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BBV Productions is a UK-based video and audio production company founded in 1991, specialising in science fiction drama. The company has expanded to include publishing of novels and scripts associated with its productions.
Company co-founder Bill Baggs is a longtime fan of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who , and BBV productions often involve characters or actors from that series. It was originally founded as "Bill & Ben Video". The "Ben" in the company name is the nickname of Bill Baggs's wife and fellow company co-founder, Helen. Marian Baggs, the mother of Bill Baggs, also operated a second distribution chain on behalf of BBV.
BBV's first production was Summoned by Shadows (1991), co-produced with the BBC Film Club. Partly as a homage to Doctor Who, which Baggs was a fan of, and partly in a pragmatic attempt to take advantage of a pre-existing audience, Summoned by Shadows was a Who-style tale of strange doings on a distant planet starring Colin Baker as the nameless protagonist (listed in the credits as "The Stranger"). Nicola Bryant co-starred as "Miss Brown". The adventures of The Stranger ran to six videos (and two audio dramas, the second remade as the sixth video). (For more information, see The Stranger (video series).)
BBV's next effort was The AirZone Solution? , an ecologically themed thriller about a near-future conspiracy. Released in 1993, Doctor Who's thirtieth anniversary year, it involved four out of five surviving ex-Doctors. Baker and Bryant starred. Successor Sylvester McCoy and predecessors Peter Davison and Jon Pertwee also appeared as members of a small group joined against a sinister conspiracy. [1]
The Zero Imperative (1994) marked a new departure for BBV. Although stuffed to the gills with ex-Doctor Who guest stars, only one of them was actually playing the same character: the story was built around Caroline John's Liz Shaw, the Doctor's companion in the seventh season of Doctor Who, now depicted as an investigator for PROBE (the "Preternatural Research Bureau"). The PROBE series ran for an additional three stories; all four were written by Mark Gatiss, who found more widespread fame as a member of the League of Gentlemen, later going on to write episodes for the revived series. The potentially-confusing mixture of Caroline John reprising her Doctor Who role with other recognisable Who stars playing different characters worked against the series, as did the way that Liz Shaw often seemed to be herself a different character from the Doctor Who original. (The latter problem may have been exacerbated by the fact that, although BBV had obtained permission to use Liz Shaw, they had no rights relating to Doctor Who itself - which meant that no explicit reference could be made to any other aspect of Doctor Who, including the events of the stories in which Liz had appeared.)
BBV's next series was a spin-off from two Doctor Who stories in the 1970s in which the Doctor assisted the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT) in defeating the Autons, robotic invaders sent to conquer Earth on behalf of the alien Nestenes. The trilogy, beginning with Auton in 1997, recounted UNIT's battle against another Auton invasion, this time without the Doctor's aid (since BBV had obtained permission to use UNIT and the Autons, but was never given permission to use the Doctor himself). Auton was also the first BBV production to have no Doctor Who guest stars at all, after Nicholas Courtney (who was to reprise his Doctor Who role as UNIT commander Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart) had to withdraw from the project, due to ill health. [2] With Courtney out, the focus of the series was the original character of Lockwood, an enigmatic UNIT agent played by Michael Wade.
After the success of the Auton trilogy, BBV produced Cyberon (involving a race of alien cyborgs reminiscent of the Cybermen). 2001's "Do you Have a Licence to Save this Planet?" was a comedy starring Sylvester McCoy as the chiropodist. This spoof not only referenced previous BBV productions- but also Doctor Who itself.
BBV's Zygon: When Being You Just Isn't Enough (previously titled Zygon: When Being Me Is Not Enough). In which Mike Kirkwood dreams of being a monster, unaware that he is in fact a Zygon, believing himself to be human. This story also includes Jo Castleton's character of Doctor Lauren Anderson from Cyberon.
A new PROBE film was released 15 April 2015 with Hazel Burrows taking over from Caroline John as Liz Shaw. [3]
After a few earlier experiments, BBV began regularly releasing audio dramas on CD in 1998, under the umbrella title Audio Adventures in Time & Space. The mainstay of the CD line to begin with was a series starring Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred (the Doctor/companion team from the 1987, 1988 and 1989 seasons of Doctor Who) as a pair of wanderers in time and space named "The Professor" (McCoy) and "Ace" (Aldred) who so closely resembled the characters McCoy and Aldred had played on Doctor Who - even addressing each other by the same nicknames - that the BBC stepped in and their seventh outing, Ghosts, consequently introduced a number of changes to the characters that made the resemblance somewhat less close, the main one being that the protagonists were now called "The Dominie" (McCoy) and "Alice" (Aldred).
The first of the Audio Adventures in Time & Space not to include the McCoy/Aldred double act was Cyber-Hunt, the first BBV production about the Cyberons. A further Who-ish note was added by the introduction of an amnesic space traveler played by Nicholas Briggs, who some years earlier had played the Doctor in the Audio Visuals series of unlicensed fan audios. (He was dubbed "Fred" by one of the other characters after her pet goldfish).
BBV moved away from characters-who-might-be-the-Doctor (a field that, in any case, lost some of its appeal for fan audiences once Big Finish Productions began producing officially licensed Doctor Who audio dramas with the original actors reprising their incarnation of the character) and, following the success of the Auton trilogy, focussed more on stand-alone dramas about various Doctor Who alien races, licensed directly from the writers who created them. For some of those writers, the BBV audios have offered a chance to revisit their creations: for instance, the range includes a story by Pip and Jane Baker explaining what happened to the Rani (last seen in Doctor Who being abducted by a group of aliens that were also created by the writing pair), and a series of stories by Lawrence Miles about his history-spanning terrorist organisation Faction Paradox.
In 2002, BBV announced that they would not produce any more audio CDs, but would instead concentrate on their new DVD releases.
In 2022 BBV announced physical collections of their audios would be produced.
The Master, or "Missy " in their female incarnation, is a recurring character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who and its associated spin-off works. They are a renegade alien Time Lord and the childhood friend and later enemy of the title character, the Doctor. They were most recently portrayed by Sacha Dhawan.
Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, fully Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, generally referred to simply as the Brigadier, is a fictional character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, created by writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln and played by Nicholas Courtney. He is one of the founders of UNIT, an international organisation that defends Earth from alien threats, and serves as commander of the British contingent. Presented at first as reluctant to accept the continuing aid of the Doctor, over time the Brigadier became one of the Doctor's greatest friends and his principal ally in defending Earth.
Mark Gatiss is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, director, producer and novelist. He is best known for his work in television acting in and co-creating shows with Steven Moffat. Gatiss has received several awards including a BAFTA TV Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, and two Laurence Olivier Awards.
The Zygons are an extraterrestrial race in the long-running British science fiction television programme Doctor Who. The Zygons have shape-shifting abilities, allowing them to replicate the appearance of another being. Limited by the small size of their force, they rely on shape-shifting and their organic space craft to conceal their numbers and seize power on Earth. The Zygons were conceived by writer Robert Banks Stewart, and designed by James Acheson as part of a collaboration with John Friedlander. Then director Douglas Camfield also influenced the final appearance. They were designed to resemble "oversized embryos."
The Stranger is a series of direct-to-video science-fiction dramas produced by BBV and starring Colin Baker. They are now available on DVD.
UNIT is a fictional military organisation from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who and its spin-off series Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Operating under the auspices of the United Nations and initially led by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, its purpose is to investigate and combat paranormal and extraterrestrial threats to Earth. Several UNIT personnel played a major role in the original Doctor Who series, and it was a regular feature from The Invasion (1968) until The Seeds of Doom (1976).
Faction Paradox is a series of novels, audio stories, short story anthologies, and comics set in and around a "War in Heaven", a history-spanning conflict between godlike "Great Houses" and their mysterious enemy. The series is named after a group originally created by author Lawrence Miles for BBC Books' Doctor Who novels.
Doctor Who spin-offs refers to material created outside of, but related to, the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who.
The Audio Visuals were an unlicensed series of Doctor Who audio dramas made by British fans in the 1980s. Featuring Nicholas Briggs as the Doctor, twenty-eight audio plays were recorded and distributed on audio cassette between 1985 and 1991.
Reeltime Pictures Ltd is a British film, television and video production company and a distributor of the films of other companies, founded in 1984 by Keith Barnfather.
The Mutant Phase is a Big Finish Productions audio drama based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It forms the third serial in the Dalek Empire arc, following on from events in The Genocide Machine and The Apocalypse Element. The arc concludes in The Time of the Daleks. This audio drama is based on an earlier Audio Visuals story of the same name.
Nicholas Briggs is an English actor, writer, director, sound designer and composer. He is associated with the BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who and its spin-offs, particularly as the voice of the Daleks and the Cybermen in the 21st century series.
Doctor Who: Destiny of the Doctors is an action video game based on the BBC British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was released on 5 December 1997 by BBC Multimedia.
The Auton trilogy is a series of direct-to-video spin-off productions based on the long running BBC science fiction series Doctor Who. The three films in the series are Auton (1997), Auton 2: Sentinel and Auton 3. They were produced by the independent BBV company and are sequels to the Third Doctor stories Spearhead from Space and Terror of the Autons. All three films have been reissued on DVD.
The Airzone Solution is a 1993 British sci-fi-thriller film, produced by BBV. It was written by Nicholas Briggs and directed by Bill Baggs. It stars Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Peter Davison, Sylvester McCoy, Jon Pertwee and Heather Tracy.
P.R.O.B.E. is a series of direct-to-video science-fiction films mostly written by Mark Gatiss and produced by BBV Productions. It was the first live-action Doctor Who spin-off series.
Zygon: When Being You Just Isn't Enough is a direct-to-DVD spin-off of the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was released direct-to-DVD and produced by the independent production company BBV. It featured the Zygons.
The Fifth Doctor Adventures is a Big Finish Productions audio play series based on the television series Doctor Who. It sees the return of Peter Davison reprising his role as the Fifth Doctor.
Cyberon is a direct-to-video unofficial spin-off of the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was released direct-to-DVD and produced by the independent production company BBV. It featured the Cyberons, a species created to resemble popular Doctor Who monsters, the Cybermen. The main character of the film, Lauren Anderson, later featured in Zygon: When Being You Just Isn't Enough. Originally released on VHS, the film was not widely available on video. The story was released on DVD from online retailer Galaxy 4 in 2012.
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