Doctor Who - Audio Details

The twenty-first century has just begun, and Malebolgia is enjoying its status as the newest state in America.  After his successful involvement with Scotland's devolution, Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart has been invited over to Malebolgia to offer some of his experiences and expertise.

There he encounters the charismatic Brigham Elisha Dashwood III, an evangelical statesman running for Governor who may not be quite as clean-cut and wholesome as he makes out.  One of Dashwood's other roles in society is as patron of a new medical institute concentrating on curing the ills of the human mind.  One of the patients there interests the Brigadier - someone who claims he travels through space and time in something called a TARDIS.

Charley, however, has more than a few problems of her own.  Amnesiac, she is working as a hostess at the local chapter of the Hell Fire Club, populated by local dignitaries who have summoned forth the demon Marchosias.  And the leader of the Club?  None other that Dashwood, who seems determined to achieve congressional power by the most malevolent means at his disposal…

"Hell is where I have come at last... and there can be no escape..."

Thus spake the Doctor.

Oh.

That is, if that was the Doctor just then.  How can we tell?  He thinks he is - but then, you think you are who you think you are.  But... suppose a highly qualified psychiatrist were to tell you you'd fantasised yourself into somebody else's identity, where your entire memory is unqualified hallucination...

You take my point, I'm sure.

And is Minuet in Hell really Minuet in Hell?  Somewhere in the Space-Time-Continuum, might there exist a tired old 1980s amateur cassette bearing that title, in which a different Doctor experienced a spookily similar Hell as this one - not in 21st century America but in the London of 1765?  Where the Hell Fire Club really was as the sensational movies and novels tell, and not, as my recent reading assures me, a lot of Antipodean-canine offal?

In an Infinite Continuum wherein every moment offers an infinitude of equally possible futures, who would have the gall to decree that this version of events is true, that false?

One thing though stays unchanged: whoever it may transpire that I am, I shall remain your humble and obedient servant...

Alan W Lear, March 2001