Stephen Gallagher’s latest contribution to the Doctor Who universe was released last week – the first of the “Beyond the Doctor” CDs from BBC Audio (see our review here). It picks up the story of the Doctor’s companion Romana after she left the Time Lord back in Gallagher’s Warriors’ Gate. He chatted with Paul Simpson about that, the new version of Warriors’ Gate that BBC Audio released a few months back, and his Lost Story, Nightmare Country, for Big Finish.

 

How did The Kairos Ring come about?

I had two ideas knocking around. One of them was the germ of the American Civil War kid’s story and the other one was what to do with Romana after she left in Warriors’ Gate and was in the Gateway. The set up there – and it was a deliberate setup – was that you had Romana and Laszlo in the Gateway as an alternative Doctor and companion.

Over the years I’ve always said, if you want a female Doctor, there is one already extant, out there in the story universe. If you want to ease fans over to the idea, particularly those fans who might be resistant to it, then do a couple of specials and see how that plays. Like with the Star Trek universe, you can have an expanded Doctor Who universe.

But of course the show came off the air and then when it came back it was the same creature but it was different. It was a new crowd of people addressing a new audience so I never pursued it, never did anything about it. I certainly didn’t try and put myself forward for the new Who, as it was called then or Welsh Who, as I’ve also heard it called.

I left it but Gareth Kavanagh, superfan and Doctor Who activist, got onto me and said, ‘Come on, that Warriors’ Gate novelisation that you talked about all those years ago that we’ve never seen, the re-edited one. How about trying to get that together and maybe do a lavish illustrated edition?’

He was going to pull some contacts together and I said, ‘Well, if you fancy doing the editing job Gareth then I’m entirely up for it’ because I’d been holding off on that for years. I had the original manuscript with all its cut and paste ups and I had a big bag of clippings [of the pieces he’d had to remove when John Nathan-Turner insisted the Target version was the same as the broadcast story]. So I said ‘If you want to tackle putting it back together Gareth…’ and he was willing to take it on.

He approached BBC Books, who hold the licence. Their cooperation would have been entirely necessary but at that time they were fully engaged with the Steven Moffat/Mark Gatiss novelisations and the Eric Saward ones as well. They just didn’t have the bandwidth to even look at it.

But in the course of that, BBC Audio got to hear about it and jumped on it. Up to that point Gareth had been tied in with the publication proposal and his editing job would have been paid for out of the publishers’ editorial budget. Of course there was now no such budget so I finished up having to do the job that I should have been prepared to do in the first place.

I sat down one Easter weekend, got all the original material out and laid it all out. I took copies of everything on different coloured paper so I could then keep track of it all as I put it back together. I reassembled the novelisation and gave it to Michael Stevens at BBC Audio and it all worked out really well. Jon Culshaw did the read, which is the next best thing to having Tom himself doing it.

At the end of that Michael said to me, ‘We’re doing these 10,000 word novellas; would you be interested in tackling one?’ And my immediate reaction was no, I’ve been back and done my Doctor Who thing. If I push it any further then I’m going to run out of road because it was something that was from quite early in my career that was nice to revisit, but it’s not what I’m doing now.

But then I thought, “But there is this unfinished business of the whole Romana thing, I actually could do something with that.” I put these two ideas together – the Joshua story and the Romana story.

I always reckon that every piece of work becomes viable the moment you take two separate ideas, put them together and see them cross fertilise each other. And sure enough, that’s what happened, because Romana and Laszlo on their own with nothing to do wouldn’t have been a story and the Joshua story on its own with no wider context wouldn’t have been a story. But if you insert one into the other or blend one with the other or breed one with the other or whatever you want to call it, you’ve got something.

It rolled and it ran to exactly 10,000 words – I actually took pride in putting the wordage at the end from the word counter, 10,000 precisely (laughs). When there was an edit made I made sure that the wordage stayed as 10,000. Then Stephen Pacey came in to do the read and here we are.

You changed the name of Lazlo back to its original Laszlo which at some point had changed during the original TV process. But the original spelling was per the cinematographer?

Yes, I’m deeply unoriginal in these things. I steal from everywhere! I don’t make anything up so you can usually trace it back to something. I don’t know why, don’t ask me why those particular choices, it was far too long ago to explain that.

What happens with these things is, once they leave your hands, they go through all kinds of stages and all kinds of things can happen. Maybe somebody just looked at it and thought, ‘Well that’s ugly on the eye, let’s just tweak it’ or maybe a typist mistyped it, because the BBC always had scripts retyped for production. Maybe it was an editorial thing, I don’t know, but when it came to rejigging the novelisation I went back to the original manuscripts and scanned those for working with.

The original spelling then became the standard and I think it’s quite nice to be able to do that kind of thing. I always liken it to a piece of clay on the potter’s wheel: the pot can go very wobbly if you don’t keep control of it, and every now and then you’ve got to add these little course corrections along the way. It’s nice to keep sight of what you originally set out to do.

It was weird because I’d waved goodbye to Doctor Who. When we did those classic shows, television was written on water. There was no VHS, there were no recordings. If you were lucky there was the occasional repeat. And Doctor Who was not a well regarded show within the BBC. If you worked on Doctor Who then it was like punishment detail for some departments.

Having said that, everybody who was there was working their socks off and doing the best that they possibly could with quite constrained resources. John Nathan-Turner loved the show, loved everything he was doing with it and both Christopher Bidmead and Eric Saward put 100% effort in. They were working 24/7 on it and out of that came this extremely durable piece of entertainment that is with us even to this day.

How much involvement did you have with the “Lost Story” Nightmare Country for Big Finish? Did you do the final scripts for that?

I did, yes. My origins were in radio. I did the first networked syndicated drama on independent local radio back in 1977, me and a bunch of mates, and moved from there to Radio 4. I really cut my teeth on Saturday Night Theatre and Afternoon Theatre. They were the big prestige drama productions at the BBC at that time. Ninety minutes on a Saturday night – thrillers, science fiction, romances, classic adaptations, you name it. That was the showcase. All that’s gone now but all of it has been reborn in the audio medium where it’s a bit like Netflix for the ears, which is great.

It was a terrific craft education. You learn to tell a story in scenes and dialogue. You learn to structure a story over a set period of time. Certainly the 90-minuter or the six episode serials I did gave me the stamina to cast the story in a full length structure. So all of that came into play in everything else that I’ve ever done since.

In a way [doing Nightmare Country for Big Finish] was like a return home. It was extremely liberating because as I’ve often quoted, ‘Nightmare Country was a million dollar movie that the BBC just couldn’t do’ but in audio I had all the resources that I could possibly ask for.

I didn’t stray very far from the original proposal that I made, which had been extremely detailed, right down to scene breakdowns and story beats. I followed that plan and I stuck to it, so what you’ve got is as authentic a version of the show as it would have been then, as you could possibly ask for.

No doubt Frank Collins [who wrote the Black Archive on Warriors’ Gate] or somebody like that will dig into the archives in Hull and do an analysis at some point (laughs).

Would you want to do another adventure for Romana and Laszlo if this one took off?

Mike said, ‘Would you be willing to do another 10,000 word story?’ and I said, ‘Well, never say never’ but to move forward what I’d need is those two ideas. OK, Romana and Laszlo are a continuing idea, But the other one? Have I got the other one? Not at the moment – but as I say, never say never. Sometimes you need a kick up the arse too to make you focus and sometimes you need a carrot dangled in front of you to have the same effect – but basically. focusing is not that easy under the current circumstances!

Beyond the Doctor: The Kairos Ring is available now. Click here to order from Amazon.co.uk

Nightmare Country is available from Big Finish