Wind And Wuthering

'Walking across the sitting room, I turn the television off...' and decide to write a quick blog update instead of being both a 'watcher of the skies' and the 'storm news'. In fact, rather than doing any of these things, at this very minute, I should really be in London for the first day's recording of an audio book, but St Jude's Storm has taken care of that - at least for the time being. If anything like a normal rail service is resumed today, we might go in and make a start. The process of recording only needs two of us; me to read and a producer to do everything else, but at the moment, we're both unable to travel and the executive producer is deciding what to do. It must be a logistical nightmare for him to potentially have to re-schedule a whole day's worth of recording across several studios and I don't envy him the task.

Moving on to other things; there was more Dr Who on TV this weekend, this time featuring Doctors 5 & 6, Peter Davison and Colin Baker respectively. The first story was Earthshock, broadcast originally from 8 March to 16 March 1982 which starred Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton as Nyssa and Janet Fielding as Tegan. It also marked the final appearance of Matthew Waterhouse who played Adric.

Synopses for this and all the other weekend classic Doctor stories are easily available elsewhere, so I won't go into detail about the story lines. I'm also keen that the postings I've done in response to the stories being shown as part of the 50th Anniversary, don't just appear to be an excuse for a bit of 'name dropping'. The motivation behind this series of updates really lies in my own personal reaction to having grown up with Doctor Who and now, quite unexpectedly, finding myself in a position of actually working with some of the actors I'd only previously seen on television, which is naturally quite a thrill.

I have very briefly met Matthew Waterhouse but never worked with him, although I'm aware that he has been recording quite recently with Big Finish. On the other hand, I've worked with Peter, Sarah and Janet on six productions and feel I know them all quite well, especially Sarah, who has become a good friend. Along with Mark Strickson, we bonded as a company during the severe winter weather a couple of years ago when we were recording three stories over a two week period, which is unusual for Big Finish.

In this weekend's second adventure with the Doctor, Vengeance On Varos, originally broadcast on 19 & 26 January 1985, Colin Baker played the title role and his companion was Nicola Bryant as Peri.

Just checking my CD collection to discover the current 'Colin count' is eleven, with more in the pipeline. Of course, I've also worked on a couple of Dr Who stories with Nicola and most recently, we've worked together on The Mervyn Stone Mysteries.

I must give a special mention to Nicola, because without her, in all probability, I wouldn't be writing any of this and wouldn't ever have worked for Big Finish. We got to know each other on a theatre tour of Don't Look Now, which also starred Peter Amory, Rula Lenska and Shirley-Anne Field.

As the tour progressed, we became good friends, sharing digs for most of our weeks away from home. With great generosity and kindness, Nicola recommended me to the producers at Big Finish and after submitting a slightly lashed together demo-reel, I was invited to work on my first audio drama for them, Paper Cuts, with Colin as the Doctor. So once again, a very big 'thank you' to Nicola Bryant!



Meanwhile, back at today's travel conundrum; if I can get into London somehow later this afternoon, I might have to check into a hotel for the night, as I can't imagine things getting back to normal any time soon and if we have an early start in the morning to catch up on lost time today...

PS: those of a certain generation, might have picked up on various 'musical' references in this posting and if you follow me on Twitter, you'll know what I'm thinking of... otherwise, how cryptic of me!