Interview - Simon Guerrier

Since the publication of his first short story The Switching in 2002, Simon Guerrier has been one of Doctor Who's most prolific and versatile writers, with short stories, new series novels, audios and even comic strips to his name. Recently he was kind enough to sit down with me and look back over his Who career so far, in this first part looking at his prose work for both Big Finish and BBC Novels, starting with the recent publication of his long-delayed tome Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story...

RD: Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us. And congratulations on The Inside Story!
Simon: Thank you very much! Yes, it’s just a relief to see it actually existing.
RD: A little later than planned...
Simon: What happened was I was going down to Swansea to a convention to announce it had been printed, and on my way Jason H-E rang up and said, “I’ve had to pull going to press, because my lawyer has raised concerns about what we’re doing.” And at that point all he said was, “I just need to get this sorted out, it’ll probably just be a couple of days.” And then it was became weeks, then it became months. He worked very hard to get all the agreements in place and make sure everyone was happy, and unfortunately that just took a long time.
RD: Did you ever think it would end up just being cancelled?
Simon: By the beginning of this year I was beginning to think, “Well maybe that’s it, maybe it’s just not going to happen.” But then in February David Richardson told me it was now very close and what would I need to do to finish it off? I agreed to write a new 5000 word chapter that would bring it up to date and not touch anything I’d done before then.
RD: When it was originally going to come out, what was it going to cover up to?
Simon: It was going to cover up to The Wake. So I wrote a new chapter – I was originally meant to write 5000 words, I ended up writing 30,000, just because there was so much to cover and there was so much good stuff. And because of that, Alex Mallinson whose design is just beautiful , had to re-lay out the whole book to make it all fit. The original brief for me was that it would be exactly the same dimensions as Benjamin Cook’s New Audio Adventures book, but in the end we’re actually fifty pages more. I had a discussion with Jason and David and Alex, and they agreed that there was so much good content it would be a shame to cut it. And even then, I think I missed a short story from one of the later Short Trips books! It was really exciting because we knew it was happening, but it was a fairly crazy month trying to get it all in.
RD: How did you come by being commissioned to do it?
Simon: The New Audio Adventures that came out in 2003 had been a big success and originally BF wanted to do a follow-up, but obviously if they were going to do one for the Doctor Who CDs they were going to have to wait for more of them to come out, otherwise they’d only have a year to do. So it seemed quite obvious to do a Benny book, and the original idea was to have a book out by the end of 2004. That was given to Ian Farrington, who at the time was basically Gary Russell’s deputy and so had access to his emails and the files in the office. And what he very quickly found out was that it was a far bigger and more complicated story than the Doctor Who one had been. With The New Audio Adventures Ben had access to all the information, emails and contracts and contact details, but with Benny, almost half of her lifetime had been under a different publisher, Virgin, and everyone who had worked there had left and gone their separate ways. On top of which, there were all sorts of bits and pieces with the BF stuff that was slightly more complicated because people hadn’t been tracking it internally in the way they had been with Doctor Who. It’s standard practise when they’re recording a Who that there’ll be somebody there going round asking questions and that hadn’t been happening with Benny with anything like the consistency. So there are large gaps, even for the audios. So in the Summer of 2005 Ian asked me to come and help him with some of the research and what we said was that I would do the Virgin bit and he would do the BF bit and that would be roughly half-and-half between us.
RD: As you say, even doing the Virgin stuff on its own was a big commitment...
Simon: Ian had already done a bit of research, and I took that and went to David Howe’s articles in Doctor Who Magazine about the New Adventures (the novels in which Benny first appeared as a companion for the Seventh Doctor) and from that put together a basic outline of what had happened. And then I tried to get into contact with all the writers. The problem was nobody could remember stuff, and because a lot of people weren’t on email at the time, there were no records.
RD: So how did you tackle that?
Simon:Just piecing it together from what there was. For example, Justin Richards had kept his synopses for a book which also included notes from Rebecca Levene the editor and the minutes of a meeting he went to. And suddenly I could say “Oh, on that date, the following things got decided.” And once I started doing that and putting in a bit of detail you could check stuff with other writers. Ben Aaronovitch might say, “I seem to remember we had a meeting up in a pub somewhere,” and then I could ask other people. And once I started putting things together the writers were remembering stuff as a result of reading what I was doing. And once that happened it started to snowball. And the original idea, that it would sort of be an introduction rather than be a big section and cover the Virgin years reasonably briefly, suddenly becamea third of the book, it’s 100 pages, 100,000 words, just on the NAs.
RD: Was there anyone you wanted to get a hold of, but couldn’t?
Simon: Yeah, there were a few people who I couldn’t get contact details for. I actually met Adrian Rigelsford at a convention in Swansea just last week and I had tried to get hold of him and he just wasn’t available. And he was really funny, because he’d read the section I’d wrote without him while we were at the convention, and he said, “Yeah, that’s all pretty accurate, I don’t have anything to disagree with – “
RD: That’s a relief!
Simon: Yeah. And the only thing he added was the name of an actress that he was quite keen on to play Bernice in The Dark Dimensions (Rigelsford’s aborted 30th anniversary Multi-Doc story)... and I cannot remember her name. She was black, and in his head she would have been a black soldier, and that would have been a top fact to have got in the book. But I had a relatively short time to interview people. Andy Lane I couldn’t get hold of in the time frame needed to get the book together. I sent him a couple of emails and he was able to answer a couple of bits and pieces but I actually just relied on old interviews to cover his bits. Mark Gatiss was busy and I don’t think was that keen on talking about his New Adventure. He says on the BBC website that he’s not that enamoured of his NA with Benny, St Anthony’s Fire so he was a bit hesistant about talking to me about that. And I asked Gary Gillatt, because I knew he wasn’t exactly Benny’s greatest fan, to write a j’accuse of what he didn’t like, and strangely enough he declined. He was very polite about it, he said “I’m going to have decline your very kind invitation to be the voice of dissent in this book of celebration.” But generally I talked to everybody I could.
RD: But then you ended up writing the rest of it too.
Simon: Ian had done a lot of the research and put it into a rough order, but there was still an awful lot that needed to be done. But then I started producing the Benny audio range myself, and obviously it was much easier for me to cover my stuff on that as well, so then I was doing the beginning and end, and bits of the middle section as well. But at the same time, because I was producing those plays, I said I was not going to be able to deliver it in 2006 which was the original due date, but realised if it came out in 2007 instead it coincided with her fifteenth anniversary and that gave us something to tag it on to. And at that point Ian said if you’re going to do that, you’ve got a year to do it, I think I should just step off this and let you get on with it. And so we came to that decision. I think by that time, because he’d been working on it for two years, he was really happy to hand it on to someone else.
RD: And, without wishing to get into details, at that point you had no idea that there were any problems?
Simon: No. Had the book come out in 2004, before the new series began, I don’t think anybody would have raised an eyebrow. Both because of the higher profile of Doctor Who and the fact that there’s an awful lot of Who content in that book but it’s not an official one, it all gets potentially political. And Jason’s lawyer was saying, “Look, it’s not like anyone’s necessarily going to have a problem with it, what we just need to do is make sure we’ve got everybody’s permission, and everyone knows what we’re doing so it’s not a surprise to them, so we don’t feel like we’ve cheated them somehow.” It really was about a courtesy thing. And you could argue that we should have just published anyway and taken any consequences that came. But the worst case scenario then would have been that the BBC would think “Well, BF are not playing fair” and not renewed their Doctor Who license. Obviously that’s an extreme possibility, but you have to be professional about these things. And actually, just going round talking to people was really good, because we got some more information, and I also had emails from people at the production team at Cardiff saying they were looking forward to reading the book because it sounded so interesting, so that sort of thing has done us good as well. It’s a shame it took so long, but I don’t regret it, it was absolutely the right thing to do.
RD: And it must be a relief it’s now out.
Simon: Oh god, yes! Lisa Bowerman and I drove down to the BF warehouse to sign preorders and on the way I said to her “I’ve been working on this book for four years, I’m half expecting the warehouse to have burnt down by the time we get there.” And then we arrived, and were looking for the warehouse, and it’s all a bit anonymous because it’s an industrial estate, and there was just this door and I could see them stacked up inside this door and we were like “Oh my God, it’s the book, it’s the book!” and we did get very squeally and silly! It’s just such an exciting thing to see it as a real book
RD: Looking over the forums, it seems to have gone down very well.
Simon: Yeah. A couple of people have pointed out minor errors, or have commented on bits and pieces where they don’t agree with a interviewee or something, but I’ve not seen anyone upset by it. The only thing that was a consideration which a couple of people have raised is that we didn’t put in summaries about what the stories are about.
RD: Why not?
Simon: It just would have taken up too much space, we’d have had to lose twenty pages to them. And they’re freely available on the web anyway. A lot of my decisions that went into putting the book together came down to: Is this information available elsewhere? I wanted to present stuff that I hadn’t heard before, or that I thought was an interesting take on events, to concentrate on the behind-the-scenes and use the fact that I had exclusive access to get stuff that you wouldn’t get elsewhere.
RD: It’s a long way coming from Short Trips: Zodiac to that.
Simon: Yeah. The story in that Zodiac was my first published fiction since I was ten years old and I got a story in my school’s photocopied magazine. I’d written bits of magazine stuff and bits of journalism before that but not a great deal. I’d gone freelance, and Jac Rayner (editor the collection), bless her, had read and rejected things I’d sent to the BBC, but sent me a thing saying “If you want to pitch for it, you can, but be aware I’m asking the biggest and most exciting writers I can think of because it’s our launch book.” And I got in. And I’m painfully aware how lucky I was just to have the opportunity. I’m really pleased with that story as well.
RD: I have to say, looking back at Zodiac now, it’s one of the more memorable stories, it’s almost a “Why has no one done this before?” thing.
Simon: Well, I ripped it off an episode of Buffy!
RD: Who’s That Girl?
Simon: Yeah. The thing I loved about that episode is that when Faith is wandering around in Buffy’s body, all her friends think it’s an improvement, because she’s less up herself and angsty. And I just thought that was a brilliant twist. And that was an easy gag to transpose to Doctor Who.
RD: And is perfect as a short story, as opposed to, say, a novel.
Simon: And it plays on the idea that the Master was always meant to be dark reflection of the Doctor.
RD: And that led to many more Short Trips...
Simon: Yeah, as a result of that I was then able to pitch for other books, but what made the big difference for me was what happened with The Muses.Jac rang me up one night and said, “I’ve got a Short Trips book going to press next week, but one of the stories has fallen through, and I need a 7000 word story with Jon Pertwee and music, can you do it?” I said, “Yeah,” and she said “Oh thanks, Simon, I have asked everyone else I can think of.”
RD: How flattering.
Simon: Yeah, and I have reminded her of that since! But the fact that a) I could do it, and b) that I delivered it really worked in my favour. Two things came out of that story. One was that Ian Farrington had liked how I had written the Brigadier and asked me to do the UNIT audio play, and the other was that I became the go-to guy when there were problems on the books, and that’s pretty much why I ended up doing so many Short Trips. People would say to me, “I’ve got a problem” or “I need a story which does this in the book,” so I’d be given specific instructions. So that worked out very well.
RD: And you also edited a number of them, starting with The History of Christmas
Simon: That was because Paul Cornell’s Christmas anthology had sold very well, and so obviously Jason and Gary were very keen to do another one. But by the time they decided that it was March or April the following year, and to do it the book would have to go to press in September or October, so they asked around if anyone was up for such a tight turnaround, and I went, “I’ll do it!” Because of the new series approvals things were taking far longer so I knew it meant some long nights and had to be run through quickly, but on the other hand it meant I got to edit a Doctor Who book! How fantastic! So I leapt at the chance.
RD: How do you go about pulling a book like that?
Simon: Well, I had a plan, but it kind of went to seed really. I had to come up with a theme for the book which wasn’t just Christmas. I re-read Paul’s Christmas Treasury and made some notes about what he’d done and how I’d make mine different - for example, it had quite a lot of First World War stories and UNIT stories, so I made a rule: no UNIT Christmas parties, and no First and Second World War stories. I’ve kind of had my fill of Doctor Who stories where he’s at that football match in the trenches between the English and the Germans! They’ve done that so many times before, what you’re actually watching is a game of different Doctors all playing each other and the soldiers are all going “What on earth is going on?” So I made some guidelines. Then I had this idea that I’d start with a story set in Rome, on the night of the astral conjunction that the Three Wise Men see, i.e the first Christmas, and then we’d go to a story in the far future, a real hard sci-fi kind of place, and it would be where’s the meme of Christmas got to? And then we’d put the stories in chronological order and you’d have a history of Christmas. I commissioned Matthew Sweet to the first one and Phil Purser-Hallard to write the sci-fi one, and then put together a document that people could pitch for. And it was funny, because really quickly word got round. In the end I had 30, 40 ideas, and I just went through them and thought which ones do I like best and which ones would play off well against each other. It’s a bit like putting together a mix tape back in the 80s, you’re saying, “Do I want an exciting one here, and if I have an exciting one do I want a more quiet one..?” And I wanted to get things from around the world so it wasn’t all cosy, picture box English Christmasses.
RD: The next one was Time Signatures?
Simon: Yeah. The idea for that came from the story I wrote for The Muses. An Overture Too Early was this story which didn’t have an ending, because my idea was “Isn’t it annoying when you hear a tune and you don’t know what it is, or you can’t place it?” And Ian Farrington said to me when I delivered it, “Oh I love the story, I assume you’ve got it all mapped out?” And I went “...oh yeah, of course,” but I hadn’t gone into it at all. And he suggested that I write a couple of Short Trips stories over several books that would pick up that story and explain it. And I had a think about it, and realised that what I’d end up doing was having stories that were going to rely on you having read those earlier stories which was no good. So he then suggested doing a book of short stories that all added up to a whole, which I thought was a great idea. By that point DWM had printed Russell’s outline for the first series of Doctor Who, one paragraph for each story, and I did something like that: for example “Here’s a First Doctor story where he sees the effects of a time cataclysm, and what we’ll learn later on is that that is the result of one of the other stories.” So I worked out how it all tied together, and then what I did, which I hadn’t done with Christmas, was that I went specifically to writers I wanted to work with and said, “This is what I’m doing, are you interested?” So, for example, my outline for Ben Aaronovitch was that I needed to introduce this character and I want it to be a fun story, not too angsty, because later on his life was going to get very angsty. And Ben said, “How about if he helps the Doctor on a fishing trip?” And I went “Brilliant! That’s exactly the sort of thing I’m after.” And I’m really pleased with that book, because it was quite a thing to juggle, but I’m proud of how it came out, especially the fact that the stories are all linked together is a surprise that you don’t get until you’re halfway through it.
RD: And you also co-edited one with Nick Briggs, Dalek Empire.
Simon: Yeah. He had commissioned it and set everything up and I and had written two stories for him. I hadn’t heard from him though, so when I popped into the BF offices one day I asked if what I’d done was okay, and he told me he was having a nightmare – because he was so busy on the TV show he hadn’t had time to check the stories. So I offered him some help, and it ended up that he edited my stories and I edited everything else. Loosely it was just reading through them all, practical editing stuff – James Swallow had a reference to the new series and I had to tell him we couldn’t do that, things like that – rather than anything creative. And I was quite happy to ghost it, but Nick was insistent I took a credit on it as well. So that’s rather good, I’ve got my name on a Dalek book.
RD: Indeed, not a bad deal. Of the books you’ve edited, are there any stories where you now think “Yeah, that’s the best one, or they’re the best ones?”
Simon: There’s a whole load of them. I’m in awe of people who write well for the Second Doctor because I find him so difficult to write for, so when Eddie (Robson) sent me his story The Avant Guardian for Time Signatures, I did just think “I hate you! It’s brilliant.” It’s really funny, and it’s clever, and he’s got the Second Doctor down to a T, so I almost feel like I’ve seen it, I can really believe it’s him. Then there’s stories like the Phillip Purser-Hallard or Simon Bucher-Jones ones from The History of Christmas which are so not what I would normally write, proper hardcore SF world building things. I think my favourite review of The History of Christmas was that DWM said something along the lines of “There’s no bad stories and that’s an achievement in itself.” I was really proud of that. I don’t think there are any duff stories in any of the books I’ve edited.
RD: What about your own stories?
Simon: I’m really pleased with The Switching, and that’s always going to have a special place because it’s the first one I did, and I still think it’s a great idea. And I really like Christmas on the Moon from The History of Christmas which is the first one I wrote consciously going after watching the TV show this is more what you do. And it’s a bit more fun. Quite a lot of the stuff I’d written before was quite angsty and I think probably quite adolescent. I know that there are people who disagree but I think my writing has got a lot more mature in that it is quite okay to be happy about stuff, it’s not afraid of being joyful, so I quite like that one a lot. I’m pleased with them all, I don’t think I messed any of them up. I really like The Immortals as well, because that was the first time I’d done quite a lot of research on a story, and I just think I got that TARDIS crew right as well.
RD: Is that the one, out of those you edited, of which you’re most proud? Or is that like asking you to pick your favourite child?
Simon: Yeah I think it is really. If I had to choose one I was proudest of, it would have to be How the Doctor Changed My Life.
RD: Which was the result of the BF short story competition, which from the outside looked a bit of a nightmare.
Simon: Yeah... I don’t regret doing it, but I wouldn’t do it again. And that was happening at the same time as I was having to finish The Inside Story as well, so that five month period was a bit hectic.
RD: Did you expect the response that you got?
Simon: No, nothing like it. I’m told, though I didn’t hear it, that we got mentioned on Woman’s Hour!
RD: How did it come about?
Simon: We’d done competitions for Benny before and had various people pitching for those, but it’s difficult to judge the quality of someone’s writing from a sample or from an outline, you really do need to see the whole story to see if it works. So it was partly from that, and also partly because there were a whole bunch of people who were saying things like, “I’ve always meant to write something, but have never got round to it.” And I thought, even if they didn’t get anywhere, it would be useful for them to actually write something. So we gave them a brief, and limited it to 2500 words, which is not a lot, you can do that in a day without too much effort if you know where it’s going, and that might set them off.
RD: Did you get many “The Master meets the Zygons” pitches?
Simon: Sadly, no. That was the strangest thing. We thought that because we were asking them to write a 2500 story, in a month, and over Christmas as well, only the serious ones will apply. So we were expecting that probably we’d get maybe 100 stories in, and instead we got over 1000, and very few of them we could reject out of hand. I mean, five or six only. The rest of them were all competent, solidly written, an idea behind them, there was development, a character, a perspective, they had something to say, people had obviously put thought and effort into them. And that meant I had to read all the bloody things.
RD: I don’t think, even if they were by the best writers that had ever lived, I could have stood it.
Simon: What Ian and I had said we’d do, even though it didn’t quite work out that way, was that we divided the stories into half, alphabetically, and he’d read half and I’d read half, and any that we thought the other person should read we put on one side, and then we’d read those as well, so that we’d end up with a shortlist, and we’d find our winner from that. So I was reading them, and going, “They’re all okay, they’re all fine,” but I think it was Michael Rees’s Swamp of Horror which was the first one I found that was just a level above what I’d read so far. And it was such a relief to go, “Brilliant. Now I’ve got this as a standard, that’s noticeably better than other things, I can get through things quicker, because I’m now comparing them to what he’s done, not in terms of ‘Have they used the same structure,’ but does it have that added spark?” And then I ended up doing most of the reading just because of how things turned out with deadlines, and I think I read over 900 of them –
RD: Over how long a time?
Simon: Four, five months.
RD: That’s good going.
Simon: What I did was I read them whenever I had a chance. So I was reading them on the train, and on the bus, and in my lunch hour, and before I went to bed, and on the loo, and whenever I could, just to get through them. And any I thought had that extra spark I put on one side. And once I had a couple like that, I could read every word of a story, and know immediately whether it went in the pile or not. And at the end of all that I said to Ian, “I’ve got this selection of stories,” and he went “How many?” and I went “25 stories, and they’d work really well as a collection.” So I had conversations with Ian and Jason and Justin Richards at BBC Books and they all said the same thing, which was that they loved the idea of doing a book of first time writers, but was it going to be good enough? So my undertaking then was that I would work with the writers and get it up to standard, so we won’t be publishing them as they were submitted. It was a huge amount of work all told but I’m really proud with how that book came out. And some of the writers have been published in Short Trips since, a load of them have found writing work elsewhere, and also what I found was that I’ve met a few people since who entered but didn’t win but said that that was the first thing they’d submitted and they’ve got published elsewhere since. I can’t tell you how pleased I am about that. So it was well worth doing, but was just a massive amount of work. I feel I’ve paid my due now, so if they’re going to do another competition I think someone else can do that!
RD: And it got great reviews.
Simon: Yeah. Generally my books have been well received. I don’t quite know why that is, what buttons I’m pressing, but I’m very gratified by that.
RD: But it’s sad the range has come to an end.
Simon: Yeah. To be fair we had a really good innings, 28 volumes in seven years is a major undertaking, and the quality of them was very high as well. The Best of Short Trips is a really strong collection, it’s a very, very good book.
RD: What to your mind makes a good Doctor Who short story?
Simon: It’s just got to be a good idea, one that gives you a change of perspective, an insight, which you might not have otherwise. And with short story anthologies as long as you can vary the tone and style you should have something for everyone, so I think those things are very rewarding.
RD: And you’ve also written novels.
Simon: Yeah. In a way, a novel is just a series of interlinked short stories because that’s how your chapters work, and you try and structure your chapter in the same way so you feel like they’re taking you somewhere else each chapter and you progress the plot, but you want discrete chunks of story as well. Novels are different as well, you take your time setting things up and play with character arcs and themes more.
RD: What’s the difference between writing for the BBC novels before the new series came along and now for the Tenth Doctor. Do you aim for a slightly younger readership?
Simon: No, I don’t feel I’m writing for a different audience. The guidelines haven’t changed. When I wrote my first novel The Time Travellers before the new series came back I had to be conscious that there were going to be kids who read it, partly because I knew the new series was coming soon and also because there are kids who just read Doctor Who books, and the same thing now holds. So yeah, the number of kids reading these books has gone up, but the same rules apply. I could have written TTT as a new series book. It would have lost that last section where they go back in time to London in the Seventies, and it would have been the right sort of length, and there’s nothing in it that couldn’t have been done as a new series book.. And I actually think The Pirate Loop is the same plot as TTT! There’s a history loop where the same things get played out again and again and again, the Doctor is trying to break the circle to get to the next stage, and halfway through one of his companions gets killed.
RD: But there aren’t any badger pirates in TTT...
Simon: No, but I don’t think that matters. I love TTT, and am very pleased with it, but reading it again I’m surprised by how angsty the tone is, and how everyone is very gruff and miserable, and it’s a very bleak, grey world. I think TPL is better written, I think my syntax and plotting is better, it’s more sophisticated and I think it’s actually a more complicated and cleverer version of the same story. I suggested that at a meeting of people who were interested in books a while back and they were horrified by the very idea, but I actually think it’s a more mature bit of writing, it’s just sillier.
RD: Mature and silly are not mutually exclusive.
Simon: No, not at all. And I know that’s not what some people want and I think that when people say the new books are less adult, what they mean is they’re less miserable. There were so many miserable endings where the Doctor would turn up and nobody would survive, that if you got to page 200 in one and nobody had committed suicide yet you felt like it was pushing the format. I think something like the Eighth Doctor Novel The Tomorrow Windows by Jonathan Morris is a brilliant, fun, clever book and is far more like a new series book than most of the Eighth Doctor books because it’s just a joy to read. And on the other hand, take Prisoner of the Daleks by Trevor Baxendale, which is just a really strong, exciting Dalek story, and one of the best Dalek books there’s been. And look at Ghosts of India by Mark Morris, which has the most remarkable conceit of Doctor Who In an Exciting Adventure with Mohandas Ghandi - I don’t think the NA version of that would have been much different. It has to gloss over some pieces, but then it never could have been vivid about some pieces because of the BBC Guidelines, but even so it addresses some big issues. And it’s fascinating to realise as you’re reading it that this teaching seven or eight years olds about the Partition period and the Raj
RD: Which is what the TV series does, aiming at more than one audience.
Simon: Exactly. And also, if the kind of accusations that people have made about the new series books was true, I would never have got away with killing Martha in The Pirate Loop. There was discussion about the tone of it, and how much detail I went into about how she died, but then there was when I wrote TTT and killed Ian. And she gets stabbed as well! I thought I would never get away with that because it’s imitable horror but no that works because it’s immediate and you understand that the character who does it is a conflicted character and so the context works. We just don’t want so much detail about what happens when somebody’s stabbed. When I first wrote it I did got into too much detail and just made it very clinical and very vivid, and it just lifted it to something which was completely different. And Gary Russell’s notes on that were just brilliant, he said, “Just cut out those two paragraphs off... ‘She’s stabbed. “Urk,” she said and died.’” And it just makes it much more immediate. But that would have been the same if I’d done the same thing for a past Doctor book. So I’m aware that The Pirate Loop and The Slitheen Excursion are more fun than TTT, the tone of them is different, but that’s not an imposition, that’s my decision. The same rules apply to Doctor Who books as do BF plays, and I’ve written Home Truths and The Drowned World under the same regime so I don’t buy this idea that it’s some sort of massive change. With the new series, the books aren’t driving Doctor Who in the same way as when there was no TV show, but the series is doing the same thing that the books used to do, with the breadth and range as they had.I’m aware that people miss the NAs, but you know, people weren’t buying them...
RD: It was a pretty hardcore audience by the end...
Simon: Yeah. The NAs sold really well, which was why Virgin were so desperate to hold onto the licence and carried on doing Benny books for so long. But the BBC books, by the end... TTT was the penultimate book, it got really good reviews for the BBC website and DWM, it was generally well regarded, it did better in the polls than The Gallifrey Chronicles and Fear, Itself, which were the other two well-regarded books of that year, to my amazement – I think both of those books are better than mine, but there you go, I’m not going to demand a recount! – but I’ve never made my advance on that book in terms of sales. It’s not sold. Even by the standards of the time of old Doctor Who books it hadn’t done particularly well and that’s because the audience was dying off. And now you look at the small press stuff that’s been doing Faction Paradox and whatever else, that attempt to have this more adult tone, and no matter how good they are there just isn’t that audience.
RD: It’s a subsection of a subsection.
Simon: Yeah. And the minority of people who want these things are very vocal about it, but they’re not really a sustainable thing. When I was writing TTT I was thinking, I’m going to have people in their 60s reading this, I’m going to have people in their teens reading this, and people who only know Christopher Eccleston reading this asking who’s this old man? You can’t please everybody, but you have to be aware that they are there, so I have to have a line in there who explains who the First Doctor is. And part of it is me thinking would I have enjoyed this when I was 14, would I have enjoyed this when I was 21, would I enjoy it now, would my Mum enjoy it, and Dad... And you think those sort of things. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. And it’s startling how big it is. Everybody watches Doctor Who now, everybody. And it’s brilliant.

In Part Two, which you can read here we turn our attention to Simon's audio work for Big Finish, including a stint as Producer on the Benny range as well as his highly acclaimed Companion Chronicles featuring Jean Marsh as Sara Kingdom. Most of the titles on this page are still available to buy, either from Big Finish or BBC books. Huge thanks to Simon for taking the time to conduct this interview!