Characters / Iris Wildthyme

Characters appearing in Iris Wildthyme stories, occasionally — but not always — taking place in Doctor Who Expanded Universe continuities, but never in the main Whoniverse continuity. For references to Doctor Who, see also the Doctor Who characters pages.

Recaps of Iris's audio adventures can be found on the Big Finish recaps page; recaps of her written adventures with the Eighth Doctor can be found on the Eighth Doctor Adventures page.

Pleas note that due to the nature of the character, the tropes described here are continuously warped and overwritten throughout Iris's adventures, even more so than is common in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe.

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Iris Wildthyme

Voiced by: Katy Manning, Maria McErlane

Supposedly another renegade Time Lord, although she's more of a constantly changing canon wildcard: a Fourth-Wall Observer who dashes in and out of plotlines with little regard for the laws of time and space. Her TARDIS looks like a red double-decker London bus, and she has a habit of claiming that many of the Doctor's escapades were really hers. She originated in a series of wildly unrelated novels and immigrated into the Doctor Who novels a few years later. In Big Finish, she played a key role in the four-part Excelis trilogy, met up with Six in the main range, had adventures with Bernice Summerfield (as well as with the Third Doctor's former companion Jo Grant, who shares the same actress as Iris), and eventually got her own proper Big Finish spinoff series.

• Abhorrent Admirer: She quite fancies the Doctor. All Doctors. The feeling isn't mutual, although when she's Armed with Canon she can warp it any way she likes.
  • Three manages to weaponise this — at one point, when he needs to influence the future while stuck at UNIT, he takes her out to dinner just to manipulate her into doing all the work for him.
  • Amusingly, Six is a bit taken aback when she says she doesn't actually fancy this version of him as much. Though by the end of The Wormery he's grown on her.
• Accidental Proposal: After Jo left Three, he asked Iris to come travel with him for a while. She interpreted it as a marriage proposal. He promptly retracted the offer.
  • Also counts as a stealthy Actor Allusion, since Jo and Iris are both played by Katy Manning.
• All Women Love Shoes: Iris keeps an office above a boutique in 1973 and sighs at all the shoes in the window as she goes in.
• And Your Reward Is Infancy: She gets killed and turns into a baby at the end of Marked For Life.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Towards Six in The Wormery. The scene even manages to be on the sweet side of Yandere.
• Big Damn Kiss: Gets in a good proper snog with Eight in the illustration to "Iris Explains", an omake story by Lance Parkin.
• Bootstrapped Theme: Iris's theme tune from her solo series started life as her and Bianca's song from The Wormery.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: With much glee.
• Casual Time Travel: Iris will casually nip to alternate 1894 Paris to have dinner in her favourite restaurant.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Bordering on insanity. Five outright calls her dangerous and delusional. (She's quite flattered.)
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Her first three regenerations looked strikingly like Edith Sitwell, Shirley Bassey and Beryl Reid, respectively. (Three celebrities who also happened to look quite a bit like Distaff Counterpart versions of William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee.) Her sixth incarnation looks rather a lot like Jane Fonda.
• Consummate Liar: There's very little indication that anything she says is true. Six actually went and checked the record on Gallifrey to see if she's even a Time Lady to begin with. There's no mention of her anywhere.
• Distaff Counterpart: To the Doctor.
• Doctor Whomage: Was written as a female parody of The Doctor.
• Expy Coexistence: As mentioned, she was written as a female parody of The Doctor but used to interact with a more straight Doctor Whomage called El Jefe who was implied to be the First Doctor. El Jefe was changed to be the First Doctor in reprints after the series was Canon Welded with Doctor Who.
• The Fog of Ages: Panda explains she's been around more years than she'll admit so her memory's unreliable when Simon asks why she can't remember if she's been to Hyspero before.
• Fourth-Wall Observer: Especially in omake material.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: This happens to Iris in The Iris Wildthyme Appreciation Society when she unwittingly swaps bodies with an obsessed fan, Wayne Bland III.
• Fun Personified: Even when her life comes crashing down around her.
• Future Me Scares Me: In The Wormery.
• Hand Wave: She manages to escape the destruction of Gallifrey and the Time Lords. Somehow.
• Hard-Drinking Party Girl: All day, every day.
• Intercontinuity Crossover: Apart from coming from a series of novels outside of the Whoniverse altogether, Big Finish deliberately chooses to ignore the massive Continuity Snarl that would be caused by her appearances in the novels, the comics and the audios as though they were all the same timeline. (Episodes starring other companions with similar problems, like Frobisher and Benny, tend to be marked "Side Step" by Big Finish for this reason. Which Iris comments on.) Her unexplained appearances in all of the above are simply considered part of her charm.
  • At one point Iris became a member of the Sisterhood of Karn, and one of her stories outright stated that in the Fourth Doctor serial The Brain of Morbius, she was one of the members who was chanting "Death".
• Julius Beethoven da Vinci: In Marked For Life, Iris says that she and Peggy were Cleopatra and Anthony in a past life.
• Lipstick Lesbian: The character started out as this. She definitely isn't gay in later incarnations.
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: She thinks she's one to the Doctor. He has no idea what she's talking about.
• Multiple-Choice Past: May be a Faction Paradox creation. May be from beyond the Fourth Wall. May be an aspect of the Doctor in some way. May just be mental. She's sometimes a Time Lady, sometimes belongs to an extradimensional race called The Clockworks.
• New Old Flame: She often claims to be the Doctor's, and he hasn't managed to deny it.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Jenny thinks that Iris only pretends to be a daft old bag because she's trying to hide something terrible.
• Odd Friendship: With the Doctor. As much as they bicker and complain at each other, he still enjoys spending time with her occasionally. Five even once took Tegan, Nyssa and Adric to celebrate Christmas in her bus.
• Refugee from TV Land: Has visited a universe where her life is a TV show at least twice. First to threaten a man who insulted her actress and later to attend a Fan Convention.
• Reincarnation Romance: In Marked For Life Iris is Long-Lived but has to find where her lover Peggy reincarnates in each of her new lives.
• Remember the New Guy?: Discussed in-universe. The Doctor can't remember the past adventures she claims they had, concluding she's lying, his memory was erased or she comes from a parallel universe and had adventures with that world's Doctor.
• Rule of Funny: Don't try to make too much sense of how canonical she is or isn't. The Doctor stopped bothering long ago.
• Smoking Is Cool: Iris loves to smoke.
• Spare Body Parts: An x-ray in Iris Wildthyme and the Panda Invasion shows that Iris has two livers as a nod to the Doctor having two hearts.
• Time Police: If the work they're in is not contractually allowed to mention Time Lords then Iris and El Hefe will belong to a race from The Clockworks called the Lords Temporal.
• We Used to Be Friends: She and Four got along quite well, both being merry Cloudcuckoolanders. Five would prefer not to remember any of it, and Iris laments about how standoffish and sober Five tends to be. (Five explains that the whole "losing Adric" thing is one reason he's not as adventure-happy anymore.)
• You Look And Sound Familiar — She's voiced in audios by Katy Manning, who played Jo Grant in the TV series, albeit 35 years of age and heavy smoking later. (Though it should be noted that she herself is nothing like Jo though. And they don't sound that similar either, thanks to Iris's raspy "years of gin and fags, chuck!" voice). Hilarity Ensues in the Big Finish audio episode Find and Replace, when the two characters team up and nobody notices they look the same.
• Your Costume Needs Work: She's visited an Iris Fan Convention in another universe and ended in being mistaken for a cosplayer.

The Celestial Omnibus

Iris's TARDIS — a beaten-down, cluttered double-decker no. 22 to Putney Common. She's smaller on the inside.

• The Alleged Car: Even moreso than the Doctor's TARDIS.
• Bigger on the Inside: Parodied with it being slightly smaller on the inside.
  • Verdigris says it is Bigger On The Inside but most of its interior is used for water storage but Enter Wildthyme and The Scarlet Empress say it gets its water from a spacetime link to a Canadian lake in 1924.
• Blind Jump: Iris activates its randomiser to evade a Monstron Time Destroyer in Iris Rides Out.
• Extradimensional Shortcut: It travels through a dimension called The Maelstrom and emerges elsewhere in time and space. This was a copyright friendly version of the Time Vortex from Doctor Who. When First Meetings was reprinted in Obverse Books' charity anthology A Second Target for Tommy as When Iris Met Billy, several phrases were replaced with more Doctor Who-familiar terms and the Maelstrom became the Vortex.
• Flying Car: Can fly through the air as well as time and space.
• Future Me Scares Me: In The Wormery, she gets cannibalised into a bar. Which is also a nexus point in a massive attempt at transdimensional engineering.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: Iris found the bus derelict as a child filled with years of her own diaries implying that the bus might be experiencing Iris' adventures over and over again.
• Inn Between the Worlds: When it becomes The Wormery, it's a bar with wormholes linking all over time and space.
• Interdimensional Travel Device: Has a dimensional drive that lets it travel the multiverse as well time and space.
• A Kind of One: Celestial Omnibuses were a type of vehicle used by Martian colonists in Paul Magrs' Lost On Mars trilogy.
• Lost Technology: When Iris first found the bus, Dick claimed Omnibuses were a type of vehicle used by the Clockworkers. But when an adult Iris finally reconnects with them, they've lost most of their technology and seem to want to get their hands on the bus.
• Magic Bus: It's a bus that can go anywhere in time and space.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Iris driving it off a cliff is a credible threat in Enter Wildthyme but it can fly in Wildthyme Beyond.
• Perception Filter: Applies it to herself and her travellers wherever they go; Iris and her companions usually can't be detected by sensors.
• Portal to the Past: The ground floor has a slash in the fabric of time and space that leads to a toilet beneath the Hammersmith Odeon in 1972 London.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: Her chameleon circuit isn't on anyone's list of priorities to fix, considering all the other things that are wrong with her.
• Starfish Aliens: As are all TARDISes.
• Thinking Up Portals: What it basically does when it enters the Maelstrom/Vortex, drives through a black cyclone that appears in front of it.
• Time and Relative Dimensions in Space: Being a TARDIS it can go anywhere in the universe as well as time.
• Tuckerization: It seems to be named after a short story by E. M. Forster about a boy having fantastic adventures on a Magic Bus.

Tom

Voiced by: Ortis Deley

In early November 2000, Tom was kidnapped by Iris when he thought he was catching the bus to Putney Common. He continued to travel with Iris before settling down on earth as an author, but was dragged back onto the bus ten years later.

• Deadpan Snarker: Extremely.
• Put on a Bus: In The Sound Of Fear, he leaves the bus for someone he's only just met, in a parody of how the Doctor's companions tend to leave him.
• Twofer Token Minority: Black and gay. His publicist loves it.
• Straight Gay: Doesn't have much camp at all.

Jenny Winterleaf

A butch, snarky traffic warden who joined Tom and Iris on their transtemporal adventures.

• Badass Normal: Got into quite a few adventures without Iris as well.
• Butch Lesbian: Very.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: Her trademark leather jacket.
• High-Class Glass: Wore a dark monocle.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: She leaves Simon and Barbra to die when she finds out Barbra has a bomb inside her.
• Teleportation Sickness: She always got the runs from transdimensional travel, which actually became a plot point in The Devil in Ms. Wildthyme.

Panda

Voiced by: David Benson

A talking stuffed panda. Dislikes being called a bear or being reminded that he's stuffed; likes pretty girls, alcohol and a good book.

• Berserk Button: He will shout in rage if called a "bear" or a "toy" Though, technically he's both, being Steven Taylor's old toy panda Hi-Fi. He just doesn't like being reminded of it.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: Has a habit of — unintentionally — sounding a bit like the Doctor, saying things like "oh my giddy aunt!".
• The Bus Came Back: A Paul Magrs story for a charity collection revealed Panda was originally... Steven's bear Hi-Fi! He somehow achieved sentience and left the TARDIS circa "The War Games".
• Catchphrase: His multiple threats to give people "a punch up the hooter!"
• Covert Pervert: Likes pretending to be a cutesy bear and crawling into girls' laps.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Paul Magrs' short story "The Runaway Hi-Fi" says that the stuffed panda, Hi-Fi, owned by the First Doctor's companion Steven Taylor was actually Panda.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: Used to belong to one of Iris's old companions. Panda didn't believe his stories about Iris but doesn't seem to be bothered by the fact that he's a living toy.
• Have We Met Yet?: When he first encountered Iris as a child, he claimed to have had several adventures with her before. When she asks him about it when she's older, he says he doesn't remember and she must have met his future self.
• Heroic Sacrifice: He got better.
• Love at First Sight: He says in Enter Wildthyme that this was how he felt about Iris when he first saw her
• Nice Character, Mean Actor: In the universe in Wildthyme Beyond where Iris' adventures are a TV show, the actor who voiced panda was a jerkass who made Iris' actress cry. He redeems himself by helping MIAOW later on.
• Non-Action Snarker: He does jump into action on occasion, but being only 10 inches tall, there's nothing much he can do.
• Refugee from TV Land: Two versions of him have simultaneously visited a world where he and Iris are fictional characters.
• Right Behind Me: Iris comes up behind him when he's talking about how old she is and her unreliable memory in Wildthyme Beyond!.
• Shoo Out the New Guy: In-universe example. One of Iris's future incarnations starred in a successful television series as well as several films. Panda only appeared in the pilot episode of the series before he was replaced by a kangaroo named Hoppy.
• Single Specimen Species: He likes to think there's a planet full of pandas like him somewhere but Iris tells him to make peace with the idea that he could be unique.
• What Happened to the Mouse??: Is in the end of series 4, but doesn't appear in the next box set nor are the circumstances behind his departure addressed.
  • Iris believes she finds him in "Looking for a Friend". It's someone who looks, sounds and behaves similarly to Panda, but it's left up to the listener to decide if it's really he.
• Your Costume Needs Work: When visiting an Iris Wildthyme Fan Convention, he blends in by being mistaken for a cosplay prop.

Barbra

A robotic vending machine from the distant future who was transported to modern day Earth through the Dreadful Flap and worked for MIAOW before joining Iris on adventures.

• Ambiguous Robots: When she found out there were living wardrobes on Valcea, she wondered if they had a common ancestor.
• Ape Shall Never Kill Ape: In Sick Building she says the servo robots are programmed not to harm eachother.
• Broad Strokes: She debuted in the Doctor Who novel, Sick Building. Her backstory in Enter Wildthyme removes The Doctor for copyright reasons.
• Can Always Spot a Cop: MIAOW used to send her undercover disguised as a regular vending machine but she'd blow it by talking to people.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Was The Load on their trip to Valcea until she ended up killing a glass rhino that was about to kill the gang.
• Giving Radio to the Romans: Iris had to work hard to persuade MIAOW not to take Barbra apart to study her future technology.
• The Load: On the trip to Valcea she was initially slowing everyone down until she defended them from a rhino.
• Multiple-Choice Past:
  • She debuted in the Doctor Who novel, Sick Building where she was built on Tiermann's World and was brought in the TARDIS to the Space Station Spaceport Antelope Slash Nitelite.
  • Enter Wildthyme gave us a Broad Strokes version of the above with the Serial Numbers Filed Off and Doctor Who references removed for copyright reasons. She now left the planet on an Escape Pod called Helen and spent time in multiple space stations and ports before reaching Spaceport Antelope Slash Nitelite.
  • Sick Building was an Ambiguous Time Period but "The Dreadful Flap" short story says Barbra came from the 35th century and Enter Wildthyme says she's from the 59th.
  • The Martian Girl of the The Lora Trilogy was a complete Alternate Continuity where Barbra was built on Mars by a man called Dean Swiftnick.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: In her time on various space stations, she used to pretend she wasn't intelligent in the hopes that people would leave her alone.
• Shock and Awe: It's implied this how she killed the glass rhino on Valcea.
• Superpowered Robot Meter Maids: Is capable killing large creatures when her only job is to be a vending machine.
• Super-Senses: She claims accute senses somehow comes as part of being a vending machine and can hear Iris from far away when Simon can't.
• Time Bomb: After admitting she has one inside her, she brings up a countdown on her display.
• Unwanted False Faith: The Glass Men on Valcea start worshipping her as a goddess and only help Iris and co. on the promise that Barbra come back to them.
• Vengeful Vending Machine: Can kill large creatures when her friends are threatened.
• Why Am I Ticking?: Realizes after leaving the inn on Valcea that the innkeeper put a bomb inside her.

Simon

A companion who meets Iris in Enter Wildthyme. He'd previously appeared "The Great Big Book Exchange" short story and a novel called Exchange about a boy and the staff of his favourite bookshop.

• Author Avatar: He's based on Paul Magrs as a teenager, how he used to visit second hand bookshops with his stepfather's mother.
• No Full Name Given: His last name is never specified.
• No Name Given: A precursor to him appeared in the "The Great Big Book Exchange" short story where he's only referred to as grandson.
• Raised by Grandparents: He was raised by them after his parents died in a plane crash.
• Unexpected Inheritance: He's surprised to find he inherited Terrance's bookshop.

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