six 25-minute episodes, starring no less than Peter Cushing and Vincent Price (the latter with a mild American accent, but you can be sure it is him) delivering a script by one Rene Basilico based on a story idea by the great Robert Holmes. We start, à la Wicker Man, on a remote Scottish island where Funny Things Are Happening. Our heroes, who have turned up to discover more about the death of an old friend, conclude that the island is a nest of telepathic mutants. They pursue their investigations further in London, where they discover tendrils of the conspiracy percolating to the top of the Establishment (apologies for mixed metaphor). Hints are dropped that Sir Alec Douglas-Hume may have been one of those involved. Richard Hurndall, the stand-in for William Hartnell in The Five Doctors, makes an appearance as a respectable Scottish banker in the last episode.

It is not a flawless piece of drama: as with many six-part Doctor Who stories, there is not quite enough story to pad out the episodes, and also most of the time the mutants don't seem to be very threatening to the rest of humanity. But of course this is a story of the Cold War era, we could see the mutants as concealed Communists (or the conspiracy theory target group of your choice - Catholics? Jews? Homosexuals? Scots???) and Cushing and Price do a good double act of trying to get to the heart of the matter; and anyway their voices are simply very pleasurable to listen to. An interesting curio which leavened my diet of Doctor Who audios. ( )