The Wreck of the Titan (Barnaby Edwards)

The release for May 2010 sees the second of three stories starring Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor and Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon.

"The Wreck of the Titan", which is written and directed by Barnaby Edwards, finds The Doctor and Jamie investigating a mystery at sea. The guest cast includes Alexander Siddig (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) and Miranda Raison ("Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks" and Spooks). Also starring are: Christopher Fairbank and Matt Addis.

The Sixth Doctor is taking Jamie McCrimmon for his first proper trip in the TARDIS. ‘This is the new Jamie, the Jamie that hasn’t remembered the Doctor, and the Doctor decides to take him for a sort of pleasure cruise on the Queen Mary’, explains writer and director of "The Wreck of the Titan", Barnaby Edwards. ‘But the TARDIS takes them to the wrong place - it’s not the Queen Mary, it’s the Titanic! And then strange things start happening, and it may or may not be the real Titanic, but that iceberg is looming, and all hell is going to break loose! And all the characters change, in this story. It’s a story of metamorphosis’.

Sixth Doctor

Barnaby Edwards has also revealed that compared to previous audio releases it has a very small cast list. ‘I decided to write this for as few people as possible - it’s the Doctor, Jamie, and four others. And that meant I could have arguably the best cast we’ve ever had, because I had the budget to do it!’

Alexander Siddig plays Captain Nemo. As this actor has revealed: ‘He’s like this mythical fictitious Jules Verne hero. An exotic, swashbuckling hero of the deep! Explorer, inventor, general renaissance man. He’s under orders from someone mysterious to get hold of the Doctor and his travelling companion...’

Jamie McCrimmon

‘This story is not set in Jamie’s era’, Frazer Hines has pointed out, ‘but it’s still old-fashioned enough - wood and balustrades and brass and stuff - that he can relate to it more than to a shiny silver dome and men in space helmets! Although it’s a different time to his own, he feels a little bit more at home in it; there are things he can latch on to’.

‘They both get their independence’, Barnaby Edwards has revealed. ‘Jamie is no longer a cipher, as he sometimes was on television. He’s more of an active character - he saves the Doctor, and he has ideas - but the Doctor still has to rescue him! It’s now less of a father/son relationship, and more like one of brothers...’

On the Back Cover:

'It's the biggest ship the world has known - and in just twenty minutes' time it's going to hit an iceberg the size of Ben Nevis!'

The North Atlantic is a treacherous place at the best of times. 14 April 1912 is the very worst of times. The Doctor and Jamie find themselves trapped aboard the RMS Titanic, 400 miles off Newfoundland and heading towards a conclusive appointment with destiny.

But the iceberg isn't their only problem. Down in the inky depths, something is hunting: something huge, hostile and hungry. This should certainly be A Night To Remember.

I spent a great deal of my childhood in the small Cornish fishing village of Port Isaac (now sadly inundated with Doc Martin fans) and my formative years were awash with tales of shipwrecks and sea monsters. Also, like many boys my age, I was a great fan of famous historical disasters: the Hindenburg conflagration, the Toy Bridge disaster and, of course, the sinking of the Titanic.

The Wreck of the Titan is a distillation of these youthful interests, filtered through countless Irwin Allen disaster movies and fortified with a healthy dose of the sort of adventure stories that were - and still are - meat and drink to me: Buchan, Wells, Doyle, Verne and Haggard.

So fill your glass and join me 'up top' at the Captain's cocktail party. We're about to brave uncharted waters on a journey of discovery. And remember: the oddest things happen at sea.


Musician’s Notes: Howard Carter

When doing the post-production work for Big Finish Audios, writing the music is often relegated to the tail end of the schedule. Not so with The Wreck of the Titan. When first reading the script, the seeds of a soundtrack began to take root, and I couldn't resist delving into the music straight away. From tuxedos on the Titanic to the wild waves of the North Atlantic, the epic scale of the story demanded an equally grandiose approach to the score.

My initial foray into the compositional process involved writing a collection of themes and set pieces, suitably adventurous and nautical in character, which I could later adapt once the edits were complete. However, the original images and sequences I had associated with the music were so intertwined that the atmospheres created by the music often informed and influenced the sound design approach, and I even ended up editing some of the action sequences to the scores I had already written. A slightly irregular approach, perhaps, but hopefully the end result justifies the means!