The Minister of Chance (series)

The Minister of Chance was a series of fantasy audio and video stories written by Dan Freedman and produced and released by Radio Static. The series centered on the eponymous Minister, who was introduced in Freedman's Seventh Doctor webcast Death Comes to Time, and his involvement in court intrigue on the planet Thea.

Cast and crew connections
Despite the cast's limited size, it has a substantial overlap with the Doctor Who and related productions, including Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, Julian Wadham, Lauren Crace, Jenny Agutter, Paul Darrow, Beth Goddard, Tamsin Greig, Peter Guinness, Kemi-Bo Jacobs, Gethin Anthony, Simon Hickson, Mark Lewis, Sophie Aldred, Daniel Easton, Richard Garaghty, James Manley-Buser, Gareth Jones, and George Murphy.

Connections with the DWU
The eponymous main character, the Minister of Chance, is portrayed and characterised consistently with his debut appearance in Death Comes to Time. Although in The Minister of Chance he was played by Julian Wadham rather than Stephen Fry, initial promotional material for the series explained this by describing him as a "defrocked Time Lord" "now in his second regeneration". The events of Death Comes to Time are alluded to as a tragedy in the Minister's past, and following from the Seventh Doctor's revocation of his TARDIS in that story, the Minister travels through time and space by "the scientific formula for doors".

Publisher's summary
A world not our own: Kitty is a barmaid in the occupied city of Tantillion. When a stranger arrives looking for an outlawed scientist, her curiosity is piqued, so she follows him into the forest. When he constructs a doorway to another world it is piqued further, so she follows him across the Frost Bridge and into a terrifying land where the laws of physics themselves are broken.

Audio
Five one-hour audio stories and a ten-minute prequel were released from 2011 to 2013. In 2020, the episodes were remastered and re-released as a podcast, with each episode split into four parts.

Film
A video adaptation of the prologue was released in 2014 to promote a Kickstarter for a full film adaptation of The Minister of Chance, but its ultimately failed to meet its fundraising goal.

Book
A novelisation of The Minister of Chance was announced but never released.

Gallery
to be added