Doctor Who: Lungbarrow (44 page)

Most Lungbarrovians cope by playing games, but over the years, decades, centuries, the games have got progressively more bizarre and deadly. You're given thirteen lives to start with... But in Lungbarrow, what else is there to do except be beastly to each other?

Cousins so far:

Cousin Arkhew, is a rather put upon little chap; the gul ible one who always gets the short straw when it comes to dirty jobs.

Cousin Owis is a bit of a sad Billy Bunter - not very nice, certainly quite dim. But extremely significant.

Cousin Glospin, the Doctor's arch-rival. In a surprising family trait, the "young" Glospin seems to bear more than a passing Byronic resemblance to Paul McGann.

Cousin Innocet, the House's moral minority, still possesses a remnant of the old Gallifreyan telepathy. In the Old Time, women were taller than the men and Innocet is tall and proud like her forebears. It's likely that the very tall body that Romana tries on before regenerating into Lalla Ward, is another throwback to the tal seer women of the Old Time - well, it could be! Innocet's long, long hair may have roots (ha!) in Rapunzel or Maeterlinck's Melisande or the braided Bride in the Stravinsky/Nijinska bal et Les Noces, but its weighty symbolism is entirely different and nothing to do with the loss of innocence. One day, Innocet will be Lungbarrow's Housekeeper, until then she keeps her journal and builds houses out of circular playing cards.

Cousin Jobiska: Edward Lear's Pobble Who Had No Toes had an Aunt Jobisca who gave him to drink lavender water tinged with pink. When a close relative of mine was suffering from advanced Alzheimer's and had to go into Hellingly Hospital, a giant rambling NHS institution in rural East Sussex, there was a tiny and very sweet old lady on his ward, who constantly said "Take me home, dear. I want to go home." Bless her, I don't think she really remembered where home was. It seemed to change on a weekly basis, rather like Jobiska's age. Hellingly, with its gothic architecture and warren of corridors, was yet another inspiration for Lungbarrow. It was closed in the cutbacks, a lot of patients went back to the community (maybe some got into government) and the place is now something like luxury flats. The House of Lungbarrow would not have stood for that.

The God of Pain is one of the old Gal ifreyan Gods, aka the Menti Celesti, who could also be Eternals (Enlightenment.) They turn up throughout the New Adventures, most notably Time (as the Doctor was her champion) and Death. I had to coordinate the writing of Lungbarrow with Kate Orman, whose Room With No Doors was the previous book in the series. I rang Kate in Sydney and she was in the middle of her birthday dinner.

After we'd both stopped going "Oh, my God!" at each other, she pointed me towards a painting, The Death of Arthur by J.G. Archer, which shows the dying King Arthur laid on a seashore, tended by three queens before he's ferried off to Avalon. Kate saw the three women as the embodiment of the Gallifreyan Gods - Red/black for Death, white for Pain and an unfixed shifting colour for Time. Bizarrely I knew the picture and had already used it in the novelisation of Battlefield. Things, like Gallifreyan clocks, run in complex interlocking circles.

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And talking of Gallifreyan clocks... The arrival of the TARDIS sends out ripples, toppling Innocet's house of cards and setting frozen time in the House moving again. And poor old Arkhew is trapped in the orrery-like clock as all the planets and orbits, representing space and legend, start to activate around him. The Doctor, of course, insists he doesn't believe in omens.

Lungbarrow's attic is like a fairy tale forest. The giant furniture recalls when we are little and can only just see over the top of the table at what Mum is doing for tea. I once saw an opera production in which a character regressed to childhood, dreaming she was ascending to Heaven. In answer to this, a white staircase at the side of the stage was suddenly replaced by a giant version of the same staircase. The character became a child again, climbing this mountainous slope one big step at a time. It was an unforgettable and radiant image. Lungbarrow's not so radiant, but you get the idea...

In the original version, it was Ace who went through the looking glass into the House's past. As a visual reference, I copied the Tenniel illustration of Alice climbing over the mantle into the glass and substituted our Perivale heroine with her Ace jacket on.

When I worked at Woodlands at BBC White City, our open-plan office was right next to the reference library. One lunchtime I found an old copy of Spotlight from the 1930s with a portrait of a young and dapper comedy actor called Billy Hartnel . I'd suggested we use it as a basis for a framed picture which the Doctor would uncover and hurriedly hide again in fright.

The garden itself is another Gal ifreyan timepiece with the statue of Rassilon as its centre.

The Drudges are the ultimate evolved form of Lungbarrow's furniture. Living wooden servants who tend to the day-to-day needs of the House. We had debates in the tv production office as to whether they should be male or female. Ben suggested (it's always Ben) that they should be one of each, but you'd never be quite sure which was which. At this point, Ace had dubbed them Grim and Grimmer. I'd always seen them as fearsome wooden Victorian governesses, but Daryl Joyce's illustrations show them as quite beautiful objects. Which is, of course, quite correct. Why should furniture be ugly?

In this flashback, Cousin Glospin is a lot older than he was in Chapter 4. And he's a lot younger too. Gallifreyan families are a nightmare.

This gathering is one of those hatched, matched, dispatched occasions, when you get to see al those distant aunties who you normally avoid and barely remember to exchange Christmas cards with. There's something of those Forsyte family gatherings in this too - everyone being frightful y superior, whilst still gossiping about the latest family scandal. Basically most of the Cousins know there's trouble in the offing and are there to enjoy the show.

There are various units of Gallifreyan currency throughout the NAs. Pandaks are named after one of the Presidents named Pandak, of whom Deadly Assassin tells us there have been at least three. Not unlike the French Louis.

I often have an actor in my head when I'm writing a part. Occasional y I've been lucky and actual y got the actor in question, but it just helps both me, and maybe the director, to nail down the type of character. In the late 1980s for Lungbarrow, I was thinking of the late Patricia Hayes, al wiry and with a fearsome energy, as Satthralope, Michael Maloney as the charming, but deeply nasty young version of Glospin (who has mysteriously turned into a McGann lookalike in the book) and I fantasised that Peter Cushing might be lured out of retirement to play Quences. These days, I'd kill for Leslie Phil ips. Innocet, I saw as Angela Down, who'd been so genuinely lovely as Princess Maria in the BBC's War and Peace. Today I'd go straight for the very wonderful Gina McKee. Alternatively, these days I'd be tempted to insist that all the Cousins were played by the League of Gentlemen, with Mark Gattis as a magnificent Auntie Val sort of Innocet.

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Cousin Satthralope: The housekeeper is the medium between the House and its inhabitants. She's in telepathic empathy with the living building, responsible for the rituals and day-to-day running of the place and the Drudges are her servants. She embodies the House's possessiveness and sense of familial duty. There's a remnant of the ancient female Pythian rulers of Gallifrey in her role.

Ordinal-General Quences: The Kithriarch, head of the Family. The elderly parent who only wants the best for his offspring. He recognised the Doctor's potential long ago and had a career al mapped out for his protege.

Unfortunately the Doctor had his own ideas... An alternative Quences turns up in the close of the chapter, with Arkhew spinning on the orrery-like clock, the Cousins in complete panic below and the dark rising up the windows, was the very first visual image I had of Lungbarrow, before I even knew the story that went with it.

This chapter starts with a collage of word pictures representing the aftermath of the House's actions. Maybe it comes from watching so much tv when I was younger, but my prose writing does seem to be very visual. In fact, I knew the stories of many literary classics, not because I'd read them, but because I'd seen them on the tel y. I did go and read quite a lot of them afterwards, but even as I read the books, I'd see the characters from the tv version.

Patrick Troughton, magnificently evil as Quilp, Alan Badel as The Count of Monte Christo, Frank Finlay as Jean Valjean. A Disney film version of any story or fairytale tends, for good or bad, to eclipse any other interpretation.

But even on audio, I still find myself trying to create extraordinary sights; sights that the tel y could never afford.

These days I watch precious little television. Al presenters who believe they're more important than the programme they're presenting should be sentenced to watch endless loops of lifestyle programmes. And one particular garden designer, who prefers concrete to plants, should have been strangled at birth by a clematis.

The Doa-no-nai-heya Monastery is the retreat featured in the previous book in the NA series, Kate Orman's Japanese epic The Room With No Doors.

For this version of the book, I've hacked out most of the second half of the original Chapter 8. There was a cringe-making overload of information there, showing what the Doctor got up to while Chris was unconscious, and it was totally unnecessary to the plot. So it went.

Gallifreyan nursery rhymes seem to be gloomy things that mourn the loss of the children. It's all down to guilt.

Children were so long ago that they've become the stuff of fairytale and legend.

The Drudges seem to have forgotten their place in the hierarchy. As maids, they are supposed to serve the Family, but since the House took things into its own "hands", they behave more like prison warders. The House has decided that it knows best, rather like high street banks that forget they are the public's servants.

After six years working in catering during the seventies, you'd think I have gone off kitchens, but I still like them a lot. They're the heart of any home. Things, both wonderful and weird, happen in kitchens. Chefs chase junior cooks with live lobsters. The kitchen staff are at permanent war with the waiters. The waiters live on a diet of filched oysters and smoked salmon. And I can't even tell you what I once saw in the dry food store in a seafront hotel in Southsea. Fawlty Towers only skims the surface, believe me. The things that other people have in their larders is just as fascinating as what they have on their book or video shelves. And what the Lungbarrow kitchen has in its larder is not quite so far from other kitchens as you'd like to think.

I like the fact that the Doctor is extremely cagey about admitting that he knows where he is. It puts a strain on his friendship with Chris, who behaves with utmost decency throughout. I'm all for a bit of antagonism between the regular characters. God knows, they live on top of each other enough, barrelling through harrowing situations which hardened troops would need counselling for. I love it when Barbara calls the First Doctor a stupid old man; when the Second Doctor deliberately has a row with Jamie about rescuing Victoria from the Daleks; or when Nyssa doesn't tell the Fifth Doctor that she's spoken to Adric in Castrovalva. You could write a whole book about Tegan's paranoias, and the Seventh Doctor has those little disagreements with Ace in Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric. Chris Cwej is a really nice guy, but his trust of the Doctor is at odds with his training as an Adjudicator, which means he can't help but have a highly suspicious mind.

Innocet is such a stickler for tradition that she even puts on her hat and coat for a trip up the corridor. People wil do anything to cling on to the past. But really she's quite literal y shouldering all the blame and guilt in the House. If she's not careful, she'l land up an unsung martyr.

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I've always had a soft spot for mushrooms ever since the sixties when a Russian spy, captured retrieving top secret information from a tree stump in somewhere like Ashdown Forest, insisted he was only looking for fungi.

"I'm only picking mushrooms" became a school catch phrase. Rather like the slogan on a sheer nylon tights offer with Paxo stuffing: "Recommended by Anita Harris." But I digress...

There's a sense that both the Doctor and Chris are getting out of their depth. Wouldn't it just be better to get the TARDIS back and go? But curiosity, always the Doctor's undoing, and a man in a stove get the better of them.

They're starting to get noticed.

The Doctor's catapult, emblem of a rascal y Dennis the Menace-style childhood. But I don't remember knowing anyone who actual y had one.

Any resemblance by the "whisper softly" nursery verse to "Christopher Robin is saying his prayers" is purely deliberate.

Strange, isn't it, how something insignificant can snowball? Does the Gallifreyan Celestial Intervention Agency appear in any other tv story? Not by name as far as I can recall. (By now you'l all be shooting off notes to the BBCi Who forum.) But when the CIA got mentioned in Deadly Assassin, I'm sure it was just one of Robert Holmes'

throwaway line jokes. Yet it's ballooned into the all purpose, undercover, machinating power that lurks behind the pomp of the High Council. It's answerable only to itself and is responsible for all those times when the Doctor starts shouting threats at the empty air.

If the smug, serpentine interrogator of Leela seems familiar, it's because he appeared memorably in one of the tv stories. He's an historian, his statements are al couched in legalese and he seems to have nothing but contempt for anything that rocks the stately circular dance of Gallifrey. For purposes of suspense, his identity wil not be revealed until much later on in the story. Meanwhile President Romana, representing the radical forces of liberal innovation, is already playing the forces of Gallifreyan conservatism at their own game.