I love Doctor Who and I love PG Wodehouse but never, except in my wildest dreams, did I expect there ever to be a crossover. So when I heard that Big Finish were releasing just that, the delightfully titled The Auntie Matter, it's safe to say I was quite excited.
It was hard to imagine how it would work in practice, but I wasn’t disappointed. Jonathan Morris (a writer who has done lots of excellent Doctor Who stuff) has done a great job here.
Aunts aren’t gentlemen, as Bertie Wooster once said, and these wise words are certainly true here. The characters include a typically Wodehousian silly ass called Bertie, I mean Reggie, and a ferocious aunt rather in the mould of Bertie’s fearsome Aunt Agatha (the one who eats broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth), only worse. "Homicidal tendencies above and beyond the norm, even by aunt standards."
The Fourth Doctor and Romana (the wonderful Mary Tamm, who sadly died after recording this series – the tributes to her in the extras are very moving), are temporarily residing on Earth. (It's harmless. Mostly.) 1920s London, to be precise, in the guise of a Lord and Lady, while the TARDIS has been set to flit randomly around the universe (in the capable tin paws of K9) until the Black Guardian gets tired of chasing it. The Doctor is devoting his time to building an etheric field disturbance detector (it detects disturbances in the etheric field, apparently) while a bored Romana decides to immerse herself in the scientific literature of the era (well, it should while away an afternoon). There’s also a young housemaid called Mabel, who’s hopeless at cooking kippers but does all right as a temporary companion for the Doctor (“try not to scream, fall over or wander off, and we should get on admirably.").
What ensues includes country estate shenanigans, alien technology, impassive valets, homicidal aunts and worst of all, the ever looming threat of….. marriage.
I really, really enjoyed listening to this. Tom Baker and Mary Tamm are terrific, as are the rest of the cast, including Julia Mckenzie as the eponymous auntie, Robert Portal as Reggie and Lucy Griffiths as Mabel. I loved Reggie and Romana's conversation in the bookshop, indeed all of self-confessed "first class chump" Reggie's lines were a joy, as were Auntie's ("That's rather the point, you abysmal goof."). Steeped in Wodehouse’s unique humour (and a bit of a Douglas Adams homage, too), it’s the Doctor Who episode that “Plum” would have written in the unlikely event that he’d ever have written a Doctor Who episode. And you can’t give higher praise than that.
What ho, chaps!
