Secret History: Doctor Who Song of the Space Whale
How to handle difficult editors: 'This scene hit me like a wet cod.' Plus Pageturners cover reveal and pre-order link!
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 rather special section on Doctor Who, 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
I can finally share the Pageturners cover with you all! It’s by artist Mike Donaldson (of Spacewarp, The Beano and The Broons fame) and I think he’s really knocked it out of the park.
All my lovely paying subscribers will get a free e-book of Pageturners.
And my very generous founding members will each receive a signed paperback edition.
The first Doctor Who post that I kicked off with is free to all readers, but you have to be a paying subscriber for just £5 per month – or £50 for an annual subscription – to read the rest of the posts (there’s a free preview every week).
The Secret History of Doctor Who covers my surprisingly long history with the Time Lord. And it will give you everything you want to know about The Meep: how the Star Beast story originated with the brilliant artist Dave Gibbons, and how it came to be regenerated for the 60th Anniversary TV Special. I’ll be sharing lots of insider stories about the Star Beast that Doctor Who fans will only get to read here.
Doctor Who Song of the Space Whale
Looking back, what happened was an instructive experience for any writer. I learnt a great deal from it. Primarily: how to recognise when you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and walk away. Because, it’s a matter of record, that this really was not a good time for Doctor Who and new writers, especially, would be amongst the casualties.
However, I learnt a lot else beside about scripting, dialogue and working with script editors—so, like the killing of the Space Whales themselves, none of it was wasted.
This will give you an idea of what it’s really like at the coal face.
Chris Bidmead was just leaving the show but said he liked Space Whale very much, although he had reservations about the scientific basis for it.
It was now 1982 and there was a new producer and a new script editor: John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward, respectively. Eric seemed very cool towards Space Whale from the beginning. In retrospect, I realise this because he had inherited rather than chosen the story. He wanted to see what else we had written. So I sent him Night Crawler. He didn’t like our dialogue and it looked as if the project was cancelled. In desperation I quickly wrote some new dialogue which reassured him and the story was on again. John Wagner and I duly turned up at BBC Shepherd’s Bush to meet John and Eric. There we learnt there was a new Doctor, played by Peter Davidson, and a new companion, Adric. Tom Baker’s character is easy to grasp, but John and I both struggled with the rather more low-key character of Peter Davidson.
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.