Short Trips (series)

"Short Trips" was a label applied to stories and books, published by both BBC Books and Big Finish Productions. Early publications released under the "Short Trips" banner were short story anthologies. The majority of these anthologies were collections of prose issued from 1998 to 2009, but Big Finish resurrected the name as a label for audio anthologies and single audio downloads beginning in 2010.

BBC Books
"Short Trips" was a name initially given to three short story anthologies published by BBC Books, starting in 1999. The notion was very similar to Virgin Books' Decalog anthology series. These three new books were published in conjunction with the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures and BBC Past Doctor Adventures book series. Each book contained stories featuring the first eight incarnations of the Doctor. After publishing the anthology Short Trips and Side Steps in March 2000, BBC Books abandoned short stories for full length prose.

BBC Audio
BBC Audio also released a few collections of stories adapted from the print books, plus a few originals, in audio format.

Big Finish Productions
In 2002, Big Finish Productions obtained the rights to the Short Trips series. The Big Finish Short Trips books, like the Decalog series, are built around themes. These include an annual volume dedicated to Christmas-related tales and one volume dedicated to Dalek stories. A total of twenty-eight volumes of new material — featuring several hundred stories featuring the first eight Doctors — were published by March 2009.

On 17 April 2009, Big Finish announced it was ending the Short Trips line, since the BBC had not renewed the company's license to issue Doctor Who stories in print. A final Short Trips volume, a "best-of" collection, subsequently appeared in May 2009, coinciding with Big Finish briefly making its back stock of earlier Short Trips books available at a discounted rate.

CD releases
In less than a year, however, Big Finish revived the Short Trips format, this time as exclusive-to-audio readings of short stories, most performed by veteran cast members. It began by soliciting stories from fans, though seasoned writers also contributed stories (along with one short story from Colin Baker). Unlike almost every thing else produced by Big Finish, they feature only one actor reading a story, being audiobooks rather than audio dramas. All in the regular series are original to audio, and have not previously appeared in print.

Monthly series
Starting in January 2015, new Short Trips have been released as monthly individual downloads.

Subscriber exclusives
In addition to the above, several stories taken from the Short Trips books (up to Tweaker) have had readings recorded and made available for special subscriber-only downloads. In December 2014, Big Finish announced a retroactive expansion of the subscriber exclusives with stories written specially for audio (from A Room with No View onwards). The expansion resulted in having four subscriber exclusives per year from 2010 onward. All successive stories were also written specially for audio.

Rarities
Starting in September 2016, Big Finish began re-releasing their Subscriber Short Trips stories in the Short Trips Rarities series.

Miscellaneous
One Small Step..., originally printed in Short Trips: Past Tense in 2004, was read by Nicholas Briggs and played as part of the The Big Finish Podcast in 2009. It was played again on the podcast in 2016.

The Toy, read by Sarah Sutton, was originally released to subscribers of The Complete History in 2015. The following year, it was made available to purchase as part of the Short Trips Rarities range.

Master Thief and Lesser Evils, both read by Jon Culshaw, were released together in 2020 as part of the Time Lord Victorious series.