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The Ninth Doctor at Big Finish

Nightowl1701 said:
Sounds like they have to ask for Moffat's permission every single time they want to use one or more of the Gang, so it seems he's the main obstacle to a Paternoster series. :brickwall:
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A licensee asking for permission to use Vastra, Jenny, and/or Strax in a story isn't the same thing at all as Moffat wanting to use Vastra, Jenny, and/or Strax in a televised product. Licensees, like Big Finish or Titan, even Panini in Doctor Who Magazine and Doctor Who Adventures, can't just do anything they want with their license. There are levels of approvals they have to go through. Characters and concepts like the Paternosters may require a little more scrutiny at every approval stage, just to ensure that the licensee isn't stepping on Moffat's own plans. Moffat, on the other hand, if he wants to write the Pasternosters into a script for series 10, there's nothing to stop him. That's just the reality of tie-ins, and it's something that anyone who's worked in tie-ins has had to deal with.

Moffat may well be standing in the way of a Paternoster Gang spin-off, but I'm skeptical that one has ever been seriously contemplated by Moffat and the BBC. For one thing, I recall Moffat saying essentially that "Deep Breath" was their last hurrah. For another, it's never been clear to me what the point of a Paternoster Gang spin-off is. When Ripper Street was in production, I could see the how of a Paternoster Gang -- use and recycle RS's sets and props -- but I could never see the why. Who is the audience? What niche is it trying to fill? What can the concept do that Doctor Who cannot? To me, the Paternoster Gang seems like the kind of concept that's ideal for the smaller, niche audience that buys the tie-ins but would be ill-suited to a wider, mainstream audience on one of the BBC channels.
 
There's a trailer for the Ninth Doctor Chronicles box set. The response on other forums has been... mixed.

I'll put it this way: the trailer doesn't make me any less interested in buying this than I already was.
 
Even as someone who's been with BF since they days when they were only doing Bernice Summerfield audios, these pseudo-New Series audios just come across as a bad idea.
 
I would have cut the trailer differently, as it doesn't do anything well. We have actors performing, we have Nick Briggs reading an audio book script, and we have Briggs mimicking the ninth Doctor's voice (and not especially well).

I would have spent more time on the actors performing, maybe with them saying things like, "Where's Rose?" and "What are we going to do?" and "What are those things?" and "Doctor, help us!" In short, have a minute of different voices saying that things are bad, things are getting bad, and the situation is hopeless. Then, in the last two or three seconds, have Nick Briggs, in the best mock Eccleston voice he can manage, say, "Hello." Then, "Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor Chronicles, coming soon from Big Finish." In other words, I'd have focused on the audio drama side of the production and not at all on the audio book side of the production.

Yes, that's selling it as something that it's not, but anyone who buys Big Finish already knows how their Chronicles productions work.
 
Yes - it struck me as a particularly bad attempt at doing a Mancunian/Salfordian accent, at one point it even seemed to verge into Scouse (Ringo Starr as the Ninth Doctor!) and something more like Yorkshire.
 
tenmei said:
Yes - it struck me as a particularly bad attempt at doing a Mancunian/Salfordian accent, at one point it even seemed to verge into Scouse (Ringo Starr as the Ninth Doctor!) and something more like Yorkshire.
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Which is odd, as I thought Briggs did a good job mimicking Eccleston in the Destiny of the Doctors series.

This trailer had me wondering, "Why didn't Big Finish just hire the guy who played Richard III in The Kingmaker? He did a tolerable Eccleston impression..." :)
 
I don't think there's a better demonstration of how creatively insular Big Finish is than the leap from "Nick Briggs got praise for a ninth Doctor impression that plugged a gap in one particular series" to "Nick Briggs should be the primary narrator for any new series audiobook regardless of Doctor, even when TV series actors are playing their own characters in the same project."
 
That Eccleston impersonation is pretty funny, sounds like something from a comedy sketch with a dim-witted Doctor.
 
There's an extended excerpt of one of the stories from the box set at the end of the latest Big Finish podcast, about 51 minutes in.

It's not so bad-- they seem to have chosen some of Briggs' worst line readings for the trailer-- but the accent and pitch are still all over the place, and he bounces wildly between a full-blown impression and a mere hint of an accent. I do think I could stand listening to it for an hour or so at a time, though, and I might for the sake of the Una McCormack story.
 
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