Peter Purves and Maureen O'Brien continue their adventures in time and space playing the First Doctor/Stephen and Vicki, in the second story in series five of The Early Adventures. This time, they find human colonists terraforming a new world utopia, but a utopia for whom?

Doctor Who – An Ideal World is out now.

Light years from Earth, a vast human spaceship hangs in orbit over a cloudy alien planet. The crew have been travelling in cryosleep for many years, looking for a habitable world to settle, and have at last located one with potential.

However, they’re not the only people to have arrived in this place. The TARDIS has landed on the planet’s surface. The Doctor, Steven and Vicki explore and quickly find themselves separated.

But it isn’t merely the hostile environment and rogue terraforming drones they’ll have to deal with. Something else is living on this world. Something deadly and waiting to consume.

It’s an ideal world. But ideal for whom?

Writer Ian Potter told us what inspired this story in the latest edition of Vortex: “The brief was just do a science fiction one – something a bit more like the series of the time, so I offered an idea about Earth colonists on an alien planet.

“It feeds on a concern of mine that’s also in The Bounty of Ceres (the third ever Early Adventure), that going into space is so hard, expensive and basically awful that I suspect we’ll not be sending the very best of ourselves out there. I think any colonists leaving the solar system are likely to be pretty driven and odd because well balanced people wouldn’t go!” Read more on this in our free monthly magazine, Vortex.

You can get An Ideal World now at £14.99 on CD or £10.99 on download. Don’t forget that all CD purchases unlock a download option via the Big Finish app and the Big Finish website.

Or you can save money with a subscription. Get all four releases of series five of Doctor Who – The Early Adventures for £45 on CD or £40 on download – remember that in this set of The Early Adventures all four stories are chronologically consecutive making a seamless series.

Coming next in the fifth series of The Early Adventures is Entanglement, an intriguing adventure set in 1930s Cambridge where violence stalks the halls of knowledge.

Cambridge, England, the mid 1930s. When the Doctor, Steven and Vicki get separated from the TARDIS they are forced to spend some time amongst the ancient spires of Sedgwick College. The college is mid-way through a leadership crisis following the unexplained disappearance of the Master of Sedgwick, Sir Isaiah Hardy. An election for his replacement is now taking place.

But is that all that’s happening in this seemingly peaceful location? The proctors are behaving in mysterious ways and the students are prone to bursts of unexplained violence. When one of his companions also vanishes, the Doctor realises that there’s more at stake here than control of an educational establishment. A dark plan is underway – one that threatens the entire future of humanity itself!