My River Song
story, The Bekdel Test, was released last week, and it seems to have
gone down very well. Hooray, I got away with it again. I’ve given it a listen
myself and had a great time laughing at all my own jokes. Well, if I don’t
find them funny nobody else will.
I expect the Big Finish site will have some reviews up soon,
they’ve all been very positive. But you don’t need to wait for reviews,
you want to order it now, don’t you? So here’s the link.
A couple of people who, as far as I’m aware, haven’t bought
or listened to the story have taken offence at the title. Well, all I can say
is, if they were to buy and listen to the story, they would hopefully discover
their offence is misplaced. My intention with the story is not to denigrate or lampoon
feminism or the Bechdel Test in any way (though, really, if you are using a
stopwatch to tell if something is sexist or not then maybe you are taking a
joke from a comic strip too seriously). Let me put it like this. My brief with
the story was to tell a story where River Song meets Missy and my first thought
was “Well, people are gonna expect them to talk about the Doctor, there’s lots
of great stuff to explore there, I can’t have them not talk about him,
people will feel short-changed – but I don’t want it to just be a story about
two women talking about a man, that would be awful.” And then I thought “Hey,
maybe I could turn that problem into a starting point for the story?” And then
the thought of calling it ‘The Bekdel Test’ just made me laugh so much I couldn’t
resist it.
But anyway, my point, if I have one, is this; you are not
gonna find a writer more conscious of the importance of giving female
characters agency than the one typing this right now. I might not always
succeed, I am not always brilliant, sometimes I fall short of my own standards,
but I am always thinking, “It’s not just enough to have female characters in
the story. They have to do stuff of their own volition. They have to make
decisions that drive the story. Sometimes good decisions, sometimes bad ones. They
have to have an emotional journey. They have to have character development.” To
treat them the same as any characters, really; male, female, black, white, old,
young, straight, gay, alien robot, whatever. And if you look at my track
record, you will see that I have always gone out of my way to write stories that
are as male/female balanced as possible and have ‘diverse’ casts (I’m not sure
I like the word ‘diverse’, it feels horribly patronising and the sort of thing
that will turn out to be terribly offensive in five years’ time). And on the
occasion where I was in a position to commission other writers for Doctor Who audios, I ended up with a
male/female balance. I can’t really do much about my own individual gender
balance, I’m afraid that was decided for me by an SRY protein about 46
years ago, but I’m doing my best to compensate for it.
So, in the immortal words of Beryl Reid in Earthshock; “The enemy’s outside. You’re
pointing your gun in the wrong direction.”
In other news, publication of my Black Archive book on The
Dalek Invasion of Earth has been brought forward to April. So you won’t
have long to wait to find out the significance of the title ‘The Waking
Ally’. The book covers every variation on the story, from Terry Nation’s first
draft, to the TV version, the film version, the novelisation... and a version
that nobody knows about...
Excited? I am, I hope you are too. You can find out more about The Black Archive here.