TSV 60

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

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

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

The Listener (13 May 2000).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the issue here.

Fellow TSV 60 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

TSV 59

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the issue here.

Fellow TSV 59 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

TSV 58

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the issue here.

Fellow TSV 58 bloggers
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

TSV 57

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read TSV 57 here

Fellow TSV 57 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

TSV 55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read TSV 55 here.

Fellow TSV 55 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

TSV 54

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TSV 54 was reviewed in Doctor Who Magazine issue 267:

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

Read TSV 54 here.

Fellow TSV 54 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright

TSV 53

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tune in next month for TSV 54!

Read TSV 53 here.

Fellow TSV 53 bloggers:
Alden Bates
Jamas Enright