In case you missed it, a brand-new Doctor Who audio drama reuniting Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper was released last week. The fourth entry in the Ninth Doctor Adventures series, ‘Cloud Eight’, is now available to buy from Big Finish.
‘Cloud Eight’ follows The Doctor and Rose Tyler as they visit the 47th century, and a floating city named High High Wycombe (brilliantly riffing on the New New York name from the TV show).
At first, the location looks like a utopia, as no one has to work and bills aren’t a thing. People also don’t dream when they sleep, but always have a blissful rest.
It soon turns out that there are “dark secrets” lurking just below the perfect veneer, and as the only person who can still dream, teenager Elsa might be the key to it all.
According to both Eccleston and the story’s co-writer Lauren Mooney, the themes of ‘Cloud Eight’ are very pertinent to our current times.
Big Finish//BBC
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“I’m really interested in the relationship between work and sense of self. There’s something fascinating about the paradise of a world without work, which was the starting germ of an idea about a future in which nobody has to work, but everybody’s minds are colonised by data storage,” Mooney said.
“We are all in a world where our attention is being clamoured for, and it’s easy to outsource our thinking and our creativity. And it’s tempting to do that, and not to think for ourselves or create for ourselves. And so this story is about the perils of doing that, because we need those things!”
Eccleston stated that the events of the story get The Doctor quite riled, and he gives humanity an important warning: “Please do not allow yourself to be controlled. Do not give yourselves up to being mechanised.”
BBC
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The 74-minute episode also features former Coronation Street actor Charlie Condou, who actually appeared in the Doctor Who TV series last year in the episode ‘The Interstellar Song Contest’.
The next Eccleston/Piper drama has already been confirmed: ‘Pandemonium’, which is set in the Powell Estate and due for an April release.
The upcoming Christmas special will also pick up from where the last TV episode of Who left off, where Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor regenerated into someone played by Piper. Is it a version of Rose, The Doctor, the Bad Wolf persona, or something else entirely? We’ve got a while to wait to find out.
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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016. In his time, he’s covered a host of live events and interviewed celebrities big and small. A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe also enjoys video games and in particular PlayStation. Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I’m a Fish.