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.

Origin

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.

Video

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]

Audio

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.

Productions

See also

• Big Finish Productions
• Reeltime Pictures

References

External links

• Bill & Ben Video (BBV) at IMDb
• BBV website
• The TARDIS Library — Full guide to Doctor Who books, videos and audios. Includes an expanded listing of BBV's Doctor Who releases, with cover images & user ratings/reviews.
• Downtime - The Lost Years of Doctor Who Dylan Rees, (Obverse Books, 2017)