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The Best Day: The Origins of Big Finish Productions
The Early Days of the Company Behind Doctor Who on Audio
While 2019 marked the official 20th anniversary of Big Finish Productions’ Doctor Who audio range, it is 2020 that perhaps marks a “true” anniversry. It was in the year 2000 after all that Big Finish hit their stride, releasing 12 complete stories as they delivered new adventures for fans of Doctor Who’s classic series. Their output would be on a scale not seen since Sylvester McCay and Sophie Aldred walked into the sunset at the conclusion to 1989’s Survival.
Since those tentative days of The Genocide Machine and The Fires of Pompeii, Big Finish have released a total of 269 monthly adventures alongside invividual ranges for the Third, Fourth, Eighth and Tenth Doctors. They have gained the rights to the ongoing series (which didn’t even exist when Big Finish started) and produced far too many spin-offs to count.
This company has given the fans of this show so many beautiful stories, moments and performances over the years that many fans no longer see a distinction between Big Finish and the televised show. Indeed, after 2013’s The Night of the Doctor, Big Finish is officially canon. The company grows to new heights year upon year, but the origins of this Doctor Who juggernaut began on a much smaller scale.
The story starts not in the late 1990s with The Sirens of Time, nor even with the preceding Bernice Summerfield plays. It starts in 1984 with the creation of Audio Visuals by Bill Baggs and future Big Finish founder Gary Russell. Both fans of audio drama and, of course, prominent Doctor Who fans, the duo decided against setting up a fanzine. Instead, they took the then-unprecedented route of the fan audio, creating Audio Visuals in the process.
“I ran the Hampshire local group of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, and one of the members of the group had a reel-to-reel recording machine. I wrote some god-awful script called ‘Planet of Death’ and got the group to take part. We only ever recorded the first episode, and, even though it was never released doing the play…
