Start to Finish: 3.11 - The Mahogany Murderers

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

The first 'Doctorless' Companion Chronicle harks back to the Fourth Doctor's Victorian Gothic outing, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, as Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter bring theatrical entrepreneur Henry Gordon Jago and pathologist Professor George Litefoot back to life in Andy Lane's The Mahogany Murderers.

A wooden body on the slab at St Thomas's hospital; criminals who died in prison walking the streets. What sinister scheme is the mysterious Dr Tulp hatching in his warehouse full of electrical paraphernalia?

Jago and Litefoot appeared in one story of the original TV series, acting as a composite Watson to the Fourth Doctor's Holmes and never entering the TARDIS. In The Mahogany Murderers, they investigate a mystery without the aid of the Doctor, with only barmaid Ellie (played by director Lisa Bowerman), framing the story as the mismatched friends compare notes over pale ale at the Red Tavern.

The plot is slight, if inventive, but the heart of this story is the chemistry between its leads. Baxter as the well-to-do Litefoot and Benjamin as the ebullient, upwardly striving Jago are a classic odd couple and their banter (through a happy blend of actors and a good script) sparkles. The minor character voices are delivered either as broad caricature from Jago or - by request - without accents by Litefoot.

The story ends on something of a cliffhanger, which would later pay off not as a sequel, but as a spin-off series which has now run to 28 audio plays, with 12 more already commissioned. Such is not undeserved, as The Mahogany Murderers twinkles its way out of the conventional mode of wistful nostalgia and allows its leads to be part of something present and ongoing. With this play, Jago and Litefoot, Investigators of Infernal Incidents, had arrived.

A more traditional Chronicle rounds off this series, as Mary Tamm's First Romana narrates the story of The Stealers from Saiph.