Monster Love

It’s all go! I have three things out this week.

 

Firstly, Doctor Who: The Monster Vault, a guide to (nearly*) all the monsters that have appeared in Doctor Who, from 1963 to 2020. I co-wrote it with Penny CS Andrews, it’s (amazingly) illustrated by Lee Johnson and the whole thing was put together by the (lovely) Paul Lang.

As you might imagine, writing this book was a dream job for me. A labour of love. So, wherever possible, I tried to go the extra mile in finding stuff out. For each and every monster I went back to the story or stories they appeared in, and went through the scripts (as broadcast) to glean every piece of information we are told, or which is implied, about them. And then I went through the rehearsal and camera scripts, looking for any extra details the writer intended which may have been left on the cutting room or rehearsal room floor. (So, for instance, the Pipe People from The Happiness Patrol have a whole backstory which is taken from the rehearsal scripts). Where possible, I tried to include the descriptions of the monsters given in the original scripts; this wasn’t always possible, because either the writer didn’t bother to describe them, or because what they ended up looking like was nothing like how they were described in the script. For the more recent stories, where I don’t have the scripts, I made use of the fact that Andrew Pixley covered every single description and cut line in his articles for DWM and The Complete History.

And then, given all this information and a word-limit of 400 words per monster (except for the ones that Came Back For More) I tried to tie together everything we know and extrapolate logically, trying to work out what each creature’s ecology, its life-cycle, how it might have evolved and so on. (So, for instance, for the first monster I covered, the Mandrels, I thought how they might interact with the Eden moths that have a tranquilising sting; maybe they feed on them and the reason why Mandrels contain so much ‘Vraxoin’ is because they have absorbed it from the moths!). That sort of thing! For over a hundred monsters.

So, essentially, it’s a book based on the monsters in terms of their TV appearances. Now, as we all know, that is the tip of the proverbial iceberg, as nearly every monster has made subsequent appearances in comic strips, novels, and audios as well as having more information included in novelisations, other monster books and online guides. While much of this information is vivid, ingenious and fascinating (such as my own backstory for the origins of the Nucleus of the Swarm), it is also contradictory and researching it would be like trying to mine a bottomless pit. A line had to be drawn somewhere and so, whilst it would have been lovely to have included the Quarks’ ongoing battle against giant space bees, I had to limit myself to stuff that was on the telly. Which was more than enough to be going on with!

I could go on. I could go through every entry I wrote and tell you where I got all the bits from. But I shall spare you that. Suffice it to say, I put in the hours, and hopefully it will delight readers to read how I have, for example, explained about who created the Raston Warrior robots and why. And even if you don’t care one bean about my theories, it’s worth getting just for Lee Johnson’s amazing illustrations.

The book should be available from all good bookshops. If it isn’t, they should be able to order it in. It’s officially out on the 22nd October but apparently it has already started appearing on shelves and copies have started being sent out by online booksellers. So if you order it from amazon it should be with you fairly soon. And if you do enjoy it, please, please, please remember leave a good review, recommend it to your friends and buy it for people for Christmas.

* A few didn’t make the grade because either they couldn’t be illustrated (hello, Visians), because they are basically just wild animals (hello, Taran Wood Beast) or because they are villains and would be better served in a book about villains (hello, Lady Cassandra). Hopefully, if The Monster Vault sells well, we’ll get asked back to do The Villain Vault.

On top of that, earlier this week saw the release of my latest Doctor Who audio adventure, Lightspeed, part of the Shadow of the Daleks epic. I’d thought that The Kamelion Empire would be my last story for the main range so I was delighted to be asked back, with the additional challenge of having a pretty tight deadline. I like rising to challenges! I haven’t heard the finished product yet, but it seems to be going down okay. It can be ordered here.

And finally, I have returned to Doctor Who Magazine after a well-deserved hiatus. The Blogs of Doom is back. And hopefully it will have an even more refined wit than usual as I had to write it twice; for some reason when I was doing my usual thing of checking spelling and taking out double spaces I also deleted half the article and then saved it, thus losing what I had deleted forever. I’m telling you this just to let you know that I’ve suffered for my art so now it’s your turn.

As usual, Doctor Who Magazine is available from all good newsagents and some large supermarkets, but you can also order it and even download it by pointing your megabyte modems in the direction of this site.

Genetic Engineering

The beginning of lockdown was quite busy for me. As well as a book all about Doctor Who monsters – Doctor Who: The Monster Vault, out very soon, you can look at some of the pages on Amazon – in a couple of months I wrote five audio scripts. One of them has, sadly, been shelved (and it was probably the best one, isn’t it always the way?), but I think most people would agree that four adventures by Jonathan Morris is more than enough to be going along with. For now!

 

 

So, after Lightspeed, Ghosts and The Queen of the Mechonoids comes Genetics of the Daleks. It’s just been announced by Big Finish and has even been reported by the Radio Times. Tom Baker joins Time Lord Victorious! So it’s story which, for the fourth Doctor, is a prologue to it all, but for the Dalek he encounters it’s a kind of epilogue. A bookend, if you like. And, in a way (though I didn’t realise it at the time) that’s what it’s about – the Doctor and the Dalek seeing a story from two different ends; for one it’s in the past, for the other it’s all in the future.

I’ve been interviewed about it in various places, so expect me to turn up talk about it in Doctor Who Magazine and Vortex. The main thing you need to know is that if you’ve followed Time Lord Victorious or visited the Escape Room (‘A Dalek Awakens’) this story will serve as a lovely bonus, but if you have done neither, it’s such a clear and complete standalone story you won’t feel you are missing out on anything at all. If you just want an exciting Doctor Who story with the fourth Doctor and the Daleks, you will not be disappointed.

The other exciting thing about it for me was that I got to hear it being recorded. Remotely, over the internet. Normally I have to travel up to London or across to Tunbridge Wells, but this time I could hear my words being acted from the comfort of my own settee (the former property of a Doctor Who companion so it’s kind of my Doctor Who settee). I can see this way of recording being adopted even after the plague has passed; I am sure directors will be happy at the thought of Jonny being far, far away in a different room during the recording.

So, yes, check out the other interviews and previews, and the story can be pre-ordered here.

 

During those hectic days of lockdown I also wrote a couple of articles for a Doctor Who Magazine Special on Production Design. I wrote an overview over how design changed when the series returned in 2004 and a jokey bit at the end pointing out how Doctor Who recycled sets and costumes from other shows and films. But never mind my bits, they are merely the walnuts in the cake, there’s all sorts of amazing other things in there, previously unseen design drawings and fascinating interviews with the previously uninterrogated. Indispensible!

It should be available in WH Smiths and all good newsagents but if that isn’t an option for you then you can simply order it online here.

Miss The Start, Miss The End

SHAKESPEARE’S DELETED SCENES*

Whenever you go to see a Shakespeare play being performed, there is always one question lurking in the back of your mind as the lights dim and the curtains open. Which bits will they cut? Because they usually do. There is usually something missing.

Not that there is anything wrong with cutting Shakespeare, of course. Every director has to decide – or discover, through a process of rehearsal and preview – whether every part of the script justifies its inclusion. And, invariably, not every bit will. The director may cut for numerous reasons; because a scene slows the play down, because it is painfully unfunny, because it gets in the way of the willing suspension of disbelief. For instance, if you go to see Henry VI Part I it might be missing Talbot flirting with the Countess of Auvergne, because it slows things down, or Joan of Arc summoning ‘fiends’ from the underworld, because it’s a bit weird for things to suddenly get supernatural in Act 5 of an otherwise ‘realistic’ history play. Or, if you go to see The Taming of the Shrew, it might be missing the lengthy prologue with Sly because it seems to be setting up a ‘framing device’, setting up the action as a play within a play, that isn’t reprised at the end so seems a bit pointless in retrospect. Or, if you go to see Love’s Labour’s Lost, the director might cut some of the stuff with the academics discussing anagrams, because they are not complete sadists.

Usually, of course, the more famous a play is, the less inclined directors are to tamper with the text. There are, after all, school parties to consider. So if you go to see Romeo and Juliet it’s likely that most of it will be intact (though they might cut some of Mercutio’s longer speeches) because the audience will be answering questions later. That said, if you go to see Macbeth it’s unlikely to include the bit where the witches break into a showtune and summon Hecate; for years directors have looked for excuses for cutting this silly digression, as it’s hard enough to get the audience to accept a play with witches and ghosts without including a tap-dancing goddess of the underworld as well. Fortunately scholars have now proved that that bit was interposed by someone else, probably Middleton, meaning directors have a cast-iron get-out for not including it.

A director may also cut to change the emphasis of a play – giving less time to supporting characters to emphasize the leads – or for clarity of action or motivation. Any director putting on Hamlet, for example, as to decide at what point Hamlet actually decides to become pro-active and seek revenge on the King (when he decides 'to be' and take arms against his sea of troubles). Because, in the text as written, his motivation is a little muddy, to say the least (indeed, some would say that is the whole point). Is it when he sees the King pray? Is it when he sees the Norwegian army marching over the hill and is strangely put in mind of eggshells? Is it when he ponders mortality with the skull of Yorick? Or a director may – perversely, because directors are often perverse – decide to increase ambiguity by removing speeches where a character explains their motivation. If it’s already clear enough why a character is doing a thing, do we need to hear them explain their reasoning in laborious detail? Back in Shakespeare’s day, people did, but not so much now. Modern Shakespearean actors are highly skilled in getting across the meaning of a line irrespective of what actual words they might be saying!

Hamlet is one of the few, possibly the only – I can’t be bothered to look it up – instances of us being given an insight on how Shakespeare’s plays were cut during his time, as we have the ‘bad folio’ version probably based on prompt sheets, probably those of the actor who played Marcellus. We know his plays were cut because in Romeo and Juliet there’s a line in the opening spiel reassuring the audience that it will all be over in two hours’ time, but there’s no way the full play can be performed in that time. (Maybe they cut the opening spiel?) When it comes to Hamlet, I’d quite like to see a version based on the ‘bad quarto’, as in some areas it makes more sense (it has the ‘to be or not to be’ bit earlier on and Gertrude realizes the King is a bad ‘un).

This is just the beginning of a long, long history of the plays being cut for performance. Nahum Tate did his own version of King Lear with a happy ending. Davenent and Dryden did their best to make a tolerable version of The Tempest, and then Davenent, in his madness, decided that what Macbeth really needed was more showtunes. Henry V had its funny bits excised to make it into a proper tragedy. Charles Johnson did a ‘mash-up’ of the comedies. Garrick cut the bit with the gravediggers from Hamlet and Bowdler famously bowdlerized the plays (but not for performance, for family readers). The idea that the plays should be performed as written – that the text was sacrosanct – only came along in the early 18th century.

Another area where the plays are usually cut is in the cinema. Partly, obviously, because films tend to have shorter running times. They may also have less physically captive audiences. And films are primarily a visual medium – there’s a Hitchcock quote somewhere about, ‘Once you’ve written the script, you add the dialogue’ – and if a play is to work in that medium it needs to be adapted to an extent. Do we need the dialogue establishing that these two characters are standing on a battlement if we can actually see the battlement? That sort of thing.

And so it is very rare for a film to give you the full text. Ken Branagh basically stuck to the script with Henry V, even including the mind-numbing stuff in French, and then perversely – I did warn you about directors – decided to do a version of Hamlet which combined both the good folio and quarto versions in a way which defied both logic and the risk of deep vein thrombosis. I mean, it’s very good, but it’s not the play Shakespeare wrote, it’s like having a version with all the deleted scenes from two different versions reinstated. But by the time he got to Love’s Labour’s Lost he basically came to the very sensible conclusion that the less of the play he used, the better.

Television has a better record of doing ‘uncut’ versions of the play, because the audiences are in the comfort of their own homes and, certainly in the early days, television was a fairly theatrical medium – plays being rehearsed and then performed live or ‘as live’ – but with the added bonus that the cameras could get in close so the actors could give smaller, more nuanced, more filmic performances, and the occasional perverse director could decide that a monologue would be better done as a pre-recorded voice-over while the actor mugged away staring into space doing ‘thinking it over’ acting.

So, up until the 1980s at least, television versions of the plays tend to have very few cuts. Indeed, that was one of the raisons d'être of the BBC’s run of not-quite-but-nearly-all the Shakespeares in the late 1970s and nearly 1980s. At last, the plays as they were written, unabridged. Well, nearly... they didn’t include Sly’s prologue for The Taming of the Shrew, they cut Act 3 Scene 10 of Anthony and Cleopatra, and by the time they got to Cymbeline they were basically skipping whole chunks of the script in order to get it over with before the pubs shut. (This is not counting the innumerable cut lines from the Henry VI plays, Richard III and others).

Anyway, this got me thinking – what is the rarest Shakespeare scene? Which scene is most often deleted? Which scene is almost always not included in performances of the plays? I have a vague memory that one of the play texts features a pointless scene about a character buying a goat or a horse but getting tricked, as some sort of obscure topical joke. Maybe that is it, but I’m not sure which play it was - because if I were to look for it, it wouldn't be there...

* This is not an article about stuff deleted by Shakespeare during the writing process, though, of course, we do know a little about that because Love’s Labour’s Lost has a transcription error and accidentally includes two versions of the same scene.