Secret History: Doctor Who - mystery of the Space Whale solved!
“Stop! Stop!” insisted the script editor. “Let me ask you a simple question. Was Eric the commissioning editor?”
Welcome to my Secret History of Comics, where I’ve shared with you all my anecdotes and insider knowledge on Marshal Law and Charley’s War. Next year I’ll publish these in book form, along with more secret histories of my most iconic characters.
Now we’re in a special Doctor Who section, in the run-up to the transmission of Star Beast, the first Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Special!
All my Doctor Who posts will be collected and published in my new book Pageturners: How To Create Iconic Stories From The Creator of 2000AD.
Pageturners is available for pre-order now!
The e-book can be pre-ordered now, and both e-book and paperback will go on sale on 26th November, after Doctor Who and the Star Beast has broadcast.
Last week I described my efforts to please Doctor Who script editor Eric Saward with my Song of the Space Whale script. After much rewriting, he was finally pleased, and we went out to lunch to celebrate.
Then, around three months later, he wrote to tell me he had changed his mind and Space Whale was dead. He felt, on further reflection, the characters were flat. After hanging on in there for four seasons, it was finally cancelled.
As you can imagine, I was completely floored by the news.
Unless you’re very lucky, or a writing genius, such tough experiences are likely to happen to most writers at some point, so there’s no real way to escape them. Hopefully it won’t be as traumatic as my experience. My way of dealing with such setbacks is to understand them and that’s what I’d absolutely recommend to new writers. If you know what’s really going on—it may be office politics or personality clashes or your story genuinely hasn’t got it—you take back your power and you can cope with the disappointment.
Or, in this case, if you realise what’s going on in time—bail!
With this in mind, some time later, I went to a writer’s workshop weekend.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Iconoblast to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.