So by 1989, ‘Doctor Who’ had died a slow death, more by a 1000 cuts and neglect from those in power than anything else. Those making the show had done their best to come up with original, distinctive stories in the face of indifference and neglect from those above. It couldn’t keep up though, despite all of their efforts the budget just wasn’t there to match the imaginations of the likes of Cartmel, Aaronovich, Briggs and Platt. So the show ended up sometimes looking like a corporate training video. That’s sad, it doesn’t lessen the stories in my eyes, but it is a difficult sell to an audience with changing expectations. We were about to get Star Trek: Next Generation, X-Files and Buffy – well I wasn’t, I don’t much care for any of them, but the point is what was expected of sci-fi/fantasy drama in terms of production values was about to change seismically – a change culminating in the TV Movie.
In this time period – between Survival and Rose (about 15-16 years), British home grown fantasy and sci-fi TV production must have been at an all time low – all I can remember is Neil Gaiman’s ‘Neverwhere’, ‘Invasion:Earth’ and ‘Gormenghast’. Then slightly related series like ‘Ultraviolet’, ‘Spooks’, ‘Bugs’, ‘Crime Traveller’, ‘Jonathon Creek’, ‘Strange‘ and the remake of ‘Randall and Hopkirk Deceased‘. All very earthbound, mostly short-lived, some good, some not so good.
Doctor Who’s Next Generation was actually waiting to batter the doors down, about to infiltrate TV and was just having to bide their time. This was my generation (and the one slightly older) – they had grown up on Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker and Target Books, Terrance Dicks, Mac Hulke and Robert Holmes. Many were the right age to be inspired by Andrew Cartmel and his team and their attempts to further the mythology of the show and broaden its outlook. By 1991, hopes for a new series were fading, but their first vehicle for world domination was about to launch – The Virgin New Adventures. Virgin Publishing had acquired WH Allen (which owned Target) in 1989. Doctor Who was to form the bulk of its output (the rest was mostly erotica), as it acquired the licence to publish original Doctor Who stories after all of the TV stories had been novelised.
The idea was that this would be the official continuation of Doctor Who if the BBC didn’t want to make it. The editor was Peter Darvill-Evans – the brief he gave to the new writers – to create ‘stories too broad and deep for the small screen’ – encouraging and fostering new talent was also part of that brief. The writers were encouraged to collaborate with each other – technology was about to make that much easier. The range launched in June 1991 with John Peel’s first instalment of the Timewyrm 4 part story arc – Timewyrm:Genesis, the arc included a story written by Terrance Dicks and ended with the first published work by Paul Cornell Timewyrm:Revelation. It ended (at least for Doctor Who)with the publication of ‘The Dying Days‘ by Lance Parkin in 1997 just after the TV movie aired.
In June 1991 I was far away and so was ‘Doctor Who’. I was in Australia, I’d worked for a while, saved up some money and set off around the world, ‘Doctor Who’ was a million miles away from me and my thoughts – I was sat on a beach in Queensland listening to Nirvana and Sonic Youth. I travelled right around the world that year starting from Greenwich, through Asia, Australia and New Zealand and back through the US and Canada. Without any of the connectivity of today, but I did have a couple of books, a Walkman, about 6 tapes, a packet of 3 and a spirit of adventure – a whole new world to discover. So I suppose in that sense, some piece of the Doctor was still with me,
Anyway, back to the matter in hand – the New Adventures. Mostly when I write about Doctor Who, I write from a position of either having lived through it or at least having had years of accumulated knowledge via the Target Books, VHS, DVD’s, audios, documentaries, books and likes of Andrew Pixley’s archives. Sure, there are others who know a lot more that I do, but I do feel like I understand it – it is part of me – all that useless knowledge. So even those stories transmitted in the years before I was born I feel I know pretty well, they’ve been in there since the ‘Making of Doctor Who’ in some form or other in my brain. Even the stuff I’ve seen least, I’ve seen at least 5 times probably more. The missing episodes, well I’ve heard every audio many, times. Big Finish, well I’ve been there from the start, I have gaps – how could anyone not have there is so much, but I feel I know my way around the range pretty well.
However there is one strand of Doctor Who where I get to feel like a new viewer coming into the series with a whole new world to discover – a bit perplexed and not knowing where to start and that is the New Adventures. A bit like the Ninth Doctors advice about visiting Paris (‘You can’t just read the guide book, you’ve got to throw yourself in. Eat the food, use the wrong verbs, get charged double and end up kissing complete strangers.’), you just need to just dive in and get lost. That is the feeling I had when sometime in the aftermath of the TV Movie I picked up some of the Virgin New Adventures in a second hand book shop in Hay-on-Wye (the place in Britain for second hand books) in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. I first bought ‘Love and War’, ‘Human Nature’, ‘The Left-handed Hummingbird’, ‘The All Consuming Fire’, ‘Bloodheat’ and ‘Nightshade’. It turned out to be a very good choice – they are all stories that I really like. I picked up most of them over the years and it is remarkable how astute that original choice was, given my knowledge of the range was virtually nil. Rather like when as a 7 year-old I looked along a shelf of Target Books in a bookshop in Liverpool and selected ‘Web of Fear’ to be the first book I ever bought.
It is a great feeling having a whole new world to explore, not knowing which stories are supposed to be good and which ones you aren’t supposed to like. Not knowing who anybody is, how the continuity works, how all of the pieces fit together. It does mean that even years later I don’t think that I have the expertise to sum up this era of Doctor Who – I haven’t even read all of them, I know which writers that I mostly like, but I have only a sketchiest idea of the discussions and battles and backgrounds to all of these. Even the season of the TV programme that I’ve watched least (at a guess 23), I could talk about with some degree of authority and tell you what I thought about it. This range well I don’t think I can. I like some of them and don’t like some of the others – normally those that wandered just a bit too far to actually seem like Doctor Who any more. Which is fine, it is part of the aim of the range along with fostering new talent On the other hand they really did stretch what was possible in Doctor Who (love and death and sex and drinking and drugs and all of that emotional stuff) and the new series reaped some of the dividends of that.
Each spring or summer I like to read one or two of the books sat in the garden. I can’t say I fully understand all of the complexities and continuity of the range and do not profess to be any sort of expert on Looms and ‘The Other’, puterspace, Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, Adjudicators and all of that stuff. So I’ll just have to do my best. There are even stories featuring a literal depictions of death personified as a being or entity – Timewyrm:Revelation for example. However all of that ‘Times Champion’ stuff, Death and Pain and Time, the eternals etc. doesn’t do much for me. So instead I’ve picked few that I find interesting and in particular those that I feel influenced the direction of the new series, when the show came back.
So let’s set our clocks back to the 90’s, on the cusp of a new world of email, message boards, AOL, PC’s and mobile phones. To a time when virtual reality was a new, cool idea. The soundtrack to this part of the thread should be some brilliant early 90’s Indie music (there’s lots to chose from – I’d suggest ‘Loveless’ to start with) and possibly that strange screeching (wheezing/groaning?) sound that a modem made as it connected you across the phone line.
A Journal of Impossible Things 