Paperback of The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who

I am utterly in love with clever Martin Geraghty's cover for the paperback edition of The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who, to published by BBC Books in July.

Wheel turn

Yesterday, the Lord of Chaos and I took a turn on the London Eye to help his cousin celebrate her birthday. I'd not been on the Eye since my days of courting the Dr, back in the summer of 2000, and had forgotten how high it is, and how strange to be right over the river. His Lordship entirely loved it - "This was my best day ever," he squealed, unprompted. Here are some photos:

His Lordship and a cousin as the ride begins.

Hungerford Bridge - and Cleopatra's Needle.

The Royal Air Force Memorial with golden eagle on top.
The TARDIS lands the other side of it in Rose (2005).

Shell building, Waterloo station, building site, playground.

Best effort at Buckingham Palace, nestling in the greenery.

The office.

The office, landscape.

Afterwards, I was required to ride the carousel.

Lady Vader

It has been an eventful week, with the Dr giving birth to a beautiful baby girl who, online, we'll call Lady Vader.

Given our history - assured, despite our best efforts, that we were unable to have children at all, then the birth of a baby girl who lived just eight days - it's nothing short of miraculous. There have been months of stress and terror, and of trying not to hope. Even when she was born, the Dr had to stay in hospital longer for tests (on the Dr not the baby) just to be sure. But now here she is, keeping us up until four in the morning demanding to be held.

We are all a whirl of emotions - though had been warned by people who've been through similar loss that the relief of a healthy baby would be mingled with sadness. But generally, cautiously, happy...

The Lord of Chaos is extremely pleased to be an older brother - and took great delight in helping choose her online and real-life names.

Actually meeting the baby has been really good for him, too: until now, all the worry and tension clouding the house has been around some abstract quantity. Now there's a real, mewling creature to tiptoe round. And when she cries, he knows - thanks to a magnificent book - to resignedly sigh, "Stupid baby!"

All this baby stuff has meant I'm a bit horribly behind on anything else - what my friends are up to, what work I should have finished, what it's like being out in company. But on Thursday, the Dr and Lady Vader wanted to sleep so I was dispatched from the hospital early and got to the launch of the Cartoon Museum's ASTOUNDING exhibition, Doctor Who: The Target Book Artwork, running till Sunday 15 May.

While there, me and m'colleague Dr Marek Kukula were accosted by this random punter insisting on a photo:

George Watson's People of 2016

Me, by George Watson

Yesterday, I became #109 in George Watson's "People of 2016", a daily photographic blog. That's me in Soho after not enough sleep.

I've known George since we started comparing notes on short films and documentatries we were both busy making. Thrillingly, he's also the author of one of the children's fan letters to Doctor Who companion Sophie Aldred included in her book, Ace! The Inside Story of the End of an Era (1996, written with special effects high brain Mike Tucker).

Doctor Who special effects

The latest Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition is devoted to six decades of effects in the series. As well as the astounding revelation that the heat barrier in The Daemons (1971) was a physical effect made from tinsel, there's a couple of things by me.

To understand how last year's episode Heaven Sent was realised, I spoke to Will Cohen, Louise Hastings and Salvador Zalvidea at Milk VFX, Kate Walshe at Millennium FX and Samantha Price at BBC Wales.

(The feature also owes a lot to Warren Frey's amazing hour-long interview with director Rachel Talalay, for the Radio Free Skaro podcast. Following that, Talalay posted a video of her demo for the SFX team, demonstrating how they could make a dissolving hand for the episode using a bath bomb kit.)

I also spoke to Academy Award-winning Paul Franklin from Double Negative, who hasn't worked on Doctor Who but explained to me its influence on his own work - including what bits of the series were used as placeholder footage during the making of the movie Interstellar.

(I met Paul when he and I were panelists on The Infinite Monkey Cage last year.)

Making Doctor Who Adventures 97% weirder

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

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

Read "The Artificial Bees" for free

My short story "The Artificial Bees" is now available on the Uncanny Magazine website to read for free. It was published in issue 9, March/April 2016.

There's also an interview with me conducted by Deborah Stanish about the story.

If you like this sort of thing, there are ways to support Uncanny Magazine.

The daughter of Sarah Jane Smith

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine, issue 498, includes my interview with Sadie Miller, discussing her new book Moon Blink and her mum, the late Elisabeth Sladen.

Oh, and there's some stuff about something Big Finish has got coming out which is quite exciting.

Essential Time Lords

Out in shops now is the Essential Doctor Who: The Time Lords, a comprehensive 116-page feast of everything you ever wanted to know about the Doctor's home planet and people.

Among the highlights are Andrew Smith's interview with Lalla Ward (Romana) and Robert Fairclough's feature on Timothy Dalton (Rassilon). Rob also speaks to T'Nia Miller about playing a Time Lord general who's "got big balls" (her words).

I've written a piece about the writers and designers who've shaped the culture and appearance of Gallifrey over the years. I also interviewed Stephen Thorne, who played the stellar-engineer Omega in The Three Doctors (1972-3).

And there's my efforts to identify who drew the sketches of potential Doctors seen at the end of The War Games (1969) and who those sketches are really of...

“Oh, he's too old!”

“Well he's too fat, isn't he?”

“No, he's too thin.”

“Oh no, that won't do at all. It's ridiculous...”

BBC Radio 4 Extra: Floating in Space

This Saturday, I'll be a guest on Floating in Space on Radio 4 Extra, helping Samira Ahmed link a three-hour collection of archive programmes and clips relating to space travel.

• Gallery of Samira trying on a space suit at Angels Costumes
• "How the space shuttle broke my heart" - a piece by Samira from 2011

"Grief is never healed"

"Memento mori: grief, remembering, and living" is a piece by the Dr in the latest issue of the Lancet Psychiatry - March 2016, vol. 3 no. 3, pp. 210-212 (you can read it for free but need to register with an email address).

It's about the Victorians taking photographs of their dead children, and why, and how today we shy away from grief. It is informed by the death of our daughter.

Gordon Tipple

Doctor Who Magazine #497 celebrates 20 years of the 1996 TV movie with a feature by Jonathan Morris and new interviews with Paul McGann (the Eighth Doctor), Daphne Ashbrook (Grace Holloway), Yee Jee Tso (Chang Lee), Jo Wright (executive producer) and Eric Roberts (the Master).

Oh, but what's that on the cover? "And even Gordon Tipple!"

Excitingly, I tracked down the Canadian actor, who gives his first ever interview about playing the Old Master for all of 29 seconds. Gordon was extremely generous with his time and great fun to talk to - and halfway through the interview mentioned that he had a photograph of himself in costume...

Doctor Who: The Fan Show

This week I was a guest on Doctor Who: The Fan Show, which is made for the young people on YouTube. By popular request (there was a vote and everything) we were discussing the 1970 story Doctor Who and the Silurians. This delights an Old Silurian in his dotage...



Afterwards, I also answered some quick questions, what you can see here:

Cornell Collective

I'm a guest on episode 9 of Paul Cornell's podcast, the Cornell Collective, recorded at the magnificent GallifreyOne convention in Los Angeles. It's a special Doctor Who edition.

Warning: the podcast is sweary, rude and ridiculous, and shows a bit too much that when Paul sent me his list of questions in advance I did a lot of preparation. It was also recorded at 11.30 at night, and we were given cocktails.

The other guests are comics artist Christopher Jones, comedian Joseph Scrimshaw, and podcaster and editor Deborah Stanish.

The Artificial Bees

Excitement! I have an original science-fiction story, The Artificial Bees, published in issue #9 of Uncanny - out on 1 March. On the right is the amazing cover by clever Katy Shuttleworth, but alas (because she's brilliant) not showing nowt from my story.

You can - and ought to - buy Uncanny #9 right this minute, but due to the magnanimous munificence of the editors my story and an interview with me by Deborah Stanish will also be put online for free in May. 

Whographica

I have a new book out in September. According to the press release, Whographica is "a journey through the Doctor Who universe by Steve O'Brien and Simon Guerrier, with infographics and visualisations from Ben Morris."

As part of the research, I got Dr Christopher Naunton, director of the Egypt Exploration Society, identifying the year in which the Daleks visit the pyramids, as seen in The Daleks' Master Plan (1965-6).

In other news, out in December is The Sontarans, an audio adventure I've written in which the First Doctor meets... well, guess.

"It was established in 1974's The Time Warrior that the Doctor had encountered the Sontarans before," says producer David Richardson in the announcement. "That line of dialogue fired up our imaginations, and Simon's thrilling script is the result - a full-blooded war story set in deep space."

Peter Purves plays Steven and the Doctor, Jean Marsh is back as Space Security Agent Sara Kingdom while Dan Starkey plays the Sontarans.

Dan Dare

Sci-Fi Bulletin reports on a new audio version of Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, and says I am writing one of the stories.

I'm adapting "Reign of the Robots", originally by Frank Hampson and Don Harley, and which ran in the Eagle comic from 22 February 1957 to 24 January 1958. It seems to have been a big influence on The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964). Most exciting.

Genre Reader interview

Me and Scott Andrews - who I killed all those times in The Time Travellers - have been ably interviewed by Will Barber-Taylor for the Genre Reader site - largely about my novella Fall Out, which follows on from the mayhem in Scott's School's Out.

Being both Professionals and Professional Liars, Scott and I manage to get through the whole Ordeal without letting on that we are, in fact, Sworn Enemies.

#Cosmonauts and #OtherWorlds

We had a great day at two neighbouring exhibitions on the gosh-wowness of space. First, Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age at the Science Museum (until 13 March 2016).

The show begins with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the visionary physicist who was testing rockets a full decade before the Wright brothers achieved the first manned flight. A huge, hand-made ear trumpet gives a vivid sense of the man, whose deafness stemmed from scarlet fever as a child. That he survived such hardship by being both tough and resourceful is also what makes him the founding figure of the space age.

Sketches from his notebooks show Tsiolkovsky's perceptive sense of what the future in space would be like - with fun drawings of ordinary life while weightless, and of a cosmonaut rushing to rescue a comrade whose lifeline has snapped. Yet facing this is a model of a rocket based on another Tsiolkovsky design, one level naively fitted with baths.

What follows is in the same vein: the incredible vision and ambition, tempered by the tricky, counter-intuitive practicality of getting into and surviving in space.

The exhibition covers the politics behind the Soviet space programme - for example, lead rocket engineer Sergei Korolov had spent years in the gulag. But I'm glad I'd recently read Nick Abadzis's Laika (2007), an extraordinary, gripping, harrowing account of the first dog in space and the humans responsible for her, which gave a more rounded account of Korolov and the pressures under which he and other Soviets existed.

In fairness, an exhibition panel on Yuri Gagarin, who in 1961 became the first person in space, underlines the politics:

“In the end, the decision to select Gagarin as the first cosmonaut was highly symbolic and political, and his working-class upbringing and photogenic smile were just as important as his ability to withstand the extreme conditions of space flight.” 

Last year, I wrote a piece about a Communist pamphlet signed by Gagarin in the possession of Croydon Airport Society. Gagarin's success was a propaganda coup - the exhibition shows him touring the UK, meeting Harold Macmillan and factory workers, and shows off the signed photograph of the royal family he received after he dined with them. But the pamphlet, with its cover illustration showing a black-and-white Gagarin looking down on a pale blue Earth, underlines a missed opportunity: the Soviets had not thought it necessary to provide Gagarin's capsule with a camera.

That error was quickly realised, and the exhibition includes the Konvas cine camera used by second cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the first person to photograph and film the Earth from space. There's also a blurry, black and white image that he took on 6 August 1961.

Another PR coup is spelt out on the panels beside the spacesuit and capsule of Valentina Tereshkova, who on 16 June 1963 became the first woman in space. If that was not enough, her spaceflight lasted just less than three days,

“longer than all the preceding American manned space flights combined”. 

But despite these propaganda successes, the Americans were fast catching up - and the exhibition suggests that this pressure on the Soviets to stay ahead meant they pushed too far, resulting in a series of accidents and failures, and them falling behind in the race to the Moon.

Having made that point, the exhibition then quite takes your breath away by presenting the Soviet LK lander from the never-attempted manned mission to the Moon. Its striking how similar much of it is to the American version - though we wondered how much that was down to both programmes being faced with the same set of problems, or whether there'd been some copying. But the differences are compelling, too, such as the spherical rather than boxy module, and the flourish of the curling handholds.

A lot of the American space programme's rockets and spacesuits are in dazzling white, so a spacecraft in bare, grey metal seems almost naked. I wondered if that also meant cosmonauts were exposed to more extreme temperatures and conditions than astronauts. We learned later that at one point in the programme the Soviets saved space inside their capsules by putting cosmonauts not in spacesuits but in ordinary clothes - a much more hazardous way of doing things.

There's lots to admire in the simple, user-friendly designs of a lot of the Soviet spacecraft. I particularly like the control boxes including a globe of the Earth that rotated in keeping with a capsule's relative position. But I'm a bit glad to be too tall to fit any of the tiny, tight boxes on display, cosmonauts squished up small for hours on end. If we were still under any illusion of space travel being glamorous, a panel tells us that Helen Sharman - first Briton in space - sweated two litres into her endearingly little spacesuit, and had to dry it out afterwards to prevent it going mouldy

It's more than there being a distinct lack of comfort. The exhibition celebrates the incredible mission in 1985 to save space-station Salyat 7 - but considering the risks involved and the conditions faced by the cosmonauts, I wondered if the US would ever have countenanced trying something similar. Laika is good at showing individuals subsumed by the Soviet state, their personal feelings discretely put to one side. And perhaps that's characteristic. Lucy Worsley's Empire of the Tsars showed how little the lives of most Russians counted for, how many died on projects such as building St Petersburg or in fighting horrific wars.

That's the haunting sense I'm left with at the end of the exhibition: that these extraordinary men and women were so readily expendable.

After coffee and cake, we mooched next door to Otherworlds at the Natural History Museum (until 15 May 2016). Brilliantly curated by Michael Benson, it's a collection of jaw-dropping images from the Solar System, blown up large and presented in darkness with a soundtrack by Brian Eno.

Crescent Jupiter and Ganymede
Mosaic composite, Cassini, 10 Jan 2001

A lot of the images present boggling juxtapositions: a close up Moon with a crescent Earth behind it, or a vista of Martian sand dunes that might be waves on an alien sea. A series showing the small black dot of Earth transiting over the fiery disc of the Sun is another good example. There are plenty of unusual angles and perspectives that take a moment to "get".

The trick is that these still images suggest movement on an enormous scale. With perfect simplicity, they show not individual bodies in space but the way they - and little us - are related. After the noise of Cosmonauts and the crowds in the main parts of both museums, it was utterly captivating - not just to me, but to the rest of the visitors gawping round in wonderstruck hush.

(If you can't make it, there's an accompanying, eye-popping book.)

Was Leela black?

Tonight and tomorrow, BBC Four is repeating the 1977 Doctor Who story The Face of Evil, in which Tom Baker's Doctor meets a new friend - Leela, played by Louise Jameson. I interviewed Louise two years ago for Doctor Who Magazine's essential guide to the companions, and with the kind permission of DWM editor Tom Spilsbury, here it is as published...

"How do I say this?" muses Louise Jameson, who played the Fourth Doctor's companion Leela in 1977 and 1978. "I adore Tom Baker now. I want that to come across in what you put. But at the time, on the show, he behaved very badly towards me and I was very unhappy."

This is surprising given that Leela was perhaps the toughest companion ever to travel in the TARDIS. A fearless warrior from a savage tribe in the far future, she loved to fight the Doctor's enemies and even, sometimes, kill. Indeed, she was named after a terrorist who'd been in the news – Leila Khaled of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

"Oh really?" laughs Louise.

She didn't know?

"Certainly not back then. I based Leela on a three-year-old who lived upstairs from me and on Bosie, my then dog."

How was Leela like a dog?

"Bosie was highly intelligent, instinctive, inquisitive," Louise explains. "She was a bassenji whippet terrier. Bassenjis have huge ears and fantastic hearing, and she'd –"

Demonstrating, Louise whips her head round, suddenly alert.

"That came from my dog."

Commenting on Leela's eagerness to kill (rather unusual for a Doctor Who companion), Louise confirms that "Tom hated it. You remember that speech of his in my first story? 'No more Janis thorns – ever!' We wrote that in the rehearsal room."

But maybe he was right to object. Louise considers. "At the time I was too connected to just me and my role to really have an opinion. Now that I'm a writer-director-producer and all those things... No, I don't think he was. Leela needed educating but it could have been done over a more interesting story arc than just one speech."

Louise explains that it wasn't merely Leela's character that Tom Baker objected to. "He wanted to travel alone and refused to be part of the audition process, even though he was invited. Pennant [Roberts, director] read the Doctor's lines. He said he gave me the part because I 'made him work'."

So when did Louise first meet Tom?

"After my final audition, very briefly. Philip [Hinchcliffe, producer] and Pennant took me to the BBC canteen for lunch. Tom was filming that day so they called him over and we shook hands across the table. He was still in costume, that great scarf and coat, and he nearly knocked everything over. Then off he went. The next time was on set at Ealing on the first day of filming. We had a tiny rehearsal in my dressing room where we both made suggestions, with Pennant as referee. Then we were filming it."

What suggestions did Louise make? She takes a moment to remember.

"I didn't understand why Leela didn't run away when she saw the Doctor – who she thought of as the Evil One. I wanted something behind me so I had no escape route. Tom didn't like that and Pennant came down on his side so I had to find a reason to stay. It wasn't difficult: Tom is so charismatic. I thought, 'She's in the presence of danger but her instincts tell her he's not dangerous and her curiosity wins out.' I don't think I've ever told anyone that!"

Louise is a committed follower of Stanislavski's theories on acting. "You need a clear objective for every sentence you say and a clear obstacle to saying it," she explains. "That's where the drama appears. Her desire is to run but this man is fascinating so she can't quite leave."

What tradition of acting does Tom come from? Louise's eyes go wide.

"That's such an interesting question! Tom is very cerebral. He's got the most extraordinary voice, and he's very aware of it. But he'd laugh if you asked if he followed Stanislavski. So would Colin Baker. Yet if you look at their work, I think they follow the rules to a tee. All my work is based on that method." She grins. "It comes into its own when you're working on scripts that don't quite cut the mustard, helps you find a way to make them work."

Louise also refers to Stanislavski when asked about Leela's costume – or lack of it.

"It didn't seem gratuitous. She lived in the jungle and the rest of the tribe wore skins too. But I was very naïve then. It didn't occur to me that I would become some kind of sex symbol. But Phillip knew that taking Leela's clothes off was a good move." She laughs again. "It added 2.5 million to the viewing figures."

In her third story, Leela swapped the skins for a full-length Victorian costume, and in Horror of Fang Rock wore jeans and a jumper. "But they realised the value of Leela in a leotard, so that didn't happen again!" Does she regret that, looking back? "No," she says. "If you want to establish a character, it's good to wear one costume throughout."

Did she ever worry about the message it sent, or her responsibility as a role model to the women and girls who were watching? Louise shrugs. "I worry about the text and whatever it takes to honour the writing. If that means stripping off, putting on a corset or pretending to be a man – I just do it."

So how did it affect her – becoming, to use her own phrase, a sex symbol? Louise smiles. "I have this catchphrase: I helped many a young man through a difficult phase in their lives. I find it quite flattering, to be honest. Though that's probably not the PC thing to say!"

To begin with, Louise wore contact lenses to make her blue eyes look brown. In pictures from an early make-up test, her skin looks very dark. Was Leela intended to be the show's first black companion? It was still fairly common for white actors to "black up" – in Leela's third story, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, the white actor John Bennett was made up to look Chinese.

Louise is candid. "It was never specified with Leela. Quite honestly, in those photos I think the make-up woman just didn't get it quite right. The dark eyes were because, I was told, Leela meant 'dark-eyed beauty'." Again, she considers. "There was always an hour and a half in make-up before I was allowed on set. I wasn't black but it was more than a tan. One of my sons is mixed race – dual heritage we say now. I think I was meant to have that kind of skin."

Louise left Doctor Who at the end of her contract, declining to stay on for another season or to return in 1980 for Tom Baker's final stories. Yet now she's playing Leela alongside him in audio plays for Big Finish. So what's changed?

"I love Big Finish," she enthuses.

But what about Tom, who made her so unhappy? She shrugs. "He said sorry. That's all it took. Now we get on brilliantly. He's a pussycat – and I'm more sure of myself. And despite everything we were – and still are – hugely admiring of each other's work."

He's never difficult to work with? Her eyes glitter as she smiles – a fierce look that's all Leela.

"He wouldn't dare..."