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Introduction - Introduction

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Preface by Marc Platt

Roots

In 1996, when Rebecca Levene at Virgin asked me for another New Adventure, I hummed and ha-ed a bit, faffing round with various ideas, but Ben Aaronovitch insisted it had to be Lungbarrow - exactly what I really wanted to do, but hadn\x92t dared suggest. Then the BBC raked back the Virgin\x92s license because the McGann TV movie was in the offing, so Rebecca decided that Lungbarrow, with its revelations of the Doctor\x92s roots, was the story to finish the book series.

In fact, Lance Parkin sneaked in under the closing portcullis with The Dying Days as a parting shot, but Lungbarrow was the Seventh Doctor\x92s final Virgin. It\x92s a sort of Doctor Who equivalent of King\x92s Cross: the final stop for a whole load of storylines, not just from the Virgin books, but stretching back into the TV series as well.

Finding a family

The idea of the Doctor\x92s family had been knocking round my head for years before I ever got commissioned for the TV series in 1988. After a quarter of a century, we\x92d learned an awful lot about the Doctor. That was unavoidable. But there was now precious little Who left in him. We all want to know about him, but we also want him to remain a mystery too.

My idea was to start afresh. To clear the decks, I\x92d commit the cardinal sin of answering the fundamental questions, and then knock the explanations sideways with a whole barrel-load of new questions. You open the locked box only to find another locked box inside. Only this one\x92s bigger. The more layers of the Doctor you peel away, the stranger and darker he gets. And he stays the same. A mystery.

I\x92d been woken at 5am one morning by the idea of the family and the living house. The last thing the Doctor\x92s family could be was obvious. He comes from an alien planet, however terrestrial (and British) its inhabitants appear, so I was determined to get away from any Earth-style 2.4 children sort of family. It had to be strange, yet familiar too.

The idea I woke up with arrived in such detail that I got quite feverish, unable to get it written down fast enough. One Loom, forty-five Cousins, two Drudges and one very grumpy House were all in place along with their hierarchy and their terrible fate. And then I sat on the story for a long time, not daring to submit the storyline. It was too outrageous. I was venturing into forbidden territory.

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Lung Light

Only at the end of 1987, when I first met Andrew Cartmel and Ben at the production office, did I tell anyone about the story. Andrew and Ben had their own plans to darken the Doctor\x92s character. They already had the Time Lords\x92 founding triumvirate in place: Rassilon, Omega and the other one that history never remembers the name of. But they were unsure how all this linked up so many aeons later with the Doctor. Lungbarrow offered a solution.

I worked on the story with Andrew for about nine months, until JN-T decided that maybe this was a bit too radical too soon. In answer, Andrew produced Plan B: we relocated some of the elements to 19th century Perivale, changed the emphasis of the story from the Doctor to Ace, and called the new story Ghost Light. And apart from a tiny reference to the family in Ghost Light, a line which Sylvester changed in rehearsal, Lungbarrow went on the back burner.

The Shopping List

Of course when you got commissioned for a New Adventure, you not only got several lunches in the Virgin staff canteen (it knocked the socks off the BBC one), but you also got Rebecca\x92s shopping list of Things That Need Including.

In the case of Lungbarrow this meant:
1) Tie up the threads set up in the New Adventures.
2) Lead into the TV Movie.

Everyone else got to choose which bits of continuity to play with. I had to deal with the whole lot. And I also had a few strands of unfinished business lurking from the TV series that needed completing too. A load of sarsaparilla-drinking sessions in Andrew\x92s office had gone into them. There are hints of them scattered all through the New Adventures, but with the advent of Mr McGann, this would be their last chance for an airing before Who took off to Heaven knows where.

Here we are again

When BBCi suggested serialising Lungbarrow on the Doctor Who webpages, I jumped at the chance to take another look, which I hadn\x92t done for years. Some bits surprised me, some of those bits I liked enormously and a few bits made me absolutely cringe.

So I\x92ve taken the liberty of tinkering a bit, changing a few things around - things that seemed like a good idea at the time, but definitely don\x92t now. I\x92ve surgically removed one section early on, swapped over a couple of chapters and added an extra sequence at the start of the final chapter. The actual story hasn\x92t changed at all. It\x92s modified and augmented, not regenerated. But maybe it flows a little better.

Whether this reappearance means that the crazy price of the original book on Ebay will come down, I cannot say. On publication in 1997, the book was a slow starter and never had time to pick up sales before it was taken off the shelves again. I regularly get royalty statements from Virgin to say that out of my advance, I technically still owe them \xA3126.41. I wish I had a stache of copies under the bed.

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Previously on the New Adventures

MESSENGER: Rassilon, the dying Pythia cursed Gallifrey. There will be no more children. The world is barren and doomed!
RASSILON: D\x92oh!
SHADOWY MAN: Told you so. Now about the shortage of housing...

CHRIS: Sorry, Roz. We shouldn\x92t have done that. But I love you.
ROZ: Tough! I\x92m leading an attack on that GTO station on top of that hill. (RUNS OFF WAVING GUN)

THE DOCTOR: Chris, it\x92s Roz.
CHRIS: Is she...?
THE DOCTOR: She went up the hill into history.
CHRIS: (BITES HIS KNUCKLES) I\x92m trying to cope.

DOROTHEE (n\xE9e ACE): These days I live in 19th century Paris. But I\x92ve got this time-travelling motor bike, so I do all my shopping at Marks and Spencers.

GOLD USHER: Do you swear by the Rod of Rassilon to uphold the holy office of President of the High Council of Gallifrey?
ROMANA: Hang on. (ADJUSTS MATRIX AT JAUNTY ANGLE) I swear.
(TIME LORDS LOOK SUITABLY UNCOMFORTABLE.)

THE DOCTOR: Chris, I have a presentiment of doom. I can\x92t see beyond my seventh self. Eighth Man Bound.
CHRIS: I\x92m still trying to cope.