Find and Replace

Katy Manning is brilliant. Really, that should be a required t-shirt slogan for every single Doctor Who fan. Not content with playing that emblem of early seventies Britain, Jo Grant, she also had a pivotal role in creating the audio version of the wonderful Iris Wildthyme.

As she says in the short interview which follows on from the action in Paul Magrs' fantastic new Companion Chronicle, Find and Replace, when first playing Iris Peter Davison, playing the Doctor, asked in horror of her accent 'Are you really intending to play it like that?' and thank God she said yes, or we'd have missed out on so much. Without that broad Mancunian accent perhaps the character would have remained trapped in prose but with it she flew until that voice is now the one that I hear when reading Iris' adventures, a the defining characteristic of Miss Wildthyme.

Which means that the combination of Katy playing Iris, Jo and the Third Doctor in Find and Replace is a dream come true for someone like me who adores all three and views the seventies as the high-spot of British television. Throw in the best writer of modern Doctor Who penning the script and, frankly, I'm in genre heaven.

Make no doubt about it, Find and Replace is the best single Big Finish release bar none since Magrs' earlier Ringpullworld and demonstrates that, when the company uses the very best talent available, it's capable of creating stories on a par with any genre work in any medium anywhere.

The acting is, of course, superb. Katy is astonishing, at times switching smoothly from Jo's winsome little girl voice, to Iris' barking Lancashire to Pertwee's patrician tones in the space of a few seconds. That Alex Lowe as the novelisor Huxley is in no way embarrassed by such a tour de force performance is indicative of his quality too, but both actors are helped immeasurably by the quality of Magrs' script, which flows and eddies as smoothly as a pint of Guinness, sliding from nostalgic reverie as Jo imagines the Doctor moving about in his lab directly above her, to unexpected confrontation as...well, you better listen to it yourself really :)

There's a very genuine sense of sheer pleasure in every aspect of Find and Replace, a very real feeling that everyone involved is having a whale of a time, best summed up by the triumphant whoop of 'Let's go back to the Seventies!' which ends part one. Credit for some of this must presumably go to director Lisa Bowerman, who contrives to keep everything moving along and to avoid the temptation to clutter the sound-scape with intrusive background bells and whistles (unlike some of the other BF directors).

Hugely recommended.

Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus

You know how it is. Your favourite book series goes belly up or starts printing books that just aren't as good as they used to be. You're stuck re-reading The Also People and The Blue Angel and - good as those two books are - moaning to people that everything's a bit rubbish now.

So it was that, with the various Who books lines either disappearing or printing books aimed at a younger audience, we - that's Paul Magrs and I - decided that this would be a great time to launch a new more adult oriented Who-related fiction imprint, publishing officially licensed Iris Wildthyme books.

Everything's a little bit hush-hush at the moment, but the first book is going to be a short story collection entitled

'Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus'

and will be published late next Spring. We're keeping authors names under our hats (there will be a story from Paul obviously) but expect lots of Who fiction luminaries to be announced over the coming few weeks

The aim is to use any profit from the short story collection to kick-off a series of twice yearly Iris novellas. The books will only be available in a limited, numbered and autographed run. Don't worry though - they definitely won't be wildly expensive. Books are for reading not hiding in display cabinets.

One thing we can announce is that June Hudson, utterly legendary Who costume designer and the brains behind the famous season 18 costumes amongst many other things, has kindly agreed to do the cover art, about which we're both totally chuffed.

Further information will appear on obversebooks.co.uk, where you can currently sign up for our mailing list and so keep abreast of upcoming news...

Something Borrowed, Everything New

There are good ideas and there are great ideas.

Naming a band 'Dogs Die in Hot Cars' and my own plan to remake Seven Brides for Seven Brothers using only the music of 'The Smiths' are good ideas.

Tetris, naming a band 'The Jesus and Mary Chain', and Joss Whedon making his vampire slayer a hot young Valley girl are great ideas.

But Paul Magrs making his vampire hunter the Bride of Frankenstein? Now that's a superb idea.

Not that I'd want to give the impression that Magrs' series of books about Brenda (Whitby B&B woman and wonderfully human creature of the night) is in any sense a mere extension of Whedon's earlier TV series. As Torchwood amply demonstrated, trying to copy Joss Whedon leads only to crass scenes of alien sex in toilets and tedious yawnfests aplenty - and Paul Magrs isn't the pinching ideas kind of writer in any case. Other writers work isn't so much grist to his mill as an odd kind of mulch fermenting in his head, being subsumed and broken down to its constituent parts before being launched back into the fresh air as something virtually unrecognisable (that sounds a bit arty-farty, I know, but I'm trying to attract a higher class of readership - more people like Steven Fry and Anthony Stewart-Head and fewer like Saffy and Steven :-)

Which brings me neatly to Magrs new book, Something Borrowed, the sequel to Never the Bride, in which all manner of dark and forgotten creatures come burrowing back into the light of day to menace Brenda and Effie(see that's the kind of new, more intellectual segue we're going for now - someone explain what's going on to Scott please).

Opening a little after the events of the first novel in the series, Never The Bride, Something Borrowed features (as you would expect) many of the cast of that book but also - to the delight of this reader at least - Henry Cleavis, Reg Tyler and the rest of the Smudgelings, as seen in both Magrs' Doctor Who novel, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and his more recent 'real world' novel, To the Devil - A Diva. Perhaps we can look forward to an appearance of the poodles of Dogworld, horror queen Karla Sorenson and the cast of dodgy soap opera Menswear in future books in the series? Maybe even Iris Wildthyme herself? I can tell you now, that would be cooler than a sculpture of David Bowie made of ice cream. Cooler even than that, if you can imagine such a thing.

Back to the present book though. Hmm, it's not easy to sum up a Paul Magrs book in a single sentence, which might explain why marketing pod-people seem incapable of launching such an individual talent into the literary stratosphere, whilst pedestrian chunderers like JK Rowling rake in hundreds of millions of pounds for their mundane and inept sagas. [Damn, I'm already losing my air of studied professionalism and slipping into my usual stock whining - give me another ten lines and I'll be calling Russell T Davies and Vladimir Romanov a pair of duplicitous shits.]

Let's try that again...

Back to the present book though. Fresh from the discovery that Whitby hosts its very own Hellmouth, Brenda unexpectedly hooks up with old flame, centenarian academic and Smudlgelings' founder member, Henry Cleavis and in doing so awakens long repressed memories from the past. Meanwhile, someone is sending poison pen letters round town, Effie and the Womanzee get shot at, Sheila Manchu turns to the ladies for help and Brenda has some very unexpected visitations in the night.

This is, quite simply, the best book of last year - a marvellous mix of an Alan Moore comic and an Alan Bennett play, packed with the odd, the perverse and the fabulous, stuffed with memorable characters and over-flowing with incident, both humorous and otherwise. Where else but in a Magrs novel would you expect to see both the Bride of Frankenstein rescuing her 100 year old lover from Goomba the Wicker(work Chair) Man and a genuinely human and touching tale of the strengths which bind friends together?

Nowhere, that's where.

Which is why Magrs is an author to be treasured in these days of writing by rote and publishing only the plastic and the puerile. Do everyone a favour - don't bother buying whatever the latest formulaic Garth Nix bollocks is called and buy Never the Bride instead. Then go to Amazon, ignore the adverts for The Bejewelled Sword of Wizardry in the Land of Implausible Unicorns and Other Faintly Chirpy Shit and buy Something Borrowed.

You won't regret it, I guarantee it.

Random Recommendations

In proper lazy blogger fashion, here's some thoughts on stuff I've enjoyed recently, including stuff I've already posted on a mailing list.

Doctor Who - Black Orchid (1982)

The first episode of Black Orchid is the best single episode of the Davison years. Discuss.

Best start to an episode? Check. Man gets murdered by mysterious figure. Nyssa apparently sleeping in a four poster bed, tossing in her sleep. Wierd Indian looking guy with a plate in his mouth. It's like a 'proper' mystery from the start.

Best joke? Check.
"That was a performance worthy of the Master"
"The Master?!"
"Yes, the other Doctor" (pause) "WG Grace."

Best setting? Check. No monsters for once and in a country house, so properly lit and shot by the BBC. A cricket match, the world's biggest Priest's Hole and a fancy dress ball - what could be better? The Doctor wandering about in his dressing gown, that's what.

Best performances? Check. There's not a bad supporting performance in Black Orchid, and Sarah Sutton turns in her best performance on the show. Janet Fielding is excellent as a flirtatious rathen than complaining Tegan, and Terence Dudley/Matthew Waterhouse manage between them to give Adric a genuine (if shallow) personality in this story (cleverly one which is stolen wholesale from turn of the century Boys Adventure stories - Adric as the Fat Owl of the Remove is something they should have run with instead of killing him off).

Best cliffhanger? Well, no (that would be the firing squad in 'Androzani'), but it's still a decent one, with the viewer unsure if it's Ann or Nyssa under the mask, and therefore uncertain whether she might in fact be killed.

Episode 2 isn't quite as good, but the performances remain solid, George Cranleigh's make-up is excellent (his hand perhaps less so) and the ending is satisfying dramatically and never over-played, for all its obvious literary antecedents.

Other good moments worth mentioning as they pop randomly into my head - Nyssa unknowingly asking for booze and Cranleigh saying 'lemonade for the children' thereby implicitly suggesting that Cranleigh thinks of his fiance Ann as a child; the avuncular policeman failing to be overly rattled by the interior of the TARDIS; and Nyssa and Tegan doing the Charleston long before the Doctor Dances.

It was a Golden Age...

Twin Freaks - Paul Magrs (2007)

Twin Freaks is the new children's novel from Paul Magrs and is well worth taking a look at, either as a quick read for an adult or a slightly longer one for a child.

Like 2002's All the Rage, in Twin Freaks Magrs takes his inspiration from culture so popular as to leave me feeling like Sir Jeremiah Harman confronted by Gazza. Instead of the horror of boy bands, however, this time round Paul plumbs the painful depths of X-Factor.

It's a nice idea - take one beautiful, but talent free, sister and one plain, but vocally exceptional, sister (who's also a dwarf), mix them together and ta da - beautiful and talented Siamese twins.

There's not a great deal more I can say about this book - I said it was a book for 'children' rather than 'young adult' because unlike his most recent non-adult book, Exchange, Twin Freaks is most definitely aimed at the younger audience. As with the earlier Hands Up this is funny, clever and entertaining and makes a point about the problems of growing up in a non-traditional family, without descending into the preachy or forgetting that the book would be nothing without a good story as its backbone. You can't really ask for more and I suspect pre-teen readers will like this a lot (Alex will no doubt tell me when she reads it).

Description of a car journey in Mumbai

This is even lazier since it's just a link - but I think this is the best non-fiction Scott has ever written, full of lovely imagery and strange detail. Skip past the first bit, whcih is a bit dull, and go straight to the section that starts 'Night falls quickly in the tropics'. A beautiful, evocative piece of writing.

Night falls quickly in the tropics

Achewood

Another link, but today's Achewood perfectly sums up the glory of that comic strip - funny, sad, odd and with an alt tag that adds to the whole.

The Hardest Call

Scrabulous

Either via Facebook or on the dedicated website, online Scrabble is the latest craze to hit the little corner of the 'net I generally sit in. Give it a go - even better, if you're rubbish, challenge me to a game and let me boost my fragile ego by beating you!

Twin Freaks

This is the first review I've seen of Paul's new book out next month*, and the reviewer generally has excellent taste so it's good to see that he's very positive about it.

Like the reviewer I wasn't entirely sure about the idea behind this one but as he says 'Singing Siamese twin sisters' are a sure fire winner.

http://marcusgipps.livejournal.com/41671.html

Also, the cover to Something Borrowed, the sequel to Magrs' Never the Bride, is now on Amazon.



* Twin Freaks is also the name of a Paul McCartney album seemingly.

"A Fine Prospect of Happiness"

Bride: "A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her" - Ambrose Bierce

Part of what marks Paul Magrs' Doctor Who books out from the tie-in herd is the plethora of ideas which seem to pour out from his head onto the page, with one insanely wonderful concept following the next like a series of bright marbles thudding down a wooden staircase. Glass men and cardboard UNIT captains tumble after mutating gila monsters and time splicing pinking shears; manipulative power-mad poodles bound alongside fantastically-endowed Robins, the Queen of Spring and Baker-shaped sex robots; and a TARDIS in the shape of a double decker bus putters down behind the lot of them, a gin-soaked old harpy at the wheel.

On the other hand, in the non-Who world Magrs started off writing 'traditional' magic realist novels. Interesting and imaginative ones, granted, and as well written as you would expect, but in certain ways deliberately limited by their chosen form. It was only in Who that he appeared to really let rip and in doing so created work which you really can't imagine anyone else doing (compare Iris in Marked for Life and her appearance in the early sections of The Blue Angel in a similar setting, for instance).

With To the Devil - a Diva Magrs began to bring more of the style of his Who novels into his mainstream work, but it's only in Never the Bride that a wholly successful mix has been achieved.

There are obvious similarities between the two novels and in some ways To the Devil can be seen as a rehearsal for Never the Bride* - specifically in that both novels use the tropes and trappings of horror movies in place of Who lore to weave a truly fantastic tale set in contemporary England.

It's an interesting point, actually - for Magrs to write this kind of book, he needs something to play with, something to roll between his fingers, mutate and subvert. In these two novels, Magrs replaces the long history of Doctor Who with that of, respectively, the Hammer and Universal horror film collections and gently tweaks their tails while creating something altogether new from the base material.

There is still a leavening of the grittiness of his early novels, which is all to the good (the depiction of the submerged loneliness of the two leads is particularly well done), but Never the Bride isn't a 'literary' novel in the sense that, say, 'Could it be Magic?' was. This is a piece of work informed by the visual not written media, where the creations of James Whale and Tod Browning, not Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, come flocking to Joss Whedon's Hellmouth - only to be confronted not by the petite Sarah Michelle Gellar, but by Elsa Lanchester as the 'monsterous' Bride of Frankenstein.

Or Brenda the B&B Lady as he's known to her friends in Whitby.

Which is the point at which To the Devil and Never the Bride deviate. To the Devil has been described, pretty unfairly, as a "Harry Potter parody for naughty big boys" - it's a lazy comparison, but it is fair to say that To the Devil could easily be made into a big-screen extravaganza in the Potter mould, filled with visual spectacle and colourful set-pieces. The characters remain true to their reassuringly recognisable roots - Karla is a Hammer queen in the mould of Ingrid Pitt, Lance is the archetypal soap star and so on - and the urban Manchester and flashback evacuee settings are ones which viewers might expect and which they are likely to be comfortable with, and the Wheatley-esque elements provide a cinema-friendly frisson of the occult.

Never the Bride, on the other hand, could only be filmed if Tim Burton or David Lynch wanted to do it as a TV series. It's set in a small old-fashioned town, there's a plethora of monsters, the good guys and bad guys are not who you might initially expect and swap places now and again, the novel ends with a ton of loose ends and the story line is really a set of linked short stories rather than a linear threaded narrative. It's very clear that this is a deliberate ploy by the author - each chapter is a different self-contained episode with the entire novel as a season arc, as Brenda and Effie bustle about town investigating sinister goings-on and bitching about their neighbours, as though Mapp and Lucia had become friends and turned detective. Affectionate nods to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Most Haunted and Twin Peaks serve to cement the feeling of a TV series in prose.

It's beautifully paced and enormously well-written, with some absolute killer lines - and it's got more ideas in it than a dozen JK Rowling books.

I've long lamented the fact that the death of the Doctor Who book range meant that we'd likely never see another book like Mad Dogs and Englishmen from Paul Magrs, but with the announcement of a sequel to Never the Bride it might well be that we now have something better.

Paul Magrs has created his own universe in which to play and, as readers, we can only be happy.


*They're even both obviously set in the Whoniverse - Professor Cleavis from Mad Dogs makes an appearance in to the Devil and MIAOW from the same book and the short story Entertaining Mr O pops up in Never the Bride. The Martians also apparently invaded at the end of the nineteenth century - a reference to War of the Worlds to add to the League of Extraordinarily Monsterous Gentlemen feel to the novel, or a plot point for the sequel?

The Complete Wildthyme III: "Femme Fatale"

"Femme Fatale" (More Short Trips, BBC Books, 1999)

Ah, this is more like it. This is where it really gets going. To coin a
phrase, there's a riot goin' on in this story.

This is Doctor Who recast as the Avengers, obviously, but it's also Who as
written by Michael Moorcock, with the Doctor, Iris et al filtered through
Paul's take on the 1960's New Wave, with the music of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed
playing in the background.

Equally obviously therefore, it's about as far from trad Who as you can
get - timelines bend round in knots, chunks of text are repeated word for
word a page or two after their original appearance, and it's never entirely
certain just whether everyone is who they seem to be (actually, it's very
clear that often they're not - what isn't always obvious on first reading is
who they *are*).

Themes which pop up in later Iris short stories make their first appearance
here - using clones for sex; literally re-writing one or other version of
history; the problems of maintaining a consistent continuity - but
concentrating on that kind of thing only serves to blind the reader to the
sheer exuberance of the prose. This is genuinely unlike almost anything
seen in Who fiction up until this point (Jim Mortimore's 'Campaign' actually
goes even further, even down to using wacky New Wave typesetting styles, but
that's the only comparable text in Who until John Anderson deliberately - I
assume - utilised a more upbeat version of the same style in DWIN's Myth
Makers collections). This is proper literary fiction, with little or no
concessions made to the fact that Doctor Who is, traditionally, aimed at
'intelligent 14 year olds with glasses'. It's very well-written, requires
some thought from the reader and utterly fails to do anything expected.

That's not to say that "Femme Fatale" is incomprehensibly dense or
deliberately hard to comprehend. Instead it's packed full of great ideas
and good jokes - just off the top of my head, there's Andy Warhol in 1968
wondering if he'd agreed to merchandise the Marilyn Monroe T-Shirt Iris is
wearing and which she'd bought in Camden Market in the 1990s; there's a book
written collaboratively by the Marquis de Sade, Gertrude Stein and Flaubert;
Iris writing a porn version of her travels for the Olympia Press; a clone of
Valerie Solanas; Sam and Iris discussing time travel in the Factory toilets;
the eventual destinaton of the Doctor and Mrs Jones...and so on. Take your
pick of your personal favourite.

There are more cool ideas in this short story than in most novels you'll
read - buy a copy of More Short Trips on ebay for a pound and turn to page
317. You won't be disappointed.

The Complete Wildthyme II: "Old Flames"

"Old Flames" (from the BBC 'Short Trips' collection, 1998)

In terms of Paul's published Doctor Who fiction, "Old Flames" is the cuckoo
in the nest. It's the Iris story which doesn't really play metafictional
games. It's the Iris story with a conventional beginning, middle and end.
It's the Iris story with a straight companion. In short, it's not terribly
Irisy at all.

This feeling of dislocation from the rest of the Complete Wildthyme (or
'The Magrsian Chronicles' as I was briefly tempted to title these reviews,
until I realised that would be *very* crap) is increased by what seems to be
Paul's hesitancy in writing Doctor Who for the first time.

Whilst he was by this point a respected non-genre author, with his debut
novel already three years behind him, there is a nervousness and caution in
'Old Flames' which isn't wholly unexpected from the new kid on the block.
Where in the next collection, he lets himself go and recasts his Who leads
as the Avengers' team, then drops them into Andy Warhol's Factory, here we
have an instantly recognisable Fourth Doctor and Sarah-Jane involved in some
fairly low-key shenanigans, as Iris attempts to marry off her latest
companion to the grand-daughter of the rich Lady Huntingdon.

Not that 'low key' and 'instantly recognisable' don't have their benefits.
Sarah-Jane is especially well-done, sounding *exactly* like the TV version,
and the Doctor is enjoyably erratic, moving from down-beat worry to gay
abandon in the turn of a page. Iris, too, is a treat (this Iris reads like
a dry run for the Big Finish audios - you can just hear Katy Manning
speaking the dialogue) and, at this early stage, the Doctor seems far more
genuinely fond of her than normal. Add to the mix the linear narrative and
clear-cut villain, and 'Old Flames' is something that even the most trad of
Who fans should have no problems in following.

Maybe that's why I'm not as fond of it as other Iris stories - if I want
what's generally termed traditional Who I'll go and watch 'Time Warrior' or
'The Invisible Enemy' or whatever. The fact that Paul generally pushes the
boundaries a bit and gives the reader something more than was possible on
the TV screen is a large part of the attraction in reading the Iris books,
and that sense of adventure is missing here. You can see it trying to burst
out now and again, most obviously in the villains who are the last remnant
of a dead race of tiger aliens, but the rest of the story is so
straight-forwardly written that when, for instance, Rector Adams describes
Lady Huntingdon as 'a terrible black spider on a golden throne', it jars
rather then delights and seems oddly out-of-place.

At heart (and imo obviously), 'Old Flames' just tries too hard to be a story
for the Everyman Who reader and although that's perfectly understandable,
being Paul's first Who short story in the BBC's first Who short story
collection, it leaves things a little flat, especially in comparison to
Paul's later Who work (and, in fact, his non-Who work published up to this
point)

The Complete Wildthyme I: "Suitors, Inc"

[With Wildthyme on Top due out (hopefully) very soon, I'm about to re-read all of Paul Magrs' Who fiction, starting with the short stories.

And as I happen to have just posted a review of Paul's latest short story to the Iris/Paul newsgroup, I thought I might as well post it here to get things started. So...]

Suitors, Inc (Seven Deadly Sins, Big Finish, 2005)

Some things are anathema to all right thinking people - the Daily Mail, Ant
and Dec, and the use of short sentences ending in exclamation marks are
surely amongst most people's top three such irritations.

Imagine my surprise therefore when I came to read Paul's latest Iris short
story, 'Suitors, Inc' and found the damn thing was littered with them. Short sentences that is! Ending in exclamation marks! Not Ant and Dec! Or the Daily Mail!

Less surprising though is the fact that this otherwise horrendous practice
works perfectly here. 'Suitors, Inc' - for all its subject matter of
anatomically correct sex robots and shanghaied horny pensioners - is a story
from an alternative universe where Target kept the Who fiction license and
started publishing short story collections for younger readers. And in that
context the plethora of exclamation marks serves to give the dialogue a
certain zip and dash and imbdues Paul's prose with an engagingly dynamic
quality. This is a story which rattles effortlessly along and which
manages - in the space of a dozen pages - to feature four Time Lords, a
couple of assistants, an enemy from another book and what seems to be the
Obverse version of a certain well-known robot dog. The dialogue is as crisp
as you'd expect and catches the tone of the respective TV characters well
(particularly the fourth Doctor), the plot is completely nuts (and the
ending is left unresolved, with absolutely everyone heading off together
into further thrilling adventures) and there's even time for an amusing
metafictional reference or two. If you had to sum 'Suitors, Inc' up in a
word, that word would be 'joyous' because you really do get a feeling of
Paul's joy in writing for this particular era of Who and as a result it's an
absolute joy to read.

Apart from a bizarre typo at the bottom of one page where a meaningless word
has been added to the end of a sentence, this is well nigh perfect and
confirms that Paul is the pre-eminent writer of short Who fiction. Lovely
stuff.