Dead Romance

Professor Bernice Surprise Summerfield, or simply Benny, is a fictional character created by author Paul Cornell as a new companion of the Seventh Doctor in Virgin Publishing's range of original full-length Doctor Who novels, the New Adventures. The New Adventures were licensed novels carrying on from where the Doctor Who television series had left off, featuring a number of writers that previously worked on the series, along with several new to the franchise. Summerfield was introduced in Cornell's novel Love and War in 1992, the first companion character original to the series. Bernice would later go on to take the lead role of the New Adventures book series, upon Virgin Publishing losing access to the Doctor Who licence, in favour of the BBC's in-house publisher BBC Books. Having left the role as companion to the Doctor, the first of this spinoff soft-reboot was the story Oh No It Isn't! in 1997, also by her creator Paul Cornell. This was possible because an unusual contract on Virgin Publishing's front gave character rights to their creators as long as they could be used in future novels by the company, instead of control defaulting to Virgin or the BBC themselves. This marked Summerfield as the first companion to have a full series of licensed spinoff material. Big Finish Productions would later take an interest in Benny, as their initial attempt to obtain the licence for official Doctor Who audio drama was rejected. In 1998, Big Finish made their first release, an adaptation of Cornell's Oh No It Isn't! done by Jacqueline Rayner for the new self-titled Bernice Summerfield audio range. As her personal debut in a performed medium, Summerfield would be portrayed by British actress Lisa Bowerman, who would continue the role into the modern day. After Oh No It Isn't!, Big Finish would produce five more adaptations of New Adventures novels Bernice appeared in. While Oh No It Isn't!, Beyond the Sun, Walking to Babylon, and Dragons' Wrath were all part of the Summerfield-led spinoff New Adventures, Birthright and Just War were versions of stories from the original Seventh Doctor range, heavily edited to remove the Doctor, Ace, Chris Cwej, and Roz Forrester, Bernice herself and her ex-husband Jason Kane filling their roles instead. Towards the tail end of the first series of Bernice Summerfield, the final New Adventures novel, Twilight of the Gods, was released, marking the end of work by Virgin Publishing relating to Doctor Who media. Bernice's story would continue after a short time-skip, however, when Big Finish began producing original works in the Bernice Summerfield series, continuing their Bowerman-led audio dramas, in addition to their own books, taking the form of concurrent novels and anthologies, making her officially the lead of a multimedia franchise. Over the years, Benny would make guest appearances in the mainline Doctor Who ranges, as well as other spinoffs later on, and have occasional crossover encounters with exclusive Doctor Who monsters such as the Daleks and Cybermen. These were rare, however, as the original Bernice Summerfield range was not allowed to even directly reference most material originating from the television series. These stories would follow her life events uninterrupted, story arcs always having direct transitions even when the rest of the cast changed, until the range concluded its main story with the boxset Missing Persons. In 2014, Bernice Summerfield was rebooted with a time-skip, starting the audio drama series The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield, now directly under the Doctor Who branding and allowing full crossover with the rest of the franchise. The first two series had her reuniting with the Seventh Doctor and Ace, the third series through to the seventh starring her opposite David Warner's alternative 'Unbound' third Doctor. The pairing was together up until past David Warner's death, the final boxset Blood and Steel and their appearance in the Dark Gallifrey series being released posthumously. Breaks between boxset releases were often filled by official audiobooks of the previously released Big Finish novels, narrated by Lisa Bowerman. In 2024, Bernice was given another soft-reboot. Starting with The Eternity Club 1, it takes place after yet another time-skip, with a new, full supporting cast. Instead of boxsets, the series would continue as single-disc releases with two shorter audios per part of each four-part series. As she was fully independent of the Doctor again, with the release of The Dalek Eternity 1 in 2025, Bernice's audios quietly dropped The New Adventures from their titles. While officially part of the same series as before, directly continuing from The Eternity Club, and still containing the Doctor Who branding and licenses, promotion and cover art once again became simply Bernice Summerfield. Big Finish has stated that Bernice Summerfield's audios unofficially hold the record for longest-running female-led science fiction audio series, as well as longest running female-led audio series. This would also have made her hold the title of longest-running science fiction audio series as a whole, however the official Guinness World Record is held by the Doctor Who: The Monthly Adventures due to her aforementioned brand reboot in 2014. Both of these statements are contestable however, as Ruby the Galactic Gumshoe by the ZBS Foundation has been running sporadically since 1982 and had a release in 2025, with no brand changes.

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