The Kickstarter for Paradise Found – a sequel to the 1987 Doctor Who story Paradise Towers – comes to its end this week, and Paul Simpson took the opportunity to catch up with the Great Creator of the Towers and the Psychic Circus, Stephen Wyatt…

How did you get involved with Cutaway Comics and Paradise Found?

Gareth Kavanagh contacted me and said that it was something he’d like to do, he’d seen the potential. So we met up and he showed me some of the previous work they’d done. We talked through a few ideas and I thought, ‘Great, please get on with it’. I always knew that I really wasn’t equipped to write the script, I don’t know enough about comic books. Gareth already had Sean [Mason] onboard and Sean understands comics. He had been waiting for a break to actually write one and he’s done a fantastic job.

The only point probably where I had any sort of impact was I read all Sean’s drafts of the scripts and made a few comments here and there in terms of story or dialogue. The rest of it, I just had the pleasure of watching.

I was kept in the loop at every stage and it has been absolutely fascinating for me because I didn’t know how a comic book was put together. I didn’t realise this division of labour. Obviously Sean first of all had to create the dialogue and he was particularly conscientious because he actually thought already how the dialogue would work on the page which I gather not everybody does at that stage.

He was already thinking visually and then what I didn’t realise is the artistic division. Silvano [Beltramo] did the graphics and then Andrew [Orton] did the colouring and then Colin [Brockhurst] then did the wording. I had no idea that the jobs were split up in that way. At each stage it was fascinating to see what each one brought to the process.

It was nice to be in on because these are all guys who know what they’re doing and if there was something that somebody wanted changed or was slightly critical of, it was always done very respectfully as one professional to another. There was no diva-dom that I could see on display at all and from my perspective, a very happy experience.

How long ago was it that Gareth first approached you?

That’s a very good question. It must have been before lockdown, which takes it back to sometime in the latter half of 2019.

And it’s just basically been trolling on since then.

Exactly. In the initial stage, like anything, there was the planning and contracts to talk through. Sean had to prepare various drafts of the story and then start to work out how it was going to be done visually. That was the stage which I was involved in, though not heavily – they’re Sean’s ideas not mine. Also I feel that what works in comics is very different from what works in television.

Stories suit the medium that they’re being told in.

Of course we all novelised our Doctor Whos – on Paradise Towers, I didn’t put in a lot of extras but what I did do was write up the script with all the cuts put back in and also in the case of some of the characters, putting in how I’d imagined them to be.

The most obvious example being Pex, who was supposed to be an Arnold Schwarzenegger piss take. It’s interesting because nowadays I think if you wanted to find a muscley guy who could his shirt off and take the piss out of himself, it wouldn’t be hard because it seems every actor of a certain age has to go to the gym 15 times a week. At that period I think they had problems: the guys they got were guys who were into bodybuilding and had nearly no sense of humour or lightness to them. Which is why they chose Howard [Cooke] who has a lot of charm but is almost too likeable and sensitive for the part, really.

It gave it a different feel.

It did. They were also worried because Bonnie was so slim and so slight they thought it would look ludicrous if they had somebody very big and lumbering with her.

I wasn’t party to any of this, I was just told why the decisions had been made. But that was something that was possible to go back to my original interpretation when I novelised it.

Were you ever tempted to do another Doctor Who novel beyond the two Targets?

No, actually I wasn’t. I didn’t have lots of other Doctor Who ideas in my head, it was quite strange and I think this is partly because I’m not interested in the mythology. I think most stories would have to include the Master or the Daleks or something and as my stories were fairly freewheeling in this way and self contained it probably wouldn’t have fitted in to what was then, being done. Until Jessica Martin said, ‘Why don’t you do a prequel to The Greatest Show in the Galaxy?’ I had never really considered doing any more Doctor Who writing.

Jessica is a very good person to have around because she’s a get up and goer, all the time, and she was effectively responsible for me doing The Psychic Circus at Big Finish. That all happened at [the] Gallifrey [One convention] where I met Matt Fitton and the rest of the group who were all chatting away. They were already working on Mags, the werewolf series, and Jessica said, ‘Why doesn’t Stephen do a story about the origins of the Psychic Circus?’ Everybody looked and thought, ‘That’s a good idea’ and I thought ‘That’s a good idea’ – and that’s exactly how it started.

Had those ideas been percolating at the back of your mind or had this sort of side of Doctor Who, in terms of continuing the fiction, been something you never thought you’d be doing again?

I think more the latter. It was my first piece of Doctor Who writing for over 30 years.

It was one of those subjects that there was enough percolating around in my brain about the origins of the Psychic Circus to know immediately that it was a goer as an idea. I could see the possibilities in bringing out the themes and ideas which are in the original which are probably not fully explored, about the selling out element and the corruption of the circus.

Was it your idea too to also incorporate a Paradise Towers prequel element to it? Or did that come from Matt or Big Finish?

That definitely came from me, I just thought it would be fun!

The element that didn’t come from me was introducing the Master. That was something that Big Finish asked for and it was fine, but I needed a bit of help from Matt Fitton, who was a very good script editor to actually deal with that side of things. The stuff to do with the circus and Paradise Towers of course I knew what to do, but with that element I needed help. I’d never before written for a running character apart from the Doctor and the companion.

And even those changed between your two stories.

Exactly, yes. So it was an interesting challenge to incorporate a running character in Who mythology.

Back then, you and Andrew Cartmel and the other writers for Season 24 had really been starting the show from scratch again – Andrew and John Nathan-Turner were stripping away the stuff that had accreted to it.

I would say it was absolutely what I wanted to do. I’m old enough to have seen the first Doctor Who episode ever when it went out and I was a big fan of Hartnell and Troughton but then I slightly lost interest. To be honest I’d never been interested in Time Lords and Gallifrey and things like that very much. I looked at [the Colin Baker season long story] The Trial of a Time Lord and thought you’d need a PhD in Who studies to understand what the hell was going on here.

You linked JN-T to that decision. He was incredibly supportive but basically he just let Andrew and his writers get on with it. I think it was much more our sense that we wanted to clear things out and go back to what, for me, was the original concept of Doctor Who which is a person in a telephone box who has adventures. End of story.

And that’s all it needs to be.

What was wonderful, I think, with how we handled the show at that point was that JN-T just let us get on with it and then worked out how to do it. He was totally supportive and open minded but he was never, to be honest, that great a script guy. He needed somebody and he was very lucky it was Andrew who came in. He needed somebody who was inventive and understood ideas and understood writers.

By the time it got to Andrew’s era, John had seen it all, and he knew what worked and what wouldn’t. So he was therefore happy to let Andrew and you guys get on with it and if he knew something was beyond them, then he would make some comment. Just looking at all the production problems on Greatest Show, whoever came up with that idea of filming in the car park was genius.

It was the designer, David Laskey who said, ‘We could do this’. As has been said on a number of occasions and by me, it was superb because that tent was so much more convincing than it would have been stuck in a studio. Those billowing corridors actually look real and rather atmospheric. You can just imagine them in the studio with somebody maybe trying to ruffle them! It was technically an absolute nightmare for everybody involved because of the constant sound disturbances but in the end the result was fantastic.

There’s so much that came together to make that story really stand out from that season.

It was actually very lucky, you can’t fault any of the elements. Alan Wareing is a fantastic director, he cast it throughout very very well. The designer was excellent, the costuming was perfect.

John could tell you when a monster was or wasn’t going to work. On that occasion we’d dispensed with monsters completely and the robot clowns, which of course were very talented acrobats with these rather eerie faces all the same, were much more scary and much more convincing than your average Doctor Who monster.

I remember early on having discussions because everybody thought what I had in mind for the chief clown was a sort of classic Coco the Clown, Ronald McDonald. But I remember from my childhood, going to the circus and those were the stooges. The real clowns were these scary people in beautiful glittery costumes with white faces who never got dirty and weren’t part of the slapstick. I said that was the image I had.

What else do you have coming up?

First of all I have written some scripts for Cutaway Comics for Gareth which hopefully will kick in as the Kickstarter takes off. So I’ve done three short pieces based on Paradise Towers characters.

There’s one called Wall-Scrawler, one called Maddy’s Diary which is about the diary Maddy kept from when she arrived in Paradise Towers up to the end, and the third one is The Rotwang Family Mausoleum about Kroagnon.

I’ve also, just off my own back, written a few short pieces based on The Greatest Show in the Galaxy characters because I would love to be able to publish some of this stuff. Nothing’s fixed but I’ve been talking to a publisher about possibly putting together a book of my short pieces for Doctor Who and elsewhere.

I’ve written more for Doctor Who the last year than in the 35 years before!

Does it feel odd stepping back into your own mind from that time?

It’s quite weird. It’s quite a challenge to do the Kang one particularly from inside the Kang’s thoughts, because you have to get back into the vocabulary and the way of thought. I did actually reread my own novel to remind myself of how they thought and spoke. Obviously once you’ve gotten back inside you can start inventing new things or new ways round it but it took a bit of time.

I think fans tend to forget that people involved with creating Doctor Who or any show don’t spend their whole time wandering around thinking “What more can I do to do with Doctor Who?” It’s a job of work at the end of the day.

Yes. I’m amazed, to be honest, that the stuff I’ve done is still being remembered.

I wrote a piece about [the] Gallifrey [One convention] because I didn’t realise that at the end, we all had to go on stage and say goodbye. I thought ‘What am I going to say?’ Everybody else was saying things like ‘Hey Gallifrey, it’s been a blast’ and this very upfront stuff and I just ended up saying ‘Thank you very much for having me, I’m really touched that the stuff I wrote all this time ago is still remembered and cherished’ or words to that effect, because that’s what I felt.

When Paradise Towers first went out the self appointed Doctor Who fans loathed it, absolutely loathed it. There are still people around who loathe it and I honestly think it’s even more amazing than that people like it is that you’ve stirred somebody up so much by your writing that 35 years on, they still hate it. I think that’s great!

I wanted to know when the Blu-ray of season 24 is coming out. I’m not on it. To be honest I was quite pissed off because they wanted to interview me right in the middle of lockdown and they were doing it over in Shepherd’s Bush. It was all fine and then, because I’m over 70, at that point I said ‘I’m sorry I need a taxi to get me to and from this’. And it’s quite clear the budget wouldn’t run to that. So I have no contribution whatsoever to the Blu-ray box. I assume they include all the stuff from the previous sets, so in many ways what I have to say about Paradise Towers has already been said.

When I looked it up, to my amazement there were already 27 reviews of the box. Most of it from people saying basically ‘I absolutely loathe this season but I have to buy it because I have to have the complete Doctor Who.’

Completism is wonderful for the people who are producing this stuff.

(Laughs) Of course it is. I was just startled to think that people really couldn’t wait for it to come out to put down somewhere how much they hated it. They won’t be sitting down with an open mind to watch the season and see if they think about it differently!

I now talk to quite a few people around Gareth’s sort of age who are younger, who absolutely loved Paradise Towers when it first came out and have remembered it all this time, as something new and fresh. But they were the younger viewers. There was this group of 20-30 year old “fans”, who were not into it, I think because there was no Doctor Who mythology. It has no references to the stuff that the show had previously been packed full of.

The other group of people who liked Paradise Towers were the higher ups in the BBC who loathed Doctor Who. I think those first shows bought Doctor Who a bit more time.

Andrew had never worked in television before and had a strong science fiction background. None of the writers had ever worked for Doctor Who before. On several occasions they hadn’t worked in television before.

I remember Andrew telling me he was watching Paradise Towers with the then, head of the department Colin Rodgers and there was a moment in the middle of these corridors when Brenda Bruce walks out and says ‘Hello, care for a cup of tea?’ The head of production just fell about laughing because this was so un-Doctor Who as he’d seen it.

It’s not seen as being a particularly revolutionary moment but it is actually a very unusual thing to happen in a Doctor Who story.

And particularly in one that is very much about high sci-fi concepts rather than a modern day, down to earth story.

Exactly yes, you don’t expect her to do that. When you write something, you lose track of what is and isn’t surprising to other people. In my head they’d always been there so the fact that she walked out into a corridor and say ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ to Bonnie Langford seemed to me to be absolutely natural but when you’re not expecting it…

One of the other lovely things that happened to me at Gallifrey was that Rob Shearman, a writer I have huge respect for, took me aside to say what an influence I’d been on him.

I was very touched, again, and he has that sort of generosity, but it’s not everybody who says ‘Watching your stories back then or listening to your radio work back in that time was one of the things that made me become a writer.’ You think ‘Wow, well that’s worth having done it all for isn’t it?’

It’s an effect that you don’t realise that you have on people.

I think this is true. There was a long period in which I think a lot of people tended to mutter that you’d worked for Doctor Who rather than saying it out loud because there was the interregnum and a general sense that it had always been rather naff and silly. Well, it often was naff and silly but, now you get people who weren’t even alive when it went out rediscovering it and finding things in it. It’s not that the work is perfect – particularly Paradise Towers is far from perfect – but Gareth saw something in there which can still be used.

Another of my memories from Gallifrey One was when I met the young women who had all come as Kangs. I’d never encountered this before.

I was just in one of the rooms and I saw them. I said ‘Are you Kangs?’ and they said ‘Yes, we are’ and I said, ‘I created them, can I have a picture with you?’ and they said ‘Oh, we’ve got our friends here’. So I ended up being photographed with seven red and blue Kangs and it’s one of my favourite photos, actually.

When I was first talking to Gareth and Sean was first writing, I said, and they both agreed, ‘I think the Kangs are the particular selling point of this story for a modern generation.’

That female, strong, punk thing has never really gone away. There’s always been either a nostalgia for it or it has been within current trends. The cleaners are interesting but I’m not sure I’d want another story with them, as the focal point!

I think I’d like them better designed to be honest.

For me, casting Brenda Bruce and Elizabeth Spriggs was my idea of heaven. I saw them on stage a lot and they’re wonderful actresses. That to me, was perfect casting. I was a bit sad that I killed them off so early in the story really. But Sean is plotting to bring them back at a later date!

The Kickstarter for Paradise Found can be found here

Thanks to Gareth Kavanaugh and team for help in arranging this interview.