0tralala

Just received from my illustrious masters at BBC Books, Doctor Who Paper Dolls - which is out in shops soonishly. It is written by me and @christeldeeofficial, and illustrated by @benmorrisillustration. You are welcome.

(Each week, I’m posting another of my old interviews with Doctor Who cast and crew.)

This striking-looking fellow is Koquillion, star of the 1964 Doctor Who story The Rescue. I have pilferred his name for my new blog collecting together interviews I've conducted over the years with the cast and crew of Doctor Who. Thirteen interviews went live this morning, and I'll add another one each week. http://koquillion.blogspot.co.uk/

Out now is a new Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition all about the times the TV show has been out on location. Among the many treats, I've spoken to designer Chris Thompson about filming at Grim's Dyke house in Harrow for The Evil of the Daleks (1967); to location managers Nicky James and Iwan Roberts about tracking down all of time and space for the new series - ideally within 45 minutes of Cardiff; and to former producer Marcus Wilson about the influence of The Empire Strikes Back on Asylum of the Daleks (2012). Thanks to the help of Nick Setchfield at SFX and Kevin Harley from Total Film, I also recall details of our own trip to Doctor Who on location, when we visited freezing cold Neath Abbey on 10 December 2010 to cover the making of The Rebel Flesh.

On the economics of the Daleks, and that calendar in The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

It's 20 years today since the Doctor Who TV movie starring Paul McGann was broadcast in the UK. Here is my interview with actor Gordon Tipple, who played the "Old Master" in the movie - for all of 37 seconds. It's as published in pages 42-43 of Doctor Who Magazine #497 (cover dated April 2016). Thanks to editor Tom Spilsbury for permission to post it here.

I utterly adore Martin Geraghty’s cover for the paperback of The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who, out in July from BBC Books.

I went on the London Eye yesterday. More photos here.

The latest Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition is devoted to six decades of effects in the series. As well as the astounding revelation that the heat barrier in The Daemons (1971) was a physical effect made from tinsel, there's a couple of things by me. To understand how last year's episode Heaven Sent was realised, I spoke to Will Cohen, Louise Hastings and Salvador Zalvidea at Milk VFX, Kate Walshe at Millennium FX and Samantha Price at BBC Wales. (The feature also owes a lot to Warren Frey's amazing hour-long interview with director Rachel Talalay, for the Radio Free Skaro podcast. Following that, Talalay posted a video of her demo for the SFX team, demonstrating how they could make a dissolving hand for the episode using a bath bomb kit.) I also spoke to Academy Award-winning Paul Franklin from Double Negative, who hasn't worked on Doctor Who but explained to me its influence on his own work - including what bits of the series were used as placeholder footage during the making of the movie Interstellar. (I met Paul when he and I were panelists on The Infinite Monkey Cage last year.)

To mark 10 glorious years of kids' magazine Doctor Who Adventures, my former boss Paul Lang has written a magnificent celebration of its daftness and delight. He describes the especial foolishness above, “How to Catch a Shark”, as my masterpiece. I've already posted all the episodes of daft comic-strip AAAGH! I wrote, and other bits and pieces I did. But there was the time we got "Koquillion" into the wordsearch. Or got the Daleks to write the horoscope (every star sign had "You will be exterminated!"). Or wrote comic strips in which the Doctor battled bogeys, bananas and space owls... Such happy times and places.

My short story "The Artificial Bees" is now available on the Uncanny Magazine website to read for free. It was published in issue 9, March/April 2016. There's also an interview with me conducted by Deborah Stanish about the story. If you like this sort of thing, there are ways to support Uncanny Magazine.