The Feast of Steven in the Telegraph

I have a piece in today's edition of the Daily Telegraph, "Exterminated! The daft Dr Who festive special lost in time" (Arts, pp. 10-11). It's about the episode The Feast of Steven, broadcast 60 years ago on Thursday, and digs into why it was so odd.

The online version went live on Sunday under the title "The story of Doctor Who’s first-ever, and profoundly daft, Christmas special" (£).

Nine days ago, I had another piece in the same paper on writer Malcolm Hulke and the Sea Devils.

Doctor Who and the Time-Travelling Almanac, by me

It seems like only a week since my last book was out. But today sees publication of Doctor Who - The Time-Travelling Almanac, billed as the official guide to the Doctor's year. It is written by me and illustrated by brilliant Emma Price.

What is an almanac anyway? Why do we have August? How do the histories of the Beatles and the Doctor overlap?

Where exactly did the Doctor mean to take Romana instead of that beach at the start of The Leisure Hive? What are the tides on Kastarion 3 like?

All this and Dalek horoscopes, banana penguins, the best time of day for Sea Devils to invade and much more... 

HARDBACK

ISBN: 9781785949173

Length: 256 pages

Dimensions: 224mm x 23mm x 143mm

Weight: 355g

Price: £16.99

PAPERBACK

ISBN: 9781473533943

Length: 256 pages

Price: £8.99

LokI: A Bad God's Guide 1 and 2, by Louie Stowell

A couple of long car journeys have been greatly aided by this pair of excellent books written by Louie Stowell and read by Ben Willbond. The Norse god of chaos, Loki, is in trouble for playing yet another prank on Sif - this time cutting off all of her hair. As punishment, Odin (or "poo-poo head" as Loki calls him) exiles Loki to Earth, in the puny body of a schoolboy. Worse, Loki must go to human school with oh-so-perfect (but dim) brother Thor, with other gods pretending to be their human parents. And then there's some bother with Frost Giants.

They're two fun adventures full of good jokes - not least where the diary Loki is keeping responds to any dishonesty in his account. There's also lots of comedy at the expense of our mundane, human world as seen by immortal gods. Loki, for example, is astonished by our "crime scenes" full of stolen loot - or, as we know them, "museums".

But there's something deeper here, in a story about a boy who wants to be good but doesn't always think about other people or consequences of actions. In the first book, there's a moral dilemma in his being able to raise a huge sum of money for charity - but only by humiliating his timid friend. The Lord of Chaos wanted to talk about that afterwards, and other bits of the story.

The second book gets into the matter of who tells heroes' stories, and which heroes are left out of these narratives. I'd very much like to see the hinted-at exploration of Cif's previously untold adventures. There's also something on the complex, tricky emotions of friendship that my children found very relatable.

Ben Willbond is a perfect narrator for this, and as well as him doing the different voices (I think there's something of Timothy West in his Odin), sound effects nicely underline some of the jokes - ie when some animal does a poo. All in all, a really good production and a good escape from the traffic.

Doctor Who Magazine 546

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out today, with plenty of exciting stuff about the forthcoming new series.

I've also researched the Cinderella pantomime that starred Peter Davison in Tunbridge Wells (1982-83) and Colin Baker in Southampton (1984-85), and the way it overlapped with the production of Doctor Who at the time - even down to dictating the locations used for filming. As well as lots of digging through archives, I spoke to both Jodie Brooke Wilson and Nicola Bryant, who each played the title role, and to Stephen Broome and Andy Ledger who were in the audience. I was also there, for the matinee performance on 5 January 1985, when I was the same age as my son is now.

There are exclusive new photographs - including one from the filming of Logopolis (1981) that is quite my favourite thing. Thanks to Stephen Cranford for providing some of the other archive material (from the collection he inherited from writer/director John Nathan-Turner) and to Daniel Blythe for a fact check. I'm also grateful to Ben Isted at the Assembly Hall Theatre in Tunbridge Wells and Holly Scott at the Mayflower Theatre (formerly the Gaumont) in Southampton.

Concrete Elephant

A few weeks ago, I was being old and nostalgic about the days of Doctor Who fanzines, especially the ones handed round in the pub I used to frequent. In May 1999, I produced my own - the first issue of a stupid thing called Concrete Elephant. Last week, it raised once again its pachydermatous head...

Written by me
Cover and design by @nimbos
Contributors: Lord of Chaos, @Mogamoka2 and @SophIlesTweets

Bibbly-Bob the Seal

Today, the Lord of Chaos and I, and our friend Erin, attended the South London Comic and Zine Fair and had a lovely time picking out daft comics and also some nice badges. We also handed out the comic we made this morning - the story and art by his Lordship, the lettering and going-over-his-pencils-in-pen by me.

Here, for your delight, is Bibbly-Bob the Seal and the Shark Adventure, (c) Lord of Chaos and his true servant.

ETA: A year later, Bibbly-Bob returned in "There's Litter on the Beach"

Making Doctor Who Adventures 97% weirder

To mark 10 glorious years of kids' magazine Doctor Who Adventures, my former boss Paul Lang has written a magnificent celebration of its daftness and delight. He describes this especial foolishness as my masterpiece:

I've already posted all the episodes of daft comic-strip AAAGH! I wrote, and other bits and pieces I did. But there was the time we got "Koquillion" into the wordsearch. Or got the Daleks to write the horoscope (every star sign had "You will be exterminated!"). Or wrote comic strips in which the Doctor battled bogeys, bananas and space owls... Such happy times and places.

Five Who Fans

My distinguished colleague, Dr Marek Kukula, and I were interviewed by the high-brains called Five Who Fans earlier this year, about our book, The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who. We responded in our usual highly polished and professional manner.

Doctor Who and the very Hungry Snake

Out in shops today is Doctor Who Adventures #363, which features another daft comic strip by me - "The Very Hungry Snake".

"The Very Hungry Snake" - Doctor Who Adventures #363
Written by Simon Guerrier, art by John Ross,
colour by Alan Craddock

As ever, I'm delighted by the magnificent artwork by the magnificent John Ross - notching up his 1612th consecutive page of artwork for the comic strip since DWA began in April 2006. What an extraordinary achievement.

Bananas

The new issue of Doctor Who Adventures features a four-page comic strip written by me. In "Five A Day", the 12th Doctor and Clara battle giant bananas on the alien world Luna Schlosser*. Even by my usual standards, it is silly.

As ever, the art is by John Ross with colour by Alan Craddock, and the editor was Moray Laing. Issue #362 of DWA is in shops now.

* Luna Schlosser is, of course, also the name of Diane Keaton's character in the magnificent Sleeper (1973). It's just possible I was, ahem, inspired by one particular scene.

Doctor Who and the space owls

The super new issue of Doctor Who Adventures boasts previews of forthcoming episodes Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline, reveals all about the Special Weapons Dalek and boasts a new comic strip by me.

"The Court of Birds" sees the Doctor and Clara in the sky of the planet Hoopoe. I'm especially exciting to write for the new incarnation of the Doctor, and thrilled as always by John Ross's extraordinary artwork. The colours are by Alan Craddock and the fine Moray Laing and Craig Donaghy let me get away with such silliness. Doctor Who Adventures #356 is in all proper shops until 21 October or available on the Doctor Who Adventures website.

Doctor Who fights ALL the monsters in Croydon

Some foolishness I wrote - Face of Boe Book, in which lots of Doctor Who monsters invade Croydon. Design by my clever friend Lee Midwinter.

Doctor Who on Florana

The splendid new issue of Doctor Who Adventures (#337, 15 January 2014) features a history of the Cybermen, an Ice Warrior poster and a comic strip by me in which the Doctor finally gets to Florana.

The artwork is by John Ross, with colour by Alan Craddock. Thanks to editor Moray Laing for kind permission to post it here.

On time travellers not using Twitter

Yesterday's Inside Science on Radio 4 interviewed Professor Robert Nemiroff from Michigan Tech University about his much reported search of the internet for evidence of time travellers in our midst.

Nemiroff and his students searched Twitter for references to the discovery of Comet ISON (21 September 2012) and the naming of Pope Francis (13 March 2013) - but references to them tweeted before either event took place. The abstract for Nemiroff's paper concludes:

"No time travelers were discovered. Although these negative results do not disprove time travel, given the great reach of the Internet, this search is perhaps the most comprehensive to date."

Hmm, I thought. And again, hmm.

Twitter is relatively big news now, but how long will that last? If Nemiroff had conducted his research a few years ago, he might have studied the contents of MySpace or eGroups or newsgroups - the social media of a bygone age that our children will speak of as myth. Recently, the Global Social Media Impact Study suggested that older teenagers see Facebook as "dead and buried". In 10 years time - let alone in some more distant future from which time travellers might come - will we need reminding what Twitter even was?

Even if time travellers knew about Twitter, why would they use it? If the tweets are not archived in their future, they might wish to read them in our time - but why would they themselves tweet? Nemiroff is rather supposing that any such time travellers would want us to notice they'd been here.

In fact, time travellers are a bit sniffy about Twitter:

KATE:
Within three hours, the cubes had a thousand separate Twitter accounts.

DOCTOR:
(UNIMPRESSED) Twitter?

Doctor Who: The Power of Three by Chris Chibnall.

That might well be a direct response to Nemiroff's study. And, just to rub it in, The Power of Three was first broadcast on Saturday 22 September 2012 - the day after Comet ISON was first spotted, and so months before Nemiroff even started his research.

"Wizard" plays BFI as part of LOCO London Comedy Film Festival

Wizard, the short film I wrote, will be screened at the BFI on Saturday 25 January, as part of the LOCO London Comedy Film Festival 2014. The film stars David Warner as Merlin working in a Croydon call centre and was shortlisted in Hat Trick's "Short and Funnies" competition last year.

It's one of 13 films showing in a 90-minute extravaganza, Laughing Stock: Short Comedy Film Showcase. You can buy tickets here. Me, director Tom and some of the cast and crew will be there to cheer the film along. Why not join us?

Wizard is also available to view online for free:

Doctor Who: 2007

Episode 733: Blink
First broadcast: 7.10 pm on Saturday 9 June 2007
<< back to 2006

The Doctor explains in Blink

Blink is something special in Doctor Who. For some it's the best ever episode, for others it's the one to show someone who's never seen the show before and ensure they're hooked.

I don't think the latter is quite right. A bit like City of Death (1979), part of the brilliance of Blink is how it plays with expectations and clichés, and the usual form of Doctor Who. If we know Doctor Who, it's more rewarding. That's why it helps that it's some way into the run - it wouldn't work earlier on in Season 3; it wouldn't work in Season 1.

(Much better, I think, for a novice to begin with season opener Smith and Jones, but surely a novice ought to start from Rose.)

The wheeze is to show what happens when the Doctor isn't around to stop the monsters - an idea used again to great effect in the following year's Turn Left. Instead, here it's up to two ordinary people - Sally and Larry - to work their way through the clues.

Since they're not familiar with the format of Doctor Who like we are, we're often a few steps ahead of them. We know to be worried as they walk into danger. We know to shout at the screen. Our own knowledge of the series makes the episode more scary.

But, on first viewing, even we are lost in the intricacies of the plot. A story like this depends on a sort of contract between writer and viewer. We agree to accept the strange, confusing world we've been landed in on the promise that it will be explained. In fact, we're given all the clues we need to solve the mystery - we just don't realise it yet.

The best example of that is right at the end, when it seems the Doctor has abandoned Sally and Larry, the TARDIS dematerialising round them, leaving them to the mercy of the Angels. It's heart-stopping stuff, the Doctor seemingly callous, Sally and Larry with no chance of escape...

But, once the solution is presented, it seems to desperately, wretchedly simple. We realise it's clearly been signposted all the way through the episode. Of course that's how to get out it.

My chum James Goss once described the six episodes (including Blink) that Steven Moffat wrote for Russell T Davies as,

"perfect puzzle boxes, full of heart and drama but also where every single bit of the mystery is in place like clockwork."

That "heart and drama" is exactly right. The Doctor and Martha appear in just three scenes of Blink but we get a great sense of their relationship. I can readily imagine a whole episode - or series - of them stranded in the 1960s, an exasperated Martha forced to take a day-job to support his building contraptions that might help them get home.

Best of all is how concisely the complex plot is spelled out in simple terms. So much of Doctor Who is exposition, building worlds and politics and problems from little more than words. There are tricks to getting through it - the Doctor says it at great speed, or peppers it with odd asides full of jokes and weird mental images, or the companion shares some of the burden.

Blink does a trick with exposition that still utterly thrills me. It's so simple, so quick, so what a real person would say. The Doctor holds up an all-important gadget, vital to him solving the problem at the heart of the episode. And explains:

"It goes ding when there's stuff."

Next episode: 2008 

Doctor Who: 2004

After episode 696 (Doctor Who): the first day of filming on the new series
Sunday, 18 July 2004
<< back to 2003

Eccleston and the Space Pig
My feature for
Doctor Who Adventures #277

Hidden away in the archives of the official BBC Doctor Who website, there's a fun video of a press conference with Christopher Eccleston from just before the new series was broadcast. One question is about his first day of filming.

"My first day, I chased a brilliant actor of restricted height called Jimmy Vee dressed as a pig dressed as a spaceman... I had to chase him up and down a corridor."

I adore the space pig. It's brief time in Doctor Who is a perfect example of the show as written by Russell T Davies - daft, funny, exciting, scary and moving all in one quick scene. I badgered the poor then editor of Doctor Who Adventures, Natalie Barnes, to let me run a feature on the space pig and she finally relented. (She also gave kind permission to post it here.)

But I also know exactly where I was when the scene was filmed. On Sunday, 18 July 2004, Big Finish held a party to celebrate five years of new audio adventures for old Doctor Who. I'd written a few short stories for them and was busy writing my first audio play, so got to go along - the first posh drinks I was ever invited to as a writer.

Before I was lost to the miasma of free fizz, I met actors Lisa Bowerman and Stephen Fewell for the first time, who I'd late be boss of on the Benny plays. And a young actor I'd seen on the telly said "Thanks, mate" to me. It was David Tennant.

Next episode: 2005

Doctor Who: 1999

After episode 696 (Doctor Who): The Curse of Fatal Death
First broadcast: 12 March 1999
<< back to 1998

"How are things?"
Rowan Atkinson meets the Daleks
Dr Who & the Curse of Fatal Death

In June 1999, Doctor Who Magazine #279 spoke to six writers all working in popular telly about how, if asked, they would bring back Doctor Who. It's fascinating to read Gary Gillatt's "We're gonna be bigger than Star Wars" again today. Four of those writers would write for Doctor Who when it returned in 2005 - but not in the way they told DWM.

"'Well, it would have to be made on film,' [Russell T Davies] said, and probably with the Doctor trapped on Earth to save money. 'I don’t think you’d put a 50-minute film series on during Saturday teatime,' he suggested with almost as much prescience as Steve [Moffat]’s 'The core elements are a Police Box, a frock coat and cliffhangers.' On the other hand, who can disagree that 'The key ingredient is death,' and Russell closed with 'God help anyone in charge of bringing it back – what a responsibility!'

Alex Wilcock, "...And It's About Time Team", 27 August 2006.

In fact, they were already working on getting Doctor Who back on TV. Russell's acclaimed eight-part drama Queer as Folk (first broadcast 23 February to 13 April 1999) included a regular character who was a Doctor Who fan, with clips from old episodes, jokes only fans would get and a cameo by the real prop of K-9.

On 12 March, a new Doctor Who adventure, The Curse of Fatal Death, was broadcast as part of Comic Relief on prime-time BBC One. The script was by Steven Moffat.


On 13 November, Mark Gatiss co-wrote and starred in three more comedy sketches about Doctor Who - one with him as the Doctor in a pastiche of the show from the 60s, another exploring how the show was first commissioned (something Mark explores again this week in An Adventure in Space and Time), and one with Peter Davison gamely playing himself.

All these productions - Russell's, Steven's and Mark's - fondly mocked the conventions of the old show show. For all Steven and Mark created new incarnations of the Doctor, their sketches were more about looking backward at what Doctor Who had once been as it was reviving it anew.

Except...

The Curse of Fatal Death is not a template for a new series. It's certainly not a manifesto for the way Steven runs the show now. It's full of things that worked as jokes because they were so unlike Doctor Who as we knew it.

Yet, they're all things that were central when the show returned: fart jokes, jokes about the sonic screwdriver as a phallus, the companion and Doctor explicitly in love, the companion's confused feelings about that after a regeneration, lots of stuff about the Doctor's mythic place in the universe... Most obviously of all, it embraces the daft fun of Doctor Who as a key part of its appeal.

I think there's something else, too. When the Master brings in an army of Daleks, the Doctor greets them with a pithy line: "How are things?"

The joke is that he's so casual, that his words sound so ordinary. It's not the way the Doctor has ever spoken before. But it will be.

Next episode: 2000

(Ian Stuart Burns has also written about that article in DWM.)

Modern Man: the director's cut

Modern Man from Sebastian Solberg on Vimeo.

Director Sebastian Solberg has posted a new cut of Modern Man, the short film I wrote earlier this year. Full credits are as follows:

Director / Producer – Sebastian Solberg (sebastiansolberg.com)

Facebook: facebook.com/ModernManFilm
Twitter twitter.com/ModernManFilm

Credits:
Rupert – Sean Knopp (@SeanKnopp)
Rachel – Nicola Posener (@NicolaPosener)
Cavewoman - Ramanique Ahluwalia (@Ramanique)
Boy Genius – Nathan Bryon (@Nathan Bryon)

Director / Producer / Editor – Sebastian Solberg (@SebSolberg)
Writer – Simon Guerrier (@0tralala)
Producer– Jassa Ahluwalia (@OfficialJassa)
Executive Producer / Cinematographer – Dale McCready (@dalemccready)
Focus Puller - Juan Manuel Peña
Gaffer – James Humby
Camera Assistant – Oliver Watts
Production Designer – Joe Eason
Art Director – Katya Rogers (@KatyaHarriet)
First AD – James Cleave (@James_Cyprus)
Makeup Designer – Lulu Hall (@HallLulu)
Costume Designer - Georgia Lewis
Costume Assistant - Jasmine Grace Whiting
Stunt Co-ordinator – Dani Biernat (@Danistunts)
Sound Recordist – Miles Croft
Unit Photographer – Gary Eason
Unit Videographer – Vicky Harris
VFX’s Artist – Andrew O’Sullivan
VFX’s Artist – Dan Roberts
VFX’s Artist – James Morrissey
Composer – Lyndon Holland (@Lyndonholland)
Sound Design – David Sendall
Grade – Francois Kamffer
Credits Illustration - Jed Uy

WITH THANKS TO
Sarah Wright, Virginia Nelson, Sarah Ahluwalia, Ella Rogers, Neil Brand, Thomas Guerrier, Adrian Mackinder and Eddie Robson, Ros Little, Abbi Collins Kitroom Monkey and Take2.

You can follow Seb @SebSolberg on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. For any enquires about Modern Man, please contact him here: sebastiansolberg.com/contact/

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin

Years ago, Gareth Roberts recommended me The Moving Toyshop, written by Edmund Crispin in 1946; I've only just got round to reading it. As Gareth said, it's brilliant: a comic murder-mystery with the feel of The Avengers. I would not be surprised to discover that it was a huge influence on Douglas Adams (especially his Professor Chronotis stories) and Jonathan Creek.

Poet Richard Cadogan finds the dead body of a woman in a toyshop in Oxford, but when he returns with the police the toyshop is not there: instead, the building is a grocer's - and there is no sign of a body. The police assume Richard has made a mistake, so Richard calls his old friend Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature - and amateur sleuth. What follows is effectively a series of chases, with rich characters playing literary games as they dodge and weave through the arcane twists of the plot. It's a joyous, witty read and the wildest occurrences all turn out to have perfectly logical explanations.

At the end of the book, we learn that "the moving toyshop" is a term from The Rape of the Lock by Pope - a poet referred to earlier in the book in one of the many literary jokes. Rather than investigate the mystery, the police want to discuss Measure for Measure with Fen, who - whenever there's a pause - likes to play games listing unreadable books or bad plays. Crispin pokes fun at Philip Larkin (to whom the book is also dedicated), and even at himself and his chronicling of Fen's adventures.

The light humour neatly plays against moments of darkness and horror: the details of the murders, the shooting of a dog, even the jaded view of Oxford, full of arbitrary rules and abuses. The book's also packed with memorable set pieces: as well as the great gag of the moving toyshop itself, there are scenes in a dodgy old cinema, a college chapel where it's important that men and women use different doors, and a part of the river reserved for nude bathing. Wikipedia even claims - with little hard evidence - that,

"The book provided the source for the famous merry-go-round sequence at the climax of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. All the major elements of the scene — the two men struggling, the accidentally shot attendant, the out-of-control merry-go-round, the crawling under the moving merry-go-round to disable it — are present in Crispin's account, though Crispin received no screen credit for it."

"The Moving Toyshop", Wikipedia, retrieved 26 September 2013.

I had some quibbles: one character is dismissed as a suspect solely on the basis that she's a pretty young thing and not overly bright. She's one of only two women to have much of a speaking role in the whole book; another woman appears briefly being chatted up, and two other women are found dead.

Also striking is an archaic use of "slut". One character has:

"a daily slut who came to cook his meals and make a pretense of cleaning ... The slut, after a day occupied mainly with drinking stout and reading a novelette in the sitting-room, returned to her own house at eight o'clock."

Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop (1946), p. 186.

But this is a delight of a book, and I'm thrilled to learn Fen has several more adventures...