Main Range

The Main Range, also known as The Monthly Adventures and the Monthly Range, was a Doctor Who audio series produced by Big Finish Productions. It was their earliest range to make use of the Doctor Who license, and remained their only consistent output until 2021, when the series ended.

The series began in 1999 with The Sirens of Time, a multi-Doctor story featuring the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors. It also featured the Eighth Doctor from Storm Warning in 2001 until 2012, when he moved to his own series of audios, The Eighth Doctor Adventures.

Stories in this range were typically narratively independent from each other, though sometimes Big Finish made stories part of trilogies, larger story arcs, or tie-ins to their other ranges, like Dalek Empire and Cyberman. One example of such a set was 1963, a trilogy of stories set in the year 1963 and released in 2013 to celebrate Doctor Who's 50th anniversary.

The Main Range included stories with all of the Doctors' television companions, including Adric, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough, Kamelion, Peri Brown, Melanie Bush, and Ace, as well as their companions from non-televised media, such as Frobisher, Maxwell Edison, and Izzy Sinclair from Doctor Who Magazine comic stories, Bernice Summerfield from Virgin Books' New Adventures novels, and Fitz Kreiner of BBC Books' Eighth Doctor Adventures. Many other characters from the television series, including several companions of non-featured Doctors, also appeared in various stories, in particular during the "Locum Doctors" trilogy, which paired featured Doctors with First, Second and Third Doctor companions.

Big Finish also created a number of original companions for the Main Range. These included Thomas Brewster, Marcipor, Erimem, Evelyn Smythe, Flip Jackson, Constance Clarke, Bev Tarrant, Hex, Elizabeth Klein, Liv Chenka, Sally Morgan, Lysandra Aristedes, Will Arrowsmith, C'rizz, and Mary Shelley. Some of these characters received their own audio spinoffs: Charlotte Pollard, which featured Charlotte Pollard, having parted ways with the Eighth Doctor, Graceless, which featured Abby and Zara, and Vienna, which featured Vienna Salvatori.

The series ended in 2021 with the 275th release, The End of the Beginning, a multi-Doctor adventure which saw the return of the Eighth Doctor, who had branched off into his own series almost a decade earlier, alongside his first and most enduring companion from the Main Range, Charlotte Pollard. This story was very much in the tone of their earliest releases, but featured returning characters from more recent adventures, such as Calypso Jonze, to celebrate this range's long history.

After The Monthly Adventures, several plot lines were continued in each Doctor's respective ranges. For example, Marc's continued travels with the Fifth Doctor, and the conclusion to his story, were released as part of The Fifth Doctor Adventures.

Branding
From The Sirens of Time to The Lure of the Nomad, all releases used the 1996 variation of the Doctor Who logo. Starting with Iron Bright, the series' 239th release, the version of the logo introduced in 2018 started being used. This marked the first instance of Big Finish using the "current" Doctor Who logo since the show's revival in 2005. It was also applied to all their other ranges, including past releases in many cases.