Peter Capaldi appeared on the Where There’s A Will, There’s A Wake podcast recently and reflected on the popularity of the Doctor Who episode, Heaven Sent, which as the Twelfth Doctor he played almost entirely as a one-hander.

The Steven Moffat-penned and Rachel Talalay-directed episode is considered one of the show’s masterpieces by many fans, and features the Doctor navigating a castle (and his grief) as he is very slowly pursued by the Veil, a near-silent creature hidden mostly from sight by its veil and played by Jami Reid-Quarrell.

To fill 54 minutes with a single actor delivering most of the script and occupying almost all of the screen time required a very special performance from Capaldi, creative directing from Talalay, and of course a script from Moffat where enough happened to maintain audience interest while also being structured in such a way where the focus was always on the emotion – particularly grief – rather than the action.

“It was very unusual. It was beautifully directed by Rachel Talalay, who’s a lovely American lady.

“You’ve got to talk about monsters and it’s a sort of circus – kids love it and everybody’s got to be entertained but actually underneath it all, there’s a sense of melancholy and death.

“That particular episode’s just all about death and I think that’s fascinating that that episode became the all-time favourite.”

Heaven Sent was even an immediate hit with audiences whose own lives meant they would have nothing to resonate with in a grief-led story, such as younger viewers. Capaldi went on:

“[Young Doctor Who fans are] smart in the sense they understand instinctively that there’s darkness and there are things around and the monsters are manifestations of that.”

“But also the fact that the central character in Doctor Who will die – even though they come back as somebody else, the one that you love has gone, and that’s a very compelling and powerful thing to have at the centre of a show.”

Capaldi, who is now 65 years old and was 57 when Heaven Sent was broadcast, is still very busy as an actor and has reasserted that he won’t be returning to the role of the Doctor on television. He very specifically cited that medium in response to Tenth Doctor actor David Tennant playing the Fourteenth Doctor in the 60th anniversary specials, so didn’t address the possibility of following Tennant into working with Big Finish for Doctor Who audio productions.

Russell T Davies created a new Doctor so he could have David Tennant and Catherine Tate acting together again, and Big Finish arguably went one better in 2023 by reuniting another all-time great combination.

For the ninth release in the War Master range, titled Solitary Confinement, Sir Derek Jacobi got to play the Master against Siân Phillips as Mendrix. Fans of both of their careers, or of the history of British television drama, will know they appeared in I, Claudius together way back in 1976 to much critical acclaim.

Having an actor as legendary as Jacobi onboard already lifts every War Master release, and pitting him against Phillips again makes Solitary Confinement, which has four different writers for its four episodes, an even more thrilling listen.

The start of episode one, The Walls of Absence, is stunning with a great musical score supporting the Master’s well written monologuing before the titles come in. After that, the audience is introduced to Mendrix, who appears to be playing a grandma. How sweet! Except we know this is a War Master story, and Phillips is an actor known for gritty roles. And just as those thoughts come in, their characters meet.

A beautiful amount of detail is put into the pair’s lines, with the Master as trustworthy as he could possibly seem. He knows who Mendrix is and what she does, so he clearly has a hidden motivation, and you don’t need the ego of the Master for that to come out as Phillips gives Mendrix such an aura of brilliance that you know she’s already figured it out and is entertaining the Master’s limited patience while she tries to return to grandparenting duties. There’s no action here, but it’s two acting greats making you hang off their every line.

There’s then an abrupt scene cut, putting the power-playing between the two in a totally different position; in a new setting, Mendrix is now in something very far away from grandma mode. And she has some bad news to deliver to the Master.

Not a moment is wasted in the opening episode as the audience gets to experience them in multiple environments, showing off their acting chops and building a level of trust while also introducing a background threat: the Master’s own health. He’s renowned for doing anything not to die, or for ensuring he will always regenerate instead of remaining dead, but rather than that be presented as his primary objective, there are multiple philosophical sessions about what makes him him (a common theme for incarnations of the Master from 21st Century Doctor Who). It feels fresh, rather than repetitive, due to the two names delivering it.

Mendrix acts as the Master’s therapist, a role with a clear goal but with parallel motivations for both practitioner and recipient as this is set deep in the Time War. And once they get close… well, who would be able to resist the urge to write a romantic subplot for two acting greats?

You don’t need to be a follower of this range or even a Doctor Who fan to enjoy how this is set up, and probably for the same reasons RTD pulled his favourite double act back together. If the material works, they can make the most out of it and sell it to any audience. And there are many quotable lines in this beautifully written piece. If it were a late-night television drama then it no doubt would have captured the imagination of TikTok and older viewers.

One of the best things about this story is it can ramp up the relationship and the level of threat at the same time effectively, sweeping you into its world and both the small and large consequences of what is happening to and around the Master. A great script, a great realisation of its science-fiction ideas, and accompanied by superb performances and music.

A classic Master cliffhanger means later episodes cover different territory and troubles, enabling him to be more villainous but with his madness still a key plot point and something that is known to other characters too since this whole release centres around the Master’s time as one of the Drane Institute’s most twisted prisoners…

The War Master: Solitary Confinement is out now from Big Finish.

The BBC wasted no time in announcing who would be guest starring in the next series of Doctor Who, and one of the notable names was Lenny Rush.

Rush is only 14 years old (five years younger than Ruby Sunday’s actor Millie Gibson) but already has a well established acting career including being the recipient of a BAFTA in May 2023, a moment he “still cannot believe” happened.

A month later, it was revealed he would be appearing in Doctor Who as Morris, and at the time Russell T Davies said the character “joins the TARDIS team just in time for the Doctor’s greatest nightmare”.

The showrunner has not given away too many further details since then, but Rush — who has dwarfism — got the opportunity while filming to discuss the experience on That Gaby Roslin Podcast, and a few months later that podcast episode was then released to the world.

Rush was light on details about his Doctor Who episode’s plot, a promise had been made to say no spoilers, but he provided plenty of detail (with input from his mother as a fellow podcast guest) about how he landed the role and how his dwarfism was the focus of some of the public response to his hiring, the way the television industry enables young actors to continue with their education while committing time to filming projects that take them away from their school and friends, his on-set experience and about what it’s like to work with Ncuti Gatwa, the new Doctor.

He will be sharing the screen with Gatwa, but we don’t know for sure if their characters will have a friend or foe relationship, and while the Doctor has his sonic screwdriver, there is a special Segway for Morris “that has some secrets inside” and may prove important to the plot. According to Rush’s mother, “the props department have jazzed it up a bit”.

Also, does Morris have a last name? He says:

“I can’t say his last name. That’s how, like, crazy [the secrecy is]. I couldn’t say his last name!”

Only a few more months until we find out all about Morris, and why he will be encountering the Doctor.

Big Finish had a nine-month release schedule for the first two series of The Ninth Doctor Adventures, but for the third, it has spread out the 12 episodes over 12 months.

There’s a half-year wait between Travel in Hope, containing episodes four to six, and this February’s release, Buried Threats, which contains the next three. Little seems to link the two, with each boxset mostly feeling like an individual release rather than part of a series so far, so you can comfortably purchase Travel in Hope without needing to have listened to any other Ninth Doctor action from Big Finish.

Below There is the boxset’s first story, and is set in the deepest area of deep space. Vyx Leeson is alone on a ship and keeps having flashbacks to a space massacre. The Doctor finds her, but he doesn’t involve himself straight away after that. Instead, the production team go for a bit more of Alien vibe as a highlights reel of her lonely life (traumatised by flashbacks) takes place. And occasionally there’s a knocking on her spaceship’s hull…

This is stretched out until one day the Doctor communicates with her once again and asks for a game of i-spy. She doesn’t want her time wasted by childish games, but does explain why she’s actually alone in space. She’s the equivalent of a station porter for LeapCore, the commercial successor to T-Mats. Nothing exciting about that, so why is she scared?

It’s an old-school sci-fi story that bides its time before properly introducing the Doctor, and then waits even longer to introduce its threat. Between those two points, Vyx does plenty of explaining under the enthusiastic scrutiny of the Doctor, revealing how much she deliberately limits what she can see in the space below and beyond her ship, and the real reason as to why she’s alone.

The plot accelerates back into proper Doctor Who territory at this point, delivering a harsh message about the dangers of the human race’s future technologies and how capitalism — in a universe where labour is still needed rather than everything being handed over to AI — gets in the way of the right decisions being made.

There’s an emotional conclusion that results in ultimately what the Doctor would have wanted, and is definitely the type of outcome that Christopher Eccleston would have enjoyed turning from words on a page into a performance.

As effective as that is, it then hurts the start of episode two, The Butler Did It, due to its setting feeling too similar. The Doctor lands the TARDIS to a spaceship repair port and basically nothing happens through the first 13 minutes as the Doctor searches for a cup of tea. As he approaches that goal, an alien who he claims to be friends with falls ill and he thinks they have been poisoned by someone nearby. At which point the Agatha Christie-style plot is set into motion.

The Doctor interviews as many suspects as possible, bringing them into the same space together before talking to them privately one by one. Eccleston is full of quips while also trying to assert himself, the usual challenge when he visits a place and quickly encounters trouble, and at one point he does wonder if his interviewing technique is a bit too bold and accusation-focused.

Once others get involved in the interviewing, this becomes a story about the power the Doctor has to instil confidence in those around him. But that has negative repercussions, as if often does, with one of the Doctor’s new friends being targeted.

So everyone is reunited in true Agatha Christie fashion and the Doctor hosts a ‘whodunnit?’ With the criminal yet to be identified, it technically means they can still be up to no good. To detail more would spoil the conclusion, and explain the choice of title.

Run concludes the set and kicks off as an intergalactic parody of US elections featuring Raxacoricofallapatorians, Draconians, the natives of Mars, and the Doctor’s old friend, Alpha Centauri (this time voiced by Jane Goddard), who is the representative for their home planet of the same name. It has a 1990s feel to it too at first, probably due to the inclusion of rocket-powered megalimos and the American accents used for the intergalactic mobsters.

Alpha Centauri is at the start of their career as a senator in the Galactic Federation and doesn’t know the Doctor yet, while Eccleston enthusiastically plays his love for the friendly alien to show the familiarity his character already has with them.

A very nervous Alpha Centauri gives their first speech to the chamber as we get another murder mystery when one of the two presidential candidates gets killed. Sometimes, it leans on the comedic/farcical element of the American political sphere, while at other times, the story goes heavy on the murkier nature of political feuds. And within it, the Doctor pushes Alpha Centauri into being a replacement presidential candidate to act as opposition to Bellatrix Vega.

That puts Alpha Centauri’s life, and the galactic federation, at threat and it’s up to the Doctor to keep peace and power in place. All that’s missing is Josiah W. Dogbolter in this political caper. There’s action scenes, political ones casting a mirror to various infamous periods of Earth ideologies, and an element of mystery that rests on how good the listener’s hearing is.

There’s a very satisfying conclusion as the day is saved, and the Doctor once again instils confidence in someone. In this instance, it’s a young Alpha Centauri.

The cast and production crew from the three stories make great contributions to the behind the scenes material, and it’s clear they all love working with Eccleston.

With that in mind, it’s a surprise Big Finish has not yet announced The Ninth Doctor Adventures will continue into a fourth series. Series three was announced in March of last year, so maybe we just have to wait a few more weeks to find out if Eccleston will continue to play the Doctor…

The Ninth Doctor Adventures: Travel in Hope is available now from Big Finish.

The Toymaker has returned to Doctor Who, to entertain himself and cause havoc, and he looks just like Neil Patrick Harris.

He will be only the second actor to portray the mysterious and mischievous villain on television in Doctor Who, since most of the character’s appearances have been in extended media. He has most frequently appeared in comics, and his facial features in print have tended to be modelled (within reason) off those of Michael Gough, the first actor to occupy the role.

Gough, who died in 2011, played the Toymaker in the 1966 serial, The Celestial Toymaker, and was set to do so again in The Nightmare Fair, a story written for Season 23 in 1986 that never made it into production. It was adapted for audio by Big Finish in 2009, but with a different actor as the main villain of the piece, David Bailie, since Gough had retired from the profession.

During his career, Gough was considered for several Doctor Who roles so played Hedin in Arc of Infinity, and was as busy with film – particularly in America – as he was with television. His first on-screen roles were in films in the 1940s, and he appeared in TV movies before actually appearing in serialised productions. But even then, he took on one-off characters rather than recurring roles.

When theatrical productions started to be broadcast on TV by the BBC and ITV, he appeared in several of those, and he finally took on a long-term TV role in 1959 since his schedule featured fewer films. In addition to appearing in adaptations of many literary classics, he also appeared in shows that would be considered TV classics such as The Saint, Colditz, and Blake’s 7.

Towards the end of his career, he was busy once more with big movies for the American market, including several Batman titles as the titular character’s butler, Alfred.

Another connection Gough had to Doctor Who was he spent over 16 years married to Anneke Wills, who played the First and Second Doctor’s companion, Polly Wright.

The last time the Toymaker was being mischievous before The Giggle was in Relative Dimensions, a single issue comic story from Titan Comics featuring the Twelfth Doctor and Clara. If you’ve not watched The Giggle live, then you’ve overlooked Russell T Davies’ warning to watch it live. Still, we hope you’ve kept yourself spoiler-free. Probably all part of the Toymaker’s plan.

The way Doctor Who is made has changed a lot over the years, but now the way it pays its makers is changing too.

The outsourcing of production to Bad Wolf Studios was the first big change that meant the show was not tied to the financial structures of the BBC as tightly as previously, and Disney+ coming onboard as a partner of the show moved the boat even further away from its traditional home within the confines (but proven employment sphere) of Britain’s leading public service broadcaster.

Whether that move is good or bad for fans at home is secondary to whether the move has been beneficial for those working on the show and will be doing so in the future.

Deadline has reported that one of the key behind-the-scenes changes since Disney+ has become involved is it has “shifted away from a residual model” and “has moved towards a buyout model” for the show’s writers.

For reference on how many people that will impact at a minimum, there have been four different writers over the last 10 episodes of the show — and The Star Beast was an adaptation of work by two other writers — and there are three writers already confirmed for the next series (and likely more given Deadline’s report).

But the origin of this change of payment model may not be about the show’s present and future, but its distant past.

Deadline’s sources indicated that commissioned writers are being paid larger sums upfront to contribute to the show rather than getting a smaller payment to write the episode and then receiving further money whenever their episodes are repeated, distributed to be shown in other countries or their ideas are used in other work. This includes original characters and settings, and widely used creations like the Daleks which the BBC has the image rights to (for use in memorabilia) but not the characters rights to (for use in stories).

This is key because Disney+’s involvement does not mean Doctor Who is produced under US labour laws, which have been a hot topic with writers striking in the nation over issues including residual payments, and is still tied to Britain’s rules about creator’s rights.

The general secretary of the Writers Guild of Great Britain (a trade union) said it wanted to scutinise the new contracts for writers on Doctor Who if Deadline’s information proved to be correct, while the website also got a comment from BBC Studios (rather than Bad Wolf Studios) which stated “all deals take into account both the rights needed by the programme funders and the fees and residuals payable to talent”.

The timeline of television production means writers for the next series of Doctor Who will likely have had their contracts, or at least the starting terms which the BBC/Bad Wolf/Disney+ use for such contracts now, settled months ago. So that predates the conclusion of the writers’ strikes in America but also the issue Russell T Davies has faced in getting the show’s first four episodes, grouped together as An Unearthly Child, back onto streaming services.

Those episodes were written by BBC staffer, Anthony Coburn, and his son Stef has taken legal action to show the BBC does not have the rights to the ideas — which the show’s 60-year history has been built upon since — from that serial. While that has not led to Bad Wolf Studios and the BBC being law-breakers by making new Doctor Who, it has led to the BBC admitting it has lost the rights to show those episodes as those rights belong to the now deceased writer, and so they cannot be watched on BBC or Disney+.

So would changing the payment model avoid future instances of writers (or their relations) taking the BBC to court over their ideas being used, and will it lead to writers being paid less? Not necessarily. The residual payments can vary in scale, and any jobbing writer will know that the more money you can make up front, the more sustainably you can live in the present even though you lose out on a long-term source of income. Also if there is never any repeat showings or reusing of a writer’s ideas, then there would never be any residual payouts anyway. That model does not guarantee additional income, but with a show like Doctor Who, it’s very likely to lead to it.

Residual rights can also be agreed upon (although no lawyer would recommend it) at a later date. For example, your script may feature original elements that neither you or the BBC would ever expect to be used again, and you prioritise other elements to licence, but then if a future writer is inspired by something small in your story and reaches out to check if they can use it in their work, then the creator can have the opportunity to stamp their name onto it legally so they can make some money from another writer using their ideas.

Would a retrospective licensing approach be used if Doctor Who really has moved to a buyout model? Of course not, because a buyout tends to mean just that occurs and the BBC would own everything in the script bar the script itself. Writers want to hold onto their ideas for more than just money, and the buyout model would deny them the chance to unless Russell T Davies’ multiverse plan really opens up doors for writers to revisit their own work via spin-offs.

But again, this is hard to be sure of without being in a BBC Writers’ Room or in discussions with Doctor Who‘s showrunner who we would like to think would want to look after his fellow writers. As for fans who write stories set in the Doctor Who universe and share them online or in published fanzines, don’t worry, a change of payment model on the show shouldn’t put you in legal trouble.

If you were in Blackpool 49 years ago, you would have had been among the first of thousands to visit the city’s Doctor Who exhibition that would go down in history.

It was a great year for Blackpool, and their long-running daily newspaper The Gazette has collected an archive of images from 1974 including several of the seaside resort’s famed Doctor Who exhibition.

Opened in April 1974 while Season 11 featuring the Third Doctor was on air, it remained an active exhibition all the way through to October 1985, by which point Season 22 – the first featuring the Sixth Doctor – had already been broadcast. When the show returned to air almost 20 years later, the exhibition was revived too and ran for several more years through the eras of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors.

A police box formed the external entrance to the exhibition on Blackpool’s Central Promenade, and with people piling in, it formed the illusion that it was bigger on the inside. It in fact connected to the actual entrance, which then led down into the large exhibition space.

While it was not compulsory for the Doctors themselves to attend, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, and Colin Baker all did visit during their tenures and were usually accompanied by their on-screen companions. A couple of them made sure that they were in costume too.

Take a look at The Gazette‘s website for sights such as the psychic spiders from Metebelis Three (Planet of the Spiders) and a chocolate Dalek being admired/attacked by Jon Pertwee and Elizabeth Sladen, all taken during the launch of the exhibition just before it became open to the public. And if you want to see what happened after the opening… take a peek.

The exhibition left an impact on the people who visited it and worked there, and a few years ago, there was even a book written about it.

You can now re-enter the world of Doctor Who spin-off Class with a new audio story from Big Finish, Secret Diary of a Rhodian Prince, starring Greg Austin as Charlie Smith and Jordan Renzo as Matteusz Andrzejewski.

The DWC caught up with the pair — alongside writer, producer, and composer, Blair Mowat — to discuss the new production, getting back into the role of Sixth Formers, and how writing music compares to scripting dialogue…

The DWC: Blair, obviously you were composer for the Class TV series, and have now written Class: Secret Diary of a Rhodian Prince for Big Finish. What’s the difference between writing a musical composition, which is essentially telling a story by writing, and with a script that has dialogue and various other notes for the actors? What’s the biggest challenge in doing that?

Blair: One of the similarities is that dialogue has an internal rhythm and pace, and if you listen to certain writers like Aaron Sorkin, he will talk about the dialogue and writing being like a piece of music. Where you put the commas, where you put the punctuation, it is musical in the way that people speak. And people don’t always necessarily speak exactly how they would do in real life, but certainly his belief is that good writing is like a piece of music. And I think always remember that when I’m constructing scenes, that they have this internal flow and this internal rhythm. So I think there are similarities between writing music and composing, but what I try to do is actually wear completely separate hats.

So yes, occasionally, I will put in things about ‘music here’ or ‘music there’ in the script, which I’m usually told off for by my script editor. Because most writers wouldn’t do that, but of course I know I’m going to be composing it so I almost put it in there to remind myself. But when I come at it as a composer, I take off my writing hat and I make completely different decisions that I might have done then when I was writing the script.

And once I hear it, what these guys have done with it, and what our director Scott Handcock did with the directing — it changes things. And I originally didn’t envision any music over the diary entries; I thought they should be straight like an audiobook, and then when I heard them I was like ‘no, actually some of these are quite sweeping and cinematic and they need something underneath to support that’. So that journey of being both a writer and a composer, and being the first thing and pretty much the last thing that goes on, it’s really intellectually interesting and something that I really, really enjoy. And I think I would be terrified to hand it over to somebody else to write up the music. I’d love to do that one day, but I don’t know how I’d feel about it.

The DWC: So if you got this production opportunity again to do both roles, could you write the music first? Or at least write the scenes with the music in your head first, and then the dialogue after, if you know what story you want to take the characters on?

Blair: Well, I sort of did do that! There’s a few instances where I knew exactly; I’d be writing something, and I’d think ‘gosh, how are we going to do that in a short space of time? How are we going to segway that?’ — and I just knew that it was going to be that piece of music. And sometimes it would be something that I had already written [as a composition] and it was just a case of adapting a melody. And the opening actually of the whole script relies on music for humour; the music coming in or coming out helps punctuate certain jokes or things that we do. So I think knowing that in advance of what’s possible, especially on our budget which is limited obviously by not having a TV budget, it’s really helpful to know what tools we have at our disposal upfront [that we can use to aid the storytelling].

The DWC: And because for this release you’re writing it, writing the music and also producing it, what additional tasks have you had to do  in building this whole audio together?

Blair: I mean, contracts are really boring! Hahaha. About 50% of a producer’s job is really boring, and oh my gosh…

Greg: Lots of budgeting!

Blair: Yeah, budgeting and contracts are really quite dull, and I’d say that I ended up almost producing it out of necessity, really. Also having that extra layer of control was nice, in knowing how we were going to go about things, how much time we had to do things. Because I had to fit it around all my music writing as well, so a lot of this was written on international flights or moments where I just couldn’t actually be with my keyboard in my studio writing music. And so had I not been producing it, I might have had to write it a lot quicker and maybe it not be as good. So that was really nice. But I produce my own film scores all the time; I’m literally booking musicians, booking recording spaces, scheduling things so that they happen on time, so it’s really no different to doing that, apart from the fact that there’s a lot more contracts.

The DWC: Greg and Jordan, this is a show set in school years, and being at school I think is one of the most unique experiences/mindsets in life, nothing else quite comes close to being a student; how do you try to get yourself back into that mindset? When people develop so much further from the anxieties and the stresses and particularly the agitations and the relationship with authority when you’re in that setting and at that age? Obviously as adults now in professions where everyone’s got respect for each other, but your tolerance for authority and understanding of others’ responsibilities as a sixth former is a lot different. How do you get back into sixth former mindset?

Greg: Well I’m 30 now — I’ve just turned 30 — and it doesn’t feel happy. It’s terrifying, and playing a teenager into your 30s… well, that’s every actor’s dream I suppose. I’ll take it as long as I can do it. It’s such a weird time in everyone’s experience, that transition as seeing the world that’s something under control and that the adults know what they’re doing, and I suppose that’s the first real time where you start testing that theory and realising that ‘oh, hold on, if I’m getting close to being an adult, I’m a young adult now, and I still don’t know what’s going on, maybe no one else does either’. So with respect to authority, that’s when you’re really challenging it. And especially for Charlie, it’s something — he has just had all the authority in the world taken away from him, so it’s particularly interesting for him trying to reestablish his own authority on Earth and understand where he lies in the social order of things. It’s a very interesting thing to try to portray, and as an adult it’s really hard to remember what being a kid’s like. It’s really hard to remember what life was like a year ago, let alone half a lifetime ago now, but that’s the eternal challenge of being an actor. It’s trying to find those emotions and trying to portray them as truthfully as possible. That’s the challenge.

Jordan: I just feel like I’ve never grown up, so it’s not that difficult. If anything, it depends on year by year. Sometimes, you feel like you’ve regressed and you’re like ‘wow, where’s the really wise 23-year-old that I used to be?’ But then life happens, and you’ve gone back to kid mode. It just happens. It’s tough because you’re having conversations with old boys as well and you’re like ‘this is so cool, I’m hanging out with you, old man’. ‘Old man? We’re just buddies hanging out — we’re the same age!’ I only notice it if I do too much sport or something and I start to break down in the elbows and the knees.

Greg: The pain is settling in. I turned too quickly to one side and my neck just froze up.

Blair: It gets worse, boys. It gets worse.

Jordan: You only really know you’re an adult when you adult stuff. It sounds strange, but that’s the truth. You only know when you move house or sort something out, book a flight, something that seems pretty basic now but actually that’s the difference as when you’re a kid you literally can’t and you push it off. Or you make like massive childish lists that you never accomplish. Like every day, I check them off. I guess I never think about it. That rebelling against authority, I feel the same; I guess I don’t feel any different towards — I’ve always felt like I was just moving around. I didn’t have like a traditional way of growing up. Anyway, that’s answering another question.

The DWC: You’ve mentioned previously that these are scenes that we didn’t get to see in the show, or Patrick Ness didn’t have time to fit them in — are there actually moments in this that are picked directly from scenes that didn’t end up televised from Patrick’s ideas/scripts, or is it original content?

Blair: It’s all original content. Well, we obviously reference things that happened in the show, and I certainly rewatched parts of the show just to actually hear their vernacular and the way that they speak to each other. And also to avoid contradictions, I will dip into episodes and I will be like ‘gosh, I really need to rewatch two minutes of that scene’. I have them all on my computer and I can access like episode two, 17 minutes in very quickly within seconds, then watch something and go ‘ah yes, okay, cool, that’s not quite how I remembered it’. So we definitely reference things that happened verbatim in the show, but everything that is in the diary is new content spinning on what’s already happened.

I will say that obviously when I was on set occasionally, when I visited in Cardiff, I had conversations with Patrick Ness and also with the producer Derek Ritchie, and it’s honestly quite hard now to remember exactly how much of what was said was public, how much was private, whether certain things have got in there that might have been from discussions back then. It’s almost impossible to know now, exactly. So yes, quite possibly there will be things that were mentioned that were never fulfilled on screen. I also got early cuts of the episodes, and so I saw deleted scenes that never even ended up on DVDs, which sometimes I actually remember as being in the episodes. And then I go back to the episode, and then it’s ‘oh yeah, they cut that, that wasn’t in it’. And I also have all the scripts from those eight episodes as well, so I can go back and read stuff that Patrick wrote that didn’t end up in the actual edit. And maybe sometimes even wasn’t filmed because of time constraints or other things, because I even have early versions of the scripts. So there’s a whole wealth of material for me be able to draw on, which I’m sure a very avid Class fan would love to have! So it’s fascinating, and yeah, it does help having that.

A big thank you to Greg, Jordan, Blair, and Big Finish!

You can order Class: Secret Diary of a Rhodian Prince from Big Finish now. Only 1000 physical CD pressings will be made, which you can order (alongside a complimentary download version) for just £10.99; or grab a download-only copy for £8.99.

What happens when you think the evil force that has been ruling over your nation has been removed from power, but turns out to still have a lingering influence? Or that its successor turns out to be even worse? Nope, this isn’t the United Kingdom in 2023, but 144 years down the line in 2167.

After the Daleks is Big Finish’s sequel to First Doctor television story The Dalek Invasion of Earth and while released in August 2021, it’s worth revisiting now because of the parallels to the present. It’s a contemporary story, but set in the far future and also in the style of 1960s Doctor Who.

The opening story of the seventh series of The Early Adventures range focuses on Susan Foreman after she leaves the TARDIS and seeks to help Earth recover from its society-destroying Dalek invasion, and acts almost as the seventh to 10th episodes of its TV prequel.

Marcus Bray is the governor of Zone 5, where the UK is, and has very different ideas to Susan about how a post-Dalek society should operate. He wants to get things back to normal, such as having Big Ben bonging again, having good trade relations with international neighbours, and stopping the violence that can sometimes make London’s streets a scary place to be. Ah, well, that’s familiar.

Now the Daleks are not in charge, their influence should have waned. But some people still think they’re Robomen, there’s a Dalek shell still about, and a self-interested ideology that festers in the Palace of Westminster.

This story sets up a depressing but totally believable picture of a future Britain, and then takes Susan and basically makes her ‘the only adult in the room’. Which, given how ‘young’ she is when she leaves the TARDIS, is one of this story’s greatest strengths as this is the beginning of the adult Susan encountered several times by the Eighth Doctor.

But her endeavours to help the human race are undone by her own alien status, which is used by others to stir up hate once she stands for election to make her ideas known. The stakes get higher and higher, exposing the rot at the heart of Zone 5 politics, before a big episode two cliffhanger.

David Campbell (played by Sean Biggerstaff in this release) is not forgotten and his point of view is used more for the next episode as Susan’s situation becomes more concerning. Events don’t move forward too much when Susan is not involved, but that’s because other plot strands are accelerating instead to built up to a final episode where the personal, political, and the despicable collide.

It packs a lot into the final half-hour, but it feels like the chaos that erupts is inevitable in what has been shown of all the characters up to that point. It’s truly a story about what bad people do in bad situations, and why it’s usually they who emerge strengthened in the peacetime afterwards while normal people continue to suffer. Within its brief as part of The Early Adventures, it feels like 1960s Doctor Who, while also being a product of the 2020s and a story that would slot into the revived era of the show.

The Early Adventures: After the Daleks is available now from Big Finish.

The first season of Big Finish’s Ninth Doctor Adventures finished in style with Old Friends, a strong boxset that really showed what Christopher Eccleston can bring to the role of the Doctor.

Fond Farewell by David K Barnes is the first of three episodes in the fourth boxset, and kicks off with a cold open that throws you straight back into the first Russell T Davies era. Eccleston is immediately on top form, a standard he will carry through the set, and you can quickly tell that Big Finish is really making use of him as an actor rather than giving him content he can have a relaxed day in the booth with. It brings out the best from a man who we know has high standards for his work.

The story takes place in Fond Farewell, an intergalactic funeral parlour, and revolves around the funeral of naturalist and adventurer Flynn Beckett, known for exposing companies for unethical practices and an old friend of the Doctor. And prior to his death, he made sure that the Doctor would be invited to his funeral.

Fond Farewell’s funerals are a little different to the standard tear-filled affairs you would expect, as they specialise in bringing the dead back to life. Kind of.

The Doctor’s unease about this concept is soon followed by several violent incidents and a whodunnit mystery contained in the parlour that no one can escape from. As tensions between guests rise, and suspicion turns towards the Doctor too, it requires the very best of his people skills to keep on top of the situation.

The episode is simply a great example of science-fiction, and the robotic assistants repeatedly delivering an eerie message drives the audience to what the outcome of the story might be. It takes longer for the Doctor to have some ideas, and he truly has to delve deeper to save the day. Although the Doctor’s own relationship with death is not explored much, and it is in fact quite a bouncy story rather than a sombre one, it still provides the cast with lots to chew on in a wide variety of emotions.

Next up is the two-part season finale, which utilises Doctor Who and Big Finish’s own mythos to really build a big conclusion to Eccleston’s return to the role.

Way of the Burryman by Roy Gill is set in Edinburgh in the early 2000s and immediately introduces another old friend of the Doctor, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and then future UNIT officer (and Lady Christina chaser) Sam Bishop. This is in effect an origin story for Sam, who is having to choose between life with his girlfriend Fiona or travelling the world as a solider. Let’s say the events of the final two episodes will end up making the decision for him.

Once the Doctor and Sam meet, they bounce off each other really well, even if they are not in agreement on quite a few things; there’s a huge amount of energy in Eccleston’s performance while Warren Brown plays Sam in a way that clearly distinguishes him from his later years as a gung-ho UNIT action hero. But if you’re unfamiliar with the UNIT or Lady Christina ranges, then it’s actually possibly even more enjoyable for a listen to have this be your introduction to the character.

The Burryman is an interesting concept as it looks like a spiky plant monster but is really just a town tradition of making a scary-looking costume and walking it around the city centre. Or at least that’s the starting point. And the Forth Bridge is the finish.

There’s a thread through this boxset of what happens after or beyond death, and that creeps into this story via multiple places and characters. It probably takes one internet image search of the Forth Bridge, given it’s such a distinctive design but not one that is necessarily embedded in the global cultural consciousness in the way that London landmarks are, to really visualise the setting the story moves into in the second half and it does the brilliant Doctor Who thing of taking such a landmark and doing something so memorable with it that for many people a new association with the place is formed. You have to wonder how many people worldwide think of the Ninth Doctor’s first episode when they see the London Eye, or have looked at the scaffolding on Big Ben for the last few years and wondered if a pig in a spaceship was to blame.

Without spoiling the events that follow any more than the cover art does, another old ‘friend’ appears and while the Doctor tells the Brigadier that he will last forever, with some great continuity to earlier stories, one of his oldest foes prove their longevity too.

The final act of the episode links directly to one of the stories from the third boxset, requiring the Doctor to confront his past and make one of those huge unenviable decisions that have colossal consequences.

The Forth Generation begins with a Moffat trick for two-parters by having a time jump before the titles, and then lands itself in the action and the consequences of the previous episode.

Without spoiling a clever plot any further, the title of the episode does refer to the army of Cybermen the Doctor and his friends are up against, and there’s also an experimental submarine nearby with a nuclear power supply that adds to the drama stakes.

Although the familiar ‘person is converted, their lover/friend tries to appeal to the human emotions still inside’ trope is used and to the usual enjoyable degree, the relationship used in this example is actually one listeners would care about, and it’s well played by the actors so it’s forgivable.

The way the Cyber army is dispelled is a bit ‘eh?’, but the threat actually remains, so it’s better to say the Cybermen are stopped in one area first to then set up a second, more personal, showdown.

Series 1 of The Ninth Doctor Adventures ends on an important moment in Big Finish continuity, by setting the path of one of its frequently used original characters, and of course there are moments between the Doctor and the Brigadier that many would have hoped for. Perhaps the best Brigadier moment though is actually in the behind the scenes where Jon Culshaw, in character as the Brigadier, talks about knowing the Ninth Doctor’s burden. It’s beautifully delivered, and reminds the listener of where this meeting takes place in both characters’ timelines.

Eccleston’s performance is the biggest selling point of almost all Ninth Doctor releases, because he gives it everything and really rewards those who have waited 16 years for him to return to the role, but also Old Friends really does deliver as the end to a series that shows how coherently planned The Ninth Doctor Adventures already is by Big Finish. And Series 2 delivers as well…

The Ninth Doctor Adventures – Old Friends is available now from Big Finish.