The Scent of Blood, by Andrew Lane and read by Dan Starkey, is the better of the two. It’s a vampire story set in 19th century Edinburgh; vampires of course have their own Doctor Who continuity, and Lane (whose strong point is crossovers between Who and other continuities) takes all of that on without going too far down fannish rabbit-holes, and bringing in some memorable characters. Starkey is also a very impressive and versatile voice performer. You can get The Scent of Blood here.
The Winged Coven, by Paul Magrs and read by Susan Jameson, is another in the sequence of stories about Mrs Wibbsey, the housekeeper of Nest Cottage, the Fourth Doctor’s home from home in rural England, with also an appearance from Mike Yates. There is some fun with mind swaps, but really the witches are just stupid, the Wibbsey situation is a one-joke plot device and I’m getting a bit bored with it. You can get The Winged Coven here.
Having discovered the BBC Original Audiobook line, and started in the middle and worked to the end, I’ve gone back to the beginning for this story set in the Nest Cottage continuity, where Susan Jameson plays the Fourth Doctor’s housekeeper, Mrs Wibbsey, some time around the 2010s. This is the story of their whisking off to the Italian coast in the 18th century, where villagers are being mean to the local non-humans, and Count Cagliostro and the local magnate are also entangled. It’s solid enough, and quite fun, though I sometimes feel that Paul Magrs camps it up a bit too much, and his / Jameson’s portrayal of the Fourth Doctor isn’t really the chap we saw on television. You can get The Thing From the Sea here.
The BBC released a series of short audiobooks in 2021-22, each taking a companion or companions from the classic series and imagining what happened after their time with the Doctor ended. The first of these is The Kairos Ring, by Stephen Gallagher, bringing Romana and the Tharils to the American Civil War, and I had read it as part of the expanded Warrior’s Gate novelisation, though you can get it separately here. The next four are a connected set of stories by Paul Magrs, and I listened to them several weeks ago with the intention of writing them up in time for Gallifrey (but did not have time).
We start with Bessie Come Home, narrated by Stephanie Cole as Bessie. She is best known (by me anyway) as co-star with Graham Crowden in the sit-com Waiting for God. (Playing a pensioner, she turned 50 while that series was being made.) It’s a nice idea to give a voice to Bessie, the yellow Edwardian car acquired by the Third Doctor and driven also by the Fourth and Seventh Doctors, and the story is an amusing recapitulation of the adventures that Bessie participated in, a real nostalgia fest. The ending has a twist that I was not really sure about; the majority of reviewers felt that it capped the story nicely, but I found it a bit contrived. (I know, I know, an odd complaint to make of a story about a sentient car…)
I felt the sequence getting a little more into its stride with London, 1965, which tells the story of Ian and Barbara returning to London after two years away. It is read by Jamie Glover, who has been playing Ian Chesterton in recent Big Finish plays (and played William Russell in An Adventure in Space and Time). Rather than floating into a fairytale ending, the two former time travellers find it very difficult to readjust to life in London and become distant from each other; Ian is sucked into writing a science fiction show by the mysterious Mr Harman, while Barbara becomes a subject of the psychic researches of the enigmatic Angela Leaman. There are lots of knowing nods to Who continuity and to Sixties culture. I felt that this was the best of the four, and the story is sufficiently independent that you could enjoy it on its own.
Sleeper Agents takes us to and beyond the other end of the First Doctor’s era, with Ben and Polly returning to London on the day that they left. This time the narrator is Anneke Wills, the only one of the four to have actually been on TV Who, reprising her role as Polly. Again we have Mr Harman and Miss Leaman, and a good role for Polly’s pet cat, and a mysterious Arctic Island; but it’s a bit of a middle story in the arc, with the ending leaving some plot strands to be resolved.
Finally, The Penumbra Affair brings back Susan Jameson as Mrs Wibbsey, the Fourth Doctor’s housekeeper in the Nest Cottage series of BBC audios written a decade earlier by Paul Magrs, featuring Tom Baker before he decided to work with Big Finish. Mrs Wibbsey receives a letter warning that all of the Doctor’s former companions are in danger, and falls into correspondence with Polly Wright, now retired, who ends up on her doorstep for Christmas. The Nest Cottage setting is beautifully realised, and there’s a good twist on exactly how Angela Leamann fits into the story. It wouldn’t make much sense to listeners who are not familiar with both the previous three stories, and the Nest Cottage series, but in that context it works perfectly well. It’s a shame that Susan Jameson has never been in TV Who.
