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Author's Notes - Gareth Roberts' guide to The Well-Mannered War

Chapter One
  

This was a kind of greatest hits book. The Chelonians I invented for The Highest Science in truly kooky Rowling-style detail back in 1991. I knew everything about them, their hierarchy, their history, how their names signified their rank. I've forgotten it all now!

I remember the idea for the opening scene came very early on - that these two friends would go through the motions of trying to kill each other. In my mind, I cast Patrick Macnee as Dolne, doing his amiable old buffer.

I always loved writing the opening TARDIS scene. I think they get longer and longer each book. I like writing the Doctor in the midst of one of his peculiar crazes, in this case tidying up. I much prefer the Doctor to be erratic and chaotic; if he starts to plan things, it takes the daftness and spontaneity away from the character.

K9's emotional trauma and the line "I'm not going to put you out on the doorstep like an old milk bottle," I nicked as a nod to the appalling film Beautiful Thing, to get some limited revenge on it.

The disadvantage of the book's initial setting is that Barclow is necessarily a dull and dismal quarry that nobody really wants to live on, and that the humans' base is cramped and smelly. I like the look of grotty planets, though. I'll always take Blake's 7 over Star Wars.

Chapter Two
  

The story really takes off here. The look of the Femdroids was taken from Gabrielle Drake and Dolores Martinez in UFO. Super-efficient robot totty, like the deadly Fembots from The Bionic Woman. Galatea was the name of the statue Pygmalion brought to life. Harmock looks like a pre-diet Nigel Lawson. He's a really jaded career politician, at the opposite end of the scale from Fritchoff, the revolutionary who comes in later.

At the time, the (John) Major government was on its last desperate legs, delaying the election to the very last moment in the hope that something - anything - would happen to reverse their fortunes. It was very tawdry and funny.

The poor tea lady was based directly on the sandwich woman who came into Virgin, who Rebecca for some reason christened 'Pony Girl'. She would slam in at really inappropriate moments shouting "I've got everything today, sandwiches, samosas, spring rolls!"

The photocopier scene was my revenge on photocopiers. Like cassette Walkmans, I felt they just weren't past the experimental stage and should never have been given to the public until they were finished. The Virgin one was a bugger, like the kite-eating tree in Peanuts. I remember trying to retrieve pages of Bad Therapy out of its innards with my teeth.

In every office I worked in, there always seemed to be somebody whose main job, it seemed, was to wander about getting people to sign a leaving card. It was the kind of triviality that seemed grotesquely out of place in a war zone, so it went in.

Chapter Three
  

I brought back Stokes because he seemed to be quite popular after his debut in The Romance of Crime. He's supposed to look like Alfred Molina as Kenneth Halliwell in the movie Prick Up Your Ears. He's spoilt and terribly insecure, obsessed with his reputation. He could just be a proficient artist but he wants the kudos of being known as producing dark and challenging work, which he can't actually do. I nicked that from George Orwell's brilliant essay on Salvador Dali, who could. Romanticism, you've got a lot to answer for.

Also, his presence in the story is supposed to hint that there's something more than meets the eye going on. I wanted to play with people's expectations of Dr Who in general, and my work in particular. The great advantage of producing a run of cosy and comforting books is that you could then turn round and surprise people. But Michael, I'm telling you the plot!

K9, of course, takes to a political career without much prodding. Having rescued the Doctor from many scrapes, it's no surprise he's got a bit self-important.

The Thargon/Sorson conflict was of course the terrifying galactic cataclysm between two fleets of empty Sqeezy bottles on strings in The Tomorrow People.

Chapter Four
  

This is where the Doctor gets to meet General Jafrid. I always like writing scenes where the Doctor, on his own, has to try and take charge or establish his authority, and has to be charming and bright to strangers - it makes a change from the more daft characterisation you get when he's next to Romana, who's so efficient.

The idea of the Darkness came about from an article I read somewhere about how flies were an incredibly resolute and successful species, and that the flies we entertain around our lampshades today are very little changed, if at all, from the flies that used to irritate tyrannosaurs.

It struck me that by the end of the universe, when the book is set, if flies had really got their act together they'd be running the show. You do wonder what havoc some creatures could wreak if they developed reasoning intelligence. Like in that fantastic old Nigel Kneale TV play During Barty's Party, where super-intelligent rats just start co-operating and eat everyone.

Chapter Five
  

The chapter title was, of course, taken from the Tories' anti-Labour campaign poster, which showed Tony Blair with glowing red eyes. I remember the first time I saw that I nearly died laughing. What were they thinking? We seem to have a tradition now in the UK, of one party being untouchable and the other one being utterly inept, since the early 80s. They swapped over about ten years ago, but it doesn't seem very healthy. Mind you, perhaps it's better than the eternal deadlock of the US.

K9's eye glows red anyway, so it would be difficult to do the same for him. Reading back over this, K9 seems to be standing on some kind of flimsy, pseudo-socialist ticket, and changing his policies depending on who he's talking to, which I guess makes him a Lib Dem.

The death of Dolne was an attempt to be a bit surprising - that one of the viewpoint characters you meet right at the start cops it before half-time (even though Dolne's still walking round after his death). The trouble with doing that sort of thing is that if you're not careful, it just looks inept. It's easier in films, like when Charles Dance gets it in Alien 3.

Chapter Six
  

This is a very clue-y chapter. If you're paying attention, Stokes's throwaway remark about "half the universe" owing their life to the Doctor, and mention of a certain object as he goes under the Femdroids' beam, might get you guessing as to who could be behind all the shenanigans.

This is also where we find out that the population of Metralubit is a computer simulation. I got that idea from playing Sim City and Civilization, where you're constantly getting ungrateful citizens rioting and burning down your palaces (well, I do, anyway). I love those games; they give a real insight into how awful it must be to have tons of power and responsibility.

When I got really frustrated, usually because I just couldn't be bothered to link up the water supply, and my citizens got really revolting, I'd unleash the giant alien octopus on them. That soon shut them up.

The Doctor's examination of Fritchoff's 'living quarters' in the caves turns up some dodgy magazines. Fritchoff wasn't based on anyone in particular, but he's right at the other end of the scale from Harmock.

In Harmock, you've got the utterly jaded old party politician, who is concerned with just staying in power and all the dreary realities, and in Fritchoff you have the equally deluded idealist who can spout any kind of nonsense as his democratic right, but will never have to engage with real, hard politics. I went to a couple of SWP meetings in the 80s, and it was just desperately pitiably funny, so I tried to use some of that.

Chapter Seven
  

I must have chosen this chapter title because my dad, who\x92s not the world's biggest Who fan, always used to wait for 'the rebels' in each story to appear. His other favourite remarks were 'They've really run out of bloody ideas this week' and 'Look, it's chucking-out time at the Wagon and Horses' whenever monsters were rampaging. I think it's time he did a DVD commentary.

A lot of Fritchoff's garbage I got directly from my college course. Three years and a glorious waste of taxpayers' money. Drama, Theatre and TV Studies, but it consisted mostly of really jaded Marxist dogma and silly postmodern pompousness, so all that stuff about 'false consciousness' and 'the unconscientized mind\x92, was some limited revenge. We had to try and raise the class consciousness of people in a bingo hall, and mount a Caribbean carnival in Winchester city centre. People think I'm making it up, but I think I quoted Fritchoff's line about 'loneliness' as a tool of the state from one of my textbooks.

Of course, all that 'Stop the dirty war!' thing is chillingly relevant now, and as I've always wanted to be chillingly relevant my moment has surely come at last.

Chapter Eight
  

Romana's protests under the Conditioner ""Whatever you're about to do, don't! I'm not human!"" - was a little nod to (probably the best bit of) the TV Movie.

I liked writing the Doctor's first confrontation with the flies. His line about fighting off a billion flies with a billion rolled-up newspapers was one of my better one-liners, I think - I'd forgotten about that, and I actually laughed when I read it again. It's weird when that happens, like there's some other version of you that you've forgotten about. A bit like The Two Doctors, I guess.

Galatea unleashing her Killer FemDroid army was a comment on the downside of a benevolent utilitarian dictatorship. The fact that they were all dressed in tight-fitting leather catsuits was obviously nothing to do with Diana Dors' Secret Police in the Two Ronnies' chillingly relevant classic serial The Worm That Turned.

Chapter Nine
  

The Web of Death was surely a long-overdue title for a Doctor Who chapter. I'm amazed we've never had Planet of Death, Planet of Time or indeed The Planet in Space. I always thought it a great shame when the makers of TV Doctor Who started turning away from those penny-dreadful titles and went for evocative nonsense like State of Decay and Terminus, which should obviously have been called Attack Of The Vampires and Horror of the Space Plague.

There's nothing more joyous about Doctor Who (for me, anyway) than those moments when the Doctor underreacts to some terrible threat. I don't think it weakens the drama - it's a good psychological tactic, and makes the whole enterprise much less grave and predictable. I remember punching the air in delight when Peter Davison's Doctor finally started being facetious to the Gravis.

Chapter Ten
  

Now the cat's out of the bag - the citizenry of Metralubit just isn't there at all. Galatea was created to rule benignly, and she actually did a pretty good job. If only you could guarantee a long line of good kings and queens, monarchy probably wouldn't be such a bad idea after all.

In the books, I think it's excusable to unleash a big info-dump towards the end, which you wouldn't do on TV - A because TV Doctor Who was always less complex, plot-wise, and B - because a book reader has a different relationship to the story than a TV viewer. You (hopefully) have got a reader's full attention, and they'll be expecting a reward for their time. And as a writer you can control how you impart the explanations and pay-off; in TV, you're always at the mercy of editors and directors.

Of course, the danger is you'll lose some of the pace - so I always tried to illustrate my explanation scenes with some kind of movement or something new - hence the sequences of the FemDroids' history.

Chapter Eleven
  

I tried to evoke a doomy atmosphere as the story got to its end - as we knew it was going to be the last Virgin Missing Adventure, I wanted things to be more downbeat than celebratory. The Doctor's musings about the universe winding down was a chance to show the other side of the fourth Doctor's character.

All the names that Stokes looks up in the TARDIS data bank were cribbed from various odd places - some of them, like Nunton Oddstock and Sybilla Strang, were the members of Hinge and Brackett's old theatre troupe, often mentioned by the dear ladies but never seen. Stokes's arch rival Fenton Breedley was the name of the artist character played by Tom Baker in Vault of Horror.

Chapter Twelve
  

Now this was an attempt to put the cat among the pigeons. I just didn't want the last Missing Adventure to end like they always did, with the characters on their way to another story. I still think this was the weakness of doing past Doctor stories - that you have to try and fit them in with established continuity, so you can't really expand the regular characters or send them off in a really different direction. I always thought it would be more fun to establish divergent continuities, where K9 stayed forever and Adric never existed, for example. All power to Big Finish for their Doctor Who Unbound series; it's long overdue.

I remember being really cheesed off when the Black Guardian threat was never wrapped up on TV. And I didn't think the Guardian's return in Season 20 was very well done, so it was a small attempt to indulge my private Who fantasies, which I'd never done before. The Black Guardian's a formidable foe; a bit like Fenric, he can shift things and people around at a distance through some unknown power, and lead the Doctor into traps.

I like the idea of the Doctor's own predictability being his downfall - that everything he did could be mapped out in advance to his disadvantage.

So the end was my way of saying, at the very last moment, that you could legitimately play around with people's expectations and with Who continuity, and it might actually be fun. Which hopefully the Well-Mannered War was in its entirety.