Talking To Yourself

In the original book, this used to be Chapter 4.

We’ve seen the TARDIS bathroom before, but somewhere, I like to think, there is also a glass roundel through which you can see all the Doctor’s washing going round and round. One of the old Audio Visual plays, which featured Nick Briggs as the Doctor, ended with the Doctor in the bath and his plastic duck laughing at him in a chipmunky, Pinky and Perky, speeded up voice sort of way. I liked that a lot, so it’s here too.

The two Aces - I wanted a sequence which would get Dorothée to come to terms with what she had become. If there had been another season on TV, Ace would only have had a couple more stories. As it was, her character stayed on into the book range and developed a long way further than anyone would have suspected. She grows up, becomes a bit of a maneater, leaves the Doctor, has a stint as a fighter in the Dalek Wars, comes back to the Doctor, and lands up living in 19th century Paris, able to commute through time using a time-travelling motorbike which belonged to Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart (black female descendant of the Brigadier!) So Dorothée and Ace have a night in with a bottle - one of those nights in where you start playing Truth or Dare and talking about forbidden subjects which always lead to trouble.

In the TV days, Ace’s surname was Gale, as suggested by her creator, Ian Briggs. Then in the books it got turned into McShane, or Gale-McShane, or Gale again. It’s a bloody minefield out there. Maybe the kidnapped Parisian Dorothée is McShane and her carbine-wielding tormentor is Ace Gale...

A Marsh Dalek appears in The Dalek Book, published in time for Christmas 1964. I really liked the Marsh Daleks and used to draw lots of pictures of them instead of doing my maths homework - they were lot easier to draw than the normal Daleks. They were quite sleek, resembling a sort of tin can on stilts with few external features apart from an eye and a gun. They patrolled wetland areas on the planet Gurnian where ordinary Daleks couldn’t go and kept the two-headed Horrokon monsters in order. I’m not entirely sure why they couldn’t just send a hoverbout patrol.