Slow Beasts

I’ve written a Doctor Who! It is one of three stories on this new Big Finish collection, Echoes, alongside Birdsong by Tim Foley and Lost Hearts by Lauren Mooney & Stewart Pringle. Mine is called Slow Beasts and here’s the blurb:

The Doctor takes Liv and Helen to see one of the Wonders of the Outer Galaxy – to Ran-Zoan, where immense alien figures loom over the plains and settlements of the Renn.

But the Slow Beasts hide a secret – a secret that, once unleashed, spells doom for this entire world.

We recorded most of it in the week of the 60th anniversary, in the run up to the anniversary specials on TV, so I’m a tiny weeny part of the first sixty years of the show.

As extraordinarily attentive readers of this website (i.e. no one) will understand, this is a culmination of a 48-year journey with Doctor Who. I was a hugely committed fan as a child, a member of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, a convention goer, fanzine-producer and more. Among my first independent attempts to write stories were Doctor Who fan fiction, and it’s all kinds of thrilling to return to that having written a few dozen radio dramas for the BBC in the meantime.

Slow Beasts is a complete one-hour story, featuring Paul McGann’s Doctor (No. 8), together with Helen Sinclair (Mattie Morahan) and Liv Chenka (Nicola Walker). That’s an amazing cast in itself, but we also had Dan Starkey and the legend that is Derek Griffiths.

Radio drama is a bit of an orphan art form in some ways which rarely gets the critical attention I think it deserves. I’m suddenly aware that this is not true of Doctor Who audios - this will be listened to, written about, no doubt slated and pulled apart by the legion of Doctor Who fans. And good thing too.

You can pre-order it here.