Lots of new (and old) Doctor Who for Christmas

There is a mini-Xmas present for Doctor Who fans this week as Big Finish have made available a free new story – War Stories, an adventure featuring the Twelfth Doctor and Bill Potts, written by Patrick Ross and narrated by Alan Cox.

The blurb runs as follows …

“The Intergalactic Fringe Festival spans a whole planet. Its programme offers millions of shows, so the Doctor and Bill can choose anything from anti-grav acrobats to the quantum cabaret. But the Doctor is alarmed when he attends a play about the Time War. It’s not just that it tells his personal history – its performance could unravel the universe.”

It is the winner of this year’s Paul Spragg Memorial Short Trip Opportunity 2024, which is an annual competition for new writers that Big Finish run in honour of the lovely and much-missed Paul Spragg.

Paul died in 2014, having worked at Big Finish since 2009, and although I never met him, I spoke with him on the phone a couple of times as a journalist on various Doctor Who-related missions, and he seemed genuinely such a lovely helpful person. It is really nice that the company honour his memory in this way.

I’ve never entered the writing competition myself, although I did pitch Big Finish a story back in the early 2000s which was kind of along the lines of “Aliens who are an allegory for fox-hunting arrive on Kefalonia in 1953 and the ensuing shenanigans end up causing the famous earthquake”. My excuse for this is that I had visited the island, the fox-hunting ban was in the news, and the movie version of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin with Nicolas Cage had just been popular, and I’m sticking to that. I can’t imagine why they didn’t pick it up LOL.

Anyway you can download War Stories here, or you could read the short little Doctor Who story that I did publish for some reason in 2019 – The Reluctant Gladiator.

There has also been new Doctor Who on the telly over the Xmas period, with Ncuti Gatwa’s second special in the title role Joy To The World appearing on Christmas day.

The Rorschach test of the ratings showed it was part of a clean sweep of the top ten places of on-the-day viewing for the BBC, although if you are addicted to “the ratings show that Disney Who is terrible, go woke go broke my friends etc etc” then they were down on the year before in terms of real numbers. You may recall I have strong feelings about TV ratings in the modern era.

Another much-missed Whovian, Dan Martin, used to do the episode-by-episode recaps for the Guardian, a mantle I picked up after his untimely death in 2020. As I wrote when I did the first one …

“It’s truly the strangest of feelings to be doing something I obviously am going to love doing, but feeling sad about it. The episode-by-episode recaps are a chatty review of every Doctor Who episode as it transmits, and then hanging around in the comments to tell everybody that obviously, they are wrong and I am right, but with kindness. It’s my perfect gig. I feel so proud to add it to my career. But I also feel such sadness about it.”

Anyway, my shorthand verdict of this year’s Xmas special in the comments was “perhaps not the most plot-laden entry into the Doctor Who canon, but pleasant enough for being on in the background on an Xmas day I thought”. Justice for Anita Benn!

[The Christmas special star, and also Nicola Coughlan]

I also watched part one of Robot last night, because it is fifty years since Tom Baker made his full debut in the role. Honestly, getting to interview him over the phone during the pandemic is one of the highlights of my life. Anyway I got rather emotional about it all, having written most of this earlier in the day and been thinking about not only Paul Spragg and Dan Martin but also the wonderful Paul Condon who we lost in 2019, and I wrote on Facebook …

“This week is the anniversary of the first episode of Robot and it’s kind of absolutely fucking mad that 50 years after it was first transmitted I can watch Tom Baker’s debut in higher resolution than it was originally broadcast. I’m fairly sure I didn’t see Doctor Who until the following summer when there was an omnibus broadcast of Ark In Space, but I also feel like I had seen the Cybermen on screen when I was a kid, which would have also been in 1975, so one way or another it’s about 50 years since a very small version of me decided ‘This is the thing!’. It really is the thing, it has given me so much enjoyment for nearly all my life. This is the thing.”

There may have been a large tumbler of red wine involved …