Bernice Summerfield (series)

Bernice Summerfield was the first series produced by Big Finish Productions, combining both audio and prose releases in an ongoing narrative, with the titular character portrayed by Lisa Bowerman.

The series began in 1998 with audio adaptations of six Virgin New Adventures novels. After the first season's success, Big Finish began producing audio stories and prose stories simultaneously.

Initially, the ongoing narrative was spread evenly between the two media - for instance, Benny became pregnant in the novel Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Squire's Crystal and gave birth in the novel Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Glass Prison, with the audio stories making several minor references to her pregnancy. However, from the third series onward, the audio stories became the primary series, with novels and short story collections providing greater depth to the world and heavily expanding on the large cast of regular characters. Occasionally, however, prose stories would be integral to the overall narrative, such as the audio story Death and the Daleks continuing on directly from the anthology Life During Wartime, and the regular characters Hass and Doggles being introduced in the anthologies A Life Worth Living and Something Changed respectively. When Simon Guerrier took over as executive producer for Series 7, he made an effort to better combine the audio and prose stories, featuring hitherto prose-only characters in audio and incorporating prose-featured events, such as the death of semi-regular character Ms Jones in the anthology Parallel Lives, into the overall story arc.

Many characters created or established in the Virgin New Adventures, such as Jason Kane and Irving Braxiatel, made major appearances in this series, and several others, such as Wolsey, Isaac Summerfield and Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, were featured in occasional stories. Additionally, links were made with Big Finish's Doctor Who content, such as the character of Bev Tarrant crossing over from the Main Range to become a regular character.

Several authors who wrote for Benny at Virgin also contributed to the line. Writers like Matt Jones, Paul Cornell, Justin Richards, Lance Parkin, Dave Stone, Ben Aaronovitch, Daniel O'Mahony, Lawrence Miles, Mark Clapham and Gary Russell had at least one story produced.

Most of the stories cover Bernice's life following her departure from travelling with the Doctor. However, several prose releases have featured stories that portrayed Bernice's life long before she met the Doctor.

The series concluded in 2013, but Benny received a new series the next year as The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield, where she was briefly reunited with the Seventh Doctor and Ace, before teaming up with an incarnation of the Doctor from an alternate universe. The release format continued to be annual boxsets, with occasional accompanying book releases under the Bernice Summerfield title.

Series 1
Series 1 was a collection of audio adaptations of Virgin New Adventures novels.

Series 2
Beginning with series 2, Big Finish began to release original audio stories about Bernice Summerfield. They also began to publish short story anthologies that continued ongoing plotlines from the audios.

Series 6
Staring in series 6, the anthology releases began to alternate between collections of short stories and groupings of three novellas. This continued until series 9.

Epoch
After series 11, Big Finish began to release new Bernice Summerfield audios in collected "boxsets" rather than spread out over months.

Road Trip
Road Trip began the pattern that would last until the series' penultimate release, where the boxset would include three audio stories and be accompanied by a tie-in novel.

Many Happy Returns
The audio story Many Happy Returns was released in November 2012 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Bernice Summerfield's introduction in Love and War. Its contributors included Xanna Eve Chown, Stephen Cole, Paul Cornell, Stephen Fewell, Simon Guerrier, Scott Handcock, Rebecca Levene, Jacqueline Rayner, Justin Richards, Miles Richardson, Eddie Robson, and Dave Stone. A portion of the proceeds went to the myalgic encephalomyelitis charity "Invest in M.E."

The Story So Far
To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Bernice Summerfield series in 2018, Big Finish released several boxsets in the Bernice Summerfield range, including Treasury, a collection of narrated Bernice Summerfield short stories narrated by Lisa Bowerman and Andrew Cartmel; and The Story So Far: Volume One and  Volume Two, a collection of six new audio stories set throughout Bernice's life.

Special releases

 * Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story: A reference book of Bernice Summerfield's life up to Series 8.

Crossovers
The Bernice Summerfield range occasionally crossed over with other ranges:


 * Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Plague Herds of Excelis: was branded as the Bernice Summerfield range story 3.0 but published under the Excelis Saga range.
 * The Phantom Wreck: Story from the special anthology The Worlds of Big Finish, a 2015 boxset which also featured characters from Big Finish's Graceless, Iris Wildthyme, Vienna, Sherlock Holmes, and Dorian Gray ranges.
 * Benny's Story: part of The Company of Friends anthology from the Main Range, but set during the events of this series.