Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Hamster Book Club - Lance Parkin Interview Part Two

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Hamster Book Club - Lance Parkin Interview Part Two · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:06
  Can we can we skip from Virgin Across to BBC books then?
• 0:11
  And could you just sort of give us a brief overview what what
• 0:15
  were the main differences between writing for Virgin and
• 0:18
  writing for the BBC? Couple of things.
• 0:23
  I was on a conveyor belt with Virgin Box.
• 0:27
  I wrote Just War was starting a history before I finished Just
• 0:33
  War. I was started Cold Fusion before
• 0:35
  I finished A History and then I just about started.
• 0:43
  No, I had some ideas. So there are a couple of lines
• 0:45
  in Cold Fusion I'd finished. That was it.
• 0:47
  I'd finished Cold Fusion. But I knew I was writing The
• 0:50
  Diving Days when I came to edit Cold Fusion that I was able to
• 0:53
  put in a couple of lines. But the foreshadow that I know
• 0:57
  it's a little bit of reference that I know there's a reference
• 1:00
  to a March invasion in all fusion that's in reference to
• 1:03
  the 90s. So I'd been on a like constant
• 1:08
  treadmill, a lovely trend. It was wonderful.
• 1:12
  But they kept me in work for for three years, whatever it was and
• 1:18
  they invited before my book was commissioned.
• 1:21
  They invited me down for a lovely meal and vegetarian cafe
• 1:26
  in Ladbroke Grove. Peter Elevens, wonderful guy,
• 1:33
  you know, introduced me to Rebecca, who was taking over as
• 1:36
  the editor. I was like, I went to a party
• 1:41
  for whatever it would have been. I can't remember what the
• 1:43
  celebration was but there was some Virgin party I went to
• 1:48
  constantly sort of in contact with them and on the phone and
• 1:51
  it was like part of the team. Oh, I got invited to the there
• 1:56
  was a like a conference for like what are we going to do with the
• 1:59
  Benny books at one of the Benny books going to be done.
• 2:01
  I've had some ideas so we all sat around the table and put for
• 2:04
  ideas to for the format of the Benny books.
• 2:07
  So I sort of felt like part of a team and valued and things like
• 2:13
  that. You can probably see where this
• 2:14
  is going. It.
• 2:22
  I want to get. I'm going to get.
• 2:23
  This is a lot. This is 1990, seven, 1988 we're
• 2:26
  talking about. So I'm going to get some timing
• 2:27
  wrong. But I I got, where are we?
• 2:37
  Beige planet. Right.
• 2:41
  I pitched something they they quickly filled up their slots,
• 2:45
  the Doctor Who books, and I was there early on pitching things,
• 2:55
  but I didn't get anything commissioned until the Infinite
• 2:59
  Doctor was the 35th anniversary thing.
• 3:03
  It wasn't as much of a gap as it sort of felt at the time.
• 3:06
  It's one of those things. It's only like a year, and I was
• 3:09
  writing other stuff. I was pretty busy actually and
• 3:19
  and that that started out as the Infinity Doctor started out as a
• 3:22
  fourth doctor story sort of key to time related story and and I
• 3:33
  was surprised I sort of left my own device as I was with it.
• 3:39
  I pitched things didn't really hear very much.
• 3:46
  I I'm struggling a little bit. I, I, I it didn't it wasn't
• 3:55
  quite clear what was going on if any doctors got commissioned.
• 3:57
  Oh if any doctor got Commission, but it was going to be that was
• 3:59
  it, right. The 35th anniversary book had to
• 4:03
  come out of the 35th anniversary.
• 4:05
  So so that was the delay that was that was a lot of the delays
• 4:10
  that I actually ended up with like 8 months more than I would
• 4:12
  have had. So it was commissioned and it's
• 4:16
  going to be the book. The books were always
• 4:18
  commissioned in like blocks, like 3 books or four books or
• 4:21
  six books in a go. So the video doctors was going
• 4:29
  to come out as like the end of the the block, but it was
• 4:32
  commissioned at the beginning of the block.
• 4:33
  So there was actually quite a long time to write it because it
• 4:39
  had to come out of the anniversary, not earlier.
• 4:41
  So that was, that was some of the most of the debate.
• 4:45
  I ended up working Gareth Robertson, Rebecca Levine, ended
• 4:50
  up working at Emmerdale soap opera.
• 4:54
  No, you know, sorry, I'm sorry. I'm an American now.
• 4:57
  I've explained what Emmerdale is to everyone.
• 5:00
  It was like, stop talking about Emmerdale.
• 5:01
  And in America, I have to kind of frame it.
• 5:07
  So yeah, they they were there. And Simon Winston.
• 5:09
  No, Simon Winston was learned, but they they were they were on
• 5:14
  Emmerdale. So Winston was editing the the
• 5:19
  the Benny books. They wanted a Benny book from
• 5:23
  me. I didn't have time to write it.
• 5:25
  I didn't have time to Co write it.
• 5:26
  So I Co wrote it with Mark Clapton and then I was also
• 5:33
  writing Infinity Doctors sort of in in that in that Timescape.
• 5:37
  And then I got to work for him as well and Gareth recommended
• 5:43
  me to Karen the producer. And I got I got to work in a
• 5:46
  room with with Gareth and Rebecca and Mike Perry and and
• 5:57
  Tom Winston for two years. So that all got all got
• 6:03
  commissioned at the same time. So, so I ended up in this
• 6:04
  position where I was actually quite well paid.
• 6:06
  I was working in TV as a storyliner and I didn't really
• 6:09
  sort of mean to be on that kind of like mad treadmill that I've
• 6:15
  been on because I was getting paid more than most of my
• 6:18
  friends of the time. It was kind of never happened
• 6:23
  again. And yeah, this is the one time
• 6:29
  in my writer life where I'm like I'm a writer and that means I
• 6:33
  can drive a fancy car and go to all these funky parties that you
• 6:37
  can't go to non writers genuinely.
• 6:43
  But this is the thing I thought the 23, you submitted a book and
• 6:45
  it got published in the amazing editor would like lie there at
• 6:48
  you and teach you how to go writer as you're going.
• 6:50
  And then and then I thought then you swat into TV and you just
• 6:53
  sort of go to parties with Kate Winslet and Gary.
• 6:58
  I would do 30th, 30th, 30th anniversary of Granada of
• 7:05
  Yorkshire Television where I was at a party with like Scary
• 7:07
  Spicer's sister and Richard Whitley and Kagan's that was
• 7:10
  there for like 5 minutes and and I was like this is the life,
• 7:13
  this is, this is. This is.
• 7:14
  I've made it baby, this. Is this is this is exactly how I
• 7:18
  thought my life would panic and so I was busy doing that and
• 7:24
  being well paid for that. But I was under contract to
• 7:26
  write Infinity Doctors as well and I know it's back.
• 7:30
  You could do both but the the the the editing experience in
• 7:35
  Infinity Doctors was not what I was expecting.
• 7:37
  It wasn't as as I don't think it really started until the whole
• 7:43
  book was in and then it wasn't this kind of I was spoken with
• 7:51
  Rebecca. I was spoken with Rebecca means
• 7:54
  the short answer to it. It wasn't quite the sort of
• 7:56
  friendly chummy kind of thing. And I think that the editing of
• 8:00
  Infinity Doctors is probably more typical experience for me.
• 8:05
  You know later on my writing career and the writers
• 8:07
  generally, I think. I think the The Virgin books
• 8:10
  were very unusual convivial setup that that that is was very
• 8:21
  I mean they had a 23 year old but it was a very strange it was
• 8:25
  not a difficult you know writing experience at all but I read it
• 8:32
  if it did Doctors was from where it was just like I'd written
• 8:37
  three doctor novels. I I wanted to kind of stretch
• 8:40
  things. I wanted to kind of move things
• 8:43
  like on the main thing was that they were novels that they did
• 8:48
  the TV show. The TV show was never coming
• 8:50
  back where they tried it the mega movie and not you know
• 8:53
  there was no real kind of if there was going to be Doctor on
• 8:59
  TV it was not going to be for a few more few years.
• 9:01
  It was I mean the moment, you know, I mean the moment you.
• 9:09
  I sort of formulated that and started writing the book.
• 9:12
  I mean I I was up another day on the same time that they're
• 9:16
  making the League of Gentlemen first series, The League of
• 9:19
  Gentlemen and that was filmed in Leeds.
• 9:21
  And we actually went to the recording of I think the second
• 9:26
  episode of of the League of Gentlemen.
• 9:28
  So that's us when Mark Aegis is dancing around in the nude in
• 9:31
  the A nude woman, A nude woman. But Mark Aegis is jumping around
• 9:38
  as a nude woman. There's your headline.
• 9:43
  The noises we're making, some of which are laughter, are
• 9:47
  horrible. The the strange noises we're
• 9:50
  making. Some of that's me and some of
• 9:51
  that's Rebecca Levin And and we just came out of that going like
• 9:56
  oh God Mark Gaters is going to be huge he's going to be a star.
• 10:00
  Gruh that's just I claim the famous that we knew Mark gated
• 10:07
  we just we just knew that at that point it was just we came
• 10:09
  out of that game like this is either this is one of those
• 10:11
  shows that it's just like if anyone watches this show it is
• 10:14
  going to become this huge cult amazing career defining you know
• 10:19
  career starting sensation. So League of League of Gentlemen
• 10:25
  Russell is in Manchester making queer as folk where one of the
• 10:30
  characters is a you know you shot two fandom where the key
• 10:33
  dramatic revolution is that one of his potential people can
• 10:37
  enable the Doctor Who's the one of them can't.
• 10:41
  And they're like we were just like, you know we would you know
• 10:48
  we would go to go home at the end of the hard day of the
• 10:51
  Emmerdale Mill and we would watch Queer as folk.
• 10:52
  It would be like he's getting away with this.
• 10:56
  He's he is like he's like this is actually like extraordinary.
• 11:02
  And then you have things at the time.
• 11:03
  And again, I'm going to get the timing wrong, but we have those
• 11:05
  that there's that huge ceremony in London where they did like
• 11:10
  the best BBC show of all time and they assumed, and it was a
• 11:14
  phone invoke and they'd assumed it was going to be EastEnders.
• 11:17
  I remember it wasn't EastEnders, wasn't it?
• 11:22
  It's. Worth.
• 11:24
  Remembering this it wasn't EastEnders but I was working on
• 11:29
  a soap so we we and and this was like the absolute like peak of
• 11:33
  soaps. There were family affairs of the
• 11:35
  peak. Family affairs was not the peak
• 11:36
  of soaps. But every every channel had a
• 11:39
  soap. The the Casualty was at its most
• 11:42
  soapy as well. So BBC out EastEnders and
• 11:45
  Casualty and ITV had Emmerdale on Coronation Street in that
• 11:50
  order. And there's Brookside and the
• 11:55
  Bill and every single thing was to soap and like a career.
• 11:59
  You know I looked forward to what I'd do next to it was like
• 12:02
  a soap opera the only like option in British TV and soap
• 12:05
  opera and so EastEnders was going to win this thing and just
• 12:11
  the absolute like. And and I know that I know I
• 12:16
  knew people who worked these thunders all the time or writers
• 12:19
  that worked and standards and they were convinced the Doctor
• 12:22
  Who fans on the Internet the kind of like done sort of like
• 12:26
  dark web kind of like international hacking conspiracy
• 12:31
  to kind of like do this. But just having Peter Davidson
• 12:36
  just sat stand there going like Doctor Who is the trait that the
• 12:42
  the video is online and it's just great.
• 12:43
  It's just like Doctor Who is a very popular program and perhaps
• 12:47
  the BBC should make it and at the same time you have you have
• 12:53
  like so Margate teacher Russell Davis here, Stephen Moffitt is
• 12:56
  is is the pupling at the time and does the curse of faithful
• 13:04
  death in 989999. So in 9899 you have this like I
• 13:11
  didn't I kind of knew it at the time.
• 13:13
  You have this coordinated strike force is probably the wrong
• 13:21
  phrase but you have Russell Davis and Rodney Davis and
• 13:26
  Steven Moffett getting their tanks into position at an exact
• 13:31
  point. The BBC defenses have gone down.
• 13:34
  And I kind of got the Russell was writing a there was, there
• 13:41
  was a proposal called Doctor Who 2000.
• 13:44
  And I think, I don't know if Gareth Roberts had a copy or
• 13:48
  they was just pretending to have a copy, but he was just sort of
• 13:51
  like had a piece of paper and he was like, oh, Rose Tyler.
• 14:02
  And no, in in 2000 there was a proposal on the table for the
• 14:08
  BBC to make Doctor Who. And it was not exactly what was
• 14:16
  made later. But there was enough of it that
• 14:20
  that when it was on, I was like, Oh yeah, I thought that was
• 14:24
  joking about. And I think, and I'm not, I
• 14:30
  don't know how well it's known or if I did, I Rose was called
• 14:37
  Rose and there was a fairly clear idea of who play her.
• 14:42
  It wasn't really Piper and I I think it's this industry gossip
• 14:49
  that I shouldn't be revealing, I think, and I might have got this
• 14:53
  completely wrong, Christopher Ecclestone was huge at the time
• 14:56
  in 199899 because he'd just been on our friends in the north and
• 15:00
  our friends in the north. I'm sure you've all seen it.
• 15:03
  If you haven't, go and watch it. It's it's it's Daniel Craig and
• 15:06
  Mark Strong and you know Chris Ferguson growing up in Newcastle
• 15:11
  just like young James Bond and young young Doctor Who starting
• 15:15
  a band together in 60s. Chris Reckon was huge as a
• 15:20
  result of that and and I made a joke that you know if you wanted
• 15:24
  to bring Doctor Who back, all you had to do was convince David
• 15:27
  Jason or Christopher Eccleston or Nick Berry probably to to to
• 15:33
  be Doctor Who and you would get it done.
• 15:35
  And I said it's all I think this has been.
• 15:37
  This was true the whole of the 1990s.
• 15:39
  If someone had managed to take David Jason to lunch and
• 15:44
  convince them to be Doctor Who at any point in the 1990s, there
• 15:47
  would have been Doctor Who would have been on six months like
• 15:51
  David Jason's doctor. He was always following the
• 15:54
  logic of TV you want to star. You want someone being in there.
• 15:59
  But I I think Christopher Eccleston was up for a role in
• 16:07
  Queer as Folk, and I think that's where the Russell Davis
• 16:11
  and Chris Rex met for the first time.
• 16:14
  And I think what they bonded over was the fact that
• 16:17
  Christopher Eccleston could not be in Queer as Folk, you know,
• 16:21
  versatile and wonderful he was. The idea of him being one of
• 16:25
  those guys. I'd love to.
• 16:27
  See. Him, it would have been very
• 16:30
  strange. I think it would have been.
• 16:34
  I think they bonded over how he wasn't right for Cora spoke and
• 16:36
  then they're in. You know, he's in the second
• 16:38
  coming for him a couple years later.
• 16:41
  So I think that there were Chris Rexton sort of marches onto the
• 16:45
  scene in that kind of time frame as well.
• 16:48
  And so, so you really do have all these sort of elements for
• 16:51
  this new TV show coming together in like 1999 two thousand.
• 16:58
  And I kind of got this sense that it might happen then, but I
• 17:10
  was I I I was writing, you know the the Ed as were started from
• 17:14
  the premise that we weren't going to see the 8th Doctor
• 17:16
  again. We're not going to you know
• 17:19
  Doctor was not going to be on TV in the near future that there
• 17:21
  might be something and and and the Infinity Doctors Sorry can I
• 17:27
  start with this answer about 35 minutes ago you've.
• 17:32
  Dropped so much. Great trivia in those I
• 17:35
  wouldn't. Cut a page.
• 17:36
  You know no one, no one's listening to him, me and Joe.
• 17:41
  The Infinity Doctors. The Infinity Doctors was just
• 17:44
  like, let's do it as novels. Let's talk about it as a novel,
• 17:47
  let's figure it out as a novel. Let's sort of do something.
• 17:54
  It's probably the densest writing I've done, sort of like,
• 17:58
  in terms of like the sort of technical side of the writing.
• 18:03
  There's a lot going on in those sentences.
• 18:06
  It's the one that's least interested in feeling like ATV
• 18:12
  show. You know, It's not really kind
• 18:14
  of like bothered about that if you want to, you know, so it's
• 18:19
  trying to work and it's trying to sort of create novelistic
• 18:21
  characters. It's trying to create a
• 18:22
  Gallifrey sort of made-up from bits of what was on the TV show,
• 18:27
  but sort of sticking them all together in a way that sort of
• 18:29
  coheres in a way. I, I, I came I came away with
• 18:39
  the infant from the Infinity Doctors thinking that the
• 18:41
  problem with Gallifrey is, is that the whole like foundational
• 18:46
  point of Gallifrey is that is that the adventure starts when
• 18:49
  the Doctor leaves. And I and I I know that there is
• 18:55
  this sort of impulse sometimes when you're sort of thinking
• 18:57
  about how would you, how would you to reformat Doctor Who a
• 19:03
  little bit that you would just based on Gallifrey, that he
• 19:06
  would be sort of like returned to Gallifrey and sort of like
• 19:08
  that would be his sort of base of operations and we'd sort of
• 19:11
  steal amongst time loans things like that.
• 19:12
  But I came away from it thinking it's not doesn't quite work well
• 19:17
  and there's not quite enough kind of things.
• 19:19
  But I like the idea of the sort of space Vatican that they or
• 19:26
  Space Oxbridge that that's a joke that's a Stephen Muffler
• 19:29
  joke isn't it? There's but it's basically Space
• 19:32
  Oxbridge or Space Vatican or space this sort of like ancient
• 19:36
  sort of Goldman gust style institution of its own kind of
• 19:39
  like rhythms and I think that there is a there are one or two
• 19:47
  stories I think you can tell them there and I tried to sort
• 19:49
  of you know tell them but it's it's you want the doctor to be
• 19:55
  special you want them to be there's a reason you don't set
• 19:58
  Superman stories on Krypton you know where everyone be Superman.
• 20:02
  You know, the whole idea is Doctor is kind of like that's
• 20:07
  always been the joke, doesn't it?
• 20:08
  Like all the staff lead people, all the people in pretty much
• 20:11
  all the Star Trek's that always like, you know.
• 20:13
  I came top of my class. Well, I was in your class and I
• 20:15
  came top of your class. Well, we were joint top you know
• 20:19
  I got an A **. Well, I got an A ****** and that
• 20:24
  that all like little, you know they're all annoying.
• 20:28
  I know I I this this might be this might be sort of
• 20:32
  projection. I went to, I went to a grammar
• 20:34
  school. I did OK.
• 20:36
  But I was, if I was ever top of my class, it would have been
• 20:39
  because of some sort of like, pandemic, massive criminal
• 20:45
  investigation that rounded up in my classmates.
• 20:49
  I'd have ever have been, you know, some of my class.
• 20:53
  But I always like the fact that doctors sort of, you know, when
• 20:55
  he goes back to California, it's always, oh God, it's the doctor.
• 20:58
  It's just this, you know, scraped through his space GCSE
• 21:02
  and you know, it's just like, you know space would work,
• 21:06
  doesn't count, Doctor. And you're claiming you've got
• 21:10
  space would work. And I I always quite like that
• 21:13
  this guy that is clearly like, you know, a demigod is also
• 21:17
  clearly like, you know, third worst Time Lord ever.
• 21:22
  You know, he has to kind of skulk away and no one's going to
• 21:26
  miss his nose. It's just like, well, you know,
• 21:29
  it's not like quantum physics has lost a great, you know, kind
• 21:33
  of thing, is it? So no, I was quite like that.
• 21:39
  But at the same time, the Doctor is also clearly a more of a he
• 21:43
  cut when he, when he comes back, he's clearly more of a sort of
• 21:45
  moral force. And just like, you know, they
• 21:50
  find exactly the right thing to do for him, which is just to
• 21:52
  exile into Earth in the 20th century.
• 21:54
  It's exactly the right thing, which is like you have a skill,
• 21:57
  you're good at this. We're going to we're going to
• 22:01
  make a bit taller and you know throw you down on earth and you
• 22:04
  can you can sort of sort out some earth problems for a bit
• 22:08
  and that's that's exactly like they've they've kind of figured
• 22:10
  out a way to kind of it's like sending it you know it's like
• 22:13
  finding this third son of some law some colonial posting
• 22:18
  somewhere in like some island. There's never going to be a war.
• 22:21
  You're fine you know you're not going to destroy in some
• 22:24
  Caribbean island you know so so you know and no I I you know and
• 22:32
  again I nothing. I've oh God.
• 22:36
  I've got to be careful about this.
• 22:37
  Nothing I've written I've not been.
• 22:40
  I've been very happy by the time it's come out with everything
• 22:42
  I've written and I think that I am I'm.
• 22:47
  I'm. I'm happy to hand someone any of
• 22:50
  my Doctor Who books and go you know, you're like this.
• 22:54
  All right. You know you've got to
• 22:55
  occasionally it'll be like what you have to understand is the
• 22:57
  20,000 people in the world were interested in but hey when this
• 23:02
  was written and so you know yeah this Meddling Monk joke might
• 23:05
  not quite difficult but the problem the problem with the the
• 23:15
  new adventures in Doctor books now is is is they're not as
• 23:19
  insanely radical and crazy as they were at the time.
• 23:22
  I mean you human nature when they made human nature for TV it
• 23:25
  just fit in. When it came out, it was this
• 23:28
  extraordinarily deliberate attempt to kind of do a Doctor
• 23:32
  Who The Next Generation kind of like moving things on get into a
• 23:37
  realm that the show I I hate Paul.
• 23:41
  Paul so good. So we did.
• 23:44
  There was a Twitter blue sky you know Twitter club and blue Sky
• 23:49
  thing where we did like one thing for each of the 60 years
• 23:52
  of Doctor Who. That was the best thing in
• 23:54
  Doctor Who that year. And I just the time of
• 23:58
  revelation comes along and it's like Paul Cornell writes the
• 24:00
  best Doctor Who book ever. And like a year later, it's like
• 24:05
  Paul Cornell writes Love and war and completely reinvents what it
• 24:09
  is to be Doctor Who. So OK, no future reinvents
• 24:17
  Doctor Who. But no, no future.
• 24:20
  At the time. Paul, I think Paul hated no
• 24:22
  future. It came out, but but it's
• 24:25
  amazing. You really didn't know.
• 24:26
  And it's just like that's actually it's very difficult to
• 24:29
  look at. It's almost impossible to
• 24:31
  understand how you get. It's not quite true.
• 24:34
  You look at the late, the late the 26th season of the TV show.
• 24:39
  It's getting there and it's working on it.
• 24:41
  And I I I just watched the the Blu Rays of the 26th season.
• 24:46
  So just in order, the first time I've watched them in orders and
• 24:49
  so on. And obviously I memorize these
• 24:53
  things. But but I was surprised that I
• 24:59
  was surprised how sort of queer coded Ace was just something
• 25:05
  that I kind of and I was. I'm not.
• 25:06
  I wasn't like stupid and naive in 1989.
• 25:08
  I was a teenage boy like midnight.
• 25:10
  I knew what, you know, I knew my way around some of these things.
• 25:15
  But I was surprised how Ace is coded very much as like I just I
• 25:25
  don't know how I missed it really because there's a scene
• 25:26
  where she disappears behind the changing screen with a Victorian
• 25:30
  lady and they were they were in clothes and they come out in
• 25:32
  different clothes and. OK OK.
• 25:35
  I think. I think I see what they were
• 25:36
  getting out there I think but that's a very you know this very
• 25:40
  sort of like whatever whatever what would now be called gender
• 25:45
  fluid non binary kind of coding for Ace that I think is like
• 25:49
  super ahead of its time. So.
• 25:52
  So ahead of its time it probably you know I and I've been the
• 25:54
  viewer who watched these videos. I haven't remember again didn't
• 25:57
  didn't spot a lot of this at the time and then you then you watch
• 25:59
  survival and she's just gay. I mean he's just gay and
• 26:04
  survival and it's just like, OK, wow realized before the rest of
• 26:10
  us. But but so Doctor Who is not
• 26:14
  like it's it's not like doing masculine dragon and then
• 26:18
  jumping to like time of Revelation.
• 26:21
  It's it's it's it's getting there.
• 26:23
  And I think that was the incredibly frustrating thing
• 26:25
  about Doctor being cancelled when it was it was was that just
• 26:29
  as it's got this kind of like sentence that Doctor Who is once
• 26:34
  again relating to the the world of the 1980s and that people
• 26:39
  involved have read things around Doctor novelizations and things
• 26:42
  like that. Just as that's happened, it gets
• 26:45
  cancelled and gets sort of snatched away.
• 26:47
  And Paul just brilliantly and beautifully just sort of just
• 26:51
  goes. I mean Patty Somerfield is just
• 26:54
  so ahead of her time in terms of like who who she is as a as a
• 27:00
  character. It's just like this sort of
• 27:01
  grown, mature woman who is an academic who is a rounded female
• 27:09
  character in science fiction. And it's just shocking that like
• 27:13
  before 1991 or 1982, whatever, there weren't these, but
• 27:18
  suddenly there are, you know, there are no firsts in anything.
• 27:20
  You know, it's the rule of all of these things.
• 27:23
  You can't sort of go, this is the first postmodern novel or
• 27:27
  this was the 1st science fiction film or whatever.
• 27:31
  And they're obviously precursors.
• 27:33
  But I think that Paul just used Doctor Who to create so many
• 27:39
  things we just now take for granted about television really.
• 27:43
  But the Doctor Who in particular.
• 27:45
  And it's just extraordinary extraordinary how how those
• 27:52
  innovations are now just so sort of like part of the fabric of it
• 27:56
  and it's it's but we were we were in an environment when I
• 28:02
  was writing Infinity Doctors or where the EDA's will run away
• 28:06
  again. It's a teamwork thing.
• 28:07
  I was. This was the point where we want
• 28:09
  every single human being on the planet was on the Internet.
• 28:12
  We were talking about the early 2000s.
• 28:14
  Now, I mean, I I brought my typed manuscript of Just War to
• 28:23
  the Virgin offices in London. I bought a train ticket
• 28:25
  specifically to carry the manuscript of Just War to
• 28:30
  London. Because I, you know, probably
• 28:33
  because it was cheaper than photocopy.
• 28:38
  But it was the thing I I bought an electric typewriter with the
• 28:40
  advance of just war. I wrote just War on it.
• 28:44
  And then I got a really cheap PC and I wrote with the advance for
• 28:48
  called Fusion. I bought the history, probably.
• 28:51
  I bought the PC and wrote called Fusion of the PC and sent them a
• 28:59
  floppy disk and with confusion on it and for the dying days, I
• 29:07
  think, I think it was the dying days.
• 29:11
  I said I could just e-mail you the book and they were like
• 29:15
  wait, what? And I was like, it's going to
• 29:16
  save, like it's saved like 2 days.
• 29:19
  OK, if I e-mail you the book and obviously it's going to be
• 29:24
  chapter by chapter because you can't send 100 in one e-mail.
• 29:29
  But I did this. I sent them chapter by chapter,
• 29:31
  the files for the dying days. And I had to phone up in advance
• 29:38
  to arrange that they could keep one of the lines open at Virgin
• 29:42
  publish. And I just, I say these things
• 29:49
  now and I like, I I feel I've got some years of life left in
• 29:53
  me and all I'm saying these things now and it's just, I
• 29:56
  sound like I'm like some. I'm like Israel, don't I?
• 30:01
  It's just, yeah. But the point was like Kate
• 30:09
  Orman and like Paul and a couple of other of us were on the
• 30:12
  Internet in 1995, but by 2000 we were all on the Internet.
• 30:17
  We were all talking to each other.
• 30:18
  We were all sort of sharing ideas and like that.
• 30:23
  And yeah, we wanted the 8th Doctor books to be kind of.
• 30:29
  There was always the pressure with the 8th Doctor books was
• 30:32
  the the BBC were looking for an audience that just didn't exist
• 30:38
  for the 8th Doctor books. They were looking for an
• 30:42
  audience of people that were casually into Doctor Who, but
• 30:45
  they would buy two Doctor Who novels of the month.
• 30:49
  And it's just like, listen to yourselves say that once again.
• 30:55
  Go say that out loud. Every month they will go to
• 30:58
  Waterstones and they will buy the two latest Doctor Who books
• 31:02
  and take them home and read them.
• 31:04
  And then by the time the next one's comes out, they will be
• 31:07
  eager to buy the next two. And it's just like you're not
• 31:09
  talking about people that liked the Paul McGann movie and want
• 31:13
  to know a little bit more about Doctor Who at this point or not.
• 31:17
  And then and and the problem was that they also they if they were
• 31:23
  about that, they, I mean Justin Richards when the new series
• 31:29
  started, when they, when the poem, when the Chris Rexon
• 31:32
  series started, came up with this really nice format for the
• 31:35
  for the the tire novels which was that they were the the
• 31:40
  virgin books. They're meant to be 85,000
• 31:42
  words. They're meant to be doing 80 and
• 31:44
  100,000 words. 85,000 words is about 256 pages.
• 31:50
  And I'm such a girly swat that with the just war, I think if
• 31:53
  you look at Just war, I think it's exactly 256 pages.
• 31:57
  I didn't realize. So when they said 85,000 words,
• 31:59
  they didn't they meant between 80 and 90.
• 32:02
  I just want that's OK, but it's 256 pages, which matters when
• 32:10
  you're printing because they print them in batches of eight.
• 32:12
  But it does doesn't matter the the Virgin books I think could
• 32:18
  have launched like the Eccleston books did.
• 32:23
  The the BBC books were launched like the Eccleston books did
• 32:26
  with a shorter books. If they'd have published 55,000
• 32:30
  word books, eight of them a year, one a month for like 8
• 32:34
  months, you might have got casual readers and you might
• 32:39
  have got that kind of just it was just before the Harry Potter
• 32:42
  thing really took off and there was that huge audience for for
• 32:46
  YA. And of course Justin Richards
• 32:47
  was was already doing YA books and new YA stuff and he was
• 32:52
  ahead of the curve. And I think that there was a
• 32:56
  permutation of this where they, if they'd launched them as kind
• 33:06
  of books for sort of Harry Potter audience, shorter might
• 33:10
  have worked. You can't.
• 33:12
  You can't with the best in the world, you can't you can't give
• 33:15
  them Devil Goblin, Goblins of Neptune, A, you know, 3rd Doctor
• 33:20
  and Joe Grant book about that. And there's already two books
• 33:24
  that came out and there's already two books coming out
• 33:26
  next month and there's already another book this month.
• 33:28
  It's not a casual fan thing. And of course they hired a bunch
• 33:32
  of new adventures offers and we're all like, we've got to be
• 33:34
  new adventures. So we're going to just do the
• 33:36
  new adventures. They're going to be, it's going
• 33:38
  to be the continuation of the new adventures.
• 33:40
  But with, you know, some of it, you know, some of them were
• 33:45
  literally, I mean the first few. I mean, it's again, it's no
• 33:47
  secret that a bunch of the early ones were just books that Virgin
• 33:51
  had turned down. And a couple of them probably,
• 33:55
  you know, I mean a couple of them shouldn't have been turned
• 33:57
  down. A couple of them should have
• 33:58
  been. And so you know you have people
• 34:03
  coming up to the BBC and going, I've got this great idea for a
• 34:05
  book not not telling them that you know virgin turn them down
• 34:13
  and that was the that was the problem with the 8th Doctor
• 34:15
  books was always that they were trying to appeal to an audience
• 34:19
  that just didn't exist. Also the audience for the the
• 34:23
  Doctor Who audience when when the Virgin Adventure start, the
• 34:27
  new adventure started coming out, it was DWM Avhs every other
• 34:32
  month I think at that point still.
• 34:34
  And Virgin Adventure like in the in the alternate months like if
• 34:42
  you will and if you're really hardcore, you'd go and buy
• 34:44
  yourself a copy of DWB or something as well.
• 34:46
  You know. And like the total expenditure
• 34:49
  for a fan was like 8 lbs a month or something.
• 34:51
  You can get everything for the tenor a month And we were all
• 34:57
  kind of like you know most of that sort of generation that
• 35:00
  revenue adventures. We were some of us were at
• 35:04
  university a lot of us was you know you're still doing A levels
• 35:07
  and you know a lot of free time basically to read to you know a
• 35:11
  book a month for that spin off from a TV show.
• 35:14
  And the environment in 2000 was the Big finish.
• 35:18
  We're big finish. We're not quite got to the sort
• 35:20
  of big finishedness that they're at now, but but Big Finish,
• 35:23
  we're releasing a a CD a month easily at that point and we're
• 35:26
  clearly looking to you know do as many of them as they could.
• 35:34
  DWM is is, you know you're buying everything on DVD.
• 35:39
  VHS is refinishing. I think still at that point a
• 35:44
  lot more demand on fan budgets and a lot more demand on fan
• 35:51
  time as well. I don't.
• 35:53
  I don't think anyone can now possibly be listening to every
• 35:57
  single bit. I'll try.
• 36:00
  But it's tough, no? I have tried and I and I try.
• 36:04
  I mean the the downside of that is that you and you know, the
• 36:06
  upside of that is that you end up with, if you just buy the
• 36:09
  stuff you love, you know, the absolute stuff that looks
• 36:12
  amazing, you end up with a really good set of comics.
• 36:14
  You end up with a really good set of like, you know, like
• 36:16
  these big finishes are amazing. Every book is a every book is
• 36:20
  you're picking and choosing and finding the ones that you like.
• 36:25
  But I don't think you have that sort of unified, mad kind of fan
• 36:27
  experience where you know, the only people reading the
• 36:31
  adventures of politically making a political decision not to read
• 36:34
  the new inventions. It's much more fractured.
• 36:38
  It was already much more fractured in 2000.
• 36:39
  That was the thing, much more sort of demand on it.
• 36:44
  And there had been 125 books. It's not possible to you know
• 36:49
  catch that kind of like exciting the TV shows.
• 36:53
  You know the TV show had exactly the same thing at exactly the
• 36:56
  same point around 100 episodes of the of the you know the
• 37:01
  current version of the TV show. Everyone is like I've seen this.
• 37:04
  We've done this and what you're looking at is like episodes with
• 37:08
  like David Warner in. And it is like you're you're
• 37:14
  saying that this is a weak episode and it's like it's it's
• 37:19
  it's got an actor and it would have killed to see him not to
• 37:21
  hear him at any point. And it's written by Someone Like
• 37:24
  You know profoundly qualified to write represent Doctor Who.
• 37:28
  And it's got an amazing premise but it's never going to worry
• 37:32
  you if it's the 100th in the same way they would do the 6th
• 37:37
  you know six or something. So I was trying and I wasn't the
• 37:41
  only person trying to find ways to make books.
• 37:45
  Kind of like not just substitutes for T you know Big
• 37:51
  Finish that the Crad Red thing at this point.
• 37:54
  If you want a story in which the 6th Doctor meets the Brigadier
• 37:59
  and Big Finish are presenting you with Colin Baker and
• 38:02
  Nicholas Courtney in you can't win that.
• 38:06
  You're never going to win that with a book you're never going
• 38:07
  to go, hey my novel captures the 6th Doctor and you know you
• 38:11
  can't do it if you. And so Big Finish, at first, I
• 38:13
  think the Big Finish and we're more experimental, faster than
• 38:20
  I'm probably giving them credit for.
• 38:22
  But, but, but Big Finish had a very easy time of convincing
• 38:28
  Peter Davis and fans to buy their stuff because they have
• 38:30
  Peter Davison in that it didn't. Stop them, they they did write.
• 38:35
  A book in the Brigadier didn't know they did write a.
• 38:38
  Book so they they did try had to do.
• 38:40
  Something different and you have people like Paul Miles coming
• 38:43
  in, Lloyd Rose, Lauren smiles. Lauren smiles.
• 38:47
  I mean bless him it was had exactly the same mindset which
• 38:52
  is like these. You are caught between the big
• 38:55
  finish or whatever the trad style.
• 38:58
  We want to see the sick Doctor with the Brigadier audience and
• 39:01
  then the new adventures things of just like and they are all
• 39:06
  murdered and touched and then the six Doctor Brigadier take
• 39:10
  lots of drugs in a brothel and and and Lawrence was you know
• 39:17
  very sensibly going or you know let's try and create this sort
• 39:25
  of new mythology. Let's sort of lean into the sort
• 39:29
  of let's let's take the fact that we have this small loyal
• 39:33
  concentrated for for literal audience and just go sort of
• 39:38
  lean into that and sort of try and try and do that.
• 39:43
  But it was it was always the 8th and the 8th actor has never had
• 39:49
  the same kind of I hate the term showrunner that the the virgin
• 39:56
  books had a showrunner. Peter David Evans was the
• 39:58
  showrunner of the Virgin books until Rebecca takes over in
• 40:02
  like, it's kind of no future. And it's Rebecca's first like
• 40:07
  proper that they there's a year where they're kind of like.
• 40:11
  Both doing it but I think it's no future that that as Rebecca
• 40:15
  is the sort of like showrunner. And I think if you if you if you
• 40:18
  divide the new adventures up between pre pre no future and
• 40:24
  then no future to dying day as you end up with them, you can
• 40:27
  see the you can see the kind of Russell T Davis Moffitt split
• 40:32
  there. You can see that there are two
• 40:33
  different two different sort of ethoses by whatever in play.
• 40:42
  The the new event that the 8th Doctor books always had the
• 40:46
  problem that the the BBC was never knew knew where to put
• 40:54
  them. I think they're not cookery
• 40:56
  they're they're part of like it's red.
• 40:59
  It's the Red Dwarf magazine that's that's that's made by the
• 41:02
  cookery department, isn't it? But but the BBC, the the the
• 41:05
  Doctor Who novels end up in some very strange department of the
• 41:07
  BBC because there's nowhere to fit them.
• 41:11
  And the BBC is this very strange organization.
• 41:15
  It's beautiful, wonderful. I would genuinely defend the
• 41:17
  BBC. I think the BBC is a thing that
• 41:19
  we need needs defending. But it is weird.
• 41:23
  And it's even more weird when it's trying to be commercial
• 41:25
  because it doesn't want to be commercial.
• 41:27
  So it's trying not to be too commercial because it might
• 41:29
  spook people so, so they they want to sort of make things that
• 41:32
  people will buy but not that too many people will buy.
• 41:35
  It's just like so you end up in this all they they really half
• 41:43
  the BBC is very suspicious about making money and the other half
• 41:46
  is very suspicious about people who don't want to make money.
• 41:48
  And Doctor Who is explains a lot Since the dawn of Doctor Who
• 41:55
  that has been the the the problem with Doctor Who is the
• 41:58
  Doctor Who left to its own devices is bigger than Star Wars
• 42:02
  and will make them billions. And and I mean that was the the
• 42:07
  Douglas Adams line, wasn't it? Where where he wrote a letter to
• 42:11
  the the BBC when it was went on that hiatus when it looked like
• 42:14
  it was going on hiatus. And he said I I know someone in
• 42:20
  the BBC, the Doctor Who makes 7 times what it costs to make and
• 42:25
  and they got to let got to the back saying well that's not not
• 42:28
  how our accountants view program making at the beginning.
• 42:33
  And and and that sort of argument was like it's an
• 42:34
  argument against your accountants.
• 42:36
  It's not an argument. Why should we be doing sacking
• 42:40
  those accountants and making Doctor Who not listening to
• 42:43
  those. But that's always The thing is
• 42:45
  it's but I mean the BBC is not meant to be a profit making
• 42:48
  thing And I think at times it's kind of it's always trying to do
• 42:56
  things about that's the time laws aren't they?
• 42:57
  Oh my God. They're always trying to do
• 42:58
  things at arm's length. They're always trying to like
• 43:00
  wipe out the Daleks. But they don't want to like make
• 43:03
  it too obvious. It's like we shall go back to
• 43:05
  Rupert Murdoch's birth and prevents it from happening.
• 43:10
  You know. Lord Rothschild, this is.
• 43:12
  Yes. Doctor.
• 43:14
  This this United Wasteland is where Lord Rothschild was born.
• 43:17
  If you can prevent the creation of the Daily Mail or somehow
• 43:23
  turn the Daily Mail to be good, we we will, we will do that.
• 43:27
  And so they've always tried to sort of like, you know, destroy
• 43:31
  their commercial rivals but not make it look too obvious.
• 43:37
  Doctor has always fallen down that that hole, but it was
• 43:39
  particularly down that hole around 2000 because they they
• 43:43
  they have this extremely niche, extremely kind of strange book
• 43:48
  series that instinctively ought to be bigger than it is.
• 43:55
  They no one at the BBC. It's not to blame anyone
• 43:58
  individual. I could probably blame naked
• 44:01
  people, but I probably shouldn't.
• 44:03
  No one at the BBC was in a position to showrun Doctor Who.
• 44:08
  No one was. There's even a point where Steve
• 44:13
  Cole was like officially Doctor Czar, but he couldn't coordinate
• 44:20
  the VHS or the home video releases with the books or
• 44:25
  anything like that because when Invasion of Time hadn't come out
• 44:29
  on VHS, I don't think when when Infinite Conductors was being
• 44:33
  written. And I thought Invasion of Time
• 44:35
  is a Doctor Who story and it's got some irons in it and it's
• 44:38
  Gallifrey. And it's quite fun if we could,
• 44:41
  you know, get Invasion of Time out, same month or similar kind
• 44:46
  of things. So people are watching this and
• 44:48
  they're reading a book and it kind of sort of the simplest
• 44:52
  kind of synergy there. It was like just doesn't work
• 44:56
  that way. I can't, you know, we cannot, we
• 45:00
  can't coordinate it. We're not in position to
• 45:02
  coordinate it in a way that we could do that.
• 45:06
  Whereas I think now you know, obviously the difference now is
• 45:09
  that Russell Davis who doesn't even work for, doesn't even work
• 45:14
  for the BBC. Technically you can just turn
• 45:15
  around and go you will release the letter bound edition of the
• 45:18
  Star Beast coincide with the Funko Pop Veep range which is
• 45:24
  coming out which I've just personally approved.
• 45:28
  And it's clearly and obviously you know we're talking about, we
• 45:32
  are literally talking about completely different level of
• 45:36
  sort of you know commercial viability and all that kind of
• 45:39
  stuff. I I, I wandered into the
• 45:42
  Infinity Doctor sort of thinking I was writing a sort of a sort
• 45:48
  of discussion document for where the novels might go in the
• 45:51
  future. You know we can we can we can we
• 45:53
  can do this and it just no one was able to kind of no, no.
• 45:58
  I if anyone was able they weren't interested.
• 46:00
  They're always willing and able to kind of like connect that up
• 46:04
  in the same way. And I and I and I hit the point
• 46:06
  there where I I was working in TV.
• 46:08
  Most of the most of the people had written like 222 new
• 46:13
  adventures of more were working in DB at that point and it and
• 46:19
  it just felt like one. I sort of I kind of maxed out
• 46:23
  what I could do with a Doctor Who you hit a ceiling.
• 46:29
  I always, every, you know, every time I wrote a Doctor Who book,
• 46:32
  I'd be like, I'd be like, you know, perhaps this is the one
• 46:37
  that breaks through to a modern audience.
• 46:39
  So, you know, a major audience. Perhaps this is the one that I
• 46:43
  did have half an eye on. The Infinity Doctors being one
• 46:45
  that like the general science fiction readership might like.
• 46:50
  It was reviewed by Stephen Baxter in SFX and it was just
• 46:53
  like my C minus or whatever it was C my C Braid review from
• 46:57
  Stephen Baxter and FSX meant a huge amount to me.
• 46:59
  He was, he engaged it like it was a hard science, science
• 47:04
  fiction novel that he liked. And he quite liked it, you know,
• 47:08
  See, I quite liked it. I'll take care.
• 47:10
  That's great. But I think the reality of it
• 47:14
  is, it's the reality of a lot of bookselling is that you will
• 47:17
  never get people to walk into bits of bookstores, listen to
• 47:22
  me. Big American book shops.
• 47:24
  You'll never get, you'll never get you know people walking into
• 47:27
  different bits of book shops. You'll never get the non science
• 47:32
  fiction crowd oriented science fiction section.
• 47:34
  You you might get the science fiction people walking over to
• 47:38
  the mainstream fiction but they'll never walk over to the
• 47:40
  romance section and even in a world where a lot of the kind of
• 47:47
  fan impulses that were weird in the 90s are now like completely
• 47:52
  mainstream. I mean you paranormal.
• 47:55
  I go into to Barnes and Noble here and there is there's a
• 47:59
  section for paranormal romance and I'm like wow this is
• 48:04
  extraordinary that but there are so many that are that would have
• 48:08
  been so tiny niches of of fan interest.
• 48:14
  Only stuff in the 90s are now completely mainstream.
• 48:18
  Even in that environment you're not going to get people buying a
• 48:22
  tie in book thinking it's a science fiction book or you know
• 48:26
  you know and it works all all the different ways People
• 48:29
  people, people don't take risks with their their reading in a
• 48:37
  way they don't they don't sort of you know the genres exist for
• 48:41
  a reason in book selling. And it's that they it's a small
• 48:45
  audience as it is. Keep it captive.
• 48:46
  Keep it kind of keep people buying the latest wonderful
• 48:51
  cosmic horror novel that you love.
• 48:53
  You know if you love this one, try this one.
• 48:55
  That's the only way you can The only way you can sell books is a
• 48:58
  sort of word of mouth. If you liked this book, you will
• 49:00
  like this. And so I sort of hit the ceiling
• 49:04
  with infinite conductors. I think that's it.
• 49:07
  Can I? Can I contradict something that
• 49:09
  you said earlier, like? I say this was this was 20-30
• 49:13
  years ago. At this point I'm going to
• 49:14
  forget, oh, it's not, it's. Not a fact.
• 49:16
  What? It's kind of a fact that you
• 49:17
  said wrong, because I'd now like to talk about.
• 49:21
  What, Michael? And I probably considered to be
• 49:22
  the best Doctor Who book written.
• 49:25
  And I'm going to hand this over to Michael, because it's Father
• 49:28
  Time, the Broads together in the first place.
• 49:31
  Where do we start? With your favorite Michael?
• 49:34
  With with my. Favorite.
• 49:35
  Yeah, no, absolutely unadulterated fanboy boat.
• 49:37
  This is. I mean, yeah, you used to say
• 49:40
  this time when you're trying to do new things with it that there
• 49:42
  wasn't there there, it wasn't going back on on TV.
• 49:47
  But I think for us when we said this, when we cut this in the
• 49:49
  podcast previously and worth saying I think plenty of people
• 49:52
  who listen to it agreed that Father Time is I think one of
• 49:57
  the best all two books ever written in in our in our
• 49:59
  opinion. I think go back to something you
• 50:02
  said way back at the start of our talk of trying trying to
• 50:05
  pitch exactly what someone else wasn't wasn't doing at that
• 50:08
  point. I I I mean I guess what was
• 50:12
  where'd your IDs come from? No.
• 50:17
  No, no, no. This is this is this is.
• 50:20
  I think I can do this fairly straight.
• 50:23
  We the writers were looking for a way to I think I think Steve
• 50:30
  Kohler come up with the idea of blowing up Califre and sort of
• 50:33
  losing all of that kind of he felt the problem was accumulated
• 50:39
  continuity. You know that there were too
• 50:42
  many sort of old stories that needed to do.
• 50:46
  I think at the time that is exactly the approach a lot of
• 50:49
  different. It is a it is a move in long
• 50:54
  running franchises that you do a back to basics, scrape off all
• 50:58
  the barnacles, start again and just get back to the absolute
• 51:01
  core of where we're going. And again, the books, the doctor
• 51:03
  books here were like a couple of years ahead of things like
• 51:07
  Smallville where you you again. This is a thing that it's very
• 51:11
  difficult to imagine these days. But Smallville starts and
• 51:13
  they're absolutely forbidden from mentioning that it's
• 51:16
  Superman and Krypton and that you know and they're telling a
• 51:20
  superhero story without doing any of the kind of capes and
• 51:23
  flying and all that kind of superhero stuff.
• 51:25
  But can you can you tell a story about a very a guy with these
• 51:28
  special abilities who just wants to do good things in the world.
• 51:31
  And it's a perfectly sensible way to to to restart a a series
• 51:40
  where you can get sort of bogged down in the sort of overlapping
• 51:46
  sort of like continuities and storylines and things like that.
• 51:50
  And I think that the destruction of Gallifrey was as you know, I
• 51:54
  mean you know it's the right answer because it's what Russell
• 51:57
  Davis it's exactly what you want.
• 52:02
  It creates this whole where where we didn't quite the thing
• 52:07
  we did wrong was because the Doctor doesn't have memories of
• 52:10
  Gallifrey being destroyed. He doesn't get any sort of like
• 52:14
  character points from it. The the the the new series
• 52:19
  Doctor, which they've had to kind of you know done so well
• 52:24
  they've had to kind of resolve it.
• 52:27
  The the new series has been about a Doctor Who's grieving.
• 52:31
  The Doctor Who's lost everyone. Whose loved ones are all dead.
• 52:35
  Who's you know not anchored in the world.
• 52:39
  Who has sort of PTSD. Who's you know who's this sort
• 52:41
  of survivors get Oh my God he sounds.
• 52:44
  I mean it's amazing he smiles at all but but that gives him this
• 52:49
  whole new mysterious side where he has lost more than we can
• 52:56
  comprehend where we have. You know that is an amazing sort
• 53:03
  of like psychological. It's also the key to it is it's
• 53:06
  simple. I am the Doctor.
• 53:10
  I came from basically mantle Olympus in space.
• 53:13
  There was this massive war where all the other gods died fighting
• 53:17
  the ultimate army of devils. And the devils were destroyed.
• 53:22
  So were the gods. I'm what's left.
• 53:25
  I am it. I'm what's left.
• 53:27
  And you, you, you then hit the note that you're going to hit.
• 53:31
  And it's quite quite soon in new series as well.
• 53:33
  Which is like my secret is I made it.
• 53:38
  I did the thing. I'm the one that did the thing.
• 53:42
  I made the choice to kill, you know, to destroy heaven, to
• 53:46
  destroy to end evil. And it's like, wow, OK, I can
• 53:50
  get that. I, you know that's that's
• 53:52
  something that you know. You don't.
• 53:53
  You don't. We've all had this experience
• 53:55
  where like someone comes along to you and go.
• 53:57
  You like Doctor Who do you. Which one would you recommend to
• 54:00
  me? And what do I need to know
• 54:01
  before I start watching it? And my answer now is like
• 54:04
  Carnival of Monsters. Carnival of Monsters are all
• 54:06
  Silence of the library. If it's silence of the library.
• 54:08
  If you want the news, though, those are the that's the answer.
• 54:11
  I will take no further questions.
• 54:12
  Do I need to know anything? Do I need to know anything?
• 54:15
  The Doctor travels in his block box and he's got a human
• 54:18
  assistant. He's an alien.
• 54:20
  Just watch it. Can you give me a longer answer?
• 54:24
  And I'm like, no. Yes, A much longer answer.
• 54:33
  As anyone who's been listening to this podcast now knows, I'm
• 54:37
  very capable of giving a long answer.
• 54:39
  I'll just give them. A copy of the history.
• 54:41
  Give them a copy of. The history, There you go.
• 54:44
  This is. Not really.
• 54:45
  This is not really how. This is not really an answer so
• 54:47
  much as a a course that you will now have to take.
• 54:50
  I see there will be a lot of reading and a lot of viewing.
• 54:55
  And yes, before you start, Silence of the library.
• 54:58
  How dare you not know about these $150.00?
• 55:02
  Yeah, so scrape away the particles, doing the thing we
• 55:07
  knew that we had to the right because you destroy Gallifrey,
• 55:10
  you've got to do something. Next.
• 55:11
  People are going to go read the book where they block Gallifrey,
• 55:14
  perhaps. Hopefully.
• 55:15
  And you're going to have to come up with something in the next
• 55:18
  few books that, like, justifies doing that because you're going
• 55:21
  to annoy a lot of people from blind.
• 55:23
  You're going to have to pay it off in some way.
• 55:28
  I have the I'm right. OK, so all of us are on the
• 55:31
  mailing list at this point. We're all kind of all the
• 55:34
  writers of give or take, all the writers. 80% of the writers are
• 55:38
  on a mailing list with various levels of engagement on that
• 55:42
  mailing list, you know, and I think I'm the one that came very
• 55:49
  quickly. We had the idea that he'd be
• 55:50
  stuck on Earth in some way, and very quickly we came up the idea
• 55:55
  we can't just sort of stick him on Earth in unit and just sort
• 55:57
  of, you know, can't do some experience.
• 55:59
  Basically we've got to think away where he's not, you know,
• 56:03
  just suddenly the scientific advisor of a, you know, thing.
• 56:07
  It's the era of The X-Files. It's sort of late Latex Files
• 56:10
  era. Think John had the idea of like
• 56:14
  the Doctor would be on the run from the FBI or something like
• 56:17
  for The Fugitive, but again, not a stupid way to do Doctor Who.
• 56:20
  I mean it's the Fugitive Incredible Hulk kind of format
• 56:24
  where the Doctor would show up in a town and solve the problem
• 56:27
  but he couldn't stick around because the, you know, the feds
• 56:31
  are after him or whatever. There's always going to be some
• 56:35
  guy pursuing him. Perfectly good idea for a Doctor
• 56:39
  Who thing. But I had the problem with that,
• 56:42
  which was they just seemed so small scale.
• 56:46
  He just come out of like fighting, you know, if he's
• 56:50
  going to planets and stopping into planetary wars and he's so
• 56:54
  powerful and he's defeating you know, fighting like time
• 56:58
  travelling tricksters and you know you can't have him like all
• 57:02
  the police are after me. I mean it's just like Interpol
• 57:07
  have got a wanted sticker. So it was just like this, this.
• 57:12
  He's going to be able to get out of that really easily and on the
• 57:14
  way. And he's got an answer as well.
• 57:17
  She's like, I'm the doctor. There are these monsters.
• 57:19
  Just let me fight the monsters and the FBI will be like, yeah,
• 57:21
  sure. You want a car, You know, do you
• 57:24
  want to, you know, we'll give you a passport and a car and a
• 57:27
  budget because, you know, that sounds like something where you
• 57:29
  need to get around a bit. But it was, you know, end of the
• 57:34
  Millennium. It was 19 when it was.
• 57:36
  This is 1999. I think we were throwing this
• 57:38
  around. I said, well, how about a 20th
• 57:40
  century story where over the course of, I think I said 10
• 57:44
  books, but over the course of a year, 12 books, 10 books.
• 57:49
  He's living through the 20th century.
• 57:53
  He starts in 1900 and finishes in 2000 and sees events in the
• 57:59
  the 20th century that he's not seen so far.
• 58:02
  And there's enough of them. You can, you can, you can.
• 58:06
  He's traveling the world. In this point, we sort of make a
• 58:08
  point that we don't do like 60s, seventies, 80s Britain, because
• 58:18
  we've seen him do that. And you also have the problem
• 58:20
  with like, why is why doesn't he just go to UNIT, you know?
• 58:22
  And so he's lost his memories. But even Even so why don't UNIT
• 58:25
  identify this guy and just immediately plug the dossier
• 58:28
  down going OK, you're the 8th incarnation of have you not read
• 58:32
  The Dying Days? In the Dying days, you you
• 58:37
  helped fight the Martians for us.
• 58:38
  So here you go. But I thought, I thought that
• 58:42
  was a nice thing because the first thing that happens is the
• 58:44
  BBC like Steve Cole or no Justin immediately we can't make it.
• 58:49
  1212 is like, you know, so I think it sounds like is it six
• 58:53
  or seven. I can't remember the Earth arc.
• 58:56
  And it was it's fine, you know, you just go, OK, well that's
• 58:59
  safe, that's fine. You just move them along and you
• 59:01
  find the nice thing is it was such good, sort of such good
• 59:07
  twists on that format. I think there was no I love for
• 59:12
  one of the things I would say about the BBC books.
• 59:14
  I think that the highs of the BBC books are easily as high as
• 59:19
  the highs of the Virgin, the Pentras book.
• 59:22
  I think probably on balance, if you're reading both series every
• 59:27
  month, the sort of like numerical average is probably
• 59:30
  lower than the Virgin ones and I think I'm not going to name
• 59:36
  that. I can't even remember the names.
• 59:40
  I know a bad doctor books always going to entertain me like if it
• 59:43
  goes like completely wrong and I'm reading it, it's just like,
• 59:46
  oh, it's such quite oh, it went wrong again.
• 59:49
  You have been so, so bad. It's good.
• 59:52
  Well, a lot of the BBC books for me and again I'm not putting a
• 59:56
  number on it or any names on it. But there were things where it's
• 59:59
  just like I've seen the colony planet stories, I've seen, I've
• 1:00:04
  seen this one. I know this one.
• 1:00:06
  I know there's not, you know. It's never the terrible ones
• 1:00:12
  that are trying to do something weird that just fall off.
• 1:00:16
  It's always the ones that just play it safe.
• 1:00:18
  And I think a number too many of the the 8th Doctor books play it
• 1:00:23
  safe. But at the same time like Lloyd
• 1:00:25
  Rose never wrote one for Virgin and those are amazing.
• 1:00:29
  Kate and John. Kate and John do their absolute
• 1:00:31
  best work in the dates Doctor books and you have things like
• 1:00:35
  Blue Box, the 6th Doctor one, which is just same Hackers.
• 1:00:41
  It's a Mr. Robot story, but it's like 20 years before there's a
• 1:00:43
  robot. And it's like it's part on like
• 1:00:46
  history of computing stuff. It's like and that's the point
• 1:00:48
  where you look at it and just go like you commit the absolute act
• 1:00:53
  of heresy, which is like Kate, John write this book.
• 1:00:56
  Do not write it as a Doctor Who book.
• 1:00:58
  Just get it into the world. And it's not a Doctor Who book,
• 1:01:02
  because you will, you'll win awards and you won't get noticed
• 1:01:06
  as a missing adventure, but you will win awards.
• 1:01:09
  If this is like a regular science fiction, but this is,
• 1:01:12
  this is, you know, Neil Stephenson kind of stuff that
• 1:01:16
  you're writing here. And it's just like you need to
• 1:01:18
  get out there. Lawrence's stuff at its best.
• 1:01:24
  Lawrence Lawrence goes straight from like these sort of tall
• 1:01:28
  little Lawrence gets to his White Album stage very, very
• 1:01:33
  quickly or he's like live in Pompeii stage or whatever very,
• 1:01:36
  very quickly where he, you know, bringing out the triple album
• 1:01:40
  was before. He's sort of you know releases 3
• 1:01:43
  singles and then a triple album which is not quite the just just
• 1:01:47
  just keep it keep it keep it this.
• 1:01:50
  But Lawrence Lawrence is a fine, you know, wonderful writer and
• 1:01:55
  but Paul Mouth's stuff, it's just like it's the the the
• 1:02:02
  difference to me and this is again a difference of sort of
• 1:02:04
  arrogance I guess. I start out as a 23 year old.
• 1:02:07
  I'm just getting commissioned to write these books.
• 1:02:09
  I went down to Virgin I, they they gave me set piece Human
• 1:02:13
  nature Original sin War Child. There's another one in there,
• 1:02:19
  Toy soldiers. There's another one in toy
• 1:02:21
  soldiers. They gave me the the upcoming
• 1:02:26
  new adventures and said write these write write as well as
• 1:02:30
  this and it's like human nature and the also people the also
• 1:02:35
  people like Rick Wilson set piece War child write writers
• 1:02:40
  books like this and I'm sitting on the train going like but it's
• 1:02:46
  two hour ride up to York and by the end of the two hours I'm
• 1:02:48
  like I will do this I will yes I will write a book that's as good
• 1:02:54
  as human nature and they also people.
• 1:02:55
  I will. I will.
• 1:02:57
  You did well thank you. I I don't know but I was
• 1:03:00
  thinking cockiness. I I read like the full house
• 1:03:04
  stuff and it's like the Lloyd Rose stuff.
• 1:03:07
  Kate stuff. Lawrence's stuff at his best.
• 1:03:10
  You know Lawrence when he's sort of when he's edited and and I
• 1:03:17
  just go like I couldn't write some of this.
• 1:03:19
  This is just beyond what I'm capable of writing and it was
• 1:03:23
  quite for the for the best ones. The best ones are you could do a
• 1:03:29
  really nice like 10 book set of 10 book set of of BBC books and
• 1:03:38
  you would be there'd be four or five books you'd be like angry.
• 1:03:41
  You have to leave out, I think, and you could hand those ten
• 1:03:45
  books to people and go, no, this is what the BBC books were like.
• 1:03:48
  And you sort of like quietly ignore all all the ones about,
• 1:03:53
  well, it's taking drugs on space colonies and you know you could
• 1:04:01
  you could do tomorrow. Windows is, you know, all these
• 1:04:06
  people and there's a whole bunch of people.
• 1:04:07
  It's. I know you're always, I'm just
• 1:04:09
  in this trap now. I'm going to forget someone
• 1:04:11
  else. It's going to be terrible, but
• 1:04:15
  there's some really good ones. The highs are really high.
• 1:04:17
  I thought the time was more of an indulgence For me.
• 1:04:26
  It's I like it. I really like it.
• 1:04:30
  I think it's good. I I I have read the first couple
• 1:04:37
  of pages like events that I've been to, the stuff that's kind
• 1:04:42
  of riffing a little bit of Magician's Nephew and the stuff
• 1:04:47
  about snow and I just like that that's well written made.
• 1:04:53
  Sorry, that's really good. I mean I the only just like the
• 1:04:58
  last chapter of the time, the epilogue of the dying days.
• 1:05:01
  It's like 8 pages at the end of the dying days where I would not
• 1:05:05
  change a single word of what I wrote.
• 1:05:08
  But it's because I'm landing a series in a very precise place
• 1:05:14
  and I want to kind of like I'm doing quite a lot in that I am
• 1:05:17
  at the end of the night. I did quite a lot to establish
• 1:05:21
  the Doctor one established the stories over, get the Brigadier
• 1:05:24
  promoted to general canonical as according to Sarah Jane
• 1:05:27
  Adventures and the you know and the Doctor and Benny getting
• 1:05:36
  down to it. There's there's not a word I
• 1:05:39
  would change out of those last few pages, but that's because
• 1:05:43
  it's doing a job. It's sort of, it's a key to
• 1:05:45
  unlock and that's why I wouldn't change any of the words there.
• 1:05:48
  The beginning of Father Time is great.
• 1:05:52
  I really like read that. Sometimes I read my stuff back
• 1:05:55
  and it's always been, even when it's in draft form, whenever I
• 1:05:59
  read my stuff back, it's always like it was like written by a
• 1:06:02
  committee of two people, a group, you know, a duo.
• 1:06:07
  And one of them was like absolute genius and one of them
• 1:06:11
  is like a completely illiterate idiot and and both of them have
• 1:06:16
  got like, you know quite quite heavy contributions to the There
• 1:06:22
  are bits. There are bits of things I read
• 1:06:23
  sometimes where I'm like, I don't know why.
• 1:06:26
  I I mean that shouldn't work. I kind of guess it works but
• 1:06:30
  wow, I would not you know, well why did I put it that way and
• 1:06:35
  why didn't I do that beginning of other time?
• 1:06:37
  I'm like now I'm going to, I'll hold that up against.
• 1:06:41
  I'll hold that up against the thing.
• 1:06:42
  I think one wants to hold up and I will.
• 1:06:45
  You know I'm very, very happy with that.
• 1:06:47
  By the time it's a bit of an indulgence for me, I Infinity
• 1:06:51
  doctors have sort of proved that we weren't going to get like a
• 1:06:54
  breakout Doctor Who book. I was working on Emmerdale when
• 1:06:59
  I read Father Time when I started writing.
• 1:07:00
  By the time I was done with Emmerdale, that time I finished,
• 1:07:06
  I I was learning. I'd learned a lot about
• 1:07:17
  storytelling from Emmerdale. I had never watched a whole
• 1:07:21
  episode of Emmerdale until I was, like, approached to work
• 1:07:24
  for Emmerdale. And I knew I watched on
• 1:07:27
  television. I understood television drama
• 1:07:28
  and I watched soaps off and on, but I never actually watched a
• 1:07:31
  whole episode of Emmerdale. And it very quickly became clear
• 1:07:36
  to me that it didn't matter because what mattered was
• 1:07:38
  storytelling. But it was about characters and
• 1:07:42
  storytelling and like understanding the point we were
• 1:07:47
  trying to make and getting to it as quickly as you possibly
• 1:07:49
  could. A huge amount of education to me
• 1:07:53
  as a writer came from being a storyliner.
• 1:07:56
  I have mentioned Gareth Roberts's name a lot.
• 1:08:04
  I have laughed in sentences where Gareth Roberts has been
• 1:08:08
  mentioned. I do not like what Gareth
• 1:08:10
  Roberts has become in the last few years.
• 1:08:12
  I don't think he would care whether I liked what he became
• 1:08:16
  or not. I do not endorse Gareth Roberts
• 1:08:20
  current political opinions in any way, shape or form.
• 1:08:24
  I find them offensive. I find them personally
• 1:08:27
  offensive. He he is the guy that picked us
• 1:08:32
  for off the commissioning pile. He is the guy that hired me on
• 1:08:35
  Emmerdale and he was his. I don't use.
• 1:08:41
  I've spent my life. I've been lucky enough to spend
• 1:08:43
  my life surrounded by really smart people.
• 1:08:47
  I don't bandy the word genius and he's a genius at
• 1:08:49
  storytelling, story lining and story telling.
• 1:08:53
  He can find stories in the least likely places he can.
• 1:08:59
  He can pick out a detail that you haven't even noticed and
• 1:09:05
  turn it into something that's just like utterly compelling and
• 1:09:17
  that was just just listening to, that was was an education and
• 1:09:23
  writing, the mechanics of story of TV storytelling and just an
• 1:09:26
  education writing. But the the absolute tip that I
• 1:09:29
  would give for any writer of anything is just you start the
• 1:09:33
  scene as as late as you possibly can and you finish it as soon as
• 1:09:37
  you possibly can. So many bad things.
• 1:09:40
  So many bad pieces of drama. Are people walking in and saying
• 1:09:44
  hello and then getting into a fight And then, you know, they
• 1:09:49
  start to punch each other and then they fall back and then
• 1:09:52
  they go, well, I'm sorry, I thought, you know, you were in
• 1:09:54
  the wrong. And then they walk off and then
• 1:09:58
  the other person goes out of my head.
• 1:09:59
  It really hurts where he hit me. And no, you don't.
• 1:10:05
  You start the scene with the first punch connecting.
• 1:10:07
  You know, you start, You start the scene with like whoa, and
• 1:10:11
  you're like whoa. Those guys are fighting.
• 1:10:13
  What the hell? You know, they would.
• 1:10:15
  And and and you finished the scene with the guy like leaving
• 1:10:20
  the other guy for dead or whatever.
• 1:10:21
  You know you don't. You don't you don't need the
• 1:10:23
  warm up. You don't need the cooldown.
• 1:10:25
  Just the drama is the the whole point of storytelling is you're
• 1:10:28
  showing them the good bits. I would like to engrave this on
• 1:10:33
  a piece of you know illuminated stone and and and hold it in
• 1:10:40
  front of every single streaming drama production company right
• 1:10:45
  now. It's just like you just said
• 1:10:47
  this you know you know you're you're you just said this.
• 1:10:50
  The scene is there are there are scenes of things I've watched on
• 1:10:54
  the streaming driver. It feels like it started 8
• 1:10:56
  minutes before the actual scene starts and it's just like it's
• 1:10:59
  just like whoa. But no, I mean, absolutely.
• 1:11:01
  Yeah, no, just just technically just storytelling stuff.
• 1:11:07
  And a lot of that comes into comes into play.
• 1:11:09
  And part of the time a lot of it is about I was telling stories
• 1:11:12
  about or, you know, ordinaries, an odd word to use.
• 1:11:17
  But ordinary people in a village in in the modern day know kind
• 1:11:24
  of like spaceships and explosions and things like that.
• 1:11:26
  I had to figure out how to tell interesting stories about
• 1:11:29
  characters, and I did that on Emmerdale, and I brought what
• 1:11:35
  I'd learned to to Father Time and tried to kind of tell her.
• 1:11:43
  I mean, trying to do lots of other things, but trying to tell
• 1:11:45
  a sort of soapy story or the things I had learned from
• 1:11:47
  storytelling in Father Time. And it's kind of
• 1:11:55
  autobiographical. It's kind of autobiographical.
• 1:11:59
  I grew up. I moved when I was 5 or 6 to a
• 1:12:04
  town in Derbyshire that's very like Great Frith, the town in in
• 1:12:11
  Father Time. And I moved moved again when
• 1:12:16
  it's about 12 or 13. So we're a bit posher and that's
• 1:12:21
  basically what Miranda does. I am the the limits of how much
• 1:12:26
  of it is My Autobiography is hit the limit fairly quickly after
• 1:12:30
  that but but so a lot of it is my again, it's the safety.
• 1:12:37
  It is nostalgia thing. In 2000, it was way too soon.
• 1:12:39
  Greatest nostalgia. And that was kind of a joke
• 1:12:42
  because I was doing this. I was doing Stranger Things.
• 1:12:43
  But as a jerk, Yeah, we were saying because it was because it
• 1:12:48
  was like, it was like 10 minutes ago.
• 1:12:50
  And I was sort of going like, oh, they had space shuttles back
• 1:12:52
  then and things like that, Count coins.
• 1:12:57
  And that was kind of the joke. And of course now it's Oh my
• 1:13:00
  godfather. Time is like set.
• 1:13:04
  I'm doing that thing of like it's it's it's longer ago now
• 1:13:08
  than it was set then. It's like, it's, it's, it's.
• 1:13:10
  It's so it's genuine like 8 is nostalgia, but you know, but
• 1:13:14
  nostalgia. Nostalgia is the easiest cycle
• 1:13:16
  in the world to work out. You can figure out that if you
• 1:13:18
  are, if there's a sort of 50s revival in the 80s and there's a
• 1:13:24
  there's a 60s revival in the 90s, then you're going to have a
• 1:13:27
  you know the cycle is going to hit.
• 1:13:31
  You're going to hit this sort of thing.
• 1:13:32
  So so I did the sort of like 1980s.
• 1:13:35
  I just did the nostalgia thing but I just as a joke did it with
• 1:13:39
  the Transformers and stuff that is extraordinarily nostalgic for
• 1:13:46
  people now but would have been like like quite got around to
• 1:13:49
  watching them. But no.
• 1:13:54
  I'm glad to like I I I'm glad to like I it's done.
• 1:14:00
  As you know you do these things as a partly for your own
• 1:14:04
  amusement. But it's all this is.
• 1:14:06
  The beautiful thing about The thing is we can be here.
• 1:14:09
  I don't even want to know what is it, four years.
• 1:14:11
  I don't even people read. People reread them or they read
• 1:14:17
  them again or they start reading them or they, you know, they
• 1:14:20
  they they're into the new show and they pick it up.
• 1:14:24
  And I always like for the time I again, it's doing stuff that it
• 1:14:34
  has a doctrine, a fairly stable long term relationship.
• 1:14:39
  And again I wanted to leave that a little bit denial.
• 1:14:41
  But it's not that deniable. I mean it's it's, it's, it's
• 1:14:44
  that. And then I just like the the
• 1:14:48
  thing for me is that we got this 20th century.
• 1:14:51
  The doctor's going to be stuck in a place for 100 years.
• 1:14:54
  I thought, well, he's going to settle down, isn't he?
• 1:14:56
  He's going to raise kids and he's going to do things like
• 1:14:58
  that. We're either showrunner where I
• 1:15:01
  sort of like, I shouldn't never make me sure run of anything.
• 1:15:05
  I I I actually put me in charge of Big Finish.
• 1:15:08
  I will produce there. There'll be like 3 amazing CD
• 1:15:13
  releases over the course of the next eight years and Big Finish
• 1:15:18
  will be bankrupt. And, you know, people will be
• 1:15:20
  screaming like, do you not understand the business model?
• 1:15:22
  And I'd be like I didn't spend all our money on that grandma or
• 1:15:27
  something that didn't pan out and they'd be like oh right.
• 1:15:29
  OK no, I mean I would have liked I think the earth a bit of
• 1:15:35
  Morris interconnected thing where where where we did that.
• 1:15:40
  But it was fine as it was. It worked.
• 1:15:42
  It works very nicely as as separate books and and you'd
• 1:15:46
  lose things like the Turing test because you'd go well you know
• 1:15:49
  he's raising his you know his Miranda was born in 1940s so
• 1:15:54
  she'd be like in her teen. So you want to do a thing about
• 1:15:56
  a teenager and you know, I didn't be like I I, but I had
• 1:15:59
  the opportunity I could tell a Doctor Who story over 10 years,
• 1:16:02
  which you don't. Again, they've done in the new
• 1:16:04
  TV show, but they. You couldn't really do before
• 1:16:09
  that. Yeah.
• 1:16:10
  So you know if you look at some of these stories they pretty
• 1:16:13
  much real time. The Doctor is only on this
• 1:16:16
  planet for, you know, 100 minutes And and so it's nice to
• 1:16:22
  nice to have 10 years you can do in about 10 years and it's just
• 1:16:25
  like you want to do that one of these ten years going to be.
• 1:16:27
  And it's just like, well, it's about raising a teenager.
• 1:16:30
  I am absolutely no experience really raising a teenager, but I
• 1:16:33
  was a teenager, so can I have the 1980s one?
• 1:16:38
  And she can, you know? And I got it all wrong with.
• 1:16:42
  That's the hilarious thing about it.
• 1:16:44
  It's just like she she did. The one that everyone picking up
• 1:16:46
  on was there's a there's a reference to guns and Roses
• 1:16:48
  didn't like what what? And it's like Guns and Roses
• 1:16:51
  were 19-8 years and it's like the sun rule like 1993 or
• 1:16:55
  something. We didn't notice.
• 1:17:01
  That's the thing. That's the thing that's really,
• 1:17:03
  really strange is you think they did have that back then.
• 1:17:05
  It's like it was like five years later.
• 1:17:08
  It's just so but so it's but that's The thing is it's like
• 1:17:12
  it's nostalgia thing. It's a sort of collage of things
• 1:17:15
  that you kind of remember. But there being in the 1980s,
• 1:17:18
  it's not meant to be like sort of like super forensic about it,
• 1:17:23
  but it's a nice opportunity you get to kind of and the thing
• 1:17:25
  growing up in the ages is that the ages felt like 3 decades as
• 1:17:28
  well. It felt like three kind of three
• 1:17:29
  phases. You have this sort of very
• 1:17:32
  weird, kind of like late 70s, kind of like very sort of, I
• 1:17:37
  guess it's all, I don't know, it's difficult to explain, but
• 1:17:40
  you do have, there's definitely a point in the 80s where we are
• 1:17:43
  all like, no, absolutely not middle class white people, like
• 1:17:49
  grammar school educated white people whose dads were managers
• 1:17:54
  in the 80s in like around 198697.
• 1:17:57
  The world suddenly does look kind of like full of designer
• 1:18:01
  clothes and colorfulness and computers and, you know, and
• 1:18:10
  that's the thing, that was the thing I was quite keen to do.
• 1:18:14
  You think about what the Doctor would be doing on his own in the
• 1:18:17
  1980s. And like your first, the first
• 1:18:20
  image that came to me was like, he'd be with Greenpeace.
• 1:18:23
  He'd be like sinking a whaling ship, like on his own, sinking a
• 1:18:28
  whaling ship to prevent whaling in the middle of the Atlantic,
• 1:18:31
  you know, And the Icelandic people would be like, and I was
• 1:18:36
  like, it's that it's that third or fourth iteration thing.
• 1:18:38
  And I thought, what aren't you going to expect the doctor to
• 1:18:42
  do? And so, like the beginning of
• 1:18:44
  the second part of Father Time, the Doctor walks in and he's in
• 1:18:47
  an Armani front coat and he's a business consultant.
• 1:18:52
  And he's like he And it's like, no, he's got to be.
• 1:18:56
  He he has got to like embrace the kind of like crazy
• 1:19:03
  problematic ideal of what the 80s were.
• 1:19:08
  He's got to kind of drink the kool-aid or whatever.
• 1:19:10
  He can't he can't build. He doesn't.
• 1:19:12
  But you know he's he's got to be the the trick is to make him
• 1:19:17
  part of the in settling down he goes native and in going native
• 1:19:22
  he is living in a big house telling people how to like
• 1:19:27
  financially invest for you know you know fixing fixing companies
• 1:19:32
  like he sort of fixes like you know the macro Terra I defeated
• 1:19:40
  the giant crabs and now you can go off and be prosperous.
• 1:19:43
  You know it's that kind of and so I wanted to have that kind.
• 1:19:51
  I didn't want it to be. The other thing is it's like
• 1:19:56
  teenage characters. We don't know.
• 1:20:01
  So again position of privilege and but you're not aware of like
• 1:20:06
  massive socio economic forces. Even if you're like a brainy 15
• 1:20:12
  year old, you're not. You don't know what it was like
• 1:20:14
  30 years ago. You don't know what it's like 50
• 1:20:15
  years ago. You don't.
• 1:20:17
  You don't understand the sort of long term developments and and
• 1:20:20
  things like that. Even if you've read a book about
• 1:20:22
  it, you don't know. And I mean, I did by the, you
• 1:20:32
  know, by the I hope in Father Time.
• 1:20:37
  I hope in Father Time. You see that there are lots of
• 1:20:39
  different perspectives on what the 1980s were and that some of
• 1:20:44
  them were good and crazy and promising and future facing.
• 1:20:47
  And some of them were incredibly destructive and some of them
• 1:20:50
  were both and some of them were kind of like dreary and limiting
• 1:20:55
  and kind of there was a, you know, I tried
• 1:21:12
  to get across a sort of richness to it so that it's sort of both
• 1:21:14
  good and bad and try to sort of do this nostalgia thing but have
• 1:21:21
  a sort of like sting underneath it as well.
• 1:21:24
  So you can sort of see that a lot of this nostalgia is not
• 1:21:26
  going to certainly pan out the way you think it's going to or
• 1:21:32
  be as positive. I mean even like by by by the
• 1:21:35
  time I was writing it even like having a space shuttle in me,
• 1:21:37
  you realize that I mean I, I, I I remember like when I was 10 or
• 1:21:42
  11 on the first space shuttle launches and it's, it's it's
• 1:21:45
  like we were going to be like buses.
• 1:21:46
  We were going to like take buses to the you know, space stations
• 1:21:49
  and then the space stations are going to suffer us to the moon.
• 1:21:52
  And it was, but it was going to be the space shuttle was going
• 1:21:55
  to be like this absolute routine thing.
• 1:21:59
  They're going to be shuttle launches every day.
• 1:22:00
  We're going to be doing this thing.
• 1:22:02
  And it very quickly wasn't that. But that's a future that's kind
• 1:22:08
  of like plausible in 1981, you know, especially if you're a 10
• 1:22:13
  year old kid in 1981, it's very plausible.
• 1:22:16
  And it's the future that Doctor Who is kind of like constantly
• 1:22:19
  promising us as well. It's like there will be space
• 1:22:23
  station Lumia 2000 and you know the main problem with space
• 1:22:27
  travelers will get a bit bored of it.