Guest Stars

I imagine any reader of this blog, if there are any such people - and hello to you if you're out there and indeed reading this! - must be tiring of me chronicling my Doctor Who Magazine contributions here. But sod it - this blog is for me really, I doubt anyone is reading, and it's still a pleasant and flattering novelty to be paid for professional writing work!

So just a quick note to point out that I have some pieces in the latest Doctor Who Magazine special edition, which was published earlier this month. This particular special highlights some of the guest stars who have appeared in the programme down the decades - 100 of them, in fact. 10 of them received feature profiles in the publication, and I was asked to write five of these.

One of the five was on Kylie Minogue, who graces the front cover - meaning that I can, for the first time, claim to have written a DWM cover feature!

The Spare Part People

Another month and, I am very pleased to be able to say, another piece in Doctor Who Magazine. Issue 580, which came out last week, has in it a feature I was asked to write about the Big Finish Productions Doctor Who audio play Spare Parts, marking 20 years since its release. Once again I was very flattered to be asked to write a piece, and it was great fun to put together, speaking to various fans and admirers of the story about just why it holds such a strong appeal and has been recognised almost since the start as one of the finest Big Finish stories.

As always, DWM is available from WH Smith's, many supermarkets or online.

Ice Cool

I'm very pleased to have another little professional writing update.

I was recently asked to write another piece for Doctor Who Magazine, this time for their latest special edition which was released earlier this month. It's another in their Chronicles series of year-themed specials, which I was fortunate to write a piece for the 1983 edition of last year.

This time around 1967 is the year in focus, and I was asked to contribute an article about the actor Sonny Caldinez, who died in April at the age of 89. As well as being an actor he was variously a wrestler, a stuntman and a bodyguard throughout various stages of his life, and appeared in five Doctor Who stories - the first two of which came in 1967, hence his inclusion here. Four of those appearances were as an Ice Warrior, hence the title of this entry... geddit!?

As always, it was a great honour and a privilege to be asked to do a piece. I still can't believe the incredible good fortune I have to occasionally be able to write pieces about Doctor Who... and get paid for it, too!

Anyway, as always, the magazine is available from WH Smith's, various supermarkets and the Panini website.

Restoration of the Daleks

The new issue of Panini's Doctor Who Magazine, number 578, came out last Thursday, and I'm fortunate enough to have written a piece for it. Not to do with the new Doctor casting on the front cover, but very exciting to be in a 'new Doctor' issue!

My piece is about the restoration work which has been carried out on the two 1960s Dalek movies, for their new 4K re-release. I must admit that these films are not exactly my favourite iteration of Doctor Who, but I do have a certain nostalgic affection for the second one, on the basis that it was one of the first - if not the first - Doctor Who VHS tape I ever owned. It was given to me by my brother's friend Damien when I was very young, perhaps as young as six or seven.

In fact, I even still own the tape - sort of. It's been in my parents' attic for the past 18 years or so, but oddly enough I came across it just the other week when I was visiting them. I wanted to retrieve some books from a big box full of my things in the attic, and among the assorted odds-and-ends I had to move out of the way to find the books I wanted was that very VHS tape, thirty-odd years since I first owned it!

One particularly nice thing about doing this piece was that it wasn't something I pitched - I was specifically asked to do it, which is always very flattering. Always an ego-boost to be actually sought out and commissioned to do a piece of professional writing!

Anyway, DWM 578 is now on-sale at WH Smith's and all good newsagents, or via the Panini website. I hope you like the piece if you do have a read!

Harbour Writes

The latest edition of Doctor Who Magazine, issue 574, is now out and I'm pleased to say that I'm fortunate enough to have a piece in it. Called Harbouring Ambitions, it uses some of the material I gathered for The Long Game to tell the story of how the Nick Berry vehicle Harbour Lights almost ended up getting Doctor Who back onto the air five years earlier than it actually happened. 

I'm very grateful once again to Marcus and Peter at DWM for running the piece, and also for them very kindly again giving me one of the little contributor profile spots on page three, as they did when they published my Donald Wilson piece last summer.

The article also appears to have the desired effect of perhaps interesting a few more people in picking up copies of The Long Game, as a couple of extremely nice tweets about it appeared over the weekend. It would be blatant showing off to include them here, of course... But I am by no means beyond that, so here they are!

Paper Talk

It turned out that last week ended up being quite a prolific one for my appearances in assorted publications - not only the mentions of the Nexus documentary in the Radio Times and The Sunday Times, but I also had a newspaper feature I'd written published and was the subject of another.

Last week, last Wednesday in fact, saw the 65th anniversary of the first ever East Anglian regional TV opt-out on BBC Television, on January the 26th 1957. Not perhaps the most notable of anniversaries, but always being one for a bit of broadcasting history - especially for broadcasting history connected to the bit of the BBC where I work, and which nobody else is likely to notice or even mark - I decided to make a radio package about it to go out on our afternoon show. This was particularly driven by the fact that some audio from the broadcast actually still exists, albeit in quite poor quality.

The piece duly went out on Wednesday, but while I'd been making it I came up with the idea of seeing if the Eastern Daily Press might be interested in a feature about it, too. I submitted this to them earlier this month but wasn't sure whether or not it was going to be any use to them. As it turned out, however, they actually ended up running it on Tuesday - and it also appeared in Norwich's Evening News, and in the EDP's Suffolk sister paper, the East Anglian Daily Times, the first occasion upon which any of my work has appeared there. You can read the piece online on the EDP website by clicking here.

So, with the Nexus documentary having gone out on 4 Extra on Tuesday, I managed to be a writer and a broadcaster on the same day without having lifted a finger during the course of the day at doing either!

Then on Wednesday I had a message from Paul, an old friend of mine back home in Sussex, telling me that a piece about me and The Long Game had appeared on the website of one of my old local papers, the Worthing Herald. I'd actually written to them a few months ago thinking I might perhaps be able to get a bit of local publicity down there, but nothing had appeared so I'd assumed it hadn't been of any use or interest.

Then suddenly last week they evidently decided it was, and the piece appeared - I believe also in the print edition, although I haven't actually been able to see a copy of that. If anyone has one, or a scan, do please let me know!

Extra! Extra!

It was a very proud moment for me today, as after working in radio for 15 years I achieved a bit of an unexpected first - presenting a programme on one of the BBC's national radio stations.

I'd mentioned in my previous blog entry on New Year's Eve that there might be something more coming up from the Nexus documentary I made last year. What I couldn't say at the time, because it hadn't yet been announced, was that BBC Radio 4 Extra had decided to broadcast the programme. I'd pitched it to them not long after the original broadcast, suggesting I could make a 25-minute cutdown focusing on the more famous of the interviewees.

To my surprise, however, after having a listen they decided they'd like to take the entire thing - and it went out at 11am this morning. 4 Extra programmes get several outings in their week of broadcast, so it's also going out again at 9pm this evening, and twice again on Saturday.

This is only the second time I have managed to get one of my documentaries onto national radio, and the first time it's been one that I've presented as well as having produced. The previous one was my Ayrton Senna documentary, which BBC Radio 5 Live ran three times in 2014 and 2015. However, in that case, while I produced the programme I didn't present it - narration duties on that occasion were taken on by the great Rob Bonnet.

5 Live did also take another documentary of mine later on in 2017, and it was billed in the Radio Times and everything, but never in the event went out - due to a last-minute schedule change to cover England in the Rugby League World Cup semi-finals.

So I was, as you can imagine, incredibly pleased about the Nexus programme being taken on by 4 Extra - but even more pleased with the response it's already received. The Radio Times made it one of their 'Today's Choice' selections, and The Sunday Times also flagged it up:

It still amazes me to see just how far this programme has been able to go. When I came up with the idea of doing it, I did worry it was a bit niche even for a local radio station; that it might not interest anybody who hadn't been a student at the UEA, or even then who hadn't been involved in some way with the TV station. But it seems that I was very wrong about that - and very pleased to have been so, of course!

There's just something so wonderfully BBC-ish about having been on between one of Bert Coules' Sherlock Holmes adaptations, and an episode of The Goon Show...