Carolyn Seymour joins New Counter-Measures audios

Carolyn Seymour and the New Counter Measures team at the Big Finish studios
Carolyn Seymour and the New Counter Measures team at the Big Finish studios

CAROLYN SEYMOUR RETURNS to the world of Big Finish audios, in two adventures from The New Counter-Measures series that have just been released.

These two instalments were recorded back in June 2019, several months after the completion of Seymour’s work on the ninth and final series of Survivors audio box sets.

Seymour reprises the role of Lady Suzanne Clare, the Counter-Measures team’s recurring nemesis. Clare is a scheming and ruthless arms-dealer and trader in alien technology, who’s possessed of both cunning and charm.

Clare’s schemes lead her to become entangled with both the Movellans and the Daleks, and to become a (somewhat untrustworthy) associate of the Counter-Measures group.

Seymour’s character appears in both of the new stories, which bring to an end the current run of The New Counter-Measures audio adventures. The cast also includes Simon Williams, husband of Lucy Fleming, who plays the role of Group Captain Gilmore.

My reviews of The New Counter-Measures: The Movellan Manoeuvre and The New Counter-Measures: The Dalek Gambit have been published on Cultbox today.

Carolyn Seymour, The New Counter Measures Team, Nicholas Briggs and Cyril Nri
Carolyn Seymour, The New Counter Measures Team, Nicholas Briggs and Cyril Nri
The New Counter-Measures: The Dalek Gambit cover

Roger Marshall, scriptwriter of Survivors episode “Parasites”, has died

Roger Marshall

ROGER MARSHALL, THE well-respected genre TV scriptwriter, who penned the series two Survivors episode “Parasites” has died at the age of 86.

Born in Leicester in 1934, Marshall began a career in television after graduating from Cambridge University. He quickly found his niche as a prolific scriptwriter, and would go on to write scripts for The Avengers, The Sweeney, The Professionals, Lovejoy, London’s Burning and many other TV series from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Marshall co-created the 1974 series Zodiac (which starred Anton Rogers); and the 1984 show Mitch (in which John Thaw took the lead). He also created the 1984-85 canal-barge-set crime drama The Travelling Man. However, his most widely-respected creator credit comes from his work on the down-at-heel private eye drama Public Eye (1965-75), which he co-created with Anthony Marriott, in which Alfred Burke starred.

Marshall also wrote the film scripts for the Amicus productions What Became of Jack & Jill (1972) and And Now The Screaming Starts (1973).

Survivors producer Terry Dudley recruited Marshall to write a single script for the second series. The result was the highly-regarded “Parasites”, a tale of crime, deception and murder, which sees the Whitecross community threatened by an escaped prisoner and his partner-in-crime a former prison warder. The episode is also distinguished by an all-too-brief guest starring appearance from Patrick Troughton (the second actor to play the part of The Doctor in Doctor Who).

Although his script for “Parasites” was one of the highlights of the second series, and translated to the screen extremely effectively, Marshall did not particularly enjoy the experience of working on Survivors. “It was a messy production,” he told Action TV magazine when he recalled his efforts in 2005, “but memorable for me in that I got to write about barges for the first time.”

As part of his research for “Parasites”, Marshall spent time learning the mechanics of canal travel at the Stoke Bruerne Barge Museum near Towcester. It was knowledge that he later put to good use in framing the premise of The Travelling Man.

Marshall was not invited to contribute any scripts to the third and final series of Survivors, but does not appear to have expressed interest in doing so.

Marshall, who had been suffering with Alzheimer’s and Vascular Dementia for some time, died on 1 April 2020.