The nuclear ‘pool

Having rattled through The Ghost, I’ve since rattled through The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter. I loved his The Time Ships (a sequel to The Time Machine by HG Wells), and this is a similarly thrilling adventure of freewheeling paradoxes.

1962. Laura Mann is 14 years-old and not happy at having to move to Liverpool when her Mum and Dad split up. Dad’s staying at his army base in High Wycombe, and Mum’s got a fancy man, the American soldier Mort who she knew during the war. But as Laura starts school, gets teased about her accent and looking a bit like their spiky headmistress, the world is facing a crisis. The Americans and Russians are at loggerheads in Cuba and threatening nuclear war. And in a murky cavern in Liverpool, Laura’s about to hear a band called the Beatles…

The lurid pink cover (which got a few odd looks on the train) and the teen-protagonist might put some adult readers off. But this is a compelling, complex and richly drawn adventure. It’s surprisingly violent and harrowing in places.

Baxter’s Liverpool is full of telling detail, from the names of contemporary shops and products to people’s assumptions about class and race and sexuality. He deftly describes and explains the world and worldview in a way that only becomes intrusive when a character from 2007 starts harping on about mobile phones and laptops.

I’ve sometimes found Baxter’s other books a bit cold and clever. Like a lot of sci-fi, his world-building is masterful but the characters are sometimes just background to the thrill of all the physics, convenient triggers for the plot. Here, though, he takes his time setting everything up before the plot kicks in.

To begin with, it’s a fish-out-of-water, North and South sort of thing with the girl from the Home Counties struggling to survive the dark and brutish scallys. It’s got the teen-angst feel of Tracy Beaker or the first episode of Byker Grove. Even at the end, the book hinges on Laura’s relationship with her parents, the new perspectives she has of them and of herself as an adult.

But an early reference to another Liverpool band, John Smith and the Common Man, is a fun nod to where the story’s going to go.

SUSAN: I-It's John Smith and the Common Men. They've gone from 19 to 2.
BARBARA: (Not understanding a bit of it.) Hmm. (She looks puzzled.)
IAN: (Laughing.) "John Smith" is the stage name of the honourable Aubrey Waites. He started his career as Chris Waites and the Carollers, didn't he, Susan?
SUSAN: You are surprising, Mr. Chesterton. I wouldn't expect you to know things like that.
IAN: I have an enquiring mind…(Motions to the loud radio.) and a very sensitive ear.

Anthony Coburn, Scene 4 of Doctor Who’s first episode.

As the plot gets going, it seems Baxter is doing what Steven Moffat said of Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who: you create interesting characters and melt them. The vivid description of nuclear holocaust and its long-term effects reminded me of Threads. Importantly, the horror and complex plot stuff works because of our investment in and sympathy for a wide range of characters – real and invented.

It’s a quick, compelling read with constant revelations and twists. It’s similar in tone and in some plot gimmickry to my own The Time Travellers but also kept me guessing. But it does end a little abruptly – there’s the last revelation and a big bang and then that’s sort of it. Baxter ties up all the plot strands but I felt a bit short-changed. Perhaps an epilogue set a few years later might have helped. Having invested so much in these people, seen everything they have been and might have been through, it’s unsettling not to know how they ended up.

Iris and Iris

Big Finish have posted the blurb and cast for The Two Irises, written by me. It's out in April (or, as part of a boxset in February). And it may well be the silliest thing I've ever written - which is saying something.

A new adventure for eccentric adventurer, Iris Wildthyme and her companion, Panda in their time travelling London double-decker bus!

Panda wakes from a near death experience to find that Iris has sacrificed herself to save him. There’s a new Iris on the bus – and she is a he!

The new teetotal and decidedly male Iris sets course for the war-torn earth of the 22nd century, where “his” old enemies the Naxians are lying in wait…

The cast is Katy Manning (Iris Wildthyme), David Benson (Panda), Dan Hogarth (Iris Wildthyme), John Dorney (Roger the Naxian), Scott Handcock (Barry). I'm hoping to hear the dialogue edit later today.

The spectre of defeat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The geeks shall inherit the earth

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

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

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

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

Doctor Who in Crystal Palace

For my own amusement, chiefly, here's two Doctor Who magazine covers showing the Doctor's pretty friends larking about in my hood.

This one shows Doctor Who's granddaughter Susan, played by Carole Ann Ford. She's being a cave-woman in homage to the very first Doctor Who story, which featured cave men who've forgotten how to make fire. It's from a special photo shoot for the Radio Times special commemorating 10 whole years of Doctor Who, back in 1973. In the larger version of the picture, you can see Crystal Palace's monsters behind her.

And this one shows Sophie Aldred as Ace in a specially commissioned shot for DWM. Local magazine The Transmitter has just done a cover shoot of models taking tea with the monsters, which reminded me of this.

Win my book!

The latest podcast of impossible things features a competition to win copies of Doctor Who - How the Doctor Changed My Life. And also interviews with me and some of the authors.

Gotta be larger than life

As well as jamming lasagne and booze down my head-hole, Psychonomy leant me comics on Saturday. The collected edition of DC: The New Frontier comes in two volumes – a bit odd considering it's just a six-issue run. Both volumes together aren't nearly as thick as DC's famous Watchmen.

In other ways, it's very reminiscent of Watchmen. It plays on twee nostalgia for the golden age of comics – all beefcake heroes and gee-golly earnest dialogue. The wheeze here – as with Watchmen – is that, as well as super villains, our heroes get entangled in real historical events. That makes the familiar archetypes problematic. The civil rights movement and the Cold War muddy up simple gradations of “good” and “bad”. Our heroes are faced with – and commit - “necessary” evils, the moments of bloody violence all the more shocking for being side-by-side with the cheesy clichés.

Like Watchmen, we reappraise the characters as we go, learning about them, seeing them change – getting the kind of development that's still pretty rare in the medium. Like Watchmen, the heroes must unite to stop the world being destroyed by a vast monster from hell, an End of Level Baddie that doesn't talk back and they have just have to Kill.

What this ostensibly has over Watchmen, though, is that it's not specially invented heroes here. It's Superman fighting in Korea, Batman being charged of UnAmerican Activities, Wonder Woman stitched up by Nixon. New Frontiers is a radical new origins story for the Justice League – that is, the gang of space heroes comprising Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and a whole bunch of their less-famous friends.

And that's where I found it difficult. There are a hell of a lot of less-famous friends crammed in here, and it's kind of assumed you know who they all are. One whole plotline revolves around a guy whose dad flew with Chuck Yeager but who keeps being cut out of the action. Only late on – when he gains super powers – did it occur to me that all the stalling would seem more clever had I recognised his name. He introduces himself early on as Hal Jordan – real name of Superman's less-famous friend, Green Lantern.

The comic is playing, probably cleverly, on the expectation of readers who already know Hal's name. But I didn't, so it kind of whooshed me by. Likewise, I assume the hero John Henry is some other DC character I'd just never heard of, or he’s related to one or somehow cleverly mirroring someone else... No, I didn't need anyone to explain.

This is something that Neil Gaiman's 1602 could have floundered on. The wheeze there is packing all Marvel’s famous characters into Elizabethan England – so the X-Men are hunted as witches, and so on. Gaiman wisely chose to focus on the more famous Marvel heroes. A gag of a spider not biting Peter Parker works because even relative comic-book dunces know the basic premise of Spider-Man.

New Frontiers works well at mixing the complex comic continuity with real and complex history. The bizarre clash of black and white heroism with murky politics gives the story real frisson. But often the clashes are just too bizarre. When the vicious thug Batman suddenly reveals that he didn't fall out with Superman, it works as a nice character thing. But when that about-turn also shows him teamed up with a mad-keen, cart-wheeling Boy Wonder, even Superman boggles:

Superman: “Bruce, you're such a cynic. Which begs the question, what's with the new look and the sidekick?”

Batman: “I set out to scare criminals, not children. As for the boy... Well, I guess we're just two lost souls who found each other.”

Darwyn Cooke, DC: The New Frontier, Volume II, chapter 11.

Okay, so he didn’t beat up on Superman, but we’ve seen him terrorising criminals and breaking a guy’s wrists. Having bedded the story in complex history, Robin feels a glibly, awkwardly shoehorned in.

I suspect my problem is that I'm less impressed by this squeezing in of so much continuity, though I can see it would reward more DC's faithful readers. New Frontiers is reminiscent of Watchmen, but it's not quite as smart and lacks the moments of meekness and humour that counterpoint all the muscular hero stuff. More than that, by creating its own superheroes and history, Watchmen need only refer to continuity when it suits the story.

New Frontiers is great in places and a very involving read. But its very selling point – that it uses DC’s own canon of heroes – is what makes it not quite work.

Clang!

I love a good name-drop, but I love a bad one better.

"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose ... This has always struck me as one of the cleverest lines ever to turn up in a pop lyric. I first heard it one night in December 1968, when Lou Reed took me down to a club in Greenwich Village to hear a new singer called Kris Kristofferson. After we heard the set, we went back to Max's restaurant and I didn't actually meet Kristofferson until nearly three years later, when I came upon him crawling through the dog-flap at Janis Joplin's house, not long after her death, and just before her version of his song Me and Bobby McGee became a huge hit."

Germaine Greer, "Who needs monuments to freedom when you can listen to Me and Bobby McGee instead?", The Guardian, Monday October 6 2008.

It is, as you'll have guessed, the opening salvo for a piece discussing architecture.

Echo

I was in the South Wales Echo yesterday. Oh yes.

We hold the line

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idling

Today's itinerary: this evening = pub.

I have handed in Slitheen and all is well with the world. Got up late (the drilling next door didn't start until eleven today, hooray!), watched The Last Sontaran on iPlayer (hooray!), think I might now go to the gym to stretch myself back into shape... And then I might pay a cheque in and do the washing up and perhaps even find myself a copy of Russell's big book of writing.

But there is nothing especially urgent needing doing. There's still plenty to be written and sorted out, and my tax return waves a tentacle from its dark corner. But nothing as especially urgent as it's been the last few months. So I am taking a whole day off to go out and enjoy the sunshine.

Oh. What happened to the summer?

I am the law

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

Eat my shorts

I said I'd been busy... Details have been announced for the next two Doctor Who Short Trips books.

Christmas Around the World, edited by Xanna Eve Chown, features my story "Do you smell carrots?" - which had its exclusive world premiere at 11 am last Sunday, in front of as many as three faithful listeners. The book is out later this year.

Indefinable Magic, edited by Neil Corry, features my story "Pass it on". It's also got several efforts by the no-longer first-time authors from How The Doctor Changed My Life. Hooray! It's out in March next year.

Velociraptor

Amazon have the cover of my Primeval novel up now:

It obviously features Andrew Lee Potts as Connor Temple and a cheery-looking Velociraptor. The Velociraptor - meaning "swift hunter" - was about 2 metres or 6.5 feet long from nose to tip of tail, so would stand to about the height of my elbow. As my indispensable textbook says,

"The Velociraptors depicted in the film Jurassic Park were well over twice the size of the real animal."

Tim Haines and Paul Chambers, The Complete Guide to Prehistoric Life, p.127.

Drilling in my head

The Dr and the Other Wife have arrived safely in sunny Venice, after quite an Adventure yesterday in getting to Paris by train. The Dr is speaking at a conference on Mary Severn, the artist wife of Doctor Who's friend Charles Newton. I assume the conference will be a lot like FantasyCon, only with more goths and corsets.

I, meanwhile, have a lot of typing to do. Which is not helped by the stereo drilling from my neighbours downstairs and next door. I still possess the note they wrote in the first week of June saying the building work might take "until Friday". Yesterday, the machines began grinding at about eight in the morning and were still going at nine at night.

(Yes, it's now September. And despite odd flourishes of sunshine, nine is now no longer in the evening but very much at night.)

The building works have been going on so long the dim cat has stopped being bothered. I'm finding them knackering.

But on we slog. And, via Cornell, here is something rather splendid:

Standing in the Herald

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

The long fingers of Doctor Who

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But even “impish” I stole from Terrance Dicks.

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

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

The lost museum

Back from a fun but exhausting weekend in Nottingham where I made many new friends. "Made" as in met, rather than sculpting from plasticine and animating into life. That's messy.

Talked shop, traded gossip, spent a lot of money on beer and books, neglected little things like sleep. Got to talk to Dave McKean and caught up with a whole bunch of old friends. Hooray!

The train home didn't have plug sockets (!) so I did my writing by hand, filling pages and pages of notebook with stuff I'm now not sure I'm going to use. There is a lot to be done in the next week so posting here will be a bit scanty. But I notice my writing this summer has a bit of a leonine theme.

H. and J. have returned returned from the States with a present for me. Jeff Hoke's The Museum of Lost Wonder is a fancy hardback crammed with makes and madness. It's really horribly distracting from this work I have to do. And will make quite a few clever, dexterous friends of mine puce with envy. Hooray!

All said and done

Issue #400 of Doctor Who's Magazine out today includes, along with its other loveliness, news of yet another audio play thingie by me. Time travelling old rat bag Iris Wildthyme returns in February for four new adventures, starring Katy Manning as Iris and David Benson as Panda. My one, “The Two Irises”, is an “affectionate pastiche” (it says here) of 1980s Doctor Who, and ought to be out in April.

I've also been interviewed by Ashley Mcloughlin for issue 16 of his fanzine Mad Doctor Who Magazine. I used to produce my own handwritten, hand-drawn fanzines and am a bit envious of Ashley's DTP genius. In my day it was all scissors and Pritt Stick.

Off to FantasyCon as soon as my passport arrives. You don't technically need a passport to get into Nottingham, it's just I have to sign for the passport so I need to wait around. But in the last few days there's been some exciting additions to my schedule:

Friday (tonight)
9 pm – How to Break into the Young Adult Market (Main room)
With me, DJ MacHale, Mark Robson and Sarah Singlton

Saturday:
11 am - Trends in Young Adult Fiction (Gallery suite)
3 pm - Writing for Doctor Who Panel (Main room)
10.30 pm – Reading: I'll be reading something from Morrigan Books' Voices anthology (Trent Suite, 10th floor)

Sunday:
10 am - Writing for the Franchise Market (Main room)
11 am – Reading: “Do you smell Carrots?”, an exclusive sneak peek at my story from the forthcoming Doctor Who – Short Trips: Christmas Round the World (Trent Suite, 10th floor)

If you're coming along, do say “hello”. Or even, “What would you like to drink, Simon?”

I'm also provisionally booked for two more Doctor Who conventions in the US next year – Gallifrey in Los Angeles in February and HurricaneWho in Orlando in October/November. Both are subject to work commitments and pesky things like cash. But woo!

Oh, and incidentally, this is my 700th post.

Ice to see you

Big Finish have posted the covers to next year's "Doctor Who - Key 2 Time" series, including my own The Judgement of Isskar.

Dinosaurs

Amazon have posted details of my new novel Primeval: Fire and Water.

When strange anomalies in time start to appear Professor Cutter and his team have to help track down and capture a multitude of dangerous prehistoric creatures from Earth's distant past and terrifying future...

At a safari park in South Africa, rangers are disappearing and strange creatures have been seen battling with lions and rhinos. As the team investigates they are drawn into a dark conspiracy which could have terrible consequences...

Back at home as torrential rain pours down over the city, an enormous anomaly opens up in East London...

In this brand new original never-seen-on-TV Primeval adventure the team confront anomaly crises both in rain-swept London and on the hot South African plains...

Also, I seem to have made it to the second round of the Kaos Films' British Short Screenplay Competition. Since the judging gets done anonymously, I won't say yet what my one is called.

Class act

Spent the weekend with some chums, and drank and laughed a great deal. Paul Cornell, Nimbos and I also performed the following hilarity at a party on Saturday night, based of course of the Frost Report's class sketch.

Telly:
I look down on him (Indicates Merchandise) because I write for the new series and get top-billing at conventions.

Merchandise:
I look up to him (Telly) because he writes for the new series; but I look down on him (Punter) because he is just a punter. I write books and get middle billing at conventions.

Punter:
I know my place. I look up to them both. But I don't look up to him (Merchandise) as much as I look up to him (Telly), because he has got innate canonical status.

Telly:
I have got innate canonical status, but I have not got any money. So sometimes I look up (bends knees, does so) to him (Merchandise).

Merchandise:
I still look up to him (Telly) because although I have money, I am vulgar and commercial. But I am not as vulgar as his (Punter) posts to the internet so I still look down on him (Punter).

Punter:
I know my place. I look up to them both; but while I am no one, I am honest in my opinions and passionate about the show. I fund everything they do. Had I the inclination, I could look down on them. But I don't.

Merchandise:
We all know our place, but what do we get out of it?

Telly:
I get my name on the telly and a feeling of superiority over them. I get quite angry when they don’t accord me the appropriate respect.

Merchandise:
I get my name on a lot of knock-off tat. I get a feeling of inferiority from him, (Telly), but a feeling of superiority over him (Punter). I get quite angry when they don’t accord me the appropriate respect.

Punter:
I get quite angry.

Back to the grindstone today, and the first trip to the gym in 10 days. It hurt. But plenty of exciting emails to work through, and there'll be all kinds of thrilling announcements in the next few days.

Oh, and the Dr recommends something she's been working on: a BBC archive collection of Francis Bacon clips and stuff.

First past the post

Home from sunny Spain to grey and cold London, though we're told we should be thankful that it is not raining. Shall endeavour to write up where and which we got up to, but am a little pressed for time...

Plenty of post awaited us, including additional presents for the Dr's birthday. The cat seems to have found her a Sony PRS-505 e-book reader which is loading up plenty of dead people now.

I've got my copies of Doctor Who & How the Doctor Changed My Life, plus a glut of emails from the authors who are all justifiably packed with squee. You can also see the latest Benny play there, too. Hoorah!

Scott forwarded me this interesting article on "real" writing as opposed to that wretched, TV tie-in stuff. And a few people have sent sample chapters and scripts and stuff they want me looking over. But the sizeable amount of work I got done in Spain needs writing up more pressingly...

Got lots to do tomorrow then to Cardiff on Friday for the weekend. Will endeavour, where time allows, to wave a tentacle from here.

Solid gold shit, maestro

The Dr and K strong-armed me last night to the Take That musical, Never Forget, together with a coven of beautiful ladies, P. (the DJ from our wedding what likes his nonsense pop) and Unloveable.

The wheeze is that two best mates audition for a Take That tribute band 'cos they need the cash. But the ersatz Gary Barlow is clearly the one with the talent, and the temptation is to pursue his own career at the expense of his friends and fiancée. Along the way there's a lot of singing, jokes and dance routines.

Jason Haigh-Ellery is one of the show's producers and also my boss on other stuff, so I am of contractually obliged to have enjoyed myself. But that was fun. Bouncy, silly, fluffy fun with lots of ladies in the audience shrieking with enjoyment. Some of it is gobsmacking: a special effect at the end of act one, the extra chorus for the song at the end...

The encore got the house on its feet. I didn't know the words or the movements so stood, at least a foot taller than anyone else in the building, like a lemon/ourang-outan hybrid. Our coven of girls squeeed their way out of the theatre assuring each other they'd go back with various friends and hen nights. So a palpable hit, I think.

Have spent today rushing about trying to get things done as we're off on holiday to Spain tomorrow. Spent an age looking for the plug adaptor for my laptop, before thinking to look in the laptop bag. Have written author notes for Doctor Who and the Judgement of Isskar which reveal our initial plan, and those nice fellows at Big Finish have also posted up details of The Prisoners' Dilemma – a companion piece also out in January.

A new adventure with the Seventh Doctor as told by his companion, Ace.

Two prisoners meet in a prison cell. Zara is searching for the segments of the Key to Time; she was only born yesterday but already she’s killed hundreds of people. Ace is more ambitious: she was going to kill everyone on the planet.

What have they got against the people of Erratoon? They go peaceably about their simple assignments, beneath their artificial sky. They share their meals and leisure time and they never ask questions. Are they even real?

Ace and Zara will only survive if they can trust each other. Or perhaps if they sell each other out... If not their awful punishment is to become just like everyone else.

Since I'm in Spain, I sadly won't be attending the Blake's 7 convention this weekend, though many of my colleagues on the new audio series will be. Ben Aaronovitch, James Swallow, Marc Platt and Alistair Lock will be appearing alongside a great wealth of the original TV show to celebrate its 30th birthday.

It's apparently 30° in Malaga at the moment. Bliss. I will endeavour to post from the pool.

Free - yes free!

You can now download for free UNIT: The Coup (26.7 Mb) – my very first audio drama for Big Finish. The story, which stars Nicholas Courtney as Doctor Who's best friend General Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart (the KBE formerly known as “Brigadier”) and old baddies the Silurians.

London, the near future; UNIT is finished. The UK division of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce prepares to cede its authority to a new organisation... But who is attempting to sabotage the hand-over?

Originally given away on the front of Doctor Who Magazine #351 at the end of 2004, it's a prologue to the four-part UNIT series (available this month for a mere £20). UNIT of course first featured in old-skool Doctor Who in 1968, and played a major part in this year's series. The other authors and I were briefed by producer Ian Farrington to update UNIT, and we did so by pinching bits of 24 and The West Wing. Emily Chaudhry is a really quite blatant steal of CJ Cregg.

It's funny listening to it now; there's all sorts of things I'd do differently. But hear my desperate efforts to make it big and epic, and handwaving with stupid jokes to distract from the mountain of exposition. The characters Winnington, French and Ledger were named after people I knew in my teens who shared my love of Doctor Who – back when sniffing glue was more sociably acceptable.

One original plan was to have the Prime Minister turn up at the end, accompanied by the new head of UNIT, Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood – as played by a bloke called David Tennant. He turns up later in the the series.

(If this sort of thing appeals, as well as checking out the UNIT series you might also enjoy Sympathy for the Devil, in which Nicholas Courtney and David Tennant spar with David Warner's Doctor Who. Lethbridge-Stewart is also due to appear in an episode of the Sarah-Jane Adventures later this year.)

Also up on the Big Finish site are details of my latest audio adventure for Big Finish: Doctor Who & the Judgement of Isskar, out in January.

A new adventure in time and space for the Fifth Doctor and his new companion, Amy as they search for the Key to Time.

On a planet where Time stands still, the Doctor meets a woman who is just a few minutes old. She is a Tracer, sent into our Universe by her makers to locate the six segments of the Key to Time. This being without a name wants the Doctor to be her assistant, but she doesn’t tell him the whole truth. Not at first.

Their first port of call is Mars, where a society that one day will become Ice Warriors lives in peace and civility. But the Doctor’s arrival will change all that. The universe is dying, a choice must be made, and the Judgement of Isskar will be declared. The price must be paid - even if it takes centuries…

Cast: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Ciara Janson (Amy), Laura Doddington (Zara), Nicholas Briggs (Isskar), Andrew Jones (Harmonious 14 Zink), Raquel Cassidy (Mesca), Jeremy James (Thetris), Heather Wright (Wembik)

The Visitation

Doctor Who is stalking me. You can see where he's parked his TARDIS right outside my house.

Luckily, I've been primed to spot this sort of evidence.

"She stood by the nothing at the end of the lane and tried to make herself see it.

It was in an empty yard where a house once stood. There were still blackened remains, an exposed foundation. No one had built anything else on that lot, not ever. Evan had lived there once, but that wasn’t why they were there.

He paced round the square of flattened grass, one hand raised, running fingers over invisible walls.

‘You can’t see it, can you?’ Evan said, smiling a little sadly.

Rebecca reached out a hand, felt nothing..."

Michael Montoure, "Relativity" in Doctor Who & How The Doctor Changed My Life, p. 43.

80806

That's the word count on the as-yet-unannounced thing I've finished this weekend, bar another quick pass. It goes to the bosses tomorrow, and then there'll be questions and rewrites and proofs, and even perhaps an announcement. But I am pretty happy with it so far.

Got The Slitheen Excursion to finish now, and then a couple of things that have again not been announced. And that damn book of my own to get done. Maybe I need to hook myself up to National Novel Writing Month in November just to get a first draft of it done...

With all this being tied to the typing, I've booked a few quick escapes. I'll be attending FantasyCon in Nottingham from 19-21 September this year, and am very excited at the prospect of meeting guest of honour Dave McKean (who I interviewed about his film Mirrormask) as well as several mates I've not seen in ages.

For those wanting to stalk me, my panels will be:

Saturday:
11 am - Trends in Young Adult Fiction (Gallery suite)
3 pm - Writing for Doctor Who Panel (Main room)

Sunday:
10 am - Writing for the Franchise Market (Main room)

Please don't throw fruit. As an extra special bonus, I've scribbled something about writing for Doctor Who to go in the convention programme.

I'll also be attending ChicagoTARDIS from 28-30 November along with a whole bundle of m'colleagues from Big Finish, the sixth Doctor Who and Sarah-Jane Smith. And there's a couple of other exciting events coming up for which I'm just waiting on details.

Service provider

"We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books."

Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt, p. 110.

This morning, the computer didn't want to work. Which was a bit of a bother because I'd quite a lot of work to finish off and not a whole lot of time in which to do it. I unplugged things and plugged them back in again. I tried to fiddle with settings. Over the course of an hour and a half I turned the thing off and on and off again.

After some cathartic swearing I decided to have breakfast. Episode 3 of The War Machines might also calm me down. I turned on the telly. The sound came out okay but the picture remained frozen. I tried changing the channel. A pop-up box informed me that the channel wasn't available. It did the same whatever channel I chose.

"A-hah!" I thought, using my brain. "This will be a problem of the Virgin Media telly/broadband/telephone wossname. I shall give them a ring."

Only, of course the phone wasn't working.

At half eleven I got through on my mobile to a helpful chap called Gerald. He asked the usual questions - had I turned the thing off and on again, had I unplugged a few bits. I readied myself for the inevitable minutiae of tests and efforts, ratcheting up the cost of the call. But instead he said, "Sounds like I better send one of our technicians round."

"Hooray," I thought - though you can't tell from reading this off the screen that I did so with heavy sarcasm. What was the betting that it'd take a week or six, or that the one day the technician could turn up is when I'm in Spain. (I'm going to Spain at the end of next week, by the way.)

But no. The bloke was round within 20 minutes. And he'd already stopped off on the way at the thingie in the street where all our wires meet up. He lugged round the back of the telly to check it was rebooting properly, then had some fun with the computer.

Yes, there'd been a problem, he explained as he mucked about with wires. Not as bad as the citizens of BR6 who were all without broadband. Or a housing estate he'd been at that morning whose cables had all been cut. But a problem of the set up not coping with all the electric goodness I send back and forth. I wasn't plugged into the right bit, so he moved me up a notch. Or something.

The computer should have been fine from then on, but the ZyXel wireless gadget didn't want to play ball. We had a fun time unplugging different things in turn, then restarting the computer. And by about 1 pm it just decided to work.

"Blimey," I thought. "How efficient and friendly." I rang up expecting the usual Turing test where someone tries their best just to get rid of you. When really what I wanted was a Man to turn up and make everything okay. And Virgin Media did exactly that.

"Hooray," I thought. "Now I can get down to some graft." And the doorbell rang. Codename Moose wanted to borrow some books...

Anyway. The Virgin man made me so happy I knocked through my chores quite easily. I now have a bit more than an 80,000-word draft of something that's not yet been announced. A bit of tinkering over the weekend and then I can be delivered.

Bit apprehensive of turning the machine off and running out to play in the night. What if the system falls over again? Will the Man pop round as quick on a Saturday? And since this sort of service is - in my experience - little short of miraculous, should I ask him to bring a DVD of the Massacre with him?

Whiskers on kittens

The writing continues apace, though late into the night. And on the back of something I cut from it earlier, here's five guilty pleasures.

Pineapple and coconut
It's a drink, it comes in cartons and I'd never heard of it until the Dr's brother mixed it with some vodka. “Tropical!” declares the carton of the one I had today. And it is. But also no doubt full of sugar and ick.

Gardener's Question Time
Sunday afternoons on Radio 4 and just about the most genial, cheery and good-humoured half hour in all broadcast history. It's like a less noisy, brash and trendy version of QI. I don't even have a garden or any green-fingered ambition.

The Coen brothers' Ladykillers
I love the original and have concerns about the very principle of remaking old good stuff. And they've junked all the eerie subtlety for out-and-out screwball mayhem. And its got Tom Hanks in it in place of Alex Guinness, a Wayans and jokes about irritable bowels. It really shouldn't be allowed. But I laughed like a weasel enjoying a cardiac arrest.

Easy listening
The Dr accused me of this yesterday as she mucked about with iTunes. I denied it manfully until she ran through quite a lot of the noise I've loaded. Cat Stevens, Burt Bacharach, Nina Simone... I pointed to Lemon Jelly and Flaming Lips, and argued my chill-out thing also embraces the old skool. But not very convincingly.

Not shaving
Even when I've been freelancing more than six years, this is still the best evidence that I'm getting away with something fiendish in scribbling at home. See also not getting up in the morning and “meetings” with peers and producers which go on into the evening and involve a lot of beer.

Chapter 11...

...of something that cannot be spoken of yet includes the words "submission", "handcuffs" and "groin".

Swamp of Horrors (1957)

Clever Michael Rees had posted the following fun effort to YouTube, as a promo for his story in Doctor Who and How The Doctor Changed My Life.

I say you are, Lord, and I should know...

The Dr extracted me from the frantic scribbling for a trip to the British Museum's Hadrian exhibition. Being in the old reading room and with similar low lighting, it immediately bore comparison with the First Emperor show last year.

This one seems to have fewer actual exhibits, or at least no single artefacts that are quite so huge. But the interpretation is very good indeed. Whereas the First Emperor failed to ask – or diplomatically body-swerved – awkward questions about the megalomania of the subject, the (lack of) legacy and more bothersome aspects, Hadrian seems all about the tricky stuff.

A sizeable chunk is devoted to what the Roman's did for us: we seem to have inherited their wars, their economics and their architecture. Models and images of the Pantheon in Rome sat beneath the dome of the museum's Reading Room, making that inheritance plain.

It's also good on the economics, explaining how the Empire needed to expand to continue supplying the hungry city at its centre. Trade and war, and the state of the Empire as a whole, were in large part influenced by its over-dependence on oil (in Roman times, olive oil). As the Empire over-stretched itself, became dependent on all the fingers it had in foreign pies, the whole thing starts to unravel. It's (intentionally) very easy to see the links between the maps and politics of Hadrian's day and our own, and maybe even fore-taste our own decline.

The unnerving similarity of the maps of disputed borders and trouble spots then with those in our papers today suggests that nothing's changed in the last 2,000 years. One group of fellow visitors seemed to take this as reason just to shrug our shoulders at the Middle East. But what it really underlines is how the modern borders of a lot of these countries were decided by classical scholars who acted as if time had stood still.

But it's not all about what we owe the Romans. I was pleasantly surprised by the emphasis on global context.

“The Roman Empire did not exist in isolation. The Satavahana in India and the Eastern Han in China were both powerful empires of similar importance. Rome had links with both of them. At Rome's eastern border, in modern-day Iran and Iraq, was the Parthian Empire.”

Caption in the British Museum's Hadrian exhibition.

It was also good exploring the historiography, how we know anything about Hadrian, explaining the scant and bitty sources and the biases of those that wrote them. While the First Emperor presented a totality of story, Hadrian sign-posts the gaps, explicitly acknowledging that our knowledge is built up from fragments.

Picked up plenty of top facts as I nosed round. Such as that a clanking bit of dialogue from The Twin Dilemma, “May my bones rot”, seems to derive from a Jewish curse on Hadrian after the suppression of the revolt in Jerusalem.

The exhibition's family guide entirely neglects to mention Antinous – apart from his name being on the floor plan. The Dr suggested this isn't really an exhibition for kids anyway, but it also seems a bit timid for the notes to ignore such a major part of the show. Antinous was Hadrian's pretty Greek lover, and appears in all sorts of costumes and hairstyles.

The information panels explain the different attitudes to sex in Roman times – the general wheeze seeming to be that a respectable fellow would not a) shag married women and b) get shagged himself. But there's also lots on the court politics and intrigues of the Emperor having such a pretty favourite. And I found the aftermath of Antinous's death fascinating, too. (He threw himself / fell / got shoved into the Nile on a boat trip.)

“The Antinous Cult
Literary sources tell us that Hadrian was profoundly affected by Antinous's death and mourned him with unusual intensity. While Hadrian did not pass any official decree ordering Antinous's deification, he gave encouragement to those who wanted to make Antinous the object of a new cult. Shortly after his lover's death, Hadrian founded a new city on the banks of the Nile and named it Antinoopolis. He built a large temple and set up festival in Antinous's memory. Other Greek cities began to establish their own cults and festivals in honour of Antinous, led by local and senatorial leaders, who wished to express their loyalty to Rome and to Hadrian. The cult became popular among the common people where it seems to have competed with Christianity.”

Ibid.

NB the assumptions in that, the the political, pragmatic reasons for a religion flourishing. It was not unusual for an ordinary mortal to find themselves deified, and their ordinariness quickly appeals to the masses. For all the talk of loyalty to Rome, surely Antonius's appeal to the Greek cities who worshipped him was his having been Greek.

So you've got some ordinary, non-Roman geezer turned into a God because it serves a useful purpose to the politicking of the day. It happened to be the Emperor's dead gay lover, but it might just as well have been anyone.

Yeah, but dogs - - from space!

The new issue of Doctor Who's Magazine has just arrived, full of fantastic stuff. It also makes mention of a few things I have been involved in.

The Judgement of Isskar – my Doctor Who audio play out in January – guest stars Raquel Cassidy (Jack Dee's wife in Lead Balloon) as the Lady Mesca. The plays that follow mine in the Key 2 Time are by my chums Jonathan and Peter, and feature David Troughton and Lalla Ward.

Also out in January is my The Prisoner's Dilemma, and there's a picture my ugly mug on page 44, lurking behind some beautiful people. Davy's feature includes some sage wisdom of mine on the two Companion Chronicles I've written.

(Incidentally, Davy's website includes an exclusive interview with Rona Munro, which includes him asking about the slow-mo lesbo pussy-cat chase (1.57 into this excerpt) in her Doctor Who story, Survival. Yes, I was one of the "three straight men" who wanted him to ask about the subtext.)

Vanessa Bishop seems generally pleased with the audio version of The Pirate Loop, feeling Freema Agyeman is on good form chatting badgers up at the bar.

And it's also announced that I'm writing another Doctor Who novel featuring David Tennant's tenth Doctor. The Slitheen Excursion is out next spring.

40 long

Just back from a shopping trip to buy a linen suit. I used to have a linen suit, but it was one of the things that got pinched by burglars in 2003. Being the strangely tall sort of fellow that I am, either the culprit was an Ourang-Outang or they just liked the fancy suit bag. So this morning my sister - the tailor - and her friend S. accompanied me round lots of shops telling me what to do.

We tried Moss Bros and Marks and High and Mighty and The Suit Company and John Lewis, and maybe some other ones as well, but ultimately Next had a 40 long jacket and matching 34 long trousers. I tell myself the £110 is some kind of investment.

Despite the longness of the clothes, they still need adjusting. This is due to my Ourang-Outang genes topped up with lashings of monkey serum. The sister is going to unpick the hems and do some clever sewing. But how exciting to discover that we had such problems finding the right sizes because I'm otherwise quite a fashionable shape.

Scribbled several pages of incomprehensible nonsense into my notebook on the way and way back, which I now need to hack away into the computer before rushing off to another engagement. But in the meantime, my friend R. (whose innards I stole for Markwood in The Lost Museum) sent me this:

Monsters and dinosaurs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Put him in the curry

With the Dr away in the Darkest North at the moment – apparently teasing her Dad about his becoming a Writer – I made tea for a few chums last night.

I learnt my famous curry recipe while in Spain in 1996 visiting my senior brother. I assumed he was working to some carefully ordained plan, but apparently he'd just made it up there and then. I took careful note and when I got to home to Preston (where I was a student) tried to recreate it.

However, there's a translation error in the raw equipment. Preston's fine supermarkets didn't seem to do certain basic Spanish fare such as tins of tomato frito – now so beloved of Delia. So I improvised. And as a result found a magic ingredient.

No, it's not cough syrup ( a clever reference to the Simpsons).

Last night's pore-opening extravaganza also needed to be without meat or mushrooms if it were going to please my guests. So it consisted of: an onion; a small potato; an aubergine (cut up, salted, washed); two courgettes; red pepper; green pepper; broccoli; one tin of kidney beans; one tin of plum tomatoes; garlic; a dash of chilli; garam masala...

And a large tin of Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup. Yes, that's what gives the thing its sumptuous, plush delight. Bwah ha ha, etc.

I was also much complimented on my fluffy rice. The trick is to let it have loads of time, and lots and lots of water. In fact, I have a full kettle on standby to keep topping it up.

M. also brought pudding so we didn't even touch the ice cream. I am now off to hit the machines to work off some of this feasting.

There's a new and deadly danger facing us

The Restoration Team who make old-skool Doctor Who look pretty, have released a fantasto-brilliant trailer for their next DVD release.



"The War Machines" (1966) was the first of a new kind of Doctor Who, a cool and contemporary invasion of London more like the show of the 70s - or now - than a typical first Doctor adventure. William Hartnell is at his bad-ass best facing down the robot monsters. (Though I also love his manic gurning when he takes a nuisance phonecall).

The story sees the newly opened Post Office Tower taken over by an evil computer, who can, get this, TALK TO OTHER COMPUTERS BY TELEPHONE! I have spoken before in more detail of Doctor Who and Computers:

The Doctor fights to save the fashionable, modern people of London from a computer virus spreading down the telephone line. Today, computer viruses are a common blight in our lives, continually costing companies a fortune and getting in the way of us emailing our pals. What’s more, the virus here hypnotises humans, and is the first stage in a programme to make the species extinct. The Doctor fights to save humanity from the aggressor. [...]

WOTAN’s virus working on humans isn’t so unfeasible. Neal Stephenson’s modern tech novel “Snow Crash” makes the same plot a plausible threat to the computer industry, something portrayed as a real-world danger, rather than the funky, modish fantasy it seemed in 1966. It’s not the computer the Doctor has problems with – in fact, he seems quite impressed with it. It’s WOTAN’s invasive, misanthropic plans the Doctor finds “evil”. That, and it referring to him as “Doctor Who”.

It’s also interesting that part of WOTAN’s plan is ultimate global domination – and not just NW1, as it seems onscreen. Though WOTAN may seem quaint and clunky now, compared to what was going on in the real world at the same time, it was pretty cutting edge technology. Made-up, but cutting edge.

What we know today as the Internet first appeared in recognisable form in 1969. Four computers were connected to the ARPANET – though the very first user got as far as the letter ‘G’ when trying to LOGIN before the system crashed.

It was created on the understanding that a network of connected computer stations would survive, say, a nuclear strike. One of the system’s multiple locations might be destroyed, but the others would continue. This was back in the days when nuclear war was a major concern, and the system was only going to be used by the military and academics – for purposes far more worthy than episode guides and pornography.

As a result, there wasn’t exactly a rush to join up. By 1971, the system was connected to 15 computers. The first email programme was written the following year. And in 1973 ARPANET went international – connecting to a computer at University College London (just down the road from WOTAN).

At this point in the Doctor Who universe, the best technical minds were a little further ahead.

WOTAN is also, of course, responsible for the dystopian future of my first novel, Doctor Who and the Time Travellers (a sort of first Doctor Turn Left). I sometimes dream luridly of a similarly fast-cutting trailer, mashing up explosions round Canary Wharf train station with the horror-struck faces of the first TARDIS crew.

So this may be the third Droo DVD in a row I am compelled to purchase. Doctor Who is required.

Batsha sengathi yizibhanxa

Hooray for my cousin G, who asked a favour of a waiter on my behalf. I now have the opening line of something mammoth I am writing.

Well, not exactly mammoth but along the same lines.

And no, none of this means anything to you, dear reader. But right now it's everything to me.

Ere I am JH

Oh lucky you. Here's another of those sort of posts.

This morning I delivered a 4,400-word short story for something that's not yet been announced and then plodded on with the freelance gig that will pay for my new bathroom. The gig ends tomorrow and I'm well within sight of the finish line. But it's been laborious and fiddly for the last month, and devoured the insides of my brain. My neighbours downstairs drilling six days a week has not exactly assisted.

Also organised a trip to see something next week related to something that's not yet been announced either. (Though I notice there's an image on the internet where you can't quite read my name - no, I'm not going to link to it.) The thing in question is my next major hurdle, and what remains of it gets my full-time attention from Wednesday.

I've set myself pretty protestant targets for getting it all done, but really the problem is that age-old one of writing, where you can resist anything but skiving. I distract myself with expert aplomb, so tend to get tetchy if anyone else muscles in. The Dr has wisely foreseen the oncoming ogre and will be off to visit her People later on this week.

I have allowed myself nights out and adventures so long as I get through my daily amount. There will be drinks and maybe even a curry to keep the grey cells on target. On Saturday I'm doing a thing for Big Finish which will all be revealed in time.

So blogging – and meals and going to the toilet – will have to be fitted around this word ethic, at least for the next three weeks.

After that, I have something else to finish that's still awaiting the official announcing – my spies tell me that'll be in just more than a fortnight. I'm away a fair bit in September as well, so it all needs fitting round and in between. And then I'd quite like the taste of some holiday.

Though two regular gigs have both been in touch asking when I am free... And I promised myself I'd write my own, original novel before the end of the year. And there's that's spec TV script to force into some kind of shape...

So what the hell. Me and the Dr are off to Mallorca early next year to some place where we can't see or do work. And later this year I'm hoping to get up to see some chums and some castles in Scotland. And there's some work-related things to get along to, if only the details sort out.

That fits

Nimbos, the Dr and I braved the grey drizzle yesterday for a nose round Battersea Power Station – which is open to the public at the moment while Real Estate Opportunities and Treasury Holdings UK attempt to get backing for a major transformation of the site.

I love a nose round buildings like this. My freelance efforts have got me into various bars and back corridors of the Palace of Westminster and other government buildings. I've been on the top floor of 1 Canada Square in Canary Wharf and on the roof and in the basement of posh Eltham Palace. And then there's all the poking about behind closed doors that's part of Open House. It's something the Dr's got me into – her chief delight is in getting into bits of museums and historical sites not normally open to the public.

Battersea is one of the icons of the London skyline. It's the cover to Pink Floyd's album Animals and the factory churning out Cybermen in recent Doctor Who. (It also appeared in 1964's Dalek Invasion of Earth, with a nuclear power facility grafted on.)

I pass the power station on the train into town. And I got pretty close to it during my corporate parasite days when a client took me to see Cirque du Soleil who'd erected their tent just in front of it. But yesterday's day trip was something else.

The Grade 2* listed building covers a bit more than six acres – one of the largest brick buildings in Europe. The hand-out says that:

“construction of the steel frame commenced in 1929 with Battersea A completed in 1935 and Battersea B, despite the war, coming into service in 1944 with the fourth chimney completed in 1955 ... Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, architect of Bankside power station (Tate Modern) and the red telephone box was appointed architect of Battersea Power Station in 1930.”

The ginormous, functional edifice is full of lovely features. The brickwork include art deco pleats and fiddly bits. Turbine Hall A – the first of two stops on the tour – is still panelled with Italian marble, like some vast tiled bathroom. The tiles have a practical purpose in being easy to keep clean, but they also have a sparkling, palatial effect. Apparently, “despite the war-time shortage, stainless steel was used for Battersea B Auxilary Control Room”.

At it's height, Battersea generated 509 megawatts – a fifth of London's power and about half the output of a modern nuclear power plant. The excess heat was ducted out to heat 11,000 homes in Pimlico across the river. Battersea A ran for 42 years, ceasing generation in 1975. Battersea B wound up its efforts in 1983.

And since then... nothing. There have been plots and plans for years, but the place has been left to moulder and decay. One owner in the intervening years criminally took the roof off the central Boiler House as the start of renovation works that never followed on, and the weather and elements got in.

Yesterday's drizzle and misery matched the sorry state of the once mighty powerhouse. It's a whacking great metaphor in red brick and steel, a temple to the dead king Ozymandias. The great windows are broken, there are huge gouges in the walls. It's like peeking round a ruined cathedral, the dissolution only just done.

At convenient stopping places on the route stood CGI suggestions of how the view might be transformed. There are shops and cafes, offices and homes, an extension to the Northern line and routes for bikes and walkers. In the empty space south of the station itself they hope to construct a vast and green eco-dome, underneath an enormous chimney that – they say – generates all the power for the complex naturally and cleanly.

The design has a Ken Adam feel about it. Or perhaps that's just my response to any grand design effort with curves and circles in it, that is BIG and MAD and COOL. It's an extraordinary, boggling prospect. But then any use of this kind of huge space and iconic site has to be a bit loopy to justify bothering in the first place. And it's far more exciting than just luxury flats and offices, which has been the lot of several other bold architectural efforts in the capital.

I wondered if this strange, impossible-seeming prospect was how it must have seemed to people after the Great Fire in 1666. That had seen the final end of an old church across the river, one used for years as a stable. And there would be young Chris Wren ranting on to anyone who'd listen: “And then on top of that there'll be this fuck-off dome!”

Nimbos pointed out Wren would have gunpowdered any last remnant of the old building before starting work on his replacement. The wheeze of the thinking here is to support and build upon the physical and metaphysical pre-existing structure.

We followed the path to the first viewpoint, a view into Turbine Hall A. Security guards stood dolefully in the rain or what passed for shelter, all smiles and welcome despite the gloom. One explained she had only just finished a four-day stint under heavy sunshine at some music festival in Cambridge. Now she got to shiver all day in a chilly wind tunnel, the sight of visitors glooping through the rain and gravel in their flip-flops only making her feel more cold.

We marvelled at the huge space and potential, and then the sumptuous if dirt-smudged Italian marble still dazzling the vast walls. We took turns to poke lenses through the wire fence, trying to snap all the details for our various architect chums.

Then, back out into the rain and gale, venturing round the building to what they hope will one day be a riverside walk. The wire fence kept us away from the gravelly spoil heaps – with warnings of rats and monsters – and we took shelter behind three porter loos to grab another bunch of snaps.

I asked the Dr to snap the north side of the Thames, to show how different the trees and blocks of flats are to the same spot in an alternative universe where Doctor Who and his friends dared to stop the Cybermen. Not sure you can really see this pedantic point in the drizzly pictures.

Then we poked our noses into the Boiler House, a vast space now open to the air. Again there were telling fragments of its former majesty – the vivid pale blue of what once had been stairwells, struts and supports that had once been different levels.

If the team get planning permission next year, it'll then be another decade before the thing's completed. It's a bold, exciting project, a fine two fingers flicking at the threat of economic hardship. Perhaps it's an all-mighty long shot. But Battersea (and Pink Floyd) long ago showed us that pigs can fly.

Thence to Liadnan and Pashazade's engagement soiree, where I met many new and lovely people, bored them too much about things Droo, and drank rather too much beer. Hooray!

ETA: Churchill Gardens, the estate on the river opposite Battersea, featured in Britain From Above last night.

"A lion covered in bees!!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lions are frightened of helicopters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colour supplement

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

Fear not, I might tinker more.

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

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

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

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

Well, duh

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

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

Slap! Bang!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Atlatl and Jodrell Bank

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

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