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 glad 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.