Audio Plays
In late May 2004, Big Finish Productions announced that they had secured the rights to produce a new series of Sapphire & Steel audio adventures for release on CD. However, neither McCallum nor Lumley reprised their roles: McCallum was working in the United States and Lumley declined to play Sapphire again. The characters were recast, with Susannah Harker and David Warner taking over the roles. The range is produced by Nigel Fairs and Jason Haigh-Ellery.
The character of Gold (played by Mark Gatiss) appears in the first adventure The Passenger and returns in Perfect Day and Zero. He is portrayed as impatient and inexperienced when dealing with both humans and the various manifestations of Time, even more detached and clinical in many ways than Steel, almost as if he is still in training. The character of Ruby (played by Lisa Bowerman) appears in the second series story Water Like a Stone, reappearing in Cruel Immortality and Second Sight. Her character has an understanding and affinity to Time within the rhythms of music, and also comes across as rather dry and sardonic, especially when interacting with Steel. David Collings reprises his role as Silver in the third and fifth stories of the first series of audio plays and then again in the third story of the third series. During the production of each season, Nigel Fairs has had to step in at late notice to write a replacement script (writing Dead Man Walking from John Ainsworth's outline in series one, replacing Gary Russell's Big Fun with Cruel Immortality in series two and replacing Joseph Lidster's Reborn with Second Sight in series three).
It was originally said by Big Finish that the new stories would be set before the climactic final story of the television series, but the released plays are actually set after assignment 6, and at the start of The Passenger, the characters comment that it has been a long time since they last worked together and, in Cruel Immortality, imply that they were freed in some unspecified way by Silver.
At the end of The Mystery of the Missing Hour, Sapphire and Steel once again find themselves trapped. The following story, Second Sight sees the characters 'reborn' once more - this time in the guise of two young Australians, played by Blair McDonough and Anna Skellern. At the end of Second Sight, however, Ruby was able to release the previous incarnations of Sapphire and Steel from their trap - with David Warner and Susannah Harker reprising their roles for the rest of the series.
The range ends with the eponymous characters once again trapped.
The audio dramas featured some notable guest stars - including Hugo Myatt, Muriel Pavlow, Daphne Oxenford, Lucy Gaskell, Colin Baker, Sarah Douglas, Sam Kelly, David Horovitch, Mark Gatiss and Louise Jameson.
| CD # | Release date | Story Title | Writer | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | May 2005 | The Passenger | Steve Lyons | A steam train enthusiast boards an antiquated 1930s train for a journey with eleven other passengers, and an old book provides the trigger for Time to start playing out a familiar tale that will end in murder. Can Sapphire, Steel and Gold overcome one man's guilt and prevent the inevitable? (4 parts) |
| 2 | June 2005 | Daisy Chain | Joseph Lidster | An ordinary house with a seemingly happy family hides a secret that might destroy them, as well as Sapphire and Steel. The operatives must find the right link in a chain of cause and effect – but to break it, someone may have to be sacrificed. (4 parts) |
| 3 | July 2005 | All Fall Down | David Bishop | In an historical area of London, old artefacts are uncovered, and a journal provides a dangerous link to the past. Even with Silver's help, Steel finds the Black Plague reaching out from the mists of Time, while Sapphire risks becoming trapped as part of history itself. (4 parts) |
| 4 | August 2005 | The Lighthouse | Nigel Fairs | A newlywed couple move into a lighthouse intending to renovate it, but ghosts from the past, secrets from the present and phantoms from the future hurtle around one another in a time storm, threatening to engulf them all in an inescapable cycle of madness and death. (2 parts) |
| 5 | September 2005 | Dead Man Walking | Nigel Fairs (based on a story by John Ainsworth) | An unexplained death at a prison is only the first of a series of inconsistencies with Time that Sapphire and Steel are called in to investigate. (2 parts) |
| 2.1 | July 2006 | The School | Simon Guerrier | The school has stood for a century, and proud of its history. However, old ghosts are stirring and lessons will be learned… but will Sapphire and Steel become the teachers, or the students? (4 parts) |
| 2.2 | September 2006 | The Surest Poison | Richard Dinnick | An auction of timepieces, a 156-year-old man, the theft of the greatest watch ever built and its creator, the greatest watchmaker of all: all linked across history. Time has a plan, one with cataclysmic consequences for humanity unless Sapphire and Steel can stop it. (4 parts) |
| 2.3 | November 2006 | Water Like a Stone | Nigel Fairs | In an abandoned theatre on Christmas Eve, plans to celebrate a dead playwright's work threaten to lure Sapphire and Steel into a maze from which there may be no escape… |
| 2.4 | January 2007 | Cruel Immortality | Nigel Fairs | Steel is alone, trapped in a Retirement Home in the middle of nowhere. |
| 2.5 | March 2007 | Perfect Day | Steve Lyons | Steel, Sapphire and Gold find themselves attending a wedding. |
| 2.6 | May 2007 | The Mystery of the Missing Hour | Joseph Lidster | Sapphire and Steel arrive in Cairo, 1926 to solve an impossible murder. |
| 3.1 | March 2008 | Second Sight | Nigel Fairs | Sapphire and Steel have gone. Sapphire and Steel are here. |
| 3.2 | April 2008 | Remember Me | John Dorney | A faded sitcom star wanders through the darkness of a deserted pier, haunted by the ghosts of his dead colleagues. |
| 3.3 | May 2008 | Zero | Steve Lyons | The Space Shuttle Aspirant is in a decaying orbit, its engines dead. Time is running out. |
| 3.4 | August 2008 | Wall of Darkness | Nigel Fairs | An abandoned shopping centre in the middle of the night. Is the journey at an end? |
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“We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)