Yahoo News Big Finish: How a gang of fans reinvented Doctor Who
To date, almost 300 Doctor Who stories have been televised, spread across more than 800 individual episodes. But if you expand your horizons beyond the small screen, that number is much, much higher.
For close to two decades, Big Finish have been producing new episodes of Doctor Who featuring original cast members – on audio.
If your experience of full-cast audio drama is limited to Radio 4's The Archers, well, this is nothing like that. Big Finish's output evokes almost every era of the BBC's long-running sci-fi – from 1963 to the present, right down to authentic music and sound effects – and can be every bit as thrilling, emotional and scary as the television series.
You just need to close your eyes… and imagine.
Origins
Big Finish releases are officially sanctioned by the BBC (so, yes, they're canonical – characters introduced in the audio plays were even referenced in the Paul McGann-starring online minisode 'The Night of the Doctor'). But the story of Big Finish and Doctor Who begins with a gang of friends – all fans – who knocked up their own totally unsanctioned audio plays for fun.
Now, in 2017, Nicholas Briggs is executive producer at Big Finish as well as an actor and voice artist who provides the vocals for an assortment of Doctor Who monsters on television – including the Cybermen, the Judoon and, most famously, the Daleks.
But back in the 1980s, Briggs was part of the gang recording fan audio plays to cassette – the Audio Visuals, as they were known. They released four "seasons" of plays between '85 and '91, with Briggs playing the Doctor in all but the very first release.
"It's all out there, in dark corners of the internet," he told Digital Spy. "It's where a lot of us honed our skills in audio drama. Gary Russell [later script editor on Doctor Who] and I worked together on the final season, and I think it was Gary who said something like, 'Wouldn't it be great if we could do this for real one day?'.
"He worked hard to achieve that, getting friend and business entrepreneur Jason Haigh-Ellery involved. Then they went to BBC Worldwide and, eventually, got a licence for Big Finish to produce Doctor Who audio drama in 1998."
With a little help from their friends, the Audio Visuals team had made the leap from amateur to professional. Briggs was involved from the beginning, "as an actor, a writer, director, sound designer and composer," and was selected to write the first release, what would become July 1999's 'The Sirens of Time'.
Briggs and Russell gathered a number of writers who'd been working on Doctor Who spin-off material – mostly novels – during the wilderness years in which the show was off-air to unveil their plans for Big Finish, and to invite pitches.
Unfortunately, the meeting took a turn for the worse when many of the writers objected to Briggs – an untested writer – being given the responsibility of launching the audio range.
"I remember [the meeting] was very, very packed and only [novelist] Justin Richards expressed any positivity about my being the writer of the first story."
One writer in attendance was Steven Moffat, who left halfway through. Moffat only wanted to write for the eighth Doctor, Paul McGann – back then, still the most recent occupant of the TARDIS – and departed when it became clear that Big Finish had only secured the rights to Classic Series material.
A whole new era of Doctor Who
Undeterred, Briggs began work on 'The Sirens of Time', a release featuring all three Doctors who'd agree to work with Big Finish – Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. He worked on the script with Russell and Steve Cole, a consultant for the BBC, recording took place over 6 and 7 March, 1999 at Crosstown Studios, London and the final product made its way onto shelves – on CD and cassette tape – four months later.
"My goal was to show everyone that we could deliver something that was thoroughly, officially Doctor Who," Briggs recalls. "That we could do great, exciting stuff. It's still one of the biggest sellers we've done."
'The Sirens of Time' was followed in October '99 by 'Phantasmagoria', a fifth Doctor story written by Mark Gatiss, and subsequently a new play featuring one of the fifth, sixth or seventh Doctors was released every month until the end of 2000.
2001 marked the first major game-changer for Big Finish. After lengthy talks the team convinced Paul McGann to reprise his role of the eighth Doctor for the first time since 1996's TV movie. Now they were in the position of being able to look forward as well as back, crafting brand-new Doctor Who stories that could – and did – push the franchise in brave and bold new directions.
"I remember how excited we were," Briggs says of the initial recording sessions with McGann. "I remember Paul being at the studio when we all arrived. There he was, like a cheery door-keeper, standing there, welcoming us all in.
"We were all away, recording in Bristol [where McGann lived] , so it was like a cross between being on holiday and being on tour. A lot of great socialising. And I remember the thrill of Paul saying at the end that he'd definitely like to do more."
For the next four years, Big Finish's monthly range of Doctor Who plays would alternate between plays featuring the classic Doctors – with a notable highlight being July 2002's 'Spare Parts', a Cybermen origins tale starring Peter Davison – and new adventures for McGann, telling stories that both played to Doctor Who's strengths and frequently reinvented its tropes.
A whole series of eighth Doctor adventures ditched the TARDIS entirely, with the Time Lord and his companions trapped in a parallel universe. February 2002's 'The Chimes of Midnight' by Robert Shearman (later the writer of 'Dalek' for television) was voted as Big Finish's best ever release, with Steven Moffat publicly heaping praise on the gothic ghost story.
Fresh challenges – and new opportunities
Then, something huge happened. Something fantastic, but also something potentially cataclysmic for Big Finish.
The BBC announced that Doctor Who would be returning to television, for its first full series in 16 years. And when 'Rose' went out on March 26, 2005, it was to an audience of almost 11 million – the revamped cult classic was a hit.
"There was no artistic change immediately," Briggs recalls. "But we suddenly had to have our work, quite rightly, approved by a raft of new people. Before that, it'd only been one person working through it all. But now Doctor Who was suddenly the BBC's top brand. From forgotten obscurity to primetime hit in one week! 10 million viewers will achieve that."
The return of Doctor Who to television affected Big Finish's work profoundly – not just on a production level, but creatively too.
Russell T Davies had secured huge audiences by taking what had always worked brilliantly about the series, then upping the pace and emotional content. By 2006, Briggs had become executive producer at Big Finish, replacing Gary Russell, who'd left to work on the TV series, and he was keen to follow RTD's example.
"I was very conscious that we were starting to tell stories in a more 'new series' way," he says. "We sort of absorbed some of their faster, more emotional style by osmosis, particularly in the new Eighth Doctor adventures with Sheridan Smith as new companion Lucie Miller."
Playing in the big leagues
Briggs admits that the Doctor Who monthly range "struggled a bit for about a year" in the wake of the show's return to television, and as he settled into his new role of executive producer.
But 2007 brought fresh opportunities for Big Finish, as it partnered with BBC 7 (now known as BBC Radio 4 Extra) on a series of new audio plays for broadcast, after airings of old releases performed well for the station.
Beginning with 'Blood of the Daleks' co-starring Hayley Atwell, this new range of New Series-influenced adventures again starred McGann, with future BAFTA winner Sheridan Smith as his new companion, bolshy Northern lass Lucie Miller.
[Above: Briggs with Sheridan Smith]
"I think those Eighth Doctor adventures were some of my proudest moments," Briggs says. "Sheridan, although already pretty famous, was a real find for us. She energised us, and Paul."
2012 saw another box ticked, with Tom Baker – after much careful and considered communication – finally being convinced to reprise his role as the iconic Fourth Doctor.
But the most exciting breakthrough was yet to come.
In 2015, Big Finish negotiated a new contract with the BBC that for the first time allowed them to use characters and themes from the revived Doctor Who, excluding the ongoing Peter Capaldi era.
In the past two years, they've not only produced new adventures for River Song (Alex Kingston) and brought back Torchwood, they've also lured David Tennant back to play the tenth Doctor in new stories opposite both Billie Piper (Rose) and Catherine Tate (Donna).
Securing the rights to new Who "took quite a while," Briggs recalls, with "lots of meetings" and "lots of negotiations".
"I'm not sure if Gary Russell ever asked about [New Series material] after he was initially told we had to stick with 'classic' Doctor Who. But after I became executive producer, I nudged the BBC about it very regularly," says Briggs.
"I remember being told by the former head of BBC Worldwide that the delineation between 'classic' and 'new' would eventually disappear. But then, when AudioGo [a company part-owned by BBC Worldwide, who'd been producing New Series audiobooks] went into administration [in 2013], I did kind of go hell for leather to get it sorted out."
No Finish in sight
With the new series having such a palpable influence on Big Finish's output, does Briggs think the company's work during the wilderness years in turn helped to shape modern Doctor Who at all?
His answer is admirably frank: "Russell [T Davies] has quite rightly spoken about how the upper echelons at the BBC had no idea about the existence of Big Finish. And since it was up to those upper echelons to make Doctor Who return, I can see that Big Finish had no concrete, traceable influence on the return of Doctor Who to television."
But while the audio plays might not have directly contributed to the show's resurgence, Briggs thinks Big Finish made – and continues to make – an important contribution to the world of Doctor Who.
"It certainly kept fan interest alive [when the series wasn't on television], and it fostered a pool of talent that then went on to work on the TV series. Including me, naturally!"
Indeed, it was Briggs' vocal performances as the Daleks in Big Finish plays, using techniques that he'd perfected making the Audio Visuals, that landed him the same gig on television, leading to further work on the series.
He continues to work on both the TV show and as Big Finish's executive producer. The cassette tapes are long gone, with most releases available as a download, as well as on CD for the old-school fans. Due to the nature of Big Finish's agreement with the BBC, they cannot reveal sales figures, but it's safe to say they're very healthy.
The company's output has expanded almost immeasurably since the early days, with dozens of spin-off series joining the Doctor Who monthly range, alongside new ranges based on other cult classics like The Avengers, Blake's 7 and Survivors. And Briggs says there are still "loads" of boxes he's looking to tick in future.
"We want to carry on offering the strong mix of glorious nostalgia and stories that involve the most recent Doctors," he says. Even after almost 20 years of Big Finish, "there's so many more things to do – and most of them will be things we haven't even thought of yet!"
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