Big Finish

Skipping neatly over various generations of companions, we move from Vicki to Zoe for the second of the Companion Chronicles, slightly dramatised audio books in which former Doctor Who companions recount missing tales of their youthful exploits with the Doctor.

There’s a slight problem with creating tales for older companions. Do you write the stories in in the same style as the stories of the time, or adapt to changes in taste, audience, etc? With the former, you risk losing the audience through lack of pace, simplistic plot devices, et al; with the latter, you can end up losing the charm of the original stories, while making them look stupid.

Fear of the Daleks tries to have the best of both worlds by marrying modern-day writing with 1960’s style stories. Unfortunately, it fails just horribly.

Continue reading “Review: The Companion Chronicles – Fear of the Daleks”

Not wishing to be tasteless or anything, but it can’t have escaped your notice that a lot of the Doctors Who are dead now. Numbers one to three have passed on; number four is a tad on the eccentric side. Many of their companions live on, however.

Something of a dilemma for Big Finish, no? Being Doctor Who fans of the first order, they’ve got the collecting instinct, and getting those companions into the Big Finish range would be just great. Even better than Top Trumps, in fact.

Now, they’ve already had a fair stab at this. Carole Ann Ford’s played an alternative version of the Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan, alongside an alternative Doctor in a couple of the Doctor Who Unbound range; Anneke Wills, William Russell, Caroline John, Katy Manning and others have all played new characters in other Big Finish plays; and most of Tombo’s assistants have turned up in ranges of their own (Gallifrey and the Sarah Jane Smith series to be precise).

But with the slight exception of those Unbound plays and The Kingmaker, Big Finish’s producers have stopped short of getting other actors to play the Doctor. So what to do?

Cunning plan. How about creating audio books instead of plays, with the original companions pretending to be telling stories to other people? You don’t need the Doctor anymore and you get to make the companion the centre of the story.

Plus it’s cheap.

Continue reading “Review: The Companion Chronicles – Frostfire”