Doctor Who 50th Anniversary: Big Finish Produces Its Own Five Doctors

It’s like the 20th anniversary of Doctor Who and “The Five Doctors” all over again… except three of the Doctors will be different and Tom Baker won’t be just a bunch of stock footage…

Big Finish has announced that in November, to coincide with Doctor Who ’s 50th anniversary , it will be releasing Doctor Who: The Light At The End , a very special 100-minute audio story featuring Tom Baker (1974-81), Peter Davison (1982-84), Colin Baker (1984-86), Sylvester McCoy (1987-89) and Paul McGann (1996) as, respectively, the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Doctors. Their paths paths suddenly intersect when they face imminent destruction.

“We wanted to do a proper, fully-fledged multi-Doctor story for this very special occasion,” says writer, director and executive producer Nicholas Briggs, “and it’s wonderful that all the surviving Doctors threw themselves behind the project so enthusiastically. That’s not to say the first three Doctors don’t appear,” he adds teasingly. “We wanted to pay homage to the whole history of the classic series.”

The Doctors will also be joined by a number of their regular companions: Louise Jameson reprises the role of the savage Leela, Sarah Sutton plays the scientist Nyssa, Nicola Bryant is American botany student Peri, Sophie Aldred is streetwise kid Ace and India Fisher returns as Edwardian adventurer Charley Pollard.

“And that’s not all,” says producer David Richardson, “because Geoffrey Beevers is back to create mayhem as the Master, and there will be a number of appearances from some much-cherished old friends from the TV series…”

Doctor Who: The Light at the End will be released in two different versions. A five-disc limited special edition comes with two hour-long documentaries, plus “The Revenants”, a Companion Chronicles tale which began life as a free Doctor Who Magazine download. It’s performed by William Russell, who starred in the very first TV story as Ian Chesterton. The special edition comes in beautiful special packaging, and will include a number of exclusive professionally photographed images of the cast.

The standard edition comprises two discs, featuring the two hour-long episodes of the story.

Dave Golder
Freelance Writer

Dave is a TV and film journalist who specializes in the science fiction and fantasy genres. He's written books about film posters and post-apocalypses, alongside writing for SFX Magazine for many years.