Interview with Sylvester McCoy

Young at heart, Scottish actor Sylvester is most famous as Doctor Who and recently appeared in The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies. A real people person, he wants to find out how the elderly are treated in India, and is set on visiting slums and understanding how the poor can seem so happy when living in what, by western standards, is such squalor.

What was the highlight of your stay?
Watching a young gypsy man, Danesh, enthusiastically teaching his joyful class of slum children how to read and write English, in his spare bedroom.

Tell us about some of the people you met
I dined with kings, drank cocktails with Maharajas, but best of all was dancing with puppeteers in the slums of Jaipur.

What was your role in the group?
To raise a smile, and play the spoons!

I had a final scan and saw my oncologist and it’s all gone brilliantly. I am overjoyed, I am thrilled. It all looks great for the future, it’s fantastic.

Sir John has been given very good news by his oncologist but it falls short of an all-clear. Nontheless it's very good news.

DWN: Like any long-running franchise, the 'Torchwood' brand carries the weight of expectation on its back - how much pressure did you feel to satisfy its devotees in producing the new series for Big Finish?

JG: Massively. The Torchwood fans care enormously about that show - there was no point in just doing half-a-dozen stories that would fit nicely in the 2015 Torchwood Annual. We wanted to make something really special and make the fans as massively excited as we are.

Based on the production experience to date, how smooth a transition do you feel the show has made from TV to audio? Has having John Barrowman, Eve Myles and many of the other 'Torchwood' regulars aboard helped in this respect?

The cast have been enormously, enormously supportive. They're all tremendously busy but have made time for us, somehow. John records in a studio in Palm Springs, Gareth came in straight after finishing a gruelling theatre tour, Kai travelled halfway across the UK for the recording... the list goes on. And they're an utter delight in the studio. At every single recording the engineer spends most of their time laughing. It's that much fun.

It's really great to decide we're going to just tell stories concentrating on brilliant Torchwood characters. There are so many of them, and it makes each release feel special.

We'll of course learn more about how the Committee factors into Torchwood's ongoing history as more of Season One hits shelves. Was the lack of references to team members, events etc. aside from Gwen in 'The Conspiracy' an intentional move to allow newcomers to experience it without feeling bogged down by past continuity?

Yes. David Llewellyn did a very clever job of making it easy to get into. People are always worried that it's going to be difficult, or require complicated knowledge. We've worked hard to make sure that it's not.

The Conspiracy is just a thing that's around, ticking away in the background, nudging events here and there. It's building towards a grim conclusion... eventually.

What for you has been the most fulfilling element of working to bring Big Finish's latest endeavour to life so far?

That's totally unfair. Getting the first one recorded and announced while I was in Spain was very strange, and not the most relaxing holiday (leaping around a swimming pool in the dark trying to get enough signal to find out what Twitter was doing). Recording with Gareth was staggering - it was a truly remarkable performance, the most fun you can have with Ianto Jones. The joy of getting Eve and Kai back together and watching them recreate the magic of the Welsh Steed and Mrs Peel. And then, last week, spending a day in studio with Tracy-Ann Oberman. She turned up with a spare pair of high heels in her handbag, and the whole day was like that.

It's such a delight heading to the studios - the writers have done such great, great work. They really love the show and that makes it feel so worthwhile. Emma Reeves has written Gwen and Rhys perfectly, and Joe Lidster throws all of Cardiff at Yvonne - you almost feel sorry for her.

Looking ahead, can you tease what fans and newbies alike have to look forward to as Season One progresses and as a whole new season of adventures beckons from March 2016?

We learn of Captain Jack's unique way of interrogating robots, we meet Mr Pugh, the one man who can say No to Torchwood, and two very interesting people go monster-hunting across London and stop for ice cream.

A Peculiar Effect on the BBC
Written by Bernard Wilkie
Foreword by Mat Irvine
Afterword by Mike Tucker
Cover design by Robert Hammond
Published in September 2015

Bernard Wilkie is a pioneer in the world of visual effects. Along with Jack Kine he co-founded the BBC’s Visual Effects Department in 1954. Between them they worked on too many BBC productions to list, but chief among them were Doctor Who, Out of the Unknown, Quatermass, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and Some Mothers Do ‘ave ‘em. He passed away in 2002, writing this book in the late 1990s.

A Peculiar Effect on the BBC is his previously unpublished memoir and looks back on his career as a whole, covering each programme in detail with a light, but still educational, and often cautionary tone.

Whether it’s trying to make a smoke gun, encase an Ice Warrior in a block of ice, creating a Loch Ness Monster or simply coming up with a way of presenting a photo collection on screen utilising only one studio camera, Bernard and Jack rose to the occasion – often choking, soaking and terrifying their colleagues in the process. And almost all of these effects had to be done live – the pressure was on!

Bernard also talks in detail about the BBC taking over Ealing Studios and the construction of the now-defunct Television Centre. For anyone interested in the history of television, this is a fascinating eye witness account.

Foreword by visual effects designer Mat Irvine and afterword by visual effects designer Mike Tucker.

To Put You in the Picture
Written by Robert Banks Stewart
Internal illustrations by Jamie Lenman
Cover design by Andrew Orton
Published in October 2015

The memoir of Robert Banks Stewart, one of Britain’s most legendary television writer/producers, whose career has spanned five decades. Viewers who have watched television and its development over this period – including viewers of today – will be hugely entertained by this splendid autobiography.

The author has penned a host of behind-the-scenes anecdotes, most of them hitherto untold, plus descriptions of his considerable work experiences with refreshing candour (successes and failures) and delightful humour.

Credited with breaking the mould of early UK thriller dramas with ground-breaking series like Shoestring and Bergerac, he purposely set them away from the usual easy, endlessly grim metropolitan street backgrounds derived from BBC Radio, instead exploiting different locations – like the West Country and the Channel Island of Jersey. He also cleverly cast new actors such as John Nettles, Trevor Eve, Greta Scaachi and Catherine Zeta-Jones, rather than established stars, whilst also featuring film veterans like Terence Alexander and Michael Medwin in regular roles. Writing, adapting and producing – with what was called ‘the touch’ – Robert Banks Stewart was also responsible for many more hit television series, among them the initial productions of The Darling Buds of May and Lovejoy.

To regular Miwk customers, Robert Banks Stewart will be most recognisable as the author of two of the most popular Doctor Who serials, 'Terror of the Zygons' and 'The Seeds of Doom', the titular creatures from the former having recently returned to Doctor Who in the recent 50th anniversary special.

'To Put You in the Picture' is illustrated by Jamie Lenman, with cover design by Andrew Orton.

The book is available to pre-order in hardback here, priced £13.99 when ordered direct from Miwk.

We know this planet is a fragile one. Yet we stand and watch as the Arctic shrinks. We watch the home of Polar bears and whales and walruses disappear before our eyes. The time has come to stop watching. We must act.

The Arctic is one of the last great pristine ecosystems, a safe haven for endangered species and home to Indigenous Peoples whose lifestyle has survived in harmony with nature for thousands of years. This is now all under threat. It’s time to act.

Behind the 60 famous faces in this collection, there are millions more rising up to demand Arctic protection. The global movement to defend the Arctic is snowballing – with seven million people already calling for its protection

A driving force behind Target Books’ Doctor Who novels, he wrote over sixty titles, edited and recruited other authors as well. He wrote for the soap opera Crossroads, and co-created and wrote for the series Moonbase 3. He also worked as a producer on Sunday Classics. He authored several children’s series, including about a cat call Magnificent Max and, his longest running, another about a golden retriever The Adventures of Goliath.