Enter the Hornets' Nest!

This week BBC Audiobooks are publishing the first disc in the Doctor Who - Hornets' Nest series, starring Tom Baker. It's about a year since Michael Stevens first contacted me about it and asked me to pitch a story idea. I ended up pitching loads of ideas - carried away by my massive enthusiasm for the project - and wound up being commissioned for all five scripts, which I wrote during the first few months of this year.

The whole thing forms a great big, spooky Who story, set in the present day, but with a Doctor at the heart of it who has walked straight out of the past. I'm so proud of what the brilliant cast and crew have done with this - I think we've created a very different kind of Doctor Who story.

It's one that has its links back to Old Time Radio shows, such as the creepy old US shows like 'The Shadow' and 'Haunting Hour.' It's also very exciting and adventurous, with hints of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in the Forties' radio incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, or of Dick Barton and - even more so - Vincent Price in the BBC's own, 'The Price of Fear.' I think we've built a lovely subtle blend of 'levels' of storytelling in the Hornets' Nest - rather like the Gothic tales of old - with a mix of restrospective narration, dramatised flashback and unfolding events in the present-moment 'outer frame' of the story.

It begins with the Doctor summoning his old friend Mike Yates to pay a visit to a cosy Sussex cottage round about the time of the Winter solstice. Here's the Doctor as he was in 1978, but seemingly at home in a snowbound countryside, surrounded by strange bric-a-brac and stuffed animals which come creepily to life in the night...

It's a series of tales-within-tales; mystery stories nested neatly one inside the other like Chinese boxes, as the Doctor sets out to bring Mr Yates up to date in his battles with the Hornet menace. There's a lovely feeling of nighttime vigils and wintry stories at the blazing hearth...

Anyway - I hope you'll listen for yourself! And listen out for the agitated buzzing of unseasonal insects...