Doctor Who Magazine's Time Museum

Out now from the people what make Doctor Who Magazine, The Time Museum is - it says here - a virtual exhibition of the whole of Doctor Who, told through 100 objects. 

I've written three of the entries, on Cameca's brooch from The Aztecs (1964), the burping bin from Rose (2005) and Queen Victoria's gun from Tooth and Claw (2006).

By chance, I was asked for this at the same time that I was writing the panels for an exhibition in an actual museum, about which more anon.

Doctor Who quiz on YouTube

I'm one of the contenders on the debut episode of Gav Rymill's Doctor Who quiz, battling Ellie Collins, Benjamin Cook and Tim Missing-Episodes. You can enjoy it here and now:

Telegraph article on Coronation Street's dry-run episodes

I am in the Telegraph again, this time with a piece about the photographs that recently came to light of the never-broadcast dry-run episodes of Coronation Street before the series aired.

• The secret Coronation Street pilot episode lost for 66 years (£).

For this, I spoke to actors William Roache and Anne Cunningham, who appeared in the dry-run of Episode 1 before going on to star in the series, as well as John Tomlinson from Corripedia, former Corrie archivist Daran Little who wrote The Road to Coronation Street (2010), Katherine Balmer from Shutterstock which posted the images and fan Lewis Pringle who spotted their significance.

There were two things I didn't have space to get into in the article. First, Shutterstock captioned these images "telesnaps". But "tele-snaps", with a hyphen, were the brand name of the service offered by John Cura, who took photographs of TV programmes as they aired to provide cast and crew with a permanent record of productions otherwise lost to the ether. These images of the dry-run were produced in-house by Granada Television, not by Cura, so they're technically not tele-snaps.

Normally, us historians of TV refer to images of this sort not by Cura are referred to as off-air images. But these dry-runs weren't broadcast so the images aren't "off-air", but taken from internal monitors in the Granada building. So: what should we call them? Daran Little called them "screen grabs", which I've not been able to better as yet.

Secondly, the first image in the sequence is a title card saying "Coronation Street" in what appears to be the TV set. That suggests that the dry run was missing the iconic opening shots of real-life Archie Street in Salford, which John Tomlinson thinks was filmed later. He says the dry run probably lacked the famous theme music, too, quoting an interview with composer Eric Spear: "They’d left the music to the last minute," Eric Spear said in 1965. To inspire him, the director took Spear to Archie Street, in the rain. "Suddenly the sun broke through the clouds and the director said, 'That's the music I want'." [Source]

Presumably, in response to the dry run, the producers felt that a filmed sequence was needed to help convince viewers that this was a real street and not just a TV studio, with the music setting the bitter-sweet tone. That helped make the programme more convincing and compelling as soon as it started.

Interview with Nadine Kaadan for Macfest

Last month, I interviewed children's author and illustrator Nadine Kaadan for an online event that was part of the annual Macfest international festival. She was born in Paris, raised in Syria but left during the conflict there and moved to London, where she still resides. It was fascinating to hear how that life experience informs her work, and a whole lot besides...

You can now see the whole thing on YouTube here:

The books cited are:

• Tomorrow, written and illustrated by Nadine Kaadan (2012)
• The Jasmine Sneeze, written and illustrated by Nadine Kaadan (2016)
• The Kind Activity Book, by Alex Scheffler, Nadine Kaadan and Renia Metallinou (2022)
• The Power of Welcome: Real-Life Refugee and Migrant Journeys, by Marie Bamyani, Ada Jusic, Nadine Kaadan, Ramzee and Sonya Zhurenko, illustrated by Ada Jusic (2023)

I also mentioned what I should have called the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2026, and there is also a Children's Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2026. I am so old, I still think of them as annual handbooks.

You may also be intereted in a previous post, my family the refugees. And previously for Macfest I've interviewed Shirin Shamsi, Sefi Atta, Fatima Manji and Osman Yousefzada.

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E Butler

This gripping thriller, first published in 1993, comprises diary entries written by American teenager Lauren Oya Olamina between 2024 and 2027. Listening to the audiobook read by the late Lynne Thigpen was a little perturbing; I was on the M6 passing Birmingham as we passed into the future.

The basic wheeze feels depressingly prescient. Climate change is hitting the planet and there is growing unrest and violence in the US. To begin with, Lauren and her family do their best to carry on life as normal. But Lauren becomes increasingly conscious of the need to prepare for disaster.

At the same time, this pastor's daughter is working out her own religious ideas, based on the idea that "God is change" and humanity must get out into space if it is to survive. She comes to call this religion "Earthseed", and quotations from her thoughts on the subject open every chapter.

As well as the prescient stuff about the collapse of civilisation, and Lauren's philosophical musings on change, there's a fair bit about the effects of different made-up drugs. The drugs Lauren's late mother used while pregnant have left Lauren as hyper empathetic, so she feels the pain she sees in other - making it hard to fight back when she is attacked. Another drug makes people set things on fire, including themselves. 

That Lauren is a Sharer is a useful complication: it means Butler must find more ingenious ways of dealing with any given threat than simply whacking or shooting it. But I felt the pyromaniac drug made its users a bit generic - the punks in all manner of cod sci-fi who have no more motivation than a delight in causing chaos. That's a shame because this book is otherwise so good on the nuance and contradiction of character. It's a long way from depictions of Lauren's family: her brother's descent into crime, her father being in her eyes a good man for all he beats his children, the coldness of Lauren's stepmother. 

Lauren navigates various difficult situations where people don't want to face difficult truths and find it hard to trust strangers. There are some big action sequences, and a fair bit of violence, but what's epecially compelling is how the tension builds and builds. I found it utterly engrossing.

See also: me on Kindred by Octavia E Butler

The House of Shattered Wings, by Aliette de Bodard

Fallen angels stalk the ruins of Paris. The newly fallen Isabelle is preyed upon by a street gang who sever two of her fingers, keen to steal her magic. The immortal Phillippe, once a Vietnamese courtier now living in reduced circumstances, is involved. 

Soon, Phillippe and Isabelle are caught up in the machinations of House Silverspires, based around the ruins of Notre Dame. The once-grand House has also fallen on hard times. It used to be overseen by the very first of the fallen angels, Morningstar, who disappeared in mysterious circumstances. His apprentice Selene now rules in his place with the help of a mortal alchemist called Madeleine, who has her own shameful secret. Then the House comes under attack from strange, magical forces, which seem to be linked to Morningstar's disappearance...

This rich, imaginative novel was first published in 2015 and winner of that year's British Science Fiction Association award. It's a gothic fantasy set in a beautifully realised nightmare alternative Paris, the Seine running black with ashes. This Paris is, in turn, set within a world of which we only get tantalising hints but promises more adventure to come. The back cover of my paperback edition describes the book as,

"A superb murder mystery, on an epic scale set against the fall out of a war in Heaven."

Yes, there's big stuff going on here, but it's an intimate story, largely told through people's thoughts as they endeavour to navigate multiple webs. The story is relatively slow moving, I thought, allowing us time to explore the details and get to know the characters. A lot of it hinges on the circumspection of people deprived of their agency. Various characters are or have been tortured prisoners. The fallen arrive on Earth with no memory of why they were banished from Heaven. One character is a kind of drug addict. People are bound by allegiances and contracts.

I've seen fallen angels tackled elsewhere, often in gothy / fantasy stuff inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost, but this feels very different. The elements of magical war in a period setting reminded me a little of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, but we're dealing here with the aftermath of a war. There's something, I think, of Peake's Gormenghast in the House steeped in history and magic and eccentric characters. But more than anything, I was struck by how much this doesn't feel like a world I've visited before. 

At the end, some compelling mysteries remain - about secrets as yet unrevealed, about the rules of this fantasy world - and we are left on tenterhooks about at least one relationship. My paperback edition includes a short story, "The House, in Winter", set in the same world, and two more novels in the series have been published. 

The Time Team Unearthed - The Art of Adrian Salmon

I've had some late nights reading / poring over this beautiful new book collating the artwork that Adrian Salmon produced over more than 20 years for the "Time Team" feature that used to run in Doctor Who Magazine. The brief was simple: produce a single, sizzling image based on the TV episodes under discussion that particular issue. But original editor Gary Gillatt wanted Ade to use dramatic licence, to show us the things that aren't seen on screen but should be.

The result was that Ade produced a captivating image for almost ever TV Doctor Who story of the 20th century. For this book, he's gone back and filled in the gaps - and added a few extras.

The result is gorgeous, and gorgeously packaged, providing a thrilling, vivid, fast-moving history of last millennia's Doctor Who all from one artist's perspective. It is fascinating to see Ade's style develop, and the commentary explains how this was in part down to changing the tools he used (he names the specific makes of pens) and in part due to influences of other artists and an effort not to get bored.

There are loads of details I'd not noticed before - the Sandbeast in his image of The Rescue, the way the artwork for Resurrection of the Daleks mirrors what he did for Earthshock, or the tiny Doctors visible in what he did for The Power of Kroll and Time Flight. The new material is great, too, my favourite probably The Myth Makers with another tiny Doctor. But also, cor, The Evil of the Daleks. And also, woo, The Massacre... 

I'm delighted, too, that the book contains so many sketches, drafts and alternate takes. As the commentary says, some of this material has been a job to track down, and Ade has helped restore some artwork by hand painting new colours. The effort is well worth it. Kudos, too, to editor William Brooks for pulling the whole thing together.

Some of the stuff contained here is from the same period when I employed Ade for cover artwork for the Bernice Summerfield range of audio plays and books - I could tell exactly when just by looking at the style of art. In those days, it was a thrill to receive by email his thumbnail pencil sketches and discuss with him which of two or three options worked best for a particular new title. I've always been particularly, er, drawn, to his pencil sketches - and have failed more than once to convince my masters to employ him to illustrate a novel or novelisation just in pencils. One day...

But while we discussed the various options for any given cover, I don't think we ever talked about Ade's approach to his art, or how he put it together. So this book has been a revelation. How illuminating to learn his approach to colour, and what makes an image pop. The art of the art, as it were.

As Ade says, there's more of his artwork out there, as the "Time Team" was born anew to look at 21st century episodes. He also produced a wealth of other Doctor Who related artwork - I remember the unused cover he did for Short Trips: Zodiac in 2002 (not least because that book included my fiction debut). So I hope there's a second volume.

(A collected Cybermen strips next with new instalments, please and thank you.)