It turns out that I wrote another Doctor Who story during the first frenetic month of lockdown*. It’s
just been announced. It’s called Lightspeed
and it’s part two of an 8-episode story spread across two releases, comprising
Shadow of the Daleks 1 and – you’re ahead
of me - Shadow of the Daleks 2.
For various reasons Big
Finish needed me to come up with a story fairly swiftly, and so I went back
through my ‘ideas’ folder to see what I could find. I came up with the basic
idea for Lightspeed in 2016 and have
pitched it numerous times since then as a dramatic audio, a narrated audio, a
comic strip and a novel. All without success, even though I was convinced it
was a brilliantly strong, simple idea, exactly the sort of thing that Russell T
Davies would have done on telly. And the thing is, each time I pitched it for a
different medium or Doctor, I went back through the story, refining it, adding extra
ideas, tightening up the plot, so the end result is a story six years in the
making. It’s certainly had six years of idle thought put into it; one of my
ways of passing the interminable hours waiting for my son to fall asleep has
been to rethink unused Doctor Who story
ideas. I have, as you might expect, quite a lot of them, but Lightspeed was always my favourite. And
now it isn’t an unused Doctor Who story
idea at all.
It’s a fifth Doctor story, the Peter Davison one, and the
blurb is:
The trail has led the
Doctor to a spaceship in the far future - where he finds himself trapped in the
middle of a terrifying revenge plot.
And, as its title suggests, it is a non-stop fast-paced
action adventure. It’s a story that could easily have been told in 45 minutes packed
into 25 minutes.
There are also three other stories on the CD by fine
writers, and the cast includes Dervla Kirwan (!), Anjli Mohindra (!) and Jamie
Parker (!). (A few years ago every time I went to the theatre Jamie Parker was
in it, which is what happens if you go to see Henry IV 1 & 2, Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern and Henry V one
after the other).
The story can be pre-ordered here.
* As well as a book, stuff for DWM, stuff to be announced
and stuff that has since fallen through. One day my future biographer will look
back at this time and be amazed at how much I got done.
