Nicholas Briggs

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nicholas Briggs, right, in a scene from Myth Runner with Michael Wisher.

Nicholas Briggs is a British actor and writer, predominantly associated with the BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who and its various spin-offs. Briggs sometimes uses the pseudonym Arthur Wallis.

Some of Briggs' earliest Doctor Who-related work was as host of Myth Makers, a series of made-for-video documentaries produced in the 1980s and 1990s by Reeltime Pictures in which Briggs interviews many of the actors and writers involved in the series. When Reeltime expanded into producing original dramas, Briggs wrote some stories and acted in others, beginning with War Time, the first unofficial Doctor Who spin-off, and Myth Runner, a parody of Blade Runner showcasing bloopers from the Myth Makers series built around a loose storyline featuring Briggs as a down on his luck private detective in the near future.

In the late 1980s, Briggs also provided the voice of a future incarnation of the Doctor for a series of unofficial audio dramas by Audio Visuals (a forerunner of Big Finish Productions). This version of the Doctor also appeared in "Party Animals", an instalment of the Doctor Who comic published in Doctor Who Magazine issue 173, cover date 15 May 1991. Briggs also provided the model for the face of the supposed "Ninth Doctor" for Doctor Who Magazine in the late 1990s, when the magazine's comic strip ran a storyline in which the Eighth Doctor apparently regenerated, only for it to later be revealed that the whole thing had been a massive deception (see Shayde and Fey Truscott-Sade).

He wrote and appeared in several made-for-video dramas by BBV, including the third of the Stranger stories, In Memory Alone opposite former Doctor Who stars Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant. (In Memory Alone would be the last of the Stranger series to have any similarity to Doctor Who, which had inspired it.) He also wrote and appeared in a non-Stranger BBV production called The Airzone Solution.

Briggs co-wrote a Doctor Who book called The Dalek Survival Guide (ISBN 0-563-48600-7, published by BBC Books 2002).

When Doctor Who returned to television, Briggs provided the voices for several monsters, most notably the Daleks in the 2005 episodes Dalek, Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways, the Cybermen in Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel (2006), and both Daleks and Cybermen in Army of Ghosts and Doomsday (also 2006). Briggs also voiced the Nestene Consciousness in the 2005 episode Rose, and recorded a voice for the Jagrafess in the 2005 episode The Long Game; however, this was not used in the final episode because it was too similar to the voice of the Nestene Consciousness. He will also provide the voices for both the Daleks and the Judoon in the 2007 series.

Briggs has directed many of the Big Finish Productions audio plays, and has provided Dalek, Cybermen, and other alien voices in several of those as well. He has also written and directed the Dalek Empire and Cyberman audio plays for Big Finish. In 2006, Briggs took over from Gary Russell as executive producer of the Big Finish Doctor Who audio range.^[1]

Briggs also directed the BBC Radio 4 science fiction comedy Nebulous, written by Graham Duff and starring Mark Gatiss.