Big Finish are delighted to announce a very special guest star for the opening story of the 2018 Doctor Who Main Range: Kingdom of Lies. Patsy Kensit will star alongside Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor and will cross swords (or lasers) with his companions Tegan, Nyssa and Adric. While the identity of Patsy’s character is being kept under wraps, director Barnaby Edwards gives us a hint: “I can tell you three things: she’s sassy, she’s deadly and she’s partly cybernetic.”

On the planet Cicero Prime, the kingdom of Cardenas is divided, with the whole population forced to swear allegiance to either the effete Duke or the fiery, hard-edged Duchess. This is a situation both parties have grown tired of. What use is half a kingdom when, thanks to a carefully engineered murder, you could have it all?

Surely, neither of them would be rash enough to summon the deadly off-world assassin The Scorpion to help with their problem? And surely, this terrifying figure wouldn’t arrive wearing a long cream coat and striped trousers…?

Released in January 2018, Kingdom of Lies marks the return of Doctor Who’s fab four – the Fifth Doctor, Adric, Nyssa and Tegan – last seen together in March 2017’s release, Zaltys. This classic 1982 TARDIS team was first reunited by Big Finish for a Fifth Doctor box set back in August 2014.

Joining Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton, Matthew Waterhouse and Patsy Kensit in Kingdom of Lies are Jonathan Firth (Middlemarch, Wuthering Heights), Charlotte Lucas (Broadchurch, Bad Girls), Harriet Thorpe (Absolutely Fabulous, The Brittas Empire), Tim Bentinck (David Archer in The Archers, The Monk in the 2017 TV series of Doctor Who) and Richenda Carey (The Darling Buds of May, Monarch of the Glen).

Script editor Guy Adams tells us more about what to expect from this unusual Doctor Who tale: “In Kingdom of Lies, written by Robert Khan and Tom Salinksy, the TARDIS team are split into pairs and mistaken for deadly assassins embroiled in a particularly spiteful divorce. But will The Scorpion and his vicious colleague-in-slaughter Nyssa the Destroyer win the day? Or will Adric and Tegan from the deadly Order of Alzarius, strike first?

“Kingdom of Lies is, at heart, a bubbly farce. Albeit one with Deadly Drones of Death and psychotic killers for hire. Listeners who heard Robert and Tom’s Early Adventure The Ravelli Conspiracy will know they have previous for wringing joy from courtly intrigue.”

You can pre-order Kingdom of Lies at £14.99 on CD or £12.99 on download. All CD purchases unlock a download exclusive which works with the Big Finish app.

Or you can save money by getting a subscription to the Doctor Who Main Range. When you subscribe you'll get 30% off the price, free specially recorded Short Trips stories, PDFs of the scripts and extended downloadable extras. You can subscribe for either 6 or 12 releases.

Coming next in the Doctor Who Main Range is the final part of our Colin Baker, Lisa Greenwood and Miranda Raison trilogy of stories. Static is out next month.

Deep in the heart of nowhere, near a place called Abbey Marston, there’s a caravan site. The perfect place to get away from it all. Close by, there’s a stone circle they used for human sacrifice in olden times. A little further afield, there’s an old RAF research station, where they did hushhush things in the War.

There’s only one rule: the use of radios, cassette recorders and portable televisions is strictly forbidden.

People come here to get away from it all, you see. No-one wants to hear the noise. No-one wants to hear the voices in the static…

No-one wants to hear the ghosts.