#douglascamfield

Today we have a Q&A with Lance Parkin, author of multiple Doctor Who novels and a contributor to Forgotten Lives. Lance’s story ‘Past Lives’ features the Camfield Doctor (who has a guest cameo in his novel Cold Fusion) and begins like this:

‘The Doctor sipped the y’bador, which was too hot, too sweet, left much too much of a sour aftertaste, and which he instantly fell in love with.

‘“Well, everywhere in the galaxy was affected,” the Commissioner replied. “You say ‘untouched’, but everywhere was touched.”

‘He sounded defensive. The Doctor smiled and nodded.’

FL: Tell us a little about yourself.

LP: I have gone from the child prodigy who wrote a Doctor Who novel to someone who needs a stiff upper lip to think that his debut novel is older now that its author was when he wrote it. Went from Doctor Who novels to storyliner on Emmerdale, managed to translate that into a complete lack of further TV career at the exact moment Doctor Who came back to TV. I’ve had a book published at least every year since, including biographies of Alan Moore (which I think is my best book so far, I’m probably not the person to ask) and Gene Roddenberry. Met a lot of very interesting people and had a lot of opportunities as a result.  

FL: What attracted you to this project?

LP: Well … a long time ago, I wrote an article for a fanzine called Matrix, ‘Past Lives’, that suggested that if you look at all the evidence, especially The Brain of Morbius, then Hartnell is probably not the ‘first’ Doctor. There’s at least room for incarnations we don’t know about. This was, at the time, delicious heresy. It got a huge reaction, it was reprinted in Licence Denied, the Paul Cornell curated ‘best of the fanzines’ book that Virgin published. The appeal to me wasn’t just finding a loophole that broke the most basic fact of Doctor Who, it was that it opened up huge new vistas for the character, you didn’t have to imagine that everything that had happened in the Doctor’s past had happened to William Hartnell with slightly darker hair. So the appeal of this project is a bunch of people get together and show us some of that huge, hidden universe.

FL: These Doctors only exist in a couple of photos. How did you approach the characterisation of your incarnation?

LP: Mine’s ‘played’ by Douglas Camfield. Some of it is based on Camfield himself – he was notorious for planning everything very carefully, and having binders full of ideas for turning the script into a piece of television. So there’s a nod towards that. I slipped a flashback scene featuring the Camfield incarnation into my now-ancient Doctor Who Missing Adventure novel Cold Fusion, but only really picked Camfield because he had a beard, so I could go ‘the Doctor had a beard’ and everyone would realise it wasn’t one of the TV ones, but I do establish the Doctor’s married in that. I also tried to think about what the show would be like if it was modern Doctor Who but made in 1958 or whenever, I kept coming back to the idea of it being a sort of Graham Greene thing set in a world picking itself up from a devastating war. So what role does the Doctor have in that? I struggled with that at first.

FL: The stories are intended to represent a ‘prehistory’ of Doctor Who before 1963. How did that affect your approach?

LP: That’s the central paradox of this collection – how do you make this character recognisably ‘the Doctor’ but set it before the show starts? How do you have them work for the Time Lords but be a hero, not a lackey? A moral force, and experienced, but clearly not as developed as they become later? How do you fit it in with continuity – continuity that probably doesn’t let you say ‘Time Lord’? – but retain the joy of all this, which is that it’s a whole new space for Doctor Who stories sort of free from all that? How do you tell a short story that stands for and sets up a whole era? I wanted it to be a sort of pilot episode, or a teaser at least. I want people to wish they’d seen all 30 stories with this guy, not just this glimpse. As I was writing it, Paul Hanley put up his notes about his depiction of the Camfield Doctor, and said he saw this one as a sort of monster hunter, and that was sort of what I was doing, but he’d summed it up in two words, so that’s what crystallised it for me. So, to answer your question: he hunts monsters.

FL: What’s your story about?

LP: The Doctor glances across a tea room and sees an irredeemable monster. So what does he do?

FL: Who would be your ideal casting for a pre-Hartnell Doctor?

LP: I spent a lot of time thinking about this, then had a eureka moment and said ‘Peter Cushing!’, and slapped myself on the back, then about two seconds later I remembered that I wasn’t the first person to come up with that answer. Peter Cushing, but with the room to play it for the broader, older audience Doctor Who has now compared with 1965.

FL: What other projects are you working on at present?

"The Doctor wore a greatcoat and waistcoat and was somewhat overdressed..."

-- Past Lives by Lance Parkin