Posted in: Audio Dramas, BBC, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: big finish, doctor who

Doctor Who: Big Finish Has Always Been a Proper Home for Fans

Offering a wide range of adventures that they've been looking for, here's why Doctor Who fans can always find a home over at Big Finish.

While Doctor Who is on hiatus before another series is greenlit, the show is in limbo, but fans clamouring for more stories that they don't have complain about can always go to Big Finish. That's the production company that's been producing original audio drama stories featuring past Doctors since 1999. These aren't audiobooks but full-cast audio dramas with the original cast members where possible, and impressive actors are brought in to cover characters when the original actor isn't available. At this point, Big Finish audio dramas are the place for proper Doctor Who stories that are as good as the classics and the modern era of the show.

Big Finish has been expanding "The Whoniverse" for hardcore Doctor Who fans for some time now. It's not fan fiction since they have the rights from the BBC to produce original stories. They began in 1999 with dramas featuring the Fifth (Peter Davison), Sixth (Colin Baker), and Seventh (Sylvester McCoy) Doctors. Then they signed Paul McGann to play the Eighth Doctor. All these actors and the actors who played their companions have been starring in Big Finish audio dramas ever since. They also cast new companions to establish new storylines and continuities without breaking the series canon, since fans are huge sticklers for canon. McGann's Doctor now has more stories than every other Doctor combined. When Russell T. Davies revived the TV series in 2005, the audio dramas didn't stop. They continued on a regular production and release schedule. Davies has been a fan and collector of Big Finish's audio dramas and even adapted two stories for TV, hiring Robert Shearman to turn his audio drama "Chimes of Midnight" into the official reintroduction of the villains all kids love, the Daleks, in "Dalek".

In the past decade, Big Finish has managed some big swings, including crossovers fans wished for but the TV series never could make. On top of expanding their titles beyond Doctor Who into new audio dramas of genre classics like Blake's 7, Space 1999, The Prisoner, and the occasional original title, they also managed to get David Tennant to play the Tenth Doctor, Billie Piper in a Rose Tyler spinoff series, and even Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. They got Jodie Whittaker and Mandip Gill to return for their "missing" season featuring just the Thirteenth Doctor and Yaz after Graham and Ryan, and the new stories do a better job at letting the Doctor take centerstage better than her two seasons on TV ever let her. The biggest coup has been getting Christopher Eccleston to return as the Ninth Doctor, first in stories set before he met Rose, then this year in stories set during their time together and featuring more stories with Rose's mother Jackie (Camille Corduri) and set around the South London estate that established what the series has done best: combining real settings with an intrusion of the fantastic.

Nostalgia plays a big part in Big Finish productions. They're made by and for fans, after all, and the fact that the company has been able to bring out stories regularly for over two decades now shows the consistency and professional quality of the stories. These are hobbyists but professionals, and they hire not only the original actors but the cream of the crop of British acting talent. As fans, Big Finish know what they want and what fans want, and in keeping the stories within canon since they're set in the past, they don't rock the boat with any controversial changes to the canon of the story. They're more than fan fiction; they are precisely the quality of stories seen on TV, only with audio, so you can imagine the best visuals in your mind as you listen. They also nurture and develop new writers who might be the future of both Doctor Who and the TV drama industry. That makes Big Finish a remarkable company worth your attention.

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