Donna’s Wishlist started with a vague idea of a planet a bit like Shan Shen in the Turn Left story, where a chance encounter with an artefact would lead to some kind of unforeseen consequences. I wrote the description of a city made of crystal glass with a glorious plain surrounding it and then decided to think of a plot to go with it. Funnily enough, Dubai, a city mostly of glass and steel, in the middle of a desert, never crossed my mind. It was only a couple of weeks later that people started going on about it in reference to the new episode, Planet of The Dead. But I don’t think we’re going to cross any plotlines here.

The second inspiration was a comic strip story I read many, many years ago - in the 1970s in one of my ‘magazines for girls’ – either the Bunty, Jackie, Judy or possibly Mandy. It was about a girl who somehow crossed a gypsy and was given so many wishes, but if she used them up she would die. And somehow or other she ended up using wishes by accident and never thought of wishing for thousands more wishes or something so obvious as that.

I decided against a limit on Donna’s wishes, seeing as the pendant didn’t come with an instruction manual. But I took an idea from another obscure cultural corner. This one is really off the wall. In an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch – the children’s series hat used to come on Saturday morning television around the same time that John Barrowman was wasting his talents on Going Live - there was an episode in which Sabrina was infected with selfishness. This meant that she could have anything she wanted, but somebody else felt the consequences. For instance when she fancied a baked potato for lunch she ended up taking the only food from an East European peasant who had queued for hours for it. This was where the local woman with the missing money came into the plot. And of course, later on, when she wishes her father was still alive, her grandfather dies instead. And when she wishes her mother dead, it is clear why the alternative title of this story could have been ‘Consequences’.