Actually an hour and eleven minutes. My newest obsession has moved into a new medium with release of the first CD of Hornet’s Nest entitled “The Stuff of Nightmares“. The BBC has found a way to get Tom Baker, the fourth Doctor, to record audio plays 28 years after his last appearance on the TV show. I read about it in the last DWM, one of the more successful spin-offs itself.
I used to like radio plays quite a bit – especially rebroadcasts of BBC whodunnits. That was until the CBC started trying to make them and sapped my will to go on. Every broadcast out of Toronto seemed to require overdone ray guns or minutes long sweaty orgasms. No one told the CBC apparently that porn has never worked on the radio. With some hope of a better outcome, I bought an earlier Who audio play CD a few months ago about Leela on Gallifrey but it didn’t catch me either. Too much of an in-joke. Needing a web concordance to figure out what was going on.
None of that in this case. Baker’s fourth Doctor leans heavily on Sherlock Holmes and works in a familiar way, a way that works on radio. Baker keep his Who in a certain scope that is quite unlike the recent Messianic versions. He once questioned whether he had the right to kill off the Daleks – something the Ninth and Tenth would not so much as blink at… perhaps with good reason.
Maybe it’s just the tone of voice that works in this one for me. I watched one of the special extras on the Key To Time last night after the kids were all asleep. It was one of a number of episode of Late Night Story with Baker back in 1978 sitting at a desk in a study at night reading a nightmarish tale of a boy about to die. Grim and creepy. “The Stuff of Nightmares” has that, too.
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