Writing

Okay, things have been going on. I’ve started my own audio production company, Average Romp, which has released its first episode of its first series, Dick Dixon in the 21st Century. I’ll blog on all that in more detail next week; today, instead, I’ll just do a quick plug for the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine and its special edition Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition.

 

In the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine, number 564, I have an article about the Eighth Doctor’s adventures in spin-off media after the 1996 TV Movie. What The Eighth Doctor Did Next. Now, this is a very big subject, and one which could barely be encompassed by a series of articles ten times the length. So it’s more of an overview, drawing together threads, a taster palette if you like. There’s also a bit on the elephant on the room that has never been discussed – were the books, audios and comic strips really an influence on the TV series? Or were they just picking up on the same things that were going on at the time? Again, this is a subject that really could be an article in itself, but the short answer is, “Not really”. Books may have had giant spaceships appearing over London, but then, so did Independence Day and V and The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. And, yes, occasionally the TV series may tread on the toes of the spin-offs, or pull out rugs from under those toes, but that goes with the territory. As Timothy Zahn said about Star Wars; “We were allowed to play in George Lucas’ driveway. If and when George backs his truck out and runs over our stuff, we have no cause to complain.” And the same applies to Doctor Who. You just have your fun and hope that when the truck is backed out the wheels happen to miss your own action figures.

So, yes, a fun article to write. I could have had more interviewees but there wasn’t time or space, cos it’s an issue packed with loads of other good stuff. There’s even an article by someone very close to my heart (which I had nothing to do with, I hasten to add).

 

 

Out on the same day is Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition number 57, all about Writing Doctor Who. Now, I have quite a bit in this, as I writing the framing articles (for want of a better term) discussing how Doctor Who scripts were, and are, developed from original pitches, through to outlines/storylines, to scene breakdowns, to draft scripts, to rehearsal/readthrough scripts and finally to camera/shooting scripts. Giving lots of examples of Doctor Who stories along the way.

This was, as you might expect from my article on this blog, a bit of a dream job for me. I don’t have every existing Doctor Who script and of those I have, I haven’t quite read all of them all the way through, but I very nearly have. So I’ve got lots of interesting things to say – previous fan researchers have detailed things like deleted scenes and script changes before, but usually only to describe them in ‘making of’ articles. What I find interesting is the question of why stuff got changed; why scenes and dialogue were rewritten by script editors or changed in rehearsals, why scenes were dropped. Of course, these reasons can usually only be inferred – although sometimes there are interviews and correspondence which gives you some details. So, in the various articles, I explore that a little, looking at The Mind Robber as one case where we have all the script editors notes on the outline so we can pretty much exactly see why the changes were made to the scene breakdown.

And so on with other stories, trying to pick out examples of things that had never been reported before, or at least which I don’t remember being reported before (not the same thing). Such as some dialogue about Peri tap-dancing in The Caves of Androzani which made it all the way to the rehearsal script before someone realized how naff it was.

 

 

That’s the thing with putting together these articles. You can always go into more detail (what is now termed ‘granular’). I could write a whole book on stuff not covered by DWM Archives and Fact of Fictions, the Complete History and the various DWAS Production Guides. Maybe one day!

So please rush out to your nearest good newsagent or WH Smiths, or order the publications online.

Instant Karma!

A couple more Big Finish projects I’ve worked on have just been announced. They are:

Torchwood: Instant Karma

In the words of my co-writer James Goss: “Toshiko discovers a group with superpowers. Because it's Torchwood, they're operating out of a community centre, and they're not using their powers for good. Imagine if you could make the heads explode of people who annoy you. Would you use that power? Well, would you?”

Why did I want to write a Torchwood story? Well, mainly to see if I could. My feeling has always been that Torchwood’s format, for its first couple of years, was like a car that had been built in a rush. The whole show was put together so quickly there wasn’t time to go back and re-think things, there was only time to patch things up. I wanted to see if I could fix it, if I could make the format work. So why not pre-order it and find out?

The other project I’ve worked on is 

Jeremiah Bourne in Time

“Jeremiah Bourne is a boy with a remarkable gift. He can travel in time. Not by using a time machine, or stepping through a dimensional portal. It just happens to him, as though by accident. One minute he’s in the present day, the next, he’s a hundred years in the past, standing in the London of 1910.

Jeremiah has two questions; how did he get there – and how can he get back? On his quest for the answers, he enlists the help of Phyllis Stokes of The Society for Theosophical Research and her equally eccentric brother, Roger Allcot Standish, magistrate, spiritualist and dedicated nudist. He encounters the sadistic Mr and Mrs Grout and the ruthless Ed Viney, thief, gang member and slitter of throats. And he arouses the disapproval of Clementina Quentinbloom, the head of a home for ‘Fallen Girls’, by befriending Daisy Wallace, a girl ahead of her time.

Can Jeremiah get home? What is the connection between Clementina’s establishment and Doctor Henry Davenant Hythe, the humanitarian and eugenicist? And does Jeremiah’s gift of time travel have something to do with his mother’s sudden disappearance, all those years ago...”

With this project, I had the great pleasure of working with Nigel Planer on his story as script-editor. It’s a really interesting, original, idiosyncratic adventure with loads of interesting ideas and themes bubbling away, and some fabulously larger-than-life characters. Nigel has written lots of great parts for his fellow actors – and what actors they are, the cast list is like a who’s-who of British television! If you could go back and tell my teenage self that one day I’d work on a script performed by two of The Young Ones, Lord Percy, Miss Babs, Lydia the Bride, Shona Spurtle and Charlotte from the Le Bureau des Étrangers my head would probably have exploded. It exploded a little bit now.

You can find out more about it here and pre-order it here.

In addition, while I have you, don’t forget to pick up the latest Doctor Who Magazine, it has another of my Blogs of Doom by me. I think it’s slowly winning people over. Slowly but surely!

Romance

This month also saw the release of John Dorney’s excellent adaptation of Gareth Robert’s Doctor Who novel, The Well-Mannered War. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet but I’m sure it’s excellent if the script is anything to go by. I script-edited this story, along with John’s previous two adaptations of Gareth’s novels The Romance of Crime and The English Way of Death.

I’m not sure what there is to say about script-editing. Obviously, in these instances, the story was already there, so my role was mainly to act as a fresh pair of eyes, to give my honest opinion. Because I’ve written a few Doctor Who scripts myself, and because I’ve saturated my brain with the contents of other people’s Doctor Who scripts, I’m in a position where I can not just merely criticize, but also offer suggestions on how things might be fixed; the writer doesn’t have to follow my suggestions, I am not Genghis Khan, it’s more a case of going ‘If you’re stuck, here’s one way that it could be fixed, which might give you an even better idea of how to fix it, in which case, even better’. Also, in suggesting a way something might be fixed, I’m hopefully giving them a clearer idea of the nature of the problem. I know from being on the receiving end of notes how vexatious it can be to receive notes saying ‘This bit doesn’t work’ without the notes being clear why it doesn’t work or giving any clue how it might be made to work.

The important thing, I think, is that although I’m offering suggestions on how things can be fixed, the writer is welcome to go their own way. Or to argue that I’m entirely wrong, of course, that’s also welcome. Quite often my suggestion will be to just cut the bit that doesn’t work, because (in my experience) quite often the reason why something doesn’t work is because it doesn’t need to be there. A successful TV writer of my acquaintance told me a while back that the most valuable thing about script editors’ notes isn’t what they say, but that they tell you at what points in the story the script editor was bored! I’m not sure I completely agree with that, but it never ceases to surprise me how often a problem with a script can be solved by simply cutting the problematic section, or by entering scenes later and leaving them earlier. ‘If in doubt, cut it out’, is a motto I have just made up.

(It also saves a hell a lot of time and effort, but that’s just a bonus).

The one other thing that I think is important is to point out which bits of the script are good, which bits are exciting, where you laughed out loud, where you felt emotionally involved, because the writer needs to be told ‘For God’s sake, don’t cut this bit out!’ Plus it can be very disheartening to get back notes which are all negative, I think notes should be encouraging and chatty, not a school teacher marking your essay and nitpicking over grammar and punctuation.

But that’s in general. In specific, what was unusual with these stories was that they were adaptations, so, as I said earlier, the plots were already there, they already worked – but they would need to work on audio, for a new audience. So although I’d read and greatly enjoyed the novels back in the day (The Romance of Crime was partially responsible for me getting back ‘into’ Doctor Who) I thought it would be a mistake to re-read them before editing the scripts. I wanted to make sure I came to the stories as a new listener would, to make sure I wouldn’t be subconsciously filling in bits with stuff I’d read in the novel, and that I would be judging each line on its merits, irrespective of whether it was a line by Gareth Roberts or John Dorney. I didn’t want the knowledge of knowing whether a line or not was from the novel to influence my reaction to it. All that mattered was the script as a script, judged in its own terms, not how true it was to the novel.

Although, as I’ve said elsewhere, Gareth’s novels were quite close to TV scripts, being written as novelisations of imaginary TV stories, I think that adapting them wasn’t as straightforward as you might think. Because while the novels contain scenes that are deceptively evocative of the TV show, if they were just copied and pasted into a script they would be far too long. In a novel you can have characters chatting away for page after page, making long, amusing speeches, but in a script you’re always aware that the clock is ticking, that as soon as you go onto 3 pages you’re into what is going feel like quite a long scene, and that 4 pages is kind of the absolute limit unless there is a very good reason not to cut away. So John did a hell a lot of work, editing stuff down and restructuring the plot (because the plot of a 280-page novel is far too much for a 90-minute script). I can take no credit for this, I just sat back and watched him do it, and said ‘well done’ when he’d finished.

However, that said, with all the books there were bits that I remembered from reading them, favourite moments that had stuck with me, and so inevitably I would be looking out for them when reading the script. Usually they were in there, or there was a very good and clear reason why they weren’t there, but once or twice there were scenes I missed. On those occasions, I made a case why they should be included (not solely because I’d remembered them, but because they served a purpose, such as getting across a lot of exposition quickly, neatly and amusingly) and then it was up to John to decide whether or not to include them.

The one other thing is that because these stories are set in the 1979 era of Doctor Who, when it was script-edited by Douglas Adams, I felt they should really capture the spirit of that era. That’s another element of script-editing, I think – to identify what a script is trying to achieve, and to help it do that thing as well as possible, and not to try to make it do something else out of personal taste (unless what the script is trying to do is the wrong thing for some reason). Anyway, as far as these stories were concerned, that meant that I would suggest some extra jokes in the notes. Most of which John Dorney very wisely ignored - though I hope he found them amusing - but some he incorporated one or two. Usually it would just me be going ‘This bit is very funny, why not take it even further’; building on what was already there, not sticking funny bits in where it wasn’t appropriate (although, it could be argued, Douglas Adams occasionally did do that!).

But as far as my contribution goes – my very small contribution – that’s about it. Anyway, to summarize, Gareth Roberts’ three novels were excellent, one of them is back in print so you can buy it if you like, and John Dorney’s adaptations of the novels are as good if not even better, so you should buy those too.