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Hamster Book Club - Paul Magrs Interview · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:23
  None. Hamster with a blump pen knife
• 0:35
  for doing quicker. Welcome back to the Hamster Book
• 0:42
  Club. It is my pleasure and delight
• 0:45
  today to be talking with one of my favorite Doctor Who authors.
• 0:50
  One of my favorite authors in general, That is Mr. Paul Mars.
• 0:54
  Paul, hello, how are you doing today?
• 0:56
  Hello, I'm fine. I'm not bad.
• 0:58
  I'm weighed down by the cat. My cat's on my lap as usual, so
• 1:02
  my my laptop's over here somewhere when I'm twisting
• 1:05
  round on my chair while the cat has centre stage as usual.
• 1:09
  So I'm aching. I'm I'm just going to say to
• 1:13
  everybody else what I just said to you.
• 1:16
  We've been doing the Hamster Book Club for a little while
• 1:18
  now, and I've actually got 3 reportings coming out, sort of
• 1:21
  being recorded in the next couple of months.
• 1:24
  And we are going to be covering the Scarlet, Empress, Third
• 1:26
  Degree and Mad Dogs and Englishmen.
• 1:29
  So there's going to be a lot of a lot of pull codes.
• 1:31
  So I thought I'd get ahead of the game and talk to you first.
• 1:36
  Can I ask you first, what is your Doctor Who story like?
• 1:40
  How did you first come to Doctor Who?
• 1:43
  Oh well, I mean it's it's nothing unusual really.
• 1:48
  I was a 70s kid so I was 5 when Jumpert we left and I remember I
• 1:57
  think my the first images that I do with giant spider stuff.
• 2:03
  Meta B list 3 and and Jumpert we and Liz Slayden wrapped up on a
• 2:10
  shelf ready to be eaten by spiders looking like giant
• 2:14
  Greg's sausage rolls on shelves. And so my head because of the
• 2:18
  nature of of of those sets and things I thought they were in a
• 2:21
  kind of giant supermarket overrun with spiders.
• 2:24
  That's how I remembered it. And that weird thing that
• 2:26
  happens when you're a kid where you remember things and you you
• 2:29
  kind of improve on them and write your own version inside
• 2:32
  your head. So for those early years of of
• 2:34
  Tom as well, I've got this kind of scattering of of really
• 2:37
  vivid, nightmarish images and of course it was everywhere in
• 2:45
  culture. So as a kid I was there trading
• 2:48
  Weetabix cards in the playground at the age of 6 with monsters
• 2:52
  I'd never seen on TV. But somehow they were in, you
• 2:55
  know, you knew who these these things were.
• 2:58
  And I guess it all kicked in like many people of my exact
• 3:03
  generation with things like Doctor Who weekly and that being
• 3:05
  a big deal. When?
• 3:07
  When when that came out and and then suddenly Tom's last season.
• 3:13
  So that becomes a a kind of moment when people who are my
• 3:17
  age began thinking of themselves as fans because changes were
• 3:23
  afoot and we kind of owned everything that was happening
• 3:28
  new. It felt like and and and and
• 3:30
  target books were everywhere. Well, they weren't everywhere,
• 3:33
  but they were in that particular corner of every bookshop.
• 3:36
  And I was really pleased recently when I went to see Mark
• 3:39
  Griffiths launching his his new Doctor Who novel.
• 3:45
  And I asked a question about, you know, do we still need
• 3:47
  Doctor Who novels? Because some, some, somebody was
• 3:49
  asking that on a forum online. And he said yes, because even
• 3:54
  when there's a mass audience for Doctor Who, there's still a
• 3:57
  large contingent of that which is quite bookish.
• 4:00
  The people who, the kids who wouldn't have been out running
• 4:03
  around the streets playing all the time, at least in organized
• 4:06
  games, There would be indoors reading or finding somewhere to
• 4:09
  read that there is something intrinsically bookish about the
• 4:12
  programme. And of course I was, I was that
• 4:15
  that kid who then in later life when everybody seems to like the
• 4:18
  show, gets appalled that you have to share this thing with
• 4:23
  people. Because for kids like me of that
• 4:25
  time, it's all in your head, you know, it's all you own.
• 4:29
  These adventures, they they're yours.
• 4:31
  Except for the times when you did go out to play, in which
• 4:33
  case you made everybody play Doctor Who.
• 4:37
  So that that was me. And and I went through the
• 4:39
  classic kind of, you know, teen years through the 80s with
• 4:43
  Doctor Who, which was was full of delight and embarrassment and
• 4:49
  horror and dismay. And and then get to my early 20s
• 4:56
  and find that everybody I've ever been at school or college
• 4:59
  with has written a Doctor Who novel.
• 5:01
  Suddenly I was never part of Doctor Who fandom.
• 5:03
  I never joined anything. I'm not a joiner in
• 5:06
  particularly, so I was never part of that.
• 5:07
  But it's just this weird thing of people I I knew or friends of
• 5:11
  friends were writing Doctor Who books.
• 5:14
  So that was odd. And I tried to disavow it in my
• 5:18
  20s and do other things and kept being pulled back and eventually
• 5:23
  started writing Doctor Who stuff, but only after I
• 5:27
  published other things first. It felt important to me not to,
• 5:31
  to do Doctor Who first, don't know why.
• 5:33
  It just just always felt important.
• 5:35
  And so the Doctor Who stuff for me was like giving, you know,
• 5:39
  like presents to myself. I'll, I'll have a go at this
• 5:44
  thinking, you know, one book would would be the thing.
• 5:46
  And I get it out of my system. And there's been about, you
• 5:51
  know, one thing per year since then in the 25 years since, at
• 5:54
  least one thing per year in 25 years, which is ludicrous.
• 5:58
  And I really ought to grow up. Please never grow up.
• 6:01
  OK, well how did So the Scarlet Empress was your first step,
• 6:06
  wasn't it? Into writing for.
• 6:08
  Doctor Well, no. Before that there was, because
• 6:10
  it was it was BBC books and that they've not long started.
• 6:12
  And I'd I was energized by the fact that that the BBC took the
• 6:17
  license back at 97 and maybe we're going to kind of reboot it
• 6:20
  as a series. Because you know I'd I'd read
• 6:23
  the the the Virgin books but did feel as if they'd kind of run
• 6:26
  their course. They'd become quite enmeshed in
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  the world that they had created which was of a particular kind
• 6:33
  of science fiction that wasn't quite chiming with mine.
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  It was a very 90s cyborgy cyberpunk kind of universe and
• 6:46
  and it's it's just not my favorite bit of sci-fi and and
• 6:52
  and it also it's also felt rightly or wrongly my perception
• 6:55
  was that it was a bit of a closed world in terms of of
• 6:59
  getting into it and so I'd never attempted and it's quite hard to
• 7:03
  jump into a series anywhere unless you've you've you've read
• 7:05
  all of it to to write for it. So I was glad when it was kind
• 7:08
  of rebooted and and so I sent in an outline and the first thing
• 7:13
  they I think Steve Cole they've been Nuala Buffini before that
• 7:19
  and she'd been very nice and I'd written in as soon as I'd seen
• 7:24
  that the BBC were taking this back And so I sent an outline
• 7:28
  about the time that reached the single desk at BBC Worldwide
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  that belonged to Doctor Who. It was Steve sitting at it and
• 7:37
  he asked me to write a story for the first collection of short
• 7:41
  stories. They were doing short trips and
• 7:46
  and we became immediate pals, me and Steve.
• 7:48
  It's one of those things where you know we were just and it's
• 7:51
  happened a few times in Doctor Who actually with with different
• 7:53
  people I've worked with where you just chime and I guess it's
• 7:56
  shared culture shared history kind of childhoods that you'd
• 8:00
  lived in different places but you would have known each other
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  and and and then it led to to a novel almost kind of immediately
• 8:09
  and that was 97. I was writing that as I was
• 8:15
  preparing and then moving to go to UEA to start teaching the MA
• 8:21
  in creative writing. I was I was writing Doctor Who
• 8:24
  at the same time. So it was quite a busy time.
• 8:28
  Remember reading The Scarlet Empress for the first time and
• 8:31
  thinking, I've never read a Doctor Who book quite like this
• 8:36
  before, but that massive leap into sort of fantasy in that
• 8:40
  way, and obviously Iris joins us at that time, which has become
• 8:47
  an an enormous, well, a big part of your career.
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  What? Where, where did that come from?
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  What was the conception of Iris like?
• 8:55
  My I guess looking at it, I There's a few things that I
• 8:58
  love. Characters who come in and
• 9:03
  disrupt a story that we think we know.
• 9:06
  I love the kind of Baba Yaga witch figure who comes in or the
• 9:09
  fairy godmother who comes in and and causes chaos at the
• 9:12
  christening. I love the mad auntie who walks
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  in to like family life. Every party we had there was
• 9:18
  always one slightly drunken character who comes in and
• 9:22
  causes chaos. Now that's, you know, it's a
• 9:24
  sitcom kind of familiar character, but it's also the
• 9:27
  kind of figures in fairy tale and myth and also when you look
• 9:31
  at things like long, long running things like Sherlock
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  Holmes, there's Irene Adler comes in, doesn't she as his
• 9:39
  kind of strange hectic counterpart and and so I like
• 9:46
  that kind of figure. But also for me, there's this
• 9:48
  idea of Doctor Who being, I mean it's changed now of course, but
• 9:53
  a very male, straight, white, middle class world.
• 9:58
  And and I've done this again and again I noticed, I realized
• 10:01
  through different things I've written in different genres, I
• 10:05
  put in to whatever the status quo is a a kind of slightly
• 10:11
  rowdy working class woman and and do it from her perspective.
• 10:14
  I did it with with my Brenda and Effie novels.
• 10:17
  There's that's 19th century gothic novels seen through the
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  eyes of of mostly working class female monsters who don't get
• 10:25
  covered in the original stories. So it is part of that that kind
• 10:28
  of idea that I want to throw it into chaos by bringing in a a
• 10:33
  working class woman to to mess it all up and and and and kick
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  against the the pricks as it were.
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  Love the fact that she refused to conform to any kind of
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  character that you would ever see in a Doctor Who before that
• 10:45
  point. Yeah, yes.
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  Up to that point, we've seen Iris kind of in refracted
• 10:53
  through other characters since, shall we say, but but that kind
• 10:58
  of, you know, character who will chop it all up and and
• 11:01
  revolutionize things and and challenge the Doctor's kind of
• 11:07
  incorrigible position on things. Yeah, that that's become more of
• 11:12
  the norm now I guess those. Those glorious adventures, those
• 11:16
  off screen adventures that she talks about in the death zone on
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  Gallifrey with all the terrible monsters.
• 11:22
  All true. Write those for me then, please.
• 11:28
  No, It's like it's like the time Warp.
• 11:29
  You don't have to see it. What's in your head is much
• 11:31
  better than anything. Oh, for sure.
• 11:34
  That can, you know, anybody could possibly come up with,
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  Yeah, that's how I feel about things like that.
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  Sometimes suggestion is a lot more creative than anything that
• 11:44
  could possibly be realised. I think so.
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  I think it's a bit something about not being literal as well,
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  isn't it? So that you it as as the reader
• 11:53
  or the viewer, it's handed back to you for you to invent.
• 11:56
  That's one of the brilliant things about Doctor Who and why
• 11:59
  it always attracted imaginative children and people.
• 12:03
  Because there were gaps for you to imagine other stories, or why
• 12:07
  the special effects not being quite so good was important.
• 12:10
  Because then you could go off and make those things using
• 12:13
  washing up liquid bottles or whatever there were.
• 12:15
  There were gaps and and invitations.
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  I'd call them to take part. I'm going to throw out one of
• 12:23
  the one of the first questions from the Hamster audience.
• 12:27
  So Rod, who asks how far can you push boundaries in Doctor Who's
• 12:32
  storytelling, and what are the limitations when it comes to
• 12:35
  specific genres, in particular comedy?
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  Well, the only limitations in terms of comedy is when people
• 12:42
  stop laughing. I'll never have but.
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  I I I think oh what what There's so many cliches.
• 12:55
  The idea that Doctor Who can go anywhere and tell any story is
• 12:58
  the biggest lie in the world because what you you it
• 13:01
  generally is are it is a series of adventure stories which are
• 13:05
  incredibly formulaic and if you have a story that doesn't quite
• 13:08
  follow the rules or misses one of them out it feels wrong.
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  Like those episodes where you miss out the the act, the third
• 13:19
  act or whatever, where people are running about.
• 13:22
  If you don't have that, if you don't have the kind of reversal
• 13:24
  or the doctor visits the other side in some kind of conflict,
• 13:28
  the story feels kind of wrong. There's a balance to stories.
• 13:31
  So. So when people say, oh, it can
• 13:33
  be anything, be anywhere, that doesn't mean anything.
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  It could be underwater, it could be on the moon.
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  It's often the same story when you boil it down.
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  And I think even with all the mucking about that we do, it's
• 13:47
  it's just the same thing remixed.
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  And I'll never forget listening to a Big Finish on somebody
• 13:54
  else's Big Finish on an iPod when iPods were out and you had
• 13:57
  the shuffle function. And I listened to this quite
• 14:01
  straightforward Big Finish story.
• 14:02
  This is about 15 years ago, and I didn't know I had shuffle on.
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  I was on a railway, I was on a train journey and it was on
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  shuffle. I thought, wow, they really
• 14:11
  experience. Like.
• 14:13
  Big Finish doing Moffa and it wasn't I just had.
• 14:16
  So I think you know a lot of it is just just remixing,
• 14:20
  withholding a certain bit of thing your story that people are
• 14:23
  used to getting and then giving it in some other way.
• 14:27
  I think it's probably due for for some more kind of
• 14:32
  reinvention really. I think things become stale and
• 14:35
  stayed quite quickly on TV and and in in books and I think
• 14:41
  there should be more trying things out.
• 14:43
  I saw that somebody has just done a one of the puffin books
• 14:47
  for the decades collection in the form of epic poetry, a blank
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  verse or something you know, that's good, good.
• 14:54
  I mean I I when I especially when I was doing the Scarlet
• 14:57
  Empress I was really keen to try all kinds of but these are
• 15:01
  narrative strategies you know built onto a story which is is
• 15:07
  extremely old fashioned. All these things are old
• 15:09
  fashioned, of course. And of course when I did the
• 15:11
  Scarlet Empress, it was mostly about the Arabian Nights, which
• 15:14
  are the just about the oldest stories we've got.
• 15:16
  And I just wanted what I want to do is remind people all the time
• 15:19
  that yeah, maybe nothing's new, but we haven't quite put all
• 15:22
  these things together in this particular way.
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  And that's what Doctor Who can always do things like bloody
• 15:27
  Star Trek can't. Star Trek tries to experiment
• 15:30
  and turn stories round and upside down, but then they do
• 15:33
  terrible things, like putting incredibly literal ideas in the
• 15:36
  middle of an allegory, you know, which is is, which fucks it up.
• 15:42
  Star Wars forgets that it's actually just a series of of
• 15:46
  rollicking adventure stories, and maybe you should just stick
• 15:48
  to that. Doctor Who I think can go
• 15:51
  further because it's always had more.
• 15:55
  It's always been made-up on the hoof, I think, by by a series of
• 16:00
  people who've not watched or read The Last Law.
• 16:02
  Only the fans watch everything. So I think yes, it's more
• 16:06
  elastic. The elastic elasticity is kind
• 16:08
  of an illusion. It just depends on how playful
• 16:11
  you want to be and how much you want to have fun with it.
• 16:14
  And that brings you back to the subject of laughter.
• 16:17
  And I think that's extremely important.
• 16:19
  And the worst Doctor Who of all kinds, very poor first crap of
• 16:23
  which there, you know has been plenty.
• 16:26
  And you know, it's like, oh God, at least, at least the older
• 16:29
  stuff is kind of camp despite itself when it's being poor
• 16:35
  faced and that that's OK. But yeah, I can't bet anything
• 16:39
  poor faced. What's the most poor faced
• 16:42
  Doctor Who then? That's unfair, I think.
• 16:47
  I think grimy science fiction that's pretending to be aliens
• 16:52
  is the worst it gets. Doctor Who doesn't have to
• 16:54
  pretend to be anything else. If you're aiming for a mass
• 16:57
  audience, as all TV does, I think it's a really bad mistake
• 17:02
  to copy some popular movie, because usually those popular
• 17:06
  movies have copied Doctor Who in the 1st place, especially Alien.
• 17:10
  So I think you know people in spacesuits with smears of oil on
• 17:13
  them. Running down corridors and
• 17:16
  saying things like it's Showtime just before things explode is
• 17:20
  the worst it gets. Because that's pretending to be
• 17:22
  some shitty science fiction movie.
• 17:25
  Which, you know, I've got no time for, really.
• 17:28
  We brilliantly managed to point in the direction of about 5
• 17:30
  Doctor Who stories there without mentioning what but you said you
• 17:35
  said the words playful, omitting and experimental there.
• 17:39
  And I can remember a Doctor Who book which is now one of my
• 17:41
  favourite endings to any Doctor Who book, where I was completely
• 17:45
  denied a climax where Iris War time came along and took the
• 17:50
  Doctor away. And then on the Backpage there
• 17:52
  was a series of questions where I essentially have to make up
• 17:55
  the ending for myself. Kind of.
• 17:58
  I mean, yes, on the page that that is that it's all.
• 18:01
  There. I love it.
• 18:02
  I love it. It's all there.
• 18:04
  And I mean she she, yeah, she rescues him from himself, from
• 18:08
  himself, really, which I think has has been done since in
• 18:11
  something. I don't think what it is.
• 18:15
  But yeah, it's it's, I just think we've seen the pat ending
• 18:19
  so often. We we know how it goes.
• 18:22
  And really the questions are just 20 sequels, like where
• 18:25
  might the story go? And of course it never finishes
• 18:27
  here. This is where, you know the huge
• 18:30
  epics that might follow on from this.
• 18:31
  And again, it's an invitation to, to use your imagination.
• 18:36
  But it also, for me, it's about, you know, if you've got time
• 18:41
  travel, if you've got other dimensions, people could just
• 18:44
  step sideways and avoid the inevitable.
• 18:47
  They could, you know, if they weren't as heroic as the Doctor,
• 18:51
  just think out and avoid coming to that, you know, the big
• 18:55
  climax at the end. She does it for his sake, which
• 18:58
  which is kind of interesting. I mean the Blue Angel was
• 19:01
  experimental all sorts of ways in terms of having those layers
• 19:04
  of stories and you know things like that that they've tried to
• 19:06
  do on TVI mean it seems so, you know, revolutionary then.
• 19:10
  But then, you know, Chipmel was doing that with the, you know,
• 19:14
  who the Hell's this Irish bloke in The Timeless Children?
• 19:18
  And where the stories aren't literally connected, they are
• 19:22
  somehow tangentially or thematically linked.
• 19:25
  And I thought, that's amazing to to do that stuff on TV.
• 19:29
  But yeah, mostly it was me writing all these chapters and
• 19:32
  all sorts of directions, and I did actually fling the whole lot
• 19:35
  into the air and see where they landed at one point for the
• 19:38
  order they would go in. And I remember that very
• 19:41
  clearly. It's when you used to print out
• 19:43
  every page and staple. Wow.
• 19:46
  So there was, you know, there was literal cut and paste and
• 19:48
  literal choking them about, which I love.
• 19:52
  I love the idea of introducing some randomness into
• 19:56
  storytelling. There's not enough orbit, if you
• 19:59
  ask me, Simon Hart asks. Do you enjoy tying carrots
• 20:04
  together, characters together, across your books?
• 20:08
  Because it's something that he loves in your work.
• 20:11
  Yes, yeah, that's to me, it's really important and it seems
• 20:16
  natural. And the earliest fiction I wrote
• 20:18
  was a trilogy of novels set on a council estate that involved
• 20:25
  kind of magical realism and social realism and all sorts of
• 20:30
  stuff set in the Northeast. And of course, growing up on
• 20:33
  council estates, it was like all the stories in the world
• 20:39
  happening at once outside your door in quite close proximity.
• 20:43
  So the idea of ongoing narratives that that the
• 20:46
  crossover and people popping into each other's stories as
• 20:49
  easily as they would each other's kitchens or sitting in
• 20:52
  each other's gardens when when it's warm outside, it's just the
• 20:55
  same thing to me. And and so across books and
• 21:02
  across kind of because I don't see the boundaries of the
• 21:05
  stories being just confined within the book, it seems
• 21:09
  natural as well that you'll suddenly have somebody walk in
• 21:12
  from, you know, five books previously into a different
• 21:15
  series. I'm sure it's aggravating for
• 21:16
  the people, you know, working with me, but it's it's just the
• 21:20
  way, it's the way it goes. And I love doing those books
• 21:23
  like Enter Wild Time. It's about 13 years ago where it
• 21:26
  pulls together threads from a number of different things.
• 21:28
  And and then they get to, you know, to meet.
• 21:33
  I mean, again, that goes back to the the child who who loved the
• 21:39
  target novelization of the Three Doctors and couldn't wait for
• 21:42
  the Five Doctors coming on or loved Marvel Team Up or Marvel
• 21:46
  2IN1 comics where characters from different stories met each
• 21:51
  other and had an adventure. And I think as well that's to do
• 21:56
  tragically to do with being a child of a kind of of a divorced
• 22:03
  set of parents and an extended family who didn't all speak to
• 22:07
  each other there. At some level there was a
• 22:09
  longing to pull together people back to the same place because
• 22:14
  I'd I was a kid who listened and and talked to adults because
• 22:18
  kids were boring and adults told stories and and so I was aware
• 22:22
  of this kind of wealth of stories in the past when the
• 22:24
  family did interact. And so I'm sure that that that
• 22:30
  links to it all as well, that I see the job of writing as
• 22:34
  pulling characters together. And that's not exclusively
• 22:36
  within. It's not discreet within stories
• 22:39
  or books. It's a bigger project and I
• 22:42
  happen to gravitate towards genres that allows that to
• 22:45
  happen, I guess. Stai also says, Can you please
• 22:50
  tell Paul how much I absolutely adore his exchange novel,
• 22:54
  Please. It really hit for me and I
• 22:56
  absolutely loved it. That's very nice.
• 22:59
  That's a long time ago. That's, oddly enough, that's one
• 23:02
  of the threads picked up in Enter Wild Time, where the the
• 23:07
  lad running that bookshop and the bookshop itself gets to come
• 23:10
  into the the world where Iris is.
• 23:14
  I've got a question here from somebody intriguingly titled The
• 23:18
  British Alien, and I want to ask this because it's a word I've
• 23:21
  never heard before. And he asked, Are you a planner
• 23:25
  or a panster? Well, it refers to the the.
• 23:31
  It's a very American thing, isn't it?
• 23:33
  The idea that there's some kind of dichotomy between those
• 23:36
  authors who plan out everything in advance and those who make it
• 23:40
  up by the flying by the seat of their pants.
• 23:43
  It's not very elegant to describe yourself as a as a
• 23:47
  pantser, but I think I began as one and gravitator to the other.
• 23:53
  It should be that you get more freedom as you go on, but that's
• 23:57
  that's not been true. I think I've had to learn to
• 24:02
  plan things more carefully as time's gone on because you can't
• 24:07
  afford to waste time if you're doing it full time.
• 24:09
  You can't go off and and write something, you know, go off on
• 24:12
  some kind of tangent that that takes you elsewhere and you have
• 24:16
  to do kind of deep level surgery to a book when you think you've
• 24:18
  finished it. I have to.
• 24:21
  I mean, some of my synopsis are quite, quite long, and some ways
• 24:25
  doing the Big Finish stuff helped with that because they
• 24:27
  made me right, you know, quite long synopsis.
• 24:31
  I do know that some people aren't asked for these things,
• 24:34
  and I just think people worry that I'm going to go off and do
• 24:36
  something crazy, which is kind of insultingly awful, really.
• 24:40
  I hope you're going to go off and do something crazy.
• 24:43
  No, not worry. Well, some of the people you
• 24:45
  work with of course want you to conform to an idea that they've
• 24:48
  got that that is perhaps a bit more conventional than the
• 24:52
  things you're known for doing. Although obviously I can do
• 24:56
  anything as conventional as you want but I just that's part of
• 25:00
  the job of being professional writer.
• 25:02
  You know you how much freedom have I got?
• 25:04
  How whacked out can I go? How how close can I get to my
• 25:07
  own ideas or am I disguising myself as as your ideas today?
• 25:12
  That's just part of the it's like acting.
• 25:15
  So I think it but it's helped me to plan things better as well.
• 25:19
  I think takes the anxiety out. If I know what I'm doing every
• 25:23
  day and you know these puffing books I've done for the last
• 25:25
  three years, the last three autumns, they're 50,000 words
• 25:29
  long, and I know what I'm writing every single one of
• 25:33
  those days that I that that I do them.
• 25:35
  I I know which part of the kind of the clock face I'm I'm
• 25:40
  writing, which bit I've chiseled out for myself for that day, and
• 25:43
  that that does take out some of the anxiety.
• 25:46
  And within that of course you do go off and have surprising turns
• 25:51
  and adventures but within a a structure you've mapped out in
• 25:57
  your head and that that that does make me feel safer than
• 26:00
  than than I think I'm you know when I was 21 and writing novels
• 26:05
  I was much happier to to kind of ride a a roller coaster I think.
• 26:10
  That's not to say I don't do projects now on spec that are
• 26:13
  completely by the seat of my pants.
• 26:17
  Is that a more rewarding thing to do, just just sort of letting
• 26:21
  your imagination fly like that? Rewarding's funny, might be
• 26:26
  enjoyable at the time and I think, well, I mean none of it's
• 26:29
  enjoyable at the time. It's all hideous.
• 26:31
  Obviously what's enjoyable is, is having done it and and
• 26:36
  realizing what you've done. When you when you put it
• 26:38
  together. I think it can be more rewarding
• 26:43
  to to utterly shock yourself and surprise yourself.
• 26:47
  But it's always a risk because because I think all these things
• 26:50
  have become, in the 25 years, 28 years I've been a professional
• 26:55
  writer, the world of writing in all its forms has become much,
• 26:58
  much, much more conventional and stayed and resistant to surprise
• 27:08
  and shock and and unconvention. I think it's become risk averse
• 27:14
  and so many things you see out are so ordinary.
• 27:21
  Why? Why do you think that is?
• 27:23
  Money. It's just that it's it's it's
• 27:27
  declining audiences for thing. For, for, for.
• 27:32
  I mean they they fucked up publishing in about 1996 when I
• 27:37
  started writing, when they got rid of the net book agreement,
• 27:40
  you know, which meant that shops could sell books for any price.
• 27:45
  Didn't happen until 96 and they lost that.
• 27:48
  So it meant that supermarkets and and big bookstores could you
• 27:51
  must know all this could discount to their hearts content
• 27:55
  but only for a certain number of books.
• 27:57
  You get huge bestsellers here and the mid list which used to
• 28:00
  be most of publishing disappeared.
• 28:05
  And you know I just heard the other recently joining a book
• 28:08
  book subscription service that sends people remainder books or
• 28:12
  books that would be remained at all pulped.
• 28:15
  Is it something like, it sounds wrong but something like 77
• 28:20
  million unread books are popped every year in this country
• 28:24
  unread. So they're they're they're doing
• 28:27
  it wrong essentially they're selling about 20 titles in huge
• 28:32
  numbers and and you know to to appeal to just a mass audience
• 28:37
  you have to water things down mostly to PAP.
• 28:42
  I mean we know this. It's the old story and and and
• 28:47
  mostly things are are, you know it makes me laugh about people
• 28:52
  in the in the in these industries worrying about AI and
• 28:56
  you think you've done everything you can to make things look and
• 28:59
  sound and feel just like AI. You might as well do it.
• 29:03
  Yeah, why not get rid of the authors?
• 29:05
  Because you're not letting them do what they want.
• 29:07
  And you say and and and you know, publishers and TV go, oh,
• 29:11
  what we want is something like this mixed with something like
• 29:15
  this. And when they do the, the, you
• 29:16
  know, the tagline, oh, it's like Stranger Things meets Catherine
• 29:20
  Cookson, right? I mean, actually nobody said
• 29:23
  that that would be great. It's like Stranger Things meets
• 29:26
  Loki. And in you know on acid they say
• 29:29
  to make it sound jazzy and it's just bollocks, you know, you
• 29:32
  might as well put that into AI because the it's it's about the
• 29:35
  kind of it's stuff by committee, isn't it?
• 29:37
  If anything gets made by committee, it's crap.
• 29:41
  Is there writing within sort of under the Doctor Who umbrella,
• 29:45
  then? Does that give you a bit more
• 29:46
  freedom to push the boundaries a bit?
• 29:49
  No, much less. Wow.
• 29:51
  Yeah, Oh yeah, much less. Course it used to when it was
• 29:55
  off and it was the 90s and it was 80,000 word novels and
• 30:01
  there's one editor looking at 24 books a year and the editors on
• 30:07
  your side and wants you to push the boundaries.
• 30:09
  Of course you've got more freedom than it is doing a big
• 30:12
  finish or doing a book for BBC Books up off in books where it's
• 30:17
  very, you know, micromanaged. And you've got people you know
• 30:21
  rightly in looking at it from Cardiff, from the BBC, from, you
• 30:27
  know, all those people looking at it and making sure that your
• 30:30
  quotes on brand so much, much less freedom doing that of
• 30:35
  course. So I I do what I can.
• 30:40
  Was that? Was there a enormous difference
• 30:42
  between, say, writing mad dogs and writing sick building once
• 30:48
  the television show was was on the air?
• 30:50
  Yeah, and and and you know, I I've made no secret.
• 30:53
  I wanted to write one of those things for that series and was
• 30:57
  told that we must have a few years first, of quite
• 31:00
  conventional ones first. So you must wait to get this job
• 31:06
  and then eventually was told we've decided we've had enough
• 31:10
  dull ones. I was.
• 31:13
  It's appalling to those writers and now you can, but you must
• 31:17
  behave yourself. I was told in a very kind of
• 31:19
  finger waggy way, you know, no Iris, no mucking about.
• 31:23
  It's got to be very conventional.
• 31:24
  It's for an 8 to 12 audience, which I thought all Doctor Who
• 31:27
  was anywhere. I think that's where those books
• 31:30
  always work best. But a sophisticated 8 to 12 year
• 31:33
  old audience anyway, Yeah, so I was, I was so nervous, which
• 31:39
  isn't great to feel nervous, but I do remember in 2007, I really
• 31:43
  felt like I was on best behaviour and had to be, you
• 31:48
  know? And there was lots of good
• 31:49
  things in that, in that experience, loads of good things
• 31:53
  in that experience. It was it was very, very
• 31:55
  interesting coming close to all of that.
• 31:59
  Very funny. I've got some very funny stories
• 32:01
  about it, which I can't because you get drawn into all kinds of
• 32:05
  all kinds of, you know, readings and events and things.
• 32:08
  And you become weirdly an ambassador for the show.
• 32:13
  Paid and, you know, paid terribly for your, for your work
• 32:20
  as as you kind of, you know, cling to the, the, the, the edge
• 32:25
  of this Ravy train as it kind of streaks into the future.
• 32:28
  But amazing where, you know, you're suddenly sat in a
• 32:32
  Waterstones with Dalek props and Cybermen props and this huge
• 32:35
  audience queuing to come and see you as somebody to do with this
• 32:39
  show. And they're looking like, oh,
• 32:41
  it's just the writers. Great Jusp.
• 32:44
  Yeah. Well yeah.
• 32:45
  Of course and and and and, you know, so.
• 32:48
  So you're there, feeling foolish, but pleased, but
• 32:52
  foolish. Well, I mean, I wrote a piece
• 32:54
  about this about 2007 and being in Cardiff at this newly opened
• 32:58
  Waterstones with two of the of the of the novelists.
• 33:01
  And it's an essay I did. It was my blog called The Girl
• 33:07
  in the Pink Coat. And this old granddad was there
• 33:10
  with this little girl of about 6:00.
• 33:13
  Scruffy has mocked both of them. They'd come from the Wilds, you
• 33:17
  know. They were absolutely poor, just
• 33:19
  dirt poor. And they come to this glitzy
• 33:22
  Waterstones thing, and it's full of BBC books, people and
• 33:27
  Cyberman and Daleks and queues of people coming up the
• 33:29
  escalator to get their books signed.
• 33:31
  And she was hugging to her a really battered copy of
• 33:39
  Jacqueline Rayner's The Stone Rose that had been read and read
• 33:45
  into kind of dirty oblivion by now held to a chest and and she
• 33:51
  wouldn't talk. She was so kind of struck dumb
• 33:53
  by everything. And the old granddad he looked
• 33:55
  like Steptoe said, you know she just wants her book signing
• 33:57
  country and it's the author's not here, said the organizer.
• 34:00
  And I was like, we will all sign of course we become we become
• 34:05
  collectively the people doing these things.
• 34:08
  And she, I had to tell Jack, of course, as soon as I could.
• 34:12
  But it was, it was kind of magical.
• 34:13
  And I thought that's why we're doing it, not to sit here while
• 34:16
  all these, you know, people can buy with their huge collections
• 34:20
  of things to get signed or or, you know, and it's not about our
• 34:24
  egos, about, you know, we're nothing to do with it.
• 34:26
  And there was always one fella in this team of writers going,
• 34:29
  no, we're not. We're just the book writers.
• 34:31
  We're not the real writers, which just made you want to kind
• 34:33
  of kill as well. How often am I doing the event?
• 34:37
  So you've all of these things like any kind of reading, which
• 34:39
  is always embarrassing. Any kind of public event to a
• 34:43
  writer is is really embarrassing, I think.
• 34:46
  But that that made it. I just thought, yeah, this this
• 34:50
  poor lass with her book and she absolutely treasured it.
• 34:53
  It was her. And of course they, you know,
• 34:55
  they were going, do you want to buy a new book?
• 34:56
  And it's like, no, of course they don't.
• 34:58
  Of course they can't. I was working for Gardeners
• 35:02
  books at the time and I was working for them towards the
• 35:06
  sort of tail end of the 8th Doctor books and then well into
• 35:10
  the new series of ventures and suddenly they would just be mass
• 35:13
  marketed. They'd gone from a very small
• 35:15
  amount of orders to being, you know, 1-2 and three.
• 35:18
  Those three books coming out, they were everywhere of.
• 35:22
  Course. And I think, you know they're
• 35:24
  not kept going for a number of years and I think it was
• 35:26
  disgraceful that they let it go that and they didn't push them
• 35:29
  and and this weird thing where they they wouldn't publish them
• 35:33
  between the seasons. They only came.
• 35:36
  Out. Almost perfect, isn't it, For
• 35:37
  between seasons? Yeah, I never understood that.
• 35:40
  And I thought, I thought, I always thought that they never
• 35:42
  pushed that far enough. They should have been different
• 35:44
  series going, so they should have been for different age
• 35:47
  groups. They should have been how to set
• 35:50
  all the Doctors off on different kinds of as if they were all
• 35:53
  living at the same time and had one that was a run of historical
• 35:57
  stories. People who like those kinds of
• 35:59
  stories and one that's harder science fiction so people would
• 36:02
  know which one to go for. I always thought there was much
• 36:06
  more much more to be explored in in Doctor Who publishing.
• 36:12
  But they they they did other things.
• 36:15
  I. Remember, there was one
• 36:17
  reference, wasn't there? They were in Boomtown.
• 36:21
  There was a reference to the Steve Cole novel.
• 36:23
  They mentioned the, the, and I just thought they could be doing
• 36:26
  loads of this, you know, really spreading this across.
• 36:30
  I suppose that's sort of happened a bit more now with
• 36:33
  Doomsday and things like that where they're trying to do that,
• 36:35
  sort of, but I I won't go into that too much.
• 36:39
  I'm not entirely sure it. Works.
• 36:40
  I felt terrible when when? I mean when that advert came out
• 36:43
  and people were horrible about it.
• 36:45
  I thought, well, I've been involved in Doctor Who projects
• 36:47
  where the the fan audience has been horrible online at the
• 36:52
  first glimpse of a trailer or the first glimpse of somebody's
• 36:55
  name involved. So I know what that's about and
• 36:57
  what it's like, but it did make me smile the whole thing as
• 37:01
  well. I just thought, God know your
• 37:03
  audience and I think cross-platform things are just
• 37:07
  dreadful because it just feels like a cash grab and people
• 37:10
  don't like it. It's.
• 37:11
  Such a commitment isn't it as well to to get all of it?
• 37:15
  It's ridiculous. And especially Oh well, anyway,
• 37:18
  yeah, I I yeah. I'll take this in another
• 37:23
  duration, shall. I know it's it's interesting to
• 37:26
  talk about because I make what I end up kind of thinking, well,
• 37:28
  how would I do that? What would how would you do
• 37:31
  something that moved from one different form to another and
• 37:35
  how interesting could that be? And of course, I think about
• 37:38
  Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness going from
• 37:40
  1 Multiverse to the next. You know, now he's a tin of
• 37:42
  paint, now he's a lobster, now he's whatever.
• 37:45
  And of course you'd make it part of the story.
• 37:46
  Why is the story being told? You know, just in audio.
• 37:50
  Why is it now a comic strip? And you'd make people want the
• 37:53
  next bit and but you'd have to make it all as compound
• 37:56
  compelling as as each other. Not just an excuse.
• 38:01
  Get people buying everything because people shut out you.
• 38:04
  Know chopped up into segments and then just change the medium
• 38:07
  every four stories. Yeah, yeah.
• 38:10
  I mean it's it's absurd, isn't it?
• 38:12
  They, they, they. I think we've got past the point
• 38:15
  where you've got fans who'll buy everything because there's just
• 38:17
  too much stuff. So I think you have to be
• 38:19
  careful about looking as if you've just said oh we'll have,
• 38:25
  I don't know, Nyssa and the zombie and so and so in a thing
• 38:33
  and and they go to this and and they're just, you know, it's
• 38:35
  like drawing them out out of AI. Used to do a writing exercise
• 38:40
  with my students all the time where you put the names of
• 38:44
  characters or the names of something else or the names of
• 38:46
  places in pots and you pull them out at random.
• 38:49
  And the exercise was to show how we we can't help making stories
• 38:55
  out of random elements. And they'd go away and put all
• 38:57
  these things together in a way that AI never could, because of
• 39:01
  course, we bring something individual to that ourselves.
• 39:04
  So you know, that kind of melting pot of ideas is is good
• 39:08
  and useful, but it's when it just seems like it's for the
• 39:10
  sake of it, just to use the stuff up that's not good.
• 39:15
  There's a criticism I've thrown in a direction recently on one
• 39:18
  of my podcasts, but I I I want that's sort of pulling things
• 39:22
  out of a hat and throwing them on a cover and hoping it sells.
• 39:25
  Because then you're right. It just feels like it's made by
• 39:28
  committee. And what's the point of
• 39:30
  listening to that? Honestly.
• 39:32
  Yeah. Can I bring us in the?
• 39:33
  Directory like Tory cabinet. I imagine great grace next with
• 39:37
  his reshuffle, like we'll just bring back that old shit out.
• 39:41
  Everyone loved him. Everyone knows what day this is
• 39:44
  being recorded now, don't they? Yeah.
• 39:49
  Can I bring us back in the direction of Mad Dogs and
• 39:51
  Englishmen, which is one of my absolute favourites?
• 39:56
  The 100th Doctor Who novel emblazoned in golden foil with a
• 40:01
  cover of a fabulous pink poodle smoking a cigarillo.
• 40:05
  Now I saw a picture that you did after the reception to this
• 40:10
  cover online. Apologizing to doctors who found
• 40:14
  them for reminding them. But the shows are very much
• 40:17
  sorry. Oh, it was wonderful.
• 40:19
  It just made me how. First of all, what was the
• 40:26
  general reception to this? Second of all, there are several
• 40:31
  characters in this book. I called him John Fouchard, but
• 40:36
  I don't believe that's how you pronounce it.
• 40:40
  Ron Von Armin and Mr. Tyler as well.
• 40:45
  I think I know who those people might be.
• 40:47
  Really. I think you were very.
• 40:51
  You were very subtle about it. Yeah.
• 40:53
  I can't remember. Oh, OK well, I figured one was
• 40:57
  Jr. Tolkien, one was George Lucas,
• 41:01
  and one was possibly Ray Harryhausen.
• 41:04
  Yeah, I think so. I think, I mean the the point is
• 41:06
  it's it's it's about there's a kind of 1930s forties kind of
• 41:12
  inklings kind of writer, somebody who's academic, who
• 41:15
  writes fantasy and then years later his books taken up by a
• 41:18
  kind of 70s brat director like Spielberg or Lucas and and using
• 41:24
  the effects of somebody like Harryhausen.
• 41:26
  So that it's not so much satire of those particular people.
• 41:29
  The talking thing is closer, that it's about those kind of
• 41:33
  cultural figures and what they stand for and the kind of work
• 41:35
  they did and what would it be like if they put them together
• 41:38
  in one place. What would that have been like
• 41:40
  at that time? Which is something I kind of
• 41:42
  idly wonder about all the time. You know what if they had made
• 41:45
  the version of Lord of the Rings in the 60s with The Beatles
• 41:49
  playing the parts they were supposed to.
• 41:50
  What would that look like? What, you know and and why
• 41:53
  haven't we got that yet. It will happen, I'm sure, or I
• 42:00
  think in in in that I imagined one way it was John Crawford as
• 42:04
  Saraman and Betty Davis's Dandalf I.
• 42:08
  Think. Is that for real?
• 42:12
  Yeah, I think it's interesting. I've done whether there's
• 42:15
  there's a kind of, you know, hacksploitation version of
• 42:22
  talking in the 60s and that that's just stuff that amuses
• 42:25
  me. But they're always side jokes to
• 42:26
  the main thing, which is what are these cultural forces like
• 42:29
  what why do they. And the and the basis of Mad
• 42:32
  Dogs and Englishmen is actually about missing episodes, that the
• 42:36
  idea that these things were broadcast in the 60s.
• 42:38
  But if you had a space station somewhere, you could nip to it
• 42:45
  ahead of the wave of 1960s broadcasts, set up a Beta Max
• 42:50
  video and record all the old Doctor Who's and pop back with
• 42:53
  them. And that's that's where it
• 42:54
  began. But of course, it becomes
• 42:55
  something else in the telling. It becomes a thing about poodles
• 42:59
  and Noël Coward. Glorious, yeah?
• 43:02
  Why? Poodles.
• 43:07
  I think I had a postcard with a pink poodle on.
• 43:10
  You've got to never underestimate the power of
• 43:15
  suggestion. So my I think opposite UEA had
• 43:19
  all these postcards and things and there was a ridiculous
• 43:21
  poodle on a on a postcard and no coward possibly on on one next
• 43:26
  to it And and these things fuse in your head and stay with you
• 43:29
  and get regurgitated in the form of kind of dreams But I mean it
• 43:36
  was a very happy time and so well was it a happy time
• 43:39
  creatively it was because I'd I'd done those earlier books for
• 43:42
  I think I'd done 3 for BBC books before then and drifted away
• 43:45
  slightly and then it got to beginning of 2001 which wasn't
• 43:52
  terribly happy in my life. There was a few kind of we lost
• 43:56
  a few people colleagues and my Nana died and I had some time
• 44:00
  off work for study leave and I just remember reading the then
• 44:06
  whatever that month's Doctor Who books were.
• 44:08
  Oh, I do remember it was Craig Hinton.
• 44:14
  I think it was Quantum Archangel and Lance Parkins father time.
• 44:19
  Now those are both people I'd read since they were doing
• 44:22
  virgin books and I adored both of them and got to tell both of
• 44:26
  them that different points. It's so creative and and so
• 44:30
  different. And I lay on the settee and read
• 44:32
  both these books. I'm like, fuck it, I've not done
• 44:34
  one one of these for a couple of years and I knew those are the
• 44:39
  things I should have been writing, but that's often the
• 44:41
  story of of what I do. There's something I should have
• 44:44
  been doing, but this other thing comes off instead and it was
• 44:48
  this attempt to fuse all those things that I loved in one
• 44:50
  place. It's nice to mention Craig
• 44:52
  Hinton again, though, because he was.
• 44:56
  I never met him face to face, but he's very, very creative and
• 45:00
  inspirational and doesn't get enough mentions these days.
• 45:05
  And I think he exemplified a particular kind of no Holds
• 45:10
  barred, no nothing sacred, woofing it up to the kind of NTH
• 45:16
  camp degree kind of Doctor Who storytelling which has become
• 45:20
  extremely fucking mainstream. You know, the fact that
• 45:24
  everyone's very excited about Beep, the Meep and Donna Noble
• 45:28
  and things, I just think that's his kind of, in lots of ways
• 45:31
  it's it's a world that he would have recognized from his Doctor
• 45:34
  Who. Still think the Quantum
• 45:37
  Archangel is one of the ballsiest Doctor Who?
• 45:39
  A sequel to the Time monster featuring the 6th Doctor and
• 45:42
  male and every single God like creature that's ever appeared in
• 45:45
  Doctor Who. All coming together.
• 45:48
  It's not. Well, we've got to cover it for
• 45:49
  this, you know, I think you'll be a great one.
• 45:52
  I've got a question from my dear mate Paul Quinn about Mad Dogs.
• 45:57
  He asked have you read Craig Craig Brown's biography of
• 46:02
  Princess Margaret? And if you has had it, was it
• 46:05
  available when writing Mad Dogs an Englishman?
• 46:08
  Would it have influenced your construction of Princess
• 46:10
  Margaret in the novel? No, I haven't read it.
• 46:13
  I have bought it as a present for somebody, somebody who
• 46:16
  doesn't read, which is, you know, awful.
• 46:20
  I have read the UN Glen Connor Lady in Waiting book about
• 46:24
  Princess Margaret and I wish that had been available when
• 46:28
  back then because that's extremely funny, some of the
• 46:32
  kind of behind the scenes royal family stuff.
• 46:36
  But no, I'd read not a lot about her really.
• 46:40
  I don't think so that's kind of not there.
• 46:44
  It would be now. I I think I might have
• 46:47
  identified your biggest fan When Doctor Who fandom.
• 46:50
  He goes by the name of Doctor Who cover story.
• 46:53
  His name's Luke, he's a fantastic bloke.
• 46:55
  And he asks, well, he says he loved your puffing books.
• 47:01
  And if you could mash up Doctor Who with any other fictional
• 47:05
  character series, what would it be?
• 47:07
  Copyright be damned. Well, it doesn't have to be
• 47:11
  damned. And I've I've finished my next
• 47:15
  one for Puffin for next year, finished the first draft of it
• 47:20
  and I can't say what it is, but it was.
• 47:23
  It is a mash up with something that I can't believe didn't
• 47:27
  occur to me in the 1st place, and possibly because I thought
• 47:30
  it would be too difficult or too sacred to me, But it's something
• 47:36
  really important to me that I, I and that the TARDIS team is a
• 47:40
  very important one to me as well.
• 47:42
  So it's been heaven writing it actually.
• 47:44
  For once it was enjoyable. That was hard work, but I can't
• 47:50
  even say what it is. I guess they'll they'll announce
• 47:52
  it in the new year so that that was kind of an absolute number
• 47:56
  one in terms of the copyright be damned.
• 47:59
  I would love to do and I did this when I was nine years old.
• 48:06
  Anyway, Doctor Who in New York meeting Marvel superheroes very,
• 48:17
  you know, not not analogues, not, not.
• 48:19
  Piss takes the actual ones in a kind of late 70s mashup.
• 48:24
  Like you know that there's an issue of Power Man and Iron Fist
• 48:27
  where they meet an analogue of the Doctor and the Dialects for
• 48:31
  one issue, and I think they got as close as they could get
• 48:34
  without infringing copyright. That has always been, yeah, I
• 48:40
  mean the kind of the Defenders, I guess in in the late 70s,
• 48:45
  Doctor Strange and and the Hulk and and so on and so on.
• 48:48
  Falkiri or having said that, Star Wars.
• 48:57
  I mean it is peculiar. The Marvel channels, the the
• 48:59
  the, the Disney Channel that we've got is this weird rag bag
• 49:03
  of everything I was reading when I was 8 years old.
• 49:05
  And you think are they really aiming this whole Disney Channel
• 49:09
  at 54 year old British man because yes I love the she Hulk.
• 49:15
  I loved the the odd bits of all things like the Carmen Infantino
• 49:23
  Star Wars comic strips that followed the first movie which
• 49:27
  is what things to me that that's what Andor looks like and you
• 49:31
  think they have they've read those comics they they grew up
• 49:33
  with them and and beep the meep and and it's just very
• 49:40
  interesting that that it it becomes this kind of mishmash of
• 49:42
  things that are there in my you know 8 year old mind and I was
• 49:47
  making comics about them right then so I would I'd love to to
• 49:54
  put Doctor Who in in Star Wars I think.
• 49:59
  I'm firm. I've only just weirdly started
• 50:03
  exploring Marvel movies. I never, I never read any of the
• 50:07
  comics when I was younger. And it's so much confection, a
• 50:10
  lot of it. It's just special effects and
• 50:12
  things like that. My favorite, it's always been
• 50:14
  Ant Man and that sequence at the end where he shrinks down and
• 50:18
  he's on side on top of Thomas Tank Engine going around and
• 50:21
  it's just so out of left field from what they normally do.
• 50:25
  That's, that's, yeah, that's the sort of.
• 50:27
  Thing. I mean, he's a, he's a he's a
• 50:29
  great wit though, isn't he, Paul?
• 50:30
  Rd. himself. When you've got there's someone
• 50:33
  at the heart of it who is just witty anyway.
• 50:36
  And and you know, I watched The Third Ant Man and it's where
• 50:40
  it's the mother, isn't it? And Michelle Pfeiffer being.
• 50:43
  Oh, I haven't seen that one yet. Oh.
• 50:46
  Well, I I won't spoil it, but, you know, it is like, what did
• 50:48
  you do when you were in the Quantum realm for 30 years?
• 50:52
  Mother. And she's like, well, I had an
• 50:55
  affair with the kind of emperor of the universe, and he's a
• 50:57
  bastard. And off they go.
• 51:00
  And it is, you know, there's that weird mix of the cosmic and
• 51:03
  the mundane that I think Marvel always did.
• 51:06
  And it's when, you know, sometimes it just gets it right.
• 51:10
  It's astonishing. And I think those people have
• 51:11
  watched their fair share of Doctor Who, certainly when Loki,
• 51:16
  the first season, is so glitzy and big and and wonderful and it
• 51:19
  begins in exactly the same way as trial of a Time Lord.
• 51:22
  And you go through The Five Doctors at one point and you
• 51:25
  think this is aimed at a Doctor Who audience?
• 51:30
  I've got a question here from Ian Winston, who I believe you
• 51:34
  might have met recently from Castaway Comics, who says, and
• 51:38
  I'm very intrigued to hear your answer about this one.
• 51:40
  When I was chatting to him the other week, he mentioned that he
• 51:43
  wasn't very keen on the Time War.
• 51:45
  I'd like to know more about his views on this and tone in Doctor
• 51:49
  Who in general. I I don't like gritty and dark
• 51:52
  as a genre, full stop. Anyway, I think, and I think
• 51:57
  it's wrong for Doctor Who. I always thought the Time War
• 52:01
  was a kind of narrative joke, in that if you had a Time War,
• 52:05
  nobody would know. They'd all be sucked out of time
• 52:08
  and then dropped back to Earth. Like the secret wars in Marvel
• 52:11
  Comics in the 80s, where all the world's greatest heroes are
• 52:14
  taken off into space in each of their issues.
• 52:18
  But next month they were back and they said we don't talk
• 52:20
  about the Secret Wars, but there was a 12 month thing running
• 52:24
  parallel where you saw this, this war where all the villains
• 52:27
  and all the heroes fought in space.
• 52:29
  So I thought the Time War, you know, would be that because
• 52:31
  actually reading the 12 issues where they had a fight in space,
• 52:34
  it's pretty dull because it was just fighting in space, you
• 52:37
  know, it's just and they did it to sell action figures that you
• 52:41
  could, you know, fight with. So I think at some level,
• 52:44
  telling the story of something like the Time War is the same,
• 52:46
  it's just action figures fighting each other like that
• 52:49
  which isn't you know, that's not my favorite genre.
• 52:52
  I didn't read war comics as a kid.
• 52:54
  I didn't read science fiction for the fighty bits.
• 52:57
  I read it for you know, the droids bitching in the corner or
• 53:01
  Princess Leia doing this over here.
• 53:02
  That's different to the main, you know, being cleverer.
• 53:05
  I believed in, you know, Tom's doctor when he said you don't
• 53:08
  need weapons, you laugh your enemies into submission.
• 53:13
  I'll. Probably leave that during that
• 53:15
  sort of Time War period you like me or one of the two Doctor Who
• 53:19
  fans that absolutely adored the Rings of Akatin, because it was
• 53:23
  just pushing away from all of that, wasn't it?
• 53:26
  I've forgotten that one, actually.
• 53:27
  Yes. Yes.
• 53:27
  Because most of it's a song. Yeah.
• 53:32
  So, so kind of running about with guns and stuff I thought
• 53:34
  was kind of too literal. It's just too literal a thing to
• 53:38
  do. And, you know, to have John Hurt
• 53:42
  turn up as a unseen Dr. Well, it was kind of more Ben Kenobi
• 53:47
  really, wasn't it, that, you know, he was imported from a
• 53:50
  different kind of story, a story about that's actually more Star
• 53:53
  Wars. So I, I, I have an antipathy to
• 53:57
  that kind of story. Anyway, of course, I was never
• 54:00
  asked to do anything for it, which gives me an instant
• 54:02
  antipathy to do anything. What I would have told is the
• 54:06
  story of, oh, like Gracie Fields or Marlena Dietrich, you know,
• 54:12
  when they went out to entertain the troops and Marlena shagged
• 54:15
  them all, She had a queue of men in a tent.
• 54:19
  And Gracie Field, you know, went all over the Far East, through
• 54:23
  Burma, where she shouldn't have been.
• 54:24
  She went off with a Jeep and, you know, sang her songs about
• 54:28
  sitting in the bathtub and stuff in a Lancashire accent.
• 54:31
  That would have been Iris in the time war if you had to
• 54:33
  literalise it. She goes on, you know, she.
• 54:36
  It's the concert party. It's that that.
• 54:39
  So I think there's ways of and of course I've spent, you know
• 54:41
  the last or five years writing wartime saga novels under my
• 54:48
  under my pen name. So it's but again it's from the
• 54:52
  point of view of the working class women in the middle of
• 54:54
  those conflicts. I'm not interested in writing
• 54:56
  about soldiers and things particularly and I I don't think
• 55:01
  it's very Doctor Who we I don't think.
• 55:06
  And how about we sort of TOAD in general?
• 55:10
  What? What's your Doctor?
• 55:11
  I'm not sure. Doctor Who should ever stick to
• 55:12
  a particular tone. That's the whole point of Doctor
• 55:14
  Who. No, it's always about
• 55:15
  juxtaposition, isn't it? That you you open those doors
• 55:20
  and you are in the middle of something different, and I think
• 55:23
  it's at its best when it doesn't.
• 55:29
  It doesn't write about itself, which is quite something coming
• 55:33
  from someone who's written the most kind of meta, textual
• 55:36
  Doctor Who's. But I think Doctor Who generally
• 55:39
  is better when it takes you by surprise, by moving into a
• 55:42
  different tone, a different planet, a different place, a
• 55:44
  different style every few weeks. But each one you've got to stick
• 55:48
  with. And it might be jarring and it
• 55:50
  might be peculiar, but it teaches you something else.
• 55:54
  It puts you in a different place.
• 55:55
  So I think juxtaposition of tones is is important.
• 55:59
  The thing it can't be is boring or sadistic or miserable.
• 56:07
  You must have had a very frustrating time in the 80s,
• 56:09
  then occasionally. I think it was never boring.
• 56:14
  I don't think it was ever boring That that's that's the amazing
• 56:17
  thing about when you do a kind of marathon and drop into things
• 56:20
  in order, it surprises you. And yes, I mean, yes there was.
• 56:25
  There was. There was sadistic and and cruel
• 56:29
  and fighty bits there under the kind of Eric Saywood Watch that
• 56:33
  that time. But at the same time you had
• 56:34
  ridiculous star roles, guest star roles happening at the same
• 56:39
  time that were just outrageous. But fabulous.
• 56:43
  Yeah, and and that's that's what you watch for.
• 56:45
  It was like no other TV show ever.
• 56:48
  And I'd still say that about 80s Doctor Who.
• 56:52
  It's some weird mix of adventure series and game show.
• 56:56
  The way it's lit, the way it looks, it's just bizarre and and
• 57:00
  I love it for that. What's interesting is looking
• 57:02
  back through, you know, dropping into all the episodes and
• 57:06
  realizing the times when it's been humorless.
• 57:09
  And I think that's a tone that it can't, it can't sustain,
• 57:13
  doesn't work. It has to be not comic, not
• 57:17
  comedic necessarily, but it has to be humorous.
• 57:23
  I think it has to be because it in essence, it's absurd.
• 57:27
  It's it's an absurd premise. And that we we've touched upon
• 57:32
  the Skull Empress and the Blue Angel and Mad Dogs in the sick
• 57:36
  building. I've got a comment here from
• 57:39
  Michael Store Storm, who says not so much a question, but just
• 57:42
  I want to say that when the EDAPDA Rangers were in full
• 57:46
  swing, if I saw Paul's name on a book, I knew this was going to
• 57:50
  book, going to be a book that I would enjoy.
• 57:53
  I particularly love the implication of the degree that
• 57:56
  Avengers Land existed within the Doctor Who universe.
• 58:02
  Yeah, I love that. I love doing that.
• 58:06
  When I wrote Verdi Grit, we had moved to, we'd bought a house in
• 58:12
  Norwich. It was my second year lecturing
• 58:14
  and had cable TV for the first time, so I had access to shows
• 58:19
  with that. We taped hours and hours off and
• 58:23
  stayed up all night watching after these long days.
• 58:24
  And bless him, Steve Cole would be there as one of our visitors
• 58:27
  and we'd sit up all night watching The Avengers and Are
• 58:30
  You Being Served? And God tomorrow people God
• 58:32
  knows what else. And.
• 58:34
  And so using some of those elements from kind of, you know,
• 58:38
  classic British Tele fantasy seemed important to kind of mash
• 58:43
  those worlds up. The Doctor Who belonged to that
• 58:48
  somehow or they belong to Doctor Who, that there was this amazing
• 58:51
  tradition. And you've got to remember that
• 58:53
  at that point it felt as if that whole world of British Tele
• 58:56
  fantasy was dead and gone. It was all in the past.
• 58:59
  It was, you know, 9998992000 and it was all reruns and Doctor Who
• 59:05
  was very much on TV in in the past.
• 59:08
  And I'd gone through the whole 90s sulking with all those shows
• 59:11
  that I could have loved. At that point I was I was
• 59:14
  sulking against Farscape and and The X-Files and Buffy and and
• 59:21
  Babylon 5 and because Doctor Who had had had finished and I
• 59:27
  refused to like anything as much.
• 59:29
  And of course I could have quite enjoyed the 90s really, had I
• 59:33
  given into these shows. But anything current just
• 59:36
  seemed, you know, horrid. And I wanted to.
• 59:39
  And it wasn't until I gave up smoking many years later and
• 59:41
  bought things on DVD that I watched Fastcap religiously in
• 59:45
  order not to smoke. Using old telly as a deterrent
• 59:50
  for your bad habits is great. Everything I would have spent on
• 59:53
  fags I spent on TV shows I hadn't watched and so first
• 59:57
  kept. You know, there's always a few
• 59:58
  years after I had this drag effect, but I was obsessed with.
• 1:00:07
  British TV like why would won't? I think the reason I sulked
• 1:00:10
  against the American things was all the Australian things, was
• 1:00:12
  that we weren't making it and the BBC would try.
• 1:00:15
  Every now and again, you'd get strikes.
• 1:00:18
  Or Crime Traveller or something like that, yeah.
• 1:00:21
  Yes, they didn't. But the ones that kind of began
• 1:00:26
  a bit like Randland Hopkirk, which it just awfully swapped
• 1:00:33
  the parts. It would have been or or Strange
• 1:00:35
  or and and then they would stutter out and he thought, you
• 1:00:38
  just want to bring back Doctor Who don't you?
• 1:00:40
  Come on, just do it. And of course in the end they
• 1:00:42
  did they and and realized that there is a massive hunger for
• 1:00:45
  that stuff on TV. So yeah, the whole thing of of
• 1:00:48
  of writing The Avengers into it was like, this is our glorious
• 1:00:51
  history of of British Tele fantasy and it's all it's all
• 1:00:55
  there in some kind of golden land in my head.
• 1:00:58
  Children of Destiny, Yes, IE The Tomorrow People.
• 1:01:03
  That was. That was the one book, you know,
• 1:01:04
  I read halfway through. I was like, how is this all
• 1:01:07
  going to tie together? Robot sheep.
• 1:01:09
  All these 19th century characters.
• 1:01:11
  The Tomorrow People. And it never did.
• 1:01:13
  No, but it's glorious. It's a great experience.
• 1:01:19
  Can I ask you, do you have a affinity for the Third Doctrine,
• 1:01:23
  Joe? Because obviously that novel was
• 1:01:26
  your recent puffin find and replace, which is still one of
• 1:01:30
  my favorite big finishes. You sort of, you sort of been to
• 1:01:34
  that well a few times? Yeah, and it must be.
• 1:01:37
  But I wasn't even watching it then.
• 1:01:41
  I was too young. Or I must have and it must have
• 1:01:44
  been, you know, so far back in my unconscious, there's a weird
• 1:01:50
  allure about things that you just missed.
• 1:01:52
  So my first memories are, you know, with with Sarah Jane
• 1:01:55
  starting Doctor Who. I do remember things like, you
• 1:01:58
  know, when schools, when you're at school and they'd have a
• 1:02:01
  bring and buy sale and you get all these amazing bargains.
• 1:02:04
  It's not the same. Now people don't do that stuff
• 1:02:06
  so much, but getting a 1975 Doctor Who annual that had Joe
• 1:02:14
  and the 3rd Doctor, weirdly kind of late, actually, but there
• 1:02:21
  they were. And it was like this before
• 1:02:23
  time, before Tom, before all of that.
• 1:02:25
  So it had this kind of magical allure for me.
• 1:02:28
  And so becoming a fan and then videos coming out and so on, all
• 1:02:34
  that stuff suddenly comes back to life.
• 1:02:36
  Before that of course, there was the novelizations, and I think
• 1:02:40
  the very best of the Doctor Who novelizations that ever happened
• 1:02:45
  are the ones based on poetry stories.
• 1:02:47
  There's none better, especially Malcolm Hulk, especially Barry
• 1:02:52
  Letts as The Demons, The Curse of Pelagon.
• 1:02:57
  Terence's books for the main part, that the less sketchy ones
• 1:03:00
  are brilliant. And I think that run of perk, We
• 1:03:03
  best books are really the heart of Doctor Who for me, that
• 1:03:06
  that's they're so much better than the TV versions and it's
• 1:03:10
  that that I'm writing to. I think when I do stuff about
• 1:03:14
  the Third Doctrine, Joe, it's it's my the place where those
• 1:03:18
  books are. Did you envisage Katie Manning
• 1:03:22
  as Iris while time? I've got no choice now.
• 1:03:27
  Ever since she started. Yeah, completely.
• 1:03:32
  Before there was room for others, but no.
• 1:03:35
  And that's you know, whatever. 22 years of of that now and
• 1:03:40
  we've you know become the best of friends and it's one of the
• 1:03:43
  absolute gifts of working in this this you know, tough scary
• 1:03:52
  sometimes unfriendly badly paid position.
• 1:03:57
  But you end up in that you make these amazing friends And you
• 1:04:02
  know, right from Steve Cole as my editor at the beginning to
• 1:04:04
  Katie a few years in through doing Big Finish and and lots of
• 1:04:08
  other people along the way in terms of, you know, the fans and
• 1:04:12
  people who've come to stuff and people have worked with actors
• 1:04:17
  and directors and the rest of it and editors, there are some, you
• 1:04:22
  know, proper friendships, not just colleagues.
• 1:04:24
  And she's absolutely a friend that I can't believe.
• 1:04:28
  I didn't always know. And it's a long time now.
• 1:04:32
  And no, it's impossible. I love the the, the the other
• 1:04:38
  glimpses we had. So the the the mad dogs iris and
• 1:04:41
  the wormery iris as well. Both just great you.
• 1:04:44
  Know the Beryl Reed kind of figure in the Scarlet Empress,
• 1:04:46
  But now all I can think of is Katie so.
• 1:04:48
  Me too. Doing those characters as well
• 1:04:51
  in disguise that, that, that. She could do it as well, because
• 1:04:54
  she. Should have been.
• 1:04:57
  There'd be No 2 words about it. Yeah.
• 1:05:01
  So, so yeah, in eradicable. I'll I'll round this up in a
• 1:05:07
  second. You are a very busy man, but Kit
• 1:05:10
  Forbes asked a three word question.
• 1:05:13
  Why? Why pinking shears?
• 1:05:18
  It actually goes back to reading Philip Pullman and the the
• 1:05:24
  Subtle Knife, the kind of, you know, the the fancy blade that
• 1:05:27
  cuts through the between the dimensions.
• 1:05:30
  And so I was thinking about the phrase that often gets used in
• 1:05:34
  Doctor Who, and I kind of scented up a lot the fabric of
• 1:05:37
  time and space, and I thought, well, what's a fancy way of
• 1:05:41
  cutting fabric and pinking shears with a little kind of
• 1:05:44
  zigzaggy edges would be a lovely way of doing it rather than some
• 1:05:48
  awful stabby knife. It's more decorative.
• 1:05:52
  It's gorgeous. Obviously.
• 1:05:54
  This is what happens when I read your books and you know,
• 1:05:56
  something like that comes up. I'm like, I'll just go, oh, only
• 1:05:59
  Paul only think of that. That's called getting a bad name
• 1:06:04
  for yourself. Or a good one, you know.
• 1:06:08
  Then finally, I'd like to ask, can you reveal anything about
• 1:06:13
  what's coming in the future? Most people say no.
• 1:06:16
  Shut up. Oh, I've got a big finish coming
• 1:06:23
  out. They never asked me to do
• 1:06:24
  anything anymore. Only Jack Rayner, who's in
• 1:06:27
  charge of the 6th Doctor series, asks me.
• 1:06:30
  Because she's always been. She's one of those people who
• 1:06:33
  has become a friend, extremely loyal since she was Steve Cole's
• 1:06:38
  assistant back in, that sounds like they were running up and
• 1:06:41
  down corridors at BBC Worldwide. But she helped out with the
• 1:06:45
  books 25 years ago. And from the very beginning,
• 1:06:49
  doing those stories for the Short Trips books, you know, she
• 1:06:51
  would phone me and say, is this right?
• 1:06:53
  Is this what you meant? And she's just been really
• 1:06:56
  supportive of everything I've done for all these years and
• 1:07:00
  she's asked me to do various things for Big Finish in in
• 1:07:03
  recent years. And I've got a 6th Doctor story.
• 1:07:06
  I don't think this is announced yet.
• 1:07:08
  A really special 6th Doctor story coming out next year as
• 1:07:13
  part of Colin Becker's 40th anniversary celebrations.
• 1:07:19
  I can't say anything, but there's there's somebody in it
• 1:07:23
  that would be impossible now to have in somebody kind of really
• 1:07:28
  important. And I'm really pleased that he's
• 1:07:31
  in there so and and and there's there's various things that
• 1:07:34
  happen and various characters that I'd love to be able to talk
• 1:07:37
  about and that just sounds so wanky.
• 1:07:39
  It's untrue. But it'll be it'll be fun it it
• 1:07:42
  should be funny. I've not heard it yet.
• 1:07:44
  It was recorded a couple of years ago now, as these things
• 1:07:47
  are, But I'm really glad it's there and I'm glad I was asked
• 1:07:50
  to do it. Her her recent Purity sets that
• 1:07:56
  she did because obviously she stepped away from Big Finish for
• 1:07:58
  a while. Blew my mind.
• 1:08:02
  Good ditching the continuity talk, talking about important
• 1:08:06
  things, Just great characters in there.
• 1:08:09
  I loved your one at the start of you, had that very important
• 1:08:12
  task of introducing Patricia McBride and you at the start of
• 1:08:16
  the second set. It was just phenomenal.
• 1:08:19
  Yeah, I mean just somebody who knows that they want to, yeah,
• 1:08:21
  they want to make it a series about something and has that
• 1:08:26
  kind of integrity and and and fierceness to see it through and
• 1:08:31
  orchestrating all those people to write those different bits
• 1:08:33
  and it will be the best combination and how would it fit
• 1:08:36
  together. And I yeah, I did have a hard.
• 1:08:39
  It was hard for me because I've not.
• 1:08:40
  I've been. Oh God.
• 1:08:44
  Actually writing a script at that point was really hard.
• 1:08:46
  It was Post, it was the middle of Lockdown.
• 1:08:49
  And of course Lockdown never finished here in Manchester.
• 1:08:52
  It just went on. We didn't have any respite.
• 1:08:56
  And I've been, I had an awful time with a script for somebody
• 1:08:59
  else, a different company the year before when I was, oh,
• 1:09:04
  just, yeah, it wasn't good. And so I had no confidence
• 1:09:08
  whatsoever. By the time Jack asked me to do
• 1:09:10
  this, it was the next year. I think it was like January the
• 1:09:13
  1st. I had to start it.
• 1:09:14
  And you know, when you just can't get it together except
• 1:09:19
  you've got to. So you do a tiny bit each day
• 1:09:22
  and build whatever it is you're doing, whatever the kind of work
• 1:09:24
  is, whatever the kind of thing is that you're trying to do,
• 1:09:27
  just a little bit incrementally so you don't stall.
• 1:09:31
  And it had to be like that. So the fact that, you know, I
• 1:09:33
  got 10,000 words in the right order at all seems amazing to
• 1:09:37
  me. So I was, I was really glad and
• 1:09:42
  she was very, very kind through that.
• 1:09:46
  So yeah, the kind of thing I'll never forget.
• 1:09:48
  And that, that cast, You know, Colin, Bonnie, Imogen, Stubbs,
• 1:09:54
  You know, unbelievable. Really, Toby?
• 1:09:56
  Sharon, it's like doing, you know, there's been those moments
• 1:09:59
  in Big Finish where you just like, really like doing the
• 1:10:02
  horror of glam rock where? What a cast.
• 1:10:05
  And it's just and you're like, yeah, this is this is fantastic.
• 1:10:10
  I'm so lucky and and good. I'm glad I worked so hard on
• 1:10:14
  that. You know that, because they
• 1:10:15
  deserve this. Ian Winston told me that he was
• 1:10:19
  at a convention where Paul Mcgahn was asked what's your
• 1:10:22
  favorite that you've done? And Horror of Glam Rock was the
• 1:10:25
  one that he identified. Well, yeah, it was.
• 1:10:28
  It was here. It was in Manchester.
• 1:10:29
  It was about five years ago and they told me that I was, I was
• 1:10:32
  doing something else at the same thing.
• 1:10:35
  And people told me that's what it said.
• 1:10:38
  So when I I hadn't, I'd never met him person to person.
• 1:10:40
  And so I went up and said, you know, it was me.
• 1:10:44
  And then then he figured out that I'd done Stones of Venice,
• 1:10:47
  which was the first read when he was considering kind of coming
• 1:10:51
  back. And he said, so we've been
• 1:10:53
  together since the beginning. Then LA, he said in this kind of
• 1:10:58
  Scouse accent. So that was that was very, very
• 1:11:00
  touching. And it's true.
• 1:11:03
  You know, we we, we had been and of course even before that the
• 1:11:06
  8th Doctor was somebody that we dreamt into existence.
• 1:11:11
  The people doing the BBC books, whether it was Lawrence Miles or
• 1:11:13
  Kate and John or Lance Parkin or you know me or whoever, Steve
• 1:11:19
  Cole doing those things. He existed so briefly that we
• 1:11:23
  kind of pushed this instrument force of will into existence and
• 1:11:27
  that was picked up by by Big Finish and that there was
• 1:11:32
  overlap there. You know they knew what we'd
• 1:11:34
  what we what they were building on.
• 1:11:37
  So yeah, we had, it did feel as if I'd been there since the the
• 1:11:40
  beginning in a way. And it was nice and it was,
• 1:11:44
  yeah, it was fantastic that he said that to the the audience.
• 1:11:48
  I can. I've been known too gush a
• 1:11:51
  little bit in these interviews, but I took the Stones of Venice
• 1:11:55
  because I loved it so much to Venice and was listening to it
• 1:11:59
  across the lagoon. I could see those amphibian
• 1:12:03
  creatures coming out. I could see the cultists coming
• 1:12:06
  out of the side streets. Oh, it was just a fabulous time.
• 1:12:10
  Yeah that was. And that was the first thing I
• 1:12:13
  did and it was it was they had a party to probably told this
• 1:12:16
  story before but they had a party in on in a bar underneath
• 1:12:20
  Oxford St. is what I remember. And it was the 1st Doctor Who
• 1:12:23
  professional thing I've been to with other people there.
• 1:12:25
  So I'd not met Steven Moffat before or you know all these
• 1:12:31
  kind of you know actors and things.
• 1:12:33
  And I was there with my partner Jeremy, who at the buffet table
• 1:12:38
  was getting to filling two plates.
• 1:12:39
  And I, you know, why are you filling two players?
• 1:12:43
  And he said because I'm having nibbles with Servolan and he
• 1:12:46
  turned round and there was wikiwork chairs and a table, and
• 1:12:51
  Jackie dressed as Servolan smoking a fag.
• 1:12:55
  Amazing. And.
• 1:12:55
  He. Sat.
• 1:12:57
  So it was that kind of do and Gary Russell took me aside and
• 1:12:59
  said we want you to write for. Well, it was for a season of
• 1:13:04
  four Tom Baker stories at that point and I had to go home and
• 1:13:08
  to Norwich that night from London after a long weekend and
• 1:13:12
  that night write an outline for a story and I just wrote and
• 1:13:15
  didn't stop. And yeah, again Stones of Venice
• 1:13:20
  was a kind of mash up of lots of different influences, but set in
• 1:13:23
  a place, you know the whole thing of having an environment
• 1:13:26
  that's very conjurable. I think it's very important and
• 1:13:30
  that's what it's got. It's got atmosphere.
• 1:13:33
  What I've. Always said about your big
• 1:13:35
  finishes is I feel like they can go down the rabbit hole of just
• 1:13:39
  trying to do like a missing soundtrack of an action story
• 1:13:44
  doesn't interest me at all. What I really like is the
• 1:13:47
  exploration of ideas and language because I think that's
• 1:13:50
  two of your biggest tools on audio because you haven't got
• 1:13:53
  visuals and and you always lean into that so brilliantly.
• 1:13:57
  I did promise to let you go, but I am just going to ask you one
• 1:13:59
  last question from Pete Fagan because I feel like like on
• 1:14:05
  audio some of the best sort of exploration of language I've
• 1:14:08
  heard from you is the Nest Cottage Audios, which I just
• 1:14:13
  adore. And so, Pete asks, what were the
• 1:14:15
  origins of the delightful Nest Cottage stories, both in terms
• 1:14:18
  of characters and setting and getting the recordings made?
• 1:14:22
  Wow, it's a long story in lots of ways.
• 1:14:24
  But basically Tom wanted to do something new for BBC Audio
• 1:14:29
  because he'd done some target readings and I remember being in
• 1:14:33
  the car on a long drive in the passenger seat and we listened
• 1:14:38
  to the brain of Mobius when that came out, Tom reading that and
• 1:14:42
  he ad libbed, he read the beginning and he said Doctor Who
• 1:14:47
  the brain of Mobius started read by and he says Tom Beck and he
• 1:14:52
  goes me and and suddenly he's interpolating stuff and I just
• 1:14:55
  thought he's restless reading this old stuff.
• 1:14:58
  And it turns out it was true. He took Michael Stevens the
• 1:15:01
  editor aside and said can we do some new stuff.
• 1:15:04
  And and they had to be very careful because people had tried
• 1:15:07
  this numerous times before. He hadn't shown any interest in
• 1:15:10
  in Big Finish when he was given 4 outlines.
• 1:15:13
  He had been given stories by BBC Books and was insulted by some
• 1:15:18
  of the stories they sent him as a Gareth Roberts, one that he
• 1:15:20
  objected to because he thought it was too silly.
• 1:15:23
  I remember that being very disappointing.
• 1:15:25
  Steve Cole thought he was going to get Tom to come and do some
• 1:15:28
  stuff in character there and didn't happen.
• 1:15:30
  So I was skeptical that they'd get him, but they were convinced
• 1:15:33
  that he, you know, wanted to to do something.
• 1:15:36
  And they asked a number of us to pitch ideas for a five part
• 1:15:40
  thing that would be set in this world of him being a retiree in
• 1:15:44
  a bungalow with a housekeeper solving earthbound mysteries.
• 1:15:50
  Old, I think was the idea to start with.
• 1:15:52
  Or maybe that was my idea and I was invited to pitch for one and
• 1:15:55
  I just kept pitching. I was determined to write the
• 1:15:58
  whole thing, and every day, every half day I was, I was
• 1:16:01
  pitching a new bit and this is how it fits together.
• 1:16:04
  And all my stories came from rather than science fiction
• 1:16:08
  ideas, they were kind of old Horror Story ideas.
• 1:16:10
  It would have to feel like because it had been suggested
• 1:16:13
  that it was insects, it was creepy villages.
• 1:16:16
  And I thought something that felt somewhere between Mr. James
• 1:16:20
  or Robert Chetwind Haynes, you know, Hayes, those old, you
• 1:16:25
  know, pan Horror Story kind of ideas.
• 1:16:31
  And that's what they all turned out to be.
• 1:16:32
  They were, you know, they were haunted.
• 1:16:35
  Ballerina shoes or, you know, hornet's nests or evil gnomes.
• 1:16:43
  Sounds ridiculous, but it was, it was all those kind of
• 1:16:46
  elements. And in those old collections of
• 1:16:48
  short stories, you'd have those elements on the front all kind
• 1:16:51
  of spinning around in the illustration.
• 1:16:53
  You'd have a giant locust eating a doll, you know, that would be
• 1:16:56
  the cover of the Fontana Book of Horror.
• 1:16:59
  So those kind of ideas would were behind it for me.
• 1:17:02
  Tom needed to have some kind of macabre stories because those
• 1:17:06
  were the best ones. His moments in things like image
• 1:17:10
  of the Fendal or bits of you know, well the the, the
• 1:17:13
  Hinchcliffe Gothic stuff. I just want to take that in a
• 1:17:16
  different direction. And the the the triumph of it
• 1:17:19
  for me I guess was that was of creating a part of Doctor Who
• 1:17:24
  that didn't exist before. It's a different, you know, Tom
• 1:17:27
  was different every season on TV it's Tom slightly different in
• 1:17:32
  this kind of weird kind of macabre Midsummer Murders kind
• 1:17:38
  of world that that was kind of new for it all.
• 1:17:42
  So having our own little bit of it seemed the best part of that
• 1:17:45
  and and it was a chance to be utterly and unapologetically
• 1:17:51
  worthy and imaginative. And I think that's where Doctor
• 1:17:54
  Who always has to be, as long as it's.
• 1:17:55
  And that's your answer to the question about how far can you
• 1:17:57
  push this, How far can you change tone, so long as it's
• 1:18:00
  imaginative and not dull. I think those are the limits.
• 1:18:05
  You can absolutely tell when Tom Baker's like he's he's always a
• 1:18:08
  professional, he always gives a great performance.
• 1:18:10
  But you can tell when he's loving something and those sort
• 1:18:13
  of first person narrated paths of Toy Story.
• 1:18:17
  He's loving it, isn't it? You can really sell.
• 1:18:20
  Recorded those, those bits, it was all different studios.
• 1:18:22
  It was all around Soho. Those bits were in this very old
• 1:18:26
  kind of 60s recording studio at the top of the building in Soho.
• 1:18:29
  And those pictures of like, you know, John and Yoko and all
• 1:18:32
  these and you realize not the reason those pictures of theirs
• 1:18:34
  because they recorded here. So it felt like this magical
• 1:18:37
  place anyway. And there he was kind of reading
• 1:18:39
  this stuff out in this, this voice.
• 1:18:42
  And yeah, it was magic. And he, he went at it with great
• 1:18:47
  gusto. He always did with those.
• 1:18:49
  And we had a absolute blast. And you know, the cast for those
• 1:18:53
  got bigger and bigger. So by the end of it, we had 15
• 1:18:55
  people sat round, all these amazing people.
• 1:18:59
  Yeah, it was an absolute joy. Well let's let's end this here
• 1:19:05
  Paul. I think you are an extraordinary
• 1:19:07
  writer. Every go laugh and every, every
• 1:19:11
  time I'm. Laughing with Glee, Joe.
• 1:19:13
  Every time I see your name with the schedules, I get so excited.
• 1:19:16
  Whether that's Big Finish, whether that's a puffing book,
• 1:19:18
  whether that's a Doctor Who book coming out, the fact that there
• 1:19:20
  is more to come in the coming years makes me a very happy man
• 1:19:24
  indeed. Thank you so much for your time.
• 1:19:27
  It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.