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!