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

Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre: Reviews

There was great enthusiasm for the return of Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, and the audio series got quite a few reviews. Here are summaries of those which commented on Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre.

Newsstand

Dave Owen in Doctor Who Magazine amusingly compared it with the UK’s written driving test: “It lasts 70 minutes, involved more suspense than you’d ideally want on a weekday afternoon, and the outcome is a mystery until you’re explicitly told.” He liked the way the story “deftly negotiates a number of treacherous ocales”, and saw “Sarah’s fallibility [as the] story’s heart. By walking into a trap, she faces a dramatic deconstruction worthy of a Shakespearian tragic heroine, learning she wasn’t as clever as she thought she was, that her friend is her enemy, that her ally has been symbolically killed, and that she will be implicated in her enemies’ scheme so that she faces not only death but disgrace.

Dave wasn’t so convinced by the plotting (an implausible continuity point from a previous story, and the obscure motivations of the villains); the production (“much of the realization sounds like a paint-by-numbers fleshing out of the proposal); or the dialogue (Wendy’s “over-formal and unnatural” speech, and Sarah’s “inability to make uninformative small talk”). But on the positive side, “there are no redundant lines whatsoever. In summary, though, Dave thinks this audio is worth another hearing “listening to this one a second time yields a wealth of significance absent at first”. Even if it does end the whole series “abruptly […] just as it was shifting into top gear.”

In TV Zone, Richard Atkinson rated the audio third of five in the series (with 6 out of 10), thinking it “much more engaging [than] the patchier contributions of veterans Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts” (authors of the first two episodes). He thought Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre was “genuinely witty with an ambitious scale that takes ‘SJ’ all around the world (more Bond than Bugs).” Richard thought it too similar to David Bishop’s Test of Nerve episode, and suffered “by ending rather abruptly when the villains only reveal themselves at a very late stage”. But he did also say that “it’s certainly successful in bringing our heroine’s paranoia to a quite unnerving climax.”

Web

“Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre is a triumph, combining a compelling script with bright performances from a strong cast and a sumptuous soundtrack,” wrote Simon Catlow in a long and interesting review on his own site about the Big Finish audios, Tertiary Console Room.

“A story that plays strongly to the strengths of the series and in the process creates a fitting final instalment” with “an intriguing and rewarding plot” plus “rich characteristics of the regulars”, there is “some welcome humour present which adds flavour to the drama and showcases the characters, particularly Josh. […] Anghelides’ dialogue is excellent and pushes the drama along well without resorting to blatant exposition.”

Simon enjoyed the pairing of Sarah and Wendy Jennings: “Anghelides uses her as a reflection of Sarah’s character before her credibility was destroyed. Thanks to the quality of the script, there is a real sense of believability that Sarah would put her trust into this character that she’s only just met as there is an empathy between them which she doesn’t share with her friends of old.”

He also has lots of praise for the actors: “Fittingly for a series which she is the star, Elisabeth Sladen has saved her best performance for last, showing both her guile and ruthlessness in the pursuit of the truth but balancing it out well with the impression that she’s overlooking something significant in the process.” The series has “reminded us what a good actress Elisabeth Sladen is.” He adds: “Both Jeremy James and Sadie Miller continue to impress with strong performances as Josh and Natalie […] putting their characters together here shows a genuine warmth underpinning the surface spikiness of their relationship with each other.”  And Simon has revised his disappointment from earlier in the series about the returning villain, because “after hearing Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre it becomes obvious that a wholly original character would have lacked the particular resonance [..] adds to the scenes of confrontation between her and Sarah Jane towards the conclusion of the drama.

Simon’s only real reservation was that the attack on the beach “does come off as ill-conceived […] there’s no real sense that they’re in danger”. But other than that, “the story develops excellently, moving deviously,” with the script able to “sustain the spectacle further through an air of unpredictability.” Simon also liked the way that the audio picked up on elements from the previous plays, drawing them together in way that “helps make the whole series more gratifying.”

He was impressed with the way the story used the end-of-series uncertainty to “create a sense of menace and dread […] Sarah’s enemies are out there, waiting to make their final move.” In the concluding scenes, the author raises the tension to “fever pitch.”. In summary, “A stylish close but perhaps not in the climactic conclusion that may have been anticipated.”

On his own site, Cameron Mason was enthusiastic, and rates it 8-9 out of 10: “Peter Anghelides has written a roller-coaster ride of a story. It starts off slowly, building up to thrilling climax that in the end seems a little too rushed—perhaps Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre could have done with being a double CD release.”

He liked the use of a voice mail system, which “works well to show the distance between Sarah and her friends”. And the confrontation between Sarah and her enemy is “an excellent scene […] A fine conclusion that leaves the way open for more.”

“Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre brings this increasingly assured short series of audio plays to a satisfying conclusion,” wrote Steve Hatcher on the Who Central site [now defunct]. “Peter Anghelides’ tight script, well directed again by Gary Russell, maintains a brisk pace, never allowing the listener’s attention to wander.”

Steve also praised the cast: “Once again Elisabeth Sladen is in fine form as Sarah, and probably for the first time both Jeremy James as Josh and Sadie Miller as Nat are both give enough to do to make a good impression as well.” He was less convinced about the returning villain, who he did not remember, noting that “the line that Sarah utters, when she is confronted by her tormenter [suggests] the writer and producers clearly were not confident that others would not share my confusion.”

“Not Quite a Big Finish” was Paul Halt’s judgement of the audio on the Ratings Guide site. He believed that it “isn’t quite all that I had hoped for”, but gave it 8 out of 10.

Paul enjoyed the story’s “breakneck pace”, but disliked the way that the exposition appeared “in dialogue hints throughout the first fifteen minutes [..] The script is well-written, so this exposition is more or less painless; nevertheless, some listeners may find it a bit frustrating.”

As to the story, it was “more than a little nonsensical, as Sarah travels to India to investigate a bio-warfare scandal from the 1940s and ends up uncovering an even more sinister, modern-day terrorist plot […] more the kind of tale you’d expect from a James Bond movie [and] lacking a real-world connection.”

Nevertheless, Paul thought “the most successful element was the characterization of an increasingly paranoid Sarah Jane. [Elisabeth] Sladen is at her best, playing Sarah at her most flawed and, consequently, most interesting.” He also praised Sadie Miller (“sorely missed” in the previous story), but thought  “Jeremy James’ Josh is a bit underused in this entry, though he plays a significant role in the story’s climax and does a good job with a fairly difficult scene at the end.”

Paul’s major complaint was that the audio “is more of a Season Finale than a Series Finale.” On the other hand, maybe that worked, because he concluded: “I will definitely subscribe again.”

The review by Joe Ford, also on the Ratings Guide site, is more about the whole series than specifically about Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre. He is clearly a big fan of “the exceptionally talented Elisabeth Sladen who imbued her character with a lot of charm and charisma” in the TV series, and who now in the audios “plays it to the hilt, not trying to make her likable or bland but a genuinely interesting character in her own right and well worth her own series.”

Specifically about this audio, Joe liked the “international feel” and the conclusion to “the wonderful ‘arc’ that has ran through the five stories.” He wrote: “The unveiling of the villain of the piece isn’t such a surprise […] but Sarah’s astonished and bitter reaction is well worth the wait. Indeed once the cat is out of the bag and the threat is exposed, the last ten minutes of Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre are utterly gripping. The plan to bring Sarah down is quite ingenious and her apparent helplessness leaves you gasping for a happy ending.”

Indeed, Joe thought there were “lots of lovely bluffs and red herrings”, with “three terrific action scenes […] The final car sequence was one of the best set pieces Big Finish have achieved.”

Roger Pocock seemed pleased with the play, and gave it four stars in his assessment on The Doctor Who Review site [since revised, but archived here] said that it “concludes the series of five plays with the showdown we have all been waiting for, and does it in style.” Roger’s principal reservation was that “At times the dialogue is a little unnatural, and Miss Winters’ motives are never made quite clear enough.”

Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre: Interviews

I’ve done two interviews specifically about Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre. One is a BBC online interview  to accompany the launch of the Sarah Jane Smith audio series (click here to see that one). The other is a Big Finish Productions interview with Benjamin Cook (reprinted below in full).

This interview was conducted by Benjamin Cook, as part of his preparation for the Big Finish Productions book The Inside Story (published in November 2003). Ben sent me the questions, and I wrote the replies as you see them here.

Some general questions about writing Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre’

Ben Cook: Okay, a bit of background information … When and how did you get into Doctor Who?

Peter Anghelides: I must have dipped in an out of the Patrick Troughton episodes, whenever there wasn’t something that a visiting relative insisted on watching instead on ITV (usually the wrestling on World of Sport with Kent Walton).

The first evidence that I was hooked was in my Junior 1 A5 jotter at school. For my Monday Morning “what I did at the weekend” writing exercise, I would describe what had happened in the previous Saturday’s episode of The Silurians.  I must have given my school teacher the impression that, while other kids were obviously going swimming or horse riding or visiting their relatives or riding their bikes, I must have been locked up by my parents with nothing else to do.

Subsequent evidence included a model dinosaur (a tough decision—it was either that or a large-format illustration to celebrate Manchester City). The dinosaur was made of old egg boxes and pipe cleaners and glue. To this day, the smell of Cow Gum makes me think of Jon Pertwee, who I remember with much greater affection than Francis Lee and Mike Summerbee. Not least because all I got back from Man. City in the end was a badly-photocopied sheet of untidy autographs.

What is it about Doctor Who that appeals to you?

It’s been a constant in my life, particularly my childhood. It was Jon Pertwee at primary school, Tom Baker at secondary school, and later it was Peter Davison at University. By that stage, of course, I’d got involved with fandom, writing articles, producing fanzines, and going to conventions—so it became more than a backdrop to my life, it was my hobby.

What are your strongest memories of Doctor Who on television?

Too many to recall. If it were just a handful, then I’d feel like those people who can recall “the one with the maggots”, or “the one where they broke through the shop window”. And that would never do, eh?

And what are your strongest memories of Sarah Jane Smith on telly?

I was tremendously excited to find, from a close reading of the 1973 Radio Times Doctor Who Special, that there was to be a new companion. I was in secondary school by this stage, and being a naïve youth it was slowly dawning on me that these people were actors, and not just characters on TV. And there was an article (with large colour photo) of the new companion. So I enjoyed seeing her in Lincoln Green for her debut story, and there was a thrill of horror when she was controlled by the spider on her back in Planet of the Spiders.

But it was her sparky relationship with the new Doctor that really captured my imagination—how she responded to his taunting in Ark in Space, her terror and blindness in Brain of Morbius, that extraordinary Andy Pandy outfit in Hand of Fear. And then he went and abandoned her in South Croydon, the brute. Life wasn’t the same after that. K9 & Company didn’t even get transmitted in the North West of England.

Also, I want to know a bit about your career outside of Doctor Who. What do you do when you’re not writing Doctor Who adventures?

I’m a line manager in a software development laboratory that is part of the world’s largest multinational IT company. My team is a couple of dozen staff working on human-computer interaction and technical publications. I also have a couple of young sons: they are about the age I was when I first started watching Doctor Who. Their favourite Doctors are Rowan Atkinson and Sylvester McCoy.

So, how did you come to write Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre? Tell me the story. Were you asked? Or did you submit a proposal? What happened?

I had been invited along to the first Big Finish meeting where the original DW audios were discussed, but for some reason I couldn’t attend. So through a combination of poor timing and indolence I had not submitted any script ideas to Big Finish, though I’d always said I would like to have a go. So I suppose I’d been looking for an appropriate opportunity.

Unlike some of my DW author colleagues, fiction isn’t a full-time job for me, so it’s a matter of finding or making time to write. And if I’m going to do something professionally, I want to make sure that I won’t let the publisher down because (unlike many conventional hobbies) other people depend on you and there are companies with money at stake if you don’t deliver on time.

Then I was invited along to a convention in the North East of England, Dimensions on Tyne, where Elisabeth Sladen was one of the guests. She said that she was doing this series of Sarah Jane Smith audios for Big Finish, that I’d been recommended to her as someone who might write a good script, and that she’d like to ask me to submit ideas. I said that I was very flattered. Indeed, I was so flattered and taken aback that instead of adopting a suave and nonchalant attitude, and saying “why yes, how kind of you to ask, here are three brilliant suggestions and one of my business cards” I actually said “er… thanks… yes… um… was I alphabetically first on the list…?” Instead of treating  me like an obvious loon, she continued to encourage me to contact producer/director Gary Russell.

So I did. I got the series outline from Gary, I submitted a story that fitted in with that, and mine was one of those that Lis and Gary chose.

Were you confident that your story would be taken up by Big Finish? Or did it come as a complete shock? What was your reaction to the script being accepted (shock, delight, horror …)?

I don’t know whether I was confident or not. One of the virtues of submitting a story proposal, rather than producing a whole script, is that it’s not such a big thing to shred if it gets rejected. I don’t know how many other people pitched ideas (though I know of at least one that didn’t make it).

I wrote the proposal in a tremendous rush over one weekend. I’d met Lis and Gary at the convention in November 2001. I also met Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts at the convention, and chatted to them in the green room although, for some reason, we chatted about lots of things except for the Sarah Jane Smith audios. Come to think of it, we didn’t even talk about Doctor Who very much either. Anyway, I didn’t get the series details from Gary until December, and he wanted submissions by the following week. My wife’s parents were visiting that weekend, but I made my apologies, sneaked off to my study, and bashed out a suggestion to meet the submission deadline.

Then I didn’t hear back for about a month, and rather assumed nothing was going to happen. I checked with Gary shortly into the New Year, and to let him know that I was about to go out of the country—to New York on a business trip. And that’s when he e-mailed me back to say that he and Lis had chosen mine as one of the five.

David Bishop, who is much more organised than I am about these things, had a first draft of his script available before I’d even written a word of mine. He was kind enough to send me that draft, and so not only was I able to see how someone else had interpreted the regulars (Natalie and Josh), I was also able to steal his Microsoft Word template for my script.

However, I was slightly taken aback to discover on reading his script for Test of Nerve that he had written a story about a terrorist attack on the London Underground—the suggestion for story three. Now, I thought that I had pitched for that slot (mine was set in Scotland, and involved a fish farm—thrilling stuff, eh?) and so I knew I was going to have to give it quite a different spin. Gary’s guidance as script editor was invaluable. We agreed that I’d keep Sarah out of the UK for much of the story, keep Josh in the UK, and cut down on Nat’s involvement to stay within the time limit for the play.

Oh, and could I submit the script in the next two weeks, please?

On this basis, therefore, was my reaction to the commission one of shock, delight, or horror? It was a combination of all three.

And I’m particularly interested in anything you can tell me about how the Sarah Jane Smith audios came about in the first place. What was your first involvement with them?

My first involvement was being invited by Lis to suggest ideas for a script. I knew the first two had been commissioned from Terrance and Barry, and that the other three slots were available. I had thought that I’d submitted something for story three, but was pleasantly surprised to discover that I was writing the “season finale”.

It wasn’t clear at the outset whether Miss Winters was definitely in the series, and so my outline allowed for her role to be taken by another character (with suitable changes to the motivation). In my first draft, it’s Miss Winters who pretends to be a journalist and meets up with Sarah, and so the “reveal” at the end is when the CEO that they’re going to gatecrash in India turns out to be… the person with whom Sarah has spent most of the adventure! In the end, that character became Wendy Jennings instead—a younger character—and Miss Winters makes her surprise appearance at the conclusion of the adventure instead.

What part do you feel you personally played in shaping the direction of the Sarah Jane Smith audio range?

I think I’d be flattering myself if I suggested I’d shaped the direction very much at all. I suspect that mostly I got things into other people’s scripts because I was the first one to mention them in my script—the name of Sarah’s TV series and her former company, for example. There were some back-references to her pedantry about “less” and “fewer” as well. I proposed that Sarah’s changes of address should be mentioned in earlier scripts. And in the first draft of the script, Harris was a different character, though I noted that Sarah had not met Harris in person during ‘Test of Nerve’ (which I’d read before writing my script) and suggested that he could play the role in my script, too. So I had some ideas how they might save on production costs by cutting down the number of different actors!

Where did the idea for the plot of ‘Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre’ come from? What was your brief? What were your influences? Did you have to do much research?

I had followed some discussions about fish viruses in Scottish fish farms, and how a mixture of government incompetence and industry indifference had exacerbated the problem. And then I found out about a World War II biowarfare experiment that the UK government had conducted in the Indian Ocean.

I’d also written a previous audio for Paul McGann—his first “return” to Doctor Who after the TV Movie (in a short story that he read on a BBC cassette called ‘Earth and Beyond’). I’d set that story on the Seychelles, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean that I had visited with my wife several years previously. I thought there was more I could do with that sort of remote location, somewhere that took Sarah Jane far away from her friends and away from the European technological environment where she’d feel more comfortable—and yet where, ironically, she was more at the mercy of her enemies’ technology while her friends frantically tried to get in touch. My first thought was to send her on holiday to Barbados.

Were you confident that the Sarah Jane Smith series would be a success?

Yes. The Doctor Who audios were, and are, terrific, and Lis Sladen’s enthusiasm for the project was tremendous. Plus Terrance and Barry were writing two of the scripts! And the other authors were David Bishop (who’d done a Judge Dredd audio for Big Finish) and Rupert Laight (who had written TV scripts). And then me. But by the time they got round to ‘Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre’, if my story bombed, listeners would already have been treated to scripts from four experienced drama writers.

How do you find writing for Sarah Jane Smith? What did you want to do with the character?

It was terrific. I could “hear” Sarah Jane’s voice in my ear from all those years of watching her on TV, but I could also imagine how her character might have developed over the years. I agreed with Gary and with Lis, who both wanted an edgier, more self-reliant character. I also liked the idea that, in my script, she was going to be emotionally and physically distanced from her remaining friends, so it’s more fun writing for that sort of character—one who is under pressure, and who has to drive the plot.

Did you talk to Elisabeth Sladen at all during or after the writing process?

After the convention, Lis sent me an audio interview that she’d done for MJTV productions, one of their “The Actor Speaks” series. That gave me some insights into how she saw the character might have developed since being unceremoniously dumped in Croydon with a stuffed owl in a cardboard box. And it also provided me with the current sound of Sarah Jane’s “grown-up” voice.

Lis suggested a couple of changes to the submitted script, via Gary, that made Sarah more in control of her first meeting with Wendy on the boat—and we discussed that in a phone call, too. It was all very cordial and constructive. Lis was also kind enough to thank me for writing a lovely script.

What were you aiming to achieve in the relationship between Sarah and Josh?

When I wrote the script, I had a Mancunian in mind for Josh, because that was the original character brief. That informed some of the wording of the dialogue. Once Jeremy had been cast, and the script got in to the studio, there were some adjustments. I liked the idea that he was able to be a cheeky fellow countering Sarah with sarcasm. You have to have a bit of tension, even if it’s just friendly, to make the characters’ dialogue come alive on the page and keep the plot ticking along.

And what about the character of Natalie? What did you make of her?

I wrote her so that there was a kind of mother-teenager tension between her and Sarah, given that their interaction is that slightly distanced and impersonal effect you get on the phone. At the time I did that, I didn’t know that Sadie had been cast as Natalie. And on reflection if I had known perhaps I would have been a bit more cautious about using that mother-daughter thing as being too obvious, or maybe a bit impertinent of me.

As it happens, I’m glad I didn’t know and that I just plunged in! I think their interactions spark very nicely in the finished version. I was sorry that, on the day I was in the studio for the recording, Sadie wasn’t there—all her scenes had been done on a previous day.

We don’t see Nat, and unless she develops a squeaky wheel then you wouldn’t know she was wheelchair bound. There’s a tricky line you don’t want to cross, where mentioning her disability can be a way of defining her, and the character deserves better than that. David Bishop had already done a story where her disability was a plot point, so I just kept people aware of it by having her joke casually and naturally about it to Josh. Similarly, we know why it’s Josh and not Nat who gets on the plane to Bangalore, it doesn’t need spelling out.

Also, could you tell me a bit about what you wanted to do with Miss Winters in Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre? How many times did you have to re-watch Robot?!

I originally planned that Miss Winters was Wendy Jennings—actually so close to Sarah that Sarah cannot see her. When Wendy is talking on the train about whether Sarah does follow-up pieces on people she’s written about in the past, that was originally designed be to be Miss Winters secretly taunting her.

Patricia Maynard today looks quite unlike Hilda Winters from Robot, not to mention in any case that she was playing a role, and not herself, all those years ago. When she “does” the voice, you can recognise it (and very chilling it was to hear her adopt it again at the microphone, I must say—her natural speaking voice is quite unlike Hilda’s more strident tones). After so many years, then, it was quite plausible that Sarah would not recognise Miss Winters, and that Hilda could use this against her.

Because it wasn’t confirmed that Patricia was available until quite late on, I wrote a first draft script in which she did not appear at all. Wendy was therefore an older woman who linked up with Sarah in the Lakshadweep Islands, and was later revealed to be the CEO of a company that Sarah did an exposé on many years previously. When Patricia came on board, Gary and I rewrote the closing scenes to have Wendy as a younger woman working for Hilda.

I remember Robot quite well from its very first transmission. Although I haven’t seen it more than once or twice since 1974, and I’ve read Terrance Dicks’s book a couple of times, I didn’t re-watch the video or re-read the novelisation before writing Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre.

Okay, this is an important one… Could you talk me through the process of writing Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre (as far as you can remember)? What initial ideas were discarded? Which bits did you have trouble writing? How did the story develop from draft to draft? Tell me what was happening inside your head during the writing process.

Some of this is covered in previous answers. So the other bits of the process were like this…

I’d wanted to do something starting with an answerphone message for a while, and had scribbled some ideas in my notebook for this. Originally, I’d thought this would be the start of a short story, but obviously it works really well for an audio. And because Sarah was emotionally and physically distanced from Josh and Nat as the series reached its finale, it fitted in really well. If you leave a message, you don’t get the interaction of a regular conversation, so there’s the possibility of misunderstanding. And even if you’re on the phone talking with someone directly, you don’t get the body language and facial reactions always to get the meaning correct—it’s prone to misunderstanding, and that was good for the purposes of the story.

Another thing that I decided to do was up the stakes for the season finale. I’d imagined the Sarah Jane Smith series as very UK-based, and I liked the idea of getting Sarah away to a more unusual location. I don’t think I knew then that Sarah was travelling abroad with Josh for story four. But once Gary and I agreed that Sarah would spend pretty much the whole of my story out of the UK, I looked around for another venue for my finale. Originally that was set in a Scottish Loch, with the Scalar offices in a castle. But once Gary suggested keeping Sarah’ action almost entirely abroad, it made sense to go for a bigger finale and so I moved it all to the world’s biggest system of dams, the Parambikulam-Aliyar project in India, and the Scalar HQ in an old colonial building. That in turn meant I could use the Lakshadweep Islands (off the western coast of India), rather than the Caribbean location I’d first envisaged for Sarah’s holiday.

The more I thought about the distance between Sarah and her friends, the more I realised I could do with phones. It can be a slight cheat, because there’s more likelihood that someone will describe what they can see to the person on the other end of the call. I tried to resist that, assuming that the listeners would be able to work out when lots of things were happening at once. For example, Josh carries on two conversations at once while he’s on the plane; he’s talking into the seatback phone to Nat, and at the same time ordering his posh nosh from the cabin crew; so as well as pushing the story onwards it also is a bit of fun at Nat’s expense, because she’s stuck in an internet café while he’s away enjoying himself. I also quite liked the idea that Nat could “witness” Josh getting beaten up because she was listening to him over the phone—on that occasion she’s helpless to rescue him because she doesn’t know where he is, rather than because she’s stuck in her wheelchair.

Throughout the writing of the script, I tried to keep in mind stuff I’d heard in other audios that did or did not work—to avoid the latter, and emulate the former. I wanted the dialogue to sound snappy, as though motivated by people actually talking with each other rather than at each other. And at the top of each scene I imagined what the background noises were going to be like—how that might affect the way characters spoke, what it told you about the location that therefore didn’t need to be explained in the dialogue. My favourite of these is when the sound of the Coimbatore train fades at the end of one scene into the noise of Nat typing on her keyboard in the next scene.

Because I was on a business trip away from home, I had to write some of the script while travelling or in my hotel during the evening. Some of the airport and plane scenes were written, therefore, while I was in a New York airport, or flying over the Atlantic. The scene set in Brandt’s hotel room was written in my hotel room. I’m not always this Stanislavskian about writing fiction.

I think I also had a deadline for submitting a story to Paul Cornell’s Bernice Summerfield collection A Life of Surprises at about the same time. So it was a busy time for me.

Gary reworked the end of my original submission to introduce Hilda Winters into the conclusion. I had a look at that draft, and did I bit more rewriting on those new lines. Elisabeth Sladen also had some constructive suggestions, including a request to put Sarah more in control of her first conversation with Wendy on the malmi’s boat. There weren’t many changes after that.

In the very early stages of producing my outline, there was another scene after the riverside shoot-out. It was set on the dam (or possibly in the turbine room), a final confrontation with Sarah facing down Miss Winters and Brandt just too late as the barrels of brucella virus go into the reservoir—foaming away before her eyes (which she would describe in her horrified dialogue, of course); and then she got locked in there while Winters and Brandt fled the scene and left her for the authorities to find her. Was it curtains for Sarah? No, because resourceful Josh had got to the barrels first, and substituted industrial-sized containers of Indian-brand Fairy Liquid—and then he and Sarah had to flee the scene before the authorities arrive, because Sarah s implicated in an unsuccessful attempt from which she will have to clear her name.

Looking at the amount of stuff already in the outline, I decided that this finale was going to make the script far too long, and arguably too over-the-top. So it got chopped, and Josh now makes his heroic appearance at the riverside instead.

Any initial working titles?

I didn’t give it a title when I submitted the outline. Gary and I were exchanging e-mail about something called ‘SJS—Title?’ for a while. Once I had decided, it was always called Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre. I wanted a title that didn’t sound like a typical Doctor Who title, something that might have been an episode of The Bill or Casualty, a “realistic” drama series rather than a “fantasy” drama series.

How much did the script have to be rewritten before recording? Any major changes?

Most of the changes happened between the original outline and the first draft. Apart from the usual script-editing sorts of things, there were not so many changes between my submitting the rehearsal script and it being recorded, with one major exception. That exception was the inclusion of Hilda Winters, something that Gary and I agreed would need to be handled flexibly until Big Finish confirmed that Patricia Maynard was definitely available to play the part.

What did you think of Elisabeth’s performance in Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre?

She was terrific, wasn’t she? Hers was the only character where I knew the “voice” before writing the script. I didn’t know, for example, who would be playing Dr Brandt, so I wasn’t anticipating anything about the actor’s performance. So with Sarah Jane, I had a clear idea of what I thought her performance would be—even though I was writing her as a more central character than in the TV series.

And when it came to the recording, she brought so much more to it. If she thought there was a duff note in the dialogue, she’d suggest an alternative. And by the time she came to record my episode, she’d already established this rapport with the other regulars, and so the whole thing came alive in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

On the day that Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre was recorded, they also did some pick-up scenes from other episodes. So I was there when Lis did the scene by Lavinia’s graveside, from Comeback. That was just wonderful, very moving.

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What did you think of the rest of the cast that the director assembled? Are they how you’d imagined their respective characters to sound like?

Unlike with the central character, and maybe Miss Winters for the concluding scenes, I had no preconceptions about the other cast members. I don’t know, if they’d told me they were casting Peter Miles in the production, whether it would have helped or not—I mostly know Peter’s Doctor Who performances, especially Nyder [from the TV story Genesis of the Daleks], so I might have made assumptions about how he’d play the role, instead of letting him find the character from my script.

I was quite keen to have an Indian character, because non-UK characters (extraterrestrial aliens excepted) were a whole crowd of people that I couldn’t remember Big Finish doing much with. I steered away from Americans, because they had done those before, and with mixed success I’d felt. I confess that I hadn’t known before the recording that Jeremy James and Toby Longworth would be in mine, let alone that they’d done so many different and distinctive characters for Big Finish previously. So at first it was a surprise to find that Toby (definitely not Indian) was playing Chakravarty. But what a great job he did—getting the character to slightly “put on” the Indian accent when he was pretending to be a taxi driver, but without going all Mind Your Language about it. And then, when revealed as a villain later on, doing a more Indian-RP version—I think he was basing it on Art Malik, and very well too.

Wendy was originally written to be rather older than Louise Faulkner played her, because I’d initially planned for that character to be Hilda Winters in disguise. In the revised script, Gary had suggested that she be the daughter of a former SRS villain, Jellicoe from Robot, so that changed things slightly. Apart from a section of dialogue in the Coimbatore train, where Wendy talks about how she became a journalist, very little in the dialogue needed to be changed to make her younger.

How did you find working with Gary Russell and Jason Haigh-Ellery?

I didn’t work much with Jason, though I think I first met him years ago when he was a mere stripling, and nursing a pint all evening in a London pub. I’ve met him on other occasions since, but for Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre my work with him was just getting him to sign the contract and then sign the cheque. He does that very well, I must say, and I’d be very happy to work with him again on this basis for increasingly large amounts of money.

Gary I have known for many years. Indeed, we were stripling contemporaries, flogging our fanzine wares at conventions half a lifetime ago. The writing and editing on this audio turned out to be unexpectedly rather hectic, with short deadlines and fast turnarounds. If this had been with someone I didn’t trust as much as Gary, I think I’d have been a lot more worried. With someone who you know personally and professionally, you can be a bit more relaxed even when things are frantic.

Did you attend the actual recording? Did you enjoy yourself? What was the day like? Any behind-the-scenes gossip—however trivial or weird?!

Yes, I went along to the day on which most of mine was recorded. It was great fun. I’d not been the recording of a radio play or an audio before, though I’ve been to quite a few TV productions, so I sort of knew what to expect of the etiquette on the day.

It was a shame not to meet Sadie, but all her scenes had been recorded already. On the other hand, it was the day when all Miss Winters’ scenes were done, so (hurrah!) I did get to meet and talk to Patricia Maynard. We all went out for lunch together, and I had the most wonderful time sitting at one end of the table with Elisabeth Sladen and Patricia Maynard and talking about our families. Although actors get to work with each other on and off over the years, this was the first time that the two of them had met since doing ‘Robot’, so they were “catching up”. Robin Bowerman told us about his (then forthcoming) role as Henry Ledbetter in Emmerdale.

After the recording, we all went for a pint, and Toby Longworth taught me a couple of magic tricks that I have subsequently used to amaze and baffle my relatives. One of them is so simple but effective that I taught it to my six-year-old son, Samuel, who now amazes and baffles his grandparents with it. The other involves a cigarette and, as far as I know, Samuel doesn’t know that one yet.

Do you enjoy listening to your work being recorded? Or does it feel strange…?

Oh, great fun. Once the script has been written, you have to let go of it. It’s in the hands of the cast and the director. So I kept quiet unless I was invited to comment. Well, OK, except for a couple of brief moments. One was a continuity thing I spotted, that I politely asked Gary about so that he could decide whether it was worth fixing on the day. (It wasn’t obvious that Winters and Harris were driving away, so I suggested an additional line to make that clearer.) The other was when one of the actors pronounced “CEO” as “see-oh” rather than as an acronym for Chief Executive Officer.

Some of the scenes from my script were recorded on different days, so they’d already done some of ‘Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre’ before I got to the studio. They’d tried to phone me on my mobile a couple of times, to get some of the Indian pronunciations clarified. I didn’t hear these messages in time, unfortunately, so they decided for themselves. Not that I would have helped much, anyway, because to me they were just names off  a map of the Indian subcontinent, or from Air India web pages. There was one speech of Wendy’s that’s full of them: Anamalai, Coonoor, Kotagiri, Udhagamandalam and so on. That needed a couple of takes.

What do you make of how Doctor Who fans have received Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre?

They seem to have enjoyed it, don’t they? I put summaries of reviews on my website, so I’ve seen a few of them. With it being the season finale, there’s maybe a tendency for reviewers to comment on the whole series rather than specifically my story, and some of the comments are about whether there’ll be a series two. I suppose it’s nice that fans seem to want a series two!

And what did you think of the final product? What did—and didn’t—you like? And please, be as honest as you can. Gary has promised not to kill any writers who slag off Big Finish productions. And I believe him!

I really enjoyed it. It was very exciting to get my first audio play through the post! There are some things that worked out differently to the way I’d expected them, but that’s not to say that they matter or that I didn’t like them. The pronunciations of some of the words—Scalar and Chakravarty—weren’t what I had expected, but who cares? There was one typo in the script that was performed and recorded “as written”: the virus turns out to be “fat-replicating” rather than “fast-replicating” as intended. Not that it matters, unless it turns out that we have an unexpectedly-large number of endocrinologists subscribing to the series.

I had imagined the voicemail system to be a real human intonation, but with that stilted intonation you get from separately-recorded voice fragments pieced together—you know, the way that the intonation rises unnaturally at the end of numbers. The “robot voice” they used works just as well, and also saved on casting another voice. At one point I thought that I was going to have to write out all the possible combinations for the voicemail, along with other stuff like tannoy announcements for the airport and railway station, but that wasn’t necessary in the end.

The music soundtrack incorporated Indian themes, which was splendid and the effects—the sea, the restaurant noises, the train, the airport, the car chases—were great. And the fruit bat.

The Big Finish “Writer’s Guidelines” say at one point: “feel free to stretch both the listener’s imagination and BFP’s technical bods”. So at the top of one scene I wrote the direction: “The sea is shussshing up the sandy beach, slight wind in the palm trees. A lone fruit bat utters a fitful cry. (OK, the fruit bat isn’t essential. But I bet your effects guy can do a mean impression.)” Once I found out that David Darlington was doing the effects, I teased him constantly about how impossible this would be. He hunted one down, of course. A sound effect, I mean, not a fruit bat, obviously.

My only disappointment, I suppose, was that the CD booklet was a bit below par compared with the others in the series. They had changed the colour plates to incorporate the photo of Miss Winters, smiling over Sarah’s shoulder on the front cover (the early pre-release publicity version did not have her there, to preserve the big surprise for Test of Nerve). But the registration of one film must be a bit cockeyed, and that makes the text harder to read. The inside CD sleeve didn’t print at all, and there were a handful of typos. But if all I can find to quibble about is the packaging, that must give you some idea of how much I like the actual audio!

And best of all, of course, is hearing the dialogue come alive in the performances of the talented cast. Even better than I imagined it—I’m so pleased with that. Jeremy James as Josh makes me laugh out loud, even though (or possibly because) I wrote the dialogue, and Sadie Miller really sparkles as Natalie when she argues with him and with Sarah. And although it’s invidious to single  anyone out of the cast for particular praise, it would be remiss of me not to thank Lis Sladen for her enthusiasm from start to finish.

What is it about storytelling that appeals to you?

Getting a reaction from people. The first reaction is mine: I’m delighted to say that I’m a terrific audience, and quite shamelessly laugh at my own jokes when I’m writing.

The second audience is the editor—whether it’s a novel, or a short story, or an audio script, I want to amuse or divert them enough to take it further. In the best cases, that sparks further thoughts or  suggestions or observations from the editor, and that’s even better for the writing. When I co-wrote The Ancestor Cell for the BBC, Stephen Cole was a good audience for me, and I for him.

The final audience is the reader or the listener, and reaction from them comes a lot later—in reviews or in the e-mail that people send me, or occasionally when I attend conventions. It’s always great to hear from them how much they have enjoyed my writing.

An additional audience for audios, which I hadn’t thought too much about before writing Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre, is the cast. Their reaction to the script is a direct component of the final product. Their belief in it, their enthusiasm for the words, their understanding of the story, are vital. And I think any author has to love getting a positive reaction from talented actors.

If you were writing Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre again today, what—if anything—would you change?

I don’t know that I’d change all that much. With more time, maybe I’d have seen if anything could be dropped from earlier on to allow for that additional confrontation scene in the turbine room. There are one or two bits of dialogue and business I might have tidied up to make the logic of the final edit clearer. If things had been different for Patricia Maynard’s availability, I’d perhaps have featured her more in the earlier parts of the script. But on the whole, I think it all worked out rather well.

I’m particularly interested in any deleted or alternative scenes—i.e. scenes that were cut from earlier drafts of the Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre script or scenes that were changed considerably by the final draft. Are you able to send me any? Or point me in the right direction?

I’ve attached a couple of these [they also appear on this web site] from the draft before Hilda Winters was introduced into the script. The first is the train scene where Sarah and Wendy discuss Planet Three (while this is going on, you’ll recall, Josh and Nat are talking in hospital about the Scalar company—that scene didn’t change). The second is the “reveal” where Sarah first finds out that Wendy Jennings isn’t who she seems.

And I’ve already mentioned the final scene that I dropped from the outline (above).

One final thing (for now!)… The plug! Using as many—or, indeed, as few—words as you like, could you sell ‘Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre’ to readers of the Big Finish book who haven’t yet bought a copy of the CD? A free advertisement! An opportunity to bump up your royalty cheques! Tell our readers what Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre is about and why everyone should buy a copy…

What’s it about? It’s about a tenner. Go and buy it, you’ll love it. In fact, buy two copies, and give one to a friend.

And, erm, one other final thing… There will be a bullet-point section in the chapter on Sarah Jane Smith entitled ‘Things to listen out for…’ or ‘Stuff you may have missed…’ or ‘Trivia’ or something. So, do you have any random titbits of trivia on Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre for me to include? Or how about any in-jokes in the script? Point them out to me! Nothing is too insignificant. No, really! Any bits of info that haven’t been covered by the questions above…

• Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre has a continuity link to my Sarah-and-K9 story ‘Moving On’ in Decalog 3.
• I wrote two versions of the “Writer’s Notes” for the CD booklet, and let Gary choose which he preferred.
• Harris was originally a South African called Willem Dehaan.
• I made up Bandaru Chakravarty’s name by picking two different names from an Indian government site. In my first-draft outline he was called Dean Stolz! Chakravarty isn’t credited on the CD booklet, he is listed only as one of the two taxi drivers.
• Wendy Jennings was originally revealed to be Helena Cartwright, the CEO of BioGuard (a company that was mentioned earlier in the series). I think it was BioGuard—I may be getting confused with an underarm deodorant.
• Displaying my ignorance of London roads, I wrote a scene where Sarah’s taxi takes her from West London to Heathrow via the M25.
• Sarah’s original alias on her business card was “Jane Bowman, Writer”.
• My ten-year old son took the Author photo that appears in the CD booklet.
• Because of the events of The Ancestor Cell (which I wrote for BBC books with Stephen Cole), fans hold me responsible for the destruction of all the available K9s. [This was true at the time of this interview.]

RIGHT, THAT’S ALL FOR NOW. YOU CAN GO AND HAVE A LIE DOWN.

Thankszzzzzzzzzzz.

© Peter Anghelides 2003, 2009