The Boy Who Never Laughed is a peculiar microcosm of the philosophy of Big Finish in a miniature It’s Not That Wonderful A Life, Actually nutshell.

Yes, thank you, I’m aware that’s a fantastically pompous first sentence – bear with me.

Big Finish makes, for the most part, audio content from existing or historical TV franchises, with often more deep, sometimes more dark, and just occasionally more racy elements than the TV versions would have got away with. It can do that because there’s a strong and loyal fan base for the shows and franchises it uses as the backdrop for its colossal creativity.

The Boy Who Never Laughed takes us into the life and backstory of Tyler Steele, played by (recent-Alan Budd from Doctor Who’s Robot Revolution) Jonny Green.

Tyler Steele never appeared in TV Torchwood, but came into its audio world during the creation of the “new” Torchwood team including Mr Colchester, Ng, Orr and the others. None of whom have the TV show, which now hasn’t been seen on screens for 14 years, to anchor dedicated buyers in place. 

Who’s Listening?

To engage with the central dilemmas of the story therefore, you have to have followed Torchwood off-screen and into audio, through into its new team, and even then, to have a soft spot in your heart for sometime-wrong ’un Tyler Steele, who’s as often been working with malicious aliens as he has with the rift-monitoring main cast of largely post-Harkness Torchwood.

Each of those elements shaves some people out of the likely demographic of listeners for this audio. Torchwood fan: audio Torchwood fan: new generation audio Torchwood fan: new generation audio Torchwood fan who quite likes the morally grey Tyler Steele…

If you’re still here, congratulations! You’re our kind of geek.

Now that it’s just us Steele fans, let’s get down to business. In the absence of the immortal narcissism of Jack Harkness and the cynical front of Owen Harper, Steele provides one of the more interesting slabs of moral complexity in the “new” Torchwood team. He’s worked for Torchwood, he’s worked against Torchwood. He’s been shown as cocky and confident, he’s been shown as cripplingly in need of validation. He’s sometimes been, if this isn’t too cruel an assessment, made into whatever it was that particular stories needed to move them along.

Recently though, he’s been on a relative moral upswing, making some sort of lasting connection with the empathic shapeshifter Orr, and even settling into an almost cheeky chappie nephew relationship with the almost comically curmudgeonly Colchester.

And then, here, he wakes up in bed with himself.

Not in any sense by himself. But with someone claiming initially to be him, who looks like him, knows everything he knows, and in many cases seems to have a clearer vision of events in Tyler’s past than he does himself.

It’s…A Life, At Least

That’s the hook for a riff on It’s A Wonderful Life, as acknowledged in the script by Tyler occasionally calling his doppelganger “Clarence,” the name of the trainee angel who shows George Bailey what the world would be like if he’d never been born in the movie.

For the Torchwood riff on the idea, Joseph Lidster sensibly steers clear of the movie’s sopping wet schmaltzfest, and has Tyler react to his predicament in a very much more “modern sci-fi” way, perpetually looking for the trick, the con, the trip-up where he’s presumably supposed to wish something undone that will endanger either himself, Torchwood, or quite possibly the causal nexus of events holding the world together.

Because in all fairness, he’s seen a thing or two, and he’s never, wherever his moral compass may have been pointing, been stupid. 

The two Tylers (both played, in what can only have been an exhausting process, by Green) hang out, do not a whole lot, but do engage in both some Harkness-level flirting with themselves and some emotional regression through key moments in Steele’s life, being taken back to the times and places with the vivid, unnerving clarity that only “Clarence” can provide. 

We learn more than we’ve ever known about his drunken, seemingly disinterested mother, we experience a moment of joy and pride from his childhood, and we learn how it broke his heart that, despite knowing about it, his mother didn’t turn up to witness him happy. 

We hear him at a pivotal point in later life, and we go beyond his own surface-level recollection of an event, as the “angel” reveals an unpalatable truth he’s been breezing past and rationalizing ever since.

The Darkness Pasted Over

In fact, that’s the core of the story – how we live with ourselves by breezing past the moments of pain, the moments that in their rawness really matter, but over which we grow carapaces of “Not bothered!”, patterns of behaviour that potentially take us closer and closer to some notional edge of good and evil, and sometimes even push us over it.

We hear some of the darkness that has invaded and tainted Tyler Steele’s life, from the emotional absence of the mother who threw him out as a young man, to the predation of a seemingly nice and understanding teacher, to how Tyler became both of the major things we’ve heard him be – the pretty, cocky, have-it-large low-rent playboy, and the immensely insecure, love-starved man, willing to throw his lot in with any hierarchy for the desperate chance to matter. To belong. To be someone.

The central dilemma is the offer the fake-Tyler makes him, to change any individual point in his life, seeeeemingly for the simple reason that he wants the original Tyler to be happy. Genuinely, uncomplicatedly, happy.

A Little Schmaltz Between Friends

We won’t spoiler the story for you, or its twist, which actually works to pleasingly wrong-foot the listener towards the end. But suffice it to say there’s no great A Christmas Carol moral reinvention here. Tyler Steele remains Tyler Steele. 

But the application of a little, highly judicious, schmaltz, does help both Tyler Steele and we who listen to his life appreciate the impact of tiny, significant tweaks, of opportunities taken rather than shunned, and of knowledge allowing for situations to be reframed in our emotional understanding of them.

Tyler Steele may still be morally grey at the end of The Boy Who Never Laughed. But he is at least a slightly lighter shade of grey. And that’s enough for now.

By giving us as much detail as it does about the points in his life that made big impacts on him (whether he understood that they did so at the time or not), this story gives the listener probably the strongest understanding of Tyler’s character that we’ve ever had in his Torchwood history to date, and without excusing his bad behaviour, as he puts some things in a different perspective, similarly, we come to view everything we’ve known to date through a slightly different lens, a more complete picture of his character than we are ever likely to have of the real people in our lives or (without some fairly extensive therapy) of our own.

The Boy Who Never Laughed may, by the very nature of its niche audience, only be playing to relatively small percentages of the mass Big Finish audience. But it’s a meticulously crafted and masterly played Faberge egg of a piece, that adds weight, context, colour and understanding to a character who has occasionally been a script-aid more than a front-and-centre, fully rounded human being.

If you’re still buying Torchwood audio adventures, and presumably you are or there’s no reason you’d have got this far into this review, the chances are you’ll both love the invention of Lidster’s central idea here, appreciate the updated, no-nonsense approach to the central themes, and perhaps, just perhaps, feel that Tyler Steele’s character has been if not at any point especially vindicated, then certainly much more understood than ever before.  Tony Fyler