Earlier this year I was reading a book about the making of Doctor Who and I found myself thinking, “I could write something like this.” So I looked up the publisher, Telos Publishing, realised I knew one of the founders a little bit, and sent them a pitch. It’s a history of Doctor Who‘s cinematography, a greatly expanded version of the article I wrote for Doctor Who Magazine in 2021. Think of that article as the police box and the book as the much bigger console room inside it.

So, yeah. I’m currently writing my first book. And I’m loving it, especially the detective work involved.

Yesterday I went to De Montfort University in Leicester, where their archive holds a large collection of camera scripts and schedules from the series. On Tuesday I went to the British Library to hunt through old issues of Ariel, the BBC’s internal newspaper. On Monday I borrowed a friend’s VHS player, a technology I haven’t used a decade, in order to watch a rare documentary. Last week I spoke to Mark Hutchings, gaffer of the entire 21st century series, and Bernie Davis, an outside broadcast engineer on a 1986 episode.

Crucial question: pun-based chapter titles? A big part of me wants the book to be classy and above that sort of thing. But another big part of me can’t resist “The Mind of Evesham” for the chapter on the BBC’s Engineering Training Department at Wood Norton, Evesham. And then you get to “Delta and the Scanner Men” for the outside broadcast chapter and by that point you’re committed.