The latest release from BBC Audio is out now – and it’s an absolute classic. Yeti in the underground! London evacuated! The debut of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart! Doctor Who and the Web of Fear is arguably the definitive story featuring the Great Intelligence.
Read by Patrick Troughton’s son, David (who’s appeared in a number of stories including The Curse of Peladon and Midnight), this audiobook is a reading of Terrance Dicks’ original Target novelisation, originally published in 1976. Here’s the synopsis:
David Troughton reads this gripping classic novelisation of a Second Doctor TV adventure featuring the Yeti and the Great Intelligence.
For 40 years, Professor Travers’ Yeti has been quiet, a collector’s item in a museum. Then, without warning, it awakes and savagely murders. Patches of mist begin to appear in Central London, those who linger in it found dead, their faces smothered in cobwebs.
When the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive in the London Underground, they find that the web is remorselessly spreading. What’s more, hordes of Yeti are roaming the misty streets and cobwebbed tunnels, killing everyone in their path. London has been gripped tight in a web of fear.
The Doctor and his friends unite with the army, led by one Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, in defence of planet Earth. But an old enemy is lurking in the shadows…
The book was republished last year, and the DWC’s Andy Reynolds said in his review:
“One of the strengths of the book is just how Dicks applies the tension to already simmering personal relationships within the camp; Doctor Who returnee Anne Travers doesn’t trust the delightfully weaselly journalist Chorley, Commander Knight doesn’t trust the scientists, and, as usual, the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria have a hard time trying to explain how they got there.
“The cowardly Evans, adds another layer of distrust purely by his natural inclination towards running from any danger; his alarmist tendencies rule him out of anything sinister but that doesn’t mean the characters jump to the same conclusion just as quickly.”
Suffice to say, this serial’s etched in the minds of millions of fans, and this audiobook just adds another layer to proceedings.
Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, running at approximately 4 hours, is out now, with an RRP of £20.
