Churchill Victorious

The Churchill Years #2.4

Released: 15 February 2018

Listened: 11/26/22

The concluding story of this boxed set finds Churchill on V-E Day, and yet rather out of sorts. Basically, the war is won, but he can’t celebrate, because there’s so much else to do. Most of the staff is out celebrating, so after a rather disastrous attempt to cook himself lunch, he goes through intelligence reports, and finds one about power outages near Piccadilly. So he goes out in “disguise” to see what he can do about it, because that’s a perfectly sensible thing for the Prime Minister of an entire nation to do. Fortunately, this is Doctor Who, where strange power outages always mean alien activity, so he ends up finding one who’s captured the Doctor. Most of the story is played just for laughs, almost entirely at Churchill’s expense. You can’t really have a big conflict on V-E Day, since the war is over, but you can have a small story. The Doctor is kept off-screen for most of the story, which saves Ian McNeice from trying to imitate David Tennant too often, although to be fair, he does it better than in the first boxed set. The goal here seems to be giving us a peek into Churchill’s psyche without the war to sustain him, and, well, you can kind of see how he lost the next election. This is one of those stories that probably has a greater impact on British listeners.