This interview was conducted by Benjamin Cook for the book Doctor Who: The New Audio Adventures, specifically about my alternate-universe story Sympathy for the Devil. Only a small part of the interview appeared in the final volume, giving me the chance to publish most of it here.
Doctor Who Interview -Sympathy For The Devil
Okay, a bit of background information … When and how did you get into DOCTOR WHO?
I came in at the end of the Tom Bakers and stayed right through the Peter Davisons. I actually still have Peter Davison's autograph somewhere, from when I was about ten. He wrote "Happy Thursday." I saw the Pertwee-era shows when I was much older, and saw them very much as a missed opportunity - precursors of the X Files and Ultraviolet, but starring Worzel Gummidge as a pompous fop.
What is it about DOCTOR WHO that appeals to you?
Mary Tamm and Sarah Sutton. Apart from them… I always enjoyed the historicals, and the Master was a good laugh. I always wanted to know more about Gallifrey, but the more they gave away about it, the less sense everything seemed to make.
What are your strongest memories of DOCTOR WHO on television?
Peter Davison killing a Cyberman with Adric's badge in Earthshock. Tom Baker writing THIS IS A FAKE on the back of the Mona Lisa in City of Death.
So, how did you come to write SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL?
I'd done Strontium Dog for Big Finish and they liked it, so John Ainsworth asked if I would come to a meeting about the Unbound audios. This was when BF didn't take unsolicited submissions on Doctor Whos, so I was very pleased they had enough faith in me. But the meeting was scheduled for the day I was in Barcelona researching my pirates book. So not only did I not get to meet the other writers, but when I came back, I was told what my topic was going to be, because everybody else had nabbed the one they wanted. I couldn't have wished for a better one, so I didn't complain. John Ainsworth said that the one that was left at the bottom of the barrel was "What if Dr Who had never joined UNIT?" and he envisaged something truly apocalyptic. He even gave me a working title, which was The Last Stand. He wanted something like the end of the world, with everything going horribly wrong, and everybody dying. I said to him: "You realise what you're asking for is Evangelion [a famous Japanese cartoon]?" and he thought about it for a moment and said, "Yes please, with dinosaurs."
He also told me that Nicholas Courtney would be available, so I was welcome to have an alternate Brigadier to go with the alternate Doctor. My first idea was to do something that capitalised on the world over-run with Silurians and dinosaurs, with no plastics available; a kind of post-holocaust situation. I had this idea for an opening sequence inspired by Aliens, with a UNIT squad decimated by shrieking raptors, and a group of medics dragging a mortally wounded Brigadier to safety while an officer screams: "Somebody get me a doctor!" And then you hear the TARDIS materialising, and the theme music kicks in.
But then John came back and said that they had Mark Gatiss. He said: "I hope you don't mind, but could you work the Master in as well?" So I went back to the beginning of the Pertwee era, and tried to work out what would have happened if the Doctor had not been there. A lot of the stories get thrown out straight away, because the Master is only doing stuff to wind the Doctor up. A load more would have simply been resolved by UNIT, but with more draconian measures. I drew up a timeline of the way things might have happened, and it fast became clear that the critical moment, where everything would have deviated, was Mind of Evil.
Mind of Evil has a special place in my heart, for good and bad reasons. Good because it's got people in it speaking real Cantonese and Hokkien, and because the Master is clearly in league with the Commies. Bad, because there's a ludicrous brain-parasite plot bolted on, with no explanation whatsoever, and because, in an episode written at the height of the Cultural Revolution, when thousands of people were dying in China, the Doctor starts boasting about how chummy he was with Chairman Mao! I also realised that if someone were to pitch Mind of Evil at Big Finish today, they would just laugh it at and show the writer the door.
So what I decided to revisit Mind of Evil, bring back the Chinese elements, explain just where the Master got the brain parasite from, and maybe allude to the possibility that there have been times when the Doctor has picked the wrong side.
Meanwhile, I swotted up on UNIT, which partly entailed buying a copy of David Bishop's novel Who Killed Kennedy. And while I'm reading it, these lyrics start going through my head: "I shouted out who killed the Kennedys", which is, of course, from Sympathy for the Devil, by the Rolling Stones. And when I put the song on the stereo, I wondered why nobody has ever suggested that it is the Master's theme song.
Meanwhile, there's other stuff happening. Chiefly, it involved paranoia about what we could and couldn't use from other people's scripts. The Silurians, for example, belong to someone else. I wanted to do continuity-heavy material, because I think it would have been a cop-out not to. But there might be legal issues about some of the characters and monsters. I realised that putting UNIT through an apocalypse, but doing so with a completely new menace, was going to look like a cop-out.
There was even some debate, for example, with the Master, over if I would be allowed to call him Emil Keller. So I said to John, what if he defected to China after the events of Mind of Evil, and got a Chinese name, Ke Le? I told him I wanted to throw away his apocalypse idea and do something that concentrated on the Chinese. When I told him what Hu meant in Mandarin, he started giggling and said: "They'll love it!"
Now there's an incident that's always intrigued me in Hong Kong history, which is a series of jewelry store raids in the early 1990s, carried out by desperate criminals who used hand grenades. And my original idea was to set it then, and suggest that they were working for the Master, who needed precious metals to repair his TARDIS. But the Handover in 1997 was simply too tempting, so I went with that instead.
Did you write with a particular actor in mind (for the part of the Doctor)? What did you think of David Warner's performance? Were you pleased when you heard that he would be appearing in your audio drama?
I actually wrote it for David Warner, but I thought John was joking when he said we had him. I was almost all the way through the first draft, when John said we definitely had him. I've always been lucky with my BF work, but to have the Master, the Brigadier and David Warner in a single play… as John put it, "I think you can probably expect royalties on this one."
Big Finish's chief concerns were about the Doctor's relationship with the Brigadier. They wanted the Brigadier's aversion to the Doctor to be as realistic as possible (or as realistic as it can be when addressing a shape-shifting time-traveller), and for there to be a visible progression for the Brigadier, from embittered pensioner to loyal companion.
There were also some arguments about how much the Doctor could affect the action. Of course, the BF boys wanted him to take control, but I quite enjoyed the idea of him being swept along with events like Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China. So in Sympathy, he's first mistaken for a medical practitioner, and then privy to further events as an interpreter. I didn't want everyone to say "Hurrah, the Doctor's here, now we can run from the Daleks along these corridors." I wanted him to be as out of place as some nutter in ER… didn't Colin Baker actually do that in Casualty once? Turn up claiming to be an alien? I wanted to do it from that point of view. I like the idea of forcing fictional characters to confront realistic action, like in Schwarzenegger's Last Action Hero. I've done it again with 99 Code Red, which is essentially Judge Dredd meets ER.
The big argument, I think, which was kept from me but seemed to have resulted in the destruction of fair amount of crockery, was the swearing - a form of dialogue which I do indeed believe to big and clever when used in the right way. From what I could gather, John was all for it, pointing out that British soldiers do not run around gun battles saying "Oh deary me". I get the impression that Gary was at the other end of the scale, arguing that swearing was a scandalous component and was far too "unbound" from the original Doctor Who series as it existed in the eyes of its fans. As Mark Gatiss put it very succintly, he remembered reading one of the Target novels as a youth, and being literally shocked at the sight of the word "bastard" in a Doctor Who product.
I think Jason and Nick were somewhere in the middle. You'll have to ask them what was said and how it was resolved. I know that nothing was said to me and no changes were requested on the script as delivered, but that on the day of recording Gary was crossing out a few bloodies as he went. As far as I'm concerned, he left in a lot of the more scandalous stuff - such as Biblical profanity, and even added the word "pillock". I think the level of swearing was just Goldilocks right by the time Gary had finished editing it.
John was very apologetic about the number of rewrites required, but it was relatively minimal compared with some TV and film projects I've worked on. Although it was officially a "fourth draft" by the time it was finished, all the changes were relatively minor.
I knew that John was pleased with it because he bought me lunch.
I suppose what interests me about the Brigadier is something that I actually have the Doctor say in the script: that if he did his job properly, nobody would ever know. As a former translator and editor, I understand that situation very well. People only notice you when you cock something up.
Nicholas Courtney was very sweet. Very keen to understand what the Brigadier's situation was, and how this related to previous continuity issues like Mawdryn Undead. He asked me if the Brig was going to get any more adventures with this Doctor…. I think he liked the thought of it, and I had to tell him that the Unbounds were all one-offs. I was trying to sneak off early from the pub afterwards, and he said: "Oh bollocks you are," and dragged me back for another one. There is something very unnerving about playing a scene with Courtney and Warner, those two amazing voices rumbling in either side of your headphones.
As for Warner. Was I pleased? I was petrified. I've worked with famous people before, but I haven't known they were famous. I didn't see Spaced until after I'd worked with Simon Pegg, for example. But when this giant man shambled in and shook my hand and said with a smile "I'm David Warner," it was very difficult not to revert to giggling fanboy status. I was lurking in the kitchen with Mark Wright (Marcus) and Stuart Piper (Adam), and trying to make conversation, and every few minutes, one of us would point at him and mime "BLIMEY! IT'S DAVID WARNER!"
What did you think of the rest of the cast that John and Gary assembled? Are they how you'd imagined their respective characters to sound like?
Most of them, yes. John kept on ringing up and saying bizarre things like "I hope you don't mind, but Zerdin's Australian now," or "Just to let you know, Brimmicombe-Wood is Scottish." Those parts weren't written that way but it didn't bother me at all - I think it accentuated the Commonwealth card I was trying to play with other parts like Ling.
David Tennant, as the Colonel, was the "fourth star", in that he was a counterpart to the Brigadier in the way that the Master was a counterpart to the doctor. He actually managed to scare his squaddies. The studio was supposedly soundproof, but you could still hear him yelling at them from the green room. They would always come out of the studio standing up straighter.
I was very pleased wth Liz Sutherland, who is half-Chinese. It annoys me when people write Asian parts that they always expect someone to have a "conflict with their roots" or at the very least, a dumb accent. The only decent Chinese character on TV is Chen in E.R., and that's because the show has a Chinese script editor at the moment. I remember being on Southend Pier (don't ask) with two pretty Chinese girls, and a man started talking to them very slooowly, and saying "Do you like our country? Where are you from?" And they both stared at him like he was mad, and said "Colchester." I changed it to Slough in Sympathy because I think the word is inherently funnier, but that's all there in Ling - a British girl whose skin colour makes everyone think she's Lucy Liu, when actually she's Kate Winslett. I think it's something that you can do in audio much easier than in TV.
Liz said to me that this was the fourth part called Ling she'd had to play that year, but the "first who was a real person." No higher praise.
Gatiss as the Master brought a lot to his role, particularly the insane giggles, which I don't believe were in the script. I never heard him perform because I wasn't in any of his scenes, but people were coming out of scenes saying that he was scaring them. So I first heard him in the completed CD, and I thought he dripped evil.
Could you tell me a bit about the character of the Master in SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL? Did you write him to be played by Mark Gatiss?
No, I had no idea who Mark Gatiss was at the time. I wrote it for Roger Delgado (yes I know he's dead, but with him in mind). The only other place I'd heard Gatiss's name mentioned was in a convention I overheard between two Big Finish producers, about how there was this nutter who used to call their answerphone and leave messages like "This is Gatisssss, calling on purpossssssse", which was his way of auditioning for Death in the Judge Dredd audios.
Gatiss was good fun in the greenroom too. Whenever there was a lull, he would turn to Warner and say something like: "So, David, tell us about Time After Time." And Warner would roll his eyes, and pause, and then say, "All right then, I was in this pub with Malcolm McDowell..."
And whose idea was it to keep his identity a secret? Did you come up with the name 'Sam Kisgart'?
That was me. I thought it would be in keeping with tradition from the Tony Ainley years. In fact, the person in the cast photograph credited as "Sam Kisgart" is actually me. I think there was also a cast photograph taken including Mark Gatiss… hey, maybe you can include that in this book?
Any initial working titles?
The Last Stand, Big Trouble in Little England.
How much did the script have to be rewritten before recording? Any major changes?
Big Finish were very strict about certain issues in the script. They have a real handle on what makes a character Doctory, and there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing over the way he spoke. The Doctor needs to make the discoveries and lead the action
You attended the actual recording, didn't you? And any behind-the-scenes gossip?
I asked not to be credited, but I actually play a dozen parts in Sympathy. When you hear the death rattle of Ke Le (i.e. the death of the Delgado Master), that's actually me. I'm also the Chinese pilot, the Cantonese night-club bouncer, the lead chanter for the monks, one of the squaddies and a Man in the Pub. Plus a few other things.
I was convinced that with a little coaxing, I could get all the characters speaking reasonable enough Chinese. Liz was no problem, and neither, as it turned out, was Warner. I had him speaking Mandarin and Cantonese at different moments, and he never took more than two takes. There was one word he got a little bit wrong, but when he asked me if he should do it again, I told him not to. He'd managed to mispronounce something in exactly the same way as Pertwee in Mind of Evil, so I figured it was more fun to leave it in… for all those Cantonese-speaking Doctor Who fans out there. I'm sure there are many.
So I'm standing in the sun, next to David Warner, having my photograph taken, and the photographer suddenly looks up and says: "Wait a minute! I know you! You're Jonathan Clements!" Turned out he'd been a camera assistant on a photoshoot I did for a TV programme I used to present on the Sci Fi channel.
"It must be nice to be famous," quipped Warner.
Gary Russell complained every five minutes about how long the script was, and he complained to Nick Briggs about it, who would pop his head round the door every quarter of an hour and say: "Are you done yet?" just to be a git. But as it happened, Gary finished with ten minutes to spare, and roped us in to do some walla work on Davros.
What do you think DOCTOR WHO fans will make of SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL?
I hope they'll see it as an updating, and continuation, and hommage, and sequel to Mind of Evil, and a 21st century take on the Doctor's whole UNIT experience - as if it had been made in 2003 by the people who did Ultraviolet. And I hope they laugh, because there are lines that are supposed to be funny. And I hope just one or two of them maybe feel a iota of sympathy for the Master.
I hope they think it's the best Big Finish ever. At least till Rob Shearman's Deadline comes out. That's not too much to ask for, is it?
And from what you've heard, what do YOU think of the final product? Be honest! If you were writing SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL again, what - if anything - would you change?
Well, if I had the time, I might go all the way back to John's Last Stand idea and write that like I was supposed to.
The thing is, whatever you're writing ends up being about what's going through your head at the time. And Sympathy was about military organisations who couldn't prove that they did anything useful, and weapons of mass destruction, and war criminals, and Chinese spies, and the terrible waste that was the Handover of Hong Kong.
If you gave me the same set of rules and stipulations this very moment, it would be about something completely different. It would probably be about SARS, and space programs, and the Roman Republic, and it would probably be called Girls From Texas or The Killing Palace, because those are the news articles, and songs and books that are cluttering my office and mind right now. And by the time this book is printed, it would be something completely different again.
I wouldn't change a thing. I had very good and helpful notes from Big Finish and from a couple of Whovian friends, Adam Newell and Marcus Hearn, who turn up as the two traders. So I was pretty confident that it was going to push the right buttons with Big Finish's audience.
I really liked some of the sound stuff. Some things that I hadn't put in the script, like when the stealth jet goes overhead, it sets off the burglar alarms near the Brigadier's pub. Also the military snare drums that kick in when UNIT arrive. I've never written any music directions for my BF stuff. I guess I ought to, because its an element I shouldn't neglect.
I really liked the chanting monks, as well. I thought it sounded pretty crappy when we recorded it, but it's been well and truly tweaked in the studio to sound like a hundred Chinese guys droning.
TWO FINAL THINGS …
Firstly, the plug. Using as many or as few words as you like, could you sell SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL?
This is how I always thought Doctor Who ought to be.
AND FINALLY …
There will be a bullet-point section in the chapter on SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL entitled 'Things to listen out for …' or 'Stuff you may have missed …' or 'Trivia' or whatever. Do you have any random titbits of trivia for me to include? Nothing too insignificant. Any bits of info that haven't been covered by the questions above …
There are several references to the Rolling Stones song scattered throughout Sympathy, including whole lines lifted and inserted into the dialogue. I'll start you off with the Master's opening line: "Please allow me to introduce myself…" I drew the line at an owl on the hillside going "Whoo-Hoo".
The name Ling is actually Chinese for "zero". I planned to write a whole scene where Adam and Marcus tease her about her name being the last thing someone hears before a bomb goes off, but there wasn't time.
Brian Hook, a lecturer of mine at Leeds University, was annoyed that he didn't get to be the last governor of Hong Kong instead of Chris Patten. That's why he's Governor in the news bulletin you overhear in the pub.
The Brigadier's pub got its name because I was desperate to have someone say "There's Big Trouble in Little England" at some point. But it was so cheesy I couldn't bring myself to do it, so I saved it for the blurb on the CD box.
Marcus's line: "I'm not a racist! Except for the Japs and the Welsh," is a quote from the Sunday Times TV critic, A.A. Gill. He's a hero of mine, and also turns up as Adrian Adrian in Judge Dredd: 99 Code Red.
Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood was originally Colonel Singh, a fully assimilated English Sikh as a companion to Ling, the "Chinese" girl from Slough. I dropped the idea when I started to realise that a double-barrelled name was more appropriate - to accentuate the fact that he was the antagonist of the Brigadier, just as the Doctor is constantly at odds with the Master.
All the Chinese spoken in Sympathy for the Devil is real, even such bizarre terms as xixin, or "soul drainer." Hu in Chinese really can mean "He Who Tends to the Sick," as well as "Fox" and "Tiger," depending on the tone in which it is spoken.
When the Brigadier compares the Soul Jar to "Pandora's Box", he is using the original working title of Mind of Evil.
When the Doctor says "Perhaps I may be of some assistance," he is quoting Sean Connery in the movie Rising Sun.
The scene in which the Brigadier tries to defend his track record was directly inspired by the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. At one point, he is even asked to provide evidence of a "smoking gun."
The Master's "Meditate on this" was inspired by a much ruder line in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. There are others that are even more obscure. The Master also quotes the famous robber John Dillinger at one point, and also has a line lifted from the forgotten 1980s sitcom I'm Sorry I'm A Stranger Here Myself.
The Taiping Rebels in 19th century China genuinely did think they were invincible. It may not have had anything to do with alien brain parasites, though. Although Sympathy is an Unbound, some may wish to speculate on whether the Master's 19th century memories are canonical or not.
The final line, in the bonus scene that comes after the closing music, is of course a reference to the Doctor Who TV movie starring Paul McGann.