Doctor Who_ Nightshade - Mark Gatiss [108]
“Shame. He would’ve brightened the place up no end.” I 304
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remember being very disappointed that this wasn’t in the It’s fascinating now to read this. It’s like a snapshot of my TV version!
past, appropriately enough. So many of the character and place names are of people I knew then but not any more; Chapter One
Holland, Railton, Yeadon, Bayles and Vijay Degun! I used to work in a nursery and one of my charges was a wonderful The story’s setting came from a desire to redress Doctor kid of that name, one of the brightest, funniest children I’ve Who’s South East bias. As a Northerner myself, I felt it was ever known. What became of him, I wonder? He’d be, God, high time an adventure took place further up than Watford twenty one now! (I’ve just Googled him. Looks like he does though it seems odd now that I chose Yorkshire rather than something in West Yorkshire Trading Standards!) the North-East which is where I’m from. It was probably a There’s a lot of set up in this chapter but it’s still pretty combination of having recently been to college in Yorkshire, atmospheric. Lots of my own Christmas memories have the moors (I once spent such a day in Ilkley with... well, been pressed into service here and the sequence where Jack that’s another story) and, I suppose, not to want to look too Prudhoe chases his wife’s phantom onto the moor still obvious (ie Darlington writer sets story in Darlington) makes me tingle a bit.
Either that or the fact that the fairly recent Mark of the Rani Edmund Trevithick is a composite figure. He’s a grumpy had been set in Geordie-land.
old actor (my favourite kind) who used to star in a TV series I think it began life with a present day setting but then that isn’t quite Quatermass and isn’t quite Doctor Who.
Peter Darvill-Evans suggested some recent historical date I was utterly obsessed by Quatermass at that time (and and 1970 was briefly debated. I said I couldn’t imagine making a short spoof with Reece and Steve, soon to be of setting anything in 1970! But then I remembered a story one The League of Gentlemen). I wanted some of Nigel Kneale’s of my teachers had told me. He’d been the only hippy in grittiness to rub off on this story and, as I’ve said, make it Jarrow and recalled waiting outside the Pictures in kaftan more like the Doctor Who I remembered and loved. A year and Lennon specs with big, surly blokes on all sides waiting or so later when I was making The Zero Imperative with Bill for any excuse to smash his head in. It takes guts to stand Baggs, Gary Gillett mocked up some videos that can just be out from the crowd.
made out on Jon Pertwee’s shelves. They were Nightshade, What began to interest me was the notion that the 60s Nightshade 2 and Nightshade and the Imps. I don’t think obviously didn’t swing everywhere. So how about the anyone ever noticed!
TARDIS pitching up in a tiny backwater during one of the The one bit I can’t bear is the first paragraph of this most momentous years of the century? There’d be a sense chapter: “Perhaps the world was dreaming”... etc. I know I that life was being lived elsewhere and a village full of wanted some kind of “It was the best of times, it was the people all yearning, in one way or another, for a vanished worst of times” feel but it now looks so bolted on and just past. But then life - or death - would catch up with them...
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plain weird. Much better to just crack on with the story.
I was keen to get something like a real romance going in Which is what I suggest we do now.
the story as I felt baffled and confused by the recent TV
attempts at it, particularly the scene in Curse of Fenric Chapter Two
between Ace and the soldier. I mean, what was that about? I don’t know why Ace should fall for this particular bloke but Why has the Doctor decided to retire? I have no idea. I Robin seems quite a decent sort and pretty dishy.
suppose,