Doctor Who - Audio Details

The Doctor and Charley decide to take a well deserved break from the monotony of being chased, shot at and generally suffering anti-social behaviour at the hands of others.  And so they end up in Venice, well into Charley's future, as the great city prepares to sink beneath the water for the last time...

Which would be a momentous, if rather dispiriting, event to witness in itself.  However, the mechinations of a love-sick aristocrat, a proud art historian and a rabid High Priest of a really quite dodgy cult combine to make Venice's swansong a night to remember.  And then there's the rebellion by the web-footed amphibious underlass, the mystery of a disappearing corpse and the truth behind a curse going back further than curses usually do.  The Doctor and Charley are forced to wonder just what they have got themselves involved with this time…

What went into the writing of this script: mad plotting sessions through the night with Jeremy Hoad and Stephen Hornby.  Wanting to put lots of favourite things into one story.  A crumbling city, lagoons, mad cults, mad Dukes, Wuthering Heights, Dracula, Romeo and Juliet, Great Expectations, Max Ernst.  All that stuff.  Fisticuffs and drowning and magical jewels.  Masques and revels.

Also remembering queueing outside HMV in Edinburgh in 1996, the middle of the night by the castle, waiting with all the others to buy the Paul McGann film.  The Doctor springing to life again looking like him; that's in this script, too.

And, the excitement of writing my first Doctor Who novel, in 1997 - giving these characters my own words.

Summer weekends in Venice in recent years; traipsing the Left Bank and Pinot Grigio at ten pence a glass; writing in my journal in the Peggy Guggenheim museum.

And - because it's an audio script - remembering that me and my brother used to leave a portable TV playing Doctor Who full blast in the early 80's, upstairs, with a tape recorder pressed up to the speakers.  Doctor Who back then was all on audio.  Figuring out the action from the cryptic, bizarre noises.

So this is a culmination, as well as a ludicrous, bedazzling romp in Venice.

Paul Magrs, December 2000