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

• 0:05
  Welcome back to the Hamster Book Club.
• 0:07
  My name is Joe Ford and I am here today with a guest host,
• 0:12
  Mr. Michael Mills. Hello, Michael.
• 0:14
  Hello, Joe. Michael, why are we here today?
• 0:18
  We're here because we've got a a much more special actual guest
• 0:22
  on the podcast. Today.
• 0:23
  We have last year we discussed book Father Time by Lance
• 0:28
  Parking, which has a terrific response from listeners.
• 0:32
  And so we've only got Mr. Lance Parking himself here.
• 0:36
  Hello, Lance. Hello.
• 0:38
  Hi there. How are we doing?
• 0:40
  Well, how are you doing this evening?
• 0:42
  I'm OK, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I live in Ohio now.
• 0:45
  So we're in the middle of a kind of snowstorm here.
• 0:48
  So it's it's it's it's cold and blowy.
• 0:50
  But I'm, I'm surviving. So.
• 0:52
  Up by mad coincidence. We've just had snow here as
• 0:55
  well, so it's freezing at both ends.
• 1:01
  So, Lars, we're going to make no secret of the fact that we're
• 1:03
  massive fans. We'll get that out of the way at
• 1:05
  the beginning. We absolutely love your books
• 1:08
  and we have a number of questions prepared for you
• 1:10
  today. Michael, would you like to jump
• 1:14
  in and start talking about the first book?
• 1:18
  Yeah, well, the first book we're going to talk about, fittingly,
• 1:20
  your first Doctor Who book, Just War.
• 1:22
  But before we we get stuck with that, I'm going to, I'm going to
• 1:24
  Nick Joe's excellent Open a question, which is, what's your
• 1:28
  Doctor Who story? I lifelong Doctor Who fan before
• 1:36
  I before my first memory. I think my first memory of
• 1:38
  Doctor Who is the pterodactyl invasion of dinosaurs.
• 1:42
  I'd have been three or something and I and I remember pretty much
• 1:47
  every every episode since primitive Mars.
• 1:51
  Lifelong ever since I saw The Cave monsters in a market stall.
• 1:56
  Doctor Who book fan as well. So I'm a I'm a I'm 52 now so
• 2:03
  it's it's it's a a lifelong commitment at this point.
• 2:09
  It's it's the operating system of my brain as I think it is for
• 2:13
  for quite a lot of Doctor Who fans out every every actor that
• 2:16
  comes on TV has either been in Doctor Who or hasn't been in
• 2:19
  Doctor Who and you know every everything is sort of judged by
• 2:23
  those Doctor Who E standards And I'm never it's nice to see now
• 2:32
  the TV show in a position where that kind of faith I guess is
• 2:39
  just the fact that it is the biggest show in the world and it
• 2:43
  does it does feel like that's the right answer and I think
• 2:45
  that's the that's that's my daughter's story is the world is
• 2:49
  finally aligned with the truth that Doctor Who is the the best
• 2:53
  thing in it so. Took a long time for us to get
• 2:55
  here, didn't it? Yeah, yeah, I I I've used this
• 3:03
  phrase a couple of times about my my career.
• 3:05
  But but I think Doctor Who fans reality kind of called our
• 3:10
  bluff. They were like they were like
• 3:14
  you think Doctor Who is the greatest thing ever.
• 3:15
  OK we're going to we're going to try and make that happen and we
• 3:20
  were like I think I think I was a little bit caught out that
• 3:23
  that the Echoston series worked so well and I knew I'd like it
• 3:29
  and and I was very very prepared to pass on the torch as well.
• 3:34
  I I I remember watching Rose and thinking this is amazing.
• 3:39
  It's not quite for me. It's it's for new it's for the
• 3:43
  next generations of me or whatever and good luck to know
• 3:47
  on that And then then the end of end of the world with them there
• 3:51
  was a war and we lost and I was just like it's my Doctor Who
• 3:58
  it's been you know and it's it's it's amazing to me that they
• 4:02
  that amazing to me that they were able to bring it back for a
• 4:09
  family on a Saturday night for a kind of audience that was not
• 4:14
  used to watching science fiction at that point.
• 4:16
  And and and make it a show that you would watch that normal
• 4:22
  people would watch instead of Ant and Dec or whatever on the
• 4:25
  other side. And that's the amazing thing
• 4:29
  that was that. That was.
• 4:34
  That's the amazing achievement to me.
• 4:35
  I mean, I I, I I was writing Doctor Who books at a point
• 4:39
  where there were 10s of thousands of Doctor Who fans
• 4:43
  reading them. We were all a fairly homogeneous
• 4:49
  bunch, I think it's fair to say. And and it was kind of easy.
• 4:58
  I was right. I was writing books by by people
• 5:01
  like me, for people like me, you know, with the same references I
• 5:05
  could throw quite a mass reference in and no one would
• 5:08
  need a footnote or anything like that.
• 5:11
  And the absolute challenge of bringing that kind of intense
• 5:16
  kind of furnished love for something to, you know, 10s of
• 5:22
  millions of people around the world.
• 5:24
  But you know, a Top Ten TV show is an extraordinary achievement
• 5:28
  and it's just something that is very, very gratifying.
• 5:32
  Here we are now, 20 years later, and it's still top tenning, You
• 5:36
  know, astonishing. Can we can we rewind back then?
• 5:40
  So the 90s, Michael? Feel like you should have some
• 5:44
  Spice Girls megamix going? Back.
• 5:47
  As we do this. I could sing.
• 5:50
  Well, maybe it's better. We don't in that case.
• 5:53
  So I guess in terms of you go all the way up to your first
• 5:56
  book with Just War, how did that that Life Will look at vanishes?
• 6:00
  How did that turn into your first Commission?
• 6:06
  I was extraordinarily lucky and I didn't realize it at the time.
• 6:10
  I just thought publishing worked in the way that it worked for me
• 6:12
  this one time, and I'm probably 1 of 100 people.
• 6:18
  They were publishing a Doctor Who book a month at that point.
• 6:21
  They're about to go to The Missing Adventures and make it 2
• 6:23
  bucks a month. And I realized that there were,
• 6:27
  you know, 12 slots for these two books.
• 6:29
  I was a fan. I was reading them, I was
• 6:30
  enjoying them. I was at, I was at university at
• 6:35
  the time. I thought I would send away for
• 6:39
  the the writer's guide. They sent you a if you send them
• 6:43
  a stamp and an envelope, they would send you back.
• 6:46
  And it's like an 8 page stapled, photocopied set of instructions
• 6:50
  basically. And they were welcoming new
• 6:57
  writers and particularly sort of Doctor Who found writers thing
• 7:01
  about that, but it was an opportunity for anyone.
• 7:05
  This is a point around a kick myself.
• 7:06
  So anyone watching, listening, listen, you know, please just
• 7:11
  give me a virtual kick. Here I was 23 years old and I
• 7:15
  wasn't even the youngest. That's the terrifying thing.
• 7:19
  Gareth Roberts was 23. Kate woman, I think was like
• 7:24
  2425. She wasn't much older when she
• 7:26
  got her first. I think the winner was Daniel
• 7:28
  Omani. I think Daniel Omani was 19.
• 7:32
  I know when I look at like a 19 year old now, a 23 year old now,
• 7:35
  and it's just like, why did the kids running around anyway?
• 7:39
  But we all felt terribly grown up.
• 7:41
  I don't think we were, you know, felt like that.
• 7:42
  But Rebecca Levina was my editor.
• 7:47
  She wasn't 30 when she was editing my book.
• 7:51
  It was. It was young enthusiastic Doctor
• 7:57
  Who fans who I think the operative word here, I think
• 8:00
  Peter Darvell Evans hit on something which was that we were
• 8:02
  cheap. I think hiring a 23 year old
• 8:08
  Doctor Who was was probably the most cost effective way of
• 8:13
  getting 85,000 words out of something.
• 8:15
  I think that was the deep dark secret of the of the new
• 8:19
  adventures was that you know I think I got £1000 from for I
• 8:22
  mean so I mean you end up a little bit more at the end but I
• 8:26
  think I got 1000 lbs for for just War and I and I, you know
• 8:31
  that's not a huge amount of money for for you know what
• 8:33
  workout six months work or whatever it is.
• 8:37
  Yeah, no, I I was reading them and enjoying them and I thought,
• 8:39
  I'll I'll try. I not this is the bit kicked
• 8:43
  again, I've not written a huge amount of fiction before.
• 8:46
  I wasn't into sort of the fan fiction scene that was around
• 8:50
  then. But what I did is I thought,
• 8:53
  well, I've got a couple of ideas for Doctor Who stories and I'll
• 8:56
  try and work one of them up, see if I can get it to work.
• 9:02
  They wanted 33 sample chapters, so they were about 10,000 words
• 9:05
  or something like that. Eight, eight, 10,000 words about
• 9:07
  that and a synopsis for the rest of the book.
• 9:12
  And very quickly a hit on the thing that I think dominated how
• 9:17
  I always looked at the Doctor Who books, which was if there's
• 9:21
  twelve of them a year, then there's opportunity to write.
• 9:24
  But there's also lots of people coming up with ideas and they're
• 9:29
  all going to come up with the same ideas if you're not
• 9:30
  careful. We all, all of us left to our
• 9:33
  own devices sort of come up with a something where you know can
• 9:36
  be very careful because people have done these stories.
• 9:38
  But every everyone sooner or later coming up with a Doctor
• 9:42
  Who story will come up with the idea of Cybermen in the
• 9:44
  hospital. You know, they're all Ice
• 9:46
  Warrior, a War of the worlds. But it's it's Ice Warriors and
• 9:56
  and even if you do that, even if you come up with a basic idea,
• 9:59
  if you come up with, you know you can't do these days, you
• 10:03
  can't do this with Doctor. You cannot come up with an idea
• 10:05
  of someone of a Doctor Who story that someone hasn't done.
• 10:08
  So, you know this was the early night because you know, people
• 10:10
  were, I don't think it's quite The X-Files actually, but people
• 10:12
  were looking at like Roswell and flying sauce or something like
• 10:15
  that. And I was just trying to think,
• 10:18
  what hasn't been done. The range is nice, is big and
• 10:23
  successful, and they're putting out 12 books a month.
• 10:25
  They can afford to make a mistake.
• 10:26
  You know, they if they put out a book by me and it's a huge
• 10:30
  mistake. But they did that at least at
• 10:31
  least you know that I'm not going to kill Doctor Who.
• 10:34
  I think, you know, I think with all of these franchises now, I
• 10:37
  mean, there'd be no no bad Marvel movie or no bad Sherlock
• 10:40
  Holmes story or whatever is going to kill Marvel or Sherlock
• 10:43
  Holmes. I mean I thought, I thought
• 10:44
  Doctor Who's probably going to whatever whatever I do I'm not
• 10:46
  going to be able to like and Doctor Who forever.
• 10:50
  So I start, I started thinking about ideas for stories that
• 10:55
  people, other people might not be coming up with.
• 10:57
  And also then sort of like twisting it a little bit because
• 11:00
  I don't think you can even come up with like what?
• 11:02
  It's got to be A twist on that original idea.
• 11:05
  And I think with Doctor Who fans, they're so knowledgeable
• 11:09
  and perceptive and and able to sort of join things up that that
• 11:18
  you can't even come up with your second idea.
• 11:20
  It's got to be like a third or fourth version of that idea.
• 11:22
  So. So if you go, you know, Doctor
• 11:25
  Who meets The X-Files, every Doctor Who fan can form quite
• 11:29
  quickly what that might look like.
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  And I think the job of a a Doctor Who writer is to come up
• 11:35
  with, you know, three or four iterations further down the
• 11:39
  line, subvert the thing that you think you're going to watch.
• 11:43
  And and and just what I had a couple of ideas and and because
• 11:53
  it was a treadmill, I ended up making them.
• 11:56
  But just what started out as as the first thing I thought what
• 12:02
  what am I doing? And the most obvious thing from
• 12:05
  a Doctor Who found point of view that they weren't doing was that
• 12:07
  was an historical story with no science fiction elements.
• 12:13
  You know Hartnell, historical as we call.
• 12:14
  You know, no, no, no, no science fiction elements beyond you know
• 12:19
  the fact there's time travellers and you know an alien wandering
• 12:22
  around in the story and then anything what what what what
• 12:28
  point of history can you do? And I had, I think the
• 12:31
  historical ones any Gunpowder plot and I have this sort of
• 12:39
  quite brutal idea of like almost like Reservoir Dogs that after
• 12:46
  the conspiracy after the Gunpowder plot all of the
• 12:49
  conspirators meet up at a this is in real history.
• 12:51
  All of the conspirators meet up in the country has and they're
• 12:55
  all they all know basically that they're in you know serious
• 12:58
  trouble. The Guy Fawkes has been caught
• 13:00
  and all of that kind of thing. And it's basically it's very
• 13:04
  tense kind of like moment. And I thought this might be a
• 13:10
  really good idea for a Doctor Who story.
• 13:11
  It's sort of like, you know it's kind of that Reservoir dog
• 13:15
  setting. Everyone wants to know if
• 13:16
  they've been set up. Everyone wants to know they they
• 13:18
  get away. Who's got the diamonds?
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  Whatever, you know. And and and I thought it'd be
• 13:22
  nice natural kind of like small scale as well.
• 13:24
  I think. I think the other impulse to
• 13:27
  Doctor Who writers, the first one, is to do like, you know,
• 13:29
  the universe is exploding and Cthulhu is coming in and the
• 13:33
  Dialects and Cybermen are going to, you know, oh God, I've just
• 13:36
  decided flux on it, yeah. You've read that one of you.
• 13:40
  I just described flux, your first instinct just to make
• 13:42
  flux. But again, what will be
• 13:45
  different would be what will be different if it would be a
• 13:50
  smaller scale 1A character driven thing where you're
• 13:52
  looking at the Doctor and you're looking at perhaps not the logic
• 13:57
  of time travel because I think that falls apart quite quickly.
• 13:59
  And if you start looking at what the Doctor can and can't do,
• 14:04
  that falls apart quite quickly. But but you do look at a kind of
• 14:06
  moral. One of the one of the points of
• 14:10
  doing a time travel story is you look at the sort of the moral of
• 14:12
  it if you you know what's going to happen, who do you tell?
• 14:15
  You know who do you want? Who do you help along?
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  You know you know how can you change things of the better or
• 14:24
  ensure things you know work out the way they're meant.
• 14:31
  I couldn't quite get the gunpowder thing to work.
• 14:34
  It just didn't quite have a enough of AI could.
• 14:38
  I could rationalize this as Doctor Who story rather than the
• 14:41
  stage play. I went off and wrote about the
• 14:43
  gunpowder block, you know, and but I couldn't get it to work
• 14:49
  because it didn't quite feel I wanted it to be a small scale.
• 14:54
  Sorry. And it just felt a little bit
• 14:55
  too small. It just felt a little bit like
• 14:57
  it was didn't quite feel like a Doctor Who story and the other
• 15:02
  idea I had for historical period was was the Second World War and
• 15:06
  that's very quickly hit the other problem which is a huge
• 15:09
  you know, it's a World War, so whereabouts in the world and I'd
• 15:12
  always been interested in the occupation of the Channel
• 15:17
  Islands which is the only part of the care for British Isles.
• 15:21
  It's not the United Kingdom, British Isles that are occupied
• 15:27
  by Germany and and and the extraordinary thing about that
• 15:34
  to me was was that it life went on because they had no strategic
• 15:39
  purpose. The challenge had no strategic
• 15:42
  purpose. They weren't a launching pad
• 15:43
  that were sort of halfway to to the mainland or anything like
• 15:47
  that. They wouldn't have been a
• 15:49
  staging post for the for the Allied forces coming in, you
• 15:53
  know to liberate France or whatever.
• 15:55
  So Churchill sends a message to the channel and which is just
• 15:58
  sort of, you know, just stay put.
• 16:02
  We can't, we can't liberate you. We're not going to carpet bomb
• 16:06
  you or whatever. You know, you just you'll be
• 16:08
  fine. You just you'll need to wait it
• 16:10
  out. And we don't think we can.
• 16:11
  We can prioritize liberating. You see, you have this, this
• 16:14
  very, sort of very pleasant middle class part of Britain
• 16:20
  that's occupied by the Nazis for four years, whatever it is.
• 16:25
  And it's just like this is Doctor Who story.
• 16:27
  The monsters come in and they occupy and and the post office
• 16:31
  still opens and the milk is still delivered and all that.
• 16:34
  And I thought this is the, this is the Doctor Who story, this
• 16:37
  is, this is, this is it, except it's real people.
• 16:40
  So you know, you don't get the the excuse that they are
• 16:47
  monsters, that they are sort of driven by, you know, programming
• 16:49
  or whatever. And I just thought that was a
• 16:52
  really interesting Doctor Who story to be had.
• 16:55
  I needed something more. I needed something a little bit
• 16:59
  science fiction in there. So there's this stealth bomber
• 17:04
  being developed basically. And and that was the kind of
• 17:08
  science fiction plan I think I love.
• 17:11
  I like the book a lot, did a lot of things for me, changed my
• 17:14
  life. I think if I was to have another
• 17:18
  go at it, I think the stealth bomber stuff at the end isn't
• 17:23
  quite developed enough. It's not quite clear what's what
• 17:26
  the what the sort of senior Nazis are planning to do with
• 17:31
  it. One of them is one of those kind
• 17:33
  of defect using the stealth bomber basically.
• 17:36
  And but the, the immediate, you know, Doctor Who science fiction
• 17:42
  threat is, Oh no, the Nazis are going to have a stealth bomber.
• 17:45
  The Doctor and his companions are going to have to stop this.
• 17:49
  And you have the advantage, I think, that that we know that
• 17:53
  didn't happen in real life. All the technology that's there
• 17:59
  existed at the time. And the only the thing that
• 18:05
  really sort of latched on for me was was all technology was
• 18:08
  there. The Nazis could have built a
• 18:10
  stealth bomber, but they didn't because they didn't know about
• 18:13
  the radar until quite late. So you don't need to build a
• 18:16
  plane that invades radar until you know that there's radar,
• 18:21
  until you know that that's what the Allies are doing.
• 18:24
  And from there, you've got a couple of years and you can
• 18:26
  figure out that if you put the right coating on the planes and
• 18:28
  you you smooth off the hard angles of the planes, the radar
• 18:33
  sort of bounces off it basically.
• 18:38
  But they wouldn't have thought to do it because they didn't.
• 18:39
  It's a countermeasure for something that they didn't know
• 18:42
  was there. And so I thought, well, well,
• 18:44
  how would the Nazis have got like advanced where they were
• 18:46
  going to build radar? And it's like I've got a time
• 18:47
  traveler in my story. The doctor accidentally, whoops,
• 18:53
  told me he doesn't, he doesn't even do it.
• 18:56
  He doesn't even do it himself directly.
• 18:57
  He's just sort of, he's this thing.
• 18:59
  He doesn't go to the Nazis in like 1935 or whatever and say
• 19:03
  you'll need to build a stealth bomb.
• 19:04
  He just accidentally says something that sparks something
• 19:06
  off in the mind of a German scientist.
• 19:09
  But that means that the doctors kind of problem to solve as well
• 19:13
  that that that the doctor is the doctor's made a mess basically
• 19:18
  needs to clean it up and very very very sort of quickly I got
• 19:25
  that idea and and just formally in terms of the actual structure
• 19:31
  of the story I loved Warhead. I loved the undercut notebook
• 19:34
  and I love the fact you start with Ace already deep in the
• 19:41
  story undercover and the doctors the sort of presence of the in
• 19:47
  the in the background at 1st and I I did what you technically
• 19:54
  called ripped that off for just war.
• 19:56
  I just I just the first the first bit of the book is just I
• 20:00
  mean it was originally Ace. It was originally Ace when I was
• 20:04
  submitting 8 was still in them. Yeah Benny was a companion by
• 20:11
  the time I had submitted. So Benny was doing all the stuff
• 20:15
  that Roz does in London, and Ace was the one that was in disguise
• 20:23
  and that was. And here again, I'm very
• 20:26
  kickable. I sent it in and I did wait a
• 20:29
  year. It was a year and I got a phone
• 20:33
  call from Virgin and it was Rec Levine and she said, oh, we love
• 20:41
  just four and we've got a problem is that we're writing
• 20:45
  Ace out of books. And I was like oh, this whole
• 20:48
  thing is meant to be like a character thing for AIDS.
• 20:51
  I thought the whole the whole idea is it's kind of building on
• 20:54
  aces. You know the age you see in the
• 20:56
  TV show. Who has she has Muslim friends.
• 21:04
  She has. She's clearly from a sort of
• 21:07
  clearly on the against the the right wing in the 1980s.
• 21:15
  So here's her chance to sort of go and find actual analysis.
• 21:21
  And I thought, Oh no, I read a book that's a character piece of
• 21:25
  Ace. And they're going to turn it
• 21:26
  down because I wrote this book about Ace and they're not got
• 21:28
  Ace anymore. And Rex said, oh, just make it
• 21:31
  Benny. And I was like I was I was so
• 21:33
  affronted. I was just sort of like do not
• 21:37
  understand this was a cheap character piece on Ace.
• 21:40
  She goes, well yeah, but you don't even know it's Ace in the
• 21:43
  sample chapter. So you it's she's she's
• 21:46
  undercover. So just make it beneath.
• 21:47
  Just make make the reveal that it's beneath do.
• 21:50
  You know, I'm. I never could have told because.
• 21:52
  To me, and I think the thing for this was it was just incredibly
• 21:56
  useful. This is an incredibly useful
• 21:59
  formative experience for me because you do find as a writer,
• 22:04
  these things happen all the time.
• 22:05
  You know, you're writing a book, you know you're writing a book
• 22:08
  and suddenly it's a subplot in the in an Avengers movie or you
• 22:12
  know, it happens in real life or events or overtaken by by real
• 22:16
  life. I mean, you know, you you've got
• 22:20
  to have that sort of flexibility.
• 22:21
  You've got to have the adaptability.
• 22:22
  When I was working on my my TV site a few years later.
• 22:25
  I mean actors. Actors get ill Actors leave
• 22:28
  actors, you know unavailable. They've, you know, you have to
• 22:32
  suddenly be able to write a story.
• 22:36
  You have to figure out what the story is actually what the sort
• 22:39
  of deep story I'm trying to say is.
• 22:42
  And I realized I could tell all the same.
• 22:47
  Ace was there as a as a viewpoint to this Nazi
• 22:54
  occupation, and Beneath could do that just as well.
• 22:56
  And and to be honest with you, it made a little bit more sense
• 22:59
  because I think Ace would have been a lot angrier, a lot more
• 23:04
  able to express her anger and blow things up.
• 23:06
  And she's way more impulsive. So having someone having someone
• 23:17
  like Benny who is more thoughtful and more inclined to
• 23:22
  observe and take a step back and look at it in a kind of like
• 23:26
  slightly more scholarly way, it hit the themes a little bit
• 23:32
  better. Actually.
• 23:33
  In the end she she isn't going to be able to change history.
• 23:35
  She's not going to love a few Nitro 9 cans around and solve
• 23:39
  anything, and Benny perhaps understands that better than me.
• 23:42
  So she's probably a better vehicle for it.
• 23:44
  And Ros is a much better vehicle for what I was trying to do in
• 23:47
  the in the London stuff than Benny would have been.
• 23:49
  So no, it all worked out very nicely.
• 23:52
  But it made me realize very early on that storytelling is a
• 23:55
  lot about you have to be able to justify your choices.
• 24:01
  You have to be able to. You can come up with a stupid
• 24:05
  idea here, but you've got to explain why it's, you know, the
• 24:07
  best stupid idea you've got. You know you can't.
• 24:09
  You can't. If you can justify it, if you
• 24:14
  can explain why you're doing it that way and not another way and
• 24:18
  if you can answer an editor's questions, it tends to make for
• 24:21
  much better book because you are you're like it.
• 24:23
  You're in control of your material.
• 24:25
  You are you know you're absolutely confident that you're
• 24:28
  doing it because that's the best way to do it and a record.
• 24:31
  Levine was again I commissioning process with books as I spent 25
• 24:36
  years now learning is nothing like that.
• 24:39
  And editors. I've had some really good
• 24:41
  editors in my projects. Rebecca Levine was my first
• 24:44
  editor and transformed the book. Just just her job.
• 24:52
  The whole time she said it was, was to not write the book for
• 24:56
  me, but to make it the best version of my book that he could
• 25:00
  possibly make. Not to sort of try and write the
• 25:04
  book she'd have written instead, which is some of my words.
• 25:07
  That difference I've tried to do and guided me through that whole
• 25:13
  process just sort of just just you know and it it's it's a
• 25:18
  coaching it's like a coaching job you know you you you're the
• 25:23
  one that does the work but but you are much more confident that
• 25:27
  you're landing there things you need to land where you're
• 25:29
  landing you know you're much more confident about what you're
• 25:32
  doing you're much more able to do and it's it's it was
• 25:39
  extraordinary. I mean it was my first novel I
• 25:43
  enjoyed writing it a lot for me I and but I just felt I was
• 25:49
  surprised how much more I thought.
• 25:53
  I thought I had a good idea for a book but I was just surprised
• 25:55
  how much more there was as I as as we developed it.
• 25:58
  It was, it was, it was very, very gratifying process, so.
• 26:03
  Interesting to hear you say that about Ice, because that makes
• 26:05
  perfect sense, her being sort of the main character in that.
• 26:08
  But it feels like the one of the definitive Bernie's books to me.
• 26:12
  So I had no idea reading it at all that there was another
• 26:15
  version out there because Bernie's feels more vulnerable
• 26:18
  in some ways. So in that situation, it felt
• 26:20
  more tense having her in it, yeah.
• 26:23
  Yeah, there's there's a torture scene which in in in retrospect
• 26:26
  I realizes a lot of it comes from Viva Vernetta.
• 26:29
  I mean I I didn't quite realise that until, you know later on.
• 26:33
  But the Nazis, you know like I said the Nazis in the in the
• 26:40
  tunnel islands did not. They they committed atrocities.
• 26:43
  They killed people. They run their people up.
• 26:45
  They could ported a lot of them. But it but it wasn't a battle
• 26:49
  zone. It wasn't it wasn't there
• 26:51
  weren't there weren't the sort of atrocities you saw elsewhere
• 26:56
  in sort of occupied territory. They needed to do bad stuff in
• 27:01
  the book and the torture scene was always there and it was
• 27:04
  always Ace originally. I mean when you say there's a
• 27:07
  different version of the book out there, it's it's there is
• 27:11
  those 3 sample chapters which are almost exactly the same
• 27:14
  except the the Celia isn't it. Celia is an anagram of Ace.
• 27:19
  It's Ace. The idea she's Celia is like 8.
• 27:22
  The word ace is in there. So Benny ends up using a kind of
• 27:26
  pseudonym for Ace. There's those 3 sample chapters
• 27:34
  which are almost exactly the same.
• 27:35
  There's this I I I tidied them up and I I Celia is a little bit
• 27:40
  described as a little bit older than she was in the original
• 27:43
  version because I think Ace by that point is is meant to be
• 27:46
  like late 20s and Benny was early 30s.
• 27:49
  So it wasn't a massive difference but but but I think
• 27:52
  Benny was always more grown up you know and I think that was
• 27:54
  the that was the note. So those chapters almost exactly
• 27:58
  the same. And then the synopsis is, is, I
• 28:03
  don't even know. It'd be 6-6 or seven pages.
• 28:05
  It's not not huge, outlining pretty much the same story.
• 28:09
  There's a little bit more stuff going on.
• 28:10
  There's a little bit more action in London.
• 28:12
  It's like a motorbike chase in London with the Doctor and Ace
• 28:16
  in a motorbike in a side car chasing after dances in London.
• 28:19
  But just never really. I just needed something at the
• 28:21
  end and I couldn't, you know, that was a bit of action and
• 28:24
  never really worked and but I thought I needed to sort of have
• 28:28
  something going on at the end that was a little bit more
• 28:30
  dramatic. So there isn't really another
• 28:33
  version of the book, but there, there, there could have been.
• 28:39
  Yeah, it's, it's that's that's a very strange part of the
• 28:43
  process, is the idea it starts out as one thing and becomes
• 28:45
  something else. Michael.
• 28:49
  Well, Speaking of reasons that you might be kickable for your
• 28:52
  second. Novel.
• 28:54
  You got to do a multi doctor story with cold fusion.
• 28:59
  Yeah, I know. Kickable.
• 29:01
  I I didn't think they you know this was the one where I pitched
• 29:04
  the Gunpowder Plot on again at this point.
• 29:07
  And I think I'm right. So I'm I'm I'm not more than a
• 29:10
  month wrong. Gareth Roberts was writing in
• 29:13
  the plotters. So they didn't they didn't know
• 29:16
  about my Gunpowder Plot idea and I thought I'm going to pitch to
• 29:18
  my Gunpowder Plot idea and the result came back.
• 29:23
  Now Gareth's writing and of course this fast.
• 29:27
  It's fantastic and it. Was great, wasn't it?
• 29:31
  I love the plotters and it's so much better than the book I'd
• 29:33
  have written and I'd have written two books in a row where
• 29:36
  people were being tortured and it was a pure historical and so.
• 29:39
  So I'm very, very glad I didn't get it right.
• 29:43
  And I had a like this extraordinarily vague idea for
• 29:46
  another book that was about the last.
• 29:49
  It was called The Last King of England.
• 29:50
  And it was it was basically the end of the royal family in like
• 29:53
  a couple of 100, you know a couple of 100 years time and I
• 29:56
  never really had a story before it and it was that there was a
• 29:59
  young last young king with nowheres in the garden with
• 30:04
  robots looking after him and and it wasn't a story.
• 30:07
  It was kind of AI don't even know it was a picture, I don't
• 30:10
  know as an image. And they quite rightly pointed
• 30:15
  out that there wasn't a story. It was a kind of vague idea and
• 30:19
  I pitched this like third mad idea which which I I just didn't
• 30:23
  think they could take, which was the Doctor. 2 incarnations of
• 30:29
  the Doctor land on the same planet at the same time and one
• 30:33
  of them is at the sort of top of the mountain, the one at the
• 30:35
  bottom of the mountain. And they pick a side in this war
• 30:40
  and they both pick different sides and you end up with
• 30:43
  basically this battle being fought between 2 incarnations of
• 30:46
  the Doctor and they don't realize that the the genius
• 30:50
  behind the and that kind of it makes no sense.
• 30:57
  The problem, the problem is you know it makes no sense because
• 31:01
  the 7th Doctor is going to be like Oh yeah, Pete Davison stand
• 31:04
  there. I remember but even if he's a
• 31:07
  hand wave that I realized that the you're going to get a bit of
• 31:13
  corporate synergy. You could have the missing
• 31:15
  adventures that started. You could have a 5th Doctor,
• 31:19
  young, just regenerated, sort of naive and vulnerable and is
• 31:26
  about to lose Advoc and that kind of stuff versus the Doctor
• 31:31
  as he becoming the new adventures, which was this was
• 31:34
  overplayed a little bit. He's never quite as bad as this
• 31:37
  in the books as people thought. But you know he's a plotter and
• 31:41
  he's strategic and he's playing this 94 dimensional game of
• 31:45
  chess. You know that he's he was in
• 31:48
  Saddam attack absolutely perfect.
• 31:52
  But no he he, you know he he was fighting the sort of big cosmic
• 32:00
  universes will collapse kind of battle and the 5th Doctor could
• 32:04
  fight the sort of people on the street being affected by it
• 32:11
  battle And so you can end on the planet and basically instead of
• 32:14
  having picking two different sides you could have two
• 32:16
  different two different problems, two different Doctor
• 32:19
  Who problems to solve which is you have this sort of quite
• 32:22
  restrictive police state up to something.
• 32:26
  And meanwhile the 7th Doctors discovered these sort of multi
• 32:32
  universal villains that need to be, you know, contained.
• 32:36
  And so you can end up with a couple of bits where the doctors
• 32:38
  are supporting each other, but the idea of them sort of like,
• 32:47
  you know, a pose on different sides, it doesn't, you can't
• 32:50
  wait, you can't, it doesn't last long enough for a book.
• 32:53
  You can't sort of keep up for a whole book.
• 32:54
  And I think because I think part of it is the audience sees the
• 32:57
  joke and they can see the joke and they've got the joke and
• 33:01
  then you just sort of keep telling the joke for another
• 33:04
  50,000 words or whatever. I think I think it wouldn't
• 33:06
  really work and and I and I think I I the cold fish is the
• 33:15
  one thing I've ever written that I lost control of when I was
• 33:17
  writing it. I I know people like the book.
• 33:22
  I'm very, very happy people like the book and I've been saying
• 33:25
  for 20 whatever 25 years now that that that I would much
• 33:30
  rather the the audience like the book and the author didn't Then
• 33:34
  the other way around because you know that that is probably the
• 33:36
  way it's meant to work if that's the choice.
• 33:41
  I just felt like I'd lost control.
• 33:43
  I thought I was trying to do something much more serious than
• 33:45
  I was actually trying to do. I thought I was telling stories
• 33:48
  about the victims of war and that I was doing a sort of
• 33:51
  allegory for the war in Yugoslavia and you know, the
• 33:54
  United Nations role when was the Europe war in Yugoslavia and
• 33:57
  things like that. But it's like I wasn't that was
• 33:59
  the thing. It was.
• 34:00
  It was. It was a 2000 AD story and I
• 34:05
  love 2000 AD. I I I have intermittently been a
• 34:11
  huge fan of 2018 various sort of patches.
• 34:14
  I'm on a kick at the moment in 2018 but I I loved it when I was
• 34:17
  a kid. I loved them.
• 34:20
  You know, the. But what I loved about it was
• 34:22
  you had these you know, ridiculous robots being kicked
• 34:24
  around by people and people were always the villains in 2018
• 34:28
  stories. It was always it was always the
• 34:30
  Humes were always the problem and but they are very sort of
• 34:39
  that they're they're not the kind of they're not like they're
• 34:42
  both satire but they're not the kind of like 2008. 2008 is great
• 34:47
  and visceral wonderful but it's not often very it's not
• 34:51
  thoughtful it's not the it's not what he's trying it's not what
• 34:53
  he's trying to be And it wouldn't it wouldn't work work
• 34:58
  very well for. I can't remember which one of
• 34:59
  them it is. I think it's Alan Grant.
• 35:01
  I think it's on. It might be John who says that
• 35:04
  the the unethical dilemma for Judge Dredd is headshot or chest
• 35:08
  shot. And I think that's that's that's
• 35:12
  the sort of level of kind of, you know that's subtle that's
• 35:15
  the subtlety that we're dealing with is is and I was writing, I
• 35:22
  realized I was reckon it's kind of quite cartoonish story, but I
• 35:25
  was trying to be sort of very thoughtful and you know I was
• 35:31
  the guy that just was. So I will now think a make a
• 35:35
  thing about the war in Yugoslavia.
• 35:39
  For me it didn't gel. There is a ton of stuff going on
• 35:42
  and I think what it is, is I love stories, I love things
• 35:47
  where there is so much going on that you don't have time to deal
• 35:52
  with stuff that looks like the big stuff.
• 35:54
  I think this is the this is the killer app for Star Wars I think
• 35:56
  where where you just wander past these six monsters and they're
• 36:00
  all from different planets and they all clearly got long
• 36:03
  histories and you never find out about them until you know it's
• 36:06
  alright a comic series about them or whatever.
• 36:09
  I love Bor heads. I love Boras's stories because
• 36:12
  he throws away ideas. You know like a casual he'll say
• 36:16
  he'll say something like you know and of course God himself
• 36:18
  is a kind of labyrinth and you sort of like that's a that's a
• 36:23
  trilogy that's a that's not a that's not a that's not a
• 36:26
  throwaway line in a book. That's like that's a that's a
• 36:28
  career for a philosophy department that is.
• 36:32
  And and so I love that kind of. I love stories that are so dense
• 36:38
  that it's just stuff where you just can't stop yourself.
• 36:42
  It's like it's the Zucker, Abraham, Zucker kind of style of
• 36:46
  humor. The sort of police squad,
• 36:48
  airport kind of style of humor as well where not every single
• 36:52
  joke is amazing, but there are so many of them.
• 36:55
  The you're sort of always laughing, you know, you laugh
• 36:59
  over the next dead one and copies is a bit like that.
• 37:03
  There's so much going on. But I think there are things
• 37:05
  that people can kind of latch onto.
• 37:07
  And like, I just had this huge problem writing it.
• 37:10
  The tone was just a little place.
• 37:11
  It just seemed to be like, you know, I was beheading people in
• 37:14
  one scene and making like comedy robot jokes in the next one and
• 37:21
  and I got my trunk. The Big Finish did an adaptation
• 37:26
  of it a few years ago and I wrote the script for that and
• 37:30
  and I realized that I realized what it was.
• 37:32
  They're coming back to it after so, so long and just taking the
• 37:35
  book and trying to figure out, first of all, they wanted a
• 37:39
  really faithful adaptation. They didn't want me to change
• 37:41
  anything and I didn't want to change too much either.
• 37:46
  But I had to condense it a little bit and you have to kind
• 37:48
  of think a little bit more about giving actors things to do I, I,
• 37:52
  I, I do Peter Davison wrong in in Cold Fusion.
• 37:56
  I, I, I he, he he's he's not, he's not a very strong character
• 38:01
  in convolution. I think he's he's a victim of a
• 38:03
  lot of the 7th Doctor's plot. So there's a couple of points
• 38:06
  where he's just a little bit not quite sharp enough to be the
• 38:10
  Doctor, the Peter Davis next year.
• 38:13
  And I feel like I could get away with that in a book that he's
• 38:16
  never going to read. But if he's going to be reading
• 38:17
  out my life, so I better, I better give it a little more
• 38:21
  today. But it gave me a chance to kind
• 38:25
  of go through it and kind of figure out how to make it.
• 38:29
  I've made myself a little bit happier with it.
• 38:31
  And I realized that every single time, every single time I'd had
• 38:35
  a choice with Cold fusion, it was a choice between something
• 38:37
  serious and something funnier or lighter or sillier.
• 38:45
  And in the book, I'd kind of tossed a coin and sort of
• 38:48
  sometimes they would show up in a place.
• 38:50
  And it was a there'd been a massacre and those little over
• 38:52
  the walls and, you know, groaning survivors and all that
• 38:56
  kind of stuff. And other times it was very
• 39:00
  silly Jokes about Meg Lawson in jokes and and with the big
• 39:08
  finished version, I just basically picked the joke every
• 39:11
  time instead of the played it a little bit more lightly.
• 39:14
  And it was, it was, I guess it's more like it's like it's almost
• 39:17
  like being a director of a story.
• 39:21
  You sort of go, I'm going to tone that down a bit.
• 39:23
  We're going to kind of bring this together a little bit more
• 39:27
  in performance. It's going to be a little bit
• 39:29
  lighter than it might look on the screen and I think the the
• 39:36
  audio version just is a little bit sharper and it the downside
• 39:42
  of getting a 24 year old. I thought it was a 25 year old
• 39:45
  at that point to write novels as you will end up occasionally
• 39:48
  with the the last of vestiges of like teenage pretension and like
• 39:53
  you know, you know I'm going to wear a dark jacket and tell you
• 39:56
  how it really is. And you know it's like you know
• 39:59
  what Batman really do and you don't.
• 40:06
  You're right at that point where you're kind of you've not quite
• 40:11
  I think when when when you are and it's a vital part of the
• 40:14
  development of a fan. But when you're sort of
• 40:16
  16/17/18, you have to take it extremely seriously.
• 40:20
  Because that's the point where you're choosing between.
• 40:25
  That's the point where you're choosing between going out in
• 40:27
  the evenings or collecting DVDs like, I mean that's the that's
• 40:31
  the, that's the thing. I mean you are, you are, you
• 40:33
  are. You're kind of lean into it and
• 40:36
  you have to kind of go, no, this is, I remember telling my mother
• 40:40
  having a Chris Stern conversation with my mother
• 40:43
  about Teen Titans. And Teen Titans.
• 40:47
  Actually, no incredible piece of craftsmanship and I love the
• 40:53
  Teen Titans and it's great. You have to take it very
• 40:55
  seriously. No, it's not just a comic.
• 40:57
  Do not understand. It's not just a comic.
• 40:59
  It points to, you know much broader themes and the world and
• 41:03
  this this art form is so spontaneous and you know you
• 41:07
  have to kind of do that with, you know and and there's a sort
• 41:12
  of fear of being silly that you you you lose.
• 41:16
  Mine was. Mine was survival.
• 41:18
  I took my mum for his survival and said this is a pretty
• 41:21
  contemporary drama. OK, it's not a bit of sci-fi
• 41:25
  tar. She's.
• 41:26
  Just, I think, I think everyone of our, you know, our old, you
• 41:30
  know, everyone of, let's say, the New Adventures generation
• 41:33
  had that experience of like going, no, there was a dialect
• 41:37
  one, It was the 25th anniversary one.
• 41:39
  It was brilliant. It was like about the far right.
• 41:42
  It was like taking a lot of the things that have been said about
• 41:45
  the dialects and like putting them in real life.
• 41:47
  And it was so, Oh my God, it was gritty and so well performed.
• 41:50
  Watch it next week. It's called the Happiness Patrol
• 41:57
  and there comes a point where you watch the Happiness Patrol
• 41:59
  now and and then to be fair a lot of people liked it at the
• 42:03
  time but you look at it now and it's like Oh my God.
• 42:05
  This is this is this is saying extraordinarily important this
• 42:10
  is this is that's the one that's close to two it's a sin than the
• 42:14
  remembrance develop for sure that's that's the one that's
• 42:17
  that's that's sort of got not extraordinarily complicated
• 42:23
  analogy as to what was going on politically at the time And that
• 42:29
  was the one that was quite happy to tell a silly story about it
• 42:36
  which is incredibly it's really easy to be dark and grim and no
• 42:43
  serious about about these things.
• 42:45
  But to to to make mark and to to to be kind of shoddy about it to
• 42:58
  be that I mean that in a very respectful way.
• 42:59
  I mean it's A to sort of bring a kind of like an energy to it
• 43:06
  where you are you know you can't quite tell the story yet because
• 43:11
  you're telling the story in 1988.
• 43:12
  The story is still what you are trying to what you're being an
• 43:15
  allegory of is not finished yet. It's not or not finished that
• 43:19
  phase of it yet. You know it is an ongoing story.
• 43:22
  It's a story now where you look at it and it makes the joke is
• 43:29
  now you watch it and it's it's a story that makes Doctor Who in
• 43:32
  the 80s look like it was a lot more daring and political and
• 43:38
  woke Oh my God, I just use the word work you did.
• 43:41
  You did well, no. But it's a story like it's just
• 43:44
  like this was, this was a this was the story that was was doing
• 43:49
  all of those things at the time and we were cringing Bertie
• 43:51
  Bassett and harmonica plane whatever.
• 43:54
  And don't know. Again this is the law.
• 43:58
  Here is the Doctor Who will. Doctor Who is right.
• 44:02
  If you don't think Doctor Who is right you're wrong.
• 44:03
  You have to adjust your mindset until you accept.
• 44:09
  To the Doctor Who has got it right.
• 44:11
  And while I might sound like you're entering A lifelong cult
• 44:17
  where you've abandoned all critical faculties, that's
• 44:20
  absolutely not the case. We are.
• 44:22
  We're as sane as the rest of you.
• 44:24
  Either I've got a question for you, and I'm going to need
• 44:27
  Michael's help to help me with the definitions here, because I
• 44:31
  never quite got my my finger on them.
• 44:34
  Do you consider yourself a trat or a rad Doctor Who writer?
• 44:40
  Michael, will you please define those terms?
• 44:43
  Well, this was the term, wasn't it?
• 44:44
  Back in the day, it's the 90s and the naughties.
• 44:46
  This was the idea of when Doctor Who wasn't on telly.
• 44:49
  If you're going to do things with Doctor Who, should you try
• 44:52
  and do stuff that is trad traditional and like what was on
• 44:56
  telly? Or should you try and do
• 44:57
  something that was rad man and more radical depart?
• 45:00
  I and I think that this was this was a perfectly sensible
• 45:04
  question. I think that this was perfectly
• 45:05
  sensible question to ask at the time.
• 45:08
  There's always this sense with the original series even when
• 45:12
  it's brilliant. the IT could be more brilliant.
• 45:14
  You know that there is there is a sort of iteration of Doctor
• 45:16
  Who that is not limited by budget.
• 45:18
  It's not limited by time, which is basically the same thing as
• 45:21
  budget. You know you get the best actors
• 45:23
  in you get the you know you get the you get get some Disney Plus
• 45:27
  money you know you know you know it'll be great.
• 45:31
  Get Miriam Michael. He's in to be the, you know and
• 45:37
  the idea that you could sort of do Doctor Who.
• 45:40
  Doctor Who have never quite been done justice in the past.
• 45:44
  So you make it like prestige TV services.
• 45:48
  It's interesting looking at some of the discussions around the
• 45:50
  hiatus that the some of the BBC executives do seem to be looking
• 45:56
  at things like the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes and saying
• 46:00
  that's actually quite lavish, that's actually quite, you know,
• 46:04
  we want Doctor Who to look a bit more like that and be a sort of
• 46:07
  modern respectable TV show, not this sort of videotaped, you
• 46:13
  know, So we've got our best interests of the show at heart.
• 46:15
  We want it to come back bigger and better than ever.
• 46:22
  And the other, the other side of it, the radical side of it was
• 46:27
  just like there is no need to remake the Zygons if you want to
• 46:30
  watch, especially now, you know, especially, you know, this is
• 46:33
  the point as well where we're getting them all on video.
• 46:35
  And I was, I was seeing these stories, you know, certainly for
• 46:39
  the first time since they've been on.
• 46:41
  But. But seeing some of the part
• 46:45
  where you'd be trapped in part of the story, it's the very
• 46:46
  first time. And I think a lot of us just
• 46:52
  thought, well, if you want to watch Chair of the Zygons, watch
• 46:53
  Chair of the Zygons. You know, if you want to read
• 46:55
  Terror of the Zygons, go and get The Book of Terror of the
• 46:57
  Zygons. These things exist and they're
• 46:59
  great, and there's no need to kind of sleevishly remake to the
• 47:08
  format, I think. I think underlying both ideas
• 47:12
  was the idea of a Doctor Who had not quite been done right, that
• 47:16
  had never quite been that there was a better way to do it.
• 47:19
  And one of them, one of the arguments was the traditional
• 47:22
  argument because you want to to very straightforward, simple,
• 47:28
  solid Doctor Who stories. And the other side of it is no,
• 47:33
  let's go wow, let's just let's stretch what we can do.
• 47:37
  Let's let's go crazy with it. The format can take us anywhere
• 47:41
  we can. We can meet anyone.
• 47:42
  We can do anything. And particularly in the books.
• 47:44
  I mean, there's absolutely no the books.
• 47:49
  And the tension developed very quickly.
• 47:54
  We were all Doctor Who fans. That was the thing.
• 47:56
  We were all all of us could I. There's a joke in Just War where
• 48:01
  the Doctor signs a contract to the Nazis and then pockets the
• 48:05
  pen and this very fancy pen that the Nazi has given him.
• 48:10
  And that's a that's an in joke to Invasion of Time.
• 48:13
  And I thought I was the only person on the planet that had
• 48:16
  spotted the Doctor had done that and like it came out and like
• 48:19
  within three weeks they're coming out there like 3 reviews
• 48:21
  going, the Invasion of time reference.
• 48:24
  It's a little bit intrusive that he will, you know.
• 48:28
  Never underestimate the. Depth of a Doctor Who fan and
• 48:35
  I'm like, OK, I'm not going to win this one ever.
• 48:37
  I can't. This is there is no there is no
• 48:40
  thing to obscure for someone else to just turn around and go.
• 48:43
  This is just so we're all not new fans.
• 48:48
  We're all versed. We all knew the law and the
• 48:50
  question is what? What were we going to do with
• 48:51
  that? Are we going to move it along?
• 48:54
  My, I see, I always think I'm rad and I was sort of, I was
• 49:00
  kind of on the radical side of it, but but I'm very well aware
• 49:04
  that the books I ended up writing a lot of the time.
• 49:09
  I mean, it'd be very difficult to explain why there.
• 49:15
  They're these sort of radical things.
• 49:16
  When you look at what other people were doing with the forms
• 49:19
  of the books and what I would. I mean, if you're writing books,
• 49:25
  first of all, you've got a whole bunch of tools that you'll take,
• 49:28
  you know, tools at your disposal that you never had on TV, all
• 49:33
  sorts of things you can do with narrative, viewpoint and
• 49:36
  chopping up stories. You are writing for a fan
• 49:39
  audience that, like I say, knows this stuff.
• 49:42
  They're going to buy the next one they bought the last one
• 49:45
  they can remember 10 books back. So you can take a lot of stuff
• 49:52
  that is actually the hardest bit of writing really a lot of the
• 49:55
  time for, and just jump into a story and you already have the
• 50:04
  Doctor and a companion there so that the audience is already
• 50:09
  sympathetic about it. They know roughly what the
• 50:12
  Doctor Who story is meant to look like.
• 50:14
  So right from page one, the Doctor Who story can go wrong.
• 50:17
  You know, you can land. And it looks like it starts like
• 50:27
  a traditional Doctor Who story. They step out of the targets and
• 50:29
  they go and straight away they fall off the Cliff or something
• 50:32
  like that. And again, it's been done.
• 50:33
  So you can't, you can't actually come up with an example that
• 50:36
  hasn't been done there. And that's a great power as a
• 50:43
  writer. That's an amazing, enviable
• 50:49
  thing. I I I was doing my master's
• 50:52
  degree in post colonial post war British fiction when I was
• 50:58
  writing the Virgin books and I was reading all these books.
• 51:02
  I love The English Patient. I read the English page and I
• 51:05
  got the other day it came out. I loved it and it's just
• 51:09
  astonishing to me that the a lot of those 90s books that were
• 51:14
  huge, like publishing sensations and they came out and you know
• 51:17
  around the time I started writing pretty much forgotten
• 51:21
  unless there was a movie now. But at the same time, I've been
• 51:24
  walking to a Doctor Who convention and I had this
• 51:27
  experience at the Gallifrey Convention, Los Angeles a couple
• 51:30
  of years ago. A woman who was young woman, she
• 51:33
  was a teenage. My girl was started talking to
• 51:36
  me about Davros and how it related to father time and how I
• 51:40
  was like, you weren't even born, you weren't even born.
• 51:43
  You are like discussing line references.
• 51:45
  It's astonishing, amazing. It's an amazing experience.
• 51:49
  The sort of thing that I know Paul Mars, when Paul Mars was
• 51:52
  writing literary fiction before he was writing Doctor Who stuff
• 51:55
  and the lively, engaged, intelligent audience isn't the
• 52:04
  literary fiction cloud that that sort of wrote really nice
• 52:07
  reviews in his first book. It's the people saying scarlet
• 52:09
  temperance, you know, and and and so.
• 52:14
  No, exactly. No.
• 52:15
  But it's us. We are.
• 52:17
  I mean we're we're engaged fans. We love this trad versus rad.
• 52:25
  I don't see that. I don't see that there is any
• 52:31
  long term future in just doing this kind of what I used to call
• 52:35
  a this dates me a Time Team reconstruction of a kind of
• 52:39
  Hinchcliffe story. I just don't, you know, we any,
• 52:43
  any Doctor Who fan can assemble a John Purley story where you
• 52:51
  know the Sontarans attack unit or you know the Cybermen, you
• 52:54
  know, the missing John, missing John Purry story where he fought
• 52:58
  the Cyberman or whatever. It's it's, it's fine and it's
• 53:03
  good and there's an audience for it.
• 53:04
  And I realized, as I say, there's sort of like 6 big
• 53:06
  finishes that that's. Exactly what?
• 53:09
  I was going. I wasn't.
• 53:10
  I wasn't going just. Coming soon.
• 53:11
  Thank. You thank you for being the
• 53:13
  person that said that. Examples.
• 53:15
  I'm always worried that someone like wrote one.
• 53:16
  The big thing I wrote that, you know I.
• 53:21
  Hate to say they have just announced unit versus Santara.
• 53:28
  Yes. So finally we'll find out why
• 53:32
  style doesn't look like store. Yeah.
• 53:35
  And that's something you can you can do this.
• 53:37
  I think it's I I think it's a diminishing returns exercise.
• 53:44
  I think it's an exercise probably as part of a balanced
• 53:50
  diet is probably a wonderful thing to do.
• 53:53
  I I'm watching Star Trek at the moment.
• 53:59
  I love Discovery because it is such a chaotic mad mess that
• 54:05
  that clearly they settle these plates running and they forgot
• 54:09
  some of them and they plates are flying around and they're
• 54:12
  catching them and they forgot some plates and there's the
• 54:15
  sound of plates crashing in the background I think like that.
• 54:17
  And they set up stuff. They don't pay off.
• 54:19
  And they all of this incredible mad stuff because of the way the
• 54:22
  show started. And with they're just about to
• 54:25
  start the fact that this fifth season of them, they're still
• 54:27
  kind of like. I feel like they still haven't
• 54:30
  defined what that show is. They change their minds every
• 54:33
  year. But it's.
• 54:35
  I just find that so refreshing in an era of like The
• 54:38
  Mandalorian, where I like the Mandalin, I watch The
• 54:41
  Mandalorian, I watch it the day it comes on.
• 54:43
  It's great. But my feeling with The
• 54:46
  Mandalorian is, is that Disney gave them like a million
• 54:49
  surprise points. You know, you can have a you
• 54:51
  know a million surprises in your in your show and they spent them
• 54:55
  all on Baby Yoda in the first episode and it's an and it's an
• 54:59
  incredible investment. You know that that moment of
• 55:02
  like this is not the show. It's Yoda, Baby Yoda.
• 55:08
  Incredible amazing. But it means that for like
• 55:11
  whatever it is now for three seasons and counting that that
• 55:14
  that every episode is exactly the same and it's linear and
• 55:17
  it's like there's no and it's great if you want, if you not
• 55:21
  everything needs to be an amazing sort of direct and
• 55:24
  challenge to neoliberalism or whatever.
• 55:26
  It's fine. It can.
• 55:27
  It can. It's entertaining.
• 55:29
  It's always trying to be and it's great for what it does.
• 55:32
  I As part of the balanced diet, you need to have things that
• 55:36
  take these things that people love and know so well and and
• 55:42
  play with them a little bit and deconstruct them a little bit
• 55:45
  and challenge them and go, well, hang on, what is the moral
• 55:51
  compass of this? And there are some very strange
• 55:54
  moral compasses in Star Trek and Star Wars that are just sort of,
• 55:58
  you know, unexamined. I mean the price of life in the
• 56:02
  Star Wars universe is just like they just murder millions of
• 56:06
  people the whole thing. They blow up.
• 56:08
  They kill just like so many people all the time.
• 56:12
  But it's so casual people just look like 2 scenes later.
• 56:14
  I mean if you there's a Mandalorian episode where they a
• 56:17
  husband does I can't remember which one but a spouse gets
• 56:19
  killed in a in a battle and and and she's basically picked up
• 56:23
  from voping like 2 scenes later. Come on pick us around it's like
• 56:29
  that. I mean that is, I mean it's
• 56:31
  fine. But you need to at some point
• 56:33
  you kind of look at that. So I we live in a world where Oh
• 56:39
  my God, every single, you know, we Generation X, oh God, we
• 56:45
  should have looked at cancer, shouldn't we?
• 56:46
  We should have looked at climate change.
• 56:47
  We should have. We should have.
• 56:48
  We should have. We'd have sold them all if we'd
• 56:50
  have just not been campaigning to bring like Firefly back.
• 56:54
  You know, if we'd spend that energy like, you know, building
• 57:00
  electric cars and and going to the moon and stuff, we'd have
• 57:03
  been unstoppable. But we, you know, we wanted a
• 57:05
  Hitchhiker's Guide to a Galaxy movie and we wanted an actual
• 57:08
  Hitchhiker's Guide. The challenge was getting the
• 57:10
  actual Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy thing.
• 57:11
  We all got one of those now as well.
• 57:13
  So that's good. But it's the thing with
• 57:20
  franchises is there's so much in there.
• 57:22
  It's cradle to grave stuff. There's there's there's room for
• 57:26
  everyone. You're not they've not even
• 57:30
  flooded the Star Wars market, which is that looks like a
• 57:35
  drenched zone. They, I don't think the problem
• 57:39
  with Marvel is that they, the Marvel movies is that they've
• 57:42
  flooded the market there, right? But I think they've got a very,
• 57:47
  I think a very different problem there, which is that they've
• 57:49
  switched to a different set of characters that that are not as
• 57:53
  appealing as Iron Man and Thor and whatever.
• 57:56
  And I think, you know, I don't. I don't find it a great mystery
• 57:59
  why the Eternals didn't do as well as, you know, Captain
• 58:01
  America. I think.
• 58:02
  I think, I think if you can't, if you can't solve 30,000
• 58:05
  comics, you're you shouldn't be trying to make a billion dollars
• 58:08
  from the movie. And I think they got so lucky
• 58:10
  with Guardians of the Galaxy that I think they that they they
• 58:14
  just thought it was easy and what they were doing was really
• 58:16
  hard and they did a really, really hard job really well.
• 58:19
  And they forgot that. They just thought they were
• 58:22
  coming out. You know that they're in a
• 58:24
  factory and that they could just keep going and that wasn't the
• 58:28
  thing. So my point is that they're not
• 58:30
  flooded, that I think there is room for both.
• 58:33
  And I think that when the new adventures and the missing
• 58:34
  adventures came along, there was a much more obvious divide.
• 58:41
  And so we could have read on one side and tried on the other.
• 58:44
  And that's sort of Star Trek is discovering that with Discovery
• 58:47
  and Changing Worlds. And I much prefer Discovery.
• 58:50
  I'll put it that way because it's it can surprise me and go
• 58:53
  mad. Let's skip over to the dying
• 58:58
  days then, Michael. Yeah.
• 59:02
  So I mean this is one of the books that I think we open to
• 59:06
  listeners questions, we talk to people and these are the ones
• 59:08
  that people really if your books really do keep coming back to
• 59:11
  and I guess because it, you know it exists in that slightly odd
• 59:15
  liminal space of being, it's it's the end of the Virgin New
• 59:19
  Adventures, but it's also the 1st, 8th Doctor adventure.
• 59:22
  But it's tie into a reboot that by that point wasn't happening
• 59:26
  anymore with it, with Paul McGann.
• 59:29
  How did you even begin to work that one out?
• 59:37
  There was a point where we, I don't know all the inside stuff
• 59:41
  that there is going, there are going to be accounts.
• 59:42
  I know David House just brought out a fantastic book about the
• 59:46
  history of the adventures. And I know there are theories
• 59:49
  from people that have been been on both sides of the kind of
• 59:52
  publishing side of why Virgin lost their license and how they
• 59:56
  might have retained it and all of that kind of stuff.
• 1:00:03
  The the TV movie was coming. I, I and I I just benefited
• 1:00:07
  immensely from. From the TV movie The TV movie
• 1:00:09
  came was was coming out when just war was on its way and then
• 1:00:17
  no just were being published. Then there was the TV movie The
• 1:00:20
  history of the universe came out and then called fusion in the
• 1:00:23
  same year and the books just sold shed loads that year.
• 1:00:28
  They were just they did so well that year and I was like the the
• 1:00:33
  new boy from who was writing these things.
• 1:00:36
  So, so I was the one that still got some ideas and you know, you
• 1:00:39
  know still still fresh to the fight and what you know, hadn't
• 1:00:43
  written three or four of them already And I was just caught up
• 1:00:47
  in this thing. I think they were.
• 1:00:53
  I mean a lot of why why they did an eighth Doctor book is, is, is
• 1:00:56
  because they could they have time to do it.
• 1:01:01
  They had no contractual restrictions against doing it or
• 1:01:06
  nothing like that. And I wouldn't be astonished if
• 1:01:13
  people at Virgin were a little bit kind of like we're going to
• 1:01:15
  spoil the BBC. I mean, I was never in that kind
• 1:01:21
  of I I I was never. I mean, I was looking to work
• 1:01:23
  with BBS. I don't want to bury Ricky's,
• 1:01:29
  but I I like the new adventures. I didn't want the new adventures
• 1:01:36
  to end. I I they weren't going to end.
• 1:01:38
  They were going to be Benny's stories.
• 1:01:39
  But that wasn't quite ever going to be the same thing.
• 1:01:41
  And I did kind of when it was a when it was ATV show that the
• 1:01:53
  BBC were going to make and embrace and it was going to be a
• 1:01:56
  cover of the Radio Times and 10 million people going to watch
• 1:01:58
  it. It was.
• 1:01:58
  It was, it was like, OK, need if I just have to end.
• 1:02:01
  We have to bring out books that are, you know, you can't make
• 1:02:05
  jokes about Vardens and books about, you know, this is how far
• 1:02:08
  we've come because of course we can make jokes about Vardens and
• 1:02:11
  Christmas specials now and 15,000,000 people go.
• 1:02:19
  But it's at that point I thought, OK, the BBC are going
• 1:02:25
  to bring it in the house and women do it.
• 1:02:26
  They're going to think and they're going to be mainstream
• 1:02:29
  trad, I guess books, they're going to be books that sort of
• 1:02:32
  reintroduce it to a a broader audience.
• 1:02:34
  So we're not going to get away with all of this stuff.
• 1:02:40
  But I liked it and it was good. And so I wanted to write a book
• 1:02:44
  that was a kind of like celebration of the new
• 1:02:48
  adventures without going to kind of like Deep in the Leaves.
• 1:02:54
  I One of the things The Dying Days was, was it had to be
• 1:02:58
  written really quickly. I and it had to be written by me
• 1:03:05
  because everyone else was writing a book.
• 1:03:07
  Mark's doing London. Paul Koppel was doing the first
• 1:03:11
  Benny one, Matt Jones was doing the second.
• 1:03:14
  I think Justin was doing one of them as well.
• 1:03:17
  He was. He did the second one.
• 1:03:21
  Kate, Kate and John. Kate Ormond was writing like
• 1:03:25
  three. I think she was like she was.
• 1:03:28
  She was finishing off the room with no doors.
• 1:03:32
  I don't know. She was doing vampire science
• 1:03:34
  and she was doing so. I was saying she was finishing,
• 1:03:39
  finishing Outside of my Bunny ears.
• 1:03:40
  You can't see she was writing, so I was saying so she was.
• 1:03:48
  She was off the table for that. Terence was doing late doctors
• 1:03:52
  and he went down the list and delayed.
• 1:03:53
  All these people were writing something else at that point.
• 1:03:57
  So at some level I was in person who hadn't actually got a job at
• 1:04:01
  that point. I just, I was finishing off
• 1:04:02
  confusion. So I didn't have any work.
• 1:04:06
  They needed it really quickly, which limited it for some other
• 1:04:09
  people as well. I was, I was able to a full time
• 1:04:14
  writer. So I could, I could, I could
• 1:04:16
  write it really quickly. And that dictated pretty much
• 1:04:21
  everything. I I I had an idea at some point
• 1:04:26
  for a missing adventure that was a sort of Tom Clancy's style
• 1:04:29
  with Jon pertly Marshall invasion story.
• 1:04:35
  And it could have worked, but it was just, I'm not that guy.
• 1:04:40
  I'm not the guy that that can tell you the difference between,
• 1:04:44
  you know, assault rifles and whatever.
• 1:04:47
  I mean, they should have been using nothing like that.
• 1:04:52
  And I could never have done that sort of techno thriller kind of
• 1:04:56
  version. I think there's a story there
• 1:04:57
  that you could do a massive, wonderful, 900 page Doctor Who
• 1:05:03
  story that was about like a military response to alien
• 1:05:07
  invasion. I think you could do it with a
• 1:05:08
  Doctor Who. It would.
• 1:05:10
  It would work. Well, I'm just not that.
• 1:05:12
  I'm not the person to write it. And that's a story called Cold
• 1:05:15
  War. And it was, at heart, it was
• 1:05:22
  just very simple. There was a giant flying saucer
• 1:05:25
  over London, the Martians Land and Takeover story.
• 1:05:31
  What would they do? And I think Rebecca Lavina
• 1:05:38
  Nyvex, we just sat down and we were just sort of brainstorming
• 1:05:43
  ideas we could do and how can we finish this range and how can we
• 1:05:46
  kind of like tell a story that hadn't been told before and but
• 1:05:51
  sort of celebrate what we've done.
• 1:05:53
  The the main brief that was that Benny had to be, you know, a
• 1:05:56
  central character to the story. Benny had to sort of start with
• 1:05:59
  Benny and end with Benny and have lots of Benny in the middle
• 1:06:02
  because Benny was going to be the, the, the main character of
• 1:06:06
  the new Adventures moving forward.
• 1:06:11
  Yeah. And I think one of us or both of
• 1:06:13
  us sort of looked at each other at one point because we could
• 1:06:15
  kill a doctor. This is the one chance to kill
• 1:06:20
  the Doctor. And that got reported in SFX.
• 1:06:27
  Like the next issue of SFX was, was Virginia plan to kill the
• 1:06:33
  doctor in their final story. And like no one else was in the
• 1:06:36
  room and Rebecca didn't leak it. And I didn't leak it.
• 1:06:39
  And I was like, how to play part of it.
• 1:06:42
  It was never the plan to kill the doctor.
• 1:06:44
  It was always the plan to make it look like we killed the
• 1:06:45
  Doctor. But it was never the plan to
• 1:06:46
  kill the Doctor. And obviously we'd have spread
• 1:06:49
  the misinformation. But yeah, yeah, definitely it's
• 1:06:52
  not going to come back when is the Doctor died and come back
• 1:06:55
  and it's never happened. So, but it was it doesn't write
• 1:07:03
  itself because books are difficult to write.
• 1:07:05
  But it was quite straightforward At that point we sat down and we
• 1:07:10
  realized that there had never in the history of like 19, whatever
• 1:07:14
  it was, 95 Is it in the end, virgin Doctor Who books?
• 1:07:18
  Had we ever done a story in which aliens invade contemporary
• 1:07:23
  England? And we were.
• 1:07:26
  And we were like we've done stories where, like theater
• 1:07:29
  characters have come to life. Like it started with Gilgamesh.
• 1:07:34
  I mean, how do you, how do you, how did you manage to do 95?
• 1:07:39
  How do you manage to sit down and go like, we better, we
• 1:07:42
  better not copy, you know, how do you, how do you never do a
• 1:07:44
  story where like that big spaceship comes down and goes,
• 1:07:47
  hey, we're conquering Earth. And at that point it was like
• 1:07:52
  inevitable that we did that. We finished it, somehow managed
• 1:07:57
  to not do this story, Let's do it, but let's do it in new
• 1:07:59
  adventure style. Let's, let's get the Brigadier
• 1:08:04
  in. We'd have the Brigadier in a
• 1:08:06
  couple of things. He was most recently, I think,
• 1:08:08
  happy endings. So a couple of times as a as a
• 1:08:12
  character who showed up in the various versions of the books
• 1:08:17
  and we liked him. And that was the thing.
• 1:08:20
  At the time, Nicholas Courtney was the only actor who worked
• 1:08:22
  with every Doctor. So it becomes universal diet for
• 1:08:28
  it. As simple as simple stories.
• 1:08:29
  You can and you kill the Doctor in the middle.
• 1:08:32
  And Benny is the kind of viewpoint character for a lot of
• 1:08:36
  the book. And it didn't write itself, but
• 1:08:42
  I did write 15,000 words the first day.
• 1:08:45
  I had six weeks. I had six weeks to write the
• 1:08:48
  book. And I think the I must have
• 1:08:52
  been. I don't think I went out to
• 1:08:53
  London. It must have been a phone call.
• 1:08:56
  We kind of thrashed out the sort of there was never a synopsis.
• 1:09:00
  There's never anything like that as far as I remember.
• 1:09:02
  That might have been a two page. There must have been something
• 1:09:06
  because the BBC always had to prove the thing.
• 1:09:09
  But it must have been like a two page.
• 1:09:12
  The Doctor and some Ice Warriors have a fight kind of synopsis.
• 1:09:18
  And the Doctor, they always have the synopsis for all the Doctor
• 1:09:21
  Who books. Always because.
• 1:09:23
  Because the writers could never figure out how to end their
• 1:09:24
  books. They always end using his
• 1:09:26
  ingenuity, The doctor somehow saves the day.
• 1:09:30
  Furiously regular. I don't know how to end this
• 1:09:32
  book, but I can want. To measure it out.
• 1:09:37
  Admission and I'll figure it out.
• 1:09:38
  Yeah. Send me a check and I'll figure
• 1:09:39
  it out. And I had to write it and it had
• 1:09:43
  to be like, done, done in six weeks.
• 1:09:45
  I had to get the whole thing in in six weeks.
• 1:09:49
  And it's possible, and it's possible if you are, you have to
• 1:09:57
  be really, really sure about what you're doing.
• 1:10:00
  I'd be really, really sure about what your story is.
• 1:10:01
  You have to be quite a simple story that's got very distinct
• 1:10:06
  kind of act. So I think that the the Dying
• 1:10:10
  Days you could break up the dying days very easy into
• 1:10:13
  chapters and go this is a yeah this is an episode of a of a
• 1:10:19
  streaming show or whatever it is.
• 1:10:21
  It's each one is a little distinctive bit and each one is
• 1:10:27
  moves the story along in a very kind of like straightforward
• 1:10:30
  way. And the all of the the play that
• 1:10:37
  I like all of the kind of like weird crinky crinkly stuff that
• 1:10:44
  makes the stories. It was it was all the
• 1:10:46
  relationship between 8th Doctor and Benny.
• 1:10:49
  Because I think Benny is a bet. Benny I I love writing for
• 1:10:52
  Benny. I don't know what it is about
• 1:10:54
  Benny, but Benny is so, so easy to write for which is so she's
• 1:10:58
  smart but also sort of needs to know answers to things.
• 1:11:02
  But she's adventurous. But she's also like not like in
• 1:11:07
  any sense superhuman or anything like that.
• 1:11:09
  So she's she's she's she is, she is a very, a very clear kind of
• 1:11:14
  audience identification figure in that, you know, she's she's
• 1:11:17
  kind of, she's kind of into it. But, you know, it's not like a
• 1:11:23
  better way where she doesn't get quite as cold.
• 1:11:26
  It's a bit easier. And you know, they're not like a
• 1:11:28
  button they could press that could do this instead of all
• 1:11:31
  this hard work. And so Benny was really easy to
• 1:11:35
  write. I spent, I mean I think by that
• 1:11:40
  point we were all terminally online already.
• 1:11:43
  The authors and I think Kate Orman and I have spent, you
• 1:11:46
  know, thousands of, you know, hours at that point figuring out
• 1:11:53
  who the 8th Doctor was because the the TV the TV the thing that
• 1:11:57
  was astonishing. The TV movie gave us no clues on
• 1:11:59
  that. No you could go back And I I
• 1:12:03
  this is incredibly arrogant, but I am an incredibly arrogant
• 1:12:06
  person. So I, I, I there are times where
• 1:12:09
  people have said things like gay doctors character.
• 1:12:12
  You know it was developed right from the beginning where I felt
• 1:12:14
  like going thanks it's not it's not in the TV movie at all.
• 1:12:22
  And Kate and John were writing the vampire science book and
• 1:12:29
  they were figuring out a lot of what the 8th doctor was going to
• 1:12:32
  be like in the 8th doctor books. And so we were able to kind of
• 1:12:41
  throw ideas at each other, coordinate, come up with sort of
• 1:12:45
  ideas that were coming coming up with.
• 1:12:47
  I mean, a lot of it is defined against the Sylvester McCauley
• 1:12:51
  plotter Dr. The idea that this doctor knows everything.
• 1:12:54
  And it's so the 8th Doctor starts out far more kind of
• 1:12:58
  spontaneous and bouncy and full of life and constantly kind of
• 1:13:09
  improvising everything in a way that the 7th Doctor couldn't
• 1:13:12
  demonize anything at all. Some Doctor could like, you
• 1:13:15
  know, I'm going to plot in the scheme in a way that looks like
• 1:13:18
  I'm improvising. And so that was the sort of
• 1:13:23
  main, and that made it quite, that was sort of nice, clear
• 1:13:28
  enough distinction. And the Doctor is sexy in a way
• 1:13:31
  that, you know, forgive me. So that's not quite, but, you
• 1:13:37
  know, sexy in a way that the previous doctors hadn't been and
• 1:13:40
  it wasn't, it wasn't just the fact he was going around kissing
• 1:13:43
  and stuff. There is that he's clearly
• 1:13:45
  aiming at a different. So old fashioned though, because
• 1:13:48
  it's just like we're so used to this news show where was have to
• 1:13:54
  explain to people that, you know, the Doctors there were
• 1:13:57
  companions the Doctor didn't want to kiss and settle down
• 1:13:59
  wherever. It's funny, you know, because
• 1:14:02
  there was, I was going to ask you what happened after Bernie
• 1:14:05
  Summerfield threw him on a bed and snogged him and then we cut
• 1:14:08
  very quickly away from that. Scene pretty pretty much
• 1:14:11
  everything that we, you know, pretty much my my version has
• 1:14:14
  always been pretty much everything that you know, you
• 1:14:17
  can possibly imagine happened. You don't want to say that to
• 1:14:20
  me, honestly. I I think that there's because
• 1:14:24
  there was some like there's like, I think Matt Jones Beyond
• 1:14:27
  the sun. I think there's a line beyond
• 1:14:30
  the sun. There's a line where it's like
• 1:14:32
  Benny had not had sex for three years and it was very clearly
• 1:14:34
  kind of like, you know, it was like, oh, yeah, they did.
• 1:14:40
  They definitely. Oh, wow.
• 1:14:43
  Yeah. You know, Oh, no, they Oh, no,
• 1:14:46
  they didn't. It was delayed by two months
• 1:14:49
  because they were just like, added.
• 1:14:51
  We couldn't get them from Price. Many books had to be delayed.
• 1:14:54
  You know I I I I mean I I think there's a lot of things you
• 1:15:03
  leave trapdoors for the audience that they can escape out or
• 1:15:09
  escape escape emergency exits if people with with a lot of the
• 1:15:14
  doctor's I have the doctor's wife in cold fusion and it's the
• 1:15:17
  doctor's wife they were married and they had kids and they lived
• 1:15:21
  in a house And I sound so boring and heteronormative when I say
• 1:15:25
  this but but but that that was who it was the doctor got
• 1:15:29
  married to this person and they had kids and grandkids and
• 1:15:31
  that's who patients is in confusion She's the doctor's
• 1:15:34
  wife. They were married but I
• 1:15:40
  appreciate that that's too big for me to go in a book.
• 1:15:44
  I did this it's it's always couched in a way that if you
• 1:15:48
  want to be able to turn around and say that that was a
• 1:15:54
  reincarnation of the previous Time Lord or you know a Mobius
• 1:15:57
  Dr. or you know dream sequence or whatever it is you know
• 1:16:04
  there's got to be a way out for that sort of big stuff mainly
• 1:16:07
  because some some get will come along in five years and change
• 1:16:10
  it and decolonize your book and I don't want to happen sorry.
• 1:16:15
  So so but no I mean I I I think they didn't quite let me do it
• 1:16:23
  again. There was never going to be like
• 1:16:26
  penetrative sex at the end of the nine days.
• 1:16:31
  But there is a there is the was going to I don't know if this is
• 1:16:34
  going to like completely destroy your podcast ratings but I'm
• 1:16:36
  beeping if there was going to be a point where the end where the
• 1:16:40
  doctor drops Benny off at the beginning of the of the Benny
• 1:16:46
  new Adventures. Basically there was going to be
• 1:16:48
  a line where Benny said. But he looks and it's raining
• 1:16:50
  and it's dismal and she realizes that she's like this is where
• 1:16:53
  she's going to be spending the next two years of her life at
• 1:16:56
  least. And the line was fuck bet said
• 1:16:59
  Benny. Because she finally caught and.
• 1:17:06
  And that was about the only thing that changed from the edit
• 1:17:10
  because. What a shame.
• 1:17:12
  I know Rebecca sent me a note back going Not quite yet, you
• 1:17:15
  know, three more pages and you're fine, but not quite.
• 1:17:22
  But no. I mean my ending for that was
• 1:17:25
  was that I I've, I, I've actually come.
• 1:17:30
  I'm a contrarian I'm a I'm AI will argue with you know keep me
• 1:17:35
  talking long enough and I know I talk long enough.
• 1:17:37
  But keep me talking long enough and you're going to convince me
• 1:17:39
  Doctor Who's terrible and I'm like I'm not sure ever why are
• 1:17:41
  you going to get progress on Doctor But nowadays I kind of
• 1:17:47
  see the argument for an asexual Dr. I think we we have.
• 1:17:54
  When you when you look at the way that sexuality is discussed.
• 1:17:58
  I grew up in the 80s you were you were straight or you were
• 1:18:02
  gay and there were like 4 bisexuals.
• 1:18:04
  And that was basically how I think every school kid in
• 1:18:07
  Britain kind of modeled the world was that there was the no
• 1:18:10
  gender fluidity or or or anything.
• 1:18:12
  I think we had a an extraordinarily rigid a world
• 1:18:18
  where I sort of we had four O 4 errors and our brains crashed
• 1:18:21
  because Boy George came along and it was just like what's
• 1:18:24
  what's going on and and and the world today thankfully is just
• 1:18:30
  like one where we can encompass you know different definitions
• 1:18:35
  and fluidities and non binaries and part of that is asexuality
• 1:18:41
  in a way that is much more you know, it isn't you know,
• 1:18:45
  asexuality. It's not just for medieval monks
• 1:18:47
  anymore. It's it's and and Doctor has
• 1:18:50
  managed to do at the exact moment where asexuality is a
• 1:18:53
  thing. You know, it's finding something
• 1:18:54
  people can talk about and express.
• 1:18:56
  Doctor has managed to be like, oh, Oh yeah, he's in it again.
• 1:18:58
  Oh, yeah. He's about to marry.
• 1:19:00
  Oh yeah. He's going to get one.
• 1:19:01
  And the twist is now he doesn't give his companion one.
• 1:19:04
  You know, it's like it's it's like it's like what?
• 1:19:09
  And it's it's it's sorry, I just every so often we're talking
• 1:19:16
  about like 1996 factor. And I've just remembered that
• 1:19:19
  like like two months ago on TV you have Bonnie Langford lusting
• 1:19:25
  after she did Gatwa national television and David Tennant
• 1:19:31
  turning around and saying not now, Mel we've got to fill that
• 1:19:34
  fight. The Celestial Toy Maker and
• 1:19:36
  Caitlin Stewart going, Yes, Mel, concentrate now.
• 1:19:40
  What a time to be alive. This is this is like this is
• 1:19:46
  every soft and I'm you know, you know, every soft.
• 1:19:48
  And I'm Sam Tyler going, I'm in a coma.
• 1:19:52
  The universe is sending me signals that this cannot
• 1:19:55
  possibly be real that they cannot be like oh Donald Trump's
• 1:19:59
  president is he. Oh, it's just like it's just
• 1:20:04
  like yeah, it's it's every yeah. Sorry everybody.
• 1:20:08
  Mel was just enough to shoot to go on National.
• 1:20:11
  Yeah, my point was, you know, whatever it was like 30 years,
• 1:20:17
  35 years of Doctor being like asexual and it not being that
• 1:20:21
  kind of show and things like that.
• 1:20:23
  I I I the the movie, the TV movie, the Megan movie has like
• 1:20:28
  a kiss and it's a passionate kiss and immediately you have
• 1:20:31
  fancy articles going caught him, I think.
• 1:20:34
  Isn't this in the Gary Russell novelization?
• 1:20:36
  Caught him spirit of the moments the Doctor gets carried away and
• 1:20:40
  accidentally kissing his face like the sort of denial that you
• 1:20:45
  have. You know, the Doctor might have
• 1:20:47
  kissed someone and it's. I remember the Do you?
• 1:20:49
  Remember the line in terror sixes 8 doctors on the first
• 1:20:51
  page, he goes. I I just had an adventure in San
• 1:20:54
  Francisco. It was full of mad, illogical
• 1:20:57
  events and we know what he was talking about there.
• 1:20:59
  No. No, but that was the joke.
• 1:21:01
  That was the thing that I think that was the killer app of the
• 1:21:04
  new adventures. We we read them.
• 1:21:06
  All of the people writing them read them and and we read them
• 1:21:09
  in advance. We were reading them.
• 1:21:10
  We were like throwing ideas to each other, but we were fans of
• 1:21:12
  the books and we loved them. But they were also points where
• 1:21:15
  it was just like, this is infuriating.
• 1:21:18
  How dare you say that in the Doctor Who book?
• 1:21:20
  So you'd get the chance. Your next Doctor Who book, you'd
• 1:21:22
  be like, you know, shut up about fat women.
• 1:21:25
  You're wrong, you know, But it would be like, it would be, it
• 1:21:32
  would be like whatever it was, there would be something where
• 1:21:35
  someone would say something we'd object to.
• 1:21:37
  And it would be like that is, you know, the Doctor would like
• 1:21:40
  in my previous incarnation, I did want to say something stupid
• 1:21:43
  about Winston Churchill, fully tracked now, and we just sort of
• 1:21:49
  argue with each other. And that was part of the the
• 1:21:51
  appeal I think was that we were we were sort of like it was we
• 1:21:54
  were we we were. We were we were you were reading
• 1:22:00
  them every month. The readers were reading them
• 1:22:01
  every month. So it just felt like an absolute
• 1:22:03
  like disgrace if the writers went as well, you know.
• 1:22:06
  I mean it was we should be reading them and enjoying them
• 1:22:10
  as well if we weren't reading something wrong.
• 1:22:12
  So but no I mean I I just felt with the the 8th Doctor the
• 1:22:15
  other thing was that you have this sort of genie out the
• 1:22:18
  bottle with the Doctor which is you know he's he's not asexual.
• 1:22:21
  He's not like you know he is not that Grace is.
• 1:22:25
  I think the big revolution is Grace is not asexual.
• 1:22:28
  I think Grace is living with one she's running around in a very
• 1:22:34
  interesting corset dress. She's she's she is presented as
• 1:22:38
  someone that is a you know a grown sexually active woman you
• 1:22:44
  know do that and and none of the companions from the fictional
• 1:22:50
  side or whatever, you know the companions are not presented
• 1:22:53
  that way either. They sort of you know hold hands
• 1:22:56
  with someone in the last episode and that's the full that's the
• 1:23:00
  full extent of like that. You know give or take.
• 1:23:02
  You know you have you have like occasional Joe Grant or Perry or
• 1:23:06
  whatever occasionally having some kind of like some sort of
• 1:23:12
  nod towards that. But the companions were not
• 1:23:14
  exactly like, you know, it was a different show.
• 1:23:19
  The logic was different. And no, I mean for the dying day
• 1:23:22
  I just thought it's Benny Code and Benny Wood and you have the
• 1:23:32
  opportunity. I think you end up in all sorts
• 1:23:36
  of philosophical. You end up with a very with
• 1:23:40
  Doctor Who. You very quickly end up with the
• 1:23:41
  kind of problem that like is this the same Doctor that also
• 1:23:46
  there's a there's a Christopher Eccleston interview where he
• 1:23:48
  suddenly realizes he's also Sylvester McCoy and he's like
• 1:23:56
  wait, I'm playing the same. I am not just the same.
• 1:23:58
  Like I'm not like playing Hamlet.
• 1:24:00
  Like, you know, in his day, you know in McKellen or Patrick
• 1:24:04
  Stewart or you know David Warren or whatever played Hamlet, I'm
• 1:24:08
  literally playing the same Hamlet.
• 1:24:09
  It's like I'm meant to be like a slightly a slightly older
• 1:24:15
  Sylvester McCoy and and and and you can't there are, there are
• 1:24:19
  things you just can't think massively too hard about.
• 1:24:23
  Like, I I don't think that Benny was like secretly attracted to
• 1:24:31
  like the the Doctor, the 7th Doctor and that was what she was
• 1:24:35
  at harbouring all those years. I think that it was a sort of a
• 1:24:42
  new situation and a new sort of instinct that she had.
• 1:24:46
  And I think that her one opportunity to or whatever
• 1:24:50
  they're they're one opportunity to.
• 1:24:55
  And I just didn't. I knew it was a you write these
• 1:24:59
  things and you go, I just the diners is a long one as well.
• 1:25:04
  It's like 95,000 under 1000 words and I just, I just read
• 1:25:07
  100,000 words and it's literally every single thing that I'm
• 1:25:11
  going to be answering at the end of time is you know.
• 1:25:15
  Although I swear as I remember now though I swear there were
• 1:25:17
  Ice Warriors in it, right. I remember that as well.
• 1:25:20
  You know and it's and it's like I don't that is right.
• 1:25:27
  Yeah. And then we talked about them
• 1:25:28
  not being talked about but but I I think it's I mean for my money
• 1:25:34
  I think they did. I think they unambiguously did.
• 1:25:38
  Both of them were enthusiastic and willing partners in this
• 1:25:43
  process. And yeah.
• 1:25:47
  So there you go. I think we.
• 1:25:48
  Can, but I think I'm sorry. Well, that's the tipping point
• 1:25:52
  between the classic series and the new series then.
• 1:25:54
  Because you know, as you said, there's a pattern of behaviour.
• 1:25:56
  After that I've I've said this I I I think one of the things that
• 1:26:02
  was was shocking about the new series coming back Russell Davis
• 1:26:05
  series was was it was like like those of us who wrote the books
• 1:26:09
  it was like we were sitting in exam and then Russell Davis came
• 1:26:12
  along and he sat down and goes here's your here's the answers
• 1:26:18
  here's the answer to the test you've been setting.
• 1:26:20
  You know you you wrote a 300,000 word essay about about Nazis and
• 1:26:24
  the 5th Doctor and 7th Doctor muting each other and here's
• 1:26:28
  here's how you do Doctor Who for the for the you know post Buffy
• 1:26:31
  post Twin Peaks post you know DVD era kind of audience.
• 1:26:44
  No but it is it's not a coincidence.
• 1:26:46
  It's not a coincidence. Paul can.
• 1:26:48
  I mean, you know, Russell wrote one.
• 1:26:50
  I mean a lot of the people writing those early TV stories
• 1:26:54
  had written new adventures and Russell wrote, wrote one of them
• 1:27:01
  and he read them. I'm credited in Damaged Goods.
• 1:27:05
  So I'm it's like my claim to fame now.
• 1:27:07
  It's like it's like Paul Cornell.
• 1:27:09
  I can't remember. It is Paul Cannell.
• 1:27:10
  Mark get his Paul Abbott. Me, It's like, it's like, it's
• 1:27:20
  like thank you to the creator of Shameless and also loves Parkin,
• 1:27:24
  who sent me the audio tape of Tom Baker reading The State of
• 1:27:28
  Decay, my contribution. He phoned me up.
• 1:27:32
  It's like the one time I've met him like a couple times ago,
• 1:27:41
  Doctor conventions of 90s and stuff, like twice, three times.
• 1:27:44
  The only time I got phoned up was it was like, Rebecca says
• 1:27:47
  you can tell me all about vampires in Doctor Who.
• 1:27:51
  OK well what are they like in State of Decay?
• 1:27:53
  And I was like they have cloaks and they live in a full.
• 1:27:58
  And they like at one point Romana is sort of laid out and
• 1:28:02
  they're going to like drink blood from her neck.
• 1:28:04
  And they were and he was like, oh, is that it?
• 1:28:07
  And I was like, yeah. And he goes, well, I I obviously
• 1:28:10
  I remember state of the decay. I thought there's more to it.
• 1:28:11
  And I was like, they fought the time laws.
• 1:28:14
  Yeah, Yeah. They thought, I remember that.
• 1:28:15
  And I was like, what's this? And then so in the end, it was
• 1:28:18
  just like, oh, Tom Bacon did a really good audiobook on it
• 1:28:22
  won't tell you anything about vampires.
• 1:28:24
  It's just quite entertaining because, well, have you got a
• 1:28:25
  copy? So I'm making you a copy.
• 1:28:27
  So, like, my contributions were the my contributions of the
• 1:28:31
  world of Doctor Who, my main contributions of the Play Center
• 1:28:34
  on audio. I've made a copy of an audio
• 1:28:35
  cassette of The State of Decay.