Doctor Who: Simon Guerrier interview part 2

Den Of Geek
Stephen Bray
Simon Guerrier talks Doctor Who, his upcoming book set in the world of Primeval, and his further Big Finish work...
Published on May 14, 2009

Continuing our interview with Doctor Who and Primeval audio/novel/comic writer Simon Guerrier. You'll find the link to part one, if you missed it, down at the bottom...

Which Doctors do you prefer writing for, either for audio or in novels/short stories? Any favourite companions to bring to life?
I like them all, really. And as I said [in the previous piece], I don't often get a choice. The excitement is, when you know which ones you're writing for, in finding new things to do with them. Writing The Drowned World, I knew the cast and director and sound designers were going to be the same as on Home Truths. They'd been brilliant, so it was exciting to write something else for them. I really like working with Lisa Bowerman - as actress and director - but that's a different thing from my love for the character of Benny.

Do you find it difficult when writing Who to remember which audiences you're pitching things at? There's a huge difference between the Bernice Summerfield listeners and the readers of The Slitheen Excursion.
True, but then Home Truths and The Slitheen Excursion are written to exactly the same guidelines and are both very different. My three Benny plays are all quite different tonally, too. I try to vary the kinds of things I write, to stretch myself a bit. And make sure I don't get bored. There are things you need to consider for different audiences - I wrote ‘Summer of Love' specifically to do the things we could never, ever do in Doctor Who - but generally I'm writing stuff for my own sordid amusement.

With regards to your work on The Judgement Of Isskar, the first Key 2 Time story, did you deliberately set about attempting to make things different to the first ‘Key to Time' serials in relation to the amount of segments that could be recovered in each story?
When we first talked about Key 2 Time, I was thinking of a sprawling adventure in the style of the Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, with ever wilder locations and cliffhangers. I was keen that you never knew where mine was going next, that it would jump planets mid-episode, and on to a whole new story. And if I was going to set up the imbalance between Amy and Zara, with Zara pretending to have fewer segments than Amy but really having more, it needed lots of segments in that first story. We wanted to raise the stakes right from the beginning. That's relatively easy to do on audio, where it would be very expensive on television. As a result, that sort of structure isn't really part of the conventions of Doctor Who as we know them.
Read the rest here.