The random witterings of Jonathan Morris, writer.

Wednesday 16 October 2019

Forever in my Life

The next issue of Doctor Who Magazine, hitting the shelves tomorrow, is a special edition celebrating forty years of the magazine. Forty years! It seems only thirty-nine and a half years ago that my mum brought home issue 26 to see if I’d prefer it to The Dandy. A year later – it took a while to get our newsagent to place an order – I became a regular reader with issue 55. And it’s kind of been a part of my life ever since, apart from that brief seven-year-period where I’d given up on Doctor Who. Bad fan!


Anyway, you don’t care about that, you want to know what’s in the magazine. Well, all sorts of loveliness, there’s even a free DVD, and on top of that there’s three bits by me. Firstly, a piece investigating how fan opinion of television stories has changed over the past four decades, according to Doctor Who Magazine’s readers’ polls. For this, I pulled out every past issue with any sort of poll and subjected it to rigorous statistical analysis. My favourite part of the article, though, is a box-out on Fifty-Six Years of Turkeys.


There’s also a few words from me on Terrance Dicks’ Doctor Who novel Made of Steel, and then there’s a quiz on the magazine at the end. It’s a no-prizes quiz, just to please, to entertain, to please the readers. I’m particularly proud of questions 37, 38 and 41 which made me hoot with laughter when I thought of them. It’s just a bit of celebratory fun, so I hope it amuses.


In other news, next month one of my Doctor Who audio stories, Max Warp, is going to be released as an LP. On vinyl! Exclusive to ASDA, everyone’s favourite supermarket. It’s very exciting to be available in a new medium. The story itself is one of my favourites, I’m still amazed to think that I’ve written for Graeme Garden, James Fleet and Duncan from Blue, as well as Sheridan Smith and Paul McGann. At the time I’d spent a few years plugging away in the lower reaches of comedy-land so I was very much in a comedy mode, writing lots of witty lines and silly business. It also marked a return to Big Finish after a few years, so I was also in showing-off-what-I-can-do mode as I felt I had something to prove. A mode in which I have steadfastly remained ever since.


Lots of people have said very many lovely things about it, so if you have a record player, or even if you don’t, why not pick it up when it turns up in ASDA on November 15.You can find out more about it here.