Big Finish Productions The Great White Hurricane

Written by	Guy Adams
Format	Compact Disc
Released	2017

Starring David Bradley

Synopsis: Rival gangs turn streets into battlegrounds, and the Doctor and his friends are caught in the crossfire. They find themselves separated and lost in the cold. As the hunt for a fugitive turns ever more desperate, a blizzard descends. The snow keeps falling. And soon it will prove as deadly as any weapon...

• Five Points Story by Jason A. Miller

Five Points Story by Jason A. Miller 31/5/23

I love me a good Hartnell-era historical adventure. And by "good", I mean "any". All the Hartnell historicals were magical. Even The Gunfighters. Especially The Gunfighters. Simple, economical storytelling, usually with crackling dialogue and/or top-flight actors. (Yes, even The Gunfighters. Shut up.)

Most of the 1st Doctor historicals grappled with either big names in history (Marco Polo, Caesar Nero, Wyatt Earp), or with big events in history (The Crusade, The Reign of Terror). These stories typically revolved around complex moral dilemmas featuring dueling philosophies (The Aztecs, The Myth Makers). You knew that a historical was going to feature lyrical wordplay, or, as Hartnell grew more comfortable in the role of the Doctor, side-splitting comedy (The Romans, The Gunfighters).

As the Hartnell era went along, the historicals stopped being the best of the show -- The Smugglers is a finely acted story, and it's got pirates saying "Arrh!", but it's not exactly The Massacre in terms of tension and drama, is it?

But with Big Finish's First Doctor Adventures, the clock is rolled back, and we should not yet be at the point of The Smugglers, just redoing Treasure Island without having anything new to say about it. As I pointed out in my review of the first audio release in this series, The Destination Wars, we're now back in Season 1, with a brand new TARDIS crew, who can go anywhere in time or space, and can tell literally any story they want. All that continuity is gone, and we're back to a clean slate. We have a chance now to hear new, big, sweeping historical epics, with so many of the true conundrums that the Hartnell era never lasted long enough to visit. Who are we going to meet now? Christopher Columbus in Hispaniola in 1492? Richard III at at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485? Richard Nixon and Bob Haldeman leading the Siege of the Water-Gate in 1972?

Unfortunately, The Great White Hurricane gives you little of what you'd expect from a Hartnell-era historical. A huge blank check is given to the production team, but they opt not to spend it. They don't think about what made the Hartnell historical work -- they just set a story in the random past because, hey, that's what you're supposed to do, right?

This is a comedy set in Manhattan in March 1888. The Blizzard of '88, my grandfather called it -- it happened the year that he moved to America, as a five-year-old boy. A very important storm in the modern history of New York City, and in my family. But there are no famous historical personages in this story, no moral dilemmas, no sense of how this storm changed the City of New York forever. Instead, what writer Guy Adams gives us is an amalgam of the plots of The Gangs of New York and West Side Story. But without the drama of the former or the music and dance of the latter.

Now, those movies are really good sources to draw from. Gangs of New York is a somewhat underrated Scorsese film; Daniel Day-Lewis is mesmerizing as the semi-historical Bill "The Butcher" Cutting, and Leonardo DiCaprio holds his own as a first-generation Irish American trying to break the Nativist gangs' hold on the Five Points slums in lower Manhattan. In this story, some of the TARDIS crew are caught up in a fight between two gangs; Susan is abducted by a misguided but golden-hearted young gangster, and the Doctor falls in with that gangster's older brother. But, unlike Gangs of New York, which had tons to say about the politics of 19th-century Manhattan (the 1863 Draft Riots, Boss Tweed, Tammany Hall), this is more of a kitchen-sink drama, not tying the gangs into any sort of historical framework. These are just boys running around in the snow.

And, boy, do I adore West Side Story, more than may be healthy for a straight man. Leonard Bernstein with the score, Steven Sondheim on the lyrics, and Romeo and Juliet as the inspiration. Star-crossed lovers, and street gangs at the lowest end of Manhattan's economic spectrum, but, boy, can these kids rhyme. The Tonight Quintet -- right before the big fatal rumble between the Jets and the Sharks -- is absolutely one of my favorite pieces of music of all time. Of all time.

The West Side Story influence on The Great White Hurricane, though, is limited to accents. Barbara and Ian fall in with a young Puerto Rican immigrant mother (a slight anachronism in terms of true 1888 New York City immigration patterns; the great wave of Puerto Rican immigration was many decades in the future) who's trying to rescue her son from an abusive husband. The mother here is essentially Maria from West Side Story, minus the star-crossed romance and the song about feeling pretty, oh so pretty. And the accents on the boy gang members is pure Russ Tamblyn and Richard Beymer from the West Side Story movie. I'm a native New Yorker, and these accents hurt my ears. Dey hoit my ears real bad, kid. The accents in Daleks in Manhattan seem like the work of Daniel Day-Lewis, compared to the young British actors in the Big Finish audio stable in this outing.

The kitchen sink drama is, as I said, leavened with comedy. You can't really show a ferocious blizzard on audio, so instead we have a couple of storm-based set pieces amongst all the running around and arguing. There's a chase sequence on the frozen-over-with-thin-ice East River, and there's a painfully bad comedy sequence with New Yorkers shouting to each other between a frozen-in elevated train and the street below. It's basically the "I'm walkin' here! I'm walkin' here!" bit from Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, but for twelve minutes instead of two seconds.

Now, don't get me wrong. The Great White Hurricane is an enjoyable story, minute by minute. I've told you why the plot and characters don't work, but there's a lot about the audio recording that does work. David Bradley gets to display Hartnell's signature moral outrage, at the corrupt police and at the squabbling gang members. Jemma Powell is wonderful as Barbara, who carries the Episode 1 cliffhanger as the hurricane moves in on the streets of New York. Claudia Grant manages to catch Carole Ann Ford's combination of innocence and insouciance as she gradually wins over her unlikely kidnapper. And Jamie Glover (whose dad played Richard the Lionheart in The Crusade, a lesson which perhaps this story should have heeded) plays Ian as a tough action hero, an interesting read on William Russell's body of work. I'm coming to like listening to these four voice actors recreate the original TARDIS crew. And I love a good New York story, even though what I really wanted to do more, than anything else, was to rewrite all the stuff in this script and scrawl THERE I FIXED IT on the last page.

The Great White Hurricane is, in the end, not a story that needed to be told. Had this been filmed in 1964, it would have been a truly awful historical, and I'm thankful that we got true comedy (The Romans) or true tragedy (The Aztecs) that year instead. I'm glad that the First Doctor Adventures are doing historicals, and I'm glad that they're going to New York. But, hey. If you're gonna write for my city -- do me a favor and do The Godfather or Citizen Kane first, will ya?