TSV 50

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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