Ah, yeah, okay. It just always feels really performative when he’s always going to be profiting off of Jack, presumably he was already paid for the Big Finish audios, and him getting royalties off it feels pretty inconsequential when you factor in the popularity of the actual shows Doctor Who and Torchwood compared to the popularity of any given Big Finish audio (as cool as Big Finish is!).
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Yeah I’m ultimately fairly neutral on it. I get not wanting to pay him further royalties but I also get what you’re saying that the extra royalties from one audio that he’s already done are ultimately pretty inconsequential. I’m also kinda ambivalent just because I don’t personally like Torchwood or Jack enough to really care that much.
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For me I want to hear it because it has the Tenth Doctor in it.
I guess they just see it as a bad look.
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I don’t really listen to audios or read comics very often, so on that level I don’t care, it just seems overall pointless and like a waste of everyone else’s work.
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Well there’s one person to blame for that. Barrowman.
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Ah. The “look what you made me do” theory of justice.
By which I mean–Barrowman’s misbehavior was never a secret. It was public knowledge in 2008. The BBC was happily working with him for over ten years after that (to the point of putting him back in the show in 2021). At any point in that time, they could have decided not to platform him. They didn’t pull the audios because he’d just then done something terrible, they pulled it because they realized they were going to get bad attention for the fact that he did something in 2008 and they did absolutely nothing about it. That’s performative! And has very little to do with Barrowman’s actual actions, I feel.
To be clear, I’m not defending him or his actions. I just think it’s ridiculous to spend over ten years giving this man work and then suddenly pull ready-for-release audios because you’ve just now realized it makes you look bad.
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It’s not even really that they didn’t do anything about it. Julie Gardner reprimanded him in 2008 about it, and made it “clear to both John and his agent that behavior of this kind would not be tolerated.”, and then he stopped.
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And if that’s what happened why punish him again for it now! Like, either the BBC is admitting that their workplace culture was so messed up in 2008 that stuff like this was happening with 0 consequences and they only got around to dealing with it long after the damage was done, or they’re punishing someone who was already reprimanded and who already stopped doing the thing that caused the problem because they want to look good. I don’t really care about Barrowman in particular, but I don’t love the model of justice that says “person who did something bad and then stopped doing it when reprimanded should be ostracized and cut off from their career forever.” Like, the BBC can choose who they want to hire, but their motivations here do not seem rooted in actual desire to right wrongs or mitigate harm. They had their chance to fire John Barrowman in 2008, and if Julie Gardner actually reprimanded him and he actually stopped, they clearly didn’t necessarily need to fire him to solve the problem.
Obviously I wasn’t there and I don’t know the full situation, so maybe firing him in 2008 would’ve been the right move, and of course if it seemed like he was still harassing people in 2021, not hiring him anymore would’ve been good, but specifically holding back audios and comics that have already been written/recorded when he’d already had 10-15 years as the lead in Torchwood and associated spinoff media (and had recently reappeared on the show, in an episode that had already been aired!) is excessive and unnecessary. Any actual harm/harassment he could do during the making of those audios or that episode would have already been done, and it doesn’t make that harm any more or less harmful if he gets royalties off the work he did. Again, I don’t know whether he was still harassing people at that point (and I think he’s said the stuff he was doing in 2008, he wouldn’t do now), but either way the scorched earth thing misses the mark for me.
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I think part of the problem with judging both Barrowman and/or the BBC and Big Finish is that Barrowman (and I definitely don’t condone his actions) was a side effect of the Noel Clarke debacle. I don’t doubt that what Barrowman did was unacceptable, but Noel Clarke’s actions were so much worse and the Barrowman actions were only brought up as a deflection from Clarke. However, because of the connection of both men to Doctor Who and being very public, I understand that both business had to take very public action. The question that I see with the “lost” Torchwood audio now is whether the files still exist on a server somewhere at Big Finish (in which case there’s a slight possibility it could resurface at some point) or whether the files were deleted during the controversy (in which case it’s lost forever because I highly doubt they’d ever re-record it).
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Yeah, I guess I feel like they thought they had to go scorched-earth on both Barrowman and Clarke when in reality the two situations were very different.
I kind of can’t imagine they would’ve deleted the files entirely, but I guess I don’t know what Big Finish is up to.
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The audio went to print. Unless they destroyed all the CDs (and basically burn the money it took to make them), they’re just sitting in a warehouse somewhere.
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We need someone to get hired by Big Finish, find that warehouse, infiltrate it and release the CDs to the public! 
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Isn’t it ironic that BF maintains the tradition of lost episodes of Doctor Who with Absent Friends? In a few decades, we will search the world for copies of the story, only to discover their absence. And then BF will release an animated reconstruction, because all that’s left of Absent Friends is the soundtrack!
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Not before we get a thoroughly horrendous AI version made by Ian Levine 
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You know, if we found the script, but not the audio, then a horrendous AI version of the audio could be done, and afterwards, there could be a bad AI reconstruction!
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If we just found the original pitch for the story we could even have an AI recreate a horrendous abomination of a script to base all of this on 
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Sounds like a job for The shauny Doctor in his 7ARDSG!
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Parts of the script were leaked via an eBay listing of the script. We can’t confirm that it’s real but it sure makes me so mad we don’t have it.
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The terrible thing is I probably could do a bad AI recreation of audio for one of those script pieces. It’d just be too much of a pain for me to actually want to do it, since I’d have to grab a bunch of audio samples of John Barrowman’s voice and train an ai, and the same for any other characters in the script. (And, of course, no background music, etc…)
One of these things that I know you can do, but I haven’t actually done…
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I could do that without AI, just by piecing things they said in other audios together. I’ve done it before and it’s a tonne of work and generally not worth it.
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