Monday, May 08, 2017

K-9 & Company

I had a lovely weekend at the Doctor Who Appreciation Society's Capitol event, where we launched my book on The Evil of the Daleks.


The Lord of Chaos was delighted to poke his nose inside the TARDIS, to meet K-9 (he approves of the new look for the forthcoming film as it is cuter than the original) and to come home with no end of new toys.

I saw lots of old friends, had a nice chat with Bob Baker who'd I'd not met before, and really liked the exhibition of photos, letters and other curios from the collection of the late Alec Wheal, senior cameraman on 1980s Doctor Who, .


Tuesday, April 25, 2017

You can buy Evil now

You can now buy my 244-page book on the 1967 Doctor Who story The Evil of the Daleks.

It's £3.99 for an epub or mobi electronic version, £4.99 for a paperback - which is a special sale price just now - and £7.99 for both a paper and electronic version. This is such tantalisingly good value it is surely impossible to resist, so do buy it. You will obey!

There's also a free extract on the publisher's website: The Evil of the Daleks - Here and Now.

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Toys & Games

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition is in shops now, devoted to toys and games over the past six decades.

Among its wonders, I've interviewed Alex Loosely-Saul from The Who Shop (where I spent a lovely afternoon drinking lots and lots of tea), and former head of licensing Richard Hollis, designer Dave Turbitt and current creative development executive Ross McGlinchey about the role of BBC Worldwide in matching toys to the series since 2005.

Speaking of interviewing people involved with Doctor Who, I've added a 2015 interview with SFX producer Kate Walshe from Millennium FX to my Koquillion archive site - and another interview will be added next week, too.

And I've posted a special thread on Twitter. since today marks 50 years exactly since filming began on The Evil of the Daleks.

(I might have mentioned I've written a book about that story...)


Thursday, April 13, 2017

Koquillion

This striking-looking fellow is Koquillion, star of the 1964 Doctor Who story The Rescue.

I have pilferred his name for my new blog collecting together interviews I've conducted over the years with the cast and crew of Doctor Who. Thirteen interviews went live this morning, and I'll add another one each week.

http://koquillion.blogspot.co.uk/


Tuesday, April 11, 2017

The Outliers

Big Finish have announced a new Doctor Who audio adventure written by me, due out later this year. It features the Second Doctor.
In The Outliers (October) by Simon Guerrier, the travellers arrive on a asteroid in the far future, where miners are mysteriously vanishing. It’s up to the Doctor, Polly, Ben and Jamie to investigate - and the Examiner’s badge from the planet Vulcan is their passport… Debbie Chazen (Doctor Who: Voyage of the Damned) plays Dr Goro, while Alistair Petrie (Rogue One) is Richard Tipple.
Pre-order The Outliers from Big Finish.

Monday, April 10, 2017

Doctor Who paper dolls

New book out in August:


Take a romp through time and space with this fantastic collection of Doctor Who paper dolls.

Hours of crafty fun to be had, with 26 dolls – including all 12 Doctors and a range of companions and characters, from Rose and Donna to Missy and new companion Bill – and over 50 different outfits to change them into.

Learn the secrets behind the costumes, with insights from the actors and producers, and find out how to take your own dress-up to the next level with cosplay tips from Doctor Who: The Fan Show’s Christel Dee.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Simon Guerrier is co-author of Whographica and The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who, and has written countless Doctor Who books, comics, audio plays and documentaries.

Ben Morris has illustrated for Radio Times, Sunday Times and The Scotsman, and is a regular contributor to Doctor Who Magazine. He has created dozens of character icons and puzzles for Doctor Who Adventures.

Christel Dee is the presenter of Doctor Who: The Fan Show. A cosplayer, convention enthusiast and long-time Whovian, her popular YouTube channel features interviews with fans and cosplayers.
Doctor Who: Paper Dolls is published August 24, 2017 — pre-order here.


Thursday, March 23, 2017

Essential Doctor Who Robots

Out today from the makers of the official Doctor Who Magazine is The Essential Doctor Who: Robots.

Among its many delights there is me, cheerfully chatting to Michael Kilgarriff about playing the robot - the definite article - in Robot (1974-5), to Tom MacRae about the legal issues that affected the design of the Handbots in The Girl Who Waited (2011), and to Kate Walshe about the many maniacal machine people manufactured by Millennium FX in recent years. She also provides a glut of never-before-seen photographs.

Monday, March 06, 2017

Pick of the Week

Our documentary, John Ruskin's Eurythmic Girls (still available on iPlayer) was one of the 14 programmes included in Pick of the Week on Radio 4 last night, introduced by Ernie Rea. We're covered 32.58 into the programme.

Thursday, March 02, 2017

Colin and the Carrionites

July sees the release of Doctor Who: Classic Doctors, New Monsters vol. 2, and I've written the Sixth Doctor's encounter with the witchy Carrionites (last seen battling the David Tennant and Shakespeare on TV).

As I said for the news story at the Big Finish website,
"Matt Fitton asked me to write for Colin and the Carrionites. The Carrionites get their power from words, and the Sixth Doctor is the most logophile of Doctors, so I knew there was something potent there. David Richardson suggested the 1980s setting, invoking something of the Enfield poltergeist of the late 1970s, and I drew a bit on Hammer's To The Devil a Daughter, or at least my memories of being terrified of that in my teens. And I was keen to ensure that this was definitely the Carrionites, not just any witchy aliens, so I looked for something to link it firmly to The Shakespeare Code..."


Friday, February 17, 2017

John Ruskin's Eurythmic Girls

John Ruskin's Eurythmic Girls is a new documentary I've produced with my brother Tom to be broadcast on Radio 3 on Sunday 26 February, and then available on iPlayer.

Presenter Samira Ahmed has written her own piece about the documentary, but here's the blurb:

John Ruskin's Eurythmic Girls

Eurythmic dance at
Queenswood School, 1920s
Perhaps you did music and movement at school. There was a time girls across the country learnt to dance as if they were flowers. At the start of the 20th century, Jacques-Dalcroze developed Eurythmics to teach the rhythm and structure of music through physical activity. But the idea had earlier roots, including an unlikely champion of women's liberation.

John Ruskin - now derided by feminist critics as a woman-fearing medievalist - was at the centre of a 19th-century education movement that challenged the conventional female role in society. Amid concerns about the health of the British empire he looked back to the muscular figures in medieval painting and the sculpture of the ancient Greeks, in their loose-fitting clothes. Perhaps the Victorians needed to shed their corsets and free their minds for learning. In Of Queens' Gardens he set out a radical, influential model for girls' education.

Samira Ahmed argues that Ruskin was an accidental feminist. To understand where his ideas came from, how they were enacted and what survives in the way girls are taught today, she ventures into one of the schools set up on Ruskinian principles, tries on the corsetry that restricted Victorian women's lives, and gets the insight of Victorian scholars.

Contributors: Matthew Sweet (author of Inventing the Victorians); Dr Debbie Challis (Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL); Louise Scholz-Conway (Angels Costumes); Dr Fern Riddell (author of A Victorian Guide to Sex); Dr Amara Thornton (Institute of Archaeology, UCL) and Isobel Beynon, Dr Wendy Bird, Annette Haynes, Dr Jean Horton, Diane Maclean, Aoife Morgan Jones and Natasha Rajan at Queenswood School. Readings by Toby Hadoke.

Presenter Samira Ahmed
Producers Simon and Thomas Guerrier
A Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 3.

Sunday, February 05, 2017

From Croydon to Gallifrey

Yesterday, I was the guest of Janet and Steve on Croydon Radio's From Croydon to Gallifrey, talking Doctor Who, the casting of the next Doctor, the impending 50th anniversary of The Evil of the Daleks (on which I have written a book), my recent typing for Big Finish and much else besides.

Saturday, February 04, 2017

Graceless title sequence

The t'rific Tom Saunders has made this tremendous opening title sequence for my science-fiction series, Graceless.


As the video says, it stars Ciara Janson and Laura Doddington with Annie Firbank and Sian Phillips, is written by me, directed by Lisa Bowerman and you can buy Graceless IV now.  

Monday, January 23, 2017

Radio Free Skaro and Whographica

Win a free copy of Doctor Who infographics book Whographica via the terrifying beings who run podcast Radio Free Skaro in conjunction with my masters at BBC Books.

As an added bonus, you can hear me, my co-author Steve O'Brien and illustrator Ben Morris explain all the many secrets involved in writing the thing.

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Cover of Evil

Here is the cover to my forthcoming book on 1967 Doctor Who story The Evil of the Daleks - out in May from the Black Archive series:


The artwork is by Blair Bidmead and Cody Shell. The blurb for my book is as follows...

‘Without knowing, you have shown the Daleks what their own strength is!’

 In the midst of swinging London, the Daleks run an antique shop. The Victorian items on sale are all completely genuine – but they’re also brand new. Soon the Doctor is following a trail back to 1866 and then to the Dalek home planet of Skaro. It’s not just the authenticity of a few antiques that’s at stake but what it is that makes us human – and how that can be used. 

The Evil of the Daleks (1967) is an epic, strange and eerie conclusion to Doctor Who’s fourth series, originally commissioned to kill off the Daleks for good. For all it’s set in history and on an alien world, the production team were consciously grappling with very contemporary issues – and improvising round practical circumstances out of their control.

This Black Archive title explores how The Evil of the Daleks developed from commission to broadcast 50 years ago – and beyond. Painstaking research and new interviews with many of those involved in the production shed fresh light on the story, its characters and its mix of science and history. 

Simon Guerrier is a writer and producer, and author of a number of Doctor Who books, comics and audio plays.

For more stuff about The Evil of the Daleks, click the label below.

Friday, January 13, 2017

Graceless offers and trailer

Here, hear the amazing trailer for Graceless IV which is out later this month. The writing is by me but the extraordinary song is the work of Duncan Wisbey.



In the meantime, this weekend those splendid fellows at Big Finish are offering special offers on previous Graceless adventures.

Saturday, December 31, 2016

Dan Dare poster

Here is Brian Williamson's exciting poster for Dan Dare: Reign of the Robots - the story I've adapted for audio, due out in April.


The original comic strip - drawn by Frank Hampson and Don Harley - ran in Eagle between 1957 and 1958, and is a corker. Brian Williamson previously drew 36 instalments of AAAGH! that I wrote.

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Trailer for The Sontarans

Doctor Who - The Sontarans is out now from Big Finish, detailing the first encounter between the Doctor and those potato-headed monstrosities. It stars Peter Purves and Jean Marsh, and I did the typing.

Clever Tom Saunders at Big Finish has also engineered this extraordinary trailer. Mneh, mneh, mneh - most exciting.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

Dinosaur Island at Crystal Palace

As regular sufferers of this blog will know, I've long been in love with the dinosaur sculptures at Crystal Place, built in the 1850s. Today, the clever Dr had booked us in to a rare trip onto the island so we could get up close to the lovely, cumbersome beauties.

The pictures below show the amazing efforts of the conservation team - and how much they still have to do. So if you like these pictures, fling money at the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs conservation page. You're welcome to reproduce the images I took, but ideally make a donation to the friends, and credit the pictures to me.

Mosasaurus
Note the second set of teeth inside
Iguanadon


Pteradactylus x2

Lord of Chaos inspecting Iguandon's bum

Inside brick-built Iguanadon
(This is where they put the steam motor in my story)

Hylaeosaurus spines

Megalosaurus

Teleosaurus x2, and Christmas presents

Megalosaurs eyeing up Hylaeosaurus
and 2x Iguanadon

Iguanadons chillax

The relative sizes of claws

Iguanadon, mid anecdote

An Iguanadon, surrounded by lunch

Mosasaurus waving us goodbye - note those secondary teeth

The Dr, in her best clothes
See also Doctor Who in Crystal Palace.

Monday, December 05, 2016

Graceless IV cast and crew

"Dancing at the end of time," proclaims the newly released cover for Graceless IV, the artwork by Anthony Lamb.

The new series, comprising four one-hour plays that I've written, is out next month and available to pre-order.
Here are the full details:

4.1 The Bomb
There's a legend told in a town by the sea, about two wicked sisters who died to save the world. Now the world faces another catastrophe and there's no one to turn to for help. Which is bad news for Joy and Amy, and their grandchildren...

4.2 The Room
Buried under steel and iron and concrete, and protected by high security, there's a secret room. From here, General Onora Cormorant directs the Gloit forces as they wage war across the whole planet. But stopping the war will take much more than just getting into that room...

4.3 The Ward
For more than a decade, Space Dock has had an exemplary health and safety record, not least because of the wicked sisters working in its hospital, bringing the dead back to life. But what are they really doing there, and what's it got to do with one poor nurse's love life?

4.4 The Dance
In the flood and the fire,
In the heart of the sun,
We were lost, we were dying,
We have only begun,
And the rest of the song,
Remains to be sung,
So we'll dance through the night,
And the dawn never comes,
Just the two of us.

NOTE: Graceless contains some adult material and is not suitable for younger listeners.
Written By: Simon Guerrier
Directed By: Lisa Bowerman

Cast

Ciara Janson (Abby), Laura Doddington (Zara) Annie Firbank (Amy), Siân Phillips (Joy), Adam Newington (Pool), Hugh Ross (Dodyk), Victoria Alcock (Marcella), Jennie Goossens (Judge Engin), Annie Jackson (Kronchev), Nichola McAuliffe (Comorant), Carol Starks (Slink), Petra Markham (Annie), Carolyn Pickles (Gutierrez), Dan Starkey (Chaff), Richenda Carey (Triangle), David Sterne (Oblong), Duncan Wisbey (Graves). Other parts played by members of the cast.

Sunday, December 04, 2016

Off air images from The Evil of the Daleks

For my forthcoming book on 1967 Doctor Who story The Evil of the Daleks, I undertook some especially nerdy investigation.

Of the seven episodes of the story, only episode 2 exists in the BBC archive, but from the other six episodes there are a total of 414 off-air photographs (that is, taken of the story playing out on a screen, rather than on set during production). There are four main sources of these images:
Here are three things I've tried to do with these images to better understand The Evil of the Daleks.

1. THE SEQUENCE OF THE OFF-AIR IMAGES
We know the order in which to view the tele-snaps because they were printed in strips, and we know the order of Chris Thompson's images because the negatives still exist - again, in strips - so it's easy to follow the sequence. But how do we work out the order when we put both sets of images together?

A useful aid is the camera scripts - that is, the scripts detailing how the cameras should cover the action, as used in the studio recording of the episodes. The camera scripts for this story are included on the CD soundtrack in the box-set Doctor Who: The Lost TV Episodes - Collection Four.

As an example, scene 4 of episode 1 is set in the study of an antique shop and according to the camera script began with a tracked-out close-up shot of Waterfield through a magnifying glass. 


A tele-snap shows this, the magnifying glass filling the middle of the lower half of the frame, obscuring Waterfield’s mouth and nose as we look at him face on:


The script says there was then a knock on the door, and the camera was to elevate and track out as Waterfield went to answer it, providing the first establishing shot of the room. That’s what we see in the first of Chris Thompson’s images: a wide shot of the room full of antiques, Waterfield with his back to us as he bends to unlock the double doors in the centre of frame:

We can see Waterfield from head to toe, but with his back to us it’s not clear from this image – as it is in the script – that he’s wearing Victorian clothes. Note that the dialogue in the scene doesn’t refer to what he is wearing: it’s a visual clue to him being out of his own time, bolstered by Waterfield’s later, spoken, mix-up over guineas and pounds.

The next tele-snap is from a moment later: the same camera position but with the door now open. Waterfield has stepped back and to the right, and is in profile as he faces Keith Perry:


The next tele-snap is a close two-shot of Perry and Waterfield as Perry admires an antique that’s apparently just off the left-hand edge of frame. The camera script says this is a clock on Waterfield’s desk, but Waterfield’s desk is later visible on the other side of the room. The dialogue doesn’t say ‘clock’, so Perry might be admiring something else.


Thompson’s next photograph shows Perry in roughly the same position, but Waterfield some distance behind him, on the other side of his desk:


This is almost identical to the next tele-snap, except Perry is bent a little lower to examine whatever antique is just out of shot, and Waterfield is slightly further left behind the desk – the suggestion being that after the previous tele-snap he moved right, off the edge of frame, and then came into shot again behind the desk.


Again, the next of Thompson’s images is almost identical to the next tele-snap, looking down on Perry as he seems to admire the room’s chandelier, and it’s difficult to tell which of the two images comes first. So we need another clue...

The last of Thompson’s images from this scene still has Perry gazing upwards at the chandelier, but we can also see Waterfield standing behind his desk. Since that suggests the camera has pulled back and to the left since the previous two images, we can perhaps work out the order by comparing the position of the leg of Waterfield’s desk to Perry’s shoulder. In the tele-snap, the leg is some distance from Perry; in Thompson’s similar image, Perry’s arm just obscures the very end of the leg; in Thompson’s next image the leg is completely behind him. So, watch the position of the table leg adjacent to Perry's arm:


2. HOW MUCH THE SURVIVING EPISODE 2 HAS BEEN CROPPED

When The Evil of the Daleks was made, the episodes were recorded on two-inch videotape. None of those original recordings survive, but a copy of episode 2 made on 16mm film is held by the BBC, and was used for the commerical releases on VHS and DVD.

To make a 16mm copy from the two-inch videotape in the first place, a film camera was positioned in front of a screen on to which the episode was played from the tape. As Richard Molesworth explains in his brilliant book, Wiped! Doctor Who’s Missing Episodes (Second Edition), ‘the 16mm film recordings were slightly zoomed in ... to ensure that the edges of the screen were never captured’ (pp. 273-4). This means that the existing 16mm episode is a slightly cropped version of the original. Can the off-air photographs tell us how much has been cropped?

Here are two comparisons from the beginning of episode 2, in which a character called Kennedy is cornered by a Dalek.
  • Top left: a screengrab from the repeat of this sequence in 1968 story The Wheel in Space episode 6 - where it's shown on the TARDIS scanner screen.
  • Top right: a screengrab from episode 2 of The Evil of the Daleks, as featured on the Lost in Time DVD box set.
  • Bottom left: John Cura's tele-snap, care of Doctor Who Magazine.
  • Bottom right: John  Cura's tele-snap, care of the photonovel on the BBC Doctor Who website.
In this first image, the tele-snaps at the bottom show a slight gap between the top of his head and the upper edge of the frame, while in the episode on DVD the very top of his head is out of frame. The bottom right-hand corner of the tele-snap crops Kennedy’s hand, slightly more of which is visible in the episode.


In this second comparison, we can see more of the upper-most hexagon on the panel behind Kennedy than we can in the episode:


Overall, it’s about 2% from the top and about 1% of the bottom from the total height of the tele-snaps. But when I put this to Steve Roberts, of the Doctor Who Restoration Team which prepared the episode for DVD, he said that:
"The amount of image crop in a film recording is variable. Mostly you’ll find that there is more cropped from the top than the bottom – as demonstrated in your comparisons ... The film recorder camera had to ideally pull-down the next frame – pulling out the registration pins, accelerating it from stationary, decelerating it back to stationary and putting in the registration pins again – in the 1.6 milliseconds of video field blanking. This was extremely difficult and in practice it wasn’t actually possible to do it, which would result in distortion at the top of the image as the first few lines were being recorded to film as the film was still settling to stationary. To avoid this distorted area being seen on subsequent projection, the film recorder would blank the first few lines of the picture so that they were never recorded to film.

There are so many variables. Cura’s monitor would be over-scanned too, there would be some overscan and blanking in the film recorded as discussed and there’s always some overscan at the telecine stage – where film recorded on location is played into the studio recording of the episode – to avoid the ragged edges of picture appearing in the video frame."
So the existing episode is missing material from the top and bottom of the frame, but we can’t be sure how much is missing, and some of it might have been missing on the original two-inch videotape.

3. ANIMATING THE OFF-AIR IMAGES
Lastly, in several cases, two separate off-air images are almost identical - some where John Cura took two "tele-snaps" in very quick succession, and other where two photographers happened to capture the same instant.

But that means we can return something of the missing story to life:

Thanks to Simon Belcher for technical brilliance, Tom Spilsbury and Peter Ware at Doctor Who Magazine and Richard Bignell at Nothing at the End of the Lane for sharing images, and Steve Roberts for his patience in untangling my muddled thinking.