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Every vista is beautiful, from the minefield of black holes to the sea of floating books through which our heroes swim in weightless wonder.

Review and illustration by Jamie Lenman

As anyone who lived through them will tell you, there are two versions of the 1980s. There’s the fictional 1980s, familiar to us through movies of the time and today’s Netflix dramas, where everyone wears neon leotards and has vertical, asymmetrical haircuts. And there’s the real 1980s, which were mainly beige-coloured, with an awful lot of concrete, and were generally a little bit dull. The Fifth Doctor’s reign on television from 1981 to 1984 is an accidentally truthful record of what this period was actually like. There’s no beiger Doctor than Peter Davison’s (he’s literally covered in it) and, in between sundry peaks of wild excitement, things do occasionally border on the humdrum.

In Tim Foley’s Pursuit of the Nightjar, the first entry in Big Finish’s latest Fifth Doctor Adventures set, the trio of Doctor Five, Nyssa and Tegan are transplanted from the ordinary, brown-glass-with-redpiping 1980s into its Hollywood mirrortwin, bathed in pink and blue light (coming from nowhere in particular) and swathed in gorgeous synthwave, conjured with effortless skill by maestro Howard Carter. As luck would have it, the atmosphere suits them very well indeed.