The Magic Mousetrap (Matthew Sweet)

 Following on from November 2008’s "Forty-Five", the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Hex return to the Big Finish Doctor Who audio range in a season of three new adventures.

April’s "The Magic Mousetrap", by historian, journalist, broadcaster and "The Year of the Pig" author Matthew Sweet, has been directed by Ken Bentley. The Seventh Doctor’s first story in this run kicks off with a typically theatrical, larger-than-life story that sees The Doctor end up at a Swiss sanatorium in the year 1926, where director Ludovic ‘Ludo’ Comfort uses parlour games to keep his rich and famous patients busy. The Doctor soon suspects, however, that someone’s playing a more sinister game. Someone with a score to settle…

The Doctor is played by Sylvester McCoy, Ace by Sophie Aldred and Hex by Philip Olivier who find themselves pitted against the return of an old enemy - The Toymaker.

This four-part story guest stars Nadim Sawahla (father of Julia Sawahla, and best known for playing the role of Doctor Hamada in Dangerfield), Nadine Lewington (Holby City) and Paul Antony-Barber (Doctor Kendrick in the season 28 television story "Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel"). Also starring are: Joan Walker, Andrew Fettes and Andrew Dickens.

Seventh Doctor

 As revealed by director Ken Bentley, ‘I was over the moon when I first read "The Magic Mousetrap" It’s so theatrical, and that’s certainly a style - given my background in theatre - that I’m comfortable with. It’s set in a sanatorium nestled on the side of a Swiss mountain, and getting the exterior scenes to sound right took a little work. We needed the exteriors to sound majestic, and we needed the characters’ voices to carry across valleys and bounce back at them from the mountains beyond. But it’s not just about the sound design at work, its about the actors inhabiting that place, making you believe they’re there, seeing it and breathing it’.

Being set in the Alps and therefore rather isolated the writer points out that the sanatorium setting is ‘a place entirely cut off from the world. Once you enter, it’s very difficult to escape. That’s a situation that seemed to be crying out for the arrival of the TARDIS. Oh, and an early version of the story originally had Agatha Christie in it - until "The Unicorn and the Wasp" bagsied her’.

‘I’m very excited about directing this season’ director Bentley has also announced. ‘They’re all very different scripts and demanded a clean slate each time, a different approach to casting, the style of performance, right down to different demands on sound design and music. As directors go I’m also a bit of a chameleon and thrive on contrast, so working on three very different stories was a thoroughly enjoyable exercise - and over the course of the three stories we do develop a thread that’s been concerning some fans for a while...’

It has also been revealed that we shall hear our heroes, Ace and Hex, as we have never heard them before…

On the Back Cover:

Switzerland, 1926: The Doctor finds himself halfway up an Alpine mountainside, on his way to an exclusive sanatorium for the rich and famous run by the Viennese alienist Ludovic ‘Ludo’ Comfort. In between bouts of electric shock therapy, Ludo’s patients – including faded music hall turn Harry Randall, chess grandmaster Swapnil Khan and Lola Luna, darling of the Weimar cabaret scene – fill their time with endless rounds of Snap!, among other diversions.

But The Doctor soon suspects that someone’s playing an altogether more sinister game. Someone with a score to settle…

Four years ago I was sent to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. Hahlbruck: the clinic where Thomas Mann set his novel, The Magic Mountain. I went to interview the last patients - elderly gentlemen, some of whom had taken a British bullet in the Second World War. There was something otherworldly about the place - just the sort of otherworldliness into which the Doctor might plausibly wander.

So when Big Finish gave me one of their shopping lists - Doctor Who meets Agatha Christie - there was no problem about where to set the story. Then Agatha had to go off to investigate the case of a giant wasp. Doctor Who has three explanations for the destruction of Atlantis - one explanation of Christie’s disappearance was probably enough.

So that left more room to tell the story of another inmate of the sanatorium - one who some listeners may have encountered before...


Directors Notes: Ken Bentley

We kick off the latest Seventh Doctor season with a story that’s quite literally mental.

I come from a stage background and I’ve long been hankering for a theatrical script to direct for Big Finish. When this one landed on my doormat I thought all my birthdays had been rolled into one.

It’s an inventive and utterly bonkers journey into the mind of one of the Doctor’s most infamous foes. But The Magic Mousetrap is not merely a frivolous tale, Sweet is cleverer than that - in this game of life and death there are no winners. He’s found the point where comedy meets tragedy - drama’s holy grail - and that’s no small achievement.