What Are the Longest Gaps Between Appearances for an Actor Playing a Doctor Who Character for Big Finish?

Big Finish started producing Doctor Who audio dramas in 1999. That was twenty-seven years ago—meaning BF have now been producing Doctor Who content longer than the original television programme actually ran! (I got into it in 2001 myself, so twenty-five years ago... which seems quite bizarre. Twenty-five years prior to that would have been 1976, when Tom Baker and Lis Sladen were in full throttle, and that material felt quite old-fashioned to  me at the time. Now you're telling me Storm Warning is as old to me now as The Masque of Mandragora was to me then!?)

Josiah W. Dogbolter

Big Finish has been running long enough that there can be some very long intervals between appearances by Big Finish characters. My attention was first drawn to this when Toby Longworth appeared in Oct. 2018's The Quantum Possibility Engine as crimelord Josiah W. Dogbolter: he had previously appeared as the character in Nov. 2002's The Maltese Penguin, meaning he had a gap of almost sixteen years between his two appearances as the character. That's a long time... especially when you keep in mind that Maltese Penguin was probably a one-day job! So you perform a character for a single day, and almost six thousand days later, you are asked to come back!

A poster on the Doctor Who BBS GallifreyBase drew my attention back to these kind of intervals when they pointed out Samuel West last appeared as Morbius in Aug. 2008's The Vengeance of Morbius, and then finally reprised the character in Apr. 2024's Dark Gallifrey: Morbius, Part One. That's fifteen years and eight months. So not quite as long as the gap between Longworth's appearances as Dogbolter, but pretty close. So with the help of the fine folks of GallifreyBase, I set out to calculate the longest gaps between Big Finish appearances for Doctor Who characters.

It had to be the same actor playing the same character. Additionally, I was only interested in Big Finish appearances; there's probably a whole different post to be made about classic series actors making returns as their characters for Big Finish. (For example, Ralph Watson last appeared on tv as Captain Knight in Mar. 1968's The Web of Fear, a role he would not reprise until Aug. 2019's The Diary of River Song: The Web of Time, a gap of over fifty years!)

Deeva Jansen

Here's what I believe to be the top fifteen contenders:

• 1. Michelle Livingstone as Deeva Jansen: 20 yrs., 11 mos. from Sword of Orion (Feb. 2001) to The Further Adventuress (Jan. 2022)
• 2. Nicholas Briggs as the Temperon: 20 yrs., 0 mos. from The Sirens of Time (July 1999) to The Legacy of Time (July 2019)
• 3= Toby Longworth as Josiah W. Dogbolter: 16 yrs., 3 mos. from The Maltese Penguin (July 2002) to The Quantum Possibility Engine (Oct. 2018)
• 3= Conrad Westmaas as C’rizz: 16 yrs., 3 mos. from Absolution (Oct. 2007) to The Battle of Giant’s Causeway (Jan. 2024)
• 5. Samuel West as Morbius: 15 yrs., 8 mos. from Vengeance of Morbius (Aug. 2008) to Dark Gallifrey: Morbius, Part One (Apr. 2024)
• 6. Sam Kisgart as the Unbound Master: 13 yrs., 2 mos. from Sympathy for the Devil (June 2003) to The Unbound Universe (Aug. 2016)
• 7. Sonny McGann as Alex Campbell: 11 yrs., 10 mos. from To the Death (Mar. 2011) to Cass (Jan. 2023)
• 8. Maggie O’Neill as Lysandra Aristedes: 11 yrs., 3 mos. from Gods and Monsters (Sept. 2012) to The Last Day, Part One (Dec. 2023)
• 9. Angela Bruce as Brigadier Winifred Bambera: 10 yrs., 9 mos. from Animal (June 2011) to Agents of the Vulpreen (Mar. 2022)
• 10. Siobhán Redmond as the Rani: 10 yrs., 7 mos. from Planet of the Rani (Oct. 2015) to Fear of the Light (May 2026)
• 11. Michael Jayston as the Valeyard: 10 yrs., 4 mos. from He Jests at Scars… (Aug. 2003) to Trial of the Valeyard (Dec. 2013)
• 12. Amy Pemberton as Sally Morgan: 9 yrs., 3 mos. from Signs and Wonders (Sept. 2014) to The Last Day, Part One (Dec. 2023)
• 13. Charlie Hayes as Death: 9 yrs., 0 mos. from Master (Oct. 2003) to Love and War (Oct. 2012)
• 14. Geoffrey Beevers as the Master: 8 yrs., 7 mos. from Master (Oct. 2003) to Trail of the White Worm (May 2012)
• 15. Anna Hope as DI Patricia Menzies: 8 yrs., 6 mos. from The Crimes of Thomas Brewster (Jan. 2011) to The Legacy of Time (July 2019)

Michelle Livingstone as Deeva is the most impressive in more ways than one. Many of these actors continued to appear at Big Finish, just in different roles—while Nick Briggs went twenty years between his two appearances as the Temperon, he's probably never even gone a single month without appearing in a Big Finish audio! But Livingstone made zero appearances for Big Finish in any capacity between Sword of Orion and Heart of Orion. Did she even remember she had done two days recording for Big Finish over two decades prior?

What's craziest to me is that we've entered a time when people can be nostalgic for C'rizz. I'm nostalgic for C'rizz!

Will Deeva be dethroned? Maybe someday they'll bring back Colin McIntyre as Sancroff from The Sirens of Time... as of now, that would be twenty-seven years at a minimum!