- Miwk Publishing

AN UNOFFICIAL AND UNAUTHORISED
GUIDE TO DOCTOR WHO ROAD SIGNS
ANDY X. CABLE
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2016
Turn Left
An Unofficial &
Unauthorised Guide
to Doctor Who
Road Signs
Andy X.Cable
Turn Left
First published March 2012.
This expanded edition first published in paperback February 2013 by Miwk
Publishing Ltd.
Miwk Publishing, 45a Bell Street, Reigate, Surrey RH2 7AQ
ISBN 978-1-908630-24-7
Copyright © Miwk Publishing Ltd 2013
The rights of Andy X. Cable to be identified as the author of this work have
been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
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prosecution and civil claim for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover and book design by Robert Hammond.
All photographs and illustrations © Andy X. Cable.
Typeset in Transport and Gill Sans.
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Introduction
Hello. I’m Andy and I’m a Doctor Who fan just like you
probably are.
Two years ago I made a website about my collection which
I’m no longer allowed to talk about and my website was
taken away from me which was upsetting, hurtful and
horrible.
Before it was taken away from me it had over three million
hits from people who were genuinely interested in my
collection. But even though my collection has been taken
away from me now I decided last week that just like the
Doctor I wouldn’t give up. I was good at collecting what I
used to collect so I could be great again and I started
collecting something new that wouldn’t get me into any
trouble.
When I’m walking somewhere or on a bus or running away
from someone I often notice road signs which can usually
be found at either end of a road and most of the time
they’re white with black writing. You must’ve seen them
because they’re everywhere.
Often a road name reminds me of a happy memory and
since almost all my happy memories are from my love and
deep and kind fondness of the BBC TV series Doctor Who
then it made sense for me to write these road names down
in my little black book.
I’ve presented them in this book in the order I’ve written
them down for the most part rather than alphabetical which
would be pointless and time-consuming and I don’t want to
waste your time or consume it either for that matter.
I hope that you too will seek out these roads and enjoy them
as much as I have. Some of these roads I go back to again
and again just to feel that warmth that flows through me
when a road sign works its magic.
A wise lady once said ‘Build high for happiness!’ and my
goodness, she was right! So let’s all be Bin Liners and make
this world a happier place through road signs.
I hope by the end of this book you too will be my very best
friend forever because already I know you must like me
because you can see how brilliant my collection is and how
much more of a fan I am than you. I like that about you very
much
Andy X. Cable
February 2012
Thanks
I, Andy X Cable, would like to thank my very best friend
Robert Hammond for his enthusiasm, design, hard work and
encouragement with this book. He is my very best friend and
I am sure he will be my very best friend forever and I thank
him even though he often says rude words and has naughty
thoughts.
I would also like to thank a boy with metal in his eyebrow
called Phil Ware who told me most of my book was wrong
and I had to make it different.
AxC
Publishers Note:
Whilst we appreciate there are many errors within the text
of this book, Andy had an almighty sulk after the first proof
read and insisted ‘it was all perfectly fine and we were stupid
for changing it’. Accordingly, we have reverted to the text as
it was originally supplied to us.
Waterhouse Lane
The Doctor’s friends all like him a lot and so did Adric who
was a little boy the Doctor met who stole melons with
spiders in and was good at adding up numbers. Adric had
some friends but they weren’t very good friends and not as
good a friend as the Doctor was. Romana didn’t seem to like
Adric because she doesn’t like little boys because she’s
stupid. I don’t like Romana because she’s got a sonic
screwdriver just like the Doctor’s and it’s JUST NOT FAIR.
Adric got killed to death when the Cybermen flew a
spaceship into the Earth with him in it. The Doctor and Adric
were very good friends but the Doctor never kissed Adric
because this is the old series and the Doctor never used to
kiss all of his friends.
Parbury Rise
If you change the R to a D then it’s ‘Padbury Rise’ which is
named after Wendy Padbury who played Zoe Heriot in
Doctor Who with Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor. Zoe
was really clever and had PVC hot pants which make me
touch myself.
Kingston Road
This one takes me back to Ben Aaronovitch’s Doctor Who
story from 1988 with music from Keff McCulloch when the
black man in the café says his grandfather was chained up
and sold in Kingston and Sylvester McCoy, the Seventh
Doctor, says he’s going to throw a boulder in a lake to stop
the Daleks.
Hinds Way
I get so tired of hearing about Doctor Who’s friends
wearing short skirts and acting stupid because they don’t
although some of them do wear short skirts and are a bit
stupid but not all of them like Liz for example who did
wear a short skirt but certainly wasn’t stupid, but then
there’s Jo who was stupid and also wore a short skirt. But
the really stupid one in the short skirt was Jamie as played
by Fraser Hinds in not just Doctor Who in the sixties, but
also in the eighties when he came back twice both in The
Five Doctors (without Colin Baker) and Two Doctors (with
Colin Baker) and in Two Doctors he was with Peri who
never wore a short skirt except in Twin Dilemmas when
Colin Baker tried to strangle her to death written by
Anthony Steven.
Telegraph Hill
White-haired radio personality and sometimes scarecrow
Jon Pertwee was almost killed by a flex on the telephone
going all around his neck and getting all tight once. Luckily
for him it was in a Doctor Who story so he didn’t get hurt
for real and it was in The Terrors of the Autons which was the
second Auton story after The Spearhead from Space and Jo
was now his friend but she didn’t wear a short skirt in this
one or boots which makes it a bit rubbish but it’s really
great. The Master made the telephone flex do it but I can’t
remember if he went up a telegraph pole or if he was in
one of those little green cupboards you see in the street
that have telephone wires in them. Another telegraph is a
thing on ships so they can send out distress calls if they are
sinking which is stupid if you think about it, they would be
much better off with a telephone really (as long as the
Master wasn’t there to make the telephone flex strangle
anyone.) There was probably a telegraph operator on the
Titanic in the Christmas episode that was on the Titanic, not
the real one but a Titanic in space, and Tom Campbell the
policeman from the first Hollywood Dalek film was there
selling newspapers and had changed his name to Wilfred
Mott. There was also a boy who was really a robot and his
head looked like a red hedgehog and Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth the Second came out of Buckingham Palace at the
end and said ‘Thank you Doctor’ and it was stupid but Mum
really laughed. I’d never heard her laugh before. Mr Scarman,
Scarman’s brother, had a radio telegraph thing set for Mars
and it got Sutekh’s SOS call and blew up.
Marshall Crescent
Graham Williams made rubbish Doctor Who stories and
the most rubbish was the stupidly long The Key to Time which
went on forever. At the end there’s a character called the
Marshall who has white hair and Lalla Ward’s in it too before
she became the second Romana in the next story written
by Terry Nation called The Destiny of the Daleks which had
Daleks in it.
Station Avenue
Terence Dudley directed The Four to Doomsday and he also
wrote the two-part story which was the last purely
historical Doctor Who story on TV in ages called The Black
Orchid about a black orchid and some posh people in the
country who play cricket. Nyssa had a double called Annie
and when they all arrived they arrived at a station.
Horn Street
Azal, Aggedor and the Nimon all had horns. I sometimes
wonder what it would be like to have a horn, or even better
still, two horns. It would make brushing my hair more
difficult but then so would a hat. Also, how do you lie in a
bed if you’ve got a horn? Doesn’t it keep brushing against
things and stop you being comfortable? Actually it would be
really difficult to wear a hat if you had a horn. I don’t think
I want a horn now.
Azal,King Daemon
ballpoint pen
Azal was a really tall devil from outer space who had the same
hair and beard as Doctor Who producer Jonathan Turner and
the teeth of the Fourth Doctor Tom Baker and braces made of
curly hair. His best friend was a little boy made of rocks who
had red eyes and made sparks come out of his hand and then
people would disappear and be dead. None of it is remotely
believable and my drawing is better than the whole story.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Windmill Lane
Verity Lambert produced some other television programmes
as well as Doctor Who and another one she did had Colin
Baker, Paul McGann and Peter Davison in it and it was called
Jonathan Creek and he lived in a windmill because he was
a magician.
Bakery Street
Eric Saward used to write for Doctor Who and then he
became what’s called a script editor where he’d take other
people’s scripts and rewrite them because he hadn’t
explained clearly to them what it was he’d wanted in the first
place. After a while he got really cross with doing this and
blamed it all on the producer Jonathan Turner and he left
taking his scripts with him, one of which was a story about
Doctor Who and the great fire of London where London
burned down because the Terileptils set fire to the Fifth
Doctor Peter Davison’s sonic screwdriver near some hay in
a bakery. But apparently it was always meant to happen so it
didn’t matter and he left London to burn taking Tegan, Nyssa
and Adric, who was really good at maths, with him.
Heather Road
William Hartnell’s wife was called Heather and she went to
a Doctor Who convention in 1983 at Longleat House which
was the first Doctor Who convention I’d ever been to and
I don’t think this road was named after her but I think she
would’ve smiled if she’d seen it and I’ve yet to see an Andy
Street or Andy Close but if I did I’d smile to myself.
Martha Road
When I fell down the stairs once and hurt my head and my
arm and my legs I went to hospital and I saw lots of doctors.
One of them tried to move my arm and it really hurt which
made me cry out like the Sixth Doctor Colin Baker being
sucked into the sand during the finale of the penultimate
episode of the epic fourteen-part story The Trial of a Time
Lord. Mum told me I was overreacting but then she told off
the doctor for being too rough. I was in hospital for three
days because I kept getting dizzy and there was ringing in my
ears. While I was in there I saw lots of other people who
were sick or had things wrong with them like Leslie who
was 83 years old and had to have her arm cut off because
it stopped working. They used to come round and feed us
and offer me tea or coffee or water but they wouldn’t let
me have soft drinks because they only had squash. Once a
boy called Jeremy offered to push me around in a
wheelchair which sounded like fun. He took me all the way
to the top floor of the hospital and we looked out the
window and Jeremy got into trouble for spitting on people
down below and he ran off leaving me there and I got
blamed for it but how could I have done it? I couldn’t even
stand! It was so unfair. The next day Jeremy apologised and
bought me a portable DVD player which had new Doctor
Who on it which I don’t really like but I missed the Doctor
so it was fun to watch even though it was the episode
where Rose first turns up and becomes friends with the
Doctor called Rose. After I watched it twice he said we
could go for a ride again but I insisted we only go down not
up so we did. When we got to the exit of the hospital I got
scared because Jeremy said we were going to the shops and
I knew I wasn’t allowed and I didn’t even have any money. I
cried a little bit and shouted and he called me a baby and let
go of the chair which by now was on the exit ramp. It rolled
forward getting faster and faster and for one brief moment
I wished my mouth was gagged and for once I’d be just like
the Doctor in The Spearhead from Space and then I smacked
my face into a bin and woke up in the hospital again an hour
later.
Dragon Road
You don’t see many dragons in Doctor Who because
they’re really expensive to make. In the story The Talons of
Weng-Chiang, Magnus Greel has a big dragon with lasers for
eyes which is worked by a little dolly with a pig brain. It’s
really exciting and the Doctor, Litefoot and Jago barely
escape with their lives. There’s a story with dragon in the
title, do you know what it is? It’s called Dragonfire and it was
written by Ian Briggs and was about a world made of ice but
the dragon wasn’t really a real dragon and it was just a man
in a suit and looked a bit rubbish actually.
Kane When He Was Melting
ballpoint pen
Have you ever tried to draw a
picture of a man’s face melting off?
Well don’t bother, it is more difficult
than you would think. You have to
draw really really fast because it is
moving too quickly and it will make
you as cross as I got which was a lot.
I think it is still a really good drawing
though, I don’t hate it or anything.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Back Lane
Jon Pertwee had a bad back and he told me as much at a
convention once and I told him Mum had a bad back too
and he said it wasn’t as bad as his because apparently his
really hurt and I told Mum this and she said he was wrong.
Green Lane
On the morning I saw Green Lane I had received my
cassette of the music from Doctor Who via eBay. It was
called Doctor Who: The Music II. I have a thing my dad
got me before he went away which plays tapes as you walk
down the street, all you do is wear headphones and you can
hear everything on the tape. It uses six batteries though and
doesn’t last long so I always have to take spares with me.
The eBay trader included two stickers of the actor David
Tennant in the guise of the Tenth Doctor which I hadn’t paid
for as part of the auction which was very thoughtful of them
indeed but while I appreciate the gesture, it does explain
why I had to pay £6 for postage on the item, I wonder how
much cheaper that would’ve been without the stickers? As
I left the house I pressed play and walked to the bus stop
but as I walked down the path and through the park my tape
began to scare me as the music reminded me of The Five
Doctors when all the Doctors met up because the series was
twenty years old. In the story, Sarah Jane Smith who is a
reporter is wearing a purple plastic anorak when she’s
kidnapped by a black pyramid at a bus stop and drops her
handbag. I kept looking around me for the pyramid but I
couldn’t see it in the sky which worried me more because
the Second Doctor Patrick Troughton and his friend the
Brigadier also couldn’t see it at one point and so I started
running for the bus stop and then had an idea: I’d run to a
different bus stop! That would fox it. I did this and ran for
much further than I thought because the bus stops are
further apart than I realised. Very tired I caught my bus and
sat on the top at the front because it feels like I’m Sarah Jane
in K1’s metal hand. There were some teenagers at the back
of the bus who were shouting loudly at each other and
insulting their mothers which seemed like a horrid thing to
do. One of them accused another’s of kissing a sailor and I
was so cross I couldn’t take any more and told them in no
uncertain terms that Harry Sullivan was a sailor and I’d be
proud to call him Dad. They were horrid to me for the rest
of the journey, they kept whistling at me and calling me ‘sailor
boy’ and insulting my mum and calling her names. I was so
scared and no-one was stopping them. In the old days you
could tell a conductor but there aren’t any anymore and the
only thing I could think of was to press the emergency
button which I did and the bus stopped and the driver
shouted up the stairs for whoever did it to come down. I
was scared because he sounded cross and then heard him
stamping up the stairs just like my dad used to when he was
cross. He told me off and wouldn’t let me explain why I’d
pressed the button and he threw me off the bus and
everyone downstairs cheered as he did it which upset me
and by now it was raining so I was wet and upset. But then
everything brightened for me because I was standing by
Green Lane which immediately evoked a memory of myriad
green joyous things from Doctor Who like Sontaran blood,
Jon Pertwee’s velvet jacket in The Time Warrior, death, the
Master’s mind-controlling sweet-tasting maggots, Sil, Sil’s
marshminnows, a milkshake in Dragonfire and the BAFTA
award-winning Crispin Green who edited the new series
story about a werewolf and a diamond and Queen Victoria.
More Road
This road sign made me remember what dirty liars the BBC
are. At the beginning of the 1985 adventure The Attack Of
The Cyberman starring the very loud Blake’s 7 extra Colin
Baker as the Doctor, it said the story was written by Paula
More which is wrong, it was Eric Saward and Ian Levene
that wrote it. They wouldn’t let a girl write a Doctor Who
story, that would be stupid. More Road turned out to be a
lie as well as it was a cul-de-sac and I had to turn round and
walk back again as there was actually no more road. Sir
Patrick More was in the episode that introduced the boy
Matt Smith as the Doctor in Doctor Who.
Sullivans Reach
Once in the story The Ark in Space the Fourth Doctor Tom
Baker and Harry Sullivan had to switch off a security
machine. The button was a little bit too far away for Harry
to stretch and operate.
Sandwich Close
Lots of Time Lords are evil and the Rani is really evil because
she makes miners restless so that they use her bath house
more and Omega is really bad because he’s made of
antimatter and hasn’t got a face but can somehow shout a lot
without even having a mouth. The Master is a really bad Time
Lord and he wears black a lot and sometimes wears disguises
like in The Deadly Assassin when he disguised himself as a
corpse. His TARDIS is better than the Doctor’s because it
can change shape which the Doctor’s TARDIS could do if he
just fixed the chameleon circuit but he doesn’t know how
and besides if it really was a chameleon, surely it would just
change colour depending on its mood rather than change
shape entirely? What would happen if you landed on a planet
full of pins? Would the TARDIS be able to turn into a pin? I
doubt it. The Master got sent to prison once and when the
Doctor went to see him they had a swordfight and the
Doctor ate a sandwich.
Burton Close
Before Doctor Who was a Welsh programme it went to
Wales in a story called The Green Death and then it went to
Wales again in a story called The Delta of the Bannermen but
it was different Doctors both times with Jon Pertwee in The
Green Death and Sylvester McCoy in The Delta of the
Bannermen. I think the road in The Sarah Jane Adventures
was named after the Bannermen but you’d have to ask Russell
T. Davies because I don’t know for sure and wouldn’t want to
upset you with something that you could think was a lie. Mr
Burton didn’t believe the Doctor and Melanie Bush at first.
Mel was the Doctor’s friend and he never kissed her.
Pelman Way
Brian Hayles wrote lots of Doctor Who stories because he
was a writer and the BBC kept hiring him and two of the
stories he wrote for them in the seventies were about a
planet called Peladon and it had miners called Pels and a big
hairy brown thing called the Aggedor which liked nursery
rhymes and meat.
Selby Close
Doctor Who conventions can be amazing. I once met a
man who gave me a copy of the Jon Pertwee Doctor Who
story Invasion of the Dinosaur for just sixty pounds! What a
bargain! That’s just twelve pounds per episode. It was so
very, very kind of him and I was just so happy. But other
times I’ve met horrible people at Doctor Who
conventions like Robin at Dreamwatch in London who told
me I was very stupid because I counted the space rogue
Sabalom Glitz as a companion and he didn’t and then he
pointed out that Glitz never actually travelled with the
Doctor physically in the TARDIS. Well that’s just stupid
because Liz Shaw didn’t either and people call her a
companion. I hate you Robin because you made me miss
Shakedown, the Sontaran film, because I was so upset I had
to leave. I didn’t go to a Doctor Who convention again for
months because of that.
Mariners Point
No, when I got back and checked it’s Maiden’s Point. So just
ignore this.
Concorde Street
I’ve never ever been on holiday because I’m scared to go
because we’d have to go on a plane and I’ve seen what
happens on planes in Doctor Who. In one story the Fourth
Doctor, played by the eccentric booming-voiced Tom Baker,
was chased around a quarry by a biplane that fired guns at
him. I’d like to fly in a spaceship though as they seem safer
than planes. Mawdryn’s ship would be the best of all because
it looks so comfortable and Nyssa might be there and I could
talk to her or get her a drink or play the computer game
with her. I’d hate to be on the Zygon spaceship because it
looks wet and squidgy and I bet it really, really smells. Also
the Zygons would keep trying to kill me whereas Mawdryn’s
undead friends wouldn’t try to kill me because I’m not a
Time Lord as far as I know. I did wonder once if maybe I was
a Time Lord but I don’t know how to take my own pulse or
check my heartbeat and when I have had to visit my GP he’s
never mentioned anything about me having two hearts. I did
wonder if I might regenerate if I hurt myself and once I
jumped down some stairs to find out but I didn’t regenerate
completely. My legs and my right arm were broken and I
fractured my skull on the oak leg of the writing bureau. They
put my legs in plaster and my arm as well. They fixed
themselves in time and I’m sure that that must have involved
some regenerative process of sorts but my head still really
hurts in the mornings. I’d hate to be on the Axon ship from
The Claws and Axos which is a funny title because the Axons
were blobby with tentacles and they didn’t have claws so
someone really messed up there and should’ve been fired.
Mind you if I was on the Axon ship I could be there with Jo
Grant which wouldn’t be so bad. Probably the worst ship to
be on would be the freighter from the story Earthshocks
because it blew up.
Judge Street
The Doctor is always on trial and yet I can’t think of a single
story which actually has a judge in it. The actress Lynda
Bellingham, best known for preparing Oxo on television in
between other programmes, played a sort of judge in the
epic Doctor Who story The Trial of a Time Lord where the
newly blonde Colin Baker was put on trial for all the
mistakes he’d made and in reality he was ultimately sacked
for the same thing. She wasn’t called ‘Judge’ though and
neither were the three Time Lords at the Second Doctor's
trial for exactly the same thing he was tried for some
twenty-or-so years earlier! The actor and American John
Barrowman was a judge on some rubbish programme on
BBC1. It was rubbish though so I didn’t watch it but Mum
did and it used to make her cry sometimes, much like
Torchwood did for me. I just didn’t understand
Torchwood. When Owen, the doctor in the series,
grabbed a girl and touched her she seemed to like it but
when I did it in the library everybody got really cross and I
wasn’t allowed to go to the library anymore but he was still
allowed to go to Torchwood until he died twice.
Beech Walk
I’ve been to nearly nineteen Doctor Who conventions and
at least three of them were run by Dominitemporal
Services which is owned by Andrew Beech and he would
often be seen at the conventions walking quickly from one
place to another. Once at a convention I bought an enamel
badge of the third Doctor Who Jon Pertwee standing in
front of the yellow Edwardian roadster, Bessie. I’ve never
worn it as it’s not very good.
Kenneth Road
In Doctor Who now it’s not unusual to see newsreaders
reading news in stories where news is reported and needs
reading out. But back in the sixties when William Hartnell
was the Doctor it was massively unusual and in the story
The War Machines which is black and white but still good the
Doctor comes across robot tank-things called War Machines
and has to defeat them and the computer WOTAN which
calls him ‘Doctor Who’ which is actually his real name.
Heather Close
Zygons are like great big orange babies covered in Yorkshire
puddings and they had a massive lizard pet called Skarasen
that kills Scottish people and oil rigs. They only appeared in
Doctor Who once and it was with the fourth Doctor Who
Tom Baker and he was friends with Harry Sullivan and Sarah
at the time. Harry got shot by a man in a kilt and he was
close to some heather when it happened. I thought he’d been
killed.
Skarasen
ballpoint pen
Skarasen looked like a
massive weird dog that ate
oil rigs and the Zygons drank
milk out of it. It seems odd
to drink milk from an
underwater dog and I don’t
know how eating oil rigs
makes milk, it wasn’t explained in the story. No wonder Robert
Stewart Banks wasn’t allowed to write another one!
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Ninefoot Lane
The actor and gentleman Mr Roger Delgado had a wife
called Kismet and she did a voice for Doctor Who once
where she played a massive spider that liked crystals. She
scared the Third Doctor, played by the light entertainer,
comedian and panel show presenter Mr Jon Pertwee, to
death. The spider she played kept going on about ‘the eight
legs’ but they clearly had nine because there was another
leg that went up through the box she was sitting on and
into her abdomen. I don’t really like spiders but Russell T.
Davies obviously liked spiders a lot because he wrote giant
spiders into his Christmas Special but I can’t remember the
title of it, Christmas of the Spiders or something probably.
Dudley Road
When you watch Doctor Who stories the music you can
hear is only heard by you and not by the people in the story,
except on special occasions like when Ace listens to the
jukebox in The Remembrance of the Daleks or when Jamie
listens to his tranny in The Evil of the Daleks. Most of the
music you hear is made by Dudley Simpsons who is
Australian and appears in The Talons of Weng-Chiang as the
conductor of the orchestra at the Palace Theatre. Douglas
Camfield didn’t like Dudley Simpsons so wouldn’t let him
work on the programmes he directed. Dudley Simpsons
didn’t write the Doctor Who theme music though, the
tune you hear at the start and end of each story, because
this was written by a man called Ron Grainer who couldn’t
play any instruments so gave it to Delia Derbyshire to try
and make sense of and she managed to turn it into the
Doctor Who theme which a lot of other people have
changed over the years. Once there was an album released
which had four variations on the Doctor Who theme tune
which was called Doctor Who: Variations on a Theme
and it was the first ever square CD ever. I’m pretty sure it
was the last too as I’ve never seen another one and it was
difficult to describe a square CD as a ‘compact disc’ because
one of the things about a disc is that it's round and not
square but a square is square and not round so it can't ever
be a disc. The floppy disks that went into Dad's computer
were square though but I think that must be because they're
spelled differently. Dudley Simpsons didn’t provide any of
these theme tune variations because he wasn’t asked and
instead they were done by Mark Ayres, Dominic Glynn and
two were done by Keff McCulloch presumably because he
misread the memo or something and they just left his second
one on to be nice. Actually now I think of it, it might have
been Mark Ayres who wrote two versions of the theme in
fact I think it was but I took ages to type all that and it’s a
shame to waste it because it’s there now and you’ve already
read it. Dudley Simpsons was sacked when Jonathan Turner
took over because he liked music to sound better and be
made on computers and stuff because it was the eighties
now and not the dark ages. He even got someone else to
rewrite the theme tune again but that’s got nothing to do
with Dudley Simpsons.
Dudley Simpsons
Getting Livid As
He Thinks About
Computers
ballpoint pen
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Peri Court
Peri went bald and died and then got married to Brian
Blessed and I never really liked her much because of her
stupid whiny voice.
Pratt Avenue / Lethbridge Road / Holmes Way
A triple bill! These three roads are really close to each
other and I had the time of my life on the day I found them.
I was in Peterborough looking for Pratt Avenue which is
named after the second Master, the actor Peter Pratt. I
walked the length of the road but it ended in a dead end
which was disappointing and reminded me of the Master’s
fate in Pratt’s only televised story, the four-part The Deadly
Assassin in which a deadly assassin attempts to kill not just
the President of Gallifrey but the Doctor himself who’s
having none of it and stops the Master’s evil plan which is
good because otherwise he’d have been killed and the series
would’ve ended there and DWM might never have
happened. So I went back to the end of Pratt Avenue and
turned right instead of left and this is where the title of this
book really comes from because if I hadn’t have turned left
I’d never have found the very next road – amazingly Holmes
Way! The very writer who had written The Deadly Assassin
for the BBC had a road almost opposite the road I had been
in. I was delirious with happiness as I walked shakily up
Holmes Way, savouring every moment and wishing I too
smoked a pipe like he did. I got to a dead end again. What
is it with Peterborough? The roads don’t go anywhere. But
I remembered a turning I had passed just a few moments
earlier and you could honestly have knocked me down with
a feather. I sat on the pavement for a moment, my ears filling
with tears at the shocking and astonishing coincidence before
me. I was now in Lethbridge Road! I felt like I was dreaming.
In my bag I had a bottle of Dr Pepper whose lid I unscrewed
and took a sip from. I looked around me and saw an elderly
lady tending to some roses and briefly thought of the Ninth
and Tenth Doctor’s dear friend Rose who kept dying. It’s
moments like this that keep me doing what I do. I stayed there
for most of that day and read my Howe's Transcendental
Toybox book, looking for new revisions. It felt comfortable
and beautiful and the lady tending to her roses pricked her
thumb on a thorn.
Mark Street
Doctor Who stories have music which makes you watch
them more because without the music there’d be nothing to
listen to other than words and noises that things make when
you touch them or drop them. Lots of people have made
music for Doctor Who and my favourite is the composer
Mark Ayres who made music for the story The Ghost-Light
because he signed my Doctor Who: Variations on a
Theme CD at PanoptiCon (a Doctor Who convention)
when Carl Forgione who played Nimrod refused because he
wasn’t in it or on it. Why are people so cruel?
Chillingham
Ha-ha, this is where the frozen madman shopkeeper Kane
should live! I was visiting a friend in Staffordshire and he
pointed this out on a walk so really it’s his joke and I feel
bad for stealing it but we were laughing so hard for so long
we nearly missed dinner. I never really understood
Dragonfire because if Kane was frozen wouldn’t he be hard
like a lolly? It’s also sad because Mel leaves and I liked Mel
because she was a very good friend to the Doctor. I don’t
like Ace because she doesn’t even know his name and keeps
shouting her name which is weird because if Harry or Nyssa
had done that nobody would’ve liked them very much.
Imagine if Harry had gone round in Robot yelling ‘Harry!’
every time he liked something. It’s just stupid.
Wolf Lane
I don’t think I have ever seen a wolf. There were meant to
be wolves in Curse of Fenrics (which was called Wolf Of
Fenrics for a bit), a Seventh Doctor story starring the
Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy, but you never saw them
as it was probably too expensive and dangerous to have
wolves in the BBC television studio. There was also meant
to be a wolf in the story The Bad Wolf, and they kept going
on about Bad Wolf this, Bad Wolf that but they didn’t show
the wolf again. Maybe Jonathan Turner had told them it was
too dangerous to film a wolf and in the end the Bad Wolf
was just Rose which was stupid. In The Greatest Show in the
Galaxy Mags was a werewolf and I thought she was very
pretty and I used to think about her when I had a bath.
There was also a massive great wolf in the new series story
with the Queen and a diamond and Scottish people.
High Street
Eric Saward was helping people to write Doctor Who
stories for years but then he got annoyed with them and his
boss and sulked and ran away from the Doctor Who
production offices so no-one was around to help write
stories until Andrew Cartmel was given his job and he got a
boy called Stephen to write a story called The Paradise Towers
which has Pex and a waste disposal chute in it and the phrase
‘Build High for Happiness’ which I wrote on the inside cover
of my diary. This road name reminds me of that phrase.
Eric Saward Crying Because His Job Is
Too Much Like Hard Work
ballpoint pen
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Goldstone Road
The human race ran into space because they were scared
like babies of the solar flares, and when they woke up the
Doctor saved their lives from the dreaded Wirrn and then
much later he went back to the same station to stop the
Cybermen from blowing up lots of gold that was shaped like
a planet. Cybermen hate gold because they panic when
they’re near it. In The Silver Nemesis Ace, played by an
inexperienced actress called Sophie Aldred, used a catapult
to fire loads of gold coins at the Cybermen which killed
them all except the Cyber Leader who took his piece of
gold out and was alive still. Lady Peinforte in the same story
had gold arrows which a Cyberman struggled to stand near
because he was so scared of it. So why then can they just
beam down to a planet made of gold and not have a great
big panic? They just walk about like it’s rock or something.
If I was a Vogan I’d have built my teleport thing out of gold.
That would stop the Cybermen. The new Cybermen, or
Cybus Men as they actually are, are not scared of gold so
can’t be stopped at all and instead you have to fire a sonic
screwdriver at one of their computers so their emotions
come back and their heads blow up.
Flax Mill Close
This looked too much Maxill for me not to write it down in
my book but then I’d gone four days without finding a single
road sign to do with Doctor Who and I was, I admit,
getting a bit desperate. I’m sorry if I’ve let you down with
this one and I promise to try harder with the other entries
and I hope it doesn’t spoil our very good friendship because
it means an awful lot to me indeed.
Madox Close
Once, when it was raining, I decided to get out all my
correspondence with various Doctor Who alumni and
catalogue it into era folders because it made more sense that
way. As I started to pull it all out of the cupboard lots of
tiny slithering insects came crawling out and terrified me. My
mum said they were just silver fish. I had no idea fish could
live out of water. The next day I went to Mr Jennings who
owns the hardware store in the high street and I asked him
if I could purchase some hexachromite gas. He laughed at
me and I had to explain several times what it was and he just
didn’t understand and then the boy James who works there
on Saturdays also started laughing and I felt scared and silly
and ran out of the shop. I’ve not been back in the cupboard
since.
Castle Road
Kamelion was a robot that joined the fifth Doctor Who
Peter Davison in the story The King’s Demons and Kamelion
could change shape into lots of different people like the
Master and the Doctor and the King but he couldn’t change
shape into a castle which was okay because the story was set
in one anyway.
Pyramid Close
I can’t for the life of me remember why I wrote this one
down, but it probably had something to do with The Pyramid
of Mars.
The Heronry
I have no idea why I wrote this one down either but it’s in
my road sign notebook so I obviously wrote it for a reason
and I’m frustrated and angry that I can no longer remember
why I wrote it down and I’m just going to stop writing now
because my hands are shaking. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Spicer Close
I’m sorry about yesterday. I’m still very angry. However
anger is appropriate because Michael Spice played two very
angry men in Doctor Who. He played the vengeful brain
Morbius and the angry man with the pig-brained midget
Weng-Chiang (really Magnus Greel!). Like Stephen Thorne
he made a lot of money in the seventies from the BBC by
shouting all the time.
Davison Drive
When Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor, died, I was very sad.
Tom Baker didn’t die, in fact he’s still alive and I hope with
all my heart that he’s still alive when I finish this book and
it’s released as otherwise I’ll be wrong. But when the Fourth
Doctor died he regenerated into a new Doctor played by
Peter Davison who sat up at the end of Logopolis and saw
Tegan, Adric and Nyssa but didn’t say anything but we saw
his face and that was amazing. But then we had to wait for
months and months and months to see him again. But my
dad had a plan and he took me to London where I saw the
new Doctor in a parade where he was in his new costume
before he’d even chosen it in Castrovalva by Christopher H.
Bidhams. After the show which was something to do with
the mayor, Dad took me to a Wimpy and we had a burger
and chips and a milkshake which wasn’t as nice as I’d had
before but it was still really exciting as nowhere sold
milkshakes at all back then ever. In the Doctor Who story
Dragonfire written by Curse of Fenrics writer Ian Briggs the
Doctor’s new friend Ace works in a bar which sells
milkshakes and she pours one over her boss’ head and gets
fired which made me laugh. I’d love to pour a milkshake over
my boss’ head because she’s so stupid. She moans at me all
the time. It doesn’t matter what I do, when I turn up for
work or how I talk to people I’m always doing something
wrong and one time she tried to fire me but then my mum
went to Citizens Advice and got me my job back and now
she doesn’t tell me off as much but still doesn’t like me.
Some days I’m late for work because I’ve been watching a
story which I’ve forgotten is six episodes and not four like
The Inferno which is seven episodes and made me half an
hour late once and it’s got Primords in it and one of them’s
Sergeant Benton but then he dies but not really because it’s
a parallel universe made of fire. Another time I was told off
for being late on my lunch break but again it wasn’t my fault
I’d just started reading DWM in WH Smiths and lost all
track of time because there was an article about the viewing
figures for one of the new series episodes where they
explained that rubbish viewing figures are okay now because
people tape stuff and watch it later, but I used to do that
with Doctor Who throughout the eighties and I still have all
my tapes so why don’t they go back now and reassess all
those viewing figures from back then? You can’t argue with
that, Michael Grade.
Ambassador Road
The Ambassadors of Death is at least seven episodes long and
was made in colour but now it’s black and white because it
got old.
Centaury Place
Another green thing in Doctor Who was the
hermaphrodite hexapod Alpha Centauri who used to live
on Peladon and wore a cloak. Alpha Centauri only had one
eye and met the Doctor twice, both times as Jon Pertwee,
whereas when Sabalom Glitz met the Doctor the Doctor
was different both times.
Ranmore Common
There are so many seeds in Doctor Who I struggled to
list them all but as well as Seeds of Doom there are also
Seeds of Death. These were in the Patrick Troughton story
which was black and white but still good called The Seeds of
Death and it had Ice Warriors in it who viewers would later
find out were green. The Ice Warriors were sending seed
pods to Earth via a transmat but the Doctor stopped them.
The Ice Warriors were pretty stupid really because the
Krynoids sent their seed pods to Earth and their seed pods
could survive in snow! Ice Warriors love snow. The
commander at the base that ran T-Mat (another word for
transmat (another word for matter transmitter)) was
Commander Ranmore and he had a friend called Miss Kelly
who helped the Doctor.
Sutton Avenue
If you drill down far enough into the Earth you can get some
green stuff which will turn you into a really hot werewolf. I
tried this once when I was at school. David Camber told me
I was stupid because I liked Doctor Who and wore a K9
badge and it upset me so I decided if I dug deep enough in
the garden I could become a werewolf and kill him to death
with a fire-strangle. So I dug for ages and ages and after four
days of digging I was told to stop by my mum because it was
raining and I never bothered finishing the job. But I did push
him down the stairs after an English lesson and he banged his
head and he still slurs his speech even now which serves him
right.
Burnham Green Road
What have the Patrick Troughton black and white Cyberman
epic The Invasion and the colourful Tom Baker debut Robot
got in common? Apart from robots? And the fact they’re set
on Earth? Give up? Well they both have characters in them
played by the accomplished character actor Edward
Burnham who isn’t green.
Orme Road
Geoffrey Orme wrote a story about fish people for Doctor
Who in the sixties and it’s black and white and rubbish. It
was so bad that the BBC set fire to it and got rid of all but
one episode which they kept to remind them why they
burned it in the first place, but then some Doctor Who fans
found another episode so the BBC really are rubbish at
burning Doctor Who.
Friends Road
I think what I like most about the Doctor from the TV
series Doctor Who about a Time Lord who travels in time
and space in a blue police telephone box is that he has lots
of friends who seem to like him and he likes them, even
Tegan who shouts and wears short skirts. I don’t know why
girls wear short skirts because it must be cold and
sometimes you can see their knickers like with Jo Grant in
The Claws and Axos or The Three Doctors with William
Hartnell. I liked it when Nyssa wore a short skirt in the
story Mawdryn’s Undead because she looked very nice and
pretty in it and I like Nyssa a lot and I’m sorry that she left
the Doctor because I think he still misses her. Zoe wore a
very short skirt once in The Krotons which was written by
Robert Holmes but I don’t think the script said anything
about the short skirt. I was once at a convention where
they were auctioning off a script of The Krotons for charity
and I bid up to £85 and won but didn’t have £85 and was
asked never to attend a Manopticon event again which was
upsetting but I still went the next year and no-one noticed.
I often wonder which companion I would dress up as if I
could. I don’t think I could wear any of the outfits the ladies
wear with the possible exception of Mel’s outfit from the
story The Delta of the Bannermen where she wore a denim
suit with a red neck-scarf. I got the jeans and the shirt but
I have yet to find a red scarf. I also got an army outfit from
Mum for my birthday in 1987 which I sometimes wear when
I have a UNIT Weekend. I even wore it to a signing with
Nicholas Courtney who plays the Brigadier and he saluted
me and I had to correct him and point out he was wrong to
do this as I wasn’t really in the army and he said he wasn’t
either anymore which was clearly a lie as he was in The
Battlefield a few weeks later working for UNIT. When I was
in Coventry for the 1991 Doctor Who convention
PanoptiCon there was a girl who was dressed as Romana in
The City of Death and I thought she was really pretty and
spent most of the Saturday following her around. She didn’t
spend much time in the convention, in fact she never really
went in and was walking around town for the most part. Her
mum called security in the shop in the end because she said
she didn’t even like Doctor Who and the outfit she was
wearing was just what she had to wear at school. Her mum
and me had a fight about this and I kept saying she was
Romana and her mum kept saying her name was Kellie.
Because of that I missed Mat Irvine’s talk on special effects
and have never managed to find him at a convention since.
Sometimes I dream about Kellie.
Balloon Street
There was girl who lived in the eighties who sang a song
and it was called 99 Red Balloons. In the lyrics she says ‘The
war machine springs to life, opens up one eager eye, focussing
it on the sky, ninety-nine red balloons go by’, but you can tell
she can’t have ever watched The War Machines ever in her
life as there were no balloons in it, just some robots that
smash stuff and Dodo going away thank goodness. Also the
story is black and white so even if there was a balloon in
it you couldn’t tell what colour it was anyhow you stupid
woman.
Gough Road
Michael Gough played a Celestial Toymaker and I think a
Time Lord as well.
Romana Square
Romanadvoratrelundar was a Time Lady and probably still is
but we’ve not seen her since Warriors’ Gate where she went
off to help a man-lion fix some mirrors. She was originally
played by the actress Mary Tamm who had black hair.
Romana was sent by the White Guardian to help the
Doctor, played by the actor Tom Baker, to find something
called the Key to Time which ultimately wasn’t particularly
important and the whole series of The Key to Time stuff was
actually very boring and rubbish but then it was produced
by Graham Williams so it would be. Mary Tamm left in The
Armageddon Factor which was the last story of The Key to
Time and it also featured an actress called Lalla Ward who
played Astra and K9 was in it too. Lalla Ward took over as
Romana in the next story which was written by Terry
Nation and had Daleks in it and no music called The Destiny
of the Daleks and Davros came back as well but he wasn’t
played by Michael Wisher and sounded funny. Lalla Ward
makes needlework things and I bought one once and have
it on my wall in a frame next to my 25th Anniversary First
Day Cover which is also signed by Derrick Sherwin who
was a script editor on Doctor Who a long time ago. Lalla
Ward married Tom Baker and then divorced him because
they didn’t like each other.
Audric Close
Adric was a friend to the Fifth Doctor played by the young,
vibrant actor Mr Peter Davison who wore a sort of creamcoloured cricket outfit for some reason or another. Adric
could do sums really quickly and used to steal fruit on the
planet Alzarius where there were Marshmen and stuff.
Coleshill Road
I wish I’d gone to the same school as Susan because maybe
I could’ve gone off with her school teachers Ian and Barbara
and her grandfather Doctor Who. Mind you I wouldn’t have
wanted to go to the cavemen bit because all that was really
boring. If I went anywhere I’d probably most like to go with
the Fifth Doctor played by the actor Peter Davison in The
Black Orchid and watch cricket and have a dressing-up party
with food and drinks and probably a murder but not a bad
one. The school featured again in the Seventh Doctor story
The Remembrance of the Daleks where a little blonde girl is
working for the Daleks and hanging around graveyards. It’s
very scary indeed but not as scary as when Ian is shouting at
Susan for being rubbish at science. The TARDIS is parked in
a junkyard in the first story and the junkyard appears again
in the Ian Levene/Eric Saward story The Attack of the
Cyberman where a man called Lytton helps some Cryons in
return for diamonds which are really common on Telos but
I think he was stupid because Telos is really cold and those
probably weren’t diamonds at all but ice.
Parsons Place
There haven’t been anywhere near as many vicars in Doctor
Who as you might think, in fact I think we’ve seen more
since the series came back than we ever saw up to 1989.
There isn’t even a vicar at the end of The Black Orchid and
that’s a funeral! The best vicar, apart from Mr Magister in The
Dæmons and the one at the end of The Remembrance of the
Daleks and the blind one in The Remembrance of the Daleks,
was Nicholas Parsons in Curse of Fenrics who was scared of
vampires. He got killed.
Banks Lane
‘Excellent!’ – that’s what I have signed on my HMV carrier
bag from 1988 when I saw David Banks leaving Wimbledon
Theatre. We spoke at length about his portrayal of the
Cyber Leader and he even gave me one of his crisps from
the bag he was eating at the time. It was a funny flavour, sort
of like the McCoys (no relation … ha-ha!) Steak flavour but
a little more spicy and less salty. They were really nice and
it was very kind indeed of him to even offer me food but
since by then we were very good friends it seems only right
that he should share. He also signed my book which was
the recently novelised Dragonfire which he turned over and
over in his hands and then pointed out he wasn’t in it. I
realised this and felt a bit put out that he thought I wouldn’t
know so I snatched the book back from him angrily but then
he apologised and snatched it back, writing ‘To Andy, all best
wishes, David Banks’. He appeared in many Doctor Who
stories portraying the emotionless and mechanical Cyber
Leader with depth and a degree of humanity that other
actors like Kilgariff failed to deliver. He wrote a book about
Cybermen which I bought in hardback and paperback but I
couldn’t afford the special limited edition because it cost as
much as a holiday cottage.
Book End
I thought the road sign for this road said ‘Bok End’ but I
wasn’t sure as the bus was going very fast because there is
a big long gap between stops and the road was quiet that
day and the driver was late which he usually is because he
talks to all the other bus drivers before we leave the station
and he smokes too much and smells of leather. So I got off
at the next stop and then got a bus going back the other way
to have another look at the sign, but the bus was going too
fast again and I still couldn’t read it. I spent two hours going
backwards and forwards like this and spent an extra £4.25
on more tickets and I only got to read it because the bus
had to stop in the road for an hour when the car in front of
us hit a woman on a bike. I got to work three hours late for
nothing, it wasn’t Bok after all, it was Book. The Bok was a
dæmon in the story The Dæmons which isn’t even how you
spell demon. There was also a book in the unfinished story
Shada which was rubbish and was produced by Graham
Williams shortly before the BBC got someone else to make
Doctor Who good again. The Second Doctor Patrick
Troughton used to carry a big old diary around with him and
check things like dates, names and drawings to remind
himself of things he’d seen. That’s where I got the idea for
this book which is also a book and should be in this bit.
The Bok
ballpoint pen
The Bok! He was really cross all the time and I’m not surprised,
he only did one story and it was rubbish. In my drawing he
looks like he is laughing at something but I promise you he isn’t.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Waterer Gardens
What have Warriors of the Deep, Fury from the Deep, The Talons
of Weng-Chiang, The Powers of Kroll, The Planet of Fire, The Leisure
Hive, Logopolis, Death to the Daleks (by Terry Nation), The
Resurrection of the Daleks and Curse of Fenrics all got in
common? No, it’s not gardens – it’s WATER! Gallons and
gallons of water. As you can see by how small that list is
there’s not as much water in Doctor Who as you might
expect. Quite often people claim to drink glasses or cups of
water in Doctor Who but you can usually see the cup or the
glass is empty because television is mostly made up of lies
and these cups and glasses are just what they call ‘props’. In
The Battlefield when the Seventh Doctor (who is also Merlin)
played by Sylvester McCoy takes Ace who is played by Sophie
Aldred to the pub he buys a glass of water and it costs a lot
of money. I’m not sure if rain counts as water or not in which
case there’s also a few stories with rain in them which I
mention later, but of course Curse of Fenrics has rain and
water because Ace swims in it at one point to get away from
the Russians and the vampires.
Church Wa;lk
The Master is an evil Time Lord also from the planet
Gallifrey because that’s where Time Lords live and his name
is just the Master because like the Doctor he hasn’t got a
real name. The Master has been played by lots of actors
including Geoffrey Beevers and Anthony Ainley but when he
was Roger Delgado he used to pretend to be other people
so Roger Delgado was pretending to be the Master who
was pretending to be Mr Magister who was a vicar of a
church in The Dæmons that got blown up and had a crypt.
Woodhouse Lane
Sometimes the Doctor goes home to Gallifrey which is his
home. He’s a Time Lord and the Time Lords live there and
when he went back in The Deadly Assassin written by Robert
Holmes he saw all sorts of weird things when he entered
the Matrix like a surgeon, a clown, a spider and a lake (Argh!
I forgot this one in my list on the last page! I’m leaving it in
to prove I am human). When the Doctor was drowned at
the end of episode three a lady called Barbara Woodhouse
complained because she said it was scary for children to see
and she made them change it which meant my copy that I
have on VHS from BBC Enterprises has a noticeable dip in
quality just before the end titles roll and it’s very distracting
indeed and she should be ashamed of herself and I wrote to
her grandchildren to say as much.
Robert Holmes
biro
This portrait of Robert Holmes
was the last drawing I did for my
book and it might be my best
picture ever. It makes me cross
because Robert Holmes was the
best Doctor Who writer ever
but Christos Achellios and Peter
Archer never did a picture of him
which is a disgusting disgrace and
means I am the better drawer.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Taylor Avenue
Steven Taylor is a space man and he has a panda and he can
sing.
Pertwee Way
I bet you didn’t know this, but what have the Sylvester
McCoy story The Battlefield with Marcus Gilbert and the
William Hartnell story The Dalek Masterplan with Pamela
Greer have in common? They both star Jon Pertwee’s wife
Jean Marsh! I never thought I’d need to know that but then
one day in 1994 I was at a convention called Dreamwatch
where they were showing the Sontaran movie Shakedown
and I went to a pub for my lunch because I was old enough
to and because there were some really loud boys in KFC
who were looking at a magazine with dirty pictures of the
actress Katy Manning in it and they scared me, the boys and
the pictures. In the pub I noticed a machine where you put
money in and it asks you questions and you get three
different choices for an answer and if you get all the
questions right it gives you back more money than you put
in and the questions were all about television and I watch
television so I gave it a go. It cost me a lot of money but I
eventually made four pounds and my winning answer was
‘Jean Marsh’ but it was an absolute guess because I didn’t
know what the question was and I still don’t to this day, but
it does mean I missed the The Genesis of the Daleks panel
which led to a great sadness within me.
Bridge Street
The Watcher stood on a bridge in London during Logopolis
when he told the Fourth Doctor played by the actor Tom
Baker that he was going to turn into Peter Davison, the
actor who plays the Fifth Doctor. Adric couldn’t hear what
they were talking about because he was somewhere else at
the time.
Queens Silver Court
The lady who lived in the house next door to my nan had a
corgi dog just like Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second
does in the 1988 story The Silver Nemesis and in real life. It
used to run around the garden and go all mad and bark its
head off when I shouted over the fence at it and the lady
who lived in the house next door to my nan would get cross
with me for making her dog get giddy and noisy just like the
robot dog K9 at the beginning of The Pirate Planet. One day
I found a long hollow bamboo stick in Nan’s garden so I
made some holes in it with an old biro that was blue and
didn’t work and tried to make a flute like the flute the Fourth
Doctor made in The Powers of Kroll, a Doctor Who story
starring the Fourth Doctor played by hat-wearing man Tom
Baker as the Doctor who wasn’t Rohm-Dutt, a dirty gunrunner. I was trying to play the same song that the Doctor
plays in that story but my stupid flute just made this highpitched squeak instead which made the corgi run around all
weirdly. This was really funny so I kept on doing it for about
an hour until the flute made a really weird honking noise and
the dog ran sideways like a crab into the fence and got a
nose bleed.
Birdswell Lane
Of all of the Doctor’s many many friends I think the one he
probably liked least of all was Dodo who was rubbish and
named after a bird and played by Jackie Lane. This was when
the stories were black and white so the ones she’s in aren’t
very good and she had to play piano in The Gunfighters which
she did really well but not as well as Gwendoline in The
Ghost-Light who sang as well and was actually pretty.
Stewart Street
I’ve never seen a real live snake except at a zoo once and
in a reptile house and the only other snakes I’ve ever seen
were in Doctor Who and both were in the same two
stories, The Kinda and The Snakedance. In The Kinda there
was a man who was very horrid to Tegan when she was
dreaming and he was played by Jeff Stewart who was also in
The Bill until he was sacked like Colin Baker.
Chesterton Drive
This was the surname of the Doctor’s friend in the early
stories who was called Ian and his surname was Chesterton
and the amazing thing is that in the very first episode we
actually see him driving a car with Barbara in it as they
follow Susan home in the fog to find out why she’s so stupid.
Circular Road
Something I always think about when I think about Doctor
Who is the TARDIS walls which are covered in circles that
are sometimes called ‘roundels’. There are so many different
circles in Doctor Who such as the shape of the second set
of Jon Pertwee titles, the ‘O’ in ‘Who’, the top of a Dalek, or
the ‘neck’ section as it’s sometimes called, a Chumney, a
robot deactivation disc, the top of a sonic screwdriver, the
seal of Rassilon, the chalk circle Ace and Shao Yung hide in
in The Battlefield, the base of William Hartnell’s walking stick,
a monopticon … actually is round the same as circular? If it
isn’t then most of those are probably wrong and I apologise
if you were writing them down as I went.
Starfield Close
When I was 12 years old I had the fright of my life while
sitting down to watch the new Doctor Who. I’d hated it for
two years, it was just rubbish, rubbish, rubbish but then the
music started and titles were different and it sounded like
someone putting metal in a food processor and throwing it
past my head really fast. I'd never heard music from a
'synthesiser' before but apparently that's what this was and it
was the new theme tune to Doctor Who and there was a
new title sequence and a new picture of the Doctor too! The
way the story title was written on the screen had changed as
well and it looked like it was made of plastic or glass and
looked so realistic. I rocked on my knees in front of the telly
in utter excitement as the Doctor slept on the beach in a
deckchair and Romana and K9 were still his friends but he
was wearing a weird new costume and the music in the
programme was weird and different too just like the title
music. I shouted out to Mum and Dad that it had changed
and then remembered that Dad had gone and suddenly it felt
like Dad was K9 – full of seawater and broken on a beach,
except dad wasn’t carried away by Lalla Ward dressed as a
sailor. I soon forgot all that when the Doctor was suddenly
ripped apart on screen and his screaming, agonised, fuzzy
head flew toward me from my television and that strange
music like nails being forced through glass gravel screamed
with him. I sat closer and closer to the telly as I suddenly felt
like I was travelling through space. Mum later explained that
they created the effect by getting lots of men dressed in black
to stand in front of a black curtain and walk toward the
camera holding torches. Mum was always so clever like that
and I wrote into Doctor Who Monthly to tell them she’d
worked it out but they never printed my letter which left me
feeling sad and cheated.
Brain Street
If you were to get a really sharp knife and stab it into your
head and push it all the way around like you were opening
a hard-boiled egg, inside you’d find a big, soft, pink squishy
thing and that’s your brain. If you see your brain you die
because really it should always be kept behind your eyes. In
Doctor Who brains aren’t often seen but a man called
Solon stole a criminal brain from Gallifrey where the
Doctor lives and took it to Karn where the Doctor doesn’t
live and the brain belonged to an angry man called Morbius.
Solon made a body out of bits of other people and things
and monsters and stuff and then put Morbius’ brain in a
goldfish bowl and sat it on top of the body he’d made which
made Morbius cross. In The Time and the Rani there’s a giant
brain which confuses the newly regenerated Doctor as
played by Sylvester McCoy but it’s not really his fault
because the evil Time Lady the Rani keeps drugging him
which isn’t very nice. When I was in Brain Street taking
photographs a lady came out of her house and told me I
couldn’t take photographs of Brain Street because she didn’t
want me to but I got cross with her and told her I could and
then she called a man out of her house and he was really big
but my mum taught me to stand up to people like him but
he hit me.
Marius Road
I took a photograph of it to prove it is real but the flash
went off on my camera without me telling it to and reflected
against the bus window and if you saw it you would think I
was only taking a picture of a stupid explosion or a massive
piece of cotton wool.
August Lane
When the sixth Doctor Who Colin Baker was sacked he was
replaced by the seventh Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy who
wore a different scarf in his first story and didn’t get his
question mark umbrella until a little later still. Sylvester
McCoy was in lots of stories for a while and even did a huge
Hollywood film with Paul McGann as the Doctor as well in
San Francisco on New Year’s Eve in a hospital. He ate jelly
babies just like the fourth Doctor Who Tom Baker but that’s
not why I mentioned his scarf. His birthday’s in August.
Blood Road
The Doctor’s blood is red because he’s a Time Lord. We see
his blood in The Deadly Assassin and Two Doctors. Sontaran
blood is green and we also see this in Two Doctors. Human
blood is red just like Time Lord blood and we see this in Two
Doctors. Androgums like blood and sometimes shove their
hands in it and lick it up as can be seen in Two Doctors.
Severn Drive
So many actors have played the role of Doctor Who and so
have comedians like Jon Pertwee and Sylvester McCoy.
Sylvester McCoy was the Seventh Doctor and he carried an
umbrella in case it rained which it amazingly did twice, once
when the Gods of Ragnarok tried to scare him by making it
rain in the studio and lots of rain in the story Curse of Fenrics.
How much other rain have you seen in Doctor Who other
than that? Not much I’ll bet.
Benton Lane
Sergeant Benton didn’t have a first name so the gifted actor
John Levene who played Benton decided that his first name
should be John which was quite clever of him because it’s
the same name as his! Sergeant Benton appeared in several
stories with several Doctors and they all liked him very
much indeed and the last time we saw him was in The
Android Invasion which was also Harry Sullivan’s last story
unless you count his flashback at the end of Logopolis or his
flashback in The Resurrection of the Daleks. Sergeant Benton
liked Sarah Jane Smith as well but he didn’t really like
Captain Yates who took his cheese from him when they
were looking for ghosts in Sir Reginald Styles’ house.
Sergeant Benton didn’t just work for Captain Yates, he also
worked for the Brigadier who was played by Nicholas
Courtney. I once got a video of a special film that was made
starring the actor John Levene as Sergeant Benton called
Wartime but I had to put it in the cupboard because it
scared me and now I’m worried it’s probably covered in
silver fish.
Dreaded Cybermat
ballpoint pen
I still do not have the bravery to
draw a silver fish so I have done a drawing of a Cybermat as
they are exactly the same except metal and made by
Cybermen. I did think it was too silver-fishy and got a bit
scared and started to scribble it out but I didn’t want to let
you down as you are my best friend.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Springfield Road
I have passed this road many times when I have been to Lidls
to get baked beans, bread and sometimes Dr Pepper, but it
didn’t mean anything at all to me until the episode of
Doctor Who where there were people made of this white
stuff that was alive and a girl had a really long neck in the
toilet. It was called The White Goo People or something like
that probably, I don’t know, I hate the new series. Rory
Williams and the young Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor
were talking about Dusty Springfield when they heard one of
her songs in the building where the people made of white
stuff lived and it got hit by a solar tsunami. I don’t know
much else about the woman, just that she had a hit song with
Nutwood City Limits and she is now dead according to the
internet.
Earls Avenue
The Doctor is really, really old. He’s a lot older now than
he used to be but he can never remember how old he is
and always gets it wrong. There are eleven Doctors in total,
unless you include Peter Cushing, the Valeyard, Trevor
Martin, the other Tenth Doctor, Joanna Lumley, Richard
Hurndall, Edmund Warwick, David Banks, Nicholas Briggs,
Hugh Grant, Richard E. Grant, Stephen Payne, Rowan
Atkinson, Jim Broadbent and Lenny Henry. The first ever
Doctor was played by a man called William Hartnell who
died so they made the Doctor turn into Patrick Troughton
and when they did they had Cybermen in the story and
Polly and Ben were the Doctor’s friends (he never kissed
them, even when he was dying) and Earl Cameron was also
in the story.
Leeson Crescent
I hate K9 because he’s rubbish and once at a local group
meeting I was shown a video of the Fourth Doctor Tom
Baker saying the most appallingly rude things to K9 when he
couldn’t answer a question and John Leeson did his voice.
Scarman Road
I’m not allowed to talk about my brother because he’s in
prison and my mum says he’s not family anymore, but
sometimes I send him letters and he writes back to me.
When Doctor Who came back on the telly and the
northern actor Christopher Eccelston took on the role of
the Time Lord I drew storyboards of each story and sent
them to my brother together with an audio cassette
recording of the episode. I did this all the way up to The
Long Game when he finally wrote to me and told me to stop.
His letter was full of swearwords and horrible comments
about my hair. He said he ‘…didn’t even own a blinking
cassette player’ (I’ve censored the word he actually used
because I wouldn’t want this book to get an 18 certificate
when it’s made into a film). I can’t believe he doesn’t own a
cassette player. Everyone has one otherwise how do they
listen to The Pescatons or The Genesis of the Daleks or The
Origins of the Cybermen? I still record all the new episodes
of Doctor Who to audio because I’m afraid the BBC might
set fire to them again and if they do then this way I’ll be
ready with an audio recording so that BBC Enterprises can
release the stories with linking narration by maybe Simon
Pegg or Mark Gatiss. I suppose it’s because the BBC haven’t
burned the episodes that the Target people haven’t
novelised them. I wish Terrance Dicks would novelise some
of the new stories as I would find it so delightful to hear his
descriptions of the new Doctors. He describes Peter
Davison as having a ‘pleasant, open face’ which while I agree
to a certain point I actually find Peter Davison’s face is far
too small for Peter Davison’s head. I wish my brother would
get strangled by a mummy for what he said, but not by my
mummy because then she’d also go to prison and I’d hate
that but it would be fun to visit her in the style of Jon
Pertwee in The Sea Devils.
Terrance
ballpoint pen on Lidl receipt
I drew this picture of Terrance Dicks from a memory in my
head, I didn’t copy or trace it. If I ever meet former script editor
for Barry Letts and Target novelisation author Terrance I will
give him a high quality photocopy of this original piece of
artwork that I did all on my own and I’m sure he will be very
happy as no-one has ever done a drawing of him before – my
tribute to the man who copied the script from Meglos and
made a book out of it and it had a cover by Andrew Skilleter.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Dog Lane
I made a list of all the Doctor Who stories with dogs in
them on the bus on the way home from work the other
night but then I lost it and someone else must’ve found it so
please, if you see it published anywhere either in print or
online please contact me and let me know because they
have stolen my private property. Off the top of my head
now I know there’s a dog in The Mark of the Rani written by
husband and wife duo Pip and Jane Baker who were no
relation of Colin Baker, the actor that played the Sixth
Doctor, because I asked him and he said they weren’t but
laughed and said no-one had ever asked that before so I’m
glad I surprised him there. I have yet to find out if they were
related to Tom Baker or not but I would’ve thought Peter
Haining would’ve mentioned it in at least one of his many
oversized books. There’s a dog-man in Mindwarp too which
isn’t really called Mindwarp at all because it’s part of one
massive story called The Trial of a Time Lord where the Sixth
Doctor, Colin Baker again, is put on trial (he’s a Time Lord)
for messing about with history and stuff. It’s fourteen
episodes in total and several of them are good but the end
is a bit messy because Eric Saward left and took the scripts
with him which seems really unprofessional to me since his
job was to write them or at the very least explain to other
writers how to write them and what was required but he
apparently found this very difficult to do which is a shame
because all the other script editors seemed to find it quite
easy to do which is probably why they didn’t leave taking
their scripts with them and just resigned at the end of their
contracted season. I can’t think of any other dogs now but
both the ones I can think of were in Colin Baker stories
which is really weird because his Doctor liked cats and cats
hate dogs.
Piper Road
When Doctor Who came back as a new series in 2005 it
was all very different and weird and the Doctor’s new friend
was a little girl called Rose Tyler who I once saw in another
TV programme one night without any clothes on and she
was jumping up and down on top of a fat man who paid her.
When Rose was in Doctor Who though she kept kissing
the Doctor which was weird and it’s lucky for him that she
didn’t jump up and down on him naked. Rose left and came
back but then she left again and came back but now I think
she’s left for good. One of the stories she came back in is the
one this book is named after. Oh wait! There was a dog in
Doctor Who and the Survival too. I think it was the producer
Jonathan Turner’s dog which was called Pepsi. I got to walk
Pepsi once at a convention when he asked me to buy him
some cigarettes from the shop around the corner. And I
forgot about K9! He was a dog wasn’t he? I’m rubbish at
remembering dogs and I know there were more on my list
than that. I do wish someone hadn’t stolen it from me.
Queens Road
I don’t know much about Peladon because I thought The
Curse of Peladon was just so boring. It went on and on and on
and at one point there were some Ice Warriors who weren’t
even bad they were just nice and I’m sorry if I spoiled the
story for you then because I didn’t mean to. In another
Peladon story there was a Queen called Thalira who reminds
me of the lady who works in our local library and I really
like her and get nervous when she speaks to me. I think she’s
pretty and hope one day she’ll marry me and we might kiss
like the Doctor and Martha.
Beehive Way
Sometimes Doctor Who meets other Time Lords like Drax,
the Master and Morbius’ brain. I think the old Welsh honeyenthusiast Goronwy in the 1988 story The Delta of the
Bannermen was a Time Lord but the boy in the red shirt at
the Blue Box convention I spoke to says he wasn’t and I
didn’t like that boy because he was eating a sandwich in the
autograph queue for Deep Roy and that’s just rude.
Stubble Hill
Bat milk cures you if you fall into a spectrox nest as
Perpugilliam Brown found out when she fell in a spectrox
nest on Androzani Minor or Major and the Doctor, Peter
Davison, the Fifth Doctor, helped her out and then gave her
bat milk to make her better but before he could do it he
had to escape from the gunrunners led by Stotz who didn’t
shave properly.
Peri Crying When She
Woke Up One Day And
Had Grown A Beard
ballpoint pen
I have no idea why I drew this.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Silver Street
I always think of Cybermen when I see the word silver
because the Cybermen, apart from the black ones, were all
silver. I can’t say for certain that the Cybermen in black and
white stories were silver because like almost everything
else they were really grey on my TV. Cybermen hate gold
and well-cooked meals and they absolutely love bombs.
They look different nearly every time we see them but the
Cybermen I like best of all were in the Patrick Troughton
story The Invasion because they didn't speak which was
really scary. I hate the new Cybermen because they’re not
even Cybermen and they’re rubbish because they stamp
around like robots and Cybermen aren’t robots at all. It’s
stupid.
Ropery Road
I wrote this down because I was sure Li H’sen Chang said it
in The Talons of Weng-Chiang but I just checked twice and he
doesn’t so I’ll delete it before the book goes to the printers.
Turlough Road
When I was little my dad took a photo of this one from a
bus when he was in Northern Ireland which is hundreds of
miles away and he had to go by boat. He said I’d like it and
he was right that I liked it because it looked amazing and I’m
very proud of him indeed for spotting it. As you already
know because you are a fan of the BBC TV programme
Doctor Who about a Time Lord, Turlough wasn’t his friend
at all but a murderer who wanted to kill the Fifth Doctor,
Peter Davison, because he was working for a Black Guardian
who hates the Doctor because of something that happened
when Graham Williams was making Doctor Who which is
entirely understandable because it was rubbish when
Graham Williams made Doctor Who just like it’s rubbish
now but for different reasons because now it’s rubbish
because the Doctor keeps kissing everybody. Turlough didn’t
kiss anybody, not even Nyssa or Tegan when they left which
is unkind. Turlough spent all the time in prison or a duct or
the console room and never did anything at all in Doctor
Who but Mark Strickson once gave me two sweets from
his bag at a signing and signed all four of my items even
though he was only allowed to sign two which was generous,
thoughtful and lovely of him which goes to show that not
everyone is the same as the character they play on television
or in Doctor Who. I like Mark Strickson and I think we’re
good friends now since that event even though he’s never
written to me or mentioned me in DVD commentaries.
Mandrell Road
Castellan Mandrell appeared in the Doctor Who story The
Deadly Assassin.
Basset Drive
Some monsters from Doctor Who can be laughed at by
people who don’t appreciate the programme, the scripts, the
acting or the direction or even the superb sound mixing.
Often you’ll see the 1986 monster the Kandyman in clip
shows on TV which take the mickey out of Doctor Who
(not Mickey the companion, it’s just a phrase). When the
Kandyman appeared in Doctor Who the people that made
liquorice tried to sue Jonathan Turner but he told them to go
away.
Cloak Street
I once wore a cloak to work after I saved up money and
bought it on eBay because I wanted to be just like the Third
Doctor, Jon Pertwee. But people pointed and laughed at me
and then when I got off the bus and it was really windy the
cloak blew up and off my shoulders and I had to run up the
High Street to get it and nobody would help me. It got all
wet when it fell in a puddle and then it got blown some more
and a lady parked her car on it. When I went to pick it up it
ripped and she refused to pay for it and a policeman said she
didn’t have to pay for it because it wasn’t her fault which
isn’t fair. I’m never going to wear a cloak again and that
money was just wasted.
Castellan Avenue
Castellan Spandrell appeared in the Doctor Who story The
Deadly Assassin.
Celestial Gardens
I recently bought some Doctor Who Lego which was really
exciting because I didn’t know they even made Doctor
Who Lego but then a boy in The Who Shop told me it
wasn’t real Lego and it was just pretend Lego so I felt
cheated and sad.You can buy lots of Doctor Who toys now
and I got a set of all eleven Doctors which came in a big
TARDIS box and they’re all in there because I checked. They
even made a figure of Paul McGann and he was only the
Doctor for a few minutes which were rubbish. In the old
days I used to buy the action figures made by a company
called Dapol who were used to doing trains and weren’t
very good at Doctor Who things. I had two Mels, one wore
pink and one wore blue and both had red hair and they were
great and I couldn’t believe they didn’t release a Dragonfire
Mel because then I’d have had three. I also had two Seventh
Doctors whose likeness was based on the actor Sylvester
McCoy. They did lots and lots of Daleks and I got eighteen
altogether which were different colours and one of them
was covered in glitter which was great for when I was playing
The Remembrance of the Daleks and the Doctor fires his
weapon at them which is all glittery. I’ve got a Davros with
two hands too which my pen friend Julien complained about
because he said it’s wrong but as I see it he’ll be laughing on
the other side of his stupid face one day because if his
Davros’ arm breaks off, he hasn’t got a spare and I have. I
also had their TARDIS console which makes lots and lots of
noise when it goes up and down and again that’s just like in
the programme, especially like Keeper of the Traken where the
TARDIS is incredibly noisy, presumably this is the Keeper’s
influence. Nobody’s ever released a figure of the Keeper
because it would probably be really expensive to recreate
his chair, but Dapol did release Melkur which was incredible.
I wish you could buy Kangs. They’d be really cheap to make
because you'd just do one or two or three (but no more)
and then paint them different colours like they did with the
Voc robots from the four-part story The Robots of Death. If I
could have any figure I wanted then I’d have a Nyssa figure but
I’m not sure which outfit I’d like best. Not the stupid The
Snakedance outfit because I hate it a lot but I really like the
Mawdryn's Undead outfit which would be perfect. The
underwear from Terminus would be exciting but I’d worry
that she was getting cold as my room doesn’t have a radiator.
Murray Road
Buses come in all shapes and sizes in Doctor Who but
mainly they’re the same shape and size as a normal bus. The
Master, an evil Time Lord played by the versatile gentlemanly
actor Roger Delgado, used a bus to move his Autons and
daffodils around in the Third Doctor story The Terrors of the
Autons which featured the actor Harry Towb who was
already known to Doctor Who fans for his work in the first
episode of the six-part Ice Warrior epic The Seeds of Death.
The Master even got to drive the bus at one point. There
was another bus in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy which was
painted with lots of different colours and had a robot bus
conductor who tried to kill the Seventh Doctor, Mags and
Captain Cook. I think Ace was there too but I didn’t notice
her and my memory doesn’t include her either so if she was
there I just forgot which can happen sometimes. The Seventh
Doctor saw a lot of buses as when he and Mel won a trip to
Disneyland from Ken Dodd which was in Wales, Mel took a
bus there and it crashed but the Doctor saved it by poking
at the TARDIS with his umbrella which worked but then it
got blown up anyway by the Bannerman Gavrok. He really
hated Chimerons.
Sheridan Close
In a poll of actors best suited to play the role of the Doctor
in 1993 the seventh choice on the list was the actor Nigel
Havers who had previously appeared in a sitcom with
Chancellor Flavia herself Dinah Sheridan. If he had been the
Doctor then it would’ve made Don’t Wait Up so
confusing that I probably wouldn’t watch it. I’ve never seen
an episode anyway because it’s never on when I watch TV.
Balls Cross Road
When I was at first school Craig Evans said Doctor Who
was rubbish and if you liked it then you were an idiot so I
threw a football at his face. He got cross and pushed me
into the sandpit and started shoving handfuls of sand in my
mouth, loads and loads of it for ages, and the dog poo that
I noticed in the corner of the sandpit earlier that day
vanished, and I was really coughing and cried a lot. He got a
fishing hook caught in his neck in the summer holidays and
his throat went black just like from a bite from a Cybermat
in 1975.
The Dog Poo
biro
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Hoo Green Lane
Ha-ha, try saying it aloud. Isn’t that funny?
Marshall Crescent
When Graham Williams was sacked for making rubbish
Doctor Who stories and Jonathan Turner was given his job,
the first thing Jonathan Turner did was to schedule filming
on Brighton Beach showing the Doctor asleep, Romana
walking on the stones and K9 exploding in the sea. That’s
how you do it, Williams. I once went to Brighton Beach but
I couldn’t find the exact location of filming and had chips
instead which had salt on them which would keep the
Fendahleen off.
The Links
The Links were frightening monkey men in the BBC TV
series Blake’s 7 in an episode titled Terminal written by
Terry Nation who invented the Daleks and was mega-rich.
But I hate Blake’s 7 because it’s rubbish and this road
reminded me so, so much of the amazing work of the
Australian actor Kevin Lindsay in the Doctor Who story
The Time Warrior where he played a Sontaran called Links.
Reid Street
If you are born a girl, when you grow and you are an old
woman you have loads and loads of time on your hands
which is why old women just cook piles of jam or knit
blankets for cold babies in other countries, they have nothing
else to do. One old woman who didn’t make any jam or
blankets was Beryl Reid because she was too busy being
captain of a spaceship that was full of Cybermen and bombs
but she didn’t know about that.
Tennis Road
When the Doctor met his friend Craig he played football
with him and they played for a pub and the Doctor kept
trying to kiss the other players. It’s the second time
football’s appeared in Doctor Who because some boys are
playing it in a field when the Master sees them through his
big yellow cat eyes. There’s been lots of cricket in Doctor
Who because the Fifth Doctor played by the actor Peter
Davison wore a cricket outfit which he got from a cricket
pavilion in the TARDIS when Tegan’s lipstick melted. But to
date nobody has ever played tennis in Doctor Who
because tennis is rubbish, however the German actor Anton
Diffring who played the Nazi man DeFlores in The Silver
Nemesis only did it so that he could watch Wimbledon
which I think is tennis. Also the First Doctor played by the
old actor William Hartnell once wrote to a producer and
asked them to stop the young cast from playing table tennis
in the rehearsal rooms. I think he was right to do this
because they were being paid to rehearse their scripts, not
mess about on a table tennis table. I don’t think there’s ever
been any golf in Doctor Who though. Except Mr Trenchard
playing golf in his office but that doesn’t count and it makes
a stupid noise that wouldn't happen when the Doctor plays
and the ball goes into Mr Trenchard's glass because it would
only tinkle and wouldn't make an electronic noise unless it
was a game with batteries in which it isn't because it's a
glass.
Green Street
When I read this one in my notebook I laughed out loud
because so many things in Doctor Who are green aren’t
they? Goodness me, I can barely type for the tears in my
eyes. But what could I possibly have been thinking of when I
wrote this one down? Krynoids? The Third Doctor’s velvet
jacket in the story The Time Warrior which introduced
Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, a role she would play
for many years afterwards before eventually being given her
own series in Wales? Sutekh’s gaze? Sea Devil neck? The
polka dots on Delta’s dress in the Doctor Who story The
Delta of the Bannermen? The hardback spine of the Brian
Hayles novelisation of his TV script The Curse of Peladon? The
tops of trees? There are so many trees in Doctor Who I
have no idea which ones I could’ve been thinking of. Perhaps
the most fitting trees would’ve been the ones at the end of
Doctor Who and the Survival as the seventh Doctor Who and
his friend Ace walk back to the playground in Doctor Who and
the Survival talking about what they’re going to do next
before they were both sacked by the BBC.
Roman Road
Doctor Who used to go back in time lots more than he
does now and when William Hartnell was Doctor Who
they’d go back in time almost every week and once they met
the Romans in a story called The Romans about the Romans.
It wasn’t the last time they’d see Romans. They saw Romans
in Patrick Troughton’s last story as well but those Romans
just ran a lot and shouted. Just lately Romans have returned
to Doctor Who in the form of the plastic Auton nurse
Rory who is married to Amy who kissed the Doctor because
that’s what his friends do now.
Bruce Grove
I once got punched in the cheek by a lady in Wilkinsons and
I got a really nasty bruise on my face which people pointed
at and whispered about for a week afterwards. Bruises really
hurt. Bruce sounds like bruise but can also mean Bruce, like
Angela Bruce who played Brigadier Winifred Bambera who
said ‘Oh shame!’ a lot when I think what she meant to say
was something much ruder because she was in the army. She
fell in love with Ancelyn who was a knight from another
dimension and she didn’t like the Brigadier at first but then
she did like him. Bruce was the name of the Master before
he became the American Master in the The Enemy Within and
a lady called him sick when he was in the hospital. She
should know better being a nurse than to joke about people
being sick when anyone around her could’ve been dying from
being sick. The Pirate Captain in The Pirate Planet was a
shouting man and it was a rubbish Graham Williams story
and was written by Douglas Adams who used to write
Doctor Who as a comedy because Graham Williams just
let any old thing get made and he was played by Bruce
Purchase. I bet you didn’t know there were so many Bruces
in Doctor Who did you? Australians call everyone Bruce
because they’re weird like that and Tegan was an Australian
just like her cousin Colin and the Aborigines in The Four to
Doomsday. Kylie Minogue was also an Australian and she
appeared in a Christmas special with the Tenth Doctor
played by David Tennant who isn’t Australian but is Scottish
which means he’s from Scotland and in the story she was in
he said his age was nine hundred and one. I've watched lots
of Doctor Who more than lots of people and this doesn't
make any sense to me He was at least 900 in The
Remembrance of the Daleks so that means that The
Remembrance of the Daleks, The Happiness Patrol, The Silver
Nemesis, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, The Battlefield, The
Ghost-Light, Curse of Fenrics, Doctor Who and the Survival, The
Enemy Within, Rose, The End of the World, The Unquiet Dead,
Aliens of London,World War Three, The Dalek, The Long Game,
The Father’s Day, The Empty Child, The Doctor Dances,
Boomtowns, The Bad Wolf, Parting of the Way, The Christmas
Invasion, The New Earth,The Space Beetles, School Reunion, The
Girl in the Fireplace, The Rise of the Cybermen, The Age of Steel,
The Idiotic Lanterns, The Impossible Planets, Satanpit, Love and
the Monsters, Fear Her, The Army of Ghosts, Doomsday,
Christmas of the Spiders, Smith and Jones, The Shakespeare Code,
The Grid-Lock, The Daleks Take Manhattan, The Evolution of the
Daleks, The Lazarus Experiment, Forty-Two, The Human Nature,
The Family of Blood, Don’t Blink, Utopia, Last of the Drums and
The Sound of the Time Lords all take place in the space of one
year of the Doctor’s life. That means he regenerates three
times that year. It’s just stupid and it goes to show what
happens when you have someone producing Doctor Who
who has never seen an episode of it before in their life.
Claw Hill
When the BBC made a story with Patrick Troughton playing
the Doctor called The Macra Terrors they only had enough
money to make one Macra crab. It must have been really
expensive to make a crab in the sixties because there wasn’t
even enough money left to film the story in colour. When
they finished making it they burned the film to make sure
no-one ever wanted expensive crabs again. Macra crabs did
turn up in Doctor Who again in the 2007 story The GridLock and there were thousands of Macra crabs in that, so
crabs aren’t as expensive now as they were in the sixties
otherwise they would have only had one Macra crab (or less)
in The Grid-Lock.
Sleep Hill
When I was seven my dad got me some Spider-Man
pyjamas from a jumble sale but I didn’t ever wear them
because they weren’t Doctor Who pyjamas and they
smelled of vinegar and because the Doctor never wears
pyjamas, except in the Christmas special that had David
Tennant as the Tenth Doctor making his debut appearance
as the Doctor with an orange but that was years later so
how was I to know and anyway it was rubbish. When the
Doctor was Peter Davison he wore pyjamas in The Black
Orchid but he had just got out of the bath and you’re
allowed to do that. The Doctor also sometimes takes
showers like in the new series story where the young boy
who plays the Doctor now was having a shower and talking
to cats, and also in The Spearhead from Space when ex-Navy
man Jon Pertwee took a shower in the hospital. I like
sleeping. Sometimes when I’m asleep I have bad dreams like
the time I dreamed I was in a crypt and was attacked by the
Ergon with its matter/antimatter gun thing and I woke up
screaming and screaming and screaming. Once when I was
on a bus I had a nightmare and woke up not knowing I’d
been asleep and screamed ‘No! Not the mind probe!’ so
loudly that the bus driver stopped the bus suddenly,
pointed right at my face and told me off and a fat old lady
said I was stupid. She was stupid.
Mongers Lane
When I cycled past this one I got really really excited
because I thought it said Mondas Lane which is where the
Cybermen were born and they moved it next to Earth in
the eighties.
Crowden Crescent
When the BBC ran out of money Philip Hinchcliffe who was
the producer at the time left and a new man called Graham
Williams took over Doctor Who and made lots and lots of
rubbish stories which looked like comedy sketch shows. In
the end they sacked him just before he finished a season, not
even letting him finish the work on Shada which didn’t look
very good. Instead his last story was one with Graham
Crowden in it. I didn’t like it because Romana had her own
sonic screwdriver and that’s just not right at all because she’s
only a girl and wouldn’t know how it worked.
Sonic Screwdriver
biro
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Hart Gardens
Because Doctor Who is a Time Lord from the planet
Gallifrey he has two hearts which are on the left and right of
his chest and we get to see them in The Caves on Androzani
The Enemy Within and The Spearhead from Space. In The
Spearhead from Space the Doctor thinks it’s a mistake on the
X-ray or a joke and he gets angry about it. In The Enemy
Within the Doctor thinks it’s a mistake on the X-ray so she
kills the Doctor. She’s a different Doctor to the Doctor and
I was always told at school that a normal Doctor can be
written as ‘doctor’ but it looks wrong to me because I like
Doctor Who so much and know so much about it.
Martyr Road
The Doctor has had lots of friends over the years including
Dodo, Jamie and Turlough. He has friends so he has
someone to talk to about what he’s doing and why, but now
in Doctor Who he has friends so he can kiss them. The
fourth Doctor Who Tom Baker would never have kissed
Lieutenant Surgeon Harry Sullivan RN! He was played by
Ian Martyr.
Weld Park Avenue
The Seventh Doctor played by the clownish and undersized
actor Sylvester McCoy is often criticised by idiots for his
era as the Doctor. I think this is unfair as his stories are just
as good as any others and they look more expensive too
unlike the black and white stuff which is nearly all rubbish
and got burned. The BBC never burned any of Sylvester
McCoy stories which I think proves my point. He didn’t do
many stories because by now the seasons of Doctor Who
were much shorter, I think it had something to do with the
clocks going back or something. I’m not really sure. He had
lots of great stories like The Paradise Towers with the Kangs
who were all girls and different colours although the poor
Yellow Kangs are all unalive now, and he also met a man
made of sweets called The Kandyman who had a big blue
face and mad spinning eyes. He also met Haemovores which
are big blue vampires except they couldn’t call them
vampires because vampires are copyrighted. The
Haemovores killed lots of people and Nicholas Parsons and
they could weld metal under the sea with their bear hands.
I think they were called bear hands because of the claws,
I’m not sure.
Flower Lane
I’m very scared indeed of daffodils and the orange plants in
my nan’s garden which look like the ones from The Planet of
the Daleks which spit stuff on you. This is because of Doctor
Who which constantly uses flowers to scare the viewers.
The daffodils were used in the Third Doctor story featuring
Michael Wisher called The Terrors of the Autons and he also
played Davros and someone else. The daffodils would look at
your face and then squirt stuff (plastic probably) onto your
nose and mouth and it would stop you breathing and you’d
die which is what nearly happened to the Doctor’s new
friend Josephine Grant whose uncle pulled some strings. The
Autons, or Nestenes as they are also called for some reason,
handed out the daffodils from a giant bus. There was a flower
in The Revelation of the Daleks that the people on the planet
could eat if they’d bothered to try. Instead they ate each
other because Davros was cooking their dead bodies and
selling them to them as dinner which is probably the
revelation mentioned in the title but to be honest I’m just
not sure because it simply isn’t clear enough. The Kinda
people of the Kinda tribe in the story The Kinda gave out
necklaces made of flowers and Tegan fell asleep when she
was wearing one. I once made one using some rope and a
stapler from all the flowers in Mum’s garden and she got
really cross with me and stopped me watching telly that day
which meant I missed episode four of The Visitation and it
wasn’t until I got the Target paperback adaptation that I
found out how the story ended which was a relief because
for me the Terileptils were still on Earth somewhere with
their dreaded pretty android that Nyssa loved.
Ruden Way
Robert Holmes wrote lots of Doctor Who stories for
Doctor Who and in 1973 or 1974 or 1975 he wrote a
story about a space alien that goes back in time and takes
over a castle with a robot and a mask called The Time Warrior
and then he wrote about the same aliens later with two
Doctors instead of one but the aliens had enemies called
Rudens.
Butler Close
There are lots of butlers in Doctor Who and even a Mr
Butler in the Jon Pertwee story with all the dinosaurs
invading London called Invasion of the Dinosaur which isn’t all
in colour but should be. There are two butlers in the same
season, one in The Pyramid of Mars and one in The Seeds of
Doom. If there had been another then there would’ve been
three!
Canada Drive
Dr John Smith was an alias used by the Tenth Doctor in the
stupid new series of Doctor Who when he met some
scarecrows and things and pretended he was a teacher. At
one point he tidies up a scarecrow who looks just like Jon
Pertwee and tells the nurse he kisses that his parents were
called Sidney and Verity and in a way this is true because
what the writer didn’t know was that Doctor Who as a
programme was invented by a man called Sidney Newman
and a woman called Verity Lambert. Sidney was from Canada
which isn’t the same as America apparently.
Victoria Terrace
Because Graham Williams was really bad at making Doctor
Who he was sacked and the production was stopped on the
story Shada because it was rubbish. One of the cast
members, Victoria Burgoyne, was very upset because it was
her first job according to Tom Baker in the BBC Enterprises
VHS home video release about his time on Doctor Who: The
Tom Baker Years. Burgoyne is a anagram of ‘bogey run’ but I
would never tell Victoria Burgoyne that as it is rude.
Albert Road
Sutekh was an Osirian and he lived in a pyramid on Mars
where he thought about missiles and things and escaping and
he did eventually in the Doctor Who story The Pyramid of
Mars with Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor and Elisabeth
Sladen as Sarah who said at the beginning of the story ‘Well
as long as Albert didn’t wear it.’
William Street
William Hartnell was the first actor ever in the world to
play Doctor Who and he did it for three years and came
back once in the story The Three Doctors which had two
other Doctor Whos in it -- Patrick Troughton and Jon
Pertwee who were the Second and Third Doctors. Tom
Baker didn’t appear in that story presumably for the same
reason he wouldn’t do The Five Doctors or Two Doctors. In
fact in The Five Doctors even William Hartnell didn’t appear
because a different actor called Richard Hurndall played him
instead and I met Richard Hurndall at Longleat where he
signed my packet of Doctor Who stickers. William Hartnell
never signed anything for me because he’s dead, but I did
buy a signed postcard of him from a lady at a convention
called Visions. She had dozens of them and it sits proudly on
Mum’s fridge with all the other postcard Doctors except
Colin Baker because he fell off and we don’t know where he
went. We think he’s under the fridge but it’s too heavy for
us to lift.
Green Wasp Lane
I bet you’re thinking that wasps aren’t green, they’re yellow
and black – well not always because at the end of The Green
Death when the Third Doctor, played by light entertainer
Jon Pertwee, encountered some terrifying giant maggots,
those giant maggots turned into giant wasps and those giant
wasps were green, probably because the title of the story
had ‘green’ in it but they were wasps and you can see one
on the front cover of the Target novelisation. This was the
first Doctor Who story set in Wales and now they’re all
set in Wales because the Doctor’s Welsh now.
Bennions Way
Of all the methods of playing an Ice Warrior I’ve liked best,
I genuinely believe Bennion’s way is best of all. When I saw
this road in Richmond I immediately thought of the Ice Lord
and his big long cloak and hissy voice. I don’t really like Ice
Warriors though because they look rubbish, sound rubbish
and their plans are a bit rubbish too. Also they go to Peladon
a lot and Peladon is really boring and it’s not even black and
white. But Alpha Centauri is brilliant though and makes the
two Peladon stories among the very most interesting of all
the stories you could ever see.
Jagger Lane
Graham Williams was still allowed to make Doctor Who
even though he made rubbish Doctor Who and while he
was making it the viewing figures were really high but that’s
because there really was nothing else on telly owing to a
strike by all the other channels. The highest viewing figure
came during The City of Death which is a stupid story about
the Mona Lisa which is filmed partly in France for no good
reason at all other than to go on location for a bit. Romana
dresses as a schoolgirl but I don’t like it because Mum told
me I’m not supposed to look at schoolgirls anymore. Julian
Glover played Scaroth who had one eye and a face like green
worms eating a pineapple which he somehow hid under a
rubbish plastic mask which he tore off frequently. But how
could he see if his one eye was slap bang in the middle of his
forehead, Graham Williams? Why didn’t you think about that?
It doesn’t make any sense does it, Graham Williams? And
what about his feet? Surely when he had a bath someone
would see his big green feet? Stupid waste of time.
Nightingale Road
I once hid in the woods. I was being chased by two boys
and my mum after I accidentally stole a bike from outside
the library because it wasn’t mine and I forgot I’d walked to
the library and I got scared when they chased me and as I
cycled up the road they kept shouting that I was a thief and
a lady shouted that someone should stop me. A man ran in
front of me and tried to grab the bike but I shouted at him
that I wasn’t a thief and jumped off it and ran away across
the road where I was nearly hit by what I later found out
was a Ford Fiesta Popular Plus. There were some playing
fields by the shops so I ran into those but they kept chasing
me and Mum had seen me run across the road while she
was shopping in Budgens for our dinner and she joined
them, but Mum can’t run very fast because she’s old and her
legs don’t work properly. I saw the woods and thought it
would be a good place to hide. I hid behind a tree and was
shaking so thought I’d better eat one of my sweets to calm
me down, but all I had was a Sherbet Fountain and when I
tore it open my shaking hands made the liquorice fall on
the floor and it got all leafy and twiggy which meant I
couldn’t eat it so I had to use my fingers instead and just eat
the sherbet from those. But then the boys started shouting
that they knew I was in the woods so I did what the Seventh
Doctor Sylvester McCoy did in the 25th Anniversary special
story featuring Lady Peinforte called The Silver Nemesis. I
tried to impersonate a bird to distract them, but it didn’t
work because my fingers were covered in sherbet and when
I wiggled them in my mouth it gave me a fizzy whistle and
then as I was doing it I remembered that the Seventh
Doctor played by Sylvester McCoy actually did this to
attract the attention of Ace’s pursuers and not to put off his
own pursuers or something like that, I wasn’t thinking
straight, so I stood up quickly and shouted ‘I am not a bird!’
but some sherbet got stuck in my throat and I started
coughing a lot and the boys ran over to me and one of them
kept punching my head while the other one shouted names
at me and the sherbet started fizzing out of my nose. Mum
scared them off in the end.
Dicks Way
All of the Dalek stories were written by Terry Nation but
not all of the Dalek story books were written by Terry
Nation because some of the Dalek story books were written
by other authors. For instance Terry Nation didn’t write the
novelisation of his second Dalek story Daleks’ Invasion of
Earth because he was too important and busy. The TV story
was directed by Richard Martin but he didn’t direct the
feature film version starring Peter Cushing who was also in
Biggles: Adventures Flying Through Time.
Slyther
ballpoint pen
I did this drawing of Slyther
because he does not appear in
the Hollywood blockbuster
The Daleks Invade the Earth
2150AD! and it’s a shame they
forgot to film him because he is the best bit in the six-part
William Hartnell story Daleks’ Invasion of Earth. He is brilliant
and his scary roar will haunt me until my death in the future.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Sandcross Lane
Another clear homage to the William Hartnell Doctor
Who story with William Russell as well whose name was
also William which was called Marco Polo and was burned by
the BBC.
Cook’s Hole Road
Chefs are few and far between in Doctor Who because
mainly it’s all about space and time and monsters and aliens
and these days kissing. In the burned and lengthy and missing
story The Enemy of the World where the Doctor has a
Mexican double, there’s a chef who gets really cross about
all the noise and stuff. He’s very funny in the one surviving
episode which can be found on the DVD Doctor Who – Lost
in Time. I don’t understand that title because they’re not
‘lost’, they were deliberately and strategically torched,
erased or binned. It’s a bit like saying that a murderer
merely ‘lost a living body’.
Matthew Street
There was a record in the eighties by a man who sung a song
that went ‘I was sitting with Matthew, we were watching TV I said
Hey Matthew, what do you see?’ and then Matthew who I think
is a child starts listing the things he watches and he says ‘I
see Dallas, Dynasty, Silver Hawks, He-Man,Tom & Jerry, Dukes of
Hazzard, Airwolf, Blue Thunder, Rambo, Road Runner, Daffy Duck,
The A-Team,The A-Team, I see The A-Team.’ Not one mention of
Doctor Who, which is why Matthew undoubtedly grew up
to be very lonely, very sad and very unkind. There are other
Matthews in Doctor Who like Matthew Waterhouse who
played the boy Adric who had a gold star and Matthew
Robinson who played the Director in The Resurrection of the
Daleks and later went on to reprise that role in The Attack of
the Cyberman.
Holme Place
Doctor Who stories have writers and the writers are hired
to write stories for each season of Doctor Who because if
they didn’t then the Doctor wouldn’t know what to say or
who to say it to and where. One of the very very best
writers was a man called Robert ‘Bob’ Holmes and he wrote
lots of brilliant stories like The Space Pirates, The Mysterious
Planet and The Powers of Kroll. He smoked a pipe and died
before finishing his last story which wasn’t very good anyway.
Spoil Lane
If you know what is going to happen in an episode of a
Doctor Who story before it is even on the television it is
called 'spoilers' as River Song tells us every week. The
people on the Internet know everything about a story
because they all go and watch it being filmed in a garden or
up a hill in Wales and then they tell everyone else so it is
ruined for everyone and it makes Steven Moffatt so angry
he says they are idiots and stupid on Twitters. They are idiots
too, you should only really ever watch Doctor Who when
it is on the television and it has to be on a Saturday night
otherwise it is wrong. In 1987 my mum bought me a gift
pack of the artwork by the artist Christos Achellios who
did the drawings on the covers of Target books when they
were good and it had a print of The Dinosaur’s Invasion in it.
Mr Achellios (I am not sure if that is his real name or if he
is just not English) had drawn a picture depicting the Third
Doctor played by radio personality Jon Pertwee being
menaced by a scary great dinosaur. I didn’t even know there
were dinosaurs in this story as I didn’t have the VHS video
cassette as it wasn’t 2003 it was 1987 as I have said already
and episode one is only called The Invasion to keep the
surprise of a stegosaurus as a surprise (and I have to make
sure you know it isn’t the same as the Patrick Troughton
The Invasion story which had Patrick Troughton as the
Doctor and Cybermen before they became rubbish and
Frazer Hines paddled a canoe in a dirty canal. It is an
entirely different story but it is still Doctor Who) and it
would have been a surprise if Mum hadn’t ruined it. If Barry
Letts wasn’t dead he would be very cross with Mum and
swear at her on the computer too. You’d think she’d have
learned after buying me the The Five Doctors paperback in
1983 before the story was even on the telly.
TM
Bumble Hole Lane
To be really popular in Doctor Who you must be metal and
you’re not allowed to have any legs. Apart from the Doctor
and the TARDIS and Polly and the jelly babies, the Daleks
and K9 are the two most popular things and they are both
made of metal and none of them have legs. Do you know
what else the Daleks and K9 have in common, I bet you
don’t. Two different men, one called John Leeson and one
called Roy Skeleton, were both in a children’s show with
songs and a pink hippo who could speak and it was called
Rainbow but it was on ITV so it was rubbish. John Leeson
who was K9 and Roy Skeleton who was the Daleks both
played the same character in Rainbow and it was a bear
called Bumble.
Lavinia Close
Sarah Jane Smith has an Aunt Lavinia. I have nothing else to
say about this.
Medlar Close
The BBC didn’t really like black and white Doctor Who
stories so they burned them a lot until they ran out of them,
and now they like them again and want them back. I wish
they would make their stupid minds up. One of the stories
they had burnt but then got back had the first Doctor Who
William Hartnell in it with a Monk who some people call
‘The Meddling Monk’ which seems weird but it’s probably
because he was in a story called The Time Meddler and he
had a watch.
Wood Street
Sarah Jane Smith once pretended to be her own aunt so she
could visit the Doctor (played by Jon Pertwee) in The Time
Warrior and find out where all the missing scientists were
going because she was a journalist and not just a nosey girl
but she was accidentally taken back in time by the Doctor
(still Jon Pertwee) and she got lost and met Irongron who
had a massive castle and lots of furniture and almost all of
it was made of wood of some sort or other. There’s lots of
different types of wood.
Red Street
When I was trying to take a picture of the road sign for Red
Street, a lady who lived there came out of her house and
asked me what I was doing. I explained to her that I was
writing a Doctor Who book about all the Doctor Who
road signs in the Great British Isles and I showed her my
black book where I wrote them down with my blue pen.
She seemed really interested for the first five minutes but
then she said she had to go and replaster her bathroom and
she said goodbye and she was really very nice and polite,
not like some people who have been rude about my book
and my blue pen right to my face. She was posh, really posh
and I mean really posh, even posher than the very posh
Rodan, lady traffic controller on Gallifrey in Invasion of Time
which had Sontarans in it but for only two episodes so it
doesn’t count. Rodan and the savage knife girl Leela ran
away into the wastelands of Gallifrey in episode three of
Invasion of Time, and when Rodan and Leela ran away Leela
had a red cloak on but it’s purple on the DVD for some
reason.
Death Lane
So many things die including my cat The Valeyard. I called him
The Valeyard because he was so inquisitive and cross and
he’d had lots of accidents too according to the shelter so I
imagined he, also, had run out of lives. When the Fifth Doctor,
the successful and affable Peter Davison, visited London
during the Great Fire of London, he stopped off beforehand
with his good friends Nyssa, Adric and Tegan and met some
villagers and a Terileptil android which dressed up as Death.
It scared the villagers and even Adric, but not the Doctor
and Nyssa vibrated it to death sonically but it made her sad
because she liked the android and thought it was pretty. The
Doctor dies a lot. He died in the programme and in real life
too because William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and the
comedian Jon Pertwee have all died since they were in
Doctor Who. The Daleks have killed even more people than
anyone else probably. The Doctor’s friends kill things and
people too, for example Nyssa killed the android I
mentioned a couple of lines back and Melanie Bush shot the
robotic pool cleaner in the four-part story The Paradise
Towers. The Sixth Doctor, played by the actor Colin Baker
who was no relation to the Fourth Doctor actor Tom Baker,
once drowned a man in acid.
Jansel Square
I’m so sure there was a Gallifreyan called Jansel but for the
life of me I can’t find which story he’s in and I’ve watched
loads of Time Lord stories today trying to find him. I’m cross
and I’m leaving him anyway because technically it could also
refer to the Jansel Thorns that Leela used to kill Chinese
people with.
Victoria Mews
When the Doctor was an old man and was played by the
actor William Hartnell during the sixties, he had lots of
friends travel with him including Susan who was his
granddaughter and he never once kissed her. Another
friend he had was Vikki who was from space and left in a
story which the BBC set fire to because they hated it. The
Doctor never once kissed Vikki either.
Military Road
The military feature a lot in Doctor Who because the
Doctor is really, really good friends with Brigadier Alistair
Lethbridge Gordon-Stuart who made UNIT (United Nations
Intelligence Team) and Bessie. They’ve been friends for years
and years and the Doctor has never once tried to kiss him
even when the Brigadier was dying in The Battlefield and not
even when the Brigadier saved his life in that other story. In
fact the Doctor has never kissed anyone from UNIT ever,
except for Jo Grant when she left in The Green Death to
marry Cliff Jones who was Welsh but even then I don’t think
he kissed her, I think they just hugged. Captain Yates and
Corporal Benton are also in UNIT and they appear in lots of
stories and in one story Captain Yates betrays everyone
including his friend the Doctor and his boss the Brigadier and
even his friend Sarah Jane Smith who he tricks into thinking
she’s in space where she gets really scared and picked on by
people who also think they’re in space and one of them’s an
athlete. UNIT also feature in the story The Resurrection of the
Daleks which is the only Dalek story not written by Terry
Nation because he was away at the time and they had gas
bombs which melt your face.
Rowan Road
Doctor Who and comedy do not mix as Graham Williams
found out to his peril when he made Doctor Who wrong
and had to leave. Lots and lots of people have tried to make
funny sketches about Doctor Who and lots of them have
failed but Steven Moffatt did okay when he wrote The Curse
of the Fatal Death with Rowan Atkinson as the Doctor. But he
got it all wrong because the Doctor’s friend in it is played by
Julia Sawalha and he kisses her and that’s wrong and he
turned into Joanna Lumley and that’s weird.
Styles Close
I’ve never had any wine so I’ve never been in a wine cellar
and to be honest I’ve not really eaten much cheese in my life
either, but the Third Doctor played by the light entertainer,
singer and comedian Jon Pertwee absolutely loved cheese
and wine and had lots and lots of it in The Day of the Daleks
about some gorillas (they haven’t even got fur!) who want
to kill a man who’s having a meeting with the Chinese and
Jo’s scared of ghosts.
Glen Close
I wrote this down because it really made me laugh but it has
nothing to do with Doctor Who so I should probably leave
it out of the book, but since it made me laugh it might also
make you laugh and that might be nice for you after all these
facts you’ve digested. Thank you for buying this book, by the
way. I really do appreciate it and I’m glad you’re my friend
because friends are hard to find and I don’t kiss all my friends
like the new Doctors do.
Camel Grove
I wrote this down when I saw it because I was sure there
had to be at least one Doctor Who story with a camel in
it and now when I sit down to write this and I look at my
notebook I’m left perplexed as to what I was even thinking
in the first place because of course there aren’t any camels
in Doctor Who. We don’t have any camels in England and
there can’t be any in the new series because I’m pretty sure
they don’t have any camels in Wales either. You’d think
there’d be at least one in The Pyramid of Mars but I don’t
think there is and haven’t got the DVD at the moment
because I posted it to Michael Sheard to sign and he never
sent it back and doesn’t reply to any of my letters asking
for it.
Jubilee Close
Travelling in time is such a problem for the Doctor because
you never know if you’re going to go somewhere you’ve
been before and end up meeting yourself. The Doctor went
to Karfel twice but I have no idea why because it’s really
rubbish. If I were to go somewhere twice then I’d go to Lord
Cranleigh’s house in The Black Orchid or Harry’s café in The
Remembrance of the Daleks. Once, when Tegan got lost and
the Doctor and Nyssa and Tegan were separated, Tegan met
the Brigadier who was also the Doctor’s friend and he
helped her find the Doctor and the Doctor found out
where she was and when she was because the Brigadier
remembered it was the Queen’s Jubilee which was in 1977
so the Doctor found her and they met Turlough who was
actually rather horrible to everyone and kept trying to kill
the Doctor -- just like the Master, only ginger.
Spider Lane
I was once helping Mum with her shopping in Tesco and I
picked up a cantaloupe which was heavier than I thought and
I dropped it and it broke open on the floor. Do you know
what crawled out? I don’t because I ran away screaming as
the memory of the Fourth Doctor story written by fan
policeman Andrew Smith was still ringing in my brain when
spiders crawled out of fruit when it got foggy. There were
massive, huge, enormous spiders in The Planet of the Spiders
and one spider even bigger than them which had massive
hairy legs and laughed. Later on in Doctor Who there was
a Christmas special with giant spiders but I didn’t really watch
it because Doctor Who wasn’t very good by then which is
a shame because it used to be so brilliant and fun and now it’s
just kissing, kissing, kissing. I'm sure I've mentioned those
spiders before.
Omega Street
We don’t know much about who Omega was but he’s really
cross and shouts a lot and doesn’t have a face. He lives in a
world of antimatter at the other end of a black hole where
two of the three Doctors in The Three Doctors went to see
him to try and make him happy but the Second Doctor’s
recorder killed him. He came back again years later in the
Fifth Doctor story called The Arcs of Infinity written by
Johnny Byrne and set in Amsterdam because it could be.
Omega has a hand called the Hand of Omega but really it’s
a coffin which blows up Thals and makes baseball bats fizzy.
Omega, Rassilon and the Doctor seem to have been friends
but they don’t seem very friendly to each other and don’t
seem to recognise each other when they meet so I might’ve
got that bit wrong.
Ancil Avenue
The Doctor is very good at magic tricks and does lots and
lots of them. In The Ambassadors of Death he makes a
massive reel of tape vanish into thin air which is just
amazing. And then in The Talons of Weng-Chiang he does lots
of magic tricks for Henry Gordon Jago who smokes a cigar.
The Seventh Doctor can do amazing magic tricks like
juggling and making little plastic cards appear which is
probably why Ancil, the knight from another dimension,
mistook him for Merlin in the story The Battlefield.
Nigel Fisher Way
I wrote this one down in Chessington and was so excited
at the time but now having checked it was actually David
Fisher that wrote The Creature from the Pit and I feel stupid.
Scalby Grove
I was shopping for a present for Mother’s Day or ‘Mothering
Sunday’ as Mum said it should be called, and looked
everywhere. I got on the X64 bus that goes into town and I
went and tried places like The Body Shop where they sell
those packs of soaps and shower gels and stuff, but Mum
didn’t really believe in those and never took showers so the
gel wouldn’t ever get used. I looked for clothes for her but
for reasons I have promised to never talk about again I
couldn’t look in every shop as some of them won’t let me in
anymore. They even have a photo of me behind the till in one
shop which is so unfair and really very hurtful and unkind. I
haven’t told Mum about that shop or what happened as she’d
get cross and stop me going out. I was having lunch in Burger
King when I heard someone behind me talking about a new
computer game they had played and they said they could play
it all day which made me think of the angry mad plant man
with the black gloves called Harrison Chase and he said he
could play all day as well and his best friend was a horrible
bully called Scalby. I decided that based on this I should buy
Mum some flowers and went to the flower shop but they
were really expensive and I couldn’t afford them so keeping
Mr Chase in mind I decided to look at other types of plants
and hit upon vegetables. I bought Mum lots of vegetables and
they were so cheap. I got her courgettes (they made me
laugh, they can’t make their minds up, they are like giant
gherkins or tiny cucumbers), parsnips, carrots, swedes,
turnips and a cauliflower which looked like the Rani’s giant
brain from the Sylvester McCoy story The Time and the Rani.
I was going to get her some asparagus too but it was really
expensive and the lady in the shop said it would make my
wee smell but I don’t know what she meant because my wee
always smells.
Warrington Close
The actor of colour Mr Don Warrington now plays Rassilon
in the Big Finish audio plays thus proving that Time Lords
can change colour when they regenerate. Rassilon made lots
of things like Black Scrolls, a game, a harp and a seal.
Crabtree Lane
I don’t like the new series of Doctor Who. I don’t like the
Doctor kissing his friends and I especially don’t like that it
never mentions the old series as though the Doctor is
ashamed of his past selves. But recently when David Tennant
was playing the Tenth Doctor, the Doctor found some
massive crabs in some smoke and they were Macra crabs.
There were also Macra crabs in the Patrick Troughton story
The Macra Terrors and he must have recognised them from
that.
Macra Crab
ballpoint pen
The BBC only made one big Macra crab for Macra Terror and
they even made that wrong, it was hairy which is stupid, crabs
aren't hairy -- monkeys are hairy. There isn't a huge monkey in
Macra Terror because that is the copyright of King Kong.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Ainley Bottom
This was written on a toilet wall at the Hotel Leofric in
Coventry and I had no idea what it meant until I found Ainley
Bottom in Halifax and spent several minutes walking down
it. It’s quite narrow and there aren’t any houses in it, just a
few business places. Ainley Bottom’s also quite overgrown
and had lots of cracks in it. Halifax is a horrible town and I
have no idea why the building society chose to name
themselves after it. I spent several hours in the KFC there
waiting for a side order of gravy which was meant to come
with my Boneless Banquet and although I could see lots of
them in the counter unit nobody was passing it to me and in
the end I had to cough really loudly to get some attention
but then the girl in there said I was being a nuisance and
asked me to leave and I told her I wasn’t leaving without my
gravy and she said I couldn’t have gravy and coleslaw because
I would only get one side order with what I was eating and
I said I knew that and had expected to pay for my coleslaw
separately and she just didn’t understand and called the
manager who told me I was harassing his staff and could I
just sit down and eat my meal and when I did sit down to eat
my meal I dropped my Pepsi which spilled all over my food
and on the floor and on my trousers and two little children
pointed and laughed and said I’d wet myself which was
horrible because I haven’t done that in years and even if I
had done they were really rude to point it out and that’s why
I hate Halifax.
Lytton Fields
Commander Lytton was made up by a writer called Eric
Saward and isn’t real he’s just a character. Lytton was in two
Doctor Who stories, once with the actor Peter Davison
and once with the actor Colin Baker and in the second
story he appeared with the wrestler Brian Glover and in
the first story he appeared with the children’s television
presenter Chloe Ashcroft. Lytton worked for the Daleks
and then he worked for the Cryons and then he got his
hands all smashed up and bloody by the Cyber Controller
who really hated him. Lytton wasn’t in any more stories
because he died in The Attack of the Cyberman when the
Cybermen tried to turn him into a Cyberman but he didn’t
want to be turned into a Cyberman so he stabbed the
Cyber Controller with a screwdriver. It was a very exciting
sequence which haunts my dreams to this very day.
Royal Walk
Every twenty-five years something terrible happens and
that’s what The Silver Nemesis is all about really. In one scene
the Seventh Doctor played by the actor Sylvester McCoy
whose real name was actually Percy James Patrick Kent
Smith, and his very good friend Ace who has a stupid name
and a stupid jacket, try to sneak around Windsor Castle but
it’s where the Queen lives and the Doctor doesn’t
recognise her when she’s walking her dogs. He’s met lots of
Queens in his time: Thalira, Katryca, Elizabeth the First and
the Tenth, Queen Spider, Queen Victoria and Queen Xanxia.
The Sixth Doctor’s good friend Peri was going to be King
Yrcanos’ queen but then she died because he shot her when
she was bald.
Gun Road
There are so many guns in Doctor Who that I’m struggling
to think of a story which doesn’t have any guns like Doctor
Who and the Survival or An Unearthly Child. Actually that’s
quite amazing that the first and last real Doctor Who
stories don’t have guns in them at all. Isn’t that incredible? I
wonder if it was deliberate? I will ask the writer and woman
Rona Munro, if she ever answers any of my letters. The
Doctor doesn’t like guns at all. He does hold them
sometimes like in The Seeds of Doom, The Resurrection of the
Daleks and The Enemy Within. Some Cybermen have guns
built into their foreheads which must be very hot when they
shoot people. Guns don’t just fire bullets, they can fire lasers
as well. I’ve never fired a gun in my life except for a water
pistol which wasn’t much fun on my own. Sometimes if you
get shot by a gun it can kill you. Harry was shot by Caber in
The Terrors of the Zygons but he didn’t die he just got a graze
on his head but that’s probably because he was a doctor but
not the Doctor.
Courtenay Gardens
One of the Doctor’s very best friends is the Brigadier who
he first met in the future when he was helping the First
Doctor stop the Daleks. The Brigadier is in lots of stories
including The Web of Fear, The Battlefield and The Five Doctors.
In The Battlefield the Brigadier has a massive house and it’s
surrounded by a massive garden. Doesn’t this road sign make
you laugh now you know that?
Manor Gardens
You just cannot look at this sign without instantly thinking
of The Caves on Androzani, the final story of the Fifth Doctor
Peter Davison. I looked at it five times and thought of The
Caves on Androzani every time. See? It is very clever because
the word ‘manor’ combines the two words ‘major’ and
‘minor’ into one word and when Peter Davison’s hand went
all scabby from spectrox poisoning he was on Androzani
Major or Minor I can’t remember which, but both planets
are mentioned in this story a lot so it still counts, whatever
you may think.
Sun Place
The Sun turns up in loads of stories and you can’t miss it
because it’s one of those things in Doctor Who that
everyone’s seen at one time or another. If it’s daytime now,
look out the window and look up. You might have to tilt
your head around a bit but the massive bright thing made
of fire is the Sun and it makes our calculators work. The
Sun is very hot indeed. If you were to have a lolly like a Fab
or something on the Sun it would probably melt in seconds
and then the stick would burn up along with you because
the Sun is just made of fire and because of this it’s orange
and very bright indeed. It was all the Sun’s fault when the
human race decided to leave Earth and run away to the
Nerva Beacon before The Ark in Space and then they all got
eaten by massive wasps with green hands. There’s a story
devoted to the Sun called The Sunmakers but it’s another
Graham Williams story and I hate it so much I won’t even
have a copy in the house.
Cow Lane
This road sign made me remember a day when I got the
biggest shock of my life, and it was an even bigger shock than
Turlough leaving the Fifth Doctor at the end of The Planet of
Fire which has got a whacking huge volcano in it. I was eating
Findus Crispy Pancakes for my dinner and watching the
specially extended for VHS edition of the Seventh Doctor
story Curse of Fenrics with Mum. She wanted to watch it, it
wasn’t like I was scared or a baby or anything. Anyway when
the two common girls who can’t afford tights stay with their
grumpy aunt near Maidens Point where Nicholas Parsons is
the vicar, Mum said that the aunt reminded her of her home
economics teacher from school, Mrs Edwards, and Mum said
she ‘was a real cow’. I was too shocked to watch episodes
two, three and four as I had never heard Mum swear so
much before.
Crispy Pancakes
old pen
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Constable Court
Policemen appear all the time in Doctor Who but then
that’s no great surprise because he does drive around in a
Police Box! There are policemen in The Terrors of the Autons,
Logopolis, The Resurrection of the Daleks, The War Machines and
even a policeman in the very first scene from Doctor Who
way back in 1963 when a policeman steps out of the swirling
black and white fog with a torch. Sometimes there are space
policemen like Fisk in The Nightmare of Eden but he’s really
silly and the story’s rubbish because it’s a Graham Williams
one and he made bad Doctor Who.
Star Lane
When I wrote this down I was thinking of the stars we see
in the sky, but then I remembered that it could also mean
the ‘star’ of Doctor Who: the Doctor. Stars appear a lot in
Doctor Who, the shiny ones in the sky and the actor-type.
One of the first Doctor Who stories to feature stars was
The Enemy Within which starred Paul McGann as a halfhuman Doctor and an American Master played by Julia
Roberts’ brother. His name was Eric. The Doctor looked up
at the stars and pointed them out to Grace who he kissed
because by then he’d started kissing all his friends.
Ashby Avenue
I’ve spent so long trying to get the autographs of every
Doctor Who writer ever in my copy of The Making of
Doctor Who by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke and
imagine how furious I was to discover that the writer of the
Patrick Troughton story The Dominators, a Mr Norman
Ashby, didn’t even exist! How dare they lie to us like that?
It’s Leon Ny Taiy all over again.
Upper Pines
Cybermen are dead scared of gold. Just the simplest sniff of
it and they cry out something like ‘Gold!’ or ‘Look out! Gold!’
In the Doctor Who story starring Sylvester McCoy as the
Seventh Doctor the Doctor met some Cybermen who
wanted an arrow from a Nazi and before they went to meet
them he and Ace watched a jazz band play in a local pub
where Ace got her tape signed and later she got it wet.
The Tracery
Speaking of The Silver Nemesis, the Seventh Doctor story
starring Sylvester McCoy and written by Kevin Clarke who
went on to not write any more Doctor Who, there were
some stunts where Ace had to run around with a catapult
and another one where she fell in the water. When Ace
jumped through the window at Coal Hill School it was done
by a stuntwoman called Tracy who had to do it because
Sophie Aldred would’ve been killed otherwise and someone
else would’ve had to play Ace which would’ve been so
confusing for the Doctor who has only just got used to her
having Sophie Aldred’s face.
Jay Close
I’m not very, very tall and I’m not short either so I don’t really
notice things around me being big or small, not even ants
which are pretty small. When I take a bath the plughole isn’t
particularly big or small and a box of matches looks about
normal to me too. So you can imagine my absolute terror
when I got to see a copy of Planet of the Giants, a William
Hartnell story featuring William Hartnell as the First Doctor.
It’s black and white, but it’s good too. The TARDIS crew are
all made really tiny by something I can’t remember. How does
it happen? I might watch it again later and check in which
case you’ll have an explanation here somewhere but I may
forget so sorry if it’s missing and I didn’t mean to upset you
or spoil your day. The other really, really special thing about
this story is that it’s only three episodes long which was
unheard of then and wouldn’t happen again for many years
until Dragonfire featuring Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh
Doctor was made and broadcast on BBC1 by the BBC.
Capell Gardens
Robots are amazing. They’re super-strong, super-clever and
super-looking. There are lots of robots in Doctor Who but
the most memorable of all them has to be K9 with the Voc
robots from The Robots of Death a significant runner-up. In
the story a man with a big pointy hat runs a big lorry that
rolls over the desert collecting sand. He tells other people
in silly hats what to do and they then tell the Voc robots to
do what he’s told them to do. Sometimes they tell a Super
Voc, like SV7, to tell the robots to do what he’s told them
to do, but essentially the robots do most of the things that
need to be done because they do what they’re told to do.
Anyway the robots stop doing what they’re told to do by
the man in the pointy hat because a man called Taren Capel
who wears make-up and shouts a lot has told them not to
do what they’re told to do by all the others and only do
what he tells them to do which they do! And he tells them
to kill people and they do! And nearly everyone dies but
luckily the Doctor and Leela save the day because Leela
hides in a cupboard with a bottle of helium which is what
the Doctor tells her to do.
The Cloisters Mall
I rang every doorbell in this road and not one of them
sounded like the Cloister Bell which was first heard in the
Fourth Doctor story Logopolis which was written by a
scientist called Christopher H. Bidhams and had the Master
in it and Nyssa too. The Cloister Bell is heard lots more
times in Doctor Who as the years go on and it’s also the
sound on my mobile phone when I get a text message but
no-one ever texts me and work only ring me when I’m late.
Mono Lane
This road must be named in tribute of the hard-working
Radiophonic Workshop who made the first Doctor Who
noises and gun sounds and the TARDIS taking-off sound with
a key on a piano or something, and they could only afford
the one microphone. Most of the sounds were made by Dick
Mills who did squelches for the Ruden in The Horrors of Fang
Rock, the clanks of the TCE hitting the floor in the 20th
Anniversary story and several others. When he didn’t do the
noises someone else did like Brian Hodgson or sometimes
the actors themselves. Sometimes the music becomes a
sound effect and it confuses me, like Kane’s men in Iceworld
when they stamp on the ground and it goes in time with the
music. I once tried to make sound effects for my own
Doctor Who audio play which I will upload to Facebook
when it’s finished because I think people will love it and I
bought twenty sound effects CDs to make it with. It’ll
probably be set in a zoo because almost all the CDs are
animal noises, and I need to get a CD player before I can do
it as well because I’ve only got a tape player in the house.
Mint Street
I laughed and laughed when I saw this road sign as it made me
think of Magnus Greel or Weng-Chiang as he is also known
from The Talons of Weng-Chiang, the Tom Baker adventure that
featured deer-stalker wearing (but only in this story) Tom
Baker as the Fourth Doctor. If Magnus Greel lets his long
horrible fingernails get dirty like the Doctor says and doesn’t
mind his face being all runny and wrong, he probably doesn’t
clean his teeth very well and could probably do with eating a
mint or two! Do you see why it is so funny now?
Stair Street
When I was at a convention in 1988 a boy put his hand up
during the Q&A and asked the comedian and singer Jon
Pertwee what his favourite monster was and Jon Pertwee
obviously didn’t hear because he said he hated the Daleks
because they couldn’t go upstairs. I couldn’t believe he’d
thought of this as it had never occurred to me before, and
then I saw in Doctor Who in the episode The Destiny of the
Daleks by Voord creator Terry Nation that the Doctor, then
played by Medics star Tom Baker actually tells the Daleks
to climb a piece of rope which obviously they can’t do
because their suckers couldn’t grip rope, and I know
because I tried. But this was a Graham Williams story so it
was rubbish anyway. The Seventh Doctor played by the
eccentric performer Sylvester McCoy once shouted to his
good friend Ace to go up the stairs when they were in Coal
Hill School where Ian taught history and Barbara taught
cooking. But when they ran up the stairs the Doctor got
locked in and a Dalek started to follow him by FLYING! I
couldn’t believe it. I remember that I spat out my tomato
soup in amazement and Mum wouldn’t let me drink soup
when watching Doctor Who anymore which was fair
enough because it left a massive red stain on the rug and it
looked like someone had been killed there and the postman
said as much when he came in to change that light bulb.
Curiously enough the stairs in that moment in The
Remembrance of the Daleks weren’t the only ones in that
story, in fact two other people die on stairs in that story.
Stairs are crucial to the whole thing. First the old gruffvoiced racist Mr Radcliffe dies from the little girl’s fingers on
the iron steps by the Dalek warehouse and then later on
her sparkly fingers kill Mike as well in his mum’s house and
he breaks the bannister. But also Ace, the Doctor’s friend
whose real name is Dorothy which sounds a lot more
normal than ‘Ace’ which she insists on shouting every few
minutes, runs away from lots of Daleks on some stairs in the
school. It’s not the only Doctor Who story to feature so
many stairs but it’s certainly one of the ones with the most
stairs in it. There were some stairs leading upstairs in the
Palace Theatre in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, but then they
probably went down as well. In the episodic version of the
20th Anniversary story The Five Doctors starring Mark
Strickson, the third episode ends when the Master, now
played by Anthony Ainley but not using an alias on this
occasion, walks down some stairs just as the First Doctor
and the Australian Tegan walk by. I’m pretty sure there aren’t
any other cliffhangers involving stairs although there may be
stairs visible in many of them. I fell down the stairs once but
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned that elsewhere in this book.
Bessie Lansbury Close
Because the Time Lords broke the TARDIS the first time they
put the Doctor on trial in the story The War Games which is
four episodes longer than The Talons of Weng-Chiang, he had
to buy a car to drive around in on Earth. The Brigadier gave
him some money and he bought a yellow Edwardian roadster
named Bessie. He drove Bessie a lot and so did the Fourth
Doctor Tom Baker and the Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy
but the Fifth Doctor Peter Davison never got to drive Bessie,
not even in the anniversary story The Five Doctors with Philip
Latham as Borusa who had gone all weird.
Whomobile Because
I Can’’t Draw Bessie
ballpoint pen
illustration © Andy X. Cable
St Mary’s Way
The Doctor might never have kissed his friends in the
proper series but sometimes the actor playing him did and
the Fourth Doctor played by the actor Tom Baker kissed
his friend Romana who was played by the actress Lalla Ward
and they got married. But before Romana was played by the
actress Lalla Ward she was also played by the actress Mary
Tamm who didn’t kiss Tom Baker but she did see lots of
exciting things when she was with him like a giant squid
called a Kroll and her android double.
A Kroll
usual biro
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Beard Road
I’ve never grown a beard because Mum won’t let me and
she says men with beards are perverts but I have no idea
what she means by that. Recently the Eleventh Doctor
played by a boy called Matt Smith had a beard because he’d
been wearing a straightjacket for months and couldn’t shave
properly. Among the many bearded people in Doctor
Who you have: some of the cavemen from An Unearthly
Child, the Master, the Master but not the Master, the Master
or the other Master, Peter Walmesly, Caber, Hepesh,
Shardovan, Captain Avery and everyone in Season 18.
Linden Crescent
Doctor Who isn’t always on the telly, sometimes it’s at the
cinema like when they showed a special Doctor Who
trailer for the new series at my local cinema and I had to
buy five cinema tickets before I got to see it costing me
more than my BBC licence fee that year. When Doctor
Who is a film the Doctor is played by Peter Cushing who is
an old man but probably not as old as William Hartnell and
the Daleks are bigger. The first time Peter Cushing plays the
Doctor it’s with Roy Castle who plays Ian who I don’t think
is the same Ian that’s in the TV series and Jennie Linden who
plays Barbara who I didn’t think was the same Barbara as the
TV series but it does seem like a coincidence now I type this
and I suppose it’s always possible they were both teachers
except she was reading a book about science at the start of
the film and not history and Ian’s meant to be the history
teacher so either she was reading the wrong book or she
was reading it so she could understand what Ian was talking
about all the time. Barbara wasn’t in the second film which
had Donna’s grandad in it back when he was a policeman but
for some reason he can’t remember the Doctor when he’s
older probably because he’s old and confused. In the second
Dalek film the Daleks invade London again which is really
stupid because they use exactly the same plan they had in
the TV series and the Doctor beats them exactly the same
way again and you’d think they’d have seen that coming what
with them having giant mutated robot brains and that.
Callow Field
I’d never even heard of Charles Dickens until I saw that boy
Gatiss' episode with Christopher Eccelston shouting in it.
The Hermitage
When the Fifth Doctor played by the youthful actor Peter
Davison decided to regenerate he was replaced by the
actor Colin Baker playing the Sixth Doctor. But the Doctor
did his regeneration wrong and ended up mad. He tried to
strangle Peri at one point which was very exciting because
the Doctor had never killed a companion before except
Adric. Because he felt bad about it he decided he would
become a hermit and that Peri would have to live with him
forever somewhere. But then luckily some children were
kidnapped and he was enlisted by another Time Lord to
stop a big slug from making them do maths. After that he
seemed better and stopped trying to kill Peri but he did
keep shouting a lot.
Josephine Avenue
A lot of the Doctor’s friends are really pretty and the
prettiest is Josephine Grant who was the Doctor’s friend
when he was Jon Pertwee and she was played by Katy
Manning and I’ve seen her without any clothes on when I
searched for her on the internet once. When I saw her at a
convention I told her I’d seen her naked and she laughed
but then when I described everything I’d seen she stopped
laughing and I got moved on by a steward before I could get
my book signed which was a copy of Peter Haining’s
celebratory Doctor Who: 25 Glorious Years which I
already had signed by several other people. When Jo was
with the Doctor she used to wear short skirts a lot which
showed her knickers all the time and I used to rewind and
watch them in slow motion when they were on video which
my mum said would have an effect on me but it never did.
Nyssa Close
Nyssa was played by Sarah Sutton and she was a very good
friend of the Fifth Doctor played by Peter Davison. Her
father was called Tremas which is an anagram of ‘stream’
which she fell into when they visited Castrovalva with the
Doctor in a Zero Cabinet. The Master stole her father’s
body, changed the hair, and then used it to be the new
Master and was not played by Roger Delgado but by Anthony
Ainley who liked cricket almost as much as the Fifth Doctor.
Nyssa was really clever just like Adric which made Tegan feel
really thick because she was not only an air stewardess but
also Australian and the Doctor hated her. In her last story
Nyssa took off all her clothes and kissed the Doctor but it
wasn’t a dirty kiss like in the new series, she kissed him
goodbye because they were such good friends and friends
can sometimes do that if it means a lot. I wish Nyssa had
stayed and Tegan had left because Tegan was Australian and
always shouting at everyone and Nyssa never shouted
except when she was in trouble and even then she didn’t
shout very loudly.
Auton Croft
Nestenes are plastic people who are controlled by a giant
green octopus thing that comes from outer space but
sometimes they’re called Autons and they appeared in two
proper Doctor Who stories: The Spearhead from Space and
The Terrors of the Autons and also in the new series story Rose.
A boy at Dimensions told me they came back again in the
new television series with the enormous-faced boy-man
Matt Smith but I don’t watch it anymore because it got
stupid and rubbish.
Tees Avenue
Life aboard a Sandminer is very difficult indeed and the
water doesn’t taste of anything unless you put something in
it (probably a Taste Pill). Commander Tees was in charge of
Storm Mine 4 when Uvanov, the captain, got arrested and
hid because Zilda thought he killed her brother but he
didn’t really. Tees was played by Pamela Salem who was also
in The Remembrance of the Daleks and The Mysterious Planet
and was even in a James Bond film I saw on TV the other day
but it wasn’t Doctor Who so it’s not important.
Emms Passage
The BBC hated the black and white Doctor Who stories
so they set fire to all of them to get rid of them which I did
with several pieces of fiction I wrote once which I then
hated because they weren’t very good and several of my
ideas appeared in the new series of Doctor Who which
was upsetting. When William Hartnell was the actor playing
the First Doctor in the sixties he made a story called The
Galaxy Four which was written by a man called William
Emms who I don’t think was related to William Hartnell I
just think they had the same name. Once when I was in The
Who Shop I saw a gun from this story which actually looked
pretty rubbish so I assume the story was also pretty
rubbish. It must be because Vikki was in it and Vikki was
stupid.
Chumneys
ballpoint pen
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Acorn Close
I’m typing this on an Acer computer I got from the back of
the local paper in the classifieds section. You can get lots of
things from there and once I got a Dapol TARDIS for twenty
pounds which was just so exciting. The light even works but
it doesn’t make any sounds unless you drop it or tap it
against something. This computer can do lots of things like
spell checking, calculators, painting programs (programmes
on a computer are spelled p-r-o-g-r-a-m-s but I don’t know
why). I got a BBC ‘emulator’ for my PC which runs in a little
window but I can’t work out where I’m meant to put the
cassette of Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror. It doesn’t fit
in the floppy drive and I’ve tried putting a tape machine next
to the computer and playing it REALLY loud but nothing
happens. I also once found a man who could fix Mum’s dodgy
tap in the back of that paper.
Watling Street
The Yeti are massive bear things that live in the snow and
have a big metal ball in their tummy. The Second Doctor,
played by the film actor Patrick Troughton who took over
from the actor William Hartnell in 1966, met the Yeti three
times in Doctor Who. Yes! That’s right, three times because
what you probably don’t know is that he also saw them in
the story The Five Doctors where he met his friend the
Brigadier again who had retired but was still called Brigadier.
When he met the Yeti the first time the Doctor was with his
friends Victoria and Jamie and they met a man called Travers
and they meet him again later when the Yeti are in the
London Underground and he was played by Jack Watling
whose daughter, Deborah, played Vikki.
Cartmel Road
I once had a fight with my best friend at school because he
said I was weird and I said he was boring and so we stopped
talking to each other and he told Amanda King that I played
with myself in maths classes and it was a horrible lie
because although I often played with myself in the
playground I never played with myself in lessons because I
had to work. Neil, my friend, also told people that I kept a
pair of my mum’s knickers in my bag which they all laughed
at and said was weird but it isn’t weird and I had them there
in case mine got dirty or I lost them. I found him boring
because he was always talking about this girl he liked called
Abbie who looked like Nyssa who was played by the actress
Sarah Sutton in Doctor Who and had a double called
Annie. Abbie didn’t have a double but she wouldn’t speak
to Neil because he hung out with me and so he started
being nasty about me to everyone and I felt really sad and I
think that’s how the producer Jonathan Turner must have
felt when the struggling script editor Eric Saward said bad
things about him to a magazine and left Doctor Who even
though it was his job to make sure the scripts were there
meaning Jonathan Turner had to sort out the scripts and
produce the programme which was unfair and mean. I spoke
to Jonathan Turner about this in 1993 at Longleat and he
said it didn’t bother him that Eric was cross but that it was
an awful lot of hard work to get those scripts together at
such short notice which is nicer than I would have been if
it were my job. Eric Saward was replaced by a new script
editor with a funny voice called Andrew Cartmel who,
despite his name, wrote out Bonnie Langford in his first
series which made me sad because I liked her and she was
pretty and the Doctor liked her and they were good friends
and he replaced her with Ace who I hated and she looked
and acted like a boy all the time and was really rude to
people. He also bought in lots of new writers who had never
written for Doctor Who before which really surprised me
when their names came up on the opening titles and I didn’t
know who they were, this was all before the internet of
course! Please excuse my joke and I hope you didn’t laugh
too much as it makes it difficult to read and you have to find
your place again. Andrew Cartmel wrote a book about
working on Doctor Who and it was good but he kept
talking about fancying all the girls on it, especially the Kangs,
which I think was unprofessional and Jonathan Turner in his
memoirs in DWM never once mentioned any of the girls he
fancied from Doctor Who which clearly shows he was the
better man.
Spithead Avenue
This sounds like something stupid Ace would say, like when
she said ‘Birdbath’ and ‘Donut’. I hate Ace. She was rubbish.
Lambert Avenue
Verity Lambert was the very first producer of Doctor Who
ever and she wasn’t even a man! She was responsible for
everything about Doctor Who and it’s because of her we
have Doctor Who now and she must be very proud indeed
to have a scrappy old scarecrow named after her. Verity (to
her friends) frequently produced Doctor Who during the
early William Hartnell years and she even cast William
Hartnell as the Doctor or Doctor Who as he was known
back then. She went on to make lots of other programmes
which were all really good but sadly she passed away a few
years back which made me sad.
Tree Close
Trees feature prominently in very few Doctor Who
stories. They’re ever-present at most locations but rarely
form part of the actual plot. In one of the new series stories,
I don’t know the names of them, probably Doctor Who and
the Tree People or something, the Ninth Doctor played by
the northern actor Christopher Eccelston in a black leather
jacket, meets a race of people called Trees and they’re made
of wood and tree and everything. He kisses one of them
because the new Doctor kisses everything he can get his
face near. But he never kissed the Rani or Peri in the Sixth
Doctor story starring the noisy Colin Baker The Mark of
the Rani. In this story the Rani creates landmines which turn
people into trees. I wonder what the people’s Princess, Lady
Diana would’ve made of that? She hated landmines but
always cited the reason as being because they hurt and
maim people, but surely if they just generated fields of trees
then they’d be good and even her ex-husband Charles, the
Prince of Whales would be pleased about that because of all
that carbon offsetting stuff? I can’t think of another example
of a tree in Doctor Who unless you count the one the
Fourth Doctor, played by the offbeat and bohemian actor
Tom Baker, hides Sarah Jane Smith in, in The Android Invasion
where androids had guns in their fingers and brand new
coins. As for those stupid trees in the Christmas special
with the boy Matt Smith, don't get me started.
Wotan Street
The writer and man Ian Stuart Black wrote a story called
The War Machines which was about machines built by a
computer for war against humans. It was a bit rubbish
because it was black and white and had Ben in it who’s a
sailor and is grumpy at the beginning until Polly perks him up.
In it they talk about a worldwide web of computers which is
basically the internet that we have now. I find the internet
confusing because I don’t know where it’s kept. Our local
library is pretty big and has lots of books which I sometimes
borrow. I once borrowed a book called The Sheep Pig
because I thought it was a Terrance Dicks book I’d not read
before but when I got home and after I read it I found out it
wasn’t Doctor Who at all but about a pig that thought it
was a sheep and Terrance Dicks hadn’t written it, I’d just read
the cover wrong. The internet has so much information that
sometimes it gives you the wrong information. Often when
I’m looking for something it shows me sex things. Once
when I was looking at a sex thing I didn’t realise it was a sex
thing until I left the room to go to the toilet and came back
and saw the picture from a longer distance and it was clear
it was a sex thing and I got worried in case someone would
find it on my computer but no-one ever did yet. I was going
to look up more information on this story but I don’t have
the video or book because Mum didn’t like Ian Stuart Black’s
name because he sounded Scottish and apparently she was
once short-changed in a shop by a man with a Scottish
accent. She also didn’t like black people either so he was on
a hiding to nothing really.
Bidhams Crescent
Christopher H. Bidhams was the script editor of Doctor
Who when the BBC sacked Douglas Adams and Graham
Williams for making rubbish Doctor Who and put the
new producer Jonathan Turner in charge to make it less
stupid again. Bidhams was known for his scientific approach
and he knocked spots off other writers like Holmes,
Sloman and Orme. He wrote the Fourth Doctor’s very last
story where he regenerated at the end and turned into the
young Peter Davison but then he left and came back to
write Frontios for Eric Saward about giant woodlice from
space who turn dead bodies into mining equipment. He
once signed a book for me at a Doctor Who convention
and stupidly spelled his own name wrong. I threw the book
away in angry disgust and have yet to find a replacement,
but it wasn’t a proper book, it was one of the Virgin
reprints so it doesn’t count.
Glass Street
I hate it when the Doctor does stuff he’s not meant to do
because it makes me cross. In some stories he does things
which he would never normally do, like shooting people,
drowning them in acid, shouting at them, kissing them and
jumping through a glass skylight and punching them and then,
to add insult to injury, pointing a gun at them. Ace jumped
through a glass window once too.
June Lane
I was once sent to a stupid training thing by head office
which meant staying in a hotel in Surrey. Apart from
conventions I’d never been away before and Mum would
always stay with me when I went to those. But this time I
was on my own and because I got into an argument with
stupid Karen and her stupid clipboard of rubbish I was asked
to leave and so I wandered on my own around Redhill in a
fury. It was my lucky day because I found this signpost which
I discovered I could change using my marker pen. I keep
three pens with me at all times in case I see people from
Doctor Who and I need to get an autograph from them
because as well as road signs I do also collect autographs
but only from people who were on television in Doctor
Who. By drawing a ‘B’ and putting a line on the ‘e’ I was able
to make the sign say ‘June Bland’ -- hahaha! Take that stupid
Redhill people. Now your road is named after a blind
landlady or a freighter’s first officer. How do you like that?
Actually thinking about it now I’d really like to live in a road
named June Bland, it’d be magical. I wonder if the sign is still
like that? I might get a train down and clean it off in case I
get into trouble.
Saxon Park
Mister Saxon is an anagram of ‘Master No. Six’. This doesn’t
make any sense at all because 1) Roger Delgado 2) Emrys
Jones 3) Geoffrey Beevers 4) Anthony Ainley 5) Peter Pratt
and 6) Sir Derek Jacobi so surely Mr Saxon is Master No.
Seven? In which case he should have been called Name Verse
Snot. Even then it’s still wrong. Roger Delgado was the last
Master since Peter Pratt couldn’t regenerate anymore so
Pratt would be thirteen or fourteen-ish and Beevers I think
is meant to be the same as Pratt and we don’t know which
Master was before Sir Derek Jacobi and even then I
completely forgot about Eric Roberts and Gordon Tipple
who played the Master in The Enemy Within starring Joe
McGann’s brother, Paul. It was while working this out that I
was late for work once and stupid Karen gave me a warning
and made me stay later that evening for a stock take which
was so boring but we got to carry laser scanners around
with us and I pretended I was the Toll Keeper from The Delta
of the Bannermen.
Wallscrawl
permanent marker
I did this wallscrawl of stupid Karen my boss being thrown off
a multi-storey car park by a Cleaner from The Paradise Towers.
I drew it on the living room wall and Mum got so cross I said
she sounded like Kroagnon. If Karen was a Kang she’d be a
yellow Kang because they’re all dead.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Ottercops
I’ve never been to this road but found it on the internet
when I searched for ‘police of the sea’ in Google because I
wanted to report a robbery from when I was swimming last
June and someone took my wallet and I didn’t even know
the sea had police until I saw it on telly. Ottercops is a stupid
name for a road and I wouldn’t want to live there and
especially not in No. 5 Ottercops because then it would
sound like there were lots of otters and now I wonder what
an Ottercop actually looks like and I might try drawing one
and sending the picture to The Mill to see if it inspires them
to make an exciting special effect for the new series of
Doctor Who if it ever happens now that the boy Matt
Smith is so unpopular with the schoolgirls who like to watch
him kiss people.
If I was ever arrested I’d hate to be arrested by an Ottercop
because it wouldn’t be able to put handcuffs on me or even
drive a car. I can’t drive but I’ve seen Celia do it and it’s really
difficult as you need both feet and a flipper wouldn’t work
which is what I think otters have instead of feet like in the
film Splash.
The Doctor was arrested once in Doctor Who when
Autons dressed up as policemen and jumped down the side
of a quarry because the Brigadier turned up in his little blue
car which I didn’t even know was blue because I turned the
colour down on my video as it didn’t look right and was
rubbish. It was only when I read the excellent DWM that I
found out the car was blue and now that I know it’s blue it
makes me think it must’ve been deliberate because the
Doctor’s TARDIS is blue which is also a police thing. In this
case it’s a box.
Mayfair Road
After the Seventh Doctor story The Remembrance of the
Daleks starring Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor had
been on television I got very excited because there was a
building site down the road from Mum’s house and I
wondered if a grey Dalek was hiding in the shed there like it
did in episode one of The Remembrance of the Daleks so I
went in there through a hole in the fence on a Sunday when
no-one was working and it was all quiet. It made me think of
another Dalek story as it was very dirty and there were
broken rocks everywhere and wire and dust and I felt like
the Doctor in the Skaro wasteland on the planet Skaro in
the Doctor Who story The Genesis of the Daleks, another
story that had Daleks in it. Under a brick I found a magazine
full of pictures of dirty girls without their bras on who were
kissing other girls just like the Doctor kisses all his friends
but at least he doesn’t do it with them naked! I looked all the
way through the mucky book because there was a girl in it
who looked just like Lalla Ward and she had handcuffs on
and was someone’s prisoner which made me think of The
Destiny of the Daleks (another Dalek story!), which is why I
don’t know where the loud angry voice that shouted ‘OI!’ at
me came from. I threw down the magazine and ran off and I
had to hide under a pile of green ladders for twenty minutes
and I made my Sunday trousers smell awful by lying in some
runny dog dirt by mistake and when Mum washed them they
made all the other washing smell like runny dog dirt for
weeks.
Ladder
biro
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Scarf Road
Have you any idea how dangerous it is to wear a massive
long scarf like the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker? I tried for
two years and I kept falling, hurting my wrist, catching on
things and all sorts. After a while I switched to a paisley
scarf like the one the Seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy
wears. But I didn’t like it as much and it doesn’t really go
with any of my clothes as it’s bright red. Scarves are
pointless, they don’t do anything except get in the way and
anyway my paisley scarf got lost because I left it in a branch
of Costa Coffee when I went to the Tom Baker signing in
London where he signed lots of books he’d written and
when I went back and asked for it they said no-one had
handed it in. They must’ve been lying because if someone
had found it they wouldn’t have kept it because nobody can
be that unkind and a thief.
Viner Close
I got so lost once in Walton when I was meant to be seeing
a double bill of the two Peter Cushing Dalek films but
nobody gave me a map and I walked around for ages and ages
not knowing where I was because I didn’t have a map and I
don’t live in Walton usually. I got a train all the way back
there as I remembered a road which meant so much to me
as although I was scared and had been walking for hours this
road made me feel safe and warm and I sat next to the sign
for nearly five minutes when a man walking his dog asked if
I was okay and he walked me to the cinema where I joined
just as Ian fell on the crusty dinosaur thing. Viner was in a
Doctor Who story called The Tombs of the Cyberman and it
was written by someone and he was played by Cyril Shaps.
Mercury Road
In the very first Dalek story on television called The Dead
Planet, the First Doctor acted like a filthy disgusting liar to
the rest of his friends and pretended the TARDIS’ essential
fluid links were broken, it was mercury that was said to be
needed to fix them. In the end it may be a lie because there
was nothing wrong with the fluid links at all and the old man
simply lied just to go and look at the Dalek city. I found this
unforgivable which is why I rarely watch stories with the
First Doctor, played by the tetchy white-haired actor William
Hartnell. His friends included the history teacher Ian
Chesterton and the science teacher Barbara Wright, though
that may be the other way around as they don’t do much
teaching in the series and I don’t like the first episode
because the Doctor shouts all the time. He was also friends
with Vikki, Dodo who was rubbish, Sara, Polly and Ben who
was a sailor.
Mount View
Lots of people go to the Psychic Circus because it has
incredible acts like clowns and a ringmaster. When the
Seventh Doctor played by the diminutive funnyman
Sylvester McCoy takes Ace played by aspiring actress Sophie
Aldred to the circus which is now on a planet called
Zegonax, they meet all sorts of weird and wonderful people.
Among them is Whizz Kid who rides a bike on sand which
must be really difficult and it looks very hot and he’s
wearing a jumper so I wouldn’t want to be him! They also
stop off to buy something to eat and get directions from a
lady with a fruit and veg stall. She hates the Doctor and Ace
and the circus and the other people that want to go to the
circus, probably because she’s old.
Newberry Hill
Don’t all the things in Doctor Who look pretty? That’s not
an accident, it’s the work of a designer, and one of the best
on Doctor Who, aside from seven or eight that were a lot
better, is a man called Barry Newberry who designed lots of
stuff like the TARDIS, the Daleks and K9. I once got him to
sign eighteen of my Target books at a convention when I
found him in a café just down the road. His beans went cold
but he was very polite about it and even jokingly asked if my
carrier bag was a TARDIS because it seemed bigger on the
inside. We laughed about it a lot and now I am sure we are
the very best of friends.
Salamander Quay
There are lots and lots of stories where the Doctor or one
of his friends meets a double of themselves and The Androids
of Tara is one of them and so is The Black Orchid where there
are two Nyssas which is very exciting because when one of
them got bored talking to you, you could talk to the other
one and she wouldn’t be bored. There was also a double of
Martha in Doctor Who once and there were even two
Tenth Doctors when his hand fell out of a jar. But once there
was a double of the Second Doctor Patrick Troughton which
I think was played by his son David Troughton in the story
The Enemy of the World but there’s no way of finding out
because none of the episodes exist because the BBC hated
them and burned them which upset Barry Letts because he
directed it and later went on to produce Doctor Who. It
was black and white so it probably wasn’t very good but the
book was quite exciting and it was written by Ian Marter
who played Harry Sullivan in The Ark in Space.
Hospital Road
When the Second Doctor got face-changed by the Time
Lords he turned into the Third Doctor played by the radio
personality Jon Pertwee who wore a cloak. In his first story
he was taken to hospital where they took his blood and Xrays and his shoes and the TARDIS key. And then when he
left the new Doctor played by labourer Tom Baker was also
taken to hospital. Would you believe it? The Seventh Doctor
also ended up in hospital but not for the reasons you think
he did, oh no! He went there before he regenerated
because he had to go there for Grace to kill him and then
he turned into Paul McGann in a fridge. He’s not strictly
speaking been in hospital much since, however the Eleventh
Doctor played by the young Matt Smith spent some of his
first story in a hospital too! So there’s a lesson to be
learned here: if you’re writing a Doctor Who story for a
new Doctor then make sure there’s a hospital in there
somewhere as it’s very much tradition now.
Red Road
Who doesn’t think of the Seventh Doctor Sylvester
McCoy’s red question mark umbrella when they think of the
colour red, its vibrant glossy handle which curves down to
the black, fabric, folded, waterproof wings and ending in a
sharp red point, dusted with the remains of the Black Dalek
from Earth in 1963 in The Remembrance of the Daleks?
Speaking of Daleks, how about the red Dalek in the massive
Hollywood blockbusters starring the respected film actor
Peter Cushing? Then of course there are the Kangs, the Red
Kangs, and the Red Kangs are best because they were
beautiful unlike the stupid Blue Kangs.
Tower Hill Road
Sometimes in Doctor Who the Doctor can meet himself
which is really weird and only happens on anniversaries or
for charity or for the sake of it. The first time he did it was
in The Three Doctors which when it was a book was called
Doctor Who and the Three Doctors which surely makes four
Doctors? Anyway it’s barely even three of them because
William Hartnell was hardly in it presumably because he
was working on a film or something. But Patrick Troughton,
the Second Doctor and Jon Pertwee, the light entertainer
and singer who played the Third Doctor were both in it.
They argued a lot and they were attacked by big jellies
with crab claws which attacked them. Jo Grant was in the
story too and at one point you can see her knickers but
I’m not allowed to talk about those anymore because
people’s lawyers told me it was wrong and not right so I
don’t do it because it’s wrong and makes everyone angry.
Then in The Five Doctors four more Doctors got together,
well three really as William Hartnell wasn’t in it and Tom
Baker as we all know wasn’t allowed to work at the BBC
because he wasn’t the Doctor anymore. When they made
Two Doctors there were just two Doctors in it which is
brilliant because that’s what it says in the title and they
finally got it right. In The Five Doctors they play the Game
of Rassilon which involves wandering around a quarry with
Cybermen and a Raston Warrior Robot who could fire
arrows out of his arm until you find a tower and then you
go in and say you don’t want immortality. Lots of the
Doctor’s old friends turned up again and not one of them
kissed each other at any point because that sort of thing
is wrong in Doctor Who these days and shouldn’t happen
ever at all. Borusa was in it too, but he had gone all weird
by this point.
Jago Road
Once I went outside to a theatre which was just like the one
Henry Gordon Jago owned in The Talons of Weng-Chiang
except it was different and was a real Doctor Who play
which starred the Third Doctor played by the cabaret artiste
Jon Pertwee. It was called Ultimate Adventure and the Doctor
spoke to Mrs Thatcher and she sent him to a nightclub
where a girl kept on singing and there were Daleks and
Cybermen and the Daleks looked rubbish. The whole thing
was rubbish but it was brilliant to see Doctor Who on
stage and afterwards we met Jon Pertwee (who played the
Doctor) who wrote his name in my souvenir brochure so I
had to buy another one because he’d ruined it. I was so
cross. Afterwards Mum took me to something called Space
Adventure which was in London and it was rubbish but
afterwards there was a Doctor Who shop which sold toys.
Cranleigh Terrace
When the Doctor had lots of friends they went to a
dressing-up party. There was the Fifth Doctor played by
Peter Davison whose daughter played the Doctor’s
daughter in The Doctor’s Daughter in new Doctor Who, and
there was Tegan, Adric and Nyssa as well. The Doctor did
really well at cricket and had a bath and a lemonade and
wore a dressing gown and not all Doctors get to do that
and Adric couldn’t stop eating like he had never seen food
before. Then people got killed by a man who had a rubber
lip which looked weird and there was a black orchid and at
the end the house is all on fire. It’s a really quick story and
good to watch if you need to be somewhere in an hour but
have time to kill before you leave.
Bush Road
Melanie was played by Bonnie Langford who Doctor Who
fans hate because she used to sing and dance and that means
she can’t act and shouldn’t be in Doctor Who, but it never
stopped the light entertainer and panel show host Jon
Pertwee and he was an actual Doctor! Melanie was created
by Pip & Jane Baker who are a husband and wife writing team
and very good friends with the actor Colin Baker who was
no relation and she had red hair. Mel never got an
introductory story because she appeared in the Doctor’s
future as part of his trial by the Time Lords in The Trial of a
Time Lord which was really long and lasted for a whole
season just like The Key to Time except it wasn’t produced by
Graham Williams. I like Bonnie Langford and I think if she
met me she’d like me too and we’d be best friends and drink
tea sometimes.
Brigadier Hill
There are things called ‘parallel universes’ where everything
is exactly the same as it is here only it’s different and not
the same at all. The Doctor once got lost in one of these
parallel universes when he was played by the occasional
personality and singer Jon Pertwee in a story called The
Inferno. When he went to this other world he met his friend
Liz but she was now called Elisabeth (which is the longer
way of saying Liz) and he also met the Brigade Leader (which
sounds like Brigadier in a way) who was exactly like the
Brigadier but he was much more cross and blind in one eye.
Ever since then the Doctor has never ever been in a parallel
universe because it lasted seven episodes and it was too long
for six parts.
Hawkins Close
The Daleks aren’t real but you could be forgiven for
thinking they were because they’re so terrifying. But what
makes them real is a man called Peter Hawkins who has
supplied the voice of the Daleks ever since 1963 and right
the way up to present day. He must gargle water or
something because it sounds so alien and scary when he
does it. But he doesn’t operate the Daleks because little
tiny men do that inside and pedal them like bikes around
the studio or on location depending whether the story is
being shot outdoors or not. He also did the voices of the
Cybermen but not the ones in the new series because they
sound rubbish and aren’t even Cybermen anyway.
Master Road / Magister Road
Master Road and Magister Road are so close to each other
they’re almost the same road. Isn’t that amazing? I knocked
on every door to see if the writer Guy Leopold had ever
lived in the street because I find it too great a coincidence
to think he hadn’t because he really is having a joke on us
if he expects us to believe we’d never find this. None of
the houses have gargoyles though and there’s no church
either. One lady was really rude to me when I knocked on
her door and she called me a name I’ve only ever seen
once before in an issue of DWM which is full of swearing
and stories about the actor and gay John Barrowman
waving his privates at his fellow cast members. Can you
imagine that happening in the sixties? Of course you can’t.
Verity Lambert would never have stood for it and I doubt
Mr Barrowman would’ve pushed his thingy into her face
either.
Fendall Road
I’m allergic to bees and as a result I’m terrified of wasps.
Once when I was in the car a wasp stung me on the bottom
and Dad had to pull over to the side of the road on the
motorway and kill the wasp and I was crying because I was
so scared and then a lorry knocked the mirror off the side
of the car and Dad got so cross and blamed me for it but it’s
not like I parked the car or drove the lorry is it? There was
a giant, massive wasp in the new series of Doctor Who
recently when the Tenth Doctor played by the erratic David
Tennant (ha-ha, Tennant sounds a bit like ‘Tenth’ -- I never
noticed that before) and his shouting friend Donna met a
huge, enormous wasp that liked Agatha Christie books and
it had a lady from a sitcom my mum likes in it and her name
was Felicity Kendall. In the black and white story The War
Machines starring the elderly and white-haired actor William
Hartnell, there’s a newsreader called Kenneth Kendall who
was real.
The War Machinesl!
ballpoint pen
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Stable Road
The Masques of Mandragora is the only Doctor Who story
ever made to feature a horse but not a stable. This was
because the horses were probably kept in a field or
something and you won’t know this but that’s not Tom
Baker riding the horse because it’s a stuntman called Terry
Walsh who had to ride the horse for Tom Baker because
it’s against the law to let actors ride horses except for
Sylvester McCoy in Doctor Who and the Survival because he’s
Scottish, at least that’s what Keith said. Now I think about
it I don’t think there’s a stable in Doctor Who and the Survival
either, but the planet’s unstable so that evens things out.
Sunny Road
I hate hot weather because it makes me sweaty and smelly
and uncomfortable and it means I can’t wear a coat because
it’s too hot so I don’t have enough pockets to keep all my
things in and have to use a bag or something instead. During
the filming of Doctor Who and the Survival it was so hot that
one of the girls playing a Cheetah Person went mad and ran
away screaming. Sylvester McCoy told me that story at a
signing and his confiding in me tells me we are very best
friends. I can’t wait until Christmas as I bet he sends me a card.
Doric Drive
The Doctor's TARDIS can't change shape because he broke
it, but the Master’s can. His TARDIS has been a Police Box
too and a Doric, not Corinthian, column. It was sort of
sandy colour and was still a stone column when he parked
it in the high-tech Pharos Project control room.
Snake Lane
Snakes are reptiles. They look like really big worms and don’t
have feet, ears or toes. There aren’t many snakes in Doctor
Who, but they do feature prominently in the two Peter
Davison stories where he plays the Fifth Doctor in The Kinda
and The Snakedance. The snake is called The Mara and it’s huge
and nasty and makes Tegan throw apples about and scares her
in a dream when she falls asleep by some wind chimes with
flowers on her. In the 1988 story The Greatest Show in the
Galaxy which stars Ian Reddington as the Chief Clown and
Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor, the Doctor turns a
snake into an umbrella but it doesn’t impress the Gods of
Ragnarok. I'm sure I've typed some of that earlier in the book.
Pattern Lane
I once got shouted at by stupid Karen at stupid work just
because I had spent a whole day in the shop measuring the
items we sold against my forearm and making a list of the
things that were the same length as my forearm and I would
have written a book about them too if stupid Karen hadn’t
made me so angry. And if she hadn’t ripped my list up. The
only one I can remember from my list was the green fire
extinguisher next to the kettle in the kitchenette where we
are allowed to make soup for dinner or hot drinks like tea
or UNIT cocoa but I never use the kettle and never will as
it is full of crunchy great lumps of limescale and it makes me
feel really sick just thinking about it. The schoolgirl Susan
Foreman drew a pattern on some paper in the very first
Doctor Who story with William Hartnell as the Doctor
and it had cavemen in it, and Susan Foreman sounds a lot like
‘sizing forearm’ when you think about it.
Bunbury Way
There’s a Patrick Troughton Doctor Who story which is
really, really long and is ten episodes long which is really,
really long called The War Games and it has David Troughton
in it who was Patrick Troughton’s son, but there’s also
another really, really long story called The Trial of a Time Lord
which is fourteen episodes long and has Joan Sims in it, but
the same actor in both of those stories is a man called
James Bree and this road is nearly named after him.
The Orangery
Orange features heavily in many Doctor Who stories
possibly because it was rarely a colour used for the CSO
process (Colour Separation Overlay process) where a
colour could be keyed out of a recorded shot and replaced
with a new element. Like blue screen only green or yellow
or blue. The Zygons in the story The Terrors of the Zygons
were noticeably orange and had a little orange pepperpot
made of flesh which they stuck to things when they wanted
their pet Skarasen to destroy oil rigs and stuff. Fire is very
orange in colour and there have been many flames in
Doctor Who over the years including The Caves on
Androzani, The Five Doctors and The Visitation but it is merely
coincidence that all three are stories featuring the Fifth
Doctor, Peter Davison. It is also a coincidence that the most
orange book cover, the one for The Arcs of Infinity, is also a
Peter Davison story. The new Doctors talk about being
ginger a lot but wasn’t Colin Baker ginger? He looked ginger
though he was blonde in The Trial of a Time Lord when for
some reason he had girls’ hair which is probably why he got
sacked. Tegan dropped apples on Aris’ head in the story The
Kinda, also with Peter Davison, but apples aren’t oranges and
they’re green not orange but they are a fruit. The only other
orange thing of note would be the oranges that Sarah picks
in The Masques of Mandragora and she gets arrested for it.
Troughton Place
The most remarkable thing about the 1985 Robert Holmes
story Two Doctors is that it was one of very few stories to
feature fish of any kind, let alone trout. The Doctor goes to
great lengths to try and catch a Gumblejack which he insists
taste really great but Peri disagrees and isn’t wearing her
shirt and you can see her bra and everything. Of course one
story is all about fish and that’s The Underwater Menace
where there are fish people but they’re nothing like
Mermaids which don’t exist and are made up. There have
been Macra in The Macra Terrors which were huge great big
crabs, and there was a giant clam in The Genesis of the Daleks.
Many people have theorised that the second course to be
served at Josiah Smith’s dinner party in the 1989 story The
Ghost Light was to be fish as there is a reference to it in the
script and also Ace has kedgeree for breakfast and that has
fish in it. The Fourth Doctor went fishing once in a rubbish
Graham Williams story and of course there was another
Williams story that had a really big wet squid in it called
Kroll. I suppose Sea Devils and Silurians are fish aren’t they?
I can’t imagine eating either of them except maybe a Silurian
because they have good arms.
Davros Clam
biro
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Blue Lane East
Blue is the most important colour in the whole history of
Doctor Who because without it we wouldn’t have a
TARDIS and we wouldn’t have an official colour for
mourning on the planet Necros. It’s also important to the
special effects because in the old days they always used blue,
except when they used yellow, to make different
backgrounds appear in different stories like space or a
mountain or a church or a spider’s web. The TARDIS is blue
but in the old black and white stories blue wasn’t around
and the TARDIS was dark grey. In The Happiness Patrol which
featured the Seventh Doctor and girls in really short skirts,
the TARDIS was painted pink and I once bought a Dapol
TARDIS on eBay which someone had painted pink and
customised and it cost me about three hundred pounds but
it was worth it and I cherish it dearly every day. There was
once a really blue crystal from Metebelis III which the Third
Doctor, the entertainer and Worzel Gummidge star Jon
Pertwee, found on a planet called Metebelis III and he gave
it to Jo Grant, his friend, when she ran off with a Welsh man
to get married. Jo hated it though and sent it back to him
and he got it back in the story The Planet of the Spiders
which was about a massive spider which wanted a blue
crystal so it’s a stroke of luck Jo sent it back when she did
but unfortunately the Third Doctor was scared to death by
the spider and fainted when he got back to UNIT where he
turned into the Fourth Doctor now played by Tom Baker
who had a really long scarf and big eyes. None of the Voc
robots in the story The Robots of Death were blue but the
android in The Timelash had a blue face.
Blue Crystal
biro
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Angel Street
There are two main types of angel in Doctor Who, there
are Weeping Angels and there are Hosts. Hosts are not like
chat show hosts, they’re more like Voc robots as featured in
the Brian Croucher story The Robots of Death. Hosts can fly
and throw frisbees from their heads. Weeping Angels don’t
really weep, they don’t cry at all actually because they’re
made of stone and if they look at you you’re fine but if you
look at them they can’t move and if they touch you they send
you back in time or pour sand in your eyes. Weeping Angels
are everywhere, especially in graveyards and I once stared
at one for sixteen straight hours in Toxteth. I was absolutely
terrified and it was only when a fox walked by and looked at
the angel that I realised I could run away without it following
me, but even today I checked all around my house and in the
back garden to make sure there wasn’t an angel there.
Weeping Angel
ballpoint pen
illustration © Andy X. Cable
~Turner Road
Jonathan Turner was the producer of the Doctor Who
programme made by BBC Television during the eighties. It
was much the same as the programme made in the sixties
and seventies only it was very different and barely
recognisable. Firstly old Doctor Who didn’t have any
colour in it because it was expensive or something. Also the
Doctor stopped having white hair when Tom Baker took
over although Patrick Troughton probably had white hair
and it looks black on his stories because they’re only black
and white and if he had white hair it would be the same
colour as his face and he’d look like an egg man or
something. The music was almost exactly the same too
except that now instead of using musical instruments like
pianos and recorders, they instead used computers and stuff
which make bleeps and whoops not dissimilar to the noises
heard in the Doctor Who story The Sea Devils about sort
of turtle men in string vests who have torches which blow
fire into your face until you die on a beach. Jonathan Turner
really liked pretty blouses and they were always very
colourful and I took several photos of him at various
conventions when he was alive. I couldn’t take them after he
died because he stopped going to conventions because he
was dead. Eric Saward probably thinks he was just being lazy
or hated fans, but I checked and spoke to people and
Jonathan Turner is definitely not alive anymore.
Campion Drive
Sometimes Doctor Who isn’t Doctor Who at all but
another programme with the Doctor in it and one of Mum’s
favourites was Peter Davison who she said was pretty and
she watched everything he was in which was tough because
he was in everything. One of the things he did was a
programme called Campion where the Doctor and a
wrestler solved mysteries in the past. I wanted to buy it for
Mum on video and when I typed ‘Campion’ into the
computer search thing in the shop it came up with a result
which I clicked ‘order’ on and when I went back to collect it
it turned out to be a film about a deaf woman and her piano
and there was a man who got his thingy out and a little girl
in it and I was cross and took it back to the shop to say it
had a piano in it and I didn’t want it and the man in the shop
said it had a piano in it because that’s what it was about so
I told him he was stupid and a lady next to him gave my
money back even though there was some butter on the case
where I put it on the table before work that morning.
Kingsmill Close
I like a nice sandwich just as much as the Doctor who eats
a sandwich twice in the story The Sea Devils where Jo Grant
wears trousers instead of a skirt. The man in The Terrors of the
Autons has sandwiches and a boiled egg for lunch when the
Master shrinks him. I can’t think of any other sandwiches
from Doctor Who except for the four bacon sandwiches
and the cup of coffee that stupid Ace orders in The
Remembrance of the Daleks which confuses me as I don’t
know if it’s a single sandwich cut into four or four
sandwiches altogether in which case she is a greedy fool.
Kettlewell Drive
Something the Doctor loves more than anything else,
including Rose, is a good cup of tea. It crops up a lot from
the Second Doctor Patrick Troughton asking Polly, his friend
when it was black and white, to make him a cup of tea, all
the way up to Rose’s mum Jackie bringing the Doctor back
to life at Christmas in his pyjamas using a flask of tea.
Doctors never drink tea when they meet each other and
this has yet to be addressed in any of the large format
Doctor Who books available to the market from the
writer Peter Haining. The Second Doctor eats a lot in Two
Doctors but this is because he’s been spliced with an
Androgum to make him hungry enough to give them
control of the TARDIS. In The Five Doctors the fake First
Doctor and the Fifth Doctor have drinks near them but
they don’t consume them, in the case of the First Doctor he
merely eats some pineapple which I don’t believe William
Hartnell would’ve liked. He’d have had an apple or some
strawberries or possibly even something more wild like a
blackberry or raspberry. To date no rhubarb has even been
seen in Doctor Who and neither have lemons which are
yellow and can sometimes be sliced and put in tea.
Clamhunger Lane
I don’t know why Doctor Who fans love The Genesis of the
Daleks so much because I think it’s rubbish. I don’t like
Davros because I can just imagine by looking at the screen
how he smells. I think he probably smells of pork
scratchings which Mum broke a tooth on once and I had to
rush her to the hospital on the bus which took ages. I don’t
even like Daleks. I hate Daleks. I tried to build a Dalek and
it was impossible so goodness only knows how Davros, with
his one arm, no legs, no eyes and long fingernails could ever
have managed it. I think this is why all his early experiments
turned out the way they did, like the splodge in the bucket
and the giant hungry clam that tries to eat Harry’s trousers.
My Dalek was useless. I managed to build the bottom okay
and get the wheels on, but after that it kept moving about all
over the place when I was trying to hammer the side panels
on and in the end I got angry and kept smashing and
smashing at it with the hammer until it was completely
broken and my neighbours were cross because of all the
noise and crying I did that night. Had I finished my Dalek I
would’ve painted it probably blue.
Jacobs Way
When the Americans found out they had lots of money they
didn’t want they gave it to a man called Philip Segal who
decided he wanted to make a Doctor Who film with it and
he did and it was called The Enemy Within and it was written
by a boy called Matthew Jacobs who had, as far as I can tell,
never seen Doctor Who in his life before. I liked Paul
McGann as the Doctor because he had amazing hair and no
shoes, and he is from Liverpool (like me) and has loads and
loads of brothers (unlike me). The story was really good and
exciting but rubbish, and I was not happy at all when the
Doctor kissed Grace because there was spit everywhere and
it made me ill and I couldn’t eat my chicken strips. The
Master was in that film and he was played by an Oscarwinning actor from Hollywood called Eric Roberts who had
a little Chinese boy with him for some reason. I think the
Master likes Chinese people because he had a Chinese girl
with him in The Minds of Evil when he was Roger Delgado.
Curzon Road
I don’t really like going to cinemas because they’re too big
and too loud and the films are always rubbish because
people talk a lot and blow things up and no-one wants to
see that which is why cinemas are so cheap. Once I went to
a cinema in Walton which was showing two Dalek films
which starred a Doctor called Peter who wasn’t Peter
Davison even though you’d think it was, but was actually
Peter Cushing who was an old man with a moustache and
the only Doctor to have a moustache until Matt Smith grew
one with a beard in one of those new stories with all the
kissing and crying. Once at the cinema when I went on my
own there were two people in front of me who were kissing
a lot and they kept getting in my way so I asked them to
stop kissing and watch the film because it was all about
some boys who had built a spaceship out of an old
fairground ride and a computer. But they told me to shut up
which was rude so I kicked the back of their chair because
I was cross and the man accidentally cut the girl’s lip when
his chair moved forward and she screamed and then two
boys who worked for the cinema came rushing in to see
what was going on and the man and the girl said it was my
fault and we were all taken outside. When we got into the
corridor outside and it was light I could see lots of blood
on her face and her top and I felt dizzy and asked them if
they could phone Mum to come and collect me but the man
said he wanted the police called because he said it was
assault but I didn’t bite her! He did. I started to panic and
sometimes when I panic I hum and because I was humming
so loudly people came out of the cinema screens to
complain about the noise so I was taken to the manager’s
office which was messy and had a really big poster for a
scary horror film which I couldn’t look at so I kept staring
at the floor asking for Mum. When the police came they
asked if I kicked the chair and I lied and said I didn’t and
they believed me which was a relief because they let me go
and the manager phoned Mum but the girl was really cross
because her top was covered in blood and Fraggles from
the telly. I didn’t like the Dalek films because Susan, Ian and
Barbara weren’t the same as in the television version and
Louise wasn’t even in the television version and she wore
a cape like Jon Pertwee.
Mortimore Road
When the BBC ran out of money and fired Sylvester McCoy
and Sophie Aldred in 1989 because they didn’t like The Silver
Nemesis, they had to find a new way to make loads and loads
of money and so they decided to release lots of really big
books written by Doctor Who fans. They started off with
ones about a Timewyrm which I didn’t understand at all. Then
they tried some about cats which weren’t very good either
and finally they stopped making them confusing and got
David Banks to write one too. He was a Cyberleader in the
Cybermen stories on BBC1 (but not the black and white
ones, only the colour ones) and he is friends with Andrew
Skilleter who draws like me. I went to an event at The Who
Shop once where there were some authors of The New
Adventures and one of them, Jim Mortimore, said my story
about the Doctor having a really nice holiday in Somerset
sounded great and I tried to remember as much as I could
about it and wrote it down on the back of The Who Shop
flyers and gave it to him so he could show the people at
Virgin Publishing but they never got back to me. One day I
might finish my story especially now that I’m a published
author and my book has sold millions.
Holley Crescent
I once went to a signing in London where lots of boys
queued for hours to get their copies of The Inferno signed by
the actor John Levene who was in it as an angry army
werewolf. I think the Seventh Doctor story with the husks
was also being signed that day but I can’t remember who by
because they were boring and I didn’t even get to see John
Levene because a man walking down the queue line said he
was Bernard Holley from The Claws and Axos. I didn’t believe
him at first because he didn’t look old enough, but he made
a face like an Axon which excited me so luckily I had my copy
of Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of the story in my bag which
I was going to ask John Levene, the actor, to sign. I asked him
to sign it and he did and then ran off laughing and joined the
end of the queue which seemed strange to me. Then when I
looked round I’d lost my place in the queue while he was
signing it and everyone had moved forward and they
wouldn’t let me back in the queue even though I’d been
there for two hours and they said the man who signed my
book wasn’t Bernard Holley at all which upset me and they
told me to go away. On the train home I looked at the book
and it just said ‘You are a twat’ and had a smiley face next to
it and I cried. I saw that man again at a convention in 1994
and he was selling a fanzine with two other boys. I wanted
to make him pay for my book but I was too scared because
he had a shaved head and people with shaved heads are
either violent or have had cancer, that’s what Mum always
says. He didn’t look like he had cancer, and if he had and I
complained to him he might’ve felt faint. When I did finally
get the chance to meet Bernard Holley just last year I took
my copy of The Claws and Axos with me and gave it to him to
sign and I got thrown out of the convention because when
he opened it, it said ‘You are a twat’.
Caroline Street
Cinemas are stupid places and the food is really expensive
which isn’t a problem because I take my own food with me
in my pocket or a little bag. I can remember when Doctor
Who was going to be turned into a film in about 1989 and
a boy saying to me at a convention that it would be really
good because Tim Curry was playing the Doctor and I didn’t
know who Tim Curry was so I asked the man in Our Price
Records and he didn’t know either but the lady in WH
Smiths did and she said he was a transvestite which I had to
look up in a dictionary in Hatchards and it means someone
who wears girls’ clothes who’s not a girl. I don’t understand
what that means but I don’t think he sounds quite right to be
playing the role of the Doctor on a large cinema screen
where lots of people would be watching. I can’t imagine
William Hartnell in a bikini or Colin Baker in a short skirt
and a tight top. I might try and draw them. Jon Pertwee wore
girls’ clothes once when he played a cleaner in The Green
Death with Welsh maggots and great big cape-hating flies. The
film was also supposed to have a companion played by
Caroline Munro but when I asked her about this at a
Memorabilia event she said it was never the case so DWM
lied to me which was cruel and hurtful and I don’t think I
can ever forgive them for it.
Crusade Walk
When the BBC set fire to all the black and white stories
because they were rubbish, they didn’t know that one day
Doctor Who would be sold for millions of pounds on
video and then later on DVDs which are rubbish. They got
scared and started looking for copies of the ones they’d
burned because lots of angry Doctor Who fans wanted to
kill them and their families because of what they’d done.
One old woman I spoke to at a convention said she hated
the BBC for what they’d done and that she wanted to hold
back her television licence money to teach them a lesson. I
ignored her because she was boring and smelled a bit like
wine gums and Tippex. I helped to look for missing episodes
by trying my local shop and while I found lots of stories
none of them were missing. I was especially excited to find
a copy of The Seeds of Death in Superdrug which usually only
sold shampoo and tissues but having paid for it I got home
and phoned the BBC and they said it wasn’t missing at all. I
couldn’t be bothered looking for missing episodes after that.
Neither could anyone else until The Tombs of the Cyberman
was found and there was a big event in London which I
wasn’t allowed to go to because Mum was still cross about
the thing with the knife. Nothing else was found until an
episode of the boring Crusader was discovered by some
Australian boys. I still haven’t seen it because it looks boring
and the book was rubbish. Just the other week two more
episodes were recovered which were from The Galaxy Four
and The Underwater Menace which are two more really
rubbish stories and I’m sick of them only finding episodes
from rubbish stories when The Highlanders and Marco Polo
are still missing completely from the archives which is what
the BBC calls their video shelf. If you are going to find a lost
story at least find a good one! I remember my tall friend
Adam was offered the chance to buy an episode of The
Macra Terrors at PanoptiCon in 1991 but he didn’t have
enough money and the boy selling it said it wasn’t a problem
if he came up to his room and cuddled him for a bit but
Adam didn’t want to miss the Eileen Way panel.
The Cliff Path
Adric got blown up for going back to a calculator to check
his sums in Earthshocks and this is why I’ve never used a
calculator in my life because they scare me. Sometimes
companions come back into Doctor Who. Even though
Adric was completely dead he still came back twice because
he had to. So did Harry and the Brigadier. Harry is in The
Android Invasion along with Sergeant Benton played by the
actor John Levene. I once saw John Levene do stand-up
comedy at a Doctor Who convention where I had paid to
have an evening meal with Sarah Sutton and it turned out it
wasn’t just me and Sarah but nine other boys as well all sat
around a big table and I didn’t get a chance to speak to her
except to ask if it was her drink that I’d knocked over and it
was and I think she was cross. When Nyssa left she wasn’t
wearing much and the Doctor gave her a nice kiss. Tegan
wasn’t wearing very much either when she left and I worry
about her even now running around London with no money
and the same smelly clothes. I’ve been in the same terrible
situation myself and it can be really scary. This was before
mobile phones and I didn't have any coins for the payphone,
just a limited edition Doctor Who phonecard and I obviously
couldn’t use that.
When Jo Grant left she had two options, marrying the
professor or staying with the Doctor, played by the comedian
and panel show host Jon Pertwee. She chose the former.
Publishers Note:
For two months in 2011 we had no contact with Andy - until
he sent us the illustration on the facing page.
Publishers Note:
For two months in 2011 we had no contact with Andy - until
he sent us the illustration on the following page.
Pringle Gardens
My cousin Carol who is very pretty had to take her
daughter to a special dressing-up party several months ago
and she asked me to help with the costume and since her
daughter quite likes Doctor Who I said I’d make her a
Doctor Who outfit and I put her in a leotard and sprayed
her grey, then stuck straws in her hair and sprayed those
grey and then put a miniature corn-on-the-cob in her
mouth, also sprayed grey, and nobody at her school
recognised her as the Malus even when I made her cling to
the wall from the window ledge so they can’t possibly be
Doctor Who fans and now Carol won’t talk to me
anymore because her daughter got sick from all the grey
paint which was toxic and it’s hardly my fault, just as it’s not
my fault she fell from the ledge either. The really brilliant
part was when the paint started to make her sick, she was
actually hanging from the ledge at the time and threw up
onto the ground just like the real Malus! I wish I’d had my
camera phone with me because it was very amazing. Carol
didn’t even come to Mum’s funeral because she said it was
sick having a Kang ceremony but I thought it was fitting.
Everyone dressed in blue or red and walked around the
church saying Mum was both brave and bold as a Kang
should be and I dressed as the Chief Caretaker and gave a
speech about how Mum had been taken to the cleaners.
There were only nine of us there so it wasn’t as weird as it
sounds and was much like the TV story it references, The
Paradise Towers. Sometimes I think Pex is pretty like a girl.
Circus Street
The Psychic Circus in the Seventh Doctor story The Greatest
Show in the Galaxy starring funnyman Sylvester McCoy as the
Doctor isn’t the only circus to ever appear in Doctor Who.
I bet you don’t know the other one. It was in the Jon
Pertwee story The Terrors of the Autons, which starred radio
comedian Jon Pertwee as the Doctor and also had a circus
in it, and it was a proper circus with elephants and real
clowns, not stupid robots just pretending. There was a man
called McDermott in it whose head got eaten by a plastic
chair and Toberman made his second appearance playing
Tony the black strongman. There was also a scientist who
didn’t like boiled eggs but his wife always put one in his
lunchbox which he hated. He would have left her if the
Master hadn’t turned him into a little dead doll. Mum used
to make me egg mayonnaise sandwiches for my lunch but
she never cooked the eggs and it made the bread very wet
and difficult to eat, but I would never have left her. She left
me.
Battery Close
I got a remote control Dalek for Christmas and it stopped
working after six hours because the batteries had run out
and I phoned Character Options and they said I had to buy
new batteries for it but I told them that the batteries were
included with the Dalek so if they run out and break then it’s
down to them to replace them and they told me that wasn’t
right and they stopped talking to me so I wrote to the BBC’s
Watchdog programme who said that Character Options
were right and I was wrong so I turned their programme off
and threw the Dalek into a hedge.
Spain Hill
Before Mum died we’d booked our first ever holiday abroad
and I got to choose where we were going and had it
narrowed down to three places: Lanzarote, Amsterdam or
Spain. When I spoke to Karen at work about this she said
Amsterdam had streets where girls sit naked in windows
and if you give them money they give you a naked cuddle or
a private kiss. Why would someone do that? It’s called the
Red Light District and Peter Davison talked about it at a
Doctor Who convention I went to once in 1987 and he
said that some men had mistaken the Australian actress
Janet Fielding for one of these girls which everyone thought
was very funny but it made me think Peter Davison wasn’t
a very nice man for telling people this. Mum wouldn’t go to
Lanzarote because of a farmer she once met so we ruled
that one out straight away, which meant we’d go to Spain
which is where the amazing 1985 story with TWO Doctors
in it called Two Doctors was filmed. One of the Doctors was
the actor Colin Baker who played the Sixth Doctor and his
friend was called Peri and at the start of the story she’s only
wearing a bra but you have to get really close to the
television to see this. The other Doctor in it is the Second
Doctor who isn’t black and white anymore called Patrick
Troughton and he was also in The Three Doctors and The Five
Doctors and The Underwater Menace which had Fish People
and the sailor Ben Jackson in it. Karen said Spain had really
good night clubs but I don’t understand why anyone would
want to go to a club at night? You go to bed at night. But
then mum died and I didn’t know how to get a passport so
we never got to go to Spain which made me sad as I’d hoped
to catch moths or butterflies or whatever it was Oscar did.
Shakespeare Road
I don’t remember much from school but I do remember a
man named William Shakespeare who wrote plays about
people wanting to kill each other and we had to sit
through lots of them which wasn’t so bad as we either
watched them on the telly which they’d bring in out of
another room and it had big wooden doors on it and it
meant we wouldn’t be learning for a while, or we’d go to
the theatre and see people act it out on stage which is like
telly without the adverts and the screen is bigger
depending where you sit. Posh people laugh at the jokes
even though they've heard them lots and lots of times
before but then I still laugh at the bit in The Invasion when
Patrick Troughton runs down the alleyway and the
explosions are going off behind him, it is just brilliant and
really funny. He was a natural clown. The Doctor met
Shakespeare but he looked completely different to how he
looked when the First Doctor played by William Hartnell
saw him on the TARDIS-telly with Vikkkii (I never know
how to spell that). He was in colour for a start. These days
Shakespeare is dead, just like Mum.
Moffat Road
Peter Davison is a massive liar and a horrible man for doing
so. He has signed lots of my books and videos over the years
and even signed my Easter Egg but then I found out on the
internet that Peter Davison isn’t even Peter Davison’s real
name and that his real name is Peter Moffat which means he
doesn’t just act he directs too. I hate liars and Mum says they
burn in the fires of hell and that’s just what Peter ‘Davison’
will do. The horrid, horrible, liar-man of a man.
147
Key Street
When I went to London to look for roads and pop into The
Who Shop I got lost and worried and scared and when I
saw two policemen and was going to ask them for help but
then I thought of The Terrors of the Autons and realised they
might rip their faces off and give me a daffodil. I went into
a shop and the man in there didn’t speak English and kept
saying weird words at me so I decided I should really speak
to the two policemen after all, but as I approached them I
thought about the two policemen in The Resurrection of the
Daleks who shot a man with a metal detector in front of
Tegan who was wearing a short skirt. I turned and ran as
fast as I could and luckily I found a tube station and Grandad
always told me that if you’re lost in London just look for a
tube station as you can get anywhere from there.
Apprehensive about Yeti I managed to find my way back to
East Ham but The Who Shop had gone and no-one knew
where it was. I got the train all the way back home and as I
got to my front door I realised I’d lost my key. I usually keep
it on a chain around my neck like the Third Doctor. It wasn’t
there and I knew why because I’d got into a scuffle outside
Forbidden Planet when a man asked me what time it was
and I checked my watch and he asked if I had a phone and
I said I didn’t have it on me and he said loudly and angrily
‘Give me your phone!’ and I told him to not be silly. He
pushed himself into me but another man running for a bus
pushed me back and the man who needed to phone
someone fell back into the road and his hand was run over
by a moped and he screamed and so did I. But then I
remembered the lesson I’d learned from The Enemy Within
starring the Liverpudlian pop star Paul McGann. Above the
front door I keep a small wooden block which I painted a
letter ‘P’ on. Inside that was the spare key and I let myself
in with it. I had to get a new one cut and it cost nine pounds!
I had to pay with my birthday money that Ahuzuomoke next
door gave me. She’s been looking after me since Mum died
and sometimes cooks me dinner.
My 9.00 Key
biro
This drawing is great because
I drew it out of my memory. It
is probably better than the
real key and certainly cheaper!
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Merlin Road
When I got my first job doing a paper round for the local
newsagent, then owned by Anne, I used to have to ride my
bike around town and put people’s newspapers into their
letterboxes as fast as I could before school. Once when I got
to one house the man there hit me around the head with the
newspaper and said I’d broken the glass in his greenhouse the
day before and I knew I hadn’t and said I hadn’t and he said I
had. He phoned my mum who had to walk to the house and
he showed her the greenhouse, but luckily she knew I’d been
watching Twin Dilemmas when he said this had happened so
he apologised to me and it turned out to be a boy called Kirk
that did it who smelled funny and smoked cigarettes and used
to spit on me all the time. It was a case of mistaken identity
which is what happened with the Seventh Doctor played by
the former TISWAS cast member, Sylvester McCoy in the
television story from 1989 called The Battlefield with Bessie.
Everyone thought he was Merlin and he wasn’t he was just
the Doctor and he was wearing a brown jacket now which
might be why they were confused.
~Totters Lane
Today I used some of the inheritance money left to me by
my mum when my mum died to get a train all the way down
from Liverpool (where I live) to Chobman in Surrey (where
I’ve never lived) so that I could take photographs of a
brilliant Doctor Who road sign. A friend on Facebook told
me about it but I won’t name him as he says he has his
privacy on Facebook set up in such a way that I can't even
see his photos. It’s a shame as I liked the photo of his sister
a lot and have it as my wallpaper on my computer that I’m
using now. It wasn’t a very nice day so I didn’t wear my
glasses because I thought it might rain and I didn’t want to
have smeary eyes when I found Totters Lane, yes TOTTERS
LANE, a lane named after the same lane where the very first
Doctor Who story ever was filmed and where the 1985
production team returned in 1985 (and in 1988).
The train journey took ages and there were lots of stops on
the way but I had my little tape player with me so I listened
to my BBC audio cassette of The Tombs of the Cyberman read
by the Third Doctor Jon Pertwee which is stupid as he
wasn’t even in it and the BBC should have asked Patrick
Troughton who was in it and was the actual Doctor Who in
that story. Just as it gets all frightening and Toberman is
being turned into a cybernised man, the train stopped at
Clapham Junction which is the biggest train station in the
world and we had to wait for ages which was really
annoying but I had Cybermen in my ears to keep me
company and anyway it was brilliant because out of the
window, five or six platforms away, on one of those cold
blue metal seats they have at railway stations I saw an owl
waiting for a train, just perched on the back of one of those
cold blue metal seats. I was amazed as I didn’t know animals
got on trains like people and I tried to take a photograph of
it but the train window was really dirty and the stupid
camera which is rubbish just kept focussing on the window
dirt and not on the owl and I didn’t want to get off the train
in case it went away without me or in case I scared the owl
away (not on purpose but by accident, I might trip over
something and distract the owl which would run off
screaming). I phoned Ahuzuomoke on my phone and told her
about the owl, and I had to say it twice because I whispered
it all the first time but then remembered I was inside the train
so my voice probably wouldn’t make the owl flap away, but
she said I must be wrong because an owl can fly and doesn’t
need to catch a train and I got cross and said that my eyes
had proof but I couldn’t take a photograph and I stopped
talking to her because she was saying I was a liar or wrong or
making it up and I wasn’t.
I don’t have anyone else’s phone number so I just watched
the owl and drew a picture of it to show Ahuzuomoke to
stop her saying I told dirty not-trues. The train I was on
started to move away from Clapham Junction just as the owl’s
train came into the station and then the owl stood up and it
turned out it wasn’t an owl, it was just a very short lady with
a massive pile of hair on her head who had just been sitting
down, but from the neck-up she did look like an owl viewed
from behind so really I was not wrong but maybe I should
have worn my glasses after all. I wouldn’t have ever thought
she was an owl if I had seen her from the front because she
had a chin like a mid-eighties Sontaran.
After hours and hours and hours, I finally got all the way to
Chobham only to find out the very best road sign in the world
didn’t exist, it wasn’t Totters Lane it was TROTTERS Lane
which has got nothing to do with Doctor Who at all, so
thank you for nothing Allen Jackson who lives in Canterbury!
Scotsman Drive
Before I was wrongly banned from the largest and biggest
Doctor Who forum on the whole of the internet I read in
the section about Doctor Who DVDs that the paper insert
covers of the DVDs are two-sided with different information
and pictures and things on them. This made me really very
cross as it means I have to buy two of every DVD so that I
can display all of the covers correctly in my bedroom and
that is stupid as it is very expensive to buy just one of them
at a time. £12.99 for Sontaran Experiments starring eccentric
Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor which is only two episodes
long like Rescue, the 1965 William Hartnell story? I don't
think so. I was explaining all of this to Mr Campbell who
works in the photocopy shop in the high street and who is
deaf in one ear and I had to say it all twice because he told
me I had said it to the wrong ear the first time and that
made me nearly as cross as the two DVD cover idea. I have
no idea what Josephine Grant of UNIT was going on about
when she called the Mr Campbell she knew at UNIT supplies
‘a dolly Scotsman’ in the Jon Pertwee story starring Jon
Pertwee as the Doctor called The Terrors of the Autons as the
Mr Campbell I know isn’t a dolly Scotsman, it makes no
sense and is stupid, he is just half-deaf and really annoying. I
wish I knew the tall, silent, kilted strongman Caber from the
Tom Baker story The Terrors of the Zygons. I would get him to
throw a photocopier at Mr Campbell, I bet he would hear
that. To top it all I can’t even watch these stupid DVDs
because I don’t own a DVD player. Mum wouldn’t allow
anything in the house that contained a laser.
DVDs I Don’’t Own
biro
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Nesta Road
Because my garden is so small I never really did much with it.
I always liked going to my nan’s house because she had a big
garden and strawberries growing in pots which I ate because
she said I was allowed to. So I decided I’d start growing my
own. I bought strawberry seeds and straw because the man
in the garden centre said I needed straw because they grow
on straw and I suppose that’s why they’re called strawberries.
They took forever to grow but eventually they did and I tried
one and it wasn’t as nice as Nan’s. It wasn’t even red, it was
just green and for weeks my bottom didn’t do what it was
meant to do when I went to the toilet and my stomach hurt
a lot. I didn’t eat any after that but then I noticed a month
later they were red and much, much bigger. They tasted really
nice then. The next day I went into the garden and found
loads and loads of slugs all over the pot and on the
strawberries. I was so cross I jabbed and stabbed at them
with a trowel but when I hit them they burst open and slug
goo went all over the strawberries and I didn’t want to eat
them anymore. Every time I was in the garden after that I was
reminded of those stupid slugs so I took the whole pot which
was really heavy and tried to get rid of it in a bin at the end
of the road but it wouldn’t fit. A lady asked me what I was
doing and I told her that the slugs made me sad and she didn’t
understand what that had to do with strawberries and I told
her it didn’t matter because I was going to get rid of the
stupid plant if it killed me and she said I could put it in her
composter as she only lived around the corner. I went home
with her and poured it all into a great big bin that looked like
a smooth Dalek and then she put her hand in my pocket and
touched my thingy so I ran away. Now if I’m out walking I
don’t walk near her house and Nesta was a massive slug in
Twin Dilemmas.
White Horse Road
Ertan at school swore blind that unicorns were real and
when we went on a school trip to the zoo he said there
would be unicorns and I looked for hours and didn’t see a
single one and when we got back on the coach again at the
end he said he’d been joking and I’d missed all the other
animals because of it. It wasn’t until I saw The Mind Robbers
on VHS from BBC Enterprises with a cover painting by the
artist Alister Pearson that I saw my first unicorn and I cried
a little bit but then I found out from Fraser Hines at a
Doctor Who convention that it wasn’t a real unicorn but
a horse that they’d painted with white paint and
paintbrushes. I was so angry that I stormed out of the
convention and cried for a short while in the toilets where
a man asked if I was okay and I said I was sad about the
unicorn and he said he understood and left but sent two
stewards in to see to me and they got me a cup of water. I
queued for Fraser Hines’ autograph just so I could tell him
how upset I was but when I got to the end of the queue it
was Wendy Padbury and I was in the wrong line so I had to
get her to sign my Emmerdale Farm photo of Fraser
Hines and she said it was weird because it wasn’t her and I
pointed out that I knew full well she wasn’t Fraser Hines
because he was taller and that I wasn’t stupid.
Dogs Head Street
The Black Guardian was a bad man who hated the Doctor
and wanted him dead and he made Turlough try to kill him
on several occasions but Turlough wouldn’t do it because
he was scared. I spent a whole bank holiday watching all of
The Key to Time which was the usual Graham Williams
rubbish (no wonder they got rid of him!) and the three Peter
Davison stories right up to Terminus which is my favourite
because it’s all about Nyssa and she looks very pretty in it.
There’s a scene where she jumps on Olvir when he breaks
into her cell and she sits on his tummy and I’d like her to do
that to me but I don’t know why because I’m not a chair. It
just looks nice. Nyssa is made to feel better when she
catches a death-disease by the Garm who is covered in
carpet tiles and has a really big head with red eyes. Turlough
pulls bits out of the TARDIS console which is a really stupid
thing to do and if I was the Doctor I’d not let him in the ship
because he’s clearly trouble and awfully naughty. The story
has everything, even a really cool robot which is one of the
best in the series and the music is really exciting and I have
it on tape somewhere. Apparently the DVD of the story has
a commentary by Sarah Sutton which I’m so excited to hear
and have bought all the DVDs but still can’t afford a DVD
player but one day I will and I’ll be able to hear her talking
through it and it will be like she’s sitting on the sofa next to
me watching Doctor Who. I hope Tegan doesn’t talk
through it though because I won’t be able to hear the story.
The Black Guardian’s coming back in Doctor Who
according to a boy at Dimensions (a Doctor Who
convention) who says the Black Guardian brings all twelve
(yes, that’s right -- Matt Smith is leaving) Doctors together to
fight the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Ice Warriors, Sontarans,
Rudens and three different Masters and it’s going to be
amazing except that Rose is in it and Ace and I don’t like
either of them.
The Key To Time After I
Have Stamped On It
Because It Is Rubbish
ballpoint pen
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Pearson Place
I took up art having been inspired to do so when wearing
my backpack on a recent trip to a gallery with Ahuzuomoke.
She goes walking with her friends from the church and she
suggested I go with them. It’s tiring and I don’t know how
she can manage it as she’s really very fat. She tells everyone
this but when I said she was fat the other day she got cross
with me and said I was rude. It made me think of Mum when
she told me off. In the gallery it was quite cramped and I
turned around suddenly and my backpack scraped across
one of the paintings and tore it just like the cover of Rona
Munro’s novelisation of Doctor Who and the Survival only the
scratches went the other way around and the picture wasn’t
of Sylvester McCoy who played the Seventh Doctor and the
Pied Piper at the National Theatre. There was quite a row
and people were shouting and in the end Ahuzuomoke had
to buy the painting because I didn’t have any money. When
we got home she left the painting in my room because she
said it would remind me what friends are for and the
importance of looking after someone else’s property. She
says I have to go with her to her church every Sunday for
the next month as payment. I’ve never been in a church
before, except for Mum’s funeral and it wasn’t even a proper
church. I’ve painted my bed which came out the wrong
shape and I painted some fruit in a bowl because everyone
seems to do that on the TV but I was working too slowly
and it took a few days and I kept eating the fruit before I’d
painted it so my painting has ghost-fruit on it where I drew
an outline but couldn’t colour it in because the fruit had
gone. I tried to paint Mrs Greville’s cat from over the road
but it was too far away and was only around at night and it’s
difficult to see a black cat at night because everything else
looks black. I’m certain I will get better and better at this.
Fruit Bowl with Fruit
And Ghost-Fruit
ballpoint pen
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Crozier Road
Sometimes I wish I could have my brain removed from my
head and a new brain put in its place because sometimes I do
things which upset other people and I don’t mean them to.
On my first day at the church I took a book with me to read
in case I got bored and it was the Virgin reprint of Logopolis
by the bearded script editor Christopher H. Bidhams which
has a lovely image of Nyssa on the cover painted by the
talented artist Alister Pearson. As I sat reading the book on
page 41 when the line ‘Corridors! Tegan was sick of them.’
came up I chuckled and drew the attention of everyone in
the church and Ahuzuomoke got angry with me and took
the book away. I wasn’t bored for long because now
everyone got up to sing which was weird and I’d not been
told it would happen and at first I screamed a bit as I thought
everyone got up for a fire alarm or something that I couldn’t
hear. But there was loud singing and clapping and everyone
seemed so happy and it was completely at odds with
anything else I’d done on a Sunday where I don’t recall ever
seeing anyone clap before except maybe on 3-2-1 which I
think was on a Sunday and Ted Rogers used to give a small
clap to everyone that walked in or out of the studio and I
never knew why because there was a whole audience there
to do it for him. Ted Rogers always reminded me of my dad
because he used to wear a blazer as well.
Jackson Way
You can join the army, the navy or the airforce if you want
to and they’ll teach you how to fire a gun, fly a boat and
drive a plane if you join them and Mum used to tell me I
should join up but I was holding out for UNIT until she told
me it didn’t exist and by then I already had a job in that
stupid shop. Sailors probably have the most exciting life
because they see Sea Devils, sea monsters like the Myrka,
Skarasen or whatever that big thing was in The Carnival of
Monsters which starred Tenniel Evans and provided an early
part for Harry Sullivan actor Ian Marter who played Harry
Sullivan in The Android Invasion, The Genesis of the Daleks and
some other stories. Harry was the Doctor’s friend when he
was Tom Baker and Harry was only qualified to work on
sailors so he could’ve worked on Ben who was a friend of
the First Doctor played by Michael Craze. An old man called
Colin was talking to me after church the other week.
Sometimes we go to his house as he has a big back garden
and makes lots of tea and people bring cakes. I’m starting to
like Sundays and Colin lives in Jackson Way which makes me
think of Ben and Polly every time we slowly walk into it. We
have to walk slowly because Ahuzuomoke hurt her ankle
last week when she was getting her newspaper out of a
hedge. I told her that the Doctor’s friends always hurt their
ankles. There’s a lady from the surgery who comes around
two days a week to bandage her foot and her name is Celia
and I like her because she’s pretty and also because she
looks like Phyllis from the Seventh Doctor story Curse of
Fenrics except she’s not white and Phyllis was really white
because she’d had all her blood sucked out by dreaded
Haemovores. I told her about the Haemovores and she said
she remembered watching one with the Oxo Lady in it and
I found out it was The Trial of a Time Lord and asked if she’d
like to watch it again and she said yes and then I told her it
was fourteen episodes and I think it was too long for her to
watch as she said she’d leave it for now because she hasn’t
got a video player.
Peel Yard
Goodness it’s cold! It’s Kane-cold out there today. How
ironic that today I should see Peel Yard while helping Colin
move his things back from his dead ex-wife’s house. She died
yesterday and he said he had to get his things back quickly
but couldn’t carry them all himself so he’d rented a van and
we had to break her window because he’d lost the key but
I’m sure she won’t mind. We got a lot into the van and I
found an old Radio Times from 1987 which had a listing for
The Paradise Towers in it! Just imagine! I had to write Peel Yard
down on the back of one of Colin’s wife’s photos because I’d
left my notebook at home not expecting to need it. When
we got home we saw Celia a few doors down from Colin’s
house and Colin asked her in for tea and she said yes and we
had tea with French Fancies which I like because they remind
me of brightly coloured Quarks. Celia was unhappy because
one of her patients she sees regularly had died and it made
me sad to see her unhappy. After I helped Colin to unload
the van I went to see Mr Hood who runs the church and
asked him if he could do something nice for Celia’s patient
on Sunday and he said they’d have a memorial for her and
sing a special song which we did and Celia didn’t know we
were going to do it and she cried and I was worried I’d upset
her but she said she was crying because she was happy and
I said I’d felt the same way when I found out Doctor Who
was coming back on the telly in 2005. She kissed me on the
cheek and said it was a nice thing I’d done.
Grimwade Street
I found out from a man at church that there is an actual
real-life Concorde plane at a museum in Weybridge in
Surrey. I’d been desperate to go but couldn’t get there
because it’s so far away from where I live. On my birthday
Celia came round and I told her she had the wrong house
and that Ahuzuomoke’s house was next door and her ankle
was better now. But Celia was looking for me and had
arranged tomorrow off work and offered to drive me to
Weybridge so we could go to the museum as a birthday
present. I was so excited but it meant we had to get up at
4 a.m. for the drive! That is really early but I said it wouldn’t
be a problem and she said she’d pick me up first thing in
the morning and I said I’d see her then. I didn’t sleep at all
that night because I knew the alarm was going to go off. At
2 a.m. I decided to go to the 24-hour Asda over the road
and buy some French Fancies for tomorrow because Celia
had said they were her favourite and because I’d eaten
Scampi Fries the night before I thought I’d better get an air
freshener for her car because it’s a long journey and noone likes the smell of scampi on someone else’s breath. They
didn’t have any air fresheners so I bought some flowers
instead because they smelled nice when I went in.
Celia picked me up at 4 a.m. and seemed far too excited
about the air-freshening flowers I’d bought, insisting she
leave them at my place in water and not take them with us.
I shot upstairs and brushed my teeth three times instead
while she was tidying my kitchen cupboards. We left a little
late but still got to the museum just after 9 a.m. but it didn’t
open for another hour so we walked around the car park
talking and I told her all about Doctor Who and Mum and
my videos. She said she had a DVD player at home and that
if I wanted to I could watch one of my DVDs at her house
and I said I would. The museum was just a load of old cars
but some of them looked like the Third Doctor’s car Bessie
which was later driven by Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy
and was once driven by Colin Baker in a 3-D Eastenders
special. We found the Concorde in a field of planes and we
were actually allowed to go inside it though we had to pay a
bit more. It’s really small inside and I couldn’t work out
where in the plane they would’ve put the TARDIS as there
was no room, even if it was lying down. Celia said it was
exciting and sad that they didn’t fly anymore. After Concorde
we had a cup of tea and Celia said it was really sweet of me
to get the French Fancies but we didn’t eat them because I’d
squashed them in the car and they didn’t look like Quarks
anymore they looked more like Sil.
Quarks !l
ballpoint pen
Quarks were the robotic slave-children of the ruthless and evil
Dominators. There were more Quarks than Dominators as
there were only two Dominators but nearly six Quarks. They
were amazingly realised by the BBC who spent more than they
normally would on them meaning that the story had to be
reduced from six episodes to five, just to make up the extra
money. They didn't talk much and just said ‘Blllp! Blllp!’ a lot
which is really difficult to say on the phone.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Shearman Road
After Celia said I could watch my DVDs at her house I saw
her again at church and asked if I could do it on Tuesday and
she said yes and so I went home to pick a DVD straight
away but suddenly I was worried because I didn’t want Celia
to hate it. My first choice was The Paradise Towers because I
wanted to hear the new score by David Snell but I didn’t
think Celia would like the Kangs who can be quite scary in
that story. Then I thought about The Chase which stars
William Hartnell as the First Doctor and lots of Daleks. But
it’s black and white and she might hate black and white telly
and the music is quite jazzy and gives me a headache
because it’s not really music at all it just sounds like
someone punching a piano. I couldn’t sleep all of Sunday
night because I couldn’t decide which story she would like
best. In the end I looked on the internet and found a
Doctor Who website. It was the first time I'd used the
internet without Mum being there, but Ahuzuomoke's son
Danny had set up my computer so I could use her 'wireless'.
The ‘forum’ was scary as everyone seemed angry and didn’t
like what other people liked, but they all seemed to agree
that girls prefer the new series of Doctor Who so I
reluctantly chose The Dalek which stars the unusual-eared
northern actor Christopher Eccelston as the Ninth Doctor.
Celia said she remembered Daleks. I also took The Pyramid
of Mars just in case. I’d bought a new copy because Michael
Sheard still has mine. Celia was wearing a very pretty dress
when I got to her house and I told her it was pretty and
she said that it was nice of me. She’d also made a cake which
tasted horrible but I lied and said it was nice. We watched
The Dalek and she really liked it. She said that Rose, the
Doctor’s friend, used to sing songs and was married to a
millionaire. I think she meant the actress Billy Piper rather
than Rose because Rose lives on an estate and looks poor. I
said I’d once seen her in a TV programme late at night where
she didn’t have clothes on and was cuddling men for money.
Celia seemed shocked and asked what the programme was
and when it was on. She said we could watch The Pyramid of
Mars as well if we wanted to and I did want to and she said
she couldn’t see it very well from where she was sitting so
asked if she could sit next to me which was annoying because
the sofa was quite small but it actually felt nice having her next
to me and she cuddled my arm with her head on my shoulder
while we watched the evil Sutekh shred the Fourth Doctor
Tom Baker’s brain. She got quite scared by it all and asked lots
of questions like why Sutekh had been imprisoned with lots of
robots and missiles and how does Sutekh eat or go to the
toilet which I’d never thought about before. In fact now I think
about it again, how does that organ keep playing after the man
in the Tommy Cooper hat gets up and walks away? I wonder
if the Doctor can hear the incidental music when he's in a
story? When it had finished Celia said she’d like me to show
her more of my DVDs if I wanted to and she kissed me
goodbye and I don’t even remember sleeping that night.
Innes End
Celia and I were driving on the road when I saw this road
and told her about Innes Lloyd and I said we should watch
the last story he made as a Doctor Who producer and she
said that was okay but when I got home I found out it was
The Enemy of the World starring Patrick Troughton twice. It
doesn’t exist anymore because the BBC set fire to it and the
only story I could find that Innes Lloyd did that does exist
was The Tombs of the Cyberman and they missed his name off
the credits so we couldn’t really enjoy it.
Fancy Road
When I woke up on Wednesday I had a letter in the door
which was from Celia and she must’ve dropped it off that
morning because she was working nights and she gets very
tired but I don’t work nights so I go to bed instead
otherwise I’m tired for work the next day. The note said
that she’d been invited to a party at work and it was fancy
dress which I thought meant posh clothes but apparently
it’s dressing up which I used to do with Mum on the first
Tuesday of every month but never in April. I couldn’t think
about anything else at work and Karen said she’d been to a
fancy-dress party before and I said she probably went as a
pig or something and forgot I was still talking to her and
she got cross and told everyone I called her a pig but I
didn’t! I just said she probably dresses like a pig which isn’t
the same thing at all so she was lying. Celia said we should
go as Charles and Diana but I didn’t know who they were
so said I didn’t want to so she said we should go as Doctor
Who people which got me really excited. She had a dress
she’d worn for an amateur dramatics play which was just
like Nyssa’s in Keeper of the Traken and she said she could
change her hair to look like Nyssa’s as well and would I like
her to go as Nyssa and I said yes because I’ve always wanted
to go out with Nyssa somewhere. We had to try and find a
costume for me but I could only think of three and they
were Annie from The Black Orchid by Doomwatch scribe
Terence Dudley, the Terileptil android from The Visitation
written by the angry man who blames everyone for his
problems or a Tharil. But Nyssa never met the Tharils so I
don’t know why I put them on my list now that I look back
at it. The Annie outfit was apparently not a good idea
according to Celia so instead we set about making the
android outfit which we did using a pair of purple trousers,
a blue shirt and about seventy bags of Haribo. We glued all
the Haribo to the clothes and onto my face and then I wore
big white gloves. It looked amazing. I bought Celia some
earmuffs that I’d seen in the charity shop and we went to
the party which was horrible and hot and noisy and all my
Haribo started to melt and I ended up looking more like a
Gel Guard by the end of the night and it’s still sticky now as
I type this. But Celia had a good time and she tried to teach
me to dance and I met some of her work friends who were
all very nice and said she’d told them a lot about me which
I think was a bit rude of her as I don’t know them but I don’t
think she meant anything bad by it. Tomorrow I’m going to
do myself eggs for breakfast!
Celia of Traken
new ballpoint pen
This is my friend Celia looking pretty as Nyssa from Doctor
Who but not quite as pretty as Sarah Sutton, the real Nyssa,
who also looks pretty but Celia’s pretty too especially when
she’s dressed as Nyssa who was in Doctor Who.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Frobisher Road
Celia has a friend who works at Knowsley Safari Park and
they gave her free tickets and she asked me to go with her
and I said I would because I like being with her as she’s nice
and she’s pretty even when she isn’t dressed up like Nyssa
of Traken. I walked to her house and then she drove us
there and we met her friend Kate who was very nice but
only had one eye and wore a patch and I thought this was
quite scary and I told Celia afterwards and she said there
was nothing scary about it but said I must be improving
because not that long ago I would’ve told Kate to her face
that she was scary and she had a point and I thought about
it as we watched the elands and that the reason I hadn’t
said anything was because I didn’t want Kate to be cross
with Celia. The park was amazing, there were so many
animals. Some of them Celia said she remembered from
when she was little. She used to live in Africa but came to
England when she was thirteen because her dad had died
and she lived with her mum and she said she didn’t know
any English back then which was amazing because she
speaks perfect English now but then she’s been here for
thirty years! Her mum died two years ago and we both miss
our mums. We looked everywhere but I couldn’t find any
penguins. Celia said there wouldn’t be any because it was a
Safari park and you don’t see penguins on Safari but I was
certain there would be at least one and we never found it.
We had lunch and Celia’s sandwich had a fly in it and I went
to complain for her and they said the fly must’ve landed
there after she’d opened it and I got cross and told them
not to call her a liar and the man apologised and gave us
both a free cake each and Celia a new sandwich. I let Celia
have my cake because she thought the man might have done
something to her new sandwich. As we left the restaurant
Celia pointed at the chocolate biscuits on the counter and
they had PENGUIN biscuits! We couldn’t stop laughing and
I was glad because I really like Celia’s laugh.
Cromer Road
Ahuzuomoke wanted to visit her grandchildren in Norfolk
and asked me if I’d like to go with them and even said Celia
could come too if she wanted to but Celia had to work
which was a shame. I had to work too but I just didn’t go in.
Ahuzuomoke’s daughter Afia has a really big house and I had
a room of my own which was a relief as I thought I’d have to
sleep on the sofa. Afia had a horse at some stables and when
we went there we had to drive on Cromer Road which
made me think of the Brigadier in The Three Doctors and
immediately I thought it would be a good idea to show it to
Celia when I got home. Ahuzuomoke puts credit on my
mobile phone each week as it means I can send text
messages to Celia when I’m working. I texted her and told
her about The Three Doctors and she said she was already
watching it! She said she missed me and put on a DVD to
remember me and she couldn’t believe there were three
Doctors in one story and I said it was amazing but really
there were only two Doctors in it because the First Doctor,
William Hartnell, was dead when it was made. I told her
about the horse and about how it had kicked a man and he
had to go to hospital and she was sad she wasn’t there
because as a nurse she could’ve helped him. She likes being
a nurse. The only weird thing about Cromer Road is that it
was all trees and tarmac and I don’t see how the Brigadier
could confuse it with the antimatter world of the terrible
Time Lord god Omega without a face.
Days Road
What a great name for a road! Any time you see the sign
you’re reminded of days. I’ve had some amazing days this
year. Mum dying was a bad day and so were the days
afterwards, but then I got to speak to Ahuzuomoke who
Mum hated because she said she didn’t belong in this
country. Mum obviously just didn’t know her very well and
Ahuzuomoke says it was just Mum’s age that was the
problem and that lots of people used to be that way. I never
realised that what Mum used to say upset anyone. But now
I’m best friends with Ahuzuomoke and her family and she
says I am part of their family now. Danny has even moved
into my house because it’s too big for just me and he’s got
Mum’s old room. We’re looking at getting the wall knocked
through and having one big house which would be nice
because I used to be so lonely even with Mum around, but
now there’s always someone in the house and I’ve always
got friends or voices around me to enjoy. I still don’t really
understand church. I love it because I get to sing and
everyone’s happy and so nice, but I find the readings and the
praying quite boring and I just don’t get it. In The Face of Evil
the Sevateem thought Xoanon was a god and he wasn’t and
there are lots of stories in Doctor Who which prove
there’s no such thing as God. Celia says I shouldn’t say
anything about that in church so I don’t. Celia is now my
very best friend and we spend a lot of time together. Two
weeks ago she kissed me during the closing titles of episode
two of The Day of the Daleks and it’s the first time I’d ever
kissed anybody on the lips and I really liked it and she said
she did too. I’ve been reading back through my notes in this
book and I used to hate kissing and not see the point but
now I do see the point but I still don’t think the Doctor
should kiss his friends and I still don’t think he should ever
kiss Lieutenant Surgeon Harry Sullivan. Colin says Celia is
my girlfriend and I never realised it before. We’ve been
friends for seven months now but it seems like forever. Celia
got me a job at the hospital where I push people around in
chairs or on trolleys so I sometimes get to see her there
and it’s much nicer than my old job. I even saw my old boss
Karen in the hospital but she was dead because she’d been
electrocuted by some faulty wiring in the shop. Celia joked
that I’d messed around with it before I’d left. I never dreamed
I’d ask anyone, but I have been thinking of asking Celia if she’d
marry me and be my wife. I can just imagine what Mum
would say!
Afterword
I’ve often been asked about my middle initial. This has been
a very frustrating problem for me and it’s all to do with the
stupid internet which wouldn’t let me have my name,
‘andycable’ as an email address and one of the suggestions
the staff at Google came up with was to put an ‘x’ in the
middle of my name. This made me quite cross because my
real middle name is Harrison and I liked it because it's like
Harrison Chase, the man with the greenhouse who fed raw
steak to the Krynoid. But this meant I now had to have a
new middle name and I can tell you that my middle name is
actually Xoanon which I chose and gave to myself and had
changed by deed poll which is an amazing thing you can do
when you’re old enough. I chose Xoanon because it
describes perfectly how I feel. You know that scene where
the Fourth Doctor played by the actor Tom Baker is on his
knees and the three screens with his own face on are
confused and scared and asking questions? That’s how I feel
every morning when I wake up. Sometimes I wish those
stupid voices would just shut up and go away, but then I’d be
lonely so I wish they wouldn’t.
Thank you for reading my book to the final end.
AxC
[email protected]
http://www.facebook.com/andyxcable
Further selections from Andy’’’s sketchbook
I had no idea that all my drawings were so brilliant until I
put some of them on the internet for other people to see
and everyone really loved them even a man who writes
Starburst which was a bit weird because I thought Starburst
were Opal Fruits with a different name. Here are some of
my brand new drawings of mad people I have done
especially for you -- my friends and my fans.
Mr Sin
ballpoint pen
Mr Sin was a little boy who wore make up and a dress and sat
on Chang's lap when he was doing magic on stage in the Palace
Theatre which was owned by Henry Gordon Jago who smoked
cigars. Mr Sin had the brain of a pig which meant he snorted
and grunted like a pig would. He stabs people with a little knife
because a big knife would look silly.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Aukon
ballpoint pen
Aukon was a vampire in the vampire story The State of Decay
which was read by Tom Baker on an audio tape I got out of the
library for £1.50. You mustn't make Aukon mad because he can
make a bat follow you and if it did it would probably kill you,
or bite you and then kill you, or kill you by biting you. He
wasn’t allowed to be in another story because he died at the
end of The State of Decay.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Romulus & Remus
ballpoint pen
Romulus and Remus were two twins in the story Twin Dilemmas.
They must be mad because they absolutely love maths and noone in their right mind likes maths.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Sharaz Jek
ballpoint pen
I drew Sharaz Jek on the
back of a stock sheet at
work and stupid Karen said
it looked racist and I didn't
know what she meant so I
said she was stupid and I'd
call my mum and she told me
to go home because she was
sick of me which meant I had
an extra two hours to spare
in the afternoon during which I watched The Awakening twice
because I couldn't find The Time Warrior and wanted to watch
something with peasants in it.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
War Chief
ballpoint pen
I think this is a drawing of War Chief
from the Patrick Troughton story The
War Games but I can’t remember
because I started drawing a drawing
of Scalby from The Seeds of Doom at
the same time and I don’t know
which one this is now.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Some of the Ants from my friend Colin’’;’s garden
ballpoint pen
You might not think ants are mad but these ants were because
I tipped my cup of tea all over them because it tasted wrong.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Cable vs Achellios
ballpoint pen
I drew this picture of me, Andy X. Cable all cross and unhappy
and throwing a chair at Target cover artist and painter Christos
Achellios. I am still angry at his drawing for the Target book
The Dinosaur's Invasion featuring a drawing of a dinosaur as it
ruined the story for me, I had no idea dinosaurs were even in
it. I also had no idea what Christos Achellios looked like so I
guessed from his weird name that he might be a Mexican artist
and painter, so I drew him as a Mexican artist and painter. This
incident did not really happen except in my head where it was
like watching a really short film, and this drawing that I have
done (I drew it, not Christos Achellios) is like a freeze-frame
from that film. It took me three hours to draw and it is the
best drawing of a Mexican I have seen. I hope my angry face
does not scare you. I do look very fierce there don’t I?
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Malcolm Clarke
ballpoint pen
Malcolm Clarke was a madman with a box. He made all the
noises for Doctor Who stories like The Sea Devils where he
did an electronic splodging and ka-weee noise. The artist
Christos Achellios was a big fan of Malcolm Clarke's music and
included his surname on the cover of The Dinosaur's Invasion
that he painted with paints. I hate the music Malcolm Clarke
did because it's not music at all, it's just a horrible noise which
sounds like knives and vinegar, sharp and pointy and like having
thorny roses pushed into your ears when you don't want them
pushed into your ears. I once spoke to a boy at a Doctor Who
convention called PanoptiCon who said that Malcolm Clarke's
music was brilliant and I told him he was stupid and wrong and
anyway his name wasn't PanoptiCon, that was the name of the
convention and I just typed it wrong a bit.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
#Lord Omega Crying
ballpoint pen
OMEGA! The dreaded Time Lord who shouted his head off
even though he didn’t have a mouth because it was antimatter.
Omega frightened me so much that I commissioned myself to
do this portrait of him to teach him a lesson. He has
materialised in our world of non-antimatter and because he is
antimatter he doesn’t like it and even a snail frightens him and
makes him cry, he is really unhappy and he has stopped
shouting. I didn’t finish drawing his cloak as I was worried my
pen might run out. I spent ages doing the snail and I think it
shows. It is my best drawing of Omega ever too.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
That Mad Old Woman
From The Seeds of
Doom (I forget her
name)
ballpoint pen
The Seeds of Doom is a really
scary story for the Doctor
and Mr Charles Winlett to be
in and for me to watch. It is
full of the Krynoids who are
massive plant-things and they
can talk and squash a house
and shake but the really scary thing in it is an old lady with
boggly eyes who paints pictures (like I do) and she paints stupid
roses or daisies (not like I do). Actually I do it with a biro and
ink instead of a brush and paint because that's messy and you
can end up walking around for a whole day with yellow paint on
your ear and won't find out until some bully yells ‘Yellow ear!’
at you on a bus and even then you don't realise because you
thought they asked you to yell at beer and you shout back ‘I
don't drink beer!’ really loudly and a policeman stops you in the
park thinking you're drunk because you're shouting at the top
of a bus that you can't yell at beer.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Slaarzlyrrrrssss
ballpoint pen
This is what I think an Ice Warrior
looks like under his hat. A boy at
Dimensions says I’m wrong but he’s
stupid and wore a Patrick Troughton
costume with a Matt Smith bow tie so
I think we know who is right and who is wrong and his Who is
wrong. Ha ha – that was my joke.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Not The Helen Keller Machine
ballpoint pen
Imagine a sponge. Imagine a really
big green (or grey) sponge that
sucks up every evil thought
around it and uses it to power its
own mad, evil machine. That’s
what the Keller machine is and my
teacher at school insisted it has absolutely
nothing to do with Helen Keller even though she has the same
name as Emil Keller and I got sent home from school for loud
arguing because of that when I was little. I don’t know where
that teacher is now but I hope the sponge gets her because
she was horrible to me. I once tried to build a Keller Machine
from the bin in the kitchen, a lettuce and some wires but it
didn’t work. It looked really really good though. Almost as good
as this drawing which is one of my best.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Pointed Hat Man
ballpoint pen
This is a man I saw at a Doctor
Who convention and I have no
idea what his costume was meant
to be. When I asked him he said it
wasn’t a costume but it must be a
costume because nobody would
wear a hat like that unless they
were a clown or something. He had
long antennae coming out of it and
he would take ages to say words just like Stein in that Dalek
story which doesn’t have Nyssa in it. His moustache was weird
and although I haven’t drawn it, his backpack was covered in
badges just like stupid Ace’s backpack.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
An Ambassador of Death
ballpoint pen
This is a drawing of an Ambasssador of Death from the
Doctor Who story The Ambassadors of Death. I have only
drawn one of them as they all look the same which is silly,
how did they know which one is in charge of invading the
Earth? The Ambassador of Death I have drawn doesn’t have a
big hand in the story The Ambassadors of Death, I have drawn
it that way to make it look like he is reaching out of the book
like a 3-D film. I tried to draw the Third Doctor in the
background but it went wrong and now it looks like the
Ambassador of Death is trying to catch a bat who has a face
like the Malus and I scribbled it out so pretend it isn’t there
even though you know it is. The BBC have made a DVD of
this story and they have coloured it in which is very clever
but it’s also stupid. If it was meant to be like that they would
have made it in colour in the first place. The Doctor Who
theme tune at the start of this story is stupid and wrong too
and I just have no idea what Dudley Simpsons was thinking.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Woman
ballpoint pen
This is the horrible woman who
operated on me when I was in
hospital with my big hand and
she made it small again. Her
name was Doctor Roberta
Homes which was brilliant but
she didn’t understand why it
was brilliant. I explained to her
that Robert Holmes was a
writer who wrote really good
Doctor Who stories but none
with Nyssa in unless you count
The Caves on Androzani where
Nyssa came back to comfort
her very best friend when he
was dying from not having any
milk or something. Anyway, Doctor Homes was from Australia
and spoke with a silly voice like Tegan did. She also shouted like
Tegan, especially when I showed her my drawing of her. Sorry
it’s a bit creased up but she screwed it up and threw it across
the room and called me a ‘bloody idiot’. I don’t like her. She
made me mad.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Amelia Ducat
ballpoint pen
This is the name of the drawing from the other page that I
couldn’t remember, the drawing of the Mad Old Woman From
The Seeds of Doom picture. If you like you can photocopy her
name from this page and then glue it with Pritt Stick to the
other page so that your book is right. I am sorry if I have made
you really cross and I hope the photocopier at your library
isn’t very expensive.
Rory Williams Pond
ballpoint pen
In the new series Rory is now made of plastic and is over three
thousand years old which is even older than Jon Pertwee,
William Hartnell and Nicola Bryant. Because he fights vampires
with broomsticks I said to him at Memorabilia that he was an
Action Man and he laughed a lot and said I was very funny, then
he wrote his name in the wrong place on my poster and I didn't
say goodbye to him because it upset me.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
The New Dreaded Cybermat
ballpoint pen
They’re stupid and rubbish. Rubbish with teeth.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
The Collector
ballpoint pen
Condor was a boy who
lived on a planet full of
old
witches
with
Professor Solon. He had
big eyebrows and only
one
arm
because
Professor Solon took his
other arm away because
he was naughty and then
Solon put it on his
monster, The Morbius. A boy on the internet said that Condor
had the biggest eyebrows in Doctor Who but he is an idiot,
The Collector from The Sunmakers has the biggest eyebrows so
he is wrong and my drawing of The Collector proves it and
makes him look even more stupid than he is.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
The Master
ballpoint pen
The Master can make people
do what he wants by staring at
them and telling them to do it.
I have tried this and it doesn't
work. It just makes people very
angry like the time I told the
girl in KFC that I wanted lots
of chips and she said the bag
was full.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
A Silence (A Silents)
ballpoint pen
I wasn’t sure if this monster
was the Silents or the Silence
so I have written down both
names because one of them
must be right. It’s rubbish
because monsters don’t
wear human clothes and if
they hadn’t wasted the
money on filming some of
this story in stupid America
they could have made the
rest of the body instead of
making it just wear a suit and
a tie. It was so confusing and stupid I was not surprised when
they took it off air for six months. The Sea Devils also wear
clothes but it's just a stringy sort of dress thing and you can see
through it which is a bit weird. I don't even know why they
wear it because it must rise up when they swim underwater
and from what I can tell it's just something to hang their gun
off. Even then they could just wear the belt. It's amazing how
many Doctor Who monsters have no clothes on. Like The
Morbius. No wonder he was cross.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
The Venom Grub Drinking A Can of Fizzade
ballpoint pen
Ice hot, Fire Escape!
illustration © Andy X. Cable
The Arcturus
ballpoint pen
I am the first
person
in
the
world to ever draw
The Arcturus. I
have never seen
another drawing of
him and I did four
trying to get it to
look right so I must have set a new Drawing The Arcturus
World Record. I got confused and drew him with a moustache
three times. The Arcturus is green and was in the same story
as the Ice Warriors who are also green so it must have been
confusing for Jon Pertwee, the singer and radio personality
who played the Third Doctor who also wore a jacket that was
green but not in this story.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Melkur
ballpoint pen
I drew this picture of
Melkur from Keeper of the
Traken really quickly
because I had to go down
the road to the shop
before they shut and buy
some new beans. I hope it
doesn’t disappoint you, I
still tried very hard to
make it look good. Until I
did this drawing I had
never noticed how big
Melkur’s neck is. It’s
massive isn’t it?
illustration © Andy X. Cable
Revisitations 3 DVD Review
I have been given a review
copy of a DVD which is
weird because up until three
weeks ago I’d never been
able to play a DVD so
they’re new to me like when
new flavours of Pringles turn
up in the same colour tube
as the old flavours and you
buy them and they taste
wrong and when you take
them back they won’t give
you your money back
because you ate the Pringles.
Except with this DVD I didn’t pay for it because they gave it
to me for free which is amazing because they don’t even
know me. So now I have to review them or they’ll want them
back or make me pay for them or something and I really
need the money so can’t afford to pay for them.
The story is called Revisitations 3 which is weird because I
haven’t heard of that story. The packaging is rubbish.
There’s no box or case and the discs are just in little
plastic sleeves which don’t even have pictures. I doubt
anyone would buy them if they saw them on a shelf in
HMV or Asda or Galaxy 4. I am going to draw my own
pictures for the sleeves and stick them on using sellotape or
blu-tac or something. Actually I think that’s meant to be
‘Sellotape’ because it’s a brand name and the boy who told
me to write this said I had to get things like that right and I
suppose ‘Blu-Tac’ is the proper name for blu-tac as well so I
also got that wrong, but I’ve got to fill up a certain amount
of words so won’t go back and change it now in case I don’t
have enough words when I’m finished.
When I put the first disc in it turns out they’ve sent me the
wrong story which is just as well because I never saw the first
two parts of Revisitations. While I waited for the disc to load
up and for the menus to play through I made myself a
sandwich which was tuna and sweetcorn which I’d mixed up
with mayonnaise and it was really delicious. I also made myself
a cup of tea and washed up the things I’d used to make the
sandwich. Then the menu came on. The story they sent me
I’ve already seen. It’s called The Robots of Death and it features
the Fourth Doctor who’s played by the actor and bohemian
Tom Baker. In this story his new friend is Leela and she’s very
pretty and doesn’t wear many clothes because she’s a savage
and has a knife and thorns and a yo-yo. The story is really
really good because it’s not made by Graham Williams and
it’s not black and white either. Also it’s not a new series story
because there’s no kissing in it. There is crying though
because Zilda is sad that her brother’s dead and Poul cries
because one of the robots has got a bloody hand. It turns out
it was Dask all along. Sorry if I’ve spoiled it for you but I’ve
seen it before.
The next disc was a story called The Tombs of the Cyberman
and it was in black and white and had Patrick Troughton as
the Doctor and it was boring so I turned it off.
I put in another disc and it looked like it was going to be the
Cyberman story all over again but instead it was just lots of
boring programmes about Cybermen and there were people
talking and trailers for another story and I just didn’t like it
at all. They never used to fill the videotapes with rubbish like
this. I hope they don’t charge extra for that disc because it’s
not really fair on any boys who buy it thinking it will be great.
I tried another disc and it turned out to have The Three
Doctors in it which features three Doctors and mainly the
Third Doctor who was played by the panel game host and
entertainer Jon Pertwee who later played a scarecrow in a
television programme for little children. I watched some of
this story but it was confusing because the Second Doctor
played by the impish Patrick Troughton was wearing a bright
blue shirt and his shirt wasn’t blue in the Cyberman story it
was white and they got this wrong and it’s wrong to get
things wrong because people don’t always know they’re
wrong and it made me cross so I turned it off.
I’m very glad I didn’t pay for these DVDs because they aren’t
what they said they were and they were all pretty boring and
I’ve got them on video anyway. Hopefully I’ve managed the
800 words I had to write for this and you like it.
This review originally appeared in the fanzine Fanwnak (http://fanwnak.blogspot.co.uk/)
The DVD set Doctor Who: Revisitations 3 (bbcdvd3003) is available from all
good stockists.
Andy on Facebook
24 September 2011
I tore the cover on my DWM because the tape from Doctor
Who Adventures stuck to it and now I’m cross because
they’re both ruined and it’s all stupid and wrong.
25 September 2011
I didn’t like Doctor Who last night because the Cybermen
still aren’t proper Cybermen and the Doctor wore a stupid
coat which he never wore before and it looked stupid.
26 September 2011
Trying to get a head cleaner for my video but nobody sells
them anymore and I’ve just ticked off the twentieth box on
the sleeve. I hope it’s going to be OK.
27 September 2011
Just woken up to six missed calls from work and stupid Lisa
leaving me a message to say we ‘need to talk’ ... she can’t
sack me though, Mum made sure of that last time. Stupid
Lisa.
28 September 2011
Got moaned at at work today but she knew better than to
try and sack me. Then as I sit down for my lunch I read that
Doctor Who Confidential has been cancelled which is sad
as I couldn’t wait for them to start covering the old series
as well in the 50th Anniversary year to celebrate 50 years of
Doctor Who which will be 50 years old in 2013.
29 September 2011
A man took my money that I dropped at the bus stop today
and said it was ‘finders keepers’ but it was my money and
not his and then I didn’t have enough for the bus and had to
walk in really hot weather without a drink or hat. But
Colony in Space has been posted. Can’t wait to see the
cover. Will watch the VHS tonight.
30 September 2011
Today I saw the postcards for my book about Doctor Who
roadsigns and I got very excited and took one down to
Maggie in the newsagent and asked her to put it in the
window and she did so look out for it.
1 October 2011
I couldn’t sleep last night because it was so hot. The sheet
on my bed kept coming untucked and I don’t know how to
stop it doing it. Mum used to make the bed but now she
can’t and I read David Banks’ Iceberg for a bit but there
were no Cybermen and I got bored.
1 October 2011
I’m going to order a pizza for my dinner. I’ve never done
this before and I’m really excited. I’ve got three menus, one
is Pizza Hut, one is Papa Joans and the other is Pizza GoGo.
I don’t know which to choose as they all look good. I don’t
really like cheese but there’s lots of other stuff on them as
well. I’ve got £17.32 to spend. What’s ‘pepperoni’?
Stupid pizza. It was rubbish. That pepperoni stuff was
horrible and hot and made my mouth burn and a piece
dropped on my t-shirt and stained it orange and I can’t get
it off so will have to buy a new shirt but can’t because I
spent all my money on the pizza. Pizza is horrible and I still
don’t understand who River Song is.
2 October 2011
Colin Baker shirt ruined by a stupid pen and my glass of
Ribena but I might be able to turn it into a Nyssa shirt as it’s
half purple and the other half by chance is mostly the
colours she wore in The Snakedance. I’ll have to show it to
Sarah Sutton at a convention soon and I’m sure she’ll love it
very much.
3 October 2011
Stupid training day at work today with them telling me how
to use the credit card machine which is pointless because
I’m not even allowed near the tills after that thing with the
balloons.
5 October 2011
I’ve spent the evening drawing a new picture for the cover of
my book because I don’t like the one that Robert Hammond
did. I hope Robert likes it.
6 October 2011
I’ve been learning the words to Father of Heaven all week
and I still can’t get them right and it’s making me cross and
I’ll go mad if I have to read them to myself again.
7 October 2011
Just been driven down Alan Road. Amazing.
8 October 2011
I can’t sleep because of that stupid bread bin.
10 October 2011
I am feeling very happy that people like my artwork and I am
going to treat myself to a can of Dr Pepper this evening and
watch The Minds of Evil in black and white because the BBC
couldn’t afford to make it in colour anymore.
When I had my lunch today I found a bag of 5p coins in the
park and I counted them up and it came to five pounds
worth which means I can buy more pencils or five things that
cost a pound. I’m back on the computer because my The
Minds of Evil video is stuck and I’m scared to take the tape
out as it’s tangled in the machine.
12 October 2011
Someone’s painted the word ‘stupid’ on my front door in
green paint and it won’t come off and I was late for work
because of it.
13 October 2011
There is a new set of Doctor Who dollies available and one
of them is Omega but it’s the rubbish Omega from the old
black and white stories and not the good Omega from
Amsterdam who had a friend with a pen.
14 October 2011
Today I’m going to a car boot sale and I’ve got some money
to spend after paying for the train to see Johnny Byrne after
he emailed me but he didn't answer the door and now I
don't think it was really from him after all. He promised me
lunch and everything. I'm hoping I find a copy of the
hardback of The Minds of Evil because it’s orange and
Terrance Dicks wrote it because Don Houghton couldn’t
be bothered.
15 October 2011
Sometimes I play the noise of the TARDIS doors opening
on my MP3 player when I open the front door.
17 October 2011
I think Karen should shut her stupid face and go away.
I’m going to bed sad and I’m going to wake up in the morning
and be positive about stupid Karen and her big eye.
18 October 2011
I’m going to work now and I’ve decided to wear my hat
because it’s so cold out but my hat had a spider in it as I
hadn’t worn it in a long time and now I’m scared of my hat
and I’ve left my hat at home and I’m hoping my hat isn’t
there when I get back because I don’t know what to do with
my hat now.
18 October 2011
Stupid sandwich shop sold me the wrong sandwich and now
I’m having to eat the wrong sandwich which stinks of beef
and a hot paste which has hurt my mouth. I was nearly sick
twice.
19 October 2011
I complained about the cress yesterday and now they’ve
banned me from the shop.
22 October 2011
Today in town I bought some cress seeds which a book in
the library says I can grow on pieces of cotton wool. This
will show them.
23 October 2011
Stupid cress hasn’t grown yet. Bored with this.
I stayed up all night and nothing grew and now I’m tired and
I missed church so everyone’s cross with me and I think I’m
just going to go to bed and throw this stupid cress in the
bin.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
24 October 2011
I screwed up all that cotton wool when I got in from work
just now and when I threw it at the bin it landed on the floor
and looked like a dead Plasmaton which made me think of
Concorde, the plane.
27 October 2011
Tonight I will be watching The Kinda which has apples and
snakes and little paper people who get broken and can’t be
mended.
I don’t really like snakes but I would like Tegan to drop
apples on me.
28 October 2011
Today at work we have a ‘loss prevention’ man in who thinks
I’ve been stealing Strepsils. He looks like Pat Gorman.
29 October 2011
I’m not at work and work have phoned twice and I don’t
want to go in or answer the phone because I’m too busy
and I don’t like them.
A fox outside my window sounds like an angry Quark and
it scares me.
2 November 2011
On my way home from work I missed my bus but then I
found seventy pence on the floor which I’m going to take to
the police station tomorrow and hand in just in case
someone’s lost it.
I am thinking of building a Dalek. I think if I start from the
bottom it will be easier. I just don't know if I'd ever finish it.
3 November 2011
Haha! Stupid Karen at work has been suspended. I don’t
know why. Probably for being stupid.
4 November 2011
That cress I threw on the floor has grown! It looks like
dozens of tiny Krynoids on a moist cloud (behind a bin).
6 November 2011
I’m going to build my own Dalek! Just like the triple-eyed,
cabbage-faced shouting-man Davros.
13 November 2011
I wish I hadn’t nailed the wheels to the bottom of this Dalek
because it moves around the room when I’m trying to staple
the panels on.
16 November 2011
I miscounted how many balls I need for my Dalek. When I
counted them the photo was head-on and so I thought I’d
only need twelve but now I’m making it I don’t think twelve
is enough and I think I need more and this is so stupid and I
can see why Davros was always cross now.
18 November 2011
Stupid Dalek.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
20 November 2011
I’m getting really fed up with this stupid Dalek now. I’m going
to make a Cybermat instead because they’re smaller, silver
and need less paint because I’ve only got one can but it’s gold
and I hope the Cybermat doesn’t die.
22 November 2011
My book is getting orders from people who want to buy it
which is good because it means they aren’t ordering the
wrong book which means I can quit my job this year and
become a full-time writer. That would show stupid Karen.
23 November 2011
Cybermat turned into a green maggot but when I tried to
take a photo of it in Colin’s sandpit it was already dark at
four o’clock in the afternoon so the picture was rubbish
and I’ll have to do it again if Colin’s home on Saturday which
he probably will be unless he goes out.
1 December 2011
I had a man come round today to buy my half-Dalek which
I advertised in the newspaper for £60 but he said it wasn’t
anything like a Dalek and that I’d wasted his time and now
I’m sad.
8 December 2011
I wish I’d bought that new pen now.
9 December 2011
Today on the bus a man gave me a leaflet about a Christmas
Fair in town but the fair had already happened and when I
got off the bus to tell him this I couldn’t find him and then
I found he’d written a telephone number on the back of the
leaflet but when I called it he said very rude sex-things to
me. Why would someone do that?
12 December 2011
I have been asked to take part in a channel 4 programme
about my old collection but I don’t know if I should do it as
they might make fun of me and call me names like the Daily
Star did.
18 December 2011
I have been trying to phone the BBC all day to ask when my
DVD of The Paradise Towers will arrive from Amazon. Why
don’t they answer?
19 December 2011
I dropped my best pencil and now when I sharpen it it keeps
breaking which means I can’t use my pencil and it was my
best one so I’ll have to use a biro instead.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
21 December 2011
I thought I’d use the rest of the paint I bought for my
Cybermats to spray the Christmas tree silver so I’d have a
Cyber-Tree but now it looks like a TV aerial because the
paint melted all the plastic off it so I’m going to repaint it
red so it looks like the top of the van from the Dalek story
with Omega’s coffin in it.
25 December 2011
It’s quite lonely today. Even my friends in the computer are
quiet.
27 December 2011
For Christmas Ahuzuomoke got me a new set of pencils.
There are eighteen of them which is more than I had before
Christmas so I will be drawing and writing with them and
already have written some things and drawn some things
with them.
29 December 2011
I’m sick to death of pigs.
30 December 2011
I have spent all morning sticking stupid sale stickers on
stupid boxes of smelly stuff that leaks everywhere and now
I smell like a bath.
8 January 2012
I think my pencil might be a wood-Auton. I just tried to
draw a Cyberman and it turned out rubbish which wasn’t
my fault.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
15 February 2012
I got a letter from the BBC today saying that my script for
Doctor Who wouldn’t be used because I hadn’t told them I
was going to send it. That’s just stupid. I can’t tell everyone
everything I’m going to do before I do it because then I’d
never get anything done. It’s a wonder Doctor Who even
makes it to the screen.
17 February 2012
I lost a ten pound note today when I put the wrong hand in
a postbox and now I don’t have any money for dinner so
will have to eat the jar of fish paste in the cupboard until
Monday when I can get more money. I haven’t even got the
cress I tried to grow.
29 February 2012
Very excited. I have been left a lot of money by an uncle I
didn’t know I had. I just need to scrape together the legal
fees they want and send them off and then I get the money.
I can finally buy Mum a better headstone.
Mr Ngati in the letter is asking for two thousand three
hundred pounds for the legal fees as apparently I have to pay
for them to transfer it all into my name from my uncle
(who’d have thought I’d have an African uncle! How strange.)
and apparently there is tax or import tax or something to be
paid. I’ve written back asking if I can pay it in bits because I
don’t have two thousand three hundred pounds I’ve only got
eleven pounds to last me until March 3rd.
10 March 2012
I am very excited because my book comes back from the
printers next week and lots of people have bought it already
and now I’ll be able to buy a car and learn to drive so I can
drive the car that I buy.
12 March 2012
I have taken Thursday and Friday off work and will be getting
a train to Surrey to meet the boys who have published my
book and collect a copy in person and probably sign them
too because I forgot to write a bit in and will have to add it
in the back of the books or people will be cross.
14 April 2012
I’ve had an itchy wrist all day and now it’s gone red and
blotchy and aches.
15 April 2012
My wrist this morning is going black and the lumps are all
yellow. It really, really hurts now.
17 April 2012
I have one hour to use the internet at the hospital because
you have to pay for it and I’ve only got three pounds on me.
It turns out my wrist was worse than I thought and although
I’ve lost some fingernails they say it’s on the mend now.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
This is the man who was in the bed next to me last night. I
was drawing him when another man came in and said he
was dead but I said he couldn’t be dead because I’d drawn
him alive. The man said I was wrong so this picture is a dead
man that I didn’t know was dead. They moved him out of
his bed before I could finish the legs so I had to make them
up from my imagination and I think I did a good job. Because
he was under a blanket I don’t know if he was wearing
trousers to his pyjamas. He may have been naked but I didn’t
want to draw his thingy and his bits and that.
20 April 2012
I hate hospital. Everyone keeps dying after I talk to them.
My arm still hurts. There’s a nurse called Leila here and I
had to tell her my arm ached just like Toos did in The
Robots of Death.
22 April 2012
I was supposed to come out of hospital today but I banged
my face on the bed picking a pen up off the floor and
apparently I have concussion. Stupid hospital.
24 April 2012
I’m trying to get to sleep but the stupid man in the bed
opposite keeps crying. Why won’t he shut up? I asked him to
shut up and then shouted at him to shut up and he wouldn’t.
I even threw water over him, then a nurse came in and
thought he’d wet the bed and they treated him like a baby.
Haha.
25 April 2012
The man in the bed opposite is dead this morning. He’s the
seventh person to die since I got here. Good – I got no sleep
because of him.
Stupid hospital. This man keeps
clip-clopping into my room on
his crutches and shouting at
me for losing his newspaper
and I didn’t lose his newspaper,
I threw it away because it was
old.
Every day I hear the noise of
his metal feet coming up the
corridor and it scares me. He
shouts in what Lisa says is a
Scottish accent but to me he
just sounds drunk. He says I
owe him sixty-five pence for
the paper and I don’t have
illustration © Andy X. Cable
sixty-five pence so he’ll just
have to go away and I told him this and he started hitting
the leg of my bed with his stick and I don’t know how he did
it because he didn’t fall over or anything.
I really want to get out of this hospital now and they won’t
let me go and no-one’s been to visit me apart from the angry
Scottish newspaper man.
I haven’t really eaten anything because food doesn’t stay
down. They have a tube that goes into my arm and
apparently that’s better than food. Danny brought me in
some biscuits but the nurses took them and ate them and
so I just told him they were nice but he hasn’t been for a
week so I think he thinks I was being ungrateful.
27 April 2012
I hate hospital and proactive text.
28 April 2012
My arm hasn’t improved so today they are operating on it
to see if there’s anything weird inside it. I hope I’m not
awake when they do it as it will hurt as they use a knife or
something to get through the skin. Breakfast this morning
was served at 6.30 and it was too early and I told them and
the woman serving it told me to stop moaning all the time
and I called her a cow because she was.
4 May 2012
I feel a bit sick after my operation and my hand hurts even
more now. I am waiting for a man called Dr Homes to come
and see me and I wonder if he smokes a pipe like Robert
Holmes?
5 May 2012
Today they have put a television in our room because some
stupid football’s on later and none of us even want to watch
the football, just fat old Michael in his stupid big bed with his
smelly old sores. I hate football. I have asked if we can get a
DVD player so we can all watch Colony in Space instead
because Mary in the bed opposite says she doesn’t care
what we watch. I like Colony in Space because it’s got a lot
of space in it unlike The Space Museum which actually
doesn’t have any space in it. Unless you mean space like you
get a space between two things (for example a cup and a
plate on a table have space between them, but it’s not black
with white dots unless you’re having supper in space itself
which is up in the air and if you were having supper there
you’d be dead). I have new pills to try to see if they can make
my arm stop getting bigger. I wondered at first if I might have
been touched by a Krynoid at some point but for the life of
me I can’t recall going near any pods or anything and I don’t
fancy steak so it’s probably nothing.
6 May 2012
So now a man is coming in from Australia to look at my arm
because he wants to try a new drug which is on trial just
like the Sixth Doctor.
7 May 2012
Lunches in the hospital are cancelled because of a power cut
so I just tried to leave to get something from the shops and
they wouldn’t let me because they said all the shops are
closed because the banks are having another holiday so
instead I’m just having what I can get from the vending
machine which was empty by the time I found my way back
to the ward. I have some peanut M&Ms and a carton of
Ribena. I’m very hungry. The man who died last week had
some biscuits he didn’t eat but I’m scared to eat them in
case they were poisoned.
8 May 2012
I’ve been sent home for five days until this Homes man
comes over from Australia. I had lots and lots of post when
I got in and could hardly open the door. Among the things I
got was a letter from the water people telling me my water
would be turned off for a few days while they do work in
the area and it starts today for five days. I can’t have a bath
anyway with my hand the size it is.
18 May 2012
Today I saw Doctor Homes and Doctor Homes isn’t a man
but an angry old woman. She was very rude and cross and
said my hand didn’t make any sense to her and she really
hurt it when she squeezed it and she took blood and stuff.
They also want me to wee in a little tiny cup twice every
day which is impossible because I tried last night and the
cup filled up really quickly and I couldn’t stop and the bed
was covered in wee and I couldn’t hold the cup and my
thingy properly with my big hand.
23 May 2012
I don’t even care about her ulcers – she snores and I hate
her.
25 May 2012
Now I’ve lost my pen and when I took one from the nurse
she reported it as a theft and now security won’t let me
leave my room but I have a room to myself which is good.
5 June 2012
Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.
Stupid. I am so cross.
10th June 2012
My custard is runny, my head hurts and Janet Fielding is
rubbish in The Timelash as Vena.
25 June 2012
Everything in my newsfeed is boring and you’re all boring
and I hope you have rubbish evenings which they will be
because you’re boring.
26 June 2012
I have been told that my update last night was rude. Well
poo to everyone that thought it was rude. I am really really
cross about the stupid hospital and I don’t care about any of
you.
1 July 2012
I have fixed the light in the kitchen by taking out the long
bulb and replacing it with a candle on the side counter which
I light when I need to see something and it was only fifty
pence when the man in the shop wanted five pounds for a
new long bulb! Madness.
5 July 2012
I will be at the London Film and Comic Con on Sunday
signing my book Turn Left: An Unofficial and Unauthorised
Guide to Doctor Who Road Signs and you should come and
see me because it would be nice of you to do that. (I will be
very slow to sign books because of my very big wrist.)
8 July 2012
I have to go all the way to London today. The man with the
train tickets says I have to take a bus part of the way but he
didn’t tell me which bus. Another man in a van said he’d give
me a lift so I’m in his fishy van now and he’s driving round
and round town muttering in another language. I think he’s
lost or cross or both.
10 October 2012
Today a man said I looked like a footballer and when I asked
him which footballer he said it didn’t matter and that any
footballer would do, as long as they looked the same as me.
I’ve never been told I look like a footballer before but I was
once told that I had nice trousers by a lady on a train.
17 October 2012
All the letters I put in the post yesterday have just been
delivered back to me. I don’t know why. They told me to
write my address on the back of the envelope which I did
and took nearly an hour in the post office while people got
angry with me. Stupid postman must have held them the
wrong way around.
3 December 2012
I have decided to become a 3-D computer artist so that I
can help to animate the stories that the BBC burned
because they were rubbish.
I have finished a
picture of William
Hartnell who played
the First Doctor
which you probably
didn't know. I spent a
long time on his white
hair which looks like a
girl's hair and I made
him really grumpy
because he was always
threatening to hit
Susan.
I will do Patrick
Troughton next who
played the Second
Doctor who was called The Doctor and a German man
called Salamander who looked just like the Doctor except
his hair was different. When I've finished them I will start
work on a TARDIS which is blue.
Befriend Andy - www.facebook.com/andyxcable
Ranking off the Doctors
1 PETER DAVISON
Peter Davison was the Doctor at the start of the eighties
which were a long time ago now and his best friend was
Nyssa who was very pretty and nice and liked the Doctor
very much indeed. She was very good at science and once
made a machine which vibrated an android to pieces which
is more than can be said for Peri who would’ve just
screamed at it or moaned until it got bored. The Fifth
Doctor wore celery on his jacket because it protected him
against gas or something. He is the very best Doctor of all
and I have met him four times and the third time he signed
my copy of Frontios which had giant woodlice and Tegan in it
but not Nyssa because she’d left by then.
2 TOM BAKER
The Fourth Doctor was the first Doctor to meet Nyssa who
is very pretty and nice and wasn’t as good a friend to the
Fourth Doctor because she hardly met him but she saw him
die and she worked out before the other stupid people there
that the Watcher had been the Doctor all the time which I
didn’t know and I was amazed when he turned into Peter
Davison. The Fourth Doctor wore a long scarf and shouted
at people a lot and he had to put up with Graham Williams
making rubbish stories for him to be in because everything
Graham Williams made was rubbish and I hated it because it
was stupid and Doctor Who shouldn’t be stupid.
3 JON PERTWEE
The Third Doctor reminds me of my nan because she used
to wear a long cloak and had white hair too but she never
did karate or judo and she didn’t drive a hovercraft through
dinosaur legs which Jon Pertwee does because it’s in the
script. I doubt he does it in real life because there aren’t any
dinosaurs that I know of yet. He was really good friends
with Jo Grant who was very pretty and sometimes she wore
really short skirts and you could see her knickers but only
if you paused the video right.
4 SYLVESTER McCOY AND PATRICK TROUGHTON
I can’t decide between them so they are both in fourth
place and they are both very similar because they both have
black hair and they both played the Doctor on the BBC.
They also both met Cybermen, Daleks and the Master but
the Second Doctor only met the Master very briefly in The
Five Doctors so it probably doesn’t count. The Second
Doctor never met the Kandyman or Lady Peinforte or Ace.
Ace was rubbish. I hate Ace.
Sylvester McCoy
old ballpoint pen
illustration © Andy X. Cable
5 COLIN BAKER
Colin Baker was a really angry man who shouted all the
time and tried to kill Peri. I think if your name is Baker you
have to shout at people. I don’t think Tom Baker ever tried
to kill Peri but I bet he would’ve done if he’d have met her.
The Sixth Doctor didn’t really do much as he fell off his bike
and died after only doing a couple of stories and they were
mostly rubbish except the ones with Mel in them who was
really pretty and a very good friend to the Doctor even
though his hair had gone stupid.
6 CHRISTOPHER ECCELSTON
I don’t really care about the rest of the Doctors because
they’re all rubbish but I really like them so I will write about
them. Christopher Eccelston was a really common Doctor
because he had a northern accent which sounded silly. He
wore a leather jacket which looked really good so Mum
bought me one for Christmas but she couldn’t find a boy’s
one so she got me a girl’s one and it didn’t really fit properly
and she’d had to get it from a special leather shop and it
had words on the back that she didn’t know about until I
put it on for the first time on Christmas Day. I won’t say
what it said because it was very rude indeed but I haven’t,
despite what it says, and I never will. I think Christopher
Eccelston probably would though.
7 PAUL McGANN
If it’s not bad enough having Scottish and northern Doctors,
now we have to have a Scouse Doctor who mumbles all the
time and keeps kissing people. I live in Liverpool and nobody
speaks like that here. He sounds strange. I don’t like the
little Chinese boy either because he lies and steals things
and Mum said everyone from abroad does that which is why
she won’t let me shop in the Spar even though it’s cheaper.
The TARDIS looked amazing in this story and had bats in it
which was weird because we never heard them in any other
story and you’d think they’d flutter by once or twice if
they’d been in there all that time. Paul McGann was so bad
they wouldn’t let him make any more stories and made him
turn into Christopher Eccelston who had bigger ears and
shorter hair.
8 DAVID TENNANT
I hate him. He’s rubbish.
9 MATT SMITH
The boy Matt Smith is very strange because I think he’s
probably a really good Doctor but he’s always in such
rubbish stories surrounded by boring people like stupid
River Song and ugly Amy who looks like she’s made from
pins. He has a really big face which is like Peter Davison’s
which when you draw it you realise is a really small face but
with a massive head to put the face on resulting in lots of
space around the outside of his face that you feel you
should colour-in or do something with because it really
stands out. He’s also friends with a boy called Rory who’s a
nurse and everyone knows nurses are girls so new Doctor
Who is even more stupid than I said before when I said it
was really stupid.
10 WILLIAM HARTNELL
The First Doctor is a horrible, violent man. He tries to
murder a caveman in his very first story and he threatens to
smack Susan’s bottom in another story. He really hates
Susan as he’s always telling her off or shouting at her. I can’t
imagine any other Doctors smacking their friends’ bottoms.
Would Matt Smith smack Rory’s bottom? Would the Third
Doctor put the Brigadier over his knee? The Fifth Doctor
would certainly never pull down Nyssa’s skirt and smack
her pretty bottom. I know because I asked him at a
convention once and the stewards wouldn’t let me get
anything else signed after that. Stewards at conventions are
horrible bullies just like William Hartnell.
Andy Cable’s favourite Doctor Who stories
My most favourite story ever is The Paradise Towers because
there’s so much excitement in it. You’ve got the Kangs who
are all so pretty and Pex, the caretakers, the Rezzies who
remind me of Mum the way they hate outsiders and threaten
people with knives and of course Mel who is definitely the
very best friend the Doctor has ever had. I’d love to visit
Paradise Towers but I don’t know where they filmed it. It
looks really really tall though.
I like Mawdryn's Undead because Nyssa is so pretty in it and
the Brigadier comes back twice and Turlough and Tegan are
in it too because it’s Turlough’s first story and he has a
crystal which the Black Guardian gave him so he could kill
the Doctor with it. The Brigadier mentions Benton at one
point and says he sells second-hand cars now and I wonder
if that’s where the Brigadier got his car from and if Benton
gave him a discount or not because they used to work
together. Elaine in WH Smiths gives me a discount whenever
I go in there because I never told anyone about her and
James.
The Claws and Axos is a really good story because Jo Grant
looks really pretty and the Master is in it too and he wears
a suit. It’s got the Third Doctor, played by the brother of Bill
Pertwee, Jon Pertwee in it. He wears big cloaks which look
a bit like Mum’s old blanket she had on her bed which I got
glue on when I was making my Dalek a few weeks ago.
The Five Doctors is an amazing story because it has so many
Doctors in it (more than five!) and Caroline John looks really
pretty in it. Elisabeth Sladen comes back as usual and K9 has
a little scene when really he should’ve been in the whole
thing because the Fourth Doctor and Romana are in it and
they would’ve had a K9 as well. K9 is really rubbish though
and they gave him his own TV series with Australians where
he looked all weird like a red-eyed woodlouse. He flew and
shot lasers and stuff and I found it really, really boring. I sat
through lots and lots of episodes and neither the Doctor
nor even Romana showed up once. Why does Sarah even
have a K9 anyway? She left in The Hand of Fears long before
the Doctor ever met or stole K9 so how did she get one?
There was a book which came out by Terence Dudley which
tried to explain it away by saying the Doctor sent her a K9
but I know that that’s rubbish. I think she must’ve got it
from the second Romana somehow.
Another of my all-time favourites is Terror of the Vervoids
because Janet the waitress is very pretty and really nice and
friendly and I think I could have a really nice meal with her
if I ever met her. She works on a spaceship where there’s a
murder and the Doctor gets involved to try and find out
what happened with the help of his friend Melanie. I can’t
really remember if he worked it out or not because the
story kept stopping for the Doctor’s trial and some things
happened when other things didn’t and I got confused and
never really finished it. Also it was really difficult to get my
videos out of the TARDIS tin they came in which was stupid
because it didn’t have a light on it. The plant-men were
called Vervoids and they stuck massive thorns in people’s
necks just like Leela did. So why didn’t the Doctor kill Leela
too?
I like Keeper of the Traken because it’s the first story with
Nyssa in it and I like Nyssa a lot and she’s the Doctor’s best
friend after Mel. I can’t imagine how he would choose
between Mel and Nyssa. If Davros or Tobias Vaughn held a
gun to either of their heads and asked the Doctor to
choose I really don’t know which one he would save. That
said I’m not sure Davros could hold a gun to someone’s head
because he’s only got one arm and it’s all wrinkled and
crackly and it would probably be a heavy gun. He’d have to
get Nyder to do it for him but I can’t work out why Nyder
and Davros would be in a room with Mel and Nyssa. Also I
suppose the question depends on whether he’s asked to
choose one of them to die or to choose one of them to live
but the Doctor would know what to do because he asked
some mummies in a pyramid on Mars in The Pyramid of Mars.
They’re both very logical girls so they’d probably understand
but I wouldn’t trust Davros as it would probably be some
sort of trick and he’d kill them both. I’d kill Peri because she’s
annoying and shouts all the time and she has a body like a
little boy’s.
I can tell you stories I don’t like! There are lots of stories I
don’t like. I hate that stupid new series which has just been
on the telly which had Hitler and a robot and stupid River
stupid Pond and her stupid eyepatch and stupid Amy and
stupid Rory and the stupid console room which looks like
marbles in a yellow fishtank.
River Song
biro
illustration © Andy X. Cable
I don’t even know who or what River Pond is. She’s just an
old woman who talks really slowly and goes cross-eyed
sometimes. There was some rubbish about her being Amy’s
daughter but that’s just stupid because River Pond not only
has a different name to Amy’s daughter but also she’s clearly
far too old to be her daughter and even if she was her
daughter, why wouldn’t she just say she was her daughter
when they met instead of going around with her stupid
diary and talking about stupid things that the Doctor
apparently hasn’t done yet, but he must’ve done them or
she wouldn’t know about them or have written them down.
River Pond is rubbish and I hate her.
I hate Rose too. Rose is stupid and boring and annoying and
just goes around kissing everything or crying. I think kissing
must make her cry for some reason. The Doctor seemed
to really like her and I don’t know why because all she ever
did was complain and she was horrible to Mickey who
seemed to be a nice boy but she barely spent any time with
him and clearly hated him even though he was meant to be
her boyfriend.
I don’t like Martha either. Martha’s even more boring than
Rose and she liked the Doctor a bit too much and got really
creepy and scary, especially when she was covered in goo
and went bad when the Sontarans came back and they were
really small and blue.
I really hate Doctor Who and the Silurians as well because it’s
a stupid title and the Doctor’s name isn’t ‘Who’ apparently
so they were really stupid to do that. Nobody called Susan
‘Susan Who’ at school did they? So he must be Doctor
Foreman because that’s her surname and she’s meant to be
the Doctor’s granddaughter. I think that works, assuming
her mummy didn’t marry anyone which I can’t say for sure
because we don’t see anything on TV which explains that. In
fact I looked this up and it means the Doctor must have a
daughter which he does in the new series because David
Tennant marries her though really she’s a different Doctor’s
daughter which is really confusing and I’m going to just give
up on this now and finish it later. (He didn’t. Ed.)
The Eleven Doctors
I was going to end the new version of my old book with a
drawing I commissioned by myself of all Eleven Doctors
because this year is the special anniversary of Doctor Who
and I don’t know how to make cakes.
The first Doctor I did a
drawing of was the Second
Doctor Patrick Troughton
because I didn’t want to draw
the First Doctor William
Hartnell first because he was
a bully and he was always
really cross. It took ages to
draw Patrick Troughton as the
Second Doctor and I got so
illustration © Andy X. Cable
bored I couldn’t be bothered
to draw all the others and you must know what they look
like anyway so I don’t know why I even bothered drawing
the Second Doctor now.
The last drawing I did for
this book is the Eleventh
Doctor, the boy Matt Smith.
He is sad because this is
the end of my book and the
rest is just stupid adverts
for other books I don't
care about. He's probably
also fed up with River
stupid Song and her
‘spoilers’, ‘sweety’ rubbish. I
hate her so much.
illustration © Andy X. Cable
AVAILABLE NOW FROM MIWK PUBLISHING
JUSTYCE SERVED
A SMALL START WITH A BIG FINISH
by Alun Harris and Matthew West
In 1984 a group of Doctor Who fans began a project which would
continue for another decade and eventually lead to much greater things.
Audio Visuals: Audio Adventures in Time & Space were a non-profit, fan
endeavour creating full-cast audio Doctor Who drama. 27 plays later the
majority of the creative team would go on to be involved with Big Finish,
an officially licensed range of Doctor Who audio dramas.
For many fans Audio Visuals seem almost canon. Nicholas Briggs was our
Doctor. We remember the Daleks’ destruction of Gallifrey before it even
happened on TV. We supported our Doctor through drug addiction,
companion-loss and the horror of Justyce.
This book is a guide to those days.
With contributions from Nicholas Briggs, Gary Russell, Nigel Fairs, John
Ainsworth, John Wadmore, Alistair Lock, Patricia Merrick, Richard
Marson, Nigel Peever, Jim Mortimore, Andy Lane, Chris M Corney and
many others, all wrapped up in a new cover by Tim Keable.
Celebrate Doctor Who fan creativity at its very best.
100% OF THE THE AUTHORS' PROFITS FROM THIS BOOK WILL
BE DONATED TO AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL UK.
ISBN 978-1-908630-03-2
RRP £17.99
(£9.99 if ordered direct from Miwk Publishing)
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THE LIFE & SCANDALOUS TIMES OF
by Richard Marson
For more than a decade, John Nathan-Turner was in charge of every
major artistic and practical decision affecting the world’s longestrunning science fiction programme, Doctor Who. Richard Marson brings
his story to life with the benefit of his own inside knowledge and the
fruits of over 100 revealing interviews with key friends and colleagues,
those John loved and those from whom he became estranged. The author
has also had access to all of Nathan-Turner’s surviving archive of
paperwork and photos, many of which appear here for the very first time.
‘Completely addictive – scurrilous, fascinating, hilarious and naughty...’
Sophie Aldred (Ace)
‘Reading it has been like travelling back in time myself. You’ve really
brought John back to life, as complex and unpredictable
as I remember him.’
Kate Easteal (John’s secretary, 1986–88)
ISBN 978-1-908630-13-1
RRP £17.99
(£13.99 if ordered direct from Miwk Publishing)
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n
w
o
r
u
o
n
i
g
n
i
w
o
l
Wal
AN AUTON GUIDE TO
the stories behind the stories of the Seventh Doctor
Doctor Who is now in its fifty-first year and enjoying its 12th 13th 14th
latest of many actors to take on the lead role. Every era is different, each
actor brings their own style to the role, each producer and script editor
makes their mark and probably Sylvester McCoy’s era is one of the most
divisive among fandom.
The Auton guide to the stories behind the Seventh Doctor’s era answers
all the questions fans haven’t been asking :
Cleaning Robots: What can you actually clean with a drill and a saw
blade? We tried.
Who built the Rani’s lair? How long did it take?
And how did Delta fit into Mel’s dress?
We worry about these things so you don’t have to.
SOME THEMES AND IMAGES IN THIS BOOK ARE OF AN ADULT NATURE.
FOR THIS REASON, DISCRETION IS ADVISED FOR YOUNGER READERS.
AUTHOR'S PROCEEDS FROM THE SALE OF THIS BOOK WILL BE
DONATED TO ALZHEIMER'S SOCIETY.
ISBN 978-1-908630-76-6
RRP £17.99
(£6.99 if ordered direct from Miwk Publishing)
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Drama and
Delight
the life and legacy of
verity lambert
by Richard Marson
For five decades, the name Verity Lambert appeared on the end credits of
many of Britain’s most celebrated and talked about television dramas, among
them Adam Adamant Lives!, Budgie, The Naked Civil Servant, Eldorado,
G.B.H. and Jonathan Creek. She was the very first producer of Doctor Who,
which she nurtured through its formative years at a time when there were
few women in positions of power in the television industry. Later, she became
a pioneering independent producer, founding her own highly-successful
company, Cinema Verity.
Within her profession, she was hugely respected as an intensely driven,
sometimes formidable but always stylish exponent of her craft, with the
stamina and ability to combine quantity with quality. Many of her
productions have had a lasting cultural and emotional impact on their
audiences and continue to be enjoyed to this day.
But who was the woman behind all these television triumphs and what was
the price she paid to achieve them?
Drama and Delight capturse the energy and spirit of this remarkable woman
and explore her phenomenal and lasting legacy.
ISBN 978-1-908630-33-9
RRP Hardback £19.99, paperback £17.99
(£17.99 / £14.99 if ordered direct from Miwk Publishing)
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Eight years of bizarre cartoons from
the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
...the earth was invaded by a horde of sticklebacks?
...Jackson Lake thought he was Mr T and not the Doctor?
...the TARDIS crew met Posh and Becks?
From the pages of Panini’s Doctor Who Magazine comes a complete
collection of Jamie Lenman’s comic strip, published under the name
‘Baxter’.
Collected here for the first time, these are presented in a full-colour
hardback book and includes some unpublished early drafts, rejected
ideas and commentary from Jamie.
Miwk Publishing will be donating £1 for every copy sold to Giggle
Doctors – Theodora Children’s Trust (http://uk.theodora.org/en-gb)
ISBN 978-1-908630-73-5
RRP £19.99
(£14.99 if ordered direct from Miwk Publishing)
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THE QUEST FOR PEDLER
THE LIFE AND IDEAS OF DR KIT PEDLER
by Michael Seely
“...a staggeringly-thorough piece of work... Literally no stone has been left
unturned in presenting an exhaustive record of the life and times of a
unique and rare talent” Starburst Magazine
For many people, Kit Pedler is best remembered as the man who created
the Cybermen for Doctor Who, a real life scientist who was brought in to
act as an advisor and bring some science to the fiction. The Cybermen were
his ultimate scientific horror: where the very nature of a man was altered by
himself, by his own genius for survival, creating a monster. Pedler was that
rare animal, a scientist with an imagination. He liked to think 'What if...?'
Together with his friend and writing partner Gerry Davis, he created the
hugely successful and controversial BBC1 drama series Doomwatch, which
captured this fear and frightened the adults as much as the Cybermen
scared the children.
With contributions from his family, friends, colleagues and critics, this
book tells the story behind a fascinating, charismatic, complicated, and
demanding human being; a natural teacher who didn't just want to
pontificate about the problems facing the world in a television or radio
studio, but actually do something practical about them.
ISBN 978-1-908630-33-9
RRP £17.99
(£12.99 if ordered direct from Miwk Publishing)
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For over a decade from 1982 to 1995, Tim Quinn would write and Dicky
Howett would draw the regular comic strip in Marvel’s
Doctor Who Magazine.
Silly, wacky and always funny, these strips led to two spin-off
publications in the late eighties by which time the strip had moved with
the evolving magazine and gone to colour.
Reprinted here for the first time is a collection of well over 150 strips,
some in full colour, from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine as well as
the contents of both The Doctor Who Fun Book and It’s Bigger on the
Inside. The artwork has been painstakingly restored to provide the best
quality reproduction possible.
Also included along the way are the thoughts of Tim & Dicky and some
previously unpublished material along with some Doctor Who material
Dicky Howett produced long before his time on Doctor Who Magazine
going back as far as 1966. Not only that, but all their work for the Doctor
Who Specials and the Doctor Who Yearbooks.
It really is even bigger on the inside …
ISBN 978-1-908630-41-4
RRP £24.99
(£18.99 if ordered direct from Miwk Publishing)
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ti m e a nd
spa c e s
a photo journal of
doctor who filming
by Yee Jee Tso
In 1996, Doctor Who came back to our screens after a seven year hiatus.
A new Doctor (Paul McGann) faced off against his old adversary The Master
(Eric Roberts) with help from new friends Grace (Daphne Ashbrook) and
Chang Lee (Yee Jee Tso).
Unable to film in San Francisco, the production used locations in Canada
instead.
Now, 20 years later, Yee Jee Tso revisits these locations and, together with
photographs he took on set at the time, and new photographs depicting the
locations now, he pieces together the production process and the history
behind the locations used – the Time and Spaces.
This love-letter to the Doctor Who TV Movie is presented in a full-colour,
square-shaped, deluxe hardback (approx 78 pages, 156mm x 156mm)
featuring photographs never previously published.
ISBN 978-1-908630-33-9
RRP Hardback £17.99
(£14.99 if ordered direct from Miwk Publishing)
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TIME &
SPACE
& TIME
TRUTHLESS BILGE ABOUT EVERY
DOCTOR WHO STORY EVER
by Robert Hammond
Who sent Phillip Hinchcliffe a special rug and nine goslings?
Why did Palitoy lose £26, five shillings and sixpence?
Who wasn’t keen on ‘dumb little lizards’?
Who wanted a French monkey puppet?
Read this book and find out...
£1 from every copy of this book sold will be donated to the PDSA
(People's Dispensary for Sick Animals)
ISBN 978-1-908630-71-1
Hardback £15.99 if ordered direct from Miwk Publishing)
AVAILABLE NOW FROM MIWK PUBLISHING
A
P E C U L I A R
E F F E C T
O N
T H E
B B C
by Bernard Wilkie
Bernard Wilkie is a pioneer in the world of visual effects. Along with Jack
Kine he co-founded the BBC’s Visual Effects Department in 1954. Between
them they worked on too many BBC productions to list, but they included
Doctor Who, Out of the Unknown, Quatermass, Monty Python’s Flying
Circus, and Some Mothers Do ‘ave ‘em. Bernard passed away in 2002,
having written this book in the late 1990s.
Whether it’s trying to make a smoke gun, encase an Ice Warrior in a block of
ice, create a Loch Ness Monster or simply come up with a way of presenting
a photo collection on screen utilising only one studio camera, Bernard and
Jack rose to the occasion – often choking, soaking and terrifying their
colleagues in the process. And almost all of these effects had to be done live
– the pressure was on!
Bernard also talks in detail about the BBC taking over Ealing Studios and
the construction of the now-defunct Television Centre. For anyone
interested in the history of television, this is a fascinating eye witness
account.
Foreword by visual effects designer Mat Irvine and afterword by visual
effects designer Mike Tucker.
ISBN 978-1-908630-33-9
RRP £17.99
(£14.99 if ordered direct from Miwk Publishing)
p u b l i s h i n g
www.miwk.com/
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www.twitter.com/#!/MiwkPublishing
p u b l i s h i n g
Many DOCTOR WHO fans love to collect things.
Whether it's old episodes, books, scripts, replica
costumes or used underwear, they'll collect it to
the very end. Andy Cable used to have a website
which drew well over two million hits in just
under a week, and his love for DOCTOR WHO
couldn't have been stronger when his collection
was cruelly taken away, but he bounced back to
start a new one.
Armed only with his little black book and a small
blue pen he'd got from Argos, he began listing
and cataloguing DOCTOR WHO-related road
signs. Now his collection, which he's spent
nearly seven months working on, is presented in
what he hopes will be the first of several
volumes. His passion will become your passion
in this genuine and fanatical page-turner.
‘When I first heard about this book, I had a feeling
that I might like it, that it might appeal to my own,
slightly left-field, sense of humour. I was wrong.
TURN LEFT exceeds every expectation I had. I
absolutely adore it. 10 out of 10.’
J.R. Southall, Starburst Magazine
U.K. . . . . . . .. . . . . . . £14.99
U.S.A. . . . . . . . . . . . $22.99
AUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $22.99
EURO . . . . . . . . . . . . € 18.99
ISBN 978-1-908630-24-7