Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow Part 54

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Cousin Satthralope: The housekeeper is the medium between the House and its inhabitants. She's in telepathic empathy with the living building, responsible for the rituals and day-to-day running of the place and the Drudges are her servants. She embodies the House's possessiveness and sense of familial duty. There's a remnant of the ancient female Pythian rulers of Gallifrey in her role.

Ordinal-General Quences: The Kithriarch, head of the Family. The elderly parent who only wants the best for his offspring. He recognised the Doctor's potential long ago and had a career al mapped out for his protege.

Unfortunately the Doctor had his own ideas... An alternative Quences turns up in the close of the chapter, with Arkhew spinning on the orrery-like clock, the Cousins in complete panic below and the dark rising up the windows, was the very first visual image I had of Lungbarrow, before I even knew the story that went with it.

Chapter 8.This chapter starts with a collage of word pictures representing the aftermath of the House's actions. Maybe it comes from watching so much tv when I was younger, but my prose writing does seem to be very visual. In fact, I knew the stories of many literary cla.s.sics, not because I'd read them, but because I'd seen them on the tel y. I did go and read quite a lot of them afterwards, but even as I read the books, I'd see the characters from the tv version.

Patrick Troughton, magnificently evil as Quilp, Alan Badel as The Count of Monte Christo, Frank Finlay as Jean Valjean. A Disney film version of any story or fairytale tends, for good or bad, to eclipse any other interpretation.

But even on audio, I still find myself trying to create extraordinary sights; sights that the tel y could never afford.

These days I watch precious little television. Al presenters who believe they're more important than the programme they're presenting should be sentenced to watch endless loops of lifestyle programmes. And one particular garden designer, who prefers concrete to plants, should have been strangled at birth by a clematis.

The Doa-no-nai-heya Monastery is the retreat featured in the previous book in the NA series, Kate Orman's j.a.panese epic The Room With No Doors.

For this version of the book, I've hacked out most of the second half of the original Chapter 8. There was a cringe-making overload of information there, showing what the Doctor got up to while Chris was unconscious, and it was totally unnecessary to the plot. So it went.

Chapter 9.Gallifreyan nursery rhymes seem to be gloomy things that mourn the loss of the children. It's all down to guilt.

Children were so long ago that they've become the stuff of fairytale and legend.

The Drudges seem to have forgotten their place in the hierarchy. As maids, they are supposed to serve the Family, but since the House took things into its own "hands", they behave more like prison warders. The House has decided that it knows best, rather like high street banks that forget they are the public's servants.

After six years working in catering during the seventies, you'd think I have gone off kitchens, but I still like them a lot. They're the heart of any home. Things, both wonderful and weird, happen in kitchens. Chefs chase junior cooks with live lobsters. The kitchen staff are at permanent war with the waiters. The waiters live on a diet of filched oysters and smoked salmon. And I can't even tell you what I once saw in the dry food store in a seafront hotel in Southsea. Fawlty Towers only skims the surface, believe me. The things that other people have in their larders is just as fascinating as what they have on their book or video shelves. And what the Lungbarrow kitchen has in its larder is not quite so far from other kitchens as you'd like to think.

I like the fact that the Doctor is extremely cagey about admitting that he knows where he is. It puts a strain on his friendship with Chris, who behaves with utmost decency throughout. I'm all for a bit of antagonism between the regular characters. G.o.d knows, they live on top of each other enough, barrelling through harrowing situations which hardened troops would need counselling for. I love it when Barbara calls the First Doctor a stupid old man; when the Second Doctor deliberately has a row with Jamie about rescuing Victoria from the Daleks; or when Nyssa doesn't tell the Fifth Doctor that she's spoken to Adric in Castrovalva. You could write a whole book about Tegan's paranoias, and the Seventh Doctor has those little disagreements with Ace in Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric. Chris Cwej is a really nice guy, but his trust of the Doctor is at odds with his training as an Adjudicator, which means he can't help but have a highly suspicious mind.

Innocet is such a stickler for tradition that she even puts on her hat and coat for a trip up the corridor. People wil do anything to cling on to the past. But really she's quite literal y shouldering all the blame and guilt in the House. If she's not careful, she'l land up an unsung martyr.

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Chapter 10.I've always had a soft spot for mushrooms ever since the sixties when a Russian spy, captured retrieving top secret information from a tree stump in somewhere like Ashdown Forest, insisted he was only looking for fungi.

"I'm only picking mushrooms" became a school catch phrase. Rather like the slogan on a sheer nylon tights offer with Paxo stuffing: "Recommended by Anita Harris." But I digress...

There's a sense that both the Doctor and Chris are getting out of their depth. Wouldn't it just be better to get the TARDIS back and go? But curiosity, always the Doctor's undoing, and a man in a stove get the better of them.

They're starting to get noticed.

The Doctor's catapult, emblem of a rascal y Dennis the Menace-style childhood. But I don't remember knowing anyone who actual y had one.

Any resemblance by the "whisper softly" nursery verse to "Christopher Robin is saying his prayers" is purely deliberate.

Chapter 11.Strange, isn't it, how something insignificant can s...o...b..ll? Does the Gallifreyan Celestial Intervention Agency appear in any other tv story? Not by name as far as I can recall. (By now you'l all be shooting off notes to the BBCi Who forum.) But when the CIA got mentioned in Deadly a.s.sa.s.sin, I'm sure it was just one of Robert Holmes'

throwaway line jokes. Yet it's ballooned into the all purpose, undercover, machinating power that lurks behind the pomp of the High Council. It's answerable only to itself and is responsible for all those times when the Doctor starts shouting threats at the empty air.

If the smug, serpentine interrogator of Leela seems familiar, it's because he appeared memorably in one of the tv stories. He's an historian, his statements are al couched in legalese and he seems to have nothing but contempt for anything that rocks the stately circular dance of Gallifrey. For purposes of suspense, his ident.i.ty wil not be revealed until much later on in the story. Meanwhile President Romana, representing the radical forces of liberal innovation, is already playing the forces of Gallifreyan conservatism at their own game.

Chancel or Theora's hairdo is not a symbol of the labyrinthine plot.

Chapter 12.Cousin Rynde is an unsavoury fel ow. He used to be in catering (that rings bells), but now he's more of a spiv into any sort of dodgy deal. He's always ready to sel you, under the counter, no questions asked, half a pound of tafelshrew and mushroom sausages that he's knocked off from the Drudges' kitchen. Don't touch them, they're well past their Best Before date.

Drat, another of the legion of games from Innocet's compendium, is a card game, probably the Gallifreyan equivalent of the German game Skat.

Wouldn't I much rather write an Earth-bound story? Wel , it certainly hands me a lot of minute detail on a plate. I know, and the readers know the references, rules and social structures for Earth. But I do love fil ing in the detail of alien societies. That's where the colour comes from and I can spend far too long getting myself into the right world for a story. I have to be inside it before I can write it. Even then, it still has to be recognisable for the reader. Real alien life could well be so alien that we wouldn't recognise it as life at al . On tv, we rarely see more than half a dozen woggly creatures to represent an entire race. So most tv alien societies can only be variations on an Earthly theme.

Are the living Houses a complete anathema to everything we've ever seen of Gallifreyan culture? I don't think so.

They are a throwback to the beginning of the Intuitive Revelation, which marked the end of the dark days of the Old Time. Like the Looms they house, they were conceived to protect a species threatened with extinction: the Gallifreyans themselves. TARDISes are very much alive; so is the old and battered Hand of Omega, itself a relic from another age. If you looked at the ancient culture of j.a.pan, before it adopted and outdid the invasive culture of the West, you might think it very unearthly indeed. The past is there to be respected, but there's no point in writing at all if you don't come up with something new.

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The body-bepple is a 30th century extension of tattooing or body piercing, allowing the fashion-conscious to remake their bodies into interesting (and exotic) forms. When Chris first appeared in Andy Lane's Original Sin, he was aptly beppled into the shape of a giant teddy bear.

Time Lords count their age in years and generations. Even over this, there seems to be rivalry. The Doctor keeps quiet when asked how old he is. He's going through his regenerations far too fast.

Chapter 13.Looking at the array of creatures that turn up in Lungbarrow, from gullet grubs to fledershrews, blossom thieves to scrubblers and neversuch beetles, it feels like time for someone to write a Flora and Fauna of Outer Gallifrey.

Natural history has always been one of my specialist subjects (see Ghost Light), and when I was about seven, I wrote to David Attenborough asking how I could go about being a zoo keeper. In those days, he presented the Zoo Quest series for the Beeb, exploring exotic locations in black and white and collecting animals for the London Zoo.

He even wrote back to me outlining his path through university and the BBC. My career never really followed the Komodo dragon path, but over forty years later, the man is still one of my heroes. There should at least be a s.p.a.ceship, even better a major planet, named Attenborough.

Meanwhile, we already know that there are cats and mice on Gallifrey, and tafelshrews first turned up in Time's Crucible as laboratory specimens on board one of the first Gallifreyan timeships. In Paul Cornell's Happy Endings, we learn that there is a Loom of Ra.s.silon's Mouse. But in The Invasion of Time, that load of couch potatoes, the capitol-bound Time Lords, are terrified of being cast out into the wilderness. Maybe it's the centuries of urban living that make them uncomfortable with the uncontrol able wildness of nature. They'd rather watch it on a screen.

We're back to David Attenborough again. Even so, the remote Houses have orchards and formal gardens, presumably tended by the Drudges, and we know that the Doctor used to high-tail it up the mountain to visit Mount Lung's local hermit.

I do like this image of looking up the chimney, staring up at a tiny disk of sky which must seem as remote as an unreachable planet.

The end of this chapter, with its revelation of what has befallen the House and its inhabitants, was the original end of the tv version's first episode. And as Innocet points out, a large part of the blame lies with the Doctor himself. All that being mysterious is final y catching up with him.

Chapter 14.The original TV storyline was a three-parter set exclusively inside the House of Lungbarrow, just as Ghost Light never ventured outside Gabriel Chase. It was a Seventh Doctor and Ace story, so none of the other companions in the book - Leela, Romana or the K9s - appeared. Chris Cwej is in the book by proxy as the Doctor's current companion, and a lot of his story was original y designated to Ace. The parts of the story set at the Capitol are only in the novel - the expanded book version was an excuse for plenty of political intrigue and conspiracy theory (at the time, we were all in the depths of X-Files mania.) Romana has spent quite a while with the Tharils in E-s.p.a.ce, so the leonine time sensitives are her obvious choice to serve as the first alien amba.s.sadors to Gallifrey for thousands of years. Haven't things changed a lot since the Fourth Doctor refused to take Sarah Jane Smith home with him?

The two K9s were a pretty irresistible idea. The Tharils must have overcome the problems that stopped Romana's K9 (the Mark II version) from leaving E-s.p.a.ce. So here they are, both wittering the obvious in those supercilious tones to anyone within hearing distance. K9's best feature is his ability to speak the unspeakable, unconstrained by the human vices of politeness and consideration. It's an endearing quality shared with Daleks and Cybermen if they're written properly and with the adorable Anya in Buffy. Two K9s are even better than one. Fortunately we're spared Sarah Jane turning up with her model as wel .

Leela has been having quite an effect on Andred, leading him not just up the garden path, but right out into the woods where all sorts of things can happen to an unsuspecting Time Lord. When Andred says that their physical relationship is the sort of things that other Time Lords watch on screens, has it occurred to him that he and Leela might also be the subjects of higher scrutiny? He can have no conception of the importance of their liaison. And talking of conception, Romana and her retinue have al been sitting round the screen with their fingers crossed.

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The courtroom visited by the Time Lord in black is the heart of the CIA's domain. It's also probably the chamber where the Second Doctor was tried at the end of The War Games. The courtroom in The Trial of a Time Lord was on that ma.s.sive s.p.a.ce station - or was it a time station? At least here, we are spared an inquisitor dressed as a wedding cake, complete with rampant doily as a ceremonial col ar of office.

There was a sort of inevitability that Leela and Dorothee should team up. Two strong women, both fighters skil ed in their respective weapons. But of course, to start off with, they don't get on. It seems to be standard procedure for Ace/Dorothee to be spiky towards other companions. She was the same with the Brigadier in Battlefield and although she and Benny are friends in the New Adventures, they are forever circling each other like a couple of very wary cats.

Few people get close to Dorothee as a person, and if she sees them getting between her and the Doctor, then a degree of jealousy tends to kick in. Meanwhile, if this catwalk cat-fight had been in the TV version, it would be the point when all the private cameras in the studio suddenly appeared, just as they did when Ace and Gwendoline wrestled on the bed in Ghost Light.

Chapter 15.How much blame must the Doctor take for his Family's plight? We know from experience that he has a catalytic effect on any situation he visits. No one who meets him, even for just a moment, walks away untouched, unscathed or properly mangled. His involvement is usual y beneficial, but in his Family's case it's downright catastrophic. If you trace back the disastrous events in the House, don't they all lead to the moment when the Doctor failed to come home? Or do they go further back to the moment when he left? Or stil further to the moment of his birth? Cousin Glospin suspects it goes even further than that. Perhaps the real problem is that the Doctor exists at al . Sooner or later he may final y have to start saying he's sorry.

Poor Satthralope, rudely awakened from her deep sleep. She is keeper of the keys, the spider at the heart of the House's web, lost and lulled in shadowy dreams like Aunt Ada Doom, who saw something nasty in the woodshed at Cold Comfort Farm. It takes time to wipe the sleep from her rheumy old eyes. But when she wakes, when she feels the shuddering protests of the House to which she is wedded, when she sees the transgression thrown along corridors of mirrors; then forbidden secrets, lost under the dust of centuries, wil be uncovered and the price of their hiding will be exacted. Far better for everyone, if she just turns over and goes back to sleep again.

I needed another pa.s.sage harking back to happier times and childhood adventures. The only sunlight in Lungbarrow comes in shafts of memory from life before the darkness. So it's a hot dry summer in the valley at the foot of Mount Lung. Somewhere across the meadow the Gal ifreyan equivalent of the Famous Five are solving crimes and being insufferable little oiks, the Gallifreyan equivalent of Swallows and Amazons are fighting pirate battles on the lazy river, the blossom thieves in the magenta orchard are too f.a.gged out to tweet, and even bookish Cousin Innocet has been led out of doors on a berrying expedition by her roguish Cousin, the Doctor.

Happy days. Any time now, Moominmamma wil arrive with the lemonade. It all serves to deepen the dank gloom to which the Family are now condemned. I like this little scene very much.

Chapter 16.One of those Victorian style "at homes" where guests call, present their cards, take tea and exchange pleasanteries? Not real y.

In Kate Orman's Return of the Living Dad, the Doctor, Chris and Roz spent time in Sydney, 1966. Chris and Roz didn't get the jokes in The Producers - a bit like all those incomprehensibly unfunny jokes in Victorian copies of Punch. You had to be there at the time and not just visiting.

Poor fat Owis has minimal social skills, is easily led and is far more at home with objects and animals that don't tell him how to behave. He's still a very large kid. In the 673 years since the trouble started, no one seems to have developed in the House at all. They've just grown thinner, paler and madder. And Innocet's hair has grown longer.

It's as if time stopped when the sun went out.

Sepulchasm - a typically grim board game of both luck and skill, named after the Gallifreyan equivalent of Purgatory. The players move their chapter-coloured counters round the board, trying to reach the safety of "home."

They use telepathic skills to stop their counters tumbling into h.e.l.l when the ground cracks opens under them. It was either that or Serpents and Siege Engines (the Gallifreyan equivalent of Snakes and Ladders) or the Victorian counter game Squails.

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Gallifreyan dice seem to be a law unto themselves. The eight-faced die may have indeterminate numbers, but it does have a secret agenda to guide its performance: it can throw up any score that the author feels like.

I've been vegetarian since 1988. But like most of us, I could still murder a bacon sarnie... unless someone put one in front of me, that is.

Chapter 17.m.u.f.fins - I recommend orange, lemon, lime and poppy seed. These go down well in the green room during recordings at Big Finish. Chocolate too, of course. And last Christmas, I invented m.u.f.fins with mincemeat filling.

I was getting bored with the same three Time Lord Chapters being trooped out like a mantra in homage to the sainted Robert Holmes: Prydonian, Arcalian and Patrexes. So I added the Dromeian Chapter (probably Social Democrat) and the Cerulean Chapter (Blue in colour, Green in policy.) Neither have been heard of since.

Lord Ferain's Alternative History of Skaro picks up on the possible alternative Dalek history timeline created by the Doctor's intervention during Genesis of the Daleks, as described in Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping's indispensable Bible The Discontinuity Guide.

The masonic symbols in Ferain's office imply secret rituals and dark deeds (and the police force too.) Ra.s.silon was originally described as an architect. Although that suggests he was the architect of Time Lord civilisation rather than just a few high rise blocks and a leisure centre round the Citadel. I'll stop this thread now before my brain runs amok with scenes of mighty Ra.s.silon arguing with the builders over how many mirror tiles he wants in the bathroom or how long a tea break should be.

I didn't want to stage the equivalent of the "M briefs Bond for his latest mission" scene in a boring old Presidential office. Having a tea party inside Monet's Impressionistic water lily paintings is much more up Romana's frivolous, yet stylish, garden path. Or perhaps the idea of a garden path. Rather better than going to Monet's actual garden at Giverny (complete with loads of tourists.) Or you could go to the Orangerie Museum in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, where the oval rooms containing Monet's pictures encircle you so that you feel as if you're inside the paintings (complete with loads of tourists.) Only you can't at the moment - a sign on the door says Closed For Refurbishment Until 2004. So I apologise to Daryl. This scene is probably a nightmare to ill.u.s.trate, only I get the impression(!) that he's looking forward to it.

I like the idea that the Time Lords' exclusive power comes at a price. If Gallifrey is already slightly outside the continuum of the rest of the Universe, surely a good observation point, then the Time Lords' investment in the stabilising influence of Omega's Black Star has only made things worse. The power that neither fluxes nor changes is slowly, slowly grinding the whole of Gallifreyan existence to a halt. At this rate, the Time Lords will eventual y be frozen in Time themselves and the rest of the Universe will come to look at them instead.

Encounters and Exits It was de rigeur on TV Who that theology and religious belief got couched in the most simplistic of forms. Black hats versus white hats, especially fetching when worn as fashion statements by the Black and White Guardians.

But every seesaw needs a fulcrum on which to balance; a catalyst to inspire them; a pin to pop their overblown balloons.

The New Adventures suggest that between the Black and White Guardians, there is a Red Guardian of Justice to balance the scales and referee the perpetual battle. And on Gallifrey, between the imagination of Omega and the rationality of Ra.s.silon, sits the balance of that other one, the one in the shadows, what's he called, you know... the one no-one ever remembers the name of. Somebody to blame. This archetypal figure, by turns mocking clown or judgmental whistle-blower, turns up in all manner of myths and legends, and here he is in the creation sagas of the Tharils too. It does suggest that on the flowing river of time, there's one person who can never resist sticking his oar in...

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Chapter 18.While I would be messing about trying to avoid having to face Satthralope, the Doctor just marches into the lion's den to confront her. Do unto those what they would do unto you before they get the chance to do it. One of the reasons I like the Seventh Doctor is that because he appears so una.s.suming, his defiance and even foolhardiness appear much more dynamic and brave.

The House portrait - the Lungbarrovian version of the dreaded annual school photo. At Eastbourne College in the late sixties, this meant five hundred boys with beautifully brushed hair, V-signs behind the headmaster's head and one wag dashing round the back to appear at both ends simultaneously (just like the cover to Happy Endings.) But in Lungbarrow, it means forty-four suspects and one victim for Chris, and one suspect and forty four victims for Innocet.

The walls of the House of Lungbarrow are thronged with portraits of the Doctor's ancestral Cousins. Years ago, many were bought as a job lot by the Arts Council and distributed throughout the galleries, castles and stately homes of England. They're usual y disguised with labels attributing them to one Old Master or another. But don't be fooled, these are really the Doctor's relations. Innocet by Hans Holbein or Satthralope by Rembrandt. So go on, join the National Trust and see how many you can spot! And don't forget that every Cousin can have thirteen faces. So there are plenty to choose from!

The "Quences disinheriting the Doctor" scene made a much edited reappearance in the script of Auld Mortality.

Derren Nesbitt recorded it too, but due to time constraints, it was the only major cut from the final CD version. It languishes metaphorically on Alistair Lock's cutting room floor.

Having bad dreams is bad enough. There are times when I've had dreams that make me afraid of going back to sleep (often involving crocodiles in the weirdest locations.) Dreams are uncontrollable. But having someone else's bad dreams is even worse, particularly when you're not even asleep.

Chapter 19.Terrapin-Maiden from Chris's FreakWarrior mags is a close relative of Rosa Caiman's Jaguar Maiden in Loups-Garoux.

Chris is realising how little he real y knows about his friend, the Doctor. It's as if the Doctor that we see, or are allowed to see, is just the tip of the most monumental iceberg ever. What lurks in the murky depths below the surface is anyone's guess. Even the Doctor isn't sure.

The living Houses of Gallifrey are as much a part of the Families as the Cousins who inhabit them. Satthralope's task as Lungbarrow's Housekeeper is not unlike a lone sea captain, trying to steer a grumpy ocean liner that gets in a strop if it's woken up too quickly. The House has been drowsing uneasily on automatic pilot for centuries, but now a very large iceberg has just changed course and is heading in the its direction.

The catafalque, the funeral carriage that guards Quences's gla.s.s coffin, is another of Lungbarrow's fairy tale references - the dragon that guards the treasure h.o.a.rd. Anyway, it was time for a big rampaging monster. Like all the furniture in the House, the catafalque has basic instincts and reflexes of its own. It protects its master. I imagined it as an elaborate bier in a vaguely oriental style, its black lacquered flanks adorned by the writhing statues of legendary beasts. Gal ifreyan Chinoiserie/j.a.panesery. It's also really an excuse for Badger to make a dramatic entrance.

Chapter 20.Not so much a chapter, more a couple of important moments which move on events outside the aegis of either Chris or the Doctor. Battle lines are being drawn. Knives are being sharpened. Defences are being reinforced. But like the fragmented railway network after privatisation, no one is talking to each other. All the protagonists have their own private grudges to settle.

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Chapter 21.For years, I've had a theory that the Doctor's capacious pockets are as dimensional y transcendental as the TARDIS, a bit like Mary Poppins' carpet bag. Hence his impossible fetching out of the umbrella in the previous chapter. They might even be portals to another universe or something called Props Direct, a place that supplies just what the Doctor needs, but not always in the most useful form. Maybe we could have an entire adventure set in the Doctor's pockets, although A Universe in my Pocket sounds like a gooey celebrity autobiography best avoided.

So Chris is being treated to the Doctor's diverted nightmares. I'd wondered how the Doctor's head could cope with all that information, memory, manipulation, lateral thinking etc, once things started getting too busy in there. If he gets what the technical y-minded call a right brainful, does a little window pop up saying Out Of Memory? The Doctor's symbiotic empathy with the TARDIS supplies the drastic solution. The ship starts franchising out the data to other local repositories - i.e. i.e. Chris's head. I suppose it isn't programmed to ask permission first. Chris's head. I suppose it isn't programmed to ask permission first.

The Doctor's little speech about his uncomfortable feelings over coming home is the sole survivor of the sequence that I cut from the end of Chapter Eight in the original book. It works a lot better here on an emotional level, as well as in purely story-tel ing terms. But the Doctor is being deeply insensitive by saying it in front of Innocet. There are things that you do at home that you'd never do in public. But at least he has started to apologise.

There wasn't really room for Benny in this book. But in the tying-up of the New Adventures, it was important that she put in an appearance, however brief, in the final walkdown of companions. "Well Doctor, I'm afraid your old friend Bernice Summerfield can't be with us in person this evening. But she is on the line now, live from an archaeological dig somewhere in your head."

The image of the wel is borrowed from Maeterlinck's play Pelleas and Melisande, another huge influence on Lungbarrow with its stifling gothic castle, doom-laden family and tragic lovers. As one character says "there are parts of the garden that have never seen the sunlight." The play also contains one of the most frightening lines I've ever come across in anything: in answer to the child Yniold's questions "Why are the sheep so quiet? Why don't they talk any more?", the shepherd replies "Because this is not the way to the sheepfold." Pelleas is all shifting moods and dark colours. It shows you one thing, but means another. Little is defined, everything is symbolic or by implication. Debussy's setting of the play is arguably the greatest of 20th century operas. I'd certainly vote for it. I first heard it thirty years ago and I'm still always moved to tears by its melancholic beauty. The sunlit music for Act Two, Scene One goes with what Innocet saw by the wel .

Chapter 22.I first came across astral travel, the out of body experience, in The Ka of Gifford Hil ary, one of those occult novels by Denis Wheatley. He seems to have gone way out of fashion now. Maybe his works would seem a bit lurid or tawdry these days, but in the late sixties when I couldn't get enough of them, they felt like an adults-only branch of the wild monstrous fantasy of which Doctor Who was the main stream family branch. But those were the days when Eastbourne Col ege boys had to get written leave to go into town (maybe they still do), and I used to sneak out to the cinema with a friend to see The Devil Rides Out or Dracula Has Risen From The Grave, probably at the risk of detention if we'd been caught.

In a fit of venomous pique, the First Doctor takes sneaky revenge on Glospin and the rest of his Family. A bit like children reporting their parents for drug abuse or sueing them for maltreatment. I didn't antic.i.p.ate this bit in the initial storyline. But when I got to the chapter in the text, the Doctor decided to go in a different direction. I love it when the characters take charge and override my projected storyline. In one fell swoop, the Doctor added a whole extra dimension as to how and why the House had been struck from the Gallifreyan records. And that dimension is called Spite.

The owl statue outside the Chapterhouse echoes Paul Cornell's fondness for the birds. This particular Prydonian owl draws parallels with the carved face on a wall of the Doge's Palace in Venice. Into its mouth, citizens could slip anonymous accusations about their neighbours. The accused would then be tried by the city's fearsome inquisitors, the Council of Ten. So let's face it, Glospin may be The Villain, but the Doctor is just as capable of giving as good as he gets.

In the multi-possibility universes of Doctor Who - Unbound, there must be numerous versions of how the Doctor left Gallifrey. Almost as many as there are long-term fans, in fact. So where the hel , I hear you ask, is Susan?

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Chapter 23.The chapter t.i.tle is the first of several al usions in this section to Hamlet's encounter with the ghost of his father, also murdered horribly, also seeking revenge.

When Innocet reels off the various versions of Ra.s.silon's consolidation of his power, it's clear that history is rarely factual. It depends far more on who's writing it. A bit like whether you read The Guardian or, heaven forfend, the Daily Mail. But whichever version you read, the poor old Other gets a pretty bad press.

Omens (which the Doctor doesn't believe in): When I was at school, there were afternoons when we were required to watch the 1st XV rugby team. During one match, everything suddenly went very quiet. The breeze dropped and the birds stopped singing. The match continued, but the hush in the air was heavy and palpable. After at least a minute or so, we heard a distant car, a screech of brakes and a horrible thud. At the next corner along the road, a man had been hit and killed by the vehicle. The silence beforehand had not been my fantasy, because several people commented on it. It's not explicable by any law I know, but I am certain that particular event was antic.i.p.ated on a far deeper level than I can understand.

On the appearance of Quences's ghost, the Doctor invokes protection from angels and ministers of grace. It's another Hamlet line, but the Ministers of Grace also turned up briefly in a short story The Duke Of Dominoes in the first Decalog collection. And in a Dalek story I planned that never really got off the ground. The MIGs are a faction of self-appointed guardians of our morals, galactic Mary Whitehouses, determined to make the cosmos a better place. They are probably Daily Mail readers, are in a permanent state of shock over the moral decline of universe and would like to hang nice net curtains around absolutely everything.

It was standard practice for pictures of Adam and Eve, neither of whom had a 'natural' birth, to show the naked couple without belly b.u.t.tons. So the children of Gallifrey, born fully grown from genetic looms in which their DNA is woven, don't have navels either. The looms are allocated one to each House, and have controlled the numbers of Gallifrey's otherwise doomed population for aeons, ever since the Pythia's curse rendered the people sterile.

Consequently there has been no natural evolution in the Gallifreyan form either. The looms are just a people factory. There are no real children. Random physical features are in place to preserve individuality and some semblance of gender. But nothing fluxes or changes. Or to quote an old Mid-Gallifreyan nursery verse: Isn't it dark Isn't it dark Isn't it cold Seek out the future Before you get old Once there were children This is their doom Now all the people Are born from the loom This first appeared in Cat's Cradle: Times Crucible. Strangely it goes (more or less) to the tune of Send in the Clowns. Only the Doctor is different. His deformity, an old-style placental navel, apparently suggests some slight hiccup or other interference in Lungbarrow's loom processing system.