THE DOCTOR WILL HEAR YOU NOW

Doctor Who has been vanishing and reappearing with the reliability of a cheap magic trick since 1963, usually just as the public has begun to forget why it ever cared. The latest pause—announced with all the solemnity of a BBC press release that promised a Christmas special in 2026 while the rest of the calendar yawns emptily—is merely the show doing what it does best: taking a breather so that someone, somewhere, can work out what on Earth it is supposed to be this time. In its absence, the heavy lifting will once again fall to the unsung heroes of the medium that dare not speak its full name on television: audio drama. Specifically, Big Finish Productions, that modest outfit which has been quietly producing more Doctor Who than the BBC itself for a quarter of a century. 

It is a situation rich in irony, the sort that would have delighted the more melancholy sort of Time Lord. While the Corporation frets over ratings, Disney partnerships, showrunners, and the eternal question of whether the sonic screwdriver has become too silly, a company operating out of a few rooms in Hampshire has been getting on with the job of telling proper stories. They have done so with the full participation of almost every actor who has ever worn the scarf, the question mark jumper, or the leather jacket. Tom Baker, still sounding as if he has just swallowed a particularly mischievous planet, continues to record. Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and Paul McGann have all kept the flame alive with a diligence that borders on the heroic. Even the newer incarnations such as Tennant, Whittaker and Eccleston have dipped in, proving that the call of the TARDIS is stronger than any television contract. 

The sardonic observer might note that this is precisely what one should have expected. Television Doctor Who has always been at its most fragile when it tries to be important. Big Finish, by contrast, has the luxury of not mattering in the eyes of the wider world. No focus groups, no international co-production notes, no anxious executives wondering if the latest monster will play in Peoria. Just writers, actors, and a sound booth. The result is often gloriously free. You can have a four-hour epic about the consequences of a single temporal paradox without worrying about the budget for exploding spaceships. You can explore the moral ambiguities of the Doctor’s lifestyle in ways that would make a family audience shift uncomfortably on the sofa. And, crucially, you can let the performers act.

There is something almost indecent about how good some of these audio performances are. Listen to McGann’s Eighth Doctor, that beautiful, doomed romantic, and you realise what a waste it was that his television movie never quite worked. Or hear Nicola Bryant’s Peri finally given material worthy of her considerable gifts rather than the shrieking that television occasionally reduced her to. The chemistry between old companions and new threats crackles in the dark in a way that no amount of CGI can replicate. Your imagination, that cheapest and most powerful of special effects departments, does the rest. One begins to suspect that the best Doctor Who has always been the one that leaves room for the listener to fill in the gaps. 

This is not to say that Big Finish is flawless. Like any long-running series, it has its share of duds—stories that sound as if they were written during a particularly slow afternoon on the bus. But even the weaker entries possess a certain honest charm. They are not pretending to be the Next Big Cultural Event. They are simply getting on with it, month after month, year after year, like a reliable provincial repertory company that somehow keeps attracting the best talent. Compare this to the television version’s periodic nervous breakdowns, when it tries to reinvent itself with the desperation of a fading celebrity. 

The revival has had its moments, to be sure, but one senses the strain: the need to be diverse, relevant, mythic, funny, scary, and emotionally devastating, often in the same forty-five minutes. Big Finish can do all those things too, but it spreads them out. It has the luxury of time. A box set can build a world over several hours. A single story can afford to be quiet. The best of them—The Chimes of Midnight, Spare Parts, The Natural History of Fear, to name a few classics—achieve a depth that television, with its terror of losing the remote-control surfer, rarely risks. And then there is the sheer volume. Guinness World Records has already acknowledged the achievement: the longest-running science fiction audio drama series, with hundreds upon hundreds of stories. While the BBC debates whether to make another series or simply show old episodes with new introductions, Big Finish keeps producing. The First Doctor rubs shoulders with the Eighth. The Sixth gets redemption arcs that television never quite managed. New companions arrive, old ones return, and the universe keeps expanding in your headphones. It is less a cottage industry than a quiet empire.

Here is where the sardonic humour meets cold practicality. If you have not yet begun collecting Big Finish, the time has come to develop a mild but manageable addiction. Not because it is your cultural duty—perish the thought—but because the alternative is to sit around waiting for television to remember what it is for. Life is short, and the gaps between Doctor Who seasons have a habit of stretching like a particularly vindictive time corridor. Start with the obvious: the Eighth Doctor adventures if you loved McGann’s brief flicker on screen. Move on to the Fourth Doctor box sets, where Tom Baker’s voice alone is worth the price of admission; it is like having a favourite eccentric uncle tell you bedtime stories about cosmic horror. Sample the lost adventures of the earlier Doctors, lovingly reconstructed with the original actors where possible. And do not neglect the Companions series, which often give the supporting players their best material in decades.

The beauty of it is that these stories improve with repetition. Unlike a television episode you can binge in a weekend and forget by Monday, a good Big Finish audio rewards careful listening. You notice the layering of sound design, the precision of the performances, the way a seemingly throwaway line in Part One pays off devastatingly in Part Four. They are, in the best sense, literature for the ears. One should, of course, approach the enterprise with a certain wry detachment. Collecting audio dramas in the twenty-first century has the faint air of eccentricity, like maintaining a collection of wax cylinders or insisting on listening to the wireless. But that is rather the point. In an age when everything screams for your visual attention, there is something quietly rebellious about closing your eyes and letting the mind’s eye do the work. The Doctor, after all, has always been at his best when slightly out of step with the prevailing fashions.

So stock up. Assemble your range as one might a collection of single malt whisky: not for immediate consumption, but for the long, cold nights when the BBC has once again misplaced its sense of wonder. Let the shelves groan under the weight of those distinctive covers. When the next television revival arrives—trumpeted with all the usual fanfare and inevitable slight disappointment—you will be able to greet it with the calm superiority of one who has not been idle in the interim. You will have been travelling, you see. While others waited, you were already out there in the vortex, having adventures. Big Finish will keep the TARDIS flying through the long nights. 

The least we can do is go along for the ride. After all, in the words of a wiser head than most television executives, the universe is a big place. Best not to explore it empty-handed. Or, in this case, empty-eared.

BELFAST'S NEW (IMPORTED) TROUBLES

Northern Ireland, that small but densely packed laboratory of grievance, has spent the better part of three decades in the 1970s and beyond, testing the proposition that men with strong tribal loyalties and ready access to explosives might, under the right conditions, learn to live together. The Troubles, as they were euphemistically called—rather as one might describe a mild case of food poisoning that lasts twenty-five years—left thousands dead, entire districts scarred, and a peace process that required the sort of patient diplomacy usually reserved for a farmer trying to evict New Age Travellers off his land with nothing more than a shepherd's crook and wishful thinking. 

And yet, here we are in 2026, on Kinnaird Avenue in north Belfast, where a man was set upon with a knife in what onlookers described, with the sort of understatement the Irish have perfected, as an attempt to saw off his head. Bystanders intervened; one suspect was arrested; the victim was hospitalised with serious injuries. The cordons went up, the cameras clicked, and the usual rituals of official concern were observed. All very familiar. Only this time, the accents and the grievances were not the old, comforting, almost folkloric ones of Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Republican. Something newer had been imported, and with it, a different flavour of barbarism. 

One pictures the scene with a certain dry inevitability. The police tape fluttering like bunting at a particularly grim fête. The forensic officers in their white suits, picking over the debris of yet another evening that failed to live up to multicultural expectations. The post that drew attention to this unhappy affair put the matter with commendable bluntness: after decades spent coaxing a fragile peace from the wreckage of the Troubles, why import an 'alien culture' into Belfast? It is the sort of question one is not supposed to ask in polite society, lest one be accused of noticing things. Governments, after all, have their reasons. They speak in the lofty language of enrichment, diversity, and the demographic refreshment that ageing European populations apparently require. What they mean, of course, is that someone must do the jobs that natives find tedious, pay the taxes that sustain generous welfare states, and—crucially—vote in ways that keep the current managerial class in office. The cultural consequences are treated as minor footnotes, to be managed by community liaison officers and stern editorials in the Guardian.

Northern Ireland, however, has form when it comes to footnotes that explode. For all the ink spilled on the sectarian divide, the province developed, over time, a certain grim expertise in managing its own divisions. The paramilitaries knew one another; the security forces knew the paramilitaries; everyone knew the rules of the game, however bloody. There was, beneath the horror, a perverse sort of local knowledge. The new arrivals arrive with no such shared history. They bring their own codes, their own conceptions of honour, their own enthusiastic interpretations of ancient texts that recommend vigorous use of the blade against the unbeliever. The result is not dialogue. It is not fusion cuisine and street festivals. It is a man on the pavement in north Belfast having his head worked on with a knife. 

Here the satirist’s temptation is almost irresistible. One imagines the policy meetings in some brightly lit Whitehall office, where earnest young graduates with first-class degrees in PPE and second-class degrees in reality sat around declaring that what post-Troubles Belfast really needed was a fresh injection of cultural vibrancy. Perhaps a few honour-based violence workshops. Maybe some workshops on female genital mutilation awareness, to balance the books. The Troubles, after all, were terribly white. How provincial. How lacking in global perspective. What better way to broaden horizons than to introduce practices honed in rather warmer climes, where the rule of law has a more flexible relationship with scripture?

And yet, for all the knowing smirks one might direct at such folly, there is a deeper irony at work—one that even the most jaded observer might find almost touching. For all that Northern Ireland endured in the 1970s, mass, unlimited third-world immigration may yet prove the issue that finally unites the Irish people ideologically, if not politically or geographically. Protestant and Catholic, north and south, Unionist and Nationalist: suddenly they find themselves staring at the same phenomenon. Not the old enemy across the border or across the street, but something imported from afar, alien in custom, expectation, and temperament. The very diversity that was meant to dilute old hatreds has, in a twist worthy of the blackest comedy, provided a new focus for a shared recognition: this is not working.

One can already hear the spluttering from the usual quarters. How dare you reduce complex migration patterns to crude generalisations? As if the spectacle of repeated attempts at impromptu surgery with a kitchen knife were merely a matter of statistical outliers. As if the reluctance of certain communities to integrate were a myth invented by tabloid editors rather than a daily observable fact on the streets of London, Malmö, Paris, and now, apparently, Belfast. The Irish, of all people, with their long memory of invasion, famine, and cultural erosion, might have been expected to spot the pattern. Instead, many embraced the rhetoric of open borders with the enthusiasm of converts to a new and fashionable faith—only to discover that the new faithful do not always return the compliment.

There is something almost poetic in this development, the grand narrative of European self-effacement reaching its absurd conclusion in a province that once specialised in absurd conclusions. The peace process, painstakingly assembled like a fragile piece of modernist sculpture, risks being knocked over not by the old tribal cudgels but by the newer, sharper implements of an imported intolerance. And the people who once divided themselves so meticulously over whether to salute the Queen or sing Amhrán na bhFiann may yet discover that, when it comes to basic questions of physical security and cultural continuity, they have more in common than the bureaucrats ever allowed.

Whether this unity will express itself in any coherent political form remains to be seen. Geography and history still weigh heavily; the border is still there, the old slogans still echo. But ideology is a subtler thing. It moves in the realm of recognition—what people know in their bones, even if they dare not say it aloud at dinner parties. In that realm, the knife on Kinnaird Avenue has spoken more eloquently than any diversity consultant ever could.

One can only hope the lesson is absorbed before more cordons go up and more victims go down. Because peace, once lost, is devilishly hard to regain. Ask anyone who lived through the 1970s. Or, better still, ask the man who very nearly lost his head trying to enjoy a quiet Monday evening in Belfast.

STARMER FALLS OFF HIS SILICON HORSE

In the great tradition of British political leadership, one occasionally encounters a figure so perfectly suited to the role of national disappointment that it seems almost cruel to mock him. Almost. Then one remembers that this particular specimen, Keir Starmer, has appointed himself the nation’s nanny-in-chief, determined to shield the youth of Britain from the terrible peril of TikTok while leaving them perfectly free to inherit his own masterclass in mediocrity. One pictures the man now: that permanently startled expression, like a provincial solicitor who has just discovered his filing cabinet has been infested with something progressive, peering out from behind the curtains of Downing Street as if the electorate might at any moment storm the gates demanding actual governance. Instead, they receive a social-media ban. How very Starmer. How very, pathetically, him.
Let us be clear from the outset. This is not the action of a serious statesman weighing evidence and public mood. This is the reflexive spasm of a weak-willed authoritarian who has spent his adult life confusing the removal of civil liberties with moral seriousness. Starmer, that hollow man with the face of a disappointed supply teacher and the political instincts of a weather vane in a hurricane, has reversed himself yet again. Two years ago he was dismissing the very idea of age-appropriate smartphone edicts. Now, with the polls sagging like his own jowls on a Monday morning, he is suddenly the valiant protector of the nation’s teenagers from the horrors of short-form video. One wonders what particular blend of focus-group despair and parental sob-story finally penetrated that thick skull of his. Probably the same blend that convinced him Brexit was both a good idea and a bad idea simultaneously, depending on which way the wind was blowing through Islington.
The timing, of course, is exquisite in its cynicism. Days before a by-election, with the vultures already circling his leadership, Sir Keir decides his legacy shall be the state telling parents they are too stupid to manage their own children’s screen time. This from a man whose own offspring, one gathers, navigated the digital world without apparent catastrophe. But then consistency was never Starmer’s strong suit. The fellow flip-flops with such elegant regularity that one half-expects him to announce a ban on political consistency itself, lest some dangerous principle take root in the Labour Party.
What a pathetic creature he is, when you look at him squarely. There he stands, the very picture of out-of-touch bewilderment: a knight of the realm who achieved his highest office by promising everything to everyone and then looking wounded when reality proved uncooperative. His idea of bold leadership is to ban the very platforms where the public mocks him most effectively. One can almost hear the internal monologue in that nasal, lawyerly whine: “The people are saying mean things about me on the internet. Quick, pass a law. Make it look caring. Something about the children. The children are always a winner.” Never mind that the evidence for such a sweeping prohibition is about as robust as Starmer’s spine. Correlation, hysteria, and a handful of tragic anecdotes dressed up as causation will do nicely when one’s primary concern is not truth but the desperate preservation of one’s own floundering authority.
Here is a man who rose to prominence by presenting himself as a decent, moderate sort—only to reveal, in office, the soul of a minor bureaucrat convinced that every social ill can be solved by tighter regulation and a sufficiently stern expression. Social media makes teenagers anxious? Ban it. Never mind the evidence that suggests the causal link is, at best, tenuous. Never mind that previous moral panics over everything from penny dreadfuls to video nasties eventually looked ridiculous. Never mind, above all, that British parents might just be capable of exercising judgment without the Prime Minister inserting his clammy handshake into their domestic arrangements.
No, Starmer knows better. Starmer, who looks as though he has never had an original or dangerous thought in his life, has decided the nation requires his personal intervention to prevent the young from encountering unapproved opinions, unflattering memes, or—God forbid—laughter at his expense. One imagines him in the small hours, pacing Number 10 in his sensible slippers, muttering about 'harmful content' while ignoring the rather larger harm inflicted on a nation's personal liberty by his own government’s incompetence. The economy stutters, the borders leak, the public services groan, and the Prime Minister’s big idea is to stop sixteen-year-olds from doom-scrolling. Magnificent. The ship is listing badly, the captain is rearranging the deckchairs on his phone, and the passengers are to be denied access to the shipping forecasts.
This is authoritarianism for the terminally timid. The sort of man who needs facial recognition technology and age-verification schemes to feel safe in his own skin. The sort of man who believes the state should play the role of disappointed parent to an entire generation because he himself lacks the courage to address genuine problems. Starmer does not lead; he manages decline with the anxious fastidiousness of a man who has never quite recovered from being mildly unpopular at school. His entire bearing screams “please don’t shout at me.” Unfortunately for him, the British public has rather a lot to shout about, and the louder they shout on X and elsewhere, the more frantically he reaches for the off-switch.
The unintended consequences, naturally, will be vast and hilarious. Teenagers, being teenagers, will circumvent the ban with the effortless ingenuity that Starmer himself so conspicuously lacks. The law will be mocked, evaded, and ultimately discredited—teaching the young an excellent lesson in the futility of official edicts, if nothing else. Meanwhile, the real issues—family breakdown, educational failure, a culture that has lost confidence in itself—will remain untouched by this pathetic gesture. But never mind all that. Sir Keir will have his legacy: the man who tried to save Britain’s youth from Instagram while presiding over their inheritance of a diminished nation.
One almost feels sorry for the fellow. Almost. Then one remembers the expression on his face whenever he is required to answer a difficult question—the slight pursing of the lips, the hunted look in the eyes, the air of a man who wishes the whole business of democracy could be conducted via pre-approved talking points and a reliable majority. This is not leadership. This is the last refuge of a political nonentity who has run out of ideas and is now reduced to banning other people’s ideas instead.
In the end, Keir Starmer’s social-media panic reveals him perfectly: a hollow, authoritarian lightweight, terrified of public opinion, contemptuous of parental autonomy, and utterly adrift in a country that increasingly sees him for what he is—a temporary embarrassment with delusions of moral grandeur. The teenagers will be fine. It is the adults who inflicted this man upon them who should be seeking therapy. Preferably offline.