More on Tegan Audio

The official Doctor Who website confirmed the story today, which we reported yesterday from the pages of the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine, that Janet Fielding would at last reprise the role of Tegan Jovanka for an audio story to be released next year by Big Finish. "In fact, I'd all but given up asking," Big Finish producer Gary Russell is quoted as saying, with regard to his recent attempts to convince the actress to return to the role. "Then over a lovely dinner a few weeks back she volunteered. 'One,' she said. 'Just the one,' with a steely gaze that told me that it will, indeed, be just the one." Says producer Jason Haigh-Ellery, "I know Peter [Davison] is going to enjoy renewing their sparring partnership, and I hope the fans will get a kick out of hearing this older Tegan getting to say one or two things she probably wanted to get out of her system at the end of Resurrection of the Daleks," indicating that Peter Davison would join her for this audio and that it will take place after the character left the series' continuity. Not noted on the official website was the news that the Tegan story will have character/story links to "Dead Men Walking," an audio starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as the Sixth Doctor and Peri, written by Joseph Lidster (who has also written the Tegan serial, "Summer in the City"); the story features the Cybermen and is due next year. The connection, along with "one or two characters", is Cybertechnology, with the Cybermen returning in Lidster's story, set in Baltimore in 1986, at the home of Peri's parents, "where the Doctor uncovers a sinister plot to reanimate cadavers at a funeral home". The report also notes that Mark Strickson returns for the November audio "Singularity" by James Swallow -- Strickson has not been in an audio for some time -- and that subscribers will receive an additional Sixth Doctor and Peri special CD called "Cryptobiosis" by year's end; the new single-disc story "came from the open-submissions pile" [in 2003], and is written by Elliot Thorpe.