I did not immediately take to The Scarifyers, a series of audio plays starring Nicholas Courtney as retired police detective Lionheart and Terry Molloy as his sidekick, horror writer Professor Dunning, together solving 1930s X-Files type mysteries in London and elsewhere. Though the two stars are excellent, the first few scripts felt a bit thin and over-reliant on Doctor Who in-jokes. But once we get to the third or fourth story, things start to come together, and when Brian Blessed appears as a guest star in the fourth story, he fits in rather modestly and yet also memorably.

The sixth story was made after Nicholas Courtney died last year, and is rather poignantly about his character’s disappearance; his place is filled in the narrative by David Warner, playing his retired sergeant (Warner doesn’t really sound demotic enough for that part but otherwise is great as ever). By the end, the door is left open for more adventures with the Warner/Molloy combination, and that would not be a bad thing at all.

I don’t think I had come across the work of Simon Barnard or Paul Morris before, but I’ll look out for more by either.