The Time Travellers (series)

The Time Travellers was an audio series featuring Sylvester McCoy as the Professor and Sophie Aldred as Ace. It was released by BBV Productions between 1998 and 2000. The series was originally unnamed, with The Time Travellers branding only being introduced in the seventh instalment. The tenth and final story instead bore the series title The Dominie, while some later promotion and the Republica novelisation used The Professor & Ace.

The series appealed to audiences by featuring McCoy and Aldred playing characters very similar to their roles in Doctor Who, the Seventh Doctor and Ace. Bill Baggs had attempted to get the official license for Doctor Who audios and effectively decided to do it anyway when the BBC turned it down. Despite this, the series also incorporated several licensed concepts from Doctor Who stories, beginning with its first episode, Republica, which was set in an alternate timeline from the 1997 BBC Past Doctor Adventures novel The Roundheads. Later episodes such as Guest for the Night mentioned characters like Truman Crouch and Posedor who had previously featured in the Virgin New Adventures novel Deadfall.

As The Time Travellers continued, the main characters were differentiated further and further from their Doctor Who counterparts. By Ghosts – the seventh The Time Travellers audio and the first of Audio Adventures in Time & Space series 2 – the Professor decided he preferred to go by "the Dominie", and "Ace" began using her real name, Alice. The BBC had sent a warning letter to BBV about the names, having ignored it before; Steve Cole told Downtime that the BBC was enforcing its copyright more strongly at the time as they hoped to find a new partner to make Doctor Who with. McCoy said in a 1999 interview that the issue was most likely using the name "Ace", which could be copyrighted where "Professor" couldn't be, and Aldred told Downtime they could have "gotten away with it" by calling her Alf (the character's originally planned name).

Finally, in the 2021 novelisation of Republica, the Professor's ship was named Cosmos, rooting the character in the public domain Doctor Omega series.

Audio stories
BBV Productions released ten The Time Travellers audios in its Audio Adventures in Time & Space line. The first six were the first six releases of Audio Adventures series 1, while the next three were released sporadically over the course of series 2. The final audio, Punchline, was the only Time Travellers release of series 3, and it marked the Doctor Who universe debut of author Robert Shearman, writing pseudonymously as "Jeremy Leadbetter".

Novelisations
In 2021, one novelisation of a The Time Travellers audio was released in BBV's Novelisations in Time & Space line. "The Dominie" also cameoed as the Mistress' mentor in the novelisation of The Choice.