Big Finish 162: Protect and Survive

Big Finish stories of recent years generally aren't what they used to be, but there's still the occasional rare gem, and Protect and Survive is one of these.  Since the end of the cold war, most, in the west at least, have been happy to forget the period as if the potentially world-ending conflict between East and West never happened, and the cold war has over time become a less and less common subject for popular fiction.  That this trend may now be coming to an end, as evidenced by the like of the recent BBC series 'The Game' is a sad reflection on our contemporary politics, as the idiots who run our foreign policy, seemingly desperately hungry for a new cold war, if not worse, go out of their way to seek confrontation and discord with Putin's Russia.  Strange how soon we forget, even seemingly those of us who lived through the sixties, seventies, or eighties.  How we once grew up somehow having to be reconciled with, or in denial of, the fact that we lived under constant threat of nuclear holocaust.  The threat never truly went away, and may even be greater today than it was then, but somehow with all the weight of history behind us, and all the knowledge previous generations lacked (such as just how close we really came to annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis), we'd still rather forget the uncomfortable truth of the recent past.  And as for the near-religious belief in the US in the ultimate victory over Communism, in the 'American Century', in the 'single Superpower', in 'American Exceptionalism', well that particular mindset seems bedded in for a generation or two at least.  And in the interim, as we shift political power from the generation of the Cheney's and Rumsfeld's to that of the millennials, who have grown up blissfully ignorant of the still very real nuclear threat hanging over the planet ?  Well, we're fucked, aren't we ?

Protect and Survive plunges Ace and Hex right into the very apocalypse many of us grew us fearing, and keeps them there in one of the tightest, more claustrophobic, and most atmospheric releases of recent years.  The title is taken from a remarkable series of public information films and pamphlets that were genuinely produced in the UK in the 80's with the intent of reassuring and pacifying the public in the event of a nuclear attack from the USSR.  Most Americans of a certain age are probably at least vaguely aware of the 'Duck and Cover' pieces of the fifties and sixties, but we're talking about the nineteen-eighties here, and trying to convince modern Britons that taping up their windows and hiding in their cellar for a few days would somehow protect them from the awesome explosions and fallout of the Soviet Union's most powerful weapons, each of them exponentially more powerful than those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Protect and Survive does a fine job of both capturing the ultimate futility of such efforts, and imagining the horror of facing the desperate reality of the 'survivors' of a nuclear attack, and in the case of Hex and Ace doing so over and over and over again.

This being modern Big Finish, it is unsurprisingly part of a three-part 'trilogy', and the larger story here regarding the Elder Gods frankly isn't much to get very excited about, but while the focus remains on Ace & Hex and the elderly couple whose shelter they share, the drama and tension is some of the best one could expect from Big Finish.  Sylvester McCoy's Doctor remains hidden in the shadows for much of the story, being eventually revealed as much more of the spider at the centre of the web, in keeping with his history on TV, and reflecting a theme of abandonment by the Doctor that seems increasingly common with Who, both on audio and TV, in this case giving Sophie Aldred and Philip Olivier that much more opportunity to bounce off one another and to shine in the Doctor's absence.  Sound design and editing throughout are excellent.  Would that it were financially possible for BF to return to an era of far fewer ranges, and one in which each of the main monthly releases could reach this level or better...

If you truly want to add to your nightmares, the original Protect and Survive videos are available at the Imperial War Museum (http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060022098) and elsewhere, and remember that this was our actual very recent history, and part of an imagining that could still reflect our very imminent future...or lack thereof.  Stupid humans !

http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/protect-and-survive-330