Yesterday,
Big Finish officially announced the continuation of their monthly
Doctor Who main range until the end of their current license in March
2020. This will bring them to their 262nd regular release.
That's an enormous amount of Doctor Who.
I
don't have the actual numbers to hand but between main range,
Companion Chronicles, Paul McGann and Tom Baker spin-offs and so on
there are already more Big Finish stories under the Doctor Who name
(nevermind Jago & Litefoot, Counter-Measures and the rest) than
have ever been made for TV. Every Doctor other than Tom Baker have
done more than twice as many Big Finish audios than they did TV
stories. Even Baker has enough stories on pre-order now that he will
have done more stories for BF than the BBC by the end of next year.
They've worked with every living regular actor from the classic
series bar one and she's never gonna do it so let's just call this as
big a win as they're getting.
They've
done wonders with the missed opportunities of the classic series:
producing stories that exploit Steven Taylor's backstory; finding a
way to make new stories with Sara Kingdom; completely rehabilitated
the Sixth Doctor (with no small amount of input from Colin Baker);
created a bunch of innovative new takes on the companion role; gave
us an actual Eighth Doctor era; and made several stories that deserve
a place on an “all time classics” list.
This
is not to say there aren't issues. In recent years their pool of
writers has shrunk somewhat with a lot
of stories coming out under the same names. Not bad names, not names
I dread or anything, give me a good Nicholas Briggs monster mash or a
John Dorney character study any day, but I do like a varied diet in
my Doctor Who. I'm also not totally convinced hour-long single CDs
were the best format for the Tom Baker range, they often feel rushed
and as if the stories don't have room to breath, oddly a feeling I
rarely had for the similar McGann line.
Still,
in spite of any of that this is my favourite form of Doctor Who right
now. I'm sort of fatigued on the TV show and the Doctor Who Magazine
comic strip never quite reaches the heights of its glory days (the
Eighth Doctor and 2009 Tenth Doctor strips, if you're wondering) and
the less said about the direction of the books the better.
So,
on balance I'm looking forward to this and I'm looking forward to
what these guys have coming up next.
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