The Companion Chronicles range has always been an opportunity to explore beyond the parameters of what would have made Doctor Who stories on TV that stood any chance of being commissioned.

Sometimes, that allows them to be personal, small-scale, intimate adventures. Sometimes, it allows them to be dementedly off-the-wall or overly-expensive-to-film stories. Stories with very little Doctor in them are a commonly understood event in modern seasons of Doctor Who, but back in the Classic era, they were practically unheard of. The Companion Chronicles gives us the opportunity to hear those too. Pure historicals, which have all but died out in the modern era, can be resurrected with all the pomp and circumstance of their black and white glory days. 

The Families box set does all that and sliiiightly more – we’ll get to that in a minute – while delivering four Hartnell-era stories from across almost the whole of the era, each of which has some thread that connects them to the fundamental idea of family.

Into The Temple

We start off with Maureen O’Brien’s Vicki in the Doctor-extremely-light story The Temple of Light, by Jonathan Morris. It’s a story that fits very much into what are loosely described as the “sideways” stories of early Who, where the format stretches beyond the back and forth in time and space idea and takes us and the crew into weird dimensions of challenge and potential terror. Think somewhere between Inside The Spaceship and Planet of Giants and you’re in the right territory.

Vicki wakes up after what seems to have been an explosion of the Tardis console. 

She finds herself in a strange place with no sign of the Doctor, Ian or Barbara. She’s on a world with the eponymous Temple of Light, and a city in which time runs at a different pace. There are rivers of mercury, and technology that the locals don’t understand, repurposed to serve their relatively primitive needs. 

What they do understand is the need to sacrifice organic life to their temple, so that it keeps producing life and energy for them. 

You can imagine how they react to young newcomers who could potentially refuel the temple for a long time by their sacrifice.

What is going on, and where has Vicki really ended up? And will she have time to both find out, understand, and escape with her life? 

That all rather depends on whether she can convince three generations of characters, all played by legendary vocal chameleon Duncan Wisbey, that their entire way of life is parasitical, and needs to end so that she can find her way back to the Tardis and her friends.

Wisbey, who is introduced to us as the youthful Nebron, and in time plays both his own grandfather and an even older ancestor (generations of families having evolved in service to the Temple of Light), is a crucial anchor in this story, giving O’Brien practically everyone against whom she can react as the story evolves. He’s worth at least three salaries here, holding the whole thing together and giving O’Brien the chance to prove Vicki’s mettle even without her adoptive Tardis family.

The story would probably have worked in the Sixties as a full-cast adventure, but it’s in the absence of the regulars that this not only becomes a Companion Chronicle, but also gains a lot of its wow factor. There was always a tendency in the early years of Doctor Who for the young girl companion to be written as a touch on the helpless side, but here, Vicki works the problems of where she is, gaining knowledge and eventually a full understanding of what has happened to her. 

There are sacrifices to be made here, absolutely, and questions to be asked about the relative value we place on different kinds of lives. O’Brien steers us through both the adventure and the moral maze Jonathan Morris creates, with the determination of a seasoned time traveller. 

When the realities of the episode click into place, you’ll think they were always obvious, but until then, Morris, O’Brien and Wisbey do excellent work treating this as another adventure in time and space, hooking us in, making us care, and working their way towards an inevitable but hard-won conclusion. 

Susan In Mourning

Stardust and Ashes by Ian Potter takes us into the life of Susan Campbell at a very particular point. You might need to steel yourself going into this one, because it’s Carole Ann Ford at probably her most affecting and most effective. This is Susan having grown up. Been a wife. Been a widow. Been a mother, and then, tying in with her connection with the Eighth Doctor, lost her only son in a battle with the Daleks. 

Susan is grieving, deeply and broadly, and she has a job to do, which is interrupted by a man named Perryman, who wants to hear her tell stories of long ago and far away (Wisbey again, adding at first interference and eventually kindness to the tale). 

That divides the story into two halves. On the one hand, there’s Susan’s narration of an adventure on a spaceship with her grandfather, Ian and Barbara, which you’re free to hear as a discussion on assisted suicide if you like, while also involving a malfunctioning artificial intelligence and a ship-based, highly incentivised running track. The great challenge in the story is how to stay alive on a ship with no food, while also trying determinedly to turn off the computer intelligence and get back to the Tardis, and as far as it goes, it’s a perfectly solid adventure story with Susan and her Tardis family.  

But where the real meat and the money of the story lives is in the practical coda, with Susan and Perryman talking about their respective losses, through the Dalek invasion, the subsequent sickness, the re-invasion, and essentially just through the processes of life. 

While it would spoil the punch of the story to tell you how it ends, suffice it to say that Perryman’s presence and character gives Susan the strength to do what she has needed to do for some time, to approach a kind of closure on a chapter in her life, and to honour both the family she made in her Tardis days and the family she nurtured on Earth.

Importantly, too, there’s some solid Carole Ann in the storyline here, with Susan saying she “fell in” to playing a child around her grandfather and her teachers, because that was how they saw her, when it was actually nothing like her true nature. 

As with Vicki in The Temple of Light, Stardust and Ashes allows Susan to acknowledge that while the Doctor may be the bright star around which a portion of her life orbited, she is – and probably always was – quite a strong enough personality in her own right to make her own destiny and meaning.

A Sinking Ship

The White Ship, by Paul Morris, is to some extent a fantastic, full-on, straight-down-the-line pure historical. The Doctor and Steven Taylor (Peter Purves) arrive in Normandy as King Henry I is preparing to sail for England. The Doctor, as ever, is keen to get among the nobles and see history close up, while Steven, a touch long-suffering, is told to stay ashore and get to know the would-be adventurers to England. 

As in the template of many a genuine pure historical from the era, there are thrills, spills, mistaken identities (with Steven somewhat comically being mistaken for Stephen of Blois – eventual king of England years down the line). What makes this perhaps the kind of pure historical that could only be delivered in audio is the ghastly, tragic nature of the events that unfold. 

A vessel is fitted out to take the majority of England’s would-be rulers, including Henry’s legitimate heir, William Adelin, across to the rainy little country to the north.

It is called the White Ship, and it is destined to sink with all hands but one, obliterating the line of succession to Henry’s throne just one generation after his father William the Conqueror had established it. 

The lack of a legitimate line would later engulf England into a bloody civil war between Stephen of Blois and the Empress Matilda, and it’s rare that such a period can be traced back to a single cataclysmic event. 

The White Ship disaster is one such occasion though.  

While Morris delivers a practically perfect pure historical, it’s unlikely that it would ever have been broadcast back in the day simply on account of its dark and downbeat eventual ending – as though the Tardis had landed on board the Titanic, and there had been no way to get off.

But as a Companion Chronicle, the story works brilliantly, delivering, like life, a great mix of comedy and drama until the moment when there is only drama, and the following moment, when there is only silence. 

Morris even gives Doctor Who fans a little moment of lightness at the very end, with the Doctor enlisting the help of a knight called “Sir Gilles” to help recover the Tardis. It could be nothing, obviously, but Fifth Doctor fans will remember a “Sir Gilles” who was close to the English throne 95 years after the White Ship tragedy, dabbling with the signing – or not-signing – of Magna Carta.

Mushrooms Of Hate

And finally, as the little bit more than usual that this box set delivers, there’s a welcome return for Lauren Cornelius as Dodo Chaplet in her first narrative role for Big Finish, The Y Factor by Christopher Cooper. Alongside Stephen Noonan’s First Doctor and a semi-historical appearance by arse-kicking jujitsu trainer Edith Garrud, the story, set in 1947, would have been entirely filmable in the Sixties, and works on multiple levels at once, meaning it could well have been added to the on-screen canon.

Cooper gives us a grand, multi-threaded scheme involving Nazi sympathisers, carnivorous mushrooms, and a propensity for hatred passed on by touch – hate as plague, essentially – while also threatening a pre-Tenth Planet regeneration, and adding a neat commentary on the closeness of genetic maleness to the propensity for hate and war, and explaining that the Doctor is not especially male. He has, to quote the script “a whole alphabet of chromosomes whizzing about this old body of mine.” 

That’s an extra-special joy when we learn that Edith was responsible for training the original Suffragists in hand-to-hand combat so they could effectively resist both arrest and – ahem – manhandling.

While the story is definitely broad enough in scope to have been a TV adventure, involving the Doctor and Dodo tracking an alien escape pod, shenanigans both in a factory and on a military base, and a quick teleportation to an alien space-ark, it’s also definitively a Dodo-forward story, which fits it nicely for the Companion Chronicles range.

The family element in this story is less pronounced than in some others in the set, but there’s enough in Edith’s relative estrangement from one of her sons, and Dodo’s relationship with her great-aunt, to add a touch of warmth to an ending that promises reconciliations all round. 

The Companion Chronicles have always existed as a set of enormously satisfying Easter Eggs to the traditional ranges. Here, under relatively new producer Dominic G Martin, they are very clearly in good, strong, focused hands. The Families set will repay you for your outlay with both strong performances, enthralling stories, and a sense that your need for extra colour and detail on the companions of the Hartnell era has been well served and satisfied.

Especially given Susan’s recent return to the on-screen universe of Doctor Who, Stardust and Ashes is a particular stand-out of the set (while also tying in to Susan’s grief, as is also heart-rendingly portrayed in Susan’s War 2: Family Ties), but there are no misfires here. There are just four slabs of solid, companion-centred joy. Tony Fyler

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