Charting the Year

A bit of a painfully tenuous title for this blog post, basically to have an excuse to have some sort of image to place at the top there - showing that the audiobook version of Pull to Open is still doing well in one of the rather niche Amazon charts in which it features. Top twenty - can't argue with that!

But I always look to do a blog post on New Year's Eve if I can, looking back over the year. I may not have had another book published this year, but I have been working on some new book projects - in particular, a new non-fiction book with which I am rather pleased. It's not finished yet, as it still needs a lot of tweaking and adjusting and checking and correcting, but I do have a draft of it done, so we shall see what 2025 brings for that one.

It has also been a very exciting year for a reason which I cannot discuss yet, and for a writing project which I have been commissioned for but can't yet say what it is as it has yet to be publicly announced. I am very proud of it though, pleased to have been asked to do it and also pleased with the result. I can't wait to be able to tell you all about it in due course!

In terms of what I can discuss, looking back I am quite pleased with the various bits and pieces I have managed to get out there in a professional capacity this year. Writing for the Radio Times, for Doctor Who Magazine and for BBC Online is not a bad little selection of credits to have. As well as, of course, the aforementioned Pull to Open audiobook!

Admittedly, the big one is still missing. Another year has gone by, and I have still not yet achieved my dream of having a novel professionally published. But I feel as if I am inching closer to it, even if that may be a delusional idea. While it may be a different field, I can't help but feel that having some non-fiction books published in recent years is at least a step in the right direction. The project I can't talk about is a very good sign, too.

I do know and understand and appreciate the fact that I will never be a great novelist, nor even a particularly successful one. But I don't think it's delusional to believe that one day, eventually, before the end of my life, I will be a published novelist of some sort. Even if it only happens once.

I just have to keep plugging away at it, as I fully intend to continue doing in 2025. Happy New Year to you all!

On the Christmas list

They've made a list, they've checked it twice...

Well, I actually don't know how many time they've checked it, nor how the items on it were selected, or how many people were involved in the process. But I do know that BBC Studios, the BBC's commercial subsidiary which among other things deals with licensing, merchandising and so forth, have published an official Doctor Who Christmas gift guide on their website for the show.

And I am on it!

Well, not me personally. You can't wrap me up and send me to the Doctor Who fan in your life as a Christmas present, which is probably good news for all concerned. But they have included among their recommendations the audiobook version of my book Pull to Open, which was released last month.

Okay, so the audiobook is an officially-licensed BBC Studios product, as indeed are all the other items on the list, so you may say that this is more of an advertising feature than anything else. And of course, you would be right. But there are plenty of other things they could have included, even just from the audiobook range. And for whatever reason, Pull to Open has been selected to be on it, which is rather pleasing.

Admittedly, I am not entirely certain how you give as a present something which isn't actually available as a physical product, but only via download. But it is, as they say, the thought that counts, and of course I would heartily endorse the idea of giving the gift of Pull to Open this Christmas! If nothing else, it presumably makes a good last-minute gift idea for a Doctor Who fan right up to and including on the day itself, as you don't actually have to either go out and buy it or get it delivered.

Incidentally, in the event that anybody is reading this after having received Pull to Open as a present - Christmas or birthday, the audiobook version or the full-length paperback - I'd love to hear from you. Especially if it was a welcome gift which you enjoyed, obviously! I like the idea of my work being given as a present, so do please leave a comment below and let me know!

Daleks: The Ultimate Guide

There's another new Doctor Who Magazine special currently on the shelves, released at the end of last month, and it's another one for which I was asked to write a couple of pieces. This one is called Daleks: The Ultimate Guide, and the title explains it all, really - a focus on all things Dalek-y, from pieces on all the Doctor Who stories in which they appear to features on various aspects of their history, both in the real world and within the fiction of the programme.

The two features I was asked to contribute were a profile piece on the four actors who have played Davros, the creator of the Daleks, and also a piece looking at the Daleks' impact down the years in terms of the show's ratings. Did Doctor Who get higher ratings when the Daleks appeared? If not, why not? If so, why and what was the background?

For the answers to those questions, you'll have to buy the special of course! Available now via the Panini website, or Amazon, or in WH Smith, etc. Once again they were very enjoyable pieces to write, particularly the ratings one which I had an interesting time looking into the details of and putting together. I was also particularly pleased with it as I was able to find a nice fit in it for a thought I idly threw away in a tweet last year but with which I'd been rather taken. So I was quite chuffed when I realised it worked well as part of something more substantial here.

Back in Time

It’s out! Again!
 
Well, actually it’s been out for a couple of weeks now, but today being the 61^st anniversary of the first episode of Doctor Who being broadcast, it seemed appropriate to write here today about the audiobook version of Pull to Open now having been released.
 
It’s a strange thing, to listen to your own writing being read by an actor, in the person of Christopher Naylor here. Of course given that I have spent over 17 years now working for BBC radio, I am used to having words which I have written spoken aloud by others. But this felt slightly different. It’s more of a performance, and it does feel rather nice listening to it being read that way.
 
It's also very nice, of course, to have an official piece of Doctor Who work released under the BBC banner. I’ve written a fair bit for Doctor Who Magazine over the past decade, which is also officially licensed and comes out with the BBC logo on it, but again this is slightly different. A full-length audiobook, a long, sustained piece of writing, and an official part of the BBC’s wider Doctor Who output beyond the television series.
 
Not, of course, that I would dissuade anyone from reading the original paperback edition from Ten Acre, which is still very much available. Indeed, if you happen to be reading this having bought and enjoyed the audiobook version – and if so, thank you! – then you may still enjoy the book even more, as it’s much longer and is able to include much more background and detail.

One rather nice thing about the audiobook is that it’s actually featured quite highly in the charts. Well, all right, in one specific Amazon chart for one specific category of audiobook. But it still counts, and I’m taking it! Although admittedly I probably won’t be going so far as to add “best-selling” to any of my online profiles anywhere… Not quite yet, at least!
 
But thank you, Doctor Who, for once again enabling me to feel as if I have in some small way done something, and achieved something. It’s always been a very positive presence in my life, as it has been in so many people’s, and it’s lovely to think that there might be someone out there who’s fascination with its history might be sparked off by Pull to Open in the same way mine was by the likes of the Howe-Stammers-Walker books all those years ago.

Fire, Fire!

I seem over the past couple of months to have become in the day job a kind of unofficial correspondent on the anniversaries of ‘notable fires in Norwich which had a profound social or cultural effect on the city, but in which nobody was hurt or killed.’

 

Or at least, that is to say that I have made radio pieces and provided online articles regarding two of them. Which, in that very niche field, is still more than average!
 
The most recent was on Friday, which was the 40^th anniversary of the fire which so seriously damaged the old City Stand at Carrow Road that it had to be demolished and rebuilt. This was an event of which I was aware, but which I hadn’t realised the anniversary had been approaching until I received an email a few weeks ago from Bob Ledwidge, the BBC reporter who was actually on the scene that early morning forty years ago reporting on the fire for television.
 
I’ve known Bob a bit for some years, and as one of the founding members of staff at BBC Radio Norfolk he was very complimentary about the programmes I put together for the station’s own 40^th anniversary back in 2020. Knowing my fondness for archive material and my ability to weave a good tale out of it, Bob suggested that I might be interested in doing something on the anniversary of the fire.
 
This seemed like a good idea, and I was able to pitch the idea to the breakfast show to make them a piece. But in addition to that, I also made a longer version, a 10-minute mini-programme really, for our Secret Norfolk local history series which is available online via BBC Sounds. I’m rather pleased with it, and you can have a listen to it here:
 

 

I also provided some copy for my colleagues at BBC News Online to be able to put up an article on the anniversary of the fire, although in this case my byline is more of a courtesy than anything else – it’s more that they used my copy to make their own piece rather than it being something I could be said to have written. Which is obviously fine, I should add – they know rather more about writing News Online pieces than I do!
 
All of this comes only a couple of months after I did the same thing for the anniversary of another notable Norwich fire – the burning down of the old city centre library in August 1994, which eventually resulted in its replacement by the building where the BBC is based in the city and thus in which I now work, The Forum.
 
This was a fire which had a huge impact on the city – a real sense of social and cultural loss, and an event still very strongly remembered by anybody who was living in the city, and probably much of the surrounding county, at the time.
 
I provided the same set of material for this as I did for the Carrow Road fire anniversary on Friday, but my sense of satisfaction with it all was probably the opposite way around. The News Online piece ended up being pretty close to what I had actually written, so it feels much more like something I can justifiably say is ‘by’ me. But although I was pleased with the radio piece when I’d made it, I realised  very soon afterwards that I’d actually done a pretty bad job of it.

Almost nothing of BBC Radio Norfolk’s own coverage of the library fire that day exists – in fact, I was only able to find a single, very brief excerpt in an episode of the BBC Television book programme The Bookworm from later that year. So I mostly had to use a mixture of national radio and regional television material to help tell the story.

 
But stupidly, it was only once the piece was finished and had gone out that I thought to check that day’s output from BBC Radio 5 Live, which is easily accessible on the BBC’s internal archive system. And there was a huge amount on there – live reports, recorded reports, voice pieces, all from BBC Radio Norfolk personnel and much of which had almost certainly originated from the station’s own output that day. I was particularly angry with myself because I’d also been frustrated at the lack of material from the library fire when making my BBC Radio Norfolk 40^th anniversary series four years ago, and if I’d thought to check 5 Live then it would have been a much stronger opening to the third and final episode of that than what I was eventually able to cobble together.

 

I was so angry with myself about all this that my colleague Matthew Gudgin – who’d actually been reporting on the library fire that day in 1994 – took pity on me and used some of the material from 5 Live in the news and on the afternoon show on the anniversary day. So it didn’t go entirely to waste!
 
But the frustration came from the fact that there will almost certainly never be a chance to do the job again properly. No reason to make the far superior piece which the 5 Live material would enable. And I missed out on not making that much better piece simply by not having thought of something obvious which should have occurred to me four years beforehand, and would still have made a difference even had it occurred to me one day sooner than it did.

Into the Vortex

There is currently a new Doctor Who Magazine special out, fresh onto the shelves, and I'm pleased to say that I was asked to contribute to it. It's a particularly nice one to be a part of, as it's a bit of a mammoth effort - the first complete episode guide to the show which DWM has done for a very long time. The idea is that with almost the entire show now available on the BBC iPlayer for anyone to watch pretty much any of, this will help highlight connections and themes between stories.

Given its nature, it's an all-hands-on-deck sort of effort, and I was pleased to be asked to be one of those hands. I ended up writing the entries for the Ninth Doctor's first three episodes, and the Tenth Doctor's first four, something I enjoyed very much as they're all episodes I know very well and like a great deal. This includes episodes such as Rose, the opening episode of the show's revival in 2005 which means a very great deal to me, as I suspect it does to many other Doctor Who fans, and that year's Christmas special The Christmas Invasion, which is one of my very favourite episodes.

But with a few of them it was quite some time since I'd last gone back and re-watched them, so it was fun to do that. There were one or two things I spotted which I don't think I'd noticed before, so it was nice to be able to include some of those observations. I also enjoyed looking back through some of the contemporary reviews of and pieces about the episodes for the 'What They Said' sections of the pieces - nice to get a snippet of Bonnie Greer's Newsnight Review verdict in there! Which I'm sure many will remember from the time.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it if you do have a read, as there's lots of great work by many of the great and the good of Doctor Who writing. And me! Into the Vortex is available now from all the usual places, including the magazine's website.

Pick Up a Penguin

It's only one month now until the release of the audiobook version of my book Pull to Open, which tells the story of the creation of Doctor Who in 1963. And here's a little bit of pre-publicity for it, in the form of BBC Audiobooks' Doctor Who catalogue for this autumn. Published on the Penguin website, as Penguin Random House are the company who release BBC Audiobooks titles.

It's nice to be in there alongside all those other forthcoming audiobooks, and as an official piece of BBC Doctor Who merchandise, too. It's also nice to be able to bring a version of Pull to Open to those who, for whatever reason, are unable to buy or to read the full-length printed book version from Ten Acre. Which is, of course, still available for anyone who is interested.

In other news, it looks as if there might be a very exciting possibility of something else Doctor Who-related happening, writing-wise, in the future, although it's still early days so I can't say anything more about that just yet. I have also finished a draft of a possible new non-fiction book, too. It's something on which I have been working for much of the year, not directly Doctor Who-related this time, although it still needs further work for which I am awaiting another couple of archive research trips next month before I hopefully have a more complete draft ready by the end of the year.

Oh yes, and I have started writing a new piece of fiction. Something inspired by a comment I read in some research I was doing last month, which suddenly resolved itself into a plot in my head and which actually seems to be going rather well so far. Whether it will end well is another matter, but I am at least not totally despairing of its quality even as I write it, which is perhaps half the battle. I might even actually be enjoying writing it, which for fiction is often a rare pleasure, I find...