Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [140]
In this flashback, Cousin Glospin is a lot older than he was in Chapter 4. And he's a lot younger too. Gallifreyan families are a nightmare.
Chapter 6
This gathering is one of those hatched, matched, dispatched occasions, when you get to see al those distant aunties who you normally avoid and barely remember to exchange Christmas cards with. There's something of those Forsyte family gatherings in this too - everyone being frightful y superior, whilst still gossiping about the latest family scandal. Basically most of the Cousins know there's trouble in the offing and are there to enjoy the show.
There are various units of Gallifreyan currency throughout the NAs. Pandaks are named after one of the Presidents named Pandak, of whom Deadly Assassin tells us there have been at least three. Not unlike the French Louis.
Chapter 7
I often have an actor in my head when I'm writing a part. Occasional y I've been lucky and actual y got the actor in question, but it just helps both me, and maybe the director, to nail down the type of character. In the late 1980s for Lungbarrow, I was thinking of the late Patricia Hayes, al wiry and with a fearsome energy, as Satthralope, Michael Maloney as the charming, but deeply nasty young version of Glospin (who has mysteriously turned into a McGann lookalike in the book) and I fantasised that Peter Cushing might be lured out of retirement to play Quences. These days, I'd kill for Leslie Phil ips. Innocet, I saw as Angela Down, who'd been so genuinely lovely as Princess Maria in the BBC's War and Peace. Today I'd go straight for the very wonderful Gina McKee. Alternatively, these days I'd be tempted to insist that all the Cousins were played by the League of Gentlemen, with Mark Gattis as a magnificent Auntie Val sort of Innocet.
227
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 classics, 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 Japanese epic The