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Doctor Who - The Audio Adventures
Brand new audio CDs from Big Finish Productions

Big Finish at (just over) 10

It’s (just over) ten years now since Big Finish decided that the world needed to hear (but not see) more Doctor Who. The team behind the Audio Visuals – something that was a little before my time but which the internet has kindly provided – went legit, first with Bernice Summerfield (leading to an SFX review which took them to task for selective quoting) and then with the official BBC Doctor Who licence. I can remember the announcement in DWM – with photos of the Doctors at microphones to prove this wasn’t Dark Dimension II or something equally fanciful. This was real. This was happening. I wasn’t online in those days, shocking as that sounds, so I don’t know if squee was squee’d but I don’t remember the world camping outside Forbidden Planet waiting for Sirens of Time to be officially released. Considering this was the first proper Doctor Who – old school – since 1993’s Dimensions in Time or 1989’s Survival or, if you’re very hardcore, 1979’s Horns of Nimon, things seemed a little muted. The DWM cover disc released to promote Sirens of Time never reached my CD player – if I had a CD player in those days which I’m not sure I did – and it was quite some time before I finally succumbed (after a good day selling Star Trek videos to a second hand shop in Manchester) and bought both Sirens of Time and release number 6, The Marian Conspiracy. On cassette tape because I had, as mentioned before, a shortage of CD players. Sirens of Time was both great – because it’s Doctor Who with proper people in it – and lousy – because it’s not very good. The individual episodes work ok until we get to the final part and the fanwanky bits on Gallifrey. I know why they wanted to give everyone a big multi-Doctor story to get the range off to a big start but it doesn’t work on any level. It’s nice to hear the boys in action but that final episode is just what you’d expect fans to produce if they actually, somehow, persuaded Messrs Davison, Baker and McCoy to read their scripts into a microphone.

Looking back over the last decade, Big Finish have had many successes and achieved many things. Their greatest achievement is probably making the Sixth Doctor into many people’s favourite classic Doctor. He was appallingly served on television but Colin Baker never lost faith that under the costume, the politics and the mistakes lay a really good Doctor. It didn’t even take time to make his Doctor work on audio – he’s got it nailed from the off. By his second story, the aforementioned Marian Conspiracy, he’s got a warm, friendly, witty, caring, forthright, heroic Doctor that can stand alongside any of his other selves. He’s so good he even makes me wonder whether Mary Tudor has had a bad rap these past five hundred years.

All the Doctors have been well served – Davison was the best of the TV Doctors in the 80s and he’s been given much good material to work with. McCoy has been allowed to play all the variations of his persona – from the comical season 24 Doctor to the darker season 26 Doctor to the melancholic TV movie Doctor and even the Time’s Champion Doctor of post-season-26 and the NA’s. All without ever becoming as unlikeable as he did at times in the New Adventures when the big picture blinded him to all the little pictures in front of him. And then we have Paul McGann – given barely an hour on television and expanded into a genuine Eighth Doctor by his Big Finish adventures. McGann’s Doctor has the same sense of joyful renewal after a world-weary incarnation that David Tennant did post-Eccleston. Both come across as Doctor’s who have been given a new lease of life after atoning – through death – for the sins of their odd-numbered former selves. Seven played dice with the universe, Eight has a sense of new wonder and new eyes through which he wants to see everything. It’s a shame we never got to see this McGann on TV in a series of his own. And whatever you may thing of the Eighth Doctor adventures from BF, they are light-years ahead of the dribble we would’ve got had Fox’s Doctor Who series made the air.

It’s not just the Doctors who have benefited from Big Finish’s audio adventures. Each Doctor has been given brand new companions – sometimes fitting into non-existent gaps but who really cares about that? – to overshadow the old ones. The 80s was not a time when companions were well drawn or well cast. JNT might decide the hair colour or occupation, pick a photo from Spotlight and leave it down to the script editor and the writers to try and turn ill judged choices into a workable character. Big Finish on the other hand have given us some excellent new Tardis travellers. With the exception of C’Rizz – explicitly created solely to be a gooseberry when the Doctor-Charley romance was cold-watered – each of the new companions has been an outstanding success. Evelyn Smythe – the first of the newbies – has proven that you can have an intelligent, older companion and still have adventures. Some of her dialogue might grate a little but Evelyn is warm, friendly, useful – being a historian – and works well with Colin’s Doctor. And she’s something they would almost certainly never do on television so that’s another plus. On TV she’d have to be played by Judi Dench and that's never going to happen. Erimem divides listeners – some like her, some can’t stand her. I’m in the former camp. I think she works well as the character out of time. She is continually evolving as she’s exposed to new technologies, attitudes and experiences but she never loses her Egyptian core values. She’s different to Peri and they never forget that. At times they may appear like sisters but underneath they are very different people. Hex has done what few thought could be done – he’s made Sophie Aldred’s Ace into a likeable character. No disrespect to Sophs who is a stalwart of Doctor Who both on and off screen but she was an unconvincing teenager in the 80s and was an even less convincing teenager now the actress is in her 40s. They were too scared to take her down the battle-hardened route of the New Adventures so they held her in limbo, giving her nothing except a pathetic run of "growing up" stories when she insisted on being called McShane. Fail. So along comes a slightly annoying scouse boy and suddenly she’s a really effective big sister character. Effortlessly switching between grown up companion and stand-in Doctor as the scene demands. She’s so much better as the middle character in the trio than she ever was as the young protégé and it’s all down to Hex. And then there’s Charley – Charlotte Elspeth Pollard – Edwardian adventuress and companion in more stories than you’d think if you had to guess. Charley is at her best when being that largely lost character – the enthusiastic British explorer. She's at her worst when being a love sick puppy who hasn't quite grasped that the Doctor can never be her hubby-wubby. Once they got over the whole romance angle, Charley became a lot less irritating. Ironically, her current tenure with the Sixth Doctor is probably her finest few hours as she's developed into an excellent character but without all the baggage of the Eighth Doctor era.

The latest new companion is Lucie Miller who stars with Paul McGann in seasons of stand alone 45 minute episodes. I have never quite forgiven Big Finish for releasing these on single CDs and making whole seasons cost so damned much but they have mouths to pay and bills to feed I suppose. They do make subscribing to the range quite attractive, even undercutting Play and Amazon if you get your subscriber discount. I was sceptical about the 45 minute format, thinking it was a knee-jerk reaction to the TV series and a desperate attempt to tell stories that would appeal to Squeevians. But it does actually work. At their best – and they're probably hitting a 60-70% success rate – they are as good as anything Big Finish has produced elsewhere. I've yet to hear the third season though and my enthusiasm has perhaps been dampened a little by the unnecessary double cliffhanger at the end of series 2. But that aside, the Eighth Doctor and Lucie range has been an undoubted hit.

But it hasn't all worked. Big Finish's peak of interest was the build up to the 40^th anniversary story – Zagreus. They gave themselves an enormous 16 month gap between the end of Neverland and the release of the three-disc epic for people to bubble themselves up to fever pitch. A shame then that the BBC chose to announce the New Series just as Zagreus was straining at the release leash. The official, genuine, bona fide, absolutely essential anniversary story was suddenly just a tranche of fanfic again as people craved news from Cardiff. But I can't blame that entirely for Zagreus's flopping – the story itself is, frankly, wank. I've heard it twice and I've no real idea what's going on. It's like the end of the Prisoner but with a less memorable soundtrack. I'm fairly sure the Tardis gets melted down and turned into a sword at one point. Everyone is playing someone else, none of it is real – except the bits that are – and if its arrival was circumstantially underwhelming, the reaction to it was justified bewilderment. 16 months waiting for that? They tried hard – god did they try – but the result is the very epitome of what fans write for other fans when they're so engrossed in their own mythology that they don't stop to wonder what anyone not in the room will think of it.

Zagreus was followed by perhaps Big Finish's least successful creative decision – the divergent universe arc. Sending the Doctor and Charley into another universe to have adventures away from the usual staples of Daleks, Cybermen and rogue Time Lords with cunning agendas. It was a fine idea, stripping away all the continuity and rebooting the range in the grand tradition of comic books. There were only two problems – one was that the divergent universe wasn't well thought out and ended up being little more than The War Games on a Pratchett turtle's back and two was that they abandoned it when the New Series started so newbies wouldn't be saddled with years of continuity to wonder about. When the news came out that they were going to abandon the divergent universe two years early, sighs of relief were heard up and down the land. They knew it hadn't worked, we knew it hadn't worked and nothing they were going to be able to do would make it work. There were some good stories along the way but being saddled with membership of this story arc has actually made those good stories seem less good. They get lumped in with the whole messy failure and we don't give them the credit they deserve.

Away from the problems they had half a decade ago trying to do something different with the McGann stories, Big Finish's main difficulty has been how to make their product attractive to fans that have come aboard since the New Series started. Despite having the ultimate cross-generational promotional tool – DWM which appeals equally to Them and Us – they haven't been able to sell to the new audience. And their existing audience now has 13 brand new telly stories a year to keep them satisfied. Interest in Big Finish feels at its lowest for years. I've got six months' worth of stories waiting to be listened to (though, to redress the balance slightly, I've just listened to a dozen stories from a year or two ago in the car so I've not totally lost interest), other long time supporters have commented that they buy them but don't always bother to unwrap them. Buying the new BF CDs has almost become a ritual we go through because we have a vague sense that supporting them is the right thing to do but we don't care enough to actually listen to them. Like repeating a prayer in church without ever stopping to wonder what it means.

To their credit they are trying new things. Their download service is superb with releases added to your account the moment they are available – a free bonus if you're a CD subscriber – along with exclusive extras such as interviews and scripts. The time and effort that has gone into making the download system as reliable and smooth as it is has to be admired. Especially as the files are unprotected MP3s and the whole enterprise might've been abandoned as making the file-sharers' lives that little bit easier. They've also changed their release patterns so we now get three stories in a row for each Doctor and themes can run between them. This is certainly something that could develop nicely and encourage people like me to listen to them when they pop through the old letter box. They've also had another crack at the single-episode anthology releases which tended to work well in the past. Combine that with the Lost Stories – which might be shite because the scripts were generally rejected for a reason but at least they're doing something interesting – and the always entertaining podcast and this is a company which is making a real effort to re-engage those fans jaded after ten years of endless releases and a product which has its good days and its bad days.

There is of course the matter of that product and there being too much of it. Thirteen monthly releases, eight McGann stories a year, mini series like Cyberman, I Davros, Gallifrey and Dalek Empire, the Lost Stories and the rest mean it is almost impossible to keep up. Many of us keep buying the monthly titles on auto-pilot simply because we know that getting behind would mean such an enormous bill to catch up that we'd simply never do it. The quantity of Big Finish's output – which also includes other franchises such as Benny, Dark Shadows, Judge Dredd and Stargate – is either a sign that the company is in rude health and can afford to invest in products whose payback periods often run into years, or it makes them greedy bastards out to squeeze every penny they can from the notorious Doctor Who Collector breed. I like to think its mostly the former combined with a healthy enthusiasm on the part of Briggs and co to make as much good stuff as they can before the party's over. They'll probably never have this much creative freedom anywhere else and they're going to enjoy it while its here.

Looking back at ten years of Big Finish has been an interesting experience (for me at least). Who would've thought, as Sirens of Time came out, that they would be nearing 200 Doctor Who releases of one sort or another, would've produced almost as much Doctor Who as the classic series ever did, would've coaxed Paul McGann into the Tardis or finally produced the Space Whale, that they would have made Colin Baker's Doctor the equal of those around him, that they would've attracted so many big names to take part in these little plays and that they would've become such a part of modern Doctor Who that people take them for granted. Following the Big Finish range may be an expensive hobby but it's one I'm glad I've kept up. The stories may often disappoint first time around but listening to them again – as I did from "Son of the Dragon" to "Kingdom of Silver" recently - I enjoyed them more second time round. Most TV Doctor Who isn't that great when it still smells new. People are too quick to judge Big Finish – they want instant gratification rather than something that gets better over time. Luckily – and I saw this on Tomorrow's World so it must be true – CDs will last forever so we can always revisit the first ten years when we feel less jaded and enjoy Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure That We Can't See But Can Hear.
 

Postscript - I wrote the above a while ago. During 2009 which was the actual anniversary year. I just never got round to posting it. Mainly because I wanted it to be the relaunch of the Big Finish section of the site and something like that requires more work than I had time to do at... well... the time. But now - buoyed somewhat by the excellence of the first two stories in the Stockbridge trilogy - I am almost certainly, definitely, probably going to to relaunch the Big Finish section of the site. Hence dusting this off when it is still almost relevant and giving thought to how all this will work. I like the idea of one review of a new story and one review of an old story each time. The only flaw in that is writing two reviews. But I'm sure I'll find a way round that one.