We Cried: More! More! More!

This time last year, a review of a year's worth of Doctor Who was obliged to comment that 33 new full-length stories in one year - for a nominally dormant format - was startlingly productive. Well, it's time to recalibrate: 2001 has outdone its immediate predecessor with 36 official adventures hitting a seemingly insaturable market.

The increase is partly accounted for by the first in a series of novellas from Telos Publishing, Kim Newman's intriguing prequel to An Unearthly Child, Time and Relative, and partly because the last year saw no short fiction anthology from BBC Books, with all 22 release slots this year filled with full-length novels. The eighth Doctor strand saw the end of the Doctor's long exile to Earth and, from Colin Brake's Escape Velocity, a new companion in Anji Kapoor. The year has been bookended (as it were) by tales from Lance Parkin and Lawrence Miles, two of the most popular and iconoclastic contributors to the range, but otherwise the range seems to have spent most of the year catching its breath, consolodating the successes of last year and gaining strength and momentum for the next. The previous Doctor range, on the other hand, is even more of a patchwork than before, taking seriously it's tacit remit to provide something for everyone, from the violent horrors of Mick Lewis' Rags to the familiar historical epic stylings of Keith Topping's Byzantium! Of particular note is The Shadow in the Glass, a rushed replacement for the a delayed novel which was, paradoxically, one of the year's most accomplished releases.

After a false start with the special edition of The Five Doctors, BBC Worldwide's DVD range really took off in the last year with The Robots of Death relaunching a series of extras-heavy products. The effort put into these releases is most evident on Spearhead From Space , which no longer resembles the tatty home movie evoked by the original VHS release. The only contentious issue is visual effects - some sequences were omitted from Remembrance of the Daleks in error, and some shots from The Caves of Androzani and the upcoming The Ark in Space are available in alternative, impressive, but pointless, reworkings. Despite this, the Doctor Who "restoration team" is to be commended for the feast of rare material - out-takes, trailers, interviews - included on these discs. Despite a declining profile, VHS releases are likely to continue for the foreseeable future for the simple reason that there are so few tales left to release - the latter four Doctors' eras are now complete, and those few stories still seeking release should be available within a year or so before the bottom falls out of the VHS retail market entirely. BBC Worldwide are also showing some initiative in enhancing sales of the barrel scrapings still seeking release - packaging unloved tales such as Colony in Space and The Time Monster together in attractive limited-edition tins for fans to covet and stroke.

BBC Worldwide also continues to impress with the release of soundtracks of missing stories, October's The Daleks' Master Plan boxed set being of particular note for its multi-media CD teeming with bonus material. An interesting curio was the 1970s schools radio show Exploration Earth, starring Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen, included as an incentive for fans to purchase yet another variant of Genesis of the Daleks. The online adventure Death Comes To Time gained near-unprecedented press coverage and much acclaim from fans and, following eighteen months' hard work in providing quality audio Doctor Who releases, Big Finish Productions' major achievement for 2001 was, of course, the engagement of eighth Doctor Paul McGann for their first four adventures of the year. The first such release coincided with a stylistic relaunch - and saw the equally impressive coup of enlisting David Arnold to rework the signature tune. With 2001 having seen an expansion by Big Finish into stand-alone Dalek adventures, and the bonus Excelis stories scheduled for the early part of 2002 upping the new-story count yet further, Big Finish is leading the way in the seemingly unstoppable continuation - and expansion - of Doctor Who...

A Life of Surprises?

If you believe it would be impossible to surprise your average Doctor Who fan as well as 1982's Earthshock did, this year should have proven you wrong - and I'm not talking about the return of Lawrence Miles. Big Finish successfully kept under wraps the return of Geoffrey Beevers' Master in Dust Breeding and the introduction of new companion Erimem in The Eye of the Scorpion. The hiring of Christopher Biggins for a lead role in December's The One Doctor might also qualify as a surprise; it's the sort of decision fans had a tendency to react very badly to back in the late 1980s, but this time no-one seems to have batted an eyelid...

There's been the odd surprise in the novels, too, including a revelation a few pages from the end of Gary Russell's Instruments of Darkness likely to have eyes boggling in disbelief, and Lawrence Miles' The Adventuress of Henrietta Street has its share of jaw-dropping moments as well. This is healthy and commendable - of all its many attributes, the ability to surprise, shock and astonish readers, listeners... viewers?... must be the one aspect of Doctor Who to suggest that the format has plenty of life in it.