Poirot's first case

Tonight, ITV shows Curtain: Poirot's Last Case, bringing to an end the series of adaptations starring David Suchet. Until last month I'd never read any Agatha Christie, but – prompted by Lucy's Worsley's history of British murder – I got my wise chum Robert Dick to recommend some. He had me start at the very beginning...

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) was Christie's first published novel and marked the first appearance of Hercule Poirot.

“Poirot was an extraordinary-looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost as incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound. Yet this quaint dandified little man who, I was sorry to see, now limped badly, had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police. As a detective, his flair had been extraordinary, and he had achieved triumphs by unravelling some of the most baffling cases of the day.”

Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), p. 23.

For a character Christie would still have appearing in new adventures more than 50 years later, it's striking that in this first appearance he's already “old” (p.59). [By The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Poirot has retired.]

The novel is set during World War One – so our first encounter with Poirot is soon after Sherlock Holmes' last bow. In fact, Poirot is compared to Holmes on page 11. Poirot is a refugee living with other Belgians in a small English village, but the story is narrated by another detective, Captain Hastings.

Hastings is an unreliable narrator, often wrong in judging character or making sense of clues – yet honest in his account about that wrongness. The effect of this dual assessment of each detail – by Hastings and by Poirot – is to encourage us as readers to play along. The text reproduces a map, a fragment of charred paper and a facsimile of the handwriting found on an envelope to help us play detective.

Just as in the Holmes stories, Poirot gives lessons in the deductive arts.

“Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.”

Ibid., p. 80. 

“Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory – let the theory go.”

Ibid., p. 82.

“Real evidence is usually vague and unsatisfactory. It has to be examined – sifted. But here the whole thing is cut and dried. No, my friend, this evidence has been very cleverly manufactured – so cleverly that it has defeated its own ends.”

Ibid., p. 103. 

He's a strange little man, fussy and fastidious, straightening other people's ties and tie pins. It's this attention to detail – and to tiny incongruities – that makes him so good at nabbing crooks. But Poirot is not entirely in control: as the tension of the case affects him, he builds houses from playing cards to steady his nerves (p. 178). Then, when given a last, essential piece of evidence, he kisses Hastings on the cheeks and rushes off - scandalously “hatless” (p. 179).

Though Hastings often has fun at Poirot's expense and describes him looking ridiculous, he also greatly respects him and his methods. For much of the book he – and we – struggle to keep up with Poirot's “little grey cells”. Poirot can also have fun Hastings' expense, too:

“'Yes, he is intelligent. But we must be more intelligent. We must be so intelligent that he does not suspect us of being intelligent at all.' ...

There had been times when when I hardly thought that Poirot appreciated me at my true worth.

'Yes,' he continued., staring at me thoughtfully, 'you will be invaluable.' This was naturally gratifying...”

Ibid., p. 124.

Towards the end, there's quite a surprise when Poirot becomes the man of action:

“A chair was overturned. Poirot skipped nimbly aside. A quick movement on his part, and his assailant fell with a crash.”

Ibid., p. 190.

Yet there's little depth to Poirot: he's a series of fussy ticks. We learn very little about him or his background other than that he's highly thought of by the police in his own country; we don't even know the names or relationships of the other Belgians he's living with. His mannerisms – his way of slipping into French mid-sentence – make him a caricature.

This is also true of the other characters populating the story – wild young things, maiden aunts and bounders, larking about round a stately home. In fact, with posh, hapless Hastings narrating it reminded me most of all of a Wodehouse farce, only with a murder. There's little sense of reality; the death doesn't seem to affect anyone more than being a interesting puzzle.

In some cases, that light caricature becomes more sinister. One red herring concerns a spy, who Poirot refers to as “a Jew of course” (p.147) – then defends him for being a “patriot”, because, the detective appears to think, though the man in question has been naturalised for 15 years he cannot really be an Englishman. The suggestion is not of one bad Jew; it's all of them.

The ending, neatly, comes as a surprise when the murderer is exposed as someone we thought had been ruled out earlier on. Poirot then delights in explaining how the puzzle fits together, and there's a light-hearted ending as he promises that Hastings might get the better of him next time. The parlour game is over, though the implication is that the murderer will now hang.

It's fun and ingenious but I felt a little unsatisfied – even a little disturbed – that that is all it is.

Robert's next recommendation was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

Kaiser Wilhelm vs the Gays

The Dr recommended me Philipp Blom's The Vertigo Years - Change and Culture in the West, 1900-1914. It's an excellent, often funny, often harrowing account of the period, each chapter taking a calendar year and using one specific moment to explore broader themes.

Kaiser Wilhelm comes off particularly badly: a comic villain like Dick Dastardly. One chapter covers the scandal of his adviser and friend Philip of Eulenburg turning out to be gay, at a time when that was a serious criminal offence. The ensuing court case and revelations in the papers destroyed Eulenburg.

"While the journalist was mulling over the morality of wrecking a man's life for political gain, Kaiser Wilhelm himself was cruelly reminded of his abandoned friend in 1908, when his boyhood comrade, General Dietrich Hülsen-Haeseler, chief of the military cabinet, was entrusted with cleansing the Prussian officer corps of homosexuals in the wake of the Eulenburg affair. Hülsen-Haeseler appeared before the guests of a hunting party in the Kaiser's honour dressed 'in pink ballet skirts with a rose wreath and began to dance to the music'. Having finished his performance, the Count bowed to the applauding audience, and collapsed. General chaos ensued among the guests. Princess Fürestenberg, the hostess, wept uncontrollably and the agitated Kaiser was seen pacing up and down, but the doctor who had been hastily summoned could do nothing more than declare the performer's death by heart failure. When attention finally turned back to the general, rigor mortis had set in and it proved very difficult to get the late chief of the military cabinet out of his tutu and into more seemly military attire."

Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years - Change and Culture in the West, 1900-1914 (2008), p. 178.

Doctor Who: 1994

After episode 695 (Survival, part 3)
Shakedown - Return of the Sontarans, premiered 1 December 1994
<< back to 1993

Susan and Ace?
Shakedown (1994)

Earlier this month, TV Choice gave a special award to Doctor Who for reaching 50. Peter Davison made a short speech:

"When Doctor Who was taken off the air in 1989, it seemed unlikely it would ever return - but we had forgotten about the fans, the people who had grown up watching and being inspired by the show."

A few years ago, I traced one thread of how that happened - starting in 1994.

Five years after the last episode had been broadcast, there was still no prospect of new Doctor Who on TV. Yet there was an audience for books, videos and magazines - a grown-up audience with disposable income. The Dreamwatch convention even produced its own original straight-to-video adventure, Shakedown  - which my friend Jason Haigh-Ellery worked on.

"‘Keith Barnfather had been offering [the convention] Downtime,’ says Haigh-Ellery. The script for this was by Marc Platt, and reunited several of the Doctor’s companions – a major selling point for fans. ‘But it just wasn’t ever going to get off the ground,’ Haigh-Ellery remembers. ‘That was nothing to do with rights but the availability of the actors. Kevin Davies heard about this, and said, “I’ve got this idea for a Sontarans story.”’

... The Sontarans would be just one way of drawing the fans to Shakedown, as the project was christened. The script would be by veteran Doctor Who writer Terrance Dicks and the production could also use ‘name’ actors when casting its several human characters. Because these were new roles, actor availability was no longer a problem – if one former Doctor Who star could not make the proposed shooting dates, they could go to another. The new roles also appealed to the actors.

Me, Bernice Summerfield - The Inside Story (2009), pp. 95-6.

"Directed by Kevin Davies, Shakedown was shot on location at HMS Belfast, a former frigate docked on the south bank of the Thames, in the summer of 1994. The cast was largely culled from Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, and included Ace-actress Sophie Aldred in the role of Mari. The bitchy, cowardly character was specifically written to be a million miles from Ace.

‘It’s always lovely to be given something different to do,’ says Aldred. ‘Ace had been going a long time even then, and there’s only so much you can dig into her past. She’s had everything analysed, every part of her. So actually to play a different part and confound audience expectation is fantastic. I think that’s really a kind of carry-on from the TV series, where people like Sheila Hancock and Dinsdale Landen completely relished play baddies. It’s always more fun to play the baddie, let’s face it.’"

Ibid., p. 56.

"The project got moving quickly. ‘Within a couple of weeks,’ says Haigh-Ellery, ‘everything was signed, sealed and delivered. It was that fast.’ Gary Leigh was executive producer, with director Kevin Davies and composer Mark Ayres also producing. How did Haigh-Ellery get involved? ‘I’d done productions, I was really keen to do it and also I’m a businessman. I’d worked with Gary on his magazine so he trusted me. He said, “Can you help me out?” So I came in as associate producer.’ What is the role of an associate producer? ‘As I discovered on that shoot, it was to stop the executive producer from killing the director! It was quite fraught, as we were all very honest about in the Making of Shakedown video. I think the film is great, don’t get me wrong. We were doing a Terrance Dicks Doctor Who script by any other name!’

The production went over budget, but by this point Haigh-Ellery had got the family business into much healthier shape. ‘I was able to say to Gary Leigh, “Don’t worry, I’ll cover it.” It was good I had the money to do that.’ Yet it had been a long slog to reach this point. ‘That two weeks filming on Shakedown was my first holiday since 1988,’ he says. ‘You wouldn’t think it was a holiday, but I did.’

How successful was Shakedown? ‘It made its money back and it’s still earning money today,’ says Haigh-Ellery. He was keen to start work on a follow-up project, but others did not share his enthusiasm. ‘Gary Leigh will say himself that he found Shakedown quite difficult,’ he continues. ‘We talked about Shakedown 2, and Gary was like, “Yeah, but I’m not doing it now.”’"

Ibid., p. 96

So Haigh-Ellery went it alone, commissioning Paul Cornell to write an original science-fiction drama, Phoneix Ryan, that he hoped would star Sophie Aldred. He was in negotiations with the Sci-Fi Channel to co-fund the project (as they had done on the PROBE series written by Mark Gatiss, which also starred characters and actors from Doctor Who).

Phoenix Ryan didn't happen, but as part of the negotiations Haigh-Ellery was required to set up a production company. So, on 21 June 1996 he formally registered company 03217457 - Big Finish Productions Limited.

We will speak more of Big Finish later.

Next episode: 1995

Doctor Who: 1993

After episode 695 (Survival, part 3)
Thirty Years in the TARDIS, first broadcast 29 November 1993
<< back to 1992

It really is bigger on the inside...
Thirty Years in the TARDIS (1993)

What a joy Thirty Years in the TARDIS was - a celebration of Doctor Who that concentrated not on its worthiness but how it made us feel watching. At the time, it didn't look as if Doctor Who would ever return to our screens. It had been off the air for four years, a special anniversary story had stopped production almost as soon as it started, and Children in Need's Doctor Who / EastEnders crossover didn't exactly convince a mass audience that the show deserved resurrecting.

I love Dimensions in Time, but Thirty Years was something to be proud of as a fan. Director Kevin Davies worked wonders to achieve so much more than just a series of clips and contributors: it's full of monsters and special effects, and a sense of Doctor Who not just as something from the past but a series that could still deliver real thrills.

Best of all is a shot towards the end where a small boy enters the TARDIS. Despite what I've said before about Doctor Who no longer being for children, here's one discovering the main wheeze of the series in exactly the way that the audience did in the very first episode. But this time we follow behind him, moving from the police box exterior into the control room all in one single shot.

That magical effect had never been done on Doctor Who before, and wouldn't be done again (or at all in the series proper) until last year's Christmas special:



I think that's extraordinary: the very idea that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside is at the very heart of the show. It's so wildly ridiculous; yet in this trick shot it's there before our eyes.

I remember being amazed in 1996 that the television movie, with its massive budget, failed to include that effect with the other expensive set pieces. I looked out for it in the 2005 series - and then read in Doctor Who Magazine that Russell T Davies had hoped to feature it. There are good reasons why not: it's a relatively simple trick requiring a pair of locked-off cameras, but it requires a lot of setting up. The time it would eat up in a recording day simply made it impractical. (Last year's Christmas special did the legwork in CGI.)

It occurred to me, reading Russell's explanation, that it would be a simple enough trick to do in an audio. All I needed was enough dialogue in the scene to cover them walking from the door to the console, as the sound effects changed. So, entirely for my own self-indulgence, I wrote it into the play I was writing at the time: The Settling, delivered in October 2005.

The scene is Drogheda in 1649, some time after Oliver Cromwell has massacred the town:

MARY:
All names have meanings. I’ll probably choose something loyal to the king. Charles the second, I mean.

DOCTOR WHO:
Here we are.

HE FISHES FOR THE TARDIS KEY.

MARY:
You keep supplies in this? For our journey?

ACE:
Yeah, sort of. So what names would mean loyalty?

AS DOCTOR WHO SPEAKS, HE OPENS THE DOOR AND – ALL IN THE SAME SCENE – THE WOMEN FOLLOW HIM INTO THE TARDIS. NB: THIS IS THE ‘MCGANN” TARIS INTERIOR FX.

DOCTOR WHO:
"Charles", obviously, for a boy. For a girl… "Elizabeth" would say "monarchy". Though it’s also a favourite of the Puritans. Cromwell’s mother, his wife and his favourite daughter are all called Elizabeth.

DOCTOR WHO WORKS THE CONSOLE.

ACE:
That’d be diplomatic, then. [BEAT] Oh yeah. Mary, should’ve warned you about – [this place.]

DOCTOR WHO:
(KINDLY) It’s all right. You’re safe in here.

ACE:
Yeah, but mind the mess. We’ve been redecorating.

MARY:
(AWED) I can feel it! I can feel it all at peace! It’s like... like a church. You worship here?

DOCTOR WHO:
Not exactly. It’s our home. Ace, this is going to be tricky. I could do with your help…

PRESSING BUTTONS ETC.

ACE:
Right.

PRESSING BUTTONS ETC.

Releasing the handbrake…

THE TARDIS DEMATERIALISES.

Doctor Who: How the 
Doctor Changed my Life
cover by Alex Mallinson

(Director/producer Gary Russell suggested it should be the vast TARDIS interior from the TV movie, this being the point when the Doctor redecorates. I wish I'd thought of it first.)

That shot from Thirty Years was also in my mind when I commissioned Alex Mallinson for the cover of a book of stories by first-time authors: How the Doctor Changed my Life.

Why does that effect so get to me? There's a particular thrill when a companion takes their first step into the TARDIS, and finds that an ordinary-looking police box contains a whole impossible world.

In that trick shot, just once in all 50 years of the series, we get to take that step with them.

Next episode: 1994

Doctor Who: 1992

After episode 695 (Survival, part 3)
Resistance is Useless, first broadcast 3 January 1992
<< back to 1991

Confessions of an anorak
Resistance is Useless (1992)

Who was Doctor Who for?

As I've argued so far, by 1992 it was no longer on telly, no longer for children and - in the New Adventures books - being written for and by fans. I was thrilled by those books for their bold take on Doctor Who and the feeling I got from reading them (and pitching my own paltry efforts to the poor editorial staff) of being part of a community.

But not everyone shared that excitement. Plenty of fans didn't like the books: indeed, editor Peter Darvill-Evans felt moved to defend the range in Doctor Who Magazine #200 (cover dated 9 June 1993):

"I've just received another letter of complaint. 'Why are the New Adventures so awful?' is the opening line..."

In the letters pages of DWM, and in the ever more professional-looking fanzines, there were earnest debates and essays about the relative merits of the range and what constituted proper Doctor Who.

Though new adventures for the Doctor were limited to books and comic strips, he was then suddenly back on TV. On 3 January 1992, BBC Two broadcast Resistance is Useless as a lead-in to a series of repeats of old Doctor Who. Nowadays we're used to clips shows and Doctor Who being repeated but at the time this was very unusual: it was the longest series of repeats in 10 years.

Yet while the Five Faces season of repeats in 1981 - and the Monsters repeats in the 1980s - had been aimed at a mass audience of general viewers, the 1992 repeats seemed to target a more select group.

It's weird watching Resistance is Useless now: the clips themselves are full of excitement: monsters, deaths and strangeness, the Doctor being brave and funny. There's a madcap mix of the scary and daft that makes up much of Doctor Who. The programme does a great job of selling the prospect of full episodes, even if those episodes are nearly 30 years-old and in ropey black and white.

But, undercutting the actual evidence of the thrilling nature of Doctor Who, the clips are presented by a croaky-voiced anorak, imparting nuggets of trivia.

"Everyone knows that TARDIS is an acronym for Time And Relative Dimensions [sic] In Space but not many people know why this Type 40 TARDIS, which the Doctor stole from the Time Lords, is shaped like a police telephone box. Well, that's due to a malfunction of the chameleon circuit which enables it to change its shape and blend in with its surroundings. It jammed in London in 1963, the date of the first episode. It's interesting to note that a horse named Call Box won a race at Doncaster on that very day."

The implication is that Doctor Who appealed chiefly to dreary nerds.

That same presumption seems to be there in the BBC Videos of the time. Doctor Who sold well on VHS, often appearing in the top 10 charts, competing well against movies. But who did the people producing the videos think they were selling them too?

In March 1992, The Pertwee Years offered tantalising clips and three episodes from the third Doctor's era - at a time when it seemed impossible that all his episodes would one day be available to buy. It includes an episode from the story Inferno - one of my brother Tom's favourites.

In it, the Doctor steps sideways in time to an England ruled by dictatorship, and meets sinister versions of his friends Liz and the Brigadier. The exterior scenes shot round the Kingsnorth industrial estate have a particular, eerie bleakness. But (as Tom pointed out to me) the episode chosen for the video - episode 7 - shows little of this atmospheric stuff: we glimpse the alternative Liz and are then back to reality.

Why choose this episode? It's the least atmospheric, exciting and strange of the whole story. But, as Jon Pertwee says on the tape, it's of interest because it includes the final appearance of the original TARDIS control console prop. I'm sure the anorak would approve.

I don't mean to criticise the people who produced these videos and programmes: they made judgements based on the perceived market. As we saw last time, the audience for Doctor Who had got older and more niche. If these teens and grown-ups were going to justify time and money spent on a daft old family show, perhaps it's no wonder they took it rather seriously, and mined it for ever more trivia.

At least, that's what I think I was doing at the time. My name first appeared in Doctor Who Magazine in 1992 (alongside Tom Spilsbury who is now editor):

Me and Tom Spilsbury in the letters page of
Doctor Who Magazine #186 (1992)

I glimpse in that letter an oleaginous teen trying to get in with the grown-ups. That painful eagerness to please is also there in the 'stories' I wrote at the time - I still have a box of them, but no, you're not getting a look. They're not exactly stories anyway, as any plot has been squeezed out by all the references to past Doctor Who adventures, grown-up science-fiction and other books I thought of as worthy. I genuinely thought the more clever references I crammed in, the better the story got - but I was being semiotically thick (sorry).

I was so keen to win acceptance and justify my sticking with Doctor Who that I rather lost track of its appeal in the first place. What I wasn't writing, what it never seemed to occur to me to write until years later, was stories that were scary and exciting and fun.

Nightshade
by Mark Gatiss
- via Virgin Territory

But if did occur to Mark Gatiss. His first Doctor Who story, the novel Nightshade, was published in August 1992.

"The book moves at a cracking place, full of drama. It’s built up of dialogue and action sequences, so reads like the novelisation of a TV story. It’s brief compared to many of the later books – only 228 pages – and keeps the reader on tenderhooks right until the end. The fact that it’s set in the days up to Christmas 1968 lends a significant atmosphere of invaded cosiness, as well as establishing a strong sense of time and place."

Me, "Attack of the Memory Cheats", a review of Doctor Who: Nightshade, posted 31 August 2006.

(Thanks to Jonathan Morris for the scan from DWM.)

Next episode: 1993

Dylan and Doyle

I had a lovely weekend in Swansea as the guest of the Dylan Thomas Centre for their Doctor Who Day on Saturday. Saw lots of chums, my friend Chris arrived with a huge box of tiffin, and I got to meet Annette Woollett - who played Adelaide in Horror of Fang Rock.

As well as getting us to witter on about our typing, event co-ordinator Leslie was keen to find a connection between Dylan (the locals all seem to call him "Dylan", not "Thomas", which I found shockingly over-familiar) and Doctor Who. We managed to argue that the series has plenty of poetic language and a poetic sensibility for seeing the everyday from a new perspective... Then there was pizza and whisky.

Despite knowing better than to attempt trains on a Sunday, I plodded slowly home yesterday via diversions and delays, but had a nice old natter with Matthew Kilburn and got some typing done. Then, because there were more diversions and delays in London, I took a scenic route and so passed the house in Tennison Road where Arthur Conan-Doyle lived at the time he killed Sherlock Holmes.

Arthur-Conan Doyle's house
in Tennison Road, south London

Blue plaque on Arthur Conan-Doyle's house

Doctor Who: 1991

After episode 695 (Survival, part 3)
Timewyrm: Revelation, first published December 1991
<< back to 1990

Andrew Skilleter's cover art for
Timewyrm: Revelation by Paul Cornell

Who was Doctor Who for?

I argued last time that in 1990 Doctor Who had stopped being for children. That fact was self-evident to Peter Darvill-Evans, who in 1991 was editor of the long-running Doctor Who novelisations. I spoke to him in 2006 about it:

‘It was quite obvious,’ says Darvill-Evans, ‘that Doctor Who fans had grown up, particularly as the viewing figures were relatively low towards the end of the 1980s. It meant that the vast influx of Doctor Who fans had been teenagers during the 70s and early 80s, and they were now growing up. It was a bit absurd to be producing children’s books for them.’

John Freeman could also see this on Doctor Who Magazine: ‘Our readership was late teen and getting older by the issue.’

Me, Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story (Big Finish: 2009), p. 10.

Both men tailored their publications to suit this older, more dedicated audience - and that's probably how Doctor Who Magazine and the books survived the long period without Doctor Who on TV. DWM studied and analysed the show in ever greater depth. The New Adventures books featured adult themes - sex and swearing, drugs and psychedelia, and an awful lot of references to then-current indie bands.

At the time, I was just the right age to embrace this more mature Doctor Who (the first of the New Adventures was published just as I turned 15). Now it seems incredible that the range would purposefully exclude child readers. This, though, was very much of the time - I argued before that Doctor Who was just one of a number of well-known heroes being reinvented in a darker, more violent form. (In 1989, I'd been furious that the new James Bond film was a certificate 15 as I wasn't old enough to see it; and I felt terribly grown-up getting into see Batman, the first ever certificate 12.)

But it wasn't the adult tone of the Doctor Who books that especially hooked me so much as the sense of community they engendered. That community was down to two factors that made the New Adventures very different from most other ranges. First, there was something in the contracts that Darvill-Evans drew up for the authors.

"We had to put into our contracts with authors that these characters and the TARDIS and so on were owned by the BBC, therefore they couldn’t use them without our permission. I also put into the author contracts a clause which said that any character that the authors created remained theirs but that they, by signing the contract, granted Virgin Publishing the right to use those characters in other people’s books. It meant that any character or creation, or anything created in a New Adventure, could be used by any other New Adventures author."

Ibid., p.9.

As a result, authors developed characters and settings from previous books, creating a vividly detailed history of the future, full of recognisable friends and enemies. The more you, as a reader, kept up with the series, the more rewarding this development would be.

But there was something else profoundly important. Darvill-Evans had spotted what he called,

"a huge untapped and rather frustrated pool of talent amongst Doctor Who fandom".

Ibid., p. 11.

The press release announcing the New Adventures, dated 27 June 1990, said the range was open to submissions from previously unpublished authors. This was an unprecedented step: reading the 'slush pile' of unsolicited manuscripts can be arduous work. Yet the Doctor Who books quickly struck gold.

Paul Cornell was the first to be accepted. His first novel, Timewyrm: Revelation, was the fourth New Adventure, published in December 1991. It was an extraordinary, strange and rich debut - I received it as a Christmas present and read it from cover to cover that very afternoon.

Paul was followed by more first-time authors, among them Mark Gatiss and Gareth Roberts (who, like Paul, would write for the TV series when it returned); Justin Richards (now in charge of the Doctor Who books); and Andy Lane (now the bestselling author of the Young Sherlock Holmes books). That was just in the first couple of years: Doctor Who books continued to offer opportunties to first-time authors.

Not only were the books developing a shared universe but anyone could be part of it. I sent my first submission in to the editors in 1994. You can read it here (it's not very good) and see the response I got from editorial assistant Andy Bodle (which was amazing). Even though I was rejected, the kind response and the invitation to try again kept me avidly reading the series, and it kept me writing.

(I was finally commissioned to write a Doctor Who novel in 2004 - 10 years after my first attempt. I owe my career as an author to that initial, kind rejection.)

So, as I said at the start, who was Doctor Who for?

Watching telly is a largely passive experience. It might make us laugh or cry, we might shout at the screen, but (unlike theatre, for example) our responses don't shape or affect those telling the story. Our role is simply to watch. There are shows that want us to write letters or ring in, or - these days - Tweet along. But, especially with drama, the audience mostly takes what it's given.

Fandom - any kind of fandom - is about being involved. Dressing up, writing our own stories, discussing the production of the show in depth - all fan activity - is about taking an active part. It's sometimes said as a criticism that fans have a sense of entitlement, but that's exactly what being a fan is (though that doesn't excuse bad behaviour).

For a brief and thrilling time when Doctor Who wasn't on TV, fans could participate in the creation of new Doctor Who. Not on TV and not for children, but a Doctor Who of the fans by the fans for the fans.

But how did it look to anyone else?

Next episode: 1992

Doctor Who: 1990

After episode 695 (Survival, part 3)
First broadcast: 10.15 pm on 21 November 1990
<< back to 1989

The Doctor and K-9 search out space

Search Out Science was an educational series for school children, broadcast (if I remember rightly) late at night for teachers to record on video and then use in classrooms. The final episode, Search Out Space, was a quiz about space stuff hosted by the Doctor. It's now available as an extra on the DVD of the Doctor Who story Survival.

I watch a fair bit of children's telly these days. It's not changed a great deal in the last 23 years, with there's the same mix of low-budget mayhem, earnest facts and entreaties to the audience to take an active part. In Search Out Space, Sylvester McCoy gamely larks about and keeps things lively while Ace, K-9 and an alien called Cedric spell out the science bits.

Ace at Jodrell Bank

It's not a particularly sophisticated programme. Someone's decided the Doctor will look more alien if he wears tinsel on his hat, and bright white spots have been painted on his umbrella so it will show up against the starry background. But I love seeing Ace sat on the dish of the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank. And for all it's silly, things like K-9 floating through space while discussing the properties of stars is something they did in The Sarah Jane Adventures.

A lot of the shortcomings of Search Out Space are just a question of tone. Compare this to Exploration Earth: The Time Machine where Tom Baker and Lis Sladen play the clunky educational content much more straight, or the more recent mini-episodes starring Matt Smith that have been written by school children. But there's something else.

It's odd that K-9 is in it. Yes, the robot dog had been very popular with children, but he'd not been in Doctor Who since 1983 – and then only in a single scene. Search Out Space uses the theme from spin-off series K-9 & Company, first broadcast in December 1981 and repeated only once, the following year. How old was the audience of Search Out Space meant to be? Had they even been born the last time K-9 was on telly? For young children especially, a few years is a glacial age.

Perhaps its odd that this children's programme used Doctor Who at all. Oh, I can see there's a link because Doctor Who was made for a family audience and is all about travelling in time and space, plus at the time Sylvester McCoy was a regular fixture on children's television. But how much did Doctor Who appeal to school children in 1990?

The BBC had stopped making the series, citing poor ratings. And just in terms of viewer recognition, the show hadn't been on since the previous year, there were no repeats, and what few Doctor Who videos existed at the time weren't ones with Sylvester's Doctor.

Search Out Space assumes we know who the Doctor is, and that the police box hanging about in the sky above Ealing is his spaceship. But it's not using Doctor Who because it's a current series, more that the Doctor's an easy shorthand for someone who knows about space. That's why he's paired with K-9 – and wears a long scarf in the scene in the snow. It's not current Doctor Who as the children watching will know it but a generic mish-mash of what the show's producers remember.

The children's quiz show Time Busters (1993-5) did something similar. Broadcast on Sunday mornings on BBC Two, teams of child contestants “travelled in time” on a double-decker bus and then competed in different tasks. The Doctor Who connection? Apart from travelling in time in a familiar London object, the show was hosted by Michael Troughton, in a style and costume not a million miles from his dad's as Doctor Who. But that was never made explicit – the kids wouldn't need to know; it might just raise a smile from their parents.

Doctor Who had become a character from history. Children might be assumed to recognise the character, his ship and even his robot dog. But it wasn't their show any more.

Next episode: 1991

Doctor Who: 1989

Episode 688: Ghost Light, part three
First broadcast: 7.35 pm, Wednesday 18 October 1989
<< back to 1988

The last shot
Ghost Light, part three

These days, it's not at all easy to get on to the set of Doctor Who and details of forthcoming stories are zealously guarded. But when the series was made at BBC Television Centre in London things were very different – as my chum Paul Condon explains.

'Above each of the studios at TVC there's the main gallery where the producer and director sit,' says Paul. 'But there's also a public viewing gallery, where people going on tours round the building can observe what's going on and BBC staff can see what other programmes are being recorded.'

Staff could also sign guests into the building – as happened with Paul in 1989. 'A friend of mine from the Merseyside local group [of Doctor Who fans] had just moved to London and got a job working at the BBC,' he says. This friend offered Paul – then aged 18 – the chance to watch Doctor Who being recorded. 'It was the first time I'd ever been to London without my family, and probably only the second or third time I'd been to London full stop. It was very exciting.'

Paul's friend wasn't the only one offering access to the viewing gallery, as Paul found when he got there. 'Over the course of the day, maybe a dozen people came in and out.' Who were they? 'I didn't really know the old guard of fandom, so I don't know. I didn't recognise them.'

There was no direct contact between the viewing gallery and the production team on the show – Paul and the others could watch proceedings in the studio but not get in anyone's way. 'But there's a sound feed so we could hear everything going on,' he says. 'There were monitors set up as well so we had the feed from the cameras.'

And what could Paul and the other fans see? 'I hope my memory of the day hasn't let me down on too many of the details. The viewing gallery is probably about 70 or 80 feet up from the floor, so it's a high vantage point. You get to see pretty much the entire studio floor beneath you, looking down into the sets, through the roofs of the rooms that have been laid out.'

Paul visited on 3 August 1989 and saw the final day of recording on Ghost Light – in which the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) takes his friend Ace (Sophie Aldred) to a haunted house in the 1880s.

Did the Victorian sets look impressive? 'Oh gosh yes. I couldn't believe that they'd managed to get that main staircase set in there. It looked incredible – and big. From our high angle, we couldn't get a very good view of most of it because the walls of the set were so high. There were a couple of scenes – stuff in Josiah's living room, pulling the drawer out with Inspector Mackenzie in it – that we couldn't see at all so we were relying on the monitors. But it looked absolutely lovely.'

What was the atmosphere like in the viewing gallery as they watched? 'Very hushed, very excited,' he says. 'People who'd been to recordings before were more nonchalant – you could tell the really excited ones were there for the first time, with wide-eyed saucer eyes. But there was a lot of excitement whenever we heard a new bit of dialogue or they moved to a new set or scene.'

So what did Paul see being recorded? 'Lots of the sequences in the main hall. Things like Mrs Grose opening and locking the doors, and welcoming people in – all that stuff from right at the beginning of part one.'

'But I think the day was really being used more for practical effects and stuff. There were a lot of retakes of Sharon Duce as Control jumping through the glass and escaping from that room. I also saw that brilliant sequence where Sophie has the flashback, with all the cockroaches and creepy- crawlies, and the police light on her while Mrs Pritchard looms up behind.'

'Actually, there was a fantastic scene that got cut, with Mrs Pritchard going after Ace and pulling out a machete from under her skirt! It looked almost Carry On – presumably that's why they cut it. But yeah, we saw lots from each of the episodes. They were bouncing round the story quite a lot.'

Did that make it difficult to follow the plot? 'I had very little idea what the hell was going on. But when I got back from it I wrote a little article for the Southport Doctor Who club, full of teasers and hints about what to expect, as if I did!'

How long was Paul there in the viewing gallery? 'To start, I probably had about an hour and a half. Then we went to the BBC Club, had a bite to eat and a drink, and went back for a bit more.'

He was there to see the shot of Mrs Pritchard and Gwendoline being turned to stone. 'There was a lot of stuff with cameras being reset at different angles so that the actual petrification effect was done pretty much live in camera with an electronic overlay over it.'

It was the last shot of the day, and of that year's Doctor Who. 'Some of the cast and crew went to the bar but we didn't hang around,' says Paul. 'We'd been there all afternoon, I'd seen what the BBC Club looked like and my mate wanted to go home. It was the end of a working day for him. I hoped I'd be able to come back again the next year and see more. But, well...'

As it turned out, Ghost Light wasn't merely the last Doctor Who story to be recorded in 1989 (though not the last to be broadcast). It was also the last television Doctor Who story to be made until 1996, the last to be made in the UK until 2004 and the last to be made at BBC Television Centre ever.

Paul didn't suspect the series was about to be axed as he left TV Centre that night. 'No one did at all at that point. There may have been whispers going around the production team but certainly as fans we had no idea.'

Doctor Who may have left TV Centre for the last time, but Paul ended up working there. 'Yes, for the last three years of its existence, when the Entertainment department was in there. I'd often take friends on tours round the building and show them places used in Doctor Who, like the entrance to the World Ecology Bureau [in The Seeds of Doom] that's really just a door into the studios. I'd give them a tour through all the public viewing galleries to see what was on. They'd usually gasp at how high up it is, and how big and empty those spaces are when there's nothing in them. It took me back to the first time I saw them.'

As Paul says, when he took me for a tour in late 2010, many of the studios stood empty and unused. Earlier this year, TV Centre closed for the last time. Paul sighs.

'My department moved out into one of the new buildings where The One Show is filmed. About two weeks before Television Centre closed, I took part in a staff recreation of the Roy Castle tap dancing routine. Ridiculous! But, you know... It was one of the last things filmed at TVC.'

'And then, a week before it closed, I was going into a meeting there. There was hardly anything left. But as I was coming in, there was a camera crew in the concrete doughnut. I thought, “What on earth are they filming now?” I looked over to the left, and there was Mark Gatiss with the biggest grin on his face. Bloody Doctor Who was filming! It was for An Adventure in Space and Time, with Verity Lambert, Sydney Newman and Carole Ann Ford, on the reactions as they arrived. That was the perfect goodbye to TVC for me. It was literally the last time I went into the building.'

Verity and Sydney at TVC, Feb 2013
From Planet Mondas, via BlogtorWho

Next episode: 1990

Doctor Who: Faceache

In shops from today, issue #332 of Doctor Who Adventures includes “Faceache”, a new comic strip written by me, illustrated by the amazing John Ross and coloured by the remarkable Alan Craddock. Thanks to editor Natalie Barnes for permission to post it here.

Modern Man: the director's cut

Modern Man from Sebastian Solberg on Vimeo.

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

Director / Producer – Sebastian Solberg (sebastiansolberg.com)

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

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

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

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

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

Blake's 7: Spy

I've written another Blake's 7 play for those splendid fellows at Big Finish:

Spy by Simon Guerrier
Starring Jan Chappell as Cally, Michael Keating as Vila and Gemma Whelan as Arta
Cally and Vila are undercover on the Federation-controlled world Cortol Four. It's a mission with an irresistible prize. And it's a mission that goes horribly wrong…

It's one of three hour-long stories in The Liberator Chronicles volume 7 out in February 2014 (but available to preorder now). The other two stories are by my mortal enemies Eddie Robson and James Swallow.

Doctor Who missing episodes - so what?

Doctor Who: The Macra Terror, part 4
One of the 106 missing episodes

At last, after months of rumour, the BBC have announced that an as yet undisclosed number of episodes of Doctor Who have been returned to the archive. So what? Why all the excitement? I've been asked this by a few people, so here's my best effort to explain.

Until this new find, there were 106 missing episodes of Doctor Who.

In the 50 years since Doctor Who began, 798 episodes have been broadcast, so just over 13% of all Doctor Who episodes were missing (798/106).

(The next episode, The Day of the Doctor, to be broadcast on 23 November, will be episode 799, the Christmas one after that episode 800).

Episode 798 was also the 102nd new episode since the series came back in 2005 – so there were more episodes missing than those starring Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant and Matt Smith put together.

(Yes, since it came back the episodes have been longer than they were in the 1960s, but still).

The 106 missing episodes were all from the 1960s, all from the first and second Doctors' adventures. There were 253 episodes broadcast in the 1960s; just over 40% of them were missing (253/106).

• A third of the first Doctor's episodes (44 of 134) were missing.
• More than half of the second Doctor's episodes (62 of 119) were missing.

The second Doctor appeared in 21 stories (comprising various numbers of episodes); just six of them were complete – and all but one of those from his last year in the series.

All six episodes of his first story, The Power of the Daleks, were missing, as was the preceding episode - The Tenth Planet part four – in which the Doctor regenerated for the first time.

The last complete story found was the four-episode The Tomb of the Cybermen in 1992; in the 21 years since then, just four more episodes - each from a different story - have been found, plus various brief clips.

Also missing were the first appearance of regular character Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the death of companion Sara Kingdom, the débuts of companions Katarina, Dodo and Jamie, and the departures of companions Vicki, Steven, Polly, Ben and Victoria.

We know an awful lot about the making of Doctor Who – it may be the most painstakingly researched TV show ever. Clips, photographs, scripts and other documents have helped us gain a sense of what missing episodes might have been like. Novelisations, soundtracks and the memories of those who watched or worked on the missing episodes have suggested which ones were particularly good or bad. But nothing compares to seeing the episodes themselves. Of the last two episodes discovered, Galaxy Four: Airlock included a bold speech-to-camera and a flashback scene, while The Underwater Menace part 2 made me entirely reevaluate the story.

We don't yet know how many episodes, or which ones, have been found, or if they include complete stories. That's fuelling speculation and excitement in the run-up to the announcement, which seems due to take place sometime tomorrow afternoon.

So, it's all pretty thrilling. Oh, and here's me on the missing episode least likely to be found.

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

When we first meet space thief Jean le Flambeur he's in prison, forced to play endless versions of the prisoner's dilemma against a fellow prisoner who turns out to be himself. Each time he fails to co-operate, the prison rewrites a bit of his memory and makes him play again, trying to force-evolve him into a more sociable citizen. It's a strange and brilliant idea, and just the start of the story.

The Quantum Thief (2010) creates an extraordinary future, at the heart of which is the wheeze that, thanks to technological advances, memories live on after bodies die. Bodies die exactly on schedule according to a person's allotted duration (sort of like in Logan's Run). The 'dead' souls are then transferred to other, less human bodies, to work as slaves for an allotted time, before returning to life. As a result, time is currency; you pay bills in seconds.

Hannu Rajaniemi constructs a rich and complex future. In fact, I sometimes found myself a bit lost. Science fiction often requires us to plunge into an environment we don't understand on the promise that we'll make more sense of it as the story goes on. We pick up clues and learn how things work, which can be very satisfying. But it can also be hard work.

Rajaniemi has a PhD in mathematical physics and this is unabashedly 'hard' sci-fi. There's lots on quantum states and encryption, and at times I couldn't quite keep up with the story. For this poor arts graduate, 'hard' sf might as well mean 'heavy-going', with the same kind of fascination for technology and hardware you get in war fiction, where it's all statistics of weapons and vehicles.

That's a shame because the story is, at heart, a classic heist - Jean using deft tricks and sleights of hand to keep one step ahead of the detective on his trail. But, like the detective, I often found myself baffled by what was going on, only realising later what Jean had managed to achieve. The effect was to distance me from the action; I didn't feel for the characters.

It doesn't help that the book is so humourless. And I'm not sure it quite delivers on its early promise. The plot ultimately hangs on some sci-fi horcruxes, and the last big battle falls rather flatly. In a world where few people ever really die, it's difficult to feel any great fear for people involved. Rajaniemi's future is constructed so robustly I didn't feel enough was at stake.

A Delicate Truth by John le Carré

I'd forgotten the delicious thrill of a novel by John le Carré.

There was a time when I glutted on his books - and reported all to this very blog. I read The Secret Pilgrim and The Constant Gardener in August 2005, shortly before seeing the film of The Constant Gardener, I read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in April 2006, The Honourable Schoolboy the following month and Smiley's People the month after that, The Mission Song in January 2007 and The Looking-Glass War in December 2008. (I also read - and loved - Call for the Dead at some point in that period, but seem not to have blogged about it; and I'd read le Carré in the far-off days before this blog, too.)

His newest novel, A Delicate Truth is all very familiar: an intelligence job goes wrong and is hushed up, but three of the people involved won't let it go. As they attempt to uncover what happened - and who is to blame - the establishment closes around them...

As always, le Carré creates distinct and real characters, most drawn from the country's best schools, all conjured with names and quirks that seem effortless, as if he's copied them down from real life.

For example, former ambassador Sir Christopher 'Kit' Probyn, is diligent, keen and, moving to a new home, deftly learns his new neighbours' names and habits and history, weaving himself into the community. His wife's illness - sparingly mentioned - adds an extra note of grace to a character we quickly warm to, which makes it all the more effective when he's dismissed by his masters as a 'low-flyer' and used in their wretched scheme.

Le Carré's brilliant at building tension as the story plays out. The plot hinges on the privatisation of intelligence work, and the inevitable blunders - and deaths - that result from applying a payment-by-results approach to such uncertain work. The prose is elegant, full of choice detail and often witty, but this is an angry book, the intelligence sector just one further target of a general policy to open up public service to carpet-baggers and zealots. That policy is sociopathic, as he fumes late on (I've redacted the names so as not to spoil the story):

"In a half-hearted effort to find excuses for [character 1], [character 2] even wondered whether, deep down, the man was just plain stupid. How else to explain the cock-up that was [event]? And from there, he wandered off into an argument with Friedrich Schiller's grandiose statement that human stupidity was what the gods fought in vain. Not so, in [character 2]'s opinion, and no excuse for anybody, whether god or man. What the gods and all reasonable humans fought in vain wasn't stupidity at all. It was sheer, wanton, blood indifference to anyone's interests but their own."

John le Carré, A Delicate Truth (2013), p. 296.

As always, there are no easy answers or happy endings, and making a stand against the villains means facing appalling consequences. Le Carré conjures a complex, nasty world, one recognisable from the daily news. But the power of the book is in the simplest of concoctions: good people we feel for, struggling against overwhelming odds to do the right thing.

"Obamacare in space?" - a review of Elysium

Standord torus
Artwork by Don Davis (1975)

I have written a review of Elysium for the Lancet, examining the claim that the film depicts some kind of "Obamacare in space", and comparing it to what must surely be a principal influence: Don Davis' extraordinary paintings of the proposed Stanford torus space station.

(I have previously posted about this on my Tumblr blog, as well.)

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doctor Who: 1988

Episode 675: Silver Nemesis, part one
First broadcast: 7.35 pm, Wednesday 23 November 1988
<< back to 1987

Ace's newspaper
Silver Nemesis, part one

Gosh. When, later this year, The Day of the Doctor celebrates 50 years of Doctor Who, part one of Silver Nemesis will be exactly halfway. For this ancient dinosaur who still thinks of the Seventh Doctor as new, that is really quite boggling.

That first episode of Silver Nemesis is also one of just five of the 798 episodes in the series so far that is set on the day it was broadcast:

1. The Feast of Steven (25 December 1965)
   It's Christmas Day in Liverpool at the start of the episode, and there's nothing to suggest it's not 1965.
2. Volcano (1 January 1966)
   The TARDIS briefly stops in Trafalgar Square as the bells sound the new year, and again there's nothing to suggest it's not 1966.
3. Logopolis, part one (28 February 1981)
   Two stories later, in Four To Doomsday, we learn the date that Tegan missed her flight.
4. Silver Nemesis, part one (23 November 1988)
   Ace's newspaper gives the date and it's the day predicted for the return of the comet.
5. The Big Bang (26 June 2010)
   The date, given through the series, of Amy's wedding and the TARDIS exploding.

There are a few near misses. Ben says in The Faceless Ones, episode 6, that it's 20 July 1966 - “the day it all started” – but that's four days after the broadcast of The War Machines, episode 4. The Wedding of River Song says the Doctor dies on 22 April 2011, the day before the broadcast of The Impossible Astronaut.

Though the more recent Christmas specials are often set on Christmas Day, they're not set in the year they were first broadcast. The Christmas Invasion, broadcast 25 December 2005, must be set in 2006 because Rose has been away for more than a year according to Aliens of London, where the missing persons poster says she vanished in March 2005. The next Christmas special takes place a year later as it refers to the events of the previous Christmas, so is set in 2007 (but broadcast in 2006), and so on until The End of Time, part one. The last scene of The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe (2011) is set, according to Amy, two years after she last saw the Doctor, on the day of his 'death' in April 2011.

What does any of this matter? Well, for a show that can go anywhere in time, the series rarely lands in the present day. The apparently 'present-day' episodes are often a few years in the future – which, as I've argued before, allows the programme more freedom to destroy famous landmarks, spread deadly plagues and generally create mayhem.

There's also an issue of scheduling: the makers of Doctor Who can't always be certain of the date an episode will be broadcast. It might be bumped for the football or Eurovision, or because of events in the news. The schedules are only confirmed a few weeks ahead of broadcast and anything might change.

I think it's fun that for a series about an erratic time machine that doesn't always go where it's meant to, it never quite lands according to schedule. And that, for a show that's often telling us about the relativistic nature of the 'past' and 'future', events rarely happen 'now'.

The Doctor can't remember
where and when he's meant to be,
Silver Nemesis, part one

(Thanks to Jonathan Morris and Jim Smith for letting me put some of this to them before posting it.)

Next episode: 1989

Doctor Who: 1987

Episode 654: Time and the Rani part 1
First broadcast: 7.35 pm, 7 September 1987
<< back to 1986

The CGI TARDIS
Time and the Rani part 1

The 1986 season of Doctor Who began with a thrilling special effects sequence: the camera panning across a vast spaceship as it catches the TARDIS in a beam of light. This model shot was some of the first visual effects work on the series by Mike Tucker – who is still working on Doctor Who today. (I hope to speak to Mike on this subject another time.)

The 1987 series of Doctor Who also began with a thrilling special effects sequence as the TARDIS tumbles out of control. But this was not a model shot: it was entirely computer-generated by Oliver Elmes and CAL Video – the same team that created the show's new CGI title sequence. Part 1 of Time and the Rani sees the Seventh Doctor's debut but it's also the first time the TARDIS appears as CGI.

I've been thinking a lot about the role of CGI recently, prompted by a comment made by writer Philip Reeve at the Phonicon convention earlier this year. Explaining how he came up with his extraordinary Mortal Engines, he spoke of trying to achieve “the Clangers aesthetic mixed up with an action movie”, and of how much he admired the “hand-made” feel of old children's telly.

On 20 August – 50 years to the day after the first studio session on Doctor Who had made wobbly bits of light for the title sequence – I asked Philip to expand on what he meant.

What sort of hand-made children's telly were you thinking of?
I grew up in the 70s so I'm thinking back to The Clangers, Noggin the Nog and things like that – quite simple children's television – and also Doctor Who in those days. In fact, if you look back at pretty much all television drama of that era, like Poldark or The Onedin Line, it's not trying to compete with film in the way that TV drama does now. It's theatre: filmed theatre. The scenes outside the windows are painted and it's very obvious that people are not sitting in real rooms but sets. That requires the audience to bring a certain amount of imagination to it, which is something that has gone from television now. It just tries to look real.

Is that the appeal of hand-made TV – that the audience is more active in watching it?
Hmm... Yeah, I think partly so. Of course, with children's stuff particularly there's an element of toys coming to life. Children do that all the time anyway with their toys, moving objects around and animating them in their own minds. So I think there's always an appeal to children of little things moving about as if by magic. They very quickly get across that barrier of thinking “This is made of plasticine but I accept it”. That is entirely good, using the imagination children have anyway.

So does CGI take away from that?
Lots of CGI stuff is great: the CGI animation is very good in something like Monsters Inc or whatever – as good as cell or stop-motion animation. It's just a different look. But I am tired of CGI stuff in science-fiction movies. Avatar, for all it's script problems, was extremely beautiful and the first CGI movie which actually convinced me. I just don't see where you go from there; I don't think there's much point pursuing that sort of pseudo-realism. Watching Pacific Rim made me think that I would much rather watch someone in a big monster suit trample nice models than see it being done in pixels.

Have you seen Moon, directed by Duncan Jones?
Yes, that's one of the few sci-fi movies of recent years that actually stands out – because he uses miniatures, I think. It's got this certain feel... When you look at the movies of my era – I'm thinking of Alien, Bladerunner and things like that – when the spaceships or whatever go by you know there's something there. You know it's a miniature but at least it's a real thing.

There's a tactile quality to it.
Yes, a quality of something actually being real. Of course, nobody watching the film thinks “Oh, that's really a spaceship going by”. You assume that some sort of trickery is employed. I just think that it makes it so much more visually interesting. Things like Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies had a mixture of miniatures and CGI. I'm not entirely sure what they did but that explains why there's a certain grandeur to the cities and so on, a feeling of these being real things in front of you.

You talked about children animating things anyway, so how much did the tactile quality of old TV encourage you to write and draw stories yourself?
(Long pause) I don't know. It's hard to say, really, because you grow up surrounded by that stuff so I don't know how much it came from within and how much it came from inspiration. Certainly, if I rewatch something like The Goodies or Doctor Who I can see exactly why I thought I could go out and make movies on my dad's super-8 camera because they're very doable. There's a kind of feasibility about them. They haven't got casts of thousands or vast effects. I'm not talking about the special effects so much as the ordinary outdoor scenes of people doing stuff. It was all very achievable – or looked so to me at the age of nine or whatever. I was a movie-maker by the time I was 10 or 11 and I'm sure that was completely inspired by watching things on telly and thinking “Oh yeah, I could do that”. I couldn't – but I almost could.

So how much was your recent Doctor Who e-book, The Roots of Evil, written to have a hand-made feel?
I don't know. As a writer you simply describe things and you're never really sure what pictures will emerge in readers' imaginations. It's kind of a collaboration. I put down the raw materials and it's up to the reader to make it up in their mind. I'm not sure how good their special effects budget is. But in my mind, when I was writing it, I treated it as a nostalgia exercise. I tried to make it feel like the kind of story I would have expected to see in 1978. I tried to go for the achievable sets and effects of that era. I imagined it done with three old tree branches and not much else. But I don't know if that comes across and, to be honest, I don't think it matters. It's aimed at the children of today and I imagine they are brought up on far more sophisticated effects so have a far more impressive picture in their minds than I had in mine when I was writing it. (Laughs) That's fine.

Philip Reeve, thank you very much.

Next episode: 1988