Doctor Who - Audio Details

Many years ago, on a dark and stormy night, the disfigured and enigmatic Doctor John Smith invited his closest friends, Inspector Victor Schaeffer and wife Jacqueline, to a dinner to celebrate his birthday.  A few hours later all the occupants of that house had been changed - some where dead, others mentally scarred forever by the events of that night.

So, what happened to the distinguished dinner guests on that evening?  Perhaps, we'll never know.  But two clues have led to much speculation - found outside the study window, a charred umbrella with a curved red handle and found inside the house, a blood-stained of Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

For one person, this night represented an ending: an ending to the thousand years of darkness and an ending to ten years of light.

But, for everyone else, is there no ending of this one night of Hell?

The Master terrified me as a child.  He was Evil.  So, when Gary Russell asked me to pitch an idea featuring him, I was well chuffed.  Except that Big Finish wanted a character-based story and when you think about it, the Master doesn't really have that much of a character.  He's just Evil.  With a captial 'E'.  No matter what theories I came up with to explain his character or behaviour none of them seemed to fit.  Yes, sometimes he's fighting for survival and yes, sometimes, he believes that the universe would be a better place if he ran it but at other times he's dressing up as an Oriental or trying to stop the Magna Carta being signed.  And he never wins.  Ever.

This set me thinking, what must it be like to be the Master?  Always alone, laughing at your own jokes, failing in everything you do... wouldn't you just give up?  Wouldn't you just retire to some backwater planet and live a normal life?

But what it you can't?  What if something inside you compels you to act the way you do?  In the same way that the Doctor can't help interfering and trying to help those less fortunate, what if the Master cannot help but kill?

What would you be more afraid of?  The Master?  Or that no matter what you did, no matter how hard you tried to escape, you were the Master?

Joseph Lidster, May 2003