UNIT - Snake Head

audio drama by Jonathan Clements

“fast-paced adventure”
- Doctor Who Magazine

“a quiet masterpiece”
- Simon Catlow, Tertiary Console Room

Authors are usually unable to answer when people ask where they get their ideas. In the case of Snake Head you can actually hear a recording of me having the idea. Listen to the commentary track on Manga Entertainment's Vampire Hunter D, and you'll hear me musing aloud about Kosovan folklore and snake-oil salesmen, and coming up with a pitch for a spooky episode in a paranormal detective series. Fast-forward a year to an email from Big Finish producer Ian Farrington, asking if it would be okay for the new UNIT series to re-use a character I'd created for Sympathy for the Devil. I get the feeling that Snake Head was payback: a script commission to thank me for saying yes.

So I dusted off my idea from the Vampire Hunter D commentary, and I crashed it into some thoughts that were wandering around my head about Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay, and my grandmother's tales about asylum seekers in my hometown. Was it not enough that I submerge the place beneath a radioactive swamp in Down to Earth? No, apparently not. And if you listen to Snake Head, you will hear me in my first, and probably last, Albanian-speaking role. For more details about Snake Head, you can read the interview I gave to an incredulous Southend Evening Echo.

Buy it here.

_____

Mutilated corpses washed ashore at Foulness. Tales of treasure around a Saxon grave. Immigrant workers disappearing from the Southend sands. Chinese smugglers caught with a Yugoslavian cargo. All are curious events, but are they really problems for UNIT? Emily Chaudhry and Robert Dalton have one day to solve the mysteries, before jurisdictional issues take the case to their rivals.

But what of the man who boasts of paranormal powers, who claims to be the child of a thing that should not be? Is he a liar or a saviour? As a killer stalks the seashore, Chaudhry and Dalton must decide for themselves, with their very lives on the line.