Alan Barnes and David Richardson seemed very happy with
NIght's Black Agents as they got back in touch almost immediately
asking for another script.,,, As for the fallout from the likes of {preceding story] Death In The Family,
to be honest I wasn't really informed of the details of any of
that: I was essentially asked for a free standing story for Doctor,
Ace and Hex with no other proviso. In the very late stages of
scripting, Alan suggested a couple of lines for Hex referring to a recent
experience of death, so I knew something was going on, but the
details of this weren't spelled out for me: I think they were playing
their cards close to their chest in case anything leaked out. So I
had no real knowledge of my story being part of a 'trilogy': I worked
on it very
much as a self-contained story.
...I had always been fascinated by the work of H. P.
Lovecraft and the basic idea was to take that very gothic science fictional
world and bring it into collision with the Doctor's world. The
combination of horror and a weird kind of beauty in Lovecraft's work is
very haunting: the great big slimy monsters in Lovecraft are
never JUST big slimy monsters - they're ancient Gods and have all the
strangeness and sublimity of that. But, in a way, the personality of
Lovecraft is
almost more fascinating than the work itself: this
slightly nerdy introverted man who had all these weird universes
exploding in his head, so obviously that inspired the character of
Doveday, pushing it all the way so that Doveday's actually one of the strange
alien creatures he writes about.
But there's another side to Lovecraft: although in many
ways he was a decent, kindly, sensitive man, at certain points in his
life he was attracted to fascistic ideas about white supremacy and
racist ideas about supposedly 'lesser' races... a story like 'The
Horror At Red Hook' is a real racist diatribe and the dread of human/alien interbreeding that runs through virtually all his stories
would seem to have undercurrents of that. So, rather than make
Doveday himself a
hateful character, I split that other, nastier side of
him off into the character of Whytecrag - so it's really a sort of
bifurcated dual portrait, Jekyll & Hyde style: Doveday is obviously
Lovecraft, but
Whytecrag's his other, nastier side. I would have liked,
in a way, to make him more overtly a foul-mouthed racist - but you
have to be careful with things like taste and decency in a Doctor
Who context.
The Lovecraft story that's most directly an influence in
plot terms is "At The Mountains Of Madness". The likes of
James Cameron and Guillermo Del Toro have been trying for years to do a
mega-budget direct adaptation of that, but they never seem to have
licked the
script problems. I think it's kind of fun that we at Big
Finish sneaked through a sort of unofficial quasi-adaptation
when no one was looking!
There was one very key change to the plot in the early
stages. The original idea was that the Doctor, Ace and Hex travel not
to an island off the Alaskan coast, but to an alien planet, a moon of
Saturn or something like that. And there, impossibly, they find an
exact
reproduction of the New England coast that was native to
Lovecraft. And Freya and the other people at the mental hospital
would actually belong to a whole other alien race, a peaceful race
wanting to contain the risk of the Karnas'Koi - imprisoning Doveday in a
sort of 'velvet
cage' version of his natural environment and assuming
human form to keep up the illusion. But Alan Barnes, rightly I think,
thought that was just too weird and baroque and encouraged me to set
it on earth and have Freya & co. be real human beings. The only
thing I regret is
that in that original version Sunlight would have had an
'edge' in the most literal sense... you'd wander so far in this New
England landscape and you'd come to something almost like the
back edge of a theatrical backdrop and there'd be a while other alien
landscape beyond. That's slightly lost in the earthbound version -
and I wondered about revising the title, but Alan loved it, so
we stuck with it.
I thought the finished thing worked pretty well. I
liked Michael Brandon in the Doveday role: I was really
impressed by the interview with him - he seemed a guy who had really thought seriously about what he was doing,
he wasn't just camping it up or fooling around. That's what you
need, writing in this kind of genre. And it means there's only degree of
Kevin Bacon
between me and Dario Argento! And I wanted to give Ace,
who I always liked, something more touchy-feely to do than the usual
tomboy running around. The scenes where she's embracing Doveday to try
and hold him in human form have, I think, a kind of weirdly erotic,
romantic
quality... they show the inspiration of an old Scots folk
tale I've often done in my storytelling act - the ballad of Tam
Lin. On the back burner, I have a novel called "Eyes Of Tree"
based on the same story. That'll see the light of day, someday.
....Sylvester McCoy was actually just back from a cruise
around Alaska - so he had the real scenery fresh in his mind! The name 'Whytecrag' just popped into my mind - it was
months after
Lurkers had come out that I realised where I'd got it
from: I was travelling on the Glasgow southside suburban train line
that I'd known since my childhood and passed through the station at
'Whitecraigs', which is the station closest to my childhood home.
The very first Doctor Who I ever saw was "The Sea
Devils" - that was my proto-Whovian experience and I suppose, in retrospect,
there's echoes of that here: the coastal setting, the reptilian
monsters linked with a more human(oid) megalomaniac. I suppose if
it works on
that kind of old-fashioned atmospheric monster story
level, then I
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.