Once the New Year's special's out of the way, we won't have any
Doctor Who for well over a year (although some might say that's a blessing - not me though). Therefore, I have some Big Finish/audio recommendations for everyone if you get a sudden inflow of cash over Christmas or you want to add some stuff to your list:
Novel Adaptations
Big Finish has produced full-cast audio drama adaptations of some of the Virgin New Adventures and Missing Adventures books. I cannot recommend these highly enough - they're some of the best things Big Finish has ever produced.
I haven't listened to any of the Fourth Doctor ones, so I can't comment on those, but I strongly recommend the Seventh Doctor ones, particularly
Love and War,
Damaged Goods (adapted from the novel by Russell T Davies. Yes,
that Russell T Davies),
Theatre of War,
All-Consuming Fire (the Doctor meets Sherlock Holmes!),
Original Sin and
Cold Fusion which I recommended a couple of times earlier in the thread, but I'm going to recommend again.
Legend of the Cybermen
This is one of the best main range entries I've ever heard. I will say that you need to have listened to
City of Spires and
Wreck of the Titan first to get the full effect, but you can also listen to it on its own perfectly fine. It's one of the funniest, saddest, maddest and most brilliant
Doctor Who stories ever made. It's a sequel to the story
The Mind Robber, but it's a more than worthy one and some might say it surpasses the original.
It reunites the Sixth Doctor with Jamie and Zoe and if you're like me, you're probably thinking that's great. After all, I don't think many companions in the history of
Doctor Who (except maybe Adric) had exits as tragic as Jamie and Zoe. Getting returned to your own time with your memories of your travels with the Doctor erased is a heartbreaking way to go.
Well, lest you think you're getting a happier ending for those two out of this, you're dead fucking wrong. If you don't cry at the end of this story, you have no heart. The final line of this story on its own fucking broke me.
And I loved it.
"And I was lost to her again..."
The First Sontarans
I haven't listened to much of the Lost Stories range (Big Finish's adaptations of scripts for the TV show that never got made), but this one was bloody great. It is to the Sontarans what
Genesis of the Daleks was to the Daleks. We got the fucking
Two Doctors instead of this back in the day. No fair!
Ravenous 2
This was a massive fucking improvement over
Ravenous 1 which I thought was a huge letdown.
Better Watch Out and
Fairytale of Salzburg are already two of my favourite Eighth Doctor stories.
Escape from Kaldor was pretty good too and
Seizure was... okay... the other stuff makes up for it. Plus, you don't really need to have listened to
Ravenous 1 to understand what's going on, unless you really want to know what happens to Helen right after
Doom Coalition 4 (make me wonder why they made
1 in the first place, but hey ho).
The Third Doctor Adventures Volume 4
You're probably thinking to yourself "Hang on minute. Isn't Jon Pertwee dead?" Yes he is, sadly, posthumous *ahem* barely audible "cameo" (if you can call it that) in
Zagreus notwithstanding. So how are we getting Third Doctor stories? Well, enter Tim Treloar.
Tim Treloar plays the Third Doctor in this range and it's actually quite remarkable what he does. He doesn't sound
exactly like Jon Pertwee, but it's very close and as with performances like Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi in
Ed Wood, this isn't someone doing an impersonation - this is someone becoming the person they're playing. You forget it's an actor pretending to be someone else and totally buy they are that person. Even though the voice wasn't an exact match, for most of it, I forgot I wasn't listening to the real Jon Pertwee. It has to be heard to be believed.
But you probably want to know about the story quality for these Adventures. After all, Big Finish does a Fourth Doctor Adventures range with the real Tom Baker and that's... well, it's pretty meh. I can't answer that question for the whole of this range, but I can say I really enjoyed
Volume 4. You have
The Rise of the New Humans where Rufus Hound reprises his role of the Meddling Monk for a fun romp and then
The Tyrants of Logic, which gives the Third Doctor the Cyberman story he should've had on TV and doesn't disappoint.
Plus, this one's usually on sale, so you should be able to snap it up for a reasonable price.
BBC Audiobooks of Doctor Who Novelisations
These are audiobook readings of the Classic Series novelisations that were produced by Target Books back in the day. They're really good listening and I particularly recommend the ones read by Jon Culshaw. He does a Tom Baker impression which is so dead-on, he actually sat down with the real Tom Baker and you can't tell which is which:
His reading of
Genesis of the Daleks is like watching the TV story with the pictures switched off and they even get Nicholas Briggs in to do the Dalek voices. Plus, these audiobooks are slightly cheaper than the Big Finish audio dramas and you get slightly more for what you pay for.
Happy listening!
Still, good find.
look what I got for Christmas:
. Glad you got something this great