First introduced to the audio range in 2001, Charley Pollard was an ongoing companion to the Eighth and Sixth Doctors for almost a decade. Since her time in the TARDIS ended, new stories have often revisited that era, but in 2014, we glimpsed Charley’s life after the Doctor, with the launch of her eponymous spin-off series.
“What Matt Fitton and Jonathan Barnes did with Series One was brilliant,” enthuses Nicholas Briggs, who created Charlotte Pollard, and has written its entire second run, “but it wasn’t quite what I’d intended. They wrote straight-down-the-line adventure stories, and I did fall in love with it, but I wanted to be a little bit more edgy, a little bit more realistic.
“So Series Two is a crisis for Charley,” he reveals. “Everything falls apart. At the end of the first series, she’s going to set off on a big adventure and takes a risk. In this series, it becomes clear within seconds that the risk has not paid off, she’s not been lucky, and she’s about to die. So it’s about Charley being a survivor, really, and being able to think on her