Story: In 1999, after over two years of petitioning the BBC for the rights, Jason Haigh-Ellery and his cohorts at the largely fan-run audio production outfit Big Finish Productions launched a new series of official and original Doctor Who audio plays. The author chronicles the making of the first fifty Doctor Who audio stories, plus several spinoff releases such as the Dalek Empire and Sarah Jane Smith series, going behind the scenes of the writing process, production, post-production and even fan reaction to individual titles.
Review: It almost seems anticlimactic to think about it now that Doctor Who has made an impressive return to the top of the British television ratings, but a mere six years ago, Big Finish’s Doctor Who audio productions were almost more than the fans ever could have hoped for. And with the recent broadcast of some of the eighth Doctor audio plays starring Paul McGann on BBC Radio 7, things appear to have come full circle: the BBC has more or less branded these plays-on-CD as bona fide Who.
It wasn’t an easy road though. “The Inside Story” deals frankly with that, as the story begins with Big Finish’s head honchoes vying for the rights to do “real Doctor Who” and running into the BBC’s wariness of fan-made audio and video productions such as those made by Bill Baggs. For an entire decade, fandom’s only Who fix came in the form of novels (which some fans felt, and not always unjustifiably so, betrayed the premise and tone of the original TV series) and those unofficial, Doctor-Who-in-everything-but-name fan videos and audios. The BBC’s reluctance is somewhat understandable, when fan entrepreneurs like Baggs were releasing audio plays casting Sylvester McCoy as the time-traveling “Professor” with Sophie Aldred as “Alice,” making decent money from the sales, and not owing a cent to the BBC because, more or less, only the names were changed. When the BBC’s editors heard Big Finish’s existing (and officially licensed) audio plays revolving around former Doctor Who novel companion Bernice Summerfield, however, things changed: not only did Big Finish demonstrate quality production values, but they were dealing in an above-board manner, securing the rights to do Bernice Summerfield audio stories instead of taking Baggs’ “near-beer” approach.
Each story is given a generous page count of coverage, though quite a bit of that space is given over to photos. Surprisingly, for something published by Big Finish itself, the text isn’t always an exercise in self-back-patting – author Benjamin Cook acknowledges that some stories were, perhaps, less than well-received by the fans, and puts fairly frank questions to the writers, directors, and even actors involved. He usually gets some frank answers too – though it’s pretty clear that some of the writers can be rather touchy about the subject.
There’s a lot of new information to be found as well. Before reading “The Inside Story”, I was unaware quite what lengths Big Finish had gone to in trying to court Tom Baker to join the ranks of their “audio Doctors”; stories such as The Holy Terror, The Stones Of Venice and The Spectre Of Lanyon Moor were all originally pitched as fourth Doctor/Sarah stories, but were later redistributed among the other Doctors when Baker declined the invitation. (I was also unaware of the degree to which Baker has apparently criticized Big Finish in public – I’m not quite sure what to think there.) Big Finish’s attempt to bring Anthony Ainley back as the Master is similarly fraught with missteps – the actor demanded creative input in exchange for his involvement. The quest to get Paul McGann on board, while not quite so epic, is another one of those things that was nearly derailed by a misunderstanding. The book also answers my long-standing question about what happened to Alistair Lock, who was almost ubiquitous as composer and sound designer on the first three years’ audios and then seemed to vanish (and didn’t participate in the interviews for the book either). And there’s a fairly honest retelling of some of the discussions that just won’t go away – the place (or lack thereof) of verbal profanity in Doctor Who, whether or not to acknowledge the New Adventures novels beyond a couple of appearances by Bernice, and more. Effectively serving as executive producer of the series in its audio form, the buck usually stops at Gary Russell, and for the most part it’s easy to admire his rather conservative stance on these issues.
Also covered in the book are the out-of-continuity Unbound audio stories, the linked trilogy of Excelis stories, the Dalek Empire and Sarah Jane Smith spinoff series, and the process of creating the cover art. Every story has a trivia sidebar, and more than half of the stories include at least one interview with an actor, writer or some other participant in the making of a given story. My singular beef with the book is a halftone dot gradient pattern running across the top of every page – maybe it’s just my eyes, but that pattern plays hell with my vision, and from a design standpoint, that’s the only problem with the book. And that’s just about the only problem, period – it’s a very fair, even-handed book editorially, and one gets a sense of the personalities and the work ethic in play.
It’s almost easy to overlook the Big Finish audio plays’ place in Who history now that the TARDIS is on television again (and, despite the honestly appreciative foreword by one Russell T. Davies, one wonders what will happen to Big Finish because of that TV revival). But these plays have redeemed the sixth Doctor, extended the life of the seventh, and have brought Paul McGann back to the role of the Doctor after the still hotly-debated 1996 TV movie, lending a little more credibility to the George Lazenby of the Time Lord set. Yes, many of the stories carry some of the soap-opera-ish undertones that began to creep into the TV series during the 1980s (no small wonder, as it’s the 80s Doctors that the audios have revived), and sure, they haven’t all been great. But recently the BBC itself turned around – having granted a license to Big Finish to do eighth Doctor audio plays several years ago – and then bought the rights to broadcast some of those eighth Doctor stories on Radio 7, lending them yet another layer of credibility in the official continuity of the series. It’s hard to tackle the question of how vital Big Finish was in the TARDIS’ trek back to TV; this book barely even touched on that, having been published around Christmas of 2003 when the announcement of the new series was still quite fresh. But it’s hard to argue that Big Finish has kept the series alive for fans, giving us new stories to listen to in during the wilderness years and in the months between new seasons; in a similar vein, one can’t help but notice the big Roman numeral I on the book’s spine; undoubtedly there are more stories to tell behind the scenes too.
Year: 2003
Author: Benjamin Cook
Publisher: Big Finish
Pages: 278