Adam is accused of the murder of Georgie…

This final story from Guy Adams takes his reinvention of the classic 1960s series into much deeper territory than you might expect after listening to tales of corrupted Blackpool Rock and indeed the opening few minutes of the episode, in which Adam, Georgie and Simms do their best to bring a sense of justice back to the dregs and darkness of London 1966. Everything comes tumbling down to Earth before the credits as Adam is accused of murder…

Spoilers follow…

Seriously, if you’ve not listened to the episode, don’t read on.

The first time you hear this, you seriously start to wonder if Adams has pulled off as big a change in the set-up as Adrian Hodges achieved with the first episode of the Survivors reboot a decade ago, when one of the key characters from the original series died. You believe, along with Adam, that it all has to be a trick, that somehow whichever one of his nemeses is behind the fake version of Adamant simply used some other poor unfortunate in Georgie’s place… but then there’s the cruel comment from Margo Caine: why would she get someone else? Adam’s – and our – world crumbles at that point, and it’s only thanks to Simms (in a scene that tests the mettle of both Guy Adams and Blake Ritson) that he doesn’t commit murder himself. And then we have the funeral, and go into the end credits.

Except that the credits are interrupted by a familiar voice. But it’s a familiar voice communing with a character who can’t be there. Can he? Or do we need to re-evaluate the whole series as a result of this short scene?

It’s not a fun romp; as director Nick Briggs notes in the extras, there’s a novelistic feel to the scripting, with Sheila Reid giving a beautiful performance as Edna Pollack – the sort of bystander that Nigel Kneale incorporated into his scripts, and which I suspect he would be proud to have created. The relationship between Adam and Simms is tested to the limit; the relationship between Adam and his own demons likewise. Leighton Pugh’s copper is the sort of unreconstructed police officer that Life on Mars was demonstrating, a type that could as easily have stepped from the early Avengers episodes that Big Finish recreated so well over the last few years.

It’s not easy listening, and I suspect that there are quite a few people who’ll be as surprised by it as I was – but it’s a story about loneliness and mental health, about what happens when the crutch you’ve come to rely on suddenly isn’t there. Yes, there’s high melodrama and low cunning, but beneath the surface, it’s one of Guy Adams’ best pieces of writing for audio.

Verdict: Very, very different from anything that’s come before for Adam Adamant. 9/10

Paul Simpson

Click here to order Adam Adamant Lives! volume 1 from Big Finish