With Dalek expert Gav Rymill, I’ve written 28 entries on different models of Dalek, charting their evolution from the very first Dalek story in 1963-64 to their more recent full episode, 2022’s Eve of the Daleks. There are some new facts and insights included, such as my outlandish theory about when and why writer Terry Nation decided to make them look the way they do.
Each entry is illustrated with a CG rendering of the particular model by Chris Thompson.
"a perfect gift for curious minds, young and old alike."
Out today, The Story of the Solar System - A Visual Journey, is a sumptuous big book of space infographics written by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock off of The Sky at Night with some help by me and design/illustration by Emma Price. Exactly what you and everyone you know wants for Christmas, if you even dare wait that long.
There's also a review of Deathworld, the story I script edited for Big Finish, which Jamie Lenman finds "surprising, and really quite touching". In Galaxy Forum, reader Bill Silver says nice things about the work Gav Rymill, Rhys Williams and I did on recreating the sets of missing episodes in the recent special issue.
And I think Eddie Robson's fun "This month in..." column (p. 49) uses an image of Doctor Who creators Sydney Newman and Donald Wilson that I spotted in an old issue of BBC in-house magazine Ariel, snapped on my phone and then cropped - those are Judi Dench's hands (and wine glass) in the bottom left.
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| Aerial, December 1967 |
Cut to the Chase, pp. 20-23
To accompany CG recreations by Gav Rymil, me and Rhys Williams detail the Dalek Pursuit Ship, mentioned in episodes 3-5 of The Daleks's Master Plan and then seen in episode 6, "Coronas of the Sun".
The Hole Story, pp. 32-35
There are 97 missing episodes of Doctor Who and, to date, 786 episodes existing in the BBC archives. But there are still bits missing from the latter - stuff broadcast but since lost, and stuff recorded but never shown...
The Final Countdown, pp. 44-49
Gav, Rhys and me again, this time on the sets for the last of the missing episodes, The Space Pirates Episode 6.
We've previously recreated sets from a bunch of missing episodes, so here's the list so far:
The new DWM also has news of something I've been involved in: six boxes of papers belonging to the late David Whitaker - first story editor of and prolific writer for Doctor Who - have been donated by his niece Melanie to the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York. The Borthwick Institute website boasts more details and a catalogue of the David Whitaker archive. I've also written a piece on the papers in this collection relating to Doctor Who for DWM's Print the Legend special, currently in shops.
The Borthwick Institute is a very good fit for these papers because it already holds similar collections, including an archive relating to David's great friend producer Ernest Maxin. I visited the archive while researching my biography of David, as Maxin had kept two of his unproduced screenplays (see Maxin, box 14). I'm grateful to Gary Brannan at the institute for all his help.
My two bits are:
pp. 18-21 Script to Manuscript: David Whitaker
The influences on Whitaker that helps to ensure the Doctor Who novelisations began at such a high standard, with some stuff I've picked up from my research into Garry Halliday as well as a previously unpublished photograph of Whitaker with Vincent Price.
pp. 22-23 The Final Chapter
Details of the Doctor Who related paperwork loaned to me by Whitaker's niece Melanie, including - reproduced in full - the surviving first page of his unfinished novelisation of The Enemy of the World, with permission of Whitaker's estate.
See also my biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television.
That's followed by "Baby Love", in which I talk to the team about realising the episode's diminutive guest stars. There will be more from me about Space Babies later in the year...
And then, in "Music's Gonna Flood Back In!" - a line cut from towards the end of the final version of The Devil's Chord, fact fans - I interview Sam Dinley, music assistant to Doctor Who composer Murray Gold.
The guard turns out to have strong opinions on the matter and the Doctor is soon out of his depth:
GUARD
You've no idea what a relief it is for me to have such a stimulating philosophical discussion — there are so few intellectuals about these days. Tell me, what do you think of the assertion that the semiotic thickness of a performed text varies according to the redundancy of auxiliary performance codes?
DOCTOR WHOYes.
Doctor Who and the Dragonfire by Ian Briggs (1987)
The question is drawn directly from an academic book on Doctor Who, in a section applying some ideas originated by Keir Elam — now professor of English literature at the University of Bologna.
“What Elam calls the semiotic ‘thickness’ (multiple codes) of a performed text varies according to the ‘redundancy’ (high predictability) of ‘auxiliary’ performance codes.”
While this might at first seem impenetrable, authors John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado immediately unpick its meaning.
“Thus, for instance, if the sets, music and so on were simply to reinforce the actors’ performance without adding to it or inflecting it in the direction of new associations, but simply overlaid the acted ‘pace’ and ‘drama’ with their own, they would be relatively redundant, serving only to bind together the text’s temporal unfolding. On the other hand, in the Williams/Adams story, City of Death, the use of music and sets in the scenes featuring the Count and Countess was more entropic, drawing on motifs which some audience members recognised as ‘very forties’, and therefore potentially relocating the stolen art theme in terms of, say, The Maltese Falcon.” (The Unfolding Text, p. 249)
In fact, the production of Dragonfire might have learned something from this and benefited from the same kind of added richness.
I’ve been busy over the past fortnight researching and writing a bunch of things and The Unfolding Text has been useful on more than one. First published in 1983 to coincide with Doctor Who’s 20th anniversary (so covering what’s now one-third of Doctor Who’s history), it was part of a “communications and culture” range published by Macmillan and executive edited by Stuart Hall and Paul Walton. Alongside The Unfolding Text were an academic study of James Bond and titles such as The Politics of Information, Culture and Control and Reproduction Ideologies.
My memory of the book, having read it while doing English Literary Studies at UCLAN in the last millennium, was that it’s heavy going, that sentence spoofed in Dragonfire representative of the whole. There’s certainly a lot of technical language but this time I found it all enjoyably gossipy.
The authors spoke to cast and crew from the past and then-present of Doctor Who, and attended rehearsals and recording of the 1982 story Kinda. Their media studies approach is quite different from the interviews published in fanzines, Doctor Who Magazine and other sources from the time, which tended to focus on what happened when, building up a timeline of production. Here, we get deeper insights into the thinking behind creative choices and a sense of what these mean. That’s especially revealing when people involved in making Doctor Who talk about stories they didn’t work on.
How fascinating, for example, to hear Douglas Adams — script editor on Doctor Who 1978-79 before becoming the best-selling author of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — explain why he didn’t like Logopolis (1981), written by his successor.
“In comparison to what we were doing, the new ones [episodes] are terribly, terribly slow. We seem to have endless, endless wanderings round and round the same point. I think that, in the time we were there, there was this sheer weight of ideas we managed to pack in — the sheer number of events and things going on … In contrast, in Logopolis we … did seem to spend ages and ages wandering around and around and around the interior of the TARDIS.” (pp. 219-220)
Then there’s where all this wandering led. Adams says he'd expended considerable energy in clarifying the “final threat” of any given story and “what the villain actually wants” (p. 170). He could see that reintroducing the Master — in the story preceding Logopolis — made plotting much simpler because he’s effectively the “guy in the black hat” and we can take for granted that he’s up to something bad.
“But to my mind that in the end means ‘boring’ because why does a guy want to take over the universe? … At the end of Logopolis suddenly you had the Master broadcasting a message to the entire universe, which to me just doesn’t mean anything. There’s nothing you can visualise there, and there’s nothing that actually has any meaning in any real world.” (p. 171)
Logopolis still haunts my imagination but it’s fascinating to hear Adams explain what he saw as fundamental shortcomings, the issue of tangibility illuminating his time on the series and the stories that followed. The sense is that, had he stayed in post, he wouldn’t have commissioned Logopolis. And he could critique the story because, even after leaving Doctor Who, he kept on watching and puzzling over how to make it work.
So, these interviews offer us authoritative insight into Doctor Who. Yet there’s something odd about the authority of this book. I’m especially conscious of this as the author of books and magazine articles about Doctor Who, and rereading The Unfolding Text has sparked a whole load of thoughts about my approach to authority.
For example, in citing Adams, the authors of The Unfolding Text repeatedly refer to him as “Doug”. How we refer to people has an impact on the way we perceive what they say. “Doug” is not Adams’s name professionally — he was always credited as “Douglas” — and I’d never heard him referred to “Doug” elsewhere. That suggested that the authors were on particularly close terms with Adams, which might then explain why he’d been so candid. My sense of the authors’ authority was coloured by the way they used his name.
But I checked with Kevin Davies, editor of last year’s best-selling 42: The Wildly Improbably Ideas of Douglas Adams, who’d known Adams very well. And he told me that, no, Douglas wasn’t “Doug":
“I think it’s safe to assume the Unfolding Text guys didn’t really know him.”
And that recolours my sense of authority here: if the authors got that wrong, what else might not be right?
While the authors clearly had access to production and many members of the cast and crew, they lacked access to archive materials more readily available now. That leads to some errors of fact.
“Though Donald Wilson, head of series/serials, also hated the [first] Dalek story, Lambert went ahead on the grounds that the next planned story, Marco Polo, was not ready.” (p. 42)
For one thing, Wilson was head of serials — there was a separate head of series at the time. For another, Lambert wouldn’t have considered replacing Marco Polo with the Dalek story. When it began, Doctor Who alternated historical stories with sci-fi, so you couldn’t swap one for the other. In fact, the first Dalek story was brought forward to replace a serial then called The Robots.
Besides, I think the above is cribbing from a mistaken belief among fans that two-part The Edge of Destruction was commissioned at late notice to fit between the Dalek story and Marco Polo because of delays on the latter. We now know from contemporary paperwork held in the BBC Written Archives Centre that that isn’t what happened at all — which I go into at inordinate length in my recent book for the Black Archive.
The most striking issue of access in The Unfolding Text is how little the authors have been able to see of old episodes on which to base their judgements. Chapter 1 devotes a lot of time to the very first 25-minute episode, An Unearthly Child (1963), and a similar level of depth is given in Chapter 6 to the Fifth Doctor story Kinda (1982). Coverage of the Fourth and Fifth Doctor’s eras is pretty wide-ranging, I suspect because it’s a recent memory for the authors and those they spoke to rather than that they went back and watched episodes anew. Discussion of the Second and Third Doctors’ eras is predominately focused on one story each, neither of them particularly representative of that period of Doctor Who. From the index:
‘Krotons, The’ 61, 69, 74-81, 91-7
‘Monster of Peladon, The’ 9, 52-4, 86-91, 106, 114, 182-3, 188, 224, 280
How different things are today, with almost all of Doctor Who up on iPlayer for researchers to research and for readers to check. It's also easier to check the correct titles of stories — The Unfolding Text refers to Masque of Mandragola and Castravalva on occasion, but also spells them correctly on others. And it attributes a line of dialogue to the wrong production team:
“With the exception of the Troughton era, Doctor Who has fundamentally adhered to the original brief of Verity Lambert and David Whittaker (sic) that the Doctor should appear as a ‘citizen of the universe and a gentleman to boot’.” (p. 100)
I don’t mean to nit-pick: it’s more that these things all illuminate something I’m very aware of at the moment — how access to old episodes is changing the ways that fans can and do engage with Doctor Who’s rich history. In what I write now, I can direct readers to watch episodes for themselves rather than spelling out what happens, and I can leave them to judge for themselves rather than offering an opinion. It’s a surrender or sharing of authority. But that also makes me realise how seldom The Unfolding Text provides synopses of the stories it mentions, given readers at the time were generally unable to see them again. We must take these authors on trust.
Some of the people interviewed hold pretty sexist views, not least on the role of the Doctor’s companions. This can be very revealing about what made it to the screen. Sometimes the authors also challenge the people interviewed but I think there’s a danger that things said by cast and crew then inform or even dictate the analysis.
For example, producer John Nathan Turner explains how the regular characters in the 1982 series were designed to appeal to a broad audience:
“We’ve got the young heroic Doctor who hopefully appeals to everyone, especially the ladies. We have a female companion called Tegan, who is 24, nice figure, nice legs who appeals to the men. And we have two young companions, Adric and Nyssa, who are both 18-19 and are there for audience identification — the younger audience.” (p. 207)
This is very different to what he inherited a year before from Douglas Adams and producer Graham Williams. Indeed, Nathan Turner thought that the mature, knowledgeable line-up of the Fourth Doctor, Romana and K-9 was “ludicrous”.
“There was no reason for the Doctor ever to have to explain anything to Romana. So that all conversation between them either became very bitchy to impart the plot, or else it was an unreasonable scene where the Doctor has to say, ‘Well, there’s part of your education that you don’t know about, and here it is…’” (p. 217)
When, exactly, is Romana “bitchy”? With episodes now readily available, we can go look for ourselves. Without them, we can only go on Nathan Turner’s say-so.
To be fair, the authors dig into these claims a bit, citing his “nice figure, nice legs” comment twice on the same page before asking him if there had been only tokenistic development of female companions.
“I don’t think it’s tokenism. Certainly the feminists would like Tegan. It just makes for greater drama between your regulars if you’ve got an aggressive girl who tends to think she knows best. It’s not tokenism in any way. It just makes for a better line-up if there is friction.” (p. 218)
But that doesn’t really square with what he said before, which the authors don't really address. Worse, I think, is that The Unfolding Text pursues a line of analysis directed by what they’ve been told and the terminology used.
“In … his second season, Nathan-Turner also reintroduced the 1963 element of Doctor and companions who don’t always ‘get on with one another’ but — very consciously — for ‘character’ rather than ‘bitchy’ reasons. … As with Barbara and Ian [in the 1960s], Tegan’s ‘bitching’ relationship with the Doctor was generated by his inability to return her [home].” (p. 217)
Even in quotations, it’s deploying “bitchy” as objective rather than objectionable. Do Barbara and Ian have a “bitching” relationship with the Doctor? How does the “friction” generated by “aggressive” Tegan differ from the “bitchy” Romana? Is that really the word to use? Go watch those episodes again and I think the answers are no, no and no.
There are new interviews including Richard Unwin's chat with Louise Jameson and Matthew Waterhouse, Robbie Dunlop's chat with Janet Ellis and Graham Kibble-White's chat with Dave Gibbons. Robbie also met with June Hudson, the costume designer of the burgundy version of the Fourth Doctor's costume seen in his final year in the programme, and with Mark Barton Hill who now owns that coat. How lovely to see a photo of the label, with Tom Baker's name written in under the address of Morris Angel & Son Ltd, the costume house Hudson employed to cut the coat.
It's prompted me to post on the Koquillion site the article I wrote about the Fourth Doctor's Season 18 costume and my chat with Ron Davies who cut the coat.
I've also got two pieces in the new special edition:
pp. 22-25 The Doctor Who Wasn't
A very different version of the Fourth Doctor can be glimpsed in surviving draft scripts and other evidence.
p. 82 Many Happy Returns
He left our screens after 1981's Logopolis - or did he? The Fourth Doctor was never far away.
I've written the preview of Episode 1, Space Babies (pp. 14-15), and spoke to writer and executive producer Russell T Davies about this completely nuts story (to quote the preview), ahead of a post-broadcast set report next issue.
I've also written Who Crew: Second Brain (pp. 36-37), in which I spoke to Sharon King and Jess Gardner, co-producers on next year's series of Doctor Who.
Then there's Script to Screen: Jimbo (pp. 38-41), featuring some of the team behind the chonky robot seen in last year's Wild Blue Yonder: production designer Phil Sims, concept artist Nandor Moldovan, prop modeller head of department Barry Jones, and puppeteers Brian Fisher and Eliot Gibbins.
pp. 26-27 Who crew: A head of schedule
An interview with executive assistant Sophie-May Twose.
pp. 28-34 Script to screen: Stooky Bill and family
An in-depth feature on the development of the puppets seen in last year's special episode The Giggle, in which I speak to executive producer Joel Collins, production designer Phil Sims, head of department modeller and fabrication manager Barry Jones, director of Automatik VFX Seb Barker, puppeteers Olivia Racionzer and Eliot Gibbins, and actress Leigh Lothian who played the voice of Stooky Sue.
pp. 36-37 Gallifrey Rises
My report on last month's Gallifrey One convention in Los Angeles, including interviews with programme director Shaun Lyon, Star Trek writer David Gerrold, and fans Erika and Katarina.
pp. 14-20 Script to Screen: The Goblin Crew
In a deep-dive feature on the creation of the goblins and their king for Christmas episode The Church on Ruby Road, I spoke to executive producer Joel Collins, production designer Phil Sims, Neill Gorton from Millennium FX and Will Cohen from Milk VFX.
pp. 36-37 Can You Fix It?
An interview with director's assistant Abdoul Ceesay.
p. 82 Insufficient Data: Sunday Supplemental
A new infographic by me and Roger Langridge exploring the issue of Sundays in Doctor Who - and Doctor Who on Sundays.
The new issue features some bits by me:
pp. 32-27 Tower of Strength
I spoke to production designer Phil Sims about UNIT Tower (aka The Penguin), as featured in The Giggle last year and due to be seen again later this year.
pp. 46-47 The Lonely Nights of the Long-Distance Runner
An interview with production runner Thani Subkhi.
p. 82 Sufficient Data - Take Cover!
An infographic of DWM cover stars over the past 600 issues. Sadly, this will be the last Sufficient Data illustrated by brilliant Ben Morris, who I've worked with since our days together on Doctor Who Adventures a thousand years ago. We've collaborated all sorts of fun stuff, including our book Whographica with Steve O'Brien, and Ben even laid out my family tree as a gift for my parents. Thanks Ben, for everything.
Among the myriad treats in the same issue, I was especially taken by Jason Quinn's interview with digital archivist Helen Randle from BBC Library and Curatorial Services, talking about the wealth of old paperwork - memos, sketches and sheet music - that is being unearthed and shared. You can dig into this stuff in The story of Doctor Who from the BBC archives, and click "follow" to get notified of updates. It's even available outside the UK.
On pages 42 and 43, there's my interview with post-production producer Ceres Doyle (who has worked on Doctor Who since 2004) and post-production supervisor Liv Duffin, who I spoke to in October.
There's also a nice review by Jamie Lenman of Whotopia, the book I worked on with Jonathan Morris and Una McCormack.
I've got one thing in this issue: the latest Sufficient Data infographic takes us right back to the beginning of Doctor Who, with everything we know takes place in the Doctor's life before the first TV episode.
But there's also handsome adverts for my two new books, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television and Whotopia - The Ultimate Guide to the Whoniverse. In fact, I only realise now, with everything put out on iPlayer, that our new book is the perfect guide to all these episodes, providing loads of ways into it. How clever, and they didn't tell us!
The Doctor Who Magazine website also has a competition to win a copy of Whotopia, open until 8 December. Good luck!
I've a handful of things in the new issue. As well as featuring (for the third time) as one of the beauties on page 3 (see below), there's also a news item about my forthcoming book David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television and the launch for it to be held at the Portico Library on 9 November.
On pages 38 and 39, there's "Effective Management", my interview with VFX editor Matt Nathan - the latest of a regular series in which I pester members of the crew. On page 48, there's the first of a new regular feature by me, "Stasis Cube", devoted to a frozen instant in time (in old money, a "photograph") which is bigger on the inside. It's inspired by the series of blog posts I did 10 years ago, starting with an arresting image from the first episode of Doctor Who.
Finally, on page 82, there's the latest "Sufficient Data" infographic, illustrated by Roger Langridge and this time devoted to the number of original instalments of comic strip per incarnation of the Doctor published in DWM over the past 44 years. My post on how I worked out the last "Sufficient Data" seemed to go down well, so here's some more faff about this one.
Deputy editor Peter Ware suggested something related to DWM comic strips to tie in with coverage of The Star Beast. After a bit of thinking, I shared a picture of the "tree maps" we'd used as chapter title pages in our infographics book Whographica, with boxes of different sizes corresponding to the relative number of pages each chapter had.
This seemed a big ask of the poor artist, so I also suggested that some of the less well represented Doctors might be in silhouette, or in some cases we could use pre-existing artwork from respective eras, blown up in a Pop Art / Roy Lichtenstein way - a David Gibbons Fourth Doctor, a John Ridgway Seventh Doctor, etc. The decision was made to produce one big bit of artwork crowded with 15 Doctors.
With that basic idea approved, I then had to decide exactly what I was measuring.
Editor Marcus Hearn asked for the focus to be on strips from DWM. That was a relief given the volume of comic strips produced by other people. But even this "simple" data set included complications. For example, the first instalment of Ninth Doctor strip Monstrous Beauty wasn't published in a regular issue of DWM but an accompanying supplement. I thought we should include it because it came as part of the package that came with issue #556, so was part of the whole. Marcus went further and asked me to include associated publications. I dug through boxes of old issues working out what this would comprise, and made a list of original comic strips featured in DWM Special Editions, Yearbooks, Storybooks and the 2006 Annual.
DWM has sometimes reprinted comic strips and it didn't seem fair to include the same strip more than once. I initially suggested that they had to be "new to DWM", which meant including in our count some strips first published in Incredible Hulk Presents (Hunger from the Ends of Time! in DWM #157 and #158) and TV Comic (Flower Power in #307). But that surely meant we also had to include all the strips reprinted in Doctor Who Classic Comics, which would have sizeably skewed the figures. We decided to exclude all reprints.
I initially thought I'd count pages of comic strip per Doctor. This proved something of a headache. The very first issue of DWM, then called Doctor Who Weekly, is a good case in point:
Depending on the answers to the above questions, the Fourth Doctor appears in four, five, six, seven, eight, nine or ten pages of comic strip in this single issue. (Plus there's a photograph of him with a comic-strip style speech bubble.)
If we count pages in which the Doctor appears, things are also complicated by some plot lines where what looks like the Doctor turns out not to be - for example, with the "Nick Briggs" incarnation in Wormwood (DWM #262-#265). There are also strips where events depicted are a dream, such as in The Land of Happy Endings (DWM #337).
Comics material in back issues of DWM also included Lee Sullivan's half-page comic strips advertising Big Finish releases, produced in the same style as his work for the regular DWM strip. If we included those, then why not the comic-style illustrations of text stories or reviews? Given the DWW/DWM regular comic strip can be funny and satirical, was there also a case for including the Quinn and Howett / Nix View / Jamie Lenman / Lew Stringer joke strips? Should I also include pages of comic strip published by DWM/Panini as extra material in collected editions - such as artwork showing the newly regenerated Ninth Doctor featured in the book version of The Flood?
The thing is, there's a useful precedent here. There's a canon of Doctor Who TV episodes, though they can considerably vary in length, and we know which mini-episodes and sketches don't count, however much they might feature the right actors in character tied into the lore. The Five Doctors is an episode and Time Crash isn't. On the same basis as producing infographics on episode numbers, I focused on numbers of instalments of DWM strip.
Even then, I puzzled over how to include Evening's Empire. The first instalment of this was published in DWM #180, then the rest of it failed to appear until published in compendium form some years later. The compendium version used the same artwork from the first instalment but amended some captions and dialogue - so did that make them "original" rather than reprints, meaning they should be counted twice?
Do the collected editions of Evening's Empire and of The Age of Chaos count as one instalment each, or do I count them by the number of episodes/chapters they comprise? Dividing them up was surely counting the format for publication as originally intended rather than how these stories were actually published.
Since we were including Yearbooks and Storybooks published by DWM/Panini, should I also have included the comic strip from Doctor Who Adventures - but only during the period it was published by Panini?
We haggled over this to come up with a discrete set of data from which we could produce a set of different-sized boxes without requiring too many footnotes, which are always a problem to squeeze in to a single-page infographic. We handed this all to Roger Langridge, and he's made it look amazing.
Accompanying this, there's a feature by Laurel Hart in praise of Mel. Plus there's the regular "Sufficient Data" infographic by me and Ben Morris, this time detailing Mel's myriad screams.
A few people have asked about methodology and what these things actually involve. So...
Much as I wish it had all been my idea, editor Marcus Hearn proposed an infographic based on Mel's screams to tie in with the rest of the issue, and suggested I look at waveforms and decibels. After some time trying to dig into that myself, I called in the technical genius of Nimbos who ran a spectral analysis of Mel's first three screams from the closing moments of Part Nine of The Trial of a Time Lord.
In the graph above, the vertical Y axis shows frequency in Hertz and the colour represents volume in decibels. The first scream, circled on the left, begins at about 3,000 Hz and then drops to about 2,000 Hz - roughly moving from a C note to a B. More or less the same thing happens in the second scream, circled to the right of the first scream and in the centre of the image. A third scream, circled to the right of this, seems to be a partial repeat of the second scream, presumably to extend it and added in the edit.
Below this, also circled on the right of the graph, is the start of the closing theme. At 988 Hz, this is a B, so Bonnie pitched her screams an octave above this, starting at C and then descending to B to segue neatly into the theme music, as per the instruction from director Chris Clough.
In each scream, the volume peaks at about -28 dB, though obviously volume is dependent on the setting of your speakers. But how loud a scream sounds to us can also be affected by context, and note how much other sound - or orange - there is going on at the same time: incidental music, explosions, and yet the screams are distinct.
When we compare screams from episodes, the context can be different - for example, without incidental music or explosions. That means a scream might sound very different, and yet turns out to be at a similar pitch and volume. Other factors that might affect what we're measuring include how sound was originally recorded, how that's been adjusted for the Blu-ray releases we worked from, and how the sound may be compressed or otherwise affected in undertaking this kind of analysis.
Accepting the potential margins of error, we at least had a starting point for comparison with other episodes. This, for example, is the spectrum for Mel's screams while trapped in the Rani's bubble trap in Part Two of Time and the Rani:
It comprises more but shorter screams, and the context of music and sound effects is different, so this graph is very different from the last one. Yet the screams (outlined in the green box) are all at about 2,200 Hz, and many feature the same kind of pitch shift from C to B as we saw before. The context is different in these two episodes but Mel's screams are very similar.
In fact, across her tenure in Doctor Who, Mel's screams are impressively consistent. Unfortunately for me, that means the data is not sufficiently varied to make for an interesting infographic.
While Nimbos worked diligently on this spectral analysis, I watched every one of Mel's episodes, skipping forward to the scenes in which she appeared to note the time and duration of all screams. This raised some issues over the precise criteria for defining a scream. Screams often occur right at the end of an episode and so are included in the recap at the start of the next episode - should those be counted once or twice? There are occasions when Mel cries out warnings or shouts things like "Nooo!" - but do those count as screams? There are also instances when, because of music, sound effects or other activity on screen, I couldn't be certain if Mel was screaming or not. I could identify the start and end of some screams to the accuracy of a tenth of a second but others are clouded by surrounding noise and I needed a consistent approach - ultimately deciding to round up each scream to the nearest full second.
These factors then had to be relayed in the infographic, in as few words as possible.
Having gone through the episodes twice to ensure the data was right, I then had to come up with a way to present the result visually in an engaging way, led by a new and striking illustration. It's difficult to do this until you have the data in front of you and a sense of its scale, range, peaks and troughs.
I usually sketch some rough ideas before settling on something to include with my written-up brief for the illustrator, so that queries or objections can be raised before it gets laid out. Sometimes this takes a while - and the solution then springs to mind as I'm doing the washing up. But the way to convey this particular data set presented itself during my watch-through and I mocked up the following:
As Ben Morris worked on that, it became evident that showing both time of screams and duration made things too cluttered. That meant further revising the data set to trim down the text presented. Then assistant editor Peter Ware had to point out, with heroic tact, that I'd cut one small bit we needed. Eek!
The result seems to have gone down well. If you like this sort of thing, there's a new "Sufficient Data" infographic every four weeks in DWM. You can still buy Whographica, a book of Doctor Who infographics, by me, Steve O'Brien and Ben Morris. Steve and I also wrote a book of infographics about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Oh, and you might like to read my own interview with Bonnie Langford for DWM in 2014.
