Star Flight, the latest BBC Doctor Who audio short trip by Paul Hayes, drips competence and class from every syllable of its hour and six-minute run time.

It takes us back more than sixty years in TV time, to the very first Tardis team we encountered, while delivering the kind of “Things happen. And then get worse. And then get worse again” style of storytelling so beloved of Dalek creator Terry Nation, especially in those early years of William Hartnell Doctoring.

On top of which, it does that glorious thing of taking the shine off the cliches of the science-fiction genre, all glittering spaceships making no-friction warp jumps for the purposes of expanding human knowledge. 

Nah… No such Star Trekking for Hayes – he takes us on board the interstellar equivalent of a holiday flight to Marbella, during a period of human space flight he describes as “after faster-than-light, before warp drive.”

In other words, it’s both a bit new and a bit shonky, and awaiting the big scientific breakthroughs that will allow for all the Star Trek stuff. That’s what “star flight” is – a clunky but effective way of travelling through the stars, almost akin to ye olde dead reckoning on sailing ships, where ships plot a straight line course from A-B, and then another from B-C, and so on across the tediously huge distances between points of light in the illimitable blackness and bleakness of space.

A Vervoid Vibe

If you’re looking for a vibe for this story, think Terror of the Vervoids on an interstellar Easyjet flight, where, as it happens, most of the crew are there for the plotting of those straight-line courses or the comfort of the passengers.

From the instant the Tardis arrives on board Cavis Sunliners Flight 307 (catchy, eh?), many, many things start going wrong. 

In fact the arrival of an unspecified additional time-travelling mass out of thin air on board the ship is enough to drop it out of star flight, briefly bugger up the artificial gravity, and give the on board AI, Pym – think Alexa, but sliiightly less irritating – a solid old-fashioned conniption. 

Chief Officer Sopel? Also less than entirely impressed with the arrival of four seeming stowaways on board his ship. There’s a solidly Doctor Who amount of gruffness and shouting here, which feels remarkably comforting in this kind of story – the last thing you want is for the Doctor and friends to be welcomed on board with open arms, particularly when Everything is Going Wrong.

Ramping Up and Up

Oh yes, the Everything that’s going wrong – it barely begins with dropping out of star flight.

There’s Susan, the ever-inquisitive noticer-of-things, wandering about in areas of the ship where she’s very clearly not supposed to be, just in time to be suspected of a bit of engine sabotage.

There’s the person who in fact committed the bit of engine sabotage, and the reasons they did it. As with Vervoids and Security Chief Rudge, there’s some chicanery going on here, but it’s altogether more optimistic on board Flight 307 than it was on the Hyperion 3. But just like Rudge’s double-dealing, the chicanery here is swiftly overtaken by Events.

Events like there being no one on the staff who has the engineering know-how to repair the damage, meaning the ship is almost immediately stalled in the middle of a very great deal of Nowhere. 

Which is always helpful.

Annnd then there’s the Kleede.

The Kleede are an odd bunch, and would undoubtedly have been an existential challenge for 1960s TV budgets to render in anything like a convincing way. Giant, floating, multi-floored creatures of unusual shape and ability is about as detailed as the designer’s notes would probably have got.

And why are they suddenly interested in Flight 307?

The First Doctor Giving No Stuffs

That would be telling to a slightly spoilerific degree, but again, think Vervoids in terms of everyone having their own side-deal, hustle, or dubious, unethical reason for being on the flight. The Kleede, by comparison to the dubious, devious examples of humanity on board, have a straightforward objective, and go about getting it achieved… erm… straightforwardly. 

That puts the First Doctor into something of a quandary, because firstly, the reason the Kleede arrive is that something unethical was done and they want to reverse that action, really rather a lot. But secondly, if the Doctor allows them to reverse that action, the chances are they’ll go on to be simply beastly to a whole bunch of planets. Whereas if he actively doesn’t allow them to reverse the action, they will at the very least be entirely beastly to everybody on board Flight 307. 

And while absolutely nobody gives him the authority to act as arbiter between the humans and the Kleede, the joyous fact of the First Doctor’s sometimes lofty busybodying means that he gives not the first stuff about being granted authority, and just gets on with the job, empowered, as he sees it, by his status as a citizen of the universe. 

It would also be spoilerific to tell you how the whole mess of problems that Hayes layers up for our first Tardis crew is eventually resolved, but suffice it to say he keeps his foot on the accelerator all the way through the twists and turns until he blasts us out of the final curve with significant consequences for the Kleede, a way forward for the remaining staff and passengers of Flight 307, and even a happy-adjacent ending for an on board rogue with extremely useful skills.

A Real Rollercoaster

There are deaths, there is danger, there’s an ever-escalating sense of threat, but such is the nature of Hayes’ storytelling, you don’t feel short-changed by such happy-ending elements when they’re delivered. In fact, you feel particularly satisfied, and like you want to hear more from him. Star Flight is a rollercoaster of a short trip – all adrenaline and tight turns, and the urge to line up again the second you get off the ride.

And in case that all sounds a little brainless or heartless, rest assured – Hayes has you covered there, too. Perhaps most of all, he pauses for a moment in the rapid escalation of the day on which everything is terrible to give you one of the most genuinely sweet moments of dialogue between Ian and Barbara, touching on the era from which they hail, and the consequences of their young lives happening when they did. We’re not about to spoil it for you, but it will make you go “Aww,” without ever succumbing to saccharine.

On reading duties, Christopher Naylor (known to many Who-fans as the new audio version of Harry Sullivan, and almost uncannily perfect in that role) brings both an anchoring solidity to the storytelling as it ramps up and up, and also delivers an Ian Chesterton which, while not in any sense an impersonation, channels the fundamental decency of the character, to help propel the story through its more urgent moments without ever tipping into histrionics or panic.

The result of all of this is an action-packed, intrigue-packed, shenanigan-packed story that brings the qualities of the original Tardis team to the fore, while never letting any element of the situation sit quietly in the background. There’s lots going on, and Hayes and Naylor together take you through it all with aplomb, leaving you feeling breathless and satisfied and eager for more. Star Flight is one of the stronger, more enjoyable releases in the Doctor Who short trip series from BBC Audio in recent memory, and it’ll repay your investment on many levels at once. Tony Fyler

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