TSV 55

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

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..."

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

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

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

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

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