Circle of Memory, the latest short trip in the BBC Audio Doctor Who collection, has a definite sense of mood, of time, and of the way Doctor Who was done in the era it evokes.

That era is early-to-mid Eleventh Doctor, with both Amy Pond and Rory Williams on board the Tardis, and one of the things Ayres gets most invitingly right is the sense of an enormous quantity of banter between the three leads, often seemingly just for the sake of it but actually building relationships, points of relevance, and increasingly, actual storylines.

Circle of Memory is big on banter, especially in its early minutes. Which is actually a more impressive feat than you might at first imagine, because it also deploys another strong feature of the Steven Moffat era – memory loss. 

In fact, our heroes spend a god deal of the adventure’s run-time uncertain about quite who they are, and are eventually helped to understand who’s who by the very Moffaty MacGuffins of a tape recording and a signed photograph.

So, to coin a phrase, that’s all right then.

Come Along, Ponds

What of the plot?

Just as the banterfest establishes a very familiar Eleven-and-Ponds tone to the story, its plot is Moffatly multi-layered, with crashed spaceships, lone survivors (who, because this is New Who we’re dealing with, are obviously blue), a circle of standing stones with an unexpectedly high-tech purpose, parasitical beings that bear more than a passing resemblance to the Gangers from the Eleventh Doctor story The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People, or indeed the Body Snatchers from Jack Finney’s novel and four subsequent movie adaptations…

Oh, and a surprising redemption arc plucked oddly out of nowhere, as when a Shakespeare wannabe-tragedy suddenly turns out all right and has to be recategorized as a comedy, much to everyone’s surprise.

The layers of the story uncurl like a zesty strip of orange peel, and you quickly learn to trust Ayres, as you’d trust Moffat to take you on the trip, and trust that things will make an Eleventh Doctor kind of sense by the end of it.

And joyously, Ayres pays off your faith, but only after taking you – again, in a style very reminiscent of the era which killed off Rory more times than anyone but a Doctor Who fan would bother to count – to the very edge of tragedy and terror and absolute defeat for our Tardis team.

The Extra Layer

There’s a way to read Ayres’ story which can do the additional thing that makes occasional Doctor Who stories stand out from the crowd. Yes, it delivers believable characters, both known and new, and yes, it delivers some interesting science fiction, and some societal dilemmas when it comes to questions of what people will do, and what they will countenance, for the perceived survival of their kind.

But you can also go the extra miles with Ayres’ story and see it as an analogue of a heartbreaking human experience – it resonates with the story of Alzheimer’s sufferers. Our heroes wake up one morning unable to remember who they are, or who anyone else is, and are forced to deal with the world on a whole new, baffling level of memory-blindness, taking every new being and situation (at least initially) on face value because they have very little context by which to judge it. 

That feels raw and particularly agonising, because the more our travellers learn, the more it contributes to their own defeat in Ayres’ story, so we yearn for a happy ending even as we see the door to such an optimistic resolution closing right in front of us. 

That Ayres then manages to deliver one nevertheless is perhaps the most Eleventh Doctor era thing about the whole story, and you’ll end up punching the air in triumph at the reason he’s able to pull it off, and the way in which within the confines of the story, the overarching wholesomeness of our Tardis team has positive ripple effects for the future of both a whole species and a whole planet.

In these dark and uncertain times, we need stories like Circle of Memory and when it’s over, you’ll fight in vain to keep a Matt Smith grin from growing all over your mouth.

Forward, O Favourite Sontaran…

Reading duties on this short trip fall to King of Sontar and regular Who-reader Dan (Strax) Starkey. Weirdly enough, while we’ve heard Starkey deliver solid approximations of many Doctors in his reading career, Eleven doesn’t sit entirely comfortably within his range. You won’t listen to Circle of Memory and think “Wow, Dan Starkey was born to play the Eleventh Doctor.”

What you will think is “Wow, Dan Starkey’s a seasoned professional at this audio lark, and he fills the brain with characters that are sketched well enough for you to forget he’s reading and just go with it.”

Okay, you might not think that out loud – that’s the sort of thought that only occurs to reviewers. But you get the point – there’s no precise mimicry here, but plenty of characterisation that is by all means good enough to involve you in the story and the characters. And also good enough to make you appreciate what a startlingly idiosyncratic performance Matt Smith actually gave us for the years when the Doctor, to coin another phrase, was him.

Circle of Memory is unnerving, rich, layered, full of authentically Moffat-era banter, and develops increasingly into a scenario where you and Team Tardis both are downing in fear and isolation, only to pull a grin and an upswing out of its pocket at the end, without ever cheapening the magic of that accomplishment.

Go onnnn, take a trip around the Circle and see if it doesn’t improve your day. Tony Fyler

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