Pull to Open

Yesterday evening was very exciting for me. After a long time waiting for everything to be sorted and settled and ready and it to be appropriate for it to be made public, my publishers (and it feels exciting itself just to be able to say that!) Ten Acre officially announced my new book! It’s called Pull to Open, it tells the story of the creation of Doctor Who in 1963, and it will be released on the 24^th of July.

I wrote the book through 2022, and Stuart at Ten Acre was gratifyingly very keen to take it when I sent it to him at the end of the year. It’s taken a while having to wait for certain bits and pieces to fall into place and doing some edits and other admin, but finally we’re almost there and the time was right to announce.
 
But why, some people may ask, go back to 1963 again? Why go back to tell a story which has been told before? When even in the introduction to The Long Game I mentioned how although the creation of Doctor Who was a story which had long fascinated me, it was one which had already been well-told by others.
 
So why have my go at telling it now?
 
Well, I gradually came to realise that although that was true, it had never been told in quite the way I fancied telling it.
 

Doctor Who: The Sixties, a Christmas present I received in 1993 which helped start me off on this journey.

After The Long Game had come out in the autumn of 2021, it became clear that I could, in fact, write something other people would want to read, and I had done a pretty good job of it. Lots of people bought it. Lots of people said very nice things about it. At the very end of the year, in one of the interviews I did to promote the book, with AJ Black for his website, he asked me if I had any other books lined up.

 
“I can’t imagine ever writing another non-fiction book, either Doctor Who or otherwise,” I told him. “But you never know! If I am struck by a good idea for one I might give it a go. Certainly in Doctor Who terms, I think pretty much anything else I might want to write about has already been very well researched and written about by other people. Whereas with The Long Game I knew I had something new and a bit different which hadn’t formed the basis of a book before. If I ever think of something else like that, I might have another try!”
 
And that kept nagging at me, once the interview came out. It felt like a waste, somehow. All that good will I had built up with The Long Game, there had to be some way I could channel it into something else. Frankly, I knew that if I put my efforts in 2022 into trying to write fiction there was very little chance of it being published. If I put them into writing a non-fiction work, specifically a television history of particularly Doctor Who one, I knew that it would be at least seriously considered and probably had a very good chance of being published.

 
But what could it be…?
 

I’ve written before on this blog about how the creation of Doctor Who in 1963 has cast a kind of spell over me. I think many of us have particular little slivers of history, little eras, which form a kind of bubble of interest. Where a particular combination of the people and the circumstances and the background and the culture and the society all get a hook into our consciousness somehow.
 
BBC Television in 1963 is very much that for me. It’s why, nearly 20 years ago now, I had a go at writing the story of the creation of Doctor Who as a novel. That was no good, of course, and it would be no good trying that again. So what else could I do with that interest?
 
I did have one ‘way in’, as it were. In 2021, I’d written a piece for Doctor Who Magazine about the co-creator of the programme, Donald Wilson. This was something I’d first researched way back in 2015, and it was originally a much longer article, but eventually by the time it reached print there was only space for a shorter piece. But I still had all of that writing and research. I knew I had a ready-made chapter on Wilson’s life.
 
But a chapter of what…?
 
Once again, it came back to that nagging feeling. Another book. A Doctor Who book. And finally, the realisation that I could tackle the very start of the show in a way which I didn’t think had been done before.
 
Firstly, with this book, the creation would be the story. Those books I’d loved so much in my childhood and my teens, like Doctor Who: The Sixties or The Handbook: The First Doctor, had begun the story and then carried on to tell the tale of a whole era. This book would only go up to the end of 1963 – the point at which Doctor Who was about to go nuclear, so to speak, as the Daleks rolled onto Britain’s screens for the first time. Poised with a happy ending, just as The Long Game was with its finale of the return of the show being announced in September 2003. A perfect, ready-made narrative structure.
 

But secondly, I knew from the kind comments I’d had that one of the things people had really enjoyed about The Long Game was the way in which it provided the wider background and context of what was going on in the BBC at the time. Who these people were who had taken these decisions, and how they’d come to be in those jobs at that time. Not just what had happened and when, but why it had happened. How the BBC and the wider British television industry was working at that point in history.
  

I knew that if I could bring all of that, and combine it with the strong narrative thread of the events slowly coalescing for Doctor Who to rise into existence, I could write a really strong book. With 2023 being the show’s 60^th anniversary year, it seemed perfect. So, hopefully, that’s what I’ve done. On the 16^th of January 2022, I sat down at my laptop and typed the opening words: “When did Doctor Who begin?” There’s been a lot of writing, research and effort since then, but now, 130,000 words later, I have a book.

Among all the many, many lovely comments I’ve had since Pull to Open was announced by Ten Acre yesterday evening, one of the ones by which I was most touched was from a user called DeeDeeTee on the GallifreyBase Doctor Who forum. They wrote that: “The Long Game was an incredible read. Paul's skill is managing to tell the history of the BBC through the history of the show. I'm really looking forward to seeing how he weaves this magic in telling the story about the very beginning...”

It’s a wonderful feeling to find that someone you don’t know at all has read something you have written and understood exactly what you were trying to do with it. Trying to explore and explain part of the deep, rich and complex history of the BBC through the narrative of how that history influenced the development of Doctor Who.

Whether or not I have succeeded… Well, time will tell. We’ll see what people make of it next month.