Here comes the past #14: Doctor Who: On the beach with New Adventures

Doctor Who started to die a long, slow death when the BBC took it off the air in 1989. Apart from a lamentable crossover with Eastenders, 89 minutes of Paul McGann and the odd comedy sketch, the TV show was off the air and gone from the world.

Russell T Davies and chums sorted all that out years ago, and brought back the Doctor, better and bigger than ever. But for 15 years there, Doctor Who was pretty much dead in mainstream culture.

But it was only his TV adventures that were dead. Something strange and wonderful was happening with the Doctor in a new format, with a new series of novels that took the Doctor into previously unexplored realms of time and space. They were called the New Adventures, and if you get me drunk enough and thinking about girls with short, dark hair, I'll swear they are the best Doctor Who stories ever.

Here's a slice of space and time: Sometime in 1997, I'm on a beach in Dunedin on the arse end of the world, drinking a bloody big bottle of scrumpy cider and reading a book that has the best Wings-based pun ever, and it also features an incredibly smart woman with short dark hair who orders a pint of vodka, and I fall in love with Professor Bernice Summerfield.

Benny is the first proper companion introduced in the Doctor's novel adventures, and she's an absolute delight – snarky and sharp and clever and resourceful and expanding her mind as she falls through the universe. Never mind about running off with the good Doctor, I want to explore the limits of space and time with somebody like Benny.

She's still out there now in 2015, starring in the occasional book or audio adventure, and she's still as beautifully sharp as ever.  

The New Adventures were published by Virgin and were born in the immediate aftermath of the TV show's end, with the Doctor and Ace strolling right out of Survival and into the Timewyrm saga. It only lasted a few years, until the BBC grabbed the rights back in the wake of the McGann movie, and almost all of the Virgin novels have long since fallen out of print.

But they burned brightly, and remain a massive influence on the current generation of Doctor Who writers. Some of the New Adventures novelists went on to write for the series themselves, and some of them peaked a long time ago, but there was such a sudden rush of infectious enthusiasm for what you could do with a Doctor Who story at this time, with a burst of creativity and cleverness.

It became a series that got inside the TARDIS crew's heads like nothing before, or since. Unashamedly going for an older audience, the stories were complex and human, with a direct focus on characterisation – lots of hugs and hurt feelings as the Doctor saved the world again.

They could get quite brutal and dark, with massive body counts and destruction on a galactic scale, but they also featured the Doctor going off and getting drunk on his 1000th birthday and singing Happy Birthday to the universe, and they featured strange, lyrical tales set in long-ago English summers.

Paul Cornell set the new standard with Timewyrm: Revelation, and would come back every year or so to raise the bar again, and it was a level of quality that no other TV tie-in novel series came close to touching. There were consistently brilliant books by Cornell, Kate Orman, Lance Parkin, Andy Lane and Ben Aaronovitch, and they were all must-reads, with stunning ideas and swaggering style.

Here's another slice of time and space: One night during this period of New Adventures, I have this ridiculously vivid dream about pain and loss that leaves me with an inexplicable crush on the character of Dodo, a young woman with short, dark hair who was in the TV show in the 1960s and is precisely nobody's favourite companion.

I'm not sure where this comes from, all I know is that I'm fucking shattered when I get to the part in Who Killed Kennedy where she is callously murdered for plot purposes, and it isn't helped when she ends up with a brain-eating STD at the end of The Man In The Velvet Mask. Dodo deserved better.

The Man in The Velvet Mask wasn't actually a New Adventure, it was a Missing one. A couple of years into the run of NAs, the editors started putting together new stories about past Doctors, filling in the character's continuity with new travels and confrontations. Some of them emulated the new style, and weren't that successful for it, while ones that were more blatantly homaging the era they were going for worked out all right.

But my favourite Doctor is always, always the current one, and it was the New Adventures that mattered. They started getting deeply weird as they built up a new story of the Seventh Doctor's new role as Time's Champion, a Machiavellian mastermind who played chess with the cosmos and still understood the value of a single life, who negotiates for peace on apocalyptic battlefields and then goes off to play the spoons.

They played fast and loose with the Doctor's world, and I totally understand how it turned a lot of people off, and some of them had the worst book covers I've ever seen on a science-fiction novel (they got tremendously better towards the end), so I can see how Who fans could reject it.

They also got delightfully self-indulgent, with the 50th book a huge love-fest for the whole series, a book line that got drunk on their own possibilities. The end was near, and things got tangled up in psi-war nonsense and real-word computer failure, and the last few books came out of order and became legendarily rare, even as they promised answers to the oldest of questions.

One last slice of time/space is longer than the others, and stretches over a year or so as I get obsessed with these books, almost too late for my own good.

I know about them, but other than watching the odd old story on video, I have little to do with Doctor Who in the early nineties. I see the books in the stores and check out the back covers, but it's only when I get Return of the Living Dad, another continuity-drenched piece of gushing Who love, that I fall for them.

It's fortunate timing, because I'm just able to grab the hardest ones to find before they disappear, and spend the rest of the time buying them in bulk, the first time I ever use the internet to figure out and track down a new obsession.

And it is an obsession - I'm in my early twenties, and my entire pathetic life revolves around getting as fuckin' wasted as possible, re-reading The Invisibles in search of the meaning of life, and tracking down Doctor Who books. It all melts together, and I'm sitting on that damn beach, getting drunk as fuck and spinning out while reading No Future and Flex Mentallo. It all seems so normal.

And then it was all over. The BBC books came in and were never as satisfying, with a lack of a strong editorial vision or real point. They got briefly interesting with Lawrence Miles' additions to the saga, but they proved too inherently self-destructive to really get anywhere.

And then, at long last, the TV show came back, and it was amazing, with strong actors and high production values the old series had only ever dreamed about. Most of all, it came back with brilliant stories which built a whole new level to Doctor Who, and the debt they owe to the New Adventures is palpable.

There is that same cleverness, and that same naked sentimentality, that could be found in the best New Adventures, and they gave the good Doctor's adventures a new credibility. They could be about more than running down corridors and filling 25 minutes of air time. They could be about anything, as small as hurt feelings, or as large as threats to the universe.
 

I came in so late, and had to go back and read the books in totally the wrong order. And it too me years to track down the last few New Adventures I needed, which was understandable, considering the last few's pitifully tiny print runs. I paid more than fifty bucks for a copy of Lungbarrow a few years ago, because I had to have it, but the one I could never track down was Cornell's Human Nature, the one that everybody raved about, until I got it the other week.

It was weirdly easier to live with that hole in the collection when the story was used as the basis for a two-part story in the TV show, with the Seventh Doctor's story claimed by the Tenth. But I was always looking for the book then I got it a few weeks ago, and it's done.

I still haven't read them all, because I'll have to be pretty desperate to finally crack open The Pit, but I'll get there one day. Like all particular periods of Doctor Who, it was the perfect thing for its place in time and space, and we've all moved on, but I still have a lot of dopey affection for these stories, too wide and weird for the small screen.

- Originally published 8 July 2015

Not long after completing the whole set, I did start reading them in order, one a month, every month. I'm up to Damaged Goods and the most shocking thing I've discovered is that I'm more of a Roz man than a Benny boy these days. Now I'm trying to decide whether to go for the Missing Adventures of Eighth Doctor Adventures next. It's an important decision.

Here comes the past #13: The day we saw the Loch Ness monster

Nobody actually expects to see the Loch Ness Monster when they go visit the Scottish lake. The odds of seeing something weird in those dark waters are just so implausible, especially when you're surrounded by hundreds of other tourists on a dreary weekday afternoon.

Nobody really thinks they'll see this thing, which has become ingrained in the modern collective unconscious – a monster that everybody has heard of, but nobody ever really sees. Nobody feels real disappointment when they go to the lake and see nothing, because, really, what are the chances?

And nobody believes us when we say we saw it, but we really did.

The lovely wife and I have been to Scotland twice – the second time was just last year, when we went so far north we fell off the end and ended up in the Orkney Islands. But the first time we went to Scotland we only got as far north as Loch Ness.

It was the summer of 2007, and we were on a first major trip around the world, a newly married couple checking out the planet, and liking what we see. Scotland was about halfway through a six-month trip, and we were only in Edinburgh for a few days before heading off to Europe for a couple of months.

Time was tight, but we had to go see the Loch Ness, because I'd been fascinated by its story, ever since I was a little kid. So we caught a coach up there, saw the lake, bought the tea towel and went for a cheesy boat ride on a tourist vessel packed with sonar equipment.

And we spend about an hour on the lake, and we're heading back to port, and we’re facing backwards while everyone is looking out the sonar screen, and the shore is about 30m away and between us and the shore, there is something there and....

Whatthefuckisthat?

Nessie was one of my absolute favourite real life monsters as a kid. I looked at every blurry photo and read any dodgy book and magazine article I could find on the Loch Ness Monster. I don’t care that all the famous photos of the monster have been debunked over the years – I still love them.

In fact, it was probably my favourite, followed closely by Bigfoot (almost entirely due to that few seconds of the Patterson–Gimlin film – I still find the way he swings his arms particularly haunting). There was just something a little creepy about Loch Ness, and that old, dark lake, and the secrets it hides, and all the stories it generates.

I know there isn’t really a monster. I know that there is no dinosaur in that lake, and that most of the sightings and photos have been the work of hoaxers and the over-eager. I know the Loch Ness Monster doesn’t really exist.

I still saw it.

This is what we saw:

About 10m out from the shore, at a part where the hillside dives sharply into the water, there is something in the water. Janie sees it first and points it out to me.

It looks like two brown dolphins briefly breaking the surface of the water, rolling over smoothly and barely making a ripple on the surface. Two months before this, we’d had the extraordinary luck to be barrelling around New Zealand's Marlborough Sounds in a small boat with a two-stroke motor, surrounded by a pod of hundreds of dolphins, so we were familiar with that kind of motion.

The moment only lasted two or three seconds, and then there was nothing, and the lake was still again.

It wasn’t a great ‘HOLY SHIT’ moment, just a deeply profound moment of ‘HUH?’.

Was that….? Did we….? Could it…?

The first thing we asked the guide on the boat was whether there were dolphins in the lake, because that’s what we thought we saw, but he just laughed at us, and said they’d choke on the peat. We told him we just thought we saw dolphins, and he said it was probably just diving ducks.

I don’t know what the hell we saw, but I do know one thing: That weren’t no ducks.

Obviously, I didn’t get any photos, but I don’t regret that one fact, not one little bit.

It was all over so quickly, that if I had been scrambling around for the camera, I might not really have seen it at all, and I wouldn't have the moment seared into my brain, like it is now. There was just no time to react, only to gawp.

I'm still so grateful that the wife also saw it, because I'm sure I would have convinced myself I'd imagined it by now, if I'd been on my own. But we both saw it, and we both saw the same thing, so it can't have been a figment of the imagination. We really did see the monster.

I mean, we still barely believe it ourselves, even with that back-up, so we don't blame anybody else for not believing us. I totally wouldn’t believe us. I would laugh at any of my mates who said they saw Bigfoot, (or even a moa). I can only expect the same in return.

Nobody really sees the monster. Only bullshitters would say they did. Especially when they didn't even get any damn photos.

I don't care. I know I saw something, and she saw something, so there definitely was something out there on the lake, that grey Tuesday afternoon in 2007.

And it might have been otters, or big bloody fish, or some strange optical illusion, or even those diving ducks, but I really don't want to know the truth. (It was definitely something living, I can say that much.)

Because, as sad as it sounds, that was one of the best moments of my entire life. I went to Loch Ness and saw something strange, and never in my wildest dreams did I think I would ever be that lucky. But I was, and now I've got a story and an experience that I will take to my grave, and I don't care if nobody believes me, or scoffs when I say I saw it. It was still one of the greatest days ever.

We also stopped by the Loch when we were heading north last year, and spent a lovely sunny Sunday morning wandering around Urquhart Castle and eating tablet, and I kept glancing out at Loch Ness and looking for strange wakes and waves.

I didn't see shit, but that's okay.

I'd already got a lifetime's worth of strangeness out of those waters.

- Originally posted on June 30, 2013 

We still people that this happened to us, they still tell us they believe us, but we can see it in their eyes that they really, really don't.

Here comes the past #12: Mark Millar wants to know what you are talking about

 

 

- Originally published 5 July, 2018 

I thought he'd got out of the habit, but read some recent Millar comics and they were full of it. I thought about updating the list with another dozen or so examples, but I think the point has been well made.