The Cumberland News, always on my daily reading list, has an interview with Michael Spencer, one of the writers of the new BBC7 Doctor Who radio plays. He also has a script lined up for Colin Baker in the regular Big Finish run.
I did like this quote: “On a typical day Michael gets up at 9am and works for two to three hours after breakfast, before succumbing to ‘the writer’s worst enemy’ – the internet.”
I know what that’s like…
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…
Another month, another Davros play from Big Finish: I, Davros – Purity. Okay, fair dos: it’s part two in a four-part mini-series that started last month with I, Davros – Innocence. We’ve moved on a bit now.
Ostensibly, the narrative link between the various plays in the series is that Davros has been captured by the Daleks to help them out of a hole. Apparently, Davros thinks talking about his personal life is the best way to do this. I like to think he’s sitting in front of an open fire, with the Black Dalek next to him, sucking up mulled wine through a special attachment. I’m not sure why the Daleks are humouring him so far, but they are.
While Innocence saw Davros eulogising about his childhood and how it taught him to be a man (ie sociopath), Purity takes us to Davros, aged 30, stuck in weapons testing, wishing he could be something big in the science corps.
BBC Norfolk, which always seems to be first with the Doctor Who news these days, has a nifty interview with Terry Molloy, who played Davros, creator of the Daleks, back in the 80s. He’s mainly plugging I, Davros (review of Purity coming this week and I’ve already covered Innocence), but it concludes with this potential spoiler. Or not.
MB: Are there any whisperings from the Doctor Who office in Cardiff whether Davros might return to our screens?
TM: You might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment.
MB: You could…
TM: But I won’t. It was worth a try. [He laughs]
You’ll have to watch the video to see if he laughs like Davros or not.
If there’s a Doctor synonymous with Big Finish’s range of Doctor Who audio plays, it’s Paul McGann. Doctor number eight has appeared in books, comics and countless other media since his appearance in the TV movie of 1996. But it wasn’t until 2001 that McGann was to appear again as the Doctor and show us how he would have portrayed that wanderer in time and space if he’d been given the chance.
It was Big Finish who gave him that chance. Together with the producers, he’s crafted a fun-loving, slightly comedic, sports-worshipping, Peter Pan of a Time Lord that anticipated the lonelier, romantic and pop culture-friendly tendencies of David Tennant’s tenth Doctor – he does, perhaps, encapsulate best the various themes of Big Finish’s disparate writing styles.
Now several ‘seasons’ in, with 1930s adventuress Charley Pollard by his side, he’s encountered Daleks, Cybermen, the Brigadier, the Time Lords and dozens of new enemies, forever dispelling the “George Lazenby” jibe that he’s endured over the years. He’s not had the best of stories, with a few notable exceptions, but he’s had some of the best of the Big Finish ‘atmosphere’ in his time.
Now, we have Memory Lane, perhaps the most Eighth Doctor-ish story of his adventures so far.
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