Torchwood: Instant
Karma
In the words of my co-writer James Goss: “Toshiko discovers
a group with superpowers. Because it's Torchwood, they're operating out of a community
centre, and they're not using their powers for good. Imagine if you could make
the heads explode of people who annoy you. Would you use that power? Well,
would you?”
Why did I want to write a Torchwood story? Well, mainly to
see if I could. My feeling has always been that Torchwood’s format, for its
first couple of years, was like a car that had been built in a rush. The whole
show was put together so quickly there wasn’t time to go back and re-think
things, there was only time to patch things up. I wanted to see if I could
fix it, if I could make the format work. So why not pre-order it and find out?
The other project I’ve worked on is
Jeremiah Bourne in
Time
“Jeremiah Bourne is a boy with a remarkable gift. He can
travel in time. Not by using a time machine, or stepping through a dimensional
portal. It just happens to him, as though by accident. One minute he’s in the
present day, the next, he’s a hundred years in the past, standing in the London
of 1910.
Jeremiah has two questions; how did he get there – and how
can he get back? On his quest for the answers, he enlists the help of Phyllis
Stokes of The Society for Theosophical Research and her equally eccentric
brother, Roger Allcot Standish, magistrate, spiritualist and dedicated nudist. He
encounters the sadistic Mr and Mrs Grout and the ruthless Ed Viney, thief, gang
member and slitter of throats. And he arouses the disapproval of Clementina
Quentinbloom, the head of a home for ‘Fallen Girls’, by befriending Daisy
Wallace, a girl ahead of her time.
Can Jeremiah get home? What is the connection between
Clementina’s establishment and Doctor Henry Davenant Hythe, the humanitarian
and eugenicist? And does Jeremiah’s gift of time travel have something to do
with his mother’s sudden disappearance, all those years ago...”
With this project, I had the great pleasure of working with
Nigel Planer on his story as script-editor. It’s a really interesting,
original, idiosyncratic adventure with loads of interesting ideas and themes
bubbling away, and some fabulously larger-than-life characters. Nigel has
written lots of great parts for his fellow actors – and what actors they are,
the cast list is like a who’s-who of British television! If you could go back
and tell my teenage self that one day I’d work on a script performed by two of The Young Ones, Lord Percy, Miss Babs, Lydia
the Bride, Shona Spurtle and Charlotte from the Le Bureau des Étrangers my head
would probably have exploded. It exploded a little bit now.
You can find out more about it here and pre-order it here.
You can find out more about it here and pre-order it here.
In addition, while I have you, don’t forget to pick up the
latest Doctor Who Magazine, it has
another of my Blogs of Doom by me. I think it’s slowly winning people over.
Slowly but surely!
