River Song will team up with Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor for new Doctor Who adventures
After travelling with several incarnations of the Time Lord, Alex Kingston is ready for the big one
It’s fair to say that Alex Kingston’s River Song has hung out with an impressive array of Doctors in her time, adventuring with Matt Smith, David Tennant and Peter Capaldi in the Doctor Who TV series and teaming up with Paul McGann, Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker and Peter Davison for a series of Big Finish Audio Adventures (the episodes with Davison and Kingston will be released next year).
But now the time-travelling Doctor’s wife is set to team up with perhaps the most iconic Doctor of all for an audio story – the fourth incarnation portrayed by Tom Baker, whose long scarf, sonorous voice and love of jellybabies made the character (and series) iconic around the world and ensured Doctor Who’s popularity for decades to come.
Baker and Kingston will record the stories (which take place in a different point in River’s timestream than when she met the other Doctors) for the fourth series of ongoing collection The Diary of River Song, following adventures with the Eighth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors in series one and two.
At the moment there are no more details of Kingston and Baker’s adventures, as there’s still a whole third series of River Song diary entries to go before series four comes over the horizon.
Still, there’s plenty to look forward to in THAT four-part series as well, as River meets the Fifth Doctor for the first time and battles modern series foe Madame Kovarian (a returning Frances Barber) in a collection of adventures previously announced in September.
And bundled with the Tom Baker news, Big Finish have revealed some more details of those Peter Davison episodes, which can be read below.
When River Song goes shopping for a whole load of unclaimed loyalty points, she uncovers secrets linked to her tangled past.
The Doctor arrives, and the mystery deepens. He is already exploring the universe with another companion – someone River knows nothing about.
Madame Kovarian has been busy, and this time she will not accept failure…
3.1 – The Lady in the Lake by Nev Fountain
On Terminus Prime, clients choose their own means of demise. Something exciting, meaningful, or heroic to end it all.
But when River discovers that there are repeat customers, she knows something more is going on.
She begins to uncover a cult with worrying abilities. Its members can apparently cheat death, and that’s not all they have in common with River…
3.2 – A Requiem for the Doctor by Jac Rayner
River has joined the Doctor and his friend Brooke on their travels, and they stop off in 18th century Vienna.
Brooke thinks history is dull. Until people start dying.
Mozart’s legacy is not just his music. River has more than one mystery to solve before a killer is let loose on the people of Vienna – and on the Doctor.
3.3 – My Dinner with Andrew by John Dorney
Welcome, Mesdames et Messieurs, to The Bumptious Gastropod.
The most exclusive, most discreet dining experience outside the universe. For the restaurant exists beyond spacetime itself, and the usual rules of causality do not apply. Anything could happen.
It is here that the Doctor has a date. With River Song. And with death.
3.4 – The Furies by Matt Fitton
Stories of the Furies abound across the cosmos: vengeful spirits hounding guilty souls to death. Madame Kovarian taught them to a child raised in fear, trained to kill, and placed inside a spacesuit.
Kovarian knows the universe’s greatest threat. The Doctor must be eliminated. An assassin was created for that purpose.
But if Melody Pond has failed, Kovarian will simply have to try again…
The Diary of River Song 3 will be released in January 2018
Authors
Huw Fullerton is a Commissioning Editor for Radio Times magazine, covering Entertainment, Comedy and Specialist Drama.
