The Raincloud Man (Eddie Robson)

 December 2008’s release was to be a story called "Blue Forgotten Planet" but it was replaced by "The Raincloud Man". Written by Eddie Robson this Sixth Doctor story, with companion Charley Pollard, has been directed by Nicholas Briggs and was recorded on the 26th and 27th June 2008.

With the planned move, in 2009, to three-story seasons for the monthly Doctor Who audio adventures range, has to some extent been trailed through 2008 with a number of ongoing strands cropping up across several different adventures. This is even more explicit in "The Raincloud Man", as not only is it another in the developing story of the Eighth Doctor’s former companion, Charley Pollard, and her travels with the Sixth Doctor, but it’s also an explicit sequel to the 2008 story "The Condemned".

‘The pairing of Colin and India has worked brilliantly’, Executive Producer Nicholas Briggs has revealed. ‘So brilliantly, in fact, that we've altered our upcoming plans for the range. I'm delighted to reveal that our original idea to conclude this partnership in December has been postponed, with "Blue Forgotten Planet" now being pushed back into 2009. We've more stories yet to tell with these two. So, the December 2008 slot has now been filled by a story provisionally entitled "The Raincloud Man"’.

"The Raincloud Man", sees the two travellers reunited with DI Menzies, again played by Anna Hope who played cat-nun Novice Hame in the 2006 television story "New Earth" and its sequel, "Gridlock", in 2007. ‘It was part of the brief’, returning writer Eddie Robson has revealed, ‘Anna Hope was great in the part and there was general enthusiasm within Big Finish for bringing her back. And I was glad to revisit Menzies, I liked writing her in the first place - and writing her with Anna’s Menzies voice in my head was even better, it’s always easier to write a character when you know the voice beforehand.’ As in "The Condemned" it seems that DI Menzies is still having to deal with alien infiltration in Manchester, but the stakes are raised considerably higher when a mysterious gambling ship arrives in Salford Quays.

Sixth Doctor

 Also starring in this story are: Michael Fenton Stevens, Aidan J David, Octavia Walters, Simon Sherlock, Jeremy James, Steven Hansell and Andrew Dickens.

Regular listeners will be aware that the Big Finish producers are teasing us a little with regards to how long it seems to be taking for Charley to confess to The Doctor that she has already met him - albeit in a later incarnation. ‘The Doctor has accepted her as a good friend by this stage and they’re getting on well,’ Eddie Robson has revealed, ‘but in "The Raincloud Man" he’s reminded again that all’s not right. It’s a bit of an elephant in the room because charley knows it too, but she doesn’t know what to do about it. There’s a lovely sense of doom over the whole thing...’

India Fisher

India Fisher, who plays Charley, has stated ‘I’m always terrified that listeners will get to the point where they’re bored of Charley, but actually Charley has changed a bit since moving across to be with the Sixth Doctor - she’s grown up a lot. Plus there’s the fact that she has some information about their relationship that The Doctor doesn’t’

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Accompanying this release is the annual 'Subscriber Special'. Titled "Return of the Krotons" this audio adventure features the return of Robert Holmes’ crystalline creatures, the Krotons, who made their first (and only) appearance in the 1968/69's Second Doctor television story "The Krotons". Nicholas Briggs has written the script and has directed the story, which again features the popular pairing of the Sixth Doctor and his 'new' companion Charley Pollard. "Return of the Krotons" precedes "The Raincloud Man".

On the Back Cover:

Having just defeated the Krotons, The Doctor is treating Charley to a hearty English breakfast, when an intriguing mystery suddenly presents itself. And to solve it, they must plunge back into the criminal underbelly of Manchester, where an old friend is up to her neck in alien trouble.

But what seemed like a mere mystery ends up being a life or death struggle at the centre of an interplanetary war in which the stakes are so high, The Doctor or Charley must gamble and lose their identity. And throughout, the lone figure of the Raincloud Man may hold the key to success or failure.

The Raincloud Man is a sort of sequel to my earlier Sixth Doctor and Charley story The Condemned, in as much as it’s set in Manchester and features the return of DI Patricia Menzies (who we were all keen to bring back after Anna Hope brought her to life so brilliantly).

There’s no connection in terms of plot, but taken together I suppose these plays are my attempt to pick up a thread from the Sixth Doctor’s era which I always felt had unfulfilled potential; the early scenes of Attack of the Cybermen, when Lytton and his gang are preparing for their heist. That sequence seems to have come out of an old Euston Films crime drama, it’s very 1980s and it’s a world which Doctor Who rarely went near. The story went off at a totally different tangent after that, which I found disappointing. So this is me trying to bring the Sixth Doctor back to that kind of setting, to see how he copes.


Also Available: Doctor Who - The Condemned

Manchester, 2008. The TARDIS lands inside a run-down tower block, beside a dead body - which leads to some awkward questions when The Doctor is found there by the police. Made the prime suspect, how can The Doctor prove to the no-nonsense DI Patricia Menzies that this is not the open-and-shut case it seems, and that she’s actually investigating the death of an alien?

Higher up in Ackley House, a girl named Maxine watches The Doctor being taken away in a squad car. Someone wants her to find out what happened in that room, and isn’t going to be happy if she doesn’t come up with the goods. But she’s got hold of someone who knows - someone very important to The Doctor…