A Life More or Less Ordinary

Powershop of the Daleks

2012-01-22T13:08:00.014+13:00

This advert for New Zealand company Powershop (a standalone subsidiary of state owned Meridian Energy) is currently appearing on various pages on the news website Stuff, and presumably elsewhere as well.

Last month Powershop were forced to drop another advert in this campaign which featured an Darth Vader, following a request from Lucasfilm's lawyers who understandably objected to the unauthorised use of the character.

Powershop are now using an image closely resembling a Dalek. Close enough I believe to raise the ire of the BBC and Terry Nation's estate. There is certainly no wording an the advert to indicate that either party has approved its use.

The artwork isn't terribly original either. It is clearly based on artist Richard Jennings' cover of The Dalek Book, published by Panther Books/Souvenir Press in 1964.

Addenda...

In addition to the online adverts, this artwork is also being used by Powershop elsewhere. Posters featuring Powershop's Dalek have been spotted on display in bus shelters around New Zealand.

The above photo was taken by Simon Granville (that's his reflection!) at the corner of Victoria and Dixon streets in Wellington on Saturday 21 January.

Simon says, "I've seen the poster in a couple of other places too, including along Arthur St on Wellington's bypass and on a huge poster on the side of a building on Stout St near the train station, both highly visible places." Simon adds that the posters have appeared very recently. "I first saw them on Saturday, and I would have noticed if they'd been there last weekend, so they're only a week old at most."

Incredibly, there's more. Powershop has an online game for visitors to their site to play. The game is called Merry Xmas from Santa's Robot Helpers. The eponymous robot helpers are Daleks, and fairly accurately rendered ones at that - with the addition of a jetpack for the player's character, a red Dalek.

The simplistic game involves moving the red Dalek across a landscape, picking up gift-wrapped boxes along the way, and then blasting fifteen brown Daleks to end the game and deliver the gifts to Santa Claus.

The Christmas theme suggests that the game hasn't just been added to the site but has probably been there for at least a month. Here's a screenshot from the game:

(Thanks to Jon Preddle for pointing out the game)

Sex in Space

2011-11-03T18:28:00.002+13:00

The Prison in Space is an unmade Doctor Who story from Patrick Troughton's last season that has survived as a complete set of scripts. These scripts have just been published as a book by Richard Bignell under the Nothing at the End of the Lane imprint.

The four-part serial was conceived as a light-hearted comedy story, a broad satire of the battle of the sexes. Commissioned in April 1968 from the experienced television scriptwriter Dick Sharples, for a time during its development it was intended to write out Jamie and introduce a replacement male companion. The story is especially remarkable because it came so very close to being made. A director, David Maloney, had been assigned, design work was underway and casting was in progress by early October 1968 when producer Peter Bryant decided the story was not working out. Its replacement was The Krotons.

Early this year, Richard Bignell asked me if I’d like to write a review of the story as part of the supplementary material to be included in the book. I had previously written a piece for Richard’s first Nothing at the End of the Lane script book, Farewell Great Macedon, and eagerly accepted the opportunity to contribute to the follow-up volume.

My two-page review, entitled ‘Sex Crimes’, is a fairly scathing of the dreadful sexism prevalent in the scripts. I do however praises other aspects of the story, such as continuity references to an earlier televised story, the strong characterisation of the Doctor and Jamie, and the highly imaginative opening sequence. I wrote my piece in isolation from other contributors and it wasn’t until I received a copy of the finished book that I saw that my review was one of two - the other, by Jonathan Morris, is more forgiving of the story’s shortcomings and effectively provides some balance to my criticisms. This seems to have been more good fortune than design as I gather that Jonathan was equally unaware of what I'd said in my review.

In addition to mine and Jonathan’s critiques, there is also a 'Time Team' feature in the style of Doctor Who Magazine's popular and long-running column, reuniting the original line-up of Jac Rayner, Peter Ware, Clayton Hickman and Richard Bignell - though it should perhaps be noted that Clay is suspiciously slumbering throughout the group discussion!

Also included are Brian Hayles’ original storylines for the Ice Warrior story Lords of the Red Planet, which was scrapped in favour of a different serial - The Seeds of Death.

The highlight of the supplementary material is in my opinion Andrew Pixley’s article ‘Winds of Change’ which examines month-by-month the behind-the-scenes work on the writing and production of Troughton’s turbulent final season throughout 1968.

The Prison in Space script book offers an invaluable insight into what was so very nearly a produced, televised Doctor Who story. It is available to purchase here.

The Corden Factor?

2011-10-21T21:51:00.002+13:00

The second half of Doctor Who Series 6 has now screened in New Zealand, and overnight viewer ratings for all six of these episodes have been posted. The ratings for the top-performing programmes on each of the main television channels, as supplied by Nielsen Television Audience Measurement, are published daily on Throng.

As I've posted previously, ratings are available for the first-run screenings of each of the Matt Smith episodes. The figures show that Series 5 performed better than the first half of Series 6. Amy’s Choice topped the chart for last year's series with 146,560 viewers. This year's series opener, The Impossible Astronaut, just about matched this with 146,520.

At the other end of the scale however, no episodes from Series 5 dipped below six figures. The Beast Below was the poorest performer on 105,140. This year the ratings haven't been nearly as strong. The seasonal special A Christmas Carol, got a dismal 85,130, and The Almost People plunged even lower to 67,060. Only the opening three episodes (The Impossible Astronaut, Day of the Moon and The Curse of the Black Spot managed six-figure ratings.

I think the later timeslot is the key contributing factor accounting for this year's under-performance. In 2010 episodes screened at 7.30, whereas this year Series 6 and the Christmas special started at 8.30 pm. This later start time not only pushed the episodes out of reach of younger viewers who could not stay up to 9.30 to see to the end of the programme, but also placed Doctor Who directly against heavy-hitting prime-time drama series on the other main channels.

That said, the ratings for this latest batch of six episodes - which continued to screen in the same Thursday 8.30 pm timeslot - are not all bad news. The opening two episodes, Let's Kill Hitler and Night Terrors, rated a respectable 117,110 and 119,850, placing them slightly ahead of several of last year's episodes. The audience dropped off for The Girl Who Waited and The God Complex, and the supposedly highly-anticipated series finale, The Wedding of River Song, which dropped to a low 80,490.

The stand-out episode was however Closing Time, which gained an astonishing rating of 171,280. This is higher than any other Matt Smith episode. Closing Time was also the top-rating programme on Prime on the day it screened. No other Matt Smith episode of Doctor Who has charted first on Prime's daily ratings.

So what compelled so many viewers to tune in for this one episode? Was it that it featured James Corden, an actor familiar to New Zealand television audiences from the oft-repeated Gavin & Stacey... or was it the return of the Cybermen? Both Corden and the Cybermen were promoted in Prime's trailer for Closing Time, screened frequently in the week leading up to the episode's showing.

Series Six Part 2:

Let’s Kill Hitler (15 September 2011): 117,110

Night Terrors (22 September 2011): 119,850

The Girl Who Waited (29 September 2011): 102,210

The God Complex (6 October 2011): 96,430

Closing Time (13 October 2011): 171,280

The Wedding of River Song (20 October 2011): 80,490

Series average: 114,562

Ranking:

1. Closing Time (13 October 2011): 171,280

2. Amy’s Choice (13 June 2010): 146,560

3. The Impossible Astronaut (19 May 2011): 146,520

4. Flesh and Stone (30 May 2010): 146,470

5. Cold Blood (27 June 2010): 143,270

6. The Hungry Earth (20 June 2010): 135,700

7. The Lodger (11 July 2010): 135,490

8. Vincent and the Doctor (4 July 2010): 128,950

9. The Curse of the Black Spot (2 June 2011): 126,240

10. The Pandorica Opens (18 July 2010): 120,610

11. Night Terrors (22 September 2011): 119,850

12. The Big Bang (25 July 2010): 118,220

13. Let’s Kill Hitler (15 September 2011): 117,110

14. The Time of Angels (23 May 2010): 116,710

15. The Eleventh Hour (2 May 2010): 113,000

16. Victory of the Daleks (16 May 2010): 111,930

17. The Vampires of Venice (6 June 2010): 109,500

18. The Beast Below (9 May 2010): 105,140

19. The Girl Who Waited (29 September 2011): 102,210

20. Day of the Moon (26 May 2011): 101,760

21. A Good Man Goes to War (30 June 2011): 98,790

22. The Rebel Flesh (16 June 2011): 96,580

23. The God Complex (6 October 2011): 96,430

24. The Doctor’s Wife (9 June 2011): 91,660

25. A Christmas Carol (30 January 2011): 85,130

26. The Wedding of River Song (20 October 2011): 80,490

27. The Almost People (23 June 2011): 67,060

Delivering the Book

2011-09-21T22:39:00.006+12:00

Today I composed a short email, attached a Word document, and hit 'Send'. In doing so, I delivered the manuscript of my book to my publishers.

The Comic Strip Companion: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who in Comics 1964 – 1979 (to give the full title), has been four long years in the making. I was contracted to write it in late September 2007.

At that time I had not yet been approached to write DVD Production Information subtitles. I was still working full-time. My mum was still alive.

I finished writing the first draft back in June 2009. Since then I've been editing and revising, a process that has proved to be just as time-consuming as getting that first draft written.

I haven't kept a watch on the word count during editing, as I cut far more than I added during this phase - there's few things quite as disheartening as watching the word count plunge - so I was surprised to discover that the manuscript I delivered today was 185,676 words. That is remarkably close to what I predicted nearly three years ago: in December 2008, six months before I finished the first draft, I estimated it would come in at 185,000 words!

I've delivered the book, but it remains to be seen what my publishers make of it. I'm certain that there will be tweaks to be made based on their feedback. After four long years, it's in their hands.

Very soon I'm going to start work on the follow-up volume covering the later years of the comic strip. Hopefully this next book won't take quite so long to write!

Dalek artwork origins uncovered

2011-08-12T13:12:00.008+12:00

I'm currently making corrections and changes to The Comic Strip Companion 1964-1979, working from notes made on the manuscript by my good friend Jon Preddle, who is the book's very first reader.

Jon's notes on the chapter covering The Daleks strip from TV Century 21 alerted me to something I'd overlooked in the manuscript. Jon writes, "I might be wrong on this, but didn’t Chris Achilleos base his Target book cover Daleks on Turner’s style?"

This sent me scurrying over to my bookshelves to check, and sure enough Jon is correct - Target novelisation cover artist Chris Achilleos didn't just base his Daleks on Ron Turner's strip illustrations - he directly copied them, and here's the evidence:

Postscript...

And it doesn't stop there. As Jon has since pointed out, Achilleos clearly again turned to Ron Turner's artwork for the TV Century 21 strip when he illustrated the cover for the novelisation Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks. This time, Achilleos reversed the images and altered the designs very slightly, but they are unmistakably based on Turner's artwork.

I've reversed the relevant sections of Achilleos's cover on the right for a direct comparison.

Doctor Who Viewing Figures

2011-07-01T17:31:00.010+12:00

Thanks to Throng (which has for the past two years published online the daily viewer ratings for the top performing programmes on each of the main channels), we can get an idea of how Doctor Who has been performing on New Zealand television of late. Throng's viewer ratings come from Nielsen Television Audience Measurement.

The figures for the first half of Series 6, which finished screening yesterday, show that the series got off to a strong start with a very healthy 146,520 viewers tuning in for The Impossible Astronaut, but thereafter declined, dropping below 100 thousand viewers after the third episode, and hitting its lowest point with The Almost People which had just 67,060 viewers. The series made a strong recovery for the finale, with 98,780 viewers watching A Good Man Goes to War. Curiously the ratings follow a consistent pattern of decreasing one week and increasing the next.

Series Six:

The Impossible Astronaut (19 May 2011): 146,520

Day of the Moon (26 May 2011): 101,760

The Curse of the Black Spot (2 June 2011): 126,240

The Doctor’s Wife (9 June 2011): 91,660

The Rebel Flesh (16 June 2011): 96,580

The Almost People (23 June 2011): 67,060

A Good Man Goes to War (30 June 2011): 98,790

Series average: 104,087

So how does this compare with previous Matt Smith episodes? Here are the ratings for last year's series, as well as the Christmas special screened earlier this year.

Series Five:

The Eleventh Hour (2 May 2010): 113,000

The Beast Below (9 May 2010): 105,140

Victory of the Daleks (16 May 2010): 111,930

The Time of Angels (23 May 2010): 116,710

Flesh and Stone (30 May 2010): 146,470

The Vampires of Venice (6 June 2010): 109,500

Amy’s Choice (13 June 2010): 146,560

The Hungry Earth (20 June 2010): 135,700

Cold Blood (27 June 2010): 143,270

Vincent and the Doctor (4 July 2010): 128,950

The Lodger (11 July 2010): 135,490

The Pandorica Opens (18 July 2010): 120,610

The Big Bang (25 July 2010): 118,220

Series average: 125,504

Christmas Special:

A Christmas Carol (30 January 2011): 85,130

One conclusion that might be drawn from these figures is that Doctor Who performs better when screened earlier in the evening (Series 5 screened at 7.30pm whereas the Christmas special and Series 6 started at 8:30pm), and on Sundays (where Series 5 episodes screened) rather than Thursdays (Series 6 and the Christmas special). The lower figures might be the result of some younger viewers missing out on seeing the series on broadcast, as the later broadcast means that it is on after bedtime. It is not necessarily just the children who may account for the lower figures but also the parents who might otherwise have watched the episodes with them as a shared family viewing experience.

Taking all of the first-run Matt Smith episodes screened to date, here they are ranked by rating. The Impossible Astronaut just misses out on being the highest-rated Matt Smith episode, but by The Almost People, screened just over a month later, is the lowest.

Ranking:

1. Amy’s Choice (13 June 2010): 146,560

2. The Impossible Astronaut (19 May 2011): 146,520

3. Flesh and Stone (30 May 2010): 146,470

4. Cold Blood (27 June 2010): 143,270

5. The Hungry Earth (20 June 2010): 135,700

6. The Lodger (11 July 2010): 135,490

7. Vincent and the Doctor (4 July 2010): 128,950

8. The Curse of the Black Spot (2 June 2011): 126,240

9. The Pandorica Opens (18 July 2010): 120,610

10. The Big Bang (25 July 2010): 118,220

11. The Time of Angels (23 May 2010): 116,710

12. The Eleventh Hour (2 May 2010): 113,000

13. Victory of the Daleks (16 May 2010): 111,930

14. The Vampires of Venice (6 June 2010): 109,500

15. The Beast Below (9 May 2010): 105,140

16. Day of the Moon (26 May 2011): 101,760

17. A Good Man Goes to War (30 June 2011): 98,790

18. The Rebel Flesh (16 June 2011): 96,580

19. The Doctor’s Wife (9 June 2011): 91,660

20. A Christmas Carol (30 January 2011): 85,130

21. The Almost People (23 June 2011): 67,060

New Doctor Who (no spoilers!)

2011-04-18T23:09:00.009+12:00

I saw the first two episodes of the new series of Doctor Who today, at a press preview held five days in advance of their first television broadcast anywhere in the world. The preview was put on by Prime Television, the channel which will be screening the new series when it airs in New Zealand (the start date has yet to be announced).

I've been asked not to say anything specific or to spoil any plot details (not that I would anyway, as I'd hate to have such things revealed for me if I were reading this having yet to see the episodes). So no spoilers lie ahead, I promise.

The screening was preceded with a series trailer introduced by the Doctor himself, greeting us - "Hello, New Zealand!" - from inside the TARDIS in a specially-recorded segment.

We had been advised that the episodes we watched were not the final edits, so it will be interesting to see what, if anything, has changed when the proper versions are broadcast.

This two-part story (The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon), is truly epic in scope. The twists and turns are so mind-boggling that I feel I need at least one more viewing to get everything straight in my head. It's no hyperbole to say that this is definitely one of the most complex and ambitious Doctor Who plots ever, so pay close attention, even to the smallest details.

The adventure is chillingly creepy in places, and I'm sure that certain scenes will provide potent nightmare material for younger viewers. In the fine tradition of the best Doctor Who episodes however, the chills are tempered with some moments of brilliant humour, and Matt Smith in particular gets to deliver many funny lines.

Since the 2005 revival, Doctor Who seems to have stuck to a series structure of leading with a relatively lightweight adventure followed by a gradual build-up to an epic finale. This year's series looks to be very different indeed. This story has all the feel of an epic series conclusion, and even manages to overshadow last year's The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang. If this is how the new series begins, how can it possibly get bigger and more impressive from here?

The second episode ended with a series trailer showing many more scenes from upcoming episodes that do not appear in any other trailers. Judging by what I saw, we're in for a real treat this year.

Quite superb. Doctor Who is back, and in grand style. I cannot wait to see more!

PS: Many thanks to Prime for inviting me along to the preview.

Armageddon It

2011-04-13T21:16:00.010+12:00

Rochelle and I arrived home on Monday evening after four days in Wellington. We were in the capital city for Armageddon, a comic-con style event that takes place there once each year. Rochelle runs an online sci-fi collectibles store, Retrospace, and has a stand selling her wares at each Auckland and Wellington event.

This year was the third consecutive Wellington Armageddon we’d attended as exhibitors, and by far our most successful. The success is measured not just in terms of revenue earned and volume of stock sold, but also logistically as it was the easiest and most effortless experience we've had running a Retrospace stand at Armageddon.

In past years we loaded up our vehicle with as much stock as we could possibly cram in and drove from Auckland to Wellington. This had its drawbacks as it restricted on the amount of stock we had available to sell and also meant that by the time we arrived to set up and start selling we were already shattered from a ten-hour drive, and that's not even taking into consideration the return journey.

This year Rochelle loaded the stock into two large packing crates and booked a freight company to take them down. We enjoyed a short flight from Auckland to Wellington, arriving refreshed, and ready to set up at the TSB Arena, located on the city’s scenic waterfront.

The Retrospace stand, before the doors opened on the first day.

Unlike previous Armageddon events, which had quiet periods, at this year’s event we had a fairly constant crowd of customers clustered around our stand. I believe the attendance numbers for the show were significantly up on previous years as we were hearing reports that on the Saturday people were being refused entry for a time due to overcrowding issues, and there are mutterings about needing to perhaps move to a larger venue.

While working on the stand I chatted to a wide variety of people. Some were so enthusiastic that they came dressed as their favourite character (there were quite a few Matt Smith Doctors both male and female), while at the other end of the spectrum there were those who seemed just a bit overwhelmed by it all. Some came over to chat about Doctor Who, drawn by the large array of merchandise we had displayed on our stand. I was even recognised from my appearances on the Doctor Who DVDs and a television item about Rochelle and me that screened on Close Up some weeks earlier. It seems I have my own local fan following, of sorts.

There were some interesting conversations, most memorably a debate between several teenage girls over whether David Tennant or Matt Smith was better. I ventured that I thought Smith was a slightly better actor, and got agreement from one girl, whilst another piped up that she preferred Smith because his sonic was bigger than David’s. Size, apparently, is important.

Feeling slightly overwhelmed by the crowd...

The event had an array of guests, including Colin Baker (the Sixth Doctor, Doctor Who), John Leeson (Voice of K9, Doctor Who), Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck, Battlestar Galactica), and several others, but I didn’t get to see any of their talks. Even with the invaluable assistance of those helping us out on the stand (thank you so much, Chris, Wade and Kim), it was rarely possible to get away for any length of time. I expected a quiet period whilst Colin and John were talking on stage, but this never occurred and we continued to have people buying Doctor Who merchandise from us during that time.

I did however get to meet John Leeson, who is a really lovely man. We discovered over drinks on the Friday night that we share a few areas of common interest and experience. I was also chatted with John’s lovely wife Judy who told me all about her work as a production buyer on such films as The Hours, The Golden Compass, and Martin Scorese’s latest, Hugo Cabret. Given her impressive background in movies, I thought that Judy ought to have been a guest speaker at Armageddon herself, but she was having none of it.

His Master's Voice - John Leeson

I also got to meet a couple of the animation voice artist guests, namely the charming Paul Eiding, whom I introduced to drinking cider, and Michael Sinterniklaas, the voice of Dean in The Venture Bros, and who uncannily looks a little like his animated alter ego. Michael told me he’s been a Doctor Who fan for years, and seemed as impressed to learn that I worked on the DVDs as I was that he worked on one of my favourite animated series.

"Go Team Venture!" - myself and Michael Sinterniklaas

Roll on the next Armageddon, in Auckland in October!

Absence of Malus

2011-01-31T22:43:00.011+13:00

I began writing production text for the BBC / 2|entertain Doctor Who DVD range two and a half years ago. Quite early on I think it must have become apparent to my commissioning editor that I have an particular affinity for the Fifth Doctor's era, because I soon found myself the go-to guy for stories from Peter Davison's third and final year. (Thankfully Warriors of the Deep was already out on DVD, as that's one story I don't regard with much enthusiasm.)

Thanks to 2|entertain deciding that they needed to commission brand new production text for special editions of two previously-released stories, I've been responsible for a straight run of five consecutive stories: The Awakening, Frontios, Resurrection of the Daleks, Planet of Fire and The Caves of Androzani. That's 18 episodes in total, or 7 hours, 23 minutes of viewing time. I no longer have to be cryptic about any of those titles as 2|entertain has revealed the 2011 schedule in the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine. All of the as-yet unreleased stories I've worked on are on that list. I've known for a couple of years that I was due to cover all five stories and I've gradually been working to complete that set. As of today I'm feeling a sense of accomplishment: I've just delivered the production text subtitles for The Awakening, which completes that set.

Every time I tackle one of these subtitle scripts it seems to eat up a large chunk of my life. I can't vouch for my fellow writers but it seems to take me a good couple of months to complete a four-part story, from beginning the research to finishing the scripts. Even when I'm not actually at my desk, working away on the project, it still occupies my thoughts. I always experience the mental equivalent of a great weight lifting from my shoulders when I put the finishing touches on a script and email it off to my editor on the far side of the world.

There is not much time to take a breather this time around. While I've been working away at The Awakening, other tasks have been mounting up. I've an article I've promised to write for one publication, an interview I need to edit for another, and there is also the matter of my book, which I need to get back to revising very soon.

For a long time I thought The Awakening would be my last subtitling job. It is the final Peter Davison story scheduled for DVD release, so that is 'my' era effectively done and dusted. But it now seems that my days of writing production text are not quite over yet. Mid-way though writing this latest set of subtitles, I was offered another commission. It's a completely different era of the series, of course, but I'm not about to pass up more work. So before too long I'll be immersing myself in the minutiae of another Doctor Who story. Maybe this one will be my last? Who knows!

Oh, and if you think the title of this post is a dreadful pun, wait until you see how The Awakening was going to end before the final scene was rewritten!

Long Ago in an English Winter

2010-12-22T16:22:00.005+13:00

Paul Cornell has assembled an online collection of pieces of fan fiction featuring characters he had created. The stories are represented as a list of links on his latest blog entry The Twelve Blogs of Christmas: Nine. Among the stories represented here is one that I wrote sixteen years ago.

Signifying Nothing revisits a moment from the 1989 Doctor Who television story Battlefield, framed as an encounter between the Doctor (in his seventh incarnation) and the Brigadier. The story qualifies for Paul Cornell's list because his creation, Bernice Summerfield, features in the story. This is a slight cheat as although Bernice is in the story, she is not at the heart of the piece.

The story appeared in print in TSV 38, published March 1994, but it was originally intended for Doctor Who Magazine. In the early 1990s DWM featured one-page short stories called 'Brief Encounters', in which typically some aspect from the series' past would be revisited. Signifying Nothing was written as my first and only attempt at submitting something for this series. Before I could submit it I learned that the magazine had a huge pile of 'Brief Encounters' stories awaiting publication. Somewhat dishearted by this revelation, I decided against mailing in my story.

Perhaps I made the wrong decision. If I had sent my story to DWM, and if it had been accepted for publication, who knows what might have eventuated? I would undoubtedly have been encouraged by this small success to write more short stories. It may have even given me the impetus I needed to finally do something about that long-talked-about Doctor Who New Adventures novel I had aspired to write, but ultimately never did.

Instead, the story ended up being published in TSV, my Doctor Who fanzine. The version that saw print was trimmed down from the original, losing some extraneous material about past companions socialising over drinks. I also excised the fact that it was a Christmas party, which accounts for why it is snowing outside the Brigadier's house. Had this detail been retained it would have been highly appropriate for the story's inclusion in Cornell's fiction collection, which is one of his Christmas-themed blog articles.

It is especially fitting to me that Paul Cornell should showcase this story, as his novel Timewyrm: Revelation had been hugely inspirational, opening my eyes to the potential of Doctor Who in prose fiction. I can see some of the influence of Cornell's fiction in my story with its emphasis on a character's internal emotional struggle, the wintry landscape and even the Shakespeare quotation.

Television story novelisations excepted, Signifying Nothing was my last piece of published fiction. I subsequently decided to focus exclusively on writing non-fiction for TSV and other publications, and that's where my writing career has taken me since.

Resurrection Revisited

2010-11-11T14:00:00.008+13:00

I've delivered my fourth set of Production Notes subtitles.

This latest set is for the Resurrection of the Daleks Special Edition DVD. Normally I have to wait some months after I’ve written subtitles for a story before I can discuss it openly, but on this occasion there is no such impediment to disclosure, since the title has already been announced by 2|entertain as forming part of the Revisitations 2 box set, which is due out (I think) around the middle of next year.

I was offered the commission for this story, along with the of The Caves of Androzani Special Edition two years ago, just after I delivered the Production Notes for Planet of Fire. I had demonstrated with that first job that I could do the work to the required standard and as these two stories book-end Planet of Fire, I was the obvious choice to tackle both.

While I was very keen to do The Caves of Androzani, being as it is a very highly regarded story which regularly tops polls of favourite stories (even beating out Blink in last year’s Doctor Who Magazine survey), I was less enthusiastic about Resurrection of the Daleks. It is not so much that I dislike the story, though it pales in comparison to Androzani, but rather that I had a feeling of ‘been there, done that’ about this one.

I had written a fan novelisation of Resurrection as a not-for-profit book a decade ago (ebook available here). In order to write that book I had scrutinised the story in great detail. I knew every character, every scene, every line, intimately. The prospect of going back over old ground did not thrill me but I did not want to pass up the opportunity of more work. The idea that I could have a sequential ‘run’ of stories on DVD was appealing, and my past familiarity with the story could also work to my advantage by speeding up the writing process. So I agreed, in September 2008, to do both stories.

For the next two years, Resurrection sat on the back-burner while I tackled other projects. My third set of subtitles (for a story which for the moment must remain nameless since it has yet to be announced), was completed in September. Following this delivery, I had just two months to produce the Resurrection subtitles from start to finish. I knew this was achievable but there was little margin for error.

As soon as I started work on Resurrection I discovered that the time-coded DVD I had been supplied refused to play. The time-codes are an essential part of the subtitles script, defining the precise placement of each block of text on screen. I usually like to get the time-codes worked out early on, but this time I had to rethink my process so that I wasn’t unduly delayed whilst I waited on a replacement time-coded disc to arrive from the UK.

The penultimate week before the delivery date was already booked up with helping Rochelle run the Retrospace stands at Armageddon, during which I would be unable to work on the subtitles so I had to work around this. Then, directly after Armageddon, I came down with a severe cold which I almost certainly caught at the expo. This meant that I was sick throughout the last week I had in which to finish the subtitles, so as much as I just wanted to crawl into bed, I soldiered on and managed to deliver the complete set of subtitles on schedule.

I'm relieved that, despite the haste with which these were written and the obstacles I encountered along the way, this latest set of subtitles was approved with relatively few changes.

I’ve now resumed working on revisions to my much-delayed Comic Strip Companion book, something I had to put aside while working on the subtitles. Although I'm still writing about Doctor Who, it is still a big change to move from short, pithy blocks of informational text to long-form prose critiques and analysis; from grim Dalek massacres on DVD to the Doctor's slightly bonkers but ever-so-charming exploits in the pages of TV Comic.

Production Text Podcast

2010-10-19T16:39:00.004+13:00

My very first podcast interview has just gone live. (I've been interviewed on the radio a few times, but never before on a podcast, though theoretically the medium's the same).

I'm interviewed by an old friend, Ian Bisset, about my work on the Doctor Who DVD production text subtitles.

I first met Ian in the early 1990s when he lived in Wellington and was a key player in the organisation of the Wellington Chapter. Ian and I fell out of contact when he emigrated to the USA later in the decade, but we've recently rekindled contact via Twitter. Ian is one half of the Cultdom Collective, a regular series of sci-fi themed podcasts with a clear bias towards all things Doctor Who. Ian asked me for an interview, and once I'd got to grips with Skype we finally recorded an hour-long session last month, at which time the DVD of Planet of Fire, featuring my first set of subtitles, had recently been released in the USA.

It's a chatty, informal interview and starts with a bit of a ramble through our mutual history before getting down to the nitty-gritty of what the production text subtitles entail and how I approach writing them.

Here's the link:
http://cultdom.com/2010/10/18/cultdom-special-interview-with-paul-scoones/

Toast of the Vogels

2010-08-31T11:04:00.010+12:00

Time Space Visualiser, the fanzine of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club, won the 2010 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Fanzine at the national science fiction convention held in Wellington last weekend. This is only the second time in nearly a decade that these awards have been run that TSV has picked up a Vogel, so this is cause for celebration.

As former editor and founder of TSV I am of course delighted at this news. All credit - and the actual award - should go to Adam McGechan, who took over from me as editor several years back. Adam was responsible for producing the issue (TSV 76) under consideration for this year's awards.

Several months ago I predicted here that the nomination was the most recognition TSV could hope to receive from these awards. I was wrong.

The fanzine category this year has been awarded jointly to both TSV and Phoenixine, the fanzine of the Wellington science fiction society. I presume this means that both publications received equal numbers of votes. This is remarkable given that voting took place at a convention held in Wellington and was likely attended by most if not all readers of Phoenixine. Furthermore, judging by the lack of comments on the Doctor Who club message board, it would appear that very few TSV readers were in attendance.

So how did TSV manage to do so well?

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that for the first time in the history of these awards, TSV was available for anyone to download and read as a PDF during the voting period. This was born out of necessity. The usual procedure is for physical copies of each of the nominated publications to be displayed at the convention, but this particular issue of TSV sold out many months ago and with a small-run reprint proving too costly, Adam and I elected to re-release it online. I did not have a spare physical copy available to supply to the convention, but I did provide the PDF download link, which was added to the ballot listing on the Vogel Awards website.

I'm assuming therefore that a number of voters clicked the link, downloaded the issue and had a read of it before casting their votes. Perhaps these readers were impressed at the standard of the writing, the range of articles and reviews, the great cover artwork and the well-ordered stylish layout. TSV 76 is, I think, one of the best of the half-dozen issues produced by Adam so the zine was shown off to its best advantage.

In my earlier post I stated, "The awards are not about quality but popularity." I don't mind conceding that I may have been wrong in that view. Either that or TSV is far more popular in the general New Zealand science fiction community than I had realised.

Postscript:
Adam has posted about winning the award on his blog here. Note: 'Adam Christopher' is his literary pseudonym.

TSV and Time Unincorporated

2010-08-15T22:33:00.004+12:00

Time, Unincorporated is a series of books published by US-based Mad Norwegian Press reprinting collections of Doctor Who fanzine articles. Volume 1, issued last year, collected the writings of prolific fanzine contributor and author Lance Parkin. Volume 2, issued earlier this year, is a collection of essays broadly themed around the classic series by a various writers.

I recently purchased a copy of Volume 2 and have been dipping into it over the last week. Some of the material has a ring of familiarity. This is because over a third of the essays originated in the pages of Enlightenment, a rather wonderful long-running Canadian fanzine that I’ve been following for many years. Up until recently, Enlightenment was edited by Graeme Burk, who also, perhaps unsurprisingly, co-edited the second volume of Time, Unincorporated. I’ve corresponded with Graeme online a number of times over the years but we’ve never actually met.

Even though I’ve previously read some of the articles, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this great collection of intelligent and thoughtful writing, which also includes pieces from other fanzines such as Shockeye’s Kitchen, Dark Circus and Shooty Dog Thing. Although it is purportedly a collection of fanzine articles, over a third of the 74 essays have never been printed within the pages of a fanzine. There are a number of pieces from the Doctor Who Ratings Guide website and others were written especially for this book. I have no problem with this, though I do think that the inclusion of two chapters from the recent book Time and Relative Dissertations in Space (published 2007) is unwarranted. I’m sure that like myself, many other readers will have purchased both titles, rendering such duplication redundant.

The Time, Unincorporated series is of interest to me both as an enthusiastic supporter of fanzines and as a fanzine editor. So far the series has not featured anything from my own publication, Time Space Visualiser, but that is not a reflection on the quality of material. The omission is in fact due to future plans for the series. To quote from the foreword to Time, Unincorporated Volume 2:

Outside the UK, one of the most influential zines published over the past twenty years is TSV (Time Space Visualiser), the fanzine of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club, but it’s hoped that TSV will get a future volume of Time, Unincorporated all to itself.

That's very flattering to have my fanzine described in such glowing terms. It was not until I bought a copy of the book and read the foreword that I realised that plans (however tentative) for this future volume had now been made public.

Publisher Lars Pearson first ran the idea past me of putting out a TSV themed volume of Time, Unincorporated back in 2008. Soon after that Graeme asked if he could publish material from TSV in the volumes he was compiling. These two approaches seemed to me to be at odds with each other. Naturally Graeme would have wanted to pick out the best and most interesting pieces from TSV’s back catalogue, leaving the later TSV specific volume lacking some of its showpieces.

We did not get as far as discussing the individual items under consideration for reprinting, but Lars, Graeme and myself all agreed to hold back all TSV material for its own volume. In retrospect I can see that this decision denied Volume 2 of some of its potential diversity. The reason that there is so much material from Enlightenment in that book I think is at least partly attributable to the withdrawal from consideration of anything from TSV.

There are many more volumes planned in the Time, Unincorporated series, and Lars has indicated that the TSV volume will be some way down the track. So, as yet, I’ve made little progress with this project. I have at least made a start on assembling a list of contents.
It has been interesting to look back through past issues and select pieces that I believe are deserving of a place in the collection.

For copyright reasons, the book will not feature fiction or artwork, so the collection with be comprised of articles and longer story reviews. There are several pieces that have reappeared in other publications which may count against their inclusion. In addition, I will need to seek permission from each and everyone of the writers whose material I want to use. I have kept in contact with many past contributors, but I daresay there will be some individuals who will require a bit of detective work to track down.

I think too, that just as Graeme has done in his volume, I may commission some original pieces for the collection so that, even for someone familiar with all 76 past issues of TSV, there will still be something new and interesting to discover in the book.

Panic Moon issue 1 (July 2010)

2010-07-19T14:29:00.011+12:00

I'm intrigued by the current revival of Doctor Who fanzines. Why this is happening now and not five years ago when the series first returned to our screens is a bit of a mystery to me. Perhaps the new generation of Who fandom is only now discovering the medium in force. I thought perhaps paper-based fanzines were becoming a thing of the past, but it seems I was wrong.

After reading some favourable comments online, I ordered one of the new crop of fanzines, the UK-based Panic Moon, produced by Oliver Wake. I like the title which is both both cryptic and yet has currency for those in the know (An anagram of companion, it is the cover-name used for auditions for the role of Amy Pond).

Panic Moon is a small, conveniently pocket-sized A6 publication, and runs to 28 pages with a fairly small font size so that there is actually surprisingly a fair bit to read.

Most of the issue is filled with individual reviews of each of the Matt Smith stories. All too often fan critics seem to feel the need to accentuate the negative, so it is are refreshing to see that the reviews, from a number of different writers, are fairly balanced in their critiques. Interspersed with these reviews are short features on controversial topics including Amy Pond's character, the redesigned Daleks, and Chris Chibnall's writing.

Although almost all of the issue is taken up with coverage of the Matt Smith series, there is room at the end for commentary on a few other recent fanzines and the latest crop of Big Finish releases. The introduction explains that this emphasis on the new series is simply because it is topical and that the next issue will have "more old series stuff".

The artwork, all in black and white, is of a high standard and is used sparingly throughout the issue, nicely complementing the writing. The layout is pleasingly straightforward and unfussy.

I like this fanzine, and have no hesitation in recommending it.

Panic Moon is available to order worldwide, via payapal. Details can be found at:
http://panicmoonfanzine.angelfire.com/home/

Radio Live Interview

2010-05-26T22:03:00.003+12:00

A bit of shameless self-promotion here.

Doctor Who will be a featured topic on Graeme Hill's Weekend Variety Wireless programme on Radio Live, this Sunday 30 May from 10.30 to 11am, and I'll be joining Graeme live in studio to talk about all things Doctor Who.

Graeme tells me he's a bit of a fan himself, so I'm looking forward to having a good chat about my favourite subject.

A short piece about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop will be featured, and we'll also be promoting the Greatest Doctor Who Weekend Of All Time marathon of new series episodes that is due to screen on New Zealand's UKTV channel a week later.

There will be a couple of competitions you can enter to win in conjunction with the Radio Live programme. The prizes are a Fourth Doctor and Davros statue from Weta, and a TARDIS cookie jar from Retrospace.

Radio Live broadcasts on various frequencies around the country, and can also be listened to online (see their website for details). I believe that Graeme Hill's show will be available to listen again from the afternoon of the following day.

Vying for the Vogels

2010-04-25T00:29:00.003+12:00

TSV has just been announced as one of the nominees in the 'Best Fan Publication' category of the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, New Zealand's national SF awards. The full list of nominations for the Vogels can be viewed here. The winners will be announced at Au Contraire, the New Zealand National Science Fiction Convention for 2010, taking place in Wellington over 27-29 August.

This year TSV shares the category with Phoenixine, the fanzine of the Wellington Phoenix science fiction club, and a third publication called The Event.

Phoenixine has been the recipient of the award in the Best Fan Publication category (formerly called 'Best Fanzine') for most of the last decade. The exceptions were 2009 and 2007, when there was no award in this category due to insufficient nominations (TSV was not eligible in 2009 as no issues had been published in the previous calendar year). TSV has been nominated most years alongside Phoenixine, but has only won once - and that was by mistake.

A miscount of the votes resulted in TSV being announced as the winner at the awards ceremony at Icon in Wellington at Easter 2005. The issues nominated for that year's award were my final two as editor, TSV 69 and 70. The error only came to light when the voting papers were checked a couple of weeks after the event. The organisers apologised and made amends by issing a 'Joint Award' to both fanzines. I wasn't at the convention and only heard that TSV had 'won' when I received the apology from the awards organiser. The rather fetching engraved trophy statuette, manufactured by Weta Workshop, still sits on my bookshelf.

TSV is a fantastic-looking publication with a high calibre of material, thanks to the talent and effort of current editor Adam McGechan and the zine’s many contributors. This might count for something if the Vogels were decided by an impartial judging committee assessing the quality and merits of each nominated work.

The awards are instead voted for by attendees of the national science fiction convention and by members of SFFANZ (Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand). TSV’s readership is barely represented in these spheres whereas many readers of Phoenixine are, I believe, SFFANZ members and/or frequent convention-goers. Naturally, they will vote for ‘their’ publication over any other nominee, whether out of loyalty or familiarity - or both.

Is there anything wrong with this state of affairs? Perhaps not, though in my view ‘Best’ is a bit of a misnomer for the category. ‘Most Popular’ would be a more fitting epithet. Maybe Phoenixine is thoroughly deserving of being called ‘Best’. I don’t know as I’ve not had the opportunity to view an issue in recent years. Regardless, that is not the criteria by which the Vogels are currently determined. The awards are not about quality but popularity.

It is a pleasure to see TSV and Adam’s name as editor very deservingly included on this year’s ballot, but it is a pleasure tainted with the certainty that this is the highest accolade we can hope to achieve at the Vogels.

Ian Scoones RIP

2010-02-28T23:28:00.004+13:00

I've just learned that Ian Scoones has died.

Ian was a visual effects designer who worked on many episodes of Doctor Who and the first series of Blake's 7 in the 1970s. He also worked on Thunderbirds, Hammer Horror movies and the Hammer House of Horror television series.

I found out about his death on Total Sci-Fi Online, and have since learned that he passed away from liver cancer on 20 January this year.

I first become aware of Ian when his name appeared on the end credits of Doctor Who. To see that someone who had the same surname as myself was working on my favourite television programme made a big impression on me in my pre-teen years. At the time I didn't know of anyone with the surname Scoones who wasn't part of my extended family.

Over the years I've sometimes been asked by Doctor Who fans if I'm somehow related to Ian. Now I do have an uncle who frequently crops up in BBC television credits, but that's underwater cameraman Peter Scoones, best known for his work on David Attenborough's nature documentaries. As far as I know Ian is not a relative - or is he...?

In the mid-1990s, I tried to find out if there was in fact a family connection. Ian Scoones offered for sale via mail order a series of art prints of his production paintings from Doctor Who. A representative of his wrote to TSV, the Doctor Who fanzine I edited, to see if we would advertise these for sale. I took the opportunity to write back, confessing that I was curious to find out if there might be a family connection.

Ian didn't reply directly, but his representative wrote on his behalf, saying that Ian had read my letter. The letter said that Ian didn't know the Scoones side of his family at all as his father had left his mother when he was very young. He did however very kindly send me a complimentary set of his art prints, which I've kept to this day.

In later years myself and my father both conducted a fair amount of research into the Scoones name and put together a fairly comprehensive family tree. Two people called Ian Scoones crop up in my research; one's my father's cousin, and the other's a professor at Sussex University with a prodigous collection of books and papers to his name. But I'm still none the wiser as to how and where the visual effects designer Ian Scoones fits into scheme of things.

Here's the interesting thing though. Judging by the various photos I've seen of Ian Scoones over the years, there was definitely a resemblance to members of my branch of the Scoones family. Could it be that we are in fact related? Was his absent father one of the Scooneses who appears in my family tree? It's a mystery that will probably never be solved.

Vworp Vworp!

2010-02-24T23:51:00.006+13:00

I received my copy of Vworp Vworp! Volume One today.

This is a publication of particular interest to me as it focuses on the history of Doctor Who Magazine, with a particular emphasis on the comic strips. Naturally, some of Vworp Vworp!’s material will be referenced and footnoted in volume two of my book, The Comic Strip Companion.

Vworp Vworp! is currently - and very deservedly - receiving many positive comments online. The A4, perfect bound full colour glossy publication is produced to such a professional standard that it could easily pass for a DWM special issue. It. What is most remarkable is that it is a fanzine, produced not for profit but as a labour of love by editors Grant Kavanagh and Colin Brockhurst.

The content includes an impressive line-up of articles and interviews with such familiar (to long-time DWM readers) names as Dez Skinn, David Lloyd, Dave Gibbons, Pat Mills, David J Howe, Andrew Pixley, Jeremy Bentham, Scott Gray, Clayton Hickman, Ade Salmon, Alan Barnes, Martin Geraghty and more.

Even though the written material is impressive it is just about eclipsed by the visual feast of colour and imagery throughout. If this were a professional publication I would still think it superb. That this quality has been lavished on a non-profit fanzine is, quite frankly, simply astounding.

All this aside, I must declare my own vested interest. My name appears in the “with thanks to” list, but that’s my one and only appearance in the issue. It wasn't always going to be this way, and in fact my involvement in its gestation stretches back over one and a half years.

I first got involved in October 2008 when I discovered online that a one-day event was shortly due to take place dedicated specifically to Doctor Who comics. I greeted this news with mixed feelings of delight and dismay; delight because it was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to attend since I was (and indeed still am) involved in writing a book on this very subject; and dismay because it was due to take place in a pub in Manchester, on the far side of the world. Frustratingly, had this taken place a few scant months earlier when I was still in London, you couldn’t have kept me away.

Had I been able to go, I would most certainly have volunteered as a guest speaker to talk about my book. Instead I did the next best thing. Gareth Kavangh, the organiser, was preparing a Doctor Who comics-themed fanzine called Vworp Vworp! to launch it at the convention. I emailed Gareth and offered to write an article for his zine, and he gladly accepted. I also provided him with some research material for a panel he was running at the event. So, in lieu of being there and giving a talk, I wrote down what I would have said instead. My article discussed my particular interest in Doctor Who comic strips and my book. I knew a number of like-minded comic strip writers, artists and fans would be in attendance and it was an opportunity not to be missed to let them know who I was and what I was doing.

Good plan - in theory. Trouble was, the convention came and went. Gareth ran out of time to get his fanzine together so it wasn’t published in time for the event. These things happen. Not to worry, he was still determined to produce the publication, and still wanted to use my article. In February 2009, Vworp Vworp! writer Matt Badham interviewed me by email about my book. The plan was for this interview to appear alongside my article.

Months passed. Gareth was busy with his Masters degree and the zine understandably had to get placed on the back-burner. By July, Colin Brockhurst had joined Gareth on the project. At this time I pitched a second article idea for the zine, this time a look at how Scott Gray got himself established as a comic strip writer. I interviewed a number of usual suspects, including, crucially, the elusive Scott himself. Before I could deliver the piece I learned that there was no room left in the issue and that the piece was instead under consideration for a planned second volume.

By December I learned that my earlier article and accompanying interview about my book had also been dropped from the issue. This wasn’t too much of a disappointment; during my years as a fanzine editor I was frequently faced with the agonising decision to drop a piece from an issue. That never gets any easier, and I could certainly appreciate that my article and interview were no longer a good fit for the issue's repositioning as a celebration of all things DWM. Besides which, my book still wasn’t finished, let alone scheduled for publication, so it made sense to hold the article over to a later date when it would be more timely.

Still very much eager to help out, I offered Gareth and Colin my services as a proof-reader and fact-checker. This was accepted, and shortly before Christmas last year, I pored through eighty pages of PDFs looking for errors. I came up with a list of sixty corrections, most but not all of which made it into the issue (if you see a few typos on page 79, rest assured that I did point them out!)

Gareth very kindly has sent me a complimentary copy of the issue, which I received in the mail today. I cannot recommend this publication highly enough. Although I saw it all on my computer screen when I was proof-reading, I cannot help but marvel at the final, printed product. It is a thing of beauty; Gareth, Colin and their team of contributors deserve to be very proud indeed of what they have achieved.

Go to www.vworpvworp.co.uk to order, but be quick - they're selling fast!

My only hope is that at least something of mine gets published in volume two...

Confessions of a Subtitle Script Writer

2010-02-08T21:27:00.010+13:00

I write for Doctor Who.

At least that's what many people seem to think when I attempt to explain exactly what I do.

In fact I write for the BBC Doctor Who DVDs. I write Production Information Text scripts. Production Information Text is a subtitle option on Doctor Who DVDs that appears whilst as a series of on-screen captions, providing a constant feed of factoids about each episode as you are watching.

These subtitles include such fascinating trivia as deleted scenes quoted from the scripts, details about when and where certain scenes were shot, potted histories of cast members' careers, observations of continuity errors, and discussions about the writer's influences, amongst other gems.

I delivered my first set of subtitle scripts in September 2008. This was for Planet of Fire, Peter Davison's penultimate adventure. I've been intending to write something about creating the subtitle scripts for this story, but I've been waiting patiently to do this until the DVD has been released. That way it will be relevant and it will also enable me to post screen-grabs to illustrate what I'm talking about. Planet of Fire was to have come out last month (as part of the Kamelion box set), but has been delayed until sometime around June.

I've just delivered a second set of subtitle scripts. I can't say yet which story this is for, as there has yet to be an official announcement. Such information is commercially sensitive. Numerous threads on Doctor Who message boards are filled with postings fervently speculating which story will be announced next. (As the number of stories yet to be released on DVD decreases, the chances of guessing the next title correctly correspondingly increases; it's expected that every old surviving Doctor Who story will be out on DVD by some time in 2013).

I was commissioned to write this to-be-announced story, along with another couple of 'TBA' stories, not long after delivering my first set of scripts. At the time, a delivery date had not been set (or at least not communicated).

When I wrote the subtitle scripts for Planet of Fire I set aside around six weeks during which I worked on no other projects so that I could apply myself to the task with minmal distractions. This time around (possibly unwisely in hindsight), I decided instead that I would tackle the project in small concentrated bursts. The scripts were not needed anytime soon, so I worked on them as and when I felt like it; the odd day or few hours here and there. This was a great way of taking short breaks from my other writing, which is a fairly long non-fiction book analysing comic strips, and quite a different disicipline from the subtitle scripts.

Three weeks ago I received a wake-up call in the form of an email out of the blue from my editor, asking how I was going with the scripts. He explained they were significantly over-deadline. There was a bit of leeway for late delivery, but they were needed as soon as practicable.

Although I had done most of the groundwork and had compiled a set of rough notes, I had yet to actually start writing the scripts. I may not have known what the deadline was until it had passed, but nor had I asked about it in the intervening months. At this point I went into a state of mild panic.

I can at times be a terrible procrastinator which is a trait I've discovered I have in common with many freelance writers. An overdue deadline is however a powerful motivation tool. I made a concerted and sustained effort to sit down at the computer and force myself to just keep going, hour after hour, day after day. I devoted just about every spare hour I could to working on these scripts. Even when I wasn't writing, I was constantly thinking either about what still needed to be done, or how to compose the next section I needed to write.

I finished and sent the completed set of scripts yesterday evening - three weeks after learning that the deadline had passed. I felt an immense weight shifting from my shoulders after I wrote the last line on the final script.

I'll blog about the specifics of this set of scripts as and when the story is released on DVD, but I've written about this experience here and now, whilst it is still fresh in my mind, as a reminder to myself not to let myself let a writing project sit on the back-burner by for so long again.

BBC Radio 4 Interview

2009-12-28T14:29:00.007+13:00

I am interviewed in The Lost Episodes, a new BBC Radio 4 documentary first broadcast 26 December 2009 in the Archive on 4 series.

I was approached by BBC researcher Mark Harrison to take part in this production on 9 October this year. Mark described the documentary to me as 'a one-hour piece covering the wiping of some of the early episodes of the series and the subsequent hunt and restoration projects that bring these stories back to life.'

Mark invited me to be interviewed about my involvement in finding the last known surviving copy of The Lion, episode 1 of the 1965 William Hartnell Doctor Who story The Crusade. On my recommendation Mark also invited Neil Lambess to take part in the interview. As Neil and I found the episode together it is only right that he should be involved in telling the story.

Neil and I were interviewed together in a studio at Radio New Zealand in central Auckland early on the morning of Tuesday 17 November. This was a live link-up with the documentary's presenter and producer Shaun Ley, who was in the UK.

In a previous blog entry I discussed being interviewed for Stripped for Action for the Doctor Who DVDs and how I found this a somewhat nerve-wracking experience. By contrast the radio interview was a lot more enjoyable. Listening back to my comments I think it is plainly evident that I am far more at ease on audio than I am on video. In the radio studio I only had to focus on what I was saying and didn't need to think about where my eyeline was or whether my hands were waving about. It also helped that I wasn't the sole focus of the interview, so if I faltered or got anything wrong, Neil was right there to jump in and take up the story, and I supported him likewise.

At the time of writing, the documentary can be heard online via the Listen Again audio stream on the BBC Radio 4 website (though this will probably only be available for the next week).

I found it was fascinating and thoroughly engaging. The focus on audio restoration in the first half of the programme ideally suits the radio medium.

The story of the discovery of The Lion is featured towards the end, beginning around 47 minutes into the hour-long programme (that said, I recommend listening to the entire documentary).

The Lost Episodes is currently attracting some criticism in Doctor Who discussion forums. The central complaint is that it omits other individuals involved in the discovery and return of missing episodes. I have some sympathy with this view but I can also see the programme makers have chosen to focus on an individual episode find rather than covering the circumstances and people involved in each separate discovery. The Lion was selected, it seems, because it is of particular interest. As Shaun Ley says in the documentary, it is "perhaps the most remarkable rescue story in the Doctor Who Archive".

The documentary does however unfortunately misrepresent one aspect of The Lion's recovery.

In the documentary, Sue Malden says that the BBC asked Bruce Grenville if it could have a copy of his film print after an auction house had enquired about selling the print, and that Bruce then agreed to the BBC's request to loan the film. Shaun Ley's narration then states that it was after these "issues had been ironed out" that I went to collect the film.

These comments I think give the false impression that Sue Malden negotiated the return of the film with Bruce Grenville and that I was then despatched to collect it. In fact I sought and gained Bruce's permission to borrow the film to send back to the BBC some time before the auction house or Sue Malden got involved. By the time this issue arose the film print was already held, on loan, by the BBC.

This minor niggle aside, I'm delighted to have had the opportunity to take part in this documentary, which coincidentally was broadcast just days before the eleventh anniversary of the day that Neil and I made that historic discovery of a long lost episode of our favourite telesion programme.

The Flying Pig Story

2009-11-23T14:15:00.011+13:00

Today is the tenth anniversary of Flying Pig. The ambitious New Zealand-owned and operated internet retail store opened its virtual doors for business on 23 November 1999.

Had Flying Pig endured and become the success that was hoped for when it launched then this milestone would today be a cause for celebration. Imagine if you will a giant inflatable cartoon pig resembling the company’s logo floating over Auckland and a glitzy celebratory party covered by the news media.

In reality Flying Pig folded just two years after it launched. In that time the company had endured considerable down-scaling from a staff of sixty-plus at its height to just six on the day it closed.

A number of my former work colleagues look back on the venture with a degree of bitterness and regret. I understand that. Those of us who were there at the beginning were sold on the concept with the promise of expansion, growth and company shares which never eventuated.

I however have generally positive memories of Flying Pig. I am one of only two people who were there on launch day and still there on the fateful day that we were all made redundant, two years later.

I think in some small way I may have helped inspire the company’s creation. During the latter half of the 1990s I worked for the flagship store of Whitcoulls, New Zealand’s leading bookstore chain. I managed the store’s ‘Book Information’ counter, which involved sourcing non-stocked book titles from local and overseas distributors to fill customer orders. On the strength of my performance in this role I was invited to develop a proposal for an up-scaled version of the same service, to serve Whitcoulls’ customers nationwide. I pitched this to the Whitcoulls CEO who signed off on it. I got my own department located in spare space above the shop with a staff of six to eight people, handling direct phone sales, orders from stores and, eventually, Whitcoulls’ own fledgling buy-online store.

From this seed grew the idea of a separate business venture: an internet store with a vast array of books and videos. Flying Pig was masterminded by the very same Whitcoulls CEO who had approved the concept I had helped develop. The Flying Pig online store was the logical extension of that proposition.

My small team was drafted to join Flying Pig in early November 1999. In physical terms this meant relocating from the second floor of the Whitcoulls building to the basement area of a building situated in Freemans Bay. We were set up as the customer service and orders fulfilment team, which was very similar to what we had been doing at Whitcoulls.

I personally felt frustrated at what I perceived as a sideways move, so agitated to join the content management team located in the office upstairs. I was given responsibility for managing the Video & DVD category. At the time DVDs were very new on the New Zealand market; when I initially set up the DVD category there was perhaps only fifty titles available.

Flying Pig opened its virtual doors to the public for the first time on 23 November 1999 with a huge amount of promotion that included billboards and students carrying placards around the streets. Unfortunately the site wasn’t able to cope with the huge volume of online traffic this generated and promptly crashed, resulting in many calls and emails from frustrated potential customers, and unfavourable comments in the media. It is hard to assess in hindsight how much this incident affected the Flying Pig brand, but internet customers are in my experience a generally unforgiving bunch, quick to criticise and slow to forgive perceived wrongs, so I am certain that we lost a portion of our potential customer base.

Despite this early setback the entire staff enjoyed a great company outing to Waiheke Island as a Christmas party and team-bonding exercise. Who knows how much additional ‘team bonding’ might have taken place had our drunken plans for an impromptu night-time skinny-dip not been curtailed by the perhaps fortuitous arrival of the bus to take us back to the ferry!

During the early months of 2000,the company continued to grow. More staff were hired, a new larger location for the business was located, plans were developed for the addition of such diverse categories as tools and wine, and Flying Pig was to be floated on the sharemarket with staff to get shares in the business.

All of these plans for expansion came suddenly and badly unstuck in March 2000 when the so-called dotcom bubble burst with the collapse of the NASDAQ in the US. The shockwave effect on local investors who had contributed to the company’s considerable start-up and operations costs resulted in an immediate need to downscale. Plans to expand the online store, to move premises and to issue shares were abruptly shelved and some staff members were made redundant. Not long after this we vacated our sunny office space and joined the customer service and despatch team downstairs in the gloomy garage/basement area.

Those of us who survived this downsizing rallied together to make the best of a dispiriting setback. We held weekly barbecues and drinks and a light-hearted team atmosphere prevailed most of the time.

In early 2001, following further down-scaling, Flying Pig was acquired by Auckland-based magazine publishing company IT Media and a much-reduced team relocated to share office space with the likes of Rip It Up, NetGuide and NZ Rugby magazines in Kitchener Street. By this time I had been promoted to oversee the general content for the website as well as still handling the ever-growing video and DVD categories.

Within a few months IT Media also fell on hard times and began shedding titles and staff. Flying Pig’s General Manager left and I was encouraged to fill the vacated post. Despite my initial insistence that I wasn’t equipped to run the entire company, by May 2001 I found myself as the head of what was by now a rather small operation with just six staff.

The crunch time came seven months after my appointment as GM. A protracted dispute between a creditor and IT Media that I was powerless to resolve came to a head with the receivers called in to close down Flying Pig. We turned up for work one morning in early November 2001 to find the website down. A short time later we were told to leave as we had all been made redundant.

I arrived home around midday, suddenly unemployed and in a state of mild shock at the turn of events. That very afternoon I received a call from a old Flying Pig colleague, now working with Noel Leeming. He wanted to know if I’d be interested in coming to work at Noel Leeming to use my experience to help set up their online store. As one door closed, another one opened, and I'm happy to report that I was later able to bring on board a couple of my former Flying Pig colleagues.

New Zealand's most popular website, Trade Me, was established in 1999 around the same time as Flying Pig. Who knows, had things turned out differently perhaps Flying Pig might have enjoyed similar success, and ten years later, I might still be working for the company. It is perhaps unlikely though that had this been the case, that I would have ended up as the General Manager!

How I got Stripped for Action

2009-11-05T11:18:00.005+13:00

The Doctor Who: Dalek War DVD box set (recently released in the UK), contains two 1973 Jon Pertwee stories: Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks. The set has been eagerly anticipated by fans due to the extraordinarily successful colour restoration of episode three of the latter story which for the past three decades has only existed as a monochrome recording.

The DVD has personal significance as I crop up in the extras. I’m in two separate features, both instalments in the ongoing ‘Stripped for Action’ series which examines the history of Doctor Who in comics. It’s the second time I’ve appeared on a Doctor Who DVD. The first was on Lost in Time some years earlier where I talked about finding a lost episode in an interview that was shot in my living room.

The invitation to appear in the documentaries came about at relatively short notice while I was in the UK last year on a month-long holiday. I had emailed Marcus Hearn, the director of the ‘Stripped for Action’ series, back in April 2008 to let him know that I was writing a book about Doctor Who comic strips and suggested meeting up while I was in London to compare notes since our two projects covered the same ground.

Several weeks passed. Then, on 20 May, midway through my stay in London, I received a reply from Marcus. He had just seen my email having recently returned from a month-long overseas trip. Marcus asked if I was still in London and if so would I like to be interviewed on camera for ‘Stripped for Action’? I replied that I had two weeks left before I had to fly home and if he could arrange something in time I’d be happy to participate.

Marcus pulled out all the stops to arrange contracts and book studio time at short notice to accommodate my limited availability. We met up in a coffee house in Soho to work out what we should cover in the interview and using these notes Marcus came up with sets of questions. I received these a few days in advance of the recording so I that had time to consider my answers. Marcus had already delivered most of the instalments in the Stripped for Action series, two of which had already been released on DVD. There were just three left to complete the series and Marcus wanted to interview me for all of these in a single studio session. Two of the three were The Third Doctor and The Daleks which both appear on Dalek War. The third documentary has yet to be announced, so I won’t disclose the subject of that one. It shouldn’t be hard to guess what it is, though.

My contributions to ‘Stripped for Action’ were recorded at a studio in Wapping, London on Tuesday 3 June 2008. This was just a couple of days before I was due to fly home to New Zealand.

To make good use of the studio booking, Marcus arranged two regular commentators, Jeremy Bentham and Alan Barnes, for the same studio session. Jeremy is a highly-respected ‘elder statesman’ of Doctor Who fandom who had written some influential articles about Doctor Who comics back in the early 1980s. I met up with Jeremy in London earlier in my trip to interview him for my book, and he and his delightful wife Paula treated me to a very nice dinner at an upmarket London restaurant. It was a delight to meet him once more at the studio recording.

The recording session took place in a small concrete-walled studio. I sat on a chair against a green screen backdrop. In the finished documentary, the green has been keyed out and replaced with an assortment of panels from the comic strips. I was advised not to wear anything green as this would interfere with the process. The screen was illuminated by a ring of exceedingly bright green lights placed around the camera lens which I found very distracting at the edge of my vision.

Marcus sat some distance away from the camera and fed me the questions and directions. So that my comments would make sense in the documentary I had to phrase my answers as self-contained statements. For example, when I was asked to describe the style of comic artist Ron Turner, my answer needed to begin something like “Ron Turner’s illustration style was...”

Going into the recording I felt prepared and confident but once it got underway I was surprised to find the experience more of a challenge than I’d expected. I was put off by the intense lights and to my horror I started muddling my words and speaking too fast. Fortunately Marcus is a patient and understanding director, and we did a few retakes of the initial question until I had relaxed into the process. As we began recording I was directed by one of the crew to keep still and to keep my hands out of shot. When I’m speaking, like most people, I tend to move about a bit and gesticulate, so having to sit still and not use my hands felt unnatural and disconcerting. I’m still not entirely sure why I was given this direction. On the documentaries a number of my fellow commentators can be seen waving their hands around which I think in contrast makes me look stiff and uncomfortable.

Following my session I got to sit and watch as Jeremy (who had arrived during my recording) took my place in front of the camera. I could sit and listen to Jeremy talk all day; he knows his subject very well indeed and is also clearly a confident and accomplished speaker. I had kept my answers fairly brief and to the point, whereas Jeremy expounded at great length, impressively covering the answers to a whole range of questions in a single informative and detailed monologue.

Alan Barnes turned up after Jeremy and I had finished our contributions. After a short break Alan went into studio to record his segments and Jeremy and I left to catch the train home. The walk to the station gave me the opportunity to chat some more to Jeremy about my book and he was very supportive of the project and subsequently sent copies of some early articles he’d written about the comics.

I received my complementary copy of the DVD box set from 2|entertain earlier this week, so one and a half years after the recording I've finally seen the finished results for the first time. I'm never comfortable with seeing myself on screen, and this combined with recalling just how uncomfortable I'd felt during the recording itself, meant that it was with some trepidation that I watched these features. Just a handful of my responses have made it on to the documentaries - but I consider that a good thing; my limited appearance makes them slightly easier to watch, and I'm relieved that my discomfort isn't as evident on screen as I'd feared.

Alas, the credit’s not quite right (as seen in the screen shot). I’m billed as the author of The Comics Companion which should be The Comic Strip Companion. I’ve already had people who have seen the documentaries contact me to ask where and when the book’s available. The answer is that it’s not finished yet. I’m hopeful that it will be out sometime next year, and it is being published by Telos.

Priest and Prestige

2009-08-20T12:31:00.005+12:00

I first encountered the work of British science fiction author Christopher Priest in 1987 when I purchased a secondhand copy of his novel A Dream of Wessex in the Old Book Cellar on Albert Street, Auckland. That shop has sadly long since disappeared, but my admiration for Priest's writing has endured for more than two decades.

I have all of Christopher Priest's novels and short story collections, and own as many as four different editions of each book. In my defence I'll point out that Priest does sometimes revise his work in later editions so a certain degree of duplication is essential to keeping up a full set of his work (that's my excuse anyway, and I'm sticking to it).

Priest's books have sat untouched on my shelf for a few years now, not through any disillusionment, I hasten to add, but simply because he hasn't put out anything new to re-engage my interest in recent years; his most recent novel The Separation was published in 2002. I renewed my interest in Priest's writing when, whilst recently scanning my bookshelves for something to read, I pulled out The Separation (I only own one copy of this particular title!).

The Separation is a complex and compelling epic story following the lives of twin brothers who experience very different versions of the events of World War II. The novel presents conflicting, overlapping versions of reality and the reader is left to make sense of which bits are 'real' and which are illusory. It is a distillation of the recurring themes of identity, of mirrored experiences and of perceptions of reality which appear in many of Priest's books and short stories, and mark him out as, in my view, a simply outstanding writer.

While still engrossed in re-reading The Separation I was inspired to find out if there was any news of Priest's next novel, so I looked up his website. I'd discovered and bookmarked this a few years back but hadn't visited it in a while. I was pleasantly suprised to discover that in the interim Priest had established his own imprint, GrimGrin Studio, and had so far published four of his own books which were available to purchase via mail order.

I promptly sent off an enquiry email to Priest, with a heady mixture of awe and delight at the fact that I was communicating directly with someone whose work I had admired from afar for such a long time. I received a very pleasant and informative reply from the man himself, telling me all about his new and upcoming books. I sent off my paypal order last week and yesterday received four very handsome editions, all signed and personalised.

I've already finished reading one of those four books, The Magic: the story of a film. It is a fascinating insight into both the novel and the film versions of The Prestige. Even if you've never heard of Christopher Priest it's likely that you will be aware of this box-office-topping 2006 film directed by Christopher Nolan, with its all-star cast of Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, David Bowie and Scarlett Johansson.

The novel on which The Prestige is based was published in 1995, eleven years before the film's release. In The Magic Priest begins by revealing his inspirations and the writing process. I was astonished to learn that he wrote the novel as three drafts, each a complete re-write with no cutting and pasting from the previous version.

The narrative then moves on to various bids for the film rights, with Priest opting in 2000 to take a chance on the then little-known director Christopher Nolan. Nolan is best known today as the director of the incredibly successful Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, but back then all Priest had to go on was Nolan's low-budget, independent film The Following. Priest had no input on the screenplay for The Prestige, which was written by Nolan's brother Jonathan. He was keep so far out of the loop during the long period between the initial optioning of the film rights and the film's eventual release six years later, that incredibly his only source of information about the film was what he could glean from the internet via Google Alerts.

In his descriptions of going to see the film, at first at the press screening and twice more at the cinema, Priest appears to be an anonymous observer in the crowd; his only concern after the initial screenining is to dash off to his train, and is later able to eavesdrop apparently without fear of being recognised as cinema goers discuss the film.

The last few chapters of The Magic are given over to an analysis of how the film differs from the novel and Priest's views on what worked and what was less successful in the screen version. He might be forgiven for coming across as a little bitter at some of the decisions taken with the material, but it is a balanced, well-considered appraisal.

The two stage magicians, Borden and Angier, central to the story of The Prestige are rivals each seeking to comprehend the secret behind the other's 'vanishing man' act. It strikes me that there seems to be a slight metatextual echo of this in The Magic. It is a stretch to describe the two Christophers, Priest and Nolan, as rivals, but certainly there is an element of a clash in the British author and the Hollywood director's respective visions of the story in different mediums, but when Priest admits in The Magic that he is unable to figure out how Nolan achieved certain shots this seems to mirror something of the magicians' inability to discern exactly how the other's prestige is achieved.

The Magic leaves me wanting to re-read The Prestige, something I'm certain I'll do quite soon now that I have embarked on my re-read of Priest's oeuvre (right now, I'm mid-way through The Extremes), but I also want to re-watch the DVD of The Prestige. I was disappointed by the film the first time I saw it, feeling that it wasn't a patch on the novel, but having read Priest's own views on the film's strengths and weaknesses, I'm keen to give it another go.

Chopping and Changing

2009-07-28T12:28:00.003+12:00

During the weeks since my last post announcing the completion of the first draft of my book, The Comic Strip Companion, I've been editing the manuscript. I was looking forward to this part of the process, but it is proving to be a bit of a challenge.

Having spent the best part of two decades as the editor of a fanzine, I've had a fair bit of experience of proofing and editing the work of other writers, and I think I've become fairly adept at this.

What I've discovered is that I'm not nearly so good at editing my own work. I can stare at something I've written and struggle to see the faults. The problem is simply that when I read over my own work I know in my head what it's supposed to say, which gets in the way of recognising what I've actually written.

Ultimately the book will need a fresh eye to read it over and pick up the bits I've missed, but before then I need to do an edit and a rewrite to pull it into shape, and that's what's keeping me busy at present.

It's not just about tidying up the words; I've also been rearranging the structure. The book follows the format of an episode guide and, as part of each entry, I've written about each story's various reprints. Reading back over the finished book I could see that the entries for stories without any reprints seemed a lot more readable. These entries didn't interrupt the narrative flow with diversions to discuss a reprinting that had occurred twenty or thirty years later.

Another problem I had with the reprint sections was that some of the observations I was making were common to a number of the reprints, such as (for example) the removal of artist credits, or the colouring of black & white strips. This resulted in a large amount of frankly rather awkward repetition.

The solution came to me as I embarked on the editing process: remove all of the individual reprint sections and group them all together in an Appendix at the back of the book. All of that unnecessary repetition was dispensed with as I discussed features relevant to a whole swag of reprinted stories within a few concise paragraphs. As a consequence, my word count plunged. I think I lost in the region of six thousand words in just one day, which sounds alarming, but they we re words I really didn't need and, much more importantly, the book has significantly improved.

Right, back to the editing.

First Draft Finished!

2009-06-08T20:05:00.002+12:00

I've just this hour finished writing the last section of the final chapter of my book, The Comic Strip Companion (Vol 1: 1964-79).

I began writing on 14 April 2007, so it's taken me slightly over two years to get to this point.

As my book takes the form of an episode guide my work has been mapped out for me from the start; I've had to chronicle stories both good and bad and find something uniquely meaningful to write about each and every one of the Doctor's first fifteen years of comic strip adventures.

I've maintained a spreadsheet to keep track of my work, so I can see at a glance that I've scrutinised and documented the contents of 1,993 individual pages of comic strip, as well as a stack of reprints not included in that total. The word count stands at 207,189.

Work on the book is far from complete, however. There's a few short supplementary sections to be added and the whole manuscript's going to need revising from beginning to end.

I'm planning to put the book aside and focus my attention elsewhere; on another, shorter writing commission I have waiting for me. I'm hoping that this will clear my head, so I can come back to the manuscript with a relatively fresh eye. I've edited work by many other writers over the years, so I hope I can be equally efficient with my own material.

New Companion

2009-05-30T01:07:00.007+12:00

The new Doctor Who companion will be played by Karen Gillan.

Just last week I was discussing the new companion with Toby Hadoke, a fellow fan who was visiting from the UK. As well-informed as Toby is about various aspects of the series, he didn't know who would be playing the new companion. We both thought that an announcement had to be imminent though - and sure enough just days later a name has been revealed.

I was working on my book late tonight and happened to flick over to Facebook and spot that someone had just mentioned the casting. I looked up the BBC News site to see the full announcement, which again had only just been posted. This is quite a novelty for me as usually by the time I find out about a piece of major Doctor Who news it's already all over the Internet.

I notice that a Google search for Karen's name at this stage doesn't bring up many useful results - all that will soon change, I'm sure. I also see that Karen's Wikipedia page was only created today - mere minutes after the announcement.

So who is Karen Gillan? All I've seen of her is her role as an unnamed soothsayer in The Fires of Pompeii. I expect there will be many fans rewatching that episode now in an attempt to get an idea of what Karen is like as an actress.

I think it's interesting that a trend's developing, in that Karen follows in the footsteps of Freema Agyeman and Catherine Tate, each of whom first appeared in a one-off role in the new series prior to being offered a regular part as the companion. Perhaps we're getting to the point where we'll start looking rather closer at each actress who appears in Doctor Who and sizing her up as the next companion!

Boldly Going...

2009-05-10T21:42:00.005+12:00

The first Star Trek movie I watched on the big screen was The Wrath of Khan. I went to see it with my first girlfriend, who was far more obsessed with Star Trek than I was. She was utterly inconsolable when Spock died at the end.

Seeing the new Star Trek film today I was left wondering how she might have reacted. No doubt she would have been relieved that Spock survived, but there’s some fairly radical retooling going on regarding the series continuity, with some devastating events that might induce weeping among some hardcore Trekkies.

I’ve watched most Star Trek episodes and movies and I once belonged to an SF club dominated by trekkies, but I wouldn’t call myself a fan. It certainly didn’t bother me that the new film effectively erases or at least drastically alters events from the moment of Captain Kirk’s birth onwards.

The new film does for Star Trek what the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale did for the James Bond franchise in that it goes back to the beginning and retells the origins with a fresh outlook and a thoroughly modern appearance. The slate isn’t wiped entirely clean however. Just as Casino Royale retained Judi Dench’s M as a link from the old to the new, Star Trek has Leonard Nimoy’s Spock popping up to reassure viewers that this really is still the same old series.

The changes to the heavily-continuity laden Trek universe wrought by the film very cleverly reboots the franchise from the beginning - all bets are off as to what happens next for Kirk and his crew - whilst at the same time still allowing for the prior existence (from the elderly Spock’s perspective at least) of all of the television series and movies.

I thought the cast were on the whole very good, allowing for the fact that the actors had the difficult task of replacing some very well-established performers. For me the stand-out was Karl Urban, who absolutely nailed Dr McCoy’s dry cynicism.

Above all else, this film unequivocally breaks the ‘curse’ of the odd-numbered Star Trek films!

Meeting One’s Heroes

2009-04-07T16:38:00.008+12:00

Rochelle and I spent this last weekend in Wellington during which time we promoted Rochelle’s new company Retrospace at the Armageddon expo. Almost the entire weekend was spent selling merchandise and I found that this provided an opportunity to meet many fans that I wouldn’t have a talked to had I been at Armageddon as just another attendee. I was stunned at the number of young pre-teen and teenage girls who professed to be fans of the series and obviously knew all of the new series stories in great detail, proudly claiming to have watched "every episode of Doctor Who" (meaning of course everything from 2005 onwards) . These fans seemed to identify very much with David Tennant’s Doctor (rather than, say, Rose or Martha), and at least a couple of young female fans were dressed up as the Tenth Doctor.

One of the first people I met on the first day of the expo was a young man called Floyd. Upon sighting issues of TSV on the table, he asked me if I knew Paul Scoones. When I explained that I was he, Floyd almost exploded with delight, asking to shake my hand and have his photo taken with me. He’d read TSV since he was a boy, and really was genuinely was awed to meet me. I'm not recounting this incident in order to mock him. Although I felt undeserving of his accolades, at the same time I was also impressed that he had such respect and admiration for my work. I met many more TSV readers over the course of the weekend that had nothing but kind words to say about the magazine, but no one came close to this guy in terms of sheer unbridled enthusiasm.

Later in the weekend I got to take Floyd’s place and meet one of my own personal heroes, the Fifth Doctor himself, Peter Davison. Davison, along with Mark Strickson (who played Turlough) were two of a handful of star guests at the expo.

I had been asked by the organiser, Bill Geradts, to interview Peter and Mark in a panel on stage on both days of the expo. I arrived with a prepared list of questions covering aspects of the careers of both men, only to learn from Bill that the two actors had decided that they didn't want to be interviewed and instead preferred to take questions from the audience. I was a bit deflated at this habving gone to some effort and also told a number of people that I'd be conducting the interviews, but at the same time I was also a little relieved. I’d been concerned about how the interview would be received by both the actors and the audience alike. It also freed me up to spend more time on the Retrospace sales table where it rapidly became clear that Rochelle would be swamped with customers for most of the weekend.

Photo: Peter Davison (L) and Mark Strickson (R) on stage at Armageddon.

I needed to present Peter Davison with a copy of the latest TSV issue, which contained an interview that Adam McGechan had conducted with him many months earlier. I waited around until the autograph queue had slowed to a trickle, and then joined the end of the line. The woman immediately ahead of me had a large stack of photos for Peter to sign, and I could see that although he was still being pleasant to her, that he’d really rather be doing something else.

I nipped past the woman and instead struck up a conversation with Mark Strickson, who was sitting next to Peter. I’d interviewed Mark almost twenty years earlier at an Auckland convention, and told him this. Mark understandably didn’t recall our earlier meeting, but it broke the ice and I told him that I was writing information subtitles for the BBC Doctor Who DVDs, and we compared notes on a couple of specific incidents from his stories that I’d been researching.

Peter Davison had up until this point looked to me understandably rather weary at having signed so many autographs, but as he listened in on our conversation his face lit up with a broad smile and he began talking to me, offering his own thoughts on the stories we were discussing. He asked about which titles I was working on and the three of us discussed the upcoming releases. (I won’t go into specifics as all of the titles I’m doing have yet to be announced on the schedules.)

Having gained Peter’s undivided attention, I then got to talking with him about his other roles and I told him about my great appreciation for another of his series, A Very Peculiar Practice. We shared our mutual hope that the second series would one day come out on DVD (Peter felt that the fact that it was made by BBC Birmingham had effectively shut it out of the schedules). He seemed delighted at my suggestion that At Home with the Braithwaites was his opportunity to play a raving unhinged character after having been perhaps the only truly sane one in Peculiar Practice.

I presented Peter with TSV 76, and he seemed genuinely touched that I’d gone to the trouble of handing it to him in person. We shook hands and he thanked me very much for talking to him. I think he was relieved that I’d talked to him as a fellow professional, our common ground being that we both worked on the BBC Doctor Who DVDs, and that I hadn’t asked for a photo or an autograph like so many hundreds of fans had done over the weekend.

I came away from that meeting feeling elated at having met a childhood hero. Peter Davison had been my Doctor when I was a teenage fan, and for nostalgic reasons remains a firm personal favourite amongst all of the actors to have played the role.

As I'm sure Floyd would agree, it can be a thrilling experience to meet one’s heroes.

Watchmen

2009-03-10T22:32:00.004+13:00

David Bishop introduced me to Watchmen when he loaned me the graphic novel sometime in the second half of 1989. I was sceptical as I'm not much of a fan of superhero comics, but David assurred me that this was something different, something extraordinary.

Watchmen blew my mind. It opened my eyes to the wondrous potential of comic strip narrative structure. I marvelled at the dense, multi-layered plot, the frequent time shifts, the metaphors, hidden clues in the artwork and the sheer scale of the story.

Twenty years later, I've just seen the movie version on the big screen. I can't think of any other movie project that has spent as long in development as this one. I've waited years to see it, and thankfully it didn't disappoint.

The direction was superb, clearly taking many visual cues from pages of the comic. It was an odd sensation recognising so much of the imagery as familiar in a movie I had never seen before. It was equally jarring when the movie did diverge from its source material such as, for example, the outward appearance of Veidt's Antarctic fortress.

The cast for the most part were very good indeed; I especially liked Patrick Wilson's Dan Dreiberg and Jackie Earle Haley was just perfect in the pivotal role of Rorschach. Malin Akerman's performance as Laurie was however disappointingly a bit flat. Maybe she was directed to underplay the part, but I didn't engage with the character as much as I did with the other costumed heroes.

I've read that the movie has had at least half an hour cut from the theatrical release, which will be reinstated for the DVD. Although I could see the gaps I believe that's because I'm familiar with the source material. It looked pretty seamless to me on screen, and the only exception I can think of being Hollis Mason, most of whose scenes were chopped, leaving him as a character who crops up briefly early in the movie and is never seen again.

The major difference between the comic and the film is the ending. I wasn't expecting this to be the case, but I actually prefer the movie version. I don't believe that a giant squid-like alien would have been in keeping with the tone and style of the rest of the movie. I always thought it jarred a little in the comic.

Just as in the comic, there's a lot to take in when watching the movie, and I suspect that it will reward multiple viewings. I'm certainly very much looking forweard to getting hold of the extended version on DVD.

Back to School

2009-02-28T15:13:00.002+13:00

Many years ago I trained as a Secondary School teacher. It seemed at the time like the best option to make full use of my university degree in History and English. I completed the one-year course, during which I taught in three different schools, and graduated with a Diploma of Teaching.

The problem was that after graduation there was a shortage of jobs in teaching. I could count the list of vacancies on one hand. The only use I made of my DipTch qualification was to do some short-term, private tutition work, helping students prep for their exams. Eventually I moved into other work, and left teaching behind.

My teacher training never seemed like a wasted year of my life; as a manager of a number of staff in three different companies, I've found that many of the basic principles of classroom teaching have served me well. My teacher training gave me the skills to be an effective communicator, to keep people on task, to plan effectively.

Much as I enjoy writing, it's not lucrative enough to sustain me financially, so I've been giving so thought about what I want to do next. Preferably something that leaves me with enough time to continue writing part-time.

So I've been thinking about relieving teaching. My DipTch is still recognised; I just need to do a retaining course to get back up to speed and get registered.

I started looking into this last week and learned that the goverment funds free courses for returning teachers, to encourage people like myself to get back into the profession.

TeachNZ, the teacher recruitment unit of the Ministry of Education, pointed me in the direction of my old alma mater, the University of Auckland. When I finally got through to the right person (which was a mission in itself), I learned that there is indeed a retraining course coming up, but there's some doubt over whether it will take place as the course has not received any funding.

If the funding doesn't come though, the course won't take place. Without this course I cannot register and I cannot teach.

Meanwhile in the newspapers and on the television we're told that the goverment is pouring millions into job creation schemes. How about putting some of that money into teacher training...?

Making Progress

2009-02-19T01:14:00.003+13:00

I've reached an important milestone in the writing of The Comic Strip Companion.

As of tonight, I’ve finished the last of the chapters dealing with all of the Doctor Who comic strip stories originated in TV Comic, Countdown and TV Action magazines from 1964 to 1979, which is the period covered by this volume. I've so far written 159,311 words. I've written individual entries for 166 different comic strip stories or, to put it another way, 1,601 comic strip pages - and that's not counting all of the various reprints which I've also covered.

Most of the book is now written - but there's still more to be done.

There are other comic strips published during this period that, although they are not considered part of the regular series, it would be remiss of me not to cover them in the book. These include the strips that appeared in: the Doctor Who Annuals; the Dalek Annuals; the three 1960s Dalek books; The Daleks strips from TV Century 21 comic; and the American comic adaptation of the first Dalek movie. This material amounts to an additional 56 stories, which might sound like a lot but many of these stories are significantly shorter than the ones I've already covered. This extra material will form supplementary chapters located at the rear of the book.

I've also got some recently discovered archival material that I need to find places to write about in the chapters I've already written. This previously unseen material casts new light on the origins of the Doctor Who strip and provides additional insight into the development of a number of the early strips. The documents also include three story proposals which were never published. This information has never been published elsewhere and will undoubtedly be of great interest.

I need to devote some time as well to revisiting some of what I’ve already written. I started work on the book nearly two years ago and over that time I've gradually tweaked the format and style as I’ve progressed through the chapters. I need to revisit the earliest sections I wrote and do some revising so that the whole book ends up with a readable, consistent format and style.

Right now though, I feel a sense of achievement in having written all fourteen chapters that form the main body of the book. There’s a way to go before I’m done, but now it feels like the end is on the horizon.

Going Down in History

2009-02-12T17:06:00.003+13:00

I'm concentrating most of my time on writing my book (latest word count: 152,000 words or thereabouts), which is why I haven't blogged in the last month.

I do however want to take a moment to mention the lovely surprise I received on opening the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine (#405) today. Editor Tom Spilsbury's 'On this Month' column (which takes a nostalgic look at a past issue) casts an eye over issue 275 from ten years ago, and covers the article I wrote for that issue (one of my first professional writing commissions), about the return of The Lion. I wasn't expecting this, so it was a delightful to see that Tom namechecked both myself and Neil Lambess, and even quotes Neil on his likening of the find to something out of Indiana Jones.

After all this time it's still a thrill to see myself and Neil remembered for our small contribution to Doctor Who history.

Here's the item:

The Eleventh Doctor

2009-01-05T15:16:00.003+13:00

“Hello, Paul? It’s Ben from Radio Live here. I’ve just spotted the news about Doctor Who. I'm wondering if you would talk to Jemma on our show tomorrow morning about it.”

That was the phone call I received yesterday, and as a result at 6:55am this morning I was on air talking about Doctor Who. I couldn’t help thinking that, ten years on, history was repeating itself. When the news broke about the return of the missing episode in January 1999 I was hounded by the television radio and print media.

But Radio Live wasn't calling about a missing episode. The news was that the BBC had just announced the casting of the Eleventh Doctor. Even though I’d only discovered the identity of the actor myself less than an hour before that phone call, I agreed to the interview.

The casting of the Doctor had taken place in secrecy, as these things do, fuelling a media frenzy in the UK ever since 29 October 2008 when Tenth Doctor David Tennant publically announced his resignation live on television whilst accepting the National Television Award (for Outstanding Drama Performance). It’s a measure of just how massive Doctor Who is these days that speculation flooded the UK news media.

Fan discussion forums were just as busy, endlessly debating the merits of such supposed contenders as Paterson Joseph, David Morrissey, Chiwetel Ejiofor and James Nesbitt among many others. Billie Piper was even mooted as a strong contender, which seems absurd – not I hasten to add because of her gender, but because having been so strongly identified in the series as Rose Tyler, having her play the Doctor just simply would have been way too confusing.

Betting agencies soon got in on the act, with updated lists of their odds widely reported. It’s perhaps instructional to note for future casting speculation that they were well off the mark; the actor awarded the role didn’t even appear in Betfair’s top 20 picks, just hours before the announcement (which leads me to wonder if he was tempted to put a wager on himself; that could have been a nice little earner!).

The announcement was made on Doctor Who Confidential, a BBC television documentary screened in the UK on Saturday evening. I downloaded it Sunday morning while staying well clear of the rest of the internet, least I spoil it for myself. Rochelle and I then sat down and watched the special in the early afternoon, seeing for the first time Matt Smith, the man who will be the Eleventh Doctor.

At just twenty-six year old, Matt Smith is the youngest of the eleven Doctor actors, but only a few years younger than Peter Davison was when he accepted the part of the Fifth Doctor (he was 29). Apparently the producers were not particularly looking for a young man when they began the casting process, but the final decision to go with someone so youthful must surely have been guided by such factors as the ability to cope with the gruelling recording schedule (which could easily wear out an older actor); and also to appeal to the series’ huge audience of children (I’m sure Matt Smith will look more appealing on the covers of the Doctor Who Adventures magazine than, say, James Nesbitt).

I’m not familiar with any of Matt Smith's roles and didn’t recognise his face or his name (though as I’ve watched The Secret Diary of a Call Girl and part of Ruby in the Smoke – in both of which he starred opposite Billie Piper – I realise that I must have seen him before). I like the idea that the BBC has gone with a virtual unknown. I think some of the Doctors, and Peter Davison most of all, suffered from strong public association with prior roles (Davison was already well-known as veterinarian Tristan Farnon from All Creatures Great and Small).

I like the fact too that Matt Smith has very slightly unusual facial features, including a high forehead and a prominent chin. Looking a little bit odd ought to be a plus factor for the Doctor. Tom Baker for example had a rather distinctive appearance (bulging eyes, huge bushy hair, too many teeth) which all helped him to define the part as his own. In his interview he waggled his fingers very expressively while talking, which immediately struck me as very 'Doctorish', and something I'd be keen to see him carry over into his performance.

It’s likely to be a year and a half before we first get to see Matt Smith playing the Doctor on television, but I for one am looking forward to see what he does with the role in 2010.

The Lion's Roar

2009-01-03T11:20:00.007+13:00

This morning I received a text message from my old friend Neil Lambess wishing me a happy tenth anniversary.

It was ten years ago today that Neil phoned me to ask if I'd meet him later that day.

That was, for me, the beginning of a whirlwind of events that earned us a place in Doctor Who history books. Neil had contacted Auckland film collector Bruce Grenville, who apparently had a missing Doctor Who episode 16mm film print in his possession. Bruce agreed that Neil and I could come around to his Grey Lynn flat and view it on the evening of Sunday 3 January 1999.

The missing episodes are the Doctor Who equivalent of the holy grail; film prints and videotapes junked and destroyed by the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s in the belief that no one would ever miss them. This was in the days before repeat screenings were commonplace and home video was unheard of.

Bruce had the first episode of a 1965 story called The Crusade. The individual episode was called The Lion. It was the only known surviving copy in existence.

My own contribution to the discovery was to negotiate for the loan of the film print. The BBC wanted to borrow it long enough to clean up the film and make copies. I communicated with the BBC's restoration team and persuaded the collector to loan the film. I was nervous that at any moment the negotiations could have fallen through, and I'll never forget the moment I walked back to my car with the film safely clutched under my arm.

For one evening I was in possession of perhaps what was - at that moment - the rarest, most coveted Doctor Who item in existence. Here's a photo of me taken that evening, clutching the film.

(It's a sign of the changing times that whilst those shelves behind me are still in the same position in my study, these days they're filled with DVDs rather than videotapes...)

I despatched the film to the BBC's Doctor Who restoration teamin London by secure FedEx courier the following morning.

These days, the episode can be viewed on the BBC DVD Lost in Time. In addition to the episode, the DVD contains an interview with myself, Neil and Bruce Grenville. Our contribution to Doctor Who is recorded for posterity.

A decade on from that historic find, Neil and I remain very proud of our achievement. Neil - thanks for the memories, my friend. Isn't it time we found another one?

The full story of the film's discovery can be read online here.

TSV 61

2008-12-30T10:44:00.006+13:00

TSV 61 was added to the online archive earlier this month, eight years after its original publication in December 2000. This allowed the issue’s limited selection of festive content to once again appear seasonally relevant. Witness in particular the Karkus doing battle with a Cyber Santa; many years before the Cybermen got to appear in a televised Doctor Who Christmas story!

Alistair Hughes’ cover artwork is a superb pastiche of the film poster for Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and promotes the extensive coverage of the Prime television screenings of every complete Hartnell and Troughton story during 2000. I’m resisting calling them repeats since eight stories (The Keys of Marinus, The Aztecs, The Sensorites, The Web Planet, The Chase, The Gunfighters, The Dominators and The War Games), had never previously screened in New Zealand - and to date none of these have rescreened either. (How about it Prime - isn't it time for some fresh screenings of episodes made before 2005...?)

In the previous issue I put out a call to readers to write up their views having watched each of the stories on Prime. Vernon McCarthy and Gerald Joblin both sent in brief pieces, and Robert Boswell contributed the bulk of the issue’s coverage. Robert had written several pieces for TSV in the past, but as he was outside the regular pool of writers appearing in each and every issue, he brought a relatively fresh perspective to the subject. Robert did such a sterling job of critiquing the Sixties Prime stories that I invited him back to cover the 1970s stories for later issues.

The highlight of the issue though, and an item that continues to this day to attract much interest from readers, was the coverage of the Seven Keys to Doomsday play. The 1984 staging of this Doctor Who production in Porirua had been overlooked by fans for many years. It later transpired that several readers knew about the play and members of the Wellington Doctor Who club chapter had inherited props from the production, but I for one remained completely ignorant of its existence for sixteen years.

TSV’s intrepid investigative reporter Graham Howard discovered the facts about the play, tracking down and interviewing theatre director Brian Hudson. The interview arrived along with a stack of black and white photographs, photocopies of the programme booklet, newspaper clippings and adverts all related to the production. I was only able to use a limited selection of this material in the article (more of which appeared in a later issue when Graham interviewed actor Michael Sagar who played the Doctor in the play), but the addition of this issue to the online archive has meant that all of this material can at last be displayed for all to see.

In September 2000 a discussion thread about the play started on rec.arts.drwho. Alden Bates (who posted to the thread) recently linked to it in his blog and I was astonished to find a posting from myself on the thread. I have absolutely no recollection of writing that post (the memory’s obviously not what it once was), though I’ve no doubt it was me who wrote it. It’s obvious I think that when I posted that message I had no knowledge about the play’s existence, and my reply reads as if I’m sceptical about the veracity of the rumour. In hindsight this seems rather unintentionally rude towards Alden, who posted a couple of newspaper clippings as evidence that the play actually existed. I’m sorry, Alden - you were of course absolutely correct.

The timing of the rec.arts.drwho thread is intriguing, as Graham’s article about the play appeared in TSV just two months later. I don’t recall a late change to the content, but work on the issue must have been well under way at this point, implying that the play article was a relatively late addition to the line-up.

Elsewhere in the issue, the Disc-Continuity Guide column made its last appearance in print. At this point it was already in the process of transforming into a comprehensive online guide to the Big Finish audios. (The last update to the guide was in 2005.) It was also the end for regular book reviewer Brad Schmidt, who decided to call it quits following a two-year stint during which he wrote 46 book reviews, some of which were originally credited to ‘James Schmidt’. I initially shouldered the task of reviewing the books myself but struggled to find the time to read all of the new titles in time to review them on top of everything else I needed to do for the issue, so I was very grateful when Jamas Enright volunteered to take over as TSV’s regular book reviewer.

Read the issue here.

Fellow TSV 61 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

120,000 words

2008-12-24T22:25:00.003+13:00

As of tonight I've hit two targets in the writing of my book, The Comic Strip Companion.

I've just completed another chapter - that's eleven in total I've written now (another six to go before the book's finished). I've also just passed the 120,000 word mark. This is a significant personal milestone.

When I started writing the manuscript last year I estimated that the entire book would be 120,000 words long. The contract I signed with the publisher stipulated a 100,000 word minimum; I thought at the time that 20,000 words over this would be a comfortable margin.

It has long since become apparent to me that this was an hugely overly conservative estimate, and I now expect that the book will end up being somewhere around 185,000 words.

The process of writing the book has been governed by setting targets and planning ahead. I have mapped the book out on an Excel spreadsheet and I update this each day. My aim has been to write about at least one complete comic strip story each day, though of late my writing time has been reduced to three days a week due to other commitments.

I wanted to complete the latest chapter before taking a few days off over Christmas, and I've managed this with a few hours to spare; next week it'll be time to open another Word document and start work on another chapter, every day a step closer to completion!

Who is... The Next Doctor?

2008-12-14T19:31:00.003+13:00

This is the burning question for many Doctor Who fans right now, mere days away from the broadcast of the new episode due to screen in the UK on Christmas day.

The Christmas special, entitled The Next Doctor, features David Tennant's Doctor encountering another individual also calling himself the Doctor, played by David Morrissey (and thus reuniting the two Davids, who were previously seen together on screen in the wonderful Blackpool mini-series).

A brief preview clip from the story (which I'm assuming is the entire pre-credits sequence) screened as a fundraiser for the Children in Need charity appeal a couple of months ago, showing the Doctor's initial encounter with this other Doctor.

But is Morrissey really the Doctor...? The BBC isn't saying - and speculation is especially rampant in light of the recent news that David Tennant is stepping down from the role in 2010. Despite intense media speculation, his successor has yet to be announced, and it's likely that any casting revelation is deliberately being held back until sometime after the screening of The Next Doctor, in order to maintain the air of mystery and anticipation surrounding this episode. There doesn't seem to be likely though that David Morrissey will take over from David Tennant as the new star of the series as the episode was recorded many months ago, long before Tennant announced that he was leaving.

So assuming that this is a one-off role for Morrissey as the Doctor, it seems to me, based on the preview clip - and absolutely no insider knowledge - that there are four possible scenarios regarding the question of the Next Doctor's identity:

1) The Imposter Doctor: He’s someone else, a con-man knowingly masquerading as the Doctor for some reason. This would appear to be the most obvious answer, were it not for the fact that in that preview clip the Next Doctor doesn't seem to recognise the Doctor as anyone special, at least initially treating him as an ordinary bystander. He mentions the TARDIS to his companion, Rosita, has his own sonic screwdriver, and appears to be aware of the Cybermen. If he's a ordinary guy pretending to be the Doctor, he's rather too convincing. So I don't think this is the most likely scenario.

2) The Arch Doctor: He’s someone else, but genuinely believes himself to be the Doctor, having been exposed to the Doctor’s memories. There’s a precedent for this in Series Three when the Doctor used the chameleon arch to place his memories and personality inside a fob watch (in the episodes Human Nature / Family of Blood), and when this watch found its way into the possession of a human school boy, Tim Latimer, his limited exposure to the watch provides him with some of the Doctor’s memories. What if the Next Doctor has one of these watches and has had his mind altered so that he thinks and behaves as if he really is the Doctor? It’s a theory given weight by a couple of advance publicity photos, which shows the Next Doctor with a fob watch. If this is the case though, where does he get his TARDIS (the one he mentions to Rosita), from…?

3) The Rift Doctor: He really is the Doctor, but from an alternate universe. The presence of the new series version of the Cybermen in this story makes this scenario all the more plausible. The Cybermen originated in a parallel reality and crossed over into ‘our’ world through the rift. In the previous story, The Stolen Earth / Journey’s End, the walls between dimensions broke down, enabling Rose Tyler, Mickey Smith and Jackie Tyler to return to our world from where they had been sealed off in an alternate reality. What if the Next Doctor is from that reality (or another one), and has come through the rift with the Cybermen? I’m favouring this scenario being the mostly likely one, but there’s another to consider…

4) The Real Doctor: He is actually the Doctor. Not someone pretending, not transformed by a watch, and not from another reality. Well and truly the Next Doctor; the Eleventh Doctor, the one that the Tenth Doctor will one day regenerate into. This scenario is possible if, in the course of events in this story, the Doctor does something to change his future so that this Next Doctor is wiped from history and never comes into existence. It’s an appealing idea, but perhaps not the most likely outcome.

If I were a betting man my money would be resting on scenario #3, but anything’s possible. The answer may even turn out to be something I haven't even considered above. For some time in the lead-up to last year's Christmas special, Voyage of the Damned (AKA The One With Kylie Minogue), fans thought that the story was set in the past aboard the actual Titanic, rather than - as it transpired - a replica spacecraft version of the ship in the present day. So this wouldn't be the first time that we've been led to believe one outcome when the truth is something quite different...

Less than two weeks from now we'll know for certain. Can't wait!

"Our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared"

2008-11-05T21:38:00.003+13:00

Today is a day of change, a day that will surely go down in history. Today is the day that Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.

Although as a British citizen residing in New Zealand I am of course ineligible to vote (in the US - I am a registered NZ voter of course), I have nevertheless followed the American presidential campaign as it has unfolded over the months. I was appalled at the possibility that Sarah Palin might become Vice President. I was rooting for Obama when it looked like he was going to be defeated by Hillary Clinton at the Democratic candidate in the primaries. I was delighted when he won then, and I am simply thrilled that he has won the presidency today.

It is a moment of huge historic significance. America, a notoriously deeply conservative nation with a troubled history of deep-seated racism, has elected an African-American as their next leader. What is much more significant to me on a personal level is that for the first time someone of my generation - a person who is a mere seven years my senior - will be the President of the USA.

Watching Barack Obama's victory speech tonight, I was moved to tears. He is a truly great orator. The highlight, for me, of Obama's speech was when he dwelt on key moments of American history, prompting a stirring, rising chant of "Yes we can" from the crowd.

It remains to be seen whether Obama will succeed in achieving all that he has set out to do. The challenges before him - including rebuilding the shattered economy and ending the war in Iraq - are immense, but from what I've seen of Obama, he seems to have the requisite will and the determination to realise these goals.

My hope is that some years from now, historians will look back on the election of Obama as the time everything changed - for the better.

TSV 60

2008-10-22T15:07:00.006+13:00

I was surprised to find my name mentioned in a recent issue of the really rather superb Canadian fanzine Enlightenment, where I’m described as holding the record for the longest-serving Doctor Who fanzine editor for my 15 consecutive years on TSV. I’ve never thought of my stint on TSV as record-breaking. 15 years is however a long time, and as I’ve progressively revisited each of the issues for the online archive, I can recall the various ebbs and flows of my enthusiasm for TSV. Issue 60, published in June 2000 - two-thirds of the way through that 15-year editorship - marked one such turning point in my commitment to the fanzine.

As the previous issue’s editorial indicated I had by this point become just a little weary of finding new things to say about the television series after ten years of waiting for it to come back. I was re-energised with enthusiasm however with the news in April 2000 that Prime television would be screening every complete story, from the beginning. I knew from the moment I first learned about this that it had the potential to deliver enormous benefit to TSV, both in the form of a fresh and relevant re-evaluation of the series, and additionally inspire an influx of new readers.

I first read the news in the Herald newspaper, when TSV 60 was in the early stages of assembly. I faxed off a letter to Prime the same day, introducing myself and telling them about the club, asking for information about screening dates to publish in TSV. A reply came back from Prime’s publicity department, asking me for advice and assistance. Over the next few months I fact-checked their press pack (correcting a number of inaccuracies before it went out to the media), composed the programme listing synopses for some of the Hartnell episodes and made two guest appearances on Alice Worsley’s Prime Living television show. Best of all, I was interviewed by the Listener, complete with the club's website address:

The Listener (13 May 2000).

Effectively I became Prime’s go-to guy for anything to do with Doctor Who. Prime's receptionists were briefed to pass on the club's contact details to anyone who called up wanting to know more about Doctor Who - which in turn boosted to TSV’s readership numbers (strangely enough the readership hasn’t increased in the years since Prime commenced screening the new series in 2005).

The Prime screenings were only just getting under way when this issue appeared, so the coverage only extended to my editorial, a news report and a mention on the front cover “Back on NZ TV – from the beginning!”). The issue was however packed with content. Recent video releases Planet of the Daleks and Revelation of the Daleks were examined by Peter Adamson and Alistair Hughes in Battle Beyond the Sofa. These two guys are big fans of the Sixth and Third Doctors respectively, but although this article provided an ideal opportunity to fight their respective corners, Peter reviewed Planet and Al reviewed Revelation. The talented duo also illustrated the front and back cover illustrations to support this article.

As I write this, the 2008 Auckland Armageddon pulp culture expo is just a few days away. This event has become a regular fixture for sci-fi, fantasy and gaming fans over the last decade, and to think that it ultimately evolved from organiser Bill Geradts’ monthly Auckland Chapter Doctor Who club meetings that he used to hold in his front living room! Armageddon has hosted several Doctor Who guests over the years, but the earliest was Jeremy Bulloch, who attended the March 2000 event, where Jon Preddle interviewed him for TSV. Bulloch was promoted at Armageddon as bounty hunter Boba Fett from Star Wars, but Doctor Who fans know him for his roles in The Time Warrior and The Space Museum.

Many of TSV’s most interesting articles, in my view, zero in on a particular aspect of the series’ fiction and attempt to reconcile this across all of the various media (TV, books, audios, comics, etc). A School for Scoundrels did just this with the subject of the Doctor’s school days, taking its lead from the extensive flashback sequence in Gary Russell’s then-recently published novel Divided Loyalties. The class ‘photos’ are fun too, and I’ve often wondered who Peter Adamson based each of the likenesses on.

Russell T Davies’ highly acclaimed drama series Queer as Folk screened on NZ TV in early 2000 and Neil Lambess and Nigel Windsor both contributed pieces for TSV 60 inspired by the series. It aggravates me a little that New Zealand television censors saw fit to take their scissors to certain scenes, but if that’s what it took to get it screened here at all then so be it. This was probably the first time TSV had ever mentioned Russell T Davies; the announcement that he was to revive Doctor Who was still three years away at this point, but there he is quoted in Nigel’s article, proclaiming “Oh I love Doctor Who!” I’m delighted to say that, despite the controversial nature of Queer as Folk, I never received a single word of complaint about the coverage of this series in TSV.

TSV 60 also sees the concluding half of my interview with Andrew Pixley, in which he talks about what he’s written other than DWM’s Archives (for which he is best known). In my frequent conversations with Andrew I recall that he was keen to dispel any notion that all he wrote was the Archives, so this was his opportunity as I saw it to put the record straight and talk about his wider interests, even those beyond Doctor Who. I love episode guide books, so I was particularly interested to get his views on what were the best examples of these.

The Foundation of Science by Jamas Enright marked the return of text fiction to TSV after a two issue absence. I’d had Jamas’s story in reserve for a year; it had been lined up to appear in TSV 58 and then 59 but each time I’d had to bump it due to space considerations. Aided by the lack of a comic strip story for this issue - and of course a keen desire not to have to apologise to Jamas for a third time - the story finally saw print.

These days Kelly Buchanan publishes Faction Paradox novels – a Doctor Who spin-off of sorts - through her company Random Static, but in TSV 60 she collaborated with Wade Campbell in on an informative and in-depth look at another series of spin-off books, the Bernice Summerfield novels. The article charts the entire 'Doctor-less' New Adventures range produced under the Virgin Publishing imprint. The article was timely as the series ended months earlier with Twilight of the Gods, Virgin’s very last New Adventure and in some ways the end of a decade-long publishing success story. Of course Bernice Summerfield went on to enjoy many more adventures in print (and on audio) under new producers Big Finish; perhaps it’s time for a follow-up article examining this range…?

In recent months I’ve been looking at a number of other online magazines and note that many of these (Shooty Dog Thing, Whotopia and Pantechnicon to name but three), offer issues as downloadable PDFs. I'm keen to do the same for TSV in addition to continuing to present the content as HTML pages. While I was preparing this issue for its online revival, I have also been reworking the original Publisher files to produce a PDF version of the issue. It’s not finished yet, but I’m intending to make this available soon.

Read the issue here.

Fellow TSV 60 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

What's the point of Postcodes?

2008-10-16T17:30:00.003+13:00

From today's NZ Herald Sideswipe column:

NZ Post has just launched its "what's your postcode?" campaign to remind people about using postcodes, writes Paul. "My wife went to post a parcel at the Victoria St post office in Auckland's CBD and although the parcel was correctly addressed including the postcode, for Kaiwaka in Northland, the staff at the counter were unable to locate the code on their system and consequently informed her that they couldn't accept the parcel!"

The 'Paul' in this item is me. When Rochelle related the story to me, I got on the NZ Post website and used their postcode finder to look up the code she'd used in the address. It came up instantly with the correct details. I've no idea why the staff at the post office were incapable of doing this. Coincidentally, the glossy brochure from NZ Post promoting the Postcode education campaign arrived in our mail box on the very same day that this incident occurred!

Getting back into the Groove

2008-09-22T21:51:00.004+12:00

Today has been a day of shifting gears and getting back on track.

For many months now, I've been writing The Comic Strip Companion, a book about every Doctor Who comic strip created in the 1960s and 1970s (and yes, there are a lot of them).

I had to lay the book to one side to tackle another, quite different writing job. I can't say much about that other piece of writing yet (I'll blog about it when it's been announced), but I will say that this was a hugely different discipline to writing the book, and I found it enormously challenging to get into the right headspace for the duration. That's now done and delivered.

So, after about a month of doing very little on the book, I've just resumed work on it.

Time to take stock. Where am I at with this? A few facts and figures might help. When I left off in mid-August, I'd completed the first drafts of nine chapters, which between them cover 87 comic strip stories. My total word count when I left off was 98,116 words (Believe me, I was sorely tempted to push on to the next chapter to break that psychological 100,000 barrier!).

I've another five chapters to write, plus three appendicies which are each probably going to be long enough to be considered chapters in their own right - so there's still a lot left to do.

Today, rather than launching straight into a new chapter, I decided to get back into the mindset by revising Chapter Six (which covers the comic strips published in 1970). The revisions included adding in a whole new subsection, and trimming down some overly wordy bits.

Having completed this revision, I took the plunge and sent this newly polished chapter out to a test audience for feedback and comments. I held off doing this until now because I didn't want the distraction of replies while I was working on the Other Project. Now it's time to start soliciting and receiving that constructive criticism. I've emailed a group of seven readers, and just hours later, I've already received my first feedback which has already got me thinking about making a few tweaks to the format. I'll hold off doing that though until I see what the others have to say.

Missing Targets

2008-08-24T17:03:00.006+12:00

My obsession with Doctor Who grew out of a love for the highly collectable Target novelisations of the Doctor's television adventures. When I was a boy I used to seize any opportunity to nip into a bookshop and peruse the shelves for the highly distinctive slim paperback books. I arranged these carefully in series order and accorded them pride of place on my bookshelves. Once I'd caught up with all of the books already available it became a matter of tracking down each new monthly release. Because each novelisation was based on a television story I always knew exactly how many gaps there were in the book series and how many titles there should be in total when the range was complete (this latter figure was of course adjusted annually to keep up with each new season of television stories).

The Target range finally ended in the early 1990s, following on the heels of the cancellation of the television series itself. The 154 novelisations covered almost but not quite all of the television stories as there were at that time. There were, frustratingly, just five gaps remaining on the bookshelf. The missing Targets were three Fourth Doctor stories, all scripted by the late Douglas Adams, and two Dalek stories scripted by Eric Saward. Due to unsuccessful negotiations with these writers, the publishers were prevented from completing the set. So close, and yet so far.

It was a desire to fill these niggling gaps that inspired me to produce my own versions of the missing novelisations. I novelised two of the five stories myself, and three other writers adapted one story each. When the books were offered as a set of five they proved extremely popular with fans worldwide (whom no doubt like me had those niggling gaps on their bookshelves). I found myself struggling to keep up with demand and had to keep reprinting in ever greater numbers. Although these books were always strictly amateur non-profit publications, this unfortunately didn't prevent buyers from onselling these with a markup. I decided to let the books go out of print and instead issue them completely free of charge as online ebooks. It has taken a couple of years to get all five books online, but I'm delighted to announce that the last of these, Doctor Who and the City of Death, went up yesterday.

The set of five novelisations can be read online (and downloaded) here.

Campaign

2008-08-22T14:03:00.003+12:00

The Crusade is not the only 'lost' Doctor Who story featuring the First Doctor that I’ve helped rescue from oblivion. I also had a hand in the restoration of author Jim Mortimore’s self-published novel, Campaign.

Jim’s novel has a fairly turbulent background. Campaign was originally commissioned by BBC Books as a purely historical adventure set in various time periods during the life of Alexander the Great, but the book Jim delivered was late, underlength, and differed radically from the original synopsis, becoming a mind-bending adventure about multiple realities set largely within the confines of the TARDIS and, for the most part, only tangentially dealt with Alexander’s life. The book was cancelled so Jim took it upon himself to self-publish the book for charity in 2000.

The limited-run paperback proved popular with fans, garnering many online rave reviews, and consequently completely sold out of its limited print run.

In late August 2006 I was browsing the Outpost Gallifrey Doctor Who discussion forum, and read a thread about how copies of Campaign, which was by now long out of print, was changing hands for large sums of money on Ebay. My only prior contact with Jim Mortimore was when I had bought copies of Campaign off him years earlier, but I dropped in an email suggesting that he take a look at the TSV website where David Bishop’s Who Killed Kennedy novel had been reissued as an ebook free for all to read and accompanied by new supplementary material including a chapter-by-chapter commentary. I proposed that if he was interested, we could perhaps do something similar for Campaign.

Jim responded positively, writing “THAT is a brilliant idea. What do you need from me?” and started bombarding me via email with some highly creative suggestions including randomised alternative endings, a complete rewrite of the manuscript, an interactive slideshow, and especially composed music (Jim’s also a musician) to accompany the book. None of this eventuated, but it demonstrates just how enthusiastic Jim was initially about the project.

We soon struck a major setback; when I’d worked on the Who Killed Kennedy ebook David Bishop had been able to supply me with an electronic copy of his complete manuscript which made things fairly straightforward. After some time spent searching his files Jim confessed that he couldn’t find a copy of his manuscript; it had apparently been lost forever in a PC crash a couple of years earlier.

I could sympathise with Jim’s predicament; I lost many years worth of TSV files in my own disastrous computer hard drive failure in 1998, and subsequently spent ages painstakingly restoring these by scanning pages of the print master copies. Scanning a copy of the book was the only practical solution that would enable the continuation of the Campaign ebook project. I scanned the first few chapters from my own copy, but as anyone who has ever tried to do this with a paperback book will attest to, this is very tricky and results in both poor quality scans and a book with a wrecked spine.

Jim sent me a defaced copy of the book that I could use instead. The only way in which it was 'defaced' was that Jim had written a dedication on the title page and then scribbled it out. I didn’t allow myself to think about how much the book could still have fetched on ebay, as I took a sharp knife and sliced away the spine. The result was a set of perfectly flat pages that made scanning considerably easier, if still very time-consuming, but on 26 January 2007 I scanned the entire thing from end to end, and tidied up as many of the text recognition errors as I could find to create a Word document of the complete novel.

Jim was delighted to once again have an electronic copy of his novel, and told me he was going to set about restoring it to its original layout and also begin work on the supplementary features. I told him to take as much time as he needed, and in June 2007 he emailed me three documents. The first was an article tracing the history of the book from his initial idea through to its final cancellation; the second a chapter-by-chapter commentary, and the third a collection of reviews of the book harvested from various internet sites. These items were, in total, almost as long as the novel itself.

I had three main concerns about the content of these three articles. Firstly, Jim had included a great deal of the private email correspondence between himself and various individuals at BBC Books, some of which pertained to a dispute over the book’s commissioning and contract. I was naturally worried that if this material was published on the TSV website we could potentially invite legal action from the individuals concerned. Secondly, Jim hadn’t held back in his use of swear words in his commentary and while this was clearly genuine and heartfelt, I was mindful of the broad age range of fans reading at the TSV website, and felt the swearing needed to be toned down. Lastly, I wasn’t comfortable with a wholesale reproduction of all of the reviews from other sources, especially if these could still be found elsewhere online.

I put this feedback to Jim and he agreed to try to seek the necessary permissions. I didn’t hear much from Jim for several months. He finally got back to me in November, saying that the permissions would not be forthcoming and conceding that a rewrite was therefore required. Jim asked me to edit out what I thought needed to be removed, but by early February 2008 I still hadn’t found time to do this as I was by now working on a book project of my own and had little time to spare. I suggested to Jim that I pass the project on to Jamas Enright. Jamas is a long time TSV contributor who has done some excellent work proof reading the online reissues of TSV. Jamas admired Campaign, and his online review of the book was among Jim’s collection of critiques from the internet.

Coincidentally, in February 2008, the Doctor Who Forum’s Campaign discussion thread has a comment from a member with the user name ‘fridaydalek’, saying “Anyone know if Mr Mortimore plans / can be persuaded to release an ebook? Who Killed Kennedy is available in this format.” This was uncannily close to the truth of what had been in the planning stages for over a year, but no hint of this had been disclosed to more than a select group of people directly involved with the project. Another user responded saying that this couldn’t happen because Jim had been threatened by the BBC’s legal department. Jim was quick to post a reply himself saying that this wasn’t true, he’d never had any such contact from the BBC over Campaign.

Jamas began working with Jim on editing the Campaign supplementary material in early March, but another setback came in later that month when Jim emailed both Jamas and myself out of the blue to say that he was pulling the ebook project and was instead going to publish the book with all of the controversial emails intact. I was understandably most disappointed at this sudden about face. I challenged Jim on his reasons, and his explanation was that although he was fine with the work Jamas had put in, he was sick of the way he had been treated by BBC Books and wanted the whole unexpurgated truth to come out. The trigger for this was an experience he’d just had with Big Finish over a Doctor Who audio play that he’d been commissioned to write and was then cancelled. Jim said, “The fact is I’m sick of being kicked in the arse for doing what people ask, and having no recourse but to allow them to make it out to be my fault when their lack of professionalism sends the whole sorry mess spiralling down the pan.”

A month later, Jim emailed again to say that he’d reconsidered, and was now happy for the ebook to appear online, with Jamas’s edits intact. Jim wrote: “Why? I hear you mumbling, in weary abandonment. You were right. You guys put a f**kload of work into this and this book would not now exist without you. That means a *lot* to me. Far more than any stupid gripe with a f**kwitted editor.”

Campaign - the ebook version – was published online by TSV website editor Alden Bates on Monday 28 April, the day before I flew out to the UK for a five week holiday. I made a tentative arrangement with Jim to meet up for a beer in London to celebrate the relaunching of Campaign, but circumstances alas prevented me from finding a suitable time to do this.

Jim went ahead and got new editions of his book published in hardback, with all of the supplementary material in the back. Jim promised copies of this new edition for myself, Jamas and Alden as a thank you for the work we’d each put into the project. In August the books were finally posted to us and turned up in the mailbox just a couple of days ago.

The new edition is a heavy substantial hardback printed on good quality paper with a glossy, full colour dustjacket. I’m name-checked in the book’s introduction, and it’s a pleasure to not only be associated with such a good-looking tome, but also to finally have a copy of the book I helped in some small way to make possible, almost two years to the day after I first suggested to the author that it ought to be reissued.

The online version of Campaign can be found here.

TSV 59

2008-08-18T16:04:00.006+12:00

In my editorial for TSV 59, published January 2000 I took the occasion of the turning of the decade to bemoan the fact that, notwithstanding the McGann TV movie, fans had gone ten years without newly-produced television Doctor Who. I wrote of the unexpected thrill that myself and a couple of friends had experienced when we first watched the cliffhanger ending of The Curse of Fenric episode three, a thrill that had been missing in the intervening years; and concluded by making a simple yet heartfelt request: "Can we have our series back, please?"

I had to wait a few more years after that editorial appeared but I’m happy to say that my request was granted and I'm now experiencing that cliffhanger thrill again, most recently at the conclusion of The Stolen Earth, which was so astonishingly unexpected it actually had me wondering whether I just seen the Tenth Doctor's swansong. Honestly, I cannot understate this: I adore the new series of Doctor Who and it's brilliant beyond words that it has been such a phenomenally huge success.

TSV 59 however belongs to a time when fans were still clutching at whatever passed for something new about Doctor Who. It seems highly unlikely that a spoof Comic Relief sketch would receive such prominence now, but there’s The Curse of Fatal Death (scripted by current producer-in-waiting himself, Steven Moffat), on the front cover. Actually that’s a rather good piece of artwork by Alistair Hughes which cleverly pastiches Target’s The Five Doctors novelisation cover.

There’s more goodness from Al Hughes inside the issue, in the form of a Lara Croft-inspired picture of Leela. The artwork appeared in black and white in the issue, but in an early example of the TSV website supporting the issue’s content, a link was provided for readers to check out the full colour version online. (Now, of course, the whole issue's on the website.)

Al’s finest work this issue is in the form of an eight page comic strip called Our Final Battlefield which is just stunning. When I first laid eyes on this I emailed Al and told him he should send a copy to Doctor Who Magazine to see if they might be interested in printing it. I’ve no idea if Al did, or if he received a reply, but to my mind it was certainly worthy of consideration.

TSV 59 also has some rather good articles, including an insightful examination of the subtext of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy by Peter Adamson. This caused a bit of a problem when an emailed comment was included that wasn’t intended for publication. Thankfully this genuine misunderstanding was soon smoothed over without the need to do anything as drastic as withdrawing the entire print run (though this was initially requested), but I have of course removed the offending comment for the online edition.

Peter was a prolific contributor to TSV for many years, delivering both quantity and quality with inspiring regularity. His input, if not always his name, infuses at least half of this issue’s content. The Machinery of Survival is one of his articles, a thorough examination (I’m tempted to write dissection) of the rather gory subject of converting humans into Cybermen. Now that’s why I think Cybermen are far scarier than Daleks.

I mentioned in a previous commentary that legendary TV historian Andrew Pixley has something of an aversion to being interviewed, claiming that the process of writing the Doctor Who Magazine Archives was simply too boring to talk about. I disagreed, and after some gentle persuasion on my part he agreed to an email interview. The first half appeared in this issue, and I think makes fascinating reading for anyone like me who regards Andrew’s Archives as the most thorough and reliable reference work ever produced on the behind-the-scenes history of Doctor Who. I just wish that these will someday get reissued as bound book editions, as it would be a lot easier to look things up if I didn't have to shuffle through more than a decade’s worth of magazines.

Even if you're already familiar with Andrew's interview from the print edition, I recommend looking up the online version as it includes a new postscript by Andrew in which he brings his comments up to date. I should add too that Andrew offered to write this for the online edition when he observed that the issue was due for republication, without any prompting from me. That's the kind of generous and thoughtful man he is.

Read the issue here.

Fellow TSV 59 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

TSV 58

2008-07-17T21:43:00.006+12:00

At the moment almost all of my writing is taken up with chronicling Doctor Who comic strips from years gone by. What started out as an interest in the comics as part of a wider focus on all things to do with a certain Time Lord has just within the last couple of years narrowed to a singular obsession as I've developed the manuscript of what will eventually be my first professionally published book.

So it is that looking back at TSV 58, first published back in September 1999, I’m interested above all else in the article it contauins about the making of one of the Doctor Who Magazine comic strips. This item will in time no doubt end up being listed in my book’s bibliography (but not until the second volume).

It’s My Party and I’ll Die if I Want To was an insight into the writing and drawing of DWM’s 1998 anniversary strip, called Happy Deathday. The article was written by Warwick Gray, better known to DWM readers by his professional name Scott Gray. Warwick – or rather Scott as I should call him from here on in – is possibly TSV’s greatest success story. Scott was illustrating and writing for TSV when he was still living in his mother’s basement in suburban Dunedin. The early years of TSV owe a great deal to Warwick's creative input, as I'm sure both long time subscribers and those who've had a thorough look through the online archive will be aware.

I remain very proud of the fact that we published Scott Gray’s earliest Doctor Who comic strips, the very same work that he submitted on spec to Doctor Who Magazine and resulted in work as a comic strip writer and assistant editor on DWM when he moved to the UK in the early 1990s. Scott is now widely regarded as one of the very best things ever to happen to the DWM Doctor Who comic strip, and it's a shame in my opinion that he stepped down as the regular writer when Paul McGann's Doctor was replaced by Christopher Eccleston.

I’ve kept in contact with Scott, and have caught up with him on a few of my UK trips (though circumstances conspired against us meeting up for a drink on my most recent foray to Britain in May this year). Despite his considerable success with his comic strip writing – which is really rather extraordinary good, it has to be said – Scott’s never forgotten TSV, and back in 1999 enthusiastically volunteered this article on the writing of one of his strips for DWM. As this particular story was a team-up with artist Roger Langridge, another ex-pat Kiwi now living in London, it was the ideal strip to write about for TSV.

I think if I recall correctly, the roughs came first. Scott adored Roger’s rough versions of the strip and thought they deserved to be printed. So that’s no doubt what got him thinking of TSV as the ideal place to showcase these. I think Scott wrote his article to give the roughs some context. As it was I didn’t have the page space to print the entire strip, but I did feature many excerpts with comparison panels from the finished version seen in DWM.

With the online publication of this issue I recently took the opportunity to pull out some dusty old box files and locate the original roughs Scott sent me all those years ago, still stored carefully away in a folder, with post-it notes still attached to the pages. There are no page constraints for an electronic issue, so for the first time ever, Roger Langridge’s roughs, plus his preliminary sketches for each of the Doctors, are finally available for all to enjoy.

Still on the subject of comic strips, but elsewhere in the issue, A Locked Room Mystery was significant for finally completing the set of all eight Doctors (as there were back then). TSV had published at least one ‘serious’ comic strip story for each of the Doctors except the first, so finally it was William Hartnell’s turn, in a suitably claustrophobic tale set entirely within the TARDIS.

Around this time of TSV 58 I know I was becoming concerned with the ever-growing number of VHS releases. I was determined to publish a review of each and every story as it was released, but with the frequency of VHS releases increasing as BBC Worldwide set its sights on completing the range within a few years, and the gap widening between TSV issues, inevitably each issue would have quite a few video reviews. So I started to look for ways to diversify these, and hit on the idea of doing a commentary in print. I put the proposal to Peter Adamson and Alistair Hughes, who responded enthusiastically, coming up with the regular Beyond the Sofa feature. These days this feature would be referred to as a ‘fan commentary’; only in print, rather than on DVD.

I can’t really make any claim to originality for the idea. I’d seen it done with SFX magazine’s regular 'Couch Potato' feature, and I think Pete and Al may also have been inspired by this source. Some readers thought TSV might have copied DWM, as their long-running Time Team commentary feature had only just begun at this time. I do know that I’d already put the idea for what became Beyond the Sofa to Pete and Al by the time I first laid eyes on the 'Time Team' feature in DWM 279, as I recall being astonished that we’d come up with a fairly similar approach at pretty much the same time.

Peter also drew the front cover artwork (providing regular cover artist Alistair with what was probably a much-needed break), and Peter’s piece ties in nicely with the focus on Nightmare of Eden for the Beyond the Sofa feature.

I’m fond of the New Adventures novels, so it was a pleasure to publish Jamas Enright’s comprehensively researched piece on All-Consuming Fire. I’d done something similar myself for Happy Endings, another New Adventures novel, back in TSV 49, and if time had permitted, I would like to have had more annotated guides in this vein in TSV.

As it was, by this time I was doing less and less of the writing for TSV myself. This was an incredibly busy and sometimes stressful time for me; a change of job was just around the corner and over the following two years I'd experience a meteoric rise from call centre supervisor to the general manager of the company. But enough about me - go off and read TSV 58!

Read the issue here.

Fellow TSV 58 bloggers
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

Eulogy for Chester

2008-06-29T22:09:00.007+12:00

Chester died today. He had been our faithful companion for thirteen years. He was a very old cat; we believe he was five when we got him, which made him 18 when he died.

Rochelle found Chester in the North Shore Times newspaper back in 1995. He was free to a good home, unwanted by the neighbours of a family who’d gone to Australia for a holiday and had evidently liked it so much they’d decided not to return. Deserted by his owners, Chester apparently decided to move in next door, imposing himself on the neighbours who’d been feeding him in his owners’ absence. They had cats of their own who became very distressed at this newcomer’s unwelcome presence. In desperation the neighbour took Chester to the vet to be put down. The vet - seeing a healthy well-fed cat in the prime of his life – persuaded the neighbour instead to place an advertisement in the paper. Which is where we came in.

We had recently had a bad experience with a rescue cat, a stray we named Max. Max had previously lived in a supermarket car park, and was clearly unwilling to settle into the pampered life of a household cat. We made a valiant effort to domesticate Max, but he escaped through an accidentally open window one day.

Chester was Max’s replacement, and Rochelle knew it was meant to be as soon as they met. She went round to view him and Chester immediately began rubbing all around her ankles. His immediate and unconditional affection was a stunning contrast to Max’s complete absence of people skills. We didn’t name Chester – that was the name given to him by his previous owners who’d scarpered across the Tasman.

So Chester came to live with us in our small Glenfield flat. We lived at the time in a converted motel unit complex, and our gregarious tuxedo cat was soon the talk of all the residents in the units, schmoozing his way into the affections of the generally middle-aged single women who were our neighbours. He sometimes could be found befriending patrons at the Georgie Pie restaurant that backed on to the flats. He also accompanied us on walks several block distant, and could even be persuaded (when placed at the top) to try the slides at the local park playground.

When we moved to our house in Takapuna Chester adapted rather quickly to this new unfamiliar territory and once again ingratiated himself with the local residents. He became rather overweight for a while due, we suspect, to snacks he received from doting neighbours. He became firm friends with our neighbours’ cat, Sammy. The two of them were often seen exploring together, until Sammy died of old age a few years later. Chester then befriended another neighbour’s small tabby kitten, called Trigger, and almost seemed as if he was mentoring a young apprentice.

Rochelle and I got into the habit of going for short walks in the evenings and weekends, with Chester and Trigger accompanying us as far as they felt comfortable doing so. Chester once walked with us all the way to the roast meal shop located two blocks away. It was probably the wafting smells of gravy that lured him on – gravy was a favourite food. We’d give him cat food with chunks of meat in gravy and he’d methodically lap up every drop of gravy and leave behind the meat.

Chester was affectionate and energetic for a long time, but as old age crept up on him he became gradually more distant and took to sleeping almost all day. His favourite spots were clumps of long grass beside our driveway and also the sun loungers on our deck where, on warm sunny days, he liked nothing better than to soak up the rays until his black fur was almost too hot to touch.

Chester was a costly cat, too. He was fussy about his food and had the uncanny ability to discriminate between cat food brands based on price. He also lined the vet’s pockets on many occasions.

He suffered a scrape to his right eye which necessitated an operation which involved peeling off the outer layer of the eye and then stitching the eye closed whilst the layer regrew. Despite suffering a week of indignity going around with one eye stitched shut, Chester’s eye never entirely healed up and he always had a slightly milky glaze over his right eye after that. He also had to have several teeth removed at various time, including two of his four incisors which caused him to thereafter always eat with his head cocked on one side.

In the last couple of years, he developed a problem with one of his back legs becoming stiff and unresponsive. The vet diagnosed this as a pinched nerve in Chester’s spine, but due to his age, they were unable to safely operate to fix the problem. Chester would sometimes have rather alarming spasms in his defective leg, which he’d find upsetting as he’d growl and bite down on his leg until the spasms subsided. It was unwise to be in his vicinity when this occurred, as Rochelle found out to her cost not once but twice, when Chester confused her arm with his leg. The bites became seriously infected and required medical treatment. To this day she bears small bite scars as permanent reminder of Chester.

Three and a half years ago, facing Chester’s declining health we decided to get a second cat, another tuxedo male we called Monty who had just been weaned from his mother and seemed to latch on to Chester as a bit of a role model. Chester was having none of it though and growled and spit at this tiny impressionable kitten whenever he ventured too close. Perhaps Chester cannily realised that Monty was being groomed as his eventual replacement. Fortunately for us, Monty quickly befriended the aforementioned Trigger, who was much closer to his own age, and the two were firm buddies, with Chester accepted as part of the group. The trio would usually accompany us on our regular walks, which stopped after Trigger sadly died after being hit by a car, and due to his bad leg Chester became too immobile for him to walk very far.

We had hoped of course that Chester would go quietly in his sleep. We’d last taken him for his annual vet check-up in February this year, fearing the worst, but the verdict was that for his age he was in remarkably good health and still had life left in him. We took a trip to the UK in May this year, leaving instructions with our neighbour for what to do if Chester passed away. He looked so frail that we really didn’t think he had many days left. To our amazement and relief, Chester was still around when we returned after five weeks away, regarding us as usual with a disapproving glare that said, “And where do you think you’ve been…?”

In the few weeks since our return, Chester’s health took a turn for the worse, perhaps exacerbated by a bad patch of cold, damp weather. In the end though, like many old cats, it was his kidneys that got him. He went off his food and had even stopped drinking water. We were concerned for his health and tried to keep him inside and as warm and comfortable as possible. Midday yesterday Chester went outside. I went searching for him but couldn’t locate him before we were due to go out that afternoon. As I drove away, I thought I saw him sitting over in the neighbour’s garden, oddly enough in the same spot where Trigger had been buried.

In the evening we returned home and learned that our neighbour had found Chester collapsed on his doorstep, howling and soaking wet from the heavy rain and in our absence had very kindly rushed him to the vet. Chester was fed and rehydrated, but in the end there was nothing the vet could do for him; his kidneys were found to be inflamed and riddled with cancer and we made the heartbreaking yet inevitable decision to have him put to sleep. He died in Rochelle’s arms mid-morning on Sunday 29 June 2008.

Chester was very old in cat years. He’d had a good life and had been well loved by both of us. I like to write on my computer late into the night, and Chester would often curl up at my feet. As I’m writing now, I’m missing his familiar presence. The memory of Chester - the cat with a huge personality - will forever remain.

Farewell old friend. Rest in peace, Mr C.

TSV 57

2008-06-09T11:17:00.003+12:00

Every issue of TSV that I've edited has had one or two leading features that define that issue's unique identity. Whether it be an interview, an analysis of some aspect of the series, a comic strip story or a particularly in-depth review, this item (or items) is the very heart of the issue. In the case of TSV 57 that core item is The Lion’s Tale, an extensive expose of the rediscovery of the rediscovery of The Crusade episode 1.

While I usually chose to leave the writing of such lead items to others so that I’d have enough time up my sleeve to actually put the issue together, in the case of this article there was no one better positioned to write the piece than myself. The fact that I was effectively doing double duty as both lead writer and editor goes a long way towards explaining why there’s a fairly long delay – half a year in fact - between issues 56 and 57.

The discovery of a lost Doctor Who episode in New Zealand generated a huge amount of interest at the time, and to this day many people I meet (fans and non-fans alike) recall the news of the find and appear genuinely interested in having me talk about my part in the episode’s discovery and return. At the time of writing (in early June 2008) I’ve just returned from a month-long trip to the UK during which I met a few fairly well-known people in Doctor Who circles, and sure enough The Lion continues to come up as a topic of conversation more than nine years later (I even got to visit BBC Television Centre on this trip and met people who were responsible for the episode’s restoration and saw the machine on which the film print was copied). A number of the people I’ve worked and socialised with recall reading or hearing about the episode discovery. It’s not something I usually volunteer myself but when I mention that I am a Doctor Who fan (something that’s rather more socially acceptable to admit to these days, to my delight), a typical response from a non-fan in New Zealand is to observe that an episode was once discovered here. At which point I confess my own involvement in that, and usually end up telling a potted version of what happened.

The full version of The Lion’s Tale appeared in TSV 57, and was subsequently republished online in a slightly altered version. This was one of the earliest items to make the transition from print to the online medium, and perhaps even pre-dates the creation of the TSV Archive. As such it means that the heart of TSV 57 has been available to read on the website for a lot longer than the rest of the issue. The article was revised early last year (2007) with the assistance of Jon Preddle, mainly to incorporate information that has since come to light about why the episode was found in New Zealand despite never actually having been screened on television in this country. The online version still resembles the original printed piece, and the one notable omission is a plot synopsis of the episode, which was borrowed from Andrew Pixley’s archive feature in Doctor Who Magazine. Despite fully intending to do so, I neglected to ask permission from either Andrew or DWM to reprint this section in TSV. Which was rather embarrassing; especially when Andrew told me that he’d prefer that I hadn’t reprinted the excerpt. Fortunately Andrew was very good about the whole thing, and the archive synopsis was left out when the article went online.

If The Lion’s Tale was the heart of TSV 57 then its soul was The Life and Times of Neil Lambess. Neil frequently mentioned to me how much he loved the Jackie Jenkins column in DWM. The Life and Times of Jackie Jenkins was a regular column about events in the life of a female Doctor Who fan. Jackie was a fiction, penned by DWM columnist Vanessa Bishop, but many of the things she wrote about had a truth that resonated with fans. Neil was particularly awed by the fact that in one instalment ‘Jackie’ talked about the return of The Lion, meaning that his key role in discovering the episode had influenced Jackie’s semi-fictional existence. I suggested to Neil that he ought to write up his own experiences surrounding The Lion in the form of a pastiche of Jackie’s column. Neil writes with a great deal of feeling and with his honest emotions very much on show, and I think that is what makes his work so compelling and so suited to this type of confessional piece. Although it was never intended to be anything more than a one-off, I was so taken with Neil’s article that I asked him to continue with a regular column, which in later issues Neil re-named Errant Nonsense.

The other key significant item in the issue was the Pilots of the Deep comic strip. This was a good fit with The Lion content in the sense that this was also about restoring a piece of lost Doctor Who narrative. Pilots of the Deep had for many years been an unfinished work, a loose dangling thread in the history of TSV. The initial two parts of the strip, which featured the Seventh Doctor and Ace encountering the Sea Devils, had appeared in 1989 but it was never completed. A decade later, the strip was reprinted with a newly-created conclusion as a collaboration between Peter Adamson and David Ronayne. It was particularly satisfying for me to see the story finally completed as I’d collaborated with Mark Roach (now a successful Auckland independent music producer) on the second instalment back in 1989. I met up with Mark late last year at a reunion of a group of old friends I hadn’t seen for years and he told me that he’d discovered the TSV website and appreciated getting to see his old Doctor Who writing and artwork again.

Finally, the stunning front cover artwork by the awesomely talented Alistair Hughes cannot pass without mention. The Doctor's face emerging from an old map of Palestine is quite astonishing to behold, and appears almost three-dimensional. Quite brilliant.

Read TSV 57 here

Fellow TSV 57 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

Taking the Plunge

2008-04-25T10:16:00.004+12:00

Today is my first day as a freelance writer.

After a full six and a quarter years working at the head office of Noel Leeming Group, yesterday was my final day as an employee of that company. It was both rather sad and also rather liberating at the same time. I was acutely aware over the course of the day that I was performing for the very last time each of the daily routines I’d done many hundreds of times over. I felt the weight of so much personal history and experience invested in that location, and in those tasks, gradually lifting from my shoulders.

I was very touched by the genuinely unexpected and welcome send-off by many of my friends and colleagues at NLG. I’d been there so long that I don’t think there was a single person at my morning tea send-off who had been working for the company when I joined way back in January 2002. As I said in my farewell speech, it is the people whom I’ll miss most of all. I’m hoping to keep in contact with some of them.

I left under entirely amicable circumstances; my position was dissolved due to some minor restructuring by the company, but this wasn’t unexpected as two and a half years ago I was advised that my job would eventually be reviewed and altered in some fashion. I was offered - and readily accepted - redundancy.

This was rather good timing as for a while now I’ve been considering devoting more time to what up until now has been my 'secondary career' as a writer. Regular, paid employment was too appealing to give up voluntarily and I needed a push to propel me outside of this comfortable stability.

I haven’t mentioned anything on this blog until now about my paid writing commissions because they've yet to be publicly announced by the respective publishers, and it’s bad form to disclose too much beforehand, but I will say that one is a guidebook about Doctor Who comic strips of the 1960s and 1970s that I’ve been working on in my evenings and weekends for most of the last year, and the other (a far more recent commission), I cannot say anything about yet as I’ve been asked to keep this confidential.

Both jobs will undoubtedly keep me busy as a full-time writer for a least the next several months, and there is the prospect of more work to follow, with a second, follow-up volume about the comic strips under commission and possibly also another writing job to follow on from the first one I cannot talk about yet, contingent on how my first piece turns out.

I’m under no illusion that these jobs will earn me enough to keep writing fulltime long-term; I will no doubt need to seek out a new job so that I don’t end up draining all of my savings, but for most of the rest of 2008 it is my intention to live the life of a fulltime, freelance writer. It’s something I’ve dreamed of doing ever since I was a teenager and I’m excited and just a little daunted at the realisation that this day has finally arrived.

Resurrecting Resurrection

2008-04-10T12:55:00.004+12:00

After spending so much of my early years as a Doctor Who fan obsessively seeking to complete my collection of the Target novelisations, I could perhaps be forgiven for feeling just a bit disappointed in the end that Target came ever so close but never quite managed to cover the entire run television stories (well, the first seven Doctors as there were back then), in book form.

There were just five stories that never made it into print (four, if you happen to think that the incomplete Tom Baker story Shada doesn't count as part of the series). Twenty years ago this year, myself and my good friend (and fellow obsessive Target collector!) Jon Preddle started out on a fan publishing project aimed at completing this quintet of missing stories. Armed with a handwritten transcript and an incomplete copy of the BBC scripts, I novelised Resurrection of the Daleks in fits and after many long delays it finally saw print in 2000.

Many more years later, with the print edition now long out of print, we've added the book to the online TSV Archive. As with the previous 'missing Target' ebooks, the online version is presented as both a set of HTML pages and a downloadable PDF, accompanied by a background article about writing the book and a cover artwork gallery.

The collection's not yet quite complete; City of Death still needs to be added to finish the set. I intend to make that available in a few months' time.

Read Resurrection of the Daleks here.

TSV 56

2008-03-15T14:44:00.006+13:00

In 1998 Doctor Who Magazine published the results of their largest-ever poll, which tabulated 2,600 readers' votes for every Doctor Who story. The top-rating ten stories were showcased in issue 265 (the same issue I mentioned first sighting at the Fitzroy Tavern in my last blog article), in a series of ten essays by different writers each explaining why the story was deserving of its placing in the top ten.

This feature impressed me so much that I was inspired to do something similar for TSV. I hit on the idea of marking Doctor Who’s thirty-fifth anniverary in November 1998 with a mirror image of DWM’s Top Ten article; TSV's Bottom Ten would instead be a series of essays counting down the opposite end of DWM’s poll results. This evolved from an idea I’d had at the back of my mind for some time to run a series of articles defending and rehabilitating stories that were popularily perceived to be the worst examples of television Doctor Who. Timelash, for example has much to commend it but the prevailing view for the vast majority of fans is that it richly deserves its anagramatical epithet.

I assembled a diverse group of ten writers to contribute to this feature, drawing on several overseas writers, some of whom such as Gary Russell, Andrew Pixley and David J Howe I’d recently caught up with on my UK trip, as well as local TSV regulars. Such multi-contributor features are nerve-wracking for an editor. Usually if I was to commission ten separate articles from ten writers and only eight or nine arrived in time, I could simply publish the later arrivals (assuming they did arrive of course) in the following issue. But with a feature like The Bottom Ten this would only work with the whole set in the same issue.

The articles came in more or less on time - with one exception that crucially was the essay for the number one story, The Twin Dilemma which I'd assigned to Phillip J Gray. Phillip had won well-deserved acclaim for his article defending The Horns of Nimon in TSV 41. As the deadline slipped by without any sign of a delivery I discovered to my dismay that for reasons best known to himself, Phillip hadn’t even started work on his piece yet. I tried to cajole him into action on a regular basis and then resorted to a tactic that had worked for Douglas Adams' publishers.

The best-selling author of The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy was notorious for not delivering manuscripts. Douglas Adams' oft-quoted line “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by” neatly summed up his legendary procrastination when it came to writing. Douglas's exasperated publishers would resort to shutting him in a hotel room with only coffee, a typewriter and his editor for company to get him to complete a long-overdue novel. Apparently it worked.

I collected Philip from his flat one weekend, drove him back to my place, sat him in front of my television set with a notepad and pen and played all four episodes of The Twin Dilemma. I watched it with him, discussing aspects of the story with him as we watched. Armed with hids handwritten notes Philip then sat at my computer and composed the article. I don’t recall if strong coffee was also involved, but nonetheless this approach did the trick.

In light of this it is remarkable that the issue wasn’t overly delayed, coming out in January 1999, just a few months after its predecessor. That said, this issue was intended to be a mid-December issue, as evidenced by Erato’s Christmas-themed double-length Karkus strip. Rather unfortunately, history would repeat itself exactly a year later when another delayed issue saw further Karkus Xmas escapades again postponed until January. Perhaps though New Zealand fans are all too used to encountering Christmas specials out-of-season.

The issue also saw the debut of what would be another long-running Erato strip, this time featuring Pex. The reference to Cybermen in the basement of Paradise Towers is a long-standing notorious in-joke that for TSV readers reaches back as far as 1987 when TSV issue 3's news pages confidently reported that the denizens of Telos would make a surprise return in that television serial.

The issue featured a number of VHS reviews, including the TV Movie, which was available in New Zealand as a limited exclusive through Whitcoulls. I was working at this retail chain’s head office at that time and helped arrange this knowing that this video was sought after by local fans. With the E-Space trilogy boxset, I allocated each story to a different reviewer but claimed Warriors’ Gate for myself. Although I’d alreadly written about this adventure in TSV 37, I jumped at the opportunity to re-examine my all-time favourite Doctor Who story. I asked Alistair Hughes to do me a Warriors' Gate themed cover , and I was absolutely delighted with the dynamic, visually inventive result. Al also sent me a full page State of Decay illustration for the back cover that he'd originally composed for the front cover of In-Vision issue 49 (dated March 1994). The cover of that issue can be seen here, and the original colour artwork can be found in the TSV 56 artwork gallery.

TSV 56 might have appeared even later than January if it wasn't for events that unfolded earlier that month compelling me to push to complete the issue as soon as I possibly could. TSV 56 was finally completed in a rush on the afternoon of Wednesday 13 January; the same day that my name appeared in a front page article in Auckland's New Zealand Herald newspaper.

A couple of weeks earlier, myself and Neil Lambess had made a wonderful discovery. We'd followed up a lead that led us to a missing Doctor Who episode, The Crusade part one, in the possession of Auckland film collector Bruce Grenville. I negotiated with Bruce and arranged for the film to be sent to the BBC. I’d hoped to break this exciting news in the pages of TSV, and I’d also written an ‘exclusive’ report for Doctor Who Magazine, but the news broke earlier than I expected, attracting the attention of newspapers, television and radio. I was phoned by journalists from both TV1 and TV3 news at work on the Wednesday morning who wanted to interview me later that day. I took the rest of the day off work and in the downtime between television interviews and also a couple of phone interviews with local and overseas radio stations, I applied myself to finishing TSV 56.

The last item to go in was a news item about the discovery, and my up-to-the-minute editorial. That Wednesday was a rather mad day, in which, for a very brief time I gained a fleeting insight into the media madness that must go with being a famous celebrity or politician. A day or two later it was all over; no phone calls from television, radio or newspaper reporters - Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame came and went. Whenever I look at TSV 56 now it always reminds me of that one day of insanity.

Read TSV 56 here

Fellow TSV 56 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

TSV 55

2008-02-14T16:38:00.008+13:00

TSV 55 (originally published in October 1998) took six months to put together. That was at that time the longest gap between issues that TSV readers had experienced for many years. That long delay is partly attributable to my six week trip to the UK that year with all the reacclimatising to everyday life that comes in the wake of being away for this length of time. In addition, and more crucially for TSV, I came back to a fairly blank slate for the issue. I'd almost completely cleared the decks of material lined up for publication with all the content that filled up the TSV 53-54 double published back in March. So TSV issue 55 had to be constructed from scratch upon my return.

The issue might be said to feature an over-abundance of reviews. This is symptomatic of the long gap between issues. My policy for TSV was to feature a review of every new book, video and Doctor Who Magazine issue. When you're covering half a year's output this can occupy an awful lot of page space. These reviews would take up even more pages in later issues as some even longer gaps opened up between issues. To his credit when Adam took over as editor he addressed this problem head-on and decided that it simply wasn't necessary for TSV to review quite so much stuff. Quite right, too.

But the big video reviews were, in my view, themselves feature articles. Granted the novel reviews would be of little interest to some of TSV's readership, but surely all readers shared a common interest in the television stories. For this reason I never had any qualms about devoting a lot of page space to the video reviews and placing them as lead articles near the front of the issues.

I usually assigned these video reviews to other writers and hadn't written one myself since Paradise Towers in TSV 50. When Frontios came up on the video schedule (paired with The Awakening), I couldn't resist tackling this one myself. I've always liked this story ever since I first experienced it as a Target novelisation. The television story - which for me came several years later - didn't quite live up to expectation (the final episode in particular is rather weak), but it's still very enjoyable. I'm really looking forward to the DVD, if only to discover if the picture's meant to be that soft and indistinct or if it was just a poor VHS transfer.

As I recall it wasn't just my affection for Frontios that prompted me to write the review; I'd also been checking an advance manuscript of Doctor Who - The Television Companion for its authors David J Howe and Stephen James Walker, and seeing a couple of quoted sections from other reviews I'd written for TSV used in the book inspired me to want to write more.

I also asked regular cover artist Alistair Hughes to do me a Frontios-themed piece of cover artwork. I told him how much I loved the Target book cover artwork by Andrew Skilleter depicting the Gravis and the planet and asked for something similar. Al's a very talented artist who likes to challenge himself to find new and interesting ways of depicting familiar visuals, and the resulting illustration is incorporates the elements I'd requested but still looks very different.

Paul McGann's Doctor finally made his debut in the TSV comic strip with Chrysalis, a sequel to The Web Planet written and drawn by Peter Adamson. This just left Hartnell's Doctor conspicuous by his absence in the run of TSV comic strips (something that would be rectified a few issues later).

I wrote about my trip to the UK in the editorial and also in a long travelogue-style article inspired by Bill Bryson's Notes From a Small Island book about his own experiences visiting Britain. There are a couple of memorable incidents from that trip that were omitted from my article in TSV 55 I'd like to share.

I had a meal with Gary Russell and Paul Cornell during which Gary gave Paul an update on his and Jason Haigh-Ellery's plans to record audio adaptations of Virgin's Bernice Summerfield New Adventures novels. At one point during the meal, Gary leaned towards Paul and said that he had someone in mind to play Benny: "What do you think of Lisa Bowerman?" he asked. Paul responded enthusiastically. "Who's Lisa Bowerman?" I wondered for a brief moment before recalling the actress from Survival.

My first Fitzroy Tavern meeting remains a cherished memory. Doctor Who Magazine editor Gary Gillatt gave me a copy of the brand new issue of DWM. It contained that jaw-dropping last episode of the comic strip The Final Chapter in which the Doctor apparently regenerates into Nick Briggs on the last page. I remember staring at that page in disbelief, much I think to Gary's delight, and then being urgently instructed to hide the issue away before anyone else in the Tavern spotted it. Maybe Gary was worried that they might be lynched by fans...?

Other highlights of TSV 55 include Jon Preddle's guide to continuity references in the New Adventures which I believe he'd been working on for quite some time, making notes as he read each book for the first time.

Alden Bates and Peter Adamson's Tenure Without Trial is a great 'What if" style article about the Colin Baker era going in a rather different, yet strangely familiar direction. Both this article and my Notes from a Who Island piece are far from new to the online archive; these were among the first items added when Alden and I first started putting up selected pieces from TSV's back-catalogue around 2002. Six years later, the rest of the issue is finally online!

Read TSV 55 here.

Fellow TSV 55 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

TSV 54

2008-01-29T15:37:00.000+13:00

TSV 54, originally published in March 1998, was the second half of a double issue paired with TSV 53. These two issues were delivered together in the same envelope, but for the online reissue I elected to space them one month apart (TSV 53 was reissued in December last year).

The online issues of TSV are stripped clean of various ephemeral content including news, adverts and letters columns, but the online version of TSV 54 belies the fact that this content was also absent from the print edition. With TSV 53 including all of these regular features - as well as book and magazine reviews - this freed up TSV 54 to deliver solid, cover-to-cover content that has, in my view, largely stood the test of time. Select the Print Version view for any other online issue in the TSV Archive and you'll see that there are always several items in the contents listing that do not have links. That's not the case with TSV 54: absolutely everything listed there is available online.

In place of the usual editorial was a piece of writing by long-time TSV reader Gillian Hart. Gillian delightfully tells of her thwarted attempts to get her friends to appreciate Doctor Who (I suspect she'd find this much easier to achieve these days!). Gillian didn't intend for this as a 'guest editorial' piece; it was an unsolicited contribution that I thought was particularly suited to open the issue.

A glance at the contents - which has just 12 items listed (artwork excepted) - might indicate that TSV 54 was a slim supplement, but in fact this issue ran to a full 88 pages (which was the standard length for TSV at that time), and it is simply that three rather substantial pieces between them occupy the majority of the pages.

The star attraction of the issue is undoubtedly Andrew Pixley's By Any Other Name. This article tackles the thorny and contentious subject of the Hartnell era story titles with the thoroughness and attention to detail that has deservedly brought Andrew widespread respect and recognition. Andrew readily concedes that there can never be complete consensus on the titles of the Hartnell stories as even the BBC's own documentation is sometimes inconsistent and contradictory, but his article looks at all of the possible appellations and considers the relative merits of their claim to veracity.

The article came about as a result of various international phone conversations between Andrew and myself. As I mentioned in my TSV 53 commentary, Andrew was a recent TSV convert, and his enthusiasm for the fanzine motivated him to want to write for it. The first article (which appears in TSV 53) was A Question of Answers. This took a look at some of the trickiest questions about Doctor Who and inevitably touched on the Hartnell story titles. It was clear to me that Andrew had a lot more to say on this topic so I encouraged him to expand on this for a separate piece in the following issue. Andrew is an amazingly fast writer and delivered this piece very soon after our discussion. It was this speedy delivery, coupled with my desire to print this brilliant but very long article as soon as practical, that led to the creation of the double issue.

I'm especially grateful to Andrew for taking the time to deliver a comprehensive follow-up to his original article. The newly-added afterword written especially for the online reissue appears at the end of the original piece and covers anything to do with the Hartnell story titles that has occurred over the last decade. It's a testament to Andrew's thoroughness that this footnote alone is longer than many regular TSV articles.

Andrew's article presented a challenge for me when I was designing the issue back in early 1998. At this time I was still getting to grips with desktop publishing using Microsoft’s Publisher application. (I'd only designed one issue on Publisher prior to tackling the TSV 53/54 double). Andrew had incorporated numerous diversions and sidetracks into his piece, and I had to work out how to design separate text boxes for these that could sit alongside the main body of the article. Andrew was delighted with what I managed to achieve, and consequently text box-outs became a regular design feature in TSV.

TSV 54 features another well-known leading Doctor Who researcher, David J. Howe. I'd first started corresponding with David about five years earlier when he, Stephen James Walker and Mark Stammers were still publishing The Frame (a rather wonderful glossy colour fanzine). David subscribed to TSV and I'd subsequently written some pieces for the seven volume Handbook series co-authored by David, Mark and Steve. With the Handbooks about to come to a natural closure with the publication of the Seventh Doctor volume, I felt this was the best time to ask David about his Doctor Who book projects past, present and future. Telos, the book publishing company for which David and Steve are now perhaps best known, wasn't even on the horizon at this point.

The interview with David was conducted via email - it wasn't until a few months later that I met David for the first time when I visited him at his South London home and got to see his attic office with its enviable treasure trove of Doctor Who collectables and research materials.

The third major piece in this issue was a Fifth Doctor and Turlough comic strip called Whispers, created by Stephen and Robert Boswell. The strip had sat in my in-tray for about a year before its publication, and Nick Withers (who knew the Boswell brothers) was still co-editing TSV when it arrived. The reason for the long delay in publishing the strip was a combination of creative and scheduling problems...

Peter Adamson was at the time responsible for overseeing the creation and development of the TSV comic strips. This wasn't an area in which I had much expertise, so I was happy to hand complete responsibility for this area of TSV over to Peter who is a very talented comic strip writer and artist. Peter coordinated the comic strip writers and artists and scheduled the strips for each issue. Typically he would edit or at least sign off the strips at script stage and also make modifications where required to the finished artwork and lettering before delivering the finished comic strip pages to me.

Whispers was however developed entirely independently of this process. The first I was aware of this comic strip’s existence was when all 14 pages were delivered to me by the Boswells sometime around late 1996 or early 1997. Naturally, I sent a copy of the strip to Peter for his input. Peter felt that the strip needed some work and outlined some changes for tightening the narrative, including resequencing the opening pages to create a pre-credits teaser.

The Boswell brothers were unhappy with these proposed modifications, and made it clear that their strip should be published in its original form. After much thought I ultimately decided to honour the Boswells' wishes and publish the strip sans modifications.

This wasn't the only reason for the long delay in publication, however. Almost all TSV issues at this time featured a comic strip story, and these were usually planned many months in advance, so Whispers had to wait for an available 'slot'. A comic strip story was scheduled for TSV 54, but with the decision to publish the issue much earlier than originally planned, the strip could not be finished in time, and Whispers which was still in my in-tray, ready and awaiting publication, filled the gap.

Elsewhere in the issue, TSV presented the second in a series of additions to the Discontinuity Guide (the first had been the TV Movie in issue 49). This instalment, which covered the 1985 BBC radio play Slipback, was the first guide entry to be co-authored by Peter Adamson, Alden Bates, Jon Preddle and was the beginning of big things for this triumvirate, who created guide entries for many more stories, initially covering the BBC’s radio play output and then tackling the Big Finish Doctor Who range from 1999 onwards. The guide additions all too soon outgrew the pages of TSV and found a new home online, as The DiscContinuity Guide. The website guide attracted much attention and praise from international Doctor Who fandom and there were for a while also plans for the guide to appear in a professionally published book. The book failed to eventuate however, and the guide rather sadly was subsequently neglected, receiving its most recent update three years ago.

The Slipback guide entry and another article, Confessions of a Melaphile (in which Alden Bates comes out as a proud Melanie Bush fan), have both been available online for some years, pre-dating the creation of the TSV online archive. Now, at long last, online readers of TSV can discover the rest of the issue in which these two items originally appeared!

TSV 54 was reviewed in Doctor Who Magazine issue 267:

This particular issue of the ever-reliable Time-Space Visualiser is more suited to the factophiles among us. With its 18-page interview with author / researcher / biographer David J Howe and a light-hearted 25-page essay on 'correct' Doctor Who story titles by DWM's arch fact-snuffler Andrew Pixley, this may at first glance seem a little too dry for the more frivolous of fans, but these articles hold their length surprisingly well. They are, I'm pleased to say, balanced by lighter items, including Discontinuity Guide-style notes for radio play Slipback, a celebration of Melanie Bush and the surreal comic strip The Karkus is Lost in Boradland!

Read TSV 54 here.

Fellow TSV 54 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

"There's a little black spot on the sun today..."

2008-01-24T14:00:00.001+13:00

I've admired The Police since I first got into music as an impressionable teenager back in 1983. Not the best timing, perhaps, as this was the same year that The Police released their last studio album, the brilliant Synchronicity (I diligently collected their entire back catalogue, but their last album has always remained my firm favourite).

The Police played at Western Springs on 29 February 1984. I really wanted to go, but didn't have the money for a ticket. I rather jealously heard all about it from my school friends, and consoled myself with the thought that they'd tour again and I'd see them next time. The Police broke up (or perhaps, rather more accurately, failed to get back together) soon afterwards, crushing this hope.

Twenty-four years later, I finally got to see The Police play Western Springs, in the company of around 60,000 others, last Saturday, 19 January.

The addition of Fergie as a support act generated additional buzz for the concert (and no doubt helped to sell many more tickets), but I'm not a fan of the Black Eyed Peas singer, and judging by the muted reactions of most of the audience, I was far from alone in this. Perhaps most tellingly, her medley of cover versions of various rock songs got a much bigger reaction from the crowd than most of her own material.

Fergie was preceded by the first support act, Fiction Plane, who were more impressive. We arrived just as they started playing, and I noticed a big cheer went up from the crowd when the lead singer said they'd just come up from Wellington. This is likely why there are now some misinformed posts online saying that Fiction Plane are a local act from the capital city whilst marvelling at how much the lead singer sounded like Sting. That's because Fiction Plane are actually a British band and the singer is Sting's son Joe Sumner - whom in a rather wonderful example of synchronicity (!) was born in 1977, the same year The Police first got together. A touch of nepotism at play there, perhaps, but Fiction Plane's performance proved they had nothing to apologise for.

The biggest surprise when The Police finally came on was Sting's appearance. I'd seen him perform live on DVD and in the flesh once before on his Mercury Falling tour (Auckland, 10 November 1996), but he now looks very much older, slightly plumper and more haggard. His torn tight white shirt and full grey beard certainly lent much verisimilitude to the opening lyric, "Just a castaway..."

Seeing Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers play together is quite simply electrifying. Sting alone is a strong stage presence but Summers' brilliant guitar playing and Copeland's incredible drumming actually seemed to be conspiring to drown out Sting's vocals and bass guitar at times, and you can quite believe the rumours that the three men like to play together, but don't actually like each other all that much. Copeland's legendary drumming style is perhaps best described as fast and hard. In addition to a large drum kit, Copeland also had a separate array of percussion instruments, and some songs (including King of Pain and Wrapped Around Your Finger), would see him dart between his kit and these instruments. Summers delivered some awesome guitar playing, with some songs reinterpreted with extended guitar parts showcasing his talent.

Although I enjoyed the opening number - Message in a Bottle - it was the second song, the brutal, soaring rendition of Synchroncity II (a personal favourite track that juxtaposes harsh urban truths with the mythic Loch Ness monster) that completely won me over. The large screens surrounding the stage that had remained dark through the first number at this point lit up with the primary colours from the iconic Synchronicity album cover.

I was less impressed with Invisible Sun, a broodingly powerful song about conflict in Northern Ireland that was somewhat bizarrely accompanied by photos of sad-looking third world children on the screens. If the message was that now that the troubles in Ireland are mostly resolved, the song should be now directed at other humanitarian issues, then it feel rather flat in my view, and took something away from the importance of the original message inherent in the lyrics.

The set list covered material from all five albums and included some of the lesser-known tracks like Hole in my Life, Voices inside my Head and When the World is Running Down... Of the 18 songs played, five each were from Outlandos d'Amour (half of the entire album!) and Zenyattà Mondatta, whereas Synchronicity had four, and Reggatta de Blanc and Ghost in the Machine were surprisingly under-represented with just two songs each. In total The Police played an impressive third of their 54 studio album tracks.

I would have loved them to play Spirits in the Material World, Tea in the Sahara, Demolition Man and Walking in Your Footsteps - but at least we got Don't Stand So Close To Me that had apparently been absent from the Wellington set list two nights earlier. Despite Sting's banter with Andy over what song the guitarist was going to spring on them next, other than the above omission the set lists for their two New Zealand shows were otherwise identical.

The crowd went wild for Roxanne, but our distance from the stage - we were perched halfway up the hill at the back of the stadium - meant that we missed out on the full effect of the sing-along audience participation. When Sting deliberately left the occasional gap in the lyrics we had to take it on faith that those close to the stage were singing along.

I loved the encores, which included another two personal favourites, King of Pain and Every Breath You Take, and I think I'd have been satisfied if it had ended there, but Andy's lone presence on stage, impatiently waiting for his band mates to return, signalled that there was something more to come. Sure enough, we were treated to a rocking version of Next to You to close out the night.

A brilliant live act that rewarded my exceptionally long wait!

Setlist:
Message in a Bottle
Synchronicity II
Walking on the Moon
Voices Inside My Head
When the World Is Running Down...
Don't Stand So Close to Me
Driven to Tears
Hole in my Life
Every Little Thing she does is Magic
Wrapped around your Finger
De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da
Invisible Sun
Can't Stand Losing You
Roxanne
King of Pain
So Lonely
Every Breath You Take
Next to You

TSV 53

2007-12-12T16:22:00.000+13:00

TSV 53, originally published in March 1998, was the first half of a double issue, paired with TSV 54. This was a unique occurence in TSV's history; issue 20 in December 1990 had come with a slim supplement consisting of overflow material from the regular issue, but the double issue TSV 53 and 54 was the first and only time that two full-length issues were published simultaneously. The arrival of these two issues in the same envelope would have come as a nice surprise for most readers, as it was mostly unplanned - so there wasn't an opportunity to announce this double-header in advance of publication.

The reason for this ambitious double-issue was that in early 1998 I discovered that I had an over-abundance of material lined up for TSV 53. Under normal circumstances I would have simply held back some of the items for another issue later in the year, but a long-awaited trip to the UK had been booked for mid-1998 and I wanted to 'clear the decks' before my departure; I also didn't think it was fair to make so many contributors wait until after I got back to see their writing and artwork in print. I made the decision to go with a double issue just a few weeks before publication when, having estimated just how much excess material I had waiting in reserve, I realised that it would be possible to fill an entire second issue.

This surfeit of material - an unusual situation for TSV - was partly due to the efforts of one man, Andrew Pixley, whose two articles in TSV 53 and 54 occupy a fifth of the total page count. Andrew is a leading figure in the field of television research. He has documented the production history of every Doctor Who story in exhaustive and accurate detail for the Doctor Who Magazine Archive series and has also written extensively about other television series for magazines, books and DVD inserts. Yet despite his considerable authority in his field, he remains one of the most humble and self-effacing people I've ever met.

I first got to know the man behind the Archives when, completely out of the blue, Andrew phoned me at home one day. He'd borrowed around thirty issues of TSV from long-time subscriber David J. Howe and, having worked his way through this back catalogue, felt compelled to phone me up from the UK to rave about just how impressed he was with what he'd just read. Coming from an exacting researcher like Andrew, this was praise of the very highest order.

Andrew was keen to show his appreciation for TSV by getting involved in writing something, and wanted to know if I had any ideas about what he might contribute. My initial suggestion was that I interview him - but Andrew graciously declined this offer, protesting that talking about researching and writing the Archives would be very dull indeed. I disagreed but he was insistent.

I instead proposed a compromise; still an interview of sorts, but one in which Andrew would attempt to answer the most tricky and challenging questions about Doctor Who trivia. This idea met with Andrew's immediate approval. I provided a set of questions I'd devised which Andrew supplemented with many of his own. The resulting feature was entitled A Question of Answers.

The article touches on the thorny issue of the correct Hartnell story titles, but Andrew pointed out that there was a lot more that could be written on this subject - which rapidly gave rise to his second, even longer, article which appeared in TSV 54. These two pieces between them accounted for 37 pages - or 21% of the total 176 page count of the double issue.

Andrew and I went back and forth a couple of time about his choice of using Peter Cook's character of E.L. Wisty for the framing sequence of A Question of Answers. The first several hundred words went on about this character before Doctor Who even got a mention. I proposed cutting the Wisty stuff, but Andrew was adamant about keeping it, explaining that he wanted to be more creative and just a little irreverent in writing for TSV, as a deliberate contrast to his strictly fact-based DWM Archives. Once he'd explained this to me I was happy to run with the version Andrew wanted.

A Question of Answers was one of the longest pieces in TSV 53, but there was still room for a fair amount of other material in there as well. The Leisure Hive was new out on VHS, and Alistair Hughes provided both a review and a rather evocatively moody cover illustration based on this story.

Sydney Newman, one of the key people involved in the creation of Doctor Who, died in October 1997 shortly before the publication of TSV 52. This gave me several months in which to research and write a lengthy obituary. After my long Terry Nation piece, which appeared in TSV 51, I was beginning to get rather adept at these! I also wrote a shorter piece about Adrienne Hill who had died the same month as Newman. TSV 54 had a third obituary, for writer Ian Stuart Black - it really did seem at the time as if the people from the sixties era were dropping like flies!

Dominion was a much-anticipated comic strip, created by Alden Bates and Peter Adamson. Readers had seen teasers in each of the three 1997 issues for this strip: Mel dressed as a Dominator in TSV 50, the Doctor brandishing a smoking gun in TSV 51 and Anzor looking threatening in TSV 52. These teasers give some indication of just how long the strip took to develop. I think it's a great strip, neatly balancing graphic violence and torture with a broad streak of black humour. Alden offers a fascinating insight into the writing process in his blog.

Tune in next month for TSV 54!

Read TSV 53 here.

Fellow TSV 53 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

TSV 52

2007-11-12T15:58:00.002+13:00

My previous TSV commentary ended on a cliffhanger of sorts, so to recap: TSV had passed its fiftieth issue hurdle, pulled off a coup with some exciting exclusive local Tom Baker coverage, and had gained a new influx of mostly overseas readers into the bargain. But my creative partnership with co-editor Nick Withers had come to an end.

The importance of Nick's two-year contribution to TSV should not be overlooked. Nick had firmly led me away from the messy horrors of using an electric typewriter, Pritt stick and light box, and transformed TSV into a clean and tidy, wondrously good-looking desktop publishing creation. Our editorial pairing worked very well while it lasted; I would edit the text and Nick would composite all the pages in Microsoft Publisher, and print them out.

Nick had indicated to me in early 1997, after we worked on issue 50, that he didn't have the time to keep writing for TSV but that he was still agreeable to doing the layout. The last issue we worked on together was issue 51, published in June 1997.

In the following months that followed, I worked at assembling material for issue 52, ready to take it all around to Nick's place for a day or two of layout work. Only each time I asked Nick about this he'd reply that he wasn't sure when he'd have spare time to get together to do the issue. Eventually it got to the point where I had just about all of the content lined up for the issue, but still no time agreed with Nick to put it all together.

What to do? I had MS Publisher on my PC, and I'd spent the last six issues peering over Nick's shoulder as he used this to lay out each page. I bought myself a copy of the book Publisher for Dummies and began teaching myself to use the application. I worked from a template copy of TSV 51 so some of the trickier details like margin settings, column widths, gutters and page numbering was already in place. I started out doing this with the full intention of taking my work to Nick and getting him to check and polish this and then print out the master copy.

One day I found myself sitting at my desk and staring at the HP inkjet printer my partner Rochelle had recently bought me as a surprise gift for my 29th birthday. Then it dawned on me that I could finish the issue and print it all out myself. This epiphany remains to this day one of my strongest memories of this issue. I completed the layout, printed the master copy myself, and TSV 52 became the first of many desktop-published TSV issues that I designed and completed as a solo effort.

The issue's lead feature was an interview Gary Gillatt. Although I was delighted to interview the then-current Doctor Who Magazine editor, Gary actually approached me with a request to do the interview, saying in an email that he wanted to set the record straight about some of the comments his predecessor Gary Russell had made in his interview with Jon Preddle for TSV 51. So with the condition that Gillatt would have his right-of-reply, I fired off some questions and Gary provided some detailed and thoughtful answers, all via email as it wasn't until the following year that I met him for the first time. Gary ended the interview by dropping some hints about "the downfall of the Ninth Doctor and Izzy at the hands of the Threshold..." At a time when the Eighth Doctor was still reasonably new to the DWM comic strip, this was bewildering news indeed and, as you'll see from my response, I was definitely intrigued. As it transpired, Gary wasn't telling porkies - the events he referred to played out several months later in a breathtaking comic strip story called Wormwood.

Bob Beechey's Patrick Troughton article came about as a result of an email conversation I had with Bob about how he was probably TSV's eldest reader, and it would be wonderful if he felt like sharing his memories of watching the early years of the series with readers like myself not old enough to have seen the sixties episodes on their initial broadcast. Bob agreed to write something, but preferred to write more specifically about his appreciation of the Second Doctor.

The five-month gap between issues meant that we'd accumulated a number of new video releases to review, and these reviews were shared out among several writers. Alistair Hughes drew the front cover art to accompany the review of The Hand of Fear, but Peter Adamson reviewed that particular story and it fell to Alistair to review The Monster of Peladon, delivering (what was for Al) a rare negative reappraisal of a Third Doctor story.

To accompany Graham Howard's comprehensive review of The Five Doctors special edition, Jon Preddle and I decided to compile a guide to the changes between the broadcast version and the special edition. We set up two televisions and VCRs side-by-side in my living room, and cued up the two versions of the story. With some nimble remote control operation we were able to keep the two playing pretty much in synch - so that anything chopped out, added in or changed around would be immediately detectable. The result was a lengthy list of notes that took an entire day to complete, and Jon had to depart before we'd finished, leaving me to cover the last five or so minutes of the story.

Jamas Enright delivered a rather good short story, Castle Attraction, which has ties to all four of the TV stories reviewed this issue. See if you can spot them all. Jamas is also the eagle-eyed proof-reader for the online TSV re-issues, and he spotted when he was proofing material for the online issue that I had an earlier version of this story that featured several segments that were changed or trimmed for the published version. The online version is the one that appeared in the issue, but Jamas has put a 'deleted scenes' section on his own blog.

The comic strip action for this issue saw Richard Scholes illustrating a story called Inheritance by Patrick O’Seanessay. The story idea germinated from a conversation Patrick and I had about the origins of the Seventh Doctor’s apparent personality change between Dragonfire and Remembrance of the Daleks; in one story he's a happy adventurer, in the next he's a darkly brooding manipulator of events. The story took a good few years to come to fruition. As with Castle Attraction, it has a strong tie-in to one of the video releases reviewed this issue.

TSV 52 was the last of the 1997 issues, in a year that had seen just three TSVs published, and three issues per annum would become the norm for several years.. Lastly, it’s worth pointing out that the online version of TSV 52 has been published almost ten years to the day that readers would have received the printed copies of this very issue!

Read TSV 52 here.

Fellow TSV 52 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

The Unquiet Dictionary

2007-10-15T18:01:00.000+13:00

I love well-researched reference books about television series. My shelves are full of them. The latest and perhaps best book about New Doctor Who is The Encyclopedia by Gary Russell. It is as the title indicates, a lexicon of every person, alien race, location, device and more featured or mentioned in the new series. Some of the entries are a little questionable (I'm not sure, for example that Kylie Minogue deserves an entry of her own simply on the merit that the Doctor quoted a line from one of her songs; or why it is that the Master's alter egois always referred to as "Harry Saxon" and not "Harold Saxon").

The book does however render entirely redundant a project that was once in development for TSV. The plan was to publish a Ninth Doctor Dictionary encyclopedia covering the 2005 series as part of an issue or possibly as a special supplement. TSV editor Adam McGechan masterminded the project and assigned each of the ten stories to a different writer. I selected The Unquiet Dead, which remains one of my favourite episodes from the first series. I worked on this in October 2005, and the Dictionary was planned to appear in TSV 72, then in issue 73, and thereafter it was shelved indefinitely. I'm not sure why, but perhaps it was to do with the difficulties inherent in coordinating and consolidating the work of ten writers, each with their own style and views about what should and should not be included.

After receiving my copy of Gary Russell's Encyclopedia, I unearthed my old notes for The Unquiet Dead entries and compared them to Gary's book. Interestingly there were a number of items I had entries for that do not appear in the book, including: Bleak House; Cardiff and Methyr Guardian, The; Cardiff Children’s Hospital; Christmas; Gloucester Chambers; Hillman, J, Milliners; Llandaff; Llwyd, Mr Fred & Mrs Frederick; Martin Chuzzlewit; Shakespeare; Snow Storm; Temperance Court and Tilly of St Leonards.

Here, published anywhere for the first time, are my notes (with thanks to David Ronayne, who provided some detailed and very useful notes that informed this revised draft).

The Unquiet Dead

1860: The Doctor picked this year for Rose's first visit to the past and claimed to not to know what happened in 1860. The TARDIS however arrived in 1869.

1869: The Doctor and Rose visited Cardiff on 24 December of this year.

Bad Wolf: When Gwyneth looked into Rose's mind she saw ‘the big bad wolf’. This was the earliest reference to Bad Wolf that Rose was aware of.

Barbarella: The Doctor likened Rose to Barbarella, meaning that her modern day clothes were inappropriate for the 1860s. [Barbarella was a sometimes scantily clad science fiction heroine who appeared in 1960s comics and a movie of the same name].

Bishop: Sneed did the Bishop a favour once, making his nephew look like a cherub even though he'd been dead in the weir for a fortnight. Sneed considered getting the bishop to do an exorcism.

Bleak House: [1852-1853] A novel by Charles Dickens, mentioned by the Doctor.

Boston Tea Party: The Doctor was present at the Boston Tea Party [16 December 1773], where he ‘pushed boxes’.

Brecon: A town north of Cardiff. The Doctor likened the rift to a blocked road between Brecon and Cardiff.

Butetown: An area of Cardiff where Madame Mortlock held her séances.

Cardiff: The Doctor and Rose visited this Welsh city on 24 December 1869.

Cardiff and Methyr Guardian, The: [Incorporating Glamorgan, Monmouth and Brecon Gazette] A Cardiff newspaper. The Doctor purchased a copy of the 24 December 1869 edition.

Cardiff Children’s Hospital: Charles Dickens’ performance at the Taliesin Lodge was to honour this hospital.

Christmas: The Doctor and Rose spent Christmas Eve in Cardiff, 1869. Charles Dickens’s novel A Christmas Carol was set at Christmas. Dickens considered Christmas not the best time to be alone, and planned to make amends with his family on Christmas Day.

Christmas Carol, A: [1843] A ghost story written by Charles Dickens, featuring the characters of Marley and Scrooge. Dickens performed a reading from this story at the Taliesin Lodge.

Dickens, Charles: [1812-1870] The famous author of works including A Christmas Carol, Bleak House, Martin Chuzzlewit, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, The Signalman and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He travelled alone from London to perform readings from his works, including A Christmas Carol, for free at the Taliesin Lodge in Cardiff on 24 December 1869. Dickens claimed to be weary of life and missed his family, from whom he was estranged, having been ‘clumsy with family matters’. He considered himself too old to cause any more trouble, thought his imagination had grown stale, and wondered if he had thought everything he'd ever think. He refused to believe in supernatural events and fantastical illusions, striving to unmask them as tricks. He dedicated his life’s work to fighting injustices and social causes, and hoped that he was a force for good. He was flattered by the Doctor’s appreciation of his work. His experiences in the Doctor's company showed him that instead of thinking he knew everything had barely started, and this reinvigorated him. He was inspired to write about his experiences. Dickens learned from the Doctor that his books last forever. He planned to take the mail-coach back to London to spend Christmas with his family and to try to make amends to them. Dickens died in 1870 and never got to tell his story about blue ghosts.

Doctor, The: He claims not to know what happened in 1860. He witnessed the fall of Troy, World War Five and the Boston Tea Party. He was a big fan of Charles Dickens, having read all of his works, regarding him as a brilliant genius. He considered himself responsible for Rose, blamed himself for getting her into dangerous situations and was very glad to have met her. He liked two sugars in his tea. He considered his clothes suitable for the time period though he changed his jumper. He had different moral views to Rose and had no problem with alien beings reusing the bodies of the dead, likening it to recycling or organ donation. He carried enough local money to purchase a newspaper in 1869 Cardiff.

Gelth: Ghostly alien creatures that lived in gas and attained physical form by inhabiting recently deceased human bodies. The Gelth apparently once had physical bodies but these wasted away as a result of the Time War and they were trapped in a gaseous state. Because they were weak they only inhabited bodies for a short time and then returned to living in gas pipes. When human bodies decomposed they produced gas, providing perfect vehicles for the Gelth. The dead when possessed by the Gelth retained some of the motivations of their former selves. The Gelth used the rift in Cardiff to cross over from the other side of the universe. As the rift widened, the Gelth grow stronger, but only a few could pass through and they needed Gwyneth to form a bridge across the rift so that they could all cross over. The Doctor offered to help the Gelth inhabit human bodies temporarily until he could take them somewhere where they could build proper bodies. The Gelth claimed to be facing extinction as there was very few of them left, however this was a lie to gain the Doctor’s cooperation – there were actually a few billion Gelth and all in need of corpses. The Gelth intended to invade by killing the human race and making the bodies vessels for the Gelth. The Gelth were drawn out of their human hosts when the air around them was flooded with gas. They were destroyed when the gas exploded.

Gloucester Chambers: The name of a building across the square from the Taliesin Lodge in Cardiff.

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen: Traditional Christmas carol sung by carollers on Christmas Eve 1869 outside the Taliesin lodge in Cardiff.

Great Expectations: [1860-1861] A novel written by Charles Dickens that the Doctor admired.

Gwyneth: A young servant girl, orphaned at the age of twelve when both her parents died from the flu. She was taken in by Sneed who pays her eight pounds a year, which she considered very generous. She went to school once a week, every Sunday but hated it. One week she didn't go and instead ran down the Heath on her own. She admitted to liking the butcher's boy, who came by every Tuesday. She quickly befriended Rose. Gwyneth had the ability to read minds since she was a little girl, but she didn’t like to use it as her mother told her to hide it. Every night she heard voices in her head. She believed she would be with her parents again one day in heaven. Her powers had developed because she grew up on top of the rift and they were getting stronger all the time. She consulted with spiritualists and mediums to try to understand her ability. She attended séances held by Madame Mortlock. Gwyneth’s powers were a key to the rift, enabling her to form a psychic bridge between dimensions. She believed that the alien Gelth were actually angels sent by her mother on a holy mission. She was killed when she formed the bridge that enables the Gelth to cross over, but in death - and possessed by the Gelth - she still retained enough of her own will for at least five minutes to realise that she had been deceived and destroyed the Gelth by striking a match that ignited the gas and in doing so saved the world.

J. Hillman, Milliners: A Cardiff company that sold locally-produced hard-wearing extra quality silk hats, advertised in 1869.

Little Nell: A Charles Dickens character [from The Old Curiosity Shop, 1840-1841] whose death scene the Doctor found amusing.

Llandaff: Sneed and Company Undertakers were located in this area of Cardiff.

Llwyd, Mr Fred & Mrs Frederick: Names that were listed on a poster advertising events in the Taliesin Lodge.

London: Rose and Charles Dickens were both from London. Gwyneth had never been to London but had seen it in drawings. Gwyneth saw visions of Rose’s modern day London. Dickens planned to return to London by mail coach.

Marley: A ghost in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, mentioned in his reading at the Taliesin Lodge

Martin Chuzzlewit: [1843-1844] A novel written by Charles Dickens. The Doctor disliked the section of the novel set in America.

Mortlock, Madame: A spiritual medium in Butetown, Cardiff, from whom Gwyneth learned how to hold a séance.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood: [1870] An unfinished novel by Charles Dickens in which, lacking an ending, the mystery of Edwin Drood’s disappearance remained unresolved.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood and the Blue Elementals: Charles Dickens' proposed revised title for his unfinished novel. He had planned to make Edwin Drood's uncle the boy’s killer, but after his experiences with the Gelth, he intended changing the book to feature supernatural events. Dickens never got to write this version, as he died in 1870.

Naples: The Doctor attempted to land the TARDIS in this city, but instead arrived in Cardiff.

Oliver Twist: [1837-1839] A novel written by Charles Dickens that the Doctor admired.

Mrs Peace: Redpath's grandmother, who died aged 86 shortly before Christmas 1869. Before she died she planned to see Charles Dickens at the Taliesin Lodge. Her body was interred at Sneed and Company undertakers where it was inhabited by the Gelth. She then killed her grandson Redpath and attended Dickens’ performance.

Redpath: The grandson of Mrs Peace, he was killed by her reanimated corpse and was interred at Sneed and Company undertakers. His body was then inhabited by the Gelth.

Rift: A weak point in time and space, a connection between dimensions. Rifts were the cause of ghost stories most of the time. A rift was located in Cardiff and Sneed’s house in Temperance Court, Llandaff, centred right over the rift, causing supernatural events going back generations. The rift gave Gwyneth her psychic powers, and she was the key to opening the rift. The Gelth used the rift to pass between dimensions. The rift was closed when Gwyneth destroyed the Gelth.

Samson: Sneed and Company’s horse, used to pull the hearse.

Scrooge: A character in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, mentioned in his reading at the Taliesin Lodge.

Shakespeare: Famous playwright mentioned by Charles Dickens, who also quoted from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

Shareen: Rose’s friend from school. They used to play truant together to go to the shops and look at boys.

Signalman, The: [1866] A short story written by Charles Dickens, featuring trains and a ghost. The Doctor thought it as terrifying and one of the best short stories ever written.

Sneed and Company: A nineteenth century firm of undertakers based in Temperance Court, Llandaff, and run by Gabriel Sneed. The company has been troubled by the dead coming back to life. This has been going on for about three months and these incidents include a sexton who almost walked into his own memorial service, and Mrs Peace, who killed her grandson and then attended to a performance by Charles Dickens.

Sneed, Gabriel: An elderly man who ran a undertakers called Sneed and Company, based at his house at 7 Temperance Court, Llandaff, Cardiff in 1869. He had to deal with many incidents with the dead coming back to life over the three months prior to meeting the Doctor, but was more concerned about what damage this might do to his reputation and his business than he was to learn why this might be happening. He was not above abducting strangers to keep these incidents hushed up, and appears to keep chloroform handy for this purpose. His only servant was Gwyneth, whom he took in when her parents died. He was aware of Gwyneth’s psychic ability and generally took supernatural events in his stride. He was killed by the Gelth and his body was then inhabited by them. [Note: Sneed's first name Gabriel was only revealed in the closing credits]

Snow Storm: Listed on a poster advertising events in the Taliesin Lodge.

Sonic Screwdriver: The Doctor used his sonic screwdriver when working under the TARDIS console.

Taliesin Lodge: A theatre in Cardiff where Charles Dickens gave a free performance to honour the Childrens Hospital, on Friday 24 December 1869, starting at 7.30pm.

TARDIS: The Doctor’s ship was unsteady when in flight, and somewhat unreliable, missing Naples 1860 and instead landing in Cardiff 1869. The TARDIS had many passages and rooms accessed via the control room. The TARDIS had a wardrobe, and from the control room it was first left, second right, third on the left, straight ahead, under the stairs, past the bins, fifth door on the left.

Temperance Court: Sneed and Company Undertakers were located at 7 Temperance Court, Llandaff, Cardiff. Sneed got the house cheap because it was said to be haunted by ghosts, going back for generations. Sneed however considered the ghost stories to be appropriate for his business as an undertaker. The house was located on a weak spot on the rift. The weakest part of the house, where the most ghosts were seen was the morgue. The house was destroyed by a gas explosion that kills the Gelth.

Tilly of St Leonards: Listed on a poster advertising events in the Taliesin Lodge.

Time War: The Gelth claimed to have lost their physical form in the Time War. During the war, the whole universe convulsed. The war was invisible to smaller species but devastating to higher forms such as the Gelth.

Troy: The Doctor was present at the fall of Troy.

Tyler, Rose: Rose was 19 years old. Her first journey into the past was to Cardiff in 1869. She dressed up in clothes from the TARDIS wardrobe. She hated her time at school, and would often play truant to go to the shops with her friend Shareen to look at boys. She liked boys to have ‘a good smile, nice bum’. Her father died years ago, but he was in her thoughts a lot lately. She had heard of the Time War. She didn't believe it was right to let aliens inhabit dead human bodies. She possibly carried a donor card. She initially believed that she couldn't die in the past, until the Doctor corrected her. She didn't blame the Doctor for exposing her to danger; she was glad to have met the Doctor, and was brave in the face of death.

World War Five: The Doctor witnessed World War Five taking place.

TSV 51

2007-10-12T12:12:00.000+13:00

As TSV entered its second half-century with the publication of issue 51 in June 1997, co-editor and desktop publishing whizz Nick Withers took his final bow. Neither of us realised at the time that this issue would be Nick's swansong, but the writing was on the wall; there are no reviews by Nick in this issue, and even though it was his turn in the cycle of alternating editorials, there's me burbling away instead. By the time the next issue came around, Nick was no longer around. There was no animosity, no falling out. Nick just decided he wanted to do other things. So for Nick's tenure as co-editor, TSV 51 was the end.

But as one door closed, another opened. This issue represents for me the point at which TSV lifted its game. Having strived for and conquered the milestone fiftieth issue with that exclusive Tom Baker material, I became concerned that maybe I couldn't possibly top that. In addition Doctor Who Magazine had given us the ultimate accolade, making TSV 50 'Fanzine of the Month'. The phrases "always essential" and "puts too many of its UK brethren to shame" from that DWM review haunted me. This was high praise indeed, and it felt a little like the small fanzine from down under had suddenly been handed a lofty reputation to live up to.

TSV faced an influx of eager new subscribers from foreign shores, lured perhaps by the Tom Baker coverage in TSV 50, but no doubt also attracted by that glowing DWM review. It wasn't enough anymore for TSV just to be a club fanzine with a random assortment of readers' contributions. We were out in the world, and attracting the attention of some high-profile fans. With this in mind I determined to make TSV’s content tighter and more focussed.

The Gary Russell interview by Jon Preddle was TSV 51’s lead item. Gary was a long-time supporter of TSV and Jon had previously interviewed him for issue 37 several years earlier. This new interview covered what had happened to Gary in the intervening period, including his controversial dismissal from Panini, his various novels for Virgin and the BBC, and the Radio Times comic strips. Gary refers to a few projects in the interview which later came to fruition - the CD-Rom he was writing for became the BBC computer game Destiny of the Doctor and the 'making of' book for the TV Movie was eventually published as Regenerations by HarperCollins. Within a year of this interview taking place Gary began working for Big Finish.

My biographical article about Terry Nation in this issue is one of the most meticulously researched things I've written for TSV. I spent a long time accumulating a stack of photocopied interviews and articles and then writing and rewriting the article. I think it still holds up quite well.

The issue had long been planned as a fiction special. Since the demise of Timestreams (TSV's fiction counterpart) in 1995, Nick and I had planned to devote one issue of TSV predominantly to a collection of short stories. We never accumulated nearly enough material to support an entire issue, but TSV 51 saw the best of what we had lined up, amounting to four text stories and a comic strip.

Keith Topping and Martin Day’s short story tie-in to The Devil Goblins from Neptune was intended to function like the Prelude stories that used to appear in DWM.

The New Adventures novels heavily influenced Morgan Davie’s dark and moody comic strip In Bloom which features features a character called the Judge that had appeared in Morgan's unpublished Sixth Doctor and Peri Dalek novel.

Sadly, this was the end for the New and Missing Adventures. The last titles in these two series (not counting the Bernice Summerfield New Adventures of course) had come out a couple of months before TSV 51, and the issue featured reviews of all but one of the last batch of books, as well as the first of BBC Books' output. For some reason the last of the Missing Adventures wasn't reviewed until TSV 52; I can't recall why, but I suspect that the book was delayed in the post.

The Green Death was new on video, and our resident Pertwee era fan, Alistair Hughes naturally wrote the review, as well as coming up with the stylish front cover artwork. Can you really image this printed on anything other than green…?

So TSV had survived beyond Tom Baker and the fiftieth issue, but Nick Withers departed. Just how I managed to keep TSV going on my own is a story for next time!

Read TSV 51 here.

Fellow TSV 51 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

TSV 50

2007-09-15T20:24:00.001+12:00

TSV 50 was a milestone issue marking both the fiftieth issue and TSV's impending tenth anniversary. The issue was originally published in February 1997 and appropriately enough has been reissued online in TSV's twentieth anniversary year.

Looking back over the history of TSV and the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club, Tom Baker’s visit to New Zealand in late January 1997 remains one of the outstanding highlights, a rare chance for local fans to get to meet a Doctor Who legend right on their doorstep. And in Nick Withers’ case it was quite literally on the doorstep since the 'An Afternoon with Tom Baker' event took place in the church hall right alongside his house!

The Doctor Who-themed superannuation television commercials and marketing campaign featuring Tom reprising the role that made him famous, put New Zealand (and more specifically Auckland) on the map for Doctor Who fans across the globe at a time when we were still coming to terms with the idea that in the aftermath of the McGann movie, there would be no new television episodes. So to see Tom back in costume at the controls of the TARDIS - even if he was hawking pension schemes - was the best we were going to get. It is indicative of the international interest in this at the time that the lead news item in Doctor Who Magazine 250 was a report about the making of the commercials.

Over a third of TSV 50’s eighty pages were given over to coverage of Tom Baker’s visit, coincidentally providing a special, unique theme befitting the tenth anniversary and fiftieth issue. The cover artwork by Alistair Hughes is a brilliant portrait of Tom’s Doctor created using a technique of scratching a black painted board, revealing the white beneath. I don't think the printed version did the piece full justice, but the online issue features a high quality scan of the bromide, showing off the art in all its glory. Tom Baker’s signature also appeared on the front cover - he didn’t actually sign the cover as it wasn’t ready until sometime after his visit, but I did get him to sign something else which enabled me to use his signature on the cover.

The Tom Baker interview, a transcript of his talk and Q&A session at the 'An Afternoon with Tom Baker' event, was the centerpiece of the issue. This interview has since been republished in Talkback Volume Two: The Seventies, edited by Stephen James Walker and published by Telos.

The Tom Baker interview was not the only material from this issue to be picked out for reprinting. Both my review of Paradise Towers (in which I rubbished Bonnie Langford’s performance but praised Richard Briers) and Nick’s review of Survival were extensively quoted in the Analysis sections for these stories in The Television Companion by David J Howe and Stephen James Walker, originally published in 1998 by the BBC and subsequently reissued in an expanded edition in 2003 by Telos. Most of the text of this book is also available online as part of the official BBC Doctor Who website classic series episode guide (see Paradise Towers and Survival).

TSV 50 saw the final outing for Graham Muir’s TARDIS Tales, a long-running satirical cartoon serial that had made something of a local fan celebrity out of its central character, Saucer the trigger-happy talking rooster. Ever since its debut in 1989 the cartoon strip had been a popular regular feature of TSV, as evidenced by complaints in the letters pages whenever Graham rested the strip for an issue. Evetually Graham decided that he’d had enough and elected to make TSV 50 the last appearance of the strip. The poignant final couple of frames saw Saucer unzip his rooster suit to reveal a bearded human inside (who bore a strong resemblance to Muir himself...) and head off to the pub. In a fitting farewell, the issue’s centrefold was a group shot of all the various characters that had cropped up in TARDIS Tales over its long history.

Although it was never planned as such, TARDIS Tales had a replacement in the form of Herr Karkus, who made his debut in this issue battling the Steel Octopus. From the outset The Karkus strip was every bit as funny as TARDIS Tales had been and was a worthy successor. In honour of the anniversary nature of the issue, I also persuaded Teri Ronayne to draw a one-off return appearance for Oswald, a cartoon about a hapless cat that had appeared in three earlier issues of TSV.

The issue saw the final instalment of the short-lived Not-So-New Adventures column, but its writer David Lawrence would return to the subject for TSV some years later with a lengthy critique of the entire range.

One of the benefits of the TSV online archive is the opportunity to put right various errors that cropped up in the original issues. TSV 50 contained a particularly regrettable mistake in that David Ronayne’s New Adventures-inspired short story, Half Human and More Than Just a Time Lord, was printed incomplete. The email in which this story was sent to me dropped some text in transit - text from six sentences was accidentally omitted and I didn’t become aware of this until after the issue had been posted. The story has now finally been published complete for the first time in the online issue.

The Wilderness Years, charting what we knew of the behind-the-scenes wranglings period from 1989 to 1995 when Doctor Who was not being produced for television, was something I’d written for TSV 48 as part of the coverage of the TV Movie for that issue. The article had to be dropped from the issue along with various other items to make way for tributes to Jon Pertwee. The article was again bumped from TSV 49 when that issue ran drastically overlength. By 1997 the article was losing its currency but I was reluctant to see it go to waste, so it finally saw print tucked away at the end of the issue.

Ever since beginning the TSV online archive project, issue 50 has represented a personal target. When I started out I took stock of the files stored on my computer’s hard-drive and realised that with a few small omissions, just about every bit of text from TSV 51 onwards survived intact, but that most of the first fifty issues were missing most if not all of their content - which necessitated the reconstruction of electronic files from scratch. So as I’ve gone about the time-consuming work of preparing each issue for online publication, I’ve always had TSV 50 focused in my sights. Now this issue is done and dusted, the restoration work should get a lot easier. As my fellow TSV archivist Alden Bates reminded me just the other day, it is five years to the month since we started the online archive project with issue 1. Which means of course that we’re averaging ten issues a year - which is not bad going at all.

Doctor Who Magazine awards TSV 50 the accolade of 'Fanzine of the Month' in its Fanzine Trap column from issue 254.

Read TSV 50 here.

Fellow TSV 50 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

The Real McCoy

2007-08-20T12:08:00.000+12:00

I was a little apprehensive in the lead-up to A Day with the Doctor, the one-day Doctor Who convention on Sunday 19 August at the Aotea Centre.

To this day I still have eye-twitch inducing memories of DoctorCon 2003, the last convention I helped organise. That event was marred by shockingly low attendance numbers and an intemperate guest actor. Fortunately this time around everything went without a hitch and it was a pleasure to help out the experienced and very capable husband and wife team of Bill and Adele Geradts, who are the team behind the hugely successful Armageddon conventions.

The convention was made possible by the fact that the Royal Shakespeare Company were on the New Zealand leg of their tour of King Lear and The Seagull, with a few Doctor Who actors in the cast.

Before the celebrity guests arrived, I was the first speaker of the day. I gave a half-hour talk about Doctor Who, the club and TSV. I'd spent the previous week thinking about the talk and put together a powerpoint presentation that worked very well as a visual aid, with the audience impressed by the colourful club logo (which I'd colourised in Photoshop especially for the presentation), and a first glimpse at Alistair Hughes' stunning new colour cover art for the forthcoming TSV 75.

I was delighted to see some old familiar faces in the audience, like former editor Nick Withers whom I hadn't seen in years. There were also many new, young fans of the series in evidence. When I explained that TSv was celebrating its 20th birthday this year and asked how many of those present were not yet born in 1987 quite a few hands went up (I feel very old...) My two nephews - both of whom love Doctor Who (not entirely my doing!) were in the audience, seeing Uncle Paul in a different light. It was especially gratifying to have a number of people - young and old - come up to me afterwards and said how much they'd enjoyed my presentation.

Although Sylvester McCoy was the star attraction, the other two actors, William 'call me Bill' Gaunt and David Weston, also proved popular. A couple of Doctor Who episodes were played before their talk to remind the audience of these actors' appearances in the series. David Weston was hampered a little by the fact that his first role, as Nicholas Muss in the 1966 story The Massacre, no longer exists, and his second as Tharil Biroc in Warriors' Gate sees him heavily made-up so that he's not very recognisable in person. William Gaunt on the otherhand looks exactly, as you might expect, like an older and more distinguished version of the assassin Orcini from Revelation of the Daleks.

Of the two thespians, Gaunt seemed to have a better recollection of his time on the show and delivered some amusing ancedotes, with his exploding bionic leg being a particular highlight. I wanted to ask a question that both men could answer equally, so I prompted them for their memories of working with Graeme Harper, who had served as a production assistant on Warriors' Gate and then as director on Revelation. Gaunt spoke well of Harper, singling him out as a very good television director who kept the cast energised and had a can-do attitude. Weston then responded that he had no recollection at all of Harper - though he did mention that the director - Paul Joyce - was removed from the production (some accounts suggest that Harper filled in for Joyce).

Sylvester McCoy's own talk was later in the day and in contrast to Gaunt and Weston who remained seated, Sylvester moved about the room, clambering past people so that he was holding the microphone for each person as they asked their question. His usual response was a short answer followed by a longer one that sequed into a sometimes familiar well-rehearsed anecdote. Which is to be expected given the huge number of similar events McCoy must have spoken at in the past. For many of those present though this was entirely fresh material and Sylvester's infectious wit and wicked one-liners made it hugely enjoyable.

I asked Sylvester about the rumours that he'd been up for the role of Bilbo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. He revealed that it came down to the last two, between himself and Ian Holm, and even though he was very disappointed not to get the part, he has kept in contact with Peter Jackson, and had visited the director at his home with Sir Ian McKellen (Gandalf) when they arrived in Wellington for King Lear. Jackson, revealed McCoy, is a big fan of Doctor Who, and owns a complete Seventh Doctor costume (that Jackson's kids pester him to dress up in!), including one of the only three surviving original question mark umbrellas made for use in the series. Intriguingly, Sylvester also said that Peter Jackson told him that there is a 'two Doctors' story being made for Series 4, which apparently will feature the Tenth and Fifth Doctors, with Peter Davison reprising his role. Hmm, we'll have to wait and see if that comes to pass...

Chatting to McCoy one-on-one later in the day I learned that in recent years he'd had to start changing his routine to remove language and stories not suitable for younger listeners. Until the new series came back in 2005, McCoy explained, he'd been playing to rooms entirely made up of adult fans. We agreed that it was great to see a new generation coming into fandom and that they were evidently enjoying the stories made long before they were born. I also got to chat to McCoy about the play and his part as the Fool.

The last event of the day was a screening of Battlefield with Sylvester delivering alive commentary, but it was apparent by this time that his energy levels were flagging, despite the organisers plying him with strong coffee. For most of the story he seemed content to just sit and watch along with the audience. No one seemed to mind; the surreal experience of watching a Seventh Doctor story alongside the man himself was a thrill in itself.

All in all, a great day.

TSV 49

2007-08-14T10:36:00.000+12:00

Thanks in part to the delayed New Zealand screening at the end of October 1996, the TV Movie was still very topical when TSV 49 was published the following month.

The purging of some of the planned content for TSV 48 to make way for the Jon Pertwee tribute meant that we had a head start on the following issue with an assortment of TV Movie and New Adventures themed items that might otherwise would have gone into TSV 48.

This combined with the new material created specifically for TSV 49 resulted in a monster of an issue running to 108 pages. This is still the single longest issue TSV has ever produced. Although 100 page issues are the norm these days - and TSV 74 came close to matching the record with 104 pages - other issues published in the mid-1990s were at most 96 pages.

The following issue, TSV 50 had to come in at a slim 80 pages to rebalance the finances. In retrospect it might have been more sensible to spread the material more evenly across the two issues but a lot of what appeared in TSV 49 was either topical or had been bumped one issue already.

It was my co-editor Nick Withers' turn to write the editorial for this issue, and he caused a minor controversy with this comment: "contrary to the rumours, TSV is continuing". The background to this remark was that there were some New Zealand fans who, for reasons best known to themselves, made a habit of creating rumours about TSV and the club. We'd heard - or perhaps read in another fanzine - the ridiculous claim that we were planning to end TSV with issue 50, so naturally Nick wanted to set the record straight. It rather back-fired on us though as it seems very few of our readers had heard this rumour, but as a result of Nick's comment now had cause to wonder about TSV's life expectancy!

Roadshow had recently taken over BBC Video distribution from Polygram (Roadshow still distribute for the BBC today). When Polygram lost the rights, they disposed of their back stock of Doctor Who titles through the Warehouse chain. Roadshow had to build up their Doctor Who range from scratch, and re-released 15 older titles in one burst. Roadshow kindly provided us with review copies and we decided to present short capsule reviews of each of these re-released videos, as many of them had not been reviewed in TSV the first time around. The reviews were divided up among a group of writers I knew I could rely on to deliver on time, and future TSV editor Adam McGechan was one of the reviewers, offering his critique of Inferno.

The back cover Warriors of the Deep artwork by the ever-wonderful Alistair Hughes is particularly good. I like the 'shared eye' effect. This was to have been the front cover, but Alistair's TV Movie illustration featuring the Eighth Doctor and Grace dwarfed by the massive console room, just seemed too good not to occupy pride of place on the front of the issue, so the Warriors of the Deep picture, which had been commissioned to support Robert Boswell's featured video review, was relegated to the back cover. Here's how the cover would have looked as originally intended:

The Discontinuity Guide addition for the TV Movie was Jon Preddle's idea. Jon had been a fact-checker on an early draft of the Discontinuity Guide and understood the book's format very well, so he was best placed to cover the TV Movie in the same style. I even went to the effort of matching the font and size to match the Virgin book when this item appeared in the print issue, so that if readers so desired they could copy the pages and stuck them into the back of the book. The feature gave rise to an ongoing series of Discontinuity Guide additions and eventually outgrew TSV altogether, finding a new existence in a web version that covered the Big Finish audios. Alas, the online guide hasn't been updated since the beginning of 2005 and is really crying out for someone to take this on and bring it back up to date.

Nigel Windsor interviewed Chris Loates, a colleague of his at Television New Zealand. Loates worked on a number of Doctor Who stories but this must have been in a junior and/or peripheral role as his name has never appeared on any of the production crew documentation for Doctor Who. He's therefore perhaps the most obscurely connected individual ever interviewed by TSV. The interview submitted by Nigel ran longer but I cut it down to remove some of the tangental stuff where Loates talked about camera lenses and focal lengths, which I felt was getting too far away from the point.

Time's Chump, by Peter Adamson, is a fascinating and indepth examination of the way the Sixth Doctor gets a raw deal in some of the New and Missing Adventures. Peter has made a point of sticking up for the often-unloved Sixth Doctor. Quite right too. This article would have fitted in nicely with the New Adventures theme of the previous issue.

Likewise with my own Wedding Notes article, which is an annotated guide to Happy Endings, pointing out many of the continuity references and obscure bits of detail littered throughout Paul Cornell's book. Paul offered to look over a draft version of the article and offered all sorts of additional bits that immeasurably enhanced the end result. I'd never realised Muldwych's real identity, for example. Peter Adamson also helped out with this one, enlightening me to some of the BritPop references I'd missed or misunderstood. I'm quite proud of this article and I selected it as one of the earliest things to get published online before the TSV online archive project began. The article is linked to from various other internet sites about the New Adventures.

The online version of this issue features a couple of 'bonus items' in the form of alternate covers, for Christmas on a Rational Planet and The Completely Useless Encyclopedia, linked within their respective reviews. Virgin Publishing originally intended these covers as the final versions and they were changed very close to publication. But was the replacement an improvement in either case...?

TSV 49 was the last issue of 1996. TSV's ten-year anniversary and our fiftieth issue were both just around the corner.

Read TSV 49 here.

Fellow TSV 49 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

Reversed Polarities

2007-07-17T10:04:00.001+12:00

While can TSV justifiably claim to be New Zealand's most successful Doctor Who fanzine, its 'South Island cousin' Reverse the Polarity (RTP) could be the next best thing. Produced in Christchurch by the affable Alex Ballingall (himself a longtime TSV reader), RTP has a small but very loyal readership who are the lifeblood of the zine. RTP celebrates its tenth birthday this year. Alex has a blog about RTP here.

I was doing a tidy up of my files yesterday and came across the following article I wrote a year ago for RTP. It appeared in issue 22, dated June 2006, as part of a much longer piece, entitled 'Polarities Reversed!', a 21 issue retrospective featuring contributions from RTP readers.

RTP Comes of Age

Some might say that I’m not the best person to be writing this article. But Alex asked nicely, and he’s up against a very tight deadline. He wants me to write about RTP, looking back at the last 21 issues from the perspective of both a reader and a fellow fanzine editor. I’ve had some fanzine editing experience and I’ve also been reading RTP since the very first issue, so I guess I fit the bill.

I responded to Alex’s eleventh-hour request because I know all too well what it’s like when you’re about to go to print and there’s still pages that remain resolutely blank. There’s only so much you can cajole, wheedle and coax your contributors when they’re only doing it for the fun. If you push them too hard then as a certain brash Aussie once pointed out, once it stops being fun it’s time to give it up. The editor then wakes up one day to find those contributors have gone somewhere else to reclaim that sense of fun. And in TSV’s case, I rather suspect that it’s RTP where some of these fun-seeking contributors ended up.

I fetched the complete run of RTP issues (1997-2006) from my bookshelves tonight and thumbed through them to jog the memory. You know a fanzine has a substantial back catalogue when it’s difficult to hold the set in one hand. RTP’s either reached that point or I need to work on my grip.

Having clocked up 21 issues, RTP can be said to have come of age, and it’s a figure that I believe makes it officially the third longest New Zealand Doctor Who fanzine in terms of issue count; and even though Gallifrey takes second place, its issues were rather slim, it regurgitated content from DWM and it ended a long time ago. RTP can certainly claim the highest issue count of any post-TSV New Zealand Who fanzine.

RTP was the brainchild of Matt Kamstra and Wade Campbell, (though it wasn’t very long before Alex started taking over – in fact there he is writing in the very first issue!). It was seemingly born out of the collective enthusiasm generated by the rebirth of the local fan community, and indeed for many issues RTP was subtitled “The Fanzine of the Christchurch Chapter of the NZDWFC”.

The inaugural RTP reviewed the 50th issue of TSV, and the reviewer described it as ‘dull’ and lacking in variety. Ouch. Fortunately this did not set the tone for the ongoing relationship between the two zines and although from time to time, particularly in the early issues, RTP would take shots at TSV things have remained perfectly amicable, with the occasional bit of fun being poked by RTP at its bigger and older cousin. I can never forget that astonishing cartoon likeness of me (that jaw line!!) from issue 11.

TSV 50 coincidentally saw the conclusion of TARDIS Tales, but Saucer Smith found a new home in the pages of RTP, ending up on the front cover of the first issue. Graham Muir was just the first of several TSV notable TSV contributors to either ‘defect’ to RTP or to divide their writings and drawings between the two publications.

There were a number of items printed in early issues of RTP that had previously passed across the TSV editor’s desk. RTP in its early days sometimes seemed a little like a safe haven for TSV cast-offs. The zine thankfully soon began to find its own identity however with such gems as the epic Pulp Who comic strip originated by Alex, with a little help from Mr Tarantino. The interviews with local fan personalities began in issue 5; this is something I don’t think TSV could get away with doing, but it works perfectly for RTP’s smaller scale and local readership. I find these interviews fascinating as even though they’re mostly with people I feel I’ve known for years, I learn things from the interviews I never knew.

There have been a few times when I’ve gone the same colour as issue 20 with envy at something that’s appeared in RTP and not TSV. If I had to pick just one example it would be that interview with Warwick ‘Scott’ Gray in issues 7-8. Oh how I would have loved to publish that in TSV. Oddly enough a couple of years ago I was having a drink with Warwick in London and sounded him out over doing an interview for TSV. He replied that he’d already been interviewed in TSV. He didn’t realize until I told him that his interview had ended up in RTP!

Other highlights that have jumped out at me during my trawl back through the RTP catalogue include Alex’s quite remarkable Japanese comic in issue 16, David Ronayne’s simply delightful Tintin-inspired covers, and Peter Adamson’s extraordinarily emotive Cydonia strip.

Finally I’d just like to share with you the secret to long-term success for a New Zealand Doctor Who fanzine. It’s quite simple, really. Devise a name that only fans will understand and then reduce it to just three initials. So now you know what all those other fanzines that are no longer around today were doing wrong!

TSV 48

2007-07-09T15:52:00.000+12:00

Throughout that long dry spell when there was no new Doctor Who coming out of the BBC it was an ever-present challenge to find fresh and relevant material to fill TSV. So naturally when something significant happened it was seized on to form a focus for an issue. So it was with TSV 48. But, rather like buses, you wait for ages for one event to come along and then three turn up at once...

Nick Withers and I planned the 1996 issues well in advance. Noticing that the New Adventures would hit the 50th release around mid-year, we decided that issue 48 would be a themed special issue, looking back over the entire range. Nick and I were both New Adventures fans, and we also wanted to acknowledge this milestone out of respect to Virgin Publishing, who had been very supportive and helpful to TSV, supplying us with proof covers and review copies for several years by this point.

I'd been hooked up the Internet since the beginning of the year and was still cautiously exploring what this new medium had to offer. I saw the potential in interviewing Doctor Who people on the other side of the world via email, so I found addresses for a handful of New Adventures authors and sent off emails requesting interviews. Paul Cornell and Lance Parkin replied, so I interviewed both writers for the New Adventures special.

Although the original intention had to been to celebrate the past, present and future of the New Adventures, it soon became alarmingly apparent that the books didn't actually have too much life left in them. Virgin were losing the licence and while the range seemed to be still going strong in mid-1996, plans were already taking shape to wind things up. Lance talks in his interview about writing the very last Doctor Who New Adventure (The Dying Days), and Paul talks about how he's about to go to a crisis meeting at Virgin to discuss continuing the range without the Doctor. So as much as TSV 48 was celebrating the New Adventures, the issue would also be delivering potentially grim news for fans of these books.

Of course the catalyst for Virgin losing the Doctor Who book publishing licence was the arrival of the much-anticipated TV Movie starring Paul McGann. At the beginning of 1996 when Nick and I were planning out the issues for the year, the movie was just entering production. Initially we didn't know whereabouts in the year the movie would screen, so linking this event into a specific issue was largely a matter of guesswork. Once the screening date was known it was apparent that we would have reviews and associated coverage in time for TSV 48. So our New Adventures special now had to defer to what would the single most significant Doctor Who event of the 1990s.

The solution we came up with was to split this issue down the middle; one half would cover the TV Movie, and the other the New Adventures, with two front covers and the pages oriented so that the issue could be read from either end.

One day in late May, while all this issue was just starting to take shape, I arrived at work and met up with Rochelle in the staffroom (we were both working at the Queen Street Whitcoulls at this time). She said, "Did you hear the Doctor Who news?" "No," I replied, assuming at first that there had been some publicity about the TV Movie that was due to screen in the UK in just a few days time. Then Rochelle told me the news she'd heard on the radio that morning. "Jon Pertwee's dead."

I remember feeling quite numb for a while while the news sank in. Jon Pertwee had been a childhood hero of mine. He was my Doctor when I'd watched my first episodes of Doctor Who. I'd continued to enjoy him as Worzel Gummidge and I met him in person when he'd been the guest speaker at the WhoCon convention in 1990. The memory of receiving news of his death is intertwined in my memory with hearing about the passing of my grandmother, Pat Scoones, who died suddenly the very same month - and to whom TSV 48 was dedicated. In an odd sort of symmetry, my grandmother was fond of telling how she'd once bumped into "Mr Who" - as she referred to Jon Pertwee - in London many years earlier.

Once I got over the initial shock, I realised that there would need to be a change of plans for TSV. Some of the planned content for TSV 48 would need to go, to make way for a tribute to Jon Pertwee. The double-ended issue idea was abandoned now that we had three different themes - each of which could have occupied an issue in its own right – to cram into one single issue.

To ensure that Jon Pertwee got the TSV send-off he deserved, we delayed publication by a month and invited recollections about Pertwee from various TSV regulars. I took on the task of compiling a biographical profile of Pertwee's full and eventful life. Working at Whitcoulls I had easy access to all the local and international newspapers so when the papers with the Pertwee obituaries turned up, I photocopied all of the items I could find and these all ended up in the issue. In a stroke of good timing a classic Third Doctor story, The Sea Devils, was a new video release and so a review of this by our resident Third Doctor aficionado Alistair Hughes was ideal; Graham Howard delivered an item about Pertwee's unseen advertisements for Telecom filmed in New Zealand, and Peter Adamson drew an eye-catching full-page illustration of the Third Doctor for the back cover. The front cover was already earmarked for a TV Movie illustration (Alistair Hughes’ wonderful portrait of Paul McGann), and after much soul-searching I felt that we should still lead with the TV Movie coverage.

So the New Adventures theme, which as originally planned would have occupied the majority of TSV 48, was relegated to third position with much reduced coverage. So much for planning ahead!

Read TSV 48 here.

Fellow TSV 48 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

It was twenty years ago today...

2007-06-18T09:02:00.002+12:00

Sergeant Pepper didn't have anything to do with it, but today is a rather special anniversary.

On Thursday 18 June 1987 - exactly twenty years ago today - myself and a fellow student, Paul Sinkovich, visited Shadows, the University of Auckland campus bar. We had a couple of occasions to celebrate, and decided to do this with a few beers.

Earlier that same day we had produced the very first copies of our own Doctor Who fanzine. Paul and I had decided over lunch that New Zealand fandom needed a Doctor Who fanzine, so in a space of a few weeks we'd created the first issue.

We called the fanzine The Time/Space Visualiser. We didn't know if it would last more than a couple of issues, but here we are, twenty years later. That fanzine - now known as TSV - is still going strong after 74 issues.

The reason I can be so sure about the exact date is that our second cause for celebration was that 18 June 1987 was my nineteenth birthday.

TSV 47

2007-06-12T10:45:00.000+12:00

I've been asked how it is that I manage to remember so much for these blog articles about the behind-the-scenes details of these old issues of TSV. The answer is simply that re-reading an issue (and preparing it for online publication) usually works remarkably well as a mnenomic trigger. Not so much with this issue, though. I was going through a very uneven patch in my life when this issue was underway. So the memories that come to light when I flick through the pages of TSV 47 are not so much about the making of the issue as they are about other more important personal things that were going on in the first half of 1996. My co-editor Nick Withers probably didn't realise just how much I appreciated his support during those trying times, but if he's reading this blog hopefully he does now.

The issue features a rather eyecatching Frontier in Space wraparound cover artwork by the ever-reliable Alistair Hughes, to accompany Alistair's review of the video. For those who've only ever seen the cover image on the website, the new online issue is a first opportunity to see the other half of the cover artwork.

The Cornflakes Connection was an account of the making of a Doctor Who segment for a breakfast cereal TV commercial, made in Auckland but screened in the UK. Myself and Jon Preddle were invited along to watch the recording take place in a cold, cavernous warehouse somewhere in the rural back blocks of South Auckland. In my career I've witnessed first hand some of the utterly inane things that advertising people will do in the belief that they're being clever and effective, but this was an early exposure to the industry. Applying fake stubble to the face of one of the performers dressed up as the Fourth Doctor because a second Tom Baker look-alike in the same shot was unshaven was a particularly ridiculous move, as was removing the distinctive - and authentic - Fifth Doctor's coat from another performer due to the primadonna director taking a dislike to it.

The highlight of the whole experience was getting to meet UK fan Andrew Beech, whom Jon and I took on a sightseeing tour of Auckland, during which Andrew treated us to some quite unprintable anecdotes, including which Doctor Who actors had apparently been sleeping with each other. Andrew had also apparently read a version of Matthew Jacobs' script for the TV Movie (which at the time was in production), and cheerfully told me the plot whilst Jon stuck his fingers in his ears and went "la-la-la" to avoid spoilers. He needn't have bothered as very little of what Andrew told me about the story - which allegedly included a nude shower scene for the Doctor and/or companion, and the appearance of a 'Millennium Star' - bore any resemblance at all to the finished production!

Felicity interviewed David Bishop about his first Doctor Who novel, Who Killed Kennedy, which was published around the time that the issue came out. The interview is now also linked from the Who Killed Kennedy ebook.

David Ronayne and Peter Adamson's Hyperborea comic strip, set in the hypothetical realm of 'Season 6b' is a rather wonderful adventure with lots of running around and getting locked up in the grand tradition of the Patrick Troughton era. I can take credit - or perhaps that should be blame - for providing David with the "happy medium" pun that appears on page 8. The strip required a fair bit of restoration work for its online publication as the original pages were stuck into the issue's mastercopy and in the intervening years pigment from the ink used to black in areas of the strip had bled on to the facing pages, creating some disfiguring areas of yellow. Thank goodness for Photoshop! The online publication has enabled me to correct a minor spelling error in one of the speech balloons, which had been pointed out by David in the following issue's letters pages.

Also corrected for online publication was the short story by Nicholas Withers, which due to a printing error noticed shortly before publication but too late to correct it, was missing a line of text from the bottom of one of the pages. Needless to say, the online version is complete.

David Lawrence's short story, A Visit, was as I recall an excerpt from his unfinished New Adventures novel called The Blue Shift. For a while I was in discussions with David about getting him to finish the book so that it could be published in full as a TSV Books novelisation, but this never eventuated.

I was and indeed still am a big fan of the New Adventures novels. I had been re-reading some of the earlier books in the series and discovered that my opinion of some of them changed on a re-reading. I was particularly struck by how much I was impressed by Transit, a much-maligned book that I'd disliked the first time I read it. This experience inspired me to create the Not-So-New Adventures column, which was to be a re-evaluation of some of the older books. Thanks to the online archive it's possible to compare if you like my radically different views of Transit in TSV 47 and in TSV 32.

Two items from this issue - Lance Parkin's The Making of Just War and Keith Topping's And Cut it... Now! were reprints from other fanzines. It was unusual for TSV to borrow quite so liberally from other sources - albeit with full permission - and I cannot recall now exactly why we did it for this issue. Perhaps we were running short of material? I have a feeling that Keith might have offered his article to us himself, and I know I was in touch with Lance Parkin via email around this time (leading to the interview in the following issue), so perhaps the same was true of his item.

TSV 47 was of course the last issue published before the TV Movie aired. Nick and I were planning a double-themed TSV 48, half covering the McGann movie and the other half marking 50 New Adventures novels. We had to alter our plans after some very sad news, but that's a story for next issue...

Read TSV 47 here.

Fellow TSV 47 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

New New Adventure

2007-05-29T11:54:00.000+12:00

I adore the Doctor Who New Adventures novels, published by Virgin between 1991 and 1997. These books picked up where Survival left off, as Sylvester McCoy's Doctor wandered off screen arm-in-arm with Ace, and took off in new and interesting directions. Like the TV series itself the quality varied wildly from book to book, but at their best the New Adventures easily surpassed the TV series.

Paul Cornell was one of the leading lights of the New Adventures; the first of many fan writers to break into series with the ground-breaking Timewyrm: Revelation. Cornell's fourth New Adventure, Human Nature, is widely considered to be the absolute pinnacle of the New Adventures. The novel sees the Doctor transform himself into the human John Smith, who unaware of his Time Lord origins, become a teacher at a English boy's school just prior to the First World War and fall in love with Joan Redfern until a hostile family of aliens disrupts his peaceful existence. Such is the power of this book that when I first read it I was actually desperate for the Doctor to stay with Joan at the end even though I knew that this couldn't happen.

I regarded the news that Cornell was adapting his novel for television with some trepidation. I wasn't too bothered about the implications for the series continuity as I'd long regarded the New Adventures as a separate branch from the TV episodes, rather I was worried that the TV story wouldn't do the novel justice and that the changes required to make this fit the new Doctor and companion would be to its detriment.

Last night I saw the first episode of this two-part story, and I was astonished at just how amazingly good it was. I've been rather disappointed by a few of the episodes this year but Human Nature rises head and shoulders above the rest. I was concerned that the Tenth Doctor was already too light and accessible to convincingly make the transition to a truly human character (one of the strengths of the novel had been that the Seventh Doctor had become increasing dark, manipulative and alien in the New Adventures so his 'humanisation' was a stark and wholly effective contrast), but David Tennant pulls off a nuanced performance as John Smith with consumate ease. The TV version also looks exactly right - it is as if the story I'd imagined back in 1995 when I read the novel has been lifted from my mind and plonked on the TV screen. It's a very uncanny experience but hugely satisfying all the same!

If this is what the new series can do with a classic New Adventures novel as its source, then perhaps more of these books should be brought to screen? What could the new series do with an adaptation of The Also People, The Dying Days, or even Russell T Davies' own Damaged Goods...?

Meanwhile I am really, really looking forward to next week's episode!

TSV 46

2007-05-09T13:36:00.000+12:00

TSV 46 was - in magazine marketing parlance- a 'new look issue'. The logo was redrawn from scratch by Alistair Hughes (at first glance it might appear unchanged, but look closer to see the improvements). Nicholas Withers created the entire issue on computer, with only the artwork needing to be pasted up after the pages came off his printer. This revolutionised the whole process of designing and assembling TSV - no longer did it take at least a week to put it all together column by column using a glue stick and lightbox; now it was computer composited and could be transformed from a bunch of Word documents into a finished publication in the space of a day spent at Nick's place. I wasn't very computer-savvy at the time, but I gradually learned how to use the then very new Microsoft Publisher 95 by watching over Nick's shoulder as he worked his magic.

The issue was meant to have been out in mid-December 1995, and the Christmas-themed A Seasonal Tale story would have therefore fitted the festive feel rather well.

There were as I recall a number of reasons for that month-long delay between when the issue should have been out and when it finally appeared. Nick had his his end of year exams to focus on, and I was experiencing my first Christmas in frontline shop floor retail in the Queen Street branch of Whitcoulls, one of the busiest stores in Queen Street.

In addition, a major review of the new Time and the Rani video failed to arrive. By the time the writer (who should perhaps remain nameless), passed the last of many deadline extensions, Nick and I had the whole of the rest of the issue all ready to go and there was no time left to review the story ourselves or ask anyone else to do it, and three blank pages to fill. I did however have a fair bit of Time and the Rani artwork that had been submitted to accompany the review - including three different artists' Tetrap head-and-shoulders portraits - so the pages were hastily filled with reprints of the reviews published in TSV issue 5. I didn't like resorting to reprinting old material like this, but I made an exception on this ocasion out of necessity.

The main feature was a long-promised follow-up interview with Andrew Cartmel about his books and comics. My ex-wife, Felicity, had by this time moved to the UK and collaborated with David Bishop on this feature. Prior to this interview Felicity had had submitted a proposal for a Missing Adventures novel to Virgin, and her interest in the process of writing a Doctor Who novel is evident from her line of questioning.

The comic strip, Monkeyhouse, was an impressive 14-page effort by Peter Adamson and Paul Potiki, primarily featuring the Third Doctor and Jo, but with a guest appearance by another Doctor and companion. The comic strip stories became a fairly regular fixture in TSV around this time, thanks mainly to the drive and enthusiasm of Peter Adamson, who gathered a small team of reliable contributors around him to work on these strips.

1996 had arrived and half a world away in Vancouver, Doctor Who was about to make a comeback...

Read TSV 46 here.

Fellow TSV 46 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

Losing my Religion

2007-04-28T11:41:00.000+12:00

That's me in the corner
That's me in the spotlight, I'm
Losing my religion

My name is Paul and I'm a former science fiction fan. It's been four years since my last science fiction convention.

I'm not a science fiction fan. I don't do science fiction fandom.

That's a rather contrary statement for someone who has run the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club for more years than I care to think about. How can I possibly not consider myself a fan, not think of myself as involved in fandom...?

I helped to start Doctor Who fandom in this country, back in the 1980s. I created a fanzine, built up a healthy readership and then passed it on to a fledgling fan club to develop even further. Then a few years later they handed it back and I ran with it.

In those few years at the tail end of the 1980s while the fanzine was out of my hands, I took the opportunity to broaden my horizons beyond the safe, comfortable confines of Doctor Who and sampled what the community had to offer.

I went along to my first science fiction convention, in Auckland at Easter 1989. I found myself in the company of like-minded individuals. I made new friends. I met a published science fiction author for the first time. I had a flirtation with a girl. I drank a lot at the bar. I danced the night away. I went to all-night room parties and slept in a hotel corridor.

What lingers strongest in my memory of that weird and wonderful weekend at Abby's Hotel half my lifetime ago is the long bus ride home afterwards. I was so exhausted, exhilarated, and despondent that I actually wept. After so long growing up feeling as if I was on the outside of everything I finally found somewhere that I felt like I truly belonged. Coming away from that convention was like coming down off an enormous high, and I couldn't wait to get my next fix.

Science fiction fandom was intoxicating. I sought it out, I had to have more. I joined a science fiction club and went to every one of its regular monthly meetings. I went to every convention I could, anywhere in the country, and took every opportunity I could to get involved.

By the following year's Easter convention I was editing the convention booklet, performing in the opening ceremony, and dating one of the convention organisers. (We ended up getting married and I think the science fiction fans at our wedding outnumbered the other guests.)

I attended more conventions than I can count. I volunteered to be on panels, gave talks, organised quizzes, ran auctions. Call it a drug, call it a religion. For me, science fiction fandom was all of that and more.

Perhaps I did too much, too soon, too often. Maybe I burned out. Seven years after getting involved I was on the retreat, finding myself starting to avoid fans and fandom. I didn't feel like I belonged any longer. My marriage crumbled and slowly dissolved. My ex-wife stayed in science fiction fandom; I didn't.

Science fiction fandom is full of good, decent, well-meaning people, but I moved on, no longer felt any connection to them. Many perhaps inevitably paired up, got married, had children. They started taking those children to conventions, dressing them in science fiction costumes, parading them around as the next generation of fandom.

I went to a funeral of a fan and the science fiction fans were all dressed in Star Trek uniforms. Not just Star Trek costumes but the formal dress uniforms that the crew of the Enterprise would wear at such a sombre occasion. They sang Amazing Grace - because that's what was played at Spock's funeral. If you're a science fiction fan, that might make perfect sense. For me it was a wake-up call that I no longer belonged.

For several years after that 'wake-up call', I kept going to the Auckland science fiction conventions. The last time was in 2003. I found myself in the company of people I used to hang out with, used to count as my friends. It felt like a school reunion in that it was socially awkward and felt like dredging up the ghosts of the past.

I felt compelled to be there because I'd agreed to give a couple of presentations. I prepared material and waited to run these, only to find out afterwards that they'd been cancelled, shunted off the schedule to make way for something else. No one bothered to tell me. I felt disconnected and unwelcome. I resolved then and there that it would be my last science fiction convention. I wouldn't be back.

Every year since, in the months leading up to the annual science fiction convention, various people ask if I will be going this year. Every year I search my soul and see if I still feel the same way as I did in 2003. One year I happened to be visiting Rotorua the same weekend that the convention took place there. I considered going simply because it was close by. But even with the convenience of close proximity I still didn't feel the spark of enthusiasm, couldn't bring myself to take that step.

This year's convention takes place in Wellington five weeks from now. But I don't think I'll be there. I just don't do science fiction fandom any more.

Oh no, I've said too much
I haven't said enough

Doctor Who 303: Gridlock

2007-04-24T10:46:00.000+12:00

Gridlock owed something to The Happiness Patrol with its absurdly exaggerated satire of modern day culture, and populated by characters rather irrationally accepting their downtrodden lot in life. I didn’t like David Tennant’s overacting when doing ‘angry’, and the completely unsubtle ‘say no to drugs’ message. The Star Wars-influenced CGI was however impressive and I liked Ardal O’Hanlon's loveable rogue Brannigan. I was thrilled at the two ‘gifts’ for classic series fans - namely the entirely accurate descriptions of Gallifrey and of course the Macra! These were both presented so as avoid confusing newer viewers (something that the JNT era often got wrong back in the day). There's an almost tear-jerking moment when the sunlight streams down on the motorway, and then the Doctor's final confession to Martha really gave things an added emotional kick - not unlike the end of The End of the World.