Further buzzing

I love this Amazon review of 'The Stuff of Nightmares'. It echoes lots of things I think about doing Doctor Who tie-ins, and why they're a special thing to do.


A sublime treat, 7 Sep 2009
By N. Campbell "seahorsenick" (Hove) - See all my reviews

You don't need me to tell you that Doctor Who's a bit of a special creature, do you? That it takes a kind of genius to get it right? Born at the early end of TV broadcasting, when creatives were fearless and the audience was strongly suspected of having an imagination. Then buffeted and shaped by the tide of nearly thirty years of life in television.

A product of the televisual medium but always somehow out-of-time, somehow old-fashioned and postmodern at the same time, speaking to several audiences at once, cheap and stagey and using a particular sleight-of-hand to produce a magic kind of suburban gothic - you can't just drop a few of its ingredients into a book or an audio play. There have been a lot of `tie-in' adventures for the Doctor, and the successful ones have done what the source material does - taken possession of their new medium, played to it and played with it. Magrs' sublime audio adventure does this.

Not only does it pulsate with the fluorescent green life that once animated the brain of Morbius and the gleaming clefts of rampaging Ogri, macabre and hilarious in the same breath, mysterious and compelling, it also manages to reflect Tom Baker's own personality and eccentricities in a way that enlarges instead of diluting the Doctor's character. The Pescatons cut with Radio 4 drama and Valentine Dyall's Man in Black, this is pure Doctor Who, the real deal, and it comes highly recommended.