Scourge of the Cybermen

Feast your eyeballs on this glorious cover by Claudia Gironi for Doctor Who and the Scourge of the Cybermen, a six-hour original audio novel I've written which will be out in July. Cybermen and sunflowers, what more could you want?

The novel is read by Jon Culshaw, with Cyber voices done by Nick Briggs. The script editor was Roland Moore and the director David Richardson.

I'm delighted that it's Jon Culshaw on this as his perfect reading of Death to The Daleks has been a big influence here - that novelisation (of a 1974 TV story) had always been one of my favourites, and I hope what I've typed has a similar feel.

Costume design in Doctor Who

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition focuses on costume design - an often neglected aspect of a series that has otherwise been studied exhaustively.

Running through the special is a decade-by-decade history of costume in the series written by Piers Britton, co-author of the seminal academic study Reading between Designs: Visual Imagery and the Generation of Meaning in The Avengers, The Prisoner and Doctor Who (2003), and its full of gems like the way Sandra Reid had to find plausible ways to put companions from Earth's past into more contemporary clothes.

"Her solution for Victoria, in the character's second serial, The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967), was especially clever. Details of Victoria's original crinoline, with its ruffled bodice, were echoed in a demurely knee-skimming mini-dress, made from a very similar sprigged material but embellished with knife pleats, rather than ruffles, running from shoulder to belt." (p. 8)

The special also includes interviews with costume designers and actors from the series. I spoke to four of the Doctor's travelling companions from contemporary Earth: Anneke Wills (Polly, 1966-7); Katy Manning (Josephine Grant, 1971-3, 2010); Sophie Aldred (Ace, 1987-9); Jackie Tyler (Camille Coduri, 2005-6, 2008, 2010). I also spoke to fan Tim Wearing, who happens to own his favourite costume from all of Doctor Who.

This all dovetails with my ongoing work for the Doctor Who Figurine Collection, where I'm writing 1,200 words for each of the characters I'm assigned from the whole history of the series - as well as longer pieces for the Companion Set issues focused on Doctors and their companions. Here's a list of the issues of Doctor Who Figurine Collection I've written.

Doctor Who and the Paper Dolls

Praise the company! I've just been sent my first copy of Doctor Who - Paper Dolls, the book I've co-written with Christel Dee and magnificently illustrated by Ben Morris. It's out in shops soon.

40 long

Just back from a shopping trip to buy a linen suit. I used to have a linen suit, but it was one of the things that got pinched by burglars in 2003. Being the strangely tall sort of fellow that I am, either the culprit was an Ourang-Outang or they just liked the fancy suit bag. So this morning my sister - the tailor - and her friend S. accompanied me round lots of shops telling me what to do.

We tried Moss Bros and Marks and High and Mighty and The Suit Company and John Lewis, and maybe some other ones as well, but ultimately Next had a 40 long jacket and matching 34 long trousers. I tell myself the £110 is some kind of investment.

Despite the longness of the clothes, they still need adjusting. This is due to my Ourang-Outang genes topped up with lashings of monkey serum. The sister is going to unpick the hems and do some clever sewing. But how exciting to discover that we had such problems finding the right sizes because I'm otherwise quite a fashionable shape.

Scribbled several pages of incomprehensible nonsense into my notebook on the way and way back, which I now need to hack away into the computer before rushing off to another engagement. But in the meantime, my friend R. (whose innards I stole for Markwood in The Lost Museum) sent me this: