Way back in 2007, I was just getting into the Big Finish audios, and it did not take long until I reached the 29th of their monthly releases, The Chimes of Midnight, starring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor and India Fisher as his audio-only companion, Charlotte “Charley” Pollard. I wrote it up as follows:

The Chimes of Midnight is just creepy: the Doctor and Charley trapped in a house where the servants keep on dying horribly – and even more mysteriously coming to life. Clearly some Big Revelation about Charley’s nature is being planned.

With the new novelisation just published, I listened to it again and it deserves its place of one of the consistently top-rated Big Finish audios. The soundscape successfully invokes the cramped servants’ quarters of an Edwardian mansion, with the guest stars utterly convincing in their denial of reality, especially as they start getting bumped off one by one. There is an Irish character, the butler, Shaughnessy, played by Lennox Greaves (who in real life is a Yorkshireman). I ended the story not quite sure what had happened, but certain that I had been entertained.

This story was recorded in January 2001 but released only in February 2002. You can get it here.

It used to be that one could handily check facts about Big Finish audios on Wikipedia, but I was dismayed to discover that Wikipedia has deleted all of its pages covering individual Big Finish plays. I guess that they were judged not to be of general interest in the way that, say, Andorra’s 2007 Eurovision Song Contest entry obviously is. A shame.

Rob Shearman has novelised his two best known Big Finish audios, this and Jubilee, so needless to say I have got hold of them both. The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Chimes of Midnight is:

‘And is this exactly the same as your house back home as well?’ asked the Doctor.

This is a very lucid retelling of the story, offering a lot more depth to some of the characters – particularly Charlotte herself, but also Shaughnessy the bultler – and giving a slightly better idea of what the story is actually about. It’s twenty-five years since Shearman first wrote this, and his style has become comfortable and fluid. The house as portrayed on the page is recognisably the same as in the original play.

I think that readers who aren’t already into the Big Finish Eighth Doctor continuity might be sufficiently intrigued by this to try the other plays in the sequence, though they should be warned that this is something of an outlier. However there is plenty to discover about the Eight / Charley relationship.

You can get The Chimes of Midnight here.