You can read an interview with our new Liz Shaw and daughter of Caroline John, Daisy Ashford here.

Writers Notes

Primord by John Dorney

So here’s a question - in Doctor Who terms... what is a sequel?

It’s not as straightforward as it might appear. Is Dalek Invasion of Earth a sequel to The Daleks? Or is it just another story with the Daleks?

For a long time, I didn’t really feel I’d done any sequels for Big Finish. I’d played with pre-existing concepts like The Celestial Toymaker and Drax, but very few outright sequels.

You see, to me a sequel follows the same threads, ties the stories together. A sequel should do more than just feature the same characters. It should do the same thing... but different.

My first was probably The Perfect Prisoners. Primord is definitely my second.

It’s awfully intimidating doing a sequel to Inferno. I remember finding that story a mind-blowingly good watch when I first encountered it as a young fan back in the nineties. How do you honour a story like that?

Whenever people have floated the idea of a sequel it’s always the alternative universe aspect. And not its featured monsters. (As I was writing this, someone on the Not Big Finish forum said it’d be impossible to bring the Primords back. I laughed, then cried...). They’re underexplored, often ignored. So if we’re looking for the same, but different, that seemed a good place to go. What makes a Primord tick? And what happens when you don’t have another universe to escape to?

The Scream of Ghosts by Guy Adams

Hauntology, that’s the thing. The notion of timelessness and paradox that results from evoking the past in a piece of new art. Is it nostalgia when it’s new?

I’m a fan of electronica – as all ears born to the sounds of the Radiophonic Workshop should be – and the principles of hauntology (or, at least, the playful notion of it) has seen a distinct rise in new music digging up old, electronic bones. (For those of you fancying a taste, exploring the output of record label, Ghost Box Records would be a good place to start, a huge sample of their work is on Spotify. As would a viewing of Berberian Sound Studio, Peter Strickland’s masterful movie of sonic terror with a soundtrack by Broadcast.)

In attempting an act of hauntology myself – the day job, often – I wanted to explore that world. So we have electronica, haunted waveforms and the pastoral evoked as a crunching, electronic place of horror.

We also have a villain played by the author, forced to perform his own expositional dialogue. This is possibly the greatest, most shameful lesson I’ve ever had as a writer, I recommend it wholeheartedly. All you need is a microphone and a room of actors looking at you with no sympathy whatsoever.

Daisy Ashford (Liz Shaw), Tim Treloar (Third Doctor), Katy Manning (Jo Grant) and Jon Culshaw (Brigadier)

Tim Treloar (Third Doctor), Katy Manning (Jo Grant), Jon Culshaw (Brigadier) and John Levene (Benton)