This is really hot off the press (as it were) – Big Finish released The Four Doctors only last night, and I managed to listen to it in the car today in the intervals between being assaulted by a fellow motorist and the consequent trip to the police station to make my statement.

The Four Doctors is a special release, available for BF subscribers only, uniting Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann as the Fifth to Eighth Doctors, in a story which Peter Anghelides says was partly an attempt to do the Daleks and time travel, like in The Chase, but to get it right this time. (In the same interview he also says that his own favourite of his own stories is “The Tip of the Mind” in Short Trips: Companions, which proves that he has good taste and judgement, or at least that he agrees with me.) It’s a rather nice romp, not too intricate (as it might have been if Marc Platt had written it) but intricate enough to please the average sf fan, with the Doctors separated for most of the time but some very nice interaction between McGann and Davison, which I don’t think we have ever seen before. David Bamber (who played Hitler in Valkyrie against Tom Cruise and Kenneth Branagh) here plays the unfortunate time-travelling general who gets sucked into the Daleks’ evil plans, and he and the other guest cast, Nigel Lambert, Ellie Burrow and the ubiquitous Alex Mallinson, add welcome colour, but basically it’s the Doctors and Nick Briggs as the Daleks that we want to hear, and we get them all very nicely thank you.