I am Ashley Elsdon

someone who's doing some things

Tag: Big Finish

A wonderful company that make audiobooks of some of my favourite stories, like Dr Who, Blake’s 7 and several others.

Dalek Empire …

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I bought the Dalek Empire series as part of Big Finish’s humble bundle at the beginning of the year. It was excellent value. I’d listened to the first episode of season 1 before so it was good to get the whole story, all the season and be able to listen to them in one go.

They really to make for a very broad story arc. I’m glad I heard it all. It’s only fair to say that the whole thing has now come to an end. Well, probably anyway. It’s never an entirely safe bet to say that with Big Finish. You never quite know what they’re going to revive.

Anyway, I’d happily recommend the series to anyone who knows even a tiny bit about the Daleks. It’s a great story.

Fourth Doctor: The Darkness of Glass

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I listened to this story today and enjoyed it immensely. It was like a hybrid between Talons of Weng Chiang and The Horror of Fang Rock. It great fourth Doctor story. Just a classic. Wonderful.

The writing is great, the characters are excellent and it’s a good old fashioned adventure. I can’t say anything bad about it at all.

Survivors, the original story

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So I finished listening to this audio book. An unabridged version of Terry Nation’s original novel and read by Carolyn Seymour who played Abby Grant in the original 1970s series. It was good. Good in so many ways. Sometimes it really is worth it to hear the original story. Where all the spin offs started and the root of all the versions. That’s certainly the case here. It was well worth it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed the other versions, both TV series, what Big Finish have done with the full cast audio story, but this has been the best so far. It was coherent and in some ways helped to make sense of the other versions too.

I won’t spoil it in case you are interested enough to read it or listen to it yourself, but it is quite different from both TV versions. I won’t say more than that. I’ll leave it there. At some point I’m going to write a post about all of the versions, perhaps in a few weeks time.

Big Finish: Survivors the series

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I’ve been listening to this again. It’s interesting to hear it after watching the original series and of course the BBC remake as well. The big finish series is a different story altogether. The same ideas but different characters telling a different side to the story. It merges into the original about halfway through the set of audio books. Of course the production values are very high as you’d expect from Big Finish.

It’s interesting to get all these different perspectives on the story. The original TV series. The new TV series (comparatively new anyway), the Big Finish series, and also their unabridged version of the novel itself.

I’m looking forward to hearing the next season of the Big Finish full cast drama when it’s available, in June I think.

When I’ve finished listening to everything that I’ve got so far, and possibly even re-watching the newer TV series I might do a post about the whole lot in one go, and cover what I think of each treatment.

Big Finish: Doctor Who, The Ultimate Adventure

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This is one of the few Doctor Who stage plays, and is the only one that I ever went to. It was back in 1989 and I’ve occasionally thought about it over the years, but when I realised that I’d inadvertently bought a copy of Big Finish’s audiobook version it all came back to me.

Listening to it for the first time brought back a lot of memories, but the most interesting thing was hearing about how the production came about and the problems that it faced. It was really interesting to find out all about how it came about and what eventually happened to the production.

Whilst it is most certainly not one of the best Doctor Who stories of all time, even though it is strangely named the ‘Ultimate’ adventure! Although I guess that’s more to do with it being produced in the 80’s more than anything else. It is part of Doctor Who history, and I guess I’m one of the few (ok, probably there would have been over 10,000 people who saw it, but against the scale of Doctor Who fans that’s small) who saw it.

Anyway, I got in touch with the two people who I went with and they both remembered it, and one even still had the theatre programme! So here it is …

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Doctor Who 3.5

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Last month I bought a Humble Bundle of Big Finish Doctor Who stories. There were some really good ones in there, and I’m just finishing off listening to them. One of the last I’m listening to is “Seven Keys to Doomsday”, and the Doctor is played by Trevor Martin, also know as Doctor Who 3.5 as he did this story as a stage play inbetween Pertwee’s Doctor and Tom Baker’s. As I never saw the stage play it’s good to hear this.