Mr Mann and Roy: Book Shop

Mr Mann drops into Roy's cluttered second-hand bookshop and casually asks for a book on medieval English music covering precisely 1356 to 1390. Roy has to call on his unseen wife Margaret, who after a long wait directs him to a matching history on a nearby shelf. Mr Mann has Roy count the pages, then objects that 312 is a few too many and asks whether the author might trim the text by removing every letter O. When he admits he may be too specific, he simply asks whether the shop has any books at all and buys the entire stock, before revealing why reading was never the point.

Roy's unseen wife Margaret, heard answering from the back of the shop, is voiced by Stirling Gallacher. Narrator Tom Baker's opening aside names his own 1997 autobiography, Who on Earth Is Tom Baker?