The Reverend’s Review
FT’s resident man of the cloth reVerenD Peter Laws his dog collar and faces the flicks that Church forgot! (www.theflicksthatchurchforgot.com; @revpeterlaws) The really big fans of vintage TV shows are a little like historians. They stumble across a programme that they love (often during their formative years) only to see it cancelled and banished to the past as the TV world moves on. They’re left, therefore, with a limited amount of stories to enjoy, which become like precious artefacts. Episodes are watched and re-watched; plots, actors and dialogue are discussed online and at conventions, where fans dig deep into every inch of the limited data available. Imagine the thrill then, when they discover a show that they loved is still going on, complete with brand new stories, in some quiet corner of the Internet.
That’s where Big Finish step in, using the thrifty medium of audio drama to revive worlds long thought lost, with full-blown, radio-worthy productions that contain the killer ingredient for fans: actors from the original series. Since an actor’s voice doesn’t age like their physical appearance, it makes these new additions feel both contemporary and retro at the same time. This isn’t some reboot of the original series – these are more like lost episodes.
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Survivors is a great example. Terry Nation’s timely 1970s show remains disturbing because it was a zombie apocalypse movie without the zombies, its central question more pertinent than ever: how the heck would we rebuild society if it really did fall apart? Here, grizzled hero Greg Preston (Ian McCulloch) has a clash of ideologies with a crazed sociologist who wants to re-order the post-plague world with a copy of Haralambos in one hand and a rifle in the other.
More straight-up horror is to be found in Big Finish’s revival of the daytime soap Dark Shadows. I listened to their new series, called Bloodlust, and was surprised at how much ‘visual’ depth it adds to the TV version. I love the original show, but it sometimes felt inevitably bound by its studio-based sets. As charming and effective as the original was, Collinsport just feels bigger in the audio world.
It’s not just TV show revivals, incidentally, rich productions of classic literature are on offer too – Frankenstein, The Phantom of the Opera and Day of the Triffids are good examples – yet a look at the website proves that the Big Finish folks have cult TV running through their veins.
Such an emphasis means there’s an unavoidable air of nostalgia about what they do; the company name derives from the title of an episode of the 1980s TV show Press Gang.
Revisiting these shows reminds us of a time when things felt a little more enchanted, reality a little less dark. It’s an interesting human quirk, this desire to return to our earlier lives, and Big Finish creatively plug into this common compulsion: those old monsters keep coming, and those weirdly ageless heroes keep destroying them. Just when you thought that old light was out, it turns out that, somewhere, it’s still burning.