Oh No It Isn't! (Bernice Summerfield Big Finish) [Audiobook] [Audio CD]

Paul Cornell (Author)

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Big Finish Productions (September 30, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1903654300
• ISBN-13: 978-1903654309
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 4.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,761,736 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Is it or isn't it?, August 29, 2001

By 

Joseph McCauley (Normal, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Oh No It Isn't! (Doctor Who: The New Adventures) (Mass Market Paperback)

An amusing story, something like a cross between Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger and Douglas Adams' Hitchhhiker's Guide series, and likely to appeal to fans of these series. Bernice and her cat, arguably the two main characters, were engaging characters that were fun to read about. A lot of cliches from classic tales are used here in twisted and surprising ways. A very funny story.
But there were enough problems to keep me from giving it a higher rating than I did. There were too many other characters that were interesting but inadequately developed. The plot was rather chaotic, taking turns seemingly at random. It struck me as the sort of story that could have been developed from one of those creativity exercises where you are given several unusual, diverse objects or characters, and you are supposed to conjure up a story that uses all of them.
You could certainly do worse than to read Paul Cornell's Oh No, It Isn't.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oh No It Isn't audio recording, August 24, 2000

By 

M. Sleeman "Cat Lady Meow" (Beltsville, MD United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Oh No It Isn't! (Doctor Who: The New Adventures) (Mass Market Paperback)

It has been a long time sinse I've listened to such a fully book. Being self conscious, it takes a lot to get me to laugh out loud at work, but this one did it. I even found I had to stop my data entry to listen, and hoped I wasn't overheard. This is definately a book I will read and listen to again and again. I also will lend it to all my friends, or recommend it for them to buy.

3.0 out of 5 stars Oh, what is it?, July 24, 2002

By 

Andrew McCaffrey "The Grumpy Young Man" (Satellite of Love, Maryland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Oh No It Isn't! (Doctor Who: The New Adventures) (Mass Market Paperback)

I finished OH NO IT ISN'T! a few days ago, but I'm still not quite sure what to make of it. It's a fun romp that spends the first hundred pages being absolutely not a romp. It's a fantastical, farcical fantasy that tacks on a bizarrely scientific ending. It's concerned with establishing a foundation to the (then) new series of Benny Adventures while also attempting to maintain a standalone tale. In short, it's doing quite a lot of different things almost at once. I found it to be enjoyable, but the further into the story I delved, the more restless I became.

The only major problem I found with OH NO IT ISN'T! is that it drags, quite heavily in parts. It's trying to be light and frothy, but it never seemed to be quite as light as it wants to be. A secondary (and mostly serious) subplot keeps pulling the action out of fluffville and grounding the entire book so that it never goes quite as far as it could have. Frivolity is quite a difficult concept to successfully pull off, and I don't think that Paul Cornell totally succeeded. Certainly there are some remarkably fun pieces, and I was entertained throughout much of the book. But too much lightheartedness can become tedious, and I found the secondary plot to be mostly distracting. There are times when the story is neither one thing nor the other. Had Paul Magrs written this same story he probably would have left out most of the real world portions (including the shaky ending) and moved the plot along faster. And I probably would have enjoyed that version more than this one.

Now, I'm quite willing to concede the possibility that I had less than ideal reading conditions here. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I was unable to read the story in the larger chunks that it was probably best suited for. Breaking it down into smaller pieces and reading only short sections a day can only have hurt this overall experience. While initially I had been very enthusiastic about the story, pulling the book out for the third day of Benny still locked in panto-land with no clue as to how to escape began to require more and more effort on my part. The longer the panto scenes went on, the less desire I felt to pick up the book again. Nothing seemed to be happening other than pop culture references and word plays. Obviously, that's the nature of the medium here, but while an actual panto performance doesn't go on for a terribly long amount of time, the same thing in a book requires a greater investment of time from the audience. The jokes and the puns do manage to liven those sections, but there were many moments where it felt like an uphill battle.

OH NO IT ISN'T! can be quite a lot of fun, if you're in the mood for an odd sort of romp through panto-land. Many of the jokes are devastatingly funny, and there are numerous pop culture references to keep one amused, from the Marx Brothers to Pulp. As a light and frothy adventurous frolic, it mostly works. Had the plot moved a bit faster, I probably wouldn't have ended up being as bored by the middle section, but perhaps looking for a quick storyline in a panto is a fruitless task. On the other hand, it's quite possible that panto is just one of those genres that doesn't translate well to the novel format.