The Latest Big Finish News

Jago and Litefoot Facebook Group

(12/03/2010)
As the countdown continues to Series One of Jago and Litefoot (out in June!), why not join in the fun at the J&L group on Facebook. Just click here.

The group offers exclusive photos, chat and - as we get closer to release date - there'll be many updates and the odd video too!

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Shada and The Mirror Effect

(10/03/2010)
We're pleased to announce that new stock of Doctor Who: Shada and Bernice Summerfield: The Mirror Effect has been delivered to us, and sent out to customers.

Thanks to everyone for their patience while these popular titles were being repressed.

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Rob Shearman at Waterstones

(10/03/2010)
Rob Shearman will be signing copies of Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical on Saturday March 20 from 11am to 1pm at Waterstones in the Lakeside Shopping Centre.

Pop along and see Rob - and grab a signed copy of his acclaimed short story collection - at 69 Thurrock Lakeside Shopping Centre, West Thurrock, Grays RM20 2ZG

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New Writers' Opportunity - Update

(08/03/2010)
As previously stated, the total number of pitches received in response to the New Writers' Opportunity announced in January was more than twice predicted... which means it's taking significantly longer than anticipated to work through the electronic pile!

Doctor Who script editor Alan Barnes is halfway through reading all 1,200 pitches, so you're going to have to wait a few weeks longer to hear the outcome.

It isn't going to be possible to send out personalised feedback on individual pitches, but each and every pitch will receive our fullest consideration. Please don't contact us regarding the status of your pitch – we'll update you on our progress here at www.bigfinish.com.

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Much-Loved Holmes

(08/03/2010)
Plenty of positive feedback coming in on the Sherlock Holmes front! Here are a couple of sample reviews of the releases so far...

Having been a fan of the world’s foremost consulting detective for more than a quarter of a century, I was more than a little excited by the prospect of Big Finish delivering a series of Holmes audio dramas. After all, given the incredibly high quality of their Doctor Who series, if they did even half as a good a job with Conan Doyle’s most famous son as they do with their resident Time Lord, then we were all in for a treat. Having had The Last Act on a near-continuous loop for the last week, I’m going to have to bite the bullet and admit to something that I’d rather not. That is, I’m hooked. Hopelessly addicted like the opium fiends of Victorian London, I keep coming back for more and more and more of this wonderful story.

The Last Act is based on David Stuart Davies’s one man play that was written specifically for Roger Llewellyn, and given his sublime performance as the near unbalanced, eccentric genius Holmes in this Big Finish adaptation, I’m now determined to see the play, to experience the source from which this stream has sprung, first hand. Set in the aftermath of Watson’s funeral, and against the backdrop of the First World War, The Last Act finds Holmes recounting their working life and friendship in his own indomitable fashion, confessing past sins and finally revealing painful truths to his departed friend, as everything he once knew and held dear changes around him.

Llewellyn, a man whose previous work (much to my chagrin) I’m unfamiliar with, delivers, quite literally, an incredible performance, taking on all the significant roles (Moriarty, Lestrade, Watson, Mortimer, etc) as Holmes travels through the corridors of his previous life, painting an intimate, revealing and at times quite shocking portrait of Holmes, and in the space of this one production has become part of a new triumvirate (Rathbone and Brett being the other members), one of only three men to have delivered a definitive performance of Holmes. Absolutely brilliant and absolutely essential. - Mass Movement magazine

Big Finish Productions, fine purveyors of audio dramas featuring Doctor Who, Dark Shadows, Stargate and Highlander, kindly sent us a set of review copies for their most recent line: Sherlock Holmes. The first two of these dramas share the distinction of having originated as one-man theatrical plays written by David Stuart Davies and starring Roger Llewellyn as the great detective.

As noted by Davies, the most difficult part of a one-man Sherlock Holmes play is that Holmes never comes alone. Without his physician sidekick, Holmes is nothing... A fact Holmes admits to in the opening to The Last Act. In this play, Holmes returns to an empty 221b Baker Street in 1916, eulogising and conversing with his dear departed Dr Watson.

On the far side from recent cinematic versions of Holmes, The Last Act is a vulnerable character study that never drifts further than the armchair of his study. It reveals a Holmes who is deeply stunted emotionally, whose dedication to logical deduction develops from childhood traumas unrevealed even to his closest friend. Llewellyn plays him with the kind of vain bombast necessary of a man who truly believes himself to be the world's greatest detective, as a device to mask his constant feelings of alienation in a world progressively more and more out of step with himself.

The whole of Holmes' career forms the backdrop, the first line being his first words with Watson - "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive." - from 1887's A Study in Scarlet. The trajectory of Holmes' life is laid out, from Irene Adler to Watson's marriage to Reichenbach Falls to the Baskerville Hound to His Last Bow in 1917. His idiosyncrasies are honestly dealt with, including his ambiguous relationship with women. On the one hand he utters contempt for Watson's domestic bliss and prides himself on not allowing clarity of thought to be afflicted by love, except in the case of the astonishing Adler. Some of the love feeling is permitted for this woman who is so much not a "typical" woman, and Holmes can seethe with sympathy for the adulterous couple caught having murdered an abusive husband in self-defense.

That contempt for Watson's marriage, the breaking up of the band, is only the tip of Holmes' ambiguous relationship with the doctor. Moving through the stages of grief, Holmes' affection is betrayed by his palpable anger at Watson. On the one hand, he is furious at Watson's condemnation of his little vice, his seven-percent solution of cocaine. At first he needs the stimulation, whether an exciting case or a drug-induced haze. By the end, he needs the escape. This emotional stuntedness comes out again when Holmes blames Watson for harping on his drug addiction but never speaking up when he is facing a genuine moral quandary. In the end, without his connection to the rest of humanity and with a mechanized war raging across Europe, Holmes realizes that his time is past.

Lighter fare is to be found in the second audio-drama, The Death and Life. This story, another one-man play devoid of Watson, twists in Matrix-like convolutions in its playful meditation on how fictional characters must feel at their creators turning on them.

It is 1893 and Holmes is on the trail of the Napoleon of Crime, a shadowy figure who is at the heart of half of what is illegal and all of what is unknown in London. At the same time, Arthur Conan Doyle has sent notice to the board of The Strand magazine that he intends to kill off his character definitively in The Final Problem. So that he cannot possibly be brought back, Conan Doyle purrs over the creation of the detective's greatest nemesis yet, a man equal to his intellect who will push Holmes on to a fateful meeting at Reichenbach. Holmes, however, has begun to notice something odd. It is as though the whole world is turning against him. Watson has moved on with his married life, Inspector Lestrade of the Yard is proving more adept at solving cases than ever before, and then there is this business of the Napoleon of Crime. Why has never heard of this criminal mastermind before? Why has he not been able to deduce his existence until now? Is the greatest mind in the British Empire losing his wits?

Llewellyn pulls in overtime, switching not only between the recollections of a lonely Holmes but also between Conan Doyle and Moriarty. He rises admirably to the task, as he had in The Last Act. His Holmes still vacillates between vain egocentrism and the bewilderment of Holmes going down the rabbit hole. He also portrays the conflicted Conan Doyle quite well, who begins with wanting to kill Holmes with earnest regretful ambition to move on with his literary career and draws to a kind of megalomania of asserting the God-like control of the creator over the created.

The third Sherlock Holmes drama to be produced thus far by Big Finish is an adaptation of the play Holmes and the Ripper. This one is a full-cast recording starring Nicholas Briggs as the detective and Richard Earl as Watson. Briggs is, of course, most well-known as the voice behind the Daleks and Cybermen of Doctor Who. He is also the producer for Big Finish's Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who lines. Both CD and MP3 download versions are available and, in the final analysis, well worth the purchase for fans of the great detective. They are well-written, well-played and novel documents adapting otherwise near-inaccessible performances for a mass audience. - Voyages Extraordinaires

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