It’s the festive season, and Mr Colchester (Paul Clayton) has some good news and some bad news. The good news is we don’t need to read yet another ‘This Was OUR Year!’ round robin letter. The bad news is why: because our lives depend on it.

This loose series of monologues is a highlight of a series that’s often made entirely of highlights. Paul Clayton’s laconic, unflappable Colchester could easily have been the sort of serious voiced government spook who shows up a dozen times in stories like this to tell us how doomed we are, stop us from being doomed, actively doom us or all of the above. It being Mr Colchester he has, odds are, done all three more than once anyway.

But, it being Mr Colchester, he’s got nothing left to prove. So, in the space of 19 minutes, Goss and Clayton give us two presents we didn’t know we needed. The first is a note-perfect skewering of family letters, reimagined here as a feral alien psychic weapon designed to depress us into compliance. It’s both a lovely idea and exactly the sort of esoteric, right handed joke that Mr Colchester would absolutely make. The truth doesn’t matter and that makes it funnier and even more horrific.

The second gift is the one you really want. Mr Colchester, a man whose dark corners are as dark as they can get, is still fundamentally compassionate and decent. The ending here is one part Mr Rogers’ reassurance and one part Christmas Jumper’d Henry V battle cry. It’s been an impossibly hard year for so many of us, including me. It’s very easy, in years like this, to feel like all you’ve done is hold in place. As Mr Colchester points out, that’s an achievement in and of itself. You’re unique, as he points out. You’ve done remarkable things. You’ll do more. So will he. It’s a sort of quiet, battered, resolute optimism that echoes my favourite 11th Doctor line: ‘Halfway out of the dark’ and it ends this remarkable audio postcard on the uplifting note it, you, I and Mr Colchester all deserve.

Verdict: A Christmas present you can, and should, open now. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart

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