More Short Trips |
Short
story “Good Companions”, first published by BBC Worldwide in March 1998, ISBN: 0-563-55565-3
I originally
pitched an unsolicited version of this story, called “The Return Ticket” and
featuring Liz Shaw as the companion, to editor Stephen James Walker for Virgin
Publishing’s collection Decalog 2. I liked the idea of an older
companion facing a later (perhaps as-yet unseen) Doctor and his new companion,
with the twist that she didn’t recognise him immediately. Stephen turned it
down.
I later suggested
it to Jon Blum and Kate Orman, who were constructing a proposal for a
“Decalog-style” book of companion stories for BBC Books editor Nuala Buffini. That
never made the shelves.
Subsequently, I heard that
new BBC books editor Steve Cole was commissioning stories which Tom Baker would
read on an audio-tape called “Four by Four”. I sent Steve a story called “Revenants”,
which featured the fourth Doctor and the second Romana (entirely on spec). The
audio didn’t happen, in the end. But I got a chance to write a different audio
story for the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) instead; that was “Bounty” on the Earth & Beyond tape.
When Steve was
looking for contributions to the second BBC Book of Doctor Who short stories
(following the successful first book, Short Trips), I suggested
“Revenants” again! Steve felt that the temporal tricks in it were too similar to
a story he had already commissioned (“Dead Time”, by Andrew Miller, which had
also previously appeared on the Earth & Beyond
audio), so he asked me to suggest something else. So I dusted off
“The Return Ticket” and e-mailed it to Steve. We agreed on a few changes and
clarifications, and he commissioned it. “Revenants” eventually appeared in the
next short story collection, Short Trips and Side Steps.
The proposal you can
see here is the one I sent to the BBC, and is therefore revised a lot from
earlier versions. I decided not to use Liz Shaw as the returning companion,
because someone else had carelessly killed her off in another book set before
my story.
The story took
seven drafts. For several of them, I used Grace Holloway from the TV movie as
the featured companion. Steve and I agreed that this wasn’t so successful, and
late on I rewrote the story to use Tegan Jovanka instead.
I made the Doctor
in the story an as-yet unseen future incarnation (so that readers would wonder,
along with Tegan, whether it really was him). I realised after a while that he
reminded me of the ginger-haired “Merlin” Doctor that Marc Platt wrote
(briefly) into the opening of his novelisation of the TV story Battlefield,
and so in the end I adopted some of the nuances from Marc’s character too.
In joke: the rest
home is called “Shawlands”, as a reminder of who the story originally features.
Thinking about the
story now (early in 2001), it seems to me that it was amusingly prescient – the
UK railway system is in disarray after the disaster of Conservative
privatisation, and last year it ground to a halt because of (among other
things) torrential rain and flooding. Check this out for yourself in the excerpt
here. Newsstand reviews were generally more positive than those on the
web.
Some imagery in the story
refers to Whitman’s poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” from the 1881-2 edition of Leaves of Grass. As I mention above, one of the other
stories in the collection is “Dead Time” by Andrew Miller. Andrew’s story
introduces the Gallifreyan Flowers of Remembrance, which make a startling
reappearance in The Ancestor
Cell.
Last
updated: 15 March 2001