Tom Baker (1) (1934–)

Scratchman is not a standard Doctor Who novel. It’s something stranger and more personal: a pair of Doctor Who stories filtered through Tom Baker’s own voice, memory, and late-life perspective on what it meant to be the Fourth Doctor.

If you love or miss the Fourth Doctor, the audiobook is essential. This is Tom Baker at his best — playful, melancholy, self-aware, and deeply inside the character. You don’t just hear the Doctor; you hear Baker’s understanding of him: the loneliness, show more the bravado, the tenderness for his companions, and the quiet knowledge that the universe does not always let you arrive in time.

Structurally, the book is really two linked stories.
The first, about the living scarecrows, is the stronger and more coherent piece. It’s folk-horror Doctor Who — concrete, cruel, and emotionally unsettling. The idea that people can be hollowed out and left standing in the fields in the shape of themselves is genuinely disturbing, and it carries a powerful sense of grief and loss.

The second story begins when Sarah Jane and Harry are pulled into the underworld, and the Doctor follows them. This section feels less like a monster story and more like a meditation on aging, fame, and what it means when the role that defined you no longer does. It’s funny, thoughtful, and full of Baker’s voice, but it doesn’t quite belong to the same novel as the scarecrow horror that came before it.

As Doctor Who, Scratchman shows the usual franchise seams. There are narrative gaps, improbable escapes, and moments where companions are saved again and again when logic says they shouldn’t be. These are not flaws so much as genre DNA — this is Doctor Who, not hard science fiction — but readers who care about strict internal logic will notice them.

What makes Scratchman work isn’t its plotting. It’s the intimacy. This feels like Tom Baker finally sitting down with the Fourth Doctor and saying, quietly, “This is who you really were to me.”

It’s uneven. It’s strange. It’s sometimes silly.
And it’s quietly moving in a way very few tie-in novels ever manage to be.

If you care about the Fourth Doctor, listen to it.
You won’t just get a story — you’ll get a voice coming home. show less

A Doctor Who novel from the Fourth Doctor himself! (Well, with a little help from James Goss, apparently. Which is a good choice. He's definitely one of the best writers doing DW tie-ins these days.) Apparently this began life way back when Baker was filming the show, when he and Ian Marter, who played companion Harry Sullivan, started kicking around their own ideas for a script. Eventually he worked up a very rough version of a screenplay, which was considered for a movie version, but, of show more course, never actually made.

I am glad we finally got to see a version of it, though, because it's very enjoyable in novel form. The first half really feels like it would fit perfectly into that era of the show, with pitch-perfect characterization and just the right blend of scariness, silliness, and humor. I found it utterly delightful. The second half takes kind of an unexpected turn and gets downright surreal, which didn't work for me quite as well as the first part, but it was still imaginative and interesting, and entertaining in its own completely bonkers way.

I do recommend it for fans of Classic Who. show less

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Four years ago I listened to an abridged audio version of this book, read by the man himself; now I've finally read the whole thing, fourteen years after frenziedly speed-skimming a newly published copy in an Oxford bookshop without actually buying it. It is quite an extraordinary and painful book, by a man who doesn't much like himself and, to his continuing amazement, found in his early 40s that everyone suddenly liked him. Baker confesses many show more tales of personal betrayal, of lovers, colleagues, relatives, and himself; he is rather fascinated by his own awfulness as a human being, and he achieves the difficult task of communicating his fascination to the reader, because he is also very funny. The book (deliberately, I think) doesn't do justice to himself; I was struck, having read this just after listening to Big Finish's April podcasts, which feature a long interview with him divided into several sections, by the fact that most of the anecdotes he shared this year with Nicholas Briggs were very different from the stories spun for his readers in 1997. I also take a wild guess, judging from hints dropped in interviews, that he has actually had some serious and effective psychotherapy; no mention of that in the book, which itself may have been a cathartic experience to write, but also perhaps writing about healing and acceptance might have spoiled the story.

If you are looking for insider information on Doctor Who, this book doesn't give you much - perhaps 30 pages out of 270, and the show's history has been better chronicled elsewhere (including in the DVD commentaries to which Tom Baker has contributed). But if you are interested in reading a peculiar personality study, written by its own subject, this is one of the more memorable ones out there. show less

Doctor Who: Scratchman is a story that's been gestating for a long time. Beginning life as an idea for a film by the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, himself, Scratchman never resulted in an actual film, and the idea gathered a lot of dust as Baker moved onto other things. Until now, that is. Aided by prolific Doctor Who novelist, James Goss, Tom Baker returned to his Scratchman idea and turned it into the newest Doctor Who novel from BBC Books. So, is the novel worth the long wait? More or less, show more yeah.

I'll be blatantly honest, here. I can't imagine Scratchman as a film. Certainly not one that could have been made in the 1970s/1980s with the budget and technology that would have been available to it. There are just so many images in the novel that would require a great deal of special effects work - particularly in the second half of the story - and I just don't think it could have been believably accomplished in those days. I say that as a way of saying that I love this novel. It's brilliantly creative, often very spooky, and all around enjoyable. The story is split pretty neatly into two parts - similar to the way serials from the classic era of Doctor Who were split into distinct parts. This works very well as the first part focuses primarily on the setup while the second part delivers on the promised confrontation between the Doctor and Scratchman.

It's very unique for a Doctor Who novel, too, as it's primarily told in the first-person from the Doctor's point of view. Most Doctor Who novels are told in a third-person point of view, so it's always a lot of fun when we get to jump into the Doctor's mind like this and truly experience a story through his eyes. Scratchman uses a framing device much like the one used in The Trial of a Time Lord season; the Time Lords have called the Doctor back to Gallifrey in order to prosecute him for his actions taken during this adventure. The bulk of the story is the Doctor explaining all that happened to the Time Lords, and it works brilliantly. Occasionally, we cut back to the trial and hear from some of the Time Lords present at the trial, but it's mainly just an excuse for the story to be told from the Doctor's point of view. And, boy, does this novel capture the Fourth Doctor's voice perfectly. It surely helps that Tom Baker wrote the novel, and wrote it in his own voice, but it's just amazing how perfectly the narration sounds like it's coming from the Fourth Doctor. I listened to an excerpt of the audiobook - narrated by Baker, himself - and the prose flows so naturally from his voice.

The narrative of Scratchman - and its pacing - is also superb. The book starts out very strong, immediately building a very spooky and ominous atmosphere, and things quickly get kicked into gear as the Doctor, Harry, and Sarah Jane encounter these scarecrows that come to life. Spooky scarecrows aren't exactly an original idea for Doctor Who - nor is the twist related to who's behind the scarecrows, either - but they're still very effective here, and the design of them - or, at least, the description of their design - is perfectly nightmarish. It's the kind of design that would really upset some of those watchdog groups. The first half of the story introduces a lot of side characters, all of whom are very well written and feel well-defined and well-rounded. Some of them even reappear in the second part of the book, but to say any more than that would be too spoilery. The second part of the book trades in the nightmarish atmosphere for some truly hellish imagery - pun intended. Scratchman is definitely a formidable foe for the Doctor, and the entirety of the second half of the story - including Scratchman's ultimate defeat - is brilliant.

All in all, this is a very good Doctor Who novel. As weird as this might sound, I'm kind of glad the original film version of this story never got made because it allowed us to experience this story in a medium that works really well for it. Baker's writing is immensely enjoyable. He perfectly captures the sound of the Fourth Doctor - though, you'd expect nothing less from the actor who's played him all these years - as well as capturing the voices of Harry and Sarah Jane. The plot is well constructed, well-paced, and full of scares and excellent payoff. Scratchman is the kind of novel that you won't want to put down once you've started it. It's a brilliant addition to the Fourth Doctor's adventures and a book that any Doctor Who fan should read. show less