RogerBW's Blog

2019 Australian science fiction comedy audio drama in eight parts, by John Richards. Dr Anastasia Black used to save the universe every week, but now she's enjoying a comfortable retirement. Until Eddie Jones comes to her door to sell her a new electricity contract…

Clearly this is a Doctor Who parody, but its tropes are very much of the new series, including robot Hitler, corporate drone world, all of Australia on a single starship, a country-house murder, and so on. In itself, that's not terribly interesting, but Richards has managed to put a promising spin on these well-worn ideas, helped by allowing a strong dose of genre-savvy in the scripts. (It's easy to get that wrong; the trick, I think, is never to forget that if you didn't love it in the first place, you wouldn't know it well enough to mock it.)

The decent scripts, combined with the charisma of the leads, make this unpromising idea work far better than it really deserves to. Even the Australian cultural cringe doesn't seem overdone, though it's perhaps a little dated.

There's not much to say about it, except that this kind of thing usually fails, and this time it works.

The first few episodes have already fallen off iPlayer but the later ones are still available at the time of writing, and the first is freely available from the producers.