"the next really big months for the franchise will be August and September"

TV As the latest television series draws to a close with its many questions (Who is the Doctor? Who is Clara? Will the ratings improve?) I thought it was worth reminding the casual fans amongst you (I know, so patronising) that the next really big months for the franchise will be August and September because in August and September the big monthly multi-media Doctor Who franchise experiments reach the Eighth and Ninth Doctors.

This is incredibly exciting.

In the Wilderness years, the Eighth Doctor material was pretty much split three different ways. The BBC Books, the Big Finish and the Doctor Who Magazine comics.

Except in August, three other publishers will be having a go because they'll have to because they've decided to publish something for each of the Doctors.

So Puffin will be publishing one of these ebooks and given the slightly random choice of authors we've had so far each with their own often tenuous and hazy notion of what Doctor Who is, it's going to be interesting to see how one of them deals with a Doctor for whom most writers have had a rather tenuous and hazy notion. Will it be someone who followed the character through the wilderness years or someone whose entire research will be based upon the TV movie?

There'll also be the Eighth issue of the IDW tribute comic which will have this cover and be written by the Tiptons, who as you know I'm a huge fan of. Presumably they'll bring the same skill and accuracy they've brought to the other Doctor's incarnations (the First Doctor able to control his TARDIS, the Fourth Doctor saying "My Dear...") to the Eighth.

But on top of all that, his episode of Destiny of the Doctors, AudioGo's epic which I'm most excited about just because of the logistics. It's to be written by Alan Barnes who pretty much steered Eighth through his Big Finish adventures and in the comics, but the real mystery is as to who will read it. All of the other stories are essentially audiobooks with bits of acting read by a companion of each of the incarnations. Except Eighth's only on screen companion is Grace played by Daphne Ashbrook and as Big Finish, who're producing these for AudioGo have explained in the past they don't have rights because they're wrapped up in the TV Movie itself.  Unless AudioGo do still have right by virtue of having released the audiobook version of the novelisation back in the day in which case that's exciting.  But the other option is that it's going to be one of his audio companions and entirely set within the Big Finish timeline, which means that this really will be a celebration of the character even when it was off the air.

Then in September all of those questions are updated when the Ninth Doctor gets his first officially licensed stories since 2005 (give or take the odd IDW cameo).  So a Puffin ebook, an IDW comic and a Destiny of the Doctors with the added question of who's going to read that because there aren't that many choices within the parameters.  Billie Piper?  John Barrowman?  Bruno Langley?  With the added interest that along with the following two Doctors, they're the first nuWho related material produced by Big Finish (I think).

Squee.