The idea came from seeing a number of pieces of fan fiction in which The Doctor walks Rose home from school after she was bullied. These varied in quality, but seemed about the same in terms of the plot. Young Rose gets helped by strange older man who appears then disappears. When she meets him again she’s forgotten.

Well, it’s not a bad idea, but I wanted to try it a different way. So I had the TARDIS land in June 1974. That year Jackie was eight years old and The Doctor was having troubles of his own. Neither part of the story really stood up on its own. So I interspersed Jackie’s attempt to stop her younger self being hurt by the school bullies with The Doctor trying to help his third incarnation regenerate. THAT was why it had to be a Saturday. June 8th, 1974, was the day that the last episode of Planet of the Spiders broadcast. Thanks to the BBC classic series episode guide for the exact date. Russell T. Davies doesn’t like multi-Doctor stories. I do. So every so often you get one in my stories.

Incidentally, Russell did actually, in hindsight, mess up this story, because in this story I have implied that Jackie’s father died quite early in her childhood and that she had a very similar life to that Rose had, growing up in a one parent family without much money. There is nothing to indicate it, but I always had the feeling Jackie and Rose had been part of the same poverty circle for a long time. But in Army of Ghosts Jackie talks about Rose’s ‘granddad Prentice’ which would be HER father, and Rose recalls him dying a few years before. That obviously contradicts my version of events, but I decided not to try to revise the story. Russell’s creative wavelength and mine might be similar in places, but I go my way and he goes his.