I really liked this story, playing with the medium the story is in is always going to be really fun. The setting works wonderfully on audio, listening backs to tapes just as the characters are is great, and having one of the characters be blind just adds to it even more.

There's also some really fun interplay between the ‘monster’ and the antagonist, and it's these sort of stories where almost everyone sucks (especially if driven by politics) are great to listen to.

Doctor Who – The Monthly Adventures

#003. Whispers of Terror ~ 8/10

◆ An Introduction

Calling the Sixth Doctor a controversial incarnation would be stating the blatantly obvious, but he would become the earliest success story of the audio adventures. When BigFinish reworked the character, he would receive some of the greatest scripts, and the best companions, but that’s not for a couple of releases yet. This information might tempt you into skipping his first full audio outing, but you would be missing out on something rather inventive.

People often take the sound design in these adventures for granted, but you’d certainly be paying attention if sound itself were the enemy…

◆ Publisher’s Summary

The Doctor and Peri find themselves in the Museum of Aural Antiquities, where every sound is stored for posterity – from the speeches of Visteen Krane to security service wire taps and interrogation tapes. But they also find an intruder, mysteriously changed recordings, and a dead body.

Before long the Doctor realises that there is more going on than a simple break-in or murder. How can he defeat a creature that is made of pure sound?

◆ The Sixth Doctor

Considering this was written before the grand reworking of this incarnation, I’m surprised at how well-characterised Ol’ Sixie is. Justin Richards has perfectly captured his piercing wit, his stratospheric ego, and that flair for the dramatic which makes him oh-so captivating.

Even before the enforced mellowing of his character, Colin Baker had long been my favourite incarnation of the Doctor. Firing on all cylinders from the very beginning, he delivered an amazing performance in ‘Whispers of Terror’.

He doesn’t shout! People who have to resort to shouting to get what they want are merely demonstrating the inherent porosity of their argument. It’s something that he never, never does… he said whilst shouting like a lunatic. The Doctor claims to have a better sense of direction than a homing pigeon. He’s never all that helpful and forthcoming, which Peri finds very annoying!

◆ Peri Brown

Our resident botanist made pretty sporadic appearances alongside the Sixth Doctor – production were seemingly more interested in her travels with his predecessor – so it’s rather unfortunate that she spent this adventure fading into the background.

Donning the fake accent once more, Nicola Bryant steps back into her role with the utmost ease. I appreciate that she still delivered a solid performance, despite not getting much to do in ‘Whispers of Terror’.

Where’s her sense of adventure? Where’s her curiosity and longing for knowledge? According to Peri, it’s longing to leave.

◆ Sound and Vision

Justin Richards was the first person to take full advantage of the audio medium by making a sentient sound creature that had the ability to manipulate or perfectly reproduce any other sound. He also decided to set this adventure within the Museum of Aural Antiquities: an archive of every recorded sound in existence, featuring everything from government wiretaps to old broadcasts of Liza Tarbuck’s show on BBC Radio 2. Essentially, the sound creature had quite a lot of camouflage.

The sound creature in this adventure was widely regarded as one of the greatest actors of his time. He was a very private man who shunned the visual medium, working mainly in the field of audio recording.

Visteen Krane later turned to politics and eventually announced his candidacy for the Presidency. It was widely believed that he would win the election with a landslide majority and name his agent, Beth Pernell, as his running mate. However, finding her ruthless policies and ambitions abhorrent, he planned to record a speech denouncing her. Upon discovering this, Pernell had Krane assassinated… but that wasn’t the end! Although Krane’s body perished, he had earlier used the equipment in his sound suite to transfer his brain waves into the medium of sound.

Several attempts have been made over the years to replicate the basic ideas of this adventure – even the legendary Tim Foley tried with ‘Fight Motif’ – but none of them have been able to replicate the success of this original outing.

◆ Sound Design

This was the first script to really take advantage of the audio medium, which meant Harvey Summers got the opportunity to create a gorgeously experimental soundscape. Every sound and recording is stored within the Museum of Aural Antiquities, but having a sentient sound creature bouncing around the place can really mess with your head. Glitching audio tapes from a recently deceased actor, several murders, and even a spectacular car crash towards the climax of this adventure! Considering ‘Whispers of Terror’ is a twenty-five year old production, it’s aged remarkably well.

Babbling voices drift through the museum as the TARDIS begins materialising. Heavy rain falls outside while two criminals attempt to break in. Gantman claims there are shades of sound as well as light, and demonstrates this by manipulating Krane’s most famous speech; raising the pitch by 20% and making the late actor sound like a nightcore edit! The recording of Krane’s speech starts glitching and distorting throughout the museum. An ominous whistling comes from outside of the sound studio, mere moments before Fotherill is taunted by what sounds like the laugh from a corrupted audio file. Fotherill is electrocuted: several thousand volts spark through his body. The sound creature starts ranting and raving at Dent, demanding answers and causing her to become hysterical with fear. The final recording of Visteen Krane is played several times over; the gun firing, followed by his body falling to the ground with a thud. The sound creature sends itself as a voicemail to Pernell’s car phone… causing her to violently crash the car, killing herself in the process!

◆ Music

There’s a harshness to this score which likely comes from the cheap and cheerful equipment the sound artists were lumbered with back then – the equipment wouldn’t be upgraded for another four releases, if I remember rightly.

Considering this adventure features an entity composed of pure sound, we could always imagine that it was interfering with the score itself. Some great work from Briggsy here.

◆ Conclusion

“If you don’t like it, don’t listen to it!”

Visteen Krane was widely regarded as one of the greatest actors of his time, who later turned to politics and eventually announced his candidacy for the Presidency. It was widely believed that he would win the election with a landslide majority and name his agent, Beth Pernell, as his running mate. However, finding her ruthless policies and ambitions abhorrent, he planned to record a speech denouncing her. Upon discovering this, Pernell had Krane assassinated… but he managed to transfer his brain waves into the medium of sound. He would have his revenge!

Justin Richards took the metaphorical bull by the horns and created the first experimental audio adventure, featuring a sentient sound wave. Nowadays, it would seem like the obvious thing to do… but that’s probably because several writers have attempted to replicate the idea. He executed it really well, and even added in some political intrigue with the Pernell plot.

Despite being a production from twenty-five years ago, ‘Whispers of Terror’ has aged like fine wine! This was when BigFinish realised the full potential of the audio medium, and I can highly recommend giving it a listen if you’re curious.

Alright, Whispers of Terror. This is both mine and Big Finish's first audio story with the Sixth Doctor. I've been looking forward to getting into Colin Baker's audio stories for a few reasons. One of them is that I've heard Six's stories are some of the best in the MR, but more importantly because I have some... well mixed feelings on the Sixth Doctor and how he was portrayed in his TV run. I really like the concept behind him; a loud and theatrical character who is confident about speaking truth to power. I think Six, in his TV run at least, is at his best when he gets to stand up to corruption and establishment (i.e his speech to the Time Lords in The Ultimate Foe). However I don't think this concept is often executed particularly well. Especially in season 22, it feels like in an effort to make the doctor more confrontational they end up making him feel more mean spirited and aggressive. He acts so arrogant to the point of lacking respect or even compassion for anyone other than himself. The way he treats Peri I find particularly uncomfortable as she is the victim of a lot of unrequited aggression from somebody who is supposed to be her friend. However I have heard from numerous people that these character issues are fixed and that his character got reworked for the audios, emphasising the Doctor’s more compassionate side while still maintaining his self confidence. So going into this audio the one thing I am expecting is more mellow characterisation of the Doctor and a more friendly dynamic between him and Peri.

Unfortunately, however, I don’t really feel like this was fulfilled. I didn’t end up liking the story all that much and this is one of the main reasons. Their dynamic is not as bad as in some S22 stories but it still rubs me the wrong way. Six starts off this story by yelling at her about how unnecessary yelling is. I don’t find this lack of self awareness funny, I find it arrogant and annoying. From what I gather though this seems to be pretty common consensus and the ‘reworking’ of Six’s character really starts with The Marian Conspiracy. A story which I’ve heard a lot of good things about so I will reserve judgement until then

Finally, on the story itself, it was… fine? I guess. Conceptually it’s amazing. The idea of having audio related villains for an audio format seems quite obvious but it’s still a very interesting concept. I do like some of the mystery elements in the story and the stuff where they play around with audio editing but overall this story just doesn’t come together as an enjoyable experience for me. This is because I just do not think the execution is there at all. The worldbuilding here is practically non existent. I know that Pernell wants to overthrow democracy but I have no idea as to why exactly or what democracy even looks like in this society. She’s just given the most typical wannabe dictator characterisation imaginable and we’ll call it there. The rest of the cast are just as one note which is impressive given that this entire story is set in one place and we only meet a few people. I’m ragging on this story quite a bit but it is a moderately more enjoyable experience than Phantasmagoria. I gave that a 5/10 but I don’t feel like this is deserving of a 6/10 so I’ll give it a 5.5/10 and since that has no equivalent on the star system I’ll just round it down to 2 1⁄2 stars.

This is part of a series of reviews of Doctor Who in chronological timeline order.

Previous Story: Slipback

This story is a perfect example of Big Finish being able utilise the audio format to make really unique stories. This isn't a particularly experimental story by today's standards, but it was definitely a sign of things to come. Being Nicola Bryant's first performance as Peri for Big Finish and Colin's second they slip back (pun intended) into their roles quite naturally. The setting of an audio museum is perfect and I like how it technically continues on from Slipback. The story has a really compelling mystery and the idea of a monster that takes the form of a soundwave is terrifyingly done here (unlike a certain other sound-based villain).

Unfortunately this is where my compliments end. This story could easily have been a part shorter, there's a fair bit of padding and at one point the story was practically resolved only for something to happen again. It's impressive how much this story drags at times considering it's on the shorter end of Main Range releases. The cast, while they're all alright, sound really similar. There's a lot of characters and with them sounding so alike I found it hard to tell who was who except the Doctor and Peri. It also doesn't help that they're just forgettable characters in general.

Overall, I gave this story a 7 because I was impressed at how experimental it was for the time but in retrospect it's more of a 6.

Next Story: ...ish

09.01.2022

Pretty clever to make one of the first audioplays about audio editing. I enjoyed the idea of edited truth and post-truth explored here. Though in quite crude form, it really explored what today is harsh and common reality on every level of life.

The pure sound villain is a cool idea as well. As far as I'm concerned it was reasonably well-executed.

Unfortunately, that's where the problems emerge. It has a lot of what I can only describe as playbacks, where a certain part of the audio is repeated, and it's unclear what is the context for it. It gets really confusing really fast.

The ham-fisted democracy/fascism paradigm is both surface-level and tangential, the story doesn't really focus on it. It seems more like a C-list action movie villain motivation - there had to be something, but they couldn't bother to neither integrate it in the story nor come up with something fun and original.I'm also not a fan of the Six/Peri dynamic. I found their constant bickering repulsive, and I constantly feel sorry for Peri. She's also barely in this story: I feel it would've worked better as a standalone Six story.

2/5. It's got cool elements, but it's not a good story.

Well I'm surprised it took them this long. I know it's only the third story, but I feel like they would have gone for an audio based monster immediately, considering this is the audio medium. The setting is quite good as well. It's an audio museum with a curator who is aptly blind. They're collecting the speeches of a recently dead politician. But the speeches seem to be altered somehow. His presumptive nominee for VP is coming to broadcast the speeches in tribute.

Naturally, though, all is not as it seems. The speeches have been altered to praise the VP pick. And the recording of the politician's death was indeed altered to make it seem like he killed himself. In actuality the VP had him assassinated. Because, naturally, she is a fascist and the politician she had killed was a liberal.

This is all makes for a thrilling story particularly because the politician survived being assassinated by uploading his consciousness into sound. He exists as a sound pattern and alters the museum's sound pieces to communicate. He works against the VP and alters the speeches to what he originally intended, denouncing her and bringing her down.

This one is good, and not just because it's the Sixth Doctor. The Doctor here is still squarely in his season 22 pedantic asshole phase before he mellows out. Crucially, though, Peri gets some jibes in at him and he doesn't seem like he's constantly on the verge of murdering her. Peri seems a lot less scared that she's going to die at any moment than she did in season 22. And she's not simpering as much. That's progress I guess? He's still dismissive and arrogant towards the villain, as he should, and he's taking baby steps towards being better. I see why, though, that the next Six audio they did was with Evelyn, just the companion he needed to mellow out.

The Monthly Adventures #003 - "Whispers of Terror" by Justin Richards

With the audio plays being a whole new method of storytelling for Doctor Who, it would be expected that some innovative ideas would be done with the format. So, just three audios in, writing regular Justin Richards created a story with a creature made entirely of sound as the villain. It’s a novel concept for an entirely sound based story that would eventually be perfected in the magnificent Scherzo but here, it’s clear Richards was not the writer for such an out there idea.

In a museum of auditory antiquities, the Doctor and Peri come across a murder and a series of peculiar tamperings. With a presidential candidate trapped with them, the pair must uncover a conspiracy heralded by a creature made of sound.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

At first glance, Whispers of Terror seems to be a classic base under siege with a distinct horror element, which unfortunately is not the case. It keeps up this persona for its whole first part, which is easily the best bit of the story, being incredibly well written, scary and honestly quite stressful. It’s here we’re introduced to the sound creature, which for the first half of the audio is our villain and it’s with this inclusion that we see Whispers of Terror’s excellent sound design; the ghastly voices the creature speaks in and the uncanny mimicry it carries out are both incredibly well executed and undeniably scary, though these concepts would be done better in Scherzo 49 episodes later. The creature is not underutilised either, there are some fantastic scenes making use of the idea, such as when it’s tortured via an editing software, having bits of its soundwave cut out and mixed up. Between the creature, the sound design and the setting, a wonderfully alien museum of sound, I was ready for a chilling horror adventure with great effects and a better antagonist.

However, after Part 2, this story turns from a horror story to a political thriller when, in a somewhat madcap reveal, the sound creature turns out to be the consciousness of a murdered presidential candidate and his former pick for vice president - Beth Pernell - becomes our antagonist. It’s a weird change in tone that honestly doesn’t work for me and I feel the episode does away with what was a really strong concept. However, it does try another twist besides the reveal of the sound creature’s identity: one character is revealed to not be real and instead just the sound creature again but using a different voice. It’s a weird choice and it never really comes back, which makes the whole thing just seem odd. As for our leads, this is deep into JNT bitching era and neither the Doctor or Peri are any fun; this was a few audios before Big Finish decided to go down the route of a kinder Sixth Doctor and so here, he does nothing but bicker and is honestly at points like the worst of Season 22. I appreciate the fact that some people like a more boisterous Doctor but him just being permanently irritated makes listening to him miserable.

Whispers of Terror is a story in two halves - a well written and constructed horror and a somewhat messy conspiracy thriller, two stories that simply do not go together. It had some great concepts that only contributed to a couple of great scenes, with the rest feeling somewhat like wasted potential. Not bad by any means whatsoever but it’s a story that has been done and will be done better.

6/10

Pros:

+ Great first part that expertly builds tension

+ Conceptually rich and interesting setting

+ Really creative usage of the sound creature mechanic that makes for some fantastic scenes

+ Wonderfully eerie sound design that really elevates the horror

Cons:

- Loses focus after its first part

- Compared to an abstract living soundwave, vice president Beth Pernell is a very dull villain

- The reveal that a character was really just the sound creature tricking somebody felt unnecessary

- The Doctor and Peri were written incredibly insufferably

quite enjoyable, sixie feels very like he did in classic who, so its nice to hear the early days for him before his big finish development! some really nice scenes with peri getting a chance to shine, and lots of nice twists and turned. audio was really used well in this, as a plot point even!

Whispers of Terror, in my opinion, holds up a lot better than some of the other early Big Finish monthly range titles.

I think this audio does a great job transitioning us from the more established traits of the Sixth Doctor from the television series into the more complex, dynamic, and interesting version Big Finish transformed the character into. This has some great "egoist" moments for Six but also allows for a bit of depth, as we navigate a story all about politics, lies, and deceit.

In a world where faking footage is becoming an increasingly realistic possibility, this story feels very contemporary in spite of being old enough to vote, so I think that's quite impressive. It was nice to have Nicola Bryant back, and I feel she did a good job too, while the rest of the supporting cast largely enriched the experience. I particularly liked Amber Dent and Visteen Krane as characters and they were both performed well. The ending was a little abrupt for me and doesn't really work in my eyes, but on the whole I enjoyed this audio quite a bit, certainly more than Sirens of Time or Phantasmagoria. This might be the more ideal place to start with Big Finish but even then I'm not sure it is the best option.

Still, it has some cool choices for its sound design and just enough life to the writing that is was a positive experience on the whole, even if I am unlikely to revisit any time soon.

For an audio story, this does something rare: it uses sound to its advantage as part of the plot. This story revolves around a sound wave alien, so sometimes you're unsure if the voice you've just heard is the person you thought it was, and it leads to some wonderfully chilling and eerily unnerving moments, helped enormously by the actor playing the sound wave. This story could not be told on television; trying to do it in a visual medium would be a pale echo of what you get here.

Unfortunately, the identity of the sound creature is so obviously signposted from Part One that it makes the reveal at the cliffhanger to Part Two utterly ineffective.

Aside from that, however, I really can't find anything to dislike about this story. Colin Baker gives us the Sixth Doctor as he should have been, and Peri in this one is a little laid back but perfect nonetheless. The sparing use of background noise and incidental music is a pretty brave move, but it enhances the atmosphere so much as every voice and noise you hear ultimately draws your attention.

No way they used Audacity to torture a sound wave creativity 10+

Seriously, maybe this is a very common thing in stories and I haven’t consoomd enough media to see how repetitive this idea is, but a living sound? A LIVING SOUND WAVE THAT CAN HIDE IN AND IMITATE SOUNDS!!??? That’s cool as shit.

The isolated setting is executed very well. You do truly feel like you’re stuck with the creature. Same thing whenever it latches onto someone and starts doing the spooky sound stuff.

The political subplot gives the story even more depth beyond just the great monster of the week, and is also a fun mystery in itself that connects nicely to the main sound creature shenanigans.

Lots of smart twists in the story as well. There’s just so much fun stuff they did with the sound creature. I mean it can imitate any voice and sound and hide in any voice and sound there’s just so much you can do with that aaaaaaaa i love the concept so much. They utilized it so well.
Now what if it could escape through the speaker you are listening through? Bring back this idea and have the creature attack Big Finish listeners that sounds like a good idea.

Great first story for ol’ sixie at the main range. Probably has the best introduction of all Doctors here.

A solid outing from the Sixth Doctor in his first solo outing. The plot is a fairly simple who-done-it and find-the-monster, with plenty of classic Six and Peri banter. The plot can drag a little, but overall it is solid and well executed. The voice acting is top-notch with a great sound design. Not a perfect release but solid anyway.