Top Tennant

News just in… well, it was news to me, thanks to David Darlington, who sent me the December newsletter from the Audiobook Publishing Association.

The announcement actually happened two months ago at the Chiswick Book Festival. The competition was announced in July, as I may have mentioned. And there was also an article in The Independent about the nominations here.

Anyway, thanks to participating members of the public, Pest Control was voted in the Top Ten. Thank you voters! Fellow nominees who didn’t make the Top Ten were Cormack McCarthy, Julian Fellowes, Duncan Bannatyne, the late E M Forster, Barack Obama, and Paddington Bear.

There were three categories – fiction, non-fiction, and children’s. About four and a half thousand members of the public voted on a list of twenty titles that had been selected from over one hundred titles entered by audio publishers. The panel’s selections were based on excellence in several criteria: quality of literary content, abridgement, reading, production value and sound quality.

The winner of the fiction category was Tea Time for the Traditionally Built by Alexander McCall Smith, read by Adjoa Andoh (published by Hachette). Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (Bloomsbury) topped the children’s chart. And the overall winner was Dear Fatty, the audiobook of Dawn French’s autobiography, read by Liza Tarbuck and published by Random House.

Full results:

• Dear Fatty by Dawn French read by Liza Tarbuck (Random House) – Overall Winner
• The Graveyard Book written and read by Neil Gaiman (Bloomsbury) – Children’s Winner
• Tea Time for the Traditionally Built by Alexander McCall Smith read by Adjoa Andoh (Hachette Digital) – Fiction Winner
• Doctor Who : Pest Control by Peter Anghelides read by David Tennant (BBC Audio)
• Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks read by Jeremy Northam (Penguin)
• A Room with a View by E M Forster read by Juliet Stevenson (CSA Word)
• Slumdog Millionaire by Vikas Swarup read by Kerry Shale (Harper Collins)
• The Last Fighting Tommy by Harry Patch read by Alan Howard (Hachette Digital)
• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga read by Kerry Shale (Orion)
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy read by Rupert Degas (Naxos)

Before I get too excited, I should note that this inaugural award was initiated by Agile Marketing, and featured “the very best in audio publishing from January 2008 – March 2009″. But it’s always lovely to have recognition for something I’ve written, and I’m grateful therefore to my publishers for nominating me, the judging panel for shortlisting me, and the public for voting.

It’s a CiN 2009

Back in 2001, Justin Richards and I wrote a sketch for the  GallifreyOne Doctor Who convention in Los Angeles. As it’s Children in Need this week, I thought I’d share it via the blog. If you like it, why not make a donation to the BBC charity event. And if you don’t like it… er… make a donation anyway, you humourless oik.

So here is… the Insurance Sketch. (Non Doctor Who fans may look away.)

DRAX:       Good morning Mr Glitz.

GLITZ:     Good morning Mr Drax. (fx: phone rings) Hang on a second, I’ve just got to take this phone call.   

DRAX:       Where is that dizzy ginger receptionist when you need her?

GLITZ:     Never mind, I’ve got it.  (picks up phone) Hello, Glitz and Drax Intergalactic Insurance Company – we make it right for only five grotzits a day – can I help you? (covers phone). It’s Decider Dexeter from Planet Alzarius.

DRAX:       Here’s the Jurassic Era file. (passes it over)

GLITZ:     Yes, Decider Dexeter. We’ve investigated your claim throroughly. I’m afraid we have to reject your claim for the death of your boy Adric. (listens)  It was contributory negligence I’m afraid, on three counts.  (a) Driving a space vessel without insurance. (b) Driving while underage. And (c) Driving while wearing pyjamas. (listens)  Yes, pyjamas Decider Dexeter. The lad was clearly half asleep after just getting out of bed. No, I don’t care if Adric was half asleep most of the time anyway.

DRAX:       Give him to me. (takes phone). Hello, Decider Dexeter? It’s Mr Drax here. I think you should know that there’s a counter claim against you from a Mr Scaroth. Yes, he’s the last of the Jagaroth, apparently. (listens) The last, yes, and that seems to be the problem. Apparently your boy Adric crashed his ship and wiped out the whole Jagaroth race on primeval Earth. (listens) Yes, I know Mr Scaroth has an ocular disability. But he claims that your lad scattered Mr Scaroth across the entirety of history.  He’s in multiple fragments across Earth’s timeline.

GLITZ:     We’ve had 12 phone calls from him already today. 

DRAX:       And Mr Scaroth is going to call again yesterday, Decider Dexter. (listens) Yes, I know that Adric had a star for mathematical excellence, but that’s not an alibi, Decider. Well, perhaps you feel you’ve come to the end of the road with that claim You can always resubmit it. Goodbye. (hangs up)

GLITZ:     What did you tell him? 

DRAX:       I told Dexeter we’ve come full circle. If he calls again, tell him that British Airways also want to counterclaim against the loss of two Speedbird Concorde aircraft which were trashed in the late Jurassic period.

GLITZ:     Well don’t worry, because Richard Branson says he can still fly them at a profit.

DRAX:       Any other calls today?

GLITZ:     There’s a Mr Omega waiting for you in reception.

DRAX:       Is he alone?

GLITZ:     Well, he’s brought no body with him. 

DRAX:       Tell him I can’t see him today. He’s only trying it on, you know. He wanted to sue the Time Lords for unreasonably holding back his career.

GLITZ:     Oh yes, “I should have been a God”. And what about that skin condition he claimed for last time?

DRAX:       Turned out he’d just glued Rice Krispies on his face.

GLITZ:     Oh, that other Time Lord called, too. Mr Morbius. I asked him why he wanted to insure the lungs of a birostrop, and he got a bit angry. I could hear him knocking things over in his laboratory.

DRAX:       Did you tell him he’d need some new clause on his contract?

GLITZ:     Yes, but he thought I’d said he needed a new claw.

DRAX:       I’ve got a good mind to cancel Mr Morbius’s policy.

GLITZ:     Don’t talk to Mr Morbius about having a good mind, please. Besides, he rang off when I told him we’d already canceled Dr Solon’s medical cover.

DRAX:       (checks notes) Did President Borusa get back to you, by the way?

GLITZ:     Yes, turns out that he decided against taking out life insurance.

DRAX:       Was that because you asked him what happened to his previous body? He seems to have run through quite a few in quick succession.

GLITZ:     No, he was harping on about how he wouldn’t need life cover any more. He’s got some deal with Rassilon Insurance.

DRAX:       Call on line one for you. Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart? (picks up phone and hands it over)

GLITZ:     (Fake sincerity) Alistair! (he obviously gets an earful) Ah, yes, hello Brigadier. Mmm. Bad news for you on your  Devil’s End claim, I’m afraid. Yes, the jeep and the helicopter. Well, as far as superheated domes of air are concerned, we have to treat that as…

DRAX:       An Act of God.

GLITZ:     An Act of God, yes. Particularly with it being so close to the church. Mm. Yes, I’m aware that the church was razed to the ground. But Mr Magister is in custody, as I understand it, and will be unable to submit his claim form within the legal timeframe. Anything else I can help you with Brigadier? Oh yes… third party fire and theft for a car. What make of car? (listens) I’m afraid you’ll need to be a bit more specific. (listens, then sighs) All right then, that’s a “sprightly yellow roadster”…

DRAX:       Is it customized?

GLITZ:     Any modifications to the vehicle? Hmm. Yes, well I’m afraid I don’t have inertial dampeners on my database here, Brigadier. Sorry, goodbye. (hangs up)

DRAX:       Next time, tell him that he can’t get extended work insurance for his whole platoon. I mean, how many other serving British officers have lost seven men to the Daleks, four men to blobs of jelly from another dimension, and three to a tyrannosaurus rex? Not to mention blowing up the entire earth?

GLITZ:     Be fair, that was a parallel reality.

DRAX:       Yeah, and that’s what I said when I turned down his claim.

(they giggle)

GLITZ:     And bear in mind that the Brigadier never seems to have more than twelve men in his platoon.

DRAX:       With that kind of fatality rate, are you surprised?

GLITZ:     Hang on, we’ve had a couple of claims come in on the fax here, Mr Drax. There’s that teacher in London whose car was stolen. (studies fax) Does that look like “Chesterfield” to you?

DRAX:       No, it’s, Mr Chesterton. Does it say say how long his vehicle had been left parked in Totter’s Lane?

GLITZ:     Four years.

DRAX:       Tell him to forget it. And there’s also this medical claim from a Miss Nyssa, for an outbreak of Lazzar’s disease.

GLITZ:     Did she explain the medical basis for the claim?

DRAX:       Yeah, but I was able to confuse her with technobabble. Turns out she knows very little about telebiogenesis. Now, what’s this note on the file for Mr Sutekh?

GLITZ:     He was looking for travel insurance for his long-awaited journey to Mars. And we wanted to know how long he’d been at his current address.

DRAX:       And…?

GLITZ:     Seven thousand years, apparently.

DRAX:       Sounds like a safe enough risk. What’s this one?

GLITZ:     Life insurance claim. Interesting, it’s a guy who’s missing presumed dead.

DRAX:       Oh, yes. Mrs Earthling – she called earlier about her husand, called…. (checks list) Mr Earthling. She last saw him catching a bus to Zolpha Thura. You know, on the phone she sounded quite spikey.

GLITZ:     No, turn it down, he’ll probably be back in time for tea.

DRAX:       What if she tries to renegotiate the terms of the insurance?

GLITZ:     Tell her that would be the ultimate impossibility.  Now, what did you tell this one?

DRAX:       King Midas? I pointed out that this was at least the third time that he’d claimed for the complete and utter destruction of the underwater kingdom of Atlantis. He got one of his guys to call in yesterday.

GLITZ:     That would be Professor Zaroff?

DRAX:       Yes, he thought that nuzzink in ze vurld could stop them claiming now. Oops, call coming in  on line seven (picks up phone and listens) It’s the Master. Hello Mister Master. Yes, I’ve got some rotten news for you about the Castrovalva claim. Well, you have no claim. (listens) Yes, I know, you have no Castrovalva either. (listens) Yes, I’m aware that the entire place was obliterated when it was reduced to a singularity, don’t you hate it when that happens? But as the place never really existed in the first place… We will refund the premium, of course. No…  Yes?   Mmm. Yes?

GLITZ:     What’s he saying?

DRAX:       He’s saying “I am the Master, and you will obey me… you WILL obey ME…”

GLITZ:     That old trick, eh?

DRAX:       Thank you, Mr Master. Yes, the cheque’s in the vortex. Goodbye.  (hangs up) Now look here, Mr Glitz, a pile of small claims from San Francisco in 1999. 

GLITZ:     Ah yes … an ambulance… some sort of cardiovascular intra-arterial device stolen from the hospital… broken fire hose at the local scientific institute…. And a chip taken from a beryllium clock.

DRAX:       This one’s from the Cyberleader. He wants to make a claim for the validium-based destruction of his entire war fleet.

GLITZ:     Yeah, tell him we’ll pay it directly into his credit account…  (together) So long as it’s on his gold card!

DRAX:       (together) So long as it’s on his gold card!  (alone) Nice one, Mr Glitz. Now, what about this application from Eldrad of Kastria?

GLITZ:     Show me the application form. What’s this, male or female?

DRAX:       Er… both.

GLITZ:     O…kay. Any phobias? Afraid of heights. Family history of illness: all wiped out millennia ago. It’s not looking good for him is it? For her, I mean.

DRAX:       Well, we could insure just the hand I suppose.

GLITZ:     That would do it. Ooh, call coming in on line four hundred. It’s the future President of Gallifrey. (hands over phone)

DRAX:       President Romanadvoratrelundar, lovely to hear from you. I understand you’ve spent a couple of decades away in E-space, was that a pleasant break? (listens) There’s a problem with your insurance, President Romanadvoratrelundar. (pause) Well, we can’t fit your full name into the little boxes on the application form. We wondered if we could just put you down as President Romana. (pause) OK, how about President Fred? (pause) President Romana it is, then. (listens)  Yes, I can do you a discount for multiple Gallifreys. Yes. Yes. And specific buildings insurance?  Well, how many sides does this Panopticon building have? Four, I see. Didn’t it have six when we spoke about it last week? OK. And you’re aware of the exclusion that applies in the event of War?  Hello?  Hello? Hmm, the line’s gone dead. (hangs up)

GLITZ:     Oh bloody hell! Look at this from the Doctor, again. The guy’s a pharmacologist’s nightmare.

DRAX:       What, has he got fatal poisoning again?

GLITZ:     Yeah. Claim number was for death by blue crystal poisoning. Number five was spectrox toxaemia. And number six was a severe allergic reaction to carrot juice.

DRAX:       Carrot juice?

GLITZ:     Carrot juice!

DRAX:       What was it last week? Number seven: shot by hoodlums in Vancouver? Number four: had a bit of a fall? He’s taking the piss. He’ll be saying that he just got a bit dizzy next. Why can’t he just die of old age any more?

GLITZ:     His latest claim says that he’s feeling a bit flat after turning  back into a mirror-licking psychotic.

DRAX:       Is there any evidence he actually regenerated?

GLITZ:     No.

DRAX:       Well tell him to sod off then.

GLITZ:    (shrieks) Oh noooooo! Here’s one we really can’t get out of, Mr Drax. The Monitor of Logopolis just wrote to us (holds up big sheet of paper full of holes). Policy 4242, with the Block Transfer Computation loophole. Seems like they had a few loopholes of their own, and now I’m afraid they can claim for the destruction of the planet Traken.

DRAX:       The planet Traken? Hang on… (checks) My database doesn’t show it any more! I can’t even see Metulla Orionsis. Oh, you idiot, Mr Glitz!

GLITZ:     We are beyond recriminations, Mr Drax. Beyond… everything.

DRAX:       We’re beyond our credit limit, Mr Glitz. That’s for sure. Let’s scarper before the SSS catch up with us. That Sara Kingdom’s had it in for us ever since we turned down that life insurance claim on her brother Bret Vyon.

GLITZ:     After you, Mr Drax.

DRAX:       That’s right, after me, Mr Glitz!

(They flee the stage)

Pest in show?

I was very flattered to learn recently that Doctor Who: Pest Control is one of the nominations for the Best Audiobook of the Year. If you liked it, you can vote here. Or if you prefer something else, you can vote for that instead.

The site also links to snippets from each audio. For mine, it’s an exciting action sequence narrated by David Tennant.

There’s also an article in The Independent about the nominations here. Even better, it shows the cover of my audiobook on the front page.

Fellow “best audio” names include Sebastian Faulks, Neil Gaiman, Alexander McCall Smith, Cormack McCarthy, Julian Fellowes, Duncan Bannatyne, Harry Patch, Dawn French, the late E M Forster, Barack Obama, and Paddington Bear.

Flag day

The fragrantly lovely James Moran has launched a competition via his Twitter feed. Caption this: http://twitpic.com/8as4d You need to tweet your caption by July 1st, using the #jmcap hashtag. The prize is to have a character named after you in the next thing that he gets made or published, and a signed copy of the DVD or book or magazine or whatever.

It’s most unlikely that anyone would namecheck me in anything, because my surname is a bit unusual. I accidentally namechecked someone in my own Torchwood novel Another Life, an Antipodean author who blogged about it when one of her friends drew her attention to it. My novel character was a secretary who met a grisly end. The author sent me a very charming e-mail. Her friend had suggested the namecheck was karmic comeback for a critical review she’d written. Posters on her blog saw a deeper revenge motive. Alas, it was just that I hadn’t checked for such a coincidence. And as I wrote the novel before the first series of Torchwood aired, my book was finished well ahead of any TV reviews, so any revenge would have been prescient at best.

We are careful about names in the novels. I picked some fairly innocent surnames (Bee, Wildman) from boys I was at at school with, though there was no other resemblance. My thoroughly professional editor Steve Tribe did note that one Welsh name I’d used was also the name of an unfortunate child victim in the Aberfan disaster, a 1966 catastrophe so dreadful that it makes me tearful just to think about it. So obviously, we changed that.

The photo that the flagrantly bubbly James Moran invites us to caption shows him standing on the paving flagstone lift inside the Torchwood Hub. This is a classy one up on most of us, who have our photos taken on the equivalent flag outside the Cardiff Millennium Centre in Roald Dahl Plass.

Andy Lane, Dan Abnett and I had our photos taken standing on that flag (the outside one), allegedly as a publicity shot for the trade press. We did it when we visited Cardiff as part of our research for the first set of Torchwood novels. I also took a “flag” photo of Joe Lidster on the slab. Joe was contracted to do the audio adaptations of the three novels, so obviously Andy and Dan and I didn’t get him in our group shot — I mean, we had to have certain standards. (I wonder whatever happened to Joe? Nothing good, I’ll bet.)

Series one of Torchwood hadn’t yet been transmitted, at the time of our photo, so for us it was a private joke. The success of the TV show has now made that slab a bit of a pilgrimage site for fans, and hurrah for that. We three novelists were granted a privileged insight of the whole first series — scripts, a studio tour, and an early viewing, all with appropriate nondisclosure agreements. When I wrote my second Torchwood novel, Pack Animals, I got to see scripts for the second series as preparation. It was very exciting.

The third series of Torchwood is broadcast over five nights on BBC1, starting July 6th. I’ve not seen any advance information about it, and I am even more excited about it — desperately avoiding spoilers, and eagerly anticipating five nights of thrills and shocks and laughs and surprises. The florally jungly James Moran is one of the writers. It’s going to be fantastic. So I thought I should flag this.

Klein bottle

The idea of a Klein bottle intrigues me, so my co-author Steve Cole and I incorporated the idea into The Ancestor Cell as the “bottle universe” that had first appeared in previous books. Some reviewers grumbled that the bottle was never a Klein bottle, but when one rereads Interference I don’t believe that anything in it makes that impossible, or even implausible, as a subsequent development. And “it was never intended to be a Klein bottle” is irrelevant. The Doctor Who books build and develop within a shared universe.

In the fictional world of the novel, Steve and I proposed that the extrapolation of a stoppered Klein bottle into a three-dimensional rendering could create an  enclosed space, and that such a three-dimensionally-rendered container could be “filled” in the very process of its conversion into that rendering from a higher dimension – i.e. from its non-orientable (and theoretical) fourth-dimensional rendering. Simple, eh?

Acme make a Klein stein (buy one for yourself at http://www.kleinbottle.com/ if you wish).  It plays similar games with the idea. One could consider this a three-dimensional rendering of a four-dimensional object, in which to exist in a three-dimensional space it has to make the physical concession that its surfaces intersect, and so the mug doesn’t leak – and you can put a lid on it, like a stopper in a bottle, so that your beer can’t leak out at all. It’s not four dimensional at all, of course, but (horrors!) they call it a Klein bottle. And yet the trading standards people aren’t asking them to recall all units because they patently are not closed nonorientable surfaces with Euler characteristic zero!

Now extrapolate that a “real” Klein bottle might have been part of the “methodology” for enclosing a universe in the first place – and if there’s a science for how one does get an entire universe into a conventional bottle, then it’s one that my own research failed to throw up – so let’s presume that a “methodology” may be postulated. One could conduct the “capture” in a fourth or higher dimension and then “snapshot” it down to the three-dimensional rendering in which the physics of that lower dimension “traps” the contents. (I’d show you how to do this, but I’ve left my notebook in a higher dimension.)

An analogy for this might be the (reverse) rendering of a two-dimensional artefact into a three-dimensional artefact. I can trap a column of two-dimensional ants in an endless route march by enticing them onto a two-dimensional strip of paper, and then when they’re all aboard I twist and join the ends into a Möbius strip. Now they cannot get off, because these two-dimensional creatures can’t go over the “edge” and can only march endlessly along the single plane.

The problem is that this confines only two-dimensional creatures. The analogy for The Ancestor Cell’s “Klein bottle” is that it cannot confine four-dimensional creatures; the bottle “leaks”. And in the narrative of The Ancestor Cell, that leakage is caused when the Time Lords cast it into the Vortex – which, the novel implies, is a catastrophe along the lines of casting it into the fourth dimension where the three-dimensional snapshot rendering no longer applies.

The novel doesn’t go into such detail, of course; it’s an action adventure novel, not a PhD thesis. But for what it’s worth, that’s the thinking behind calling it a “Klein bottle”. We extrapolated imaginatively in speculative fiction without feeling hidebound by the general machinery of algebraic and differential topology.

Could we have chosen to call it something else? Yes, but we thought it was more fun to pick a name that the general reader would recognise from “popular science” (rather than because it was something a Maths postgrad student would quibble about). I imagine most folk would think of this animation as the familiar two-dimensional rendering of the three-dimensional animation of a Klein bottle. There is also a “figure eight” Klein bottle (animated here) which is rather less visually appealing for the purposes of The Ancestor Cell.

My current favourite image of a Klein bottle is this one, a Lego version! I was going to ask my kids to make one for me, but there’d be no end of complaining. (Geddit?!)

A mathematician called Klein
thought the Möbius strip was divine.
He declared: “If you glue
the edges of two
you can make a strange bottle like mine.”

Now, here’s an experiment you can do for yourself at home. My analogy is “stoppering a bottle” not “creating an intersection” or “severing a contiguous surface”. In this sense, a stopper touches the surface, it does not break it. I think I’ve explained the fictional logic for rendering a Klein bottle in three dimensions above. And the “Klein bottles in a three-dimensional environment” (like those links above) can, indeed, be stoppered.

If you take a pair of scissors to a Möbius strip and cut it, you may get a piece of paper (long or otherwise) with a twist in it – because you’ve cut across from “side to side” and severed the strip; and subsequently, if you wish, you can deform it without making any further intersections by simply untwisting it and laying it flat (i.e. reorienting it within the third dimension). But a different single cut may instead result in another single-loop strip. Try this yourself: try cutting a Möbius strip right down the middle parallel to the edge.

Now do the same thing again… and again… you have now made three cuts, and you still have something more than just “a piece of paper with a twist in it” – and what’s more, you cannot reorient it in the third dimension to get a single strip of paper lying in one plane, unless you make a further intersection.

A mathematician confided
that a Möbius strip is one-sided.
And you get quite a laugh
when you cut one in half,
for it stays in one piece when divided.

There are multiple other variants of the first cut, by the way, each of which depends on where the cut starts and ends and almost all of which just create a slit in the strip. Now cut along the whole length of a similar strip that has two twists in it to start with (i.e. it’s not a Möbius strip) and see what you get.

Now, analogously, imagine taking a pair of scissors to a Klein bottle (theoretically speaking, and in four dimensions – for Doctor Who fictional purposes, you may prefer to use Noel Coward’s pair from Mad Dogs and Englishmen). You may get a Möbius strip or something entirely different; it depends on the nature of the imaginary intersection, and in which dimension(s).

If you split a Möbius strip you get another single joined-up loop… but if you theoretically join a Möbius strip edge to edge, you get a Klein bottle. What’s going on there, eh? Putting a stopper in a Klein bottle rendered in three dimensions is not the same thing as cutting a Klein Bottle or cutting a Möbius strip. If you put a stopper in a “Klein bottle rendered in three dimensions” you get an enclosed space. To “stopper” a Klein bottle rendered in four dimensions, you’d need more than just a three-dimensional “stopper”. And this is the basis of one plot point in The Ancestor Cell.

Note also that to create the Klein bottle you need a fourth dimension. As mathematicians have noted, this doesn’t mean it has to be “the fourth dimension” (i.e. time) which is the game we play in The Ancestor Cell.  We didn’t go into great detail in the novel, because we thought that would be… well… a bit dull.

Three jolly sailors from Bladon-on-Tyne
sailed off to sea in a bottle by Klein.
As all of the sea was inside of the hull
they found the whole voyage exceedingly dull.

Face facts

Whose were those faces in The Brain of Morbius“? (Non Doctor Who fans may roll their eyes and look away now.)

Today, there’s post-Morbius evidence from the transmitted programmes that David Tennant is playing the tenth incarnation of the Doctor. There also continues to be a popular cultural conception that reinforces this, whether that’s in pub quizzes about the show, or newspaper reports that have mugshots of the actors from Hartnell through Eccleston as “previous Doctors” where the reporter or picture editor doesn’t feel the need to list Richard E Grant, Richard Hurndall, Adrian Gibbs, Peter Cushing, Trevor Martin, Robert Holmes in a funny hat, Joanna Lumley, or (presumably, since last Christmas) David Morrissey. Such a non-diegetic influence on the show is not inconsiderable: if you don’t think that non-diegetic influence matters, think how long after Remembrance of the Daleks it took to lay to rest the myth that Daleks can’t negotiate stairs. In the quiet corner of an unfunny comedian’s set somewhere, they still can’t.

The evidence that Tennant is Tenth is pretty overwhelming. There were nine previous faces in the flashbacks in The Next Doctor. Now one could construct an argument that there are only ten faces shown because that data is based on what the Daleks knew about the Doctor, and they hadn’t met him before the Hartnell incarnation. But The Next Doctor is a story, in part, about who the true Doctor really is. That scene is at the heart of that discovery, and it’s a conscious acknowledgement by the current production team of who the non-fan public will recognise as the Doctor(s). It would therefore be an odd “reading” of that scene to suggest other than that it reinforces the current status quo. In fact, to do otherwise would be like arguing away the “Goodness, so there are five of me now” from The Five Doctors because it wasn’t actually Hartnell who said it: recasting the First Doctor was just a production convention, and it was the intention of the production team that it really was the First Doctor, and not some impostor.

What’s been revealed in Time and the Rani, The Five Doctors, etc. plus the continued non-diegetic reinforcement outside the programme makes this the current status quo: there are ten Doctors, and Hartnell was the first.

The problem is that fans who want there to be a “whole cloth” for the transmitted programmes need to revisit Brain of Morbius to integrate those eight “mystery” faces into the current status quo. To do that means intepreting that 1976 sequence in a way counter to the intentions of the author/editor, the producer, the director, the costume designer who dressed the previous Doctors, and the contemporary logic of the scene as transmitted. And to reinterpret all of that is a post hoc rationalisation. The evidence of the 1976 programme is that the faces are the Doctor, pre-Hartnell.

The production team either didn’t know or didn’t care that there was a one line in the entire show’s previous history (The Three Doctors, three years earlier) that suggested otherwise. And when people like me saw The Brain of Morbius on its first transmission, we thought “ooh, he has more than three incarnations”. A few were a bit cross: “Gasp! That contradicts The Three Doctors!” What I don’t recall was any strong feeling that those were Morbius’s faces. The contemporary status quo (whether one liked it or not) was that they were the Doctor’s faces. It’s the context of those subsequent stories that invites people to reinterpret the 1976 sequence as transmitted, or even to impute unspoken motivations to the production team. My favourite of those that I’ve ever heard is: “the director didn’t like the idea after all, and so directed it to undermine the theory”. No he didn’t. Justin Richards and I interviewed director Christopher Barry and producer Philip Hinchcliffe for our In-Vision issue about The Brain of Morbius. (My second favourite silly theory, incidentally, is: “You wouldn’t catch Supreme Ruler Morbius wearing a hat with a feather in it”.)

It’s hard to explain now what it was like to see that pre-Hartnell Doctors sequence for the first time in 1976, without all the hindsight we have nearly 33 years later that informs or affects our reactions to it.

There’s nothing especially baffling about the way the transmitted scene plays. The picture editing shows a definite sequence, entirely within the conventions of mid-70s multi-camera TV drama. There’s a cutaway from the faces for a reaction shot on Sarah, which does not suggest that the battle sequence has been reversed or that the Doctor is regaining lost ground. It’s a tense, well-directed, nicely-framed set of shots that doesn’t play games with non-sequential logic — when there’s a reversal, you see the reversal (as with Morbius’s “fight back”). For the director (or editor) to subsequently omit a sudden dramatic reversal in the Doctor’s favour seems to me quite implausible.

The dramatic and emotional logic of the scene is that the Doctor’s gamble has failed, and that Morbius must now surely win — until the fault in Morbius’s plastic headgear, flagged earlier in the story by Solon, (literally) blows Morbius’s mind and sends him careering mindlessly away to be driven, like a beast, over the cliff by the Sisterhood. Morbius’s downfall (literal, again) is a delicious combination of:

• The Doctor’s self-sacrifice in exploiting Morbius’s self-pride; we know that’s the kind of thing he would do, because two stories before we’ve seen him facing down Sutekh, another foe much more powerful than himself
• Morbius’s imperious overriding of Solon’s advice about the headgear; we recognise that from earlier in the story, so it’s a physical flaw that echoes his mental fragility
• The Sisterhood’s first journey out of their clandestine hideout; hitherto they have controlled things on- and off-planet with their mental prowess, and now they finally face their enemy in person, as the Doctor has been doing.

Furthermore, Morbius’s dialogue during the duel reinforces the Doctor’s losing streak, and there’s no dialogue and no reaction shots of Sarah or the Doctor to suggest otherwise — neither that Morbius is somehow an unreliable commentator on the scene, nor that the Doctor has any other recourse during the latter stages than simply to survive. The Doctor’s brave gamble pays off, but it seems to be at the cost of his own life, until the elixir (also flagged earlier in the story) is able to save him — a just reward for him earlier bringing the flame back to renewed life.

That’s the contemporary intention of the scene, as written, as directed, as performed. And I think it’s how most viewers would have viewed it (whether it pleased them or made them cross) at the time.

Had the production team, or subsequent producers, built on that intention, one wouldn’t need to reinterpret the sequence. Instead, we’d be finding a way “around” that one line in The Three Doctors. Maybe that was the “first” or “earliest” Doctor that the Time Lords knew about, or the first/earliest that they could reach back to with their limited power, or some other inventive excuse. And excuse it would be, of course: The Three Doctors, as much as any previous story, was informed by the extra-diegetic view that there were, as it says on the tin, three Doctors who travelled in time and space who surely must meet up at some point. It’s an overt 10th Anniversary celebration of the show itself: there have been three, and here they all are.

But the production teams didn’t subseqently follow-up on the pre-Hartnell Doctors. What they did was to ignore it. In the case of the Hinchcliffe/Holmes and Williams/Holmes production teams, plus the Williams/Read/Adams production teams, they neither confirmed nor denied it over the next three years. In the case of the Nathan-Turner production teams (variously script edited), they flatly contradicted it on a handful of occasions over the subsequent decade. Yet even when contradicting it, they didn’t explain away those pre-Hartnell faces in The Brain of Morbius. I think that would have been an unnecessary (and dull) story interlude, even in John Nathan-Turner’s continuity-fascinated era of Doctor Who. And the extra-diegetic reinforcement of “Hartnell was the first Doctor” with each new regeneration added weight to that.

• 1976 status quo: there are incarnations of the Doctor before Hartnell, and we see them on screen
• 2009 status quo: there are only ten incarnations of the Doctor to date.

In the presence of this contradiction but the absence of an explanation, there’s literally nothing in the programme that makes explicit who those Brain of Morbius faces are in terms of the current status quo. We have to find our own interpretation, and select and interpret (and sometimes selectively interpret) contradictory evidence to suit our personal preference.

What a quandary! The answer, it turns out, is that there is no single answer. It remains a matter of fannish interpretation. Meanwhile, the current status quo is: there are ten Doctors, shortly to be eleven. When Matt Smith was announced as the new lead actor in the show, he was acclaimed as “the eleventh Doctor” by the majority. Including me, though I’m one of those who says that those are the Doctor’s faces in Morbius. It doesn’t bother me; I can stand the confusion in my mind, and it doesn’t make my brain pop and fizz inside its plastic headgear.

Front Line Worlds

I do enjoy some of the online reviews of my novels. Here is a current favourite, allegedly reviewing Frontier Worlds. It seems very enthusiastic, but may also be a warning of the risks of automated translation.

That said, however… who can disagree that “Peter Anghelides is as good as idling cunning Chinatown-surrealism formation Olympic games”?

It is indeedy an satisfying spout, so don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Transparency

Nadine Dorries MP blogged about her experience of being interrogated by e-mail, and the possible motivations of the newspaper’s owner. She said that “the Daily Telegraph has rang Central office and asked them to ask me to remove my blog and not to mention the contents of my blog on air”.

Fortunately, you can still find the missing blog in Google cache here: http://bit.ly/ZqyS I found her entries for May 22nd, May 16th, and May 15th the most interesting.

Meanwhile, that bastion of reliability the Mail on Sunday has news today about whistleblower (and Tory fundraiser, according to The Independent) John Wick who sold the disclosure of MPs’ expenses claims because he was “motivated by a sense of public duty”. It appears that he also “left a trail of bad debts from a succession of failed businesses” and may therefore have “badly needed the reputed £100,000 he was paid for the Commons expense claims”. More private finance than public duty? For all I know, the Telegraph still considers such matters “a distraction”.

So apart from not wanting to discuss the motivations of their tax exile owners, or discuss whether they paid for the procurement of this information, or being unwilling to allow one of the MPs to explain in more detail on her own blog, the Telegraph clearly has nothing to hide.

Fiddlers

The only good fiddling recently was by the shouty boy who won the Eurovision Song Content while surrounded by the Norwegian push-ups team. The other type, involving UK Members of Parliament, was clearly a Bad Thing.

Yet the contrarian in me ponders the context:

• The Telegraph seems to have fingered as many as six dozen bad apples, which would be six dozen too many. But does that mean the rest of the barrel of well over 500 MPs are all tainted too? The implication is that they’re struggling to find more people like Kelvin Hopkins who are exemplars of good practice. But is absence of evidence also evidence of absence?
• Is the reporting as thorough as you’d expect? Some of the more exaggerated Telegraph claims suggest that innuendo is common currency. Such as their feeble opening salvo on the PM (he repaid his brother for a shared cleaner, shock horror) or the less-than thorough analysis of the claims by Norman Baker?
• Quite how helpful is a level of analysis that reveals one MP was legitimately reimbursed for a 75p Scotch egg?
• Do people understand the difference between allowances and expenses?
• There’s an odd implication that MPs who happen to be rich shouldn’t be making any claims. So millionaire Geoffrey Robinson is somehow more virtuous than millionaire Chris Huhn because he doesn’t claim something to which he’s entitled. This apparent  redistributive fervour seems particularly odd coming from the Telegraph.
• Why wouldn’t the Telegraph respond to repeated questions on Radio 4’s Today programme last week about whether it paid a substantial sum of money to procure the information? In my opinion, that would be a little closer to corruption than a leak from a publicly-motivated whistleblower. (Apparently the  question was merely “a distraction”… so that’s all right, then, let’s ignore it. That’s what a politician would do, eh?)
• And if the Telegraph is getting worked up about whether the spirit of the law is being met when people stay within the letter of the law, what does it have to say about the “tax exile” Channel Islands arrangements of the owners of the Telegraph? Perhaps that’s a distraction, too.

I don’t want MPs who fiddle their expenses or abuse their allowances; some of it is clearly indefensible. Parliamentary reluctance to publish the information sooner and more thoroughly has created a febrile atmosphere and public anger. The implication in the Telegraph and elsewhere is that other parties will benefit from “alternative voting” in the forthcoming elections, without much analysis that those other parties aren’t immune themselves from previous investigations into embezzlement of funds and electoral fraud, which resulted in arrests.

A more thorough analysis of the context suggests there’s more than meets the eye here about the Telegraph investigation itself. Until that’s clearer, I’m suspicious that it’s not just Norway whose fiddling has an element of Fairytale about it.

Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre

This audio was first published by Big Finish Productions in November 2002. Production code: SJ05

These blog posts provide information about the commissioning, writing, and recording of my first audio play. They therefore contain a number of spoilers if you haven’t heard the play yet. In particular, you can get a big clue by looking at the revised cover in the interviews post; that cover, unlike the one on this page, features the villain!

Elsewhere, you can read my original proposal and my scenes breakdown before I wrote the final script.

As to how the audio came about… I was invited to visit Newcastle in November 2001, to be part of a BBC Books Writers panel discussion at the “Dimensions on Tyne” convention. While I was there, I met Elisabeth Sladen—who was a guest at the convention. I was very flattered when she told me that she knew about my previous Doctor Who writing, and that she would like me to consider submitting an idea for Big Finish Productions’ forthcoming Sarah Jane Smith audio series.

Well, how could I refuse? Sarah Jane is my favourite Doctor Who companion, and to be asked by the actress who starred in the role… So I took the opportunity to discuss the series with Big Finish Producer Gary Russell (who was also at the convention).

Shortly after the convention, Elisabeth Sladen sent me a copy of an interview she had recently given, in which she discussed how she thought Sarah Jane Smith would have changed over the years, what her attitudes would be today, the sort of person she might have become. (You can hear this interview for yourself by ordering MJTV’s audio CD The Actor Speaks Volume II.)

In December, Gary sent me the series outline for consideration. Based on this, I wrote a proposal for a 60-minute script, and sent it off over Christmas. By the end of January 2002, Big Finish and Elisabeth Sladen had decided which were the five scripts they wanted to do—and mine was chosen as the final of the five adventures. The others are written by Terrance Dicks, Barry Letts, David Bishop, and Rupert Laight.

The audio was recorded on 26 February 2002, and I was able to go to the studio session in London and meet the cast:

Sarah Jane Smith	Elisabeth Sladen
Josh	Jeremy James
Natalie	Sadie Miller
Harris	Robin Bowerman
Wendy Jennings	Louise Falkner
Brandt	Peter Miles
Taxi drivers	Toby Longworth Mark Donovan
Directed by	Gary Russell
Producers	Jason Haigh-Ellery  Gary Russell
Executive producer for BBC	Jacqueline Rayner