Interview - Simon Guerrier Part Two

In the second of our two-part chat (Part One is here) with prolific Doctor Who writer Simon Guerrier, he looks back over his audio adventures, including his critically acclaimed Companion Chronicles Home Truths and The Drowned World...

RD: Your first audio was the UNIT pilot.
Simon: Yes it was. I got that because Ian Farrington liked my Brigadier in An Overture Too Early in Short Trips: The Muses, and asked if I’d be interested in writing one?
RD: Why the pilot rather than one of the four regular CDs?
Simon: The thing was, while the CDs obviously had royalties and the pilot, which came free a cover CD with Doctor Who Magazine, didn’t, Ian said that it would be the pilot would be the one that most people would listen to by far I just I’d go for that one!
RD: Looking back now, how do you feel about it?
Simon: I think you can tell it’s my first audio. There are a number of problems with it. It’s not long enough, for example, it’s only seventeen minutes long. And there should be a conversation between the Brig and the Silurian which explains what’s going on, and sets the Brig’s stall out. There should be a scene between Chaurdry and the journalist so that we know what their relationship is because the story really hangs on that being clear. And I probably could have explained who ISIS were a bit better and how they were different to UNIT. It’s a bit clunky, the explanation isn’t quite there, the pace is a bit strange, it’s trying desperately hard to be pacey and exciting. I’m making it sound like I can’t sleep at night, that’s not it at all, it is just funny listening to it again, I go.... “Ooo.” I definitely think I made the right decision in doing the pilot, as a freebie given away on a magazine I just about get away with it, whereas if it was an hour-long CD which people had paid for, I don’t think what I wrote was quite good enough. I’m not sure, if I’d had this delivered to me, I’d have commissioned me again.
RD: Surely the experience as a whole wasn’t that bad?
Simon: Oh no! It was brilliant to do, and being in studio with Nick Courtney was just a joy, and he was really nice about it, and was delighted that I’d knighted him. I think I’m right in saying that he hadn’t been Sir Alastair before that, and I’m so delighted that was picked up in Sarah Jane, because that makes it real and important and canon, and tediously that really pleases me!
RD: This isn’t a reflection on what you’ve just said, but I don’t think overall UNIT was one of BF’s biggest successes...
Simon: Oh I don’t know, I’ve not seen any bad reviews of it. I think there’s a couple of reasons why that might be the case. Although the Brigadier’s in it, he’s a minor character so he doesn’t have that same high level sell that something like DE or Cyberman does. It’s the furthest BF have gone, aside from the Unbound, from stuff as established on telly, and it is consciously intended as such. I can kind of see why that might not endear it to people, not that they don’t like it but they might not love it. We could have done the further adventures of the Brigadier, Captain Yates and Sgt Benton, it would please a certain listenership but it might not have been as rewarding for us to do. We did talk about doing that kind of thing, but we ended saying “We’d far rather have David Tennant come back as Bringham-Wood” than have Yates or Benton. I think they’re great characters and you could do all sorts of things you could do with them, as Hornet’s Nest is showing at the moment, but just the idea of going with Tennant’s character, because in the Unbound he’s a villain, but in this one he’s a goody, so it means you’re playing against expectation a bit. I know there’s been talk about doing more UNIT, never more than “Should we do more...” but yeah, I think the series works as a whole, they’re four strong stories, I don’t think anyone has anything to be ashamed about. I proposed – and it’s probably not fair to say this as Nick and Jason weren’t wholly excited about the idea – if you did a regular range story or a McGann story which used those UNIT characters that series would suddenly get a jolt in the arm and people would see it in a different light.
RD: Well you did use them in a Short Trip...
Simon: Yes. But just having McGann turn up in the middle and taking as read that this is who UNIT are, would make a difference to people’s perceptions of it.
RD: From there you did a Benny play, and then the big one, in 2005, was getting The Settling.
Simon: That came about after I did The Lost Museum, which Gary was very happy with, he had very few notes on it, and on the day we recorded it he said to me, “You should come in for lunch, I’ve got an idea for something else.” So I met him for lunch and he said “I saw this documentary on Channel Four about Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, I think it would make a great Doctor Who story.” He had a comedy historical coming up (Nev Fountain’s The Kingmaker) and he wanted a serious one to contrast it, which would mean doing the research and getting it right. He’d already asked Dan Abnett, who’d turned it down, but I was up for it, because it sounded like an interesting idea.
RD: Was it a period of history with which you were familiar?
Simon: I did the Civil War at school, and had read bits and pieces about Cromwell, and knew that an awful lot we think we know about him is invention since he died, either by the Royalists when the Restoration happened or from the 19th Century. Gary wanted to examine his character and take it just from contemporary stories, which was quite brave and contentious. So I talked to the 17th Century curator at the National Portrait Gallery where my wife worked at the time and he suggested some books to read, the BBC Greatest Britains biography of him, Christopher Hill’s God’s Englishman, which is a classic of its time, and also Tom Reilly's Cromwell: An Honourable
Enemy which was the book the documentary Gary had seen was based on. And the guy who wrote it has since been in touch with me having heard the play. He doesn’t quite agree with my take on Cromwell, but sent me a really nice email saying how much he’d loved it, not just the writing but the sound design. And I was like, “Oh, okay, that’s kind of a compliment for somebody else!” And he said he’d researched it but it had never occurred to him what it would sound like.
RD: How did you go about taking that initial idea and making a Doctor Who story from it?
Simon: What I did was I wrote notes about what I thought about Oliver Cromwell before I did any research and based Hex’s point of view on that, from stories he’s been told. And then I used the research that I found out after that as the thing that has to be unpicked. So it’s not that Hex is necessarily trying to change history, but he already thinks he knows what’s happening, so it’s the preconception they’re trying to alter, not the reality. And that became the plot. My big problem became what can I do with the Doctor? How do I a) not have him say what’s happening, because presumably he’d know, or b just stepping in and calling a halt to it, because, after all, this is the guy who stopped the Daleks. And then I discovered that one of the guys who was with Cromwell in Ireland then became a founding member of the Royal Society and I just thought, “No, that’s what the Doctor does.” He basically challenges someone else to think differently. He doesn’t change the massacre, but he changes the development of humanity, or western thinking at least. And once I’d got that the story just followed. I tried to base everything that Cromwell says or does on things he actually said or did that we’ve got reliable sources for. The back cover blurb of the play, for example, is his order to the city, it’s a real historical document, just mocked up with the blurb. The original version shows Cromwell’s peculiarly skinny copper-plate handwriting, so Lee Binding the designer just made it more legible.
RD: The most striking thing is that you manage to make Cromwell, during arguably one of his most vicious periods, seem human and understandable.
Simon: It was difficult to write because how can you make this guy who in some ways was a monster sympathetic and understandable? My take on him is that any of the other people around him would have been a worse leader. You’ve come from ten years of civil war when the country was decimated. Every time they seemed to be on the verge of sorting something out, the King would go back on his word, and they just said we don’t have any choice, we really are stuck on what we can do.
RD: You feel it’s an important story for both Ace and especially Hex, he develops so much as a character during the course of it. You really do put Hex through the ringer.
Simon: When you’re writing it you’re looking for ways to make it feel real. What you’ve got to do is care about these people and feel that the things that they’re fighting for matter. And it’s rare even in old Doctor Who that you get companions going “This is hard work.” And by putting Hex through the ringer in a way that Ace used to put through the ringer on a fairly regular basis it meant that she could go, “I know what we’re doing is hard work, but it’s worth doing.” She’s the mentor, and it also means that she’s got into it and found her place. That was one of the problems with Ace before, you never felt like she got anywhere, with people still writing her as a rebellious teen, and you thought, well why doesn’t she go off and do something else?
RD: I have to say, in the first two or three years of Big Finish, they were struggling to find things for Ace to do.
Simon: Hex was just a perfect shot in the arm for that team. The dynamic works better – they were struggling to get it right and when Hex came along it just worked.
RD: Was the framing story for those two always part of the plan?
Simon: No. Originally, it was too short, and Gary basically said, how about having a narration between Ace and Hex. That was his idea.
RD: Now it feels like an integral part of the story.
Simon: I loved writing that stuff between Ace and Hex, I thought it was really good fun, and exploring their relationship in a way that hadn’t been done up to that point.
RD: It established their very different feelings for each other.
Simon: Yeah, and Gary had ideas about where Ace and Hex were going to go which he gave me that I seeded into the narration bits. What Ace feels about Hex, what Hex feels about Ace, does Hex necessarily want to continue with the Doctor. He’s not got the same attitude to the adventures that Ace does, while Ace, after spending years wondering how much you can trust the Doctor, has finally come to terms with the fact she does trusts him but she’s also still keeping her independence. And so it was about establishing that she’s matured and she’s grown up, which you can do because Hex is there in a way that would be difficult if he wasn’t. And then when Gary was gone Nick and Alan (Barnes) said that they had their own ideas about what they wanted to do, to take it off in a slightly different direction, which is how these things work.
RD: And then there was a bit of gap before you did this year The Judgement of Isskar.
Simon: Yeah. The Settling was 2006, recorded in November 2005, by which time I was working pretty much full time on Benny, and that was a big amount of work, with 6 CDs and three books a year plus The Inside Story plus the short story competition. And I was doing The Pirate Loop, and some other freelance work to pay the bills. So it was all a bit hectic.
RD: How was it producing Benny? There was some big things happening during your time in charge.
Simon: I was very conscious that we were a tiny niche compared to who were buying Doctor Who stuff. And one of the things I had to do was to get people to notice us, because some people just weren’t aware that Benny was still going. So I did some self-consciously big, dramatic and controversial thing – I did one where they all have sex with each other, there’s Benny kissing a woman on the cover –
RD: Shamelessly exploitative stuff!
Simon: Yeah, and I didn’t impose that on anyone else, I did that in a story I wrote myself so I would take all the flak. And if needs be I would have said, well okay we tried it, it didn’t work, we won’t do it again, but bizarrely no one seemed to mind. I’ve seen one complaint about it, but everyone else seems to be quite happy about it
RD: I think you’d have to be a bit deluded to complain about that kind of stuff in a Benny audio...
Simon: And it did seem to work, it did get us a certain amount of notoriety and people have picked up the series since and things.
RD: What brought you back to the Who audios?
Simon: Two or three days after I signed off on The Wake, which was my last Benny play, I was going off to a job at a publishing company at Ladbroke Grove, and I got on the same bus as Nigel Fairs who was off to a recording. And we said hello, and he said there’s going to be this Key 2 Time thing and are you interested in being part of it? And I said, of course I am, and got invited to a meeting at the pub. And to my excitement the pub was not a “Here’s what we’re doing, you can pitch for it” meeting but rather a “We’d like you to be involved in setting it up, here’s some ideas we’ve got, what do you think?” and it was a done deal that I was going to be a part of it. We had to get the outline and scripts sorted out quite quickly because of Peter Davison’s availability.
RD: Was writing the first one a bit of a poisoned chalice?
Simon: The problem was that there was a lot of exposition and backstory that needed to be explained. My original plan had been that that original opening sequence where the Doctor meets Amy would be three pages of script, a a pretitles sequence, so we set up what the series was about and then boom, we’re in the story. But there was just so much to explain that it ended up seven pages long.
RD: It’s very like the opening to The Armageddon Factor.
Simon: And that was very consciously done.
RD: And Amy is the third companion, after William/Isaac and June in The Slitheen Excursion, you’ve created.
Simon: And also Chaudhry if you count her adventures in the Short Trips, I gave her a surname, named after a mate of mine. I hadn’t thought of it like that, that’s fun. The idea was that by making Amy a tracer herself she could explain the plot as well as the Doctor could, so that you didn’t have Peter Davison giving you a lecture on what the Key To Time is, and it made it a bit different, and it also meant that she had a much more personal stake in what they’re doing, it made for a more emotive setup.
RD: Was it always going to be her, as opposed to a regular companion?
Simon: Yes, the brief was that they wanted to come up with a new girl companion for the Doctor, who might just be for these three stories or might come back in the future, or might spin off into a Companion Chronicle, which is what they did with Zara (Amy’s evil counterpart) in The Prisoner’s Dilemma. And we decided that over the three stories she could develop, so she’d be a bit of a blank slate to begin with and then become more of a rounded person, which meant that by the time she had to face putting the key together and giving it up, she’s become a person in her own right and there was more of a stake in it. The only way you could really do that though was to have it be the person she was with, ie the Doctor, who influenced her. Eddie Robson wrote a book about the Coen Brothers’ films, and he pointed something out about The Big Lebowski, which is that it repeats dialogue we’ve heard earlier in the film, and he’ll say things that we’ve heard on news reports or that the police have said to him or whatever. I just thought that was a really nice way to tie it all together, so I used that with the Doctor and Amy. It’s an absolute sod to write, as I discovered, because you basically want to make sure that all the concepts that Amy is familiar with are things that the Doctor has said before, so I cheated a little bit!
RD: And was The Prisoner’s Dilemma always part of that same commission?
Simon: No, that came later. I don’t think I even had a conversation about The Prisoner’s Dilemma until about the time they were recording the three plays. One of the ideas was that it could be about Zara and her boyfriend Zinc as an origin story. And when I wrote Isskar I had an idea of their backgrounds so I came up with a rough story that would work around, which I pitched to David Richardson. The problem was, because it was going to be a Companion Chronicle, it would have to have a Doctor in somehow. My first thought was to make it a second Doctor story and he doesn’t know who Zara is, but we kept coming back to the problem that he’d then recognise her in Isskar and we ended up just tying ourselves in knots. If we’d thought to do this before I’d written Isskar and it had been recorded, we could have had a thing in there where the Doctor said, “We’ve met before...” but of course we hadn’t. I think it was David who said if it was the Seventh Doctor he would already know what was happening, and if he sent Ace off on a mission, he would already know the outcome of the story, and so would we, but Ace wouldn’t. And we just immediately went “Ohhhhh, that’s how you do it.”
RD: It’s another fun day at the office for Ace...
Simon: What I figured was, Ace is abandoned on a planet other than the one the Doctor left her on, she’s in a situation where no one’s going to come to save her, so what’s the worst thing that can happen then? That she doesn’t remember him or know who she is. And then that in turn would play into all Zara’s arc, which is that all that matters to her is all the stuff she’s learnt because that defines who she is. That meant I could play them off against each other, and because it’s then fifty percent Zara and fifty percent Ace, it was logical that they got an episode each. And I had to read Jonathan and Peter’s scripts to see where it was all going, because they’d gone off in different directions slightly to the original plan, to tie it all together. So that was actually quite strange, because I wrote it about four months after I’d finished Isskar, and had to go back and remember, which is weird because I think of The Prisoner’s Dilemma coming last, but it kind of comes first as well.
RD: When it was first announced there were some grumbles about being people asked to invest in another range to make the three regular plays understandable?
Simon: I think to be fair that’s a justifiable concern, and one I was very aware of. I was very conscious of trying to make the story stand alone. I think it does. You kind of buy the idea that there’s another story going on that you’re not party to, especially because it’s the Seventh Doctor - we’re used to the idea of only getting half the story and half way through the Doctor suddenly reveals that he and the villain have been playing chess for a million years and you’re like, “Oh right okay... You didn’t think to mention that before?” I’m not sure you necessarily buy Isskar and think you need to hear The Prisoner’s Dilemma or vice versa, but I think if you do listen to them both it’s a more rewarding experience.
RD: It is good commercially though...
Simon: That makes it sound very cynical. It also makes it about rewarding the listener which might sound like spin but I genuinely believe that. You want people to be engaged in the show. Because we all watch shows with story arcs. I was thrilled by the Bad Wolf story arc, wanting to know what it was, and that’s a rewarding thing. Yes, it’s about Russell asking you to pay more attention, but it’s also rewarding, the viewer is engaging with it more and is happy with it.
RD: And I suppose with the amount of stories BF produce a year, there’s an inevitability that there will emerge a backstory.
Simon: And also it would be unfair to set all this stuff up and not pay it off as well. If you’re not setting things up, not making things last from story to story, you kind of go none of this really matters, and if you dip in and out you’re not going to miss out. So you have to make it worth sticking with.
RD: From The Prisoner’s Dilemma to your two other Companion Chronicles. Is it right to say that Home Truths and The Drowned World have got you your best reviews?
Simon: I think that’s probably fair. There’s always people who say “Oh I didn’t like that one,” or “Meh,” but I’ve not seen any drawn out critiques from people not liking them.
RD: Which is quite a feat – I can’t have been the only one who, when it was first announced that Sara Kingdom was being brought back, thought “Ohhh, wait a minute, that might be going too far..” How did it come about?
Simon: When I was at the Key To Time meeting, David Richardson asked if I’d be interested in doing a Companion Chronicle. He said that pretty much anyone was up for grabs, but he had a list of people who were interested in doing one, and Jean Marsh was one of them. And I immediately said.. “Ah...”
RD: So you knew immediately what you wanted to do with it?
Simon: I think I said to him at that point, “You’d need to do it so that the story she tells explains how she can be telling the story in the first place, and it’d have to be a ghost story because she’s a ghost of some kind.” My original idea was to do it as a Christmas story in a haunted house, and Alan (Barnes) pointed out that that’s a bit too much like Chimes of Midnight, and, as he said, I just wasn’t going to win that one. It was his idea to make it a futuristic house, one in which the idea of granting any wish you want is just another gadget like a mixer or whatever, which was a brilliant idea, and the whole story just came from that. Home Truths is a ghost story with a scientific twist.
RD: Where did Robert come from?
Simon: I was reading MR James’s stories looking for things I could steal and he has a lot of very rationale clergymen investigating supernatural things, and I deciaded I wanted to have a space version of that, with a guy who clearly doesn’t believe in ghosts but ends up talking to one, and how does he deal with that? And like MR James it’s a really disturbing concept behind it, that’s quite intrusive and invasive and is a bit freaky.
RD: And, speaking as someone who really likes the Daleks Masterplan, you’ve given Sara Kingdom a third dimension.
Simon: I hope so, I hope I fleshed her out a bit. There’s quite a lot of that in Eddie Robson’s Short Trip The Little Drummerboy which I used as part of my research – I reread it because it’s basically the only thing that Sarah’s in apart from the Dalek Annuals. It’s an interesting one because I find the format just incredibly rewarding to write, because you can pause for breath and take your time and really get inside people’s heads to find out what do they actually think. It’s an integral part of the format. I actually prefer the CC’s to the main range, I love the intimacy of them, as though someone was reading a story. There’s something really nice about the atmosphere of an older companion recalling events and putting their perspective on it now. It just gives it a layer of gravitas and depth. It’s very rewarding to write.
RD: And, without taking anything away from your work, the two productions are beautifully put together as well...
Simon: I’d love to take full responsibility for the success but there was an awful lot of very clever things done by other people. Jean Marsh has an older voice and you can hear the pain and anguish in her voice which is an immediate emotional trigger to the listener, and you’re grabbed straight way. Both actors have such lovely voices to listen to. They’re both rather well spoken and rather on the nose with their pronunciation so you just get caught up in it and it’s a very nice listening experience. And brilliantly what their performances do, and what Lisa (Bowerman, director) and Richard and Lauren (Fox and Yason, sound designers) do is they pace it perfectly. They keep you waiting. And that’s not what I wrote, that’s just perfectly put together, you’re waiting for stuff, and it’s the anticipation and the tone of it which comes out of the production which is as much a player in why it sounds so good. I can’t tell you how pleased I was when I got commissioned for The Drowned World and David said that it would be the same people doing it again, because I knew they’d going to make it good. I’m so pleased with how well it’s gone down, it’s one of the things I’m happiest with that I’ve done.
RD: And at the end of The Drowned World, either you or David do mention the possibility of a third chapter...
Simon: David has said there’ll be a third one...
RD: Can you reveal anything yet about it?
Simon: When I got commissioned for the second one, I had ideas for what I wanted to do. And one of those was a story which was one of the two I had for Home Truths, which is about people caught up in the workings of a clock, which is referred to in both stories. And I’ve got an idea what that is. And talking to David when I was thinking about the second one, he said, the thing about that is that it’s another haunted house type story, it’s another MR James-y story, I’d like the second one, which we were calling Sara 2 Kingdom for our own entertainment, to be a space adventure. We’d just had a spooky one, and as she’s a sci-fiy character he wanted one where she’s in space with a rifle, back against the wall, being Ripley from Aliens.
RD: How Terry Nation would have had her?
Simon: I also had to work out what would be the relationship between her and Robert, why he would come back to see her and what he would want from her if he came back, and why he hasn’t told her to disperse. And what I kept finding was that I had too much of that as a plot, and so I basically went, if I do two stories, looking at it as a trilogy, I had an end point which I really like where they get to at the end of Part Three, and I can settle it up. So the plan was to make Part Two a more sci-fiy one and part three another haunted house one, and wrap it all up, or at least get it to a point of closure.
RD: The Drowned World is still quite spooky...
Simon: It did come out more spooky than I’d thinking. I wanted it to feel like a William Hartnell-era story, so there was a stage direction for when she goes out onto the alien world that the sound effect should be Blue Veils and Shifting Sands, because that’s what would have been played had the story been made back in the day. To certain listeners that would immediately conjure up the atmosphere. And yes, although there was Sara making a stand and with a gun, it wasn’t quite what I was briefed for, but I got away with it, David liked it.
RD: And back to full on scares for Part Three?
Simon: My idea was that the house responds to people’s unconscious wishes, so what are Robert’s unconscious wishes, what’s he in it for? But the spin on that is what are Sara’s unconscious wishes, because she grants people wishes, and there’s a rule that hasn’t really been stated that she can’t grant her own wishes, which is a fairy tale constraint. I know what Robert and Sara both want, and that’s what we’re going to discover in the third story, but it also defines their outlook for part two. So I told Lisa, and she obviously told the actors, or we discussed it, and I was very clear going that there was no guarantee, but David was asking them all if they’d be up for part three and then they mentioned it in the extras, so it’s official. But then there’s that terrible thing of, “I hope I still get to write it!” So whether it’ll happen and when it’ll happen and how it’ll happen, is to be confirmed.
RD: Having written short stories, novels, comic strips and audios, which do you prefer? Which is your natural home?
Simon: I like the variety of it. It’s good to go from a novel to a play, which is what I’ve just done. A novel’s actually quite lonely, but I don’t have any particular preferences. I’d be worried if I got stuck only writing one.
RD: Do you find each one is a different discipline?
Simon: Yeah.. If I’m writing Home Truths, I ask how do I do this that wouldn’t work in any other medium, how do I use audio as part of the story, so you play to the strengths of it. Sometimes it’s just for really stupid things, like in Isskar I’ve got visual gags, just because that’s funny to do on audio. The Doctor runs the wrong way, and Amy says “No, it’s the other way” and the Doctor goes “Oh yeah,” and that’s a visual gag. That’s partly to make it feel like you’re watching an action movie, even on audio, and as I’d heard Davison say in an interview that he missed visual humour in audio, I thought, “Right then...” And in The Settling there’s a scene where the Doctor’s outside the TARDIS and moves into the TARDIS all in the same scene which I put in solely because Russell had said that they hadn’t been able to work out how to do that for the new series, just because the practicalities would have taken too much time. On audio all you have to do is keep him talking and it’s the sound effects that change, and it’s cheap and easy to do, and really satisfying as well.
RD: You’re also working on Extras for the DVDs...
Simon: Yeah I’m doing a few of them. We did one for the Cybermen reissue earlier this year, a history of the Cybermen, and we’ve got a couple of others in the pipeline which will come up probably at the end of next year I guess, Makings of and Special features, which is quite fun.
RD: What’s the nicest response you’ve had from fans?
Simon: It’s a real pleasure when people enjoy what you’re doing. There’s been brilliant things like when the Key 2 Time was first announced there was a livejournal list set up for people writing fan fiction for Amy and Zara, months before anyone had heard who they were or what they were like! I’ve met two of the girls responsible for this and used their names in The Drowned World, lovely girls, but just a barking mad thing to do.
RD: What about any not so pleasant experiences?
Simon: The thing that really bothers me about online fandom and fandom generally is how angry it can be, and that if they don’t like a story it’s like you’ve spat at them. And it does get very personal and very hot and bothered and that is strange. I mean, I love Doctor Who and I know there are stories that don’t work, but it never makes me angry. If it did I’d probably have to walk away from it. I saw a review of TTT where the guy basically says “I really don’t like this book because I don’t like what the BBC books have been doing recently with stories that change history,” and I thought... “Fine, but the point of TTT is to explain why history gets changed, this is going to be a consequence of it.” He also didn’t like the fact I’d put Ian and Barbara getting together in the end .
RD: That’s been going on as long as there’s been original Doctor Who fiction.
Simon: Yeah, and if I hadn’t done that, it would have been inconsistent with other books and that would have been technically wrong. And fine, that’s his opinion, but he really laid into the book on the basis of those two points, and you just think, “Alright then...” If you have comments like that all you can do is shrug them off. Generally all the meetings I’ve had with people at conventions have been positive and generally polite. I have had people come up to me and tell me what they don’t like about what I’ve done, and that’s always an odd conversation... An awful lot of problems with the internet stuff is that you have to think about what you say before you say it. Have you thought about it, considered your opinion, or are you just reacting? And an awful lot of that kind of thing is just reacting and people whipping themselves up into a storm, without really stepping back and saying “It’s a TV programme...”
RD: And I think it feeds on itself...
Simon: And it’s not as if this stuff wasn’t happening in fanzines, in the old days. It’d be a lot slower but you still get people shouting at each other in the letters pages and storming off in huffs and making comments about the agendas. You look at Jan Vincent-Rudzki’s famous review of The Deadly Assassin, where he accuses them of ruining Doctor Who. There are bits in his argument which are really good, but it’s such an angry review that it clouds what he has to say. And what happens when somebody engages like that is, all you do is step back. The funny thing is people have a real sense of ownership of Doctor Who, and because you get Confidential, and the magazine and stuff and insight into how it’s made and put together, that also feeds into it, they feel part of the process. And there’s a generation of Doctor Who fans who saw it cancelled in 1989 and for whom the 90s were all about how it all went wrong, for them there’s a terrible fear that if you get it wrong now it’ll disappear again, and that motivates their ire. And it’s bizarre, because they’re furious but not because they want Doctor Who to be cancelled, but because they want to protect it and make sure it’s okay, and you go, it’s twisted, but you have to remember that. And the fact that people care about it, I guess that’s a good thing? But they are a minority. Generally, fans are all very enthusiastic, and want to engage and hear other points of view and be challenged. Look at the poll that’s just been in DWM, if you disagree and say “Oh I really love The Twin Dilemma” which is the bottom one – there are bits of TTD which are brilliant, even if people don’t agree they’re enthused about that, and that kind of thing makes you want to watch it again and look for these things. So generally it’s very positive. And you mustn’t lose that sight of that because of a small but vocal minority who are never going to be happy with anything. If it makes you angry, you don’t have to watch it, you just walk away and maybe you should. If it doesn’t make you happy don’t do it.
RD: Is there anything you haven’t done in Doctor Who yet that you would like to do?
Simon: There’s a whole load of things I’d like to do. Telly would be nice, telly generally would be nice, I’m quite keen to write telly generally. I’ve had some bits and pieces going that way, in terms I’ve pitched stuff to them, sent stuff to them, none of it’s been picked up, I’ve gone through Writer’s Room, and I’d quite like to do that. I would like to write for Matt Smith in some form or other, I’d like to write something for Christopher Eccleton’s Doctor because I haven’t written for his Doctor and that would complete the set, which sadly enough is something I’d like to do. There are some ideas for stories that I’d really like to do. I’ve just pitched something to David which I think is a really interesting story and quite different from what I normally do. I like doing different things and trying different things out.
RD: And outside the world of the TARDIS?
Simon:I’m working on a standalone sci-fiy thing. I guess the thing it’s most like at this stage is the novel Casino Royale. It’s set in the 50s, after the Second World War when everything’s quite bleak, and although it’s quite a big adventure the world feels quite parochial and small. It’s an idea I’m quite pleased with, I’ve done all the research for it, it’s just getting on and writing it, and the thing is I’m not getting paid to do it, so it’s got to be worked round other stuff. And I’ve written a short film which me and my brother are trying to set up.
RD: And what else can we look forward to in the next year with your name on it?
Simon: I’ve just delivered a Being Human novel, which will be out whenever the new series is on. I love Being Human, it’s a great show. I feel very privileged to have had a go, and I got to go to the set, where the cast and crew could not have been more generous and helpful. I found the writing quite tough because I’d been spoilt with with Doctor Who, where you can have big explosions and monsters and whatever, but you have to keep things on this quite lowkey and based on reality and stuff. I couldn’t cheat in a way I can cheat with Doctor Who. I’ve a Liz Shaw CC coming out in April, a couple of other bits of BF stuff that are in the pipeline which haven't been announced yet that should be out next year, the DVD documentaries too. Oh, and I’m in Girl Number 9, James Moran’s webseries, an extra, you probably won’t even see me. I think I’m in the final shot. I got it on the merit of being tall and nothing else. He said “You’re tall and I need somebody tall.”
RD: Is that how you’re credited? “Tall Man in Background?”
Simon: I’m not even sure I’m credited. My character did have a name but not any lines, it’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it. I did it as a favour for James, and that’s great. I’ve read it and it looks beautiful, it deserves to be a great success, and I’m very honoured to have played a tiny part of it, on canyousaveher.com.
RD: We’ll keep an eye out for you. Simon, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you, thank you very much!