Unearthing Earthshock

Doctor Who: The Collection - Season 19 blu-ray set was released in December 2018. I was commissioned to write the production information text for the season's penultimate story, Earthshock.

Eight minutes into the second episode of Earthshock, there’s a continuity error hidden in plain sight. It’s initially on screen for just four seconds and reappears in four even shorter shots over the next half-minute. Blink and you might miss it.

The Cybermen have remotely-activated their bomb hidden in the caves on Earth. The Doctor is inside the TARDIS frantically working to block the signal to prevent the bomb’s detonation. The tension mounts as the action cuts back and forth between the TARDIS, the Cybermen and the bomb.

But wait - there’s something not quite right about that bomb. Perched on top of the device is the magnetic clamp device from the TARDIS toolkit. An item that the Doctor is seen fixing to the top of the bomb just after the nine-minute mark. A full minute after it is first seen sitting on top of the bomb!

The Cyber bomb, with the Doctor's magnetic clamp in place on top.

Later, the Doctor places the clamp on the bomb.

I’ve viewed Earthshock a lot over the past three and a half decades. I think it’s one of Peter Davison’s best stories. Each time I've watched, the mistake with the bomb has completely passed me by. As it undoubtedly did for the production crew at the time and has subsequently done for countless viewers. I checked reference books, magazines and websites that contain lists of such things, and not one of them makes a mention of this error.

I only noticed it because I was paying exceptionally close attention to the story. I was making notes for the production information text commentary (or ‘info text’) I wrote for the Season 19 blu-ray set in 2018.

Info text is just one of the many special features included on the ‘classic’ series Doctor Who blu-rays, and the DVDs before them. The text appears on screen as subtitles, but rather than transcribed dialogue it provides a commentary about the story’s production. The text points out pertinent, specific details about moments in the episodes as they appear, as well as general information about how, when and where the story was made.

With all of the entertaining special features on the wonderful new blu-ray sets, the info text tends to get a bit overlooked. Which is a shame, because this feature delivers a lot of interesting new information that you won't find elsewhere.

In some cases, the text that originally appeared on the DVDs has undergone only minor revisions for the blu-ray collections, but certain stories have been given brand new info text subtitles. The Season 19 blu-ray has new info text for three stories: Four to Doomsday, Black Orchid and Earthshock. I was commissioned to write the text for the Cyberman story.

I previously worked on the Doctor Who DVDs, writing info text for eight stories released in the latter half of the range. I mainly covered 1980s stories. I’m particularly interested in this decade of Doctor Who as a researcher and as a fan of the series. When the DVD range wound down around 2013, I thought that I’d written my last lot of info text. I was surprised and delighted to be invited back to work on the blu-rays.

I approached Earthshock with a little trepidation. It had been five years since I’d last written a set of info text, and I had to re-familiarise myself with what was involved in the process. I was aware too that the story didn’t appear to have gone through any significant alterations during its development. I’d never before worked on a story with such a close match between what appears in the rehearsal scripts and on-screen. There were no early script drafts or major rewrites, and no deleted scenes. Such material offers a wealth of detail to discuss in the info text. Part of the challenge I faced with Earthshock was to find other aspects to discuss in the subtitles.

The work involves viewing the story with fresh eyes. I work using timecoded copies of the episodes in order to specify the exact moment a subtitle appears and disappears on screen. Because of the precision involved in placing subtitles around shot changes, my preferred approach (which I must add isn’t necessarily that used by other info text writers), is to start with a slow, close watch through each episode noting down the exact timecode (measured in 25ths of a second), when each new shot commences. Earthshock has an exceptional number of these per episode, ranging between 167 shots (for Part One) and 245 shots (for Part Two). It takes me most of a day to work through a single episode. I’m not just noting down timecodes. I also use this slow-time viewing to annotate a copy of the script with any observations that I think are worthy of inclusion in the info text. The benefit to this stop-start scrutiny is that otherwise overlooked details, such as the aforementioned continuity error with the bomb, tend to spring into focus.

It was while doing this slow watch-through that I noticed an error with the life form scanner that appears in Part One. While Lieutenant Scott and his party are exploring the caves, on the surface Walters is tasked with monitoring their progress. Each individual is represented by a dot of light, which winks out when that person is killed. When first seen, the screen shows a cluster of 13 dots, representing Professor Kyle, Lieutenant Scott and eleven troopers. Over the course of the episode smaller groups split off and are picked off by the androids, so the display changes accordingly. There are however a couple of shots of the scanner where the dots don’t correspond to the number of troopers. The number drops by two when there is no reason in the story for this change, and afterwards the scanner screen is once again displaying the correct number of dots.

Count the dots... there ought to be 11 in the cluster at the top right of the picture, but only 9 are displayed.

Those dots, when displaying correctly, are an accurate reflection of how many troopers are present in the story. By comparing various items of production paperwork, I was able to determine that there are 14 in total. Unusually for this era of Doctor Who, it’s an evenly balanced group, with an equal number of men and women. The cast lists initially caused some confusion, as they included six credited and 11 uncredited performers playing the troopers, making a total of 17. The reason for this became clear when I discovered that three of the walk-ons had to be replaced during production.

The troopers wear name tags on their uniforms but in all but a few cases, we don’t get a clear enough look at these tags to see make out the names. Most of the group never take their helmets off so it’s difficult to tell them apart. Some are named in the credits, and others are identified in dialogue, but a few remained nameless. Thanks to a scene breakdown document that lists the characters involved in each scene, however, I was able to put names to all of the troopers. New Fact! The non-speaking female trooper who goes to the freighter is called Austin.

Trooper Austin (left) played by Nikki Dunsford, seen here with Lieutenant Scott (James Warwick).

On the subject of unnamed characters, what about the Captain, memorably played by Beryl Reid. What’s her name? She's called Briggs in the script and on the closing credits, but that name never appears in the story itself. There’s evidence too that the story's writer Eric Saward might have had another name in mind for the Captain. At one point in Part Two, a scripted direction intended for Briggs instead refers to her as ‘Stien’. It seems likely that in the original version of the script this was the Captain’s name and this solitary mention was overlooked in revisions. Saward clearly liked the name enough to reuse it in Resurrection of the Daleks. In Part Three, there’s also evidence that the Captain may have originally been male, as the Cyber Lieutenant says ‘his’ rather than ‘hers’, a mistake in the script that wasn’t picked up on during production.

The unnamed Captain Briggs (Beryl Reid), or should that be Captain Stien?

The scripts also helped to get to the bottom of an anecdote concerning a familiar Doctor Who catch-phrase that first crops up in Earthshock. The Doctor’s “Brave heart, Tegan” interested me because in a 1984 interview for Doctor Who Magazine, Eric Saward claimed that “Brave heart” was something spontaneously ad-libbed by Peter Davison during the recording of the scene. The memory clearly cheats, as the line’s already present in the rehearsal script, prepared before the cast began work on the story!

Another Tegan-related phrase, “I’m just a mouth on legs”, stumped me. According to various sources, including most recently the Doctor Who – The Complete History partwork, this phrase was included in the story after an American fan had used it to describe Tegan. This struck me as unlikely given that fandom had only recently seen Tegan on screen for the first time when Earthshock was written. I checked with a number of people who were likely to be in the know, including Janet Fielding herself, but no one knew the answer. The info text must be as accurate as possible so, as I was unable to verify this particular claim, you won’t find it in the subtitles.

Researching info text can be an eye-opening experience. I go into each story thinking I already know it well, but after a close rewatch, and reading through the scripts and the production paperwork, I realise that I’ve learned so much more. The most enjoyable aspect of my work on the info text is getting to point out fresh discoveries to viewers. There’s a lot about Earthshock I haven’t touched on here, so pop in the blu-ray, turn on the info text and find out more!

This article was first published in issue 498 of Celestial Toyroom, the fanzine of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society.

Spearhead from Space: 40 Years Ago

40 years ago this month I watched Doctor Who for the first time. My earliest exposure to the series occurred between 6:01 and 6:30pm on Friday 14 March 1975. The episode was the first part of Spearhead from Space, Jon Pertwee's debut story. I was aged six-and-three-quarters. 

Spearhead from Space marked Doctor Who's return to New Zealand screens after a protracted absence lasting three and a half years. The programme had last screened in September 1971 when the Patrick Troughton story The Wheel in Space was transmitted. (New Zealand missed out on seeing all of Season Six). By the time Spearhead from Space screened in March 1975, New Zealand was more than five years behind; at the time UK viewers were watching the Tom Baker story Genesis of the Daleks.

I was of course oblivious to all of this. As far as I was concerned, Doctor Who was just another new thing to watch on television (four months later, in July 1975, I discovered Thunderbirds and was immediately hooked, but that's another story...).

I have Mum to thank for noticing that Doctor Who was on that evening, and calling me over to watch it with her on our black and white television (we didn't get a colour set until many years later, but at this stage it wouldn't have any difference as Spearhead from Space was broadcast here in monochrome). Mum recognised Jon Pertwee's first story as one she'd seen five years earlier and she thought I might enjoy it.

As parents often are, Mum was concerned about which television programmes were suitable for her young children to watch, but she knew and approved of Doctor Who. Mum had been a teenager in London in the 1960s when the William Hartnell stories were broadcast on the BBC. She had watched the series with her older brother. I was born in London in June 1968, mid-way through a seven-week repeat screening of The Evil of the Daleks. Mum had continued to watch Doctor Who after I was born. I may have even caught sight of some episodes when I was younger and simply not remembered them. Our family emigrated to New Zealand in June 1973, the week of my fifth birthday, between the end of Frontier in Space and the beginning of The Green Death.

My memory of watching Spearhead from Space for the first time is understandably patchy. I believe I probably missed watching the beginning of the first episode. I have this memory of Mum describing to me how the Doctor had arrived on Earth and fallen out of the TARDIS. For many years (up until I saw the story again, or perhaps when I read the Target novelisation), I had this remarkably vivid mental image of the police box appearing in an ornate garden and the Doctor pitching face-forward from the doorway on to a paved pathway between two flowerbeds.

The earliest memory of the series that I can be sure of comes from near the end of the first episode. The Doctor is in a wheelchair, with a bandage stuck over his mouth. He is being loaded into the back of an ambulance outside a hospital when he springs to life and takes off, rolling down a path in his wheelchair at speed. As absurd as it sounds, this sequence gave me nightmares, and is probably why it has stuck in my memory.

That's the only scene I remember clearly from the first episode, but I recall various other bits from later in the story, most notably the boiler-suited blank-faced Autons stalking through the woods (cue more nightmares), Sam Seeley's cottage, and the Doctor and Liz working side-by-side at a laboratory bench, which I think might be from the fourth episode.

I have seen Spearhead from Space many times over the years but each time I do it I find myself transported back to my childhood. It will always have a special place in my affections as the point at which I began watching Doctor Who, 40 years ago.

Fan Memories: Audiotape Recordings

It seems a ridiculously antiquated thing to do now, but there was a time when I recorded episodes of Doctor Who as they were broadcast on television. Not on DVD-R or even VHS, but on C60 audio cassettes.

In the 1980s when I was a teenager, our family didn't have a video recorder. We didn't have a colour television until 1985. These were expensive luxuries - or at least my parents considered them so.

I can pin-point the day I started making audio recordings of Doctor Who: 25 April 1983, the day that Part Three of Four to Doomsday screened in New Zealand. 

It started with wanting to make a recording of the theme music. Having worked out how to set up the stereo and microphone in front of the television in the living room to do this, it occurred to me that I may as well record the entire episode.

Lacking a microphone stand to point the microphone horizontally at the television speaker, I constructed a rudimentary cradle using my younger brother's Duplo blocks. 

I begged my family to remain quiet for the duration of the recording, so as to avoid capturing unwanted background noise. I was so anxious about getting the recording right that I often forgot to properly focus on watching the episodes.

As I only had a handful number of reuseable C60 audio cassettes and could only fit two episodes to a tape (one on each side), I was selective about which stories I recorded. If I had the novelisation, I didn't bother making a recording, so for example I skipped Time-Flight. When I acquired a new novelisation, I'd reuse the tapes for that story.

I made good use of the recording of Black Orchid. I listened to the audio of that story so many times. Rewatching the story years later, I realised that I could recite the dialogue from memory. I transcribed the audio and turned this into a novelisation, typed up and bound as a Target-sized book for my own personal collection. It sat on my bookshelves slotted between The Visitation and Earthshock. Sadly I no longer have this: when the 'proper' adaption arrived in 1987, I promptly binned my inferior version, ashamed of an achievement I'd been immensely proud of just a few years earlier. 

The very last story I recorded on audiotape was The Ambassadors of Death, in July 1985. Around the time of the broadcast of that story my family finally replaced our old black and white television with a brand new colour set. I eagerly looked forward to watching Doctor Who on our new television, but The Ambassadors of Death was broadcast in black and white - oh the irony! The first episode I saw in glorious colour was therefore Episode 1 of Inferno. 

I was still a few years away from acquiring my first video recorder, but it was at that point that I stopped making audio recordings. I'm not entirely sure why I stopped, but I suspect it had a lot to do with owning most stories beyond this point as novelisations. My priorities had changed too, Doctor Who wasn't quite the all-consuming interest it had been and I'd become more interested in recording songs off the radio than television programmes. 

When I later got involved in Doctor Who fandom, I was fascinated to learn that I hadn't been alone in making off-air audio recordings. This was, I discovered, a common fan activity that dated right back to the beginning of the series. Indeed it is entirely due to these fan recordings, that audio copies survive of every missing episode. 

• For more on the subject of fans recording Doctor Who episodes on audio, I recommend 'Love Off-Air' a feature on Disc One of the DVD Doctor Who: The Invasion.

Doctor Who Series 8 NZ Viewer Ratings

Series eight of Doctor Who recently finished screening here in New Zealand. The episodes, which screened as usual on the Prime channel, were transmitted a week following the UK broadcasts, screening here on Sunday nights at 7.30pm.

Viewer ratings indicated that these twelve episodes were watched by an average overnight rating of 123,273 people. Adding in time-shifted viewers (those who recorded the episodes and watched later), that average increases to 143,114. 

Several of the earliest episodes, all screened during September, received the strongest overnight ratings. 

Deep Breath received the lowest rating of the initial five stories on overnight results. This may have been due to the extended length of this episode, causing it to run an hour later than usual, finishing at 9.25pm. The episode’s strong performance in the timeshifted ratings, indicates that many viewers appear to have elected to record it for later viewing. The episode also premiered a week earlier in cinemas around the country, which may have also contributed to the relatively low rating for a series premiere.

The second episode, Into the Dalek, saw a sizeable increase in the overnight ratings, gaining 18,750 viewers. Ratings remained consistently high for Robot of Sherwood, Listen and Time Heist, with an average of approximately 135,000 across these four episodes. 

The Caretaker, which screened at the beginning of October, suffered a sharp decline, dropping by 28,710 viewers from the previous week. Although the following episode, Kill the Moon, gained back some of the lost ground by picking up 11,140 viewers, the series never regained its earlier highs.

The strongest performing episode from the latter half of the series on overnights was the finale, Death in Heaven, on 128,570. 

The two lowest rated episodes on overnight ratings were the aforementioned The Caretaker, on 106,520 and Flatline on 109,820.  

Consolidated ratings, which include timeshifted viewers, who record programmes and watch after transmission, give a more accurate indication of the total audience. Robot of Sherwood in particular benefitted from these additional viewers, with 24.38% of its consolidated figure coming from timeshifted rating. 

Conversely, In the Forest of the Night, which had an overnight audience of 123,070, placing it closest to the series average, suffered a drop to last place in the timeshifted ratings.

Doctor Who on Prime was placed in the same timeslot as some heavily-promoted and highly popular offerings on rival channels TV One, TV 2 and TV3. Doctor Who was usually in fourth place for overnight ratings in its timeslot, but for both of the last two weeks of the series it managed to make it into third place, edging out TV2.

TV One consistently gained the largest audience share for the timeslot. For nine weeks Doctor Who was placed against TV One’s My Kitchen Rules New Zealand (average overnight 373,161). For the last three weeks Our Big Blue Backyard instead occupied the timeslot (avg 463,370).

Over on TV3, The X Factor screened for most of the run (avg 236,956). When this ended, the movies How to Train Your Dragon (194,540), and Shrek Forever After (275,540), occupied the slot for the last two weeks.

TV2 most often came in third place for the timeslot. For the first four weeks two half hour shows, The Middle (avg 201,312) and The Neighbors (avg 169,582) were up against Doctor Who. For the next five weeks the timeslot was occupied with a family movie, including such titles as Brave and Toy Story 3 (avg 225,670). The final three weeks saw the movies replaced with The Voice (avg 110,480). This series saw a marked drop in viewers for TV2, and the final two episodes of Doctor Who gained higher ratings than The Voice.

Overnight Ratings
(and most watched on Prime chart position for that date)
1. Into the Dalek (7 Sep 14) 135,840 (2nd)
2. Listen (21 Sep 14) 135,740 (3rd)
3. Time Heist (28 Sep 14) 135,230 (3rd)
4. Robot of Sherwood (14 Sep) 133,040 (1st)
5. Death in Heaven (16 Nov 14) 128,570 (3rd)
6. In the Forest of the Night (2 Nov 14) 123,070 (4th)
7. Mummy on the Orient Express (19 Oct 14) 121,850 (3rd)
8. Kill the Moon (12 Oct 14) 117,660 (2nd)
9. Deep Breath (31 Aug 14) 117,090 (2nd)
10. Dark Water (9 Nov 14) 114,840 (4th)
11. Flatline (26 Oct 14) 109,820 (2nd)
12. The Caretaker (5 Oct 14) 106,520 (4th)

Timeshifted Ratings
(and % increase of audience watching timeshifted)

1. Robot of Sherwood 42,900 (32.25%)

2. Deep Breath 26,180 (22.36%)
3. Into the Dalek 21,360 (19.85%)
4. The Caretaker 21,140 (17.37%)
5. Listen 20,500 (16.62%)
6. Kill the Moon 19,560 (15.89%)
7. Mummy on the Orient Express 19,360 (15.72%)
8. Flatline 19,080 (15.10%)
9. Time Heist 16,130 (11.93%)
10. Death in Heaven 12,580 (9.78%)
11. Dark Water 9,770 (8.51%)
12. In the Forest of the Night 9,540 (7.75%)

Consolidated Ratings
(and % of total audience watching timeshifted)
1. Robot of Sherwood 175,940 (24.38%)
2. Into the Dalek 157,200 (13.59%) 
3. Listen 156,240 (13.12%)
4. Time Heist 151,360 (10.66%)
5. Deep Breath 143,270 (18.27%)
6. Mummy on the Orient Express 141,210 (13.71%)
7. Death in Heaven 141,150 (8.91%)
8. Kill the Moon 137,220 (14.25%)
9. In the Forest of the Night 132,610 (7.19%)
10. Flatline 128,900 (14.80%)
11. The Caretaker 127,660 (16.56%)
12. Dark Water 124,610 (7.84%)

Ratings: Nielsen Television Audience Measurement, All 5+, sourced from Throng.co.nz 

Doctor Who Talk at the Auckland Central Library

I will be giving a talk about Doctor Who this Wednesday 12 November 2014, from 6 to 7pm, at the Auckland Central Library.

The talk is to mark the 51st anniversary of Doctor Who - although of course here in New Zealand it is actually the 50th anniversary!

I'm be talking about several aspects of Doctor Who, including its long history, how it has been viewed in New Zealand, my passion for the show, my work as a writer/researcher for the BBC DVDs, and my book, The Comic Strip Companion.

The talk will be along similar lines to the very well-received one I gave at the Takapuna Library in 2013, and also at the national science fiction convention earlier this year. I'll be showing a number of images and some short video clips to illustrate my talk.

I will have limited quantities of my book and the DVDs available to purchase and get signed afterwards.

Hope to see you there!

Zeus Pod

Zeus Pod, a new Doctor Who podcast, may well be the first of its kind in New Zealand. Certainly it is the only locally-produced fan podcast based on the series that I know of.

It is the third incarnation of what began eight years ago as Zeus Plug, a printed A5, hand-distributed ‘pub zine’; then migrated online as Zeus Blog. Now the Zeus name has a new lease of life as a lively and upbeat weekly audio podcast, hosted by Jono Park.

Jono’s professional experience as a presenter is clearly in evidence with his confident delivery, and highly structured plan for each episode, keeping things (mostly) on track, though his desire to get episode under half an hour may be thwarted by talkative guests and the amount of material covered in each instalment.

Zeus Pod is planned to run for a ‘season’ of thirteen episodes, with each weekly programme focusing primarily on a review of that week’s new Doctor Who episode.

A spoiler warning for New Zealand fans watching on Prime, which is showing Doctor Who on Sunday evenings a full week after the UK: you’ll want to wait a week before listening in as these episodes are recorded and made available soon after the UK broadcasts.

I was the guest on Zeus Pod’s second episode, titled ‘BB’ (and yes, appropriately enough, it does name-check The War Machines). Jono and I discussed what we thought of the first Peter Capaldi episode, Deep Breath, and tried to make sense of the mystery set up in that episode. I’d avoided going online to see what others were saying about it, so at the time of recording I believed my theory about the identity of Michelle Gomez’s character was original. I subsequently discovered that many fans appear to have reached the same conclusion. We’ll probably all be proved wrong by the end of this series.

In addition to critiquing the debut episode of Series 8, I took part in the ‘60 Second Story Smackdown’. This is a regular segment on Zeus Pod, in which Jono offers up random pairs of stories and the guest has to make snap judgements over which one is better. I doubt I’ll soon be living down one particularly controversial decision …

Jono also challenged me to a ‘first lines’ quiz, involving guessing the correct story from a reading of the opening line of dialogue. I must confess that I felt some trepidation about this segment. I should make a confession here: I don’t re-watch Doctor Who very often. Yes, it’s true! Where possible I prefer to leave a few years in between viewing a particular story, so that when I do see it again I find enjoyment in re-discovering what I’ve partly forgotten in the interim. This means of course that details – such as opening lines of dialogue – rarely linger in my memory. Consequently I was expecting to be thoroughly humiliated in this quiz. Have a listen and see how I did.

I’ve been a guest on a number of overseas Doctor Who podcasts, but it was a pleasure to finally get to take part in one originating in my own country.

I thoroughly recommend Zeus Pod. It can be listened to and downloaded on Soundcloud here.

A Year Without Doctor Who

The Sixth Doctor arrived in March 1984, thirty years ago this month.

Just a couple of weeks ago I got to discuss this milestone with both Colin Baker (the Sixth Doctor) and Nicola Bryant (his companion Peri) when I hosted a series of talks with them in Dunedin and Christchurch, at the Armageddon Expo events.

As I talked to these two actors about the anniversary of their first appearance in Doctor Who I couldn't help but think that the relevance was slightly lost on myself, and perhaps also on those members of the audience who were old enough to remember what it was like to be a fan thirty years ago in New Zealand.

1984, the year in which Peter Davison's third and last season aired and Colin Baker commenced playing the Doctor, was entirely devoid of any televised Doctor Who at all in this country. Not one of Colin Baker’s stories screened here until November 1988, several years later and indeed some time after Colin had departed the role.

The series had abruptly halted on TVNZ following ‘Mawdryn Undead’ in late November 1983. This was an unfortunate point at which to break the series as it left hanging the ongoing plot involving Turlough and the Black Guardian.

At first it appeared as though TVNZ were giving Doctor Who a brief respite over the summer months. I can remember being relaxed about this break at first, possibly even relieved. My family were in the habit of going away camping on a remote beach - without a television set - for two weeks in January. I’d have been most upset if the show had been on at the time.

I’m sure I would have been even more annoyed had I known that it would be a very long wait. That summer of 1983/84 came to an end without any sign of Doctor Who’s return. It became a weekly ritual to scan the New Zealand Listener’s television listings, eagerly searching out a billing for the next story, only to be deflated week after week, month after month. The series finally returned in April 1985, after a hiatus that lasted about 18 months. There was a bittersweet twist to this. The return was not the anticipated latter half of the Fifth Doctor’s era (which should have resumed with ‘Terminus’). Instead we were treated to older stories from the 1960s and 1970s. I was thrilled to get to see these vintage episodes, many which I’d never viewed and those I had seen were dim distant memories. It did mean however that it would be years before TVNZ got around to screening those much delayed new episodes.

The prolonged absence was made all the more agonising because for the first time ever I was well informed about what was screening in the UK. At the beginning of 1984 I discovered Doctor Who Magazine. My grandmother most generously set up a standing order with her local newsagent in East London, and started posting me a copy every month commencing with issue 84, which arrived in early January.

Doctor Who Magazine was a treasure-trove of previews, set reports, reviews, and photographs. I studied these issues in obsessive detail, scrutinising every word and picture, trying to imagine what thrilling-sounding stories such as  ‘Frontios’, ‘Planet of Fire’ and ‘The Caves of Androzani’ must be like.

I witnessed through the pages of the magazine the departure of the familiar TARDIS crew of the Fifth Doctor, Tegan and (for me, the newly arrived) Turlough, to be replaced by the Sixth Doctor and Peri. My impression of these two characters, played by unfamiliar actors, was entirely based on what I saw and read in the magazine.

A large part of my understanding of what the Sixth Doctor was like came from reading the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip. Of course I knew from the photographs elsewhere in the issues that he had a tasteless and gaudily colourful costume but in the uniformly monochrome strip it actually looked quite stylish. The new Doctor seemed good-humoured with an easy-going personality.

The Sixth Doctor’s stories were extraordinarily imaginative, at least in comic strip form. Even without having seen ‘The Twin Dilemma’ I think I must have realised that the surreal mind-bending visuals of stories like ‘Voyager’ and ‘Once Upon a Time-Lord’ were nothing like what was happening in the television series, but these strip stories gave me a deep and enduring admiration of Doctor Who in the comic strip medium.

1984 and the arrival of the Sixth Doctor has been occupying my thoughts a lot lately, and not just because of the thirty-year anniversary or talking to Colin and Nicola. I’ve reached the point in the writing of the second volume of The Comic Strip Companion in which I’m covering the earliest strip exploits of the Sixth Doctor. Thirty years is a long time, but as I re-read the pages of ‘Voyager’, marvelling at the gloriously surreal twists and turns of Steve Parkhouse’s surreal script and John Ridgway’s absolutely stunning illustrations, I can’t help but be transported back to that time when this was the only new Doctor Who.

I turned sixteen in 1984. I wish I could tell myself at that age that one day I’d be the author of a series of books about the comic strips, that I’d write the production information text for DVDs of those 1984 stories that I used to speculate about, and that I’d be chatting to the actors who played the Sixth Doctor and Peri. I’m not sure which of these facts would impress my younger self more. I’m not even sure he’d even believe me.

I made it through the Wilderness

Ten years ago something quite extraordinary happened. Doctor Who came back.

Around midday on Friday 26 September 2003, New Zealand time, a news story appeared on the BBC news website, announcing that Doctor Who was returning to BBC television, as a multi-part series developed by Russell T Davies. 

I don't recall now how I first found out about this news, but I may have been tipped off by my friend and fellow fanzine editor Adam, who had better connections in the UK than myself and had likely been given a heads-up about the news on the BBC website. I in turn alerted my friend and fellow fan Jon Preddle. I phoned him at work but he wasn't at his desk. He phoned me back a short while later but also missed getting hold of me. So we discussed the news via email.

Here's a few of the emails from that afternoon:

From: Paul Scoones | To: Jon Preddle | Friday 26 September 2003 14:30
Subject: News

So, thoughts on the new series news just announced today? I'm cautiously excited but there are so many hurdles to just that it remains to be seen whether it'll actually get to our screens.

                                                                                                                                  

From: Jon Preddle | To: Paul Scoones | Friday 26 September 2003 15:04
Subject:  RE: News
I'll believe it when I see it - as I said to your answer phone!

From: Paul Scoones | To: Jon Preddle | Friday 26 September 2003 15:23
Subject: RE: News

I'll believe it when I've got the DVDs, the novelisation and the Corgi toys all gathering dust on my shelf.

That exchange hardly seems like the reaction you would expect of a couple of life-long fans of the series. Although we were excited by the prospect of Doctor Who’s return, we were also somewhat cautious about getting our hopes up and just a little skeptical of the series actually going ahead.

Jon and I had spent years following all of the various rumours and speculation concerning the potential return of Doctor Who to television throughout the 'wilderness years' period when the series wasn't in production. We’d got our hopes up on numerous occasions, only to have them dashed. In 1996 Paul McGann was cast and Doctor Who went back into production, but what looked at the time like it might be the pilot for a new series disappointingly turned out to be no more than a one-off television movie.

In 2003 Doctor Who reached its 40th anniversary year. I had been editing Time Space Visualiser, the fanzine of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club for 13 years.

It was challenging to find new and interesting things to say about the series. With no new television series to talk about, TSV was  increasingly focused on the BBC novels and DVDs, and the Big Finish audio dramas. Some readers started grumbling about the predictable nature of the content, and the readership was gradually dropping away. 

I felt the time was right for a new editor with fresh ideas and a new approach. By mid-year I’d reached a decision. I announced that I would step down and passing the zine on to Adam, my new co-editor.

The issue featuring this announcement went to print in the third week of September. The news that the series was coming back broke one day before I was due to collect copies from the printers. I hastily put together a one-page 'TSV Extra' covering the announcement to include with the issue.

I remember thinking how extraordinarily weird that timing was. After so many years of editing TSV with no new series news to report, the revelation that the series was to return came just after I'd committed in print to stepping down as editor! I had been TSV editor since the beginning of 1991, which was just one year after Doctor Who ceased regular production. I’d documented the series in print throughout its ‘wilderness years’ and now that it was coming back I was no longer required.

Ten years on from that wonderful news of the series return, a row of new series DVDs are sitting on my shelves. I've just checked; yes, there is some dust on them. I'm ready to believe.

Poll Result

The latest Doctor Who Magazine (#464) has the results of 'The Best of 2012!' Merchandise Poll.

The Books Non-Fiction category results from the 2012 Doctor Who Magazine Merchandise Poll

The Comic Strip Companion appears in fifth place. That's a good result, especially considering the high standard of the competition and the large number of titles my book was up against. 

Looking back at the poll form (in #455), this category listed eleven suggested titles (including my book), with readers also invited to vote for any of the many other non-fiction Doctor Who titles published last year. A couple of the titles that didn't receive enough votes to make it into the top five were well-publicised and widely-distributed official BBC books.

I'm delighted that my book about a frankly rather niche subject has been so well received.

It is also lovely to see Behind the Sofa in third place, as I had a piece published in that book.

Written out of History

One of my proudest achievements was finding a lost episode of Doctor Who, an honour I share in equal part with my good friend Neil Lambess.

Neil and I found a 16mm film print of The Lion (the first episode of the 1965 William Hartnell story The Crusade) in the collection of Auckland film collector Bruce Grenville in early January 1999.

Neil did the investigating that led to the find. Neil then contacted me and we went to meet Bruce and view the film together, thereby verifying that it was a missing episode. I then handled the episode’s return to the BBC.

Neil and I have always been of the view that we deserve to share equal credit for the episode’s discovery and return. We would not have it any other way.

I remember saying to Neil, shortly after viewing the film, that our discovery had surely earned us a place in the Doctor Who history books.

So it was upsetting to see in the recently-published Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition, The Missing Episodes - The Second Doctor Volume One that my part in the discovery and return of The Lion had been effectively written out of history.

The special itself is an absolutely superb record of the early Patrick Troughton stories, showcasing the missing episodes from The Power of the Daleks to The Faceless Ones with a series of telesnaps (photographs taken of the television screen as the stories were originally broadcast).

The special is prefaced with a four-page article by Richard Molesworth called The Numbers Game that covers the various discoveries of missing episodes. Many people responsible for making these finds and returning film prints to the BBC are name-checked in Richard's coverage of the subject.

The discovery of The Lion in New Zealand is covered in one paragraph. There is no mention of my name and, worse still, my involvement has been wrongly attributed to others.

The problem lies with the last two sentences of this paragraph. Here’s the first of these:

Grenville showed the episode to a friend of his, Neil Lambess, who was also a fan of the series, in 1999.

The friend of Neil's who was also a fan of Doctor Who was me, not Bruce. Grenville was not especially a fan (he wasn’t even aware that the series had missing episodes). He also did not know Neil prior to the episode’s discovery. They met for the first time when we went along to Bruce's house to view the film. What this sentence also omits to say is that Bruce showed the episode to both of us: I was sitting there right alongside Neil when we first saw the film.

Here’s how I think this sentence should have read:

Grenville showed the episode to Neil Lambess and a friend of his, Paul Scoones, who was also a fan of the series, in 1999.

Moving on to the paragraph's last sentence:

Lambess realised that Grenville had a missing episode, and helped facilitate its return to the BBC later that year.

This time it's Neil rather than Bruce to whom my involvement is wrongly attributed. I "helped facilitate" the episode's return: I negotiated the loan, physically collected the film and made the arrangements for its transportation to the UK. Furthermore, this all took place within days of making the discovery, not “later that year” as the article claims.

Again, here’s how I think it should have read:

They realised that Grenville had a missing episode, and Scoones helped facilitate its return to the BBC days later.

What I find most surprising about this is that the article's writer, Richard Molesworth, is the author of Wiped! Doctor Who’s Missing Episodes which is regarded as the definitive book on this subject. There is a section in the book where Neil and I are quoted about the discovery and return of The Lion. Richard only had to refer to his own book to fact-check his article and avoid making these mistakes.

I posted about the article’s errors on Facebook, and received the following response from Richard: “Sorry Paul, no slur intended - my brief was to be concise, and quite a few names got left out of the article - it was more of a 'what was found and when' piece. The 'who' often got truncated or omitted. Sorry if I've offended.” A short time later he added: “This had nothing to do with the editor, let’s make this clear.”

I can appreciate the need for conciseness, but this should never be at the expense of factual accuracy. Omitting any mention of my name from the article is annoying but not necessarily wrong; ascribing my role to other people most definitely is.

In the article, those two sentences amount to 40 words. My suggested rewrites above come to 43 words. That's right, just three additional words could have fixed this.

A Flawed History Lesson

Marking Doctor Who’s fiftieth anniversary is a monthly comic called Prisoners of Time, published by IDW, featuring a story for each of the eleven Doctors. At the back of each issue is a series of features on the history of Doctor Who in comics by various writers. 

Issue 4 (April 2013) has a two-page history of the comics from the beginning up to the present day, laid out as a series of panels with comic strip-style captions. The “history lesson on how it all came to be” (as it is headed) is presented by Dez Skinn, the man who devised Doctor Who Weekly in 1979. Skinn's own contribution to the history of the comic strip is immense; his legacy is still going strong today, as Panini's Doctor Who Magazine.

It is a shame therefore that certain aspects of this history are not particularly accurate. Some of the facts pertaining to the early years of the comic strip, prior to Dez Skinn’s involvement in 1979, are simply wrong - especially in relation to TV Comic, a publication that Skinn does not appear hold in high regard.

I want to be clear that my intention here is not to criticize Skinn, or to imply that he somehow deliberately set out to mislead. I'm simply keen to set the record straight on the subject. It does strike me as odd that no one seems to have fact-checked the piece (having written a book on this very subject, I'd have gladly offered my services).

The earliest error is to do with the television series rather than the comic strip. Discussing the beginnings of the series, Skinn states that An Unearthly Child, the opening story, was up against ITV’s The Buccaneers. In fact the first five episodes were screened against the ABC serial Emerald Soup. The Buccaneers appeared against Doctor Who on ATV London from 28 December 1963, one week into the second story.

The history then claims that The Dalek Book came out only five months after the Daleks made their television debut. This is a forgivable error, as many sources have wrongly stated that this book was published on 30 June 1964 (which is five months after the conclusion of The Daleks). It was only whilst researching The Comic Strip Companion that I learned that the book was in fact published later, on 30 September 1964. This long-standing misapprehension most likely originated because someone got one digit in the date wrong: ‘30/9/64’ became ‘30/6/64’.

This dating error has a knock-on effect when Skinn subsequently observes that the Doctor Who strip in TV Comic began "five months later". In fact The Dalek Book only preceded the TV Comic strip by about six weeks.

Perhaps the most egregious error in the whole feature is the suggestion that TV Comic did not mention the strip on the cover when it first appeared. This is plainly wrong. The first issue to feature the Doctor Who strip was #674, dated 14 November 1964. The cover of that issue clearly states: "Starts today! Doctor Who" (pictured here).

The history compounds the error by including the wrong TV Comic cover (the issue featured in the history is #709, dated 17 July 1965 - eight months later - which did not have a mention of Doctor Who).

Skinn offers the view that the strip wasn't mentioned on the cover "... maybe because they weren’t very good". That may be Skinn's opinion, but I have examined a great deal of correspondence between the BBC and the publishers of TV Comic from 1964, and there is no suggestion that the strip wasn't considered worthy of promotion. Four of the initial nine issues featuring Doctor Who have a reference to the strip on the front cover, so TV Comic could hardly be accused of failing to promote its new acquisition. Skinn makes no mention of the five month period in 1967 when the Doctor Who strip appeared in full colour on the front cover of every issue of TV Comic. 

The history goes on to mention The Daleks comic strip, which began in 1965. Skinn claims that the strip appeared in “TV 21”, but the comic was actually called TV Century 21. TV21 was the name given to a later relaunch of the comic in early 1968, two years after The Daleks strip ceased publication. This is an error that crops up in various places.

Another minor error involves the dating of the first World Distributors Doctor Who annual. It is claimed that it was launched for Christmas 1966, but the first annual came out a year earlier.

The history discusses the strip’s move to Countdown which later became TV Action, and states that the comic had "130 weekly issues". This is almost but not quite right: there were 132 issues.

Lastly, Skinn dismisses the later years of the TV Comic strip, claiming that with the arrival of the fourth Doctor the comic “simply ran reprints of Jon Pertwee strips with Tom Baker's face added!" There were indeed reprinted stories with Tom Baker’s features redrawn over Pertwee (and Patrick Troughton in one instance), but what Skinn doesn't mention is that this only happened in the weekly TV Comic issues for nine months from July 1978 through to the strip’s last appearance in March 1979. The history overlooks the three and a half years (a considerably longer period) prior to this when original, weekly Tom Baker strips were run in TV Comic.

I think it is clear that Skinn has a low opinion of the Doctor Who strip in TV Comic. He observes that TV Comic's license for “two reprint pages” prevented him from launching his own Doctor Who comic strip publication "for years". Presumably he is unaware that TV Comic only moved to running a reprinted Doctor Who comic strip in their weekly issues after the publishers had advised BBC Enterprises in May 1978 that they intended to quit the licence. The catalyst for this decision was probably the recent raising of the royalty rate for the strip that TV Comic was required to pay to the BBC. The timing of the strip’s last appearance in May 1979 suggests that it is likely that TV Comic may have been contractually required to give one year’s notice. If so, the very reprint strips that so irked Skinn were likely a portent that the licence was about to become available, paving the way for October 1979's triumphant launch of Doctor Who Weekly.

It is good to see that the long and fascinating history of the Doctor Who comic strip is receiving coverage with these features in the Prisoners of Time series. It is just a shame that in the case of this instalment the facts have not been accurately presented.

The TARDIS Tales Treasury

The newly-published TARDIS Tales Treasury is a collection of all of the published comic strips by the funny and talented Graham Muir. Graham is a New Zealander who is well-known in local Doctor Who fandom for writing and drawing a long-running humorous comic strip called TARDIS Tales, which often mercilessly poked fun at various aspects of the television series.

The strip's main character was not the Doctor himself (who nevertheless usually appeared in one or more of his incarnations), but rather Saucer, a smart-talking, laid-back, super-intelligent chicken not adverse to ridding himself of bothersome characters in the final frame with a knock-out punch or a blast from a sub-machine gun.

TARDIS Tales made its debut appearance in 1988 in the pages of Time Space Visualiser (TSV), the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club zine. The strip was a well-established regular feature by the time I took on the editorship of the publication for the second time in 1991.

When I became editor I gave the zine a major revamp, changing almost every aspect, but the only feature that I was happy to retain unaltered was TARDIS Tales. I admired Graham's talent and passion for the strip and recognised that his creation had a strong following with readers. I don't recall my exact words all these years later, but I'm fairly sure that my directive to him would have been along the lines of, "keep doing what you're doing, it's great."

Excerpt from TARDIS Tales: The U.N.I.T. Reunion (1992)

TARDIS Tales finally bowed out of TSV six years later. Such was the clamour from fans for new material that Graham was subsequently  persuaded to create a handful of spin-off strips for Telos and Reverse the Polarity!, a couple of Christchurch-based fanzines.

The TARDIS Tales Treasury collects all of Graham's fanzine strips, along with his artwork and some fascinating previously unseen examples of his early unpublished work, under one cover. For the first time Graham's strips are presented at 1:1 scale. I produced TSV's physical masters (in the days before digital publishing) at A4 size, with the printed copies reduced to A5-sized pages. Graham drew his strips at A4 but until now many readers have never seen TARDIS Tales at full size.

But wait, there's more! In addition to the strips and artwork there is also a substantial 'behind-the-scenes' history and examination of the strip, occupying most of the first 75 pages of this 200-page book. Written by Alex Ballingall, the book's editor, compiler and designer, the text section comprehensively chronicles Graham's cartoon work from its beginnings when Muir was doodling during his school days up to the latest (and last?) TARDIS Tales strip completed especially for the Treasury in 2010.

The paperback book is handsomely presented with a full-colour cover by Graham that is a fitting homage to The Dr Who Annual from 1968.

The book has been a long time in development. It was over a decade ago that I first organised a set of copies of the strips from the TSV print masters for this project. I later contributed comments for inclusion in the 'behind-the-scenes' sections and more recently an afterword. Thanks to Alex's perseverance the book has at last been published. 

I am most impressed with the look of the finished, printed book, and it clearly shows that Alex has devoted a lot of time and attention to getting it just right. 

Leafing through this volume I am now inspired to showcase more of TSV's 'back-catalogue' in this format.

Well done, Alex and Graham!

The TARDIS Tales Treasury is available to order here:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/graham-muir/the-tardis-tales-treasury/paperback/product-20381010.html

The Book has Arrived!

I collect Doctor Who books. I have hundreds of the things carefully arranged on floor-to-ceiling shelves around the walls of my study. I love receiving each new title, but the arrival of today's latest addition to the collection was far more exciting that usual. 

A box of author copies of my book, The Comic Strip Companion, including paperbacks and one hardback copy, arrived by courier this morning.

I was out at the time, enduring a uncomfortable hour-long session at the dentist. I arrived home with a numb mouth to be greeted by my wife Rochelle with the news that FedEx had called by to drop off a box for me.

Excitement overcame the drowsy after-effects of of dental surgery as I cut open the package and handled for the very first time actual, physical copies of my book. It really existed!

I'm in New Zealand; Telos, my publisher, is in the UK. I've spent the last week hearing from enthusiastic  overseas readers who've received the book, whilst all the time I've been eagerly awaiting my own as the books made their way around the globe. 

I knew that the book had been printed and distributed. It's just that until I held the finished published copies in my hands it didn't feel completely real to me. Just feeling the solid weight of the limited edition hardback with its glossy cover, or leafing through the only slightly more manageable paperback, is an indescribably satisfying feeling. 

Entirely coincidentally, the book has arrived in my hands almost exactly five years after signing the contract (on 26 September 2007), and one year after delivering the manuscript (on 21 September 2011).

(Author's expression in these photos due to numb upper lip...)

The Comic Strip Companion Sampler

I'm delighted to offer a set of sample pages from The Comic Strip Companion: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who in Comics: 1964–1979.

As someone who often buys books online, I'm a great believer in the value of offering a preview of the contents and I've frequently decided to purchase on the strength of reading sample pages.

The PDF sampler is downloadable from the link below. It includes the contents pages, the first story entry, and one of the 'interlude' articles.

This should provide a taste of what the book's about and how I've approached writing about the comic strips.

The Comic Strip Companion Sampler

Thank you to David J Howe at Telos Publishing Ltd for arranging the sample.

Limited Hardback Edition

The plan was that The Comic Strip Companion would only be available in paperback but, when it was first made available to pre-order in June this year, a number of fans expressed their preference for a hardback version. Telos do not always produce hardback editions for their titles but, in response to popular demand, one is now being produced for my book.

The limited hardback edition (I'm told that over half the allocation has already been pre-ordered), features a different cover design to the paperback version. David J Howe at Telos wanted something special for the cover so sought out an artist who worked on the original comic strips to create a new painting especially for the book. I'm simply delighted that Bill Mevin has painted the cover.

Bill Mevin's association with Doctor Who comics dates back to the mid-1960s. He was the second artist to work on the the Doctor Who strip in TV Comic, over a six-month period from October 1965 through to April 1966, and was the first to illustrate each of the strip's weekly instalments as full colour paintings (his predecessor, Neville Main, had drawn the weekly strip in black and white). Mevin's cover painting features William Hartnell's Doctor, which is appropriate as his Doctor was current at the time that Mevin was working on the strip.

Both editions of the book are 608 pages (yes, considerably longer than as originally advertised!) with an eight-pages in colour displaying a number of the comic covers from the 1960s and 1970s.

The book was sent off to the printers yesterday. Now there's a wait of around six weeks until it is due to be released at the end of September. Oh the anticipation!

Countdown to The Comic Strip Companion

The Comic Strip Companion: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who in Comics: 1964 - 1979 will be published later this year.

The expected release date of 30 September 2012 has recently been posted on the Telos Publishing website, along with the reveal of the cover and blurb. Judging by the comments posted online in reaction to this announcement, it appears that there are many readers eagerly awaiting the book’s publication. I count myself among them. I may have spent countless hundreds of hours researching, writing and revising over the past five years, and I’m very keen to see the finished product.

The Comic Strip Companion is a guide to an aspect of Doctor Who that may be unfamiliar to many fans, as all the comic strips published in the years covered by this book are long out of print. The book does not reprint the actual strips. For rights reasons this is not possible. The book does feature an 8-page colour section featuring a selection of relevant comic strip covers.

Each individual episode has a plot synopsis, so anyone who has not read some, or perhaps even all, of the comic strips under discussion should still find the book entirely accessible. It also provides a lot of information that even readers who do have the strips to hand will not have known about before, sourced from original correspondence, synopses, scripts and interviews with some of the writers and artists.  

The fifteen year period covered in this book details every Doctor Who story, produced by Polystyle Publications (formerly TV Publications), that appeared in TV Comic, Countdown and TV Action. 

The Doctor’s comic strip adventures began in November 1964; one year after the television series was first broadcast. For the following fifteen years, Doctor Who appeared in comic strip form almost every week, amassing many more individual stories than the television series. In May 1979 the strip was discontinued. After a five-month hiatus the strip was re-launched as a regular feature in Doctor Who Weekly (later Doctor Who Magazine, where the strip continues to this day). This break and subsequent change of publisher marks the conclusion of the book’s comic strip coverage. I am writing a follow-up volume that will pick up the story of the comic strips from October 1979 onwards.

Most of the book is taken up with a year-by-year, story-by-story coverage of the weekly strip, but there are sections included for the comic strip adventures in The Dr Who Annual, the Dalek books and annuals, and The Daleks, a weekly strip that appeared in TV Century 21. The book also has appendices that detail all of the reprints, adaptations, humorous strips and even a handful of associated text stories.

The book is an A5-format paperback, around 500 pages in length, and is now available to order from Telos.

Quarter Century

New Zealand Doctor Who fandom is a quarter of a century old this month. That is older than many of New Zealand's Doctor Who fans. It is also roughly half the lifespan of the entire television series from 1963 until today.

Twenty-five years ago saw the publication of the first issue of Time Space Visualiser (TSV). The fanzine was later adopted by the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club.

The birth of organised, sustained and widespread Doctor Who fandom in this country occurred in June 1987 but, of course, there were New Zealand Doctor Who fans long before this time. By 1987 the show had been screening here for nearly twenty-three years (the first episode was broadcast in September 1964, making New Zealand the first country other than Britain to show the series). These fans perhaps even produced their own small-scale and short-lived fanzines. I know I did; in the mid-1980s I put out a slim monthly publication for a small group of school friends.

I was a first-year student at the University of Auckland when I met another fan, Paul Sinkovich. Paul loaned me his extensive collection of fanzines and videotape recordings of stories I'd never seen before. These opened my eyes to wonders beyond what I'd happened to catch on television (New Zealand was years behind the latest episodes at the time), or read either in books or the official Doctor Who Magazine. Paul had also corresponded with a number of fan friends around New Zealand. 

I saw an opportunity to pool our resources to create a publication that could cater for and unite the local Doctor Who fan community. The result was Time Space Visualiser, an A5-sized photocopied fanzine filled with articles, reviews and short stories. The first issue, cover-dated July 1987, was finished and published in mid-June just in time for my 19th birthday. I put out two further issues later that year. TSV soon gained a respectable number of readers and contributors. I began making many new acquaintances through the fanzine, including Jon Preddle, who remains to this day one of my best friends.

In 1988 I changed TSV to a simpler, newsletter-format publication. The considerably shorter issues were reflective of my declining interest in certain aspects of fanzine production. I handled all the typing, layout, copying, publicity, subscriptions and distribution. It proved to be a heavy workload for one person to manage. 

TSV would almost certainly have ended after its first half dozen issues if it was not for a trio of Christchurch-based fans - Andrew Poulsen, Scott Walker and Kay Lilley - who, in early 1988, established the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club (NZDWFC). The club was getting started just as I was thinking about ending TSV. They had a club, I had an established fanzine - it was an ideal match. The club adopted TSV with my blessing, picking up the numbered issues where I left off.

Although I was happy to relinquish the editorship, my interest in writing about Doctor Who was undiminished. I was a frequent contributor to TSV over the next few years and produced several side-projects which were published as special issues by the NZDWFC. I also helped organise a local Auckland chapter of the club, which held a series of extremely well-attended video days.

Things came  unstuck in late 1990 when the Christchurch-based club went seriously into deficit over the running of WhoCon, a Doctor Who fan convention. The event was undoubtedly a success from the point of view of attendees but in the aftermath of this event, none of the organisers had much enthusiasm for remaining involved in running the club or TSV. 

So I volunteered to step in. It was clear to me that, even if the club’s leadership was in disarray, the organisation still had a large following among New Zealand fans and it would have been a terrible shame to let that die off. Having helped run the local chapter for a couple of years, I had built up a circle of Auckland-based fan friends who were willing to assist with getting the club back on its feet and it was possible to delegate some of the tasks involved in producing TSV.

I ran the club and edited TSV for the next fifteen years, seeing them both through a period often referred to as the ‘Wilderness Years’, that lengthy gap when Doctor Who was not being produced as a regular, ongoing television series.

In 2005, just as the new television series revival was gathering pace, I stepped down as editor and passed responsibility for the fanzine on to Adam McGechan, who had tailed me on TSV for a few issues and proved himself a capable successor. Adam produced six issues between 2005 and 2009, giving TSV a fresh new look and bringing in a number of new contributors. Meanwhile, I continued to oversee the club, and managed the printing and distribution of TSV.

TSV #76, which was to be Adam’s last issue, came out in March 2009. Adam later decided to step down as editor. Writing as Adam Christopher, he has subsequently pursued a career as a novelist with his first novel Empire State published at the beginning of this year. 

Meanwhile, I found paid work as a writer. I was commissioned to write the production information subtitles for a number of stories in the BBC Doctor Who DVD range. I was also contracted by UK publisher Telos to write a guide to the Doctor Who comic strips. Both opportunities arose because the respective editors were familiar with the quality of my work from reading TSV.

Due to these professional writing commitments, coupled with the demands of managing a small business (Retrospace Sci-Fi Collectibles) with my wife Rochelle, TSV has been on an extended hiatus for three years now. I continue to keep a watchful eye on the club, which has a constant presence through its website and online discussion forum.

I haven't given up on TSV. I very much want to see it continue. I have ideas for what I would like to do with the next issue. I would have liked to have had this out in time for TSV’s twenty-fifth anniversary, but this simply hasn’t been possible to organise. 

So I’ll have to settle for marking this milestone by announcing that plans are underway for TSV’s return. Stay tuned!