RNIB Audios

[Lord President]

I've recently come into possession of some Doctor Who Audio Books recorded for the Blind. Three Doctors, Carnival of Monsters and Loch Ness Monster read by Gabriel Woolf, and now Iceberg, the New Adventure written by David Banks. These came as a revelation to me as I didn't even know they had been recorded.

Does anyone know of any others?

[Rob McCow]

It'd seem strange if RNIB had never had any Doctor Who books done as audio books, but aside from the marketed BBC releases, I've never seen/heard any! Perhaps they were more common in the 80's/ early 90's?

[SiHart]

here's some information about them from The Millenium Effect website

The founder of the Royal National Institute for the Blind, Thomas Rhodes Armitage, was born in Sussex in 1824, and following his experiments with embossed writing - where braille was found to be most successful, and put to extensive use - the RNIB began to offer equipment, education and assistance to those with partial or no visibility. From 1918 they operated schools for blind children, trained adults for employment as masseurs, and during the second world war opened a commercial college to train switchboard operators, typists and secretaries. As employment patterns changed the college also began to train computer programmers, and today the RNIB's employment officers help visually impaired people to find work in commerce, administration and the professions, while the Department of Employment offers a placement service for those looking for work in industry.

The RNIB's talking book service began in 1935, and has since expanded from 500 members to 90,000 users nationwide. Originally, a talking book consisted of a specially designed gramophone record that held 25 minutes of recorded material per side. Now the books are recorded, unabridged, onto special cassettes that can hold up to 12 hours of narration, with celebrity readers including Terry Waite, Clare Rayner, Michael Palin, Joanna Lumley and Joyce Grenfell. These unique cassettes are playable only through special devices - today the size of walkmans, pictured below - available through local libraries and charity organisations to the registered visually impaired. The cassettes themselves can be requested and ordered through normal library services, and the list of titles available continues to expand with every month.

Whether by popular request or managerial choice, several Doctor Who novels have been available in this format. The first, titled simply Doctor Who, ran to over 9 hours and included unabridged readings of Terrance Dicks' novelisations for The Three Doctors (1973), The Carnival of Monsters (1973) and Terror of the Zygons (1975). Their reader, Gabriel Woolf, had portrayed Sutekh in the Doctor Who story Pyramids of Mars (1975), and has since recorded more than forty major novels and stories (including all of George Eliot's) for various organisations and has toured as narrator with some of the finest orchestras, performing The Soldier's Tale, Carnival of Animals, The Snowman, Peter and the Wolf and The Oxford Elegy to name a few. His Doctor Who reel-to-reel cassette - never commercially available, but still accessible through libraries - has caused much speculation in the past, from rumours that the stories were abridged, merged, or rewritten to belief that they included sections from either the Malcolm Hulke/Terrance Dicks tome The Making of Doctor Who (1972) or Alan Road's Making of a Television Series (published 1983); a full account of the 5-track tape appears below for the first time. Other titles available through the RNIB have been written and read by David Banks, including his semi-factual Cyberman book and 1993 Virgin New Adventure Iceberg, and we hope to bring you further information on these recordings soon.

TME wishes to state clearly that these recordings were not intended to be, and never shall be, available commercially or to the general public, but were and are exclusively for the registered blind through the RNIB (www.rnib.org.uk). They were, however, recorded with full acknowledgement and consent from the copyright holders (the British Broadcasting Corporation and WH Allen) and as such come under the bracket of officially licensed Doctor Who products, earning them a very worthy mention here. Although it is possible that international libraries and organisations have recorded further Doctor Who-related readings, we regard them as unofficial until proven otherwise.

Si xx

[Jon Masters]

TME wishes to state clearly that these recordings were not intended to be, and never shall be, available commercially or to the general public

I can immediately visualise certain televisual historians breaking into libraries across the country to obtain the precious things

[Lord President]

Thanks for the info guys, they are very good readings, I can recommend them highly! ;-)