Dance Like No One Is Watching

Doctor Who: The New Adventures 1991-1997

Doctor Who clocks up another decade this year, with three, 60th anniversary specials due in November. Back in 2013, during the show’s golden anniversary, I was asked to contribute to a fan publication called, You and Who: Contact Has Been Made. This was a series of books containing essays describing an individual’s personal connection to particular Doctor Who TV stories.

Just to be awkward, I wrote about Doctor Who: The New Adventures, a series of books that took over from the TV series, when it ended in 1989. It was very difficult to cover sixty-odd books in fifteen hundred words. In the end, I wrote a more of a short story disguised as an essay.

You and Who is now out of print. So, here is said essay/story in full.

“It was an interesting time”

I stumbled down the dirt track, away from the music. I wove through the parked cars and spotted a campfire next to a couple of deckchairs. One chair was occupied and the other was vacant.   

"Alright if I sit here for a bit, mate?" I said to the bloke.  

"Of course," he replied. "Be my guest."   

I slumped into the deckchair, took a swig from my can of Red Stripe and attempted to regain my composure.   

"Having a good night?" asked the man.   

"Yeah," I said, "Just need to chill for a bit. I've been dancing for... I dunno... what time is it?"    

It was only then that I focused on the man's face and realized who he was.   

"It's around 4 am," the Doctor replied, cross-referencing his wrist and pocket watches.   

 "I... didn't expect to see you here," I said.   

"Oh, you don't shake me off that easily," said the Doctor, straightening his fedora.   

"Don't get me wrong, Doctor," I said. "I'm pleased to see you and everything. But, I'm also slightly disturbed, what with you being... fictional."  

"Am I?" he replied in all innocence.  

"Here, I've got one of your books with me." I reached into a pocket in the leg of my combats and retrieved a crumpled copy of The Left-Handed Humming Bird.   

"Ooh, that's good one!" the Doctor exclaimed, snatching it from my hand a flicking through the pages. "Why do you have a book with you at a rave?"   

"I was reading it in the van on the ride down yesterday," I explained. "Where are we anyway? I never did find out."   

"How am I supposed to know?" the Doctor shrugged. "It's your fictional world."   

"This place is real, isn't it?" I said. "I'm real."   

The Doctor shook his head. "This is place is based on one of your memories," he explained. "It's not corporeal. You are a fictional version of yourself, based on the you from the mid-1990's." He rummage in his pockets, retrieved a small hand mirror and handed it to me; "See? It's all tramlines and tie-dye right now."   

He was right. I looked twenty years younger. I swigged my fictional beer and pondered.   

Eventually, I enquired if the Doctor was alone.   

"Chris is around somewhere," the Doctor replied.   

"And Roz?" I asked.   

The Doctor said nothing. Reaching down, he threw another piece of wood on to the fire.   

Poor Roz.   

The first rays of the sun began to peek between the trees. The Doctor's eyes darkened slightly. "Perhaps you would like to get to the point?" he muttered.  

"Yeah, sorry," I said, sifting through my brain for the point. "I'm supposed to summarize the significance that The New Adventures held for me. It's...  really hard to rationalize..."   

"And attempting to do so when you're completely off your face really helps, I suppose?" the Doctor grumbled.  

"Listen," I said. "The 90's were a very transitional time for me. I thought, by drawing a parallel, I could segue into how they were a transitional time for Doctor Who as well."   

"Well, segue away!" boomed the Doctor, with a theatrical wave. "Although, I'd be careful if I were you. Your subtext is starting to show."   

I gazed at the grumpy little man in the pale linen suit and wondered what I'd ever seen in Doctor Who.    

One of my earliest memories were of Doctor Who, when he had white hair, being attacked by dinosaurs and turning into the Doctor Who with curly hair and a scarf. I mean, yeah, that's not what actually happened in the TV show, but then Doctor Who isn't a TV show. Or rather, it was never merely a TV show.    

For a while, when I was growing up, my father drove a van delivering books to bookshops. We were never short of something to read in our house. Amongst the things my Dad would misdeliver were the Target Doctor Who novelizations. My brother and I had a small collection of them before we were even old enough to read them properly.   

By the tail end of the 80's, I was teenager with a Saturday job and buying the monthly releases. People like John Lucarotti and Donald Cotton were dusting off and reworking their missing or never-likely-to-seen adventures. The TV series faltered, then found fresh purpose and was cancelled for its trouble. It was the end...   

"Please don't say; 'But the moment had been prepared for'," moaned the Doctor.   

"I wasn't going to," I lied.   

The Doctor raised his eyebrows.   

"OK," I admitted. "But, it's appropriate, don't you think? The novelizations carried on, even when we didn't know what was happening with the TV show. Ben Aaronovitch, Ian Briggs, Marc Platt all seemed to be pointing to a way  forward in their books at the time. It was as if the story that started on TV, when the dinosaurs attacked the white haired Doctor Who and he turned into the curly haired Doctor Who..."   

"It didn't happen like that," said the Doctor.    

"… and all the prequels and extended remixes that I'd read as books," I went on. "It felt like it was all converging. Uniting."   

The Doctor shrugged. "It was an interesting time," he admitted. "That business with the Timewyrm for start..."   

The Timewyrm sequence that launched Doctor Who: The New Adventures began with John Peel's Genesys, was followed by Terrence Dicks' Exodus and then Nigel Robinson's Apocalypse and were all perfectly lovely. But then the final book in the sequence was published. Paul Cornell's Revelation came as a... well... you know. 

A story involving a sentient church on the surface of the moon, Ace's childhood bully and a trip through the Doctor's mindscape; Revelation was ambitious, confident and brimming with possibilities. Most importantly, it wasn't an apology in lieu of a television series. It luxuriated in its medium. This was a watershed, if not the watershed, in all of Doctor Who.   

"Really?" said the Doctor doubtfully. 

"Yeah," I said. "There were better books to come, but this was the 'Mission Statement'. The new direction. The New Deal. And you bagged the Time's Champion gig."   

A dark smile curled across the Doctor's face. "No more Mr. Nice Doctor," he murmured.   

"Nah," I said, finishing the dregs of my can with a grimace. "You've always been a bit of a ****."   

"Charming," huffed the Doctor, folding his arms.   

"Well, come on! You dumped your own granddaughter on a post-apocalyptic Earth with only the clothes she was standing in!" I reminded him.   

"You make it sound worse than it was," he grumbled.   

"Actually," I continued, "Now that I think about it, she didn't even have a pair of shoes. You went off with one of them."   

"Alright, alright!" he snapped.   

"All because some bloke slapped her with a fish...” I added, knowing full well I was pushing it. The Doctor leapt from his chair and shouted; "Enough!"   

I shut up.  

There was a fair amount of angst and regret and chickens-coming-home-to-roost in The New Adventures. The relationship between Ace and the Doctor was tested to breaking point and beyond. After the Doctor accidentally killed her boyfriend, Ace flounced off and joined the space corps, venting her frustrations by killing Daleks for a couple of years. The pair were eventually reconciled. This emotional, extended sort of character arc was something not seen in Doctor Who before, but would become standard in The New Adventures and in every incarnation of the ongoing narrative that followed.  

I retrieved my final can of warm beer from my jacket pocket. The Doctor was standing with his back to me, poking the fire with his umbrella.   

"I've only got one left," I said. "I'll share it with you if you like?"   

"No, thank you," The Doctor replied.   

I cracked the can and glugged from it.   

"Do you know what it was about The New Adventures?" I said.   

"Do tell," sighed the Doctor.   

"It was all those other sort stories that you always knew had happened," I said, wondering exactly where I was going with this. "Those things that were alluded to on the telly, but couldn't be slotted into a twenty five minute TV show."   

The Doctor turned. "Go on," he said.   

"Take, The Also People," I went on. "It's basically you guys having a nice holiday. The whodunnit is almost completely secondary. Chris has a holiday romance. So does Roz… sort of.  Kadiatu drops in for a sangria. I mean, it's a mind-boggling space holiday with an artificial god in a Dyson sphere, of course. So, it’s still completely Doctor Who, whilst being unlike anything you could see on TV."   

I clambered to my feet. "People forget that, at the time, the TV show was never coming back!" I ranted. "The New Adventures carried on when no one else was looking. Broke boundaries! Took liberties! Pushed it as far as it could go!"   

The sun could no longer be ignored. Birdsong was seeping through the thud of the sound system. I could see The Doctor considering his next move. Slowly, he sat back down in the deckchair. He wasn't going anywhere.  

It was going to be a beautiful morning.