Audio CD/download review
Big Finish / AudioGo
Release date Out now

The First Doctor visits the Fourth Universe; the Second discovers a sexist society; the Fourth encounters old enemies; the Fifth discovers the power of music; the Eighth tries to have a merry Christmas – and the Daleks make various plans for conquest…

Another bumper month begins chronologically for the Doctor with Quinnis, a Companion Chronicle told by Carole Ann Ford as Susan. Set shortly before the series’ first story, An Unearthly Child, it is another intriguing tale from the pen of Marc Platt.

Filled with descriptive imagery, it’s an interesting view of the original Doctor more as grandfather and scientist than epic hero.

Don’t listen to the CD extras, though, until you’ve heard all of this month’s releases!

VERDICT: 7/10

Prison in Space is the main feature of the new Lost Stories collection, The Second Doctor Box Set.

This missing Dick Sharples script is brought to life by Frazer Hines multi-tasking as narrator, Troughton impersonator and playing Jamie, accompanied by Wendy Padbury as Zoe and most of the female characters.

Technically, it’s great, and fantastic to hear an almost-faultless rendition of that particular TARDIS team, but the story itself was quite rightly dropped from the schedules for the show, even then feeling embarrassing – let alone in the 21st Century.

VERDICT: 6/10

Accompanying that is The Daleks: The Destroyers, an adaptation of Terry Nation’s proposed pilot for his metal meanies’ invasion of US television that was cancelled shortly before production began.

With Jean Marsh once again playing Sara Kingdom, Big Finish have created a terrific evocation of that ITC era. It ends on a cliffhanger – let’s hope they have the rights to resolve it!

VERDICT: 8/10

The Fourth Doctor’s Demon Quest concludes with two instalments: Starfall, set in 1976 New York, and Sepulchre.

Everyone involved with Starfall seems to be having great fun with the setting and the various comicbook ideas that are explored, with Paul Magrs producing some great one-liners and new takes on the genre.

Sepulchre wraps everything up, but feels a little unsatisfactory: it’s linked too closely in with the 2009 original series Hornets’ Nest (something that the rest of the series managed successfully to avoid).

It’s good to hear Tom Baker, Richard Franklin and Susan Jameson working together, and there’s some suitably timey-wimey shenanigans (as well as a very Star Trek solution to one major problem) but let’s hope that the third series spreads its wings a little more.

VERDICT: Starfall: 7/10; Sepulchre 7/10

The Fifth Doctor features in the main Big Finish release, The Demons of Red Lodge and other stories, a portmanteau of four slightly interlinked tales.

Competition winner Rick Briggs’ The Entropy Composition, which makes good use of the aural medium, and John Dorney’s DVD commentary-based Special Features are the highpoints, but unlike some of the previous four-story CDs, there are no particularly weak tales.

VERDICT: 7/10

Subscribers also receive The Four Doctors, Peter Anghelides’ single CD tale, which sees various incarnations of the Time Lord interact with a Dalek Prime and others falling back through the Doctor’s own time stream.

A different take on the multi-Doctor epic, it’s one of the company’s better freebies.

VERDICT: 7/10

Finally, the Eighth Doctor meets up with Susan, and his great-grandson Alex in Relative Dimensions, also written by Marc Platt.

Loosely tied into Quinnis, this sees a very different relationship between Susan and her grandfather, particularly when things start to go seriously wrong aboard the TARDIS.

A much more Christmassy tale than last year’s story (Death in Blackpool), it even features the Doctor recounting a trip to a certain stable in Bethlehem just over 2000 years ago…

VERDICT: 7/10

By Peter Quentin