Doctor Who Magazine released a new special edition earlier this month, focusing on the producers / showrunners from across the history of the programme from 1963 to the present day. I'm pleased to say that earlier this year I was asked to contribute a couple of pieces to this, and they've now appeared in the finished version as my first professional writing efforts of 2023.
I was asked to write the pieces focusing on Doctor Who's one-off 1990s return in the form of the 1996 TV Movie and its producer Philip Segal. I was glad to be able to do this as the TV Movie is a production for which I have an enormous amount of affection. Even though it ended up of course with the disappointment of not leading to any new series, as a 12-year-old I found it incredibly exciting - to actually have new Doctor Who! The show had been off-air as a going concern since I was five years old, a lifetime at that age, and even though the Doctor Who videos I bought with my paper round money were mostly all new to me, I knew that I wasn't quite the same. This was different. This was properly new. Doctor Who was back!
As I say, it sadly wasn't to last, and we had to wait nearly ten years for the proper return. But the fact that it did eventually come back makes it all the more possible to look affectionately on the TV Movie, so I was pleased to be able to write about Segal and also to interview the movie's writer, Matthew Jacobs, who very kindly spared me some time to chat via Zoom from LA.
That's not the only exciting thing about this latest DWM special for me, though. In one of the pieces after mine, Eddie Robson writes about Russell T Davies... and refers to The Long Game, as if it's a proper book by a proper writer! I found this enormously flattering and, of course, quite the ego boost!
I'm also rather pleased to have contributed to DWM again for the first time under the new version of the old 'diamond' logo, which it recently adopted. This pleased me purely for nostalgic reasons - the magazine was using the older version of that logo when I first became a reader of it in the mid 1990s.
The Doctor Who Magazine 'Showrunner' special is out now from Panini, available at WH Smith's or online.
