FRONTIOS: June 2010

Big Finish was born of the wilderness years. The dark period before the show’s 2005 revival found massive popularity with a whole new generation. A period when Doctor Who was still a ‘cult’ franchise followed only by a niche fan following.

It seems strange to me that Doctor Who could ever become a cult show. A show that had its heart in the right place, and was about fighting tyranny, making peace where possible and striving to build a better world- values that anyone can get behind, regardless of age. Surely any casual viewer who happened upon the show could instantly ‘get’ it.

The Doctor was always a hero worth rooting for. Occasionally, in The Silurians and Genesis of the Daleks he’d admit defeat to a moral conundrum, but mostly he was a reliable, noble, pragmatic hero who could be counted on to make the important decisions for the greater good. Not always the ‘right’ decision, but as right a decision he could make given the circumstances. In City of Death, the Doctor spends the story sabotaging Scaroth’s efforts to save his people and in doing so he actually comes across as the villain of the piece, until the ending finally reveals the consequences for humanity if Scaroth succeeds. But such morally challenging writing is enticing and inviting to a developing young mind, unlike the repellent, heavy-handed preachiness of a lot of sci-fi.

Some stories from the 70’s golden age of the show are so progressive and cutting edge that I actually don’t think they’ve aged or dated at all today. When I first saw Genesis of the Daleks repeated in 1993, it was so sharply paced, tightly edited and unflinching in its exploration of themes of war and tyranny that it honestly felt modern, and it felt pertinent to the recent Gulf War. When it was repeated again in the year 2000 amidst pre-millenial dread and the massacres in East Timor, it still felt relevant. Likewise The Deadly Assassin and City of Death with their media-savvy post-modernism and twisty narratives could have been repeated in 2000, and sat comfortably alongside Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Fight Club.

But let’s define what makes a show ‘cult’. My own interpretation is that it’s crucially about having the kind of content that only the show’s fans can truly appreciate. A show usually becomes cult, when it places important emphasis and concern on things that casual viewers wouldn’t care about. A casual viewer wouldn’t care about Star Trek’s interstellar politics and Starfleet regulations. A casual viewer might feel emotionally involved in Buffy’s interpersonal relationship angst during the early seasons, but as the show continued and became more melodramatic and miserable, you really needed to have known and loved these characters long term to feel any sympathy. Usually a sign of a show becoming ‘cult’ is when it starts taking itself too seriously and its protagonists become less spontaneous and human, and more autocratic, arbitrary or indecisive in response to stricter character parameters (which sometimes leads to a backlash of the makers fighting against those limitations and getting the protagonist to act completely against character and go off the rails in a desperate attempt to build a contrived arc-story).

Arguably Doctor Who did become a ‘cult’ show in the 80’s, and also it gradually ceased to have its heart in the right place, where the show’s emotional tone would fluctuate wildly between ridiculous over-reaction and equally shocking apathy. The first real sign of this heartlessness was in Time-Flight when the Doctor and his companions grieve Adric hysterically for a minute and then immediately they change the subject and start acting bored in the most blatant display of compassion fatigue. Making it clear that we had entered an era where life had become very cheap.

From there of course the show became exclusively aimed at its fanbase and no-one else. Attack of the Cybermen’s half-hearted plot about the Cybermen planning to change history and prevent Mondas from being destroyed isn’t exactly incomprehensible to casual viewers but there’s no dramatic stake for them in it, especially when the event isn’t even due for another year. I don't really think Attack of the Cybermen's continuity is alienating to casual viewers, nor do I think it weighs the story down, on the contrary it's a breathtakingly lightweight story, but the continuity is just not enough of a good premise for a story, so there's nothing much for any viewer to connect to. A far worse example is Warriors of the Deep where casual viewers are given no explanation for the Doctor’s incomprehensible insistence on preserving the genocidal Silurians even whilst they’re massacring people. It doesn’t make sense why the Doctor is placing the Silurians’ lives above the humans, even whilst the humans themselves place the Doctor’s life above their own with one woman even taking a bullet to protect him, apart from the nasty, circular logic that has to contrive the story ending with everyone dead for the sake of it. Only fans could possibly understand the Doctor’s ludicrous stance here, and even as a fan myself, I see it as nothing but a complete character assassination.
The sad irony is that fan-pleasing continuity may have caused the story being conceived as a redundant, contrived sequel to an ended tragedy, and a hollow, insincere reiteration of the original Silurians’ ending and moral mantra, but the real problem with the story’s fannish excesses is how it takes fandom’s unsustainably idealistic take on the Doctor as a rigid pacifist (something he never was), and turns it into a nightmarish reality in which the Doctor’s ideals make him rigid to the point of impotence when he should be saving innocent lives, and generally turning the once championable figure into an absolute monster of a moral tyrant who lets everyone be pointlessly sacrificed for his principles. The Doctor of Genesis of the Daleks wouldn’t have bitten Sarah’s head off just for urging him to destroy the Daleks, or called Bettan a ‘pathetic savage’ for fighting back against a genocidal threat and not subscribing to his suicidal pacifism. Mind you the appeasing Doctor of Warriors of the Deep would have willingly told Davros how to prevent future Dalek defeats and left the tape with him out of warped pity for those doomed Daleks. Infact Warriors of the Deep is a story where not only are the actions of its characters completely ridiculous and unmotivated, but where anyone who suggests doing the sensible thing is outright demonised for it. The main problem with 80’s Doctor Who is that unless you were a long term fan, this volatile, misanthropic, calloused, criminally negligent Doctor just wasn’t someone worth rooting for anymore. Imagine if Aliens or Star Wars presented its heroes as neurotic appeasers who literally hand victory to the bad guys and ensure the deaths of everyone they were supposed to protect. Million dollar budget or no, any cinema audience would have quite rightly felt like the butt of some sick practical joke.

Warriors of the Deep and Attack of the Cybermen are very much the worst offenders, the biggest flies in the ointment when it comes to continuity excesses. Not so much for leaving casual viewers in the cold, but more because they actually manage to cheapen and disgrace the very past they were trying to homage, with their mean-spirited, contrived massacres. I mean have the once indestructibe Cybermen ever lost so much dignity by being reduced to such cannon fodder? To be completely honest there aren’t really any other major offenders in the 80’s. The 80’s Master stories were mostly terrible but they acquitted themselves by their own simplicity. The Two Doctors actually benefits from its nostalgic elements, as Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines actually bring some charm and class to an otherwise mean spirited story, (the Doctor’s anti-Androgum racism is just as sickening as his humanity-hating and species favouritism in Warriors of the Deep). Arc of Infinity, dull as dishwater though it is, I think can be forgiven since it was made not long after the 1981 repeat of The Three Doctors (or at least it could be forgiven if JNT had left on The Five Doctors).

The thing is, continuity and back-referencing isn’t a problem in and of itself. Surely the one Totter’s Yard reference in Attack of the Cybermen didn’t chase away 1.7 million viewers, and on that score I think fans can take the problem of overt continuity far too seriously. I mean, to bring Star Wars into the mix, The Empire Strikes Back as a film carries its fair share of back story and back references, but it was also my first ever Star Wars film, and I was hooked by its adventure and fantasy, its unrelenting chase and drama and danger, and sheer unpredictability. Any backstory elements became part of the film’s intrigue, making me want to know more and see more and imagine the whole size of this universe. Likewise The Five Doctors and Remembrance of the Daleks are well crafted and intriguing enough to entice first time viewers and would have a particular appeal and allure to the growing adventure roleplaying culture of the 80’s. They’re very quest driven narratives where the continuity is merely incidental amidst Daleks in the school basement, magic superpowerful baseball bats and the Raston Robot taking on troops of Cybermen. Any kid can get behind that. Furthemore Remembrance of the Daleks particularly had its heart in the right place. It was a progressive and moral story that raleighed against the attitudes of racists and fascists without actually demonising them, and in which the Doctor succeeds by turning the enemy’s own destructive impulses against them. Also Enlightenment, Revelation of the Daleks and Curse of Fenric have similar roleplaying game leanings and some real zeitgeist grasping moments, like Terry Gilliam-esque pirates and ships sailing through space and Alexei Sayle blasting away Daleks with beams of rock and roll.

The problem becomes when a story conceived on continuity proves to have no real reason to be told and nothing to say, and where the constraining shopping list results in half-hearted, frustrated, bitter, contrived, defeatist or even schizophrenic writing. Warriors of the Deep is the most schizophrenic and morally confused example, veering wildly between the Doctor’s stance of rigid pacifism, to him then slaughtering everyone with gas attacks.

In terms of why the show became cult in the 80’s, I think there are two important factors to consider. Firstly, it was getting harder to get a casual audience to believe in the show and feel a dramatic stake in it when the show was being made on a shrinking budget and was looking increasingly unconvincing, particularly when Star Wars had just been and gone. So in that regard it looked like the safest target audience to pitch the show at was long term fans. They were more likely to get behind the show and be prepared to believe in it. But those fans had certain demands. They wanted Doctor Who to feel more real, with continuity references to reinforce authenticity and that it was all part of an ongoing story. Plus they wanted rid of the rampant comedy of the later Tom Baker years. And so JNT met their demands and resultantly 80’s Doctor Who became a reference checking, tick boxing exercise that took itself so neurotically seriously that it often bore an uncanny resemblance to the most stuffy, soulless workplace orientation videos (no wonder fandom today is overran with slimy, petty-minded jobsworths).

The other factor to consider is that when JNT got the job, he didn’t have the relevant experience and wasn't really prepped for the role, and so it wouldn't be surprising if he went into the job with something of an inferiority complex. This seemed to influence everything that went wrong, all the desperate, self-defeating decisions and the show’s sudden failure to understand basic human behaviour. The worst symptoms of this were that JNT blacklisted all the show’s past writers who were very much the heart of the show, perhaps because he feared they might undermine his authority. He pitched the show more at the fans because he wanted to be liked. But worse still was how his inferiority complex and control freak neuroses became forced onto the Doctor’s character.

So to me the problem goes beyond Doctor Who falling out of mainstream favour, and into the realms of completely outright losing touch with humanity. In its 70’s prime Doctor Who wasn’t just popular, it was very much connected to the outside world, almost spiritually so. The show didn’t just begin and end with itself. But in the 80’s Doctor Who completely turned inward and its very soul fell into decay. Of course you could make a case that the more objectionable content of Attack of the Cybermen, namely the disturbing hand-crushing of Lytton (presumably symbolising his ‘penance’ for his sins, in keeping with the 80’s macho ‘pain builds character’ philosophy a la Robocop and Die Hard), all happens after the infamous 1.7 million ratings drop, and that episode one is actually quite good. You could even point out that the worst ratings decline happened after the cancellation crisis, and argue that it was actually the toning down of the show’s violence that made viewer’s lose interest.

My own take on why the ratings suffered is quite simply that it was caused by re-scheduling. When the show switched to weekdays for Peter Davison’s first season, it found something of a niche audience whilst the Saturday audience was dying, but even that audience (pardon the pun) petered out. Then with Attack of the Cybermen the show moved back to Saturdays, and the ratings predictably suffered. To compare it to another popular show that often got poorly scheduled by the BBC, I was a major Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan in my teens. That show was my confidant and solace in those difficult teenage years, but when it was moved around in the schedules I tried keeping up, but eventually I just gave up on it. It’s like being stood up too often, it becomes inconvenient when the show’s no longer reliable or on when you expect. In terms of Attack of the Cybermen, I also think that the 45 minute format was a mistake at that time. I think the public back then regarded Doctor Who as a nice, light, incidental 25 minute snack of a show, and anything beyond that length verged on being a chore. Also Attack of the Cybermen was mediocre at best, and it was hardly a special occasion like The Five Doctors or Resurrection of the Daleks. Evidently the general public weren’t that patient.

But nonetheless, when I think back to how I lost interest in Buffy, I think it was falling out of the routine of following the show that actually had a sobering effect on my view of the show’s current quality, and realising that I didn’t particularly miss it because I had been enjoying it far less. I think that’s exactly what happened with 80’s Doctor Who as well. There wasn’t any one episode that provided a sudden wake-up call, so much as a gradual realisation that was sharply reinforced by the loyalty-testing hurdle of erratic scheduling, and allegedly there were even fans who had watched the show from the very beginning who started giving up and tuning out in the mid-80’s. So that’s my feeling of what led to the show’s decline and how it contributed to the eventual cancellation of the show for 16 years, a few false starts notwithstanding.

As things stand currently, there are two main entities of Doctor Who now running. There’s the excessively hyped, mainstream, popular revived show that’s been the BBC’s flagship ever since it was revived back in 2005. And then there’s the cult Big Finish audios range that has been running for far longer and features most of the original actors from the old show (and a few actors from the new series too), but which gets no mainstream recognition and has even been dismissed by some fans as worthless uncanonical fanwank.

I must say I don’t really rate the New Series much, and I certainly don’t think it’s worthy of the hysterical, unhinged sycophancy it’s been lavished by fans. Particularly by trumped-up, elitist fans who always leave me cold, and who tend to assume the right to tell other fans what to think and to psychologically profile and demonise any fan critics of the show or anyone outside their nauseating little plastic ‘love-in’, and it strikes me that their desperate fixation with ratings figures and the casual viewers’ perspective smacks of a disturbingly cultish disassociative thinking. It has always baffled me almost to the point of surrealism how frighteningly seriously fandom can take the show. I have consistently found fans who are critical or curmudgeonly of the New Series to be far more sincere, unpretentious and down to Earth and all round sane than these sycophantic creeps.

Frankly I find the New Series to be so desperately audience conscious that it doesn’t seem to have faith in its viewers or to believe its own fiction. Doctor Who was once a show that invited your investment into its wonder and whimsy, and encouraged you to maintain the spell from your own end. But New Who seems so much a part of the bitchy, sneery modern media that it’s completely inapproachable in the same way. It’s as if any viewer investment is being continually mocked and the audience is being kept out on some private joke.

The fans often praise Russell T. Davies for cutting out the continuity baggage and making the show accessible for new viewers. Ironically though I find Russell’s best work is when he actually embraces rather than represses his inner fanboy as he does in Parting of the Ways and Turn Left. Both of these stories hark back heavily to classic stories. Turn Left of course rifts on Inferno’s nightmare concept of an apocalyptic parallel universe where the normal rules of the show don’t apply and the Doctor can lose. It also throws in a bit of Kinda’s soul searching through a circle of mirrors for good measure. Parting of the Ways is very much an amalgamated reworking of Vengeance on Varos and Resurrection of the Daleks. Both were nihilistic mid-80’s stories that demonstrated how the insecurities and bitter behind the scenes conflicts of the JNT era could sometimes produce moments of real, raw art amidst the mess that articulated the uncompromising polarity and hopelessness of the times. Vengeance on Varos was a stark vision of society’s dehumanisation and moral decay amidst the growing corporate mindset, desensitising media, rampant individualism and increasing social isolation. Resurrection of the Daleks had a similarly fringe theatre feel in its surreal allegory of police brutality during the Miner’s Strike, and it exhibited beautiful moments of self-aware moral uncertainty, which were of course performed wonderfully by Peter Davison. But it was off-balance, unrefined and lacked hope and I feel that this was something that Russell made an effort to rectify in Parting of the Ways. Vengeance of Varos rather prophetically is about Reality TV, and Parting of the Ways runs with that same theme. Despite it being somewhat affectionate in its parody of popular reality shows, Parting of the Ways is very much about how people have become fixated with the mundane and with petty bitchiness and divisions, and thus nobility, heroism and unity just aren’t seen as fashionable anymore. The Doctor himself says ‘do you think anyone votes for sweet’, and of course this ruthless social Darwinism has a cohesion with the coming fight for survival, and final moral stand, and how the population has remained glued to its screens whilst greater forces move in to engulf them.

Parting of the Ways, just like Turn Left, captures Russell penning a sincere love letter to the Doctor’s heroism (rather than his libido), revelling in the dark and apocalyptic and the fannish joy of connecting things, linking stories together and drawing a history with repercussions and consequences, and gathering favourite characters together, and thus producing something with a genuinely utilitarian spirit, celebrating mortal heroism and ordinary people realising their potential to do positive things and stand together (rather than being hopelessly idiotic stooges to the usual bad comedy). This is where Russell taps into the old show’s ethos of the promise of human endeavour and making a difference (about the potential of all people, not just the ‘special’ and ‘superior’ Doctor and companion). Even the gamestation controller defies a lifetime’s indoctrination by the Daleks in possibly the most beautiful, well polarised scene Russell ever wrote for the show, really drawing poetic binary opposition between humanity and machines, despair and hope, subservience and rebellion. But unfortunately I can’t help but see the way those stories end with these guest characters all killed off or their timeline erased as just reinforcing New Who’s stunted anti-intellectualism.

And then of course we have Journey’s End which represents the flip-side of the coin, in which despite some entertaining or poignant moments and the fact that the drama is played refreshingly straight, it’s all diminished by Russell’s excess fannish indulgences, and also by how the Daleks are reduced to a complete joke as Donna pulls a few levers and turns them all into spinning tops, and how Rose’s happy ending with a clone blow up sex doll Doctor is so absurd and unbelievable that it destroys all credibility of the character and her emotional journey. I think even many shippers would have felt betrayed and that this ‘happy ending’ was a sham.

I must confess that I have been rather snobbish about shipper fans in the past. The problem I had with the shipper view of the show was the belief that the Doctor and Rose’s relationship was the most important thing in the universe and that if the Doctor and Rose really were together, then all would be right with the world again, whereas I remember a time when Doctor Who was actually about coming to terms with the fact that there’s a lot that’s not right with the world.

All things considered I just find Big Finish to almost consistently provide the kind of thinking man’s entertainment that New Who rarely does. Sure I’ll admit that New Who looks like its getting back on top now that Moffatt’s in charge, and that Big Finish has seen something of a decline in recent years as it’s somewhat lost its edge and produced some real stinkers like The Dark Husband and The Boy That Time Forgot. But even so, my heart is still closer to Big Finish as being ‘true’ Doctor Who.

I know already that the snobbish, trumped-up toffs of fandom are going to get sniffy about my geeky fanboyish treasuring of non-canonical fanwank in preference to a show that millions adore. But whilst Big Finish is marketed and promoted as niche fan product, whenever I listen to a Big Finish audio I don’t feel like I’m listening to something ‘cult’ at all. I feel I’m listening to Doctor Who like it was when the show was in its 70’s prime and when it really had something to say about the real world, and was enlightening and positive and worth your time, moment by moment. The audios seem to be written by fans who share my dismay at the show’s moral degeneration in the 80’s, and who are now committed to producing stories which always explicitly emphasise good, coherent narrative storytelling and the binary opposition between the good values of the Doctor and the evils of his enemy. The audios to me are Doctor Who with its heart in the right place, and concerned with mature issues we can all get behind because they’re issues we have grown up with. I feel confidently that those audio stories would be just as effective if heard by a casual audience.

Of course the main measurement of whether a particular era or range of Doctor Who is mainstream or niche, is about how well that era in question stands alone. In some ways I think fans love this just as much as they love continuity. Fans love connections and the idea that events in a story transcend itself to become part of a greater history. But also fans love neatness and compartmentalisation, and being able to encapsulate it all in one self-contained story. There’s something beautiful about the idea that if City of Death was the only Doctor Who story, or Tempus Fugit was the only X-Files story then they’d still make perfect sense as a standalone or a pilot. With Doctors 1-4, each Doctor’s era stood alone nicely, independent of the eras before. Doctors 5-8 were not so lucky, as they existed in a more continuity-driven, navelgazing show that was wholly dependent on its past. Also the Fifth and Sixth Doctors were so strongly defined and characterised as contrasts to their respective predecessors that neither of them as characters made sense outside the context of being a contrast.

The RTD era actually had a mission statement to be a wholly independent standalone from the classic series, aimed squarely at people who’d never seen classic Doctor Who before and quite likely never would. In that it was an almost complete success. The Ninth Doctor’s brief run is possibly the most self-contained era of Doctor Who you’d ever find. The Tenth Doctor era was a near total success in that regard. In some ways the Tenth Doctor era was dependent on what had been established in the Ninth Doctor era, but that can be forgiven since it was in recent memory. But actually it laid much of its own groundwork in Series Two, namely Pete’s parallel world with its Cybermen, and of course the Cult of Skaro which appear in every Tennant Dalek story.

Bringing back Sarah Jane Smith could have spoilt this self-containment, but it didn’t. Sure I personally much preferred the old character of Sarah Jane back when she was an independent, touchy, steely model of middle class stoicism who would have easily gotten on with her life after she left the Doctor, rather than spending thirty years pining for his return. I also think that Elisabeth Sladen’s performance of delicacy is ill suited to and even abused by New Who’s blubbing over-emotionalism. But in the context of New Who, Sarah Jane’s presence worked as representing an older version of Rose, achieving a certain character symmetry. As a standalone it worked.

Then of course was the difficult issue of bringing back the Master, which to be honest I think did rather push it in terms of fan-pleasing. I really didn’t feel the Master had a place in a modern Doctor Who, and really I believed he should have stayed dead in the TV Movie, if not all the way back in Castrovalva. I’m also sure I’m not the only one who thought Last of the Time Lords was one of the worst Doctor Who episodes ever written, and that the writing of the Master himself was particularly atrocious. But as a standalone it just about worked. With the premise of the New Series being that the Doctor is the last of his kind, having him then come across another survivor who happens to also be his arch enemy of old really works in this context.

Where I feel that the RTD era maybe fell short of its mission statement was when he broke this fundamental ‘last of my kind’ premise in End of Time, and brought back the Time Lords. The thing is the Time Lords’ presence in the classic series was part of the show’s equilibrium, their destruction would have been a dramatic event, so from that perspective, bringing them back is satisfying. But in New Who the Time Lord’s absence is the equilibrium, their destruction was a definite, past event, case closed. From that perspective, bringing them back devalues the show’s premise for a glimpse at something of the old show’s legacy (literally before New Who’s time) that the casual audience had no reason to want to see.

The Time Lords’ return was simply a fan-pleasing gimmick, especially reimagining them as corrupt villains in a manner we as fans like to think Robert Holmes would have been proud of. Except it was done so appallingly, and it certainly wouldn’t convert someone who wasn’t fond of the idea. When Robert Holmes re-imagined the Time Lords as a corrupt society in The Deadly Assassin, they were realistically corrupt in a way that reflected genuine failings of society, and even as the show became more shallow and derivative in the 80’s, and the idea of the Time Lords being a corrupt society with a token traitor became less potent and more cliché, the Time Lords still retained a certain believability. You knew why they would destroy Earth to protect their secrets and self-interests. But End of Time does away with that and re-imagines the Time Lords as just a generic bunch of insane super villains who are going to destroy the universe for no apparent reason whatsoever. The only thing that makes sense about the idea is that Russell T. Davies, the militant atheist who began Torchwood with a dead man reporting back that there’s no afterlife, wanted to soapbox again about the evils of religion and so conceived that the Time Lords’ very belief in an afterlife and that death isn’t the end alone makes them a dangerous threat to the universe, believing they’ll ascend their own Earthly bodies. But honestly they were so poorly motivated I doubt they even knew themselves what their real reasons were.

But that’s the only real strike against the new show’s self-containment, and in a lot of ways it feels nothing short of gratuitous since the Time Lords are dismissed so easily back into non-existence that their return seems pointless, but it’s not quite. Their return was somewhat hinted at ever since The Sound of Drums featured a flashback to the Master’s Gallifreyan childhood, and when Davros’ return revealed that it was possible to break the time lock and go back in time to before Gallifrey’s destruction. Furthermore the Time Lords’ return reveals the mystery of the Master’s condition, and as the Doctor comes to relive the traumatic event and makes the same choice again, the Time War angst achieves a certain closure, with the Doctor coming to understand he had no choice and he can never go back to save his people. It’s rubbish closure of course, because it means the Time Lords have to be completely, ridiculously demonised to make the Doctor feel justified, and the Time War is completely demystified and ceases to feel like a real event that happened to real people.

So what about Big Finish? Does that have the power to standalone? Well, on first impressions the answer is a resounding ‘no’. Big Finish is wholly dependent on the old series, and constantly defers to it as the true canon. It fills existing slots, it features past Doctors and companions in the middle of their TV journeys. It’s particularly dependent on the JNT era, which is frustrating for me because I’d rather pretend the JNT era didn’t happen and that the show had ended in 1980 instead- with the Daleks and Movellans stuck in perpetual stalemate, the Master last seen in pretty bad shape and the Fourth Doctor and Romana leaving Skonnos and travelling off into the sunset for centuries more unseen adventures together. In-fact I can think of no better closing note for the show than Horns of Nimon’s uplifting masquerade party knees-up (it sounds crazy but most of New Who still works that way, provided you blink during the past Doctor clip montages in The Next Doctor and The Eleventh Hour, and if you treat Time Crash as non-canon).

But ironically that’s the crux of the matter because if the show really had ended there, then we simply wouldn’t have Big Finish today, because then you really couldn’t have Doctor Who without Tom Baker and we know he would have refused to do them. If the baton was to be passed to Peter Davison then unfortunately ending the show with Logopolis or Castrovalva wouldn’t do the trick. Peter Davison’s Doctor would need at least two years on TV to escape the shadow of Tom Baker and establish himself as a proper Doctor, rather than an imposter. In many ways The Five Doctors would have been an appropriate ‘full circle’ end point (the Master does escape, but Rassilon promises he’ll face retribution soon), and it definitely would have been the show’s last chance to end with its dignity intact, given what was around the corner. But had The Five Doctors been the ending, then Big Finish wouldn’t really be able to follow it up, because Janet Fielding would have refused to be involved. There would still be the option to do Fifth Doctor and Nyssa adventures to fill the gap between Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity, but really that wouldn’t provide the kind of variety and diversity that Big Finish thrived on. So sadly it comes down to the fact that all the horrors and indignities that happened from Warriors of the Deep onwards had to happen, because Big Finish and everything else that makes up today’s Doctor Who just couldn’t exist as we know it otherwise.

So that pretty much scuppers Big Finish’s independence from the past. But hold on a minute. If we treat Sirens of Time as the pilot episode, then it establishes a series based on snapshot glimpses into various parts of the Doctor’s multiple lives, and that time is not linear and so these different points in time for the Doctor might as well be happening simultaneously or concurrently. It establishes that the three Doctors are different aspects of the same man. As with the JNT era, the Doctors are established in contrast to one another, but here they’re more well-rounded and layered characters, and not quite the reductio ad absurdum versions they were in the TV series. The Fifth Doctor is given a veneer of threat beneath his once hapless diplomacy. The Seventh Doctor more of the kind of quieter, contemplative moments that I think his often rushed TV stories needed more of. Mainly the Sixth Doctor’s harsh exterior is shown up as bluster hiding a soft-centred compassion and fallibility beneath it all. Indeed apart from Sirens of Time, the Sixth Doctor’s ruthless streak only really features in a few audios like The Sandman, Bloodtide, Jubilee, The Reaping and Brotherhood of the Daleks, in other words, only when the story requires it.

The companions are a mixture of old and new, and often it’s actually the new companions like Erimem, Evelyn, Hex and Charley which manages to be the heart and soul of many of these audios. This approach of including new character quintessentially keeps things fresh, particularly with Erimem the strong-willed Egyptian pharaoh who joins the Fifth Doctor and Peri, a companion I particularly became hooked on and wanted to hear more adventures of and learn more about (I particularly recommend The Church and the Crown and The Son of the Dragon). There was also Evelyn Smythe, a particular fan favourite, an elderly history teacher with a heart of gold who joins the Sixth Doctor and often gets an opportunity to knock the Doctor from his high horse. Okay she was kind of out of place and got in the way a lot in the Dalek action of The Apocalypse Element, but besides that she has worked superbly with the Sixth Doctor, whether being the voice of compassion to a captive Dalek in Jubilee, or reminding a devastated Doctor that he can’t deny two people the happiness of falling in love, even if that love might doom them in the future in Arrangements for War. When I think of how well Evelyn works in the audios, it makes me despair at the ageism of New Who and how the modern Doctor is now someone who would openly and spitefully say to Torchwood in front of Jackie “Please don’t put in my memoirs that I travel in time and space with my companion’s mother, I have a reputation to uphold.”, Suffice it to say it’s a damn shame Evelyn would never be a TV companion in this day and age.

Of course these new companions allow the Big Finish range to stand alone. But the already existing companions like Nyssa, Peri, Turlough, Mel and Ace are a bit more difficult, mainly because they’re pre-established. So we don’t see them arrive or depart in the audios (unlike the new stock), but sometimes Big Finish does the next best thing and gives the familiar companion a return visit to their home, like in Primeval, The Reaping and to an extent The Rapture, thus reasserting their roots and how they came to be where they are now. In-fact The Reaping we get to see how Peri's antagonistic yet oddly functional relationship with her mother makes a lot of sense of her bond with the Sixth Doctor, despite all their spiteful bickering. Circular Time goes one better and gives Nyssa something of a departure story in glimpsed snippets where the third act features Nyssa at a point where she’s outgrowing the Doctor and realises she will soon be leaving him, and the fourth skips ahead to after Terminus, where Nyssa is now a married woman. So in that regard it works well as a standalone, but only late into the fact, not from the outset.

Then of course we have the monsters and villains. Big Finish mainly showcased the Daleks and particularly the Notorious B.I.G. of Daleks, the Emperor. But they also gave a look in to the Cybermen, the Master, Silurians, Ice Warriors, the Nimon (do NOT blaspheme the Nimon!), Omega, the Vampyres, and even the Myrka, and they actually managed to redeem the creature. In recent years Big Finish have been reviving even the Celestial Toymaker, the Guardians, Zygons, Wirrin, Autons, Krynoids, the Rutans and the Krotons, and if we’re including the Unbounds then the Valeyard gets one all to himself in the terrible He Jests at Scars.

But nonetheless, Bloodtide and The Zygon Who Fell To Earth could easily be enjoyed by someone who’d never seen any of the previous Silurian or Zygon stories, in much the same way as someone who’d never heard of Iris Wildthyme could still enjoy listening to The Wormery. With the more recurring villains like the Daleks, Cybermen and the Master, they actually got their own origin stories in Davros, Spare Parts and of course Master, although the last one was pretty redundant since he’s not featured in the audios since (well not unless you count Circular Time). But more importantly the Daleks and Cybermen got fresh new timelines. The Cybermen timeline in the audios now centres around the Orion war between mankind and their own androids who want independence and equal rights. The Dalek timeline skips ahead from Davros’ influence or the Movellan plagues and depicts the Dalek Emperor heading the Dalek Empire of the far and distant future, building a new powerbase in the Seriphia galaxy.

Ah yes, the Daleks. For so long they had been kept on a short leash by copyrights and remained unwelcome to the New Adventures and other Wilderness years spin-offery. Then after a long wait, we finally got their comeback in 1998 in the controversial novel War of the Daleks by John Peel. Sadly it was just a very bitter work of deliberate continuity vandalism, written out of contempt for the post-Genesis Dalek stories and the book even went out of its way to decanonise those TV Dalek stories so that apparently the Hand of Omega destroyed the wrong planet and so Skaro still exists, and also the Movellan war was faked by the Daleks who had created the Movellans in order to fool Davros. Yes, in order to bring the Daleks back to their 1960’s indestructible imperial grandeur, War of the Daleks makes out that the Daleks devoted much of their energies to complete self-destruction, such as creating the Movellan virus to destroy vast legions of themselves, just to fool Davros. I think the Daleks suffered far more indignity in John Peel’s book to be honest.

Nonetheless you can see how Big Finish followed the ideal behind that ‘back to the 60’s Dalek golden age’ mission statement. Big Finish kept the focus on doing Dalek stories without any appearance from Davros, and trying to also avoid the factional civil war angle too which had become cliché in the 80’s. And given rather more free reign by the Nation estate, Big Finish launched their new batch of Dalek stories with a Douglas Adams-esque trilogy in four parts. We got The Genocide Machine, The Apocalypse Element and The Mutant Phase, featuring each Doctor in reverse chronological order, under the umbrella title Dalek Empire, and then when the Paul McGann audios got belatedly launched, his Doctor too became part of this story arc in Time of the Daleks.

It wasn’t really the best run of stories in retrospect, with a tendency to become bogged down in the worst sci-fi excesses of speech-making, cliched characterisations and dumbed down sermonising. In particular the last two were pretentiously convoluted and confusing and ended up as something of a mess. Nonetheless there were some interesting ideas being used, whether it was the Daleks getting hold of a flammable element that could ignite entire galaxies into flames, or post-apocalyptic human survivors living in some kind of surreal student house share, or the Daleks having an uncharacteristic interest in quoting Shakespeare’s more morbid soliloquies, and it effectively set up a new Dalek time line that would be followed up in the absolutely stellar Dalek Empire spin-off series (which I’ll discuss further down). Besides at the time they had enough Dalek action and kisses to the past (Robomen, Thals, Special Weapons Daleks and President Romana) to make us happy. More importantly this prominence of the Daleks, coupled with the reassuring presence of the original actors and the four part cliffhanger format made the audios more appealing to fans who never bothered with the novels ranges. Indeed Big Finish felt more like charming Doctor Who of old, rather than many of the desperately dark and smutty and childhood-desecrating New Adventures.
The best of the early Dalek audio stories would have to be Jubilee (later adapted into a stellar TV Dalek episode), by Rob Shearman who made a mark with The Holy Terror and Chimes of Midnight, which perfectly balanced dark humour and poignant human tragedy. Jubilee dispenses with Dalek continuity and focuses on the basics, on what the Dalek iconography really represents, and how the shallowing of the show into brand commodity has diminished that message. In many ways Colin Baker’s more anti-hero Doctor is perfectly suited to this story because it’s about the dangers of traditional notions of black and white heroism and how people don’t have the right to just assume their own impeccable morality and demonise and make judgements on others. It’s about moral tyranny and people hating the burden and imprisonment of their roles in a conformist society that can break even a Dalek’s will. More importantly it attacks our society’s values without being mean spirited. When the New Series pandered to mainstream culture with the Doctor praising Donna for being a shallow, materialistic celebrity-gossip fanatic, it just felt insincere somehow. Jubilee however approaches our consumerist society with warm understanding that fear and insecurity makes us consumers, and even that consuming is a form of aversion therapy. It raleighs against the dehumanising dangers of moral absolutes, champions the underdog, and even questions the Doctor’s piety, and overturns the show’s traditional morality by having a Dalek prove to be the most honourable character of all.

Big Finish had avoided using Davros, out of an understandable feeling that the character had become overused and probably should have remained dead at the end of Genesis of the Daleks, and that actually the Daleks were a more formidable imperial power without him turning up to upstage them. Davros’ last appearance had been in War of the Daleks, and you can tell the author has nothing but contempt for Davros and simply introduced him in order to kill him off once and for all. The point is, it was looking like revisiting Davros or that strand of Dalek continuity was a bad idea. Sure War of the Daleks had done a vandal’s job of it, but quite honestly in many ways War of the Daleks seemed as outstanding and exciting as another Davros arc story could be.

But then it came 2003, and Big Finish decided to commemorate the show’s 40th Anniversary by doing a trilogy of stories featuring prominent recurring villains from the show. A nice idea really, the first anniversary story had been The Three Doctors, now it was time to do the three villains, and appropriately Omega was one of them. There was also the Master, and the trilogy would have looked incomplete if Davros wasn’t part of it, and it would have been an interesting idea to see if Davros could work in a standalone story without the Daleks.

I must admit my feeling was one of scepticism, as I certainly felt that Davros had become redundant. My fears were that a Davros-focused story would either succumb to the character’s lack of range, or worse try to gague new interest by completely rewriting the character to the point where it wouldn’t really be Davros anymore. I was proved completely wrong when I listened to Lance Parkin’s Davros. Now Davros is set just before Revelation of the Daleks and sets up elements that link nicely into Revelation of the Daleks. The interesting trick that it manages is to fit into that continuity slot, and still somehow make it plausible that Davros could become a reformed character. It’s an incredibly existential story in which the concept of Davros is taken back to the central core of being an undead creature, kept alive by hatred and sheer will. Even his recitations of his imprisonment in Resurrection of the Daleks feels perfectly in place and describe how during his cryogenic stasis he became almost a being of pure consciousness existing in the purgatory between life and afterlife, and constantly being brought back to the living. This is something that of course wouldn’t have been conveyed in Resurrection of the Daleks because it was from Season 21 which was from the outset a very materialistic season, tailor made for a very materialistic decade (by which I mean it was about how material things and our Earthly bodies are all there are, that there’s nothing spiritual connecting us and so there’s no sense in reason or empathy anymore and all that matters is who has the best hardware for inflicting death and bodily damage). But it’s perfectly placed here, and it makes the story feel self-contained, and the reminder of his imprisonment suits the conflict between Davros’ rehabilitation and his past being steeped in sin.

There’s a haunting feeling of temporal vertigo about the story, of a kind I can only recall feeling before in The Daleks’ Masterplan and Trial of a Time Lord. Davros’ life stretches before us and his flashbacks to the days of the war on Skaro reinforce that he is now the last of a dead race. He even remembers the day his fellow scientist and would-be-lover Shan told him prophetically that she knew ‘life on Skaro is doomed’. The Kaled race now lives only as fading embers in his memory. Indeed Davros is reimagined as an historical relic, and it’s because of this sense of existentialism that Davros becomes a precious figure who perversely feels deserving of preservation. His life really is a whole universe, and thus it makes sense why even the Sixth Doctor, of all people, can’t just kill Davros to ensure he never harms anyone again. This aspect also works because essentially Davros and the Doctor here are drawn as two antithetical sides of the same coin, and so were the Doctor to kill his enemy, the binary opposition would be broken as would the existential link. But nonetheless the story is still in some unspoken way posing the troubling question of whether the compassion and sanctity of life that separates the Doctor from Davros actually makes him equally as monstrous for allowing Davros to go on living to kill again. The angle the story initially seems to go for is that Davros was a product of his environment in the warzone of Skaro, and that being effectively reborn in a seemingly utopian future where the capitalist dream of prosperity and security has come true, maybe Davros can adapt to a better world and change for the better. Yes it sounds ludicrous but the audio story makes it sound honestly plausible, because against all the odds Davros’ feelings of overwhelming guilt are sincere.

The story firstly goes for the angle that Davros was a product of his environment in Skaro’s warzone, and that reawakened in a seemingly utopian future where the capitalist dream of prosperity and security has come true, maybe Davros can adapt to a better world and change for the better. It sounds ludicrous but the story makes it plausible. Davros’ overwhelming guilt issincere, but it doesn’t change him. His guilt proves to be part of a cycle of depression that always sees his paranoia and cold ambition win out. So it ends with Davros unchanged, and yet makes that in itself a tragedy. It’s a fantastic piece of drama that continually ups its intellectual stakes.

Then there’s The Juggernauts- one of Mel’s best stories, and Davros utilising the Mechanoids has been a long missed opportunity. Then the Davros saga reaches endgame in the Eighth Doctor story Terror Firma which rounds off a nice trilogy. In terms of continuity it’s the only audio story to refer to Skaro’s destruction, which makes it rather anomalous. The Dalek audios had more or less made their own continuity, independent of the TV stories. But Terror Firma was very dependent on a specific event on TV that the audios had never acknowledged before, so it was somewhat out of synch with Big Finish continuity. However Terror Firma made the destruction of Skaro so integral to its story that this didn’t matter, because it still achieved a self-sustained independence and life of its own. The story constructed the conflict between the Doctor and Davros as a grand mythic, almost titanic one between almost God-like beings that’s been raging for centuries, and as such mentioning the destruction of Skaro simply sounds like par for the course of this conflict that’s now reaching endgame. It firmly establishes Davros’ revenge mission, and the Doctor’s developing ruthless streak and growing intolerance of Davros, and thus it feels like a natural souring development in the Doctor and Davros’ rivalry. What’s more simple, traditional and relatable than a story of revenge, and the resourceful ingenuity that revenge can inspire? However many fans dismissed Terror Firma as over-complicated continuity fanwank- a complaint that basically amounts to ‘I don’t like it because it’s unfashionable’. Terror Firma would work as a standalone. It features sympathetic characters and it encapsulating the Doctor Who universe in one story, its adventures and darkness, joys and sorrows, good and evil, revenge and mercy. If you’d never heard of Davros before, then in this story he is redefined in graspable terms as a bitter, lonely, schizophrenic megalomaniac who feels he can only cure himself by creating a single-minded uniformed universe of Daleks. Infact the story is heavily laced with the theme of finding identity in a confusing storm of emotions, surely any teenager can instantly relate to that. The Doctor is defined in opposition as a beloved hero, defined by his friends. Charley and C’rizz represent the angel and devil on his shoulders (much like Tegan and Turlough did). Every recurring element has a fresh context and an almost therapeutically satisfying payoff, making a rich story that’s equally poignant and chilling.

Well inevitably this leads to discussion of the McGann range. This probably had the greatest potential to run as a standalone. A new Doctor, free from old companions and continuity baggage or having to fit in a slot. His run of adventures could indeed go on forever and go in any direction. Sure the first season of McGann stories comprised a pretty uninspiring set- Storm Warning was an okay pilot story but nothing special, Sword of Orion was deathly dull (which is odd because the old Audio Visuals version was very pacey and gripping), Stones of Venice again was nothing special and Minuet in Hell wasn’t the best finale. However in his second season we got classicls like Seasons of Fear, Chimes of Midnight, Neverland and a neglected little solid story in Embrace the Darkness. The only weak entry in that season was the overly convoluted and confusing mess of Time of the Daleks. But Neverland was a great little cliffhanger finale, with a welcome display of the Eighth Doctor and Romana dynamic, which felt almost like Season 17 again (except of course that it lacked that extra bit of chemistry you can only have when the two leads are shagging in real life).

But Zagreus was a complete continuity nightmare, the kind of continuity nightmare that makes you realise how inoffensive a lot of the continuity exercises that fans complain about and get hysterically wary of really are by comparison. And with that the McGann range of audios completely lost their standalone appeal. Not surprisingly, Nicholas Briggs decided to start again with a new range tailor made for BBC7 featuring McGann teamed up with Sheridan Smith as Lucie Miller, in a 45 minute template which suggests a half-way house between Big Finish and the New Series. So that’s a good point to discuss the spin-offs. Big Finish has done many spin-offs, so I’ll stick to the important ones. Iris Wildthyme and Cyberman can happily stand alone with their new lease of life and fresh new timelines. Bernice Summerfield Adventures occasionally revisits Daleks, Ice Warriors or Draconians, but the stories are done with such confidence and spryness that background details don’t matter. Gallifrey actually stands alone better than expected, with much of its lore and Gallifreyan politics being made on the spot, aside from retconning Romana’s regeneration in Destiny of the Daleks, and even that has an over-arching purpose. I’ Davros is exquisite, with a mesmerising central anti-hero with an opportunist nature amidst the war and a thrilling string of political developments. What more could you ask for? The Sarah Jane Smith series stands alone nicely, and it’s nice to get the old, independent, steely Sarah back, not the blubbing ‘older Rose’ of New Who.

The Companion Chronicles are an anthology series that can be dipped into at any point, but they’re only really light snacks, with only The Prisoner’s Dilemma and The Mahogany Murders approaching Big Finish’s best. The Unbounds are mostly pretty standalone. A first time listener could easily follow Masters of War or Full Fathom Five. But, He Jests at Scars (the Valeyard one) is almost as unmanageably, inaccessibly continuity-obsessed as Zagreus.

But the best standalone spin-off must be Dalek Empire. A spin-off series that boasts well-defined, strong protagonists, and sees the Daleks redefined as something of a technological inevitability that exists in every parallel universe. Infact I firmly believe this series could have easily filled New Who’s place on TV and been every bit the ‘event TV’ that the New Series was. In-fact when I first got into the series I skipped the first season and started straight on Dalek Empire II, having heard a few interesting details about how this second series featured a Dalek factional war with another race of Daleks from a parallel universe, and I must say I followed it fine without having heard the first series. The predicament was immediately apparent and I instantly got what each character was about. When Susan Mendes vowed her willingness to commit martyrdom it was clear why she was such a beloved galactic figure of hope and rebellion. She was a perfect feminist hero, fighting oppression with superhuman resilience, with every fibre of her being (making a welcome rebuttal of Warriors of the Deep’s vile suicidal appeasement ethos). How could a casual listener possibly be alienated by this? Simultaneously the continuity made it consequential, transcendental, like what happened here would have long-term galactic repercussions. I was hooked and had to find out what happened next. I suddenly couldn’t care less about Series 3 of New Who with the Doctor’s constant moaning about Rose.

Dalek Empire felt very true to the classic series spirit. The juxtaposing epic minimalism, clash of stoic forces and boys’ own overkill. It was Eric Saward’s kill-crazy approach done right, with strong characters and uncontrived organic narrative- more survival horror than mindless self-destruction. It captured the unpredictable spontaneity and empowerment of roleplay gaming. Writer and director Nick Briggs had been doing audio Doctor Who dramas since working with the Audio Visuals group in the mid-80’s and he had a very good ear for what works on audio and was very savvy about blending his meticulousness with a dose of experimentalism and always striking an instinctive mood in his stories. For instance the Fifth Doctor story Creatures of Beauty has a disorientating non-linear narrative and it actually feels like a fractured, fragile mindscape, having to reckon with traumatic memories piece by piece. The melancholy mood is intoxicating, and I just desperately wanted the Doctor and Nyssa to escape this depressing world. Dalek Empire shared Creatures of Beauty’s environmental themes, painting its war as a conflict between technology and nature, and the Daleks being the ultimate eco-menace, they even pursue the rebel’s ship by polluting its fuel tanks to leave a smog trail. Nick’s mastering of mood, themes and character, and instincts for what works made him seem ideal for taking over as range producer when Gary Russell left.

Sadly since Nick took over, the range has gone downhill. I’d say the range really jumped the shark with The Dark Husband. A completely unfunny comedy episode that seemed to stretch a single joke through its entire length. It was nothing like the inventive, warm-hearted comedy of The One Doctor’s clever satire on our nostalgic, ‘knowing’ celebrity obsessed modern pop culture. It felt horribly cynical and smug, with a contemptuous ‘this’ll do’ attitude, and really came across like it had been written by someone who had never listened to Big Finish before and who thought it wouldn't take much to impress the fans. The average Big Finish audio today feels diluted and half-hearted, which I put down to Nick and his staff doing too much rewriting of someone’s original work. Christopher Bidmead was so unhappy with the rewrites to Renaissance of the Daleks that he took his name off it. Gary Russell may have wrote Zagreus but he allowed his own authors complete artistic integrity, resulting in stories that had a hard boiled purity. But, this current disrespect for artistic integrity is seeing the range become like the soulless JNT excesses.

There are occasions today where the author’s letter is respected, namely with the Lost Stories and the stageplay adaptations, and the quality shines as a result, making you wish Big Finish could get back to its free reign, daring creative freedom again. The adaptation of the Seven Keys to Doomsday stageplay was a beautiful, delicately done piece of work with a haunting atmosphere of cosmic homesickness. Terrance Dicks’ writing perfectly nails the Doctor and Trevor Martin plays him with such warmth. It’s a masterfully crafted, strong drama with a thoroughly uplifting ending, and frankly it should’ve been New Who’s pilot story because it would make a great starting point for new viewers of the show. It rivals City of Death’s beautiful ability to stand alone from the rest of Doctor Who.

But Big Finish now has a ‘supply-and-demand’ mentality which has seen them using hollow continuity gimmicks that just feel like cheap sales pitch cheats, like the Key 2 Time trilogy, Paper Cuts, Vengeance of Morbius and especially Adric’s return in The Boy That Time Forgot. Oh dear that was such an utterly depressing story, and not like Creatures of Beauty’s operatic ecstasy of grief or Terror Firma’s satisfying primal scream drama, it was just drab, lifeless and miserable. There was no reason to bring back Adric at all. Spare Parts had beautifully reckoned with his death, and even somewhat made an apology for Time-Flight’s insincere, apathetic Adric-grieving scene. But with The Boy That Time Forgot, I don’t get why this story was made or who it was aimed at. I mean Adric as a character has very few fans, and even they would probably be horrified by this contemptuous character assassination of Adric, there’s even one sickening moment where he borderline tries to rape Nyssa, and a friend of min pointed out how even Sarah Sutton sounds so uncomfortable with that particular scene that it’s like she’s hoping if she performs it awkwardly enough it might get thankfully cut. It’s unbelievable that Big Finish even considered doing this horrid story.

Dalek Empire IV was even nastier. It was a Noel Clarke star vehicle ret-con set alongside the first Dalek Empire series in order to entice new listeners and not bog the series down in backstory, but this limited how the story could develop. Unlike previous Dalek Empire series’, there wasn’t that grave doubt about how things would turn out for our galaxy, and seemingly Nick’s solution to this problem was to try keeping things unpredictable with arbitrary twists, dark turns, out of the blue character actions and infuriating cop-outs. The result was Doctor Who’s most mean-spirited story since Mindwarp dropped a bridge on Peri. Even Chris Chibnall couldn’t contrive such charmless nastiness and repugnant characterisation.

Admittedly Dalek Empire was always an incredibly bleak, morbid, violent, morally ambiguous war series, but beneath that it was actually very humanistic. Nothing articulated the series’ underlying morality better than when bereaved father Siy Tarkov was confessing to his Dalek interrogators that he was most fearing for the many youths who’ll be drafted to fight the coming Dalek war. It was angry and violent, but in an exorcising and cathartic way, rather than the directionless, poisonous anger that drove and soured Dalek Empire IV. Dalek Empire IV was just characters doing reprehensibly cruel things for petty, selfish reasons, not for any greater good, whilst Susan Mendes and her humanitarian ideals (which were once the series’ emotional centrepiece) were treated with shocking, heartless scorn, which almost suggested Nick Briggs had developed an outright contempt for his writing creations.

Older audio releases like Nekromanteia and Night Thoughts had their horrifically nasty moments but even then the heroes still emerged with their decency untainted. Flip-Flop’s politics were questionable, but ‘questionable’ was the key word, the story actually made you think. But Dalek Empire IV’s cruelty was just mindless. Yes mindless. Big Finish was once a stream of consciousness and intelligence, now it’s become dumbed-down, pandering and on auto-pilot. Big Finish used to have its heart in the right place. There were moral tales like The Fearmonger and Live 34 that raleighed against racism, or The Holy Terror which was a tale of remorse and forgiveness, or even Embrace the Darkness which confronted the Doctor with his misjudgement of a noble species, or the way stories like Master and Red acknowledged the dark side of humanity being part of us all, and did so in an elating, affirming, spiritually-renewing way, like confessing to the priest. Now Big Finish gives us would-be-rapist ex-companions, Enemy of the Daleks’ mindless macho self-destruction, and Assassin in the Limelight’s tastelessly unfunny gallows humour.

Perhaps the problem is that Nick Briggs is spreading himself too thin between New Who and Big Finish to put his usual concentrated heart and soul into the audios. But the other problem is that Big Finish now has to desperately compete with New Who, because now New Who is seen as the genuine article and Big Finish is seen as non-canon even by fans who hate the New Series. This approach of making audio stories more TV-worthy has sometimes paid off, like with the nicely spirited and old school Time-Reef, Plague of the Daleks and City of Spires, but overall this approach has just seen Big Finish become product rather than art. Big Finish today -like New Who- is so audience conscious it doesn’t seem to believe its own fiction or have faith in its audience’s intelligence. Doctor Who and Big Finish once invited your investment into their wonder and whimsy, whilst you maintained the spell from your end. Now they’ve become so cynical that they’re completely inapproachable that way, like our investment is being mocked.

The oddest thing I heard Nicholas Briggs say about the way he was influenced by New Who was that he wanted to make the audios match up to the kind of ‘full-blooded drama’ that New Who was doing, and I was left wondering what the hell Davros, Spare Parts and Dalek Empire were if not full-blooded drama. Or what about the scene in Gallifrey where Cissy Pollard was writing a tear-soaked letter to her missing sister Charley, making me want to hug the speaker in the hope the vibe got to her? That was mature, life affirming emotional drama, not New Who’s immature, tediously circular and artificial emotional drivel. I feared Big Finish would now try really hard to force an emotional response and bring plots to a halt so that characters could moan about their relationships. This fear was somewhat confirmed with Dalek Empire IV’s unbearably whiny, self-aggrandising ‘hero’ and it’s emotionally bullying tone.

Yes, that’s the problem. The audios are now trying too hard to be like New Who. Much of Dalek Empire IV seemed based on the same desperate approach of the New Series, of making the hero have yelling rages and shouting a lot and intimidating people into submission just like the Tenth Doctor does when he wants to prove himself ‘badass’. Except here it only made the story feel far more mean spirited. Maybe even the thinking behind The Boy That Time Forgot makes some sense now. The New Series has always copped out of its prophecies of ‘killing off’ a companion in the season finale only to have the marked for death companion suffer a fate that isn’t really death but is somehow supposed to represent a symbolic ‘kind of’ death. I think that prompted Big Finish to do something similar with Adric’s death and do a story where he turns out to be physically alive but dead in spirit. Also I think Big Finish wanted to follow the example of the New Series story School Reunion which explored the bitterness of those companions left behind and their unfulfilled romantic longings, and so Big Finish decided to do the same with Adric, but they tried to subvert it and turn it up to eleven by having him so bitter that he wanted to have the Doctor put to death and he meant to have his sexual desires towards Nyssa fulfilled even if it must be by coercion.

If you want my own theory as to why Big Finish has been in decline since at least The Dark Husband, then I think the hype surrounding the New Series on TV has played its part. Obviously the fact that the new range producer Nicholas Briggs works on both Big Finish and New Who and is rather spreading himself too thin plays a part. But really what I think the problem is, is that for a while Big Finish has become regarded as redundant and inferior now that the New Series is back on our screens, and that it was simply fannish product. Now of course I only need to listen to the likes of Davros, Chimes of Midnight, or even something as low-key as The Spectre of Lanyon Moor to know that Big Finish is so much more than that, and so much more than the dumbed down and safe New Who will ever be.

But the fact is, the more sycophantic fans have started to treat New Who as though it puts everything beforehand to shame, as though we fans should be ashamed for liking the old stuff or the spin-off material or any Doctor Who that the general public doesn't know or care about. There are now long term fans who dismiss the entire old series as slow and lacking any emotional impact at all (as if The Dalek Invasion of Earth or The Ribos Operation never happened). Infact in one issue of the Shooty Dog Thing fanzine, Jon Arnold actually wrote an article making a case for having the old stories edited down to be more like the fast paced new stuff in the hopes of appealing to the kids. The Big Finish audios have also been on the receiving end of this dismissive attitude with some followers of the range now contemptuously dismissing the older audios as high-brow, elitist, pretentious, dull sci-fi 'fanwank'. For the record my experience is that such fans tend to be the very loudly anti-intellectualist ones who love trashy, nasty TV shows like Footballer's Wives and Big Brother and seem to lap up how the New Series follows a similarly trashy vein.

It reminds me of something Gareth Roberts once said in Licence Denied about how there's a danger in fandom's tendency to enjoy the show excessively. It strikes me that we fans now live in an age where official canonical Doctor Who is available in abundance and can be enjoyed in excessive bouts, and bearing in mind the 'drug addiction' metaphor, it's perhaps no surprise that the fans who claim to feel such obsequious love for the New Series are ironically the very fans who give me the most creepy and cold vibes. Like any hardcore addicts, the worst sycophantic fans seem to display a disturbing lack of empathy and come across as borderline psychotic in their railing against any fans who dare speak critically of the New Series. To many fans, the fact that New Who is on TV automatically makes it superior to the audios, and these days being a fan who would rather cling to the audios is seen as rather sad and something to be ashamed of. Now that Doctor Who is in abundance and fandom is living by excesses, the old series and the Big Finish audios are now consequently regarded as very disposable and surplus to requirements.

The trouble is, I think the view of Big Finish being inferior to New Who has become so ubiquitous that Big Finish themselves have started to believe it. Now they self-consciously make crap, gimmicky fan product like Boy That Time Forgot and the Key 2 Time trilogy and don’t expect us to take it seriously anymore because its only crappy fanwank. They don't care about giving their audience anything more challenging or intelligent than the predictable utterly unfunny inaneity of The Dark Husband’s one-note bad joke. Infact they seem to think it's better that they make their audios as forcibly jokey as possible in order to avoid boring casual listeners with anything too portentous, but at the cost of immediately spoiling any drama or mood-setting.

Big Finish worked because right from the first opening lines you believed in its environment and you were there on that alien planet or that vivid future Earth with (or without) the Doctor. But Big Finish stopped believing in what they were doing a while ago. The average audio now just sounds recorded in a sound booth, even before the dreaded self-indulgent spell-breaking CD extras remind you it’s only a CD recording. Big Finish used to be far more than that. The magic’s gone, and I fear it’s gone for good.

Ian Berriman once eloquently described the Williams era as “a butterfly world, destined to be as transient as it was beautiful”, which perfectly describes Big Finish’s golden years of being made with care, vitality and love by fans, for fans. Maybe the audios are past their lifespan and purpose now. The show’s now back on TV and the redemption of the 80’s Doctors is done. You can’t keep fixing what’s no longer broke.

Thomas Cookson

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