The fourth of the Big Finish Short Trips anthologies, and the third edited by Jac Rayner, published in 2003. At that stage we had eight canonical Doctors, so it seems in retrospect a fairly obvious idea to compile a collection of nine stories, each featuring one of them, with one more featuring them all. And while there are many cultural uses of ( Read more... )

Thanks to the brilliant Twitter-sleuthing of Gareth Roberts, we have William Hartnell playing Cliff Richard's father in an episode of a 1969 series called Life With Johnny, so obscure that it is absent from IMDB (which generally seems to include everything down to drama students' five-minute final year projects). There were six episodes in total, ( Read more... )

The last Fourth Doctor book on my list! I've read all the 45 novelisations (counting The Pescatons and both versions of Shada and The Stones of Blood), 7 annuals, 12 Past Doctor Adventures, 8 Missing Adventures including this one, and a dismal Telos novella. Though that still leaves some of the comics collections ( Read more... )

Having praised both the Sarah Jane Adventures on television and the associated audiobooks, I thought I should try the 11 novelisations - the pilot, the five stories of the first season, the first two from the second season, one from the third and two from the fourth. Apparently the first ones sold rather poorly, so the decision was made to adapt ( Read more... )

Parasites were not allowed the dignity of names, but under the circumstances Hezzka acknowledged that the beast was called Mr Jottipher.
The militant turtle-like Chelonians are a particularly entertaining creation of Gareth Roberts', here attempting to take over the planet Zamper, a building yard for warships with its own intriguing secrets of who ( Read more... )

Since I'm rewatching New Who, I thought I should repeat my practice with Old Who and read the relevant annuals as I go through the episodes. I'm a little ahead of time here, in that the 2006 Annual wasn't published until after we had seen The Parting of the Ways and I'm only up to The Doctor Dances, but there's not much in it. Anyway the Annual ( Read more... )

We've waited a long time for this, the lost novelisation of the lost Doctor Who story, brought to life from the final version of Adams' script by one of the best-placed of the current Who authors. And it is pretty damn good. Having watched both the 1992 video of the surviving parts of the original 1979 filming, and the webcast version with Paul ( Read more... )

I had given this First Doctor story a try once before, and thoroughly bounced off it, but for the sake of completeness I thought I should give it another go. It's not quite as bad as I thought first time round - in particular, I retract the accusation that the book itself is anti-Catholic - but the number of historical and linguistic solecisms is ( Read more... )

I read this with some interest given that we had an episode by Roberts on TV last weekend, but there's not much connection between them; this is a satire on media culture, with some particularly vicious digs at cult tv and charity fund-raising, with plot elements including an evil child genius, celebrity androids and voracious genetically ( Read more... )

Another of the late 1990s BBC anthologies of short stories about the first eight Doctors. Standouts for me: "64 Carlisle Street", by Gary Russell, featuring the First Doctor, Steven and Dodo; "Special Weapons", by Paul Leonard, with Mel and the Seventh Doctor; and "Good Companions" by Peter Anghelides, featuring Tegan and a future Doctor with red ( Read more... )