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| Nicolas Briggs, founder of Big Finish Productions |
The driving force behind and face of the group was Nicolas Briggs, who would later go on to be the official voice of classic villains the Daleks and the Cybermen for the revived era of the show from 2005 to present day, who to this day is still one of the chief writers and creative producers for most of its audio ranges. With Briggs taking on the role of the Doctor in the early days and the group even getting the chance to recruit some cast members from the original show such as former companion actors Elizabeth Sladen and Nicolas Courtney, the team eventually caught the attention of the BBC and in 1999 the BBC granted the audio production company the license to create official original audio adventures for the series, granting them the budget and ability to write stories for the main series Doctors that would feature the original cast from the show. This was especially a big opportunity for the team to continue the adventures for the Eighth Doctor played by Paul McGann who only appeared once in the failed Fox TV movie pilot. The audio plays that the team produced in their early days were akin to the general format of the original television series, with the company producing stories that comprised of four to six part stories, each part being roughly 25 minutes long featuring simple sound effects and synthesized scores either sourced from the original program or composed specifically for a given audio play. The format for these adventures in the modern age of digital downloads and CD box sets are either standalone or only two to three part stories, each installment ranging from 1 to 2 hours in length, with one individual story or part in a multi part story on each disc or download. Big Finish's production value today is much more lavish, featuring a wider array of sound effects and more ambitious music to create a much more textured and immersive soundscape compared to their work in their early days of the late 90s to early 2000s. Many modern day Big Finish box sets also include bonus hour-long interviews with the cast and writers of each audio play in a given set.
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| Actors India Fisher, Paul McGann and Michelle Livingstone promotional photo recording Sword of Orion for Big Finish in 2000 |
The story of Big Finish is one that is exceedingly rare in the general television landscape in terms of granting fans of a given IP the opportunity to become the official creators of ancillary content for a given series, but it is a very common occurrence when it comes to Doctor Who as a franchise in particular. Many fans who had started out creating fan content for the show back during the show’s wilderness period would eventually go on to play massive roles in the series going forward, such as acclaimed television writers Russell T Davies and Steven Moffatt who began as writers for various fan novels in the 90s before becoming the biggest names in the show’s revival in 2005, with Russell serving as the showrunner from 2005-2009 and 2023-present day and Steven writing various fan favorite episodes during Russell’s time piloting the TARDIS before taking up the showrunner mantel himself from 2010-2017.
Media studies scholar Matt Hills, who has published various works on Doctor Who’s ever shifting narrative universe and fan community, argues that the show’s world building cannot be seen purely as a matter of textual attributes but rather emerges over time as sort of aggregation of fan consensus, the current creative team’s intention, and various pieces of ancillary content that all occasionally overlap to form a slight semblance of semi coherent continuity. In Hill’s essay Doctor Who’s Hyperdiegesis and Transmedia Discontinuity/Diachrony, he suggests that, “fans and official producers have co-created the ‘Whoniverse’ across decades—not simply because small numbers of privileged fans have become producers/writers/showrunners, but also because fan interpretations have been diachronically recognized within the program’s canon. Doctor Who has been marked by textual discontinuity, but fan audiences have playfully reconstructed its diegetic contradictions into coherent accounts of the Whoniverse.” (World Building : Transmedia, Fans, Industries pg. 373). It is the show’s very discontinuity that allows Big Finish to be able to create stories with just about any character they choose in any situation they’d like without feeling the need to be beholden to the main series lore as gospel. It’s ancillary content that operates like fan fiction.
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| Sixth Doctor Audio Adventure: The Quin Dilemma |
Doctor Who as a franchise is unique in the fact that it seems to be immune to the potential pitfalls some series run into in regards to ancillary content stifling fan communities abilities to from creating their own fan works to help fill in some of the narrative gaps the main series may create, as Suzanne Scott brings up in her essay on Battlestar Galactica (pg. 320). The series itself has an incredibly inconsistent and loose continuity, making it fertile ground for fan speculation and fan works to fill in the gaps. With groups such as Big Finish becoming official ancillary text for the show, however, there comes the risk as Suzanne describes of, “alienating preexisting fan communities and negatively impacting fan creativity.”(pg. 320) After all, the ambiguity and dangling plot threads from the main series could be patched up and filled in through the Big Finish range, such as the case of the Sixth Doctor and companion Peri’s tumultuous relationship and early traumatic experience in the show being addressed in the audio play “The Quin Dilemma” or the events leading up to the Sixth Doctor’s death which had never been shown or explained on screen finally being portrayed in Big Finish audio “The Brink of Death”. However, what is and isn’t considered a part of the show’s core cannon is far from consistent or set in stone. The show itself even pokes fun at this fact in the 2023 anniversary special, “The Giggle”, when the mischievous trickster god of games known as The Toymaker taunts the Doctor by remarking, “I made a jigsaw out of your history. Did you like it?”
The television series' own inconsistent canon gives the creative team behind Big Finish a fairly easy out when events that transpire in the main show and the audio plays don’t quite line up. If something takes place in the show that contradicts a Big Finish adventure, the fans at large can simply consider the audio as having taken place in another universe or that timey wimey shenanigans altered the timeline thus making it so it no longer took place in the main timeline. Characters from the main TV series such as River Song aren’t supposed to have encountered any incarnations of the Doctor before their tenth incarnation, but that hasn’t stopped Big Finish from crafting stories that feature River, played by Alex Kingston, alongside the likes of Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor, Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor, etc.
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| Fan turned Big Finish producer, Dominic G. Martin, & voice actor, Steven Noonan, discuss new audio play "Families" on The Sirens of Audio Podcast |
Not only does Big Finish’s Doctor Who audio dramas function as pieces of affirmational ancillary content which caters to what Susanne calls affirmational fandom culture (pg. 320), but it also further encourages fans to create transformative works which more closely aligns with the idea of transformative fandom. Many fans of the Doctor Who television series often stumble upon and consume Big Finish’s material as a means of gaining further understanding of the show’s mythos, being able to experience more adventures with various Doctors and companions as played by the original actors that further flesh out their characters, and have narrative gaps filled in that were never truly touched upon in the classic or modern seasons of the show. However some fans look towards Big Finish’s catalogue and see it as a jumping off point in creating their own fan works. Several Doctor Who fans have gone on to create several pieces of content based on Big Finish material, such as YouTuber Josh Snares who has made various animated vignettes depicting scenes from Big Finish audios such as a conversation between the Sixth Doctor and Peri from “The Quin Dilemma" I mentioned earlier. Snares has even gone on to animate an entire audio adventure, “Out of Time”, which he has shared on YouTube without the sound so fans can sync up the Big Finish audio with his animated video. Big Finish has even looked at fan made works as a means of recruiting new blood. Dominic G Martin, writer and star of his own fan series of Doctor Who audio adventures, was hired by Big Finish in 2021 and has served as a producer and assistant producer on several Big Finish projects as well as writing his own official audio story, “I, Kamelion”.
Big Finish stands as both a testament to Doctor Who’s unusually porous canonical boundaries and a catalyst for the franchise’s continued evolution. The company’s success—and its ongoing influence on the television series itself—illustrates how Doctor Who’s flexible continuity, its history of creator–fan cross-pollination, and its embrace of narrative multiplicity have allowed it to thrive far beyond the limits of broadcast television. Ultimately, Big Finish does more than simply fill in the gaps left by the show. It exemplifies how a fandom can become a creative engine in its own right, sustaining and expanding a fictional universe across decades.
Hills, Matt. "When Doctor Who Enters its Own Timeline: The Database Aesthetics and Hyperdiegesis of Multi-Doctor Stories." Critical Studies in Television, vol. 9, no. 1, 2014, pp. 95-113. ProQuest, https://manowar.tamucc.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/when-doctor-who-enters-own-timeline-database/docview/1540147492/se-2.
Hills, Matt “Traversing the “Whoniverse” Doctor Who’s Hyperdiegesis and Transmedia Discontinuity/Diachrony” Boni, Marta (ed.), World Building : Transmedia, Fans, Industries, edited by Marta Boni, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tamucc/detail.action?docID=5216308.
Dr Who Review, Part 9- The Wilderness Years & Paul McGann Era by Clever Dick Films https://youtu.be/XgxC0Y9h3ZI?si=tJuWs-2upYiLi0w8
Jeffery, Morgan “Celebrating Big Finish: How a gang of fans reinvented Doctor Who for a new audience” www.digitalspy.com/tv/cult/a831517/big-finish-nicholas-briggs-interview/. Accessed 30 Nov. 2025.
Scott, Susanne “Battlestar Galactica” How to Watch Television Second Edition, edited by Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell, New York University Press, 2020 pg. 319-328
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