It's Not Just The Evenings That Are Getting Darker...

The Fourth Doctor continues his journeys back through time, battling the evil hornet creatures, to a pre-Victorian 19th Century travelling circus in the Dorset town of Blandford.

The Circus Of Doom is the third in the BBC's original five-part Doctor Who audio series wriiten by Paul Magrs and featuring Tom Baker as The Doctor and Richard Franklin as retired Captain Mike Yates - and proves to be a pivotal tale in the overall story arc.

While trapped with ex-UNIT man Mike in the basement of his Sussex cottage, The Doctor has been recounting his adventures backwards down the timestream to try and trace the hornet creatures back to their origins.

A pair of "possessed" ballet shoes in The Dead Shoes gave him the clue that led to the circus, where he not only encountered their original owner but tangled with the hypnotic powers of the dwarvish ringmaster Antonio, his muscular dead-eyed clowns and "the king of the jungle".

Knowing the fate of the ballet shoes 100 years in the future saw The Doctor dancing very close to paradox territory, as he fought the realisation that there was nothing he could do to change what had already happened (in the future!), but he also gained some insight into his involvement with the hornets many years earlier.

The doomed inevitability of events simply adds to the horror as The Doctor struggles to save someone he knows he can't.

The Circus Of Doom is still groaning at the sides with a wonderful surfeit of weirdness, but now three stories into the run, I'm beginning to the clues as to where the tale is going and why it was necessary to recount the individual adventures at its core in reverse chronological order.

From what I have gleaned on the Interwebs, these particular tales are something of an acquired taste, a taste, I must confess, I am finding to my liking. Critics have bemoaned the fact that they are not full-cast plays like the main Big Finish line but - with Tom's main narration and select other voices - resemble Big Finish's Companion Chronicles (which allow stories about Doctor's whose actors are now deceased to be told).

For my money, I find the shorter (usually around an hour) length of these latter stories, and the fact that they revolve primarily around a single narrator, more enjoyable anyway.

There have also been grumblings about the "reverse chronology" of the tales, but this particular story gives strong hints as to why it has to be told this way, as well as dealing with potential paradoxes and the fact that the Doctor is following a trail of breadcrumbs backwards through time.

If anything it's this particular slant on time travel that is helping to confirm these stories as some of my favourite Doctor Who audios.

Another rather strange complaint comes from the fact that people now associate Tom's rich tones more with Little Britain - which I personally don't as he will always be The Doctor to me, first and foremost.

One of the many aspects of the Doctor Who format that I admire is that in the hands of good writers, and there is no disputing that Magrs falls into this category, it can handle almost any genre or type of story. So, yes, this Hornets' Nest range is peculiar, creepy and probably quite unique in the Whoniverse, but that doesn't make them any the less Doctor Who.

If anything, Magrs captures the quirky Englishness of Doctor Who, not only in his settings (most recently the quaintly British towns of Cromer and Blandford) but also his very deliberate use of language and pithy one-liners.

The story continues in about a month's time with A Sting In The Tail, presumably the last of The Doctor's tales to Mike before they both have to confront the creatures that have them trapped in the fifth CD Hive Of Horror.