Point of Entry [AUDIO/2010.4.?]

★★★★★

  Oh, how I yearn for the reality in which this Barbara Clegg pitch was carried through and made into an actual TV serial. Some might say it's way too ambitious for the BBC of the mid-eighties to have handled, but I disagree. Technical constraints are almost always an excuse for creatives to be... well, more creative in writing and execution. All the same, though, I wouldn't like to be in the production team tasked with bringing such an ambitious script to life.

  With the marriage of Clegg's boundless imagination and Marc Platt's literary sensibilities and a knack for character writing, Point of Entry immediately boasts a level of complexity and ambition. Creatures of sound from another world, an undead Spaniard looking for an ancient Aztec sacrificial blade, and a famous playwright's descent into selling his soul to the Devil... the ideas are rich and the dialogue is even richer, fitting perfectly with the allusions of plays and books. John Ainsworth seriously impresses here; he's able to conjure up the most dizzying and evocative scenery with top-notch sound work, and keep the actors' energy consistent with the high-stakes nature of this story. Not one performance lacks, and everyone -- especially Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, of course -- brings the right amount of urgency and paranoia to the table as the world reaches its end by the hands of the Omnim. There was never any chance for me to deny that Point of Entry is the standout of the first series of the Lost Stories; it's a masterpiece of an audio drama, so rich with layers of colourful dialogue, sparkling ideas and palpably tense atmosphere.