In 1989, Doctor Who left our screens.
Normally when a programme ends, that's pretty much it.
But this the story of how the Doctor refused to die, finding a whole new lease of life.
This is the story of Doctor Who books.
The Doctor had an unlikely saviour in the form of Richard Branson.
The Doctor Who novelisations under the Target imprint was one of the few bits that survived when Virgin Communications took over WH Allen.
The Target line started in the early 1970s and they were straightforward novelisations of the Doctor Who scripts.
Sold a phenomenal number of copies, they must have sold something like 8 million Target novelisations.
But by the time I arrived there, this was all drying up.
Peter Darvill-Evans had been begging, I think for years, to make Doctor Who books.
It's funny.
You look back now and of course there are Doctor Who novels and books but It took Doctor Who's disappearance in order to start the creation of a range of books.
DARVILL-EVANS: They were sufficiently uninterested in Doctor Who as a product.
I actually drew up the licensing agreement.
Towards the end of the novelisations, people like Ben Aaronovitch and Ian Briggs took their scripts and expanded on them, which definitely had a more mature feel to them.
And that was a signpost to the way that we could go.
The first books came out in 1991.
It literally continued factually from the television programme, in that it was Sylvester McCoy's Doctor and Ace carried over.
So it was the Continuing Adventures to start with.
But it only really felt like that for about two or three books before it really started to get broader and wilder and more surreal.
I remember sort of sitting there and reading the very first book and in my head even taking up the pages and dividing it into where the episode breaks would probably come and imagining in my own head the actual cliff-hanger sting at the end of chapter four.
The way that with Terrance Dicks' novelisations you knew that every three chapters, that was end of episode one.
Terrance Dicks' Exodus, which was the second one, I just love that.
And I remember thinking, 'cause Terrance had had this interesting renaissance, writing the late Target books.
He'd got his mojo back and they were so delightful.
And then suddenly, he got the opportunity to write a new one.
And it was a sequel to The w*r Games, you know, that was a great thrill.
In the old days when Terrance Dicks wrote novelisations, he'd explain what the Tardis was, he explained what the Doctor was, he'd explain why it was bigger inside than out and all that sort of stuff.
These are for people properly learned in the ways of Doctor Who.
ANTOINE: The first books featured the debut of Paul Cornell.
Peter Darvill-Evans wonderfully had indicated in fanzines and in Doctor Who Monthly, I think it was at the time, that he was looking for original books, so I just had a go.
People started writing in and we picked Paul because his submission seemed very, very good.
Suddenly there was somebody who I respected in fandom, who was a very experienced writer of fan fiction, um, was getting a book published about Doctor Who.
CORNELL: I still love it.
But it's Oh, it's just, "I might only get the chance to write one Doctor Who book "so I'm going to put everything in this one, everything!" We printed about 25,000 of each book and they all sold.
Did the books reinvent Doctor Who for the '90s?
It kind of took the view, didn't it, pretty much everyone who'd started watching Doctor Who as a child must be grown up by now.
It was when I was growing up and it felt like it was growing up with me.
So it seemed the obvious thing, to make a series of books which were more for adults than for children.
I wanted, I think, there to be this sort of great nostalgic kick and something at the same time which felt like it was something I'd not seen before.
The back of the books always said "Adventures too broad and too deep "for the TV screen".
But they were there to really push the franchise and to push what Doctor Who was and what the Doctor was and stuff like that into really bold and adult areas.
We didn't go out of our way to fill the books with sex and v*olence or indeed dr*gs.
But we But certainly I had no objection.
It did sort of take in a world of sex and a world of v*olence and of dr*gs.
Just more adult material.
It was more real, even if people were from another planet, they're much more grounded, they had lives, they had families, they had children, they had problems, they had poverty, they had lust.
I didn't really suddenly go, "Oh, there's breasts in Doctor Who.
"Oh, there's swearing in Doctor Who.
" Because by that age, I was swearing.
There were early books.
There was one called Iceberg which is so full of swearing.
You cannot tell any young Doctor Who fans, they'll go find it on eBay because it's like whoa! (CHUCKLES) It's strong stuff.
Ace in my book goes off and has sex with someone and I was like, "Oh, God.
I've I've got to put that in.
" It's like you've ticked a box.
"Does the Doctor get moody and grumpy?
" Tick.
"Does Bernice get drunk and have sex with an Ice Warrior?
" Tick.
Once I'd done all those sort of those, tropes that were I saw as being what were essential in a new adventure, I could then get on and write the story I really wanted to write.
In some ways, it was a natural progression for Doctor Who.
In some ways, it was a great big leap for Doctor Who.
But I think it was a very wise leap, in that it wasn't the easy option.
It wasn't the nice, safe return of the Wirrn.
The Virgin books saw a more complicated Seventh Doctor.
DARVILL-EVANS: In stories like The Curse of Fenric, he'd become very manipulative and and quite secretive about his motives and what he was doing.
And we just built on that.
This manipulative, dark Doctor I always thought it was a bit exaggerated, myself.
I don't think that's quite in the television stories that everyone thinks it is.
Sylvester McCoy's Doctor into becoming partly mythical figure called Time's Champion.
I mean, the ideal thing probably would have been to create a new Doctor.
But I think what everyone managed to do is to create a new character for Sylvester's Doctor.
They were taking themselves terribly seriously for a while.
It was like Doctor Who had something to prove.
The darkness was overplayed.
I think a lot of us realised that we were overplaying the darkness and went off in all sorts of directions really quickly.
As the range grew, it really came into its own with the launch of its own companion.
At the time, that had all the sort of zest of what it would have now, without the photo call.
So when it came time to invent a new character, we basically asked for ideas.
CORNELL: William Blake in the novel The Pit by Neil Penswick, I think, was a companion audition.
I think Sylvester and William Blake going around the cosmos solving mysteries would be fantastic.
And Paul came up with Bernice.
Bernice Summerfield is a 26th-century archaeologist.
Quite a feisty girl.
She liked a drink or two, she liked to consort with a few gentlemen friends here and there.
She woke up with a hangover and it was just like, "That's brilliant!" Because I was just at the age of starting to drink in the park.
Creating a companion is really where you put your mark on what you think the show should be like.
She had a sense of humour about her, which again, was really good.
Ace could be occasionally, especially in the books, um, a little bit worthy and a little bit angst-ridden.
RUSSELL: Virgin had ruined Ace.
I think sending Ace off to be a space mariner, a Dalek k*ller, and then bringing her back as a quite unpleasant person.
CORNELL: Well, Ace doesn't really work now in our new context.
We've got a Doctor who's enormous and kind of God-like and needs puncturing and bringing down to earth a bit.
Benny was just the kind of a companion who fitted this world better.
As the range grew, some stellar talents emerged.
We loved our slush pile.
It was where we got It was where we got ideas from, it's where we got authors from.
And it was great being able to offer so many authors the chance to be published for the first time.
There was some really, really brilliant stuff that, you know, has real stature in terms of Doctor Who history.
There was an awful lot of stuff that didn't as well.
I remember many a Saturday afternoon sitting there going 'Cause I'm just such a completist.
If I've bought a book, I've got to read it, so ploughing through some of these.
But equally, getting very excited by some of them as well.
I always loved Paul Cornell's books.
There was a writer called Kate Orman who used to write for that range that was a wonderful writer.
CORNELL: Finally, Doctor Who got a regular female author, who was contributing often and was very much one of, if not the central author of the range.
I loved Gareth Roberts' Highest Science.
I remember thinking 'Cause it felt I mean, it really was a sort of Season 17 story in disguise.
Conundrum, which is my, I think, my favourite new adventure.
Steve Lyons' book which actually made me laugh out loud and I thought, "I now know what I've been missing from them.
" Very, very clever people were sort of getting in.
Mark Gatiss wrote one.
GATISS: Coming home to a letter from Peter Darvill-Evans, and I think I read it about a hundred times and I danced about.
I think it was the happiest I'd ever been.
"All around the cluttered cloisters, musty rooms and high-vaulted halls, "there was a deep and tangible hush.
"Any light in the virtually impenetrable gloom was of a peculiarly pellucid green "spilling out feebly from every heavy wooden door and misaligned stone.
"Everywhere there was a terrible sense of stagnancy, "imbuing the whole place with a fetid, neglected atmosphere, "as though some great cathedral had been flooded by a brackish lagoon.
" And TV Centre is exactly the same today.
"From out of the cobweb shadows emerged a little group of very old men, "resplendent in their ornately decorated robes.
"The least ancient of the group, a white-haired individual "with a piercing eye and a downturned haughty mouth, "lifted the hem of his robes as he detached himself from the others, "sending little flurries of dust over the flagstones.
"He murmured a few words of apology to his comrades "and melted away into the shadows.
"After a time, he came to a small door inset in the crumbling stonework.
"He looked about him, senses alert, "and lifted his hands to grip the lapels of his robes.
"His twinkling eyes darted from side to side.
"It was time.
" "Mark Gatiss divides his time between writing and acting.
" This is still true.
"In 1991, four of his plays were performed in London fringe theatres.
" Brackets.
"Absolutely contemporary, utterly truthful and hilarious.
"City Limits.
"That dates it.
"He is currently working on several projects for television.
" It's exactly the same.
I had a series on television called Dark Season, a children's thriller.
I was interviewed by one of those science fiction magazines called TVZone.
I was interviewed by a man called David Richardson.
It was the first interview I'd ever done, it felt thrilling.
And, um I've done a few since.
I had friends who were working on the Doctor Who books at Virgin Publishing.
And so I suggested to him that it might be a good idea if he was maybe to write one.
Um He said he was interested.
I didn't know how serious he was.
So I got the address and I wrote off to Rebecca Levene and So I did like a treatment and sent it off, thinking that'd be nice.
And then, I don't know, about six weeks later, I got sent back a letter saying, "Yes, we'd like to do this.
" I had about five weeks to write it so it was a nightmare.
I just remember it was like awful, awful.
You had to write I don't know how many thousand words a day, I don't know, four thousand words a day or something?
You just got up and you had to just write and write and write.
It's hard.
It's really hard writing prose.
It's a nightmare.
It's like you sit there going, "He walked in the room wearing a green hat.
" How did he walk in?
Where did he walk in?
What sort of hat?
Why?
"Chapter one, 24th December, 1977.
"Bev lay awake hoping that Father Christmas would come "but the tall man came instead.
"She could hear his voice in the front room "but her mother's crying drowned his actual words.
"Mum had been upset all day, ever since she came home.
"Many years later, Bev would cry the same tears herself "and only then would she recognise what they meant.
"Only then, when it was too late.
"Bev got out of bed to listen, she stepped over her Mr Men sack, "as yet unvisited by Santa, "and crept to the bedroom door.
"Carefully sucking her bottom lip, "she edged the door open a fraction, wondering what she would do "if she saw another man threatening her mother.
"She'd be cleverer than last time, that's for sure.
"Last time, two weeks ago, Bev had been woken by shouting, "the voices of two men, both angry, but neither matching her mother's fury.
"Bev had run into the front room "to find that one of the men had kicked the nest of tables into pieces.
"He waved a table leg in the air, threatening Mum.
"Bev threw herself at the second man.
"Bev hardly remembered the slap.
"The most vivid memory was the sound of her nightie ripping "as she thought, 'It's new.
It's brand new last week and cost Mum a packet "and she is going to k*ll me for getting it ripped.
' "Both men suddenly looked ashamed.
"Better still, Mum was in a temper, "and when she was in a temper, no one stood a chance.
"Temper made Mum bigger somehow, "made her able to take hold of both men at once "and shove them onto the walkway outside.
"She slammed the door shut and started to cry.
"'That,' Bev thought later, 'was a shame.
' "Temper made Mum magnificent.
"When she cried, it was as though she had lost.
"And tonight, Christmas Eve, "Mum must have lost very badly indeed because she could only cry.
"This time Bev did not dare interrupt.
"This time the tall man was there.
" It's marvellous.
Damaged Goods, which, looking back at it now, was actually a very adult take on Doctor Who and very dark, very emotionally powerful.
But it's then vastly different to what I did in the television version.
Not entirely differently, and yet there are links.
It's like it's set on a council estate.
It's set amongst ordinary people, that's exactly where I wanted to set Rose.
And in the end just 'cause I think, you know, it was time to come back to real life and for Doctor Who to fly again, he has to take off in the first place.
It's a very adult thing, the book.
In fact, when When I got the job and we were heading towards production, it was the website, James Goss on the website, of the BBC website, asked if they could reprint Damaged Goods as a, you know, a sort of build-up to Doctor Who getting on screen.
And I had to say no to that, actually, because it's such an adult version of Doctor Who.
Like I say, I have no problem with children reading that other stuff but I think the Daily Mail would have.
And I think I think it just would've created unnecessary headlines and bad publicity for a show that hadn't even launched yet.
And similarly, at the same time, I refused to censor it.
The only actual story I ever took from the New Adventures was Human Nature, which was written by Paul Cornell.
CORNELL: The most wonderful thing perhaps of my career in Doctor Who is to have written the original Human Nature and then to have written it for television.
I remember sitting in my office in Manchester just going, "Oh, my God.
He's already written the best Doctor Who story ever.
"So we should do that.
You know, the Doctor becomes human for a day.
" I think I loved it so much as a book I just sort of left it.
It was there on the shelf and I thought, "Right, that's lovely.
"It's not to be touched.
It's such a good novel.
" And then once I flipped that round in my head, I went, "Oh, we could do this on telly.
" Then off I go, phoned him up, and off we went and did it.
It's a beautiful story.
ANTOINE: Soon, a range of past Doctor adventures was launched.
DARVILL-EVANS: There was a demand for it, we had people writing in saying what about some stories featuring the First Doctor, the Third Doctor and so on?
It then gave the New Adventures total free reign to go and do whatever they wanted to do.
And it gave people like me total free reign to go, "I'm never going to have to write a New Adventure again.
" CORNELL: I wrote very much a New Adventure with Peter Davison in it.
Um, unlike somebody like Gareth Roberts, who wrote those terrific Tom Baker books, which really do feel like just packed, extra-length lots and lots of Tom Baker.
The Missing Adventures to me was proper Doctor Who.
Doctor Who should be about monsters and fluffy things and maggots and it shouldn't be about deep, meaningful, "Ooh, "let's t*rture people, "let's turn people into say Oh, let's Chris and Roz" Oh, God, I hated Chris and Roz.
The worst characters ever in the entire history of any genre book ever! When the decision was made to k*ll off one of the Doctor's companions, Roz, it wasn't plain sailing.
So Vile a Sin was was a book that was being written by Ben Aaronvitch.
And he found it difficult to write and I think he did have computer problems, I think his hard disk did crash.
Um, I remember actually going round to his house on one occasion, knocking on the door, and trying to find out from him how much he'd actually written and where it was.
We did get Kate Orman to step in and finish it for him, which worked very well, but it did mean that the book was published late and out of sequence.
Uh, Roz Forrester was dead in some novels which were published and then she d*ed in a novel that was published later.
But it was the best we could do.
In 1996, something terrible happened.
Doctor Who returned to television.
DARVILL-EVANS: Doctor Who TVmovie.
The way to describe us was worried by that.
Um, it presaged a greater interest in Doctor Who from the BBC.
RUSSELL: BBC Books phoned me up and said, "Would you be interested "in writing the novelisation of the new Doctor Who Paul McGann TVmovie?
" "Yes.
" (LAUGHS) Faster than I've said yes to anything in my life.
I was so excited.
Um And then it began to sink in to me.
I thought, "That's BBC Books.
That's not Virgin.
"That's BBC Books.
Oh!" We didn't know at that time that we were going to lose the licence.
But we didn't like it very much.
Because they kicked up a fuss, because they went to the BBC and said, "No, no, no.
You can't do this.
We have the licence.
"We've done all these books over the years.
It's not fair.
"You're going to damage our sales.
" I think that was the point where somebody in BBC Books I don't think it, I know somebody in BBC Books pricked up their ears and went, "Oh, there's real money to be made in Doctor Who.
" It only gradually became apparent that actually we were going to be stopped from doing anything to do with Doctor Who, that it was all going to go back to the BBC.
To this day, it's an absolute scandal that they just took it back.
It's I don't care who hears this but it's a very, very typical BBC thing to do.
And I'm not blaming any individual, I'm just blaming the great amorphous, Axos-like creature which the BBC has always been.
With Doctor Who now going back to the BBC, Virgin Books tried to keep going.
I remember saying at a very early stage in this that you can't publish Doctor Who novels without the Doctor.
I then went against my own advice and tried to do it.
CORNELL: I was amazed that they wanted to continue with Benny as the central character.
And just tremendously pleased.
RUSSELL: It's rather unfair when I've seen people say that the Virgin Books limped on, or they d*ed.
No, they didn't.
They kind of went out in a blaze of glory.
They way he took the logo off the books before he had to in order to maintain that place in the marketplace without the logo and largely succeeded.
They kept on going for several years.
New Adventures without the Doctor might have survived on their own, but they couldn't really survive when competing against, uh, Doctor Who books with the Doctor in and so, yes, sales did gradually fall away and I closed it down.
ANTOINE: Over at BBC Books, the range had a troubled start.
Taking it over, I did feel quite bad that it had been In that we'd taken back the rights from Virgin and were pretty much nicking their publishing programme, I felt that it should've been doing something a bit different but arrived too late to be able to do much beyond inherit that format, one old Doctor Who story a month and one new Doctor Who story, with the Eighth Doctor, an ongoing series.
(LAUGHS) Yes, the BBC The BBC novels were quite similar to what we were doing with the New Adventures, um, but I suppose I wasn't surprised, I I suppose quite pleased, really.
It proved that we that we'd been doing it right.
For the first six months or so, the BBC books really didn't know what they were doing.
They very much wanted a return to more traditional Doctor Who.
But given the pool of writers that they had to draw upon, honestly, that really was never going to happen.
And I think that that went out the window after about a year.
None of the authors really liked the character of Sam, who had been introduced in the Eighth Doctor's as the Doctor's companion.
In fact, people were always trying to k*ll her off.
It was very difficult at the start of the Eighth Doctor books because we'd had so little to go on on the TV show.
Having an hour of Paul McGann screentime to base an entire novel on, it is tricky.
I watched that TV movie more times probably than is is healthy for anyone.
Actually, I also base a lot of Paul McGann quite appallingly on various TV detectives.
Um, there's an awful lot of Ironside in my Paul McGann book.
Everyone had their own ideas, I think the TV movie had polarised opinion amongst the writers as much as anyone else.
Some were desperate to confront the "is he half-human or isn't he" issue.
You really were slightly at the mercy of your writers on a range like that.
Some would come in and they'd have their manuscript and they were slightly apologetic for seeming out of it but they'd had experiments done on their head.
But as the range went on, it was getting a bit confusing.
It's difficult because you want You want them to remain accessible but also you want to do things with the characters that can't be achieved in just one book.
We have this audience who will now trust that there will be thousands and thousands' worth of pages of fiction which can tell a very, very long story.
It's actually something which no one else has ever really done before.
Where as in the New Adventures, the arc had been Arcs were stuff that happened in the background and were often character-based, in the Eighth Doctor BBC books, it felt more like the arc was the story.
I think it's probably fair to say that at times there was too much going on.
One of the most interesting things to come out of the BBC range was the Faction Paradox, which is a whole thing of its own, another great blooming of creativity.
I think they are Time Lords who enjoy paradoxes.
This sort of very technical Faction Paradox, Grandfather Paradoxes and things like that, just didn't really appeal to me.
SHEARMAN: I found the idea of Faction Paradox actually quite amazingly clever.
I found the arc that came out of it initially very, very interesting.
I found that the arc came out of that arc okay.
I found that arc came out of that arc out of that arc increasingly baffling.
The Doctor encounters Faction Paradox and then what happens then I'm not sure.
That was an interesting run of stories.
Ah, but yeah, they were a big start.
We knew when Justin was taking over, we knew we had to sort of wrap, you know, call a stop to that and let him begin with a clean slate.
With four decades of continuity, several hundred stories and dozens of past villains all turning up in the same story, a brave decision was taken.
The way I coped was to, uh, to have the Doctor lose his memory and I said only he's not going to get it back and everybody went, "Yeah, well, for how many books?
" And I said, "No, he's not going to get it back.
" One of the things I wanted to do was get back to stand-alone stories that you could pick up at any point.
It's easy to say that.
It's very difficult to do.
And by the time the Eighth Doctor adventures, as I had them told, finished, I am sure we were as convoluted and complicated and introverted as they had been when I rebooted them.
The range ran for almost a decade and hundreds of adventures, which saw the Doctor do everything from attend his own funeral to meeting h*tler.
I would say that the BBC Books canon is a substantially more consistent, more coherent run of books.
There were some great ones by Johnny Morris and Paul Magrs that I really enjoyed, The Tomorrow Windows I remember being brilliant.
There are some good books in there and some very good, very talented writers.
You can push the bounds of what you do narratively even in the conventional sense, with some of the stuff, for example, that Lloyd Rose did, uh, which is terrific fiction.
ANTOINE: But as the books entered the 21 st century, sales were declining.
And with the mountain of unsold books piling up, a drastic solution was needed.
A deal was done, I understand, to, um, send a lot of the spare stock, I think free of charge, to Eastern Europe, to orphanages.
That's fantastic.
All these poor Polish and Latvian children will be getting to read Doctor Who books.
In fact, what was happening was the books were being used to, uh, to go in the furnaces, at these orphanages to run the central heating systems to keep the kids warm.
So if we weren't building their literary skills, at least we were keeping them alive.
So Doctor Who again comes to the rescue of poor children in distress.
I was sort of aware that sales were dropping off towards the end, but that's only because my own books, kind of I mean, Spiral Scratch probably sold three copies and one of those was probably to a cat.
What would have happened if the series hadn't come back?
The people we were left with was a, a solid core of, I don't know, 4,000 people around the world, not that many, who were willing to pay for the books and that's Luckily, that's just about the number of books you need to sell to sort of break even.
We did sort of limp on for a while with the past Doctor and Eighth Doctor books to the end of 2005.
And I have to say, the expectation with almost everyone was that the new series would be a sort of flash in the pan.
And then we'd continue anyway, but maybe our Eighth Doctor books would now be Ninth Doctor books.
Ah, then of course, the TVseries was a terrific success.
The result was that the past Doctor and the Eighth Doctor books didn't sort of continue after the end of the year.
They just sort of petered out.
In two decades of original fiction, what had the Doctor achieved?
Its ability to give a chance, a first chance in publishing to so many previously unpublished authors.
It was a brilliant opportunity to do that.
And I think that's the best thing we did.
If Peter hadn't taken a chance on me, I wouldn't have got the chance to, well, to write for the new series or perhaps anything else I've done since.
And I owe Peter and, uh, and the whole range an enormous debt.
The Doctor Who books were there at a time when it was really the darkest hour for Doctor Who.
Obviously having my name on a published book was a huge thing, but having it on a Doctor Who book was a dream come true.
I think I still had all my targets in order in some bookshelf where I was living, and sort of placing it in order.
That was a moment.
'Cause I could walk into Smith's and see a book with my name on, and I did that many times, and I put it in front of everyone else's books.
It was a very revolutionary time, I think, for a TV-tie-in franchise.
Wouldn't happen now.
That's the interesting thing.
Now that Doctor Who is a big success.
You wouldn't dare go to some of the areas they did, and they did go too far sometimes.
But, um, it was a great big experiment that was remarkably successful.