This time Jonathan Cooper gives us a tale which focuses on the world of spy-fi TV shows, which were of course massive at the time and many fans of classic Doctor Who loved. Journalist Harold Chorley meets a tramp wearing a tinfoil hat and somehow manages to persuade Lethbridge-Stewart to investigate the making of a new TV show called BLIMEY. It's star, Aubrey Mondegreene, is playing all the main characters and is nearly single-handedly running the show. But he seems to get into character in an extreme way and people are convinced he seems to be in more than one place at once.
The actual plot isn't revealed to the closing stages of the book which means this is largely about the mystery. It's great because as a reader I had little idea in what was going on and frankly when all was revealed I realised I never would have guessed.
My favorite part of this book was where Anne Travers and new character Samson Ware find themselves trapped by one of Mondegreen's characters, an over-the-top German scientist. Such a ridiculous character was common in the sort of TV shows that BLIMEY is representing but they rarely work as a proper character. Thanks to the context though we can have a ridiculous German scientist and Cooper even manages to give him that brilliant accented quote from The Underwater Menace, "Nuzzink in ze vorld can schtop me now".
Cooper does a great job at ensuring all the main characters are properly involved with the story and represents them all well- even Harold Chorley, who fits into this book so well. This book also had my favorite epilogue of the series so far for reasons I won't spoil.
Yet another hugely enjoyable book in the Lethbridge-Stewart series and I look forward to reading the next one.