Squashed Easter Eggs

Don’t read this article unless you’ve seen the last three minutes of Doctor Who series 6 as reading this article would otherwise completely ruin all of it.

And indeed be sure to watch it first as nothing in this will otherwise make a lick of sense to you.

(Continued in full at Bleeding Cool.)

Meeting Russell T Davies (warning: contains deeply unflattering photograph)

That went by a lot more quickly than I expected - I needn't have bothered turning up half an hour early, I could have popped along at 1pm and been in and out in half an hour. (I suspect that the requirement to buy the £25 book put a lot of people off - lucky I got it as a birthday present last week!) Still I met a nice young lady in the queue, we chatted about RTD's various works, the book, and her favourite show Torchwood (?!) before she had to dash back to HBOS of all places - to be honest I'd expected to be waiting a lot longer, I was quite underwhelmed with the brevity of the hour-and-a-half wait!

Russell T Davies was bubbly and charming - he looks about fifteen years younger in real life! The camera really does pile on the years. I blurted out (lacking the time to say the million profound things I'd learned from or wondered about his many works) that I loved his cartoons in the book, and that he could have had the career as a comic book artist he'd wanted in his teenage years. I think he was pleased with that(!) Benjamin Cook was also very nice, I told him how much I'd been enjoying the book (so much that I missed Sarah Jane the other day!), he says they might be doing another one(!), and he almost stole my camera!

The Writer's Tale

I meant to do other stuff today but spent all the daylight hours devouring this gorgeous book. And then holding myself back because I don't want to run out of fresh stuff to read in it. It's simply magnificent, far from the fluffy vanity project you might expect for this kind of thing, it's a proper 500-page tome that gives you a genuine insight into the writing process (a little pet hobby of mine), the day-to-day trevails of running a show like DOCTOR WHO, and the life and (incredibly filthy) mind of its writer Russell T. Davies. The presentation is perfect; it's just a raw series of e-mails between Davies and the book's editor, interspersed with script extracts (usually as part of the e-mails) from virtually every stage of the writing process (including deleted scenes such as the origin of Davros!), production notes, screen captures, on-set pictures (all on glossy paper), and - best of all - lots and LOTS of Davies' own cartoons, all of which are BRILLIANT! He mentions at one point (I can't remember where, I've flicked up and down this book so many times that I've no idea where anything is in it) that he was dead set on a career as a cartoonist for Marvel or DC when he was a teenager, but was turned off the idea when his careers advisor told him he had no chance because he was colour blind (?!?) - a grave error judging by his work in this book, which is largely of a professional standard; he clearly has a great mind for visual cues. In fact I'd love to see what he'd do with a full-fledged comic book product (either writing or drawing it!).

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK. RRP £30, but Amazon offers it for about fifteen quid (at time of writing, anyway). Don't wait for the paperback, it needs that hard cover. The two authors are signing across the country next week. I've barely even read very much of it but I already know it's a wonderful product, well worth having.

UPDATE: you can read a fifty (!!!) page extract HERE.