Birthright is the second part of the Time Ring Trilogy released by Big Finish during their very early days before they were granted the Doctor Who licence.  It, like the previous three releases, is an adaptation of a New Adventure.  Birthright, though, is unusual in that the original novel was released as part of the Virgin range when it still featured the Doctor.  Birthright, though, was unusual in that it was an example of a Doctor-lite story and was released alongside the novel, Iceberg.  This novel featured the Doctor solo, whilst Birthright featured only Bernice and Ace.  Adapting this as a Doctor-less audio then was not too difficult and I assume it was relatively easy to replace Ace’s role with Jason.

In this audio trilogy Birthright has been adapted to follow on directly from Walking to Babylon, which I reviewed here.  The original novel has Bernice and Ace deposited in their disparate time zones by a disintegrating TARDIS.  In this audio, it is an exploding time corridor which sends Bernice and Jason their separate ways after leaving Babylon.  Bernice ends up in London 1909 and Jason on the planet Antykhon.  As Bernice is the main character (and Jason travels to this time zone at the end of the adventure) I have decided to place this story here in the early 20th Century part of my marathon.

When I listened to Walking to Babylon, the first part of this trilogy, I was impressed by how professional the audio sounded and commented on how it is clear, on the strength of that product, why Big Finish was granted the Doctor Who licence.  It’s odd then, that I found Birthright to be a little disappointing in terms of production.  There was something about the sound design, in particular, which seemed a little rough around the edges.  The music too seemed sparser and there were sections where it sounded very much like two people in booths talking into microphones.  The script is falls foul a little of the main pitfall of audio drama – having characters describe what they can see.  I suppose in an adaptation of a novel this is going to be more difficult to avoid as the story was originally written for a different medium.  Big Finish, nowadays, manage to avoid this problem through having huge experience in what works on audio and what doesn’t but it’s a little more obvious here that lessons are still being used.

That’s not to say it isn’t an entertaining ride.  Front and centre are Lisa Bowerman and Stephen Fewell as Bernice and Jason.  Both are, as usual, superb and carry the two plotlines well.  What’s particularly good is that Jason’s plotline doesn’t seem secondary to Bernice’s.  Both have interesting things happening and whilst the ‘mystery’ of what links the two time zones is fairly obvious (although this may be due to already having read the book and heard this audio a couple of times previously) the slow drawing together of the two stories works well.

The leads are ably supported by a good guest cast which features John Wadmore, a BBV stalwart who actually appeared in a surprisingly low number of Big Finish audios, and one Colin Baker.  A canny piece of marketing from Big Finish in those early days was to include Doctor Who alumni in their casts as an obvious selling point.  The first Bernice Summerfield releases featured Nicholas Courtney, Anneke Wills, Sophie Aldred and Elisabeth Sladen.   I was particularly impressed by Colin in this story.  He plays Mikhail Popov, a Russian police detective in London on the trail of a serial killer.  He gives a performance very different from the 6th Doctor and he manages to maintain a pretty good Russian accent throughout meaning he doesn’t even sound like the Doctor for the majority of the play.  Mikhail makes a good ‘companion’ for Bernice and it would be huge fun if Bernice was to revisit this time zone in a future Bernice release.  I mean, it’s not like Colin is averse to working for Big Finish.

The story involving the Charrl and the truth of Antykhon is a good one although it is solved a little through technobabble and I’m not sure how much Jared Khan, their human agent, adds to the story (although his role was much larger in the original novel).

Historically, this story is a bit of an oddfish.  Having left the Victorian era behind and focussing my marathon on the global exploits of Indiana Jones, it’s quite strange being back in London and have characters discussing Jack the Ripper and Spring Heeled Jack.  This story feels incredibly ‘Victorian London’, despite being set in the Edwardian era, with pubs and prostitutes, cockney scallywags and strange foreigners.  The plot wouldn’t look out of place in a Jago and Litefoot audio.  Birthright is a story set in the literary London of dark alleyways, monstrous hooded creatures and secret organisations.

The Time Ring trilogy was a strong set of audios for so early in Big Finish’s work and whilst I think Birthright is possibly the weaker of the three, it doesn’t feel like it is treading water before the final section.