BIG START: The Daunting and Wonderful Prospect of the Big Finish Audio Dramas

Every Doctor Who fan has their favourite Doctor. For the majority, this will be one of the first people they saw in the role, particularly if they started watching as children. Personally, I am rather fond of Sylvester McCoy, my first Doctor, who I first saw at age 6. When this Doctor departs, or when you have seen all of the episodes they recorded it can be rather heart-wrenching, and can leave one thirsting for more of the same. Many of the Doctors, particularly towards the end of the classic series, got short shrift and appeared in few episodes, which makes their departure even harder to take. As viewers thrilling to the adventures of an immortal time traveller, we know we cannot ever possibly be privy to everything the Doctor does, even if we spent every minute of our comparatively brief lives glued to the TV. But there is often a creeping  doubt, especially when the Doctor refers to some adventure that happened off screen, that we might be missing something extra special.

The good news is, there’s a wealth of extra adventures available featuring several of the classic Doctors, and I’m not just talking about novels and short stories and comic books. These may feature the characters, but it’s not quite the same, is it? Without the actor playing the part, speaking those words in their inimitable style, it doesn’t quite feel as if this is really, the Doctor. 

Big Finish Productions have been producing full cast audio dramas for many years now, featuring the voice talents of many of the original actors from the TV series, including Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann. These are usually told in the same format of the TV series (either multipart stories, told across several episodes of roughly 25 minutes each, or a single 50 minute episode). They also very much remain true to the style and spirit of the TV series, and many who have listened to them claim that some of the Big Finish Dramas rank among Doctor Who’s greatest ever adventures. 

The bad news is that the audio format can seem rather daunting, even impenetrable, to many people. Without an image to constantly provide information on what exactly is happening, you are forced to pay very close attention to everything that is said. If you miss the wrong line of exposition, you can find yourself lost and bewildered, wondering where the characters are and what they are doing. The lack of narration on these types of drama has several consequences. Firstly, it makes the dramas seem closer to the actual TV show, only without the pictures, rather than an audio book. Secondly, it means you have to imagine what the aliens and spacecraft and planets look like. If you have a good imagination, this can be a blessing. If your imagination is a little rusty, then it’s a mixed blessing. There are no wobbly sets or bubble-wrap monsters to ruin the atmosphere, but there are no spectacular CGI landscapes or Dalek battles to feast your eyes on either. 

It may sound as though I am trying to discourage people from trying the audio dramas, but I’m not. It’s surprising how quickly you get used to not having anything to look at or having any information fed to you visually. I have so far listened to four audio dramas (Shada, Storm Warning, Thin Ice and Crime of the Century) and am currently on my fifth (Animal). I would recommend all of these, although I take it from reviews I have read that Big Finish have produced much better dramas than these. Once you take that plunge and acclimatise yourself to a new medium, the audio dramas seem a very short step apart from the TV shows, indeed even like a natural extension of them. Voila, the amount of episodes starring your favourite Doctor just multiplied. 

The other major barrier to entering the Doctor Who expanded universe, is that Big Finish produce their dramas in more-or-less random order. If you want an experience as close as possible to enjoying extra episodes of Doctor Who, in a linear fashion, then you will need to track down a listening order that you are comfortable with. There are many of them floating around the internet, usually with advice on how the novels and comic books fit into the sequence as well. There are some discrepancies between these, but most are valid, and if you are pursuing audios only, there are few differences between them. I would recommend: The Complete Adventures Index at http://www.eyespider.freeserve.co.uk/drwho/compleat.html

This seems to be the most diligently updated of all the Doctor Who chronology websites, and it’s sequence makes a lot of sense. Audio dramas in the lists are highlighted in yellow, so it’s easy to pick them out.

So, there are two major challenges before you can enjoy these additional, and very high quality, episodes. However, I hope I have demonstrate that these are both quite easily overcome, and that it is well worth the effort. What could be better than dozens of extra Doctor Who episodes?

The Thirteen Doctors

This year has seen the introduction of two new incarnations of our favourite Time Lord. Although we still have a lot to learn about them both, we know that one, Peter Capaldi, will play the Doctor’s next regeneration. The other, John Hurt, will purportedly play a missing, previously secret incarnation – most likely the true Ninth Doctor.

This takes our total to thirteen, unlucky for some but a miraculous treat for fans. For the uninitiated, that’s eight classic series Doctors (Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee, Baker, Davison, Baker, McCoy and McGann), and five modern era Doctors (Hurt, Eccleston, Tennant, Smith and Capaldi).

Much is made of how regeneration has kept the show fresh, but it has also kept it interesting because,  no matter how much the Doctor changes from one life to the next, he remains recognisably the same being. The past fifty years have shown us thirteen different facets of the same person, each one with their own quirks and with different personality traits brought to the fore. As a result, the Doctor’s psyche has been unveiled and explored perhaps more thoroughly than any other popular fictional character. 

What will Capaldi bring to the role? We probably all have different ideas and different hopes, although I’m seeing a lot of anticipation for a more authoritarian Doctor, a more paternal Doctor, a Doctor who is more mysterious and less trustworthy. The showrunner, Stephen Moffat, has used the following adjectives to describe the next Doctor: ‘fierce’, ‘tricky’, ‘different’ (to Matt Smith), and ‘brilliant’ and  It is easy to see the good things that Capaldi may bring to the role, and very hard to anticipate problems that may arise from him playing the part. But problems there will be, I am sure, as almost every new Doctor has a few teething troubles. I am equally sure that Capaldi can pull through these, so long as we accept them and don’t expect perfection. That would be a very easy mistake to make. Because Capaldi is such a talented and well-respected actor, it is tempting to put him on a pedestal and expect too much from him, which would set him up for a fall.

I have to admit, this is the opposite of my reaction to Matt Smith’s casting. I expected very little from him, as I didn’t think he was suitable for the part at first, for various reasons which I am ashamed to say I shouted about all over the internet and am too embarrassed to repeat. Needles to say, I eat my words. After the usual teething troubles, Matt won me over with his quite brilliantly eccentric interpretation of the character. He is not my ideal type of Doctor, but he is a very good one. With Capaldi, I am simply excited to see how he plays the part, and by the implications of his casting. He seems to have all the qualities of a truly great Doctor but what qualities are they exactly?

We have seen the Doctor as an ill-tempered meddler,  an eccentric wanderer, a scientist secret agent, a madcap friend, a compassionate hero, a volatile genius, a subtle trickster, an elegant gentleman, a cursed pariah, a battle-scarred survivor, a dashing and charming casanova , and a crazy young professor. What qualities define the Doctor? We could say that he is a man of peace, but we would have to dismiss the sometimes violent sixth Doctor, and the genocidal actions of the Time War. We could say he is an altruist but that would ignore the first Doctor’s often pathologically selfish actions. We could define the Doctor as an anti-authoritarian wanderer, except the third Doctor worked with the military forces of U.N.I.T. for many years. We could call him an intellectual, a man who solves problems with ideas not action, but many of the Doctors have been action heroes to some extent. We could say that he is a man of principals, who always lives according to his own rules (however alien they may be) but then what about John Hurt’s Doctor, who did what he did in the name of peace and sanity, but not in the name of the Doctor? 

The Doctor is a man who is indefinable, yet also has a clear identity. He is infinitely adaptable, and infinitely consistent. He is a hero and an antihero, a young man and an old man, a genius and a fool, an altruist and a pragmatist, a bohemian and a traditionalist, a thinker and an action hero, an asexual and a Lothario, a man of peace and a man of war, a planner and an improviser, an alien and a human, detached and empathetic. He is Time’s Champion, The Oncoming Storm, The Traveller from Beyond Time, The Last of the Time Lords, the Time Lord Triumphant, The Raggedy Man, The Professor and, of course, River Song’s ‘sweety’.

The Doctor has worn so many faces and personalities already, and soon we will have the fantastic opportunity to view another facet of this dark wanderer.