Starring Sylvester McCoy, Bonnie Langford and Sophie Aldred, The Blood Furnace takes the companions back to their roots, and asks what happened to Mel before she joined the Doctor’s adventures?

The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Ace and Mel to a recently reopened shipyard in Merseyside. It's 1991, the hardest of times - but now they're shipbuilding once again, thanks to the yard's new owners, the Dark Alloy Corporation. A miracle of job creation - but is it too good to be true?

While the Doctor and Ace go in search of an alien assassin at loose in the yard, Stuart Dale, discoverer of the near-magical Dark Alloy material, has an extraordinary proposition to make to his old college friend, Mel.

But who is the Corporation’s mysterious client? Who does she really represent? And what's the secret of the Blood Furnace? Seeking answers, the Doctor and friends are about to find themselves in very deep water…

Written by Eddie Robson, directed by Ken Bentley, script-edited by Alan Barnes and produced by David Richardson, this story explores the past of Mel and Ace a bit more than was revealed in the original Doctor Who TV series...

Writer Eddie Robson tells us a little more on The Blood Furnace (full story can be found here) “Because of how Mel was introduced into the series, she has less of a backstory than any other companion except possibly Dodo, so I thought it might be interesting to fill that in. I figured she probably went to college, she probably had a college boyfriend - and the shape of the life she'd have had without the Doctor started to suggest itself. What if she had the opportunity to step back into it?"

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Coming next in the Doctor Who Main Range, The Silurian Candidate, out in September.

The year is 2085, and planet Earth remains on the edge of a nuclear precipice. At any moment, either of two vast rival power blocs, to the West and the East, might unleash a torrent of missiles, bringing about the terrible certainty of Mutual Assured Destruction.

But there is another way – or so Professor Ruth Drexler believes. Hence her secret mission deep in Eastern bloc territory, to uncover a hidden city, never before glimpsed by human eyes: the Parliament of the Silurians, the lizard people who ruled the Earth before humankind.

There, she’ll encounter a time-travelling Doctor, who knows the Silurians well. A Doctor on a secret mission of his own.