Recently I’ve had the pleasure of being interviewed by Greg for his Youtube channel The Times Scales, a place dedicated to Doctor Who. I’d originally planned to try and keep to a disciplined hour, but we ended up talking for nearly three, so the interview is being released in two halves. You can watch part 1, about being a fan of the classic series, thoughts on the so-called Wilderness Years, and the joy of its mainstream success when it returned. We also talk about my BBV productions, Audio Visuals and my own fan audio stories. The second half will continues with more about Westlake Films, my pantomimes, the future of Doctor Who and the excellent writing advice of Georgia Cook.
We had met online via Will Hadcroft, whom Greg had already interviewed as part of Will’s promotion of his BBC audiobook The Resurrection Plant. Greg was interested in covering my journey as a creative too, so we arranged a date and had an enjoyable conversation. Greg proves to be an excellent interviewer and I think he’ll only get better. You can watch part 1 now below and I hope you get something good out of it. If you have any questions yourself as a consequence, feel free to drop me a line here or on Twitter @gazhack.
It’s surprising to realise that Doctor Who has rarely used the Industrial North as a setting. We have seen adventures set in futuristic factories and warehouses, visited the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in Mark of the Rani and had a few romps into Steampunk. Big Finish has touched on it in The Peterloo Massacre and Industrial Evolution but that landscape of terraced houses, looming smoke-belching factories and municipal buildings that could be found from Birmingham to Newcastle has remained the province of Coronation Street and contemporary drama. So having the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe land on the corner of a cobbled street in Will Hadcroft’s The Resurrection Plant feels quite fresh.
Not that this is the actual North of England. In fact the TARDIS has brought our friends to Calico Three, a small habitable planet where the rural colony the Doctor remembers is in the grip of an unexpected mechanisation. What’s more the factories are capitalism run wild, with human workers mere expendable cogs in the machine. But nobody minds because on this planet everyone can be brought back to life thanks to the Resurrection Plant, even if occasionally they change gender along the way. The travellers investigate but are soon captured, just in time for a factory accident to lead to the creation of a terrifying mutation in the newly grown humans.
The author captures the the characters of the regulars extremely well. Patrick Troughton’s Doctor can be hard to capture in print, since so much of his character is in his delivery, but here he’s compassionate, curious, mischievous and has moments of righteous indignation. Jamie and Zoe both get moments to shine on their own too. The story seems to be setting up as a Frankenstein-influenced piece about Ren, a technocrat facing up to consequences of treating his workforce as commodities, together with a fearsome but misunderstood monster, but there’s a second act twist which takes us into another kind of drama, one that I was worried was going to ruin the authentic Sixties atmosphere that Will had recreated. Thankfully he skilfully avoids this.
Fraser Hines has been sharing his enjoyable Troughton impersonation for a while in Big Finish audio plays and books. It’s great to hear it again. Elsewhere he is an excellent reader in general and tells the story with animation and a good pace. Similarly impressive is the soundscape.
There are echoes of The Rebel Flesh and The Quatermass Experiment, but ultimately this is a great original adventure. It tells a story probably too difficult for the television series of the time to realise well, and instead takes advantage of the freedom of prose. An excellent addition to this year’s mini-Troughton celebration, along with the recently released animated recreation of The Abominable Snowmen.
CD cover
Will Hadcroft of course is a friend of mine and its been marvellous to see him achieve the ambition of writing an official Doctor Who story. He’s previously written several novels and many moons ago an adventure for my old fan audios Fine Line, called The Chattath Factor, which has recently been re-released on Youtube. It was a marvellous story to end my fan series on.
Back in the Nineties, when new Doctor Who had been absent from our televisions screens for a while, a fan mini-industry of fiction, audio and video adventures sprang up. I had become caught up in serious Doctor Who fandom in the mid-Eighties and it was in the pages of Celestial Toyroom that I first discovered adverts for the Audio Visuals, Doctor Who stories made by some of the talents who go on to found BBV and Big Finish Productions. They were extremely polished for the time and inspired me and some friends to create our own stories on cassette, selling them through fanzine advertisements. I decided to called our group Fine Line, after a quote from the marvelous comedy film This Is Spinal Tap. For me, these sonic adventures gave me a chance to write and produce credible adventures without the limitations that VHS films made in the local suburbs had.
In time, cassettes were replaced by CD-R’s, which in turn were supplanted by MP3 files. My old Fine Line website began as a way of advertising and selling my productions, and became the main means of distribution. Eventually I decided to concentrate on original work and gave up paying for the host.
Recently I have been learning up to date skills in website creation via my BSc degree apprenticeship. It’s been fascinating to learn HTML, CSS and Javascript in an organised course. The first time I was learning as I went, using magazine articles and whilst I made working pages, there significant gaps in my knowledge. In order to keep mind in the zone over the summer, I decided to create a website to host my old fan fiction projects. Audios which taught me a lot about writing, directing and seeing a creative project through.
You can find the results at http://18060801.webdevmmu.uk/ You’ll find two seasons of stories, trailers, some behind the scenes articles, and cover images and more. It’s an evolving site and I intend to add more material from time to time. Who knows I might even complete a couple of unfinished shorts we recorded back then. If you download them, I do hope you enjoy them. Love to hear what you think if you do.
One of the aims of this blog is to be a one stop shop for my work. It’s been busy lately, both with completing the first year of my Digital Technology Solutions Apprenticeship and supporting the last three productions of the Bolton Little Theatre season. But this does give me creative outlets: two new videos and my first self-created webpage in a long time.
Ladies in Lavender, based on the popular film written by Charles Dance and starring Dame Maggie Smith and Dame Judi Dench. Adapted for the stage by Shaun McKenna. I decided to go for a simple slideshow style trailer due to having limited time. Finding a good young male violinist photo was surprisingly hard. I shall also be designing the sound and operating the sound desk for that week 11th to 18th May.
Spring and Port Wine, the classic Northern comedy drama by Bill Naughton, which became a beloved Sixties Bolton movie starring James Mason and Susan George. Again a simple slideshow format, using vintage newspaper photos, a location from the film, and music from Youtube’s stock library. The music was originally intended to be “Times They Are A-Changin'” but that is not allowable due to copyright. I’m compiling the sounds for this final play of the season, but happily I am getting help on the sound desk.
Back in the late Nineties’ I was keen to join in the internet revolution and make my own webpage. I self-taught myself HTML and created a small website to promote my Fine Line Doctor Who audios, uploaded to the personal webspace I received as part of my NTL subscription. It was great fun but once my audio production days faded, my skills faded. One of my favourite parts of my current degree has been Web Development, and its been good to learn HTML, CSS and Javascript in an organised way, as well as updating my conception of how today’s web works.
As part of this I had to create a personal profile page as an assignment and you can take a look at it. The webspace comes courtesy of the degree course, but it is owned by me, rather than the university, and might well host a more interesting creative site in the coming months. Watch this space.
The Phantom Frame 