Directly picking up from Tooth and Claw, where Queen Victoria established the concept of Torchwood, The Victorian Age sees Queen Victoria visit the London headquarters to check up on how her brainchild is doing.  It is there she meets the enigmatic and already slightly legendary, Captain Jack Harkness.  But the inspection turns into something quite, quite different when a monster escapes the base and heads off into London, pursued by Jack and his newest Torchwood operative – Victoria herself!

The Victorian Age is, essentially, a two-hander between Jack and Victoria.  The monster plot is fairly by-the-numbers and I’m not sure, as a story, there was much to interest me.  The interplay between Jack and Victoria, though, is fun.  That said, I was far more impressed by Rowena Cooper’s Victoria than John Barrowman’s Jack.  I liked Jack on television, both in his Doctor Who and Torchwood versions; but something about this performance didn’t quite convince.  Barrowman’s delivery throughout much of the story is rather flat.  To be fair to Barrowman, though, some of his dialogue is terrible – a lot of ‘describing what I can see for the benefit of the listener’ which Big Finish is usually very good at avoiding, or at very least disguising more cleverly.  As it is, Barrowman spends a lot of time telling the audience where the monster is and what the monster is doing.  He is better when ‘bantering’ with Victoria but not enough to convince me – I hope is other Torchwood performances have a bit more life.

Cooper has better dialogue to work with as Victoria, although by the end of the story I did feel like I didn’t need to be told – again – how feisty and independent this woman was even though she’s the Queen.  Yes, it ties in rather nicely with the action and steel present in Pauline Collins’s performance in Tooth and Claw, but we’re also talking about a real person who in 1899 was around 80 years old and two years away from death!  When you realise this and look at contemporary pictures of Victoria from the time, it seems to stretch credulity a little that she would be getting up to the sort of stuff this story has her doing.

The rest of the cast is minimal and a very odd decision to have the instantly recognisable Louise Jameson play two separate minor roles is rather distracting.  It’s also a shame that a Victorian Torchwood London story focuses so much on Jack and not on the resident operatives (bearing in mind that Jack is – conveniently –  ‘on secondment’ from Cardiff.  The two we do meet, Josephine and Archie, have very little to do once the initial scenes are over and done with.

I like the idea of Torchwood London being based in the Natural History Museum, but once the story gets out into the London streets is all becomes a little generic.  It gets better when they hit the underground which is something about Victorian London which my marathon has only ventured into in Jago and Litefoot.  The idea of steam trains running through tunnels under London is frankly bizarre and I like the idea of Victoria turning up on a train full of her public.  Her behaviour in the pub is fun in a similar way.

As my first foray into Big Finish Torchwood I’m not quite convinced, but as this is probably not representative of the rest of the range, I’ll withhold judgement until I listened to a few more typical examples.