The Attic Inside Out Inside Out - Time Unincorporated 3 (ed Graeme Burk

Something slightly different here. I think it'd be ever so slightly pointless to review a work I'd contributed to; naturally I'm going to tell you it's seven shades of wonderful and recommend you but a copy at the first available opportunity (even though I can declare makes no financial difference to me as to how many copies it sells). I'd tell you that if I wasn't in it given Instead I thought I'd discuss the piece I wrote for it, The Attic Inside Out about The Sarah Jane Adventures; a 'Making Of' feature for the never-likely-to- exist DVD of my life.

There's no real unconventional story as to how it all came about. I've known the editors of the book for the better part of a decade, although I tended to see either of them at most once a year at the Gallifrey convention in Los Angeles. And I'd been writing for fanzine for a long while though I hadn't done anything more than dabble until I started writing for Shooty Dog Thing.

It pretty much started for me at the beginning of 2010. Graeme asked me to write an article for the fanzine he'd been editing for ten years, Enlightenment. He needed a thousand word article about the Beginnings box set, which had won the DWIN best DVD poll, inside three days before the issue went to press. So a quick rewatch of the special features as many episodes as I could fit in later I sent the article over. Graeme returned it with some excellent notes and I rewrote and resubmitted it as quickly as possible. Ten years as an editor meant that Graeme's very perceptive about what works, what doesn't and what was needed to make sure it fitted the brief he'd given me that I'd omitted. It was a brief but throughly enjoyable experience and, as Graeme was departing the fanzine, I thought no more of it.

And then six weeks later I got another message from Graeme. He was putting together Time Unincorporated 3, a collection of fanzine writings on the new series and as the numeral on the end might suggest, the third in the series. He asked if I'd be interested in writing about the Doctor Who spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures - everybody else writing in the spin-off section had chosen to write about Torchwood and though there were articles about the Who spin-offs in general, there was nothing specific about The Sarah Jane Adventures in there. Since I happen to enjoy The Sarah Jane Advenutures far more than I do Torchwood, this wasn't a problem.

So given I had a free hand, what exactly should I write about? I had a look around to see what critical writing was out there to check I wasn't stepping on anyone's toes. There are a lot of excellent reviews, both of individual stories and seasons, but very little general critical writing on aspects of the show. But then given that this is a children's show why should there necessarily be? With the lack of general writing on the show and fact that this would be the sole SJA focused essay in the volume I thought I'd try as much of an overview of the show as 2,500 words would allow. Not a basic introduction - I was writing for a fan audience who knew what this show was. Instead I thought I'd try and explain why I thought it was so remarkable that the series was even being made and why it was worth investing 25 minutes each week to follow it. I'll tap dance past the next piece as it's the dull research stuff, which essentially involved watching a lot of Sarah Jane episodes (and when I say Sarah Jane episodes I include Sarah Jane episodes of Doctor Who in that). I say dull, dull in terms of process of sitting watching episodes with a pen and notebook in hand, not in terms of the episodes themselves. Not to put any prospective writers off but in terms of research you can't really bypass that. Years of Doctor Who and Sarah Jane watching had given me a head start but it didn't give me a free pass.

And then I sat down, and tried to fit everything I'd loved about the show into 2,500 words and make it coherent. And after the usual hammer and tongs of writing, after several drafts and finding the opening hook and closing line I wanted it was ready to deliver. And so began the editing process, where the editors asked for nips, tucks and additions and very generously allowed me to exceed the original word count. Dangerous thing to let a writer do, so I was conscious of the need to make every extra word worth it. And after a couple of weeks Graeme and Robert declared themselves happy with it. Mad Norwegian announced that it would be available in the summer of 2011 and I thought no more of it until Gallifrey next year when I got to spend quality time with Graeme, Robert and a lot of fellow contributors to the book. Oh, and rather excitingly got to sit on the book launch panel. It's damn good for the ego to sit on a panel with a lot of very talented writers with plenty to say.

But there was one last pre-publication twist. On 19th April, unexpectedly, Lis Sladen died. It was the second death in a few months of a fan favourite and someone who gave plenty to fandom as well as the show. It was the kind of moment that you remember vividly, watching the news suddenly breaking across Twitter, then Facebook, then the BBC News... it even made the BB's main news broadcast at ten o'clock. Unthinkable even five years earlier, before Russell T Davies revived the character with characteristic verve and flair and made everyone fall in love with her all over again. If you want your heart broken, you can see how deeply a new generation of fans fell in love with her. I'm heading downhill to 40 and even I had a tear in my eye reading all that, even more so because my three year old son was insisting on watching School Reunion a lot. There's a whole new bittersweet beauty to watching that story now, particularly in the Doctor's speeches about everything having an end. Thematically, and just as a damn great story, it's a perfect celebration of her and the Doctor.

And I was glad I'd had the chance to pay a small tribute to her, however small. Thanks Lis.

Everything Picture - Round Up #2 (Time Lord Remix)

And things just got a lot busier round here, but more of that at some point in the future. In the meantime, clearing a little headspace...

First up are the three new Doctor Who novels from BBC Books. You might've guessed from previous entries that I'm an absolute junkie for Doctor Who novels. Can't help myself, I've been collecting the damn things for over thirty years now and I just can't kick the habit - suppose it's more stimulating and cheaper than a drug habit. The latest batch are Matt Smith's print debut, Apollo 23 from Justin Richards, Night of the Humans by David Llewellyn and Brian Minchin's The Forgotten Army. Of the three my favourite was easily Minchin's book, primarily as it takes an absolutely ridiculous looking premise and has an absolute blast with it - it involves a New York, woolly mammoth and an invading army straight from one of Douglas Adams' throwaway Hitchhiker gags. It's also got that very Doctor Who thing of knowing how ridiculous the premise is but keeping a straight face long enough to get away with it, letting the humour arise naturally from absurdity. He's also got a very good handle on the Doctor and particularly Amy, who's the de facto lead in this one. Sarky, fiery, slightly insane yet kindhearted it's the perfect print Amy.

Apollo 23 is fairly standard fare from Justin Richards - it takes an intriguing image as a starting point (an astronaut materialising in a shopping centre) and unravels a well-plotted adventure out of it. There's nothing wrong with the book particularly, all the right elements of a good Doctor Who book are in place, but it just seems to lack a certain spark - Richards is exceptional on plot, but none of his characters linger in the memory long enough to survive the turning of the final page. It somehow sums up the current Doctor Who novels - there's no real room for surprises, and they're simply merchandise to be flogged on the back of the TV show. Whilst the TV show should be the focal point for Doctor Who, it feels somehow cheapening to have the novels so lacking in adventure, flair and surprises. They've not been so unambitious since the early 80s and the infamous days of Uncle Tewwy churning out a book a month.

I rather enjoyed David Llewellyn's mainstream debut Eleven, a blacker than George W Bush's heart character study comedy, and his Torchwood work's shown flair and humour. His The Taking of Chelsea 426 wasn't particularly distinguished, having plenty of good moments but never quite coming together into a satisfying whole. Night of the Humans is very much in the latter camp. It's got plenty of clever moments - the way the 'Humans' are named, and their whole society, the Nanobomb device and the nature of the planet for three - but I've come to the conclusion I'm not overly keen on the way Llewellyn sees Doctor Who. From his two stories so far Llewellyn seems to view Doctor Who as a British Star Trek - campy, old fashioned SF with cultural nods and winks dropped in. I'm not quite sure I'd agree with that, it can tell those stories but it can be so much more than that. I might be being unfair, Llewellyn might simply have been stuck with the offworld SF book of the three, but if there is a next time I'd love to see him stretch himself with an Earthbound or oddball story. The old cultural references mean it feels like an RTD era story rather than a Moffat era one too, which jars a little. Again, it's far from bad, but it lacks the spark and sheer exuberance that makes The Forgotten Army the standout of this bunch.

On the non-fiction side I've also been reading Graeme Burk and Robert Smith?'s collection of fanzine writings, the unsnappily titles Time Unincorporated 2: Writings on the Classic Series. As a disclaimer I know both Robert and Graeme, and can thoroughly recommend them as charming company for an evening. TU2, as I shall space savingly refer to it from here on, is a spiritual sequel to Paul Cornell's Licence Denied (also the inspiration behind Shooty Dog Thing). Both are well qualified to edit such a volume - Graeme spent more than ten years editing the Doctor Who Information Network's highly professional magazine Enlightenment, and Robert runs the Doctor Who Ratings Guide, the largest collection of Doctor Who reviews online (certainly since Outpost Gallifrey went offline). It's a huge collection of musings on the Doctor Who produced between 1963 and 2004, and does draw extensively on both Graeme's magazine and Robert's website. There's nothing wrong with that when the material from both tends to be of such a high quality, not when such a breadth of other fanzines are represented. It might lack the scabrous edge of Licence Denied, but it's generally smarter. I'm possibly a touch disappointed that Tat Wood's The Frame essay on the scientifically worked through consequences of Axonite on the frog from The Claws of Axos isn't present (hey, it's funnier than it sounds), but it's a minor quibble, if you've read enough fanzines you're going to be disappointed by one or two of your favourite articles being omitted.


For me the highlights tended to be Graeme's own articles (if it wasn't such a worn down and useless descriptive cliche I'd use the word 'seminal' for his The Talons of Stereotyping) but I'd be remiss to not mention Paul Magrs lovely grab bag that leads off, Scott Clarke's 'Keys to A Time Lord' or Ben Hakala's 'The Re-Awakening of Mediocre Who', which implores us to treasure even the unmemorable stories. OR there's Dave Owen's 'Johnny Come Home', Deborah Standish's 'Classing Shipping' or the entire 'The Ones Who Made us' section... Even if an essay doesn't engage you, there'll be another smart, funny one along in a minute. A bit like Doctor Who itself really.

Hanging On To My Ego - Shooty Dog Thing by Paul Castle and friends

First a declaration of egotism and self-interest - I've written a fairly significant chunk of this book. So the review which follows is going to try to avoid judging all of my bits. Because I don't need to tell you how great they are, obviously...

I've been writing for fanzines for years - first off the stuff no-one gets to see (and I don't have copies of any more!) for a local Cult TV group, then a couple of reviews for Stone Circle and Strange Skins and, more recently, excellent Canadian 'zines Whotopia and Enlightenment. Most of which involved burbling on about Doctor Who one way or the other. But my main work's been done for the inestimable Paul 'Brax' Castle on - you guessed it - Shooty Dog Thing. Brax started the zine up in the wake of the Regenerations 2006 con, partly due to there being a lack of fanzine activity, and partly as a way to get to meet people. It must've worked wonders, certainly I made it a priority to reacquaint myself with him at the same event a year later (we'd had an all too brief meeting in 2002 and hung around the same mailing lists). And we spent a pleasant afternoon bonding over a shared love of Licence Denied, talking about the zine and kicking ideas around, ending with both of us going away buzzing and me promising him a couple of ideas. And I've been writing for him ever since, and he's become one of the best mates anyone could wish for.

Shooty's a modern zine, in outlook and production. It tends to concentrate on the old series, but with a modern outlook. Without wanting to sound too tediously hippyish, it wants to show what's great about Doctor Who, regardless of when it was produced or what form it came in. The real stroke of genius thugh was to become the first non-print Doctor Who 'zine, instead it was published as a quarterly PDF formatted for reading or for printing.

So we were socialising down in London in November when Tim Hirst, eminence gris of Hirst Books, collared Brax and asked him if he was interested in putting together a Best of Shooty Dog Thing for professional publication. ISBN, Amazon listing and everything. You might think Brax snapped his hand off on the spot but nope, after some deliberation and a revisit to make sure he had enough for a book that he'd be proud to put out he agreed. And frankly worked his arse off to pull everything together before Christmas. For my part, I was one of those he asked for extra material, initially for the tie in review section with Hirst Books other planned Christmas release, Colin Baker's Look Who's Talking, and a Bernice Summerfield Inside Story review to complement an already published article. And, madly, I managed to pitch him a piece about how the Sixth Doctor had been successfully evolved since his time on screen ended. At least that's how I pitched it, but it ended up being a massive overview of the evolution of the Sixth Doctor's character right from the start. I think that it ended up being a long article was that I was conscious of it being for publication in a book rather than a fanzine, and therefore having more space to flesh out the ideas in. I'm always trying to keep actual fanzine articles relatively short, as a) the longer ones fill up a hell of a lot of page count and I don't want to bore readers and b) with a lot of the zines I write for being prepared mainly for online consumption now, several thousand words can mean one hell of a lot of concentration and eyestrain.

Postal strikes and revisions meant the publication date slipped back to January, but that allowed a couple of articles to be switched and a stronger, changed running order of articles. I did a late proofread of the book and, despite it being late and knowing a lot of the material, found myself being drawn into it.

So what is it exactly? Well, it's a great big fuck you to the narrow minded concept that the best Doctor Who is exclusively the telly show. It's a love letter to the diversity of Doctor Who out there, the books, comics, audios, spin offs, conventions, plays... essentially about how damn great it can be, and how great being a fan of it can be. It's introduced by two Doctor Who alumni, first the multi-talented Paul Cornell, editor of original fanzine collection Licence Denied, and a quite wonderful and moving tribute to fanzines in general from ex-fanzine writer and editor and proprietor of Telos books, David J Howe. It's almost worth the cover price of the book alone. And it finishes with a loving tribute to Doctor Who and its fandom from 60s Doctor Who actress Anneke Wills. In between those pieces, all Time Lord life is there. There's fan theorising, edgy humour, convention reviews, directions to some sorely neglected corners of Doctor Who, holding fandom itself up to a mirror... it's an extended love letter to being a fan, the creative possibilities of fanhood and an exhortation to be as open-minded as possible, because otherwise you might miss something brilliant. It's perhaps less eclectic and anarchic than the collection that inspired it, but that's probably as much to do with the pieces all being drawn from one source, and possibly a certain generation of fandom being a little more mature, if still not short on mockery.

While the enthusiasm's one of the major selling points, it doesn't detract from the quality of the writing. Obviously excepting myself for egotistical reasons, it's excellent. Paul's an intelligent, genial host, knowledgeable, but never wanting to intimidate or show that off, wanting to share it instead. And his cadre of writers follow that lead, sometimes seriously, sometimes tongue in cheek, but always with a love of Doctor Who first and foremost in mind.

I'm proud to be part of it.

Buy Shooty Dog Thing here. And check out a few of the other fine publications from Hirst Books while you're at it.

Guess who's back, back again...

Yeah, I let it slide for the last twelve months again... oops. I'll import a few reviews I'd put up on Librarything before trying it all again.

Of course, there was good reason for it. If there's anyone out there and they're remotely curious, head to Hirst Books to find out where most of my writing for last year has ended up, or check out two other fine Doctor Who fanzines, DWIN's Enlightenment (issue 155) and Bob Funnell's Whotopia (issue 18), which should be available soon, if they aren't already.