Doctor Who
I was a fan of Doctor Who before I was a fan of anything else. It’s stayed with me forever. I taped the soundtrack of every episode. Then I videotaped them. Then I wrote my own novelisations, made up extra stories and drew comic strips. When the TV show finished I was at college and there was a brief, stunned pause: no more Doctor Who!
But then it was 1991 and they started up the novels series, and suddenly there was at least one original Doctor Who novel every month! For fifteen years, this was! Suddenly there was more Doctor Who than ever before, and it was a stranger, madder, more involving sort. And, of course, I’d always wanted to contribute my own stories to what is, in effect, (I believe) the longest continuing prose narrative with one, continuous, semi-consistent protagonist in human history! So I wrote off to BBC Books and asked if I could write an Arabian Nights-type adventure, and they let me! The Scarlet Empress was published in 1998 and I’ve written four other Doctor Who novels – including Mad Dogs and Englishmen, which is about The Lord of the Rings being taken over and improved by a horde of talking poodles. The most recent is a Tenth Doctor adventure, Sick Building, which is about the last few people on a wintry world about to be eaten by the Voracious Craw: a flying lamprey the size of Wales.
I’ve also written several Doctor Who audio plays for Big Finish Productions. I’ve been lucky enough to work with several brilliant Doctors, and have actors such as Katy Manning, Bernard Cribbins, Anthony Stewart Head, Una Stubbs, Jean Marsh and Tim Brooke-Taylor performing my work.
