According to Big Finish, it’s Saturday teatime in 1977 all over again: Tom Baker is finally playing the Doctor on audio. I don’t know how fussed I am about this, having never experienced a Saturday teatime in 1977 or any other year, nor having any particular affection for Tom Baker’s version of the Doctor. I mean, he’s good, but he’s no Patrick Troughton, Paul McGann, or Christopher Eccleston, is he? Having a whole new range of Doctor Who stories being marketed on pure nostalgia (Nerva and the Daleks and the Master and the Kraals!) seemed like a misstep to me, but I was curious enough that I decided to listen to the first series at least.

Nicholas Briggs launches the New Fourth Doctor Adventures with Destination: Nerva, picking up right from the end of The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Almost too much right from the end; Big Finish claims to be recreating the era to an extent that they never do with their other lines (bar The Lost Stories), but to open with all this continuity feels as about as un-1977 as you can get. I have mixed feelings about the return to Nerva: it reeks of fanwank, but on the other hand, Nerva is one of the very few settings that actually was revisited at the time.

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I was re-listening to this at the same time as finishing Leviathan Wakes, a novel with a body-horror-in-space concept similarly at the core of the plot, and given the difference in medium, Destination: Nerva pulls this off well, helped by the always excellent Raquel Cassidy (Matt Smith's boss in Party Animals and also the leader of both the Almost People and their human counterparts in last year's Who episode).

Unfortunately the decent performances are not helped by a confused plot. I listened to the first section, set in 1890, three times without really understanding its relevance to the rest of the story. The rest is set on Nerva, scene of the great Ark in Space and the so-so Return of the Cybermen, without really giving much sense of this being a known place other than Baker's rather weak "Well, I Nerva!" line. Minor characters and subplots wander into and out of the story without being resolved. It should either have been done at full length (it is only two episodes, which took me by surprise the first time I listened to it) or, perhaps better, been pared back to the core alien infestation story with more Cassidy, Baker and Jameson without trying to get us interested in the side details. A rather disappointing start. ( )

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