Big Finish: Class: Secret Diary of a Rhodian Prince Review

Ah, Class. Poor Class. I’ll be honest: I enjoyed Class and have a lot of time for it, and I think it was a shame that it got cancelled when it ended in the way it did, the mysterious governors, body swapping and Weeping Angels! Despite there being a fan base for the series no matter what people might say, Class was only destined for one on-screen series.

Thanks to Big Finish we’ve had four more volumes of audio adventures set between stories in the first series (a contract stated that the audio dramas could only ever be set in the first series with no further adventures telling stories any further than that).

Thankfully, that contract seems to have been changed and it seems we might finally be getting a look at a potential Series 2 for the Coal Hill School gang. Author and series composer Blair Mowat could have easily given us a straightforward tale, thankfully this is not straightforward, instead, we get a recap of the on-screen series as well as the previous four volumes of audio adventures, put into one coherent tale with just two characters and a nice surprising cameo at the end!

Mowat tells us the story of Class from Charlie Smith’s perspective as he navigates his new life on Earth. He begins to journal his thoughts and feelings from the time he and Miss. Quill was rescued by the Doctor to open the Cabinet of Souls. Don’t be put off by the fact that there aren’t actually any monsters in this story, despite the Shadow Kin featured on the cover, what this is instead is an excellent character study of two characters who didn’t really get much development initially.

Despite being one of the main characters, Charlie, played by Greg Austin didn’t get much to do in the television series, many of the characters suffered because there were too many in too short of a series. What also didn’t help was the great big time gaps between each episode with characters having done things off-screen. One of the worst of this is when, following the deadly petal things, Mattuesz and Charlie have a falling out and then in the next episode it’s explained that Mattuesz has been sleeping in a family member’s car.

Here though, gaps like that get explored more, so while it is a complete recap of the television series to get listeners up to date before, hopefully, the original cast return to do a new series, there are elements that make this a completely new and fun story.

Much of the fun of this story comes from Charlie’s observations of Earth’s culture. He comments on hipsters, our obsession with going to the toilet and how boring football is amongst other things, but his reactions were always never anything short of hilarious and actually pretty accurate! But amongst all that there were elements of survivor’s guilt, Charlie is the last of the Rhodians, how does he honour them?

Revenge plays a big part playing up to the television finale when Charlie uses the Cabinet to wipe out the Shadow Kin. It was a pretty impossible situation, Charlie could have let everyone die, but he had to sacrifice his honour to save the Earth which had become his adopted home. And while genocide wasn’t and is never the answer but Mowat does a brilliant job of helping us see where Charlie was coming from, even if he was hopelessly misguided. One wonders what the Doctor would have made of his actions, especially the Twelfth. Hopefully, if the series is continued on audio, then we might get to find out!

Secret Diary is a good story deserving a listen even if you aren’t a fan of Class. In terms of the television series, the one thing that really let it down for me was that it only had one writer. One wouldn’t want to “rubbish” Patrick Ness and hopefully, that isn’t what I am doing but there were things that might not have been missed had there been a team of writers working on it. One of those things is the gaps between episodes, had it been a more coherent timeline and an episode to deal with the fallout of others would have gone a long way to giving the series a chance to breathe while aiming for the more adult nature the show was constantly striving for.

As well as the masterful script from Mowat, much of the story relies on the actions of its two leads, Greg Austin and Jordan Renzo as Charlie and Mattuesz. They both reprise their roles wonderfully and it feels like the two characters have never been away. From their meeting in a lift at Coal-Hill School to their first date to their misunderstanding of each other’s actions, the two characters both in the way they are written and performed are successfully sold as a real couple and some much-needed exploration of them both being outsiders who come together helps sell the notion that they are in love.

And then there is the surprise cameo at the end, I don’t wish to spoil it but it does lead into some hints about a second series and how the characters will be dealing with the repercussions of the Series 1 finale. Hopefully, Mowat and Big Finish have managed to get the complete rights to the series because just from this story, not to mention some fantastic ones in the previous set, this has proven that there is life in continuing the saga of the Coal Hill Gang.

Order Class: Secret Diary of a Rhodian Prince from Big Finish now.