So far this blog has been about cinema (and a little bit of anime), but there’s no reason we should restrict ourselves so completely. We’ve talked about doing some pieces on American telly. I’ll be running an interview with Tom Baker later in the year. And you can expect some posts on video art and (believe it or not) Cracker in the near future. Our ever-reluctant patron, of course, was revered as a theatrical impresario before he became a film director, and I couldn’t possibly finish this sentence without mentioning his stage magic. But it’s his radio work – especially The Mercury Theatre on the Air – that gives me all the excuse I need to bring The True History of Faction Paradox to your attention.

The True History – of which ‘The Judgment of Sutekh’ is the final, sixth, installment, is not cinematic. But I could call it cinematic, for want of a better word (sonic won’t do). It’s an epic science fantasy drama set in the political domains of the embattled and morally eccentric Ancient Egyptian pantheon, spread across six discs, which together form the complete novel (again, this is for want of better – correct me if you think radio doesn’t lack a lexicon).

What I say next will prove offputting, but I haven’t much choice. Stick with me.

The True History is actually the sequel to a more fragmented series of discs called The Faction Paradox Protocols. And the Protocols were themselves spun from the BBC’s Doctor Who novels (the ones with Paul McGann’s face on the fronts, when there wasn’t anything good on TV and David Tennant was a playing Romeo for the RSC). Back then the Faction, a society of time-travelling voodoo practitioners, were principle agitators in a long-running story arc that involved the Time Lords (Timothy Dalton’s crew) at war with an unknown (and therefore spectrally exciting) enemy. The Faction were the invention of one Lawrence Miles, and after BBC Books cleared the decks in favour of all-new convolutions, they escaped into other media. There were the Protocols. There was a compelling and readable encyclopedia, The Book of the War. A range of novels. A very short-lived comic series. Most of this was overseen, and mostly written, by Miles.

Inevitably, there are reams of backstory. By the time of The True History, the Faction are all but wiped out, leaving only the frosty, intellectual Justine and the commonsensical Eliza, who are trying to retrieve what they can of the Faction’s biodata (imagine four-dimensional DNA), while nurturing at the backs of their minds potential acts of vengeance against archenemy Lolita (imagine if time machines were people too, and then imagine a genocidal one).

That’s the immediate context. But it’s also a sequel (or a prequel, depending on how you look at it) to the 1975 Doctor Who story ‘Pyramids of Mars’, in which Tom Baker fought against one of the most indelible villains ever essayed in British television, Sutekh the Destroyer. The True History starts on Earth, where Sutekh (still played by Gabriel Woolf, his voice like a caviar that will turn to ash on your tongue) is manipulating events during the 15^th Century crusades. It then leaps forward to an 18^th Century Italian village where English society men (we might say paranormal investigators) summon Justine and Eliza to help with their latest discovery, a monstrous ape. The second disc is set on the Ship of a Billion Years, the vessel used by the gods (a.k.a. the Osirians, of which Sutekh is one) to traverse the universe. The third and fourth are set between the Throneworld (where the gods live) and the Homeworld (where the Great Houses – Time Lords – come from). The fifth is set on Mars, where the Osirians built some more of their famous pyramids. And ‘The Judgment of Sutekh’, just released, is set in “time” itself.

It isn’t difficult to get your head around – I only found it tough to follow when I listened to the installments eight or 12 months apart, as they were released – and you can contentedly whizz through the series without any foreknowledge of its cousins, the books and the comic, and its parent, Doctor Who.

Miles has a lot to say about history, but his chief method of seduction is scale. True, sensawunda, science fictional scale. Case study: the Time Lords descended, in the course of 1963-89’s Doctor Who, from divine unspeakables to bickering town councillors. This is mainly worth resenting because the stories became badly told and boring, but the increasing mundanity of the Time Lords has been collectively retconned, in a sense, to become the story of a society increasingly corrupt, facing its twilight. And so it was that Russell T Davies, reviving Doctor Who, killed them all off (but only after the BBC Books had already done exactly that, a few years earlier). Part of the problem with the Lords of Time was, naturally, familiarity. The road taken was the one that rid us of the boring old souls. But it wasn’t the only solution. What happens in The True History is that the ‘gods’ have their scale restored (they are once again conceptual giants, and we are as ants, thanks as much to the story structure as the presence of human characters) but not necessarily their dignity. Even as they squabble, grave-rob, commit genocide, debate heredity and try on new faces, we’re reminded of their forbidding power and intellect. Miles knows how to deal with the facts of gods.

The success of The True History – its establishing new contexts, like adding a new power to a number – is also tied up with its medium. Audio allows for ‘species’ jokes, such as the moment when Lord Upuat, voiced by the otherwise recognisably human Julian Glover, casually drops a reference to his jackal ears. Audio can also be frustratingly expositional, and the series duly has its share of scenes where characters describe the room they’re standing in. But it’s also a brilliant (and cheap) way of telling stories that require you to apprehend competing scales. Cinematic science fiction is mostly content with physical scale – the giant floating islands in Avatar, a canyon in the rejigged Star Trek – but audio allows for different measures – scales of power, of alienness, of horror. The universe is a logorithm. The audio producers at Magic Bullet share this sense of radio with Douglas Adams and the BBC technicians who put together what is still the most renowned piece of radio SF, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in 1978.

However, The True History’s theme music does, for better or worse, feel a lot like The Tripods theme. And this implies another way of listening to this drama/novel/audio adventure/cinematic radio excursion. While the Homeworlders and the Throneworlders engage in aggressive diplomacy in central episodes, the main plot is set in a laboratory full of dead bodies and bubbling chemicals. As well as enacting the golden age powerplay you love to imagine but can never see when you’re a child with a headful of monsters and suns and vortices, Faction Paradox is also a pastiche of ‘70s ‘cult’ stuff, Hammer Horror included. Miles reformatting his childhood to explore all the mythic potential of budget British genre. This is not with a nod and a wink, but with a mouth wide open at the terrifying magnitude of the universe that is not us.

The political scepticism comes second – there’s the possibility that the whole experiment is a leftwing disquisition on the nature of history, but that’s for another day (soon, I hope). If you like the sound of all that – and I haven’t mentioned the brilliant performances by a genuine host of elderly British actors who seem to have an against-the-odds understanding of such potentially arcane material – you can find Magic Bullet Productions here.

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