Making history

What a splendid episode of Doctor Who. Will leave a little space for spoilers in case you have not seen it...

[Incidentally, I have written a diary of writing Blake's 7. And here is a nice photograph of me with stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Carrie Dobro. It will thrill you to know that this was taken outside the offices of Innocent Smoothies, of which I am an acolyte. Om nom nom.

End of spoiler space, back to Doctor Who.]

Perhaps not scary in a make-you-jump way (though I'm told by parent-friends that their kids were traumatised), but disturbing-scary because you knew they were all going to die, and because the Doctor walks away. And then...

It reminded me of the bit in School Reunion where Sarah tells the Doctor he can't save her from getting old; it's a really bothering and grown-up idea that sometimes people can't be saved. Kept me awake last night mulling it over.

I also loved the Jerking Deaths when people aren't looking. And how brilliant to make the Doctor saving everyone sinister. I also liked him calling "fixed moments in time" just a theory, so we can ignore it when we want to.

Yes, of much interest to a mercenary hack like me is the gaps it leaves for other stories. Most importantly of all, I don't think it contradicts a key work of Ice Warrior history.

Also watched Sarah Jane and Mona Lisa's Revenge, and afterwards as I chopped parsnips tried to reconcile it with City of Death, in which that portrait of Lisa Gheradini spends 400 years bricked up in a cellar and has “This is a fake” written in felt-tip under Leonardo's brushwork. Why didn't she reach critical mass in the cellar?

This sort of thing is what passes for fun in my house when the Dr is out.

Both the Doctor Who and Sarah Jane stories note that Lisa didn't have any eyebrows, as was (probably) fashionable at the time. But they don't mention some other interesting things about that portrait. Lisa sits high up on a balcony, a mad fantasy landscape behind her. As the landscape recedes into the distance, it fades to blue-green murk, an early example of aerial perspective – that is, the affect of the Earth's atmosphere.

That fantastic background contrasts with the calm posture of the sitter. And that enigmatic smile isn't gas or not being able to sit still; the effect is created by shadows at the edges of the mouth and eyes, a technique called sfumato (that is, as if seen through a veil of smoke).

So I had embarked on a complicated theory involving as-yet-untold interventions by the Doctor, Leonardo seeing an alien world through a veil of smoke and learning about the Earth's atmosphere. And then Lizbee tweeted a fine, indeed handsome, answer which is all a lot easier on the brain:

“Only the one painting was made of living ink; Leonardo had enough for the first six? Figures the psycho one would be fireproof...”

Scenes from south London

To no less august a place than Kennington yesterday for a reading of “The Ride”, a fun new play by Andrew Cartmel. Blogging now and hoovering later while thinking of notes to give him.

A bunch of other chums were in attendance. Admired Ben Aaronovitch's rewrite beard and got to meet the writer Piers Beckley who bought me a pint of Spitfire. Lively chat on all things Grub Street, and thence out into the storm.

Bus home took an hour to get down the Walworth Road due to some kind of works. I read quite a lot of The Big Sleep. Three youths tore up a newspaper and threw it at people, scoring points on direct hits. A mother and her teenage daughter had an argument in the seat behind me, their voices and heavy sighs identical which made it hard to follow.

Home to chops with the Dr, then out again to see the gestalt that is Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, who had spent all day writing and so were collapsed of brain. Even more than usual. Dozy and comfy in seats by the fire, and last ones to leave.

Chores and pitches and begs-for-work today, all as a distraction from the Great Excitement of the Evening.

Now the science bit...

Here's my talk at the Royal Observatory from Tuesday night, which seemed to go down okay.

The use and abuse of science in Doctor Who

Hello.

As Marek said in his introduction, my name is Simon Guerrier and I write Doctor Who novels, short stories, audio plays and comic strips. I’ve also written similar things for Robin Hood, Primeval, Being Human and Blake’s 7. This talk is about some of what goes through my head when I’m writing.

What follows are my own thoughts. I can’t speak for how other writers do things, let alone for my bosses at the BBC or my various publishers. I’ll use examples from other people’s work, but that doesn’t mean I know what they were thinking when they wrote it.

The title is ‘the use and abuse of science in Doctor Who’, but I’m not going to list the times the show gets its physics right or wrong. Paul Parsons’ book The Science of Doctor Who far more ably explores the real scientific ideas behind many of the Doctor’s adventures.

Arthur C Clarke in his introduction to that book says Doctor Who is more 'fantasy' than science fiction; it's not really worried about getting the science right.

I think that's far more true of something like Star Trek, which is full of stuff like tachyon beams, baryon sweeps, quantum fluctuations and event horizons. I don't even know what those things are – they're just listed on the “Physics and Star Trek” page of Wikipedia. There isn't a “Physics and Doctor Who” page. I looked.

That doesn't mean Doctor Who isn't scientifically literate. It just does different things with science – which I'm going to mean real developments in physics, chemistry and biology. My original plan was to arrive here with the latest issue of New Scientist and explain how we could work up each of its headlines into a Doctor Who story.

We would take, for example, the lead feature on the cover. And I'd ask you all, 'How could this threaten the world?' and, 'How could the Doctor stop it?'

But I don't think we can do that. Here's the [then] current issue. There's a picture of a huge meteorite hanging above the earth, and it says in big letters, '72hrs until impact – what can we do?' That's a Doctor Who story right there.

Look, the cover also says, 'Free will – you do have it, after all'. Which will come as no surprise to those of you who've seen recent episodes like Turn Left or Father's Day – where we see what happens when history gets changed. It's also true of the 1970 story Inferno. Or, to be honest, any Doctor Who story where the Doctor encourages an ordinary supporting character to step up and make a difference.

Doctor Who gets its stories from everywhere, by asking the same questions. How could developments in transplant surgery threaten the world? That question gave birth to the Cybermen, way back in 1966, monsters who've volunteered to have their brains and emotions replaced with hard wearing metal and plastic. Ask the same question of new treatments to keep us young and slim and you get the Lazarus Experiment turning Mark Gatiss into some kind of giant scorpion, or the cute little Adipose, where the fat literally walks away.

Even when Doctor Who is stealing from sources that aren't science, it's still underpinned by science. It takes the 1959 Hammer film The Mummy and turns it into the the 1975 story Pyramids of Mars. In Doctor Who the Egyptian God is really an alien and his army of mummies are robots.

It also turned The Mummy into the 1967 story, Tomb of the Cybermen, with the story transposed to an archaeological dig in space. In the Hammer version, George Pastell plays Mehemet Bey, worshipper of Karnak, who pretends to be a friend of the archaeologists then entreats the risen Mummy to kill them. In the Doctor Who story Pastell plays much the same part, but here he's a member of the Brotherhood of Logicians.

It's the same story, but the trappings of superstition have been swapped for the trappings science. They're not walking corpses animated by ancient Egyptian magic, they're cybernetic men who've been in cryogenic sleep. It's a completely different thing. The trappings of science make the story more credible. Science is an authority with which we cannot argue.

This, though, is 'Bad Science', according to page one of the book by Ben Goldacre. He speaks on page 1 of people for whom 'science' – in quotes – is, wrongly, 'a monolith, a mystery, and an authority, rather than a method.'

I'll come back to that definition later.

But the writers of Pyramids of Mars and Tomb of the Cybermen would probably laugh at the criticism that they were guilty of bad science. For one thing, they'd say, they were only interesting in writing a good story.

Before we go any further, it would help to have an idea of what a good story is.

There’s a whole publishing industry on just this topic, which I’m glibly going to boil down to just one sentence:

People we want to spend time with want something they cannot get easily.

You can test the hypothesis by applying it to your own favourite stories. We don’t have to find these people heroic or noble, we just want to spend time with them. We might not like them were we to meet them in person, but from a safe distance as readers or viewers, we want to see how they do.

They might want to stop a war or monster. They might want a particular girl to notice them. They might realise the thing that they longed for to begin with isn’t really what they want at the end. But that's the core of your story. You go off and write it up. How do you know if it works?

If you tell a joke, you know it works because people laugh. You can tell the same joke a lot of different ways – which you will, depending on who you are telling. You might use a five-act structure, you might just skip to the punchline. What matters is the laugh. Whatever you've done, whatever technique you've used, if they don't laugh it isn't funny.

Writing stories, we don’t just want to make an audience laugh. We want to shock them, surprise them, make them nod and smile and cry. Good writing contrives to affect the reader. Think again of your favourite stories and how they made you feel.

I don’t mean to be cynical. There are lots of tricks in writing – ways to make the sentences more active and vivid, the sensations more affecting. But to entice and absorb the reader takes more than a few gimmicks; it takes craft and skill. Clever method alone will leave the reader cold.

This has traditionally been a criticism of science-fiction: that the stories hang on a neat scientific idea or a plot twist that makes the reader think but doesn’t make them feel. The ideas might be clever and interesting, they might make for good science, but the execution feels clinical. I know many people who say they don’t read science fiction specifically because that’s what they expect: sf is hard work rather a good story.

The best-loved science fiction stories tend to bridge this gap between the heart and mind. The neat idea might create a 'sense of wonder' – the universe is massive, we’re small and insignificant. Or the neat idea might play to our fears – civilisation crumbles as aliens invade or there’s a nuclear holocaust.

This still often means that the idea comes first in a lot of science fiction. The starting point is not people we want to spend time with want something they cannot get easily. The emphasis seems to be that an exciting thing happens, and here are the people it happens to.

Think of the 'characters' – in quotes – in a lot of big budget movies. Are the heroes of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Twilight people we want to spend time with? Would Bella Swan hold our interest if she didn't hold hands with a vampire? Would Sam Witwicky be worth our time if his car hadn't just blown up the pyramids? Or are they only interesting because of the exciting events in which they get caught up?

Which of these two extremes is Doctor Who – characters we want to spend time with or ciphers to whom these things happen? You might argue that each episode of Doctor Who is based round an exciting thing happening in some new location. The TARDIS lands just in time for an alien invasion or the trial of some gadget that will overturn the laws of physics. We learn about what’s happening from a cross-section of people we’ve not met before, who are mostly killed off over the next 40 minutes.

These people are often well drawn and memorable. And Doctor Who is generally good at avoiding the cliché that we only learn something about a character’s back story if they’re about to die. But these are not generally ‘people we want to spend time with’ in the sense I used before. They’re there to add colour to the exciting thing that’s happening.

Here's a telling thing. In the whole 46-year history of Doctor Who, there are very few supporting characters who I think would support their own series. There’s Jago and Litefoot in the 1977 Tom Baker story, The Talons of Weng-Chiang. There’s Sally Sparrow in the 2007 story, Blink – with David Tennant and the walking statues.

That’s partly down to the quality of those stories. A recent reader survey in Doctor Who Magazine voted Talons the fourth and Blink the second best Doctor Who stories ever – fourth and second out of 200.

The quality of the writing means they're not merely supporting characters. They’re not just there to add colour to what’s going on in the stories; they’re people we want to spend time with. It’s a shame that at the end of Blink Sally Sparrow doesn’t join the Doctor for more adventures – she’s the companion he never quite had. Jago and Litefoot have just been reunited in an audio play for Big Finish; a story of their own, without the Doctor. It's part of Big Finish's ‘Companion Chronicles’ series, usually reserved for the companions who travelled with the Doctor for more than a few stories.

Companions are different from supporting characters. The Doctor and his companions are people we want to spend time with. They want to explore, and when there’s trouble they want to help. They can never do that easily.

The Doctor and his companions are the focus of the stories. Especially in the series as it’s been since 2005, the Exciting Things Happening in each episode tell us more about the Doctor and his companions than the other way round. There’s an alien invasion or some gadget that will overturn the laws of physics, but the hook of the episode is how the Doctor and his companions feel. I think that mix is what's given the recent series such a massive, broad appeal.

It's important to note that this attention on relationships and feelings does not come at the expense of other parts of the story. I've heard it said that while the Doctor's relationships remain difficult in the new series, the Events Happening are dealt with too easily. The Doctor just presses a button, or has some pseudo-science answer where he might as well wave a magic wand. New Doctor Who, I've heard more than one person say, is more interesting in holding hands than the story.

I don't think that's true; at least, it's not something that's new to the series since 2005. The old Doctors would just as often escape danger with a single bound. They would confuse the villain's computer which would blow up the villain's base, or variations on that theme. If you were lucky the villain would be killed by his own killing machine. Just as with the new series, there were a lot of supporting characters ready to sacrifice their lives.

The show has always needed to wrap its stories up neatly, with the Doctor at the heart of the answer. And I don't think that's very different from other shows. Star Trek, for all its credentials on Wikipedia, often wraps up its episodes in the last couple of minutes with the timely invention of some new technology or law of physics. Star Trek's scientific advisers might ensure the words used in the script sound scientifically accurate, but that's just using the trappings of science to validate the ending of the story.

All endings are contrived: a writer chooses if they’re happy or tragic, who lives and who dies. It feels more contrived in Victorian novels when a rich relative dies and leaves our heroine a fortune if we’ve not heard of that relative before. So writers seed clues and props that can be used in the solution. Ideally, the solution comes as a surprise but also seems, in retrospect, inevitable, even obvious.

There's a good example in Blink, second best Doctor Who story ever. The weeping angels look like statues, and we know they can only move if no one is looking at them. Sally and Larry hide from them in the TARDIS, but the TARDIS dematerialises, leaving Sally and Larry behind. They're surrounded by the angels. They can't look at all the angels at once. There's no way they can escape.

Except the angels stand perfectly still. We already know why: they can only move if no one is looking at them. And they're looking at each other.

The story uses only what we already know, it makes the Doctor central – he withdraws the TARDIS – and afterwards the solution seems so obvious. It's a trick, a contrivance, but it's perfectly done.

So what we want in a story is people we want to spend time with who want something they cannot get easily. We want the story to move us, to make us feel differently. And we want an ending that doesn't feel like it cheats.

So – and sorry if you were thinking this as well – where does science come into all that? The next bit is about stuff I've written, so sorry it's all a bit me, me, me.

First, if you're going to have science in your story, you should endeavour to get it right.

In 2005, I wrote my first Doctor Who novel, The Time Travellers, in which the first Doctor and his companions meet some scientists testing a time machine. In accepting my outline for the story, editor Justin Richards said I'd have to make sure I got the physics right.

You'll be sorry to hear I didn't invent time travel for the purposes of the book. I did read some books on quantum theory – including Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe. I also got a doctor of particle physics at the University of Manchester to look over my notes. He agreed I should use quantum entanglement. As he said – I love this quote:

The best thing with high energy physics is that you can do very weird things... and they are allowed!

He made notes on the book as I wrote it, as did a couple of mates with science degrees, and I hope they helped save me from any too galling mistakes. In return, I borrowed his name for the head of the time travel experiment in the book, and had him blown up by a nuclear bomb.

Trying to get the details right is important. It's not just about using the trappings of science. There are those who argue – the people who wrote the Physics and Star Trek Wikipedia page, for example – that this sort of thing even drives science forward, with well grounded science fiction stories acting as thought-experiments in which to test theories.

I'm not wholly convinced by this boast. A lot of SF ideas and technology would never work in the real world, at least not quite as described in the stories. Star Trek fans make much of how the series showed hand-held communicators in the mid-60s, decades before mobile phones. But you watch those old episodes of Star Trek now and it's striking how people hold their communicators – it's out in front, not up to their ear.

Doctor Who's guesses have been more off-target. The 1966 story The War Machines sees William Hartnell's Doctor battle a new super-computer called WOTAN. What makes WOTAN so utterly evil? He can speak to other computers down the telephone line. This was years before the ARPANET, the first fragile version of the web.

But even if grounding the story in real science does not advance science in itself, it can spread scientific ideas an theories. A 1982 story called Earthshock sees the Cybermen crash a spaceship into the Earth which wipes out the dinosaurs. A lot of Doctor Who fans at the time, including me, grew up thinking this was based on fact: that the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 and a half million years ago was the result of some foreign body hitting the Earth.

This is generally the consensus opinion among scientists now. But this idea, called the Alvarez hypothesis, is a relatively new one and it took time to be accepted. It was first proposed by Luis and Walter Alvarez in 1980, and so would have been a New Scientist headline just when writer Eric Saward would have been pitching the idea what became Earthshock.

A radical new theory and its central to a tea-time family adventure series, the episode with the crash watched by 9.6 million viewers in the UK on first transmission. I think that's probably the nearest Doctor Who's come to Star Trek's communicator. Doctor Who, ahead of the game in cutting edge science. It doesn't happen very often.

And if nothing else, grounding the fiction in real science means you don't break the illusion of reality, so keep the audience caught up in the story. In fact, these details can add a sense of reality to the story, drawing the reader further in. George Orwell once wrote that,

"The outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens’s writing is the unnecessary detail."

Another benefit to the writer is that getting the science right means you have to consult with other people. Writing generally means lots of lonely hours sat in front of a computer plonking down the words, so finding people who can answer your questions helps to keep you sane.

I'm here today, away from my computer, as a result of asking Marek questions. I've written a story, Shadow of the Past, featuring Liz Shaw, the third Doctor's companion. Liz, we learn in her first TV story, has degrees in medicine and physics and her job is to investigate 'the strange, the unexplained'. I needed to make that part of the story; when a meteorite crashes in the Pennines at the start, she'd want to measure and test it.

I asked Marek what tests she might do. I also asked how much notice her friends at UNIT sometime in the 1970s or 80s might have of a meteorite crashing on Earth. Marek sent me back a long email which I pasted straight into the script. This talk is the least I could do.

Something else I've discovered: a real scientific concept is a great springboard for a monster. An episode of QI gave me an idea for a monster that I've then used several times. Stephen Fry explained that even if you liquidise a living sponge, it can put itself back together. Liquidise two spongers together and they separate themselves out. Imagine a monster like that? You'd never be able to kill it. But, since it's all made of nerve tissue, you could easily hurt it and incur its wrath.

My editor at the time, Gary Russell, suggested that this spongy monster should also have the power to change shape and mimic other people. Shape changers, he explained, are cheap to do on audio because they are not an additional voice. Thus were born the Mim, who feature in lots of my stuff. And when I wanted to destroy their planet, there was plenty of information available by googling on what might make sponges extinct.

Incidentally, QI seems to have got the stuff about the sponges from The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins details HV Wilson's 1907 experiments on sponges on page 500. You could mine Dawkins' book for monsters. It's packed with good stuff. There are the sea squirts that eat their own brains when they mature, or the starfish even Dawkins calls 'Martian' because they're so unlike other life forms on Earth. Doctor Who, incidentally, gets a name check on page 284. Anyway.

Even better, sometimes getting the science right can drive the story that follows. I've written a Blake's 7 audio play due out later this year, about the early life of Blake's friend Jenna Stannis. Jenna has grown up on a space station and thinks planets are a bit backward. My wheeze was to have a teenage Jenna race spaceships with a boy that she fancies.

Script editor Ben Aaronovitch liked the idea, but tossed back my first draft because I had avoided the physics. He explained that his vision for the show didn't include star drives and other made-up convenience. Our heroes can't just press a button to make their spaceships go. At his insistence, I had to go ask my clever friends about orbital mechanics and delta-v.

You can't race space ships in vacuum. If they're both the same shape and have the same thrust they'll be perfectly matched. So my race now takes place through an asteroid field, where the ships get pinged with dust and rocks, and the pilots need skill to keep themselves on a steady course. The dust rattling off the nose cone will also, I'm hoping, make it sound good on audio.

I worried how I'd explain the physics stuff to the listener without bogging down the story in explanation. So I've used the complexity of the physics as a plot point. They race without using their ships' computers, doing all the calculations in their heads. That means they're also trying to put each other off. So I've got an important plot reason for Jenna mentioning off-hand to the guy she's racing that she's not wearing a bra.

It's important, though, that the background research doesn't take over the story. One common complaint from scientists is that we writers are happy to get our science wrong, but would never dream of inaccurately referencing history or literature. We do that all the time.

In the 2005 Doctor Who story The Unquiet Dead, the Doctor meets Charles Dickens. Writer Mark Gatiss has clearly done his research and the Dickens here has a complicated love life and a scepticism for the supernatural. The real Dickens, however, had suffered a stroke about eighth months before the events of this story. The Doctor admittedly says that he'll die in the following year, but this Dickens isn't grey-faced and limping, as the sources suggest - that would be too depressing for a Saturday tea-time. The story fudges the details; it's a recognisable, well-drawn impression of Dickens, but not the man himself.

We could make the same case for the Victorian Cardiff seen in the story: it's an impression of the time, as much to do with the conventions of period drama on television as it is about the history.

Steven Moffat – the new Head Writer of Doctor Who, and the author of Blink – talked about just this issue earlier this month. He was speaking about his forthcoming new version of Sherlock Holmes, set in the present day. He said:

"The moment you do a period piece, you've got one of two approaches. You either funk it up a bit and try and pretend that the Victorian era was just like now, or you lavish detail on it. In either case you make the background the story. Now that is lovely [in] a story that's about Victorian England. The Sherlock Holmes stories are detective stories. The background should stand at the back and, frankly, the foreground, the great heroic stories of detection should be what it's about."

It doesn't just apply to period pieces. Think about the physics in a contemporary-set show. EastEnders, for example, doesn't bog itself down in detailing how the beer pumps work at the bar of the Queen Vic. They're just there in the background, and if whoever is serving needs to go change a barrel, we know it's for some important plot reason. They won't be at the bar to hear some piece of information, or they'll have a meeting with someone downstairs that no one else will see.

In a sci-fi show, if you don't explain the beer pumps, some people feel that you're cheating. In EastEnders, they're a background detail. They help us believe that we're watching events in a real pub. They can even play a part in the driving the story. But they're not what the story's about.

Sometimes Doctor Who does foreground the science. The Doctor's had scientific companions – doctors of physics and medicine. He's been up close to black holes and seen the invention of the steam train. In the Curse of Fenric, his companion Ace, who dropped out of school in the 1980s, knows more about logic and programming than the scientists working on the first computers.

But science needs to know its place in the story. We have to accept that Doctor Who is fiction, that for all it might source its monsters from real science, they're grown to suit the needs of the story.

And yet I think there's an important way in which Doctor Who uses and even promotes science. And I think it something Doctor Who has over many other shows and heroes. It's got the Doctor.

His attitude to science is crucial. He explicitly says he's a scientist several times in the first decade of the show. He also describes himself as a pioneer among his own people. He's a horologist and chronometrist – he likes clocks – he took a degree in medicine with Lister and he clearly knows all the loopholes of intergalactic law.

Sometimes that gives him an authority, but more often it explains what he does.

He's interested in everything, and with him, everything is interesting. Every Doctor Who episode grapples with the strange and scary. It loves subverting the normal and everyday. Even when the TARDIS lands in an ordinary, suburban street you know the monsters are lurking. Ipods and Sat Nav and shop window dummys suddenly mean something else.

Wherever he goes, the Doctor asks awkward questions. What's going on? What made it like that? What can we do to help? The core of a Doctor Who story is the surprise reversal of expectations. "It's Not What You Think, Doctor!" Or, "They're Not What They Seem!" Cue end titles.

The Doctor exposes the truth, disproving theories however ancient and guarded. He's not afraid to challenge assumptions. He can make himself unpopular by making people face difficult truths. And he wants us to look for ourselves. He teaches not just his companions but everyone he can to use their brains, to question, to work out what's really going on. That drive and courage is at the very heart of science.

Think of what happened to Galileo for suggesting the Earth circled round the Sun, not the other way round. A lot of science if counter-intuitive. Quantum physics and orbital mechanics defy the way we think the world should work. Ben Goldacre describes the results of the Cochrane Collaboration, a systematic review of medical research.

"This careful sifting of information has revealed huge gaps in knowledge, it has revealed that 'best practices' were sometimes murderously flawed, and simply by sifting methodically through pre-existing data, it has saved more lives than you could possibly imagine."

Ben Goldacre, Bad Science, p.98.

I said I'd return to Goldacre's definition of 'bad science'. He spoke of people for whom 'science' – in quotes – is 'a monolith, a mystery, and an authority, rather than a method.' These are the people caught up in the Doctor's adventures, who he teaches to see things differently. He makes them ask questions.

Here's Elton Pope at the end of the episode Love & Monsters, when his world's been turned upside down:"

When you're a kid, they tell you it's all grow up. Get a job. Get married. Get a house. Have a kid, and that's it. But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It's so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better!"

Doctor Who might not always get its physics right, it might fudge the details, but it's intrinsically about a delight in the universe, in exploring, in asking questions. And that's why it's good science. Thank you.

Grand Tour 2009

Busy, busy, busy. Lots of different bits of work on and about to go on tour…

Tomorrow morning I’m a guest at Faringdon Arts Festival, reading to children at Faringdon Junior School and then trying to answer their questions. Kids tend to ask more challenging, leftfield questions than grown-ups, so I’m more nervous than normal.

My bit is just for the school kids, but on Saturday afternoon proper TV writers of Doctor Who Paul Cornell and Phil Ford will be spilling their secrets to anyone who’ll listen. Miffed I’m going to miss that.

I’ll be at a guest at the Winchester Arts Festival on Saturday, at the library where I used to borrow Doctor Who books. Me, Mark Morris and Nicholas Briggs will be encouraging three sessions of school kids to write their own monstrous stories and explaining what makes a good monster.

At the end of August I’ll be at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich – the centre of time and space itself, and location for Doctor Who and the Dimensions in Time – as part of a weekend of family activities. More details on what that will involve soon.

Over the weekend of 19-20 September, I’ll be at Regenerations in Swansea, flogging copies of the Inside Story. (How splendid that Gary Russell gets top billing above Derek Jacobi and Davros).

In October I’m hoping to do a thing in Manchester and possibly also in Leeds, of which more details soon. And then, at the end of October I’m at HurricaneWho in Orlando.

If you're able to make any or all of these, do come say hello.

Perspectives on the human condition - for kids!

Dashed away from working full pelt on two as-yet-unannounced mountains of work to attend the BBC Writersroom's Q&A with new head of CBBC Drama Steven Andrew and writer Ellie Brewer. There's a competition to write a new drama script for 8-12s with a deadline of 1 July. Hope to get something in there once I'm past my two current mountains.

Sat with a good throng of other wannabes in the Royal Court Theatre. There were clips of MI High, Roman Mysteries and Sarah Jane - the latter from an episode by one Joseph Lidster. I wonder whatever became of him?

Kids' telly is a simple brief: expanding the imagination with unmissable storytelling, offering new perspectives on life and vivid sensations the kids will remember for ever.

While kids' drama needs to be be from the perspective of kids, they also can't be in every scene because of the restrictions on child actors. So you need adults, and also adults-only scenes, and enough kids to vary up schedules. Kids also can tend to have more days off sick than adults, so you need some flexibility for last-minute re-writes.

Keep kids' dialogue short, too: the actors need to remember it, and they need to be able to say it. In fact many of the clips we saw had very little dialogue - several minutes of material all told entirely visually.

But most of my notes are about specific things in the idea I've already got. So I'm not going to share those here, at least not now.

Didn't stay long after, but said hello to Jason Arnopp, then dashed home to the waiting mountains. Missed the storm by a whisker.

ETA: Transcript of the talk here.

Porn for kids

To the BFI Southbank last night to see Coraline in eye-popping 3D. Eye-popping then replacing with buttons…

Coraline Jones moves to an old pink house in the middle of nowhere. While her parents are enslaved to their keyboards and deadlines, Coraline starts to explore. There’s the deep, deep well up the hill, the amazing mouse-circus ringmaster (Ian McShane) who lives upstairs, and the two mad old actresses (French and Saunders) living in the basement. And in Coraline’s own living room there’s a small door. Which leads to another old pink house where everything’s the same but much better… At least that’s how it seems at first.

It’s a wild ride, packed with jokes and scares and cleverness. Apart from a bit with a needle, the 3D is used sparingly to add texture to scenes rather than being all in your face. The Dr suspected you wouldn’t lose much without it, but I think the fact you’re not overtly conscious of the effect is really one of the film’s strengths. As with any special effect, the best ones are when you don’t notice it’s a trick.

That’s important because I assume the 3D is there as a hook to get people into cinemas and not squirreling pirate versions to watch on widescreen almost-cinema TV. It’d be easy to go overboard and showy.

There was a lively Q&A afterwards with Neil Gaiman (what wrote the book the film’s based on), Henry Selick (what adapted and directed it) and John Hodgman (voice of the Father and Other Father, and off the Daily Show and Flight of the Conchords). I liked that Selick started wary with his answers for fear of giving us spoilers.

Apparently Gaiman sent Selick the book long before it was published – and even before illustrator Dave McKean got to see it – having loved his previous work. That means the film has been in gestation for something like nine years. Also, Gaiman’s note on an early version of the script was that it was too faithful an adaptation. It’s a while since I read the book, but the film seems bigger, more visual, less inside Coraline’s own head. There are more set pieces and principal characters.

Answering a question from the audience, Gaiman explained that there are things you can do in a book which just don’t translate to the screen. If he describes the Other Mother as “not-quite-the-same” as the real one, the reader does all the work in realising the difference. Selick has got to realise his own vision, show us what she looks like.

But I also think a book, or a narrated story, means you’re much more inside the protagonist’s head, and the tension and excitement is as much from what they’re thinking. In film you’re rarely privy to a character’s thoughts – telling us what they’re thinking is cheating. As viewers, we stand outside the action, our emotions plucked by action not thoughts.

In book and film Coraline struggles to make herself listened to; even a boy her own age in the film doesn’t give what she says any heed. That creates problems where you’d normally smuggle exposition into the dialogue.

Gaiman says the staged version has faced the same problem, with their Coraline saying as dialogue much more of the descriptive bits of the book. If I remember by A-levels correctly, there are dramatic conventions for this sort of thing. This isn’t cheating, though there are dramatic conventions for a character addressing the audience directly. A soliloquy speaks the truth – or at least the truth as the character sees it.

I don’t think Coraline narrating more of the film would have worked. It would have placed us self-consciously outside the action, at a distance and safe from anything that befalls her. As it is, we’re right up there with her, experience things as she does, part of the 3D world ourselves.

It certainly draws you in; the Dr – the wuss puss – found a lot of it scary. Gaiman said he’s interested in the response in the UK since things like the New York Times review of Coraline dwelt on justifying the very idea of kids’ film being scary. Almost as if, said Gaiman, he was pushing “porn for kids”. Over here, he went on, we know full well that the best telly is watched from behind the sofa (he then body-swerved a question on whether he’d be writing Doctor Who).

It’s difficult judging how scary you can be: Coraline makes monsters from familiar sureties like your parents and friends and neighbours. Coraline’s own house and bedroom and dolls are warped into nightmares. Yet at the same time it’s colourful and fun, Coraline helped along the way with good and true friends, embracing the strangeness of the real world while battling the monsters.

The child who is not listened to reminded me a little of David McKee’s Not Now, Bernard. Being careful what you wish for is the basis for many a scary fairy tale. Yet the child’s vivid imagination reworking the world around them is a bit like Pan’s Labyrinth – a film Gaiman himself admits wasn’t always suitable for a 12 year-old. Just because something is told through the eyes of a child doesn’t mean it is for kids.

Having tried to write scary stuff myself, and struggled to get that balance right, I’m fascinated by this kind of thing (see Scott on his three year-old’s response to Primeval). Just as with grown-ups, different kids will accept and engage with different things. One man’s meat is another’s monster. There’s stuff I was terrified of as kid (Worzel Gummidge, David Collings as Mawdryn…) that I knew at the time no one else was scared of…

It’s good that kids’ stories challenge and scare them, and that they overcome those fears. I guess the trick is in ensuring – trying to ensure – that you challenge, not abuse.

Something something eggs

I seem to keep saying this: it's all been a bit manic of late. Sort of finished a big thing as-yet unnannounced on Friday and sent it round the houses for corrections and approval. Then sped up to Victoria to get more material for the very thing I'd just finished. Had a beer with P. in the grotty pub in the station, where we swapped gossip and discussed Government policy.

Then home for fish, chips and mushy peas in front of Quantum of Solace. Much more intelligible and splendid second time round; perhaps the smaller screen size helps, perhaps it's 'cos I already know where it's heading. But the edit is still so frenetic it's an effort to keep up.

On Saturday, with the typing done, I dismantled my office in preparation for the new floor. This took pretty much all day, and ripped two holes in my trousers. I unscrewed and delegged the fitted, too-low desk but it wouldn't come away from the wall. It seemed to have been fitted with a combination of glue and magick. Decided I'd wait for the expert: at least if the builder should pull the whole wall down, I won't be the one feeling silly.

The Dr arrived back from a day's teaching to marvel at my efforts. We then schlepped round to M. and N.'s house for a nice fish tea. Some excitement at the mussels still being alive when we arrived. I imagined them shrieking "Help me!" like that bit at the end of The Fly.

Having done the shifting chores on Saturday, earned an unusual lie-in on Sunday. The Dr even brought me tea and Jaffa Cakes in bed, where I idly glanced through the paper. Margaret Drabble thinks writing a spell against depression, and workaholicism and alcoholism go often hand-in-hand. I suspect there's something in that; not sure it's something good.

Then up, and amid the mess of office furniture and files now heaped around our living room, I laptopped a rewrite of a pitch and did some general edits on Friday's writing. Still a few bits to add and tweak, but the end is nearly in sight. Then perhaps there might be an announcement.

Will also be able to announce something else next week, the first in a new foray for me. How exciting this mystery must make my tawdry existence sound.

Then to St John's in Smith Square to hear the Exmoor Singers do Bach's St Matthew's Passion. (The apostrophication like Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, but with less monsters and more singing.) My chum (+ neighbour + boss) G. was one of the singers, and even got a line of his own. We saved our whooping for the final applause.

Psychonomy was also in attendance, and without a programme for the first half was making up his own words. Apparently they featured Nick Griffin and something perhaps about eggs. In part two, he could follow the words in German and clunkily translated English. He didn't think much of the arias, but otherwise thought it Good.

Me and the Dr have been to a few versions of the thing; for my own future reference, the Dr would like the aria after Peter's denial to be playing when she snuffs it.

Erbarme dich, mein Gott,
um meiner Zähren willen!
Schaue hier, Herz und Auge
weint vor dir bitterlich.
Erbarme dich, mein Gott.

(Touch my willy, God,
Or I will cry!
See here, My heart and eyes
Want to drink buttermilk.
Touch my willy, God.)

Passion According to Saint Matthew, BWV 244 (1727)
Translation S. Guerrier (2009)

Beers after, and then home to thick slabs of cheese on toast. I left the Dr watching EastEnders and No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and fell to bed about half-midnight.

Up this morning to wash and shave in time for the arrival of S. the builder. He sussed the issue of the desk in five seconds, and undrilled some screws I'd not even noticed. With a clunk the desk was severed from its moorings. We'll need to replaster and paint, but we should have a wooden floor down by the time I get back tonight. Then I'll need to source a new desk. One that might actually fit me.

Life is manic and also a bit expensive. So you'll have to wait for the apoplectic rant about Clive Staples ****ing Lewis. Consider it a blessing.

Top of the pulps?

How exciting – readers of Unreality SF think the Prisoner’s Dilemma one of the best 10 tie-in stories of 2008-09. There’s now a vote for the best one, so go vote for me. Closing date is 22 March.

(The site’s own review of the story thinks the story “a bit disjointed” and seems to like my daft interview at the end with the actors and director the best of it. Pah.)

I’m very busy on something as-yet-unannounced which I can’t wait to shout about. But am taking tonight off to go watch New Boy with the boss and the tracer twin who isn’t already on stage.

Moran has written sizeable, wise advice for budding writers. He enthuses about reading widely.

Of no interest to anyone, my current reads are: Matter by Iain M Banks (re-reading for a thing I’m very late writing); Blood and Guts by Richard Hollingham (hot damn it is full of top and grisly facts); Something Borrowed by Paul Magrs (still reading this to the Dr) and The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis (because it fitted in my pocket on Saturday; read it as a believer back in my pre-teens and now find it enthralling for very different reasons…).

I’ve recently finished The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (goth fun, the usual sort of thing) and Eclipse of the Crescent Moon by Geza Gardonyi, translated by George F Gushing (old-skool, Orientalist adventure, full of odd details). And I’m watching Red Riding, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle and the 50 year-old first series of The Twilight Zone (on DVD) at the moment, too.

Hope to blog on ‘em all when there’s a let up in the feverish beavering.

Can we save “dirty” and “stick”?

Fascinated by this news story about the oldest words in English. It’s one avenue of research by Reading University’s evolutionary biology group. As their page on linguistics and cultural evolution says:

“Our studies of cultural evolution investigate the idea that human cultures behave as if they were distinct biological species.”

As Charlie Darwin worked out (with a splendid sketch on page 36 of notebook B, in 1837-38), evolution means branching development – a great long family tree.

My chum Millennium Elephant once nicely explained why tree-branching means there’s no such thing as a “missing link”. In his example, you go back in time 500 years and find that human beings are still human beings. They might be a bit cruder and smellier than folk today, but they’re still our species. Make sure you’ve packed your condoms.

The English language of 500 years ago is likewise a cruder, smellier version of ours. Our speech patterns might raise some eyebrows, but we would probably be understood. Their plays and essays might feel “ye olde worlde” to us now, but we can follow the meaning.

The further back you go, though, the cruder and smellier the people and language become, and the less like us you will find them. About 250,000 years back, the branch of Homo sapiens merges with Homo erectus. (No need for condoms, but shame on you.)

Language changes much quicker than genes: a bit less than 1,000 years back, English splits between Norman French and Anglo-Saxon. But English is made up of all sorts of words nicked from other and earlier languages. So the clever Reading fellows have devised a clever comparative wossname to guesstimate which of our words would still be intelligible to the crude, smelly past. This would be useful if you didn’t have a TARDIS to translate for you (or you did but that bit wasn’t working).

The Word changes gadget lets you set the dematerialisation controls on 200 common, modern words. My Slitheen Excursion is set in 1,500 BC and in Greece. But 3,509 years ago scores 11/200 matches:

I; we
Name
How; who
One; two; three; four; five
Tongue

I can see the stickiness of simple, everyday concepts for getting across vital information quickly. But “tongue”?

Presumably they had their own words for “dirty”, “stick” and “guts”. (Although not a word for “zero” which is a much more recent concept – we didn’t have it when we created the Anno Domini calendar, which is why the millennium celebrations were a year out. I keep meaning to read this book.)

But the news report also suggests that “dirty”, “stick” and “guts” are “likely to die out soon”. Note they don’t define “soon”. It’s discussing words suspected of being 40,000 years-old, so does soon mean next century or next millennia?

Second, if I understand it right it’s not that the words will die out but be superseded. We’ll use other words to say the same things. But which words will we use? Does the research give any idea? Surely these new words will have to be better than the ones we’ve already got.

“Evolution is NOT a process of "mistakes". It's an ongoing series of triumphs over adversity, and every species alive today is a gold medal winner. We're NOT just the recipient of a spoonful of divine generosity. We have worked our way up.”

Millennium Elephant, “Stupid by design”, 1 March 2008.

George Orwell’s splendid "Politics and the English language" is a manifesto for more concrete, less pretentious writing. He favours short, Anglo-Saxon words because they’re simpler and more vivid. It would be a shame to lose our guts.

Flatshare horror

To the NFT last night for a preview of the first proper episode of Being Human, which airs on BBC3 at 9 pm on Sunday 25 January. WATCH IT - IT IS FANTASTIC.

The wheeze is that a vampire, a ghost and a werewolf share a house in Bristol. They're sexy young twenty-somethings with angst and problems with relationships, plus the perils of being monsters. It's sort of a mix of Buffy and This Life, but I felt that even this first episode set it up as distinctly it's own thing.

Writer/creator Toby Whithouse (his episode of Doctor Who made me blub) makes it funny, scary, moving, violent, twisty and just so, so good. We also got a teaser trail for the rest of the series, and yikes I am stupidly hooked.

In the Q&A afterwards with Whithouse, star Russell Tovey, producer Julie Gardner and some other producers, one audience member said she'd been surprised to like it since she's not into that "fantasy" stuff. This is one of those things that really annoys me, based as it is on two woefully stupid assumptions.

First, it assumes that anything sci-fi is rubbish or at least unworthy of serious attention. The zine Ansible has a regular "As others see us" column collecting pundits denying something is sci-fi because they thought it was good. That's not to say that everything SF is brilliant, just that there is some very good stuff.

Which leads into the second assumption, that because you like one thing that's got a sci-fi element in it that you must then like everything skiffy. So if you like Doctor Who you must also like Star Trek, if you like Star Wars you must also like the George Clooney version of Solaris, if you like Watchmen you must also like Green Lantern. But a football fan tends to only support two teams - a city team (not necessarily the local one) and one national one. All other football teams must be considered the enemy.

An awful lot of the activity of being a fan is discussing the precise bits you're not a fan of. We wade through the mountains of dross in search of the occasional nuggets of good stuff. It's why we cling to good shows so devotedly: we know they are precious and rare.

I like telly that's exciting, surprising, involving and smart. I like The Wire and Gavin and Stacey as much as I like Doctor Who. It's not that shoving in monsters makes telly suddenly good (hello, Demons). But, as Whithouse said last night, sometimes a fantasy element can lift an ordinary show into being something special.

It's only recently that British telly has caught on to this idea, as a result of the success of Doctor Who. In 1998, Ultraviolet tried a similar Buffy / This Life mix and was broadcast while no one was watching. Most people I know caught up it on video or DVD. It's a brilliant, brilliant series. But Channel 4 hid it away in the schedules, and forced the show to hide its fantasy credentials, embarrassedly. The vampires are never called vampires but instead "Code fives". (Five in Roman is "V", geddit?) Though I think that worked in its favour...

Post Doctor Who, telly is happy to announce its high concepts. The success of the Doctor has made it okay for TV to be bolder and madder. Importantly, Being Human is very different to Doctor Who - it's also got a very different feel from Torchwood, which is probably the thing it will be most likened to.

And yet... This first episode is a retelling of last year's pilot. Some of the cast has changed since then, and also some of the emphasis. And the thing that's most noticeably different, and the biggest improvement, is that they've made the vampires less all-out goth monster, and made them much more mundane.

I guess the fantasy elements work to pepper the drama, but what makes these things work is the people, their characters and relationships. The stuff that all good telly depends on.

False Starts

I’ve been avidly following Lance Parkin’s Eyeless blog, in which he unpicks how he goes about writing a Doctor Who book. Some things I concur with wholeheartedly, on other stuff he’s Entirely Insane. And that’s why it’s so fun.

Lance has got past the stage of the synopsis being approved and is on to what happens next. In an interview at the start of the year, I said:

“The first chapter is usually the hardest, because you have to rewrite and rewrite until you get the ‘voice’ of the book right. There were maybe five or six completely different openings to The Pirate Loop before I got it working. Once you get that tone and style, the rest follows much more easily.”

Julio Angel Ortiz, The Ten With… Simon Guerrier, 8 January 2008.

You want the book to start with a bang, to hook the audience from the first sentence. So what were those different openings?

On 28 June 2007, I scribbled in my notebook. I came up with some questions to ask Stephen Fewell for the Inside Story of Benny and I made a note to “send Lisa [Bowerman] script for Final Amendment”. And then there’s the first attempt at a prologue to The Pirate Loop. It needed to begin with the Doctor telling Martha about the Starship Brilliant and how it disappeared.

(Italics is stuff I went back and squeezed into the gaps; asterisks are a note to myself to insert the extra bit further down the page. And I work on the basis that it’ll all be polished anyway when I type it up.)

‘But you know everything!’
Martha [?] Jones was [age] running for her life pursued by android per hover sheep*. The sheep, it turned out, were programmed to protect the lush pink pasture of the planet Valley of Welp.

* The sheep firinge lasers from their eyes.

‘Unauthorised personnel,’ bleated the sheep in identical weary tone, ‘are to be eliminated.’
‘Not everything,’ said the Doctor, helping Martha across the over meta the paddock gate & back to where the into the next muddy field. He was a tall, skinny brightly smiling bloke and Martha had something of a crush on him. ‘You see?’ he said, arms outstretched. ‘Perfect countryside & a twinge of helium in the air. That’s why your voice is a bit squeaky. Bit of your H.E. ‘on ‘em, Human vocal chords go all stretchy.’
‘You were telling me about this spaceship,’ said Martha.
Martha made a concerted effort to sound less like a mouse.
‘Meeeh,’ said the sheep burbumping up against the far side of the gate, ‘we’ll get you next time, intruders.’
‘Well,’ said the Doctor. ‘The Starship Brilliant just disappeared There’s a perfectly rational explanation. Somewhere.’
‘Right,’ said

And that just wasn’t working. So, after a line break, I thought I’d start instead with the Brilliant disappearing:

Cap Captain Window was a short, square man with a brisk moustache & temper. He was perfectly at home on the flight deck of any starship, but he had little en delight in his passengers.
‘Teddy bears,’ he muttered
‘Her brother is in the space chancery,’ he said irritably as he inspected the hyper-geometer’s post.
‘Sir?’ said the geometer, who was a new posting & hadn’t yet learnt.
‘The space chancery!’ roared Captain Window, who loved any excuse to shout. ‘One of these lawyers who agrees the boundaries of the empire. The sort leading us all to war.’
‘Yes sir,’ said the geometer.

And that wasn’t working either, so I left it for a few days. And came up with the wheeze that the Doctor and Martha were in mortal peril, or about to be killed. What if, to take her mind off that the Doctor told her about the Brilliant? (Back when I thought I might produce Benny Series 9, I came up with a wheeze for a cheap two-hander, where Benny and Peter are in a cell waiting to face a firing squad, and Benny keeps Peter's mind off it by chatting and telling stories.) On 7 July, I wrote:

‘You’re kidding me,’ laughed Martha Jones, the day before she died. ‘I thought you knew everything.’
Beside her in the prison cell, the Doctor
She and the Doctor were in a prison cell, under sentence of death. The It was the usual thing;

And that wasn’t working, so I left a line break and started again.

Martha Jones wasn’t really worried, so long as she was still with the Doctor. He lounged beside her in the prison cell, long skinny legs stretched out in front of him, his feet in mismatching, stripey socks. The robot guards had taken his shoes, his coat & sonic screwdriver.

And then another line break.

‘You say it all the time!’ laughed Martha Jones. For someone under who was going to be executed at dawn, she was in good spirits. Beside her, in the prison cell, the Doctor stretched his long & skinny limbs.
‘I do not,’ he said.

And then another line break.

A crowd turned out to see them die.

And then another line break.

You take your time,’ said the Doctor amiably.
‘We’re not in any hurry, are we?’
‘No,’ said Martha. ‘And you want to make sure you get it right, don’t you? With all these people watching.’

And then another line break.

Martha Jones first heard of the Starship Brilliant while waiting on her way to be executed. She and the Doctor The robot people of the planet Soft had never ‘unplugged’ humans before, & while they debated twittered & bleeped about the best & most efficient method, the

And then another break for a few days. On 13 July I jotted some notes about Martha’s relationship with her family having chatted to Monster Maker. On 15 July, Millennium’s daddies hosted a marathon watch of Martha’s TV adventures and I scribbled more stuff down. And at some point around that time, Codename Moose updated his Facebook page saying he was sick of hearing Mika’s Grace Kelly everywhere he went. All this lodged in my brain, and on 20 July I wrote:

Sixty million robots danced through the streets of Milky-Pink City. They had never been program taken any dance lessons and they’d never been programmed with any styles. But they all flaunted & twisted & cavorted their metal limbs with abandon in time to the rhythm in their heads. There were tall robots doing what was sort of a rumba, & wide, heavy-lifting robots doing potat what were almost potatoes and squares.* And on all their blank expressionless faces was something like machine joy.
‘It’s funny,’ said Martha Jones watching them as the Doctor stuffed his. ‘My brother hates that song.’
‘Yeah?’ said the Doctor beside her as he rummaged through his deep pockets for the TARDIS key. ‘I like the line about [Grace Kelly by Mika].’

* They had been built to serve and pamper holiday 1000s of human holiday makers, who had then never showed up. The robots had waited patiently, but intergalactic tourism is a harsh & cruel business. The tourists never came. Until two travellers just happened to stop by.
The robots had fallen over themselves to oblige these two. They’d fought each other to make their drinks. They’d had a war over who got to help take the Doctor’s coat. Eventually They’d turned on the visitors…

Much better, and the rest of the book went from there. (And all that stuff about being stuck in a prison cell got turned into "The Great Escapes" in Short Trips: Defining Patterns.)

The spectre of defeat

Awake at five this morning as the Dr thumped around getting ready for her cab to the airport. She and the mother-in-law are now be in Cairo, visiting the pyramids and stuff. I will be holding the fort, attending to the cat and doing my tax return. Oh joy.

I’ve not made it through to the third round of the British Short Screenplay Competition, but the script is going somewhere else now and my name’s in for a couple of things that might be nice if they happen. On we plod.

In the meantime, I’ve promised all the days I can spare to one freelance gig which is keeping me busy. After a whole summer of writing from home, it’s odd to be commuting again. If nothing else, I am wolfing down whole books.

The Ghost by Robert Harris was a birthday present from a fellow writer. We never learn the name of the protagonist who narrates the story, which is apt in that he’s a ghost writer, the anonymous shadow helping former Prime Minister Adam Lang finish his autobiography.

There’s already a full draft, compiled by a loyal staffer of Lang’s who has died in mysterious circumstances. Our man’s more used to ghosting the memoirs of old rock stars, freely admitting he knows nothing about politics. But with Lang’s former foreign secretary and the international crimes court accusing Lang of war crimes, our man better bone up quick.

It’s a great shocker, full of excitement and intrigue. I read it in just four sittings because – after a slowish start – I couldn’t put it down. It has lots to say on writing-for-hire and hack work and process. There’s some great stuff with the protagonist completely failing to spot the danger he’s in (you keep wanting to shout “behind you!”). And there are also some great little details, like the Prime Minister’s security heavy reading Harry Potter. It’s a lively, exciting and intelligent read and comes recommended.

But there’s something about it that really bugged me, a constant distraction from the thrilling plot. A lot of the reviews of the book have concentrated on how much Adam Lang and his wife owe to Tony and Cherie Blair. It might be them in silhouette on the cover. The characters have similar backgrounds and quirks.

I think this is the weakness of the book. However shrewd these observations of the real former Prime and Mrs Minister, they’re wrapped up in a potboiling thriller, a conspiracy that’s patently not real. The real intrudes on the story.

“Harris, at one time a leading supporter of new Labour, had unprecedented access to Blair during the 1997 election campaign and during his heady early days of government. But his support withered over the Iraq war and Blair’s relationship with George Bush.”

Brendan Bourne, “Harris points pen at a leader very like Blair”, The Sunday Times, 19 August 2007.

As a result of Harris’s insider knowledge, we’re constantly second guessing the real writer. If Lang’s having an affair in the book, does Harris knows something about the Blairs’ sex lives? How much of the book’s conspiracy is real?

And where does it stop? If Lang = Blair, does it follow that X is a reference to Robin Cook, or Y is based on Peter Hain… The whole thing becomes a salacious guessing game, like something out of Popbitch: who is Harris satirising now?

Lang would have worked better as his own man, evidently not Blair yet faced with the same world and choices. That way the sharp contrast makes us think through the issues rather than the gossip. As it is, the book is a personal attack on individuals. And the attack fails because whatever real criticisms Harris might have to make, they’re all mixed up in an unreal, blockbuster plot.

The same is true of To Play The King (the TV version as I’ve not read the book). House of Cards worked because, by not being about any specific, real politicians, it was about all of them. Once you’d seen these fictional people being all smiles as they stabbed at each other, it changed how you saw the real politicians going about their business. But when Michael Kitchen comes in doing an impression of Prince Charles, our attention is all on his performance, judging how well observed, sympathetic or insightful it might be. It’s about him, not the story.

As a result, I kept thinking as I read The Ghost of Andrew Cartmel’s Under the Eagle. The play covers similar ground to this – a British Prime Minister compromised by his relationship with the US, the difficulties of his marriage, the thorny issue of rendition… Both feature an outsider – a ghost writer, a comedian – staying a night with the PM as all hell breaks loose.

But Cartmel’s characters are original creations, so our focus is broader. And just because of that, the points made hit harder. People in The Ghost keep insisting that the whole war crimes thing “isn’t personal”. It’s a shame Harris himself didn’t feel the same.

The geeks shall inherit the earth

Ooh! Found an online video of Neal Stephenson discussing The Fork: Science Fiction versus Mundane Culture, which was part of the Science Fiction as a Literary Genre symposium I went to in May. (You might just spot the back of my head in the video.)

It's a fascinating - and funny - discussion of the way sf and geekery had inviegled itself into the rest of the world. I'd quote worthy chunks of it here but there isn't a transcript and I'm blogging this during my lunchbreak. So just watch the damn thing.

(I did mention it before in my review of Indiana Jones and the Nineteen-Fifties.)

The symposium, incidentally, was at the Royal College of Surgeons, downstairs from the cool museum of dead things in jars. I was a bit disappointed we didn't all lie down, drinking kylixes of wine with rude pictures at the bottom. These academics don't know their history.

We hold the line

Ah, bliss. A couple of nice days off really not doing very much. I'm almost all of the way through the extraordinary, compelling The Writer's Tale, a year-long interview with Doctor Who's re-animator, Russell T Davies.

It's packed with detail and insight about the process of writing: the crucial thinking stages, the desperate panic, the ruthless single mindedness (i.e. the collateral damage done to home life), the four-in-the-morning despair... We see when and how decisions were made, who suggested what bits and how the whole vast production team is constantly driven to Try And Make It Better. I am utterly in awe.

Benjamin Cook is an exceptional interviewer, continually challenging Russell on what he says, digging deep into the marrow of his brain. If brains had marrow in them. Their frame of reference is dizzying, taking in everything from Skins and Corrie to The Cherry Orchard and Six Characters In Search Of An Author (the new version of which, incidentally, discusses David Tennant as Doctor Who and Hamlet).

It's less an interview then, as a chance to eavesdrop a long-running conversation between two very smart people. They're such warm, good-humoured company it is a pleasure to nestle beside them. I have taken it with me to the shops and the pub, sneakily reading bits while no one is looking. Which isn't easy since it's a great heavy brick of 512 pages. And desperate as I am to get through it, I don't want it to ever end. Just 100 pages to go...

Meanwhile, work begins to whisper at me from the darkness. Off to discuss a documentary project this afternoon, then back at the freelance coal-face on Monday. And I've got 10 days to finish a thing as-yet-unannounced plus an outline for something else. Got a TV spec script thing to look over again, and a different script thing has nosed its way back into my thinking. And of course there is The Novel, which I promised myself I'd have a draft of by the end of the year.

Every fibre of my being shrieks, “Get on with it, man!” So I'm now going to watch a DVD.

I am the law

Typing away to finish Slitheen and listening to lots of radio. The news is full of bail-outs and a bloke called Judd Gregg - and I keep picturing old stony face.

Standing in the Herald

A feature in today's Herald on writing Doctor Who includes wisdom from Paul Cornell, Terrance Dicks, Stephen Greenhorn and Big Finish competition winner Michael Coen - plus some wittering from me.

The long fingers of Doctor Who

Here's what I wrote for the FantasyCon programme, on the subject of writing for Doctor Who:

“His long fingers flashed over the keyboard with amazing speed.”

That’s how Terrance Dicks describes David Tennant’s Doctor on page 29 of his 2007 Doctor Who novel Made of Steel. The Doctor’s in an internet cafe, looking for evidence that the Cybermen weren’t all swallowed by the void he created at Canary Wharf. Cor, I thought when I read that sentence. And also, I’m having that.

At the time I was writing The Pirate Loop, my own tenth Doctor novel (all canapés and badger-faced space pirates) and was struggling to find simple ways to differentiate this Doctor from his predecessors. I’ve written novels, short stories and audio plays featuring eight of the 10 Doctors and one of the trickiest things is getting each incarnation right. How do you make sure that the tenth Doctor sounds like the tenth?

Terrance Dicks was obviously the person to steal from. Dicks has written more Doctor Who than anybody else – he invented the Time Lords, script-edited all of the third Doctor’s era on telly and has written more than 80 Doctor Who novels and novelisations. Dicks also believes that the Doctor is always the Doctor; the same man despite outward appearance and mannerisms. In effect, you write the same character, it’s the actors who make him different.

A good example of this is the 2003 Big Finish audio play Jubilee by Robert Shearman. At the beginning of episode two, Colin Baker’s sixth Doctor is trapped in a room with a disarmed Dalek, played by Nicholas Briggs. It’s almost the same scene as the one in Dalek, Shearman’s 2005 script for the TV series, only with Christopher Eccleston in the role. While Eccleston’s Doctor shouts and drools flem, Baker’s performance is quieter, warier, more curious.

Before the new series, when only Real Fans were likely to pick up Doctor Who books, you could even keep the reader guessing, letting them suss out which Doctor you’d chosen by which companions or adventures you mentioned. But there are now people who love new Doctor Who, “fans” who can’t rattle off the names of the actors who played the previous incarnations. Who don’t recite them every night as they brush their teeth.

So Big Finish’s Short Trips anthologies now tell you up front which Doctor features, and there’s a handy guide to the first eight on the inside back-flap of each of our anthologies. But even when you tell the reader which Doctor it is explicitly, you still need to get him right. I once edited a story where I had to ask if the Doctor in it was the fifth or the eighth. It only took a tiny bit of tweaking to get it right, adding in a particular, simple line of description – especially early on in the story.

Terrance Dicks mastered these simple descriptions: the third Doctor’s “shock of white hair”, the fifth Doctor’s “pleasant, open face”; the “skinny geek” tenth Doctor with his long fingers.

It’s not just about pinching the descriptions from Terrance Dicks’ books. There’s also the extremely necessary research of watching lots of Doctor Who on DVD. I rewatched all the existing episodes of the first year of Doctor Who to properly depict William Hartnell’s first Doctor and his companions for my novel The Time Travellers. This vital preparation meant I could steal the first Doctor’s way of starting any statement, “I should say...” and the way he stands tall, gripping the lapels of his frock coat, whenever there’s a problem. Time well spent, I think.

It’s not that you’re parodying each performance. The research often helps you spot something to hook a story on, or at least an angle to show some new facet of the characters. Genre writing of any kind is often a sort of parlour game; you have to reshuffle familiar elements so that the result appears the same but new. How do you make the Doctor just like he is on TV yet also something new?

The first Doctor on screen turns out to be not quite the grouch Fan wisdom sometimes thinks. Yet he’s often single-minded, neglecting his granddaughter and other companions when some mystery or spectacle takes his fancy. He’s also a reluctant hero: fighting monsters and injustice only when he’s made to. Only some 50 episodes into the series, as the Daleks invade Earth, does he, unprompted, dare to stop them. (Though initially he gets involved only because he’s locked out of the TARDIS.)

In practical terms, the production team had realised they needed a more active protagonist, that the Doctor couldn’t keep having adventures by accident. But within the fiction itself, what changes in the Doctor? Why does he become the crusader we have come to know? Or rather, what stops him getting involved before this? That’s the sort of thing with which I padded out my book.

It’s Jon Pertwee’s third Doctor who spends his time being rude and insufferable to his friends. (A fanzine article in the 1990s argued this was his frustration at being stranded on Earth, unable to work his TARDIS.) I pinched that for my first professionally published short story: in The Switching, when the suave Master tries to escape from prison by swapping his mind into the Doctor’s body, the Doctor’s friends don’t just fail to notice, they think it’s an improvement.

The same story wouldn’t work with any other incarnation of the Doctor; or rather it wouldn’t play out in the same way. Likewise The Time Travellers only works with the first Doctor, and at that particular moment in his life before the Daleks invade Earth. The Doctors aren’t just different superficially; their different mannerisms spill out and shape the stories.

So that’s how it’s done, or at least how I do it. I said I’ve written for eight of the 10 Doctors. I’ve not written for the ninth Doctor because he was only around for a year and all the spin-off books and annuals are now on to the tenth. And I’ve not written for the second Doctor because I found him too difficult. His character is all in the performance of actor Patrick Troughton – not what he says but the gravelly-voiced, impish, naughty schoolboy way he says it.

But even “impish” I stole from Terrance Dicks.

“The girl watched him leave [the internet cafe]. ‘Pity,’ she thought. ‘Completely bonkers, of course. But he looked rather interesting for a geek.’

Doctor Who: Made of Steel by Terrance Dicks, page 31.

Monsters and dinosaurs

On Saturday, I had a whole day of not writing. Instead, I met up with seven of the authors of How The Doctor Changed My Life, plus Paul who runs the Big Finish website, four loyals WAGs and a baby. We talked eloquently at Paul's microphone and trundled round the Doctor Who exhibition at Earls Court, and then fell into the pub.

It was a fantastic day, from watching all the parents revealing the great surprise of where they'd been dragged to of a morning, to the splendid gang of writers, keen and friendly and all bolstering each other - not at all the jadded, bitter hacks they're destined to become. I had such a nice lunch I lost track of time and suddenly a whole day had gone by. Hooray!

Rob McCow reports some of our antics, and I'll post photos and more details when the podcast is up on the BF site - in around a month or so.

We'd hoped J. would be able to join us, but some last minute insanity meant he's stuck in the US. Yesterday, we entertained his dad, who could make it out of the country. The Dr did roast chicken and we nattered on about leftie politics and went for a nose round the local monsters.

Later, the Dr and J's dad went to the Globe for the last night of King Lear, and I stayed in to work. And work. And work. Finished getting on for eleven when the Dr rolled home.

More work today. Have written 6,329 words of something and proofed something else. Not nearly where I should be, so on we plod. And tomorrow I have appointments all over London, so will be cramming words into the gaps in between.

Orwell blogs

"To look at the places where his wisdom has been invoked recently is to wonder if there is anyone, excepting Stalinists, who would not hink better of an opinion knowihng it to be one that Orwell endorsed."

Catherine Bennett, "What would George Orwell say? No article is complete these days without a thumbs-up from the great man himself", the Guardian, 13 April 2006.

Monstrously excited to hear that, 58 years after he died, George Orwell is starting a blog.

The Orwell Prize, which celebrates good journalism, begins the project on 9 August, and will post entries exactly 70 years after Eric Blair first jotted them down. They'll run until 2012 (or 1942, when he stopped writing them). The diaries also include his doodles.

BBC News has some extracts, including bits read by Orwell's son. The teasers here and on the blog page itself are full of the kind of precise and vivid detail that makes Orwell so compelling. He observes slugs, the weather, even that the Chleuh women do not smoke. I love this kind of detail. And am skippy with excitement.

Me rabbiting on about:

• Orwell's essays
• Homage to Catalonia

Prevarication

The BBC news site it full of interesting stuff right this minute (or perhaps it's just greener than the grass of my own writing chores...).

Lisa Jardine has written a very sensible analysis of the statistics relating to knife crime, which undercuts the hyperbolic furore whirling through the papers. I'm not for a moment downplaying the awfulness of any of the incidents themselves, but there's often a desperate streak in newspapers, playing up base urges of greed and fear to get us to notice.

(They of course argue that's it their job just to report stuff as widely as possible, that news is effectively a form of entertainment. But if the media won't take responsibility for the ethical value of their efforts, why should those they judge?)

Then there's this extraordinary time-lapse film from space of the moon circling the Earth. And the rediscovered dance track by Delia Derbyshire.

Nimbos let me know, since I had missed it, that Jamie Hewlett's Monkey will be the BBC's mascot for the Olympics, which is just a world of cool. A blog post from May explains the thinking and background, but misses off just how splendiferous Hewlett's stuff is. Beside the giddy joy of Tank Girl, I loved his work for Senseless Things - and still cherish the edition of Deadline which featured a two-page strip featuring the same characters. And then there was Hewligan's Haircut. And Fireball. And and and and...

And then Peter mentioned his friend Roo Reynolds - who is about to join the BBC - and especially his geeky lecture on how Lego is full of WIN.

All this and Dr Horrible. How am I meant to get any work done?