Flight Mode

It's March, which is an exciting month for me - not generally, I mean, but specifically this one. March 2026. Because this is the month - indeed, this week will be the week - which sees the release of my first professional work of fiction, my Doctor Who audiobook Star Flight for BBC Audiobooks / Penguin Random House.

It will be out there in the world from this coming Thursday, the 5th. But excitingly, it is already out there in some senses - because the first reviews have begun to appear. And the good news is, so far... they're very good indeed.

This is, admittedly, only from a sample size of two. But they are both very positive, extremely flattering reviews. The kind of thing which makes you stand up and pace up-and-down the room when you've read them. Or makes me as the writer of the work in question do so, anyway! Of course, I know that not every review will be this positive, and if you allow yourself to get too high from the nice verdicts you're also running the risk of allowing yourself to be brought down too much by the negative ones.

But what the hell. I've waited a very long time for this, so I am determined to enjoy it while I have the chance!

The first review to appear was by Tony Fyler for the website Mass Movement. I was nervous opening the link, but almost immediately reassured, and indeed fairly staggered, by the first paragraph which declares that Star Flight "drips competence and class from every syllable". Blimey! And at the end, "leaving you feeling breathless and satisfied and eager for more," too. 

Then a few days later came Rod Bell's review for the Flickering Myth site. This was another review which was also far better than I could have imagined: "Paul Hayes knows exactly what he is doing," indeed! Bell even draws a comparison with TV episodes such as Blink and The Girl in the Fireplace - admittedly, purely in terms of this being, like them, a one-off self-contained story rather than part of some grand larger narrative. But still, if you know your Doctor Who you'll know that even to be mentioned in same breath as such episodes is pretty dizzying stuff.

There were two things I was particularly pleased about with both of these reviews. One was that the work of Star Flight's reader Christopher Naylor and producer Morrison Ellis has been rightly recognised and praised. The second was that both reviews felt that the story does give a sense of character to the original TARDIS team who are its stars, and feels as if it does a good job of fitting into their era. "This never feels like an interchangeable 'Insert any Doctor here' adventure," writes Bell in his Flickering Myth piece. "It feels lived in."

That is one of the things I very consciously tried hard to do with Star Flight - I mean, self-evidently, of course, it's what you have to do with a shared universe story like this. Write the characters as recognisably the ones people know from their television stories. I know I shouldn't take too much pride in this, given it's a bare minimum requirement for such a piece, and I have effectively been training for this for decades. With so much television material on which to base the characterisations of the First Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara, it ought to be easy for any fan. But I'm still pleased it seems to have worked.

Of course, there will be bad reviews to come, and people who simply don't enjoy Star Flight. For whom it's not their cup of tea. I understand that.

But I had occasionally thought, down the years, about what might happen if I ever got an opportunity like this. To write an actual, real-life Doctor Who story. And I have worried that I might blow it, and write The Worst Doctor Who Story Of All Time. That nobody would like it at all, and it would be the final proof that I don't have a clue what I'm doing when it comes to writing fiction. These two reviews, at least, prove that I haven't done that. That I have written something some people will enjoy.

And that's an enormous shot in the arm. A boost in confidence for my other efforts at writing fiction, too. Because despite the decades I have spent as a Doctor Who fan, this wasn't easy. It didn't just role off the laptop. It took effort, and work, and revision, and sometimes I get dispirited when my fiction writing seems to need so much of that.

But if I can come up with something people seem to enjoy, which seems to work, like this... Well, then perhaps I shouldn't get so down on my other efforts. Perhaps I really can do this, after all.

An Unexpected Article

After I had done my piece on Our Friends in the North for the History of the BBC website last month, John who runs that section of the BBC site asked me about any other ideas I might have for further pieces for this year. He sent me the list of BBC anniversaries for various services and programmes coming up throughout 2026, and I did have a few ideas – but then realised there was one anniversary approaching which I had already, sort-of-accidentally, done the research for and could write a piece about.

 
When I was on one of my research trips to the BBC Written Archives Centre back in 2024 for my book When Saturday Came, which will be out later this year, one batch of files I had asked to see were those relating to the 1956 serial Jesus of Nazareth. This went out on Sundays, rather than Saturdays, so was not directly connected to what I was researching. But I had noticed that for the eight weekends Jesus of Nazareth ran, the usual Saturday programmes such as Whirligig had been moved to Fridays, and the Saturday children’s slot had been filled with showings of Westerns on film.
 
I surmised that this was because Jesus of Nazareth had been given two days of camera rehearsal ahead of its live transmissions at Sunday teatimes, instead of the usual one on-the-day set of studio rehearsals. This would mean it was occupying Studio E at Lime Grove, then the children’s studio, on Saturdays and hence why the usual Saturday programmes would not have been able to use it and that day’s children’s shows for those eight weeks had to be on film.
 
In the end, the production files for Jesus of Nazareth didn’t contain any information about this – although I was eventually able to confirm my suspicion as being correct from another source. But as is so often the case on a visit to Caversham, even though it wasn’t the direct subject of my research, I found the Jesus of Nazareth files fascinating to read through. Indeed, it’s something you often have to stop yourself doing when you’re on a research visit there – pausing to read in depth. With so much material to get through, it’s more often a case of ‘photograph first, read later’.
 
But because I did find a lot of the material so interesting, despite not having any real use for it I had photographed quite a lot of the documents in those files. Which I realised last month meant that, with the 70^th anniversary of the serial’s first episode coming up on February the 12^th, I could put a nice little article together with some of the interesting titbits from those files, without having to go anywhere to do any new research.

 

You occasionally get little reminders in life of how much you have changed as a person over the years; changes you might not be conscious of day-to-day, but which make you stop and look back and realise how you are a different person, in at least some ways, to the one you were years or decades ago.
 
Doing this piece was one such moment for me, because I know for certain that my younger self – as a child, a teenager, and well into adulthood – would have been pretty disgusted with the idea of having my name associated with anything to do with Jesus. I have been an atheist for as long as I can remember, and when I was younger I would have found the prospect of writing an article on a series with a subject matter like this deeply embarrassing.
 
These days, I am a little more relaxed about the whole thing. Still very much an atheist, of course – although, given I do mark Christmas, I suppose if pressed I would have to confess to having a kind of secular Christian background. And I did go to a Church of England primary school – so I know all the greatest hits, if not the album tracks and b-sides.
 
But now as a middle-aged man I can separate the two. I can find the production history of Jesus of Nazareth interesting, while still not having any great enthusiasm for the subject matter. And it is a very interesting story to tell – the first dramatic depiction of the adult Jesus on British television; one of the first, if not perhaps the first, children’s series to have foreign location filming; and among the earliest BBC drama serials, children’s or otherwise, to survive in full.
 
So I am glad that I read those files, and pleased with how the article turned out. It actually ended up going online a few days ahead of the 70^th anniversary, as I had been invited onto BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme the preceding weekend to discuss it. (I did it from the studio in Norwich, of course, rather than actually going up to Salford for early on a Sunday morning!) It was only a short item, a few minutes, but it was nice to be on national radio in a professional capacity, and pleasing to hear how engaged the great Edward Stourton was with the whole thing. To the extent of echoing the praise for Caversham when I gave them a mention – so it was all worth doing to get them a nice little plug, if nothing else!

Old Friends

I don’t remember how much of Our Friends in the North I saw first time around. I am sure that it wasn’t all of it – I am pretty certain I didn’t see the whole thing until it was repeated the following year. But I do know that I saw at least some of it on that first run in early 1996; and I know that something about it really drew me in.

 
It seems ridiculous to think back on. I was only 11 years old when it started – I turned 12 halfway through the run. A birthday which brought the disappointing gift of an office chair, which even at the time felt like some sort of indication that childhood was now well and truly over.
 
Our Friends in the North of course wasn’t aimed at me or anyone remotely like me, and I had no real conception of the wider background and politics behind its writing. Newcastle and London, the two cities in which the story is mainly set, were far-off places I knew little of. Probably the main thing I knew about Newcastle at the time was that its football team was, at that point, leading the Premier League and looking likely to win it that season. Oh, and that the people who lived there were referred to as ‘Geordies’, of course.
 
But none of that really mattered. Its author Peter Flannery himself has said, and was saying as far back as 1988, that what really mattered in this story were the characters, and it was their stories which fascinated me. Particularly Nicky, played by Christopher Eccleston, but I wanted to know what happened to all four of the leads, and in all of the supporting plotlines, too. Our Friends in the North had that most vital element for any story – it made me want to know what happened next.
 
I loved it still when I saw it again on DVD a few years later – in 2002, I think, a blink of an eye in some ways but a huge leap from 12 to 18. It’s always remained one of my all-time favourite dramas, and I think one of the greatest things ever produced by the BBC. It made me follow particularly Eccleston’s career with interest, and was a major reason I was so excited in 2004 when he was cast in the lead in Doctor Who.
 
So it’s long been a series I’ve been very interested in. I even created and wrote most of its Wikipedia page some years ago, back when I was heavily into doing that sort of thing – probably about 20 years ago, now. I used to do a lot of editing on Wikipedia, particularly on British television history, but while I enjoyed adding information and helping to create accurate pages about subjects in which I was interested, ultimately I drifted away from it as being slightly unsatisfying. I have too much an ego not to want my writing to be entirely mine under my name, and once it’s done I want it to stay as I wrote it, not to be able to be instantly replaced by someone else’s idea of how it should read. I do still use Wikipedia a lot and go in and fix errors where I spot them, but I haven’t done any actual substantial writing for it for a very long time.
 
Anyway, it didn’t seem likely that Our Friends in the North would ever cross paths with my professional career until last year when I realised of course that the 30^th anniversary of the programme was coming up this January. John Escolme, the History of the BBC manager, is always very kindly receptive to ideas for feature pieces for the website, so last summer I pitched him the idea of an Our Friends in the North 30^th anniversary piece to go up on the 30^th anniversary, January 15^th.

 

Knowing, from the DVD extras and Michael Eaton’s BFI book on the series from back in 2005, just how much drama there had been behind-the-scenes in actually getting the programme into production, I was confident there would be some interesting things to say about it. John agreed, and I was able to go down to Caversham a couple of times in the autumn to look through some of the extensive amount of paperwork the BBC Written Archives hold on the series.
 
Actually, though, it ended up being a slightly different article to the one I had originally thought I might write. Yes, some of those tales of the long delays to production are present in the files and are in the piece. But actually, it became less about that story – which is, after all, comparatively well-known – and more about what was happening in the BBC itself at the time. This was the era of ‘Producer Choice’, the Production / Broadcast split, and the beginning of the gradual closing down of the ‘television factory’ which the BBC had once been.

 
Obviously though there’s only so far you can go with that, in terms of both the amount of detail you can fit into a 1500-word article and the amount you want to put into what is, after all, supposed to be an article for a fairly general audience. But I was pleased with what I was able to do with it.

 

The piece seems to have gone down very well since it went online for the anniversary on Thursday, anyway. I’ve had various nice responses, both from within the BBC and via social media, and it’s certainly been one of the most widely-shared online pieces I’ve written, with the BBC Archive social accounts’ posts about it getting a lot of response. Now, admittedly I have no way of knowing how many of those people actually clicked through to the article to have a read of it, rather than just wanting to share or react to the post and image, but still – it’s a good sign!

 

I was also able to get a little bit of broadcasting out of it. Back in 2023 when I was the guest for CNS two-ways across BBC Local Radio for the Doctor Who sixtieth anniversary, one of the best interviews I did that day was with Anna Foster on Radio Newcastle. She’d been very interested, engaged and fun, so I decided to try dropping her a note to see if she’d fancy a two-way with me to promote the Our Friends piece. Fortunately she did and I went on her show, down-the-line from one of our studios in Norwich of course, on Thursday lunchtime to have a chat about the piece.
 
I enjoyed it, although I’m not massively pleased with how I came across. As too often when I do something live rather than as a carefully-constructed, built package, I spoke too fast, gabbled too much and repeated myself – very much like a bad Just a Minute contestant. You really would think I’d be better at this sort of thing by now…
 

 

But it was nice to go on, and intriguing to hear how bad they felt Daniel Craig’s accent was! Obviously I’m not in any position to be able to judge, but I’d never seen much criticism of the accents in the series before. I have, though, spotted a few more comments along those lines on social media since then – but also some saying how good they thought they were, too. So who knows…?
 
Anyway, it was good to be able to celebrate one of my favourite television dramas ever made, and a good start to the year writing-wise.