Doctor Who: Bessie’s Tape Deck – The Third Doctor Audios, Part 2

Time to check in again on Big Finish’s offerings starring the Third Doctor. As with last time, we’re still in the era when Big Finish were reluctant to recast characters whose actors had died (or, in the case of Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi, simply hadn’t agreed to work with them), which means we’re still in Companion Chronicles territory. When it came to doing these, Big Finish didn’t really have a wealth of options. Though they’d work with all the members of the UNIT supporting cast, the Brigadier, Sergeant Benton, and genocidal fascist Mike Yates weren’t really the proper companions of their period, of whom there were really only three – Liz Shaw, Jo Grant, and Sarah Jane Smith. Although Big Finish had previously worked with Elisabeth Sladen on their Sarah Jane Smith series, when she signed on to do the Sarah Jane Adventures TV show she had to give up doing side work as the character (at least for the duration of the show), which meant she was contractually locked out of the…