User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Celestial Toyroom/@comment-188432-20140603190504/@comment-188432-20140615155517

More Dead Air hate? I will say again that it's an award-winning audiobook. Tennant's voice work is superb. He captures a dizzying array of characters with recognisable, and in some cases exquisite, detail.

Were it stacked up against other single-performer audiobooks, and people really listened to what Tennant was doing, I don't think there would be any question it's just about the best-performed audiobook they'd ever heard. Don't forget: its award comes from being judged against stuff that wasn't even Doctor Who — Tennant won against other great audiobook readers performing works of "proper" literature, as well as "serious" non-fiction.

In my view, the only unusual thing about the poll is not that Dead Air was competitive, but that it won such a convincing plurality.

Please do not cast aspersions on other users simply because the vote didn't go your — or even Big Finish's — way. Dead Air's victory in no way de-legitimises anyone else's work; it only celebrates the relevancy of a particular form of audio work.

Any audio poll is always going to be problematic because a number of users won't have had the ability — either because of finances or local availability of the title — to have collected all the audios. The majority of voters are almost certainly not going to have heard every nominee. So even if some other title had won, the question would remain: "I wonder if everyone who voted listened to all the nominees?"

One factor you're not considering is that Dead Air was both significantly cheaper and massively more available to a greater number of people around the world than any Big Finish product. Thus it's possible that one of the reasons that it won so handsomely was precisely because more people had heard it.

So please don't make it seem like this vote is illegitimate — or, worse, that there is something wrong with the people who participated — because a Tennant title won. Thats's sailing a little close to a personal attack — and this was just meant to be a bit of fun.

And remember this. In my experience of hearing people talk about Big Finish, there are a wide range of answers to the question, "What's your favourite Big Finish play?" The poll results confirm this ambiguity.

See, Dead Air won by a large plurality — not a majority. Big Finish as a whole got 56% of the vote. But people couldn't agree on which one title was the best.

And indeed, with rare exception, that's the way all multi-nominee awards are. Whether you're talking the Oscars® or our little Golden TARDIS Awards, almost no winner sails to victory with an actual majority of votes. Only one of our ten questions had a clear, majority winner — most of our respondents do feel that the Daleks are the best returning adversary from the old series.

In other words, almost all of these awards can also be interpreted as a victory for the collective of the nominees that didn't win. And in that sense, more people prefer the full-cast audio work of Big Finish to Tennant's lone-man effort.