Doctor Who_ The Dying Days Part 36

'It's a shame the Doctor couldn't be here.'

'Oh but he is, Doris.'

'Where?'

'See that chap with the scarf and the tin dog?' Lethbridge-Stewart pointed across the aisle.

'Oh yes. Is the blonde girl with him?'

'Judging by her dress-sense, I would say so.'

A couple of people leant over, stern looks on their faces. Alistair smiled back at them. When they recognised him, they mumbled their apologies and returned their attention to the ceremony. Montserrat Caballe had taken her place in front of the choir and now began to sing the Recoronation Aria, the specially-commissioned piece by Lord Lloyd-Webber. Future historians would count this as the first moment of the New New Elizabethan Age, when British art and literature entered a brief, but prolific resurgence.

Alistair glanced over at Brigadier Bambera. His successors were going to do sterling work, probably even better than him. But he liked to think that he'd set a high standard for them. Hopefully in years to come, people would say that he had lived up to his ill.u.s.trious ancestry, and that by and large he'd done a good job. He knew that he'd had a good innings, and despite the old saying, he'd neither died nor faded away. Retirement wasn't so bad, not on those terms.

And that's why, in the middle of a packed Westminster Abbey on one of the most important dates in British history, despite everything that had happened, General Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart found himself roaring with laughter.

THE END.

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Author Notes - Lance Parkin's guide to The Dying Days

Chapter 1.What We Saw From the Ruined House

Benny. The Dying Days wasn't just the first eighth Doctor book, it marked the point where Benny spun off into her own series (technically, she stayed where she was, in the New Adventures, and the Doctor spun off, but you know what I mean). Bernice Summerfield had been introduced in Love and War, by Paul Cornell, and her adventures continue to this day in Big Finish audios. She was hugely popular, both with the writers and the readers. Up until this point, she'd been the sarky human counterpoint to a rather dark and distant seventh Doctor. She was the voice of his conscience, as wel as being the sort of person he was making the galaxy safe for.

While she quickly developed a life of her own, Paul originally based her, in part, on Emma Thompson's character in the film The Tall Guy, and that's still the best place to look if you want to see Benny Summerfield walking and talking right there on your tel y. I mention this now only because there's an in-joke in chapter three which no-one will get otherwise.

The Doctor's house was introduced by Andrew Cartmel in his novel Warhead and his DWM comic strip Fellow Travellers. Over the course of the books, the Doctor popped back to it from time to time. This is the first time we saw it in the 'present day'.

I never got round to explaining how Benny got the letter, by the way. The book original y ended with her dropping it off for herself. But I came up with a much better ending than that...

The book contains a number of New Adventures cliches, most of them put there deliberately, some by force of habit. The first of these is the gratuitous nudity. At the time, we'd heard that the BBC Books were going to cut down on the 'adult' stuff (laughable as that seems, now that recent EDAs have featured tantric s.e.x and a man in a romantic relations.h.i.+p with a poodle). So Benny gets her kit off here, for no reason whatsoever. Anime fans call this 'fifteening'.

The Doctor. It was very weird writing for a character who was exactly the same but completely different. Al the time, I was very conscious that everyone reading would be directly comparing my version with the one in the TV Movie. I cheated, really we see the Doctor's early scenes from Benny's point of view, and she spends her time going 'gosh, he's exactly the same but completely different'. But that's exactly what the audience do with a new Doctor. The Doctor refers back to Love and War, his first meeting with Benny. Again, it's a dual purpose reminding people that this was a book with a heritage, but making something new out of that.

As Benny notes in chapter one, I couldn't pin down the name of the President of the United States or the Prime Minister, because there was going to be an election in both countries between me finis.h.i.+ng the book and its publication. The Tories should have bribed me to say the PM was Tony Blair, simply because sod's law would almost certainly have guaranteed a landslide for John Major. But they didn't, and the rest is history. One of the amusing things, though, was that Staines could comfortably be either a Conservative or a New Labour Home Secretary.

Chapter 2.Foreign Soil Lex Christian is the first character who's an homage to an existing one. This time, it's Dan Dare, who hopefully British readers will have heard of. For the others, Dan was the hero of The Eagle, the 50s (and 80s!) comic, a square-jawed, stiff upper-lipped s.p.a.ce pilot, and absolutely one of the forerunners of Doctor Who the influence it had, particularly on Terry Nation's stuff, was immense. The reason he's in The Dying Days is a vaguely obscure one the first Dan Dare story in The Eagle is set in 1996 and 1997, so it 'took place' at the same time as the book.

Reality had caught up with fiction. The irony now, of course, in this age of digital cameras, mobile phones and cloned sheep is that we're beyond Dan Dare technology except they have better s.p.a.ce travel. The name was Dan Dare's original name when the strip was being developed.

Everyone reading knew the 'real' reason this was the last Virgin book, and all the way through, I play with that. One of the themes of the book is the interplay between 'real life' stuff and fiction. I hesitate to say this, but the book has two levels the narrative, about the Doctor and Benny fighting monsters and also a knowing commentary on the situation. One of the more blatant examples is the Who Killed Kennedy sequence, where a fictional reason is given for Virgin losing their licence.

Veronica Halliwell first appeared (and died) in the Missing Adventure System Shock.

Staines is an idiot. Anyone who'd actually read Who Kil ed Kennedy couldn't possibly think it was called I Killed Kennedy. The t.i.tle is a statement, not a question.

Benny, an expert on Mars, finally gets to use her knowledge. She'd visited Mars in Transit, but been possessed at the time. Legacy had Ice Warriors, but was set on Peladon, and she left the Doctor the book before he visited Mars again in G.o.dEngine.

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Patrick Moore, a real astronomer, and Bernard Quaterma.s.s, from the 50s serials (or, more correctly, the John Mills version from the last serial the one set around 1997) argue about Martians. In our universe, Patrick Moore would be right. But this is the Who universe, and Bernard's fears are proved correct.

Chapter 3.Return to Mars The Brigadier. I wasn't sure about using the Brigadier at first, it felt a bit like tokenism ('he's worked alongside every Doctor!'), but Bex pointed out that, perhaps more than any other character, the Brigadier had developed over the course of the New Adventures. We found out about Kadiatu, his descendant, but more importantly, we saw him in action in books like Blood Heat, No Future and Happy Endings, and he had come on to be... well, the Doctor's oldest friend. And as I wrote the book, the Brig became more and more central to it. Without giving anything away, he gets the last word of the book, which is usually a sign of someone's importance to the story.

The astronaut's survival kit is straight out of a nineteen seventies Doctor Who annual every year, breaking up the stories about people who sometimes vaguely looked like the Doctor and Sarah, there would be a feature about real astronauts.

The Party. Oh boy. Allan Bednar, the ill.u.s.trator of the BBCi version of this book, has hidden in a cupboard and won't come out until I a.s.sure him he doesn't have to draw the party. This, of course, is a theme party, and the theme is 'lame in-jokes'. Where to start? Well... the guest list includes Emma Peel from The Avengers and Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds. Lalla Ward makes the first of two appearances in the book. The rest... well, I'll let you work them out. Once you spot the Old Woman from the Sat.u.r.day Night Armistice, then you'll be heading for a high score. Apparently, if you write a Star Wars novel (which I'd love to do, by the way, if any Star Wars novel people are reading this), then you have to supply footnotes explaining al the references to existing Star Wars characters, for copyright reasons so you have to say 'he first appeared in the comics', or 'he's from such and such a novel'. If I'd done that for TDD, or was doing it for this annotated version, then the footnotes would be longer than the book.

Greyhaven is my Ian Richardson character. There's always someone in my books 'played' by Ian Richardson. I'm sure there was a very good reason for that at one point, but if there is, I've forgotten it. Anyway, this is the only 'Ian Richardson' specifically based on a character Richardson played you might very well think that he's based on Francis Urquhart from House of Cards, but I couldn't possibly comment. The character was original y named Lord Winchester, but the Virgin legal people thought that the Marquis of Winchester would sue, so it got changed.

"Afro-Saxon" was a bizarre proofreading change, one that makes no sense at al . So I let it stay in, on the grounds it would give me an amusing anecdote if the book ever appeared online in annotated form.

Another New Adventure cliche was a token gay character, usual y a young man who smiles winsomely, then dies a horrible, gory death two chapters later. Not that I want to give away what happens. I also out Ralph Cornish from The Amba.s.sadors of Death, for no other reason than that's the sort of thing we used to do in the Virgin books.

The reference to IIF building a nuclear waste dump on the Moon is me, very cheekily, linking perhaps the best television series of all time, Edge of Darkness, with perhaps the worst television series of al time, s.p.a.ce:1999.

The reference to Donnebys must rank as one of the more obscure in the book, but it harks back to the very first Who novel it's the rocket company that Ian has applied to work for.

Chapter 4.Gratuitous Violets One of my better chapter t.i.tles.

I like the stuff on Mars, with the human astronauts. It's something I perhaps should have developed more. On the other hand, it isn't their story. They're there as a pretext.

Chesterton Road is real, it's by Ladbroke Grove tube station, and you went past it to get to the Virgin offices.

Again, it's an in-joke. Because, even if I'm the only one who admits it, every single Who author thought about Ian Chesterton when they saw the sign.

Note that Benny real y fancies this new Doctor, but won't admit it.

The John Smith and the Common Men alb.u.m. They're the pop combo that Susan's listening to in the first ever episode on TV. I loved the idea that they were still going. The Who universe probably has tribute bands to them, and Britpop there was very subtly different because of their influence. Again, I'm bringing Doctor Who full circle or at least referring back to its beginnings.

Storms Over Avallion (or some minor variation of it) was the provisional t.i.tle of Battlefield, a TV story that is set a few months before The Dying Days. The joke (first introduced in Kate Orman's books, shamelessly ripped off by me here and in Father Time) is that in the Doctor Who universe, there are just as many Doctor Who fanzines, novels and internet discussion groups, but they're al discussing real alien invasions that the government wants covering up.

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Chapter 5.The World at One Deflowering Lex Christian upholds another New Adventures tradition retconning a s.e.x life for a television companion. I think, in the course of sixty books, that we managed to deflower every regular character from the TV series. Apart from K9 and I once proposed a book where K9 got a robot dog girlfriend. Ironic for a company cal ed Virgin, I know, but their 'erotic fiction' line was edited in the same room, and something clearly rubbed off. So to speak. Bizarrely, there were plenty of Who references in the mucky books, too... or so I'm told.

Rubbish monsters The Drahvins and Bandrils were among the more rubbish of the Doctor Who monsters. The joke here, not that the Brigadier realises, is that some alien invasions were beneath the Doctor's dignity to deal with.

Old clothes Benny changes into the outfit she was wearing on the cover of her first novel, Love and War.

Monkey business The description of Twelve Monkeys could equal y wel apply to the TV Movie.

Boldly going Ha! I was right. I was right about Star Trek X. Five years before it was written, I guessed right! The line 'they knew it was the last one, so they could get away with all sorts of stuff' could be the tagline for The Dying Days.

Chapter 6.Close Encounters The Roof It's unclear what the men are doing putting that thing on the roof , because I never explain it. They are setting up a homing beacon for the Martian s.h.i.+p, the same sort of beacon that the Martians need in The Seeds of Death. It's why the s.h.i.+p ends up over Trafalgar Square. But I never explain that properly. Sorry.

Bessie Note that Bessie's registration number has changed.

Life on Mars Until Mariner, most scientists thought Mars had primitive life, and none doubted that it could support life, at least in the sense that the top of Everest or Antarctica could 'support life'. Even as late as Viking, some people still held out hope. By then, it had been clearly established that Mars in the Who universe had a breathable atmosphere. So here, they're only discovering what anyone who'd seen Pyramids of Mars already knew.

The UN One prediction I got wrong I thought Mary Robinson would be the new Secretary General of the UN, but Kofi Annan got the job.

The X Files I love the end of this chapter there's a real sense of pace. It breaks the rules, too, of course. This was the era of the X-Files. Bex was a huge fan, and joked that she real y wanted to see an episode which ended with Mulder and Scully saying al that usual guff about how there probably were aliens, but they'd never have any concrete evidence... just as one of the flying saucers from Independence Day flew overhead and the caption 'to be continued' comes up.

That scene doesn't quite make it into The Dying Days, but the sentiment behind it that Doctor Who could do the 'foreplay' that the X-files does (conspiracies, government cover-ups, aliens) but, unlike the X-Files it could then go onto the 'o.r.g.a.s.m' of full scale alien invasion informs the whole book. But TDD stil breaks the rules alien invasions aren't allowed to be public. I only got away with it because it was the last book.

Independence Day Hmmmm... Independence Day. The film hadn't come out in May 1996 when I was commissioned, although I'd seen the trailer. The book was finished by the time I heard Independence Day UK, the radio story that's even more like The Dying Days. There was something in the air, that year Mars Attacks! also came out.

Back to television I know how I'd like to bring Doctor Who back to television. I've had the scene perfectly mapped out in my mind for years. No adverts, no pre-publicity, just an plain, ordinary night of television there's a new medical drama on BBC1 at eight that looks OK. Eight o'clock, the announcer solemnly tells the audience that they're going to the newsroom for a newsflash.

Then a real BBC newsreader tells us that there's an alien s.p.a.cecraft over London. We cut to a confused OB reporter what's going on. Then a electronic voice from the s.h.i.+p 'Surrender humans, or we wil exterminate you'.

Then the reporter panics, and starts to run away, and b.u.mps into a very famous actor in a frock coat, with a gorgeous young woman just behind him.

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'Don't worry,' the stranger says, 'You're safe. I'l see to that'. The reporter goes 'Who are you?'. And the Doctor turns to camera and smiles and goes. 'Me? I'm back!" Cue opening credits, cue that theme tune, cue the phone network melting down as everyone in the country is either phoning each other to tell them to watch BBC1 or shouting that they know, they're trying to d.a.m.n well watch it.

I just love the idea of some ordinary piece of television suddenly becoming Doctor Who, because... well, it's either that or just plain, ordinary television.

Chapter 7.

Work, Rest and Play.

t.i.tle Another good chapter t.i.tle, if a little lateral.

Homages Original y, the scene with the President and his aide featured a flat-voiced FBI agent and his winsome ginger partner. Even though they weren't named, this was dropped because the legal people got nervous. Bizarrely, I thought, given the number of 'homages' in the book. I have to note that this was the only book I ever got legal advice from Virgin on, and I got a lot. Perhaps, as it was the last Who book, the lawyers hadn't got any other books to read that month.

Queen and country I did wonder about the Queen evacuating the country. I suspect, in the unlikely event of alien invasion, that she'd want to stand her ground, in the same way the royal family stayed in the country during WW2. That would clash with what happens later in the book, though. This year, I've read a book called The Secret State, by Peter Hennessy, which says that in the event of nuclear war, the plan in the sixties was to get the Queen onto the royal yacht and off to Canada ('if it still exists' not the yacht, Canada).

Keeping it real I was also really nervous about involving 'real people' in the invasion section. You'l note that, after six chapters chock full of real people, from now on it's just fictional characters. As wel as legal nervousness (not wanting to paint real people as collaborators or as accepting Martian rule) there would have been something irredeemably camp about having Gazza or Scary Spice joining the fight. Watching LA destroyed in Independence Day, though, I did find myself wondering how many movie stars survived.

The Ice Warriors With the Ice Warrior, I wanted to get across that it wasn't just some tal extra in a costume with a head that didn't fit properly. This was a monster, and it looked like a monster. The idea was that it was an Ice Warrior done on a Hollywood budget. Another little touch the reason the TV Movie people gave for not using monsters was that they were too expensive Phil ip Segal said something like 'the budget would run to about two monster costumes, and you can't tell a story about the invasion of Earth with two monsters'. As a bifurcated handed salute to that sentiment, and sentiments like it, in The Dying Days there are never more than two Martians in the same scene.

You could make this story for television on about the same budget as a couple of episodes of Born and Bred.

Chapter 8.Death and Diplomacy The plot thickens Finally, someone explains the plot! All this exposition, of course, is just a way of getting all that 'plot' stuff out of the way so we can get down to having monsters chasing our heroes and going "grrrr" a lot.

The plan Greyhaven's plan, while basically undemocratic, isn't actual y an evil one. He wants to reopen all the closed factories, s.h.i.+pyards and mines. I'm sure someone, somewhere could write an essay on how The Dying Days the first Who story set in the Blair era, as Tim Col ins could tell you - was a metaphor for how New Labour courted big business and encouraged globalisation to get unemployment down.

Unanswered questions Fans have often asked how The Dying Days 'fits', given that everyone on Earth should know about the Martians afterwards. Here, Benny asks the same question. The Doctor doesn't answer.

I am he and he is me Note that the eighth Doctor speaks of the seventh Doctor in the third person.

The Brigadier The Brigadier knows that only the Doctor can get them out of this situation he doesn't know what's about to happen to his old friend.

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Chapter 9.Our Friends From Mars So cliched New Adventures cliche piles on New Adventures cliche as a prost.i.tute eats in a greasy cafe, smokes, quotes from Round the Horne, then makes a reference to a recent film. In my defence, she at no point drops a lyric from a pop song into the conversation, inverts the 'end my life' scene from The Happiness Patrol by shooting the Doctor, turns out to be related to a character from the UNIT era, notes that there was a lot less air pollution before the invention of the motor car or quotes from The Second Coming.

Such a bind I like the fact the baddy keeps his evil plan in a Wallace and Gromit ringbinder.

Chapter 10.An Englishman's Home Alone at last We see the Martians alone for the first time, and surprise, surprise they've got an evil plan that Greyhaven doesn't know about.

Code of honour The original idea of the book was that it would be the human characters who ascribed n.o.bility and culture to the Ice Warriors, but the Martians would real y be just nasty, snarling, spitting slabs of hate. Monsters, in other words.

So the humans would keep going on about how they came from a n.o.ble culture, and had a code of honour, but everything the Martians actually did was just s.a.d.i.s.tic and nasty. After the book was finished, I saw Mars Attacks!

where the Pierce Brosnan scientist character does that joke. But by then, the Martians, particularly Xznaal, had developed into pretty rounded characters. This chapter contrasts Xznaal and the Brigadier both warriors, both having seen better days, both full of regrets, both thirsting for one last battle.

Grant Morrison While, over the years, the odd 'influence' from Grant Morrison's work has been felt in my books, the coronation of an alien as king of England predates the same scene in The Invisibles by a couple of years. It is, as Greyhaven is at pains to note, a fairly accurate depiction of a real coronation ceremony.

Queen continuity Christmas on a Rational Planet, Lawrence Miles's 1996 debut novel, had a throwaway reference to the 'recoronation' of Queen Elizabeth II. I thought I was being very clever by tying up a loose end by showing why she needed a second coronation. But Lawrence was tying up a loose end himself how there could be a 'King' in Battlefield (set in the mid to late nineties, and a couple of months before TDD) but the Queen could celebrate her Golden Jubilee in Head Games (a sequence of which was set in 2001). As is often the way, two people trying to solve a continuity error have left a much bigger one in its place.

Top Secret The Brigadier and Eve joke about UNIT being a top secret organisation. In the TV series, while UNIT's meant to be one of the most covert organisations on the planet, they also drive around in big lorries marked 'UNIT', and the (local!) reporters in Spearhead from s.p.a.ce know who the Brigadier is, which organisation he runs and that he investigates 'little green men'. It's clearly one of the worst-kept secrets in the world.

Chapter 11.That Which Does Not Kil Us...

t.i.tles The chapter t.i.tle was the provisional t.i.tle of the novel The Also People. The provisional t.i.tle of this chapter was 'The Yeti on the Loo', and you all know why, so I don't need to explain.

The Tripods We never see the Martian hang-gliders in action, which is a bit of a shame. Note that the Martians also have 'tripods' (as the Martians in The War of the Worlds did), and machines that look like the Martian war machines in the fifties film version of War of the Worlds.

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Morrotov c.o.c.ktail Benny comes into her own here. This was inspired by something Mark Clapham told me Morrisons supermarket's own brand vodka was, and maybe still is, called Morrotov. Well, Mark was a university student at the time, he'd know. Benny said in Love and War that there's not a problem in the world that can't be solved with vodka. Here she demonstrates this by making a Morrotov c.o.c.ktail.

The dying Doc And the Doctor dies. SFX had already reported that the Doctor died halfway through the book, so everyone knew it was coming. It was the last book, I could do it. Every other book, you know for a fact that he's going to come bouncing back. Not here. Some people objected that BBC were doing Eighth Doctor books, so he couldn't die.