Out today, there’s a new special edition of Doctor Who Magazine about ‘The World of Doctor Who – The past,
present and future of fandom’. What a marvellous idea for a magazine. I had the
enormous pleasure of writing the first article in the magazine, about Doctor Who fans in the 1960s, before
there was social media, before there were fanzines, before there was a ‘fandom’.
For the article, I interviewed such legendary luminaries as Jeremy
Bentham, Richard Landen, Ian McLachlan and Dick Fiddy, and tracked down and
interviewed Stephen Qualtrough, who met William Hartnell as a young boy. I did try to track down the fans who ran The
Official William Hartnell (Dr Who) Fan Club but sadly they eluded me. But, to
be honest, I only had a limited amount of room, and I already had enough
material for 10 pages, never mind 4. Jeremy, Richard, Ian and Dick all gave very
interesting interviews, so at some point I’ll post on this blog some of the
stuff that I didn’t have room for, as it seems a pity for it to go unseen.
Anyway, it was a lovely article to do, I hope people like
it, and I see the rest of the magazine maintains a similar high standard.
In other news, Big
Finish have announced a couple of forthcoming Doctor Who audio adventures that I’ve written. The first is Chase the Night, due out in January
2020, featuring Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor, Lalla Ward as Romana, Matthew
Waterhouse as Adric and John Leeson as K-9. I was at the recording of this one a
few weeks ago and it sounded marvellous. It’s set during the period where the
Doctor and his friends were trapped in ‘E-Space’, having various adventures
involving marooned spaceships. I can’t say what Chase the Night is about save for that fact that it’s set on a
planet where daylight is lethal, but it’s very much in the ‘hard science’ mould
of that era of the TV series. You can pre-order it here.
The second forthcoming adventure is The Day of the Comet, due out in January 2021, featuring Tom Baker
as the fourth Doctor and Louise Jameson as his companion Leela. I attended the
recording of this one too and it also sounded marvellous (I wouldn’t tell you
if they didn’t). I’ll talk more about it nearer the time of release – 2021 sounds
incredibly distant – but you can already pre-order it here.
And finally, there’s now a blurb for my more imminent
adventure, The Crash of the UK-201. You
can pre-order it here. The blurb is as follows:
You can’t change the
past, every time traveller knows that. What’s done is done and cannot be
unwritten. But what if it isn’t the past any more? What if it’s now the
present?
The spaceship called
the UK-201 was intended to fly to the Earth colony of Astra. But it never made
it. Crashing on the planet Dido, a tragic chain of events was set in motion
leading to the death of almost all of its crew and a massacre of the indigenous
population.
The only survivor of
these events was a young girl called Vicki. Rescued by the time traveller known
as the Doctor, she’s been travelling in his ship for some time.
So when she suddenly
wakes up in her cabin on the UK-201 again, without her friends, a few days
before the accident, she’s faced with a stark choice... Can she stop the crash
from happening? And if she can, should she?
