River

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.

Kinky Boots

Yesterday I also received in the post the ‘Doctor Who – The Prison In Space’ script book. It’s an unofficial fan publication, meaning that it’s made for love, not money (quite the opposite) and is not trying to step onto any licensed toes.

It’s a huge, A4-sized, weighty tome, containing scans of the scripts for the legendary unmade Patrick Troughton Doctor Who story The Prison In Space. For quite a long time in 1968, it looked like the second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe would be having an adventure set on a future Earth ruled by women, an adventure which involved cross-dressing, disco-dancing, and some spanking. It would, no doubt, have been a classic adventure – as demonstrated by Big Finish’s fabulous adaptation of the scripts last year, by the annoyingly talented and pleasant Simon Guerrier. This script book isn’t mean as an alternative to that production, they are complementary, you have to buy both.

There are only two things wrong with The Prison In Space. Firstly, it has no monsters. Secondly, it’s very, very sexist. Because on this future Earth women are the monsters, aaah. And while it’s intended satirically, it’s quite blunt anti-feminist satire, filtered through middle-aged male fantasy. There’s a longer review/essay on the story by me included in the book, as well all sorts of other goodies; Dick Sharples' original scene breakdown for the story, Brian Hayles’ scene breakdown for an unmade Ice Warriors story, a special Time Team, and Andrew Pixley trying to make sense of the mad merry-go-round behind the scenes of Doctor Who in 1968, where scripts fell through, got pulled out of the bin, gained or lost episodes, and where the producer and script editor seemed to swap jobs on a weekly basis. The Prison In Space got so far as having a guest part cast, and sets and costumes designed before it was cancelled, suffering the indignity of being replaced by The Krotons.

To order this book, you’ll probably find the details at Nothing At The End Of The Lane in a few weeks’ time.