• Charley, To Her Friends by Stephen Maslin

Charley, To Her Friends by Stephen Maslin 3/2/11

(This might seem a bit of an abstruse way to start but bear with me...) I don't like the numbering system of the 'new' series. Calling the Eccleston era 'Doctor Who, Season One' has two drawbacks. Firstly, it's not true and secondly, it causes a rift between the show as it is and the show as it was, as if William Hartnell's first season and all those that followed are somehow less relevant. However, calling it Season Twenty-Seven doesn't work either. The sheer amount of stuff from the 1990s and the first few years of the twenty-first century puts a hell of a space, both temporally and temperamentally, between Survival and Rose and ignores many developments we now take for granted. To describe those stories from Rose through to The Parting of the Ways, I much prefer 'Season 2005', as if to imply Doctor Who 2.005 (that is Version Two, Number Five). So Pertwee's first season becomes 1.007, Tom Baker's swan-song becomes 1.018, you get the idea.

There would, however, appear to be a major flaw in this reasoning. There was no 2.001, 2.002, 2.003 or 2.004 on TV at all. My rejoinder is to say that they do actually exist, only without pictures, courtesy of Big Finish Productions. Season 2001 is therefore Storm Warning, Sword of Orion, The Stones of Venice and Minuet In Hell, while Season 2002 comprises the six stories that start with Invaders From Mars, and so on.

But why elevate audio to such a status? Lots of reasons: Paul McGann is fantastic in the lead, there are some great scripts and supporting characters, a lot of superb sound design and...

Charlotte Elspeth Pollard. For 'Charley' is one of the Doctor's greatest companions, whether you know it or not and (outside books and comic strips) had the longest unbroken spell in the TARDIS's second bedroom. It's rather obvious to state that India Fisher can act (and be honest, some of the Doctor's previous companions really couldn't - make your own list). But, more than that, Charley was engaging, witty and, above all, meticulously planned. There is a real sense of the producers having known exactly what they wanted and her backstory formed a central part of the ongoing narrative right from the start, without ever threatening to swamp it. Second only to McGann, she was also a major reason why at least some of Seasons 2001-2004 should be on any fan's shelves. The beginning of Charley's time in the TARDIS, Storm Warning, is, in spite of its iffy final episode, a sparkling debut. From the listener's point of view, the chemistry is immediate (though Storm Warning was not of course the first recorded). Season 2001's remaining stories are nothing special but in there is more than enough of Charley's charm and vivacity on show to underline that the producers had made an excellent choice. (However good a choice she was, the producers did make one mistake: the often repeated soubriquet 'Edwardian Adventuress' should be, as Mark Gatiss pointed out in The Eighth Doctor Authors, 'Neo-Georgian Adventuress'.)

If Charley was to stick around then Big Finish knew they had to come up with a much better run of stories than Season 2001. And they did; they really, really did. Season 2002 is Big Finish at its very best. Yes, all of it. Not a single bad story, not a single bad moment from either India Fisher or Paul McGann. The Chimes of Midnight and Neverland are rightly revered as out-and-out classics but the rest aren't far behind: Invaders From Mars with its inspired casting and unbeatable sound design; the sheer exuberance of Seasons of Fear; the creepy Embrace the Darkness; the fan-centric The Time of the Daleks. If Charley wasn't an archetypal companion at the beginning of that season, by the end of Neverland she most certainly was.

We had to wait a year and a half to find out just what happened next in Zagreus. This three-disc anniversary epic has received a lot of criticism (too long, too confusing, just too much) but when it concentrates on the Doctor and Charley in their respective dreamscapes, it's a wonderful, even magical tale. ("You do know you're a duck, don't you?") It's only when the more established Doctor Who regulars begin to dominate proceedings that things become a bit of a let down.

Though far from perfect, Zagreus was always going to be a hard act to follow. Scherzo, the other end of the spectrum in scale, was not a story that makes for easy listening, or one I particularly liked, but it was extremely impressive in terms of craft. At this point, however, Big Finish made two huge mistakes: firstly, introducing a second companion who completely upset the balance between Charley and The Doctor (compounding the felony with an object lesson in miscasting; Conrad Westmaas had been great in Omega but, as C'rizz, he was in completely the wrong part); secondly, dumping us in the eternal pointlessness of the Divergent Universe. (Thank heavens the impending arrival of the new series on TV convinced them to put a stop to that nonsense a lot earlier than they had originally intended.) Of the three remaining stories of Season 2003, only A Natural History of Fear deserves any attention (and only then as one of the most bizarre two hours worth of audio you will ever hear).

Season 2004 (the four stories released at the end of that year) is a return to form for all concerned (well not C'rizz obviously) and Charley has some of her most memorable moments: crippled and killed in The Last, lumbered with the grumpy Doctor in Caerdroia and, quite possibly the highlight of her entire time with Doctor, her magnificent "Life and death on such a scale" speech during part one of The Next Life; superbly written and beautifully delivered.

With the Ninth Doctor having already come and gone, the Eighth Doctor stories subsequent to The Next Life were a very mixed bag: Scaredy Cat, Something Inside and Absolution are utter garbage and should be avoided at all costs. Other Lives was, by comparison, something really special, with Charley spending most of her time in the company of Ron Moody's Duke of Wellington, a great partnership. Even better was Memory Lane in which Charley's regression to childhood is not only funny but extremely poignant. Sadly, her final story with The Eighth Doctor, The Girl Who Never Was, is not the grand sendoff it should have been; happily, however, there was a little more to come from Miss Pollard. In something of a first, she became a companion for a previous Doctor and, initially, her relationship with the Sixth Doctor, with all its mutual mistrust, was a real shock to the system; a refreshingly different dynamic with Charley having to prove herself all over again. The Condemned and The Doomwood Curse are two superb little stories but alas, with a couple of exceptions, those that followed were part of Big Finish's overall downward spiral into ordinariness.

From a personal point of view, having Charley as a companion avoided the painful necessity for modern relevance that has bedevilled so much Doctor Who since Ace. None of the TV companions in Version Two of the TV series have been bad, not one, but I prefer the extra dimension that characters like Charley, Victoria, Jamie or Fitz Kreiner give us: of our world but not of our time.

Would she have made a good television companion? No disrespect intended but I don't think she would. Alan Barnes and Gary Russell have to be congratulated for creating the right character and choosing the right actress for the time and the place, while knowing that neither Charley nor the Eighth Doctor would ever make it to TV. It's a shame that former producers of the show did not think as carefully. John Nathan-Turner may have kept Doctor Who on British TV screens for longer than anyone expected but he also lumbered us with Adric and... (again, make your own list).

Thinking of Charley entering the Doctor Who world, almost a decade after the fact, I feel the same rosy glow as I have remembering Sarah Jane during the early Tom Baker years or, for altogether different reasons, Nyssa. And this is where the nomenclature system that I began with falls flat on its face. Far from feeling part of Doctor Who Version Two, Charley's adventures with the Eighth Doctor have far more in common with the old show than the new: in general, the best stories are charming and escapist rather than, say, realistic (if a show like Doctor Who can ever be described as realistic).

Be that as it may, Charley was the perfect new companion for a time in Doctor Who's history when nostalgia was the stock-in-trade. Her having been restricted to a medium with less public recognition than television is no reason for us to exclude her from the pantheon of great companions.