The first CD of the Hornet’s Nest audio series arrived yesterday so I took the chance to listen to it on my iPod last night.

You know the story that Terrance Dicks refused to call “State of Decay” by the name “The Wasting” for fear that critics would call it a “waste” of time?  Well, the same thing could be said of “The Stuff of Nightmares”.  Is it the stuff of nightmares?

THE STUFF OF NIGHTMARES

Hornet’s Nest 1: The Stuff of Nightmares
by Paul Magrs  (who thought his name was pronouced “May-gers”?  It’s pronounced “Paul Mars” – silent ‘g’)

I shan’t make this a long review because there isn’t really much to say about it.

It is, as feared previously, a story in which the Doctor and Mike Yates spend just about the entire 70m duration sitting about chatting.  The first third of the story is Richard Franklin as Mike Yates narrating how he first “found” the Doctor again at “Nest Cottage”, and the rest is Tom Baker as the Doctor relating to Mike some of the events that led up to where they are now.

This is a far cry from the BBC7 full-audio adventures or the more evocative sound-effects laded Big Finish audios such as The Sirens of Time that I listened to just recently.  It’s very much akin to The Companion Chronicles – The Mahogany Murderers which I reviewed some time back.  The two main “stars” waffle on until, like a very slow relay race, the other picks up the baton.

There is the occasional break in which another voice enters the story during a brief scene that either the Doctor or Mike is reminiscing – but there’s nothing evocative in the sound or the atmosphere that encourages you to picture what’s going on.  In that respect, it’s not even close to The Mahogany Murderers.

To compound the problem, the voices of Yates and the Doctor don’t sound like Yates and the Doctor.  Richard Franklin sounds like an old man which is kind of excusable because this is meant to be Mike Yates “now” and there is the odd glint that he could be the same guy.  The Doctor, sadly, sounds like Tom Baker reading a book.  Only in the very rarest of circumstances does he sound like the Doctor – and each of those circumstances is during a flashback when he’s accosting the bad-guy.  For all the other time, while he’s talking to Yates, he doesn’t sound the least bit like the 4th Doctor.

I know that probably sounds strange because Tom Baker’s Doctor is Tom Baker, but there’s no disguising that (i) Tom Baker has aged and (ii) Tom Baker hasn’t played the Doctor for 30 years.  If you recall Tom’s stint as the Doctor in “Dimensions of Time” and recall it merely as “Tom Baker in a red coat”, then that’s kind of what you get here.  There’s no sense that this is the 4th Doctor.

What compounds the issue is the way in which the story is written.  The plot itself is okay – although, again, it’s a little too close to the Mahogany Murderers for my tastes (something’s bringing inanimate objects to life).  However, it’s written in a style that gives the impression that the writer is frustrated at not being asked to write Sherlock Holmes.  Lots of long words and expounded sentences which fit neither Mike Yates nor the Doctor.  The cottage, the streets, the people, etc – the whole thing feels like it’s latter-day Sherlock Holmes.  And that’s the problem.  The piece comes across as Sherlock Holmes retelling a recent adventure to Dr Watson.

Added to this, there are several “Doctor mannerisms” that suggest the writer is writing for Jon Pertwee – not Tom Baker.  Would the 4th Doctor ever decide to stay on Earth for weeks to solve a mystery of people being killed mysteriously?  Would he sit drinking tea in a cafe while waiting for the bad-guys to make their move?  And telepathy/mind-control was far more a 3rd Doctor thing than 4th Doctor.

The writer does attempt to deal with the continuity of the 4th Doctor and Mike never actually having met with a casual couple of lines about them having met at the Brigadier’s Christmas party or something.  Would the 4th Doctor really have come back to Earth to go to the Brig’s Christmas do?  I don’t think so.  We learn, through Yates, that the Doctor brings him up to speed with some other recent adventures – including Giant Rats, Robots, etc – suggesting that this Doctor is somewhere between leaving Leela on Gallifrey and waiting for the call from the White Guardian.  That’s why he’s sans regular companion.  However, the writer then goes and throws it all away with Mike Yates saying that his time working with the Doctor was in the 70s!  No, no, no.  That’s propaganda put about by “Mawdryn Undead”.  How could Sarah-Jane have come from the 80s if the UNIT years were in the 70s!  If you don’t want to go with the more likely time period, then don’t use the time period at all.  Just say “a few decades ago” or something.

If you like Tom Baker’s voice then The Stuff of Nightmares isn’t a terrible way to spend 70mins of your time – however, there are far better 4th Doctor-esque audios out there.  I have audios of Tom Baker reading Journey To The Centre of the Earth and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – and, in both of these, Baker sounds far more like the 4th Doctor than he does in The Stuff of Nightmares.  And, if you want an audio of him being the 4th Doctor, seek out his reading of State of Decay.

This CD ends in a way that suggests you’re going to have to buy all 5 of them.  So if you buy the first, expect to buy the others before the story reaches a conclusion.  As the 70mins duration of the CD is used up, the story reaches an enforced climax in which the Doctor and Mike Yates are hiding in the basement while the cottage is overrun.  Rather than take any proactive steps at this point, the Doctor pretty much says “put the kettle on and I’ll tell you what happened next, when I went to Cromer”.  He may as well have said “I’ve put the next part of this story on a CD, Mike, so you may as well nip to the shop and buy it to save me waffling for another hour”.

I don’t yet know if I will retain or cancel my pre-order for part 2.  There’s nothing here that makes me sit on the edge of my seat willing the next CD to drop through the door, but it’s not wholly awful like some other Doctor Who audios I’ve listened to either.

In conclusion, I think this is a huge missed opportunity.  They could have done a series of 5 separate adventures with the 4th Doctor in a similar way to the BBC7 Paul McGann stories.  With a full cast and decent sound effects, they may have encourage Tom Baker to be a bit more enthusiastic and, as a consequence, sound a little more like the 4th Doctor.  We could have had a hitherto unknown season of adventures with the 4th Doctor and Mike Yates that would have been worth the effort, instead of this “pass the script to each other” style of Tom Baker and Richard Franklin doing Jackanory.

In hindsight, the best part of the story is the first 10 minutes of Mike Yates arriving at the cottage before the Doctor appears on the scene.  It’s told in the “here and now” and so feels more like a real adventure than this “sitting around boring the slippers off everyone” approach of the rest of the story.

My last word would have to be that, if Big Finish had begun releasing Colin Baker’s “Lost Season” right now, I’d be buying that instead of this BBC Audio presentation of “The Hornet’s Nest” starring Tom Baker.  I wouldn’t be buying it “as well as” but “instead of”.

One line summary – buy it if you like Tom Baker’s voice, don’t bother if you just like the 4th Doctor.