Big Finish, as always, has news. The interesting stuff (ie stuff that isn’t about Benny Summerfield, The Tomorrow People, Dark Shadows, et al) is as follows:
January sees the release of The Companion Chronicles, four new Doctor Who adventures on audio – one for each of the first four Doctors. Each story will be told from the viewpoint of one of the Doctor’s companions. Maureen O’Brien (Vicki), Wendy Padbury (Zoe), Caroline John (Liz Shaw) and Lalla Ward (Romana II) all reprise their television roles.
As far as I can gather, these will be two-handers featuring the companion and one other actor – in the case of the Liz Shaw story, it’ll be Nicholas Courtney as The Brigadier, but the other stories won’t feature anyone else from the TV series. They’ll also still be Doctor Who stories, only narrated rather than acted, so don’t necessarily think of these as the audio equivalent of Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma et al, with the companion being Doctor-less and taking over as the hero/heroine of the piece.
The cover and synopsis for the first of the New Year BBC7 dramas, Blood of the Daleks, is online, too. Anyone want to guess who the enemy is going to be? Looks like they’re going for a different look for these titles and it appears quite adult and grown-up. On the other hand, reading the synopses for the stories, I don’t get the same feeling, so who knows what they’re actually going to be like.
Still, with the likes of Kenneth Cranham, Anita Dobson, Sheridan Smith, Bernard Cribbins, Una Stubbs, Ian McNeice, Elspet Gray, Timothy West, Nerys Hughes, Nigel Havers, Roy Marsden and Nickolas Grace appearing in them, it’s hard not to think the Beeb’s amped up Big Finish’s budget for a reason…
PS Wonder how close Immortal Beloved is going to be to one of our regulars’ forthcoming novel…
