Yesterday, while searching for something else I came across five one-paragraph ideas for Doctor Who audiobooks that I submitted on Sunday, 15 November 2009, a few hours before settling down to watch The Waters of Mars.
One of the five ideas is striking. I had no idea at the time that Amy’s Choice had been commissioned for the 2010 TV series and this was all a long time before the Dream Crabs featured in Last Christmas (2014). But, by total coincidence, I came up with something a bit similar:
Perfect Worlds
A sort of ghost story. Amy and the Doctor rescue each other from their dreams. After finally leaving the Doctor behind, Amy is back home with her friends – human ones and those she’s met on her adventures with the Doctor. It’s a nice day and there’s a big party. But some of the friends she knows are really dead. And then the Doctor comes to see her. He explains she’s asleep, she’s been bitten by something that’s feeding off her dreams – and is slowly killing her. He’s using a machine to speak to her: and by willing to wake up she can. The Doctor shows her the small, scaly creature feeding on their desires. And it bites him. Amy now has to go rescue him… He dreams of his own home and the thousands of people who he couldn’t save, all living happily together. Amy talks him out of staying.
This happens quite a lot: more than once I’ve been told I can’t do X or Y in a Doctor Who story because someone else is already doing it or something like it in another story I didn’t know about. As an editor and producer, I’ve sometimes had to tell people the same thing. There is a lot of Doctor Who being dreamt up all the time, so it’s not really surprising.
But on this particular occasion I don’t think I was made aware that I’d chanced upon the wheeze of a forthcoming TV episode. And by the time Amy’s Choice was broadcast on 15 May 2010, I’d forgotten having a similar idea.
That’s probably because I was a bit caught up in other things at the time. But it’s also how pitching works: if the people you’re pitching aren’t enthused by what you send in, you send in something else. Ideas are the easy bit. If there’s interest in an idea you then move on to the trickier thing of developing it into a storyline.
But I realise (having had it pointed out) that I then worked some of this Perfect Worlds idea into The Anachronauts, released in January 2012. In fact, another of the pitches sent in with Perfect Worlds was called The Deluge and reworked an outline for a Doctor Who novel I’d submitted in the early 2000s. That idea eventually ended up as The Flood, an episode of my science-fiction series Graceless, released in December 2011.
The three other ideas — Snip! Snip!, 77 Aliens and The Brain Drain — might still find homes somewhere… Never throw anything away, Harry.
This morning, out for a walk, I puzzled over where the wheeze for Perfect Worlds came from in the first place. At the time, one trick I used for sparking ideas was to scan over my shelves of books and DVDs. It wasn’t always to come up with, “A Doctor Who version of X…” Often just being reminded of a scene, a character, a line of dialogue would ignite something.
With that in mind, I think Perfect Worlds was probably inspired by the 1986 movie Labyrinth, especially the “As The World Falls Down” sequence at the ball — hence Amy being at a party — and the bit when Sarah thinks she is back in her room but it’s yet another trick. She has to puzzle out, for herself, the difference between the comforting and the real…
Maybe I’d been told, or picked up somewhere, that the 2010 series of Doctor Who would have something of a fairy-tale feel. If so, I was trying to get myself in the right kind of head space to match that — and that’s why this idea came so close to what they were already doing.
