The Baktek Illusion

November 15, 2023

The Baktek Illusion

Filed under: drwho,writing — Peter A @ 5:12 pm
Tags: doctorwho, drwho, writing

David Tennant and Catherine Tate return to Doctor Who this month, and I’m reminded how much I enjoyed writing adventures for them back in 2008.

One was the BBC Audio Pest Control. It was the first brand new spinoff adventure that David Tennant performed as the Tenth Doctor, and is still on sale in a single CD or a collection

The other was a six-page comic for BBC online, who commissioned it as one of ten stories to demonstrate the capabilities of one of their online interactive elements.

The BBC was keen to have “value add” stuff on its website, and other examples (all now defunct, alas) included a Trailer Maker, the “TARDIS Cam”, “TARDIS Trumps”, and TARDIS Tennis on BBC Sport.

Comic Maker

The Comic Maker was a make-your-own-adventure tool based on a drag-and-drop template that contained backgrounds, character images, speech bubbles, and the other artefacts of a comic strip.

Eight of the commissioned authors were TV writers and script editors: Lindsey Alford, Stephen Greenhorn, Keith Temple, Joseph Lidster, Brian Minchin, Paul Cornell and Helen Raynor.

Two other professional authors, Jacqueline Rayner and I, were asked to write stories too because of our previous work on Doctor Who tie-ins. I had written novels, short stories and audio scripts, and was known to the online team as one of the authors of the Doctor Who Fear Forecast web series.

So I wrote the final comic strip of the ten.

BBC online suggested that we each submit a script and they would create the online version. I thought the Comic Maker tool was impressive and easy to use, and I wanted to create my own comic with it for them to copy across to the public site.

I had great fun devising a narrative and dialogue to make amusing use of the available backgrounds, character expressions and artefacts, and tested it out on my two school-age children.

The Baktek Illusion was my six page comic with appropriate “page turn” moments and reveals, transitions between frames, cropped images, and dozens of individual creatures at one point.

It all went swimmingly well until I got to page six when, to my dismay the Comic Maker site barfed. There was no back up, so I lost everything and my children discovered I knew a number of novel swear words.

Now you see it…

I had taken the precaution of doing some low resolution screengrabs as I went along. And with time running out to get the story complete for the weekly release schedule, I reluctantly sent my script to the BBC online team so that they could reconstruct the pages.

Years later, that Doctor Who online site was replaced with other branded sites such as the (now archived) BBC Doctor Who blog 2005-2022, the new bbc.com Doctor Who landing page, and the comprehensive doctor who.tv site.

The Comic Maker code was abandoned as part of that change, and all ten comics vanished. Unlike other pages on that old site that can still be searched on bbc.co.uk or found in archive.org, the comics pages used Comic Maker as their platform for displaying on the web and are therefore not online anywhere.

Under the circumstances, it’s tempting to say that the whole thing is a bit of a blur. But I remember it quite well – I just don’t have a copy of the original.

If anyone does have an archive of those ten Comic Maker stories, please get in touch. In the meantime, the best that’s available are story summaries on the TARDIS wiki: