The Booklovers

A friend a mine spotted the above recommendation in the Manchester branch of Waterstones. Woohoo!

So far, reaction to the Touched By An Angel book has been extremely positive. My reaction to the reaction is about 10% delight and 90% relief.

Apparently my latest Doctor Who audio, the Companion Chronicle, Tales From The Vault, is now being sent out to subscribers. Exciting.

Thing I should have mentioned a while ago. At the Big Finish Day I was interviewed by The Doctor Who Podcast, which can be found here. You have to click the MP3 Download thing on the right and then open the file. I start nattering about 39 minutes in.

And secondly, over on the actual Big Finish site there's a podcast with behind-the-scenes stuff from a Doctor Who audio I wrote back in my dim and distant youth called Max Warp. When you get to the website there's a little control panel under 'RSS Feeds' where you press play. They start nattering about it 6 minutes in.

And finally, can somebody please tell me why blogger keeps on adding 'http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif' to my posts? Answers via twitter please.

A Piece Of Sky

So let me get this straight. In a few months, it may turn out to be the case that News Corp is found to not be ‘fit and proper’ to own BSkyB, and thus may end up having its takeover bid rejected.

Which, I daresay, will be presented as some sort of victory for morality and justice.

But, even if their takeover bid is rejected, News Corp will still own 39% of BSkyB. Which may sound like a minority stake but is, in fact, a controlling share. This means that News Corp effectively owns and runs BSkyB now (as is obvious, their Chairmen are father and son), thus influencing the editorial stance of its news output, directing policy, taking a chunk of the profits, etc. To quote The Economist; ‘If there is a problem with Mr Murdoch controlling Sky, the problem already exists: an outright purchase does not create it.’

Which, to me, seems odd. Surely if News Corp is found to be not ‘fit and proper’ to purchase BSkyB outright, then News Corp is not ‘fit and proper’ to have a controlling share in it either. Either News Corp is ‘fit and proper’ to run a UK TV station or it isn’t.

What this illustrates is a discrepancy in the 1990 Broadcasting Act, that the ‘fit and proper’ test only applies to a company wishing to have a broadcasting license (which News Corp would effectively be if it owned 100% of BSkyB) but not to companies which might have a controlling share in a company with a broadcasting license.

So when – if – News Corp fails to gain overall control of BSkyB due to being found to not be ‘fit and proper’, politicians will present it as a moral victory, and when it is pointed out to them that News Corp is still, to all intents and purposes, the owner of BSkyB, I expect they will probably just wring their hands and say there is nothing that can be done about it.

When, of course, there is something they can do about it. They can change the terms of the 1990 Broadcasting Act to apply the ‘fit and proper’ test to companies with controlling shares.

It will be interesting to see if the political will is there. Lots of politicians of all parties seem to be delighting in their newly-acquired testicles, but will they have the courage to take the public’s disgust with the behaviour of News Corp to its logical and ethical conclusion?

Do You Remember The First Time?

Couple of brief ‘heads-up’ type things.

There’s an interview with yours truly in the latest issue of Vortex, the Big Finish freebie magazine, available both virtually online and physically with purchase of recent things. I’m asked questions about this month’s Doctor Who: Companion Chronicles audio, Tales From The Vault, and I do my best to answer them with both wit and insight.

It’s odd, being interviewed. I mean, I’ve barely been interviewed a dozen times, and already there are moments when I feel like Terrance Dicks or Douglas Adams, not in a literary achievement sense, but in a I-can’t-remember-any-of-the-details-but-I-can-remember-the-answer-I-gave-last-time sense. I can barely remember the writing of Tales From The Vault, which was last year sometime, and when I get asked about Bloodtide or Flip-Flop it’s like I’m answering questions on behalf of someone else and guessing at their intent. At least with the recent stuff I still have the email paper trails and files of early drafts and synopses.

I remember reading or hearing an interview with Terry Pratchett where he said that, when he delivered the final draft of each of his books to his publisher, he’d then go back and delete all the earlier drafts from his computer. ‘Bugger posterity’. I’m far too much of a compulsive hoarder to do that but I think the process he describes is analogous to what goes on mentally; when you’ve finished a job, you use the same bit of headspace for the next job and end up recording over it. And like all memories, if you don’t revisit them, they fade, and ifyou do revisit them, you fictionalise them.

I should also plug the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine. It’s a special issue in tribute to Brigadier Nicholas Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart Courtney, affectionately known as the Brig, and includes a wonderful article about him by Nick Pegg, plus some perspicacious reviews by Gary Gillatt and Graham Kibble-Wight. So my contribution to the issue, part two of the comic strip story Apotheosis, is rather overshadowed. Which is a shame, it features some glorious artwork by Dan McDaid and is the first issue where all the bits of this incredibly convoluted ‘arc’ I’ve built up start coming together for the next, epic, four-part season finale (and the last story of my ‘run’). I invite readers to go back and check out the earlier stories. The clues were there.

As it is a Nicholas Courtney tribute issue, some people have asked why there wasn’t a Brig tribute comic strip, with the eleventh Doctor meeting the Brigadier. Well, it’s a lovely idea, but these things are all planned out and locked down months and months in advance, and I think the earlier story The Warkeeper’s Crown has already had pretty much the definitive last word, with the tenth Doctor saying goodbye to the Brigadier, and I don’t think any other story could follow that. Maybe another writer will come up with something, but I’m wary of going down that path for fear of being maudlin; there are so many people deserving of tributes I wouldn’t want to have to decide where to draw the line.