Audio Drama

Doctor Who: Short Trips
10x05 Regeneration Impossible

I'm blurring lines all over the place at the minute when it comes to my Doctor Who 60th anniversary celebratory marathon, first because I've been accidentally mixing together different Doctors on the same days (when my original intention was to keep each era cordoned off), and now somewhat deliberately, because my pick for the Twelfth Doctor also stars the Eleventh Doctor. Well, my War Doctor pick technically primarily starred the Eleventh, and also the Tenth, so I guess there's precedent.

In terms of including as much different media as possible, this is a Big Finish production — but wait! I already did them! Ah, but this represents their non-full-cast, non-original-actor output, something I personally consider quite distinct to when they have the original cast reprising their TV roles in a fully dramatised production. Even within that style, they do several different things (including, nowadays, full cast plays with impressionists/recasts where original actors can't or won't appear). So, Short Trips are shorter tales (this only runs 30 minutes), and usually (I believe) dramatised readings — i.e. it's a prose story, not a play, read... dramatically. Would that make it an audio drama or an audiobook? (I never had that distinction before the Eighth Doctor one last month, so this is the first time I've had to consider it.) Normally I'd say the latter, because of the narration, but this one doesn't actually have narration, and is instead performed as if it were a full-cast drama, albeit with one actor doing all the roles.

That's because the peformer in question is Jacob Dudman, renowned for his amazingly accurate impressions of the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors (only the latter in this particular tale), and here has a crack at the Twelfth too. I've... heard worse. It'd pass muster in an audiobook (like how Dan Starkey does a solid-but-not-exact Eighth Doctor in that one I just mentioned, for example), but I'm not sure it's good enough to be a fullblown stand-in. Still, it's good enough that you get used to it as the play goes on. It's never as much fun as a real meeting between two Doctors (i.e. between the two actors) would be, but it has its moments.

This was going to be it for the Twelfth Doctor in my marathon (other than his novella, of course), but the extra time afforded by my incorrectly guessing the broadcast date of The Star Beast got me thinking — see today's TV post for what happened next...