Doctor Who_ The Dying Days - Lance Parkin [139]
'Where?'
'See that chap with the scarf and the tin dog?' Lethbridge-Stewart pointed across the aisle.
'Oh yes. Is the blonde girl with him?'
'Judging by her dress-sense, I would say so.'
A couple of people leant over, stern looks on their faces. Alistair smiled back at them. When they recognised him, they mumbled their apologies and returned their attention to the ceremony. Montserrat Caballe had taken her place in front of the choir and now began to sing the Recoronation Aria, the specially-commissioned piece by Lord Lloyd-Webber. Future historians would count this as the first moment of the New New Elizabethan Age, when British art and literature entered a brief, but prolific resurgence.
Alistair glanced over at Brigadier Bambera. His successors were going to do sterling work, probably even better than him. But he liked to think that he'd set a high standard for them. Hopefully in years to come, people would say that he had lived up to his illustrious ancestry, and that by and large he'd done a good job. He knew that he'd had a good innings, and despite the old saying, he'd neither died nor faded away. Retirement wasn't so bad, not on those terms.
And that's why, in the middle of a packed Westminster Abbey on one of the most important dates in British history, despite everything that had happened, General Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart found himself roaring with laughter.
THE END
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Author Notes - Lance Parkin's guide to The Dying Days
Chapter 1
What We Saw From the Ruined House
Benny. The Dying Days wasn’t just the first eighth Doctor book, it marked the point where Benny spun off into her own series (technically, she stayed where she was, in the New Adventures, and the Doctor spun off, but you know what I mean). Bernice Summerfield had been introduced in Love and War, by Paul Cornell, and her adventures continue to this day in Big Finish audios. She was hugely popular, both with the writers and the readers. Up until this point, she’d been the sarky human counterpoint to a rather dark and distant seventh Doctor. She was the voice of his conscience, as wel as being the sort of person he was making the galaxy safe for.
While she quickly developed a life of her own, Paul originally based her, in part, on Emma Thompson’s character in the film The Tall Guy, and that’s still the best place to look if you want to see Benny Summerfield walking and talking right there on your tel y. I mention this now only because there’s an in-joke in chapter three which no-one will get otherwise.
The Doctor’s house was introduced by Andrew Cartmel in his novel Warhead and his DWM comic strip Fellow Travellers. Over the course of the books, the Doctor popped back to it from time to time. This is the first time we saw it in the ‘present day’.
I never got round to explaining how Benny got the letter, by the way. The book original y ended with her dropping it off for herself. But I came up with a much better ending than that...
The book contains a number of New Adventures cliches, most of them put there deliberately, some by force of habit. The first of these is the gratuitous nudity. At the time, we’d heard that the BBC Books were going to cut down on the ‘adult’ stuff (laughable as that seems, now that recent EDAs have featured tantric sex and a man in a romantic relationship with a poodle). So Benny gets her kit off here, for no reason whatsoever. Anime fans call this
‘fifteening’.
The Doctor. It was very weird writing for a character who was exactly the same but completely different. Al the time, I was very conscious that everyone reading would be directly comparing my version with the one in the TV
Movie. I cheated, really – we see the Doctor’s early scenes from Benny’s point of view, and she spends her time going ‘gosh, he’s exactly the same but completely different’. But that’s exactly what the audience do with a new Doctor. The Doctor refers back to Love and War, his first meeting with Benny. Again, it’s a dual purpose –
reminding people that this was a book with a heritage, but making something new