Friday, 23 October 2015

The Day Before Yesterday's Man

A couple of days ago the latest Jago & Litefoot box set was released - the tenth, meaning that our intrepid investigators of the infernal have now had forty audio adventures, plus four Doctor Who crossovers and the Companion Chronicle that started it all, The Mahogany Murderers. Well, The Talons Of Weng-Chiang started it all back in 1977 - it just took a while to get going.


The tenth box Jago & Litefoot box set includes a story by yours truly, The Year Of The Bat. It’s full of little twists and surprises so I can’t really describe it in great detail. It’s a standalone story, and is the result of me putting together various ideas that I hadn’t previously found a home for, and finding to my relief that they fitted together in such a neat way that it looked like I had planned it deliberately. Amongst other things, it features our two heroes as young men; but of course they can’t meet face-to-face because they didn’t know each other in The Talons Of Weng-Chiang? Or can they?

So please buy it. I’ve listened to it and it’s marvellous, everyone is very good, the direction is very good, the music and sound design are very good, it’s Jago & Litefoot, what more can you ask for?

In the bonus features, the script editor of the range, Justin Richards, mentions that The Year Of The Bat came about because the story I’d initially submitted had been rejected for being too ordinary. This is indeed the case! Of course, I think that the story, The Claws Of The Scarab, would have been excellent but I appreciate that my opinion is a little subjective! It was homaging all those Egyptian-themed Victorian novels like The Beetle and The Jewel Of The Seven Stars. I quite like the idea of there being a ‘Great Lost Jago & Litefoot Adventure’; it’s still on my hard drive, should Big Finish need another Jago & Litefoot story in a hurry, or maybe one day I’ll stick it up on this blog.

But the point is, because it was rejected for being too ordinary, I wrote The Year Of The Bat, which not only goes out of its way not to be ordinary, but which is much, much better.