Author Notes

The Brigadier. I wasn’t sure about using the Brigadier at first, it felt a bit like tokenism (‘he’s worked alongside every Doctor!’), but Bex pointed out that, perhaps more than any other character, the Brigadier had developed over the course of the New Adventures. We found out about Kadiatu, his descendant, but more importantly, we saw him in action in books like Blood Heat, No Future and Happy Endings, and he had come on to be... well, the Doctor’s oldest friend. And as I wrote the book, the Brig became more and more central to it. Without giving anything away, he gets the last word of the book, which is usually a sign of someone’s importance to the story.

The astronaut’s survival kit is straight out of a nineteen seventies Doctor Who annual – every year, breaking up the stories about people who sometimes vaguely looked like the Doctor and Sarah, there would be a feature about real astronauts.

The Party. Oh boy. Allan Bednar, the illustrator of the BBCi version of this book, has hidden in a cupboard and won’t come out until I assure him he doesn’t have to draw the party. This, of course, is a theme party, and the theme is ‘lame in-jokes’. Where to start? Well... the guest list includes Emma Peel from The Avengers and Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds. Lalla Ward makes the first of two appearances in the book. The rest... well, I’ll let you work them out. Once you spot the Old Woman from the Saturday Night Armistice, then you’ll be heading for a high score. Apparently, if you write a Star Wars novel (which I’d love to do, by the way, if any Star Wars novel people are reading this), then you have to supply footnotes explaining all the references to existing Star Wars characters, for copyright reasons – so you have to say ‘he first appeared in the comics’, or ‘he’s from such and such a novel’. If I’d done that for TDD, or was doing it for this annotated version, then the footnotes would be longer than the book.