30 Hours of Doctor Who Audio Dramas Now Free to Stream Online

“Yes, this should pro­vide ade­quate sus­te­nance for the Doc­tor Who marathon,” once said The Simp­sons’ Com­ic Book Guy while push­ing a wheel­bar­row full of fast-food tacos down the street. As the embod­i­ment of fan­dom for all things fan­ta­sy and sci-fi, he would cer­tain­ly know that Doc­tor Who, no longer an obscure BBC tele­vi­sion show but an ever-expand­ing fic­tion­al uni­verse with a glob­al fan base, con­sti­tutes the ide­al mate­r­i­al for binge-watch­ing, which he could now do at his con­ve­nience on a ser­vice like Brit­box. But it isn’t just watch­ing: now, on Spo­ti­fy (whose free soft­ware you can down­load here if you don’t have it already), you can binge-lis­ten to thir­ty straight hours of Doc­tor Who audio dra­mas as well.

“An icon of mod­ern British cul­ture and the longest-run­ning sci­ence-fic­tion TV show in his­to­ry, Doc­tor Who has nev­er been more pop­u­lar than it is today,” wrote Christo­pher Bahn in the AV Club’s 2010 primer on the series, which had relaunched five years ear­li­er after ini­tial­ly run­ning from 1963 to 1989. “No mat­ter who’s play­ing the lead, the basic premise has been essen­tial­ly the same since the show’s debut: A mys­te­ri­ous, eccen­tric alien known only as The Doc­tor (not ‘Doc­tor Who,’ in spite of the title) trav­els through time and space hav­ing adven­tures and fight­ing evil. He’s usu­al­ly accom­pa­nied by one or two humans picked up along the way. They jour­ney with him in a time machine called a TARDIS, which looks like a blue phone booth.”

This for­mat “allowed the show to lit­er­al­ly go any­where in the uni­verse and some­times out­side it, with vir­tu­al­ly lim­it­less sto­ry­telling pos­si­bil­i­ties.” At its best, “Doc­tor Who relied on sol­id, imag­i­na­tive scripts to cre­ate smart sci­ence-fic­tion thrillers with a human­is­tic, anti-author­i­tar­i­an heart. Con­sis­tent­ly pop­u­lar through the 1960s and 1970s, the show began to fal­ter in the fol­low­ing decade as tight bud­gets and ques­tion­able artis­tic choic­es took their toll.” After its can­cel­la­tion in 1989, Doc­tor Who “lived on through the ’90s, as sci­ence-fic­tion shows often do, in the wilder­ness gen­res of semi-offi­cial nov­els and radio plays.”

The best known of these Doc­tor Who radio plays, which you can hear on this playlist, come pro­duced by a com­pa­ny called Big Fin­ish. Hav­ing acquired a license from the BBC in 1999 (and recent­ly renewed it into 2025), they’ve put out a range of audio dra­mas, both one-offs and series of var­i­ous lengths, using not just the char­ac­ters but many of the actu­al actors from the tele­vi­sion show, includ­ing six of those who have tak­en on the icon­ic Doc­tor role onscreen. Owing to the fact that Doc­tor Who offi­cial­ly has no canon and thus no need for con­ti­nu­ity, rig­or­ous or oth­er­wise, they can get even more imag­i­na­tive than their source mate­r­i­al, going so far as to explore coun­ter­fac­tu­al sto­ry­lines such as one where the Doc­tor nev­er leaves his home plan­et in the first place.

Below you’ll find a com­plete list, assem­bled by a fan on Red­dit, of the series and episodes of Big Fin­ish’s Doc­tor Who audio dra­mas now avail­able on Spo­ti­fy and are now housed to our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books. The mate­r­i­al comes to thir­ty hours in total, but the ques­tion of when to lis­ten to it falls sec­ond to a more impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion: what sort of sus­te­nance will best ensure that you can keep up with all of the Doc­tor’s audio adven­tures?

Main Range:

1. The Sirens of Time
2. Phan­tas­mago­ria
3. Whis­pers of Ter­ror
4. The Land of the Dead
5. The Fear­mon­ger
6. The Mar­i­an Con­spir­a­cy
7. The Geno­cide Machine
8. Red Dawn
9. The Spec­tre of Lany­on Moor
10. Win­ter for the Adept
11. The Apoc­a­lypse Ele­ment
12. The Fires of Vul­can
13. The Shad­ow of the Scourge
14. The Holy Ter­ror
15. The Mutant Phase
16. Storm Warn­ing
17. Sword of Ori­on
18. The Stones of Venice
19. Min­uet in Hell
20. Loups-Garoux
21. Dust Breed­ing
22. Blood­tide
23. Project: Twi­light
24. The Eye of the Scor­pi­on
25. Colditz
26. Primeval
27. The One Doc­tor
28. Invaders from Mars
29. The Chimes of Mid­night
30. Sea­sons of Fear
31. Embrace the Dark­ness
32. The Time of the Daleks
33. Nev­er­land
34. Spare Parts
35. …ish
36. The Rap­ture
37. The Sand­man
38. The Church and the Crown
39. Bang-Bang-a-Boom!
40. Jubilee
41. Nekro­man­teia
42. The Dark Flame
43. Doc­tor Who and the Pirates
44. Crea­tures of Beau­ty
45. Project: Lazarus
46. Flip-Flop
47. Omega
48. Davros
49. Mas­ter
50. Zagreus

Spe­cial Releas­es:

UNIT: Domin­ion

The Davros Mis­sion

Fourth Doc­tor Adven­tures:

1.01 Des­ti­na­tion: Ner­va

1.02 The Renais­sance Man

1.03 The Wrath of the Iceni

1.04 Ener­gy of the Daleks

1.05 Trail of the White Worm

1.06 The Osei­don Adven­ture

Eighth Doc­tor Adven­tures:

1.1 Blood of the Daleks, Part 1

1.2 Blood of the Daleks, Part 2

1.3 Hor­ror of Glam Rock

1.4 Immor­tal Beloved

1.5 Pho­bos

1.6 No More Lies

1.7 Human Resources, Part 1

1.8 Human Resources, Part 2

The Lost Sto­ries:

1.01 The Night­mare Fair

1.02 Mis­sion to Mag­nus

1.03 Leviathan

1.04 The Hol­lows of Time

1.05 Par­adise 5

1.06 Point of Entry

1.07 The Song of Megaptera

1.08 The Macros

Box 1. The Fourth Doc­tor Box Set

The Com­pan­ion Chron­i­cles:

2.1 Moth­er Rus­sia

2.2 Heli­con Prime

2.3 Old Sol­diers

2.4 The Cat­a­lyst

Des­tiny of the Doc­tor:

1. Hunters of Earth
2. Shad­ow of Death
3. Vengeance of the Stones
4. Bab­ble­sphere
5. Smoke and Mir­rors
6. Trou­ble in Par­adise
7. Shock­wave
8. Ene­my Aliens
9. Night of the Whis­per
10. Death’s Deal
11. The Time Machine

Short Trips:

Vol­ume 1

Vol­ume 2

The Stage­plays:

1. The Ulti­mate Adven­ture
2. Sev­en Keys to Dooms­day
3. The Curse of the Daleks

Ber­nice Sum­mer­field:

Box 2. Road Trip

Box 3. Legion

Box 4. New Fron­tiers

Box 5. Miss­ing Per­sons

Grace­less:

Series 1

Series 2

Series 3

Dalek Empire:

1. Inva­sion of the Daleks
2. The Human Fac­tor
3. “Death to the Daleks!”
4. Project Infin­i­ty
5. Dalek War: Chap­ter One
6. Dalek War: Chap­ter Two
7. Dalek War: Chap­ter Three
8. Dalek War: Chap­ter Four

Jago & Lite­foot:

Series 1

Series 2

Series 3

Series 4

Series 5

Counter-Mea­sures:

Series 1

Series 2

Iris Wildthyme:

2.1 The Sound of Fear

2.2 The Land of Won­der

2.3 The Two Iris­es

2.4 The Pan­da Inva­sion

2.5 The Claws of San­ta

Series 3

Series 4

UNIT:

1. Time Heals
2. Snake Head
3. The Longest Night
4. The Wast­ing

I, Davros:

1. Inno­cence
2. Puri­ty
3. Cor­rup­tion
4. Guilt

Cyber­man:

1.1 Scor­pius

1.2 Fear

1.3 Con­ver­sion

1.4 Telos

2.0 Cyber­man 2

Char­lotte Pol­lard:

Series 1

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Brit­Box Now Stream­ing Now Stream­ing 550 Episodes of Doc­tor Who and Many Oth­er British TV Shows

The BBC Cre­ates Step-by-Step Instruc­tions for Knit­ting the Icon­ic Doc­tor Who Scarf: A Doc­u­ment from the Ear­ly 1980s

Vin­cent van Gogh Vis­its a Mod­ern Muse­um & Gets to See His Artis­tic Lega­cy: A Touch­ing Scene from Doc­tor Who

42 Hours of Ambi­ent Sounds from Blade Run­ner, Alien, Star Trek and Doc­tor Who Will Help You Relax & Sleep

The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry of How Delia Der­byshire Cre­at­ed the Orig­i­nal Doc­tor Who Theme

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.