A Timeless Gift ...

For four weeks, starting at Christmas, the Radio Times gave away free - each week - part of a Dr Who audio book on CD, which meant that if you bought the listings magazine for a month you ended up with two complete Dr Who stories - Feast Of The Drowned and The Stone Rose.

Both stories had their own strengths - with the added bonus of being read by current Doctor, David Tennant. While Feast was quite Lovercraftian in its monsters, Stone started off as being a rather straight forward historical tale, but quickly spun off into wonderful surreal sci-fi.

Dr Who audio books come in three types. The first is the straight forward reading of a novelisation, as these were, sometimes spiced up with sound effects and the reader doing some voices (David Tennant read ths stories in his 'normal' voice and slipped into The Doctor for his character's lines, which was very effective).

Then we have the original full-cast plays, which are also excellent, but I think less common for the Who audios. These are radio plays and are always great fun.

Finally we get the adaptations of old TV episodes, the weakest format. These use the dialogue from the TV epsiode - which is fine - but the linking narration just seems to be the stage directions from the script ... delivered in the present tense (e.g. "A beach, somewhere in England. The TARDIS materialises. The Doctor and Jamie walk out. They build sandcastles.") It's very strange and totally destroys the mystique of a radio play.

It would only take a simple change of tense to make the links more dramatic, but in the meantime I shall stick with audio books that are obviously original works.