Secret History: The Magic of Doctor Who
The Secret History of Doctor Who will cover my surprisingly long history with the Time Lord. And it will give you the full lowdown on the Star Beast.
Welcome to my Secret History of Comics, where for the past eleven months I’ve shared with you all my anecdotes and insider knowledge of creating Marshal Law and Charley’s War. Next year I’ll publish these secret histories in book form, along with more secret histories of my most iconic characters.
But this week is special as it marks the start of my Secret History of Doctor Who.
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, out some time in the second half of November. I can’t give you an exact date yet, as it’s dependent on when Star Beast, the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Special, is broadcast! But I will be putting the book on Amazon for pre-order as soon as possible.
I can’t wait to share the Pageturners cover with you all! It’s by artist Mike Donaldson (he of Spacewarp, The Beano and The Broons fame) and it’s a real smasher. More on that soon.
All my lovely generous paying subscribers will receive a free e-book of Pageturners, and my very generous founding members will each receive a signed paperback edition.
This first Doctor Who post is free to all readers, but from next week you’ll 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 will cover my surprisingly long history with the Time Lord. And it will give you the full lowdown on the Star Beast: how the comic book 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.
Paying subscribers have full access to ALL of my Secret History of Comics (plus other perks, check them out), and help me to continue giving you my best writing. I even have a free seven-day trial on Iconoblast, so you can try it first.
Let’s crack on!
John Wagner and I wrote a number of Doctor Who stories, which we submitted to the TV show and also to the comic Doctor Who Weekly.
Some we wrote together, others individually. Star Beast was a comic adventure I wrote solo, but more about that amazing story shortly.
And I’m still crazy about the character to this day! Hence why I found myself recently thinking about a potential Doctor Who story set in World War One entitled No Human’s Land. It was about a real-life, huge, steam-punk, tunnelling machine – a subterene – that was built, at vast expense, to dig under No Man’s Land, emerge beyond the German trenches and lead the Allies to victory. Instead, it got stuck in the mud and it’s still there under the Western Front today! But in my fictional version, it keeps on tunnelling deep into the earth and breaks through into a subterranean, alien world, and … no, I have to stop there.
It happens to me all the time. UFOs feature constantly in science fiction, including in Doctor Who, but no one has done a story as far as I know about biological UFOs. With the noted exception of Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Horror of the Heights about an air jungle of creatures that live in our outer atmosphere.
But what he’d described I have actually seen myself – okay, a rather tamer version. I had my own Close Encounter. A group of UFO devotees invited me to see UFOs on a flight path close to where they lived. As cynical then as I am now, I nevertheless had to check it out. The glowing lights in the sky duly appeared, unexplainable in normal scientific terms, and then one drew closer. It was an amoeba-like blob, with a kind of jelly-fish propulsion, pulsing across the night sky.
There are photos of these ‘critters’ in Cosmic Pulse of Life by Trevor James Constable. They can be seen on www.tarrdaniel.com. You also should be able to find them on Google images.
Anyway, I remember being disappointed that it was just this big blob in the sky, rather than an impressive piece of Steven Spielberg hardware. The devotees, however, saw ‘the critter’ as just that: a ‘silver ship’ and kept exclaiming that it was ‘beautiful’. They were seeing what they wanted to see and it was very different to me. The critter must have been altering their perception. This was born out by a sense that it was probing my consciousness, filling my mind with a feeling of euphoria. What an equally cynical colleague of mine called ‘beads for the natives’, designed to sucker us into believing these entities are benign. I would describe it as a psychic drug, so my subconscious reaction was to resist it: ‘Get the frag out of my head!’
I’m still baffled why they’re never to my knowledge mentioned in science fiction or ufology circles. It’s like they don’t exist – but they do. More likely, they don’t fit our mechanistic world view of reality, so they tend to be ignored. But whether you believe them or not, I found myself thinking – they would make for a great Doctor Who story. What if, for example, a grim Conan Doyle said The Horror of the Heights was all true? Because he must have got his inspiration from somewhere. What if he, too, saw the sky critters as ‘beautiful ships’ but then… Stop! I really mustn’t go there.
Real life is a constant source of inspiration. Like the Vatican observatory in Arizona manned by Jesuits who are searching for alien life in the cosmos. They kicked the Apache Indians off their sacred mountain, insisting they needed to see written records for their proof of ownership. Unfortunately, the Indians didn’t have any; it’s not part of their tradition. These astronomers are then on record as saying, if they make contact with aliens, they will need to convert them to Christianity. Truly! And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, their telescope is called Lucifer. Supposedly, this stands for ‘Large Binocular Telescope Near-infrared Utility with Camera and Integral Field Unit for Extragalactic Research,’ So that’s a relief. But, suitably modified, it sounds like a natural story for Doctor Who, doesn’t it? I could really see the dramatic possibilities, but, in the end, I used it in Slayer in my comic Spacewarp.
And then there’s Charles Fort, after whom strange Fortean phenomena is named. I’ve researched the writer’s life and, I tell you, he’s a natural for a Doctor Who, which would have to be called The Book of the Damned, after Fort’s most popular book.
The synchronicity never seems to stop. It’s the Magic of the Muse, of course. Just before writing and editing this final section of Pageturners, I wrote the opening chapter of my forthcoming novel The MI7 Assassin, set in World War One. The protagonist has as his HQ a gravedigger’s cottage in the very Gothic Brompton cemetery. There are real-life catacombs beneath the cottage which I’m sure will be useful later. Anyway, I thought I should read up on the cemetery just to see if there was anyone famous buried there I might feature in the novel. And I just couldn’t believe what I found…
There’s a six-metre tall, beautiful mausoleum that claims to be a time machine! It’s believed to be inspired by H.G. Wells classic The Time Machine. ‘The story goes that Bonomi discovered the secret of time traveling from hieroglyphs he saw on one of his (Egyptian) expeditions.’ With an inventor, he convinced a widow, Hannah Courtoy, to ‘design and build a mausoleum that would actually be a time machine. By placing their device in a cemetery, they ensured that no one would interfere with their journey through time, since cemeteries are rarely changed.’ (Read the full story here) There are weird symbols on the door to the mausoleum and, even stranger, the key to the interior is missing!
I did a quick check on Doctor Who fandom sites and I was surprised to find, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t featured as a story already.
And so I found myself thinking up a possible Doctor Who adventure involving the ‘Tardis mausoleum’ when I really should have been working on The MI7 Assassin.
The possibilities on the character are truly endless.
And that is the magic of Doctor Who.