"a perfect gift for curious minds, young and old alike."
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 |
The obvious influence, of course, is the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet, which the BBC broadcast at 6.35 pm on Wednesday 6 November 1974 - just right to inspire the development of the Doctor Who stories that became Planet of Evil and The Brain of Morbius. I dig into that and also how the same film influenced early Doctor Who as well as other sci-fi such as Star Trek (citing the excellent ‘Gene Roddenberry’s Cinematic Influences’ by Michael Kmet from 2013) and Star Wars (see the 2012 Wired interview, ‘Ben Burtt on Star Wars, Forbidden Planet and the Sound of Sci-Fi’ y Geeta Dayal).
Hinchcliffe says on the documentary made for the DVD release of Planet of Evil (by my friend Ed Stradling) that he suggested the ‘flying eye’ drone seen in the story, having read of something similar in a science-fiction story at the time. The Dictionary of Surveillance Terms in Science Fiction at the Technovelgy site helped me suggest some candidates for that story.
I also mention Isaac Asimov’s own timeline-of-the-future for his various short stories and novels, which I drew from ‘A page from Isaac Asimov’s notebook’, Thrilling Wonder Stories, vol. 44 #3 (Winter 1955), p. 63.
Edited by Gary Russell and published by Gareth Kavanagh at Roundel Books, you can buy The DNA of Doctor Who - The Philip Hinchcliffe Years from the Cutaway Comics site.
A few things strike me this time round. First, the number of times that Bilbo Baggins is referred to as "queer", Tolkien of course meaning strange or eccentric. I don't think I've ever seen a reading of Bilbo as gay but there are various bits of circumstantial evidence here and The Lords of the Rings to support it. That in turn informs a story about close male friendships, through thick and thin.
The older I get, the more fascinated I am by Gandalf, this benign, wise figure trying to sort out a hundred different bits of shit all at once. Having never had much interest in the expanded lore, this time I hung on all the little hints about what Gandalf gets up to after leaving Bilbo and the dwarves at Milkwood, and goes off to deal with a Necromancer. I now know from the film versions of The Hobbit what that's alluding to, which had always passed me by before. If I ever have a spare moment - not likely, mate - I'd like to know more about what Tolkien wrote about that and exactly when, given his revisions to the first edition of The Hobbit to better fit its sequels.
I was conscious, too, this time of the voice of Gandalf, which I so associate with my dad's reading and then, in respectable second place, Ian McKellen. Reading The Hobbit this time, I was also struck by the difficulty of distinguishing voices - the gruff-voiced dwarves, with the especially gruff-voiced Thorin, as distinct from gruff Beorn or gruff Bard or gruff Smaug. But on the whole this is a story that really works read aloud. The only thing, I think, that benefits from seeing the words on the page is all the riddling with Golem. There, for the reader to play along, it helps to pick back over the words as one might scrutinise the clues in a crossword.
But whereas The Lords of the Rings is about a fellowship of disparate characters, all very different and distinct, the main cast of The Hobbit is harder to distinguish.
Blurb as follows:
Experience a year from the Doctor's perspective with an exciting new release from BBC Books.
“The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour and the entire planet is hurtling round the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, and I can feel it.”
– The Doctor
Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac is your essential companion to a Time Lord’s ‘Year’. You’ll learn how to feel the turn of the Earth under your feet (hurtling round the sun at 67,000 miles an hour), the times each day that Sea Devil attacks are most likely (depending on the tides), how to avoid disturbing dangerous faeries (distances measured in yards), and why, despite all the invasions and Goblins, Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year.
Releasing later this year, The Time-Travelling Almanac is a must-have guide with useful tips and information provided by the Doctor and friends – and occasionally his enemies.
Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac is out in hardback on October 3rd 2024. You can pre-order here.
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.
It's a thrilling and weird adventure, especially fascinating because it adds so much insight into the creative process of that much-loved TV story. There's a particularly brilliant cliffhanger but also the character of the Doctor is like nothing we've ever seen - a kindly old man who quietly slips in to fix problems, a sort of janitor of time and space. Reading the script, I kept thinking of Mr Richardson, the gently humoured caretaker at my primary school a thousand years ago.
What a thrill to work with my childhood hero Tom Baker and to hear his own thoughts on the script and how he should play this so-very-different Doctor. What a treat to work with Terry Molloy (my daughter, who overheard some of the remote recording, referred to him as 'Scary Dude'). What a brilliant cast and crew. I'm especially grateful to director Samuel Clements, sound designer Mark Henrick and composer / exec producer Nicholas Briggs. Amazing cover artist Ryan Aplin has shared clean artwork and his process.
I've now handed on the reins of Doctor Who - The Lost Stories to another producer to be announced in due course.
There's also a feature on the sets of Trap of Steel, the second episode of 1965 story Galaxy 4, by me and Rhys Williams, with CGI recreations by Rhys and Gav Rymill. There are some very good puns in the subheadings - "A Scanner in the Works", "Asphalt Jungle", "Rill Met by Moonlight". I didn't write those.
I did write this issue's "Sufficient Data", which marks the centenary of the BBC by looking at every hundredth episode of Doctor Who. As ever, the inforgraphic is by Ben Morris.
An excerpt from the documentary will be shown at the BFI in London on Saturday, 29 October, and I'm hoping to be there to see it. I'm also continuing to research the life of David Whitaker for my biography to be published next year, and this week chatted to the widow of the best man at Whitaker's second wedding.
There are a couple of things in this issue by me, too. First, me and Rhys Williams detail the studio sets used for Episodes 1 and 2 of The Abominable Snowmen, recorded on 15 and 16 September 1967 - the latter the day on which my mum and dad got married. Rhys and Iz Skinner have then recreated this set-up in CGI. Truly, the set designers made those old TV studios bigger on the inside.
Then, to accompany the series of articles by Lucas Testro on writer Donald Cotton, including his original, hand-written drafts for 1965 story The Myth Makers, my latest "Insufficient Data" infographic is the Trojan horse as designed by the First Doctor. Ben Morris' illustration, of an outline scratched into an ostracon, is a delight - and more real history than myth.
Andy Murray is really good at identifying what makes so much of Kneale's work highly effective. One sentence, from Kneale himself on why the 1979 version of Quatermass didn't match the power of the earlier serials, is telling of his work as a whole:
"The central idea was too ordinary." (p. 210)
Also excellent is teasing out common themes, interests, strengths. I'd always found it odd that the author of Quatermass and Nineteen Eighty-Four wrote sitcom and for Sharpe and Kavanagh QC. Now I see how these things all connect: Murray's especially good on demonstrating how the Kavanagh episode, about an old and respected doctor who might by a former Nazi, is thematically in keeping with Quatermass and the Pit, in which ancient and long buried evil is suddenly brought into the light.
There's a good sense of Kneale in all this - or rather of two Kneales. One is Nigel, the cantankerous, curmudgeonly writer, all too ready to say what he thinks about other people's failings and continually cross about money. The other is Tom: kindly, supportive and practical, a devoted husband and father - and model for the dad in the Mog books.* My sense is that many of the people Murray spoke to either met one or other of these men. There was something mercurial about Kneale; something fittingly impish.
Among the many fascinating details, I was struck that, though Kneale left his staff-writing job at the BBC to go freelance from 1 January 1957, he continued to make use of his office at the BBC - presumably in or around Lime Grove - which was convenient for meeting up with directors etc. His wife, Judith Kerr, continued to work in the BBC's script unit until the end of 1957 - her six-part adaptation of Buchan's The Huntingtower was broadcast in June and July (Murray says the Scottish dialogue polished by head of department Donald Wilson (p. 88)); another adaptation by Kerr, The Trial of Mary LaFarge, was broadcast on 15 December. Kerr left the BBC around this time as her daughter was born the following month.
That means she must have overlapped with David Whitaker, whose life I'm currently researching. He joined the unit around October 1957, his first work as a staff writer - for which he didn't get a credit on screen or in Radio Times - broadcast less that two weeks after Kerr's last. I'm rather taken by the potential of that overlap, given that Whitaker later asked Kneale to write for Doctor Who.
This has sparked some further thoughts - but more on that anon.
* How amazing to learn (p. 145) that the dad in The Tiger Who Came to Tea was in part modelled on Alfred Burke, at the time the star of detective series Public Eye, and a neighbour of Kneale and Kerr.
The first panel, "Nigel Kneale, Quatermass and the BBC", was chaired by Kneale biographer Andy Murray and featured Dick Fiddy from the BFI, Toby Hadoke and comedian Johnny Mains - the latter daring to admit that he doesn't much like Doctor Who. Kneale famously hated that series, but many of us got into Kneale's work via Doctor Who. I've been trying to puzzle out why, and think a lot of fandom - of anything - is trying to recapture the strong feelings of our past. For those thrilled and terrified by Doctor Who as kids, Kneale offers a grown-up version of those feelings, and - since he was so often borrowed from - an understanding of how they were kindled.
The panel was a good, breezy introduction to Kneale and the impact of his work on television in the 1950s, though a lot of the ground here was familiar to me from Toby's recent Radio 4 Extra programme, Remembering Nigel Kneale, and Cambridge Festival's "Televising the future: Nineteen Eighty-Four and the imagination of Nigel Kneale". I'd also just read Andrew Pixley's 1986 interview with Kneale.
Next up, we watched the extraordinary opening episode of The Quatermass Experiment from 1953 (available on the Quatermass Collection DVD set). It's a while since I'd last seen this, and I'd forgotten how blurry, clunky and techbnobabble-heavy its early scenes are as we watch serious, posh scientists at their desks in a tracking control room. But that soon gives way to the extraordinary sight of a house half-demolished by the world's first crewed space rocket. We see before the characters on screen that there's an old woman trapped in the exposed upstairs; she's played by Katie Johnson who two years later was the similarly dotty Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers, only without her scene-stealing cat. It's just one of a number of well-observed comic characters enlivening the serious horror plot, adding a touch of realism - and fun - to the fantasy.
Having read The Intimate Screen by Jason Jacobs, I can understand why The Quatermass Experiment made such an impact: an original drama for television, rather than an adaptation of a stage play or book, that makes full use of the strengths of the medium to conjure an intimately creepy atmosphere. It's so busy, so populous, so nakedly ambitious - and all broadcast live. All these years later, it is thrilling. No wonder it stuck so powerfully with those who saw it at the time. As several panelists said, Quatermass was a thing that terrified our parents, that we first heard about from them decades afterwards - a folk memory of horror. (My mum says the girls at her school would make a lot of noise at the start of each episode, so the grown-ups in charge would not hear the warning of it not being suitable...)
Next up was Tom Baker in a bookish office to narrate Kneale's short story "The Photograph", in a 1978 episode of Late Night Story - a sort of grown-up Jackanory. It's an unsettling story about a sick child, but I was mostly struck by how little Baker blinked throughout what seemed to be a single take (and presumably involved him reading the story off an autocue).
Then Douglas Weir discussed the the new restoration of Nineteen Eighty Four (1954). The audience gasped at a particular example showing Peter Cushing's Winston Smith walking through Hampstead. The version screened by BBC Four a few years ago had Cushing moving through what looked like silver fog; the restored version shows him moving between trees, individual leaves crisp and clear. (I'm on the new Blu-ray release, by the way, just about audible asking Toby Hadoke and Andy Murray the question about Kneale's never-made scripts.)
Next was the panel "From Taskerlands to Ringstone Round – Nigel Kneale in the 70s", chaired by Howard David Ingham with panelists William Fowler, Una McCormack and Andrew Screen. I've been guilty of overlooking Kneale's 1970s output - The Stone Tape (1972), which I'd at least seen, and the anthology series Beasts (1976), which I haven't yet. That led into a screening of Murrain, Kneale's contribution to a 1975 anthology, Against the Crowd (included on the DVD release of Beasts).
David Simeon - who sadly couldn't be at yesterday's event - plays a vet called to a small village by a farmer played by Bernard Lee from the James Bond films. The farmer has some sick pigs and his water supply has dried up, plus a young boy in the village has had something like flu for a month. The farmer and the villagers think this all the work of a local woman, played by Una Brandon-Jones (who I recognised at once as Mrs Parkin in Withnail & I). The villagers want the vet's help in dealing with her; he's determined to champion science over superstition, insisting that "We can't go back" to the old ways. It's a compelling piece: real, sometimes funny and increasingly sinister. With a start, I recognised some of the scenery: the Curious British Telly site says Murrain was recorded in Wildboarclough, not far from where I now live. A local film for this local person, indeed.
Then Matthew Sweet chaired a panel on "Kneale on Film" with panelists Jon Dear, Kim Newman and Vic Pratt. This covered a lot of stuff I didn't know about: Kneale's work on the movie version of stage plays Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (1960), and the mutiny-at-sea story HMS Defiant (1962) - all a long way from the weird-thriller stuff. Because of that, I'd not been much interested; the panel made me want to look them out and understand the weird stuff in context. I want, too, to see his last work, a 1997 episode of legal drama Kavanagh QC.
A clip from the movie version of The Quatermass Xperiment ((1955) showed infected astronaut Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth) stalk a Little Girl (Jane Asher), who offers it imaginary cake. Asher then joined us to discuss this early role and her later, more prominent part in The Stone Tape (1972) - which was then shown in full. I'd seen this before, but it was fascinating to see beside Nimbos, who didn't know what was coming, and in the context of the day's other offering. Again what struck me was how funny it was, especially the visual gag of Reginald Marsh's hands being outlandish colours as he experiments with dyes. Toby Hadoke pointed out that Neil Wilson appears as a salt-of-the-earth security guard having been seen as a salt-of-the-earth policeman in The Quatermass Experiment, so I wonder how much Kneale consciously used the same actors over the years.
This was followed by a live reading of Kneale's 1952 radio play, You Must Listen. Mark Gatiss played the lawyer who has a new telephone installed in his office, only to find he can hear a young woman talking sauce to an unheard lover. Again, it's very funny, the lawyer embarrassed and outraged but the telephone staff all keen to listen in on this rude stuff. And then, as before, it becomes ever more sinister as we realise this saucy woman is an echo from the past. In that sense, it dovetails with The Stone Tape from 20 years later, and with elements of the other stuff we'd seen. How well chosen all these examples were; we could see we were engaged in an experiment ourselves, to trace the resonant echoes of Kneale.
By this time Nimbos and I were flagging as the short breaks between screenings had not been long enough for us to eat any food, and I was getting a bit wobbly. So we sadly missed the panel on “'The inventor of modern television': Kneale’s influences and Legacy" chaired by Jennifer Wallis with panelists Stephen Gallagher, Mark Gatiss, Andy Murray and Adam Scovell. The day ended with a screening of the movie Quatermass & The Pit (1967), and then much natter in the bar.
It was all a bit overwhelming. There was the sheer amount of stuff covered and shown, but also the way the selection encouraged us to tease out shared themes, techniques, stylistics. Then there was the visceral thrill of being in company, catching up with so many friends. I had a long drive home today, passing close to Wildboarclough and its Murrain, brain abuzz from things learned and spotted and argued. That's the thing about Kneale, who died in 2006, and the stuff he wrote that was largely screened long before I was born...
It is potent. It is alive.
In the depths of the ocean on an alien world, there’s a city run by scientists. The Doctor is only too eager to help them find new ways to counter pollution and produce entirely clean energy - research that he says will benefit the whole galaxy. But others have recognised the value of the sea base, and their interest is not so benign…
Left to her own devices, Sarah Jane Smith conducts her own investigation. The lights on the base keep flickering, which back home on Earth was the first sign that her bathroom was leaking. Out here in the depths of the alien sea, it’s the first indication of a looming disaster.
Patiently, implacably, the Cybermen are determined to conquer the base and its resources. That includes all the men, women and children who live there.
As the Doctor once again battles his old enemies, Sarah rallies the trapped and terrified people. Then, to her horror, she realises that the Cybermen have used cold logic to predict exactly what the humans will do in order to survive...
This enhanced audiobook features specially composed music and sound effects. This adventure takes place between the TV stories Death to the Daleks and The Monster of Peladon.
This academic study of costume and production design in Doctor Who has been a stimulating read, full of connections and insights that are new to me.
The author is professor and director of media and visual culture studies at the University of Redland in the US, and his 2003 book, Reading Between Designs: Visual Imagery and the Generation of Meaning in The Avengers, The Prisoner and Doctor Who, continues to be of great use in the stuff I write for the Doctor Who Figurine Collection, not least because Piers and co-author Simon Barker spoke to many designers who have since died, such as Daphne Dare who oversaw almost all the costumes for the first two years of the series. In turn, it's a bit of a thrill to see some of my own work cited in this new volume, almost like some kind of authority.
The book is in three parts. Part One is a breezy history of design in Doctor Who from 1963 to 2020, placing things in context of other TV and film, and trends in design more widely. In Part Two, he traces different ways in which we might judge and evaluate design - basically, how do we tell the good stuff? In Part Three he explores 13 particular instances of design in more depth.
As he says at the start, "In almost every episode Doctor Who [there have been 862 to date] relies heavily on both visual and sound design to create an immediate and powerfully evocative effect" (p. 15), so it's all the more impressive how much he packs in. He's on to something when he says in the introduction that Doctor Who often juxtaposes its relatable, regular characters with the strange places they visit - even when the TARDIS visits the present-day, there's something weirdly, eerily wrong going on. I think there's something else going on, too: the effort of each Doctor Who story to be visually distinct, juxtaposing itself against its immediate predecessor and all those that have gone before. Piers charts some of this, the ways in which, through design, the series converses with itself.
He's right that, all too often in fan criticism, "writing [and performance] has long been explicitly privileged over the visual", with elements of design getting "none of the nuanced evaluation typically lavished on writing and characterisation (p. 119). He uses the 1982 story Kinda as an example of a story highly praised despite serious shortcomings in design: an alien forest realised with pot plants in an overlit TV studio, and the laughable giant snake at the end. As he says, such fan criticism,
"turns Doctor Who's alleged visual crudeness into a mark of distinction: the discerning fan recognises such matters as design as a superficial consideration" (p. 120).
I think there's a corollary to that: Kill the Moon (2014) is an example of a story with very good, realistic design, but it's at odds with a rather whimsical, even silly, plot involving a giant egg. I find myself wondering if critics of the story would not have minded so much had the design been less credible.
Given my own current interest in the set design of 1960s episodes, I'm particularly struck by what Piers can reveal here. He starts with the 1961 book written by the BBC's Head of Design, Richard Levin, which sounds enormously like my sort of thing:
"A glance at Television by Design reveals a very different BBC from the image which has been cultivated abroad and to an extent also domestically over the last fifty years - the Masterpiece Theatre myth of a BBC whose output is built around period pieces and especially 'bonnet dramas' ... the visual content of his book tells a different story: it overwhelmingly presents a BBC steeped in modernism." (pp. 21-2).
Levin's department, and therefore the futuristic bits of Doctor Who, were, "permeated with the design sensibilities of Constructivism, Neoplasticism and the International Style in architecture" (p. 25). Piers is good not only on such context and influence, but also the practical side of design, especially on the TARDIS interior. The original set, designed by Peter Brachacki in 1963, is the first of Piers' thirteen designs deserving of special attention:
"Brachacki's TARDIS control room is a specifically telegenic set - which is to say, it is friendly to the relatively low-definition, monochrome screen image of the 1960s and also to the talk-heavy television fiction which was to remain standard until the later 1980s. In many ways, the nearest cognates to the original TARDIS set in BBC programming were the austere, light-filled spaces which Natasha Kroll's Studio Design Unit made for current affairs and talk shows in the years around 1960. In these often exquisitely simple sets, minimal decor and semi-abstract forms focused attention on the presenters and interlocutors ... The control console's hexagonal design, with its rising and falling central column, provided both visual interest and an anchor for dialogue, creating the basis for shots in which three or more people could be groups naturally with their facial expressions clearly visible on camera."(p. 148)
From this, Piers then details how developments in television technology - higher resolution cameras, colour, single-camera shooting - ironically served to reduce the effectiveness of this so achingly modern and telegenic set. It had never occurred to me before to consider the practical reasons why the TARDIS interior needed to change, beyond set pieces having worn a bit thin.
This is just one example. There are plenty more insights, such as the way Barry Newbery designed for stories set in Earth history, "replete with visual detail which intimately evokes the day-to-day life of is protagonists" (p. 23), in contrast to the brutalist, bare visions of the future that Ray Cusick tended to base on a smallish set of recurring geometric shapes.
There are some very minor errors: he includes the Quarks in a list of monsters introduced under producer Innes Lloyd (who had left the programme before The Dominators was commissioned); he includes Donna Noble in a list of characters he says are "working class". But these are quibbles, nit-picking, and I'm sure the result of efforts to pack in detail and cover so much ground.
Personally (and selfishly, as it would be useful for my own work), I'd have liked more direct quotation from the designers themselves. There are also things I don't agree with. Piers has firm opinions on what does and doesn't work: the iconic Time Lord collars are, he says, "ostentatious and campy" (p. 173); the Eighth Doctor's costume in the 1996 television movie, "ill-fitting and ugly"; the Twelfth Doctor's era has, "the tinniest arrangement of the Doctor Who theme" (p. 209). I am actually amazed by the pages devoted to his thesis that the Sixth Doctor's multicoloured outfit,
"does not represent the worst of Doctor Who's creative stagnation in the mid-eighties. That distinction belongs to the costume worn by Baker's successor, Sylvester McCoy" (p. 182).
He's insightful about the thinking behind and effect of the 13th Doctor's costume - something I've written about in some depth - though he cites a criticism that it might represent a "feminine absorption with style" (p. 215). This (which isn't Piers' view, just one he's quoting) really doesn't hold water - as he shows, having just gone into detail about how much the male Doctors are defined by their outfits. On this, I'm very much with Sophia McDougall re. capes and weddings dresses.
But that's rather the point - I want to argue back and I think Piers is inviting response in what he himself calls, "a first sortie into an immense territory" (p. 221). It's a book to grapple with, interrogate and battle. It has got me thinking anew about a whole load of aspects of Doctor Who. I am sure it will find its way into things I write to come...
You can order Doctor Who: Scourge of the Cybermen direct from Big Finish.
The amazing cover art is by Claudia Gironi. Cybermen and sunflowers - what's not to love?
An anthology of festive tales featuring Bernice Summerfield.
Christmas… Advent… Midwinter Festival… Spiriting… No matter what you call it on your home planet, this magical holiday at the end of the year, when the nights are dark, and the lights are sparkly, is the perfect time for telling stories...
And who doesn’t have a tale or two to tell about Christmas? Certainly not Benny.
Did she ever tell you about the time she had to escape from a herd of rampaging battle-armoured cyborg reindeer? Or the time she had to convince three tentacled young sea creatures that she was the real Santa? Or the time she nearly let an evil deity back into the world just in time for New Year…
These ten stories are collected from all across Benny’s eventful life, from St Oscar’s to the Braxiatel Collection, to Legion and even in the Unbound Universe...
The stories are:
"The Kotturuh have arrived on the planet Alexis to distribute the gift of the death to its inhabitants. The only person standing in their way is a renegade Time Lord, who has sworn to protect the locals. A Time Lord called the Master..."The release is paired with Master Thief by Sophie Iles, who had to suffer me as editor, and it's all part of the Time Lord Victorious cross-platform extravaganza wossname.
