Trapped, a haunted monster waits to consume new victims. It needs help. It needs a doctor. Unfortunately, it also needs to kill whoever it meets. Thrust into immediate danger, and on the back-foot, it will take all of the Doctor’s ingenuity to triumph.  

The Doctor in Time Lord Victorious is a different character. He's slightly lonelier, slightly scratchier, when he doesn't have one of his pals to hold him back.  

But it's nice to tell stories from different times of his life. You just have to try and make sure you're in the right mindset. The script is fascinating. I've only got one side of it, but I'm very aware there's more to this story, that there's another Doctor on the other side of the disc. I look forward to getting my LP so I can listen to it all.

 

I've read this script twice through and I'm still none the wiser. I'm more confused after the second time than I was after the first. It's only while working on it that I've become aware of how it's going to be structured.  

It really appeals to me, the idea that it's in two parts, on two sides of vinyl. I think it's fun for people listening. Part of the excitement is when the different incarnations meet... or nearly meet.

Director Scott Handcock has pulled together an amazing who’s who of Doctor Who for the cast. We’ve got alumni from the series as well as Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.

It’s been an honour to create Big Finish’s first commissioned-for-vinyl story, and utterly thrilling to write for both the Eighth and Tenth Doctors.

A thrilling new adventure for the Tenth Doctor (as played by fan-favorite David Tennant) that sees the shocking return of his deadliest enemies: the Daleks! But things aren't what they seem - time is all wrong, and something is coming that terrifies even the Daleks... The first of two oversized issues kicking off the BBC's highly anticipated multi-platform Doctor Who epic, Time Lord Victorious!

Separated from his companions, the Doctor attempts to find solace in the history of his favourite planet – Earth – but instead discovers new threats lying in wait. 

Travelling from twentieth-century East Berlin to sixteenth-century Strasbourg, the Doctor encounters creatures from other realities: monsters beneath the waves, and human beings determined to exploit their fellow man. 

But how long can he survive without a friend? 

 

These are four different takes on the Doctor in the four different stories of this collection. In one I'm quite jaunty and jolly and in another one I'm slightly more baffled.  

But I've enjoyed all the four stories. They're very different. I've always been rather fond of the stories in which the Doctor fiddles in history. But of course it's also nice to meet the odd alien.

• Ghost Station by Steve Lyons  
• Deep beneath the streets of East Berlin, Peter Meier patrols the border in an old underground station. But when the TARDIS materialises nearby, Peter realises he is far from alone. 
• The Bridge Master by Jacqueline Rayner 
• When the Doctor’s shadow is sacrificed by villagers, he brushes it off as medieval superstition —until he begins to grow weak. Can he uncover the truth behind the bridge master’s curse before it’s too late? 
• What Lurks Down Under by Tommy Donbavand
• On the waves of the Indian Ocean, all the prisoners aboard the Lady Juliana have fallen into a trance... except a single girl. Mary Wade desperately needs a doctor –and only one will help her. 
• The Dancing Plague by Kate Thorman
• Arriving in Strasbourg at the height of the Dancing Plague, the Doctor finds himself thrust into a world of paranoia. Can he bring peace to a city at odds with its own people? 

We’ve been thinking of doing a follow up to The Schizoid Earth for quite some time. Of course, some of the threads set up in that novel have played a major role in other Lethbridge-Stewart novels, through the role of the Brigadier’s brother, James Lethbridge-Stewart. Since series seven is all about parallel realities, it seemed the perfect opportunity to do a novel set entirely within the Schizoid Earth. And Robert Mammone was the first and only author I considered for the task.

While daunting, writing a novel set on the Schizoid Earth opened up a lot of exciting possibilities. I've long been a fan of alternative history science fiction, particularly authors like Harry Turtledove and especially the darker fiction of SM Stirling. The chance to use familiar characters, in unfamiliar ways, in a setting way worse than the timeline of 'our' Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart was one I couldn't say no to. Of course, when you're dealing with a villain, as the Column Leader clearly is, you have to ensure you're not making them the hero of the piece, even if they are the lead. There's a lot of fantasy/science-fiction writing out there today that embraces the anti-hero as being someone to admire. While that has its place, in no way is the Lethbridge-Stewart of the Schizoid Earth a hero – he’s a broken man ill used by his father and a servant of a monstrous regime intent on ensuring the last remnants of resistance are stamped out.

Like what SM Stirling did with his Draka books, he made one small change to history, and the result was worse than anyone could imagine. The Republic is led by vile men who do vile things, and while the Resistance is admirable in their intent, their methods tend to ape that of the Party. I had a lot of fun throwing in bits and pieces that call back to events in the Doctor Who universe. Andy is as always a font of information about the setting, and was a great sounding board when I found myself lost in the weeds. His work editing The Schizoid Earth: I, Alastair has made it an even better book (he also supplied the title – it is better than my choice 'I, Brigade-Leader'!), one I hope readers, new and old, of the range, will embrace and enjoy and celebrate!

Evil Brig, who wouldn't want to draw him. Inferno has to be in my top ten Doctor Who stories, and I love parallel universe, what if scenarios. Added to this, who doesn't want to draw Big Ben blowing up?

10 years since it was first broadcast, I still get goosepimples when the "hello Stonehenge" speech begins; I still get emotional when "The Life and Death of Amy Pond" kicks in; and I still feel a burst of excitement as the Doctor, Amy, and Rory disappear into time and space, ready for more adventures.

That's why I love The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang. It's a summation of everything good about Series 5, and about Doctor Who.

After an accident, the TARDIS lands on a luxury star-liner. Leaving their ship to repair itself, the Doctor, Leela and K9 find themselves facing a great terror: mingling at a cocktail party.

Something seems awry behind the pleasantries however. Guests are going missing, and equipment is breaking down. When the Doctor investigates further he discovers that the star-liner is literally on course for disaster.

But no-one seems surprised by this information, still less troubled. What’s going on? And can the Doctor and his friends save everyone... when nobody wants to be saved?

In Shadow of the Sun, we have a great, well-made script by Rob Valentine. A lovely slice of science fantasy. It has a great central idea and a cast of superb characters. At its core, there’s a fanatical belief in something that is patent nonsense, but the Doctor, Leela and K9 find themselves to be the only people who know the truth. That’s a great set-up!

And it also has a flavour of the often talked about ‘base under siege’ setting, which adds appealing claustrophobia to the storytelling. It makes the situation more extreme and therefore more of an exciting ride for the audience.

This is a story inspired by the modern trend of giving the same value to opinion as fact – including everything from climate change denial to the anti-vaccination movement – but specifically the recent (and ultimately fatal) rocket launch experiments intended to prove that the Earth is flat. The Doctor is about to find himself in a situation where the true enemy is pseudo-scientific hubris, and for once it might be an enemy he hasn't the tools to overcome.

When Big Finish asked me to play Sarah Jane for this story, I was very nervous. I didn’t want to create a performance from someone else’s.

So I tried to approach it as I would with any other role. I’ve tried to find my own piece of Sarah - the part of my mum that’s in me. But I have had a quick look on YouTube for Sarah Jane Smith screams, because I wasn’t quite sure how she would want me to do those. Other than that I just tried to keep it as separate in my mind as possible from the original.

The fans of Doctor Who have always been so kind and generous to me and to my family. It was always a part of my life growing up, I was never not aware of it. People have always been very kind in letting us come along for the ride really, through conventions and now things like Big Finish and, after mum passed away, the outpouring of love for her has been lovely.

How do you recast Sarah Jane Smith? Would you even want to? Those were the questions that bothered us - we love the character. We loved Lis Sladen. We worried it might be too soon and too difficult to go there. But then we realised that part of Lis lives on in Sadie, and Sadie has beautifully brought that to the role of Sarah - we all approached this carefully, and respectfully, and with love and I couldn’t be happier with Sadie’s performance. She’s done her mum proud.

Tom has actually worked many times before with Christopher Naylor, who’s played guest roles throughout different series of the Fourth Doctor Adventures. Chris is a very versatile actor, so we can cast him in so many things. But, we realised, he’s also the perfect Harry. Again, it’s very hard to follow Ian Marter, but Chris has managed to do that and Tom was full of praise for what both Sadie and Chris have done. I wonder where they could pop up next?”

I’d known of Return of the Cybermen for many years, but it was only relatively recently that I was able to source Gerry Davis’s script thanks to some great detective work by archivist Richard Bignell! John Dorney’s adaptation stays true to the original script and the era, though there have been some very minor changes to bring it in line with the kind of amends we believe Robert Holmes would have asked for. Little things that make it sit comfortably in season 12.

It’s rather different in tone to Revenge of the Cybermen - darker, scarier and more reminiscent of claustrophobic 1960s Cybermen tales like The Moonbase and The Invasion.

It was interesting working with Tom on this, because he noticed the difference in style immediately. This is Doctor Who as Gerry Davis imagined it in 1974, and it’s very much like he wrote Doctor Who in the mid-1960s. So the script didn’t quite have the same levels of emotional sophistication and wit that was present either in what Robert Holmes eventually crafted into Revenge of the Cybermen, or certainly the more recent Fourth Doctor Adventures we’ve made on audio.

I imagined what it would have been like, back in the day, if Tom had been presented with this script to rehearse and record. If you look at the script book of the first Tom Baker season, you can see masses of line changes that were added by the cast or director during rehearsals and shooting in all those stories. Some of them are the best, most memorable moments, so I reasoned that it would be a faithful process to take on board Tom’s suggestions for this production of Return of the Cybermen.

We had loads of fun, as usual, with Tom finding it particularly amusing when I was directing him with a Cyberman voice effect. At one point, he asked, 'Is he talking to me?' which made us all laugh out loud!

The children of Gallifrey are being recalled to fight in the Time War, and the Doctor’s granddaughter knows her moment has come. A new, full-cast audio drama, Susan’s War, is released today.

Intelligence. Intuition. Empathy. The requirements of a perfect agent to catch a spy. And, in Susan Campbell (Carole Ann Ford), the Time Lords have found all the attributes they need to give their work a veneer of respectability.

In the 2017 Big Finish Short Trip, All Hands on Deck, the Eighth Doctor tried to prevent Susan being recruited by the Time Lords on Gallifrey and dragged into the Time War. But his efforts were in vain, and now we find out what happens next...

Listen to the Introduction

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Time War: Susan's War
Starring Carole Ann Ford as Susan
With Paul McGann as the Doctor and William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Featuring Beth Chalmers as Veklin, Damain Lynch as Rasmus and Nicholas Briggs as the Daleks

Gallifrey needs every Time Lord to fight the Time War. A summons has been issued across the universe to its prodigals. Whatever their skills, the war effort can use them.

Susan’s call-up papers have arrived, and, unlike her grandfather, she is willing to join her people’s battle and finally return home.

Because Susan knows the Daleks, and she will do her duty...

Sphere of Influence by Eddie Robson
Susan’s first mission is one of diplomacy. The Sense-Sphere could prove a valuable ally to Gallifrey. But she is not the only one who knows the Sensorites of old. Susan will have the support of an old friend. Ian Chesterton is about to rejoin the adventure he left a lifetime ago!

The Uncertain Shore by Simon Guerrier
Susan and Commander Veklin are on the trail of a spy. Under cover on a ravaged world, they find a weary population, trapped, and waiting for the inevitable. But one among them is a traitor. The Time War is coming to Florana, and Susan will face a struggle to simply survive...

Assets of War by Lou Morgan
Cardinal Rasmus believes that Susan’s special abilities will help him assess a new weapons project. On a secret military base, creatures from the vortex are being bred for war. Gallifrey’s scientists think they can be used as assets against the Daleks. But the Orrovix are not easily tamed...

The Shoreditch Intervention by Alan Barnes
When Susan’s TARDIS is intercepted, she is given a highly classified mission. Earth, 1963 is a nexus point in the Time War, but the timelines must be negotiated carefully. Mods and rockers are not the only dangers on the streets of Shoreditch. In Susan’s past, the Daleks are waiting. But so is the Doctor!

Although she doesn't sometimes give the impression that she is, Susan is actually quite brave. She's been attacked by all sorts of weird and wonderful things, and she's quite happy to go launching herself off into time and space.

I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn't playing a younger Susan. Otherwise she just comes leaping back. It's difficult to eradicate. It's difficult too for the writers as they have no experience of the older Susan being portrayed anywhere.

I had an image of Susan from the special TV episode, The Five Doctors, in that trenchcoat which makes me think of her as a spy! So here we have her on diplomatic and espionage missions rather than military operations, to show another aspect of how special ops are going on behind-the-scenes in the Time War.

The Doctor suffers a bit from ‘species guilt’ in this one. The Time Lords have been responsible for the initial problem that created the rift in space they're trying to close. It always adds a layer of interest to a story when we go back to the ghastly Time Lords, who arguably could be seen as the biggest villains of the whole lot.