The Sirens of Time Review & The Origins of Big Finish // The Sirens of Audio Episode 1

0:00 this is not the end this is only the beginning [Music] [Applause]

0:56 so [Music] g'day g'day welcome to the first episode in a brand new doctor who podcast boy there's lots of them out there isn't there but this one's called the sirens of audio and it's based primarily on the big finish doctor who audio range and by extension we will be discussing in time some of the doctor who audio universe but we're going to be sticking to audio because it is a medium that i love and i am your host my name is duane and as you can hear from my accent i am located in australia specifically i'm located in tasmania which is an island off the south of the eastern side of australia

1:43 about an hour's flight from melbourne this episode i'm going to be on my own but i will be joined in future episodes by a co-host so looking very much forward to that i'm going to be talking about the very first big finish audio released in 1999 called the sirens of time which is where this podcast gets its name from you see what we did there on the subject of podcasts so i'd like to just tell you a little bit about the podcast that inspired me to do this in the first place and i was never one for podcasts i'm a very late bloomer when it comes to listening to them but there has been one that i have listened to right from the very beginning and that is procter who i came across proctor who through mark atkinson who's a musician

2:29 that i got to know through my time on radio when i was doing a music show and i'm a big fan of progressive music mark atkinson was a and still is a progressive musician and i once interviewed him on my show it wasn't long after that i came up with an idea for a segment on my radio show called prog to who where i talk about new episodes of doctor who surrounded with a little bit of prog at the very same time or just before i was ready to do that i got a message from mark saying hey would you like to listen to my new podcast called prog to who gonna mix up a little bit of probe music and talk about the latest doctor who and do doctor who reviews can you believe it it was actually my idea mark no it wasn't

3:16 well possibly we got the idea at the same time who knows how the universe works but i've been following mark atkinson bob fleming craig simpson from the very beginning and those guys have kept me entertained for many many years and through many episodes of their podcast and i've really enjoyed that um of course more recently john aitken and suki kark have joined procter who bob fleming's gone off and he's starting a trek this out podcast on the new picard series and star trek in general bob fleming how could you do that you doctor who traitor but um yeah those guys have really inspired me in terms of podcasting the other one that i really like is is an australian podcast called flight through entirety that i started

4:01 listening to uh from a bunch of guys um brendan jones who who i know quite well from my time in fandom about 20 years ago and nathan bottomly richard stone those guys listened to all their early stuff right through uh until more recently they actually got me into the avengers i've never seen the avengers before but because they talked about it so much i got into that show too and i'm still i'm on series six now slowly working my way through the avengers loving it but flight through entirety is the other podcast that's uh really inspired me too so thank you guys just a shout out to you so uh the two podcasts proctor who flight through entirety kudos to you i'm listening to a lot more and i'm even creating my own so there you go but to tell you a

4:49 little bit about me and my experience in doctor who fandom i've been a doctor who fan all my life in the mid 70s my dad hired a television set when i was in hospital used to come in to work and i had to spend some time in hospital as a kid i used to come in after work and watch with me in my first episodes i recall a spearhead from space and the beauty of living in australia is that doctor who was repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated quite regularly so mid 70s would have been between the age of three and five yeah so that's when i saw spearhead from space i remember that i remember snippets of um the time warrior as well and then there was tom baker throughout

5:35 those years i didn't watch so much on tv but discovered doctor who more through the target novelizations then in the mid 80s when colin baker season 22 was out that was when i was in my first year in high school i think and i was absolutely obsessed with that season of doctor who in particular revelation of the daleks was the story that got me so into fandom there was no getting me back out so i joined the doctor who fan club from that point on and i was eagerly anticipating new doctor who from then but as it happens because the abc in australia was still repeating doctor who the majority of doctor who i saw was the pertwee era they were showing around that time

6:23 and so yeah mid 80s john pertwee he was my doctor so i can say he's my doctor but i was not born in that particular time i'm a bit younger than that so always heavily obsessed with doctor who started recording doctor who episodes off the air with my beta cassette recorder and so i had a large beta collection of off-air doctor who's starting with if i recall correctly yes it was the robots of death was number one in my collection and um so robots of death talons of wang chang horror fang rock they were the three they're the three that i've watched more than anything in the history of doctor who so yeah talons being my favorite story although it's not cool to like talents of wang chang these days is it a lot of the podcasts that i listen to they they really hassle it

7:08 aren't they so i started getting into the new adventures the missing adventures during the wilderness years was very excited when the tele movie came out i was hoping that a series would be produced unfortunately fox went with sliders i also was watching sliders at the time which i really enjoyed but i thought it was rubbish compared to doctor who however i think in the long run it was better that it turned out the way it did it was a few years later that sirens of time was released i do remember that coming out but i was sort of not keeping so much in touch with doctor who news it was not until about 2002 a couple of years later that someone loaned me a copy of their chimes of midnight cd and it was the times of midnight that

7:54 got me instantly hooked on audio because i love mcgann as the doctor and i wanted to i wanted to experience mcgann and yeah what a way to to experience it we're going to be talking about times of midnight over the next month or so on this very podcast but let's talk a little bit about big finish themselves big finish as a company have been going for over 20 years now but doctor who wasn't their first release their first releases happened about a year earlier when they acquired the license for the the virgin range of new adventures of professor bernice summerfield so they're adapting some of those to audio but the history of big finish goes back even

8:40 further than that and you can get a full in-depth history on big finish if you go to bigfinish.com and look for the for the title uh talking about my regeneration it's a documentary an audio documentary that that went out on doctor who magazine i think that's now available for free on the big finish website and it goes behind the scenes of the first audio sirens of time and has some very interesting insights about how we came to have big finish audios now it all it all started when an amateur company was started in the early 80s by gary russell and bill bags called audio visuals

9:25 and for the for three seasons they produced a number of of audio visual stories of really really high quality amateur of course nicholas briggs was involved as well but i'm not exactly sure when nicholas came on i i can't recall whether he came on for the final season because it was a bit of a gap between the third and fourth season of audio visuals but anyway the audio visuals were of a really high quality then build bags decided to go and start bbv build bags video and if through the wilderness years in the 90s there were quite a few doctor who related but never doctor who mentioned series of videos many of them made by bill bags at bbv and he also did a lot of audios

10:11 as well so he had audio adventures for sale before big finish but he was getting around the licensing issue by not mentioning the doctor by name or any of the the characters by by name or anything that was copyright or trademarked or whatever but he would allude to it so we knew it was talking about doctor who but it wasn't a direct licensed product of doctor who so when bill bags went off and started his company nick briggs came on i think that might have been when he came on for the last season he was playing the doctor and they made some great audios throughout that time and in actual fact there were some great guest actors as

10:57 well throughout that time they made 29 audios in total over the four seasons that they did and they had such guest actors as peter miles you know peter miles who played knighter and genesis the daleks they had michael wisher also from genesis of the daleks nabil shaban who played seal he was playing parts as well they had these guys um playing these parts so they got were able to get some of those actors to to be involved as well which was really cool to be involved in those amateur productions several years after the fourth season so the fourth season ended in the early 90s the tv movie came out and gary russell was quite involved with the tv movie he novelized the

11:42 movie and he approached the bbc because they were getting the licenses back from uh from america and overseas bringing them back in-house so he was asking the bbc at that time whether he could obtain a licence to produce official doctor who audio but the bbc was a bit precious at the time they declined it a couple of years later gary russell approached virgin and negotiated with virgin to do the benny summerfield stories um the early ones benny summerfield by the way is still going at big finish today so it's the it's the longest running character in big finish they went decided to go back jason hey gallery and gary russell went back to the bbc once again gave him a couple of samples of these

12:28 audio cds the benny cds and steve cole at the bbc who was working on the missing stories collections at the time i think at the time that that documentary i mentioned talking about my regeneration steve cole on there mentions that he was working on a forthcoming release of the massacre so that's what they were doing they were releasing those old soundtracks at the time and it was steve cole who suggested to the bbc that look we don't have the finances to make these audio productions ourselves this company is offering to do that why don't we give them a license to do it and they agreed so that's where it began it began almost 20 years earlier

13:14 with this commencement of audio visuals i think i think that company started in 1983 1984 and if you want to hear some of those versions or some examples of audio visuals you can find them all to listen to at archive.org slash details slash doctor who audio visuals and it's interesting that some of the titles in there that are in those audio visuals were adapted to later big finish stories stories such as the mutant phase which is a dalek story sword of orion that's a cyberman story minuet in hell and cuddlesome cuddlesome was another one that was remade as a as a special annual release i think or was it a doctor who magazine released can't

13:59 remember but anyway i can highly recommend the audio visuals if you if you want to have a listen to some of that early high quality amateur doctor who audio universe content very very good stuff so we come to the end of 1998 gary russell reapproaches the the bbc they get the license to do doctor who audios thanks to stephen cole thank you very much he comes on as executive producer so and then we come to the three actors who played the doctor who were available to work on this audio it was originally made in march 1999 not originally made it was made and released in july of 1999 and it

14:44 starts sylvester mccoy colin baker and peter davidson how was this going to be received how is doctor who going to go as an official licensed audio medium product how do you go when you listen to audio i'm curious to know because i find a lot of people are just so anti audio they won't even bother giving them a try and my personal opinion and one of the reasons i do this podcast is that i enjoy the stories a lot more in audio than i do on the tv but i think what people find difficult about audio is that it's a much more involved process becoming engaged

15:29 with an audio production because it's almost like reading a book there is a reason they call them audio books with a with a book you've got a take time you've got to sit down and you're focusing all of your senses on the book including your imagination to make up the story that you're reading it's similar with an audio some of the imagination part is taken with the audio but you've still got to fill in the visuals with your imagination as opposed to tv which just dumps it all in front of you and you can be as lazy as you like you don't have to do any work to get any of that audio visual stimulus put into your brain

16:15 it's done for you with an audio production you've actually got to become involved and i find that in those early days i used to listen to audios on the stereo and i used to listen to audios in the car in places that it was easy to be distracted so if you if you get distracted from an audio play it's very easy to lose your place and when you get back to it and fully focus on it again you're not quite sure where it's up to so that's what makes audio a little bit more difficult but these days with the quality of headphones since having small children in the house again and having babies i've had to i've been

17:01 forced to listen to music and audio through headphones rather than the speakers like i used to in the old days so the old days it was i call that the early 2000s the old days there you go now i'm feeling very old but the headphone experience makes it a lot easier to stay focused and stay engaged with audio but you've got to put in the effort too and i think that's why a lot of people give the audios a miss because they don't want to put in the effort but i would encourage anyone to put in the effort to listen to these audio productions particularly for a doctor who fan because they are so so rewarding so let's dive into it with uh but we'll start off

17:49 with uh with a trailer let's have a listen you're right i think i've broken something what about you yes i'm fine thanks yeah another thing i broke your fault oh sorry i'll survive oh can you two help me up yes okay careful oh we're gonna make a fine team with you two having to help me fire poppy though i'm not a delegate i'm known as the doctor i'm a time lord from the planet gallifrey and my tardis was recently blown apart in a spatio-temporal explosion which i imagine is now known to you as the kergon wonder does that cover everything

18:35 that was a little too close to comfort oh my god listen doctor there's another one coming in get down [Music] the time lords really do want me dead destroy him okay so some production details about the story the artwork is fantastic you can have a look at the description in the in the podcast to get a picture of the artwork and by the way big finish audio doctor who monthly audio numbers 1 to 50 are all available free on spotify so i encourage anyone because some of the best audios are in that first 50.

19:20 some not well i don't know if they're the yeah i would say that the best they're also my favorite probably because i've listened to them more than any of the others because they were there wasn't as many around back then so you don't now that there's so many i don't listen to them over and over like i used to so some of those early ones i've listened to quite a few times but if you don't want to go and outlay for brand new audios right now the first 50 doctor who monthlies are all available on spotify so do yourself a favor i'm going to be the molly meldrum of doctor who audio plays and i'm going to say do yourself a favor and get to spotify and listen to the sirens of time if you haven't heard it already it's fantastic and all of the first 50. we're going to be doing recommendations

20:07 during this podcast and some of them will be from that 50 that you can have a listen to so james arnot did the cover nick briggs was very involved in this one not quite so involved in many of the other early audios but obviously he's behind he's one of the executive producers of big finish now but for this one he was the director the music and sound designer he wrote it and the producers were gary russell jason hey gallery and stephen cole was there as executive producer so this is a is a multi-doctor story but only it's four episodes but episode one starts with the seventh doctor episode two this uh is the fifth doctor episode three is

20:53 a six doctor episode four all the doctors in together so that's uh an issue with multi-doctor stories is that uh great great concept we all love to see the doctors together it's all we all find it exciting but when the idea is actually executed it's not often the most exciting thing we've ever seen in doctor who it sometimes doesn't translate so big finnish were aware of this from the start and they have when they've done multi-doctor stories in in in the future they're always aware that they needed to do something a little bit different so that's why each doctor had their own installment for this one and then didn't get together until the last half hour episode so

21:40 my my first impressions of this when i first heard it where i i wasn't overly impressed with it because as i said remember i said that i listened to to this on speakers or in the car or whatever so there was always often background noise when i was listening to audios i mentioned that times of midnight was my very first audio and that is such a captivating audio that you it forces you no matter how you're listening to it it forces you to stop and listen um sirens of time not so much but i on reviewing it for this podcast i've listened again in the headphones and it actually is extremely high quality sound design i can tell you that a very enjoyable listen

22:27 episode one that with uh deals with the seventh doctor i've read some reviews online that say that sylvester mccoy was the weakest doctor in this well that's up for debate i i don't see that i don't see why people are saying that sylvester was the weakest they might think it was the weakest story and i can explain why people might think that way in a second but i think in terms of translating from the television personas to the audio sylvester mccoy and colin baker head and shoulders above uh peter davidson peter davidson is awesome but simply for the fact that he was in his twenties when he started making doctor who on tv his voice naturally has gotten older in the in the almost 20 years since he started

23:14 to the sirens of time so peter davison in my opinion is lacking a little bit there in terms of voice and vocally the most enjoyable for me vocally was colin baker because his voice is is just amazing he you'll notice in the 20 years since sirens of time that collins colin's voice particularly the last five years has really aged a lot but because we've listened to big finnish audios over these years we don't notice so much but back then when sirens of time came out colin baker's voice was just sensational he it's no wonder that he was the favorite of the big finish audios in those early days as far as i'm concerned he was he was probably my

24:01 no not probably he was my favorite big finnish audio doctor purely for the fact that he sounded so good um and there was so much potential that he that he wasn't able to realize in the television series that he could now in this new format but anyway going back to the first episode we've got sylvester mccoy landing on a planet finding sort of being compelled to go off course by this uh ethereal sound ethereal singing the word sirens might give you might give you a bit of a clue and he's compelled to go off course and finds himself on a jungle planet where he hears someone calling out for

24:46 help who's sinking in quicksand that's how the story starts with sylvester mccoy after the after the opening uh music finishes before that i should go back and mention that the opening scenes are set on gallifrey and we've got um a character called uh coordinator vancell played by anthony keach and we've got michael wade playing the president who who are there at the pre-opening credits no it's not really credits the pre-opening music um to this episode talking about an emergency a temporal emergency that the doctor is at the center of and that's how it all starts so instantly we're we're on gallifrey with

25:33 a couple of characters it turns out vancelle is is the coordinator of the celestial intervention agency he actually has a big role to play in big finish audios up until neverland i think it is neverland i'm not sure what number that is but it's the final paul mcgann story of the second season before the the 45th anniversary special or was it the 45th no the 40th special zagreus we're introduced to those gallifreyan characters which is cool but then we go back to the jungle planet where mccoy is and we have this very interesting character very very interesting character and i think this is what puts people off this episode it's not sylvester mccoy it's this character

26:19 ruth lee that turns up and she is this harpy type of character with this really grating voice with uh with some kind of european german accent um that that turns up and it was quite jarring from from recollecting how i felt the first time i heard the episode i thought oh the heck is this who the heck is this person um but after listening to it and particularly because ruthley is played by maggie stables so maggie stables is a is an actress who became an actress as a second career she used to be a french teacher she worked with nicholas briggs about 10 years earlier and nick brought her on to play this character ruthley as it happens a little while later

27:07 maggie staples goes on to become probably the most loved and the best portrayed companion character of the big finnish audios evelyn smythe she's a companion to the sixth doctor and maggie stables is the consummate actress when it comes to that part she is perfect as evelyn probably probably my favorite audio companion at least the audio companions that have been invented specifically for for audio and she works so well with colin baker but here in this story maggie's playing a really strange character called ruthley who's working with uh with a planet to uh to get this character of sancroff knocked off we don't know that at the time at the early

27:54 part of the episode but she's working as a nurse to this uh old war criminal prisoner called sancroff and i love i absolutely love some of the dialogue that goes on between between these two it's absolutely priceless particularly when when sancroff is talking about the quality of conversation uh between them but i do so enjoy our little chats some may call it spitting belching and passing wind but to me your every utterance is simply music to the ears and it turns out that sancroff is a knight of elisha so you've got a it's a spelt double a you've got to pronounce it shah at the end of it

28:39 and the knights of elisha are characters who are going to go on and particularly one night of felicia is going to have a pivotal role in nicholas briggs dalek empire series which was not too far down the track and the knight of alicia off the top of my head i cannot think of his name but i know it was played by gareth thomas also known as blake from blake seven awesome portrayal absolutely awesome but i digress from this story the knights of elisha this is the first appearance of the knights yeah this sancroft is is an old war criminal that's being kept on this planet alive and ultimately some assassins come and try and knock him off

29:24 ruthless involved and this character that the seventh doctor rescues from the quagmire that sort of becomes a pseudo companion is an interesting one she is she's played by sarah moet and she goes into a period the next couple of episodes as well so the episode kind of ends on a cliffhanger that doesn't immediately get resolved because we go into episode 2 with going straight into the peter davidson story and what i love about the peter davidson story and a lot of people say this is the strongest story and i think just as the portrayal of ruthley is what gets on people's nerves in episode one in episode two i think it's the portrayal of captain schweiger

30:12 in this episode by mark gaidis that wins everyone over he's a really sympathetic character a really nice man for a german it's actually quite a basic story the doctor finds himself away from the tardis and he tries to get back to the tardis i couldn't help but think with the time lords trying to contact the doctor it sounded a lot like the scene from enlightenment where the white guard guardian was trying to contact the peter davis and doctor very very similar vibe to it yeah so it's just a case of the doctor being separated from the tardis trying to get back to it because the time lord's time to do so and

30:57 yeah just the the events there that happen don't really come to fruition until right at the end of the fourth episode we don't know what the it ends on a cliffhanger with the doctor floating trying to get into the tardis with bombs going off episode three the colin baker episode as i said before colin baker's voice is just superb it just drips with honey it's that good it's like he hasn't been away for a single second it's like he was never booted off the show in the first place in such an unceremonial way the story itself is probably the the least it's to my mind the least memorable story out of the three

31:44 um because there's a a creature in there that's described as being related to the the the creature in the time monster so everything's about time time swirling around once again the time lords are trying to contact the six doctor just like they had done the previous doctors to try and stop them from taking actions that they would have normally taken once again sarah mowitz there we're not quite sure who she is interesting character so we're questioning throughout the episode who this character is but we're not quite sure i enjoyed the episode but if i was to pick an episode that was the least memorable for me story wise it would be this one but the most

32:30 interesting is possibly this one just for the simple fact of hearing colin baker just take back to the doctor like he'd never left it and i think that's a joyous moment when colin baker is back as the doctor episode four we have all the doctors back together to to join up with this threat because gallifrey has been invaded by the knights of volisha gallifrey seems to get invaded a lot doesn't it by different beings and this is another one of those occasions so this is where the the openings pre title scenes at the start of episode 1 and all the cliffhangers for the doctors

33:17 they all start coming back together we start to find out sarah sarah moet her character because she she's uh she comes in episode four as night commander lyena so who is she night commander lyina uh the temperon from episode three what's she trying what is the temper on trying to do it all starts coming together in episode four so it's a very it's a kind of a timey wimey type thing very well thought out by nicholas briggs uh in my opinion and all comes together nicely you have your multi-doctor banter going on which is pretty typical and i i really enjoyed it so for anyone who's listening to big finish audio or who wants to dip

34:03 into big finish audio definitely go for sirens of time first time around i remember talking to someone from big finish once and asking them what the biggest seller was and it's always this one and i said but there's so much better stories and they said yeah but this is always the first so the first one is always going to be the the best seller and the one that people look to as a starting point obviously and because it's available for free now on spotify it's even more accessible to everyone so i can only wholeheartedly endorse the sirens of time and recommend that everyone give this a go it's a cracker of a story really well thought out it's timey why me before stephen moffat was even on the scene um

34:48 it's all over the place if you love stephen moffat timmy why me stuff well this is this is nicholas briggs style and that's one question i like it always sticks in my mind the the authors some of the authors from big finish have gone on to to to to write for the tv series but nicholas briggs has never been one of them and i just don't understand why because nick briggs's stories man he's got he put some thought into them and they are sensational stories we'll touch on some of those in in due course over the podcast so now i give the sirens of time a hearty 3.5 headphones out of 5 and i'll recommend to anyone go to spotify grab it have a listen to it and listen to it

35:33 with headphones you won't be disappointed thanks very much for listening to episode 1 of the sirens of audio what did you think oh my goodness you can leave me some feedback if you like leave us a comment on twitter you can contact me there which is audio sirens on twitter sirens of audio gmail.com if you want to send me an email if you want to keep up keep up with our website it's sirens of audio dot com it's quite easy really just do a search for sirens of audio we'll be there you can even if you go to to where we're hosting the podcast at anchor dot fm sirens of audio you can leave a voice message on what you think of the podcast what you think of the story we reviewed and we can feature your voice message in

36:20 future episodes so i encourage you to do that too what i'd love you to do if you want to do that is i'll tell you what we're doing over the next month so we're going to record these podcasts in blocks of of four episodes so so it's not a weekly thing for us but it will be for you once it gets going but it won't be for us so the first four stories have been decided on that we're going to be talking about in depth with my co-host i'll keep that a secret for now just uh to keep you in suspense about who the co-host might be but the stories that we're going to discuss are my favorite times at midnight we're also going to talk about that's going to be one episode we're also going to be talking about the psychic circus which i reading the blurb i'm not sure if it's a prequel or a sequel

37:06 there seems to be something timey why me going on there with the the most recent monthly doctor who audio psychic circus we're also going to be looking at eldrad must die and we're going to be looking at the reaping so they're the next four audios that we're going to be considering on the sirens of audio over the next four episodes so feel free to give us your feedback send us your thoughts on those episodes as i said i'll say it again anchor dot fm sirens of audio you can leave a little message clip i've tried doing it myself but anchor won't let me do it they say nice try but you can't send yourself a message so send us a message and we'll include it in our podcasts in the future so

37:53 without further ado i'm going to say farewell for now and don't forget to listen to doctor who audio because doctor who audio rocks [Music] so

39:04 you left out the bit about wiping my bottom you old charmer