The fan-favourite infernal investigators star in The Lord of Misrule with the Fourth Doctor and Romana I.

Professor George Litefoot and Henry Gordon Jago were two unlikely characters thrown together by the events of 1977’s ‘The Talons of Weng Chiang’.

On paper, the Victorian pair had little in common – Litefoot is a pathologist, while Jago is a loquacious theatrical impresario. However, two superb performances from Trevor Baxter and Christopher Benjamin marked them indelibly on the history of Doctor Who.

Audio producers Big Finish revived the characters in the 2010s, chronicling their misadventures across a series of boxsets. They also travelled with the Sixth Doctor and even enjoyed an encounter with Strax. Tremendously popular, their exploits were sadly curtailed by the death of Trevor Baxter in 2017.

The Lord of Misrule

Now, the pair return for a new audio novel. The story comes from writer Paul Morris, who penned numerous audio dramas for the pair.

The six-hour enhanced audiobook has specially composed music and sound effects, and is read by Jon Culshaw.

Here’s the synopsis for Doctor Who: The Lord of Misrule:

In 1901, something strange haunts the streets of London. A mysterious carriage appears from nowhere and seems to spirit away the unwary. But to where?

When Romana is taken by the carriage, the Doctor teams up with that other redoubtable pair, Jago and Litefoot, to find her. Their investigations lead them to discover an alien plot that could alter history.

And before the Doctor can stop it, he must first save his friend…

Paul Morris said:

“It’s always a joy to write for Jago and Litefoot, even in prose form. But one thing that is slightly different, although I can still hear the voices of Trevor and Chris as these characters, knowing that it wouldn’t be performed by them, it did give me some freedom to split the characters up, which was necessary to tell a story over this length.”

“I had one Jago and Litefoot idea which I came up with back when we were working on the original series and never used. I was very impressed by the film Midnight in Paris, where the young writer is taken back to the 1920s; he meets all his heroes and finds they aren’t as enamoured of their era as he is, they look back to an earlier era.

“I thought that type of story would work very well for Litefoot, because he has a touch of the melancholy – he’s a very thoughtful man, and in some ways old-fashioned, even when we see him in what to us is the historical Victorian era. I’d long wondered what would happen if a similar magical taxi – a magical barouche in this story – took him back to an earlier era.”

Script editor Roland Moore added: 

“The attraction of this story is that not only is it set in two time periods, it’s quite timey-wimey in the way it uses that, it’s got a modern series sensibility to it. And what Paul’s done brilliantly is revel in the language of Jago, Litefoot, and the Fourth Doctor. He’s absolutely nailed those characterisations and it’s a joy to hear them talking to each other. It’s really like a lost adventure.”

Doctor Who – The Audio Novels: The Lord of Misrule is available now as a digital download, exclusively from Big Finish.