(There Goes) The Forgotten Man

Hooray! The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine has a thing by me in it! They’ve given me my own page!

The idea behind it (for which I cannot take credit) is to do blogs/diary entries/interviews with overlooked characters from Doctor Who. The guard who is knocked out, the bystander who says “They went that way”. They might be villains or monsters, or just a tramp who cycles into a ditch in surprise.

Basically, it’s doing the same sort of thing I did for the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Master in previous issues, which all proved fairly popular.

I hope people enjoy it. If they do, I’m happy to keep writing them. Of course, given that it is replacing a long-running feature which was curtailed prematurely (nothing to do with me and I’m not going to talk about it) I know that some people may come to it with their arms folded and an air of “What the hell is this, then? Is this trying to be funny?” I completely understand and appreciate that. I can only ask that people bear with it for a few months, because everything needs a little time to get into its groove. And it is only one page!

Backwards Traveller

There’s a new Essential Doctor Who Magazine special out now. Alongside many fascinating and fact-revealing articles there are two by me; one what happened to the idea of doing ‘sideways’ stories in the William Hartnell era, and one about the Blinovitch Limitation Effect.

Both articles were fun to do. The ‘sideways’ article involved detailed reading of some Doctor Who paperwork (printed in the magazine) and, I think, discusses a ‘sideways’ episode which has hitherto been overlooked, while the Blinovitch article also involved putting aside some received fan wisdoms and casting a fresh-eyed look at how the TV series has referred to this ‘law’ of time travel. It doesn’t work in quite the way I thought it did.

Most fun of all, for the ‘sideways’ article I came up with five stories extrapolated from the ideas in the production paperwork. It’s actually quite tricky to do – I’ve written a couple of other ‘sideways’ stories for the first Doctor, you can even read one of them here.

Anyway, it’s a great magazine, please rush out and buy.