A new professional 2 hour production of Doctor Who with dialogue by Russell T Davies will be available to buy next September (2015), however you may be surprised to hear (unless you're an uber fan) the Doctor in question will be the 7th, again played by Sylvester McCoy. And rather than TV, this will be a radio style full cast audio play released on 2 CDs. *And it's not actually a new story. Confused? Here's more info...

Although they've been producing audio plays for fifteen years - some of which have been broadcast on Radio 4 Extra - Big Finish Productions aren't known to all of Doctor Who's TV viewers, which is a shame as their radio and CD productions of new episodes of Doctor Who featuring performances by Doctors 4 through 8, played by Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann have been generally great and often brilliant.

However even before Big Finish, some well known Doctor Who TV scribes such as Mark Gatiss, Russell T Davies, Gareth Roberts and Steven Moffatt were writing Who novels and short stories, and it is one of these that Big Finish is about to record, to be released in September 2015.

Doctor Who: Damaged Goods by Russell T Davies was published as a novel by Virgin Books in October 1996 and was set close to the end of the 7th Doctor's life (Virgin would only publish a further five adventures with this incarnation) and sees the Doctor accompanied by two 'space cops' a.k.a. Adjudicators called Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester as his companions. It's a fairly grim and gritty story about psychic powers set in a housing estate, darker in tone than almost all Who that has been produced before or since.

That said, it's an exciting, engaging novel and well worth a read if you can track one down (and afford the mark-up on ebay) However, you won't have to in terms of just enjoying the story, as the Big Finish audio production isn't far off.

While it's a great Who story, and it'll be brilliant to hear 'new' dialogue by RTD performed by one of the classic Doctors, Damaged Goods seems a slightly odd choice of novel for Big Finish to adapt. Firstly Roz and Chris will appear in a CD for the first time (as far as listeners of the audio plays are concerned, if they have not read the books), and also the company are bringing it out in a special box-set as well as a regular CD, paired with a more light hearted Fourth Doctor story by Gareth Roberts.

However, apart from this odd quality of the release, this is a CD that fans of both RTD's run on Doctor Who and the series in general should be looking forward to, as it's the first time the writer's dialogue will be performed by a Doctor since his two part Sarah Jane adventure with Matt Smith and it's also a story that contains elements that turned up in his tenure as show-runner on the TV series, such as a bisexual companion (Chris Cwej before Captain Jack) and a black companion (Roz Forrester before Martha Jones), and a housing estate location.

More info can be found at www.bigfinish.com/doctor-who-damaged-goods to preorder the regular CD or www.bigfinish.com/doctor-who-novel-adaptations-volume-2 for the special edition.

Big Finish's first adaptation of a novel to feature the Doctor - Love and War by Paul Cornell - was an excellent release (and can be found here: www.bigfinish.com/love-and-war ) so all bodes well for this one!