Doctor Who - Audio Details

Hallowe'en 1938.

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house not a creature was stirring...

But something must be stirring.  Something hidden in the shadows.  Something which kills the servants of an old Edwardian mansion in the most brutal and macabre manner possible.  Exactly on the chiming of the hour, every hour, as the grandfather clock ticks on towards midnight.

Trapped and afraid, the Doctor and Charley are forced to play detective to murders with no motive, where even the victims don't stay dead.  Time is running out.

And Time itself might well be the killer...

IT'S ALMOST AS IF TIME warps around Christmas - it's only one day of the year, but I always seem to be preparing for it or recovering from it.  I love it - but competing with hundreds of shoppers in crowded departments stores always brings out the worst in me.  I had the thought to write a horribly black comedy in which everyone got murdered in a really Christmassy manner - someone throttled by a piece of tinsel, another having their throat slashed by a broken glass bauble.  I considered calling it The Holly Terror - but fortunately changed my mind several nanoseconds later.

From that rather silly idea grew The Chimes of Midnight.  I live in an old Victorian house not unlike the one in which the story is set, and took to writing a fair amount of the dialogue with the lights dim in the middle of the night.  What I expected would be quite funny ended up being something which gave me a few troubled dreams.  I hope that just a few of my night terrors get felt by the listener to this adventure.

It doesn't matter what time of the year it is.  Draw the curtain, turn the lights down low, even hang some mistletoe over your head if you feel so inclined.  And imagine that you're hearing a festive ghost story, with the fire roaring in the hearth, and the snow outside falling heavy and fast, blocking out any means of escape.

Robert Shearman, December 2001