Celebration

Update.

Doctor Who: The Legacy of Time has been released. I’ve got my freebie and have listened to my story. It’s marvellous, very evocative of its era. Well, two eras. The television era of sixth Doctor stories circa 1987 and the Big Finish era of sixth Doctor stories circa 2008. I think Big Finish have been going long enough to have eras, haven’t they? Anyway, I couldn’t be more delighted with it, and thankfully it seems to be going down very well. Inevitably some people are going, “I miss Jago and Litefoot, I wish they were in it” and I sympathise. If you wish they had been in it, imagine what it was like for the guy who had a whole story worked out for them, and who wrote half a script! But any story has to stand or fall based on the end product, not what went on behind-the-scenes, and I’m glad to say that I think The Avenues of Possibility stands. 

 (I’ll get around to listening to the other stories in due course. Always a weird thing. Naturally, I want them to be good – I don’t want to be bored or annoyed by other peoples’ stories – but what if they are obviously and massively much better than mine? That might be quite hard to cope with.)

It can be ordered here. I hear they’re running low on the boxsets so don’t leave it too late!

There’s also another Doctor Who Magazine, which means another instalment of The Blogs of Doom. By all accounts, it’s a particularly amusing one this time, so maybe if the previous instalments haven’t hit the mark you might like to give this one a go. Sometimes I hit what seems to me like a rich comedy seam. I make myself laugh out loud writing these things so hopefully it will elicit a chuckle or two. 

The magazine also includes a couple of article by me, on director Christopher Barry and his work – with particular regard to ambitious video effects – on The Mutants and The Creature from the Pit. I found it quite fascinating researching these things; I think it’s hard for a modern viewer to appreciate the idea of video effects being achieved ‘live’ in the studio, rather than as part of post-production. But you would have the actors standing still in one part of the studio – holding their positions so they wouldn’t appear to move when the video mixer ‘roll-back-and-mix’-ed to them from a recording made a few minutes ago – while elsewhere in the studio a cameraman is lining up his camera at a monitor screen in order to create a glow effect, one special effects assistant is turning a roller with multicoloured strips on it and another special effects assistant is getting ready to sprinkle dust. Then the director cues the action and you have all the elements – the actors, the cameramen, the special effects assistants, and the video mixer all working in split-second harmony in order to achieve an effect that may only last one or two seconds.

So check it out, in all good newsagents and available to download now.

And... coming soon. Rose Tyler: Dimension Cannon. There’s more information about my story, The Endless Night, here. And you can listen to a bit of it here. Rose Tyler meeting Clive Finch again! Or rather another Clive Finch for the first time. Oh, I can’t wait for this to come out. I think it’s gonna blow people’s socks off.

Thunderball

Update.

There’s a new Doctor Who Magazine on the shelves, which can only mean another instalment of The Blogs of Doom. The issue has a Pertwee-era theme, so this month I plumped for everyone’s favourite rabbit poacher and sphere-hoarder, Sam Seeley. There’s also a few words on The Three Doctors from me in there.

By one of those odd coincidences, I seem to have had something released every month this year – The Bekdel Test, The Belly of the Beast, The Kamelion Empire, my book on The Dalek Invasion of Earth, This Sleep of Death and The Cars That Ate London! Well, it looks like the run will continue for a while longer as this month will see the release of The Avenues of Possibility, part of the The Legacy of Time box set, commemorating twenty glorious years of Big Finish doing Doctor Who stories. It will also commemorate eighteen glorious years of me writing them, on and off. Anyway, you can read more about the story in the latest Doctor Who Magazine (there’s a photo of me, eek) and in the latest edition of Vortex.

 But after that I think I don’t have anything coming in August. Ah well, all good things...