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Live-34 is the story that dares you to turn it off halfway through and go touch grass, but you won’t, because you can’t stop listening as the dread tightens around your throat. It is the single most stressful, politically charged Big Finish story ever recorded, and I say that as someone who has listened to Jubilee on repeat like it’s a cozy bedtime story. This isn’t cozy. This is a four-part panic attack in radio format. This is Doctor Who as full-blown media critique, and the punchline is that nearly 20 years later it has stopped being “20 minutes into the future” and started being “this morning’s news cycle, but with Ace threatening to blow up a gulag.”
The conceit of Live-34 is brilliant: the entire story is told as though you are listening to a live broadcast from a state-run news station on Colony 34. No cutaways to the TARDIS, no “meanwhile in the caves,” no scene-setting music cues—just the relentless cheeriness of state media presenters telling you everything is fine while you can hear the building burn down in the background. This is already unsettling, because you realize very quickly that you are trapped in the same information prison as the characters. If the presenters don’t report it, you don’t know it happened. There are no reliable narrators here, just PR flaks and government mouthpieces reading from the same script you’ve been screaming about on Twitter since 2016.
Colony 34 itself is… well, it’s Britain, isn’t it? Britain if it kept spiraling in the exact direction it’s been spiraling since 2010. The colony is in the midst of an energy crisis entirely of its own making, having burned through its natural reserves and then thrown a toddler tantrum at the thought of negotiating trade with its neighbors. “We don’t need them, we have sovereignty!” they yell, while their infrastructure collapses and their people starve, but at least they’re free, right? Free to die in their beds from malnutrition. This is Brexit Britain turned up to eleven, and it’s not even subtle about it. You can feel the smugness of the ruling party as they wring every last drop of political capital out of manufactured hardship, blaming outsiders for the consequences of their own greed.
Enter the terrorist attack—which, of course, wasn’t. It’s a false flag, because of course it is. The explosion is staged so that the ruling party can declare sweeping new security measures, rounding up their political opponents, detaining them without trial, and shipping them off to an undisclosed location. There’s a moment where the announcer calmly reads off the “security upgrades” with the same chipper tone as a weather forecast, and you just want to scream, because this is exactly how we got the Patriot Act, this is how we got Guantanamo Bay, this is how we got mass surveillance justified as “keeping us safe.” Live-34 doesn’t even exaggerate; it just reports the news from 2005 and lets the horror speak for itself.
And speaking of horror, this is the most overtly political the Seventh Doctor has ever been on audio, and that’s saying something considering his entire TV era was an extended middle finger to Thatcher. Here he’s not just a meddler—he’s the leader of the FTP, the official opposition party, which the government portrays as a terrorist organization. This is the most Jeremy Corbyn thing the Doctor has ever done, right down to being smeared as a radical extremist every time he opens his mouth, no matter how sensible his proposals are. The parallel is uncanny: a man trying to lead a movement for decency, demonized at every turn by a hostile media establishment working hand-in-glove with the ruling class. It’s brutal, and it’s brilliant.
Then there’s Ace, rebranded as the so-called Rebel Queen, who has taken a break from blowing up Daleks to run an honest-to-god mutual aid network. She’s sheltering dissidents, feeding the starving, and generally doing all the things that make fascists wet the bed at night. Her broadcast interview is the emotional core of part two, and it’s edited and censored so heavily by Live-34’s producers that it becomes this perfect microcosm of how media sanitizes dissent. She sounds like a dangerous lunatic because they’ve cut out everything that makes her sound human. This is exactly how leftist activists are covered in mainstream media—flattened into bogeymen so the public will dismiss them without engaging with their arguments.
And then Hex, poor Hex, gets an entire segment following him on his paramedic rounds. This should be the breather episode, except it’s not, because we learn that Hex is basically the last medic standing thanks to a worker shortage brought about by the government’s xenophobia. Foreigners have been expelled or made to feel unwelcome, and now Hex has to do the job of three people while the city literally falls apart around him. The metaphor is painfully obvious if you’ve watched the UK’s NHS crumble over the last decade, or seen what happened to agriculture and transport post-Brexit when migrant workers stopped coming. His discovery of a mass grave is gut-wrenching, and it’s the moment the story fully drops its mask and says, “Yes, they are committing genocide, and yes, the news isn’t reporting it.”
Part four is where everything snaps. The ruling party declares electoral victory before the votes are even counted, blames irregularities on the opposition, and starts openly promising border crackdowns and culture-war policies. Tell me that’s not every populist authoritarian from Trump to Bolsonaro. The Doctor is declared dead (spoiler: he isn’t), Ace is captured and tortured live on air, and the colony is put into full fascist lockdown. And then—miracle of miracles—the Doctor turns up alive, reveals the president is a literal fraud using a senile old man as a puppet figurehead, and somehow this is enough to make the populace turn on him. Which, let’s be honest, is the least believable part of the whole story. In real life, half the population would shrug and go, “Well, that’s politics!” and the other half would double down and insist that actually, it was the right thing to do. Reality is bleaker than fiction, but at least fiction gives us catharsis. But y’know, I honestly feel that this is the perfect story for those of us who know, without a doubt, that Trump is a war criminal and should be in prison, and that Biden is a war criminal and should be in prison, and that, and that Obama is a war criminal and should be in prison, and that Bush is a war criminal and should be in prison, and that Clinton is a war criminal and should be in prison, and that Starmer is a war criminal and should be in prison, and that Sunak is a war criminal and should be in prison, and that Boris Johnson is a war criminal and should be in prison, and that Tony Blair is a war criminal and should be in prison, and that…..
Final Thoughts:
It’s not just good Doctor Who, it’s Doctor Who that stares straight into the abyss and doesn’t blink. It’s an unflinching look at propaganda, authoritarian creep, media complicity, and public apathy, and it hurts precisely because it’s so familiar. It’s Jubilee’s older, angrier cousin, the one who went to the protest and got kettled by police, and now smells faintly of tear gas. It’s brilliant, it’s harrowing, and it leaves you with the gnawing sense that maybe the Daleks wouldn’t even have to invade—maybe we’d just open the door and let them in, because at least then we wouldn’t have to think for ourselves anymore.
Rating: 5 out of 5 fascist-smashing radio broadcasts.