Veteran TV writer Philip Martin is currently returning to two of his biggest hits – working on a novelisation of his gritty and increasingly meta series Gangsters, and penning a new drama (and accompanying novelisation) featuring Sil, the Thoros Betan he created for Doctor Who’s Vengeance on Varos back in 1984. With Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor now on release from Reeltime Pictures, Martin chatted with Paul Simpson about the creation of the film and book…

NB There are some spoilers for the film in this interview

 How did going back to Sil come about?

It was really out of the blue in terms of an email from Keith Barnfather. He’d done a Myth Makers with Nabil Shaban and it occurred to Keith whether it would be worth featuring Nabil as Sil for a completely one-off based on him, starring him. He suggested it to me and I said I’d have to think about it.

So I did – the difficulty was it couldn’t be allied to the BBC. It had to be just Sil – I own the copyright to him and therefore I could feature him without getting in the way of the BBC franchise, although it does limit not being able to go back to previous episodes. Keith stressed that it would have to be low budget with limited cast, so consequently it became more and more of a challenge.

I eventually came up with the idea that you could have an enclosed set: two set-ups and a stretch of the obligatory corridor. Suppose there was a trial, suppose Sil had really overstepped the mark and was in really big trouble and had to justify himself. It was a serious trial because he’d caused such devastation: he’d introduced this drug from the planet Arodor which promises wonderful things at first but there’s a price to pay after three months as it sucks the lifeforce out of you, and it was affecting young people across Europe. Sil was to be held to account, and was arrested on the Moon on the way back to Thoros Beta.

The trial had to take place on the Moon – we’re talking 250 years in the future – and the Moon had a police force and a system with its own jurisdiction. In order to extract Sil back to The Hague to stand trial, there had to be an extradition application to the authorities on the Moon, so this is the case that decides whether Sil has a case to answer, and can be extradited to Earth where there is actually a death penalty for the high treason that he is accused of.

The action takes place on the Moon and so it worked within Keith’s parameters. I think it worked well eventually but there was the discipline of having to work within a small budget and a limited set.

The great thing was having Nabil Shaban as Sil and it was great to revisit him and have some fun with him.

How much has Sil changed from the first concept of him in your earliest Varos draft through to how we see him?

In a way he reflects the times, the thirty-odd years since, and my thinking, and also I’ve been able to develop him and work on him. He always amuses me – his childlike selfishness and his tantrums and all the rest of it amuse me. I’ve enjoyed writing for him and in a way this was the culmination of a lot of the other things.

There was a question at the Gallifrey One convention last year – “If you’re writing about Sil today, where would he be? In the media?” I heard myself say, “I thought about making him President of the United States… but I think that’s been taken”, and I made a joke of it. It’s difficult writing that far into the future because it’s a different set of circumstances, the rules have changed.

What’s the area of writing that’s given you the most pleasure?

It has to be Gangsters, because I was paid by the BBC to research it, live in Birmingham for three months, find out what the underworld was, and then work through the complete oeuvre of it.

I started off in a very naturalistic way but in the second series I was starting to wonder about the genre – what the thriller genre was and what television was – and I began to break up the convention, by having the fourth wall removed at times, by taking the audience into what was going on in the writer’s mind, so it became entertaining.

Some people like the first naturalistic drive of Gangsters, and others love the way it went on to – particularly media academics!

I’ve just written the novelisation of the second season, and it has been challenging because there have been so many surreal elements that you’ve got to get onto the page and give a flavour of what the series was. Unfortunately the DVDs sold out quickly and the company 2Entertain went bust so a lot of people want to see it, but the book will hopefully give a flavour.

When you’re doing a novelisation, do you see that as an opportunity to rectify decisions that others may have made during the production process – for instance in the Varos novelisation, Colin’s quip after the guards were killed is gone.

It’s like having the final cut, and of course you don’t get that in television or film because you’re just the writer.

When you are doing a novelisation you can look at the whole thing and say: does that work, do I want to make that impression? Do I want to put that in the reader’s mind?

I can’t remember the process [on Varos] – it’s a long time since I wrote that book – and I found that with Gangsters and with Sil.

It’s a different animal. You’re writing for people that are reading words that are translated to images in their brain, and it’s words not images, so therefore you have to put more work into creating that image – but at the same time, it’s another draft. You write the best you can at the time, but when you look at it in leisure, you can see that this doesn’t work so in a way, a proper novelisation is a way of enhancing the original.

Also you can appeal to all the senses – TV is just eyes and ears, but a book can include all five…

You’ve got to use them all. Smell is so evocative. I have a scene where Kline has a fight in a farmyard; he falls into this slurry pit, and he’s got this crud and crap on him and the obvious thing about that is the smell. It’s something that is easily overlooked – and you have to think about the feel of things to get the reality of things.

In terms of Sil it was rather different because yes, there was the trial, and the film starts with the trial, Sil’s arrest. The film is about 100 minutes, but in terms of pages in a book, it needed the equal amount to be created. It’s like a prequel – how did the seeds come to be? Why was there trouble? I can bring in Mistress Na.

So when you see the people at the trial, you know who they are, what their context is, what their motives are. They’re hopefully all rounded characters and you know their desires.

Again it was a challenge – I say something is the case in the trial, but how did it come about? How was Sil taken in? How was he used? How did Kiv get there? What was his motivation? What was Mistress Na doing there? They’re all questions that you have to find answers before the fact.

 

Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor is out now from Reeltime Pictures, and the novelisation is available from Telos Books.