All the saved, war zombies and the Brigadier's rebirth: My big Doctor Who ideas

There is no new Doctor Who Christmas special this year, but that's all right - I got lots of Doctor Who stories inside me.

I've been coming up with them since I was six years old, although the first decade or so it was always something like 'Return of the Daleks', which had the Daleks, and they were returning from somewhere, and all of these were absolute rip-offs of the Dalek Invasion of Earth.

I've never had any real hopes of actually writing some proper Doctor Who somewhere, partly due to the tyranny of distance, and mostly due to my own cowardice and lack of ambition. But I can still daydream about what kind of Who story I would tell, and these are my top five ideas for Doctor Who stories that I always wanted to write. 

They are in no particular order, and they all feature the current Doctor, because my favourite doctor is always the current Doctor.

Doctor Who and the Planet of the Saved

This was born out of the classic Adric Conundrum - why couldn't the TARDIS just materialise next to Adric when his spaceship is about to crash into Earth and kill the dinosaurs, drag him on board and go on his merry way?

But if if he could do that, there were probably a lot of people across the universe he could save. Passengers on planes that went down in the cold ocean and were never found, or more than just one family in Pompeii. He could pick them up and take them away.

That meant he would have to set up a new world where they have no further impact on history, and live out long, happy and fulfilling lives in another galaxy or something.

I never had a plot other than the TARDIS crew showing up in a weird community that was a absolute mish-mash of Earth pop culture, but always thought the revelation that the Doctor was behind it would be a third act rug puller, and that it was probably done by a future Doctor, who managed to do it without falling into the usual Time Lord Victorius mode.

Doctor Who and the Second Life of Alistair

So if the Brigadier's consciousness was possibly still out there in a Cyberman, then his daughter Kate would definitely do everything she could to sort that out, and would have access to some kind of cloning technology, and could reboot Alistair as a badass super warrior for the 21st century.

The twist would be that Alistair is a bloodthirsty maniac who just wants to kill everybody, because death means nothing to him, and he'd have to be talked around to being the ultimate warrior for peace, which he always was in a strange way, before being let loose on the universe again. 

All I know is that I'd watch a series that had a super-hot young Brigadier Lethbridge-Stuart bombing around time and space with the Doctor for a while. 

Doctor Who and the One Where He Gets Chased By a Corridor

Everybody who read a New Adventure in the 90s thought they had one in them, because people had been invited to send in blind submissions, and they found some astonishing talent. They had an Australian, for goodness sake! 

Trying to be as clever as all the hot young writers in that series, my story would have started at the first Ashes test after the Dalek Invasion, with an older Tegan and Bernice getting absolute shitfaced before everyone is called to a hidden bunker that has gone crazy. Of course it turned out to be built from a bit of TARDIS from the 70s that was alive, and the new and very clever idea I had was to have the TARDIS crew running from a corridor, rather than down a corridor.

That's it, that's all I had. I was very drunk at the time.

Doctor Who and the War Zombies

When the rumour that Sir Lord Peter Jackson wanted to do a Doctor Who story was running about, it was impossible not to consider what we'd all like to see from the big man.

My own daydream involved a time travel experiment from the 30th century going wrong - because for a while every Doctor Who story was about future tech going berzerk - and bringing the dead of the Somme back to life. I've seen Jackson's collection of WW1 war planes in the flesh, and can't help but imagine a scene of the Doctor flying over a battlefield filled with the advancing living dead in a biplane that the Doctor is holding together with string and sheer force of will. 

Doctor Who and the Secret of the Curator

I thought I was being so clever.

I had this idea that that explained both the Curator from Day of the Doctor, Susan, and the Brain of Morbius pre-Doctors, and it was that was there were 13 incarnations before William Hartnell, but he was always the first Doctor, because he tried on other personas throughout his regenerations, including as the Architect, and the Explorer, and yes, the Curator, before settling on The Doctor, but that something happened in that final reckoning that wiped the memory all his previous lives.  

And then Chris Chibnill did almost exactly that, and it was actually not that good an idea at all.

Which is a better metaphor for what happened to these who ideas of mine that anything else I can think of, so I'll leave the stage now - and incidentally, a happy Christmas, to all of you at home!