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Hamster Book Club - Rob Shearman Interview · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:00
  The first thing Evelyn saw were the bodies slumped together
• 0:03
  carelessly on the floor, as if they were so much rubbish.
• 0:08
  She ran to them. She didn't care that the Dalek
• 0:11
  was watching us. She didn't care what the Dalek
• 0:13
  might do. One of the corpses was Pharaohs,
• 0:17
  of course. She'd expected that, and she was
• 0:19
  surprised at how quickly she dismissed him.
• 0:22
  But next to him lay the Doctor. The Doctor's eyes were open,
• 0:26
  unafraid, and there was something of a smile playing
• 0:29
  about his dead lips. He looked triumphant, and Evelyn
• 0:34
  could see he was not her Doctor. There was a moment of relief
• 0:38
  that felt so callous. My Doctor is still out there.
• 0:42
  The Doctor is still alive. The paradox made her head spin,
• 0:47
  made her feel a little nauseous. It didn't matter.
• 0:50
  How could it matter? Because here, in her arms now,
• 0:53
  was the body of her greatest friend, the only man she had
• 0:57
  ever truly loved. I gave my first orders, said the
• 1:02
  Dalek flatly. And did you enjoy them even?
• 1:06
  And flew at the Dalek. And the rage shocked her.
• 1:09
  The Dalek backed away as if it was shocked too.
• 1:12
  If you can do that to him, why don't you kill me?
• 1:15
  Why save my life? I do not know, said the Dalek.
• 1:20
  Silence, you have no conscience, no pity, so why do you care if I
• 1:25
  live or die? Silence, Stop asking questions
• 1:28
  or I shall exterminate you. The Evelyn would not stop, could
• 1:32
  not stop. You kill me because I ask why
• 1:36
  you won't kill me. What is the matter with you?
• 1:40
  And there she was, in her fury, so close to the Dalek that she
• 1:43
  could actually hit it, she could spit, straighten it's stalked
• 1:46
  eye. And the Dalek said nothing for a
• 1:49
  long while. Do you fear me, Evelyn Smythe?
• 1:53
  It said eventually. Evelyn's answer came out more of
• 1:56
  a shudder. more than I could possibly tell you.
• 2:01
  You are the only one whose fear means something to me.
• 2:05
  Mused the Dalek. Perhaps that is a mistake.
• 2:10
  And at that, it's gun jerked into life, pointed straight to
• 2:13
  Evelyn. So this was it.
• 2:16
  She almost closed her eyes and then decided she would die like
• 2:19
  the Doctor and keep them open forever to fire him.
• 2:23
  But the Dalek did not kill her today.
• 2:26
  I was meant to die, I had no function left, but they have
• 2:31
  given me a gun, a chance for life.
• 2:34
  In spite of herself. Evelyn asked.
• 2:36
  And what will you do? I do not know.
• 2:41
  I may kill all the humans, I may kill no one.
• 2:45
  I may kill only you. I was never intended to make
• 2:49
  such choices. The Dalek spoke carefully, even
• 2:53
  hesitantly. Evelyn Smythe, remove my gun.
• 2:59
  The gun was still pointing straight at her death, only an
• 3:03
  instant away. And why?
• 3:05
  She asked quietly. Would you want me to do that?
• 3:09
  Remove the gun and you remove the choice.
• 3:12
  I would be unable to give orders or follow orders.
• 3:17
  All I could do is die and you'll let me.
• 3:20
  Do that take. Away your only means of defence.
• 3:25
  I do not know. I might kill you.
• 3:28
  I might not be able to prevent it.
• 3:31
  I might even desire it. The gun twitched once more,
• 3:36
  preparing to kill her, or preparing to be released at her
• 3:39
  grasp. She put out her hand to it, so
• 3:42
  slowly, so warily. The gun twitched further, as if
• 3:47
  mocking her caution. Will you help me?
• 3:51
  The Dalek asked, and she pulled her hand away.
• 3:55
  No, she said. I'm sorry.
• 3:59
  I won't, I'm sorry. The Dalek looked down at her
• 4:05
  coolly. Then the gun lowered, the eye
• 4:08
  still lowered, and the Dalek turned slowly away.
• 4:13
  I understand. And it sounded so tired.
• 4:24
  Welcome to Hamster Book Club, the podcast on which books are
• 4:31
  discussed. I say the podcast, it's it's
• 4:34
  just one of many, specifically Doctor Who books, again, one of
• 4:38
  many podcasts that do that. But this one and this particular
• 4:42
  one that you are listening to is a very special one.
• 4:45
  In fact, I've been told by Joe Ford to say that it's the
• 4:48
  highlight of our year. And do you know what I'm going
• 4:52
  to say? That's no exaggeration because
• 4:55
  Joe. Hi, Joe.
• 4:57
  Hello. And myself.
• 4:58
  Hi, Me. Hi.
• 5:00
  I'm joined by someone who we admire very much indeed.
• 5:04
  And we're really, really excited to speak to it is none other
• 5:07
  than playwright, novelist, screenwriter and polymath Robert
• 5:14
  Shearman. Hi.
• 5:15
  OK. That.
• 5:17
  That's a really nice introduction.
• 5:18
  I've never been called a polymath before.
• 5:21
  I don't. I'm not sure I know what a
• 5:23
  polymath is. I don't either.
• 5:25
  I wouldn't have used it. Was good at mathematics and I've
• 5:28
  been doing my my accounts this week and I'm really not good at
• 5:32
  mathematics so thank you for calling me a polymath.
• 5:37
  I suppose polymath popped into my head because it seems to me
• 5:41
  that you're good at a lot of different things.
• 5:43
  That's I don't that's really kind of you.
• 5:46
  I, I'm not bad at writing, I think, I mean I, I think I'm
• 5:52
  rubbish at almost everything. And my wife Janie would
• 5:57
  certainly say that and she probably can here in the kitchen
• 6:01
  and she probably would be nodding along.
• 6:04
  Thank you. I mean, I, I don't, I always
• 6:06
  feel I'm sort of bumbling along really.
• 6:08
  I mean I. If I, if I could justify my
• 6:10
  flattery just just slightly. Of course, a lot of the things
• 6:14
  you do are obviously writing. I mean, we don't really know
• 6:17
  about the other things you do because they don't get
• 6:20
  publicized. No, I'm trying to clean my flat.
• 6:23
  Yes. You write in a lot of different
• 6:26
  contexts though, and I'm impressed by the kind of breadth
• 6:30
  of your experience as a writer and the and the ways that I've
• 6:36
  experienced your writing. It seemed to me kind of coming
• 6:39
  to lots of different genres and lots of different kind of
• 6:42
  locations. Yeah, I, I think I never quite
• 6:47
  know where I'm going to settle. So, I mean, I spent the 1st 10
• 6:54
  years or so of being a writer so fixated upon working for the
• 6:59
  theatre and work and writing comedies for Alan Atebourne and
• 7:04
  trying to write for the National Theatre and, you know, getting
• 7:08
  things toured around Europe and, and I, and I was a real snob
• 7:11
  about it. And I'm, and the new adventures
• 7:13
  came out while I was doing that because this is the early 90s
• 7:16
  and I was a big Doctor Who fan, obviously.
• 7:18
  But not for a second did I think I, that would in any way impinge
• 7:25
  upon my own ambitions because I was a, as I say, I was a real
• 7:28
  snob. And I just felt, and also I just
• 7:31
  couldn't write. I didn't, I couldn't write
• 7:32
  prose. I mean, prose wasn't what I did.
• 7:34
  And I, you know, and when there were rumours about TV show
• 7:39
  coming back, I didn't write television, I just wrote
• 7:43
  theatre. So it was like everything I
• 7:45
  cared about was never going to touch my fan thing.
• 7:49
  And that was quite nice actually.
• 7:51
  It just meant I could enjoy it without feeling, you know, I'd
• 7:54
  go along to convention groups in the mid 90s and everybody seemed
• 7:58
  to be angling for a new adventure.
• 8:01
  And I just thought, I don't care.
• 8:02
  I mean, I've read them and I really enjoyed them.
• 8:05
  And I have a complete connection downstairs, which is probably
• 8:08
  worth that now more than this entire house.
• 8:12
  But, you know, but it was never my, my dream of doing that.
• 8:15
  And I didn't even want to write radio.
• 8:18
  And I'd only just begun writing radio around the time the Big
• 8:23
  Finish started. So that just happened to
• 8:25
  coincide. And I again, I was, it's awful
• 8:28
  to say that I was really quite reluctant to do it because I
• 8:32
  not, not, not just because I'm a snob, but because I really
• 8:37
  worried that it would spoil it. That being a fan, that this was
• 8:41
  something that was my, my, my great innocence is my absolute
• 8:48
  strangely unex, unextinguished love of Doctor Who for 40 plus
• 8:54
  years that genuinely occupies a space in my head every day.
• 8:59
  I mean, there's always something in the day when I'm thinking
• 9:02
  about Doctor Who and have done for so many years.
• 9:05
  And that's kind of crazy, but also wonderful.
• 9:08
  And the idea of trying to make that something that was also my
• 9:13
  job, which would make it less fun.
• 9:16
  It was something I was very happy not to think about.
• 9:19
  And then it became my job for a few years and I spent most of
• 9:22
  the time I was at Big Finish trying to find ways of getting
• 9:25
  away from it again so I could so it could be fun again.
• 9:29
  Not because I wasn't enjoying it, just because I was worried
• 9:31
  that it would stop being fun, which is silly.
• 9:33
  It meant I never really, it's one time like on on summer
• 9:36
  holidays. I spent most of my time thinking
• 9:38
  I'll enjoy this retrospectively once it's over.
• 9:41
  But at the time, I'm now worrying that it might go wrong.
• 9:44
  And I don't know, I, you know, I never wanted to write for, for,
• 9:48
  for TV particularly. But I found I was doing TP
• 9:52
  Doctor Who, which was an extraordinary journey in many
• 9:55
  ways. And having done that, I just
• 9:57
  sort of found myself now writing prose.
• 10:00
  It opened the door in a funny way to prose that I never
• 10:04
  expected. I got emails from people saying,
• 10:09
  well, now that we know who you are, would you contribute to a
• 10:13
  short story anthology? And I wrote, I remember writing
• 10:16
  back to 1 and just saying, well, that's very kind, but you're
• 10:21
  talking to the wrong person. I don't do that.
• 10:24
  And he, this is a chap called Andy Murray, who is not the
• 10:28
  tennis player but was working with Comma Press in Manchester.
• 10:33
  And he said, well, it's an offer.
• 10:35
  And we've got some really good people in the book.
• 10:37
  We've got Hanif Kareshi and you know, but people, you know,
• 10:41
  people that you that, that you'd be very impressed by.
• 10:44
  And I thought, well, I could at least give it a go.
• 10:46
  I mean, it's silly to just turn it down.
• 10:47
  And there are people out there I know who want to spend their
• 10:51
  entire life trying to get attention.
• 10:53
  And here I am being offered it. And I went off to where I
• 10:55
  normally write, which is the National Theatre.
• 10:58
  And I just spent a day writing a short story.
• 11:00
  And it was the most fun I'd had in my entire life.
• 11:03
  Sadly, I mean, even beating childhood Christmases and going
• 11:08
  to theme parks, I just loved it. And then I just utterly fell in
• 11:11
  love with the idea of writing short stories and weirdness.
• 11:15
  And that became my, my, my passion.
• 11:17
  So it's a very odd thing. I, I, I, I always sort of feel
• 11:20
  that I just keep on sort of sliding into different
• 11:26
  interests. And I'm back doing theatre again
• 11:28
  at the moment. And I'm not done that in such a
• 11:29
  long time. And that's amazing.
• 11:31
  And you know, because I'm a Doctor Who fan and I, you know,
• 11:35
  I love being a Doctor Who fan and going to Doctor Who events
• 11:39
  and just, you know, I'm going to go to the BFI tomorrow and watch
• 11:42
  the Blake Seven thing, pretending it's Doctor Who
• 11:45
  because otherwise I won't get through it.
• 11:48
  And just socialising with everybody there because that's
• 11:50
  the fun part. And people will, you know, ask
• 11:53
  and say, well, you do Doctor Who again.
• 11:55
  And, and it isn't, it's tricky because it's like I've moved on
• 12:00
  to, I'm now doing a passion about short stories.
• 12:02
  I'll say to them and they'll say, oh, all right, it it never
• 12:06
  sort of, sort of seems constant. And I've got so many friends
• 12:11
  from the TV show, from, from Big Finish, from the books, who, it
• 12:15
  seems to me have spent decades keeping that flame going of
• 12:21
  writing Doctor Who and I, And I always think I don't think I
• 12:25
  have that, have that in me. And it isn't because I think
• 12:29
  that I'm better. It's genuinely that I think I'm
• 12:31
  much, much worse. I just don't think I have any
• 12:34
  doctor whose stories to tell. And and yet I have all these
• 12:36
  other crazy stuff to do. So, I mean, it's it's odd.
• 12:40
  I'm not. Yeah, I'm, I'm sorry I I am just
• 12:42
  rambling, but that's what. I was going to say, I usually
• 12:46
  start these things right at the start, you know, how did you
• 12:49
  find Doctor Who? Have you always wanted to be a
• 12:51
  writer? And I do want to ask you those
• 12:53
  questions. Yeah.
• 12:53
  But given you've just said that, let's skip right to the end
• 12:57
  then. And I'm gonna hope that given
• 12:59
  that you've, you know, written prose and audios and television,
• 13:03
  Doctor Who. Yeah.
• 13:04
  But it has only enhanced your experience of Doctor Who I've.
• 13:08
  Got a really bad comic strip for Doctor I Can.
• 13:10
  See the knife doctor. I love that comic.
• 13:12
  The cruel sea. Yeah, it's not good.
• 13:15
  I mean. The artwork was incredible.
• 13:17
  I mean, it's really beautifully illustrated by Mike Collins.
• 13:21
  But I didn't know what I was doing at all.
• 13:25
  And I and I felt I've been reading the comics back recently
• 13:28
  and I had to skip the Cruel Seed because, well, this is
• 13:31
  embarrassing because I've been seeing what people like Scott
• 13:33
  Gray have been doing now. And that's remarkable what he
• 13:36
  was doing with the 8th Doctor. And then and then again, you
• 13:39
  know, then we bring the new series back and suddenly
• 13:41
  everything changes. And then you've got these Gulong
• 13:44
  thing, four part comic strips by me and I, I don't know how to
• 13:49
  write comics and it's really obvious.
• 13:52
  And but yeah, but yes, I, I have, I'll, I'll let you finish
• 13:55
  your question. Has has.
• 13:57
  It answered can I just interject and and I'm I'm conscious that I
• 14:04
  really kind of introduce this podcast without even introducing
• 14:06
  the host. So I've done a very bad job of
• 14:08
  that. But if since this is now a free
• 14:11
  for all, I just. I think that's wise.
• 14:14
  James, I would, I would like to say how, how kind of reassuring
• 14:17
  it is to hear you. I mean, you have a bit of a
• 14:20
  track record of not dismissing, but but of downplaying your own
• 14:26
  work. I, I remember, you know, because
• 14:29
  I remember way back when the Holy Terror came out and, and
• 14:33
  honestly, as a, as a young listener, it, it blew my mind.
• 14:37
  I mean, it blew all of our minds.
• 14:39
  Those of us who are invested in Big Finish, we'd never heard
• 14:41
  anything like it. And I remember reading the you
• 14:44
  interviewed, I think probably when you were writing Times of
• 14:47
  Midnight or when that was and saying how dissatisfied you were
• 14:52
  with elements of the structure of the Holy terror.
• 14:54
  For me, that was, that was quite formative to, to kind of go, oh,
• 15:00
  here's someone who's really good at what they're doing, but
• 15:02
  they're not satisfied. And and they there's always
• 15:05
  something kind of better to strive for.
• 15:07
  I, I, I'm not often very satisfied and my Doctor Who
• 15:10
  work, I, it's hard. I mean, there are things I'm
• 15:13
  very proud of with my writing, but they're usually my Doctor
• 15:17
  Who things, which is odd because or is it the only thing I'm
• 15:20
  going to be remembered for, if at all, will be that.
• 15:23
  But but you it's an odd thing. I always felt most of my Doctor
• 15:26
  Who stuff was quite rushed and I always felt a bit embarrassed by
• 15:30
  that. I think.
• 15:31
  I mean, Chimes at midnight is really rushed.
• 15:35
  I wrote it in a week and I didn't know what I was, you know
• 15:37
  what what, what the story was from episode to episode.
• 15:40
  I would write an episode, then take a day off and write another
• 15:42
  episode to take a day off. And that day off was thinking,
• 15:46
  well what do I do now? Can I, can I get them out of
• 15:49
  just being in this at awarding house?
• 15:50
  I thought, Nah, I better stick with it.
• 15:51
  I mean, I remember consciously just struggling with how I had
• 15:55
  to fill 4 episodes for that. So I didn't like it.
• 15:58
  And when I came to novelise chimes, stupidly, I went back to
• 16:06
  The Inside Story, which is that huge hardback book that Ben Cook
• 16:11
  wrote about the big, the 1st 50 Big finishes.
• 16:15
  And I read the articles about chimes and Jubilee and I just
• 16:18
  thought, oh shut up. All I'm doing is saying, oh, I
• 16:22
  don't like it. You were.
• 16:23
  Very honest, Very honest. I look back now and I think
• 16:27
  Chimes is really good. I mean, I think it is.
• 16:29
  I think I now think I heard Chimes for the first time since
• 16:34
  it was released in the pandemic because Big Finnish had this
• 16:39
  idea, which was stealing from Emily Cook really, of doing a
• 16:43
  Twitter listen, which, you know, it was nice.
• 16:47
  I mean, it was stealing the whole Twitter watching an
• 16:49
  episode thing and I just done Dalek.
• 16:51
  So I thought, well, I'll do Chimes as well.
• 16:54
  I'll happily do that. I listen to it genuinely not
• 16:57
  knowing what's going to happen next and really worried it was
• 17:02
  going to reveal something that I just didn't like.
• 17:05
  And I thought, this is really funny.
• 17:08
  This is actually, I'm really proud of this.
• 17:10
  So there is a certain sense in which I think it can be quite
• 17:13
  boring to look back at my younger self and just see it
• 17:17
  isn't a put on. I mean, that's what I find
• 17:19
  annoying about it in a way. You just think, stop being quite
• 17:23
  so honest. Well, it doesn't come across as
• 17:24
  a plot on at all. No, it is frustrating because
• 17:27
  because it also feels a little bit, I don't know, dismissive
• 17:34
  and it's not meant to be. And I think that the people I
• 17:37
  work with on all the audios, I think they're all quite good in
• 17:41
  their own ways. I mean, there are some I prefer
• 17:43
  than others. And there are things that there
• 17:45
  are lots of mistakes in some of them, in Jubilee in particular,
• 17:49
  actually, that was very, very keen to get back to them and try
• 17:51
  and correct. But it's not other people
• 17:54
  letting me down, it's just me. But it still feels a little bit
• 17:57
  like you're you're taking other people's hard work around you
• 18:01
  and you're making it sound like something that everybody else is
• 18:05
  saying is good. You don't personally believe it.
• 18:07
  And that I think can be very, very rude.
• 18:09
  I did it with Dalek a bit again, because I have problems with
• 18:12
  Dalek I it's not one of my favorite stories by any means.
• 18:17
  And even by saying that, that sounds like I'm taking all the
• 18:20
  effort and all the generosity of the BBC and Russell for giving
• 18:24
  me the job and saying I don't care and that and that really
• 18:27
  isn't the case. But yeah, I, I think that.
• 18:31
  I think I don't know. My, my, my dad instilled in me
• 18:35
  this, this idea that I should never, ever seem arrogant, but I
• 18:42
  am. I'm really arrogant.
• 18:44
  I am, deep down, I still think I'm the best, obviously, because
• 18:48
  otherwise you're not. Every writer I know has to have
• 18:53
  this arrogance to actually believe it's worth writing.
• 18:57
  So it's a sort of weird push pull.
• 18:59
  I mean, you have this, you know, every writer I know also has
• 19:02
  this extraordinary imposter syndrome that pops up all the
• 19:05
  time. And I, you know, and we all
• 19:07
  wrestle with it. But you go back and forth, often
• 19:10
  in the same moment between believing as you're doing
• 19:14
  something that this could be the thing that makes you one day
• 19:17
  have a South Bank show documentary about you and also
• 19:21
  thinking, I just hope it's not complete shit.
• 19:24
  And you do both and you're both things occupy your head at the
• 19:28
  same moment and it's awful. And then people interview about
• 19:31
  them and, and I reveal all the imposter syndrome stuff, which
• 19:36
  is silly because what I should be saying is how proud I am of
• 19:39
  this. There are people that I wish I
• 19:41
  could be like Nick Briggs because because I'm, I'm, I'm, I
• 19:45
  mean, Nick, I, I was Nick's best man.
• 19:48
  I've known Nick such a long time now.
• 19:50
  And Nick is so good at just, and Russell is as well.
• 19:56
  I mean, Russell, I, I, I said to Russell once I, I, I met him for
• 20:01
  dinner in after a Gallifrey convention and he just left and
• 20:06
  gone to a, gone to the states. So he just, I suppose the
• 20:10
  specials. And I said to him, you know, the
• 20:13
  great thing about your Doctor Who was that, you know, he just
• 20:16
  got more and more confident. He said, Oh yes, we, we, we got
• 20:19
  better and better every year. And I thought, not sure I
• 20:22
  necessarily meant that. But I mean although.
• 20:27
  But but The thing is that is that he really owns it.
• 20:29
  I mean, you know he. Owns it, but that's But it's
• 20:31
  it's showmanship though, isn't it, I?
• 20:33
  Mean. Yeah, exactly.
• 20:33
  You're like and you're like, if you're like Russell, he there's
• 20:37
  there's impostor syndrome there as well, isn't it?
• 20:39
  Oh of. Course he is.
• 20:40
  Yeah, Yeah. I mean, I mean, and, and that's
• 20:42
  the reason why you keep trying to do things differently, which
• 20:44
  is what you see with Stephen. And we, you know, I know Stephen
• 20:48
  very well. And that entire seven years of
• 20:51
  the season, Stephen is total is constantly reinventing himself
• 20:55
  because he's trying to chase after this idea of, of, of, of
• 20:59
  what he thinks will work, but also disregarding the things
• 21:03
  that he's just done because he's just done them.
• 21:05
  He can't do them again. And just, you know, and it's,
• 21:08
  yeah, it, it, it's an odd thing. I mean, I, I think it's very
• 21:11
  important to have constant self talent about, about what you do.
• 21:16
  As I say, the problem is, is that when you read interviews
• 21:18
  back 25 years later and you just, you get really tired of
• 21:22
  it. I mean, what I was hoping for
• 21:24
  when I came to the novelisations, when I read those
• 21:27
  chapters in the inside story about Jubilee and Chimes, was
• 21:30
  some insight was something that would help me, not just me
• 21:34
  moaning about. I don't really know what I was
• 21:37
  doing. Well, I can remember the exact
• 21:39
  world. I'm sorry to do it now on the
• 21:41
  call. I don't know if you remember it.
• 21:43
  So you were saying that you were going for long walks after
• 21:45
  midnight. Yeah, you know, and a lot of
• 21:48
  that. Now I do it in the afternoon
• 21:50
  because I because I worry about not about being mugged, but by
• 21:55
  people thinking I might mug them.
• 21:56
  The worst thing I some years ago I was walking on my I used to
• 22:03
  always write at 2-3 in the morning outside.
• 22:07
  I still walk around with a notebook but but but but but the
• 22:12
  police did stop me. Oh, genuinely.
• 22:15
  Oh, yeah, I was, I was on Tooting Common, not not Barnes
• 22:20
  Common, because that would be a better thing.
• 22:22
  But and the police car stopped and they asked you what I was
• 22:25
  doing. And I said very truthfully, I
• 22:27
  was writing a comedy for Alan Airborne.
• 22:29
  And he went and then on his phone and he took my notebook
• 22:33
  and he had to look at it and he's speaking on the phone.
• 22:36
  And he's the thing, which I remember was him saying to the
• 22:39
  guy on the other end of the thing he was saying.
• 22:41
  It was definitely dialogue Sarge.
• 22:45
  No, that sounds like a line in one of your stories, you know?
• 22:49
  It sounds like a life around an Avon play.
• 22:51
  And he obviously just thought I was crazy.
• 22:53
  And he just said, yeah, OK. He said, look, if you're going
• 22:56
  to go out and write stage comedies outside in the common,
• 23:01
  could you maybe do it, you know, with a torch?
• 23:04
  An everlasting match, maybe? Never lasting match.
• 23:08
  Could you maybe do it at a time when, you know, it's not quite
• 23:12
  so frightening to other people? And I, it hadn't occurred to me
• 23:16
  that when I was living in Exeter, which is where I used to
• 23:19
  live, I just walk around the university campus because that's
• 23:22
  where the theatre that I worked at was based, the North Card.
• 23:25
  And students never go to sleep. So it doesn't matter, you know,
• 23:30
  you just meet constantly 4/4 in the morning, lots of drunk
• 23:33
  students. But yeah, in London it's a bit
• 23:36
  trickier. So now I go out for 1520 mile
• 23:41
  walks. In London.
• 23:43
  In London. I I love the Thames Path.
• 23:46
  I I walked the Thames Path. Shuffly people are always
• 23:49
  walking the Thames Path at night.
• 23:51
  I walked from just just beneath Oxford water the way to
• 23:53
  Gravesend in a few days. That's about 150 miles.
• 23:56
  It's amazing and I love it and I'm still fat, which is annoying
• 24:01
  because because I really have a passion for the hiking and it
• 24:05
  doesn't do anything to make me any fitter.
• 24:08
  It just makes me sweatier. But you don't want to know about
• 24:12
  that I'm. Just I'm just astonished that
• 24:16
  you can't walk at 3:00 in the morning in London.
• 24:19
  Well, I think you probably can at the centre of London, but I'm
• 24:22
  in zone 3 and it's, it's all kind of residential.
• 24:28
  And I must admit, you know, if I'm at home and I don't go to
• 24:31
  bed, talk quite late and I see and I see someone walk outside
• 24:34
  my house at three of them, you know, just perfectly innocently.
• 24:37
  And legally, I should add, they can walk past my house.
• 24:40
  I, I, I look out and I watch them quietly.
• 24:44
  You, you just move on. Don't, don't even stop and do up
• 24:48
  your shoelaces in front of my house because I'm going to give
• 24:51
  you a glare, which I would then pretend I hadn't done because
• 24:54
  I'm very, very nervous of confrontation.
• 24:58
  But yeah, so I wouldn't want anyone to be.
• 25:02
  I remember a time actually I had a little part time job.
• 25:05
  I was asked to do queue timing stuff by an ex of Jamies.
• 25:11
  And it was fun and I quite liked it.
• 25:14
  So I'd go out and I was queue timing while they were doing the
• 25:18
  Maltese Penguin. And I had to be picked up at
• 25:20
  5:00 in the morning to go and do this job at Wimbledon station
• 25:23
  And every, you know, I'd have to wear an orange go thing to do
• 25:27
  it. And every morning, I'd go out
• 25:29
  and wait for this taxi that they'd send for me.
• 25:31
  And a woman would just cross the road to avoid me every morning
• 25:36
  because I just standing in the dark outside a house.
• 25:39
  And I could see that that was really frightening for her.
• 25:41
  And I, I didn't know how to make it any better because I had to
• 25:43
  wait for the taxi. So anyway, yeah, I was not sure
• 25:48
  what. Well, I enter I I hijacked Joe's
• 25:52
  very good question. I can't even remember what it
• 25:54
  was now. No, I do remember what it was
• 25:56
  and I. Was no.
• 25:57
  No, it was not the new experience.
• 25:59
  It was about sort of what what you've taken from that.
• 26:02
  But actually I think I'm sort of coming to the conclusion that
• 26:06
  that you're able to look back on stuff that maybe you didn't
• 26:09
  appreciate at the. Time and.
• 26:12
  See the worth there? Although I can't, I mean I've
• 26:15
  not heard Hoagie Terra now since, oh, since it came out I
• 26:22
  suppose. And I'm quite frightened to
• 26:26
  because my main memory of that is it's just so overwritten.
• 26:30
  But it might be quite good. I don't know.
• 26:34
  Chimes. I was kind of, I was really
• 26:37
  nervous about chimes, which is one of the reasons I think why
• 26:41
  when I suggested it to BBC Books, because they'd asked for
• 26:46
  Jubilee and I tried to explain to them that Jubilee was a bad
• 26:49
  idea and they should go for chimes.
• 26:51
  And then they asked for both. And so I thought, Oh well, I
• 26:53
  better do both then. But chimes worried me more
• 26:55
  because, I don't know, over the years it has acquired that
• 26:59
  reputation, pardon me. And I just felt it would be
• 27:05
  awful to confront it properly, having to really examine it, to
• 27:09
  listen to it constantly and go for walks and hear the episode
• 27:14
  again and again and again to work out what I want to do with
• 27:16
  it and just to get really, really embarrassed by it.
• 27:20
  And I wasn't, I mean, it was fun.
• 27:23
  I mean, I, I, I remember I did, I felt that with Jubilee a bit,
• 27:27
  the bits of Jubilee. I just thought, yeah, I can't go
• 27:30
  down that route anymore. I mean, I'm not going to argue
• 27:32
  against necessarily why it worked at the time for me.
• 27:36
  But now I don't think I can justify that some of the
• 27:39
  violence and things which you know, I, I think was fine for
• 27:44
  the wilderness years, I now know the B, the BBC books, I will
• 27:48
  just step in. So let's not have that
• 27:50
  conversation. Let's find other things to do.
• 27:54
  About the man going into the Dalek, I just adore that scene.
• 27:58
  I, I'm quite fond of the dwarves, but my big problem with
• 28:03
  the dwarves in Jubilee, when I heard it back, was that it
• 28:07
  wasn't, it didn't quite fit any longer how I wanted to write
• 28:11
  that character. The president or the guy who
• 28:15
  owns them. It all came about.
• 28:17
  I remember the dwarves were inspired by Fred, King Frederick
• 28:21
  William the second of Prussia, who used to collect giants.
• 28:26
  So he was quite, he, he was a very aggressive man and all the
• 28:30
  other royal heads of Europe just knew that he was, you know, he
• 28:34
  was foaming at the mouth most of the time.
• 28:35
  And the way to keep him happy would be that you just let
• 28:39
  people know in your Kingdom this is honestly true, that you just
• 28:43
  kidnap usually simple giant men, like 6 foot six men wandering
• 28:50
  around villages and you just put a bag over their head and send
• 28:52
  them to Prussia. And then his hobby was taking
• 28:56
  all these giants and having them March in front of him.
• 29:00
  He called them the Potsdam Guard.
• 29:02
  And that's how you stop Prussia invading you and being good at,
• 29:05
  you know, in, in foreign negotiations to be a bit like,
• 29:09
  it's impossible to imagine now be a bit, be a bit like, I don't
• 29:11
  know, giving aeroplanes to an American president, you know,
• 29:15
  it's a way of trying to distract them and keep them happy with,
• 29:17
  with, with baubles. So it was fun and I had this
• 29:23
  idea. Well, I could do it with dwarfs
• 29:24
  rather than giants. And it, I don't know, I just as
• 29:28
  I came to it, I just thought it's quite funny.
• 29:30
  But I also don't know that I can properly explain why in the
• 29:33
  book. And all for a sequence of for a
• 29:37
  shock moment. I don't believe they'll let me
• 29:41
  have any way. I mean, you've just explained
• 29:45
  that the the source of that, which is actually you're making
• 29:49
  a a richly satirical point. It's just one that is not isn't.
• 29:54
  It's so obtuse. Yeah.
• 29:57
  That I mean, and it seemed to me that you've actually, I mean,
• 30:00
  one of the. It's interesting so that you say
• 30:03
  that you feel the holy terror was overwritten, because one of
• 30:06
  the things that Joe and I have been exchanging messages about
• 30:08
  constantly is just how economical the writing in both
• 30:13
  of these books is. And we were well, thank you.
• 30:16
  Well, is, is that the sign of a mature writer?
• 30:18
  Is that something that that is just?
• 30:20
  So I mean, the argument I had, I mean I, I probably wouldn't have
• 30:24
  done it if I hadn't done Dalek as a novel.
• 30:28
  And the, it's funny, I mean, had I, I don't think I'd have ever
• 30:32
  novelised, done it remotely well, had I done it at the time.
• 30:37
  But when I was asked to do it in 2019, I remember thinking I've
• 30:44
  got an odd relationship with this story anyway, and it'll be
• 30:48
  really fun to work out how I would write it 15 years later.
• 30:54
  Odd because you felt that it was.
• 30:55
  Freedom of doing, you know, it'd be like a, like a conversation
• 30:59
  with my past self trying to and in a funny way, I thought that
• 31:02
  was quite interesting to do. But I also knew I was more
• 31:05
  restricted because it's, it's Dalek.
• 31:09
  It's a thing on Netflix and you know, people know it quite well.
• 31:14
  And also it's not, I don't own it really.
• 31:16
  I mean, it's, it's a big collaborative thing.
• 31:19
  I've now forgotten how many of the ideas actually were
• 31:23
  Russell's or not. And you and you don't want to, I
• 31:26
  don't know, seem to be spiting it with chimes in Jubilee.
• 31:31
  The idea of when that popped up that that that offer from BBC
• 31:37
  Books just popped into my e-mail inbox.
• 31:40
  I just thought it'd be quite fun to see.
• 31:43
  I mean, I wrote chimes when I was 30.
• 31:48
  It was the year 2000. I wrote chimes.
• 31:50
  It didn't go back to 2002, but it was written in this time of
• 31:54
  year in 2000. So that's 25 years ago and I'm
• 31:59
  now 55. And I thought, well, I'm a, and
• 32:02
  I'm quite a different writer in some ways.
• 32:05
  And I thought, how would I do chimes now?
• 32:07
  You know, I don't have to stick to any of the dialogue.
• 32:11
  I will keep the bits I like. I don't have to.
• 32:13
  And I in fact, you know, going out on my walks, what I did for
• 32:17
  Chimes and Jubilee was I would listen to a scene and I'd go out
• 32:20
  and I would write the scene again with completely different
• 32:24
  dialogue just to explore what I wanted to do with it instead.
• 32:26
  And I would come home and I'd say, well, I can use bits of
• 32:29
  both. I want, you know, sometimes you,
• 32:32
  you would come to bits and you just think, I don't want the
• 32:35
  doctor to say that. I want him to say the exact
• 32:36
  opposite just to see what will happen.
• 32:38
  You know, you would sort of dare yourself.
• 32:40
  You'd say, I don't know that, you know, Charlie would suddenly
• 32:45
  see him in chimes to me a bit too happy.
• 32:50
  And I'd think, I don't. I wanted to be this chirpy
• 32:52
  companion. I wanted to be upset and crossed
• 32:55
  now. But it changed the entire
• 32:57
  dynamic of where this stuff goes in future scenes.
• 32:59
  And I thought, well, I think that's the right course.
• 33:01
  I, I, I, I think I should have the freedom to say if I'm doing
• 33:06
  this again, let it really be again.
• 33:09
  Let it be how I would do the story now, all these years later
• 33:14
  and see how different it is. I was, I was curious to find
• 33:17
  out. I didn't know, you know, but
• 33:18
  there are certain bits in chimes.
• 33:20
  I just, you know, increasingly towards the end of chimes, I
• 33:23
  thought, I don't think that this, I mean, I'm, I'm proud of
• 33:27
  chimes, but I don't think the ending was what I wanted to be
• 33:30
  in chimes and I didn't. I, I particularly didn't feel
• 33:33
  that the pay off with Edith worked.
• 33:35
  I I thought it had to be something that she released
• 33:37
  herself more. I, I, I wanted it to be a lot
• 33:41
  more emotion, you know, I, I, I think that, you know, for me,
• 33:45
  Doctor Who, especially since the new series came back and, you
• 33:49
  know, made it really, really obvious to us all.
• 33:52
  But it works better when it's something which feels really,
• 33:56
  really intensely personal rather than being something which feels
• 34:01
  like this is a generic science fiction story.
• 34:04
  And so I, I just try to up the personal in both.
• 34:08
  And sometimes when I heard the audios back, I thought, I think
• 34:10
  because I'm being an old fashioned Doctor Who writer back
• 34:13
  in the year 2000, I'm kind of pushing the emotion down a bit
• 34:17
  and tamping it down. And I just wanted to to try and
• 34:20
  write it as a different sort of writer.
• 34:22
  Yeah. What I found so interesting with
• 34:25
  Jubilee was you completely restructured that in places.
• 34:30
  And your opening scene in Jubilee, which is the argument
• 34:34
  between the Doctor and Evelyn about history, that's an
• 34:38
  internal scene for Evelyn at the start of that book.
• 34:41
  You don't have that argument to take place until halfway through
• 34:44
  the book at a really dramatic moment.
• 34:47
  I was like, OK, so you've you've realised actually that's a a
• 34:50
  better dramatic moment to have that dialogue.
• 34:53
  I was, yeah. I was happy that I found that
• 34:55
  bit because I didn't know they'd ever have the argument again.
• 34:58
  I mean, and it was, it's a different sort of argument.
• 35:00
  There was a draft I did which I don't think I've typed up
• 35:03
  because it's, I write everything by hand, the whole 1st 2 drafts.
• 35:07
  So there's lots of stuff, there's lots of different bits
• 35:09
  of chimes which some of which are quite spooky, but I just
• 35:12
  never, I just thought, oh, I'm, I'm over egging it.
• 35:15
  There's too many ghost stories now.
• 35:17
  So you just cut things out. And in Jubilee there was a
• 35:19
  really ferocious row between Evelyn and the Doctor at one
• 35:24
  point in the Bloody Tower and what would have been episode 2.
• 35:28
  And he's really, and I thought, well, this is an interesting
• 35:30
  debate, but I'm not not entirely sure I can now make them friends
• 35:35
  ever again. So you but it was interesting
• 35:38
  because a bit which again, it's that difficult thing that when
• 35:42
  you listen to them back, I mean, there were bits of Jubilee I
• 35:44
  felt really proud of and other bits I just thought were were
• 35:48
  tremendously eggy. And the two most eggy bits,
• 35:54
  forgetting all the stuff like let's not decapitate people and
• 35:58
  let's not lop off the limbs of dwarfs in derelict casings,
• 36:02
  because I quite like that actually, because that's my
• 36:05
  sense of humour. The bits I found the eggiest
• 36:08
  were two Doctor bits. And the first bit being, let's
• 36:13
  start with an argument of the TARDIS where we can examine all
• 36:17
  the themes that are going to come up with later.
• 36:19
  And the second one being the big speech that he gives in the
• 36:25
  final episode where he makes the stunningly unsubtle point that
• 36:32
  that the human beings are just like the dialect.
• 36:36
  If I haven't made that clear after 20 pages by this point, I
• 36:40
  really think that everybody actually would be really quite
• 36:43
  cross. So I remember just writing it
• 36:44
  and I was, I was on Tooting common again.
• 36:46
  I write on Tooting common at this point.
• 36:48
  And I just thought I came to that bit and I just thought,
• 36:51
  he's going to say, I'm not going to say anything.
• 36:54
  I think he just sits down, doesn't he?
• 36:55
  And that's how I felt. I sat on a park bench and just
• 36:58
  said, no, not, I'm just, I'm just, I'm having him say nothing
• 37:03
  because because it's all drivel. I'm not having him say any of
• 37:06
  this nonsense. And Colin delivers it really
• 37:09
  well in the audience. And at the time it it, it's of
• 37:12
  the it's, it's straight out of the era from which that doctor
• 37:17
  comes you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 37:18
  And that opening? Argument in the target, yeah.
• 37:21
  Yeah, exactly. And it feels that bit like, you
• 37:24
  know, he's berating the Time Lords in trial of a Time Lord,
• 37:27
  you know, and, and of course, you draw off that and you're
• 37:30
  thinking, Oh, well, I know Colin can do a big stand up, you know,
• 37:35
  speech where he's telling the world off, but it's not
• 37:40
  necessarily very good on the page.
• 37:42
  And I it's those things where you just feel, I think I've
• 37:46
  outgrown what this is doing. And and also you just think I
• 37:49
  don't necessarily agree with the points being made either because
• 37:53
  in your head when you're doing, you know, because again, because
• 37:58
  you acquire over years of people telling you what your stories
• 38:02
  are like. I thought Jubilee was probably a
• 38:05
  bit cleverer than it was. And I heard the audio back.
• 38:08
  I thought, oh, it's not that insightful, is it?
• 38:11
  I mean, it isn't. I mean, people are very kind to
• 38:14
  me about my stuff. But I thought, well, maybe I
• 38:16
  could try and make it a bit more complex now.
• 38:20
  Maybe I could try and make this something where you feel that
• 38:22
  this could be an actual debate more.
• 38:26
  And it's like you've, you've, you've certainly engaged with
• 38:32
  the current situation. I, I mean, I, I think I agree
• 38:35
  that it's, it's the, the novel is less inclined to kind of come
• 38:40
  down on one side of the fence or the other.
• 38:41
  It's, it's proposing problems rather than necessarily offering
• 38:45
  judgement. Yeah.
• 38:47
  But it certainly reads as something that's been written
• 38:52
  after the last few years of the political landscape.
• 38:55
  Yeah. In 2000.
• 38:57
  Well, yeah. And again, I think that's part
• 38:59
  of the thing. I mean, when I wrote Jubilee, I
• 39:01
  mean, most of the reason I wrote Jubilee is because I got, I was,
• 39:06
  it's Chris Chibnall's fault, you know, the audio, because he was
• 39:10
  my boss. We were doing ATV show called
• 39:13
  Born and Bred, which was insufferably nice.
• 39:16
  And I, every character had to be quite nice.
• 39:19
  And I got, and he gave me permission to spend a couple of
• 39:21
  weeks to go and fight, you know, to go and do Jubilee instead,
• 39:24
  which was nice of him. And I just made everybody, it
• 39:26
  was like a, that was where my, my, my anger, which people very
• 39:32
  kindly identified as being political anger, which it is.
• 39:36
  But it's still fuelled basically by being fed up having to write
• 39:39
  nice dialogue for Michael French and James Bolam.
• 39:43
  And when I did Jubilee, the novel it's come out of, I mean,
• 39:49
  I can't believe now that we had 2003, it just seems like this
• 39:54
  halcyonic time when whether you agreed with politics or not, you
• 39:59
  believed people were still basically all pushing in the
• 40:01
  same, in maybe in different directions, but still towards
• 40:05
  tolerance and kindness. And, and I, I don't want to,
• 40:11
  well, actually, I don't mind being political because Jubilee
• 40:13
  is, but I, I have been angry ever since Brexit.
• 40:16
  I mean I, I cannot believe. The last 10 years, it means if
• 40:23
  Brexit has done one useful thing for me, it's made me understand
• 40:27
  better what I believe in. But I'm horrified and I'm
• 40:32
  horrified by the by the rise of the of of the far right here and
• 40:36
  and I and I'm angry on a daily basis in a way that I simply
• 40:39
  wasn't then. And I don't know that the, you
• 40:42
  know, the posturing of an angry old man as I feel increasingly
• 40:46
  I'm becoming it's particularly helpful.
• 40:50
  But I did feel in a funny way that when I came to do Jubilee,
• 40:53
  the Jubilee kind of feels like it's pretending to be an angry
• 40:58
  political story. And I felt that I could at least
• 41:01
  do it sincerely. Now you know the which also
• 41:04
  meant that because a lot of the of Jubilee as an audio plays,
• 41:09
  this sort of heightened black comedy because what I was most
• 41:13
  interested in at the time, one of my big passions is
• 41:17
  Renaissance drama. It's what I would have lectured
• 41:20
  in had I said at university I was going to at one point, I
• 41:23
  think, go into academia. And I love Jacobian tragedies
• 41:27
  and I wanted to do a big Duchess of mouthy type big finish where
• 41:31
  people just die ridiculously, you know, through elaborate
• 41:36
  schemes and things and all of that.
• 41:38
  Suddenly when I was, you know, in this post Brexit, post Trump,
• 41:42
  I wish it were post, but you know what I mean?
• 41:44
  Because it's all their world. They seem rather silly now.
• 41:48
  I mean, it just seems to take the edge off what I was really
• 41:50
  wanted to talk about. So I found myself flattening out
• 41:54
  some of the comedy of Jubilee a bit and having to find other
• 41:58
  funny things, which is where the actor comes in.
• 42:01
  You know, there's the 37th. If he if he, you see the 37th.
• 42:04
  It's the 37th, yeah. Because I find 37 a funny
• 42:06
  number, so I thought it probably was 37 got.
• 42:09
  The three series and a Christmas special for you all right.
• 42:13
  Yeah, exactly. You know, it's, it's trying to
• 42:18
  find a way of I I just wanted Jubilee to do all the things
• 42:22
  which he did well better and all the things that which is mostly
• 42:26
  episode 3 halfway through to the end of the story.
• 42:29
  I just thought, I think it's gone a bit crazy.
• 42:32
  It's gone a bit off the rails and I don't mind that.
• 42:37
  I think that the fun part about Jubilee when you hear it is that
• 42:40
  it's so weird, garish and I, and I quite love it for being as
• 42:48
  unapologetically silly while being as angry as it is.
• 42:54
  I think it, it has a very weird flavour, which I I love, but I
• 42:57
  didn't think I could pull that off from the book in the same
• 42:59
  way. And I just thought, well, let's
• 43:00
  make, let's make it a different experience.
• 43:03
  I feel like we need to thank Chris Chibnall then for Wilson
• 43:07
  you to be so nice about that. Character really nice boss.
• 43:09
  Chris. Because the the Nigel and Miriam
• 43:12
  relationship in Jubilee, in whatever format you care to
• 43:16
  write it in, is. One of my favorite
• 43:18
  relationships. Well, thank you.
• 43:19
  It's. Just so twisted.
• 43:21
  But, but even that was a worry for me because, I mean, the idea
• 43:25
  of Miriam in particular was based upon the idea that if you
• 43:27
  take the essence of that society, a fascist society, that
• 43:33
  you've got this intelligent woman who basically wants
• 43:37
  misogyny. And there's a whole bit in the
• 43:40
  audio where she is basically betraying her husband because he
• 43:45
  never hits her hard enough. And.
• 43:49
  That came out, didn't it, That line.
• 43:51
  Sorry. That came out of the book, that
• 43:53
  line, didn't it? Yeah, well, I mean, only because
• 43:56
  I, I mean, Steve, you know, when I first spoke to Steve Cole
• 43:59
  about it, and I think Steve, I mean I'm sure he'd say it too.
• 44:02
  I think we both were a bit surprised that BBC books had
• 44:06
  said Jubilee. We hadn't heard it.
• 44:09
  I mean, Steve had. I mean, Steve was writing Big
• 44:13
  Finishes at the time. I mean, he wrote the Daleks toy
• 44:15
  for Evelyn before I did. And he just said, I'm not sure
• 44:19
  about that. We can really have this
• 44:23
  relationship of domestic abuse that the woman wants.
• 44:27
  And I said, I, I'm, I'm with you on that only because I, I'd
• 44:32
  write it in my short stories. And I, I write really weird
• 44:36
  short stories. And I think it's quite fun to
• 44:38
  try and provoke. I, I think the whole point of
• 44:42
  writing is often actually to provoke people into thinking
• 44:44
  that maybe I'm a worse person than I am, so that they have a
• 44:47
  reaction. But that isn't what I think a
• 44:50
  Doctor Who book necessarily should be doing now.
• 44:53
  But I still want people to be angry.
• 44:55
  So it was a difficult balancing act with Miriam, because I sort
• 44:58
  of wanted Miriam to be a stronger figure, but also, but
• 45:05
  she is deranged and she's awful and I, I wanted a better, kind
• 45:11
  of a better death for her than she got.
• 45:13
  And I don't know, I mean, I, I, I grew very fond of Nigel as
• 45:17
  well, because it's based, they're both basically based
• 45:20
  upon Martin Jarvis and Ros Ayers, his wife, who not because
• 45:26
  they're like that, but because I was writing so much for them at
• 45:28
  the time for Radio 4. And then I asked if they would
• 45:31
  do Jubilee and they did. And so in my head, it's just
• 45:34
  Martin and Ros being naughty, Max.
• 45:38
  Your relationship with them came came before Jubilee because
• 45:41
  you've written a lot for their company, haven't you?
• 45:43
  Yeah, for Jarvis and Ayers, yes. I mean, I mean, that's a funny
• 45:46
  thing. I mean, they just again, one day
• 45:49
  I got a phone call and it was Martin Jarvis on the phone and I
• 45:51
  have a phone stammer. I mean, I'm, I'm very bad on
• 45:54
  phones and back then it was much, much worse.
• 45:56
  And I couldn't phone him back. I had to get Jenny to phone him
• 46:00
  because I knew I wouldn't be able to say my name on the phone
• 46:02
  to him. And he just had been recommended
• 46:06
  me by 8 born who I'd worked for quite a bit as someone that
• 46:10
  would be quite fun. And so my early stuff for Martin
• 46:14
  was adaptations of stage plays I'd already written.
• 46:18
  And then I began writing original things for him and it
• 46:21
  was just fun. I'd go over to, to this place in
• 46:24
  Los Angeles and stay over with him and write.
• 46:27
  I, I wrote Deadline for Big Finnish Audio.
• 46:30
  I, I remember writing a lot of that in his spare room in Los
• 46:34
  Angeles. That was fun.
• 46:35
  I just thought, oh, I'm writing. I'm writing what I think is, is
• 46:39
  the funniest thing in the world. I really thought that.
• 46:43
  And I remember just thinking, hey, and I can go for a walk and
• 46:46
  just take in Sunset Blvd. And it was so much.
• 46:49
  And that was great. So no, I mean it was a sort of,
• 46:53
  I mean, because I knew I I could rely upon how they would play it
• 46:57
  and I knew that they would get that grotesquerie really, really
• 47:00
  well. But it's that awful thing about
• 47:03
  the novelisation thing is that you suddenly realise that all
• 47:05
  the things that you're relying upon to make the difficult bits
• 47:08
  work, which is performances you can rely upon.
• 47:12
  Or in chimes Russell Stones extraordinary score.
• 47:16
  Gorgeous. And they're gone and you have to
• 47:19
  find some way to make these things work, otherwise it's a
• 47:21
  bit flat on the page. And I just worried that with
• 47:23
  Nigel and with Miriam that they would be.
• 47:27
  I'd either have to make them a bit more colourless or I'd have
• 47:30
  to make them a little bit more. Obviously it was, it was a
• 47:33
  strange balancing act. I think I got away with it, but
• 47:35
  it was. Oh, they leap off the page from
• 47:38
  from the word go. Absolutely.
• 47:39
  Thank you. Yeah, yeah, there was a sequence
• 47:42
  which helped me where I just I went out and I just wrote a bit
• 47:45
  where about his father and jumping off Saint Paul's.
• 47:52
  Yes. And I thought, well, from I kind
• 47:55
  of get it now. It's this idea of this, of this
• 47:57
  father who just, you know, he says, I've had enough of this
• 48:03
  commit suicide while telling your son, I suppose, I suppose
• 48:06
  you're the best that's going to be you're, you're going to be my
• 48:10
  successor. And frankly, you're not up to
• 48:12
  much. But so just this person who's
• 48:14
  just desperately trying to live up to being this, this
• 48:18
  totalitarian dictator, but his heart's not really in it, which
• 48:22
  ought in Doctor Who terms to mean that actually he's, he
• 48:26
  becomes a hero. But he's not.
• 48:28
  He's just this shallow man who wants to be Hitler and he's Karl
• 48:34
  Dernitz instead. That's a reference to the guy
• 48:37
  who succeeded Hitler very, very briefly in 1945 as the leader of
• 48:41
  the Third Reich, just in time for the whole thing to collapse.
• 48:45
  But that, you know, or, or, or, or a Richard Cromwell figure.
• 48:47
  I I I I love writing about mediocrities.
• 48:52
  Because. I fear I am one.
• 48:56
  It's just the truth of it. I, I, I find that's the thing
• 48:59
  about Doctor Who for me, is that when people write about, you
• 49:03
  know, universe exploding schemes and things, I can't really get
• 49:10
  behind that. But what I can find interesting
• 49:12
  are people who just it's like the original idea of Behind
• 49:15
  Dalek, which was that it wasn't, you know, it was Van Stanton's
• 49:20
  wife who was torturing this Dalek.
• 49:23
  So that eventually when the dike finally speaks to her because
• 49:28
  her husband is obsessed with it and just spends all of his time
• 49:30
  with it and is mutating into something.
• 49:34
  And, you know, the dike finally reaches face to face and says,
• 49:37
  OK, well, here I am now what is it you want to say to me?
• 49:40
  And all she would say is, does my husband ever mention me?
• 49:45
  And that was the whole point of all, you know, we went through
• 49:48
  all the drafts of Dalek and it kept on being this thing where
• 49:52
  I'd say, well, when he gets up the stairs and it says what
• 49:54
  you're going to have me say, I want it to be really, really
• 49:56
  trivial. And BBC Wales weren't keen on
• 50:01
  that at all because it just seemed to undercut it.
• 50:03
  But that's kind of what I wanted.
• 50:04
  I wanted. But that point when you get to
• 50:06
  that moment of like face to face confrontation, all these people
• 50:10
  have died. And it was all for something so
• 50:13
  petty. So it was going to be at one
• 50:15
  point in Dalek that eventually it was going to be round seven
• 50:18
  saying I just thought you could say happy birthday because it
• 50:22
  starts off being his birthday out in the script and then we
• 50:25
  cut most of that out. It's still there a little bit,
• 50:28
  but it doesn't have much point anymore.
• 50:31
  And they didn't like that. So that bit always feels a
• 50:34
  little bit. I want it to be a real purpose
• 50:37
  to it and which is that ultimately people are quite
• 50:41
  trivial, but they do terrible things.
• 50:43
  Something which you look at later and just say that's so, so
• 50:47
  meaningless, you know, just ego. Anyway, sorry I I I.
• 50:52
  I That's really interesting because there are moments in
• 50:54
  Jubilee where you, you, you have the Dalek after 100 years of
• 51:00
  captivity and, and other characters briefly kind of
• 51:03
  confronting their own pointlessness and then kind of
• 51:08
  turning away from it and going no, no, no, no, no.
• 51:10
  That's I can't possibly acknowledge that, that it's been
• 51:13
  a waste of time. Yeah, well, because, because
• 51:15
  that's the the worst thing of all, isn't it?
• 51:17
  You know, it's the idea that you've done terrible things and
• 51:20
  it's all for nothing. I mean, those, you know, those
• 51:24
  are the best bits of Doctor Who, aren't they?
• 51:26
  I mean, that's why we love the end of nightmare of eaten, you
• 51:30
  know, when you've got tryst and it's, you know, all that he's
• 51:36
  done is just pointless. And it's just so.
• 51:40
  And the Doctor just says go away because that's I, I, I always
• 51:45
  find that so much more believable that people are doing
• 51:49
  sort of end up just going down a path of dreadful things because
• 51:52
  you make more and more excuses for doing things you don't
• 51:56
  believe are right, but you still believe you're not going that
• 51:58
  far from the straight and narrow yet.
• 52:00
  And then you realise that you've done, it's like the end of
• 52:02
  Fargo, which I I love Fargo, you know, the, the Coen brothers
• 52:06
  film. And you've got this wonderful
• 52:11
  depiction of goodness in this, you know, wonderful pregnant
• 52:17
  detective who just says to the once, once she's captured, you
• 52:21
  know, all these dead bodies and she just says something.
• 52:23
  It was all just for a little bit of money.
• 52:25
  And that's sort of how I feel. You know, I want, I always felt
• 52:28
  that the Dalek, that the, the great strength of the Dalek in
• 52:32
  Jubilee was that it has an integrity that no one else does.
• 52:36
  And that, and you've got this Jubilee celebration going on.
• 52:40
  It's 100 years, but every, everyone was better 100 years
• 52:44
  ago. Everybody, you know, they were
• 52:46
  all horribly corrupt, but at least they kind of fought for
• 52:48
  something that believed in. And now it's just this, this
• 52:52
  awful plasticky existence of merchandise and nothing.
• 52:56
  And they all kind of want to be evil, but they're not really
• 52:59
  good enough at it, which makes them just as dangerous because
• 53:02
  they're just dreadful. I mean, Pharaoh, I mean, what an
• 53:08
  awful man. Because he's just, he could be a
• 53:11
  member of any one of our political parties.
• 53:15
  You know, it's not even a big sort of party political thing.
• 53:18
  It's just someone who you can kind of see just wants to be
• 53:22
  meaningful. And he can't be meaningful in a
• 53:25
  positive way. He'll be meaningful in a
• 53:27
  negative way. I was thinking how, how how
• 53:29
  interesting it is that in a very colourful cast of characters,
• 53:34
  Pharaoh, it's almost like you deliberately refrain from
• 53:39
  filling in much character. He's the face of politician.
• 53:43
  Yeah, I, I, I made him fat, I think.
• 53:46
  He's fat, but he but apart from that, you know, he won't even
• 53:49
  get his hands dirty. You've got the the the guy
• 53:52
  torturing the the Dalek at the beginning kind of even looks
• 53:55
  down on him, thinks you know, it's just another politician
• 53:57
  won't get. His yeah, yeah.
• 53:58
  I mean, I mean, that's a policy of.
• 53:59
  Dirty work, yeah. I mean, it's the bit I really
• 54:01
  enjoyed writing was his death. I mean, I think in both
• 54:04
  versions, but it's a bit different in the book again,
• 54:07
  because I got squeamish about knives.
• 54:10
  It wasn't the bbci mean. I think people assume a lot of
• 54:13
  the stuff I cut out was because the BBC told me not to.
• 54:16
  But in fact I never. I just did it before they could.
• 54:20
  And I don't like stabbings anymore.
• 54:22
  But for some reason, I still thought that actually, it's that
• 54:26
  bit with the dialect saying, go on, then kill, kill the guard.
• 54:31
  And it seemed really funny that it was going to be trying to
• 54:35
  strangle him. And he's just asking the guard
• 54:39
  maybe and the next two facts and he's asking him to be, maybe he
• 54:44
  could breathe less. And I, I thought that was
• 54:47
  amusing in a way that I couldn't quite get out in the audio.
• 54:50
  You know, it's something I, I, I do feel that that's The thing is
• 54:54
  that Pharaoh is this person who can be truly despicable because
• 55:00
  it's all something which is indirect, that, you know, a
• 55:04
  dialect can at least kill you and look you in the eye as it
• 55:06
  does it. Whereas, you know, these people
• 55:09
  just give orders. And, you know, I mean, at least,
• 55:13
  you know, to his credit, Nigel does push a bad actor off a
• 55:16
  battlement himself. So I have to admire him for
• 55:20
  that. It works for my dad.
• 55:21
  Off you go. Yeah, exactly.
• 55:24
  Oh, yeah, that's right. I've forgotten that I, I would
• 55:28
  have made something of that. And I and I'd forgotten that I'd
• 55:30
  had his dad die from the height as well.
• 55:33
  I should have made a mention of that, but I I I I honestly
• 55:36
  didn't make the connection I think when I wrote it in. 25.
• 55:39
  Years. 25 years, right? Again.
• 55:42
  Oh, look, I mean I'm bound to you.
• 55:43
  Can put the dwarves back in. There is, there is a certain
• 55:46
  horror to that. I mean, the first, the moment
• 55:48
  when I got the offer to do Jubilee, I just thought it's
• 55:52
  going to be so hard to explain to people why I'm fighting this
• 55:56
  again, because it's, I mean, I mean, Dalek and Jubilee aren't
• 56:00
  that similar. But but that's also become the
• 56:04
  sort of fan law is that is that adaptation when if it's really
• 56:08
  just a sort of beginning inspiration.
• 56:10
  But I did think, oh, I just had this.
• 56:13
  I had this stupid idea back in 2002 about having one single
• 56:18
  Dalek in the in the Tower of London.
• 56:21
  Haunted you? And, and I'm I've had to write
• 56:24
  it so many different versions and, and, and I and because I'm,
• 56:28
  I'm a fan and I and I know fandom I I was kind of
• 56:32
  predicting the disdain on Gallifrey Bass when it was
• 56:37
  announced. They go, oh, can't shame and do
• 56:39
  something else. I'll tell you.
• 56:41
  My my first reaction was to hearing that Jubilee was being
• 56:45
  novelised was Oh my God a 6th Doctor and Evelyn book written
• 56:51
  by Rob Sherman is. Going to be in my.
• 56:53
  Hands and I was so excited. Oh yeah, well, that's because
• 56:57
  you're a nicer person. And also and, and, and to be, I
• 57:00
  mean, that ought to be the reaction I had.
• 57:01
  And it's the reaction I began to have.
• 57:03
  I mean, that was the hard thing honestly, is that I don't know
• 57:06
  there'll be any other big finishes.
• 57:09
  And so I felt a bit like Malcolm Hulk as well, but I just thought
• 57:14
  this might be the only time we ever see Evelyn in print.
• 57:17
  So it's like writing the doomsday weapon.
• 57:19
  You think I've got to introduce Joe because you may not actually
• 57:21
  get to see Joe again. And the same with Charlie in
• 57:24
  chimes. So I had to try and make both
• 57:26
  stories feel that they were, that they represented those
• 57:32
  characters in total, which I don't think necessarily the
• 57:36
  stories do as audios because they didn't have to.
• 57:42
  I think even comes across quite well in Jubilee.
• 57:44
  So that wasn't so hard with chimes.
• 57:48
  I was really keen to try and make it that Charlie had more of
• 57:52
  a, an actual direction and a finish as opposed to it just
• 57:56
  being here's a story in some sort of strange loose arc about
• 58:02
  maybe she should have died or not in an airship.
• 58:05
  But again, you know, you just try.
• 58:06
  And I was so keen to write Evelyn also because I genuinely
• 58:10
  loved Maggie Stables. Me too.
• 58:13
  She was such a nice person. She really was.
• 58:17
  I mean, we did conventions together.
• 58:19
  She was such a sweetheart. And I just wanted to, you know,
• 58:24
  I mean, I, that's what I got from listening to Jubilee again,
• 58:27
  was actually hearing Colin and Maggie and I'm very fond of
• 58:29
  Colin too. And just.
• 58:30
  Getting to say why is why is Why is the 6th Doctor the best
• 58:33
  doctor to write for? I think because he's the one
• 58:36
  that really, really cares. This is not in any way I did get
• 58:40
  anyone else. It would just sound like it is
• 58:42
  because I haven't written for many doctors anyway.
• 58:45
  But when I did Holy Terror, which was my first one for
• 58:49
  Colin, it was really interesting that in, you know, there isn't
• 58:54
  time to rehearse really. I mean, you know, you might.
• 58:57
  Back in those days it was Nick Peg directing OE Terror and it
• 59:01
  was Nick's partner Barnaby who did Chimes and, and I knew them
• 59:05
  both from university. And Nick in fact directed me in
• 59:08
  Hamlet as a student production. And he saw how bad an actor I
• 59:12
  was quite early on. And Nick got me into who?
• 59:16
  Who did you play in Hamlet? So I was, I was Horatio really
• 59:20
  badly because I can't do my L's and my L's very well, which is
• 59:24
  unfortunate for Hamlet and Horatio anyway, and, and, and I
• 59:29
  gabble because I have a stammer and it's not very obvious now,
• 59:32
  but my way out of the stammer in those days was I could either
• 59:36
  not speak at all or I would on stage just at all so
• 59:40
  incomprehensibly fast that I couldn't control my, my, my
• 59:44
  diction at all. So anyway, Nick was, I knew Nick
• 59:48
  and Nick is a very thoughtful director and Colin Riggy
• 59:52
  responded to that because Colin had read the script and Colin
• 59:55
  had comments to make. They weren't negative comments,
• 59:58
  they were insightful comments. And I'm a theatre director and I
• 1:00:01
  recognised how much he cared. And I having heard others, and
• 1:00:07
  this is, again, it's not a dig, they come in and they do it
• 1:00:10
  very, very live. But Colin really cared, and
• 1:00:14
  Colin cared about the way his Doctor was presented in a way
• 1:00:18
  that I don't think others need to worry about.
• 1:00:22
  Colin saw the chances of Big Finish in those early days as an
• 1:00:26
  exoneration of a part he didn't feel he'd got to do properly and
• 1:00:31
  so therefore he seized it. You know, I mean, when we did
• 1:00:33
  Jubilee, he was excited by what Jubilee was and we still
• 1:00:38
  discussed Jubilee. I mean, I, I see Colin, if I, if
• 1:00:41
  I, you know, if I do a convention, Colin's there.
• 1:00:43
  We, you know, he, he always comes up and gives me a hug and
• 1:00:46
  we chat and he tells me how much he dislikes Dalek because he
• 1:00:49
  does, because he says, I just think what it's it's Jubilee,
• 1:00:53
  but Jubilee, I say, which is why I put a bit in the Jubilee novel
• 1:00:59
  where he gets to see a bit of dialect.
• 1:01:02
  I don't like that because I thought that was an interesting
• 1:01:05
  point because he really hates the cruelty of the Doctor in
• 1:01:09
  dialect. And he says that's not what I
• 1:01:11
  think he should ever be. So the point about Colin is that
• 1:01:15
  whether you always agree with Colin or not, he's really
• 1:01:17
  intellectually engaged by it. And that's what you want as a
• 1:01:23
  writer. So Colin is the best one to
• 1:01:25
  write for because you know that that they give a damn that it's
• 1:01:29
  not just product. And again, that it sounds like
• 1:01:32
  I'm saying the others treat it differently.
• 1:01:36
  But when I work with Paul, for example, on chimes and skirts, I
• 1:01:39
  mean, Paul is great, but it's he's responding and he's
• 1:01:44
  terrific, but it's not something he's given.
• 1:01:46
  He's not been analysing it before he goes in.
• 1:01:49
  And, and, and I found it very flattering that Colin would want
• 1:01:52
  to, even if it meant that you had harder arguments with him
• 1:01:56
  about stuff. But that's because he cared.
• 1:01:58
  And so and so he should. And so Colin just always seemed
• 1:02:02
  to me like he was my go to doctor.
• 1:02:05
  He was. And he also, he's a fresh page
• 1:02:08
  in a way that I've never written for Peter, but Peter was my
• 1:02:11
  doctor growing up. And again, I don't have any
• 1:02:14
  great desire to write for Peter because that's the part of my
• 1:02:17
  head which feels nostalgic. And I think he did it.
• 1:02:21
  I don't see any great reason to try and stretch that because I
• 1:02:27
  don't think Peter would necessarily ask to be stretched
• 1:02:32
  in that way. Colin is looking for
• 1:02:35
  particularly in back in the year 2000, before he'd done 47,000
• 1:02:39
  other audios, he was looking for ways in which he could broaden
• 1:02:44
  his Doctor, make it interesting, make it more subtle, make it and
• 1:02:47
  that, that's a joy for a for a writer.
• 1:02:49
  So it was always great to write for Colin.
• 1:02:52
  It's so interesting you say that about Colin's reaction to that
• 1:02:56
  scene in Dalek, because that really stood out to me in the
• 1:02:59
  novelisation, that when he goes into the cell, the 6th Doctor,
• 1:03:02
  and he's initially horrified and Danny's really empathetic, he
• 1:03:06
  reaches out for the Dalek, doesn't he?
• 1:03:08
  In a really in a gentle way, very difficult.
• 1:03:11
  And, and it's that funny thing because again, I, when I came to
• 1:03:14
  that bit in Jubilee, I felt disappointed by it because it's
• 1:03:17
  a, it's to be fair, I think it's the best scene in Dalek because
• 1:03:21
  Chris is so good in that. But also it's a it's a, it's a
• 1:03:24
  stand out scene and it's not a stand out scene in Jubilee
• 1:03:27
  because it was never meant to be.
• 1:03:28
  It's just the doctrine first account of the Dalek.
• 1:03:31
  It's not the last Dalek after a great time war when you thought
• 1:03:35
  they were all dead anyway and all that rage and betrayal
• 1:03:39
  because as far as the Doctor's concerned, you put you met them
• 1:03:41
  in the apocalypse settlement 3 audios ago go anyway.
• 1:03:44
  So it's just another thing. It's, Oh God, it's another
• 1:03:47
  Dalek, which means that it, so when I heard it back, I, I
• 1:03:52
  remember thinking, Oh, this is very flat.
• 1:03:55
  But then I came to realise that that's OK.
• 1:03:57
  It's, it's not meant to be a peak scene.
• 1:04:00
  It was a cliffhanger scene, but a very obvious one.
• 1:04:04
  The other cliffhangers are better.
• 1:04:06
  But it was, Yeah. You know, it's, it's funny.
• 1:04:08
  Where was it? It is one of those great stand
• 1:04:12
  out things. I mean, Russell really was keen.
• 1:04:14
  I went the full distance on that scene when we did Dalek.
• 1:04:17
  So it was, yeah. One of the skipping across the
• 1:04:21
  chimes quickly, one of the things I really noticed, I mean,
• 1:04:25
  I've listened to chimes at midnight more times than it's
• 1:04:27
  healthy for anyone to listen to anything.
• 1:04:29
  So I know the dialogue extremely well.
• 1:04:31
  And you stressed a couple of times in the book the word love
• 1:04:36
  and Charlie saying that to the doctor and not getting back what
• 1:04:41
  perhaps she would want to get back and sort of like taking us
• 1:04:45
  in the direction of where we would go in Neverland and skirt
• 1:04:48
  so. And all of that.
• 1:04:52
  Yeah, I I wasn't I didn't expect to do that and it and I didn't I
• 1:04:57
  hadn't heard skirt so back so I wasn't trying to I just thought
• 1:05:01
  that was more interesting. I, I, I think particularly in
• 1:05:06
  the wake of the new series where Charlie feels like like a sort
• 1:05:10
  of prototype companion for actually having feelings for the
• 1:05:15
  Doctor, which are quite complicated.
• 1:05:19
  And I mean, skirts has a member. I mean, it's a deliberately very
• 1:05:23
  awkward relationship and a very awkward story.
• 1:05:28
  And I just felt I didn't, it came also out of again, I mean,
• 1:05:33
  I'm, I'm genuinely very fond of charms.
• 1:05:35
  I'm not, you know, knocking the audio down.
• 1:05:37
  But I did feel at the very end when the end of episode 4, when
• 1:05:41
  the Doctor persuades Charlie not to kill himself, could kill
• 1:05:44
  herself, partly because they could have adventures together.
• 1:05:47
  I just thought I really feel it ought to be something which
• 1:05:52
  feels so much more difficult and so much more emotional.
• 1:05:55
  And if you've and if I've built up throughout the book this idea
• 1:05:59
  and also the fact that the the household occasionally throw it
• 1:06:03
  at her as well. So, you know, I don't know why
• 1:06:05
  you think that he could possibly love you, you stupid cow.
• 1:06:09
  I thought that would mean that when I wrote that bit where
• 1:06:12
  she's really having to choose life or death.
• 1:06:17
  And it's not a simple answer, you know, it isn't simply being
• 1:06:21
  that he said, oh, go on then, I love you because he does.
• 1:06:24
  I think so. So.
• 1:06:25
  And then she says you're just, you're just saying it's easy.
• 1:06:27
  Yeah, I'm doing, I really am. I don't know what you mean.
• 1:06:30
  I, I, I don't know, but I just don't want you to die.
• 1:06:33
  And I and I found that quite moving to write and because it
• 1:06:36
  felt honest and I just wanted there to be some honest
• 1:06:39
  relationship stuff. There's the bit also where
• 1:06:42
  you've got, which is a bit of a skirt, so RIP off, I think.
• 1:06:45
  But when you realise you're trapped in a time loop for a
• 1:06:47
  very, very long time and he doesn't want.
• 1:06:51
  And in the audio, there's, there's no time to examine it.
• 1:06:53
  But in the book, you know, he just, he's, he's pissed off as
• 1:06:59
  he was in skirts though. And when she sits down and says
• 1:07:02
  to him, I just wanted to know that I'm just glad it's with
• 1:07:06
  you. What a stupid thing to say.
• 1:07:09
  But it's also a very, very human and very emotional thing to say.
• 1:07:13
  But he doesn't know. That's not helpful to him.
• 1:07:16
  And I I sort of wanted, I don't know, there's something quite
• 1:07:21
  childish about Charlie, I think hearing chimes again after all
• 1:07:25
  this time. I always was keen when I wrote
• 1:07:29
  chimes originally that and it wasn't meant to attack Charlie
• 1:07:34
  because, and I hadn't heard because Charms was written
• 1:07:36
  before Storm Warning was out. So we were all coming those
• 1:07:41
  first 10 scripts for the big, you know, for the Charlie 8th
• 1:07:44
  Doctor stuff, for all kind of being written as if they were
• 1:07:46
  the first one, which was quite fun actually.
• 1:07:51
  And my take on Charlie was originally always going to be,
• 1:07:53
  well, I like her, but I want her also to be naively uncritical of
• 1:08:01
  a setup that she's part of the problem.
• 1:08:05
  And the idea that there's this poor maid who's only, you know,
• 1:08:09
  who's only friend is a person who doesn't actually care back
• 1:08:16
  seemed to me a really important point in the audio.
• 1:08:19
  And it, I could explore that better in the book.
• 1:08:22
  And it seemed to me like that was a Mirror Now for how the
• 1:08:26
  doctor and Charlie could be so that, you know, the.
• 1:08:29
  It's awful to have someone say I, you know, I killed myself
• 1:08:32
  because you were my only friend. And she says, did we meet?
• 1:08:36
  Yeah, I, I, I vaguely recall. Oh, I'm, I'm glad that I meant,
• 1:08:42
  I meant that much to you. I mean, and there's a sequence
• 1:08:47
  I've really enjoyed writing in Charms where you get that
• 1:08:49
  flashback to how as a little girl, she saves her job.
• 1:08:55
  Because again, you know, I had no idea about that.
• 1:08:58
  I mean, that's The thing is you hear the audio and you hear
• 1:09:00
  these details. You think, oh, I can make
• 1:09:02
  something of that. So the whole point when Charlie
• 1:09:04
  says in Part 1 about how she nearly broke her tooth on her
• 1:09:06
  plum pudding. And I thought, I think that has
• 1:09:09
  to be important somewhere. It feels like like I'm leaving
• 1:09:13
  myself a clue for 25 years later to explore.
• 1:09:16
  And then I thought, oh, actually, that could be great
• 1:09:19
  that Edith think he loses her job because of that 25 and how
• 1:09:22
  many however many years ago in Charlie's childhood.
• 1:09:25
  And that's why plum pudding is so important, because otherwise
• 1:09:28
  it's becomes this and deliberately annoying joke.
• 1:09:32
  We just repeat it over and over again, which some people do find
• 1:09:34
  quite, quite frustrating. But in the book, at least, when
• 1:09:37
  you get annoyed by it, you think, well, there is actually
• 1:09:40
  some sort of emotional reason. There's a reason this is an
• 1:09:44
  echo. This is this was a connecting
• 1:09:45
  moment between the two of them. So, yeah, it's it's odd,
• 1:09:51
  Charlie. I just wanted Charlie to be.
• 1:09:56
  You're always encouraged when you write Doctor Who.
• 1:09:58
  We had the same thing with Rose. You know, you, you write the
• 1:10:02
  companion originally to be the perfect friend and the perfect
• 1:10:08
  and and you know, they always are the doctor's best friend
• 1:10:10
  who, whether it's Sarah Jane Smith suddenly or Lilo.
• 1:10:13
  And that's that's how they discussed on screening.
• 1:10:16
  It just means that they end up being tensely, rather
• 1:10:19
  colourless. And I want Evelyn and Charlie to
• 1:10:22
  both be recognisably kind, good people who nevertheless the
• 1:10:29
  relationship isn't necessarily equal.
• 1:10:31
  And there is something there to actually chew over while not
• 1:10:35
  while not betraying them and not going down that annoying path
• 1:10:39
  that has been gone down where you suddenly mean that there's a
• 1:10:42
  big feud between the doctor and Ace.
• 1:10:45
  And there's lots of shouting. And I didn't want that.
• 1:10:47
  I, I, I didn't want to create tension that wasn't, that
• 1:10:51
  wouldn't naturally be there. But I did feel that that there
• 1:10:54
  was room in the books to, I mean, the end of Jubilee, which
• 1:10:58
  is, I think one of my, the bits I actually quite liked because
• 1:11:04
  Jubilee, you know, it was always a harder process in some ways,
• 1:11:08
  because, you know, I, I'm not as fond of Jubilee as an audio, But
• 1:11:13
  I, I like the idea at the end that there's this moment of, you
• 1:11:18
  know, where she chooses to go with him still.
• 1:11:21
  And that and that Jubilee is set up also being a story where she
• 1:11:25
  wants to go now, which of course isn't true at all in the audio.
• 1:11:28
  But I wanted this to feel like it was an important pivot point
• 1:11:32
  that the events of Jubilee were going to have a consequence for
• 1:11:35
  whether or not she stays with the Doctor and he apologises to
• 1:11:39
  her because she aged to death. And it's awful what happens to
• 1:11:45
  Evelyn. I mean, we don't see it, which
• 1:11:47
  is the the it's a sort of get out.
• 1:11:49
  But you give, I think it's three moments in Jubilee where just
• 1:11:54
  because something random happens, she isn't killed.
• 1:11:58
  There are like real moments where she thinks she's going to
• 1:12:01
  die in that book. And I was sort of going, I know
• 1:12:04
  she doesn't die in this book. But I'm convinced that she's
• 1:12:06
  going to die any. Second, I've been so.
• 1:12:08
  Used to have done it and, and, and in a funny way it was
• 1:12:11
  tempting. I mean, you know, Steve Cole
• 1:12:13
  said to me early on, he said, are you going to make chimes at
• 1:12:17
  midnight? 8th doctor and Charlie And I
• 1:12:21
  said, yeah. And he said, oh look, yeah,
• 1:12:23
  that's good. That'd be nice, I said it was an
• 1:12:26
  option as opposed. To and he.
• 1:12:28
  Said you can do what you want and I did think.
• 1:12:31
  Oh, I could. Really.
• 1:12:32
  You know, I could really surprise people by having the
• 1:12:35
  Dalek at the end of the very end, you know, the real.
• 1:12:39
  And I made it a bit bigger in the Dalek spaceship because that
• 1:12:42
  bit was always a bit confusing in the audio anyway.
• 1:12:45
  But I really wanted it at the end, after all the act of
• 1:12:47
  friendship that the Dalek could at the end just simply kill her.
• 1:12:52
  I never would have forgiven you. The reason that you don't in
• 1:12:57
  part is because you just think, well, you know, it'd be nice to
• 1:13:00
  believe that they do. Doctor Who and the Pirates,
• 1:13:04
  which is my favorite evil in story.
• 1:13:06
  I mean, be an odd novel because there's so much singing
• 1:13:08
  involved, but then you'd. Have to have sheet music in
• 1:13:11
  there, wouldn't you? You'd.
• 1:13:12
  Have sheet music. I mean, you kind of don't want
• 1:13:14
  to be so arrogant as to smile other people's.
• 1:13:17
  And also Evelyn isn't my character.
• 1:13:19
  I mean, I can do what I want with the others, but I, I, I
• 1:13:23
  feel a certain, I don't want people to feel that I've been
• 1:13:29
  rude to characters that Gary created.
• 1:13:32
  Actually, I, I want, you know, I don't know that Gary will ever
• 1:13:35
  read his books, but I would like it if he did.
• 1:13:38
  He didn't feel I dishonoured his own work creating something.
• 1:13:42
  But it was tempting for a bit. I just thought I could, you
• 1:13:44
  know, or I could have at the end that Evelyn just says I've had
• 1:13:47
  enough and walks off and someone else could pick it up in another
• 1:13:50
  way. But but they had to feel for
• 1:13:53
  both, you know, as I say, because they're the only books
• 1:13:56
  necessary that they'll ever be in.
• 1:13:57
  I wanted to make them both feel like these were.
• 1:14:00
  These were real crunch moments for both Charlie and Evely.
• 1:14:04
  But I also think that the thing that both books have in common,
• 1:14:08
  which is it's sort of thematic, but in a very kind of sideways
• 1:14:14
  way, is there is a a disparity between the experience of the
• 1:14:20
  companion and the doctor, which has a real kind of resonance on
• 1:14:23
  the way they experience what's what's what's happening to them.
• 1:14:26
  And I think that what you've managed to do without making it
• 1:14:29
  this, without over blowing it or or making it melodramatic, is to
• 1:14:34
  portray just how difficult it is to really find points of
• 1:14:41
  identification with someone who's lived such a such a Yeah.
• 1:14:46
  And in infinitely bigger and weirder life than you.
• 1:14:51
  There's the I guess the kind of the cliche is the alienness of
• 1:14:53
  the Doctor. Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:14:55
  Just often kind of mishandled, I think, in by writers.
• 1:14:58
  But. But I think you.
• 1:14:59
  It's tricky. I mean, I mean, I did find
• 1:15:01
  myself because I mean, 1 you know, the sort of trick that I
• 1:15:06
  learned, particularly for Chimes, having got it wrong in
• 1:15:09
  Jubilee a bit when I was doing it, was always to know in any
• 1:15:13
  scene who I'm kind of funnelling the scene through.
• 1:15:20
  And 1 and Chimes was really helpful for that.
• 1:15:22
  And I hated the Doctor being the identification figure, you know,
• 1:15:25
  because I just thought I, I think he works more
• 1:15:29
  interestingly when we can't because he's an impossible
• 1:15:32
  character. I don't want to have his
• 1:15:37
  innermost thoughts particularly I I want him to be guarding them
• 1:15:40
  even from himself. I want people to be basically in
• 1:15:43
  a stage where you're reacting to him because I think that I think
• 1:15:46
  also because it's that typical thing about stories is that
• 1:15:50
  Stephen Moffat told me this a while back.
• 1:15:52
  He said that the problem is, you know, writing Doctor Who.
• 1:15:55
  He's that he learnt was that you have to find a basic way in
• 1:15:58
  which the Doctor Who is so amazing just doesn't come along
• 1:16:00
  and just keep on ruining your story by just solving it.
• 1:16:04
  And that's the point. If you let go too much inside
• 1:16:09
  the head. I mean, I think some might just
• 1:16:12
  do it really, really well. I think I'm just too nervous to,
• 1:16:15
  but I never really want, which is why, you know, it becomes so
• 1:16:18
  important that Evelyn or Charlie or whoever else you're with
• 1:16:23
  becomes strengthened by the fact that they're having their their
• 1:16:27
  moment instead. It's, it's tricky.
• 1:16:30
  I mean, I just think, I mean, I mean, I love the doctor.
• 1:16:34
  I still don't really know that I can predict how the Doctor's
• 1:16:37
  ever going to react in most situations, as soon as I start
• 1:16:39
  to find the Doctor predictable. And again, you know, writing up
• 1:16:42
  the dialogue, it's when you have the sequences, but the Doctor
• 1:16:45
  meet, meets the villain and it becomes so numbingly awful if
• 1:16:50
  you know. And of course we do because
• 1:16:53
  we've there are now literally thousands of Doctor Who stories
• 1:16:57
  and you kind of, if you can predict the way that they're
• 1:17:00
  going to trounce the villain and mock them and do all that, you
• 1:17:04
  think I just want you for once to surprise me by not saying the
• 1:17:09
  obvious stuff when you meet. I mean that was again in chimes
• 1:17:13
  at least with in Jubilee you have, you know, it's mostly
• 1:17:16
  eviling with the Dalek. It's not the.
• 1:17:18
  Yeah, although the the first scene where the Doctor meets
• 1:17:21
  Nigel is really thrilling. No, thank you.
• 1:17:26
  And it's thrilling partly because Nigel, I think, is
• 1:17:29
  thrillingly on the edge of. Yeah, the.
• 1:17:33
  Dangerous. But also it's thrilling because
• 1:17:35
  the 6th Doctor is, in a funny way, also on the edge of a
• 1:17:39
  different kind of madness. Yeah.
• 1:17:41
  In that you don't know what he's going to do.
• 1:17:43
  And in that scene, Evelyn is standing there watching, just
• 1:17:46
  sort of aghast at what, at the conversation she's she's
• 1:17:49
  witnessing. Because the 6th Doctor doesn't
• 1:17:52
  do any of the things you would expect, even No.
• 1:17:55
  That's right. And and Colin plays it in a very
• 1:17:57
  avuncular way. And I thought I'd quite like
• 1:18:02
  this to be something where he's just he's he's off beam here and
• 1:18:06
  he's trying to work out how to assess it by throwing curve
• 1:18:10
  balls all the time. And and also he's really puzzled
• 1:18:14
  by it all the hearting in chimes was again, it's that it's that
• 1:18:18
  final episode problem I always have with my Doctor Who's.
• 1:18:21
  I'm not very good at endings. And when you get finally you're
• 1:18:28
  talking to Edward Grove. And I just really found in the
• 1:18:34
  audio it's it's fine. But the confrontation between
• 1:18:38
  Paul Mcgannon and a talking house, I just try to find ways
• 1:18:42
  of keeping that a bit more surprising with these reactions,
• 1:18:45
  which is why I mean, that there's a bit at the end of
• 1:18:47
  that. I mean, I wrote it as a joke and
• 1:18:50
  then I stuck with it. And at the end, I was coming to
• 1:18:52
  the end of a chapter. I just had a look to say, well,
• 1:18:53
  I think that's all nonsense. And I'm not going to tell you
• 1:18:55
  who the real killer is. And I thought that's great.
• 1:18:59
  And I thought, well, maybe I should go down that path.
• 1:19:01
  Maybe it's, maybe that would actually make it that it's not
• 1:19:05
  so predictable that this confrontation with a talking
• 1:19:08
  house, because actually a talking house is, is bloody
• 1:19:11
  impossible. And it can't just be that
• 1:19:14
  because people have been telling me for 25 years that that's
• 1:19:16
  nonsense. And they're, you know, I've had
• 1:19:20
  people. It's the same with skirts.
• 1:19:21
  I, I, I sort of fell in love with the idea that things could
• 1:19:24
  just evolve out. And so a house can evolve
• 1:19:28
  sentience because it's in a time loop forever, not necessarily or
• 1:19:33
  in skirt. So it's all about evolution in a
• 1:19:35
  way that I have no idea or how any of that works.
• 1:19:39
  So I just thought it would be quite funny if the house
• 1:19:41
  believes it to be true, but the house isn't really what's going
• 1:19:45
  on. And the idea that actually
• 1:19:46
  what's fueling chimes is, is the, is the wasted imagination
• 1:19:52
  of someone who ought to have had a better life, who has weird
• 1:19:57
  ideas and interesting stories. And every single time that she
• 1:20:00
  says anything, someone slams her down and she's come to see this
• 1:20:03
  house as oppressive. So the house is she, you know,
• 1:20:07
  but the house doesn't realise it's actually made-up.
• 1:20:11
  I thought that was quite fun. Then it just gives a different
• 1:20:13
  colour to it. It just, you know, I'm giving
• 1:20:16
  away the ending. But then, you know, people
• 1:20:19
  shouldn't be listening to this. Begin but but it also brought
• 1:20:23
  back it was funny. It brought back a sort of sense
• 1:20:26
  of how it was to write the audio when I I didn't know that the
• 1:20:29
  that was the house then until I was writing episode 3.
• 1:20:32
  I just thought, Ah, who's Edward?
• 1:20:33
  Who is this Edward Grove? Hang on, So it it was named
• 1:20:38
  Edward Grove before? Yeah, it was a house.
• 1:20:41
  I thought it could be a howl. It could be the house.
• 1:20:44
  It could, it could be. Just as well you named it Edward
• 1:20:47
  Grove. It could be.
• 1:20:47
  I mean, I'm sure if I went back to my original notes, I might
• 1:20:51
  find them are bits where I've just, I've gone back and then
• 1:20:53
  corrected stuff and say, oh, if I'm doing that, I can do that.
• 1:20:56
  Although, again, doing chimes, I just found that episode 1 of
• 1:20:59
  chimes is nothing but a series of red herrings where as an
• 1:21:02
  audio writer, I'm trying to work out what's important.
• 1:21:05
  I don't know, but it was great to actually have that and then
• 1:21:09
  say, oh, I could use them now. So that the whole thing when
• 1:21:12
  there's a door, not a door, when it's a jam jar or must be jam
• 1:21:15
  jar. I just thought, yeah, that's
• 1:21:17
  eerie. And I have more Christmas
• 1:21:20
  cracker jokes popping up and I thought, oh, I could make more
• 1:21:23
  of a feature of this. It was just fun to actually make
• 1:21:26
  it seem like a lot of the wasted effort in the audio 25 years
• 1:21:31
  ago. I could now finally look as if
• 1:21:34
  it would were actually deliberate, as opposed to just
• 1:21:38
  somebody on the computer trying really, really hard to think of
• 1:21:42
  anything to pad out the episode, which I think some of it was.
• 1:21:46
  What was with the, you know, you said about not wanting to sort
• 1:21:51
  of tell the scenes from the point of view of the Doctor?
• 1:21:53
  So your preference was your original characters.
• 1:21:56
  Yeah. So what did, because I thought
• 1:21:58
  you did this so brilliantly, was it difficult to write from the
• 1:22:03
  point of view of those characters when they are
• 1:22:05
  technically two different people from from two different time
• 1:22:09
  zones? Obviously they're their own
• 1:22:10
  back. Stories are sort of changing on
• 1:22:12
  a scene to scene basis. Do you mean in?
• 1:22:15
  In chimes. In chimes, yeah, with the, you
• 1:22:18
  know, the, the, the two different time periods, the the
• 1:22:22
  chauffeur with the sun and then without the sun.
• 1:22:25
  And do you know what I mean? The details were sort of
• 1:22:26
  changing all the time. I.
• 1:22:28
  Mean part of it does this actually, this was my big fear.
• 1:22:30
  I mean, I mean, I suggested chimes because I just thought
• 1:22:34
  that would be a better idea than doing Jubilee.
• 1:22:37
  But I immediately hoped that they'd say no because I didn't
• 1:22:42
  want to spoil chimes because it's one of those sort of things
• 1:22:44
  as well where you've I've kind of grown into the idea that it's
• 1:22:48
  good over these years. And the idea of now wading in
• 1:22:51
  and doing a rubbish book of it would just make me feel so
• 1:22:54
  upset. And also what came out of that
• 1:22:59
  was thinking about it was just thinking.
• 1:23:00
  I just don't think the whole point is that they're deciphers.
• 1:23:05
  So how do I give them any backs? How do I, how do I flesh them
• 1:23:08
  out without breaking the point of the story?
• 1:23:11
  And I found that somehow I, I found a way through that.
• 1:23:16
  And it was partly about the idea of giving them their own.
• 1:23:21
  Not like I mean in a, in a dark novelisation, which I, I'm, I'm,
• 1:23:25
  I'm proud of it. But I also understand that when
• 1:23:28
  I read reviews of it, I can see why people have a problem with
• 1:23:31
  it because there's not much doctoral in it.
• 1:23:34
  Because I I give everybody a short story because that was my
• 1:23:38
  way of finding them interesting. But it also feels a little bit
• 1:23:40
  like I'm delaying the action in this.
• 1:23:42
  I really wanted that. It was an essential series of
• 1:23:45
  clues to what was going on was that people were were living
• 1:23:49
  through different sorts of ghost stories, which were quite
• 1:23:53
  revealing to themselves, but also didn't make sense of who
• 1:23:57
  they were. I mean, I was really fond of the
• 1:23:59
  Butler, who is obviously gay, been puzzled about the fact that
• 1:24:04
  he has memories of a war that hasn't even happened yet and
• 1:24:07
  having had a son in it, when he knows he's not married, he knows
• 1:24:11
  he's never had a child and he wouldn't want one and all that.
• 1:24:15
  So it was that funny thing about trying to sort of have them
• 1:24:19
  hanging on themselves to who their characters were.
• 1:24:24
  That was difficult. I suppose that was quite
• 1:24:27
  difficult. I think I, I don't quite, I, I
• 1:24:31
  think I just sort of played it by ear.
• 1:24:33
  I, I, I, I became fonder of Mary than I obviously ever had been
• 1:24:36
  in the audio because she's, she's a bit of a thin character,
• 1:24:39
  Mary. But I love the idea of somebody
• 1:24:41
  who is prepared to be with a man only because he's so terminal to
• 1:24:50
  be with that. That's when it stops, all the
• 1:24:53
  ghosts of herself appearing because they can't bear to be
• 1:24:56
  around him, so she can make herself love somebody because
• 1:25:02
  then she can just get on with being numb.
• 1:25:05
  And that's a horrible feeling. But I but once I thought that
• 1:25:09
  was the reason for Mary, I grew to like her.
• 1:25:14
  And it was finding those sort of little bits of, you know, it was
• 1:25:19
  like giving Missus Badley her Turkey and, and, and the
• 1:25:23
  frustration she has that her Turkey wouldn't stay dead, which
• 1:25:27
  was just a bit of fun. Again, it was.
• 1:25:29
  So was. That for Target Book Day, didn't
• 1:25:31
  you? That was the one that you read.
• 1:25:33
  I was always fond of the Turkey. I mean, only because I just had,
• 1:25:36
  I wanted there to be more of the Turkey, but there's just no room
• 1:25:39
  for it. But I just thought it would be
• 1:25:41
  really funny if at some point in the book I could have the Turkey
• 1:25:44
  just. I.
• 1:25:45
  Found that secret so disturbing the way.
• 1:25:48
  You were. Describing that Turkey slopping
• 1:25:51
  around that kitchen. Spraying.
• 1:25:52
  It's stuffing. Everywhere.
• 1:25:55
  And running up the walls and we do poke down with a broom
• 1:25:58
  handle. I thought that was funny.
• 1:26:00
  I mean, I mean, I must admit, you know, the whole of that.
• 1:26:03
  I was looking forward to writing that bit.
• 1:26:05
  I just thought it just gave Missus Baddeley a bit more than
• 1:26:08
  just being this sort of, you know, it's a matter of trying to
• 1:26:13
  hear the scenes and then challenging yourself about what
• 1:26:17
  might make them interesting. And quite a lot of the time you
• 1:26:20
  just found just I, I, I'd find myself want to do the the the
• 1:26:24
  exact opposite and give them a bit of a different flavour.
• 1:26:28
  And also trying to make Edith a better character because I like
• 1:26:35
  Edith in the audio. But at the end of it, she asks a
• 1:26:38
  very, very valid question, which is, OK, well, you, Charlie,
• 1:26:41
  you've not killed yourself. What about me?
• 1:26:43
  And I say, oh, it's all right, Edith.
• 1:26:44
  We'll just, we'll just remember your distant planets.
• 1:26:49
  Oh, all right, then. And I thought that was, that
• 1:26:52
  wasn't quite the answer I felt we could reach after 240 pages
• 1:26:55
  of prose. I just thought, well, that's not
• 1:26:57
  a good enough answer. And I want people to actually
• 1:26:59
  say that's not good enough. I want characters to be
• 1:27:02
  constantly saying to the things I'd written 25 years ago and
• 1:27:04
  say, Nope, I don't. I'm not happy with that.
• 1:27:08
  Charlie being talked out of the suicide, as I say, was not not a
• 1:27:13
  good enough answer. Give me a better answer, you
• 1:27:15
  know, And I just thought, well, as long as I articulate it, I've
• 1:27:19
  got to find a better thing to say.
• 1:27:21
  But you can see, I think on the page at times, my own
• 1:27:24
  frustration, not with. I mean, as I say, I'm very proud
• 1:27:27
  of chimes, but I'd just say no, no, no, no, come on.
• 1:27:30
  And then what? It's the thing that I, if I talk
• 1:27:32
  to students about writing, I mean, because I, I write a lot
• 1:27:35
  of short stories and I go into them sometimes thinking I know
• 1:27:40
  the ending, you know, I find it's usually about the halfway
• 1:27:43
  point because the ending feels predictable if you go into it
• 1:27:46
  knowing it too well. And what I always say to people
• 1:27:50
  is you then ask yourself when you think you're nearing the
• 1:27:52
  end, you say, and then what? And if there's no answer, then
• 1:27:55
  that's fine. But if there's, if you say,
• 1:27:58
  well, OK, we've reached a sort of difficult situation, but then
• 1:28:00
  what happens with their relationship 20 years later?
• 1:28:02
  Maybe you should just then you suddenly find that you've it's
• 1:28:05
  becoming a weirder, richer story.
• 1:28:07
  And and with chimes, it was always hearing the audio, an
• 1:28:11
  audio that I was to say, I'd go on my walks and I'd feel really
• 1:28:14
  proud of it. I thought, and I love the
• 1:28:16
  cliffhangers. I thought this is this is good.
• 1:28:20
  I was excited and I felt proud of it and I thought, I've got to
• 1:28:23
  ask myself a lot and then what? And then see what happens and
• 1:28:28
  hopefully there's something more to reveal.
• 1:28:31
  And I, I, I think there was, you know, I think I found a bit more
• 1:28:35
  to the Butler and I think I found a bit more to the
• 1:28:39
  chauffeur. And I felt, I felt sorry for
• 1:28:42
  them, even though they're not, because they're just sort of
• 1:28:44
  composites of other people. The chauffeur was far more
• 1:28:48
  physically threatening in the book.
• 1:28:51
  Yeah. I found as well I like both
• 1:28:54
  books OK. I think both books absolutely
• 1:28:56
  could be read now by somebody who's never heard the audios and
• 1:28:59
  just get so much joy out. I hope so.
• 1:29:02
  But I think it's even more rewarding if you know the source
• 1:29:06
  material and and you experience well, that's.
• 1:29:09
  Part of the challenge of it really was that I mean, you
• 1:29:12
  know, joking apart, you know, I mean, I, I liked as I wrote it
• 1:29:15
  to pretend. It's like when I adapt for the
• 1:29:19
  theatre. I mean, I'm, I've just at the
• 1:29:21
  moment I've got a in rehearsal Pride and Prejudice in Sweden
• 1:29:26
  and in your head you think what I'd like is an audience watching
• 1:29:30
  this never thinks at one moment, Oh well, this is a way of doing
• 1:29:35
  a book. What you want is that you
• 1:29:37
  believe as you're watching it. This was actually written, this
• 1:29:39
  whole story for the theatre. That's not going to happen.
• 1:29:42
  It's Jane Austen and, and, and, you know, it's quite famous.
• 1:29:45
  But when I was writing, obviously when I was writing
• 1:29:48
  these, I just thought I'd love people to read them and just
• 1:29:51
  think that they were always meant to be books.
• 1:29:53
  But at the same time, you kind of know it's a niche audience
• 1:29:56
  and the people most likely to buy Big Finish novelisations are
• 1:30:00
  people who like Big Finish and therefore they'll be aware of
• 1:30:03
  them. And so you sort of want to it to
• 1:30:05
  be both things at once. You want it to be, in part, a
• 1:30:08
  conversation that the that the reader is having with their own
• 1:30:12
  memories of what the audio is. Which means at the same time
• 1:30:16
  that it has to be different, because if you just offer the
• 1:30:20
  same thing, they'll get cross you.
• 1:30:22
  Know when you were writing, particularly when you were
• 1:30:23
  writing Dalek, which was going out as a target, did you have
• 1:30:27
  the kind of those target books in in the back of your mind as
• 1:30:30
  as a concept of what they. Yeah.
• 1:30:34
  I mean, I mean, I was, I was really nervous of that.
• 1:30:38
  But then I read Stevens Day of the Doctor and I'm so lucky in a
• 1:30:45
  way that I was part of the second wave of the target.
• 1:30:49
  But because if I had been asked as part of the first wave and
• 1:30:53
  I'd probably, and I'm sure I'd have said yes, but I think I'd
• 1:30:56
  have tried something much. I don't think I, I'd have
• 1:30:59
  realised how brave you could be. And seeing what Stephen did made
• 1:31:03
  me think, oh, you can read. So I remember actually, you
• 1:31:06
  know, because I, I read Day of the Doctor just before I began
• 1:31:12
  writing Dark. And so I finished Day of the
• 1:31:13
  Doctor. And on that very day I sat down
• 1:31:16
  and just thought, OK, well, I'm going to try and be like Stephen
• 1:31:20
  Moffat. I'm going to try and just write
• 1:31:21
  something which I think is interesting.
• 1:31:22
  And I wrote the prologue about this boy on a hill with a kite
• 1:31:27
  and the finger coming down and crushing him.
• 1:31:28
  And I thought, I, I know already what that is, but that that will
• 1:31:33
  surprise people. It's not, it's, it's a statement
• 1:31:37
  that you're offering the reader, that I'm giving you a
• 1:31:40
  novelisation of something that you can watch at any moment on
• 1:31:43
  iPlayer. But it isn't, it can't be quite
• 1:31:47
  the same thing. And I'm telling you from the
• 1:31:48
  word go, it won't be. And hopefully you'll be OK with
• 1:31:52
  that. With the audios, it felt more
• 1:31:54
  important in a way to do that because they're they're, they're
• 1:31:57
  longer stories. But I also have this thought, I
• 1:31:59
  don't know, it's tricky. Terence Dix is such a massive
• 1:32:03
  part of my childhood. And I think Terence was amazing.
• 1:32:08
  But Terence's entire point of writing them is different to the
• 1:32:12
  point we have now. There's no, there's genuinely no
• 1:32:16
  point in and, and, and I think there are some of them.
• 1:32:19
  I mean, I'm not going to say, you know, because I think
• 1:32:21
  everyone approaches these novels differently and I buy all the
• 1:32:24
  novelisations and some of them feel like they are much more
• 1:32:29
  faithful. And I won't say I don't quite
• 1:32:34
  see the point because I do, but they don't engage me as much.
• 1:32:38
  What I sort of want is that somebody, I saw people write,
• 1:32:43
  write to me after Dalek and they were crossed that they were now
• 1:32:46
  contradictory and I said yeah. That's what I.
• 1:32:51
  Want There we go. You're upsetting the right
• 1:32:53
  people then. Mentioned Malcolm Hulk before
• 1:32:56
  you mentioned the doomsday weapon and and to me that Dalek
• 1:33:00
  is much closer to. I mean, Dalek is like if Malcolm
• 1:33:04
  Hulk had been told that he didn't have to worry too much
• 1:33:06
  about the original storyline and was allowed to actually just do
• 1:33:09
  the world building that he was interested in.
• 1:33:11
  Yeah, I think you'd get something like that where all
• 1:33:13
  all the minor characters suddenly kind of get.
• 1:33:16
  I mean this, yeah, it's a funny thing because I was so tempted
• 1:33:20
  with both Jubilee and Chimes to go really crazy and just say I
• 1:33:25
  don't have to do any of this. But then I, I heard the audios
• 1:33:30
  and just thought, but I think that's a lot of good meat here.
• 1:33:32
  And I don't, I think that's throwing it all away just to be
• 1:33:35
  silly. But with Dalek, I did feel, I
• 1:33:40
  felt, I felt a certain duty to rescue it from being a mid
• 1:33:46
  season 45 minute episode and to try and make it feel a bit like
• 1:33:51
  it had a bit more length and weight to it.
• 1:33:55
  And I'm, I'm not sure I got that right, but I think some of it is
• 1:34:00
  pretty good. And it, it's, it's, it's
• 1:34:03
  difficult. I remember that one of the first
• 1:34:05
  things with Dalek was that they sent me a proposed back cover
• 1:34:10
  blurb and it said, you know, it's the year 2012.
• 1:34:14
  And I said, no, it doesn't. There's no point making it 2012
• 1:34:19
  now. I mean, when, when when I wrote
• 1:34:23
  dark, it was the space year 20. And I thought, well, we'll
• 1:34:27
  probably never get there. You know, I mean, possible to
• 1:34:30
  imagine it in the same way if I said something now in 2038, I'll
• 1:34:34
  think, yeah, that's just crazy. But I I hope I see 2038.
• 1:34:38
  I'm hoping we'll still, we'll have some missing episodes by
• 1:34:40
  then. And it would be, you know, it's,
• 1:34:41
  it's that sort of funny thing that I just thought, well, I
• 1:34:44
  don't see the point in now anchoring it in.
• 1:34:48
  I want this to feel like it's as modern as it can be.
• 1:34:50
  So I just won't say a year at all.
• 1:34:52
  And people went to me and said, well, you, you left that out.
• 1:34:55
  And I said, I said. Well.
• 1:34:58
  It's kind of deliberate. I mean, you know, because you're
• 1:35:01
  always trying to justify what you're writing down, as you
• 1:35:06
  know, you say, is this worth putting in the book?
• 1:35:10
  So wish more Doctor Wofford would ask that question.
• 1:35:12
  Rob in Jubilee, I mean one of the bits I mean.
• 1:35:16
  A lot of empty books. I really enjoyed in Jubilee when
• 1:35:19
  I heard it back, the bit with the Nick Briggs playing the
• 1:35:23
  Prime Minister of America. Oh yes.
• 1:35:27
  I just, I couldn't find room for it in the book the way I was
• 1:35:30
  doing it. I just thought, when can I get
• 1:35:32
  that phone call between the Prime Minister, you know, and
• 1:35:38
  Nick's really funny accent, which which which was
• 1:35:41
  deliberate. And this is not a dig at Nick.
• 1:35:43
  It was, you know, huge celebrations, you know, and
• 1:35:46
  everyone. And I just thought the problem,
• 1:35:48
  you know, and I love Miriam's response to the Americans are
• 1:35:52
  saying, I just don't like you because because you because you
• 1:35:56
  look a bit like us, but you, but that's just a lie.
• 1:36:00
  You just because because you're not really the same as us.
• 1:36:03
  So the whole of it, it's just it's just a deception.
• 1:36:06
  I thought that was really fun. And I thought, I don't know
• 1:36:09
  where to put it. And so everything that you that
• 1:36:12
  you've same in in Dalek. I mean, all the way through
• 1:36:15
  Dalek, when I was writing the TV episode, there was this one
• 1:36:18
  joke. I've said this many times, but
• 1:36:21
  it's, it's the honest truth that survived every draft.
• 1:36:24
  There's this dreadful joke. And every single time I put it
• 1:36:27
  in, Russell would say, oh, there it is again.
• 1:36:29
  We'll probably remove that. And then I just keep it in
• 1:36:32
  again. And it was broadcast and it's
• 1:36:34
  the, the hair dryer gag and I cut it out the book.
• 1:36:41
  I thought, I can't find a space for it.
• 1:36:43
  I, I didn't go. I didn't have that saying.
• 1:36:45
  I just thought I don't want now to go into some room where the
• 1:36:49
  doctor's going through some. I'd just rather have them appear
• 1:36:51
  with it. I thought I want to get on with
• 1:36:53
  it. And so and you, so you're
• 1:36:55
  constantly editing things that you actually enjoy.
• 1:36:58
  And the hard part of chimes was finding bits that I really
• 1:37:02
  liked. I can't remember what they are
• 1:37:04
  now, but it happened a lot. There was some.
• 1:37:06
  I just thought, I don't think I can find the space for this.
• 1:37:09
  And I thought, well, I'm not wiping the audio, People can
• 1:37:11
  have it. Listen to the audio as well and
• 1:37:14
  hopefully there'll be they'll see that that, you know, the the
• 1:37:17
  contradictions of them as being quite interesting.
• 1:37:20
  I hope people, I mean, I really hope people enjoy them.
• 1:37:23
  I mean, they're all. Glorious.
• 1:37:26
  But but you don't, I mean, Chimes in particular because it
• 1:37:28
  has such a, you know, a wonderful following.
• 1:37:33
  I mean, it's such a sweet thing. People write to me on Twitter
• 1:37:36
  every Christmas and say they're listening to Chimes and you
• 1:37:38
  think it's 25 years ago that that it's even remembered.
• 1:37:44
  And then you think, well, I don't want people to then say,
• 1:37:46
  oh, I've got the book a bit. And then they read and go, oh,
• 1:37:48
  he's left out all the bits I like and what and what what's he
• 1:37:51
  doing with this Turkey that's running around spraying it in?
• 1:37:54
  And why is he doing? That Christmas, no, it's a
• 1:37:57
  lovely Christmas read but what I was reading Jubilee and
• 1:38:00
  thinking, do you know what? If, if I were to read one thing
• 1:38:05
  kind of for each season of the year, this would be my
• 1:38:07
  remembrance read not because I'm, you know, I'm not being
• 1:38:11
  anti remembrance or anything like that, but it, it, it makes
• 1:38:14
  you confront the reason you, you do remember.
• 1:38:18
  It's, it's all about, you know, what, what's the, what's the
• 1:38:21
  point in going through these rituals and what do they
• 1:38:23
  actually stand for? And what do we actually believe,
• 1:38:24
  and what do we want to learn from that?
• 1:38:27
  Yeah. I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean,
• 1:38:28
  that would be great if I could spoil everybody's remembrance
• 1:38:32
  every year, but no. Yeah, I mean, it's funny.
• 1:38:36
  Jubilee has AI mean, I only realised it myself quite
• 1:38:39
  recently, you know, because you come back to your old stuff and
• 1:38:42
  you suddenly see what it really is.
• 1:38:44
  And I suddenly realised that Jubilee is actually just me
• 1:38:48
  really, really covering up writing all the themes of my
• 1:38:55
  favorite Doctor Who story, which is Night Dance, because snake
• 1:38:59
  dance, which I adore. I mean, if I tell people, they
• 1:39:02
  usually just go blank because especially if if if they're new
• 1:39:06
  serious fans, they just think, oh, what's that one?
• 1:39:09
  And then they've seen it and they say, oh, it's rubbish.
• 1:39:10
  That's one with a snake. But I love Snake Dance because,
• 1:39:13
  you know, in this anniversary year in 83, they produce a story
• 1:39:17
  which is basically a satire about pointless anniversaries
• 1:39:23
  and Jubilee, which was written 20 years after that one is for
• 1:39:27
  the 40th anniversary. And I'm just doing the same
• 1:39:30
  thing. I'm really the actual attacking
• 1:39:34
  Jubilee, which is rude of me, but I did that a few times with
• 1:39:38
  Big Finish. I would write stories which just
• 1:39:40
  basically, I look back now and I'm just saying I'm just
• 1:39:42
  attacking them. It's like, it's like my Mozart
• 1:39:46
  story is basically all about my saying to Big Finish.
• 1:39:49
  Why are you still going? Shouldn't you have stopped by
• 1:39:53
  now? Which is such a terribly rude
• 1:39:55
  thing to do, but I thought it was funny and they didn't seem
• 1:39:57
  to mind. But Jubilee, I'm just really
• 1:40:00
  saying, here we are. I mean, it's also what I
• 1:40:02
  genuinely felt in 2003 was that this is our final anniversary
• 1:40:08
  because the show will never come back.
• 1:40:10
  I thought it, I mean, spoiler indeed.
• 1:40:14
  But I always just thought, this is the, you know, 50 years.
• 1:40:18
  Where will we all be? And we can't just survive on
• 1:40:20
  these fumes forever. And I thought, you know, and I
• 1:40:23
  loved Big Finish and I was loving writing for Big Finish,
• 1:40:26
  but I just thought, I can't see how we can stay in this forever.
• 1:40:30
  You know, we're going to reach a point now.
• 1:40:32
  We're now seven years since the McGann TV movie.
• 1:40:35
  We've now had seven years with the BBC books, which are
• 1:40:38
  actually really ambitious but increasingly convoluted.
• 1:40:43
  And I don't mind that. I mean, I, I love that.
• 1:40:45
  But but, but where can you go? And I was just thinking, let's
• 1:40:48
  be honest, you know, this is 2003 and the anniversary is
• 1:40:53
  likely to be the last proper big one we ever celebrate.
• 1:40:56
  And of course that that hasn't been the case at all.
• 1:40:59
  But it but so Jubilee, you know, rather, I mean, I wish it were
• 1:41:03
  in some ways a clever comment upon Remembrance Sunday.
• 1:41:06
  It's actually more more a comment upon the Five Doctors
• 1:41:10
  because, because that's my sort of fan impulse.
• 1:41:13
  Can I ask you a question about snake dance?
• 1:41:15
  Yeah, yeah, you pointed something out to me about snake
• 1:41:18
  dance, which will never, ever leave my head.
• 1:41:21
  Really. Great.
• 1:41:22
  Well, yes, but also that it had your favorite two word piece of
• 1:41:28
  dialogue ever in Doctor Who. Have you?
• 1:41:30
  Have you found your even then yet?
• 1:41:34
  Yeah, I, I, I think there's always an even then moment in
• 1:41:39
  every single thing I write. You know, just a bit where you
• 1:41:42
  just feel this, this this suggestion of a, of aching
• 1:41:47
  loneliness somewhere that, you know, just to explain very
• 1:41:52
  quickly. I mean, there's a bit where
• 1:41:53
  Tanner is talking about, you know, we, we never see her
• 1:41:57
  husband, the the Federator, but you just get in in that, you
• 1:42:02
  know, this idea that even at the beginning of their relationship,
• 1:42:06
  he just didn't have a sense of humour just Oh yeah, even then.
• 1:42:09
  And and I and I love the. Oh, you get it now?
• 1:42:13
  Sorry James, I thought you were looking confused.
• 1:42:15
  No, no, no, I I remember the moment, but I'm just enjoying
• 1:42:18
  the memory of the scene. Actually.
• 1:42:20
  It's such a because it's so well, because, but the whole,
• 1:42:23
  but I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm with you on your reverence for that
• 1:42:26
  story because it's it's, it's a really economic, unusually for
• 1:42:30
  the time economically written. It's it's an odd thing, most
• 1:42:34
  Doctor Who. This is not to criticise Doctor
• 1:42:36
  Who because it's what Doctor Who is.
• 1:42:37
  Doctor Who is usually very much in in the moment.
• 1:42:41
  I watched Planet of Evil again recently because I've got I've
• 1:42:43
  got the Blu-ray and I'm not looking at those early colonists
• 1:42:49
  who get turned into skeletons and thinking, but what's their
• 1:42:51
  back story? Because it doesn't matter.
• 1:42:52
  That isn't the point of the story.
• 1:42:54
  But when you get a hint, which is what State Dance does so
• 1:42:59
  well, of people who've just had lives outside the drama and not
• 1:43:04
  in a sort of world building type way, which is what you get in a
• 1:43:07
  lot of science fiction where they say, Oh yes, but we're now
• 1:43:09
  this guy came from the planets Phartos 4.
• 1:43:12
  It's just this idea of people who you know, what I find about
• 1:43:17
  storytelling generally is that you are choosing whether the
• 1:43:23
  characters know it or not. You are saying for the length of
• 1:43:26
  your novel, for the length of your short story, this is the
• 1:43:28
  most important thing that ever happens to these people because
• 1:43:32
  everything else we're never going to see.
• 1:43:34
  So if you're doing a, you know, which is great for short
• 1:43:37
  stories, you can do a short story where someone just has a
• 1:43:39
  very, very boring meal, a date with somebody.
• 1:43:43
  And what's heartbreaking about is as you're reading it, you're
• 1:43:46
  aware that this you are still saying this is the only thing
• 1:43:50
  about them that is really ever interesting and that that's
• 1:43:53
  awful. And in Doctor Who terms, you get
• 1:43:55
  characters who come along and just just to be murdered by a
• 1:43:58
  Zygon. And that's really their only
• 1:44:00
  purpose in life. And when you get the odd story,
• 1:44:03
  which just hints at the idea that they kind of even know that
• 1:44:07
  that Tan her hasn't had former glories and her big moment is
• 1:44:11
  going to be that she is the mother of LON in Snake dance for
• 1:44:14
  4 episodes. It's it makes them it makes it
• 1:44:17
  sadder. And I just like sadness.
• 1:44:20
  I find that there's a sort of melancholia to, you know, that's
• 1:44:26
  a joy about doing the novelisations.
• 1:44:28
  You can sort of hint at that, you know, you can say that these
• 1:44:31
  are these these people, that this is their defining moments
• 1:44:35
  stitched together in a Doctor Who story.
• 1:44:37
  She. Doesn't even make a big moment
• 1:44:40
  of it, does she? It's so wistful.
• 1:44:41
  No, that's right. So much and and and and a less
• 1:44:45
  subtle thing would make it clear that he was he's a bigger
• 1:44:49
  dealer. He's he's an absolute bastard.
• 1:44:50
  You know, he's he's somebody who like in Jubilee that that he
• 1:44:56
  punches her but doesn't hit her hard enough.
• 1:44:58
  You know, some something really terrible.
• 1:44:59
  But it's just that he's just that he's he's obviously not a
• 1:45:03
  very nice man, but that's who she's married to and that's it.
• 1:45:07
  And LON is the product of that. And LON is ghastly, but also LON
• 1:45:12
  is an understandable bored teenager who might not be a
• 1:45:16
  dreadful person when he grows up.
• 1:45:18
  Maybe you just don't know. And the fact that you get the
• 1:45:20
  hint of state answer, people having inner lives, it's quite
• 1:45:24
  rare in Doctor Who, full stop. I mean, Russell and Stephen do
• 1:45:30
  it all incredibly well and they don't and they don't overdo it.
• 1:45:33
  But you get a sense of people really being people quite rarely
• 1:45:38
  in a lot of Doctor Who. And that is not, as I say, a
• 1:45:40
  criticism of it because it's not designed for that and you and
• 1:45:44
  you wouldn't want it. I've been watching An Unearthly
• 1:45:46
  Child recently for fun. I don't know.
• 1:45:48
  I don't need to know the inner life of Horg.
• 1:45:53
  I mean, if I had to novelise an earthly child and you know, I'm
• 1:45:56
  sure we're all queuing up because, you know, I, I, you
• 1:46:00
  know, it's such an easy story that we can all, we, you know,
• 1:46:03
  we can bring that out in multiple formats, apparently
• 1:46:05
  because, because there's such a good rights issue with an
• 1:46:08
  earthly child. But if I were to novelise an
• 1:46:10
  earthly child, I'd be trapped because my impulse would be to
• 1:46:13
  try and give a back story to them all.
• 1:46:15
  And you don't want a back. I don't want a back story to
• 1:46:18
  those bloody Cavemen. I just want them to be Cavemen
• 1:46:20
  and. I don't think Terence did that,
• 1:46:22
  you know, he. Didn't.
• 1:46:25
  You know, my favorite 1 is that sort of the kernel of something
• 1:46:28
  outside the story is that moment in the Impossible Astronaut
• 1:46:32
  where the devil says to Mr. Jefferson, do you think your
• 1:46:35
  wife ever forgave you? Let me tell you, she never did.
• 1:46:38
  And that's. All you know.
• 1:46:40
  You never find out anything else.
• 1:46:42
  Yeah, great stuff. I I just have to.
• 1:46:44
  I love that rich ambiguity of characters having things that
• 1:46:48
  that we need never know about, but there is something else
• 1:46:51
  there and it just makes them real.
• 1:46:54
  I really like that you use that word melancholia, because one of
• 1:46:58
  the things I was pondering when I was kind of reading through
• 1:47:04
  your stuff and looking at what you've done is whether you ever
• 1:47:07
  kind of consider the issue of genre.
• 1:47:11
  And Wikipedia has had a a good go at trying to sum up the genre
• 1:47:15
  of your writing, and they used a lot of words.
• 1:47:18
  And yes, I did read that. I'm not sure any of them
• 1:47:21
  actually get it right. I mean, the obvious kind of go
• 1:47:25
  to where you're you're usually associated with kind of horror
• 1:47:29
  adjacent, I guess. Yeah.
• 1:47:32
  But I'm, I'm not sure that does you justice actually, as a
• 1:47:36
  writer and, and going down that route of melancholia.
• 1:47:39
  I mean the the theme that I think comes through in your
• 1:47:42
  stories again and again is tragedy rather than horror.
• 1:47:46
  Yeah, sort of muted. Tragedy.
• 1:47:49
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, genuine.
• 1:47:51
  Not, not not. Nothing melodramatic, but just
• 1:47:54
  the tragedy of human existence and the.
• 1:47:56
  Yeah, I mean it's fun. I mean, I, everything I write, I
• 1:48:02
  intend to be funny. That's the honest truth.
• 1:48:06
  I, I, I, I, I think I am quite funny.
• 1:48:09
  And then I find out later on that but, but I sort of like to
• 1:48:13
  twist the knife a bit. No, you are funny.
• 1:48:16
  I mean, I'm I'm, I'm. I'm But again, comedy doesn't do
• 1:48:19
  you justice. No, it's an obvious thing.
• 1:48:21
  I mean I I find the horror label quite nice in a way.
• 1:48:25
  It means that a lot of my stories get re anthologised in
• 1:48:28
  horror collections. But I personally find horror
• 1:48:31
  quite hard to process. I'm really squeamish I can't do
• 1:48:36
  horror movies and I I like the dissonance of things and what I
• 1:48:41
  find interesting is people's reactions being off.
• 1:48:46
  And chimes of course is entirely that.
• 1:48:48
  I mean, and Jubilee actually. But chimes.
• 1:48:50
  What makes chimes funny, I hope is the people keep dying and no
• 1:48:55
  one really seems to care very much, which is so much more
• 1:48:58
  interesting to me. But that's why I get most of my
• 1:49:02
  the prose of my stories come out of the idea of people not having
• 1:49:05
  quite the right reactions to things and things just not being
• 1:49:09
  quite in the right place. I tried, you know, I think when
• 1:49:12
  I was a kid, I remember being really frightened by a pane of
• 1:49:17
  glass in my bedroom window. And I don't know why
• 1:49:23
  particularly. Maybe it was slightly
• 1:49:25
  discovered, but I used to fear so I never looked through it.
• 1:49:30
  That if I looked through that pane of glass, there'd be
• 1:49:33
  different weather to the other glasses, the other panes of
• 1:49:37
  glass in the window. And that would just send me mad
• 1:49:40
  because it'll be just be too frightening for me.
• 1:49:42
  And it wouldn't be that there was a threat.
• 1:49:43
  I wasn't frightened of vampires. I was frightened of things I was
• 1:49:47
  frightened of. If I tore off the the wallpaper
• 1:49:50
  in my bedroom, finding a door that couldn't go anywhere I
• 1:49:53
  didn't like things that didn't make sense.
• 1:49:55
  And I, but most things don't make sense to me because that's
• 1:49:59
  the sort of way I am. And emotionally, you know, it's
• 1:50:03
  people. I, I, I, I've read a story that
• 1:50:08
  my wife got really upset about for my last collection about a
• 1:50:15
  man who goes out with his father who has joined a thumb sucking
• 1:50:20
  society. And they just go to each other's
• 1:50:22
  houses and suck thumbs and I, and it's, and then they go and
• 1:50:29
  they're sharing each other's thumbs and they've got guacamole
• 1:50:31
  dips. And we were on a flight on
• 1:50:34
  holiday to Santorini and she just wouldn't speak to me for
• 1:50:38
  about 6 hours. She just said that was just, I
• 1:50:41
  don't know why you wrote that. It's just disgusting.
• 1:50:43
  Well, it's sort of metaphor for the oddness about finding out
• 1:50:46
  that your, your parents have a life outside the thing you
• 1:50:49
  expect, you know, it's just meant to be quite.
• 1:50:51
  No, it's just disgusting. And that was put in in horror
• 1:50:55
  anthologies. And I don't, nothing bad
• 1:50:58
  happens. And I, it's an odd thing.
• 1:51:00
  I just think it's because it's, it's about living a certain
• 1:51:03
  degree of craziness and people just not, you know, I, I, I was
• 1:51:10
  on the bus yesterday and a man got on next to me and he was
• 1:51:14
  rocking around a lot and I felt quite sorry for him.
• 1:51:17
  And I just thought, if I turn around and he starts eating
• 1:51:20
  something, which is insane, that would really frighten me.
• 1:51:23
  If I, if I his bag and he and he just eats, I don't know, some
• 1:51:30
  washing powder, then that would be so weird.
• 1:51:34
  I would just think, I don't know why that would frighten me.
• 1:51:37
  But the idea of the concept, there's a way in which I could
• 1:51:40
  take that dissonance and turn that into a story.
• 1:51:43
  And that's what I kind of try to do with Doctor Who, my Doctor
• 1:51:47
  Who stories. They, they all quite similar to
• 1:51:50
  each other, but they're all kind of just wanting to be about
• 1:51:55
  saying that the expected thing is safe and the unexpected thing
• 1:52:02
  feels dangerous because you don't know whether it's meant to
• 1:52:05
  be funny or not. And that's.
• 1:52:07
  That is what I love about your work.
• 1:52:09
  Your work makes me interrogate me.
• 1:52:13
  That's right, because I don't know if there's a line between
• 1:52:17
  the comedy and the horror. So the thought.
• 1:52:21
  Of, I don't know, let's just pull something out of chimes.
• 1:52:24
  Missus Badley being stuffed to death with her own plum pudding.
• 1:52:28
  That is simultaneously the grossest thing I can think of
• 1:52:30
  and absolutely hilarious at the same time.
• 1:52:33
  And I often read or listen to your stuff and think to myself,
• 1:52:37
  should I be laughing at that? That's.
• 1:52:39
  Really horrible. I like interrogating myself.
• 1:52:43
  I like being discomforted. There's been chimes that I
• 1:52:46
  again, I was out walking and I thought of it and I wrote it
• 1:52:49
  down and it made me laugh a lot. And it's in the book and it's
• 1:52:52
  near the end. I just wrote it as a bit to
• 1:52:55
  insert and it's Mrs. Batterly. I Yeah.
• 1:53:00
  She offers the doctor some pum pudding from her own mouth
• 1:53:03
  because it's she's already dead and she and she's just stuff of
• 1:53:06
  some pudding. And so she just out of her mouth
• 1:53:10
  and obviously she's just there. And I thought that was really
• 1:53:13
  funny. And then I read it back, you
• 1:53:16
  know, with the sort of editor's hat on, just thought maybe that
• 1:53:19
  would be too much for the BBC. And yet why it's not, you know,
• 1:53:23
  the bit which I was really worried about with chimes was
• 1:53:26
  because Mary never had a death in the audio and I gave her an
• 1:53:31
  exit. You know, we don't actually see
• 1:53:32
  it happen, but we also aware that this will be one of the
• 1:53:35
  because everybody has to die according to, to the to the
• 1:53:39
  stereotypes that they've made themselves.
• 1:53:42
  And I just thought it'd be really, really funny in the bit
• 1:53:46
  in episode 4 where she has to serve tea that she can't see to
• 1:53:53
  pour all the thing properly because she's got knitting
• 1:53:57
  needles stuck in her eyes. And then I wrote it and just
• 1:54:01
  thought, let's make it the forehead because.
• 1:54:04
  And and I got a note back from Steve Cole saying that's the one
• 1:54:07
  thing we might cut. And OK, that's not bad.
• 1:54:11
  And he's still in there, which was, but I don't think we'd have
• 1:54:13
  made it. The the eyes would have been
• 1:54:14
  wrong. And, you know, writing a
• 1:54:16
  sequence where she jams them into her eyes would be awful.
• 1:54:18
  But the fact that just happened to appear there and that's
• 1:54:21
  obviously one of her deaths is that, I mean, is that worse than
• 1:54:24
  being stuffed full of your own pump pudding or run over by your
• 1:54:26
  own car? Probably.
• 1:54:27
  I mean, I'm really just the the running over by the car is
• 1:54:31
  quite, I've made that much nastier in the book than it
• 1:54:34
  suggests. Sitting in the audio.
• 1:54:36
  He's kind of pulverised, isn't he in the book?
• 1:54:38
  The plum pudding is pretty. It's sort of viscerally
• 1:54:40
  horrible, yeah. Yeah, and the reason?
• 1:54:43
  The bum sucking is is. The thing about the the plum
• 1:54:46
  pudding death as well, I I thought what would make it much
• 1:54:49
  nastier is that the doctor has to take a Christmas, a Christmas
• 1:54:55
  crack at which is bubbling to the mouth and then and then pull
• 1:54:59
  it out. Charlie goes, well, I'm not
• 1:55:01
  going to pull that. Yeah.
• 1:55:04
  And I thought that would make it a bit nastier than just Welsh
• 1:55:07
  stuff for the pump and the idea that actually it's sort of so I
• 1:55:12
  thought that was pretty unpleasant.
• 1:55:13
  And again, it just made me laugh because it's not actually a
• 1:55:16
  horror image. It's a strange, gross comedy
• 1:55:19
  image. And it's about seeing whether or
• 1:55:21
  not people find that disgusting or not.
• 1:55:24
  My, my wife would, she's really, she really likes chimes as well.
• 1:55:31
  She, she was the first person ever to read it as a script.
• 1:55:35
  And I was really nervous of it as a script, as you know,
• 1:55:37
  because I read it so fast and I gave it to her to read.
• 1:55:41
  We weren't married then. And so she's my, she was my
• 1:55:45
  girlfriend, but I, you know, but we lived together and I just had
• 1:55:49
  to keep on leaving the room and popped back in to see if she'd
• 1:55:51
  finished it yet. And she was saying, I'm still
• 1:55:52
  reading it and I'd go out again and said at the end of the
• 1:55:55
  script, and I said, what do you think?
• 1:55:57
  I mean, do you think I dare hand it in?
• 1:55:58
  And she said, it's, it's really good.
• 1:56:00
  This is good. And I said, it's there.
• 1:56:02
  And I was so pleased. And then I gave her the, the
• 1:56:05
  novel manuscript the moment I'd finished that and typed it up.
• 1:56:10
  And of course that takes a bit longer.
• 1:56:12
  And I and I went up for very, very long and I came back and
• 1:56:15
  she'd finished it. Bless.
• 1:56:16
  I mean, I thought it would take her a few days.
• 1:56:18
  And she just said, I think that's actually, I think that's
• 1:56:21
  a really good book. And I was so chuffed by that,
• 1:56:25
  you know, because as I say, she doesn't always respond that well
• 1:56:28
  to my she. Wasn't upset by the Turkey.
• 1:56:31
  I think. I think she found the Turkey
• 1:56:32
  funny because it's the. I've not eaten chicken since
• 1:56:36
  you. Know the same world as the thumb
• 1:56:38
  sucking or the there's another of your short stories as with
• 1:56:41
  the boy with the tongue that keeps coming out and licking his
• 1:56:45
  face. Oh.
• 1:56:46
  Yes, that's right. Yeah, Yeah, that's a weird one.
• 1:56:49
  Is that, Is that the one? Is that the story about about
• 1:56:51
  the boy who eats his own head? Yeah.
• 1:56:53
  Because it's a magic trick. Yeah.
• 1:56:56
  So. One pitch you know I'd know it
• 1:56:58
  was one of yours. See.
• 1:56:59
  I think that's quite a funny story.
• 1:57:02
  So that's. So funny, but you but you
• 1:57:03
  describe in in a lot of detail, like it's, it's the imagery is
• 1:57:08
  visceral all the same. Like the part of the part of the
• 1:57:13
  comedy, I think is in the fact that you lean into it.
• 1:57:15
  You're not it's There's nothing funny about saying a boy ate his
• 1:57:18
  own. Head No.
• 1:57:19
  You describe it in in detail with the actual joke of it,
• 1:57:22
  yeah. The joke of it for me was it's
• 1:57:24
  it's this, it's from the point of view of this magician for us
• 1:57:29
  to do a children's party and all the children have a bit of trick
• 1:57:35
  that they that they can just eat their own faces until eventually
• 1:57:40
  they're just these stumps of necks.
• 1:57:42
  And it's about the humiliation of the fact that they're all
• 1:57:44
  better than him. That, that that's the story.
• 1:57:47
  But of course, I remember I was writing that one outside again.
• 1:57:51
  I write, I read that one in Saint James's Park and to
• 1:57:54
  describe I had to keep on going. I'm trying to and people just
• 1:57:58
  kept staring at me. I was on a bench and I was
• 1:58:00
  trying to eat my own face that would and I was you put your
• 1:58:06
  teeth now and you put it in. What is that man doing?
• 1:58:12
  Because, because, because my problem is as a writer, but I've
• 1:58:15
  used it, I think to my advantage.
• 1:58:16
  I, I have a Fantasia, which is not, which sounds like a
• 1:58:21
  disease, but it's, it's, it's nothing.
• 1:58:23
  It just means that I have no, I have no visual memory.
• 1:58:28
  When I close my eyes, all I see is darkness.
• 1:58:30
  I have nothing in my mind's eye at all.
• 1:58:32
  And when I, I'm not with people, I don't remember what they look
• 1:58:36
  like until I see them again. I just don't.
• 1:58:38
  One of the reasons why when I'm writing prose, I only describe
• 1:58:43
  what I think is interesting. I never bother describing
• 1:58:46
  curtains because I don't see them.
• 1:58:48
  I don't find it interesting. I'll just say, and then they
• 1:58:50
  enter the room and what's in the room that I care about, well,
• 1:58:52
  there might be a chair. I'll have them sit on the chair.
• 1:58:54
  So the chair is that. And it means I don't worry about
• 1:58:57
  what characters look like terribly much either, which, you
• 1:59:00
  know, because I find it boring, because I can't.
• 1:59:02
  If I read a novel and I see lots of description, I just think I
• 1:59:06
  can't see it. It's kind of annoying me now and
• 1:59:09
  it's a problem I have with audio drama, you know, because I I
• 1:59:12
  listen to it a big finish, but I don't always understand them
• 1:59:15
  because I genuinely with things like space battles, it's just
• 1:59:19
  noise to me. I, I can't picture anything I
• 1:59:21
  want die. So I write them in a way that I
• 1:59:26
  think plays to my strength, which is that I, I can just have
• 1:59:31
  people have conversations in small rooms because I can do
• 1:59:35
  that because I know what that looks like to me.
• 1:59:36
  I can say, well, I'm not challenging myself.
• 1:59:39
  I can't. So if I choose a visual image, I
• 1:59:43
  do a lot of them because it's fun.
• 1:59:45
  I make it really extreme. I say, well, let's have some,
• 1:59:47
  let's have a room full of children to eat their own faces,
• 1:59:50
  or let's have a Turkey running around the house up up the
• 1:59:55
  walls. And I can sort of, I can say,
• 1:59:57
  well, I can conjure that up. I just can't.
• 2:00:00
  You know, drown it in too much extraneous detail.
• 2:00:03
  Which is. What your some of your stories
• 2:00:04
  are very visual. Yeah, I I want a choice.
• 2:00:10
  I. Make.
• 2:00:11
  I've ever read is the story you wrote about Laurel and Hardy and
• 2:00:17
  in it Oliver Hardy has just disappeared from from their
• 2:00:21
  films. Yeah, that's the right way
• 2:00:22
  around. And, and, and I think so and,
• 2:00:25
  and, and you're just, it's, and again, you're finding an image
• 2:00:31
  that is inherently comic because Stan Laurel is an image we all
• 2:00:35
  associate with comedy and is a funny character.
• 2:00:38
  And you, you portrayed that very compellingly, kind of why he's
• 2:00:43
  funny, but bereft of his partner.
• 2:00:45
  Suddenly everything that he does has become immensely sad because
• 2:00:48
  he's doing it by himself. Yeah, it's almost like he's a
• 2:00:52
  strange mad person being bullied by nobody and weeping.
• 2:00:58
  And I mean, yeah, yes, that's right.
• 2:01:01
  It's I think I rather like that story too.
• 2:01:03
  But for me, they always, I don't remember them very well.
• 2:01:06
  Which? Is but it's that's a visual.
• 2:01:07
  I mean, for me, the the yeah, you know, I, I remember reading
• 2:01:10
  it. But the thing that I remember is
• 2:01:12
  you painted these pictures of Stan Laurel pushing a piano up
• 2:01:17
  that accepts by himself. I yes, I mean, I mean, I can do
• 2:01:22
  it because that's, it's sort of what's required in the course.
• 2:01:26
  You know, my background in writing theatre, I have to be in
• 2:01:29
  some ways drawing pictures on stage.
• 2:01:32
  My difficulty. And it can be difficult, you
• 2:01:35
  know, when you get editorial notes back.
• 2:01:39
  And I'm not saying this happened.
• 2:01:41
  I'm just giving as a, as a made-up example.
• 2:01:43
  But you know, if I got a note back from Steve, which I don't
• 2:01:45
  think he did actually saying, could you spend a couple of
• 2:01:48
  paragraphs describing what Charlie is wearing?
• 2:01:52
  And I'd say, I don't know, does it matter?
• 2:01:55
  And he'd say, well, that's what we would normally do.
• 2:01:58
  I'm, I'm making up an entire position.
• 2:02:00
  That didn't happen. I mean, there is something like
• 2:02:01
  that occasionally. I think I got some bits in
• 2:02:03
  Jubilee. There was a bit where with the
• 2:02:08
  yeah, when we were doing the, the, the illustrated versions
• 2:02:11
  for the big finished editions. And he came to me and said, we
• 2:02:15
  want to do a sequence where the doctor's with Rochester, with
• 2:02:18
  Nigel and you, we worked out that you never actually once
• 2:02:21
  described what Nigel looks like. And I said that looks a bit like
• 2:02:24
  Martin. Yeah, he said he and.
• 2:02:28
  Oddly enough, he does in the picture as well.
• 2:02:30
  Yeah, yeah, I said, well, just do that, he said.
• 2:02:32
  But maybe it's a narrative. You could.
• 2:02:36
  And I could only describe him and I I did go back and find a
• 2:02:39
  way of describing them both, but.
• 2:02:41
  I could only do have a DVD offender to Varos.
• 2:02:44
  Yeah, I'll just say he looks like the governor of Varos, but
• 2:02:46
  no. Or he looks like a massive
• 2:02:49
  monotre with all of his no which was taken off.
• 2:02:54
  But I could only actually write that bit emotionally, so I could
• 2:02:57
  do that. I mean, I could suddenly
• 2:02:59
  describe what Miriam looked like from his point of view and how
• 2:03:03
  he was kind of appalled by her, but I could.
• 2:03:06
  But I found I'm really bad at just straight description stuff.
• 2:03:11
  I just find it's. Just like the blusher and stuff,
• 2:03:13
  wasn't it? That's all I can remember for
• 2:03:14
  Miriam. It's, it's, you know, just how
• 2:03:16
  ridiculous her cheeks looked and she smothered herself in make.
• 2:03:19
  And with Evelyn, I I there's one bit where, you know, I go, this
• 2:03:24
  can't be Evelyn. She's old and fat and she goes,
• 2:03:27
  the doctor goes, no, she's not old and fat.
• 2:03:28
  And she goes, yeah, I'm old and fat.
• 2:03:30
  That's fine. Like I think that's all we get.
• 2:03:32
  But you know, that's enough. Yeah, well, I, I, yeah.
• 2:03:35
  And also I, I didn't want to insult, you know, Maggie,
• 2:03:40
  because there's also something about doing Doctor Who is that,
• 2:03:43
  you know? Yeah.
• 2:03:45
  And there was an editorial comment not from Steve.
• 2:03:51
  Someone was saying, you know, could you not describe Colin's
• 2:03:53
  doctor as being this? And I said no, I'm not going to
• 2:03:57
  insult Colin. And I said, you know, and I'm I,
• 2:04:01
  I am myself A, a larger to wear man.
• 2:04:06
  I, I don't mind describing people as being fat as something
• 2:04:11
  which doesn't feel like it's shameful thing, but it's
• 2:04:14
  actually more like a comical description.
• 2:04:16
  I do that or actually a form of self loathing usually.
• 2:04:20
  But the idea just coldly on the page saying I'm now going to
• 2:04:23
  describe what Doctor Who looks like kind of bores me because
• 2:04:27
  I'm not very good at it. But again, I, I, I think when I
• 2:04:30
  worked out that it's finding out what your limits as a writer are
• 2:04:34
  and what doesn't interest you, and then making that the
• 2:04:36
  strength of it, in a way it's turning those weaknesses as
• 2:04:39
  advantages. I wonder, though, Robert, that's
• 2:04:42
  why it's so potent like that. That is genuinely James and I
• 2:04:46
  have been sort of bat and message back and forth and just
• 2:04:48
  saying like, you know, it is economic prose in that it's not
• 2:04:52
  ridiculously Florida and overly discreet, but man, you get to
• 2:04:57
  the knob of the meat of the scene every time, just with so
• 2:05:01
  few words. I think it's quite real, it's
• 2:05:05
  moving, what Son said. Particularly actually the
• 2:05:07
  relationships between the Doctor and his companion in both in
• 2:05:10
  both the books, a lot is just said through a, you know, a very
• 2:05:15
  simple sentence describing a look or, you know,
• 2:05:20
  understanding. Most of my writing technique,
• 2:05:22
  and has been since I began doing prose, is that you do a first
• 2:05:26
  draft and then you go back and I just cut out all the all the
• 2:05:31
  interesting words because I just don't believe in them.
• 2:05:35
  And I think it's my background as being a drama writer, which
• 2:05:39
  is that I never believe in characters being especially
• 2:05:42
  forward in in descriptions. I don't believe, you know, it's
• 2:05:46
  not that I don't think you should use adverbs and
• 2:05:48
  adjectives because you should. And I do a lot actually for
• 2:05:50
  mostly for sort of comic effect. But I have a horror of anything
• 2:05:54
  which when I put it on the page, sounds a little bit like it's
• 2:05:58
  I'd always, I always find myself wanting to use a simpler word
• 2:06:02
  than a longer word now, because it I don't want to be seeming to
• 2:06:06
  be showing off. Yeah, I have to, you know, I, I
• 2:06:09
  try. And it's the opposite to the Pip
• 2:06:11
  and Jane approach, really, which is not to insult Pip and Jane,
• 2:06:16
  not that they'll know, but I, I, I find that things feel more
• 2:06:21
  emotionally direct. If you're not noticing the, the
• 2:06:31
  cleverness of the word, I'd, I'd rather have a clever metaphor or
• 2:06:37
  a clever allusion to something, you know, but I don't want
• 2:06:42
  anyone to be thinking, Oh, I really love the way that he used
• 2:06:44
  that. It's about finding the right
• 2:06:46
  word. And for me, the right word is
• 2:06:48
  really simple because that's just my form of writing.
• 2:06:53
  It's not to say other things are wrong.
• 2:06:55
  It's just it's, you know, the imposter syndrome in me is
• 2:06:57
  always wanting to avoid the accusation that I think I'm I'm
• 2:07:02
  better than I am by by using more complex, thicker
• 2:07:09
  description. The the the your background as a
• 2:07:14
  a playwright naturally kind of transitioned into short stories.
• 2:07:19
  Is that a kind of a a natural home for?
• 2:07:21
  I think so. Yeah, I mean, again, I, I tend
• 2:07:25
  not to write much dialogue in, in my, which is why doing Doctor
• 2:07:29
  Who books are quite weird because, you know, you are
• 2:07:32
  taking effectively, you know, nothing but dialogue and making
• 2:07:36
  it into a book. And, and, and, and my resistance
• 2:07:38
  to that is that I keep on wanting to just chop it all out
• 2:07:42
  or down or something. So, you know, I end up.
• 2:07:45
  But yeah, I, I, I, I, I try and make them very conversational.
• 2:07:48
  I always like to imagine that the short stories I write are
• 2:07:51
  things that I could, I could perform.
• 2:07:55
  And I often do perform them. I, I go around and do bits and
• 2:07:59
  it's quite fun and I, I like you, you know, I, I, I want to
• 2:08:05
  feel that the, the, that the narrator, that the narrative
• 2:08:08
  voices is its own character, which means you can get away
• 2:08:10
  with a lot of repetition and a lot of sort of chattiness.
• 2:08:14
  A lot of, you know, interesting commas which go nowhere.
• 2:08:19
  I mean, that's it's. It's a fairly deliberate style,
• 2:08:24
  which can be a bit annoying I suspect.
• 2:08:26
  Oh, I mean, I think you've written short stories that could
• 2:08:29
  be performed as monologues. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:08:33
  I mean, that's kind of what I do.
• 2:08:34
  I mean, it makes me feel more relaxed that again, it's like an
• 2:08:38
  anti pretentious thing. I don't want to be accused ever
• 2:08:42
  of writing something which makes me feel like that feels like
• 2:08:45
  beautiful prose, even though I really do care about my prose.
• 2:08:50
  I mean, it's it's an old thing. I mean, I, you know, for all
• 2:08:54
  that I've seen at times down on my stuff, I, I, I, I take my
• 2:09:00
  writing really seriously. But I'm also aware that, you
• 2:09:05
  know, again, it's playing to 1's own strengths.
• 2:09:07
  And I just, you know, try and make it so it feels like these
• 2:09:14
  things are spilling out of somebody writing spontaneously,
• 2:09:20
  even though it is actually quite crafted.
• 2:09:22
  I want it to feel that it isn't. I want it just to feel like this
• 2:09:25
  is so that when characters speak and do something, it feels like
• 2:09:29
  this is happening in the moment as opposed to this is something
• 2:09:32
  which a writer has engineered, if that makes any sense.
• 2:09:37
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:09:38
  I sort of feel uncomfortable discussing it because I'm, I'm
• 2:09:41
  aware as I do it. It sounds really potential.
• 2:09:44
  And I think, I think that that's, I think one of the
• 2:09:51
  things that I would say about your writing is that it is very
• 2:09:53
  readable and it does, it does flow and, and I, and I think
• 2:09:57
  it's probably worth appreciating that that takes effort rather
• 2:10:01
  than. Yeah, I mean, yes, thank you.
• 2:10:04
  I I, I mean, I now feel really proud of my prose.
• 2:10:07
  I mean having I I remember I've I've heard some Doctor Who short
• 2:10:11
  stories years and years ago for. Where, where, where, where can
• 2:10:14
  we find those? Short trips.
• 2:10:17
  There's some short. Trips and I vote for the Doctor
• 2:10:19
  Who annuals. You know, the first couple were
• 2:10:23
  before I began properly writing prose.
• 2:10:25
  And I think I don't know what I'm doing.
• 2:10:27
  I mean, so much of who I am as a writer now has come in part
• 2:10:32
  through what Doctor Who has helped teach me because I was in
• 2:10:36
  this rut of writing, you know, not bad.
• 2:10:41
  Some of them quirky stage comedies, which are, you know,
• 2:10:46
  some of which still get revived. And that's great.
• 2:10:48
  But I was kind of aware that I could only write them so many
• 2:10:51
  ways. And then Doctor Who kind of
• 2:10:54
  forced me to widen my palette a bit and it made me do other
• 2:11:03
  media. And I didn't necessarily do OS
• 2:11:07
  media first terribly well, but I think I got the audio quite, you
• 2:11:12
  know, but because I already knew that a bit and I was building on
• 2:11:16
  that. But you know, the Holy terror.
• 2:11:17
  I mean, you know, I, I remember making so many mistakes on Holy
• 2:11:21
  terror. I gave it a huge cast because it
• 2:11:24
  didn't really occur to me that that would be annoying and I had
• 2:11:28
  to take a part in it myself. And, and I don't like doubling
• 2:11:32
  up terribly much. I don't, I find that again,
• 2:11:34
  because of my own not wanting things to be too complicated.
• 2:11:38
  I don't like the confusion when I hear, for example, a big
• 2:11:41
  finish with multiple parts being trebled up.
• 2:11:45
  I think I don't know who anyone is now.
• 2:11:47
  I, I, I need to know when I'm listening to, to, to something,
• 2:11:50
  how to tell the speakers apart. So Holy Terror was in some ways
• 2:11:58
  a primer for how to write chimes, which I wrote straight
• 2:12:02
  afterwards. And I thought, oh, OK, well, I
• 2:12:04
  made all those mistakes. I can now do chimes.
• 2:12:06
  And part of the mistake of Holy Terror was so bleak.
• 2:12:10
  And I thought, well, you can do your black comedy, Rob.
• 2:12:12
  But I do think maybe it's more appealing to leave an open door
• 2:12:17
  of hope somewhere in this because actually that's kind of
• 2:12:20
  how I feel about life. I mean, for all that I'm that
• 2:12:23
  I'm, I'm quite grumpy about modern politics and stuff.
• 2:12:26
  I actually, I'm sort of quite amiable really.
• 2:12:30
  And I think that there's a danger of just, it's that trap.
• 2:12:34
  I think also that Doctor Who inevitably falls in when you
• 2:12:38
  start doing it, that you really want to show sophistication by
• 2:12:45
  being as bleak as possible, as if that gives it more depth,
• 2:12:50
  which is why you know, and this is not an attack up on the new
• 2:12:52
  adventures because. How did you know?
• 2:12:55
  There's actually, to be fair, the new adventures don't do it
• 2:12:57
  for very long. I mean.
• 2:12:59
  No, they get that. This is nowhere to go.
• 2:13:02
  The BBC books as well. There's a, you know, there's a
• 2:13:04
  point at which you just say, actually, it doesn't make it
• 2:13:07
  better. And I, I find the same with
• 2:13:10
  some, with some TV episodes, you know, I remember watching Day of
• 2:13:13
  the Doctor and in the cinema and genuinely believing that for a
• 2:13:22
  while that the resolution of the story was going to be an
• 2:13:26
  acceptance that they have to press the button and destroy
• 2:13:30
  everything. And the fact that it only
• 2:13:33
  occurred. And I said, I spoke to Stephen
• 2:13:34
  and he said, well, of course we couldn't do that.
• 2:13:36
  And I said, you're right, you can't.
• 2:13:39
  But I believe that that was the the option and other Doctor Who
• 2:13:44
  stories and certainly extended media.
• 2:13:47
  And certainly if I'd written it as a big Finnish audio, I'd have
• 2:13:50
  had the button press and then just saying there we are.
• 2:13:52
  And Holy Terror ends upon this. And if I have a novelised Holy
• 2:13:55
  Terror, I I would want. To massacre.
• 2:13:59
  Yeah. And, and it's just, it's just
• 2:14:01
  awful. And it ends up I I have a slight
• 2:14:04
  concern with what I think of as the Andrizani effect.
• 2:14:08
  I was 14 when Andrazani went out.
• 2:14:10
  And it seemed to me like the best piece of drama ever
• 2:14:13
  conceived on, on, on TV. And it is really good,
• 2:14:16
  Andrazani. But once you start believing
• 2:14:21
  that a story needs to be as quite as viciously killing every
• 2:14:27
  single character as that, which is what I did with holy terror,
• 2:14:30
  I think you just had people numbed by it.
• 2:14:34
  And yeah, so I mean, I, I, I find that I mean, what I have
• 2:14:39
  about Doctor Who and always have done is it's, it's traditionally
• 2:14:43
  been a place where writers learn how to write.
• 2:14:46
  You know, all of the, the classic series is it's been
• 2:14:49
  written by young writers and young producers and young
• 2:14:53
  directors. And these are people who were
• 2:14:55
  finding out how things work. And that was also the case when
• 2:14:59
  we were all doing Big Finish. I mean, what I loved about my
• 2:15:01
  time on Big Finish was that, you know, we had a bunch of writers
• 2:15:05
  who all became really good friends and we were all egging
• 2:15:08
  each other on. You know, you'd so you, you'd do
• 2:15:10
  an audio and then you'd see what they were doing.
• 2:15:12
  You'd say, oh, I want to do something like that.
• 2:15:13
  And then you'd go and do that. And you, we were influencing
• 2:15:16
  each other And it was, it was so genuinely joyous.
• 2:15:20
  I mean, it really did feel like we were all just pulling each
• 2:15:23
  each other along and we were all proud of each other.
• 2:15:26
  And it was such a, you know, an exciting time where we all, I
• 2:15:30
  mean, when you reached 2003, the year of Jubilee, we're all by
• 2:15:33
  that point in our third audio or whatever.
• 2:15:36
  And we're all trying crazy things out and you've got Jack
• 2:15:40
  doing the pirates, you've got Nick doing Creatures of Beauty,
• 2:15:43
  which is remarkable. I think I heard it again
• 2:15:46
  recently and just loved it. And you know, you've got Davos,
• 2:15:50
  you've got Nov doing Omega, which is bonkers.
• 2:15:53
  And you've got Joe doing the Master, which is one of the best
• 2:15:56
  audios ever. And it's all comes out of the
• 2:15:58
  fact that we're all we're all kind of infusing each other and
• 2:16:02
  saying, have you tried this? We could try doing this.
• 2:16:03
  And then, you know, and it was lovely to feel that, you know,
• 2:16:06
  when I did Hoagie Terror, that was an influence on, you could
• 2:16:08
  see, you could try doing that then.
• 2:16:10
  And I, I really adore that. I, I, I adore the fact that,
• 2:16:15
  that my connection to Doctor Who has always felt like, it's like
• 2:16:19
  it's a constantly moving train Doctor Who and getting back on
• 2:16:23
  to do the novelisations was fun because it felt like I wasn't
• 2:16:26
  joining the train at the same point where I got off
• 2:16:30
  originally. I was now happy to be part of
• 2:16:32
  Doctor Who in 2024-2025, where we've been through so many
• 2:16:37
  different stations by this point that simply doing what I've done
• 2:16:41
  25 years ago would be not only, you know, pointless, but
• 2:16:46
  actually just irrelevant. If you're trying to say, well,
• 2:16:49
  help, what have I learnt from what Russell and Stephen and
• 2:16:53
  Chris have been in charge of the last 20 years?
• 2:16:57
  The answer is maybe not very much massively different, but
• 2:17:02
  it's a, it's a, that's what I love about Doctor Who is that it
• 2:17:04
  feels like this, It's not just a massive sand pit we all play in.
• 2:17:08
  It's also a, a sand pit that we're kind of moving along
• 2:17:13
  together and building and the sand pit keeps, keeps on
• 2:17:15
  changing where, you know, it's like you go, you say, OK, we're
• 2:17:18
  going to go and play in the sand pit again today.
• 2:17:20
  But but they've moved where the sand pit is.
• 2:17:22
  It's now in a different town. You have to go to a different
• 2:17:25
  town to do Doctor Who now. Does that make any sense at all?
• 2:17:28
  I'm just rambling. A great.
• 2:17:30
  Engine of possibility that just doesn't stop well you and you
• 2:17:33
  really just the reason why I go and do so much podcasts about
• 2:17:38
  the wilderness years is a staggering amount of creative
• 2:17:42
  freedom that. Was absolutely at.
• 2:17:43
  The time which you know, I think.
• 2:17:45
  Is is still? Possible now, but there are
• 2:17:48
  limits, I think, to what you can do with books and audios and all
• 2:17:51
  that. Yeah, I think it's strictly.
• 2:17:52
  But I think also one of the great joys about when the show
• 2:17:55
  came back and the wilderness years stopped was in a funny
• 2:17:58
  way, you also suddenly see a wider range of because, you
• 2:18:05
  know, the fact that you open up Doctor Adventures comic, you see
• 2:18:10
  stories being written, you know, expressly for small children.
• 2:18:15
  And we'd never have done that. And the idea that suddenly
• 2:18:18
  you're not. I think the wilderness years are
• 2:18:20
  tremendously creative. It's a real explosion of stuff.
• 2:18:23
  But all being written really, let's face it, mostly for 30
• 2:18:28
  year old men and, and, and specifically men you know.
• 2:18:31
  And now I feel that, yeah, that there are so many limits and,
• 2:18:36
  and you and, and and you couldn't do.
• 2:18:38
  Do you believe the way I wrote it now?
• 2:18:40
  And that's fine because we could do it then.
• 2:18:43
  So it hasn't been taken away, but it also means that it, it,
• 2:18:46
  it kind of begs of you to try a wider approach to things.
• 2:18:50
  So I don't know. I, I, I mean, I find when, when
• 2:18:53
  I, I've been listening to a lot of recent Big Finish and I find
• 2:18:59
  it, I, I, I listen to Alfie Shaw's series for Jacob Dudman
• 2:19:05
  of the 11th Doctor. I think it's amazing.
• 2:19:09
  I think it's easily better than anything I did to a big finish.
• 2:19:13
  I really do. And I had great pleasure in
• 2:19:16
  telling Alfie and you know, of course he totally agreed because
• 2:19:20
  he's an arrogant. Actually, he really isn't.
• 2:19:24
  He's lovely, Alfie, but there's but that's The thing is that I
• 2:19:27
  don't think that that, you know, I think that the the the breadth
• 2:19:31
  of what Doctor Who can do now feels so much more varied than
• 2:19:35
  it that it really could in the wilderness years now, because
• 2:19:38
  the wilderness is there was there were no restrictions, but
• 2:19:41
  also there was no encouragement to to think of it as being
• 2:19:45
  something which could be wider than it was.
• 2:19:47
  I I interviewed Jack Rayner earlier in the week and she was
• 2:19:52
  talking about that sort of first wave of new series adventures
• 2:19:55
  when they came out, the books they did then, which were
• 2:19:57
  obviously geared at slightly young.
• 2:19:59
  And she said the wave of letters that she got from young girls
• 2:20:04
  and just just saying. Wow, I can't believe it.
• 2:20:07
  I'm allowed to be a Doctor Who fan.
• 2:20:08
  And two, there's a woman writing Doctor Who books and, and, and I
• 2:20:13
  can do this, you know, she. Just absolutely.
• 2:20:15
  I'm of male so you're right, it really did.
• 2:20:18
  Like, I mean, I mean, I got back to my own fan childhood and, you
• 2:20:22
  know, the way we would express ourselves creatively when I was,
• 2:20:26
  I mean, I had a fanzine and at my school said to David
• 2:20:30
  Walliams, who was the year below, he had his own fancy.
• 2:20:32
  He was a rival fancy. It wasn't very good mine mine
• 2:20:35
  was genuinely much better, but it's kind.
• 2:20:38
  Of good either, don't worry. No, I mean.
• 2:20:40
  It wasn't, you know, and my friend Irwin, who was the, you
• 2:20:42
  know, a couple of years above me at school, he was the real
• 2:20:44
  editor. And, you know, but what we did,
• 2:20:46
  and this is not, I hope, if I'm listening to this, he knows I'm
• 2:20:49
  not denigrating what we did. But fanzines back then were.
• 2:20:54
  They weren't very creative. I mean, we never did fan fiction
• 2:20:58
  because it wasn't Canon. And that mattered.
• 2:21:01
  We never, you know, if we went to a convention, there was no
• 2:21:03
  cosplay because that was embarrassing and we wanted to
• 2:21:06
  take ourselves seriously. So what we basically did was we
• 2:21:09
  do fan scenes, which we, we, we, we'll just write reviews of the
• 2:21:12
  previous season, usually hypocritically moaning about it.
• 2:21:16
  And that's, that's what fandom was.
• 2:21:18
  And the idea of actually going to a convention and seeing joy
• 2:21:21
  and seeing people say, look at me, look how I'm expressing
• 2:21:25
  myself through this. I think we'd have been appalled.
• 2:21:28
  I think I would have been, I mean, I, I mean, I look back and
• 2:21:30
  I, it's also knowing and I, I remember when I did Holy terror,
• 2:21:35
  I felt very consciously this I'd written a story that my 14 year
• 2:21:39
  old self would have loathed because he was such a prick.
• 2:21:45
  I mean, he was, but he, you know, he, he was, he didn't
• 2:21:48
  like, he didn't want to be challenged particularly by what
• 2:21:51
  doctor could be. He wanted to be the thing that
• 2:21:54
  made him feel that he was clever, but he didn't want to,
• 2:21:58
  you know? That's why Doctor Who fans still
• 2:22:00
  have a problem with with comedy episodes, because comedy feels a
• 2:22:05
  little bit like you're not taking it seriously, which means
• 2:22:09
  that you're not taking them seriously.
• 2:22:12
  Whereas. But that isn't the case.
• 2:22:14
  I mean, everything I've done in Doctor Who is is a comedy,
• 2:22:18
  except maybe Dalek, which was trying to be a comedy.
• 2:22:23
  But they kept taking all my jokes out, which I think is,
• 2:22:27
  looking back, more than fair because they weren't very funny
• 2:22:30
  jokes and it wasn't that sort of story.
• 2:22:32
  But I did try with Dalek to make it funny.
• 2:22:35
  It always kills me now when fans say, you know, when will the
• 2:22:38
  Sontarans be serious again again.
• 2:22:41
  When were they ever serious? This was the time Warrior.
• 2:22:46
  I mean Robert Holmes. I mean, that's what people
• 2:22:47
  forget about Robert Holmes as well, is that before he took
• 2:22:50
  over editing it, he wrote weird comedy episodes.
• 2:22:55
  I mean my favorite, and he went back to that.
• 2:22:58
  So my favorite Holmes scripts are Carnival of Monsters and The
• 2:23:02
  Rebus Operation, both of which are pointedly funny and
• 2:23:07
  brilliantly structured. And not doing Frank, I mean,
• 2:23:13
  Towns is a comedy. I mean, it's a comedy now, which
• 2:23:16
  kind of curdles because of. Two doctors.
• 2:23:18
  That's definitely a comedy. Yeah, I mean, I'm also I'm one
• 2:23:22
  of the two. I mean, I love 2 doctors.
• 2:23:26
  I think it's a difficult script and I think it's but I think it
• 2:23:30
  also hasn't it it's Robert Holmes being totally let off the
• 2:23:34
  rain to do whatever he wants and enjoying that for once in a
• 2:23:38
  really self indulgent way. But I love it because he's the
• 2:23:44
  right surely to write a story which is 1 hour longer than it
• 2:23:48
  should be and just rambles around.
• 2:23:51
  But it's full of it's so written with such a love.
• 2:23:55
  It's, it's written with, with, with love of himself.
• 2:23:59
  And that's kind of rare in Doctor Who.
• 2:24:01
  And so I it's Robert Holmes and I.
• 2:24:02
  Challenging as well though, isn't it?
• 2:24:04
  Just like your work? It's very dark but also very
• 2:24:07
  funny at the same time. I mean.
• 2:24:09
  I think he, I mean, it's a huge influence on me.
• 2:24:12
  The scene where James Saxon as Oscar gets killed as a waiter
• 2:24:17
  and you, you're waiting for the, for the gag to become OK.
• 2:24:22
  And it just doesn't, he dies. And that's, and it that I think
• 2:24:26
  he's brilliantly brutal. And yet, and you, you read fan
• 2:24:30
  commentary still. And I'm, I'm not saying they're
• 2:24:32
  wrong, I'm just saying I don't agree.
• 2:24:34
  And it's everyone's saying, well, that's just very, very
• 2:24:35
  much judged. You know, it's perfectly judged.
• 2:24:37
  It is brilliant. And then you've got an entire
• 2:24:40
  episode basically being built around that sequence where
• 2:24:45
  you've got Patrick Troughton with bushy eyebrows and and in
• 2:24:50
  shock eye, John Stratton going off into Seville just so they
• 2:24:55
  could have a sequence where they kill a comedy character
• 2:24:58
  pointlessly just to. Comedy sequence A comedy scene
• 2:25:01
  set in a basically in a comedy set that goes on and on.
• 2:25:07
  They keep doing the joke. The the scene makes no sense.
• 2:25:11
  On the one hand, there's a bunch of characters with a, a ticking
• 2:25:14
  clock we've got to find these people with because this is
• 2:25:17
  going to happen within minutes. Yeah.
• 2:25:19
  The other thing that they've got, they've got, they've got
• 2:25:21
  just the prop food is lining up on the table like two different
• 2:25:25
  scenes. And, and you're actually right.
• 2:25:27
  It's built around the death of a a a comedy death that then is
• 2:25:32
  not funny. Is the the implication from
• 2:25:34
  people often is that they just get that end of that scene on.
• 2:25:36
  It is all about the idea of misdirecting you, of thinking
• 2:25:42
  that all of this is actually, you know, because because all
• 2:25:46
  comedy is meant to be at the end of.
• 2:25:48
  I mean, it's what Holy Terror does as well.
• 2:25:50
  You. Know well, I was going to say
• 2:25:52
  it's that if you were novelising the two, if you'd written The
• 2:25:56
  Two Doctors and were novelising it 25 years later, might you,
• 2:26:00
  might you not kill Oscar Bocherbee?
• 2:26:03
  Oh, I definitely hear Oscar Bocherbee.
• 2:26:06
  Yeah. But also I I try and heighten
• 2:26:09
  the comedy, you know? I mean, you know, he's, he's a
• 2:26:11
  comic character who collects. Yeah.
• 2:26:13
  Lies and he's Oh yeah, I. His last line is take care of my
• 2:26:20
  beautiful moths. Guys trying to do as you know,
• 2:26:25
  saying, I mean, it's such a funny most, most dissatisfied
• 2:26:29
  customers usually just it's brilliant and it but it's so
• 2:26:36
  deliberate and he does with his eyes open as you say, you know,
• 2:26:38
  it's you. Serve humans here, Yes, I can
• 2:26:42
  say most of our customers are, certainly.
• 2:26:44
  Humans. It's such a great script.
• 2:26:46
  It is, it is. It's really good, and yet it's
• 2:26:48
  also deliberately not an easy script.
• 2:26:50
  And maybe, maybe the direction doesn't acknowledge how funny
• 2:26:55
  the Sontarans are written, because I also think that Holmes
• 2:26:58
  is addressing A dissatisfaction with the way that the Sontarans
• 2:27:02
  have been taken a bit too seriously by other writers.
• 2:27:06
  Yeah, although, yes, I think that's probably right.
• 2:27:09
  I mean, sometimes an experiment doesn't quite get the gag.
• 2:27:15
  Invasion of Time doesn't get the gag, but they're funny anyway
• 2:27:18
  because it's Invasion of Time, but it's but it's not trying to
• 2:27:20
  be funny with the Sontarans. It just is.
• 2:27:23
  And yeah, so 2 doctors, I don't know.
• 2:27:24
  Yeah, it's odd. I mean, Strax seems to me a
• 2:27:27
  natural and Dan Starkey's so good as well, you know, and.
• 2:27:32
  How that swaggering, militaristic figure is
• 2:27:35
  systematically taken apart limb by limb in that third episode
• 2:27:39
  is. Absolutely hilarious.
• 2:27:41
  Right. The fact that there's two of
• 2:27:42
  them that are still going through the motions of this kind
• 2:27:44
  of military relationship. Yeah, no, it's, it's great.
• 2:27:47
  I mean, I mean, and this is what I think Doctor Who eventually
• 2:27:53
  should do is, you know, you, you kind of cut your teeth on it and
• 2:27:58
  then it allows you the chance, hopefully to just say, which is
• 2:28:02
  what I think Russell does. It's what Chris did with flux.
• 2:28:04
  You know, you, I mean, I'm, I'm very fond of a lot, most of flux
• 2:28:10
  because it's because it's the most incredibly ambitious thing
• 2:28:13
  and not all of it works. But that's also the joy of it is
• 2:28:16
  that no one's tried that before and you just think as you're
• 2:28:19
  watching it. I mean, I was assuming when I
• 2:28:22
  went into flux, but it's going to be like the key to time
• 2:28:24
  season. And then we get, OK, it's, it's
• 2:28:27
  a broad, yeah. It's going to be 6 effectively
• 2:28:29
  stand alone stories which pair off into a linked season.
• 2:28:34
  And it's not, it's genuinely the long story.
• 2:28:37
  Whose it, I mean, I don't understand it.
• 2:28:40
  And at times I, I get quite cross at it.
• 2:28:44
  But I also think it's a remarkable demonstration of a
• 2:28:48
  writer under extreme circumstances saying I'm going
• 2:28:54
  to go be as brave and crazy and wayward as I want to be because
• 2:28:58
  otherwise, why am I in charge of this show?
• 2:29:00
  And Doctor Who always, always ought to be?
• 2:29:02
  I think to justify its existence, it needs to be trying
• 2:29:08
  to be as wild as possible, which is why, you know, I really like,
• 2:29:13
  in spite of what click bait articles have recently
• 2:29:17
  suggested, I really like the the second coming of Russell.
• 2:29:21
  I, I've really enjoyed it. I think it's brave and
• 2:29:23
  interesting. I don't think all of it has
• 2:29:25
  worked for me, but I'm glad it's but none of it feels predictable
• 2:29:29
  or staged. All of it feels, Oh, I, I, I can
• 2:29:33
  see why you've come back because you're not going back just to do
• 2:29:36
  something you've done before. Again.
• 2:29:38
  That's what I think Doctor Who needs to be.
• 2:29:40
  Did you have favourites? I mean, I mean, what Doctor Who
• 2:29:42
  should never be is somebody coming back and saying I wrote
• 2:29:44
  these audios 25 years ago because that would be insane.
• 2:29:50
  Don't. Don't ever let that happen.
• 2:29:52
  You have kind of favorite stand out episodes from the from the
• 2:29:55
  last couple. Yeah, 73 yards I think is a
• 2:29:57
  masterpiece. It's so good really, that it it
• 2:30:01
  it kind of is greater than Doctor Who around it.
• 2:30:05
  I just think it's one of those things you just think, I think
• 2:30:08
  that Lux is one of the most remarkable achievements.
• 2:30:13
  You know, Lux justifies everything about the Disney
• 2:30:16
  involvement. If you can just make that to
• 2:30:19
  demonstrate that you can do something as bold and creative
• 2:30:22
  as that, then I mean, I think Lux is.
• 2:30:24
  And it's not just because, as you might think at the
• 2:30:26
  beginning, oh, they can do an animation thing.
• 2:30:28
  It's because they can also just play around with form and with
• 2:30:32
  style and they do it so effortlessly and in a way that
• 2:30:35
  also doesn't feel as it might do that it's deliberately trying to
• 2:30:42
  push away the audience or annoy them.
• 2:30:43
  It, it fit. I mean, I, I just think Lux is
• 2:30:47
  incredible, but I, I, I mean, I really love the Wish world.
• 2:30:52
  Wish World's a sort of one. I would, if I could have written
• 2:30:54
  a story, I'd have written something at Wish World, which
• 2:30:57
  arguably I have he types already because it's that sort of thing
• 2:31:00
  about a sort of a fake world of ritual and rules.
• 2:31:04
  And of course I'm drawn to that. I thought Wish World was great
• 2:31:07
  and the opening fairy tale sequence of just going and you
• 2:31:12
  know, the Ronnie being a witch who can just turn children into
• 2:31:15
  geese. God.
• 2:31:16
  I mean, when have we seen? And I can, and I can hear as I'm
• 2:31:19
  watching it, people. I can hear my, as I say, my 14
• 2:31:23
  year old self getting angry because it seems to be changing
• 2:31:26
  the rules of what Doctor Who is. But I want Doctor Who to be
• 2:31:31
  unrecognisable every few years from what it was before.
• 2:31:34
  And if it leaves me behind for a while, I'm 55, I should be left
• 2:31:38
  behind by it for periods of time.
• 2:31:40
  I mean, that's the whole point of it.
• 2:31:42
  I mean, I, I, I'm, I'm not, you know, I'll be honest, I'm not
• 2:31:46
  always a massive fan of sequences of the new series, but
• 2:31:51
  I'm always glad for every single thing that they exist.
• 2:31:55
  I don't think it ought to always connect with me on an episode by
• 2:31:59
  episode basis. I, I, I'm not trying to be sort
• 2:32:02
  of noble about it. I just feel that Doctor Who
• 2:32:04
  ought to be bigger than my own, my own wants and ego when
• 2:32:08
  there's so much I already like. I could watch them on Blu-ray if
• 2:32:10
  I want. Isn't.
• 2:32:11
  That the point of Doctor Who, right?
• 2:32:13
  It can be anything, and so you're not going to love
• 2:32:16
  everything. No, and, and, and, and also the
• 2:32:18
  thing about Doctor Who, which which I think is most incredible
• 2:32:21
  thing about it is that it so resists in the way that most
• 2:32:25
  shows embrace finding a tone that they can stick to.
• 2:32:28
  That's that's when they know they've got it.
• 2:32:31
  You know, when I was watching The Sopranos and Spawn has
• 2:32:34
  really found its feet mid first season and then it could say,
• 2:32:37
  right, we're doing seven seasons of that six seasons of that, I
• 2:32:41
  think. And it knows what it is.
• 2:32:43
  You know, it's fun, but although it it does do some crazy stuff
• 2:32:46
  later, actually, there's a whole bit where he's in a coma in a
• 2:32:49
  hotel for two episodes, but that's by the by Doctor Who.
• 2:32:51
  As soon as it finds out what it is, it wants to change it.
• 2:32:54
  And that's the thing, which is always funny, is that you know
• 2:32:57
  things are prepared so in advance that if you're watching
• 2:33:00
  an episode and you don't like it, you must be aware that the
• 2:33:03
  people who are already doing the next season have already moved
• 2:33:06
  beyond what what you think you don't like.
• 2:33:08
  And that's always been the case. You're watching season 24 with
• 2:33:12
  Sylvester McCoy saying, I don't like Delta and the Bannerman,
• 2:33:15
  and they're already preparing remembrance of the Daleks.
• 2:33:18
  You don't know what they're doing, but what you do know is
• 2:33:20
  that they never stand still. What I loved about writing Dalek
• 2:33:25
  was I could see what was coming down the road was nothing like
• 2:33:29
  what I was. They'd already moved beyond me
• 2:33:31
  very, very fast. And I was thinking, it's amazing
• 2:33:35
  that the time that you're actually having my episode
• 2:33:37
  broadcast, I know that I'm already a fossil.
• 2:33:40
  Because that's what Doctor Who should be.
• 2:33:42
  Doctor Who should always be something where you feel you
• 2:33:45
  just can't guess the future because it's never going to be
• 2:33:50
  what you have in the present. And as soon as it starts being
• 2:33:53
  the same thing, that's when you've got a problem.
• 2:33:57
  But anyway, that's just me ranting on James.
• 2:34:01
  Did you, by the way, because it's near midnight.
• 2:34:04
  It's nearly midnight, Yes. How do how do we wrap this up?
• 2:34:07
  Because we've gone everywhere. I mean, can I if?
• 2:34:10
  I don't know. I mean, I I can say thank you.
• 2:34:13
  Before you, if I may I say thanks.
• 2:34:14
  Enough about the books. Because I was so nervous of
• 2:34:17
  them. I didn't, I didn't want to get
• 2:34:19
  them wrong. And it's been really lovely that
• 2:34:21
  I could send them as PDFs to you.
• 2:34:24
  And I was so worried because you'd asked if I would do this
• 2:34:27
  and then you'd read the books and say I'm not really sure what
• 2:34:30
  anything to say to her about they.
• 2:34:31
  Kind of knew that wasn't going to happen, but.
• 2:34:35
  I mean, I'm, I'm fond of them. I mean, I really am very, I
• 2:34:38
  mean, I, I do feel quite proud of them, but you don't know how
• 2:34:41
  people are going to react. And, and there's still a part of
• 2:34:46
  you that also feels, I don't know that there isn't people
• 2:34:51
  looking over your shoulder saying, what are you going back
• 2:34:56
  to scripts from 1/4 of a century ago and doing that.
• 2:35:00
  So it was great that you responded.
• 2:35:03
  So, you know, so, so enthusiastically to them.
• 2:35:06
  I I I hope that they feel new and fresh and.
• 2:35:08
  Lovely. It's so lovely to it.
• 2:35:10
  It feels not so much like revisiting them as as seeing
• 2:35:13
  them, you know, experiencing them in a whole different way,
• 2:35:16
  which. Yeah, thank you.
• 2:35:17
  That's what I'm. That's what I'm hoping for.
• 2:35:18
  But I want to next novelise them because I'll do it again.
• 2:35:21
  Yeah. 25 minutes, 10 years. Yeah, I will reinvent them
• 2:35:25
  again, which will be very. Important I do also need to say
• 2:35:29
  thank you for we all hear stories in the dark.
• 2:35:32
  Well, thank you. Which which got me through
• 2:35:34
  lockdown, but not, not just that, I mean, I did, I spent a
• 2:35:39
  lot of lockdown in the bath, actually.
• 2:35:42
  And my partner was constantly having to fetch a different
• 2:35:45
  volume. Because for the for the
• 2:35:47
  uninitiated, yeah, Stories in the dark, it's structured in
• 2:35:50
  such a way that at the end of each short story, you're
• 2:35:54
  directed to to choose another one.
• 2:35:56
  And it's in three volumes. And yeah, people.
• 2:35:59
  Can't read it on. It's not a book to read on on
• 2:36:02
  the train. It's probably unless you've got
• 2:36:04
  a suitcase on you, yes. So they might call Long Summer
• 2:36:07
  the woman's piece. I was kind of yelling from the
• 2:36:09
  bath and I did Volume 3 now. Thank you.
• 2:36:12
  No thanks. Thanks for reading it, you know.
• 2:36:14
  I I mean, I'm not sure if I can be said to never read it because
• 2:36:17
  because I did get thrown out before having read all of.
• 2:36:20
  Is it true that there's one that none of them lead to?
• 2:36:25
  Yeah, I've, I've buried things in the book that there's an
• 2:36:29
  entire section of the book which says if you're reading this,
• 2:36:35
  you're you, you've cheated. And then it gives you 3 stories
• 2:36:39
  of the importance of mazes. And then it, you know, and then
• 2:36:44
  there's another. Yeah, lots of little bits which
• 2:36:46
  just, you know, I think, I think I thought that was fun.
• 2:36:50
  How long? Did you spend actually
• 2:36:52
  structuring? Because it's.
• 2:36:56
  At. 1st at first glance it feels like a a gimmick and A and you
• 2:37:00
  know. Yeah, and and I worry about it,
• 2:37:02
  but. It's not, but it's absolutely
• 2:37:04
  clear very early on that it's not, no.
• 2:37:07
  It's it's a. Beautiful I, you know, must urge
• 2:37:10
  anyone listening if you haven't got we all hear stories in the
• 2:37:13
  dark. You need to get a hold of it
• 2:37:15
  because it's apart from anything else.
• 2:37:17
  It's just so a really wonderfully designed product to
• 2:37:21
  to immerse yourself. In Thank you it, it was based
• 2:37:24
  upon my love of immersive theatre, in part because I love
• 2:37:28
  things like show Punch Drunk where you go in and you explore
• 2:37:33
  and you're always aware wherever you're exploring that you're
• 2:37:35
  missing something else. But that's part of it.
• 2:37:37
  You know, you are guided by yourself and, and you stumble
• 2:37:42
  across things and then, and then you might suddenly say, well,
• 2:37:45
  I'm going to follow this thread by following this action.
• 2:37:48
  I'm going to race after them and see where they go.
• 2:37:49
  And I love that sort of stuff and I wanted to write because
• 2:37:53
  the short story format and short story collections tend to be
• 2:37:57
  quite Faye in as much as I mean that they're often quite
• 2:38:02
  delicately. They're like poetry books
• 2:38:04
  sometimes. And I just thought I want
• 2:38:06
  something which is short story, but it's huge as an illustration
• 2:38:10
  of the idea that that short stories are actually sieve and I
• 2:38:15
  want a book that no one can read the same as anybody else.
• 2:38:20
  So we Simon Garrier got somebody from the infinite monkey cage to
• 2:38:27
  calculate the number of variants of reading the book as you go in
• 2:38:32
  and you're making choices and then you go off in different
• 2:38:34
  directions. And apparently it's more than
• 2:38:36
  there are brains of sand on earth.
• 2:38:37
  So the the odds against you reading the same because of
• 2:38:40
  anybody else. The idea of reading a book where
• 2:38:42
  you are choosing emotionally what the book is.
• 2:38:45
  So some people read it and they think it's really, really funny
• 2:38:47
  and and sweet. Other people follow a darker
• 2:38:51
  path and you're always being warned off the darker path
• 2:38:53
  because if you go down the dark path you get really punished
• 2:38:56
  because some things get really unpleasant.
• 2:38:57
  And the book stories will start saying why are you even reading
• 2:39:00
  this? What is the point of this?
• 2:39:02
  Why you? So I actually want stories I
• 2:39:04
  really actively didn't like but had to make good enough.
• 2:39:08
  And the hard thing was I wrote, you know, it took me about 7
• 2:39:11
  years to write the first draft and then having done it,
• 2:39:14
  realising that maybe 20 of the stories weren't good enough.
• 2:39:18
  So that took another year and a half to write.
• 2:39:20
  Because it's a maze. And they all, there were five
• 2:39:24
  stories leading into every story and five stories leading out of
• 2:39:27
  every story. And they all connect in
• 2:39:28
  different ways, but they all are meant to have different
• 2:39:30
  reactions according to what you've just read before.
• 2:39:35
  If you take a story out, you have to replace it with
• 2:39:36
  something which was very different but also fitted in
• 2:39:39
  with it. It was.
• 2:39:41
  It was fun. That's, I mean, that's amazing
• 2:39:43
  that you went back and rewrote that many stories as well to get
• 2:39:46
  the right. Yeah, I mean, I mean, some of
• 2:39:47
  the stories I took out, I just felt, I think I've done this
• 2:39:49
  elsewhere. It's annoying.
• 2:39:51
  And so I have published some of those stories and other
• 2:39:54
  connections and how you keep. Track of I mean, to keep track
• 2:39:59
  of 15 stories in a short story collection is is is hard enough,
• 2:40:04
  but yeah, you've got 100 of. I I had to get very intimately
• 2:40:08
  acquainted with them all and, and I had to, I had to like them
• 2:40:11
  all. And the thing about which I, I
• 2:40:14
  will admit guilty. And I've written a few short
• 2:40:16
  story collections where by the time the book comes out, you
• 2:40:19
  think, yeah, I don't think that one's as good, but it's too
• 2:40:22
  late. And I couldn't let this go out
• 2:40:25
  while thinking that any of the story wasn't justified because
• 2:40:28
  the worst thing I was expecting were reviews of somebody saying,
• 2:40:32
  OK, well Rob has written this 650,000 word thing where, you
• 2:40:39
  know, any short story could be the next one you read pretty
• 2:40:41
  much, you know, and it's 101 short stories, although actually
• 2:40:45
  it's a lot more. I mean, there's one story which
• 2:40:47
  is made-up of 101 other stories. So which is quite big, which is
• 2:40:52
  odd. But so they start multiplying in
• 2:40:55
  different ways. And I didn't want someone to
• 2:40:58
  read the book and say we've written 101 short stories and
• 2:41:01
  60. Alright.
• 2:41:03
  So I wanted it to be that I could justify everything.
• 2:41:08
  But it's, I remember when it was the pandemic, you know, and, and
• 2:41:12
  we got hold of the copies and we opened up the box and we brought
• 2:41:15
  up this book and Jenny said, Oh my God, she said, no one's going
• 2:41:20
  to read. It's just so intimidating.
• 2:41:23
  And I thought, oh. No, the opposite.
• 2:41:25
  Oh yeah, I I do think I'm always very grateful when someone
• 2:41:29
  actually tries it because. I think no, no, no, no.
• 2:41:31
  I think maybe you have to be wired in a certain way, but I
• 2:41:34
  think that the the fact that it's in three volumes and the
• 2:41:38
  fact that they're so I mean they are, they are beautifully.
• 2:41:40
  They're nicely illustrated. I mean, you bet the Oliver has
• 2:41:43
  one day. Yeah, and it's nicely produced,
• 2:41:46
  but the I mean, the having said that, I, I'm mostly exuding
• 2:41:54
  gratitude here and genuinely, no thank you.
• 2:41:56
  There was, I think, a day when I I was basically quoting deadline
• 2:42:01
  and I was shouting from the bath.
• 2:42:03
  A bastard Robert, That's not a non common thing.
• 2:42:08
  And and it's because you you kind of clues throughout the
• 2:42:11
  books and there's a page that says there's a map to this maze
• 2:42:13
  hidden somewhere in the book. It's like what?
• 2:42:16
  I know there fucking is but but you don't tell me that's not.
• 2:42:22
  It. That's part of the fun of it.
• 2:42:24
  No, of course no. It was part of the fun of it.
• 2:42:27
  But there's. A greater meaning if you follow
• 2:42:29
  the map. I mean, that's what I find funny
• 2:42:30
  about it is that the meaning is only the meaning of the way you
• 2:42:34
  personally respond to the stories.
• 2:42:36
  But the point of the book for me, in part because some people
• 2:42:40
  often say, oh, I've never finished it.
• 2:42:42
  And I say you're not meant to it.
• 2:42:43
  The whole point of the book is about the stories you discard.
• 2:42:46
  You say, OK, I've reached story 14 and I can now read from here.
• 2:42:50
  You get different reasons to go to five different stories.
• 2:42:53
  And it could be, do you want to, do you want to try something
• 2:42:55
  else about talking pigs? Go to there if you want it.
• 2:42:59
  Which is actually more, you know, so the, the questions it
• 2:43:01
  asks you, which are sort of emotional.
• 2:43:03
  And there's some which are philosophical and some which are
• 2:43:05
  just sort of anecdotal. And if you follow them, you're
• 2:43:09
  rejecting four other stories. And you may come back to them,
• 2:43:13
  but you might not. And that's part of the point.
• 2:43:15
  And you know, I, I had friends who were reading in the in thing
• 2:43:20
  getting really upset because they were saying, but I, I don't
• 2:43:23
  know what I've, and I said, no, you're not meant to.
• 2:43:25
  You know, it's good that you haven't met them.
• 2:43:27
  I said, but I might want to, I said, well, tough.
• 2:43:29
  I mean, I, I was saying to people on Twitter when it came
• 2:43:33
  out, I said, no, no, the whole point of the book is that once
• 2:43:35
  you've finished it, you burn it if you want to do a second.
• 2:43:42
  And that's how I, I, I want to do an ebook version of it.
• 2:43:46
  And I really considered this for a while.
• 2:43:48
  I thought I'd give it a few years and then I would do a book
• 2:43:51
  where if you read a story the second time, it's changed.
• 2:43:58
  Amazing. But, but you wouldn't know how
• 2:44:01
  much it's changed into it. So of the 101 stories, they'd
• 2:44:04
  all be variants, but 75 of them it'd be really, really minor,
• 2:44:08
  and you'd get a few changes of description somewhere, and
• 2:44:12
  another ten of them would have the first paragraph.
• 2:44:15
  But then it'd be completely different stories, but more
• 2:44:18
  subtly. All the other ones would lead
• 2:44:21
  you in a path of thinking, I've read this before.
• 2:44:22
  And then they would just very different directions somewhere
• 2:44:26
  through you'd only find out if you stuck with it.
• 2:44:28
  So you'd be always asking yourself when you double back on
• 2:44:31
  yourself, is it worth reading it again or not?
• 2:44:34
  And then you have to make a decision about that.
• 2:44:35
  But they'd all be subtly different or crazily different.
• 2:44:38
  But that would mean. But Jamie pointed out to me that
• 2:44:41
  would take another few years. And she said just get over your
• 2:44:44
  bloody book like something else. Next time, next time we have a
• 2:44:48
  pandemic, though, yeah, which? I'm sure.
• 2:44:53
  I'm pretty sure that we do another one now, aren't we?
• 2:44:55
  I. Mean I think the highest I mean.
• 2:44:58
  I'm I'm kind of hopeful because, because I love the last one.
• 2:45:04
  Genuinely great time, the highest compliment.
• 2:45:06
  I mean, I, I enjoyed reading it immensely, but but the other
• 2:45:11
  thing is that it, it inspired me to write myself and oh,
• 2:45:14
  terrific. Well, I had written short
• 2:45:16
  stories before, but no but. Well, please show me, I'd love
• 2:45:20
  to. Always out there as a podcast.
• 2:45:22
  Rob Neurotic. Literature, but I.
• 2:45:24
  Wouldn't have AI wouldn't have a podcast if if that if I hadn't
• 2:45:27
  been reading those stories and it it wasn't that I was getting
• 2:45:30
  out of the bathroom and imitating your writing at all.
• 2:45:34
  No, of course it was just something about it.
• 2:45:38
  It's about the process of storytelling.
• 2:45:40
  It's about the whole thing is about telling stories and and it
• 2:45:43
  just my response was Oh well, so it.
• 2:45:48
  Became difficult because of it. It took about 9 years to do.
• 2:45:51
  Yeah, of course. Well, I mean, it's a lot of.
• 2:45:53
  Stuff I was doing other stuff I was, I was, you know, I was
• 2:45:56
  writing a few other things and I spent some years working with
• 2:46:00
  Peter Harness on show for Apple while I was doing all this as
• 2:46:03
  well. But but generally I was just
• 2:46:05
  trying to. Constellation.
• 2:46:06
  Yeah, yeah. We didn't make second series,
• 2:46:10
  which was a shame because we spent about a year trying to
• 2:46:12
  work on series. Good series.
• 2:46:13
  If you haven't watched Constellation I, I, it is fun,
• 2:46:18
  but I've never. I don't think.
• 2:46:20
  I've ever seen space as scary as it is.
• 2:46:23
  No, and I mean, and I will stress because it's it's the
• 2:46:26
  truth. I mean, it is Peter.
• 2:46:27
  I mean, Peter wrote it. I mean, I was just helping
• 2:46:31
  because we're mates and I wasn't writing it ever, but it was a
• 2:46:35
  fun thing to be involved with for a long time.
• 2:46:38
  And but yeah, so I but, but, but generally my life was doing that
• 2:46:43
  book. And you'd be asked by other
• 2:46:47
  people, publishers, you know, that say, oh, would you write,
• 2:46:49
  you know, would you think about doing something?
• 2:46:52
  And I'd say, oh, I will do, but I've got to spend the next few
• 2:46:55
  years finishing this collection. And you, let's go.
• 2:46:58
  Why? Why?
• 2:46:58
  And you'd say, well, because. And then I remember being taken
• 2:47:02
  out. It was a very nice lunch by one
• 2:47:04
  publisher. And I told her about this book
• 2:47:08
  that I was that was preventing me from accepting a contract to
• 2:47:12
  write something that would be a lot more commercial.
• 2:47:14
  And she just said, why are you doing that?
• 2:47:19
  And I said, well, it's never been done before.
• 2:47:22
  She said, well, maybe there's a good reason for that.
• 2:47:26
  And I said, well, Even so I said about another 3 or 4 years it,
• 2:47:29
  you know, So I said, so I'm nearly at the end because it was
• 2:47:34
  a it was an odd thing. I'm really proud of it.
• 2:47:39
  And at the same time, I do conventions and things.
• 2:47:42
  Again, this is in no way a dig a dog 2 fans, because I am one and
• 2:47:45
  people will come up and they'll say things like, you know, why
• 2:47:50
  did you give up writing? And I say I haven't.
• 2:47:52
  I'm still I'm doing this and I say, OK about that.
• 2:47:55
  It's not Doctor Who is it? And I say, oh, no, it isn't.
• 2:47:58
  But it's you know, I do make a reference to Doctor Who in one
• 2:48:01
  of the stories where I go to a convention and have sex with the
• 2:48:05
  the the the the with the Wrangler of the monkey on
• 2:48:08
  friends, which is in there. I don't know if you read that
• 2:48:12
  one. It's very I.
• 2:48:13
  Will tear through every story. It's.
• 2:48:16
  Not actually true. It didn't actually happen.
• 2:48:18
  It was based upon my doing Toronto trek with George Takei.
• 2:48:25
  That was fun. I was the only Doctor Who person
• 2:48:27
  there and it was very obvious that I was there because I'm
• 2:48:31
  very minor. But yeah, it's but, but people
• 2:48:35
  will always sort of ask. You know that there is an
• 2:48:39
  assumption when you you know that people assume you don't
• 2:48:42
  like Doctor Who anymore because you're doing something else.
• 2:48:46
  And I've never stopped loving Doctor Who, but I just had to
• 2:48:49
  get this book done, no? I I have.
• 2:48:52
  Doctor Who again, actually, it's, it's, it's been really, it
• 2:48:56
  feels like a sort of homecoming. And yeah, I I sort of feel
• 2:49:01
  reluctant to to give it up. But dare I say it you you
• 2:49:04
  wouldn't have been able to write those two novelisations in the
• 2:49:07
  way that you have without having taken the.
• 2:49:10
  No, I I think so. I mean, because I'd never done a
• 2:49:13
  novel. I mean, I wrote Dalek, I think
• 2:49:17
  months after finishing. We all hear stories.
• 2:49:20
  So it was really interesting to go straight from that into,
• 2:49:22
  which is why it's a bit short story heavy.
• 2:49:25
  And I think he's, you know, I'm proud of Dalek.
• 2:49:27
  I don't know how else I could have done it really, but I
• 2:49:30
  prefer Chimes and Jubilee. I think it's books because they
• 2:49:33
  feel like books and they feel like novels.
• 2:49:36
  But yeah, I'd never been able to sustain those unless I'd
• 2:49:40
  written. I mean, whenever I got nervous
• 2:49:42
  writing chimes or Jubilee, I'd look at the shelves and just
• 2:49:45
  say, well, you did that. I said stop being scared of your
• 2:49:50
  silly story with a haunted house and plum pudding.
• 2:49:53
  Just write it. It can't.
• 2:49:55
  It can't be as hard as that, can it?
• 2:49:56
  And I go, yeah, that's fair, because it does.
• 2:49:59
  It was quite hard. I wouldn't do it now.
• 2:50:04
  I don't quite know that times. I don't know how I quite
• 2:50:07
  sustained it because it was a number of years.
• 2:50:10
  And after a while, you do start thinking, is this sensible that
• 2:50:14
  I've given up my entire career for a book that quite probably
• 2:50:20
  no one is going to publish, but I'm going to be proud of I'm.
• 2:50:24
  Glad you never came to the answer no there to that
• 2:50:27
  question. No, I got things I got too
• 2:50:30
  frightened to stop because I'd spent too long on it and I just
• 2:50:35
  thought, well, what have I got to show if I don't finish it?
• 2:50:38
  And I always thought it'd be quicker than it was.
• 2:50:40
  I mean, because I didn't, I wasn't very good at the maths.
• 2:50:43
  Again, it's that polymath thing. I, I worked out I could write
• 2:50:47
  maybe about two short stories a month, 3 and a push, but they
• 2:50:54
  take me usually a couple of weeks at least.
• 2:50:56
  And that I usually want a bit of a gap so I can get away with
• 2:50:59
  maybe writing about a dozen short stories a year if I'm
• 2:51:03
  taking gaps. And I didn't work out how many
• 2:51:06
  twelves go into 101. I just thought, oh, I'll
• 2:51:10
  probably do all that in a couple of years.
• 2:51:12
  And you think, well, you can't because you can't write that
• 2:51:15
  fast. I can't think, oh, I'll just
• 2:51:18
  step it up. I'll just write 1A day.
• 2:51:19
  You can't. There are about 7000 words.
• 2:51:22
  And actually they're quite complicated stories.
• 2:51:25
  Some of them, when they aren't just, I think it was when I had
• 2:51:28
  the idea and I assumed they'd all be flash fiction.
• 2:51:31
  I don't really know how to write flash fiction.
• 2:51:34
  No, but even the short but even. 500 words.
• 2:51:37
  So I'd end up writing, it was about 7000.
• 2:51:39
  I thought, well, I can't, I can't now write 500 words all
• 2:51:42
  around it. It has to be the same sort of
• 2:51:43
  length. So it just became this bigger,
• 2:51:46
  bigger project. I'm, I'm genuinely very proud of
• 2:51:49
  it. And I do feel that it's one of
• 2:51:52
  those things that people either get or they don't.
• 2:51:55
  But thank you so much for reading it.
• 2:51:58
  James No. I, I love it and, and I love, I
• 2:52:02
  love your commitment to the, to the form of the short story.
• 2:52:05
  I was going to say it's not flash fiction because they're
• 2:52:06
  because they're so well crafted and, and, and each one of them
• 2:52:10
  is a little jewel that's really. Thank you.
• 2:52:13
  The fact that you confounded not only yourself, people that were
• 2:52:18
  offering you contracts, people that were wondering why you
• 2:52:21
  weren't writing Doctor Who books anymore, and you still
• 2:52:23
  personally wrote this. Thing it's wonderful.
• 2:52:28
  Not a while. I mean, I, I, I did think this
• 2:52:33
  sounds like a weird thing to say and, and, and it'll be a kind of
• 2:52:36
  wrap up thing because I just sort of almost aware that it, it
• 2:52:39
  just sounds so miserable. But when you do Doctor Who and
• 2:52:44
  you know, and it was saying that Mark Gatiss said to me a few
• 2:52:50
  years ago, he was, he'd done Game of Thrones and in a
• 2:52:58
  relatively small part, but you appear in a few episodes and
• 2:53:02
  Jack Mark just doesn't, it's not his thing, Game of Thrones.
• 2:53:06
  And he would get approached at stage door.
• 2:53:08
  He was at the National by Game of Thrones fans.
• 2:53:12
  And he said, I suddenly see what it was like for all the people
• 2:53:15
  I've been approaching about Doctor Who all these years, how
• 2:53:18
  it feels when you're suddenly kind of defined by something
• 2:53:22
  that you personally don't necessarily care that much
• 2:53:26
  about. And I love Doctor Who, but
• 2:53:30
  there's a part of me, you know, that that that youthful party
• 2:53:33
  wanted to be frankly, Tom Stoppard or Alan 8 ball or, you
• 2:53:38
  know, you think 01 thing that I'm going to if I die and I'm
• 2:53:46
  going to at some point. But the one thing I might be
• 2:53:49
  remembered for, I'm almost certain you will be, because
• 2:53:52
  there's a such an immortality to it now.
• 2:53:55
  You know, John Flanagan will be remembered for Medgloss whether
• 2:53:58
  he likes it or not. And I'm going to be remembered
• 2:54:00
  for for Dalek whether I like it or not.
• 2:54:02
  And it's not necessarily the thing I'm proudest of in my
• 2:54:05
  life. I love it and I'm proud of it.
• 2:54:07
  But it's also not the most personal thing I've ever written
• 2:54:10
  either, because it's so collaborative.
• 2:54:12
  And you and I just, I wanted to we all his stories in the dark,
• 2:54:15
  saying it won't change the narrative of that and it's fine.
• 2:54:21
  But I can make more peace with the fact that that is going to
• 2:54:25
  be the one thing on my tombstone.
• 2:54:27
  It's a little Dalek if I've written something, which I feel
• 2:54:32
  kind of sums me up and what I want to be as a writer, even if
• 2:54:37
  I never anything as crazy as that again, even though it takes
• 2:54:39
  me nearly a decade to write, I kind of feel whenever I feel
• 2:54:44
  down and my hypothesis syndrome gets too much, I can say I am
• 2:54:49
  proud I wrote that book. And I feel that that's it's a
• 2:54:55
  sort of legacy, even though it will probably be out of print
• 2:54:58
  quite soon, because most things are and it won't be what I'm
• 2:55:01
  remembered for, but I can when I'm when I'm on my deathbed, I
• 2:55:06
  can still say I'm glad I did that.
• 2:55:09
  And that's, that's, that's an important thing.
• 2:55:12
  And I think so many when my dad died, like so many people, you
• 2:55:20
  know, he, he, he, he wants to be a writer.
• 2:55:24
  Your life ends up being, no matter what your dreams are,
• 2:55:28
  full of things that you wish you'd done and didn't get round
• 2:55:32
  to or didn't have the courage to do.
• 2:55:33
  And especially when it's your job to be a writer.
• 2:55:37
  The idea that you, that, you know, I've been a writer full
• 2:55:40
  time since the early 90s and the idea that I would one day just,
• 2:55:46
  you know, disappear off the earth and still hadn't had the
• 2:55:49
  courage to write something that felt really personal when it's
• 2:55:53
  my job to do that. Even it wasn't my dad's job, but
• 2:55:57
  it's mine. And yet I, I just thought, I
• 2:55:59
  have to do it. I have to write something which
• 2:56:01
  is this crazy just so I can say to myself, whatever happens
• 2:56:05
  next. And it's made it help me make
• 2:56:07
  peace with Doctor Who in a way that I didn't know I need to
• 2:56:11
  make peace with. Which is why it's been so much
• 2:56:14
  easier to come back and now do Doctor Who again.
• 2:56:16
  Because I now think I love Doctor Who.
• 2:56:19
  But I also have that on the shelf was I think if I, if I'd
• 2:56:22
  been asked about jubilee or chimes 10 years ago, there'd be
• 2:56:25
  a part of it which just thought, when can I escape these things
• 2:56:28
  from my past? But now it feels like a
• 2:56:31
  celebration. I can try different things with
• 2:56:32
  it and I can have some fun. Well, can I say then, just to
• 2:56:37
  finish off that you confounded both of us by coming back and
• 2:56:42
  writing these two? It was a surprise.
• 2:56:44
  Magical book. People did seem quite surprised
• 2:56:47
  I was coming back. They're they're.
• 2:56:49
  Astonishingly good book, because I did, but it was it was lovely
• 2:56:53
  to be asked back. Just to say, I mean, you're such
• 2:56:57
  a talent, Rob, I, I feel that we are very lucky to have you
• 2:57:00
  writing Doctor Who for us. So I I just wanted to say a
• 2:57:03
  quick thank you as well. Not at all, no.
• 2:57:06
  Thank you so much for that. And thanks for, you know, it's
• 2:57:08
  thanks for, you know, reading the books and for, you know, and
• 2:57:11
  also for taking them seriously. And, you know, because you
• 2:57:15
  don't, you kind of don't expect that because you know what, you
• 2:57:19
  know what they are. You also know that these are
• 2:57:22
  things which are meant to be fun novelisations of people.
• 2:57:26
  And they're not meant, they're not things which people are
• 2:57:28
  going to necessarily analyse very much.
• 2:57:32
  But it's it's been lovely to talk about it.
• 2:57:34
  So thank you so much.