Film versus video

I wrote this article for the CMS Publishing partwork “An Adventure in Space & Time.” I wrote it in 1986 about a story I’d watched on TV in 1972 when I was at primary school. That was a 14 year difference, by which time I was at university. So I am republishing it here on my blog after a gap almost twice as long as that.

This was the first thing that publisher Jeremy Bentham ever commissioned from me. Subsequently, I learned that he’d used it as a sort of “audition piece” for the work I later did on the CMS partwork “In-Vision” which I edited with Justin Richards from 1988.

I find it interesting to read something I wrote half a lifetime ago. I’ve not changed the wording, so it still contains some inelegant phrasing that I’d now avoid. I wish I’d provided detailed references to my source material – for example, where my research revealed the mechanics of early videotape edits, or even the book in which I read the essay from which I quote David Hare. However, that wasn’t the house style for CMS at the time.

And of course the world of TV production – funding, scheduling, transmission, technology and so on – has utterly changed since 1986, let along since “Carnival of Monsters” was made over forty years ago. This is therefore a period piece, and perhaps that’s appropriate for the 50^th anniversary year for Doctor Who.

Film versus video

“Stale overlit shells in a great circle” is how the BBC Television Centre’s studios were once described by writer and director David hare. “Film is free,” he observed in 1982, declaring video to be “the hopeless hybrid between theatre and film.”

Doctor Who has from the beginning been made in electronic television studios, which is the traditional production methos for BBC drama programmes. The “ground rules” for drama production – as for all other types of television production – were established at the Alexandra Palace studios in the 1930s. Subsequent moves to the Lime Grove and Riverdale studios, and then to the Television Centre at White City in the 1960s, improved the facilities available but had little bearing on the way in which programmes were actually made.

The advantages of studio production are bound up in the cost-effectiveness of heavy investment in permanent resources. Large multi-camera studios are worked for six and a half days a week, with half a day for maintenance. In 1972, when “Carnival of Monsters” was made, it was possible to produce thirty minutes of programme per day, the same as had been achieved in the early black-and-white years of television. This is more than twice the amount of film produced on an average say’s film shoot.

However, location recording for drama was required fairly early on in television’s history, led particularly by children’s drama productions. As Shaun Sutton observed in The Largest Theatre in the World [BBC, 1982] youthful adventure scripts required fights, chases and outdoor movement. With early outside broadcast television cameras limited by the length of cable from Alexandra palace, it was logical to make use of established film technology to provide short sequences for insertion into drama programmes being broadcast live. The use of such film inserts not only gave greater flexibility and realism than false perspective sets or filmic back projection, it also allowed the next scene to be set up in the studio while the insert was running (a production breather, in effect).

Even when technological advances made it possible to pre-record sequences or whole programmes on videotape, film still had the advantage of being much easier to edit. At first, the only way videotape could be edited was by physically cutting the tape with a razor blade then splicing it together again, the whole operation carried out by an experienced editor peering through a magnifying glass. Each edit took approximately ten minutes to perform and rendered the tape unsuitable for later reuse.

By the mid-Sixties, when electronic videotape editing became available, film was already well-established as the preference for exteriors in drama; indeed, the “realistic” drama of BBC programmes such as The Wednesday Play (later Play for Today) was celebrated for tackling issues in the film medium, achieving not only a more natural performance but also a greater freedom for programme makers from in-production observation by potentially censorious executive personnel. Television OB had been demonstrated as popular for live current affairs and sports programmes, but early attempts at drama OB were hampered by the OB units’ “house style” for covering live events, which depended to a greater extent on the initiative of the cameraman and less on the scripting of a writer and director.

Film and video were thus being used together in television drama fairly extensively by the time “Carnival of Monsters” was made. However, the two media look very different on screen, as can be seen when the Doctor and Jo move from the deck of the SS Bernice (film) into the cabins (studio) or from the Drashig’s domain (film) into the cave (studio). This can be accounted for by the fundamental differences between film and video and the different ways in which they are used during production.

Film is the recording of images on a one-off basis by chemical and mechanical means; video is the electronic registration of images onto magnetic tape. Film sound is recorded separately from the pictorial image and dubbed on later; studio sound is recorded on the videotape along with the image. Film has traditionally been single-camera, with each framed shot being lit separately according to what that image has to say when edited into the complete sequence; video, most obviously in the studio, is multi-camera, and a set is lit so as to allow the recording of a sequence of shots from several cameras whose pictures are selected and edited as live by the vision-mixer (and during this process there is the continual need to avoid shooting off the edge of the set or allowing in sound booms or their shadows). Location filming is traditionally completed before the studio work (following the Hollywood precedent), and to an extent defines the later performances. Studio performances are more continuous, and time is at more of a premium when it comes to the consideration of second takes, particularly if there is an effects sequence to be achieved live. Film has problems which cannot be so readily spotted as video, inflexibilities, which are part of the filmic process: print “sparkle,” black lines and obstructions in the film gate can be discovered only when the “rushes” have been developed. Studio tape, however, can be replayed at once, even to check continuity. Furthermore, tape accepts degrees of light that film will not, and a studio is a far more controllable environment than a location: Britain, after al, does not have a climate, it only has weather.

The particular differences in 1972 were also bound up with the growth of colour television. Whereas film had been working in colour since before television’s birth, the BBC had been making colour programmes on a regular basis only since 1969. One consequence of the introduction of colour to Doctor Who was that black-and-white Overlay effects could be dropped in favour of three-colour CSO – a technique much in evidence in “Carnival of Monsters.” This meant that there was no longer any need for sharp brightness contrasts in video effects shots; instead, sharp colour contrasts were required.

John Logie Baird had first demonstrated large-screen colour television in low definition in 1928, and the post-war BBC experimental television group had made use of the defunct Studio A in Alexandra palace for experimental transmissions after closedown in 1955. America’s CBS had adopted the 525-line NTSC colour system in 1953, and this was to form the basis of Britain’s 625-ine PAL system of 1966. the constraint in Britain was that the Television Advisory Committee had required any colour system to be available also in black and white on existing monochrome sets. And when colour drama was first transmitted, the “stale overlit shells” were flooded with the light required for PAL recording, such that the mostly-overhead studio lights produced a comparatively “flat” image, albeit in a variety of garish colours (especially in historical costume drama). Location film was able to draw upon a longer tradition of colour lighting and shot composition, and the contrast between studio and film images was understandably more stark than it had been before. This is most apparent in “Carnival of Monsters” where there is a simultaneous image comparison: Vorg’s hand on video) swatting the Drashig’s (on film) is a good example of this, as is the film plesiosaurus viewed from the studio cabin.

As colour television techniques developed and video recording equipment became more refined, the difference in discernible picture quality between the sharp accuracy and “presence” of video and the subtler, “atmospheric” potential of film would become smaller. It is the starkness of video lighting which reveals the greay bald-wigs of the Inter Minorians so obviously in “Carnival of Monsters,” while the detail on the Doctor’s jacket or the character Claire’s dress is less noticeable on film than in the studio. However, Doctor Who would continue in the Pertwee years to make use of film mainly for traditional purposes: effects shots and exteriors which were too difficult or to expensive to achieve in a controlled studio environment.

Filling the gap

I’m delighted to confirm that my audio Blake’s 7: Warship was so successful that Big Finish has invited me to write three new scripts. Like my original one, they will be full-cast audios starring the original characters, and fill in the secret history of the first half of the programme’s history. The series will be called: “Blake’s 7: Filling the Gap.”

• “They must come to us.” But just how did the Decimas reach their final destination? Find out in The Web Planet, featuring Deep Roy as all the Decimas.
• What was the aftermath of “Breakdown”? You’ll be amazed by the answer in No Limit, with Alistair Lock playing Gan.
• And most excitingly of all, what happened that caused such a change in our favourite Space Commander? Discover the truth as Stephen Grief and Brian Croucher star in The Two Travises.

Furthermore, there is perceived to be another, significant gap in audio publishing – a gender gap. So, in the light of recent publicity about the disparity in girl writers, I have graciously convinced Big Finish to publish my scripts under the pseudonym “Stephanie Ledger.”

It’s the right thing to do, even if it’s a shame to lose my surname – because that would continue to suggest there are more foreigners writing for the company, in a publishing house hitherto best known for English surnames like Morris, Richards, Cole, Lyons, Briggs, Russell, Barnes, Morris, Wright, Robson, Briggs, and Morris.

Nevertheless, it’s an exciting time to demonstrate this new commitment to gender diversity. New adventures for our favourite characters. More work for me. And a wider range of women’s names on the merchandise that adorns the shelves of fandom.

The first audio should be available for pre-order later this year, with a proposed publication date of a year from today.

Good companions

What a splendid day I had yesterday at the Big Finish Day 3 event in Barking.

• I met lots of lovely people who said equally lovely things about stuff I’ve written.
• I spoke on a panel about Blake’s 7 audios along with star Michael Keating, producer David Richardson, director Ken Bentley, sound wizard Alistair Lock, writer Simon Guerrier, and the gestalt entity Cavan Scott/Mark Wright.
• I took part in a Writing Workshop, ably moderated by Matt Fitton.
• I listened in as Tony Whitmore and Laura Cowen recorded for the Doctor Who Podcast.

I also was pleased to chat with Kenny Smith, whose labour of love has just been published. It’s the Big Finish Companion Volume 2, and I commend it to you.

It quotes hundreds of people, including almost every writer, several Doctors, many companions, and loads of musicians, directors, sound designers, and cover artists.

Kenny was interviewed about it himself.

Here’s the full interview that I did with Kenny last year. To see how he has skilfully woven this into the book, and enjoy loads more fantastic stuff, go to the Big Finish website and buy the book.

 

Kenny Smith: How much did Ferril’s Folly change between your initial pitch for it, and the finished storyline?

Peter Anghelides: Quite a bit, and hardly at all! There was a long delay between it being pitched and then the final version that was produced. It was only in the latter stages that it was actually under contract for a Companion Chronicles At one stage, I was one of the authors invited to pitch for the BBC Audio series that became “Hornet’s Nest”, which at the time had the rather splendid code name “Felt Hat”. So I worked up a version of “Ferril’s Folly” (possibly called “The Iron Lady” at that stage. Commissioning Editor Michael Stevens eventually went with Paul Magrs for all of those audio readings, which also turned out to be a sort of halfway thing between Companion Chronicles and full-cast audios. And in any case, Michael also recognised the origins of “The Iron Lady” because he gets to see Big Finish’s prospective storylines in his role at BBC Audio (now AudioGO). That version would have had the Doctor as the principal narrator, rather than Romana.

After that, Big Finish was making one of its occasional attempts to tempt Tom Baker to do their full-cast audios, and I re-jigged things as one of my suggestions for that. Alas, that came to nothing, either.

Some years after I’d first got the thumbs up for the Companion Chronicles version, I asked Big Finish whether they still wanted it, because I had some time free up to write it. And they said “oh, yes please” in a way that suggested they’d never thought otherwise. So we finally signed contracts, and I delivered it as originally planned – and in very much the same form that I had originally proposed.

Can you briefly explain why it was delayed after it was first announced?

I had agreed with Big Finish that the outline was what they wanted. But before we signed contracts, they also asked me to write the finale for their Key 2 Time audio plays trilogy, a story that became “The Chaos Pool”. As that was a full-cast audio, not to mention too good an opportunity to miss, I agreed. I was also contracted to write a Torchwood novel with BBC Books, and there was a wodge of other non-Who stuff I was working on at the same time.

I explained to Big Finish that I wouldn’t have time for everything, and did not want to commit that I would deliver scripts only to let them down. I asked them which they wanted more – the Companion Chronicles or “The Chaos Pool”. They chose the latter, so that’s what I was contracted for. There was also some consideration that a story based during the first Key to Time sequence was a bit too close to their Key 2 Time stories. So as well as deferring my audio, and because they had already lined up Mary Tamm to participate, they commissioned a replacement “first Romana” story from Nigel Fairs called “The Stealers from Saiph”, and set it after “the Armageddon Factor”.

And as I mentioned earlier, other work and alternative versions of the story meant I didn’t get around to writing the script for several years.

Was finding a Key to Time device hard to include, and to explain away its lack of being found in the story?

I rather liked the idea of them not quite succeeding in a mid-season story, so I knew that I wanted them to find the segment and then have it slip from their grasp at the last minute. I then worked in a reason why they would have to let that happen – it’s a conscious decision, not a careless oversight.

I also decided on a distinctively different item for the segment’s disguise. We already knew it could be as varied as jewellery or a planet or a religious totem, and influenced other items around it. Plus there’s a lovely bit of dialogue in Jonathan Clements’ Key 2 Time script “The Destroyer of Delights” that suggests segments could be a grain of sand, or a leopard’s tooth, or a blob of molten lava, or even an atom of snot. That speech inspired me to make my segment something in a distant part of the galaxy that had then “infected” the meteoroid that brought it to Earth.

How did you find writing for the first Romana, having written for her second incarnation before?

I love that original “Key to Time” season. Much as I also enjoy Lalla Ward’s performance, I always wanted more stories with Mary Tamm’s incarnation… and this was a great excuse to do one. With another Riomana also in “The Ancestor Cell”, I suppose I’ve written rather a lot for the character now. There’s probably a collective noun: “A snoot of Romanas”, perhaps.

What did you think of the finished play, given its lengthy gestation period?

It’s wonderful to hear the final version, because it’s the application of acting and directing and sound and music and editing talent to my original script. Plus, I got to attend the recording in the studio, and that’s always great fun.

Any assorted bits of trivia, like origins of character names, etc?

Ferrill is obviously derived from “ferrous”, because of her affinity for iron. I originally called the scientist Öpik after an Estonian astronomer called Ernst Öpik. I found out about him because his son Lembit was, until recently, a Member of Parliament who spoke up about the dangers of asteroids striking the Earth – which in a way sadly typical of modern politics earned him derision rather than a thought that he might have an informed view. The script uses the phonetic spelling “Erpik” because there’s no point making life unnecessarily difficult for the actors.

I smuggled in other characters called “Clark”, “Stanford”, and “Andrews”, so that I had the excuse at one point to have a sentence that read: “The Doctor, Andrews, Stanford, Clark, and the others all raced out of the pub.” Because I knew that would make one of my colleagues who listens to the audios, an IBM Distinguished Engineer called Dr Andy Stanford-Clark, leap out of his chair in surprise when he heard it.

There’s also a vintage car joke in the dialogue somewhere. It was the sort of thing I imagined Tom Baker would have introduced as an ad lib during Season 16 rehearsals. See if you can spot it.

Any idea where in their timelines “The Four Doctors” story takes place for each of the Doctors, continuity-wise?

I have no idea. Any suggestions? I certainly didn’t worry about it when I wrote the script, and it doesn’t affect the narrative.

One imaginative reviewer suggested where they would each fit in, based on all sorts of things I didn’t even think – or wouldn’t even have known about, such as the costume worn by Sylvester McCoy on the front cover.

The first draft featured a reference to Charley Pollard being elsewhere in the TARDIS while the Doctor is gallivanting about. I don’t know whether that counts.

GallifreyOne 2013

I am delighted to be attending GallifreyOne again this year. They have just published their final program schedule.

I am participating in some panels, autograph sessions, and a kaffeeklatsch. At this point, I’d be urging people to sign up to attend if they had not already done so, but the entire event is already sold out.

I shall try to tweet while I’m there, though my experience of the hotel wifi is that it’s (a) sporadic and (b) expensive. But if you follow me on Twitter, I may tweet some thoughts and photos if I get the chance. But you’ll need to provide your own kaffee when reading them.

Spelling B7

I’ve been pondering the accuracy of my spelling when writing Warship for Big Finish at the end of last year. Big Finish does make an effort to get spellings correct wherever possible (yes, even though the occasional spelling of Bayban may seem to have been butchered).

Mostly obviously, one can rely on sources for things seen on screen. Literally in some cases — names that appear in Blake’s court records, for example, in “The Way Back.” In some episodes, there are displays on the flight deck that may repay attention with a freeze frame, a magnifying glass, and a mirror. (Or it is Flight Deck?)

Another kind of “seen on screen” is in the titles. “Blake” in “Blake’s 7″ at the start of every episode, for example. Or “Soolin” in the end credits of every episode in Season D. And usually, you can rely on Radio Times credits being written by the production team and therefore correct for planet names or characters.

A third kind of seen on screen is in the subtitles. That’s trickier, because some subtitles could be phonetic, but they are available on officially licensed merchandise, and that may count for something. There are downloadable subtitles on the web, but I’m not always sure of their provenance.

Original scripts? Not everyone has access to the original scripts — and even then, the scripts may be inconsistent (because dialogue is written to be said, not seen, so it hardly matters) even within the same script. I think this may be where the mismatch between “tarial cell” and “tarriel cell” comes from. Since I once wrote a couple of B7 encyclopaedias called Tarial Cell, you can work out my preference.

There are the novelisations — which would have been based on the scripts, and so one might anticipate the spellings would be correct there, or as correct as the original scripts. Trevor Hoyle’s novelisation of “Orac” in his Project Avalon book uses “Tarial Cell” whereas Tony Attwood’s novel Afterlife adopts “Tarriel Cell.”

There are online transcripts, but those may rely more on phonetic approximations by the transcribers — and sometimes, those may be inconsistent, too.

BBC Picture Publicity used to make photos available to the press with captions stencilled on the back of them. So that’s another “official” source that you might expect to be (usually) accurate.

The Tony Attwood Programme Guide is another source, and was not only licensed by Terry Nation’s company but also had the support of production team members. That prefers Tarriel Cell, incidentially, including capitalisation. Boo! It also includes “Galactic Monopoly” which I don’t think was ever officially used in the TV series for its appearance in (for example) “Terminal.”

There’s Wikipedia, too — for example, that has a list of Blake’s 7 planet names.

The splendid Sevencyclopedia (ah, do you see what they did there?) has lots of detail, and sometimes offers variant spellings.

There are other books like Blake’s 7: The Inside Story (Nazzaro/Wells) which was co-written by a production member and uses original sources. And there is Liberation: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Blake’s 7 (Stevens/Moore) which is written by dedicated enthusiasts who have also done B7 spinoffs. Don’t be put off by the title, it is well researched.

Some examples…

As I explain, I prefer “tarial cell” to “Tarriel Cell.” But is it lower case (as in solar cell or photovoltaic cell) or capitalised (as in Phillips screwdriver or Allen key) or both capitalised? I’m not aware of anything in the TV series or spinoffs that lend credence to one or the other (e.g. naming it after, say, Ensor’s first wife Jane Tarial who he met at university, or something). And we don’t seem to use “Teleport Bracelet” rather than “teleport bracelet.” So I prefer lower case (as does Sevencyclopedia). But I’ve even seen the variant “Tariel Cell” somewhere too. Tsk!

I think the spelling of Jenna’s last-known destination is “Morphenniel” because that’s what the subtitles say in “Powerplay” and it is also used by Sevencyclopedia and Wikipedia. Nevertheless, the Programme Guide spells it as “Morphaniel” (which I have not seen in other reference sources).

Similarly, I prefer “Sarran” as the planet where we first meet Dayna — that’s what is used in the Programme Guide, the DVD episode subtitles, the Sevencyclopedia, and Wikipedia. But Liberation adopts “Sarren,” and I think The Inside Story does that, too.

I think the best thing is to avoid the most egregious errors, and stay consistent within the BF books.

Sarah Jane interview

Occasionally people ask me to do interviews for book and fanzines. Recently, Kenny Smith was asking about the Sarah Jane Smith audio that I wrote for Big Finish for a forthcoming Big Finish Companion. That reminded me that I’d done an interview for Will Brooks and his Sarah Jane fanzine (to be published in the new year). And that in turn reminded me that I’d done an interview with Ben Cook in 2003 for a previous Big Finish book.

The way these things work is that I answer questions and the authors chop out the boring bits and weave the rest into their publication. So for the sake of nostalgia, here’s the Q&A I did for Ben back in 2003.

GENERAL QUESTIONS ABOUT WRITING ‘MIRROR, SIGNAL, MANOEUVRE’

Okay, a bit of background information … When and how did you get into DOCTOR WHO?

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 Doctor is Rowan Atkinson.

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, and 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 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 in a wheelchair. 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’s 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-Aliya 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.

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, 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, http://anghelides.org [that was the old site, before this blog] 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 (below) 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 ‘Thing 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). 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.

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

Thankszzzzzzzzzzz.

Changed scenes.

20. Int. Bangalore/Coimbatore train.

CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS SCENE. RAILWAY STATION SOUNDS AS BEFORE FROM OUTSIDE. MORE MUTED AS THE TRAIN DOOR SLAMS SHUT. GUARD’S WHISTLE AGAIN.

SARAH: [CONTINUED.] … I thought I might have missed you.

TRAIN STARTS OFF, AND BUILDS SPEED THROUGHOUT THE SCENE.

WENDY: Don’t worry, I hadn’t forgotten you. Here’s your ticket.

SARAH: Thanks.

WENDY: You look worried. I thought you might be more relieved to have got here. Any messages?

SARAH: Nothing new at the office. Now, once we get going, can I have a look at the stuff you’ve got on Scalar’s work? The stuff about Cynaro?

WENDY: Ah. [BEAT] That’s all back at the Planet Three office. In the files. On the server. Damn.

SARAH: [SOFTLY.] Because you can’t get back in to get it. Since you were made redundant.

WENDY: Oh. How long have you known?

SARAH: Long enough, it doesn’t matter. We can still work on this story together. If you want to.

WENDY: I got into journalism quite late, when some of my contemporaries were thinking about early retirement. I spent much of my early career running events, scientific research, and only recently into science journalism.

SARAH: So why leave?

WENDY: Planet Three had to rescue the company share price. They’d bid too high to retain their licence at renewal time, so they laid off the older and more expensive staff. It was such a generous redundancy offer that it seemed stupid to say “no”.

22. Int. Bangalore/Coimbatore train.

STEAM TRAIN HAS REACHED FULL SPEED NOW: THE USUAL CHUFFING SOUNDS AND RATTLING OF THE TRACK.

SARAH: So, Wendy, what’s the set-up when we reach Scalar?

WENDY: Remember you said Planet Three hadn’t removed your voicemail access?

SARAH: Yes.

WENDY: Well look, Sarah. They forgot to reclaim my I.D. and journalist accreditation. So I’ve used it to get an interview with Scalar’s C.E.O.

SARAH: It’s not a very flattering photo of you. Reminds me of someone, but I can’t remember who. An old school friend, maybe.

WENDY: Poor woman, if she looks like that! And less of the “old”, if you don’t mind. I can’t be more than five years older than you.

SARAH: Sorry. Though I haven’t been very kind to my friends back home, recently. Maybe I should call them.

WENDY: Put your mobile away. We’re in the valley now, you won’t get a signal. Talk to them when we reach Coimbatore. If the time difference isn’t too bad.

SARAH: They work odd hours, my friends.

WENDY: Can journalists have close friends, d’you think? Can one get that get that level of trust if they know you’re an investigative journalist?

SARAH: I think so. Yes. [BEAT.] I hope so.

WENDY: What about the people involved in your stories. Do you keep in contact? Ever wonder what happened to them?

SARAH: What, do follow-up pieces on them?

WENDY: That’s not really what I asked, is it Sarah?

BRING UP THE RATTLE OF THE TRAIN TRACKS AND CROSS-FADE IT INTO THE NEXT SCENE.

==========================================

33. Int. CEO’s office.

FADE IN.

BIG PLUSH OFFICE, LOTS OF CARPET AND BIG CURTAINS TO ABSORB THE SOUND. BUT THEY WILL RAISE THEIR VOICES A BIT BECAUSE IT’S A BIG ROOM.

DEHANN: In you go.

SARAH: Wendy! Thank goodness. Look who I’ve brought with me from Lakshadweep. And did I mention my lunatic taxi driver from London? [PAUSE.] Wendy, are you OK?

WENDY: You’ve got that worried look again, Sarah.

SARAH: You’re not all right, are you? What have they done?

CHAKRAVARTY: I’ll get the car ready.

WENDY: Yes, all right Chakravarty. Dehaan, you stay here.

SARAH: Wendy?

WENDY: Sit down, Sarah.

SARAH: I think I need to.

WENDY: I‘m quite all right, as you can see. [PAUSE.] You really don’t remember me, do you?

SARAH: From Planet Three.

WENDY: [IRRITATED.] No, not from Planet Three. Oh, look closer Sarah. Use your supposedly excellent powers of observation and deduction. I may have lost a bit of weight, got a lot older.

SARAH: [PONDERING.] I thought I recognised your I.D. photograph…

WENDY: You must meet so many people, Sarah. Meet and discard them in your journalistic career. You may profess to care about them. But be honest – all you really care about is the story.

SARAH: You used those words in your defence, didn’t you?

WENDY: Ah, illumination at last.

SARAH: Helena Cartwright. Business executive. You used to run Bio-Guard.

WENDY: [SAVAGELY.] Yes, I used to run Bio-Guard. [CALMER.] You ruined my business twenty years ago.

SARAH: I exposed your company’s irresponsible business practices…

WENDY: [OVER HER DIALOGUE.] That was your story.

SARAH: [CONTINUED.] I exposed your practices, I identified your culpability…

WENDY: [CONTINUED. OVER SARAH’S DIALOGUE AGAIN. LOUDER, ANGRY.] Those were your lies and your misrepresentations.

SARAH: [CONT’D. FIRMLY] … and I got compensation for the miserable victims in your workforce and your customers…

WENDY: [CONTINUED, OVER SARAH’S DIALOGUE AGAIN. FURIOUS.] Enough! That’s enough!

SARAH: [CONT’D. FIRMLY] … and you went to prison for a long, long time. Not long enough it seems.

WENDY: [QUIETLY AFTER SARAH HAS FINISHED SPEAKING.] That is enough. Unless it’s time for a follow-up story on me, Sarah?

SARAH’S MOBILE PHONE RINGS IN HER HANDBAG. SHE IS SURPRISED. OVER THE NEXT FEW SPEECHES, SHE TAKES IT FROM THE HANDBAG AND THE RING TONE GETS LOUDER.

SARAH: Oh!

WENDY: That will be your young colleagues. Calling you to warn you about me. Go on, answer it. But be aware that Mr. Dehaan is trigger-happy.

SARAH: I hope he doesn’t bear you a grudge for the ashtray.

WENDY: I thought Dehaan’s performance was almost as good as mine. Answer it!

================================

Winchester Festival, July 7th

I seem to have forgotten hitherto to say that I’ll be at Winchester’s Discovery Centre tomorrow for a Doctor Who Creative Writing Workshop. The splendid author Simon Guerrier will also be there, as will Voice of the Daleks™ Nick Briggs.

I need to keep up to date. I’ve neglected to mention my talk at a writing group earlier in the year, my panel at EasterCon, and a play and novel that I’ve written for Big Finish. The problem is that I get commissioned for these things, keep quiet because they are TBA, and then neglect to blog about them once they do get announced.

Ein Anderes Leben

My first Torchwood novel,  Another Life, was published in German this year. It’s available in hardback and in Kindle format. To accompany its publication, I also did an interview with my translator,  Susanne Döpke.

As part of a special Doctor Who day recently, the interview was published on a German sf portal here. And while  Google Translate will do you a nice translation of that back into English, I thought you may also like to see my original replies to Susanne.  What I like about this interview is that, as a translator, Susanne was interested in some of the mechanics of writing.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself for the introduction part of this interview?

Over the past decade and and half, I have written dozens of things that tie in to TV series – novels, talking books, audio plays, short stories, even a comic strip. They almost invariably relate to Torchwood or Doctor Who. That’s a TV series I have watched and enjoyed since I was a child.

I used to write amateur short stories and magazine articles even when I was still  at school. So these days, it’s like I am being paid for my hobby! I have a list of what I’ve written on my website http://anghelides.org 

You have been writing a lot of novels based on TV series – what is the difference in writing for established characters as opposed to something completely fictional?

Usually when you write for established characters, you know that they cannot be completely changed by the end of your story. Mostly that’s because the TV series defines who they are, and you’re not supposed to contradict that. You must “return” them to their starting point, because the books are bought by tens of thousands of people whereas the TV series is seen by millions.

As a contrast, Ian Rankin say of his series of novels: “To fully understand and appreciate the growth (and regression) of Rebus (and all the other recurring characters), it is interesting to read the series in the order the books were written.” Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle could have their heroes die when they chose to. But with a TV tie-in, you know your principal cast will survive, and their characters will be the same at the end of your story.

That sounds like a problem for an author, because you really want your heroes and heroines to develop, to be changed by what they experience in your novel. They are the people in the book with whom the reader will identify. If those characters learn nothing, and are unmoved by their experience, the reader will not feel engaged by the story.

One way around that is to create some new characters with whom the reader can identify – but that can’t be at the expense of the regular characters, because those are the reason that the readers bought your book in the first place.

And fortunately, another way around it is that the characters in Torchwood develop, change, even die sometimes on TV. So you can weave some threads in your novel to suggest that the events of your novel contribute to that. There are several actions and events in Another Life like that. Fans of the series recognise it for what it is, and more casual readers just think it’s part of the novel.

How did you get involved with writing novels for Doctor Who and Torchwood?

In 1989, the BBC stopped making Doctor Who for television. Virgin Books began to publish some original Doctor Who novels. Several of my friends wrote for that series, and I also did some short stories for Virgin. When the BBC decided to make a one-off Doctor Who TV Movie in 1996, they also decided to start publishing the books under their own imprint. So I suggested an idea for a novel, and they commissioned it – and after that, they  invited me to write more.

That was a particularly interesting time to write TV tie-in novels. Because the BBC was making no new Doctor Who for television, the people writing the books were able to continue developing the story of Doctor Who without worrying about contradicting the TV series. In that sense, the books were new Doctor Who for the thousands of dedicated fans who wanted fresh stories.

That changed in 2005 when the BBC started making new Doctor Who for TV, and they began to commission a different style of tie-in novel. Then Torchwood was commissioned the following year as an independent programme of its own, using the character of Captain Jack who had first appeared in Doctor Who. So BBC Books had decided from the outset that they would commission tie-in novels to accompany the new series.

I was one of the three authors they commissioned initially, because the publishers and production office thought our previous books were a good track record for the kind of thing they were looking for with these new titles. These new Torchwood books were aimed at an older audience, and were nearly twice as long as their Doctor Who counterparts.

I think BBC Books must have liked  Another Life, because I was the first person they asked to write a second Torchwood novel.

You obviously need to do a lot of research – how did you prepare for writing  Another Life?

I was first approached about writing the novel in April 2006, and it was commissioned the following month. But the first TV series wasn’t broadcast until the end of October 2006. So a lot of my research was to learn about the series concept, the characters, the location, and what was happening in those first 13 episodes without ever having seen the show.

The three novel authors met the script editor, Brian Minchin, who explained all that to us. Brian was terrific – so enthusiastic about the potential of the series, and keen to see the books were properly-researched and well-prepared. The authors also got to see concept artwork for the main set, and some of the props, because that was all still being built at that stage.

 

You have probably rewatched Torchwood for writing the novel – is that another way of watching?

For Another Life, there were no episodes to watch! I wrote the first draft before I’d seen a single broadcast episode. At a late stage, I did get a chance to view the opening episode at a special screening for the BBC productrion and publicity team. My novel was published just before the conclusion of Torchwood series 1’s original TV transmission.

When I wrote my second novel, Pack Animals, that tied in with the second TV series. Things had changed for the characters by that stage, so I was able to read a lot of the series 2 scripts before I wrote my first draft, and even saw some of the episodes before I submitted the book.

Did you get to go on set and, if so, how was that and who did you talk to?

Yes, I went with the other authors to visit the studios in Cardiff, South Wales. The original plan, I think, was to get to a design briefing meeting in June, and subsequently to talk to producer Richard Stokes, his script team, the art department, and the lead publicist. But it wasn’t possible to arrange something at such short notice. The production team were quite understandably almost completely engrossed in the very complex work of creating 13 episodes of a brand new TV series.

We were driven to the studios by a Brand Executive, Matt Nicholls, who gave us some background on various Cardiff locations. And one of the script editors, the marvellous Gary Russell, showed us around the main studio. We saw the sets for some of the regular cast, including the top-floor Victorian flat  where Gwen and Rhys lived, and the Torchwood dungeons where they locked up the alien Weevil. There was a little set for Ianto’s Torchood reception area, too, with tourist brochures in neat piles and newspapers over the windows.

But most exciting of all, we went on the Hub set. It was enormous, and built on two levels right next door to the Doctor Who TARDIS set. The lower level had the Hub’s basin area, full of water. That led up to a level where all the computer work stations stood beside the cog-wheel entrance. Then there was a walkway to the recessed autopsy area, a hexagonal tank with a barred window to one side. We went through Jack’s office with its curved desk and filing cabinets, and then into a small games area before reaching the glass screen doors of the armoury.

From that, a spiral staircase led up to a small landing where we could see Ianto’s coffee machine, and from there into the conference room that dominated the upper level.

Tha balcony around the main hub area had portholes out towards the Bay, and we were told that they would occasionally show fish swimming outside.

I dutifully made notes of things that interested me, things I saw or heard about that gave some insights into the characters – the contents of a noticeboard, the fruit bowls on a desk, one of Rhys’s magazines with the front cover headline saying “get a six-pack stomach in six weeks”, a full-ashtray in Toshiko’s kitchen  (she was originally going to be a chain-smoker who gave up after episode 7).

 

You describe the alien ship very meticulously – do you do sketches of locations for writing?

I’m terrible at drawing. I visualise things, and then write down descriptions in words. For the Torchwood main locations, I had the benefit of seeing them for real. When it’s a hospital or an army camp, I can see those for real or find photos of them. For purley invented things like the alien ship, I work out what I think it will look like so that I can organise the “action” of a scene convincingly.

The location Cardiff itself plays a very important role in Another Life that obviously took a lot of effort – why was that so important to you?
Part of the brief about Torchwood was that Cardiff was central to the series. The Hub is positioned in the heart of the Millennium developments that replaced much of what was Tiger Bay, and the area has beautiful new buildings like the Millennium Centre and the Senedd, right next to the redbrick Pierhead Building that was built a century. And of course there’s the Water Tower, which people now tend to call “the Torchwood tower,”  that allegedly reaches down into the Torchwood Hub. (We had already seen the moss-covered base of the tower in the underground studio set, dripping with water.)

Long before the Water Tower became a tourist attraction for Torchwood fans, we three authors all stood on the flagstone in front of it and had our photo taken.

So with all that in mind, I decided that I was going to make Cardiff one of my „characters“ in the novel, and transform it out of all recognition during the story. Like all the other regular characters, of course, it had to be returned to normal by the end of the book!

Are you from Wales, or do you speak Welsh? 

No, I don’t speak any Welsh at all. Prior to this, the only time I had been to Wales was for family holidays.

The novel features rain and rain and rain – is that a normal thing for Cardiff?

It can be! The last time I took my family to Cardiff, it was very rainy indeed. But I’ve also been to Cardiff when the weather has been beautiful – blue skies and warm sun. In fact, that’s exactly how it was when I went there for my set visit. I knew I was writing a story where a storm would drown the city, and yet I was seeing it in bright sunshine!

 

How did you come up with the storyline for Another Life?

Unlike some other science fiction series, the regular characters in Torchwood don’t always get on together. There’s a rivalry and tension between them at various stages in series 1, that builds to the series climax where Owen confronts Jack. That was one starting point – Owen’s aspirations to take charge, to take the initiative and become like Jack.

The other thing I liked was that throughout series 1 Jack, for his own reasons, has kept everyone but Gwen in the dark about his immortality. So what’s the worst thing that could happen to him? To be possessed by a creature that will not leave him until he dies.

My original story outline was reviewed by Gary Russell and Executive Producer Russell T Davies, and after I got their feedback and approval I used that as the basis for writing the novel.

 

The novel features the simulation game “Second Reality” – is that something you yourself are facinated by? There is “Second Life” after all…

I was interested in virtual reality environment like “Second Life” because people have used them for games and social interaction. But I also see that they have potential for things like training or data analysis through physical interaction.

One of the things I learned early on about the fictional world of Torchwood was that they had lots of computing resources, so I thought they would be able to have lots of other realistic interactions in these “virtual presence” environments – and in a way that would make an interesting story.

 

Reading the novel, I was at first puzzled then fascinated by the first person perspective of the new characters. You have probably been laughing up your sleeve while writing this – can you explain why you did that?

I wanted to start the story in an innovative way that made readers react in the manner that viewers would have reacted when they saw the first episode. And because my alien completely controls its human victims, I thought it was a good way of giving the reader that feeling of being possessed by using the second-person narrative:  ”You stare at the weapons, and don’t make eye-contact with the soldiers. Your face is impassive. You’ll give them no more clues.”

It’s also the sort of thing you get in some online games. Obviously, in modern games you have the immediate point-of-view of the character you’re playing on-screen. In older, text-based online games, that’s how the narrative was explained: “You open the door to reveal a candle-lit bridge over a dark chasm. A huge grey-skinned troll confronts you.” So that echoed the “Second Reality” part of my story.

 

Wasn’t it very hard to keep that up getting to the end of the story in the scene, when dialogue was involved?

Done throughout the book,  second-person narration would have been too alienating, literally. So I reserved it for those scenes where it was the alien point of view. The rest of the novel is in restricted third-person, and mostly the main characters: “Gwen remembered where she’d seen this kid before. He’d been been selling magazines by the covered market.”

That’s the conventional way of handling point-of-view in a modern novel, and to get your reader to identify with your protagonist. So later in the novel, when a sequence featuring one of the regulars is narrated in second-person, that ratchets up the tension – we know what’s happened before to characters in those scenes.

There aren’t many novels that use the second-person throughout. One of the best-known is Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. That’s what I’m alluding to in the opening line of my novel.

 

What is the special horror about this kind of taking over a person’s body?

It’s the literal loss of self. But it’s not a zombie possession, where the original person is killed immediately. Their memories and experiences are all still there. We know from quite early on that the only thing you’ll be able to do when the alien releases you is this: you’ll be able to understand you’re about to die.

 

What about the icky starfish creatures?

What about them? It was one way of describing the alien lifecycle, and it gave me a visible monster for a couple of scenes. Plus I like the fact that each time they encounter one, it’s bigger than the last time.

We are learning a little bit about Owen’s background. How do you create a character like Megan?

There were some limits about what history I could invent for Owen. In part, that’s because the BBC prefers the key information to be explained in the TV series. And the other thing was that they had already started to decide what they might reveal about the main characters when they were planning series 2.

I wanted a character who would already have Owen’s trust because of their prior history – otherwise, I’d have spent a lot of the novel with scenes to establish that trust between strangers. In series 1, Owen was more driven by his selfishness, so it was a quick way of exploiting that weakness in his character for the purposes of my story.

 

Is there a favourite alien that you have in Torchwood?

I like the Weevils. I didn’t want to write a “Weevil” story for my novel, but I did work in a scene that featured one.

 

Is there a favourite alien device of yours? Is it possible for you to invent one for the sake of your story or do you keep a list of cool things?

I devised the Bekaran scanner for Another Life. It’s nice to have some novelty in the book. I was able to use that device as part of the story, but also to allow some amusing interaction between Owen and Megan. I discussed it with my fellow authors for the first few novels, so they referenced it in theirs as well. But I was very pleased when Joe Lidster subsequently reused the scanner in his script for a Torchwood radio play. I think it’s in one of the audio books, too.

My favourite gadget in the TV series is the metal glove from the very first episode. It looks like an old-fashioned armoured gauntlet, but it immediately defies expectations when they use it to bring someone back from the dead. Like any of the gadgets in the show, however, it’s not what it does that’s most important – it’s the aftermath of its use, and the effects on the characters.

 

Who is your favourite character on Torchwood?

I like them all, but I especially liked Owen. Not because he’s a particularly likeable person, however – in many ways, he’s quite unpleasant. But he’s a flawed hero, and that made him very interesting character to write for.

 

What would you like this character to experience? Do you have anything in mind you’d like to share?

It’s tricky to do anything for him now that he’s no longer in the series. I was able to find some interesting and different things for him to do in my second Torchwood novel, Pack Animals, that took into account the changes he experienced in series 2.

 

If you could place one of the Doctor Who aliens in a Torchwood novel – what is your pick?

They have already done it in a couple of Doctor Who stories. Daleks and Cybermen invaded Torchwood London in the episode “Doomsday.”  The Daleks also attack Torchwood Cardiff in “The Stolen Earth.” (That second one also has German Daleks! Although they say “Exterminieren,” and I‘m not sure that’s quite correct.)

 

Any ideas for possible crossovers of Doctor Who and Torchwood?

They have quite different audiences, I think. Torchwood is aimed much more clearly at an adult audience – particularly since the bleak but wonderful series 3 aired. Whereas Doctor Who is a programme designed for the whole family.

 

Hearing that there’s going to be a new season of Torchwood with new characters – what is the first thing that comes to the author’s mind?

Haha! The first thing that came to my mind was: “I wonder if they’re going to commission some tie-in novels?” If they do, I’ll let you know.

Widow’s peekabooboo

Further to my pedantic comments about Doctor Who episode titles… brilliantly, my even more pedantic friends and readers have mentioned further punctuation examples and corrections. Thank you to (so far) the following for comments here or on on Twitter:  David C Lewis, Guido Lippe, Laura Cowen, David Darlington, Steve Roberts, Mags Halliday, Barry Platt, and MerseyMal.

They pointed out my error in saying: “The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe” doesn’t use the serial comma… instead of “The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe” doesn’t use the serial comma… 

They also provided some more examples of  ”titles that contain punctuation” — like “Rider from Shang-Tu”, which is the earliest example, from the William Hartnell story Marco Polo, though someone should tell the BBC website people that.

But my favourites (because this is the acme of pedantry from Jonny Morris) are the Troughton episodes that appeared on-screen in quotation marks! Examples include “The Krotons” and “The Space Pirates”. Or perhaps more accurately,  ”"The Krotons”" and “”The Space Pirates”” I suppose.

And then there were suggestions for other punctuation related titles, my favourites of which were “Question Mark of The Rani” and “The Clause of Axos”, both from Laurie Hooper who therefore wins the internet.

Return to Gauda Prime

 

I had an enjoyable time at recent Blake’s 7 convention in Oxford. I attended as a guest with my B7 audio colleagues David Richardson and Simon Guerrier. So my thanks go to Clare and Diane for the invitation and their hospitality. It was fun to see Gareth Thomas again, and meet Michael Keating properly for the first time. Stephen Greif even turned up at one point.

During the event, Gareth and Michael did a live audio commentary on the final episode, Blake, as part of the convention’s theme: “Return to Gauda Prime”. And it reminded me of my first visit to Gauda Prime 30 years ago, with my two friends Peter Lovelady and Tony Murray. The three of us attended the studio recordings of that final episode.

It’s hard to imagine that happening these days. In recent years, I’ve had the good fortune to get into the Doctor Who and Torchwood studios in Cardiff as part of my work writing novels and audios. But that sort of thing is still rare, and visitors have to sign confidentiality agreements. The most significant scenes are recorded on closed sets, with access restricted only to those with a need to know.

The Blake’s 7 episode we went to see recorded in 1981 included the destruction of Xenon base, the final crash of Scorpio into a forest, the return of Blake, his death at the hands of Avon, and the killing of all the main cast. So you can imagine the confidentiality agreement we had to sign before they would let us into the studio.

None at all. We just turned up.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s all the more surprising we were invited. It came about because the three of us ran a modestly successful fanzine called “Frontier Worlds”. Our friend Jeremy Bentham had worked on the original Doctor Who Weekly, and he’d suggested that we send a portfolio of our work to Stewart Wales, the editor of Marvel’s new tie-in magazine Blake’s 7 Monthly. Stewart saw enough potential to invite us to a meeting in London, and while we were there we could also visit the set of the TV series. Stewart also put us in touch with producer Vere Lorrimer, who invited us to visit a TV recording. The next opportunity turned out to be the penultimate recording day for the final episode of Series D. And at the time, that’s all we knew.

Our first priority on the day was to visit the offices of Blake’s 7 Monthly. We’d anticipated Fleet Street, but it turned out to be a set of rooms up several flights of stairs above a barber’s shop. And by the time we were there, Stewart wasn’t – he’d been called away to a Marvel meeting. We had some lunch and came back, but still no Stewart. Instead we had a chat the former editor of AD: 2000 before scurrying off across town by tube to BBC Television Centre in Wood Lane.

Blake’s 7 was the drama series with which the BBC replaced a police series called Softly, Softly: Task Force.  Like most BBC drama serials, it was recorded on video using a multi-camera set-up in the TV studios  within the Corporation’s main production centre in Shepherd’s Bush. Some external scenes were filmed on location in advance of the studio work.

Ahead of the studio days, the cast would rehearse in a large multi-storey building down the road in Acton (and thus nicknamed the “Acton Hilton”). Rooms the size of a dance floor were arranged so that the outlines of studio sets were marked out with simple poles and tape lines, with perhaps a cardboard miniature of the set design to look at to help visualise everything. The cast would learn their lines and movements (or “blocking”) for the studio days. And the director would plan her camera positions, with the production manager marking up a script with camera moves and edits so that everything was ready for the intensive rehearse-record days to follow in TV studio sessions. Towards the end of the rehearsal period, a “producer’s run” took place for the producer to see the proposed performances and provide any notes he may have.

Typically, technical preparation happened in the morning of a studio day, with the cast prepared in costume and make-up ready for recording sessions in the afternoon and evening – usually completing at or before 10 pm.

For us three visitors, therefore, arriving after lunch on the penultimate studio day meant that we’d get a tour of the sets and a chance to see rehearse-record later in the day.

Vere Lorrimer met us at TV Centre reception – a charming bespectacled man wearing a leather jacket. He shook our hands and invited us to follow him to the studio. He led us through some doors and past the heavy black curtain that encircled the studio. We saw some greenery, and then were brought into the centre of the huge, cold room. The hundreds of ceiling-mounted studio lights were off, and would be switched on later only for the recording, when the room would become a lot warmer as a result.

Between the sets was the paraphernalia of recording – cameras, sound booms, and monitors in colour and black and white because, as the producer explained to us, “some people will be seeing the programme that way at home.” Yes, it really was that long ago. At the time, there were only three TV channels in the UK — BBC1, BBC2, and ITV in its various franchises around the country. Channel 4 was not due to start until the following year, and cable or satellite channels were a distant thought.

We saw various sets from Gauda Prime, including the tracking gallery and the hut in the forest, before we were led past the Scorpio set. That should have been an early clue for us – wires and boxes led from the set all over the place, with a beam hanging ominously from the roof. Vere Lorrimer explained that  this was a fixed set, and Scorpio was wired for explosions later, when pine trees would be placed into the set to make it look as though the ship had smashed into a forest.

As we were about to move on, Vere Lorrimer introduced us briefly to effects man Jim Francis, with whom he had a brief discussion about saving Orac and Slave from the wreckage for some sort of display later on. Peter Tuddenham was going to make a tape for this. I’m not sure if anything ever came of that.

The final set was the flyer, with a huge blue screen behind it to facilitate the Colour Separation Overlay (CSO) that would make it “fly”. Blue was the more usual keying colour for this video effect, whereas these days “green screen” is more familiar than “blue screen” work.

Treading cautiously to avoid setting off any Scorpio explosions, we passed “Orac’s World”, a small enclosed space behind the Scorpio set where Peter Tuddenham provided the voices for the Slave and Orac computers live during the recording. There was a large microphone for Slave, and a close-contact “racing commentator’s” mike for Orac. The familiar Orac whining and squeaking was put on in post-production. Vere Lorrimer explained all this in an enthusiastic running commentary of his own, doing a little impression of each computer in the process.

Peter Tuddenham had told us during a “Frontier Worlds interview” that during Terminal, the concluding episode of the previous season, he discovered that someone had put a bowl of flowers in his little performance space, which was then known as “Zen’s Den”. If only we’d known what was to happen during our studio visit, perhaps this time we could have left a wreath.

We traversed the metal stairs which led up the side of the studio wall to the gallery, where the crew’s most senior staff were at work.

In my next post, I’ll explain more about what we saw during the recording, and what success we had with Blake 7 Monthly.