"A lion covered in bees!!"

Watched some of the spectacular Olympic Games opening ceremony while smashing my limbs against the machines in the gym. Say what you like about despotic tyrannies, they know how to put on a show.

The gym has four flat-screen tellies lined up together, and the Chinese movement and dance effort, symbolic of world peace and love, played out next to footage of the tanks rolling into South Ossetia. Do you think they did that on purpose?

Incidentally, we're not supposed to refer to "the Olympics" as to "the Olympic Games". I know because I once had someone ring up from the IOC brand Stasi to yell at me about it. Only afterwards did it occur to me that they should really be the IOGC.

The new issue of the DFC marks the occasion with their own Olympics - including a million-mile marathon and a "beard of bees contest", which Brian Blessed wins. It's an absolute delight of a strip, with top gags in every panel. And there's even a bit of politics, in there...

"A small insignificant town somewhere foreign-sounding has been flattened ... A huge mega-lo-sport-o-domeo had been constructed on the site... And the greatest athletes in the world have been forcibly rounded up..."

Jamie Smart, The DFC Olympics, The DFC #11 (Friday 8 August 2008), p. 3.

Speaking of sports, my current toilet reading informs me of the fantastic fact that the England football team was founded in 1870 and played it's first international (against Scotland) in 1872.

"They did not lose at home against a European team until they were beaten 6-3 by Hungary in 1953 - eighty-one years after their first international. England lost the return match in Budapest the following year 7-1, the team's heaviest defeat to this day."

Nicholas Hobbes, England - 1000 Things You Need To Know, p.426.

It's also the Hugo Awards this evening. Best of luck to Paul and Steven.

The Guardian - the only paper I'm aware of that even knows what Hugos are - says Paul is "hotly tipped". I hope that means they think he's going to win. But perhaps they know him more intimately than I do.

Lions are frightened of helicopters

Or at least they were 40 years ago. A fun new collection of BBC archive films and documents on aerial journeys (clearly nothing at all to do with Britain from Above) includes a letter from John Betjeman on 30 September 1968.

In it he's miffed that the BBC have been using his name to get permission for filming impressive swoops over Englishmen's homes (the film itself is also in the archive) when he hadn't yet agreed to narrate the programme.

I love the implicit details in this: the Beeb steamrolling ahead even before the bits of paper have been signed; Betjeman as a man with pals living in stately homes; and the madcap image of an incident at Longleat:

"Today Lord Bath tells me that his partner Jimmy Chipperfield almost died of a heart attack 'when the helicopter went over the lion and giraffe reserve, as it scared the bloody animals out of their wits, and he thought they would all escape.'"

John Betjeman, letter to BBC producer Edward Mirzoeff, 30 September 1968 – BBC Archive.

There's a great wealth of other programmes and documents to sift through (even when you should be working), and it's only a couple of weeks since they posted up all the Dad's Army stuff that made the news.

I should probably declare an interest in that the Dr has done a bit of work for the archive team. But how can you not delight in these things? I've been specifically employed to write things requiring oodles of research, and it's a joy to uncover odd connections and morsels of strange fact.

Sometimes an incongruous detail is the hook for the whole of your story. I got asked to write Doctor Who meets Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, which was never go to being much fun. I needed a way in, a way for the Doctor to have an impact without changing – or belittling – the real and awful history. And then, in the reading it turns out that the physician accompanying Oliver Cromwell's army to Ireland was later a founder member of the Royal Society. And if he does that as a result of the Doctor having a word in his ear, suddenly I have a story...

You understand why people get so hot under the collar when historical dramas and documentaries have skimped on their research. The past is often so much stranger, darker, madder and better than that. Yes, you have to trawl through it to pick out the good stuff, but the exercise is well worth it.

And George Orwell's blog is starting just tomorrow. That'll certainly help with my current regime of 5,000 words per day.

Colour supplement

A couple of people have emailed to say they found this 'ere blog difficult to read, and blamed the colour scheme rather than my wittering. It's been a while since I last mucked about with the look of this thing, so I have had a tinker.

Fear not, I might tinker more.

My copies of the audio version of the Pirate Loop have arrived and I'm delighted with it. There's a review of it by Richard McGinlay on Sci-fi-online, and I agree with him that the pirate-space badgers and Mrs Wingsworth are "brilliantly conveyed by reader Freema Agyeman".

McGinlay also says that the audio book is aimed at younger readers. The same assertion is made by Joe Ford in his review of the paper version, in what's generally a favourable review.

"I do get the strange impression that Simon Guerrier (a dead cert for quality after all the grand work he has done with the Bernice series over at Big Finish) wishes he could make this darker and more horrific, but he does a good job of that even with the playful atmosphere he has to maintain so as not to upset the kids too much."

Um, I really didn't wish anything of the sort. The idea was to do something very different from my last one, something gleeful and not bleak. If anything, my bosses had to stop me getting too silly... Yes, there were originally even more stupid jokes and references.

Well, duh

The BBC news is reporting that a man found in a bed at his Lancashire home is believed to have lain undiscovered for more than two years.

"Neighbours said Mr Dean was rarely seen and was a private person."

Slap! Bang!

Until last night I'd never been inside the Albert Hall.

My first thought was “bad CGI” - it's such a huge place inside, oval and somehow wrong to the eye. The Dr took great delight in pointing out the madder Victorian bits: the huge dome, the various baffles and barrage balloons that mend the acoustics, the plinths of esteemed Victorians and Edwardians dotted about the place.

We were there to see Prom 25: Wagenaar's overture to Cyrano de Bergerac, Dvořák's Symphony No.6 in D major and – the bit the Dr bought the tickets for - Brahms' Violin Concerto in D major, featuring an extraordinary performance by Julia Fischer on violin, twirling and twisting about like a dervish as she did the more fiddly bits.

Blimey, it was good. Bumped into a similarly awe-struck Liadnan after, and then went and had pancakes for tea.

Oh, and before all that we found our way into the Britten Theatre for part of the Proms Literary Festival. My mate Matthew Sweet was discussing Victorian music hall with critic John Sutherland and the actor Michael Kilgarriff. Kilgarriff had the audience singing along to two old music hall numbers, and you can hear our paltry efforts on Night Waves on Radio 3 on Thursday.

(Doctor Who fans will be pleased to note that the Giant Robot / Cyber-Controller spoke of working alongside Arc of Infinity's President Borusa. We heard a hissy recording of Leonard Sachs introducing variety acts with some alarmingly alliterative eloquence. And I'd thought Matthew, in his introduction, was being Henry Gordon Jago.)

Atlatl and Jodrell Bank

The Dr came home from work last night with a fun top fact. Woomera - the Australian home to the British rocketships during the 1950s and 60s, and famous for looking right through the Vogan demolition fleet in the first episode of Hitchhiker - is named after device the Eora people there used for lobbing things.

How marvellous. It's like called Cape Canaveral "Trebuchet" or "Firework".

Judge me by my sighs, do you?

A poster on the DoctorWhoforum has been asking about Doggles - a character I created for the Bernice Summerfield adventure Something Changed.

A young Cahlian scratched at his armpit as he stared back at Bernice.

She looked quickly away. The man came towards her. Humanoid, with fiery coloured skin, Cahlians were often immaculate. This one, though, could have slept in his clothes. There were stains down the front of his shirt where he'd spilled several meals. He needed a shave, and to brush his hair, and to wash on a more regular basis. She looked anywhere but in his direction. Still he kept coming.

'Professor Summerfield?' he said. His smile was disarming, radiant. Without wanting to, Bernice smiled back.

'Benny,' she said. 'Mr Dog-less?'

'Doggles is better,' he said. 'Like "goggles".'

'I'm sorry,' she said, cursing Braxiatel. He'd set her up for this. He could at least have got the man's name right. Though he might have done this on purpose, to break the ice between them. Damn him. It was the last thing she needed.'"

Er, me, in "Inappropriate Laughter", Something Changed, p. 7.

(There's a PDF of all of Inappropriate Laughter on the Big Finish website.)

I then brought the character back in my audio play Summer of Love. And Steven Wickham's glorious performance so tickled me and director Edward Salt that Doggles then featured in pretty much all of the next year's Benny. But, as the forum poster said, the audio plays never actually told us what he looked like.

(There are some people who dip in and out of Benny's adventures, there are people who only do the audios, there are people getting through the stuff in no particular order, and people who follow every possible installment with intimidating interest.)

Oddly, as I said on the forum in reply, it's tricky having people on audio tell you what somebody looks like. With lumbering alien Hass and floating football Joseph, you can have sound effects as they talk and move about, and you mention things like their pincers or sense fields to help the listener build up a picture. But Doggles is a red-skinned Cahlian devil, and Benny's so right-on and colourblind that sort of thing probably doesn't even occur to her. I did try to shoehorn a description into the dialogue but it never sat quite right. And all you really need to know is that he's humanoid (with, we presume from Summer of Love, all the appropriate physical accessories) and a bit of an oaf.

It occurs to me now what a lovely, leftie utopia the audio medium is. No one's defined by what they look like, only by what they say and do.

Comforting when worn close to the skin

Nimbos got me two books for my birthday in June, a proper reading book and one for the toilet.

The latter, Nicholas Hobbes's England - 1000 Things You Need To Know is a whole mash up of facts and figures, and quite a lot of lists. The lists - of English Nobel prize-winners or bridges by Brunel - are a bit... lacking in excitement. But there's plenty of top facts and insights along the way, too.

For example, I already knew that wool had been such a major part of the English economy that the Lord Speaker of the House of Lords sits on a comfy woolsack. These days the woolsack is stuffed with wool from all across the Commonwealth.

But I didn't know this little gem:

"Under a statute of 1556, anyone caught 'owling' - smuggling wool to France in the night - would have their left hand cut off and nailed up on display in a public place. Under George I, in the eighteenth century, this was changed to seven years' transportation."

Nicholas Hobbes, England - 1000 Things You Need To Know, p. 355.

Annoyingly, sources for this stuff are rarely given, and I'd also have liked some kind of "Further Reading" section, to help follow up on my favourite morsels. But it's a great toilet book, just as Nimbos thought it might be. And full of top facts I can pinch for my own writing.

I've set myself the target of writing a complete first draft of a short story today. It currently consists of several pages of notes in my notebook, so I should probably get on with it now...

Grey namer

Very rightly, writers of things tend only to get copies of them after the shops and subscribers. So I've not yet received my copies of the audio version of Doctor Who and the Pirate Loop, read by the lovely Freema Agyeman and available now in all good shops.

Kudos to clever Steve Tribe who abridged my complex nonsense. I had the privilege and pleasure of reading his abridgment, and he's done wonders in cutting it down by 50% - that's every other word! - and still having it make sense. In fact, it probably makes more sense than my original effort did.

Popping round to R.'s house last night to swap some DVDs, I got to listen to the opening. And - hooray! - she pronounces my silly name just perfectly. Geh (with a hard "g") - ree - uh. In fact, if I had any kind of technical know-how I would make a little loop of just that bit and play it all the time.

Having a distinctive name is good for this self-commodifying lark. (Self-commodification is something I learned about in the Mid-Victorian Literature module of my degree at Preston.) I seem to be the only Simon Guerrier on Google, and the only one on Facebook.

In fact, just this morning a girl I was at primary school with got in touch having decided it had to be me. Well, I say "girl". She is winning in the having-kids-and-dogs stakes.

I used to be very bothered by people mispronouncing my name. And now I don't really care as long they give it a good go. And don't add letters that clearly aren't there, like the man who seemed to insist on it being "Pru era" even when I corrected him.

My favourite is call centre folks who are reading from a script, and are already into their spiel before they smack bang into the all-Huguenot monicker. "Good afternoon," they say, all breezy, "is that Mr -" You hear the brakes come on too late, a sharp in-take of breath. They take a run-up and just try to say it quickly, in the hope that I won't notice.

Anyway. After all that, I'm rubbish at getting people's names right - remembering them is hard enough, let alone saying them correctly. And you will be able to hear me get lovely Sophie Aldred's name wrong - and to her face - on an extra little thing we did for The Prisoner's Dilemma, when it comes out in January. Whoops.

For the record, Aldred is of course pronounced "McShane".

The eleventh Doctor?

There are, I am aware, a lot of people for whom Christopher Eccleston is the first Doctor Who, not the ninth (or one of several ninth Doctors). There are even people who think that Doctor Who is and always was David Tennant. And there are those who know that there is much lore and legend in old-skool Who, of which only fans who were there in the Dark Times can speak truly.

S., for example, asks:

"So - Doctor Who's last 'reincarnation': does that count as a real one? How does this affect the stated limit of reincarnations?

I want to know."

Well more fool you.

I don't think this counts as his tenth regeneration; he seems to stop the process mid-way by siphoning off the energy into his discarded hand. The blue-suited Doctor is an amalgam of that energy and Donna, rather than an eleventh Doctor. He can't regenerate, so presumably brown-suited, fully Time Lord Doctor is yet to become the eleventh Doctor. I suppose Blue Suit is Doctor 10a.

But is David Tennant even the tenth Doctor? Ignoring Richard E Grant's web adventure as the ninth Doctor, or even where Peter Cushing fits in, the TV series hasn't always been sure. In The Brain of Morbius (1976) we seem to glimpse images of five Doctors prior to William Hartnell's "first" Doctor - men in Doctorish costume who bear a startling resemblance to various members of the then production team. (Some speculate that these images are not of the Doctor but of Morbius, who is also a Time Lord. I think that's willfully ignoring how the scene plays.)

Yet the Five Doctors (1983) has Peter Davison's Doctor refer to himself as the "fourth" regeneration - so he is the fifth Doctor, whatever the Brain of Morbius might think.

The first we knew of a limit on regenerations was The Deadly Assassin (1976), when the Master has run out of them and is trying to extend his life. It's established that Time Lords regenerate 12 times so have 13 lives. Later in the series the Master steals people's bodies - Anthony Ainley played him in the 1980s, and Eric Roberts in the 1996 TV movie.

The cap on 12 regenerations was also a feature of Mawdryn Undead (1983). But that story was about aliens who had stolen Time Lord technology so they could give themselves the powers of regeneration. Which implies it is something that is "given" to Time Lords, rather than something they are born with. (How Time Lords are born is another long and tricky subject).

And yet later in 1983, in The Five Doctors, the Time Lords offer the Master a "complete new regenerative cycle" in return for his help. Which implies Time Lords can be topped up. Indeed, last year's Jacobi-Simm regeneration seems pretty much identical to the Eccleston-Tennant one, so is presumably the same regular process - implying the Master got new lives. Note that when he dies as John Simm, he chooses not to regenerate. There's no implication that he can't.

Which all means there's an easy precedent for whenever whoever is playing the 13th Doctor decides to do something else. If they even mention the cap on 12 regenerations, the Doctor can just be awarded new lives by the Shadow Proclamation, or find them in a cupboard or something.

That said, the whole point of The Brain of Morbius and The Five Doctors is that eternal life is as much a curse as a blessing, something the new series has made quite a deal of too.

I bet you wish you hadn't asked now.

Housekeeping

A couple of additions to the lay out of this 'ere blog. There's now a great long list on the right of other blogists what I read. At least, the ones I can remember I read. Shout if I've forgotten you.

And also, there is now a Nothing Tra La La? blog page on Facebook. Sign up and join merriment.

White - [house] - keys

It's been announced that the theme tune to Quantum of Solace will be by Alicia Keys and Jack White - and not Amy Winehouse or Dennis Waterman. Already there is much discussion about whether this can possibly be the right choice. By people who haven't heard it.

Even then, I was a little underwowed by Chris Cornell's "You Know My Name" on first hearing. Seeing it in the film itself, though, it's really rather good.

But in looking into this (and clearly NOT skiving) I discovered the work of one LuiECuomo. He's filled You Tube with Bond title sequences, matching the titles to tunes that were considered but not used. So there's the versions of Tomorrow Never Dies with singing by Pulp, St Etienne and k.d. lang.

The latter, clearly the theme used in David Arnold's score for the film itself, got relegated to being the end song. But the first two are just plain disappointing - especially from two of my favourite bands.

There's also different takes on the same song for You Only Live Twice, tunes that could have been Bond themes or that suggest what an artist might have been like. There's Scott Walker doing Die Another Day and also some fan film and gun barrell stuff too.

And then there's this marvellous conjuration:

I am, of course, listening to Shaken and Stirred as I write this.

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

Ick

It is 29°C in my flat at the moment. Summer has finally hit in the last couple of days and the sky is a whopping blue swelter.

So it's a bit unfortunate, with the sweat pouring from my bits, that we are still without a shower. The man came on Friday to install it, only to discover that the plughole is in the opposite corner from our old one.

Normally this wouldn't be a problem, you just stick a pipe underneath. But it turns out the shower is positioned directly above the joists holding up our floor. It would be... overly eager to cut through them to make space for a pipe.

So our shower is now up on bricks, or at least blocks of wood. It means there's a bit more of a step into it, but it all seems to work. See how lightly I explain this, when on Friday it was quite the crisis.

However, that cunning solution means the tiler had to come back yesterday, smash his work of Monday and Tuesday with a sturdy hammer, and then re-tile around the slightly different space. He had already tiled our bathroom once before, a couple of weeks ago, so not surprisingly left last hoping we would not meet again.

So tomorrow the plumber is coming to fill in the last gap between the bottom of the shower and the tiled floor. Then, once it's all dry and settled - sometime Tuesday or Wednesday, if we're lucky - we will have washing facilities once again, and I will not be quite so smelly.

But golly. It's more than a month since we first found we had a leak, and it's all been horribly expensive. And the cat hasn't appreciated the noise or being locked into the kitchen while work has been going on. Fag-ash Lil that he is, at night he's been rolling in the dust and gubbins, then traipsing that all round the flat. It might be his revenge.

The Judgement of Isskar

The thrilling new issue of Doctor Who's Magazine (I got the Sarah Jane cover with my subscription) finally reveals the secret project I was writing back in January. They'd already announced that January – March sees release of the Key 2 Time, a 12-episode extravaganza starring Peter Davison's fifth Doctor on a quest to find some missing crystal pieces.

“The saga begins with The Judgement of Isskar by Simon Guerrier, in which the discovery of a segment of the key on Mars has grave repercussions... Nick Briggs (also the voice of the Daleks and Cybermen on TV) plays another old monster – an Ice Warrior, last seen on TV in 1974's The Monster of Peladon.”

“Five new audio 'seasons' of Doctor Who in 2009”, Doctor Who Magazine #398, 20 August 2008, p. 7.

The Key 2 Time features new Doctor Who companion Amy, “a sentient tracer” played by Ciara Janson, and her sister Zara, played by Laura Doddington. Excitingly, I'm allowed to tell people that these are my creations. I made one of Doctor Who's friends!

My story is out in January, alongside The Prisoners' Dilemma, a Companion Chronicle that's also by me (told you I'd been busy). Zara meets up with Doctor Who's friend Ace in this one. The Key 2 Time saga then continues in The Destroyer of Delights by Jonathan Clements and then The Chaos Pool by an author as yet unannounced for fiendish dramatic purposes. More details on cast and stuff to come.

It's wikied

The elusive Ed Grainger seems to be responsible for a Wikipedia page on Doctor Who: How The Doctor Changed My Life.

I meanwhile am continuing to post previews of the stories on the Big Finish Facebook group. And am busy writing things that have not been officially announced yet - but thanks to those people who've said nice things having heard word on the internet grapevine.

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?

I have a name for my pain

M. rather marvellously smuggled me into the IMAX last night for a press screening of The Dark Knight. It's a huge, 2.5 hour epic full of thrill and excitement, and six whole scenes of especially IMAX-tastic hugeness. Golly.

Long-toothed readers of this blog may recall my review of Batman Begins for Film Focus, where I dared suggest the general cool marvellousness was a little dulled by the lack of good roles for women. Rachel, now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal rather than Mrs Tom Cruise, seems to agree. She's now shacking up with Harvey Dent, the cool district attorney and white knight to the city – a man who's everything Bruce/Bats can't be.

But Harvey doesn't just want Bruce's girl, he also wants in on Batman's crusade to bring down the Gotham mob. The mob, led by my old mate Eric Roberts (well, I met him once), is a bit cheesed off by all this and then find themselves being made an offer they can't refuse by a kray-zee new kid called the Joker.

The late Heath Ledger's performance has been the focus for a lot of reviews so far, and it's an eye-popping, compelling and terrifying thing. Yes, Ledger should get an Oscar nomination, but then Nicholson should have had one for the same role 19 years ago. To my delight, there's no (single) explanation for where the Joker comes from here or what unhinged him. He's all the more appalling for not being explained. While Bats and Bruce and all their good-guy pals wrangle over how and when they can bend their own rules, Joker's an anarchic live-wire just in it for the explosions. The violence comes without warning; it's a shocking, brutal film and not all the regulars will be back for the third one.

As I argued with the first one, comic-book movies are all about reshuffling the established genre rules and conventions so that they come out looking new. The Dark Knight is a lot more complex, rich and full of strange moral ideas than it has really any need to be, which give the huge-scale set pieces and fast-cut fighting that much more of an edge.

It's still relentlessly male. There's really only two women in it besides Rachel: Jim Gordon's colleague Ramirez and his wife Barbara. And, I'd argue, both are there because of what they add to Jim, rather than having roles and motives of their own.

Yet it's notable that our regulars are faced with these reflections; their motives and behaviour is constantly being questioned by all sides. This doesn't bolster one particular viewpoint that comes with all the answers (as in Socratic dialogue) as to continually muddy the water. The film has plenty to say about vigilantes and civil liberties, but from lots of different voices. Batman and the goodies give their best to the cause, but the question hanging over them through it whether that best is good enough.

Batman Begins seemed to be riffing of stuff in old comics Year One and The Long Halloween. This nicks elements from The Dark Knight Returns and, I'd argue, The Killing Joke. Spider-Man has already done the hero as emblematic of the city at large, an inspiration to ever more kray-zee super-villains and yet also to the noble instincts of the city's people. There's a nice prisoner's dilemma late on in this (which I won't spoil here) that hangs on how Joker – and Batman – expect people to behave.

It reminded me of Midnight in that it's not just the predicament that's so horrifying but how characters react to it. The result, though, felt a bit too plot convenient rather than earned: two characters respond in way that's surprising because it's not consistent with what little we know about them...

That makes it sound like a criticism, but it's less a niggle as it having been swimming round my feeble brain all day. While I'm meant to be writing my own set-piece action adventure I'm tonguing the sore-tooth of the film's “message”. I'm not sure it has one. Does Batman win at the end? Are things any better for his having been involved? How thrilling, innovative and bold that such a mainstream movie doesn't seem to know...

The lantern of the Fens

Big Finish have posted the artwork and blurb for Home Truths - my Doctor Who: Companion Chroncicles featuring Sara Kingdom, as played by Jean Marsh.

"There’s a house across the waters at Ely where an old woman tells a strange story.

About a kind of night constable called Sara Kingdom. And her friends, the Doctor and Steven. About a journey they made to a young couple’s home, and the nightmarish things that were found there. About the follies of youth and selfishness. And the terrible things even the most well-meaning of us can inflict on each other.

Hear the old woman's story. Then decide her fate."

Home Truths is released in November.

Plumbing the depths

Arg.

It's 10 days since we had the bathroom floor retiled to stop the leak that was running into the flat downstairs. It cost £400 and we were without a toilet while Journey's End was on.

It's five days since the plumber came back to reseal the shower and all the floor bits with his magic glue gun since the retiling didn't make much difference. Again we were without washing facilities for two days and had to sneak into the gym. (Which we pay for anyway, it just feels odd only going to use the showers.)

And it still hasn't made any difference. So plumber came this morning and is going to install a new shower, replace all the skirting boards and generally do everything required to guarantee this sodding thing is fixed. The extra heaps of work I've taken on will just about cover paying for this.

I have, though, got a fair way into something that is not Doctor Who related and which has not been announced. (Well, it has been announced and is even on Wikipedia. They just haven't included the cursory detail that I'm the one who's writing it.) I've also written some reviews for something, got well into a whole load of unannounced things that have deadlines in August and September, and been allowed off the hook on an academic paper that is running late as a result of my needing gainful employment.

Endeavouring to rage at the sky rather than at the Dr. But it all feels like for every step forward there's five or six steps back. And then, just when I feels its gone all a bit The Mutants, M. invites me to Batman at the IMAX tomorrow.

Squee.

Sneak peak at my next book

Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting on to the Big Finish Facebook group the first paragraphs of each of the 25 stories in Doctor Who: Short Trips - How The Doctor Changed My Life, together with biographies of the authors.

The book, published in September, is the result of our competition last year to find exciting new writing talent. At the time we commissioned them, none of these authors had previously written a professionally produced work of fiction. (Many of them have been commissioned for other things since!)

Feel free to comment or ask questions, and please buy the book. Go on, I'll be your Facebook friend.

(You're also welcome to post these excerpts elsewhere so long as you explain where they're from and link to the Big Finish site.)

Here's the first one:

Homework by Michael Coen

"What I Did On My Summer Holidays By Norman Bean (Age 11)

This summer I had the most absolutely increddible incredible adventure of my life which I will now tell you about.

One evening I WENT to my bedroom. I am usually SENT to my bedroom at night but I had been out playing football all day with my new Kevin Keegan football boots and I was quite tired, so I actually said ‘Mum, I’m going to bed,’ and she said ‘Okay, see you tomorrow,’ and I went to my room to read my Roy of the Rovers comic which isn’t as good as it used to be since Roy got married (which makes it quite boring)..."

MICHAEL COEN hails from Scotland. His short story Homework won the competition for new writers run by Big Finish in 2007 and was first published in Short Trips: Defining Patterns. Although a number of his articles and papers have seen print, he is inordinately chuffed that his first published fiction is part of Big Finish’s Doctor Who range. Michael's short story, Ivory, has been published in the Pantechnicon Book of Lies, he is currently working on a novel for younger readers and has released several TV scripts into the wild, hoping they find a home.

Stone tape

To the stone circle at Avebury yesterday with a group of chums (not all of whom I'd met), for the purposes of something that will get announced in early August.

We had to retire to the Red Lion while the rain slashed down. It was one of those days like when the Axons invaded, with the weather all over the place. So when I got home I put of The Claws of Axos - I've had the DVD for ages but not seen the story since my teens.

Cor, the Restoration Team have done something wonderous with the picture, and I took a rare foray into the documentary about exactly what. The Dr got to glimpse Roger Delgado as the Master for the first time, and I was a little surprised how fab it all was. Weird and funky and cool, with a threat to the world not just to the Home Counties.

But Terror of the Autons is still 1000 percent more damn cool. Can we have that on shiny disc soonish?

Not all of it reliable

"Counterterrorism measures ought not to be extraordinary measures in a special category of their own but as far as possible part of the ordinary criminal law of the land."

Baroness Stern, House of Lords,
[Official Report, 8/7/08; col. 708.]

I was reminded of that comment while listening to Night Waves last night, in which my chum Matthew Sweet interviewed Christopher Hitchens on the subject of waterboarding (available on Listen Again for a week).

It has been claimed that 'waterboarding' is an extreme interrogation technique rather than torture - which is of course against American and international law, so not what 'we' would ever do at all. The argument goes that in difficult circumstances against terrorist aggressors this kind of thing is necessary.

Vanity Fair dared Christopher Hitchens to undergo waterboarding (in controlled conditions where he could stop it by saying a word). His article, "Believe Me, It's Torture" is available on the Vanity Fair website, along with a short video.

Hitchens explains the physical and pyschological effects in the short and longer term. He is careful to put both sides of the argument yet clearly feels, as a result of the experience, that waterboarding crosses a line. Waterboarding used to be something American soldiers were trained to resist, and for which other people were punished. And the evidence obtained, even the CIA admitted, was "not all of it reliable". There's something chilling about that grudging acknowledgement.

In the Night Waves interview, Hitchens denied that the experience changed his own views, but also detailed some of the continuing psychological hangover.

In her speech on the Counter-Terrorism Bill on Tuesday, Baroness Stern also quoted an earlier speech by Lord Judd:

“We must remember that those cornerstones of British justice which have been so admired throughout the world did not come lightly; they came from decades and centuries of struggle and rugged determination to make the law a civilised example ... Part of me recoils at the concept that, however frightening the terrorism with which we are confronted, we should by the presence of that danger begin to dismantle or erode what we have seen as fundamental to our system of justice”.

[Official Report, 27/2/08; col. 729.]

Play dead

More than once I have played zombies for Big Finish. That was me in the crowd of them during The Worst Thing in the World, and again opposite Katy Manning as Iris in The Devil in Ms Wildthyme. Even if director Gary Russell felt I was "too Baron Greenback".

Now those scamps at the BBC are offering you a chance to be a walking corpse. As the press release explains, a BBC Three documentary is following Bryony Matthewman as she makes her own user-generated zombie movie.

More details and stuff at BBC: Zombies. Grr arg, etc.

From Ace to Zara

It has been a tad of a hectic week. The spangly new computer I bought on Wednesday is an HP Pavilion M9070 with a quad core processing wossname. It's clear how clapped out the old model was: this one is fast and silent and deadly.

Schlepped the thing home from Morgan - incidentally bumping into my old boss John Bradbury and finding out about his new business, Blink - and strained all sorts of previously unknown muscles in my arms. Connected everything up and flicked the on switch... and nothing.

Turns out the base needed a DVI/VGA adaptor before it would fix to the monitor. (It's rather deceptively got a VGA port, just not one that actually does anything.) This meant a bit of hunting around Tottenham Court Road, and another day's delay before the thing even started.

Then there was a morning of saving and transfering files, installing Norton, Open Office and the various components for wireless cleverness, each of which needs you to restart the computer every five minutes or so. But eventually, having bought the thing on Wednesday, by Friday afternoon it was working.

At the same time, a number of different plumbers have come to um and er at my bathroom floor, and on Saturday a man came to tile it. It all turned out to be a lot more complex than expected because tiles had to be cut to fit round pretty much everything. He was going to be finished at four, then half six... Finally, the Dr was dispatched to deal with the inspecting and paying (just as Rose was snogging her own bespoke Doctor).

I loved the conclusion of this year's Doctor Who. The Dr was a little less enamoured, wrinkling her nose at the slushy bits. Were joined by K and my Best Man, and then tumbled into the pub for too much drinking. The Dr insists that yesterday I spent the day asleep with a hangover, whereas I think it was more a migraine collapse.

So the Dr represented me at K's birthday bash and I slept off the contagion. Watched the repeat of Journey's End in the evening. It's odd that the Children of Time only include New Series companions (bar open-brain Adam and Kylie). Where were Tegan and Ace and Ian Chesterton - or do their laptops not have web-cameras either?

Incidentally, Big Finish have announced that I've been writing for Ace again. "The Prisoner's Dilemma" is a Companion Chronicle (a sort of talking book with knobs on), in which Sophie Aldred is joined by Laura Doddington as Zara, a character created for next year's Key 2 Time extravaganza.

There's still plenty more writing things to be announced in due course, but last week's various expenses also mean I've had to sort some additional paying work (and so also had to shunt some non-paying work further back in the schedule). Means some juggling of commitments to get it all done, so probably won't be blogging much over the next month.

But one last thing: shocked to see on Millennium's blog that Ian McKay has died. What awful news. Ian was a regular, cheery presence at the few signings I've done, enthusiastic and chatty. He even bought me beer. My condolences to Ian's family - he'll be much missed by all those who met him.

There’s fire

Today is the first anniversary of the smoking ban in England. And, by complete coincidence, last night I finished watching the first series of The Smoking Room.

Brian Dooley’s rather brilliant sitcom rightly won him a BAFTA. It’s a deliciously simple idea: the people who pass through the workplace smoking room, but they’re not allowed to talk about work. In effect it’s a series of one-act, one-set comic plays, where the focus is the continually increasing gang of regular characters, the way they see the world and the more we learn about them.

Robert Webb’s Robin seems the lead character by dint of him being almost always on the screen. There’s a running gag that he never actually does any work (though in the Christmas special (oddly, a “special feature” on the DVD) he nearly succumbs to the tyrannical thrill of wielding his own clipboard). As a result, we tend to see characters through Robin’s eyes: its his reactions, rolled eyes and tutting, that signpost other character’s selfishness and stupidity.

I’d assumed, having foolishly not seen the thing when it was on telly, that it’d be more about terrible awkwardness and embarrassment, trying to thief from The Office. But there’s something much more generous about the situations here, something kinder about the relationships. Though they may be exasperated with one another, misunderstand or misuse each other, they’re united by the common aim of escaping the monotony of work for a blessed moment.

The gags come thick and fast: some downright crude, some slapstick, some silly. I realise already it needs rewatching because there’s so much crammed in there. At one point the cast are all unconsciously quoting Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” at Debbie Chazen’s character, Annie. Another time, Lilian (Paula Wilcox) comes in to find a whole room of people wearing masks of her face, bearing down on her like the Slitheen stalks poor Jackie Tyler at the end of Aliens of London. Also, this is the only telly I can think of that actually forks out for the right to have the cast sing “Happy Birthday”.

I’ve struggled to write something about individual characters but it would spoil too many great revelations. So if you haven’t watched it, watch it.

But it’s also a snapshot of a particular time: the brief period in English life between being able to smoke at your desk and then not being able to smoke anywhere on the premises. Full of trapped and bored people, longing for their holidays, the smoking room itself is itself an uneasy, unsustainable compromise.

On Saturday, we also saw The Smoking Room’s Selina Griffiths on stage in Afterlife at the National. Note performances and a clever set but I was a bit nonplussed by Michael Frayn’s script. It seemed to have things to say about the folly and hubris of man in the context of terrible history, and the role of drama in making sense of the real. But when you juxtapose one man’s ambitions for his theatre with the Nazis and exile and poverty, poncing about on stage and not worrying about the bills just seems a bit… self-indulgent.

On Sunday it struck me again how appallingly dated The Living Daylights is for foregrounding Bond with a cigarette. And jeez, how can he lecture his boss on questionable shopping while wearing that checked jacket? Anyway. Much more exciting, of course, is this:



How soon before I’m looking back on it in wonder as a snapshot of quaint, forgotten 2008?

Call me Scarface

A fun afternoon in the pub yesterday with lots of lovely chums, many of whom brought presents or at least bought pints. It’s just possible that at some point in the evening I’d had too much beer. The inevitable gloom of the not-quite-a-hangover today provokes the following self-indulgent whinge.

I seem to have become quite an adult this last week. Having spent since the age of 13 feeling, well, like I’m 13, now I am clearly a grown up.

For example, the neighbour thinks I’m adult enough to discuss the finer points of plumbing. Our bathroom (not that it’s got a bath in it) is leaking into his kitchen, and we spent a happy time on Saturday looking for holes and generally scratching our brains.

The plumber didn’t turn up this morning (well, he says he did but didn’t think to ring either of the two doorbells), so there was some more analysis of skirting boards and the possible routes of water run-off. Those who have met me will be delighted by the thought of my trying to be of any practical use.

Then at noon a nice estate agent popped round to make a judgment on our flat. We’re coming to the end of our fixed-term mortgage and Northern Rock doesn’t want us on their books any more (apparently you’re less handsome to banks when you pay them on time). And we’ve also been having thoughts about converting our loft into a padded cage for writing.

This is quite a daunting prospect, where we might have to remove the ceilings from our existing rooms and even move out for a couple of months. Somehow it all needs to be paid for, so, like wide-eyed lambs to the slaughter, we’ve been trying to suss out the numbers.

And the nice man explained the microclimate of the market, what with the proximity of train lines and the Olympics. It was only when I was writing up this conversation for our nice financial advisor that it occurred to me how grown up and sensible it all is. Or rather, how monstrously terrifying. And how little like I sound like I know what I’m doing when I say we’re going to put off any building work until we’ve got the planning in place. Yet those I’m talking to seem not to have twigged.

Then I rang my dad for some advice about diseases, on the basis of something I was hurrying to finish. One of the beta-readers had politely suggested that it sounded like I made up the science. Yes, as if he expected that this is something I would not do.

So Dad explained the difference between diptheroids and diphtheria (a tickly, annoying throat thing that’s not harmful in itself but the latter secretes a toxin that can stop your heart). He corrected my wobbly understanding of how different diseases can team up together, so you get rare and virulent things like anthrax and small pox only being transmitted as easily as a common cold.

And he explained that though we’ve got antibiotics to combat most bacteria, we don’t really have them for viruses. This is why Bird Flu could be such a problem; it the disease teams up in such a way as to spread quickly among humans, we don’t really have much to fight it. Excitingly, I happened to know the word for a disease that jumps from other animals to humans: zoonoses.

Dad’s one of a number of experts I can rely on to cheat on my homework. But as well as being kind enough to point out which bits I’d got sort of right, he then asked for a favour in return, and asked for a showbiz contact. And I managed to have the chap in question’s phone number. As if the kind of stuff I get up to useful.

Soon after, my boss and neighbour G. emailed to ask if I could help him fix broadband on his laptop, being under the impression I have any idea at all. Only yesterday Nimbos was having to explain in short and simple words that no, it’s not a matter of a new operating system. The PC I’ve had since I went freelance six years ago really has just died. So on Wednesday I am going to have a grown up and expensive day picking out a new one. And I still don’t know what the leaky bathroom is going to cost me.

Joy. I realise why people think I might know stuff. The Doctor’s friend Leela once explained that, “If you are bleeding, look for a man with many scars.” Perhaps I’m the one you run to when things are falling apart.

Share and share alike?

The not exactly new but current issue of SFX (#171, July 2008, The X-Files on the cover) includes a three page feature by Jonathan Wright on spin-off novels and shared universes.

Wright talks to a whole bunch of important people: critic and writer Roz Kaveney; Mark Newton, assistant editor on the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street books; my boss Justin Richards; writers Rob Williams, Peter David, Kevin J Anderson, Una McCormack and, er, me.

In such esteemed and clever company, I get just a paragraph towards the end. But here's what I originally said:

Let's get this one straight out of the way, franchise work is maybe regarded as not creative in the same way that 'original' work is. What's your take on that?

Original work probably seems harder because you've got to start from scratch – the people, the setting, the tone. A franchise at least gives you a rough idea of what's expected and your major characters. But you've also got to find a way to do new things within that same set-up and that gets trickier the longer a franchise has been going. There's 45 years of Doctor Who – television episodes, books, audio plays, comic strips. Fans are quick to spot repetition, but the fun – for you and for them, I think – is in producing new twists and ideas. It's sort of a parlour game. Is that any less creative? I'm not sure. It's certainly different.

I think franchise writing is also safer for a writer. There are fixed guidelines, word counts and contracts, so it's a lot less risky to write. Original work doesn't just need writing, it needs much more work to get publishers interested and then to get punters to buy it. That's a lot of investment and there might be very little return. With a franchise you know there's already an audience.

Are the rules with existing franchises slightly different to when you're pitching a new [thing]?

I've pitched original things to other people, but not very successfully. So what do I know?

Related to the above – do fans expect certain things of franchises and is that something you think about very much?

Yes, I think they probably do, but I'm not sure how you go about measuring those expectations. There are vocal minorities in most fan communities whose opinions could skew your thinking. But also you want to surprise and excite your readers, so you're looking for new perspectives anyway. You can talk to fans, or eavesdrop on their
conversations, but I think you can only really respond to your expectations. When pitching my first Doctor Who book I was thinking about the kinds of Doctor Who books I'd liked reading myself. Ones where the Doctor and his companions were prominent. Ones with mad ideas. Ones where I didn't know where it was going to go next. Even if it's not a franchise you know particularly well, you do your research and you work out what elements you yourself are a fan of.

To what extent can you decide plotlines?

For the Doctor Who books, all these things have to be approved by a great number of people but you're the one coming up with the ideas. My first Doctor Who novel, The Time Travellers, is pretty much the 5,000 word synopsis I send on spec to BBC Books in early 2003. My second Doctor Who novel, The Pirate Loop, began as a whole series of ideas I sent range editor Justin Richards after he asked for something science-fiction. We spent about a week batting the ideas back and forth, pruning them into shape. That outline then had to be approved and the approvers made some suggestions. I think the Doctor and Martha spent less time together in the original outline.

I've also commissioned stories where I gave authors a one-line or one-paragraph outline and then left them to do the rest. That works well if you're commissioning a whole series. It seems to work best if the authors aren't given too many things to squeeze in and are left to come up with the plot themselves. They tend to be keener and more creative when its their own idea.

How does the commissioning/editing process work?

These days, they call you. The editors might have an idea for the kind of thing they're after – a space story, or anything so long as it isn't set in London. They might tell what else they've got lined up and just want you to fill the gap. There's usually some general guidelines to the series – rules and footnotes you might not pick up as an outside observer. There's a set word count, deadline and contract, so you just need to come up with the outline.

Once that's approved, you go away and write the thing. Then there's various stages of editorial – a close reading by your immediate editor who might ask for all manner of changes, a proof read by a sub who'll be checking grammar and inconsistencies, and then the panel of approvers who check for tone and style. They might also ask you to tweak things to make them more in keeping with forthcoming stories.

Do you think such developments as the boom in fan fiction/online shared worlds/a more 'interactive' future will change our ideas about what shared universes are?

Fan fiction has been going a long time. There's a wealth of authors now who started out in fanzines. Back in 1990 Virgin Publishing were so impressed with the Doctor Who stories published by fans that they invited them to pitch for their New Adventures line. But that's a rare example, at least as far as I know, of a publisher actually reading fan fiction – or admitting that they have. Fan fiction's value – to me, anyway – is that it gets wannabe writers writing and gets their writing seen. You gain confidence and practical skills, which helps when then sending your work out to the professional publishers.

Do your 'original' work and your franchise work feed off each other?

Yes. You come up with ideas that maybe don't fit the thing you're working on just then, so you jot them down to use later in something else unrelated. Or you go off on tangents which prove to be whole other stories. But also just the practical stuff plays a part – you work with an editor on a franchise line who then gets a job with a
different publisher. It's even smaller scale stuff – I've learnt tricks writing copy for the government and advertising that's been useful in my fiction. My own sentence structure is certainly better having had to produce and edit other people's stuff. The great thing about writing – especially if you don't really have any other abilities – is that you can make use of any experience.

Anything else you'd like to add?

Um…

A brief bio of yourself would help a lot too.

I am 31 [not any more] and live in south London with a bright wife and a dim cat. I have written stories for as long as I can remember, though for a long time not very good ones. I started pitching to 2000AD at the age of 16, and the Doctor Who books when I was 18. It took 10 years to get a book commissioned, though by then I'd had some Doctor Who short stories published by Big Finish. I've been a freelance writer since 2002. I'm editing my third anthology of Doctor Who short stories at the moment. "How The Doctor Changed My Life" features 25 stories by first-time authors of fiction, the winners of a competition we ran last year. It is published in September 2008.

The SFX website boasts Rob Williams answering the same questions. Incidentally, this is my 650th post, in 3 years and 27 days.

32

Just back from a short gad around Cornwall on the occasion of my birthday. Trained down to Plymouth, picked up a hire car like we did three years ago. This time it was a K-reg Vauxhall Astra, which I pretty much fitted into and which was much easier to drive than the Meganne(though I found it a bit unresponsive in reverse).

Hadn't driven in three years and was just wondering if I could still remember how as we hurfed into the Plymouth traffic. That was fun.

One we were over the Tamar it was all a bit of a mystery. Was a bit apprehensive as I ulled into the steep, grand drive of Tregrehan house and gardens, but it turned out the Dr had hired us what I assume was once servants' cottages or stables. What a terribly dignified place to stay.

The weather to begin with was appalling; we were soaked to the skin in seconds and had to dry our clothes by the electric fire, even on Midsummer's Eve. Worse, the fog was so thick that cars - even with lights on it - seemed to just fade away maybe 50 yards ahead of us.

The Dr explored Par beach - and got soaked - on Saturday while I endeavoured to do some work. Then up to see Suetekh, who already had Scott et famile staying. There was much excitement in the construction of a mammoth chocolate cake; the two year-old assistant chef was much taken with the edible glitter.

We delayed the watching of Droo while small child was put to bed. Me and Suetekh ventured out to Bugle to fetch the take-away, only to discover that despite the heavy rain and fog some kind of contest for marching bands was determined to go ahead anyway. We sat in traffic for half-an-hour watching soaked, thick-coated people insist on enjoying themselves, though even up close the rain snatched away any sound of the bands.

Back to Chez Suetekh to eat, and to discover that the Sky box has fritzed and not recorded Droo. Scott and I are much teased as various frantic efforts are made with laptops and iPlayer and such. But our main concern is that we'd rather wait to watch it properly than see it popping, clagging bits where the connection's not there. After a great deal of effort, it all works out in the end and we sit mesmerised and excited.

After, I check through the various texts from people who watched it on time. "They stole the Time Travellers!" comments Codename Moose. "Holy fuck!" comments everyone else.

We roll home through fog-shrouded, eerily quiet roads. Then next day, with the sun daring to peak through the clouds, we walk the half-hour to the Eden Project. Cor. Just cor.

It is a lunar or Martian spacebase, just a practice version. Suetekh and the Family Scott joined us after the Dr and I had done the domes. We listened to live music, explored the gardens, dallied with ice-cream and Eden's own beer. I bought too many books about the architecture and things, and generally just blissed out. The science and pillow-like hexagonal structures are based on what they've learnt from 200 years of greenhouses and railway stations.

On Monday we went to Charlestown, which the Dr thinks was used as a location in Mansfield Park and Poldark. The local shipwreck museum was keen to tell us that shipwrecking happened all round the country rather than being a specifically Cornish trait. We liked the accounts of local protest about livelihoods when it was suggested making wrecking illegal.

But the museum is a strange hodge-podge, with displays of jewels a bit like Kate Winslet's in Titanic alongside a severed human foot. The Dr muttered that there was "no narrative".

Then we went for a walk, following the coastal path (apart from the bits that were blocked off because the path was falling into the sea). This was, probably, a mistake, because after Porthpean the path didn't seem to go anywhere but steeply up and down. After one climb of 172 steps we emerged onto a Y-fork in the road. And taking the left fork we ended up - some time later - emerging from the right. It is just conceivable that I should have listened when the Dr suggested we turn back.

We stopped off in Charlestown for beer and cheesy chips, and much replenished but bone-tired and sore we wearily made our way home. Stopped off at Tescos for steak and beer, and then I made up for my earlier Neanderthal pig-stubbornness with Neanderthal fire skills on the barbecue.

Tuesday was the actual birthday which began with a good haul of presents: a huge book of castles from the air; The New Five Doctors and Flight of the Conchords; a mammoth book of Icelandic sagas, with a lovely coarse cut to the edge of the pages so in profile it looks a bit like crinkle-cut chips...

Drove to Fowey where we peeked in the bookshop and stopped for coffee. The coffee shop included signed menus and photos from when Tony Blair visited - including one above the toilet in the gents. Then we clambered back up to the car park and snaggled along to Looe to visit the Dr's relatives.

I'd done Looe hill in the Meganna last time, so we parked in the main car park at the bottom and then walked up - which is about just as daft. Relatives were baffled we hadn't driven and couldn't believe we don't own a car.

Poked about the Looe shops looking for saffron cake, but there didn't seem to be any. It seems Cornwall has been quiet of late, and saffron is expensive. One baker explained that they only baked saffron cake on one day of the week.

Having seen off the relatives about six, we made our way back to Suetekh's for tea. The sunny day greyed into rain the nearer we got to her, so it ended up being an indoor picnic. I'd been fed by two separate sets of Dr-relatives, both keen to show their love in cooking, so I picked rather bloatedly at the fantastic spread. New potatoes dipped in hot Camembert is not easy to resist.

And too soon it was gone 10 and we had to be moving. I struggled to turn the car round and got us back out into the fog, and we cruised back to our lodiging without incident. Though as we pulled into the quiet car park another, parked car flashed its headlights. Didn't think much of it until we'd unpacked all our goodies and got back into our flat. And then I wondered if the other car was there for dogging, or to guard against it.

Yesterday we got up reasonably early, packed up our things, washed up and hoovered, and then idled round the gardens where we were staying before falling back into the car. A quietish journey back, with a successful stop-off for saffron cake, and then onto the train. Where, in the seats behind us, a very dull pair of suits discussed their company accounts loudly for the whole journey home.

Tired and with baggage we fought our way onto the Tube and bypassed the rush hour by going to the Antelope, where Terrance Dicks was addressing the BSFA, interviewed by Tim Phipps. Lots of laughs, some beer, some pub grub, some good chatter with mates - how nice to see Paul Cornell well past the worst of his car crash. But soon me and the Dr were both seriously flagging and tried to slip off quietly...

It seemed to take forever to get home, where the cat and many presents and cards were waiting. The cat-sitting sister had been an exemplary guest; washing sheets, hoovering and leaving flowers. I unwrapped presents, got my new sonic screwdriver working (it doesn't make the Dr's clothes fall off, even when used at the same time as the Master's laser screwdriver), and breezed through several hundred emails, mostly saying happy birthday.

And then, at last, sleep. I can feel today in my neck and shoulders how little I enjoyed the driving. It's less the driving itself as the apprehension of other people on the road. But so much done - work and play - and such an expertly judged break. Now I merely have a whole gamut of big projects to get finished, including the small matter of rebuilding the top of our house...

Memes don’t work; pass it on

I don’t normally do this sort of thing but two chums have recently tagged me with memes.

Paul Cornell says I must obey the following, so long as it’s a sci-fi book. “To participate,” say the rules, “you grab any book, go to page 123, find the fifth sentence, and blog it. Then tag five people.” Righto:

“‘It’s me,’ Jenny said.”

Steven Saville, Primeval: Shadow of the Jaguar, p. 123.

And my five saps are:

• Girl Geek
• Rob Stradling
• Dr Philip Purser-Hallard
• Cindy Knees
• Pete Kempshall

Pete has also tagged me, but his instructions are a bit more complex.

"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to."

Well, I’m at work so I’m not listening to music. And anyway, I find it difficult to talk about music because the point about music is that it does things you can’t express in other forms. But here goes.

Bohemian like you, Dandy Warhols
The only one of these here listed that I’ve seen live. They were supporting David Bowie in 2003 and what a splendid night that was. This is currently what I tend to start the day with when I’m writing at home. Itunes then shuffles up something unlikely to follow, as incongruous as…

Hang out the Stars in Indiana, Al Bowlly
Archaic, hissy vinyl track which I first heard in the background of Withnail and I. Found it recently while doing some googling about the stars going out without fuss (more in relation to this Saturday’s Droo than to Arthur C Clarke). I like the rather easy genteel thing going on in this.

Close to you, the Cure
The Dr’s very into the Cure (the dim cat hides when he hears Love Cats because he knows she’ll want to dance). And because it was by the stereo, I’ve been listening to their greatest hits a bit. How fantastic the acoustic disc is. This particular song sticks in the brain cos it’s also the theme tune to The Smoking Room, a marvelous sitcom thing which I’m only just catching up on.

Go, LemonJelly featuring William Shatner
I love LemonJelly. This is one of their songs I can remember the name of. The others are Ramblin’ Man and The Staunton Lick. All LemonJelly is good. This one’s got the Shat on it, I think following LemonJelly’s effort on his splendid album Has Been. You’ve not heard of that? You is a fool.

Tiger Rag, Louis Armstrong
A million years ago I bought this for my grandpa, who’d talked about it as the music of his youth. Apparently he and his fellow rascals would try and get to separate gramaphones playing it in synch – the 1920s equivalent of turning bass up to 11. I also love the glimpse of cray-zee, gleeful cavorting.

Space March, John Barry
Why doesn’t John Barry have a knighthood? Hot damn he is good. I rediscovered this particular one as a result of buying David Arnold’s album Shaken and Stirred – superb reimaginings of Bond themes. (Pulp’s version of All Time High is really very good, and the Dr goes all wibbly when Iggy Pop caroons that they’ve all the time world). There’s a Leftfieldified version of this on that, but I’m gonna choose the original. It’s fab music for evil space rockets swallowing each other. And it also reminds me vividly of watching You Only Live Twice ever Saturday morning on video, before going off to swimming.

Dead Man Walking, David Bowie
And to finish another one for bouncing round the room. This is off Earthling which may well be my favourite Bowie album. (I came close to choosing Little Wonder what with its video in which bass-player Gail-Ann Dorsey jumps about in devil horns and boots that look like hooves. Phwoar. I put her, unnamed, into my short story There’s Something About Mary, and in the same shop where I first saw her.)

Easy. And seven people who now must take up the challenge:

• Paul Cornell
• Millennium Elephant
• Nimbos
• Psychonomy
• Eddie Robson (yes, even though his a footie blog)
• Davy Darlington (not that he even has a blog)
• Martha Jones

Spectreville

I must have read Diamonds Are Forever when I was about 11 or 12. Reading it again, the only bit I remembered was James Bond meeting up with Felix Leiter, who pretends to hold him up and who is missing a hand and a foot after their last adventure. Even having finished it only yesterday, I’m struggling to remember the plot.

It starts in French Guinea with a scorpion and an arch-racist dentist who hates anything black. Including scorpions and ants. He hands some diamonds to a bloke in a helicopter. And thinks some not very reconstructed things.

Then Bond is given a crash course in diamonds and learns how to put a jeweller’s glass into his eye socket.

“’Don’t push it in. Screw it in,’ said M impatiently.”

Ian Fleming, Diamonds Are Forever, p. 12.

Yes, even Bond laughs at that.

He’s sent to Valance, the policeman from Moonraker, who gives Bond some make-up to hide his scar and warp his cheekbones. Then they go to Hatton Garden and annoy a dodgy bloke flogging diamonds.

Bond’s mission is to locate and extinguish the diamond-smuggling line, and of course it just so happens that he’s spotted the villain straight off. To do this, he pretends to be a posh burglar called Peter Franks, who’s already been hired by a sassy broad called Tiffany Case.

Bond flies to America (the plane stops off in Ireland on the way) with diamonds hidden in his golf balls. He’s dismissive of the American mobsters he’s out to bamboozle, and they turn out to be tough customers – a ginger hunchbuck and a guy who lives a cowboy fantasy in his own purpose-built town just a little out of Vegas.

The blurb on the back of the book quotes fellow shocker-writer Raymond Chandler in the Sunday Times:

“The remarkable thing about this book is that it is written by an Englishman. The scene is almost entirely American, and it rings true to an American. I am unaware of any other writer who has accomplished this.”

But I kept feeling Fleming was pushing the clichés. Perhaps it’s because we’re more familiar with Las Vegas and the mobsters after a string of films about them. As Bond is told the story of Buggsy (sic) Siegel I was thinking of Warren Beatty. And Spectreville – the villain’s Victoriana train and playset – reminded me of the villain in Once Upon A Time In The West. It also foreshadows the villainous gang behind Thunderball.

Again there’s the pornographic level of detail: the simply dressed women with little make-up and jewellery, Bond’s woollen clothes, his drinks (bourbon and spring water; his famous Martini with a twist of lemon) and omelettes. There’s psychological realism (or verisimilitude) in describing how casinos are built to drive people to the games, and the dead-eyed women filling the fruit machines with change.

Tiffany Case is a funny, lively broad, and Fleming gives her an awful past to make her that much more interesting. But I felt it was “interesting” like early 80s Doctor Who companions – they become awkward and difficult because of the burden of backstory. In this instance, Tiffany got brutally raped in her teens and hasn’t slept with a man since. How does Bond flatten her prickles and cure her of her horror? He, er, looks at her in a certain way. And buys her a few drinks.

That’s the most frustrating thing: Fleming suggests real difficulties and complexities and then doesn’t deliver on them. Case just switches side at the moment most plot-convenient. Likewise, Fleming’s attempts to address the race issue are quite startlingly clumsy. One paragraph might as well open with, “I’m not a racist, but…”

“Bond had a natural affection for coloured people, but he reflected how lucky England was compared with America where you had to live with the colour problem from your schooldays up.”

Ibid., p. 91.

There then follows an ill-considered joke from Leiter about the response to insensitive language – along the lines of “It’s political correctness gone mad!”

And then of course there’s the two homosexual villains, Mr Wint and Mr Kidd. There’s admittedly a delicious bit of detail in Mr Kidd being a nervous traveller – he carries a suitcase with the label “My blood group is F”. But these two killers don't feel particularly gay: they wear the label like an eyepatch, just something to make them less bland as henchmen.

A friend who has recently started reading Bond has been surprised by the latent, repressed… well, everything about the man. So I was amused by Bond’s qualifications for the perfect wife: “Somebody who can make Sauce Béarnaise as well as love.” He’s joking of course:

“‘And you’d marry this person if you found her?’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Bond. ’Matter of fact, I’m almost married already. To a man. Name begins with M. I’d have to divorce him before I tried marrying a woman. And I’m not sure I’d want that. She’d get me handing round canapés in an L-shaped drawing room. And there’d be all those ghastly “Yes, you did – no I didn’t” rows that seem to go with marriage. It wouldn’t last. I’d get claustrophobia and run out on her. Get myself sent to Japan or somewhere.’”

Ibid., pp. 163-4.

So no issues there, then. Case wins him over by, er, making a Sauce Béarnaise Bond finds “wonderful”. And she demands of him,

“’Everything you’ve ever done to a girl. Now. Quickly.’”

Ibid. p. 173.

Yes, that’s the mark of a Secret Agent. He can be in and out in perfect, swift silence – without you even knowing he was there.

No sooner has Bond got his leg over with un-legoverable Ms Case than Wint and Kidd turn up to bump them off. I’d mis-remembered Bond spotting them as crooks because one of them can’t whistle (yes, Bond thinks a man who can’t whistle is a homosexual, but he thinks it about Scaramanga) or because they’re wearing perfume (that’s what happens in the film). There’s a moment when Bond almost spots them based on a carefully dropped (clang!) signpost. But no. Instead, M sends him a telegram about the two would-be assassins just in the nick of time.

Bond stages a dashing rescue and leaves Wint and Kidd looking like they killed each other. But for all the slyness of this, it all feels convenient rather than clever. There’s no explanation of how Bond then traces the smuggling line back to French Guinea, where the last loose threads are played out.

No mention of what’s happened to Tiffany, last seen installed in Bond’s London flat. No mention of whether he’ll marry her. In all, it’s a disappointing book, with too few action sequences which anyway feel a bit abrupt and rushed.

Overall, I got the feeling Fleming was getting bored, and just wanted done with the thing. But that’s more true of the next one…

James Bond will return in From Russia With Love.

Paperback writer

An exciting surprise delivery this morning: a box-set of "Ten bestselling novels based on the TV series" - including my own badger-faced nonsense. Didn't even know they were doing these.

I have, of course, already rearranged the books into chronological order. Which makes mine the last in the set.

Poor Jim Swallow misses out on this paperback version, but I assume they can add him to a box-set of the nine books out this year.

ETA: The Book People are selling the box-set for £9.99. That's a quantum less than £1 per book. You'd be bogglingly foolish-like not to.

Zero zero colon zero zero

I’ve never been especially squeamish. A trip to an abattoir only made me hungry and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre leaves me cold. In fact, a lot of what’s labelled “horror” just comes across as nasty, brutal and short on much intelligence.

So I recently set myself the challenge of writing something spooky, and in the process tried to understand how spookiness is done. (Whether what I wrote is successful you can judge for yourselves later in the year...)

It’s not the splatter and spray of gore that freaks the audience so much as the spooky idea. The scariest bit in Halloween is not the teenagers being torn limb from limb but the moment Jamie Lee Curtis runs to her neighbours’ and they coolly ignore her plea for help. It’s the easy way they condemn her, the casual, banal meanness...

It’s not horror films and telly that appeal so much as disquieting ones. So I love the old BBC adaptations of MR James stories – and have recently reread a whole bundle of the originals. (It’s weird how varied his style can be. The Rose Garden is a comedy of aspirational manners, like a David Nobbs sitcom with an added angry ghost.) I love the shiversome unsettlingness of the silent, child ghosts in Lost Hearts and the simplicity of the adaptation of Dickens’ The Signalman, where our only cue is the increasing botheredness of Denholm Elliot.

These things often depend on us waiting for weirdness to happen: Don’t Look Now and The Wicker Man are both about the anticipation of something awful (and then the delivery is a surprise). They often rely on performance – good quality actors carrying the lack of budget: Mawdryn Undead terrified me as a kid, all down to how David Collings plays it. And they often hinge on beautifully simple idea: the Buffy episode Hush achieves something like that bit in Halloween when a freshman can’t call for help.

So last night’s Doctor Who was, I thought, spectacular. A simple idea expertly spooled out, where the reaction of ordinary humans is just as spooky as the alien monster. Well done Mr T Davies OBE. I hope Steve Moffat employs you in future.

I even dared to suggest to the Dr that Midnight was Doctor Who as scripted by Dennis Potter.

“Minus,” she said, “an unhealthy obsession with breasts.”

No, but you can’t have everything.

The Disquiet Dead

The Dr has something of the night about her. In fact, we met at a goth dinner party where I was in a black velvet suit and she was vamped out with mad hair and make-up in what I suppose is now an Amy Winehouse stylee. The Dr could – and did – hide tiaras and horns in her high Barnet back then. These days she’s really quite staid.

(Yes, it occurs to me that this is my fault like some kind of Petruchio.)

Recently, two things have been flicking her gothic switches and making us giggle with glee. First, we’ve read Paul Magrs’ Never the Bride – at least I’ve been doing the reading and even some of the voices.

Poor old Brenda runs a guesthouse in Whitby while being on the run from her past. She and her best mate and next-door neighbour Effie like nothing more than tea and a gossip, and there’s plenty of scandal to go around. A magic boutique that makes waitresses younger, or a séance live on TV… What terrible something are the nice Green family escaping? And how long can Brenda resist revealing her own awful secret?

It’s a lively, funny and often moving story full of rich description. Magrs nicely ploughs his way through all kinds of classic goth sources which it would be a shame to spoil here. Effectively, it’s five separate adventures for our aged but plucky duo – and it looks like the sequel Something Borrowed (which we’ve just bought) continues in that style.

This giddy mix of frothy fun and hijinks is really tricky to pull off (as I’ve been discovering recently in my own Magrs-inspired writing that’s still yet to be announced). But Brenda’s a delight, as is the spotting of clever references and the witty, twisty plot. My only complaint is that it needs more “she said” tagging if you want to read it aloud. So I added my own.

Annoyingly, we missed the radio version. But I’d love to see this on telly and spent more time than is probably sensible casting it in my head. Julie Christie as Brenda is my best so far.

We’ve also been utterly in thrall to Young Dracula, a CBBC series that won awards Sarah Jane was up to. The wheeze is that Dracula’s kids go to the same state school as the son of Van Helsing, but the thing’s an outrageous steal of Buffy (the Dracula episode and season seven especially).

Importantly, neither Young Dracula nor Magrs’ book are clever because of the references they make to other films and telly. (It’s an old joke but “semiotic thickness” is when you’re not as clever as your references.) Rather, they both freely thieve high-concept elements and warp them into something new.

Keith-Lee Castle never knowingly underacts as the Count, and has got himself in the litany of camp goth gentlemen the Dr recites when she’s fighting her own vampires. The rest of the large cast are also fantastic, though its Simon Ludders as the is-that-joke-really-suitable-for-kids Renfield I like best.

Like Magrs, it mixes strong plotting with strong characters and bad jokes and slapstick. And for knockabout silly children’s TV it is far more clever and funny and surprising than it has any reason to be. It’s one of the best British TV shows in ages. (And how fantastic that in just two seasons they’ve clocked up a whopping 27 episodes!)

It is an accursed outrage that Young Dracula’s not already being commissioned for a third series or out on DVD. I feel like raising an army of undead celebrities to bring these things about.