DOCTOR WHO AND THE HORNET'S MORTGAGE

When you like Doctor Who it's a bit of a life sentence. It happened quite unobtrusively when I was 11. Sylvester McCoy, the most rubbish of the Doctors, was in charge. Twenty one years later and it's still happening.

There was a saturation point for me a couple of years ago when Doctor Who, Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures (complete with something called "Subs" from a lacksadaisical CBBC) were all running together. Doctor no.8 Paul McGann was appearing in his own audio series on BBC 7. It was enough to yank the brain stem of even the most ardent superfan and yet this was just the backwash from a massive alien iceberg that had hoved through the Doctor Who community almost unnoticed by the wider world.

When the series was off air between 1989 (when I was 12) and 2005 (when I wasn't) there was an outbreak of spin-off product, compiled largely by fans of the show who could do something about it. You could call them enterprising media producers. You could call them professional anoraks. They are somewhere between the two and between them they oversaw a vast array of novels (featuring Doctors 1 - 8), audios (radio plays without a station, for which many of the non-dead Doctors came back) and comic strips.

They weren't just flogging a dead horse. They were paying a blacksmith to knock out some shoes. The idea behind Doctor Who is fiendishly simple and as such could run indefinitely. As this will-powered skyscraper of paper and CDs amassed over fandom the common and garden Whovian would ask themselves the question: just how much do we love this thing?

The series returned and this produced a natural levelling effect. Big Finish Productions were allowed to continue their audio range. The books were honed down in favour of current Doctors. The previous administrations, with their enthusiastic, occasionally inspired, sometimes amateurish attempts at Doctor Who, were given a gentle kick into touch. What had happened in the show’s absence was an unusual hybrid of fan and commerce, which to a certain extent still continues today (proceed to the Big Finish weblink at the base of this article to assess the true extent of the culty mushroom).

Fanaticals of all hues, from fans in the loop through to bona fide TV scribblers, from Emmerdale writers to Seinfeld gagmiths, wrote several dozen audio adventures for leading men Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann and that ball is still rolling after 11 years. The only living Doctor missing from proceedings was the most infamous - Tom Baker.

All this changes from next month. A series of audios produced by a devoted variant, this time at the BBC, will see Baker returning as the Doctor. He is teaming up with another elderly man, Mike Yates, a former companion of Baker's predecessor Jon Pertwee. The series, "Hornet's Nest", is a delayed whimper from the seismic impact Tom Baker made on the role in the 70s, but Baker is no ordinary actor and no ordinary Doctor. His recent, bombastic request to vet the script of an imaginary Children In Need special featuring himself testifies to the potential brilliance or appalling wrong-headedness of this new project. With its authentic cover illustration and Dennis Wheatley-esque storyline it could just be a step in the right direction. Either way it will be a colossal explosion amongst a small group of dedicated listeners.

The way I like to view it is that this is what will bridge the gap between "proper" Doctor Who and what materialized while he was away. At once a dalliance and the genuine article, this series may introduce a new audience to the bizarre but irrefutable world of the spin off product, before Matt Smith arrives in 2010 and consigns everything else to the vortex as Eccleston and Tennant did before him.

http://bigfinish.com/