BBV Productions

BBV Productions (also known as Bill & Ben Video) was a British video production company founded by Bill Baggs in 1991. The company was named for Baggs himself and his wife Helen, whose nickname is "Ben."

BBV Productions was known for its many unofficial video and audio Doctor Who spin-offs, featuring specific characters or aliens from the series. Permission was obtained from the individual writers who created (and retained rights to) their characters, rather than the BBC itself. BBV was thereby able to create new stories around the licenced characters which did not infringe upon BBC-owned material or concepts such as the Doctor or the TARDIS.

Personnel
BBV developed a repertory company of actors that appeared in many of their productions, often playing different roles. Many of these actors were previously known from their work in Doctor Who, and included former Doctor actors Jon Pertwee, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy plus companion actors Caroline John, Louise Jameson, Nicola Bryant, and Sophie Aldred.

Several actors appearing in these productions early in their careers went on to achieve further notability, including Nicholas Briggs, Mark Gatiss, and Alan Cumming. A number of personnel behind-the-scenes and in front of the camera, including Briggs and Gatiss, would go on to work on licenced Doctor Who spinoffs at Virgin Books, BBC Books, and Big Finish Productions as well as the 2005 television revival of Doctor Who.

Work in Video
BBV's first production was the 1992 video release Summoned by Shadows, which was co-produced by the BBC Film Club and starred Colin Baker playing an unnamed character only known as the Stranger and Nicola Bryant as Miss Brown. The Stranger's adventures were chronicled on six videos and an audio adventure, many of which featured former Who cast members. The sixth video, Eye of the Beholder, was later re-released as the audio story Eye of the Storm.

BBV's next release was the ecologically-themed thriller The Airzone Solution, which was about a near-future conspiracy. The video was released in 1993, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of Doctor Who and featured four actors previously cast as the Doctor.

In 1994, BBV released the first video in the P.R.O.B.E. series, The Zero Imperative, which saw a departure for BBV as Liz Shaw was the only character from the Who universe to appear (although numerous Who actors made appearances as different characters). This proved problematic for the series, as Liz Shaw seemed very much changed following her leaving from UNIT; this was due to BBV only acquiring the rights to use the character and had no rights to the Doctor, meaning that the series could make no explicit reference to any other aspect of Who – including the stories where Liz was present.

BBV's next series of spin-off videos focused on UNIT and their battles with the Autons. The first video of the series, Auton, was originally to feature Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, however he had to withdraw due to ill health. The Brigadier was replaced by the original character of Lockwood, an enigmatic UNIT agent played by Michael Wade.

After the success of the Auton trilogy, BBV went on to produce Cyberon, which featured an alien race of cyborgs reminiscent of the Cybermen called the Cyberon. The Cyberon would later go on to appear in an audio story, Cybergeddon.

In 2001 BBV released the Doctor Who parody Do You Have a Licence to Save this Planet?, in which Sylvester McCoy played a character called the Chiropodist (aka Foot Doctor) as he fought Cyberons, Autons, and Sontarans. In addition to references to past BBV productions, the film obliquely referenced various elements of Doctor Who and the unlicenced nature of BBV's body of work.

BBV also ventured into non-fiction, producing documentaries such as The Doctors: 30 Years of Time Travel and Beyond and Bidding Adieu: A Video Diary.

BBV's final release was the 2008 drama Zygon: When Being You Just Isn't Enough, which featured Zygons as both protagonists and antagonists. The main character Lauren Anderson had previously appeared in Cyberon. The film had actually been mostly shot by 2003, but initially scrapped; only after additional shooting years later was the film completed and released.

Work in Audio
After experimenting with audio for a few years, BBV began regularly releasing audio dramas in 1998 under the umbrella title "Audio Adventures in Time and Space". One line of adventures was The Time Travellers, starring Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred as "the Professor" and "Ace;" the two so closely resembled their Doctor Who characters that, by the seventh story, the BBC had stepped in and demanded changes to not infringe copyrights – the main change was that the main characters were now called "the Dominie" and "Alice."

The first of the Audio Adventures that didn't feature McCoy and Aldred was a two-story series called The Wanderer, which featured Nicholas Briggs as an amnesiac space-traveller who one of the other characters dubs "Fred". Briggs had previously played the Doctor for unlicenced fan audios made by Audio Visuals; the Wanderer stories were a deliberate continuation of that series in all but name.

"Bill was worried about getting sued by the BBC, so he wanted to further distance his 'Who Clone' products by casting someone who hadn't been the Doctor (officially)... Me! I was very reluctant, but Bill was relentless and persuasive. [...] He told me to write Doctor Who, but find some clever way of making it lawyer-proof!"

- Nicholas Briggs

BBV moved away from audio stories about characters that could be the Doctor after the establishment of Big Finish Productions' officially-licenced line of Doctor Who audio dramas, instead moving on to audios featuring other characters from the Who universe such as The Rani (licenced from her creators Pip and Jane Baker) as well as a thinly-veiled post-Warriors' Gate Romana II (referred to only as "The Mistress" to avoid infringement) and K9 Mark II (fully licenced from his creators Bob Baker and Dave Martin.)

As with their videos, BBV also produced audios featuring original characters battling invasions by licenced aliens (such as Autons and Zygons) or close matches to Doctor Who monsters which were altered to avoid infringement (such as the Cyberman-like "Cyberons.") BBV also released a series of stories by Lawrence Miles about his history-spanning cult organisation, Faction Paradox.

In September 2003 BBV announced that it would be no longer producing audio stories, with the exception of Faction Paradox, and instead would focus on video releases. By December 2005, past audio releases were being deleted from their catalogue.

Current status
The official BBV Productions website, bbvonline.co.uk, became inaccessible in late 2009. In January, 2011 the domain was taken up by a new registrant and used for an unrelated site. No official store or web presence for BBV Productions remains, and no further activity under the BBV Productions banner is known.

The Stranger

 * Summoned by Shadows
 * More Than a Messiah
 * In Memory Alone
 * The Terror Game
 * Breach of the Peace
 * Eye of the Beholder

P.R.O.B.E.

 * The Zero Imperative
 * The Devil of Winterborne
 * Unnatural Selection
 * Ghosts of Winterborne

The Auton Trilogy

 * Auton
 * Auton 2: Sentinel
 * Auton 3: Awakening

Other

 * The Airzone Solution
 * Cyberon
 * Do You Have a Licence to Save this Planet?
 * Zygon: When Being You Just Isn't Enough

Documentaries

 * Stranger than Fiction
 * Stranger Than Fiction 2: From script to screen
 * Bidding Adieu: A Video Diary
 * The Doctors: 30 Years of Time Travel and Beyond

Audios

 * ''See the full list.