Audio Adventures in Time & Space

Audio Adventures in Time & Space, originally just Adventures in Time and Space, was a and umbrella title for several subseries of audios with varying levels of legal and narrative ties to the Doctor Who universe.

1980s
The name Adventures in Time and Space was originally used for the Audio Visuals fan audios in the mid-1980s. It first appeared on AV covers in the second season in 1986, although later re-issues of the first season also used the label.

1990s and 2000s
When the producer of the Audio Visuals, Bill Baggs, began releasing audio plays from BBV Productions in 1998, he reused the title, calling them Audio Adventures in Time & Space to distinguish them from BBV's video productions. Over the following years, BBV released four "seasons" of Audio Adventures.

Whereas the Audio Visuals Adventures in Time and Space had all featured the Doctor in an unlicensed, non-commercial fashion, as a commercial entity BBV had to sell legal products. As a result, rather than featuring a single ongoing story like the Audio Visuals Adventures, BBV's Audio Adventures comprised a number of separate ongoing series.

Initially, they created approximations of characters from televised Doctor Who and hired the same actors to play them. For instance, The Stranger featured Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as "the Stranger" and "Miss Brown", similar to their Doctor Who roles of the Sixth Doctor and his companion Peri Brown. Similarly, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred played the Professor and Ace in The Time Travellers, and Lalla Ward played the Mistress in Adventures in a Pocket Universe.

Some of these otherwise-unlicensed stories retained legal links to licensed non-television Doctor Who stories, such as the mysterious time traveller in the 1991 Doctor Who Magazine comic story Party Animals who later appeared in BBV's The Wanderer, and the alternate timeline seen in the 1997 BBC Past Doctor Adventures novel The Roundheads and visited in the debut Time Travellers audio, Republica. Guests for the Night also featured mentions of Posedor and Truman Crouch, elements of the fan Audio Visuals which had since gotten properly commercial debuts in the DWU in the Virgin New Adventures novel Deadfall.

Eventually, BBV began seeking legal links to television Doctor Who stories as well. Through individual agreements with television writers, they obtained permission to use the species or characters that those writers had created and still owned. Most of these stories could then be marketed as taking place within the DWU. For instance, the cover to The Choice, which was created with permission from Dave Martin and Bob Baker, advertised the "return of K9". By the third and fourth series from 2000 to 2004, the Audio Adventures line focused more and more on these licensed characters, including K9, Zygons, Krynoids, and Sontarans, as well as licensed concepts from  , such as Faction Paradox.

Although only some stories had the legal link to "prove" their connection to Doctor Who, the entire Audio Adventures series was intended to be set within the Doctor Who universe, with all audios advertised as "from the Worlds of Doctor Who". By the fourth season, which focused mainly on The Faction Paradox Protocols, the cover template was radically re-designed and the "Audio Adventures in Time & Space" label was removed.

2020s
Although the overwhelming majority of BBV audio titles were released under this label, some were excluded on their initial release. These were the Tom Baker novel The Boy Who Kicked Pigs and the Richard Franklin story The Killing Stone. However, in the series' 2021 online relaunch, The Boy Who Kicked Pigs was rebranded as one of the Audio Adventures.

On 8 May, BBV announced the start of a fifth series of Audio Adventures in Time & Space, launching with a reading of The Door We Forgot by Bill Baggs, distinct from the previously-released Arcbeatle Press audiobook of the story.

Behind the scenes

 * Those wishing to understand more about this wiki's policies towards BBV's Audio Adventures in Time & Space should consult this discussion.
 * Due to our valid sources policy, this article concentrates on the usage of "" by BBV Productions. Those wishing a fuller explanation of this title's long history with Audio Visuals should consult the AV website.