The other reason while I’ve been lax with this blog is that
much of the nonsense that would’ve ended up here now ends up on twitter. A far
more efficient way of getting things out of my system.
The big thing I have to plug right now is the 500th edition
of Doctor Who Magazine. It comes in a special hardback envelope, containing two
magazines, a poster, stickers and an art card. I’ve been reading the magazine
since I was seven, and it has been a regular fixture of my life pretty much
ever since. I’ve had so much delight from reading the magazine and so much fun
in contributing to it over the years, I’ve learned so much, and it’s led to
friendships with so many extraordinary, talented and lovely people. So it was a
huge honour to be involved with the celebratory issue. Who would’ve thought
when my mum found me a copy of issue 55 that 35 years later the magazine would
still be going, and I’d be writing for it? Who would have thought that at the
celebratory party on Saturday I would be eating a slice of Doctor Who cake with
the cover of issue 55? It felt strangely
significant.
So what are my bits in the magazine? Well, two features. The
first is called The TARDIS Log, named
after a memorably bewildering feature the magazine ran in the early 80s. It’s
my personal guide to the history of the magazine from the point of view of a
reader; there have been other articles in the past giving the magazine’s behind-the-scenes
history, but I wanted to celebrate the magazine’s content, all the weird and
wonderful articles, interviews, columns, letters, photographs and advertisements
it has included over the years.
In researching the article, I spent a month or so earlier
this year working through every single issue of DWM. Not reading every feature
of each issue from cover to cover – that would take years and take a terrible
toll on my sanity – but spending an hour each morning leafing through ten
issues, looking out for things that were unusual, new, or which jogged a
memory. And then to boil that down to a 10,000-word article and a list of
highlights. It was a formidable but highly enjoyable task, taking an extended stroll
down nostalgia avenue. I could easily have written far more; there were so many
highlights, so many memorable moments, that when I started writing the article
I found that I had written 7,000 words and only got as far as issue 200. So I
had to be extremely strict and leave out loads of interesting stuff. Maybe I’ll
post that first draft on this blog. Let me know if you want to read
it. The shorter version in the magazine is vastly better, though!
So, yes, that’s my first article. People seem to have
enjoyed it. I am a little critical in places but I hope it’s fair. And
secondly, my other feature is a The Fact
of Fiction on the 2013 story The Day
of the Doctor. This was a tough one to do, mainly because, again, I found I
had far too many things to say! It got so long that what was intended as a
box-out on The Night of the Doctor
was put in issue 499. But it is probably the Doctor Who story with the most ‘continuity references’, the most
little details to point out, and it also has an interesting development, as
Steven Moffat began writing it with the ninth, tenth and eleventh Doctors, getting
about two-thirds of the way through before reworking it from the beginning with
the ‘War Doctor’ alongside the tenth and eleventh Doctors. A lot of the
information about the later, ‘War Doctor’ drafts had previously appeared in DWM’s The Year of the Doctor special, but I was determined to make sure I
wasn’t just repeating facts, that there was plenty of new stuff. So there is information
in The Fact of Fiction about the
early drafts with the ninth Doctor that has never been revealed before, as well
lots of additional material about deleted scenes.
Plus, one of the little challenges I set myself was to
identify all the stuff in the UNIT Black Archive, and I think I managed it –
with help from Matthew Ross, Tom Newsom and Saul Jefferies, who were supposed
to be thanked in the magazine but left off so I’ll thank them here. I’m also
annoyed with myself for getting the UNIT acronym wrong! Sometimes when you’re deep
in the fact-zone, trying to keep track of half a dozen different drafts of the same
script, you can’t see the wood for the trees.
That’s my excuse. And talking about it reminds me I really
should write a blog about my The Fact of
Fiction article in issue 499 on Warrriors’
Gate, as that was also quite an undertaking. People ask me how long these
things take to write but they only take about a week; when I’m in the
fact-zone, I lose all track of time and space, lost in the world of research.
But that’s not quite all of my bits. I was surprised and
delighted to see one of my comic strip bits picked out as one of twenty
highlights in the Let’s Do The Time Vworp
Again feature. I regard my era on the comic strip as being forgotten, so it
was a huge thrill for me to see Chiyoko in Scott Gray’s fantastic strip The Stockbridge Showdown – in particular,
to see her drawn by John Ridgway, the artist responsible for the legendary Voyager storyline that had blown my mind
back when I was thirteen. I also hooted with laughter to see the Anne Robinson
Sontaran included in the stickers; this image had been used for the cover of an
issue including my first-ever major article for the magazine, a decidedly desperate
effort about how Doctor Who was like
a game show. For my article to be commemorated with a sticker alongside
Clive Swift and a red-eyed Fish Person was an enormous honour.
And finally; the second magazine in the special hardback envelope is a pictorial history of DWM, and if you turn to page 110 some of the images of Summer and Winter specials are scans of my own copies of those magazines, kept stored in plastic envelopes for just such an eventuality. This may seem like a trivial thing – it is, I know it is – but those magazines are the ones that I pored over as a ten-year-old, and now there they are, part of the pictorial history of DWM.
So, anyway, I’ve gone on long enough. Rush out and buy DWM issue 500, it’s the best issue
ever. And for me, and for everybody involved, a labour of love.
