The feature by Kenny Smith includes an interview with me and fellow writers David Llewellyn and James Kettle.
Space Security Service - Bret Vyon Lives! is released in February 2026 but available to pre-order now.
The blog of writer and producer Simon Guerrier
The feature by Kenny Smith includes an interview with me and fellow writers David Llewellyn and James Kettle.
Space Security Service - Bret Vyon Lives! is released in February 2026 but available to pre-order now.
It's an illuminated, six-page piece covering Jean's life and career, and includes a few words from me about working with her on several Doctor Who audio stories, beginning with Home Truths.
There are some amazing photographs of Jean at the premiere of Return to Oz, care of Tricia Trozzi, as well as a feature on the press response to that movie and a checklist of merchandise. Thanks to Sarah K Crotzer for sending me a copy.
The Heartless Sea by Simon Guerrier
As Harry Sullivan and Naomi Cross investigate the apparently haunted “Warehouse 9”, they come across someone who they didn’t expect to meet – the Doctor! But one who hasn’t met them yet… and soon after they find themselves dealing with the wrath of the most furious sea there has ever been.
The story is part of Companion Chronicles: The Legacy of Time, paired up with a story called The Kraken of Hagwell by Barbara Hambly. What a thrill to be teamed up with Barbara, who I've sat on panels with at conventions.
The Heartless Sea stars Michael Troughton as Doctor Who, Eleanor Crooks as Naomi and Christopher Naylor as Harry. It is directed by Nicholas Briggs and produced by Dominic G Martin.
The set is out in January. Blurb and puff as follows:
Bret Vyon Lives!
Jane Slavin and Joe Sims encounter some familiar faces in the second volume of full-cast Space Security Service audio adventures, due for release January 2026.
The guardians of the Solar System – agents Anya Kingdom (Jane Slavin), Mark Seven (Joe Sims), and Sola Akinyemi (Madeline Appiah) – return for three thrilling original adventures.
Their most dangerous enemies, the Daleks (Nicholas Briggs), are back, in greater numbers than ever, exterminating their way across the cosmos. And when she becomes their prisoner, Anya encounters a man she used to know and love – her uncle Bret Vyon.
This Space Security Service agent was originally played by Nicholas Courtney in 1965-66 Doctor Who TV serial The Daleks’ Master Plan, and here is voiced by Jon Culshaw. Anya knows her uncle is dead, so who is this living, breathing Bret Vyon?
The Worlds of Doctor Who – Space Security Service: Bret Vyon Lives! is now available to pre-order for just £19.99 (as a digital download to own).
The three exciting interplanetary adventures are:
The Man Inside by Simon Guerrier
Anya Kingdom is a prisoner of the Daleks on a very peculiar space station orbiting a very peculiar star. The Daleks don’t want to kill Anya; they want to break her down psychologically.
One way to do that is to lock her in a cell with someone Anya knows is a fake. Whoever, whatever, this man really is, he cannot be her beloved uncle. Bret Vyon is dead, end of story.
But if Anya is to survive, she will need his help…
The Wages of Death by David Llewellyn
Furiosa 237 is a remote world in the hinterlands of the galaxy. Anya and Mark teleport in and quickly take jobs on a cargo shop. They’re undercover – on an urgent, secret mission.
Their task is to locate a device called a Progenitor, then drop it into the nearest black hole — and quickly, before it can hatch.
But at least one person on board is determined to save the Progenitor and unleash its deadly contents: a whole army of Daleks.
The Sky is for Sale by James Kettle
A huge satellite mines the atmosphere of Saturn. Following a number of threats, agent Sola Akinyemi of the Space Security Service is on board, tasked with keeping the workers and their families safe.
Meanwhile, Anya Kingdom is at Triple-S headquarters, working to expose and eradicate corruption in the service. But just as she’s making progress, HQ is attacked. And then the mining satellite is invaded – by a different hostile force!
In the desperate battle that follows, Anya and Sola will have to make impossible choices. Who can they really trust? And what horrors are they willing to sanction if it means defeating the Daleks?
The guest cast of Space Security Service: Bret Vyon Lives! includes Shobu Kapoor (We Are Lady Parts), Forbes Masson (The High Life), and Louiza Patikas (The Archers), plus further names yet to be announced.
Producer and writer Simon Guerrier said: “Anya Kingdom faces her greatest challenge yet as a prisoner of the Daleks. But help is at hand from the least expected person – Bret Vyon, traitor of the SSS and Anya's long-dead uncle! With this second batch of adventures, we really wanted to raise the stakes. With the Daleks on the warpath, Earth's future depends on alliances – but who can Anya really trust?
“What a delight it’s been working on this set of three thrilling adventures steeped in the rich lore that Terry Nation created all those years ago. I’ve loved every stage of collaboration with John Dorney and Barnaby Kay on this compelling, fast-paced series.
“The one I've written is a particular treat. An age ago, I worked on stories featuring SSS agent Sara Kingdom as played by the brilliant Jean Marsh. So it's been a particular pleasure to revisit Sara’s brother Bret and tell something of his side of their fateful story. And then there's what David and James have written to follow... Oh, just you wait!”
Big Finish listeners can save money by pre-ordering Bret Vyon Lives! in a multibuy bundle with the previous volume of Space Security Service (June 2025’s The Voord in London) for just £38 (download to own).
All the above prices (including pre-order and multibuy bundle discounts) are fixed for a limited time only and guaranteed no later than 28 February 2026.
I, in turn, get reviewed, with Jamie Lenman casting his critical eye over Smith and Sullivan: Reunited, of which I wrote one episode. He says Blood Type is "complex and nuanced", which is nice.
There are lots of other goodies this issue, not least Gary Gillatt's lovely piece about the war service of the actors who played the first three Doctors Who.
Anyway. I'm on deadlines so must dash. Will write up notes on some recent books read and post them here asap.
To accompany the release, Rob Ritchie has produced a title sequence to match Jon Ewen's amazing theme tune for the series:
Full blurb as follows:
They’re the guardians of the Solar System and Earth’s first line of defence. But now the agents of the Space Security Service face their greatest ever threat…
Anya Kingdom (Jane Slavin) and the android Mark Seven (Joe Sims) are the top agents of the Space Security Service, fighting alien threats and sinister villains across the galaxy.
Last encountered in the Dalek Universe story arc, in which they teamed up with the Tenth Doctor, these popular characters now star in their own spin-off series of full-cast audio dramas, inspired by the 1960s Doctor Who serials of Terry Nation.
The thrilling retro-styled adventures of the Space Security Service begin today with a box set of three brand-new stories, which take Anya and Mark to London in the 1980s, a Thal planet where a scientist conducts dangerous experiments, and a world on the brink of war.
The Worlds of Doctor Who – Space Security Service: The Voord in London is now available to purchase for just £19.99 (as a digital download to own), exclusively from Big Finish.
The SSS’s three latest missions are:
The Voord in London by LR Hay
1980s London. WDC Ann Kelso is assigned to CID, helping to clean up the streets. But “Ann” is really SSS Agent Anya Kingdom from the 41st century, on a top-secret mission to track down aliens hiding in the past. But then she finds a different group of aliens hiding in the Thames – with very deadly intentions…
The Thal from G.R.A.C.E. by Felicia Barker
As their investigations continue, SSS agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven journey to a planet colonised by Thals. They’re in pursuit of a Thal scientist who has perfected an experimental new weapon… But soon they are the targets…
Allegiance by Angus Dunican
The lush planet Othrys is on the cusp of civil war. SSS agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven are meant to keep a low profile while on a diplomatic mission there… But when a pregnant surrogate for the Othryn royal family desperately asks for their help, they’re unable to refuse…
Joining Jane Slavin and Joe Sims in Space Security Service: The Voord in London are Sean Gilder (Slow Horses), Madeline Appiah (Jungle), and Lara Lemon (Insomnia). The guest cast also includes Rodney Gooden, David Holt, Nicholas Briggs, Camille Burnett, Peter Bankolé, Jez Fielder, and Barnaby Kay.
Cover art by Grant Kempster. Script editor John Dorney, director Barnaby Kay and executive producers Jason Haigh-Ellery and Nicholas Briggs.
Big Finish have shared the cover artwork for Smith & Sullivan: Reunited, the Doctor Who spin-off audio set out next month which includes my story, Blood Type, as well as stories by Tim Foley and Roland Moore. The art is by Ryan Aplin.
The episode is available wherever you get your podcasts, and there's also a video version on YouTube.
The Space Security Service return!
Jane Slavin and Joe Sims star as Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven in two brand-new box sets of full cast audio drama from The Worlds of Doctor Who, coming soon from Big Finish Productions.
They’re the guardians of the Solar System and Earth’s first line of defence. But now the agents of the Space Security Service face their greatest ever threat…
Having joined David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor in the popular Dalek Universe series, the heroes of the Space Security Service will soon defend the universe once again in their own exciting adventures. Jane Slavin will return as Anya Kingdom, a special agent from the 41st century, alongside Joe Sims as her android colleague Mark Seven.
These star-spanning escapades will take inspiration from the imaginative creations of Terry Nation. Nation devised the Space Security Service for the 1960s Doctor Who TV serials Mission to the Unknown and The Daleks’ Master Plan, and expanded upon them in the Dalek annuals and comics, as well as a never-made TV spin-off series, The Daleks.
The fast-paced new adventures will see Anya and Mark encounter monsters from across the universe, from Voord in the Thames to a rogue Thal scientist.
There are two box sets of The Worlds of Doctor Who – Space Security Service to look forward to, each comprising three thrilling episodes of full-cast audio drama. The first volume, The Voord in London, is due for release in June 2025; details of the second volume, due out in January 2026, will be announced at a later date.
Space Security Service: The Voord in London is now available to pre-order for just £19.99 (as a digital download to own), exclusively from Big Finish. But see the bargain offer below for both sets.
The three episodes in this first box set are:
- The Voord in London by LR Hay
- The Thal from G.R.A.C.E. by Felicia Barker
- Allegiance by Angus Dunican
Producer Simon Guerrier said: “This series has long been in the works – arguably since Terry Nation tried to launch his Daleks TV show back in the 1960s. We've taken that as our cue and come up with a fast-moving, fun series of adventures for Space Security Service agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven, who were such a hit in the Dalek Universe range.
“We start with Anya back in London in the 20th century, working undercover as a police officer on the trail of one group of aliens - and then getting caught up with another. Soon the action moves to... well, just wait and see!”
All the above prices (including pre-order and multibuy bundle discounts) are fixed for a limited time only and guaranteed no later than August 2025.
The director of Space Security Service is Barnaby Kay, the script editor is John Dorney and the cover art is by Grant Kempster.
Blurb for the set as follows:
Sarah Jane Smith: investigative journalist; Dr Harry Sullivan: UNIT operative. Together, they journeyed to the stars with the Doctor. But when the adventures end, what can they do?
Find more...
Reunited in the chaos of 1980s London, Sarah and Harry find danger and darkness lurking beneath the metropolitan veneer of wealth and technology. With trusty super-computer K9 and the brilliant Lavinia Smith alongside, new adventures are just beginning...
The other stories in the set are The Caller by Tim Foley and Union of the Snake by Roland Moore. Sadie Miller plays Sarah Jane Smith, Christopher Naylor is Harry Sullivan, John Leeson is K9 and Annette Badland is Sarah's Aunt Lavinia. More details to come...
I'm one of the punters involved, asked about such things as The Joy of Sex and the Doctor's reacting vibrator (yes, really).
The Savages sees the departure of companion Steven Taylor, played by Peter Purves. You can find out what happened to him next in the audio stories The War to End All Wars, The Founding Fathers and The Locked Room.
Yesterday, while searching for something else I came across five one-paragraph ideas for Doctor Who audiobooks that I submitted on Sunday, 15 November 2009, a few hours before settling down to watch The Waters of Mars.
One of the five ideas is striking. I had no idea at the time that Amy’s Choice had been commissioned for the 2010 TV series and this was all a long time before the Dream Crabs featured in Last Christmas (2014). But, by total coincidence, I came up with something a bit similar:
Perfect Worlds
A sort of ghost story. Amy and the Doctor rescue each other from their dreams. After finally leaving the Doctor behind, Amy is back home with her friends – human ones and those she’s met on her adventures with the Doctor. It’s a nice day and there’s a big party. But some of the friends she knows are really dead. And then the Doctor comes to see her. He explains she’s asleep, she’s been bitten by something that’s feeding off her dreams – and is slowly killing her. He’s using a machine to speak to her: and by willing to wake up she can. The Doctor shows her the small, scaly creature feeding on their desires. And it bites him. Amy now has to go rescue him… He dreams of his own home and the thousands of people who he couldn’t save, all living happily together. Amy talks him out of staying.
This happens quite a lot: more than once I’ve been told I can’t do X or Y in a Doctor Who story because someone else is already doing it or something like it in another story I didn’t know about. As an editor and producer, I’ve sometimes had to tell people the same thing. There is a lot of Doctor Who being dreamt up all the time, so it’s not really surprising.
But on this particular occasion I don’t think I was made aware that I’d chanced upon the wheeze of a forthcoming TV episode. And by the time Amy’s Choice was broadcast on 15 May 2010, I’d forgotten having a similar idea.
That’s probably because I was a bit caught up in other things at the time. But it’s also how pitching works: if the people you’re pitching aren’t enthused by what you send in, you send in something else. Ideas are the easy bit. If there’s interest in an idea you then move on to the trickier thing of developing it into a storyline.
I sent in some more ideas and one of those eventually became The Empty House, released in September 2012.But I realise (having had it pointed out) that I then worked some of this Perfect Worlds idea into The Anachronauts, released in January 2012. In fact, another of the pitches sent in with Perfect Worlds was called The Deluge and reworked an outline for a Doctor Who novel I’d submitted in the early 2000s. That idea eventually ended up as The Flood, an episode of my science-fiction series Graceless, released in December 2011.
The three other ideas — Snip! Snip!, 77 Aliens and The Brain Drain — might still find homes somewhere… Never throw anything away, Harry.
This morning, out for a walk, I puzzled over where the wheeze for Perfect Worlds came from in the first place. At the time, one trick I used for sparking ideas was to scan over my shelves of books and DVDs. It wasn’t always to come up with, “A Doctor Who version of X…” Often just being reminded of a scene, a character, a line of dialogue would ignite something.
With that in mind, I think Perfect Worlds was probably inspired by the 1986 movie Labyrinth, especially the “As The World Falls Down” sequence at the ball — hence Amy being at a party — and the bit when Sarah thinks she is back in her room but it’s yet another trick. She has to puzzle out, for herself, the difference between the comforting and the real…
Maybe I’d been told, or picked up somewhere, that the 2010 series of Doctor Who would have something of a fairy-tale feel. If so, I was trying to get myself in the right kind of head space to match that — and that’s why this idea came so close to what they were already doing.
On pages 36-39 of the new DWM, there's my latest "Script to Screen" feature, this time on Babystation Beta - the space station seen in 2024 episode Space Babies. It's a companion piece to the coverage of that episode I wrote for issue #604 in May. In this case, I spoke to art director Jon Horsham and VFX supervisor Jim Parsons, as well as director Julie Anne Robinson.
Also this issue, my former script editor Jacqueline Rayner says some nice things about my 2011 audio Doctor Who story The Cold Equations. If that's of interest, in 2021, I was a guest on the Gallifrey's Most Wanted podcast talking about this story and the trilogy it was part of.
There's also a review of Deathworld, the story I script edited for Big Finish, which Jamie Lenman finds "surprising, and really quite touching". In Galaxy Forum, reader Bill Silver says nice things about the work Gav Rymill, Rhys Williams and I did on recreating the sets of missing episodes in the recent special issue.
And I think Eddie Robson's fun "This month in..." column (p. 49) uses an image of Doctor Who creators Sydney Newman and Donald Wilson that I spotted in an old issue of BBC in-house magazine Ariel, snapped on my phone and then cropped - those are Judi Dench's hands (and wine glass) in the bottom left.
![]() |
| Aerial, December 1967 |
"The First, Second and Third Doctors become caught in a temporal game of chess played between the President of Gallifrey and Death itself," says the blurb.
The cast includes Stephen Noonan as Doctor Who, Michael Troughton as Doctor Who and Tim Treloar as Doctor Who, with Katy Manning as Jo Grant, Jon Culshaw as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon.
Doctor Who - Deathworld is directed and produced by David O'Mahony. I was script editor on this lost story, having previously adapted Prison in Space and The Mega, and produced last year's The Ark and Daleks! Genesis of Terror.
Now you can watch a confused old man trying to remember things and articulate some kind of cogent thought.
It's a thrilling and weird adventure, especially fascinating because it adds so much insight into the creative process of that much-loved TV story. There's a particularly brilliant cliffhanger but also the character of the Doctor is like nothing we've ever seen - a kindly old man who quietly slips in to fix problems, a sort of janitor of time and space. Reading the script, I kept thinking of Mr Richardson, the gently humoured caretaker at my primary school a thousand years ago.
What a thrill to work with my childhood hero Tom Baker and to hear his own thoughts on the script and how he should play this so-very-different Doctor. What a treat to work with Terry Molloy (my daughter, who overheard some of the remote recording, referred to him as 'Scary Dude'). What a brilliant cast and crew. I'm especially grateful to director Samuel Clements, sound designer Mark Henrick and composer / exec producer Nicholas Briggs. Amazing cover artist Ryan Aplin has shared clean artwork and his process.
I've now handed on the reins of Doctor Who - The Lost Stories to another producer to be announced in due course.