Looking through some old issues of Doctor Who Magazine – I’m catching up on all the comic strips – a couple of things struck me. I mean, normally I check the letters page to see if there’s anybody I know embarrassing themselves. That’s always fun. And revisiting great articles like Gary Gillatt’s on The Fan Gene, these things should be collected and published again somewhere.
The first thing that struck me was how the return of Doctor Who was reported; in retrospect, it seems obvious, inevitable, but at the time, every glimmer of progress was greeted with suspicion and incredulity, like the boy-who-cried-wolf, taken with a pinch of salt. It’s interesting, though, to spot the first inklings as they materialize; a news story about Russell T Davies having a meeting; Lorraine Heggessy mentioning how she’d love to bring the show back but the BBC don’t have the rights; the BBC website people looking into the issue and discovering that the BBC did have the rights after all; and almost immediately afterwards, the first skittering pebbles of what became the landslide. But most amusing of all is an edition of The Space-Time Telegraph – the piss-take page – which is the first mention anywhere of Russell’s pitch to bring back Doctor Who, about a year before it happened. Uncanny.
The second thing that struck me was an interview I gave about five years ago. There’s a photo of me. I look thin. I still have that t-shirt. And, I don’t know, but I was so full of myself at the time; I think I was attempting to be ‘provocative’ but I just come across as arrogant and belligerent. I mean, I said I’d never work for Big Finish again because my TV career was going so well! Oh, to give that smug shortarse a slap.
In other news. I’ve gone back and filled some of the empty days in this blog with entries from the ‘rainy days’ file; i.e. blogs written early in the year just in case I couldn’t think of things to write. I’ll fill in more empty days as and when I can be arsed. So far, there are missives on the following subjects:
Soundalike recordings
Canned laughter
My time at Richard Huish College
Writer's block
People who take photographs at pop concerts
Why file-sharing is theft
Rewriting
Songs on Greatest Hits which were not singles