Neil Oseman

Category: Writing

  • Space Buns for Tea

    I’m about halfway through writing my book on the history of Doctor Who’s cinematography. So far I’ve conducted eight interviews, drafted 40,000 words, watched many episodes from all eras of the series (in no sensible order), read three books and numerous magazine articles, and spent untold hours in online research.

    Today I was kindly treated to lunch by a fellow of one of the Cambridge colleges, just a mile down the road from me. His father was a BBC camera op during the 70s, 80s and 90s, worked with six of the first seven Doctors, and was one of the first people I found out about when I started researching the book. Last month I worked on a short film with someone who happened to know his son, hence the lunch. It’s a small world. I came away with a copy of a treatise the father wrote about aligning foreground and background elements in VFX shots. Which is what I was doing in York last week, shooting second-unit blue-screen shots for Mars Express. It’s a very small world.

    That BBC camera op is one of a small number of Doctor Who’s 20th-Century technical crew who recorded their experiences on the series during their lifetimes. Another was a lighting designer on outside broadcasts. He wrote several columns about his Doctor Who work in an industry magazine. Now a colleague of his has come forward and generously offered me access to his notes.

    I’ve come across some real treasure troves of online information. Tech-ops.co.uk is one of them. The British Entertainment History Project is another. For anyone who’s a fan of Waris Hussein, Doctor Who’s first director, they have a three-hour interview with him. The fact that they’ve interviewed camera ops and engineers too, not just above-the-line crew, is extremely useful.

    That’s all for now. I’m doing enough writing without doing a bunch more on here too, but enjoy this strangely beautiful photocopier collage on the cover of a fan-made 1987 newsletter.

  • Wandering in the Fourth Dimension

    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.