Shoreditch, autumn 1963 – and Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton are worried about one of their pupils. But they’ve got a new teacher to help them…

The central idea for this latest set of adventures for the Doctor’s wife is that she interacts with stories we know from the first four incarnations for reasons that, in part, become clear during this opener. Matt Fitton has studied what we learn about the first TARDIS crew and applied that to their lives before the opening of An Unearthly Child, so that, in retrospect, certain actions during that story make a little more sense.

Given Big Finish has their ‘own’ version of this crew – the cast of An Adventure in Space and Time recreating their fictional roles – Fitton can have River interacting completely with them. He resists the temptation on the whole to have River being too ‘well I know things you don’t although inevitably there’s a certain amount of that, and I particularly liked the relationship built between her and Susan.

There’s alien menaces to face, and some more homegrown nastiness to deal with as well, making for an enjoyable cocktail quite unlike any River will have tried to get in the snug of the Red Lion!

Verdict: A clever reconstruction of the period and a neat prelude to An Unearthly Child. 9/10

Paul Simpson

Click here to order The Diary of River Song volume 6 from Big Finish