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David Bradley to star in Big Finish First Doctor series

September 15th, 2017 by Dave Bowling Comments

He said he would come back. Oh yes, he’d come back.

Big Finish Productions, producers of Doctor Who audio dramas featuring Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, John Hurt and David Tennant, amongst others, announced today that they are bringing the First Doctor back. David Bradley, having played both the original incarnation of the Time Lord in this year’s Christmas special and the character’s original actor William Hartnell in 2013’s An Adventure in SPace and Time, has signed on to produce a series of First Doctor audio dramas.

In a statement issued today, Big Finish stated:

Materialising in time for the New Year, The First Doctor Adventures features David Bradley reprising his role in a new set of stories for a very familiar, yet very new, Doctor.

Following his stellar portrayal of William Hartnell in BBC Two’s An Adventure in Space and Time, David Bradley (Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Broadchurch, Captain America) is set to star as the First Doctor in this year’s BBC One Doctor Who Christmas Special alongside Peter Capaldi. And now Big Finish Productions, in arrangement with BBC Worldwide, are giving this reimagined First Doctor another chance to explore the cosmos!

Bradley will be joined by the cast of An Adventure in Space and Time, taking on the roles of the First Doctor’s original three companions. Jamie Glover (Elizabeth, Waterloo Road, Holby City) plays Ian Chesterton, Jemma Powell (Alice in Wonderland, Angel, Foyle’s War) plays Barbara Wright, and Claudia Grant (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) plays the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan. Big Finish executive producer and voice of almost every monster in New-Who, Nicholas Briggs, said:

Having worked with David twice now on TV, it’s great to be working with him again. Matt and his team of writers have come up with such a beautifully authentic set of scripts. We forget how different Doctor Who was, back in those early days – and here it all is, painstakingly recreated. I find that rather thrilling. What’s fascinating about the cast and their performances is that they’re not impersonating William Hartnell and his TARDIS crew. They’re playing those parts as written in the scripts. No one can replace the brilliance of those original performances. What we’re presenting here is a kind of reinvention of that era, completely in the spirit of the original. They are new but entirely faithful interpretations of these characters.

This looks really interesting. Since the actual nature of the Doctor, his species and what they can do wasn’t fleshed out on-screen until 1969, it will be intriguing to see how Big Finish intends to handle the character. Here’s hoping they do him justice.

The First Doctor Adventures – Volume 1 is scheduled for release in January 2018.

Source: Big Finish

Dave was born at an early age to parents of both sexes. He has been a self-confessed geek for as long as he can remember, having been raised through the 80s on a steady diet of Doctor Who, Star Trek, Red Dwarf and (sigh) Knight Rider. Throw the usual assortment of Saturday morning cartoons into the mix and we have something quite exceptional: someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge of utter tosh; a love of giant robots and spaceships fighting; and the strange desire to leap tall buildings in a single bound while wearing his underpants over his trousers. The death ray is currently in the works and one day you shall all bow to him, his giant space station and fleet of funky orange space shuttles...