The Carnival of Light had two objectives. To put Chrístõ, the Time Lord, against Sammie, the SAS man at the peak of fitness, up against each other in friendly rivalry, and to make Bo the object of that rivalry. She has been gradually leaning towards Sammie as a romantic interest in her life in the past few stories, but there needed to be a point where she became Sammie’s girl and not Chrístõ’s.

The rivalry begins simply enough in the Carnival, where Chrístõ proves that he can do fire and sword swallowing, as well as extreme juggling. Where precisely Chrístõ could have learnt to do those things is something I didn’t explain as well as I could. Sammie, on the other hand, was obviously going to wipe the floor with the shooting gallery.

The Race of Fortitude, was something which would test Time Lord versus SAS, and the intention was to give them challenges where either Chrístõ or Sammie would have natural advantages. The swimming challenge should have been about equal. The walking on coals would have been easier for Chrístõ, who could control his body temperature and repair his wounds automatically. Most of the army assault course challenges naturally favoured Sammie, of course. And Chrístõ lost time by not knowing what to do with some of the devilish contraptions.

It is unlikely that Chrístõ had ever been on a Death Slide before, and they are FAR from as easy as they look. Doing it the way Sammie did IS possible, but not advisable. He was showing off, and also gaining a very slight advantage.

Of course, Sammie was going to win. There is a certain inevitability about this story, in the way that it was inevitable that the heroines in Bunty stories were always going to win the medals for the gym/horse riding/ice skating championships. But that wasn’t really the point. The fun was in the race.

This story is quite unusual in that it has a cliffhanger. Just when they thought it was all over, when Sammie had the girl and the sun came up in the morning, everyone but Sammie is kidnapped. Why? That’s the next story. This one has gone on long enough.

The title, Carnival of Light, comes from an unreleased Beatles Album. It has no connection with the album, or the Beatles, but I heard the title mentioned and thought it was a good basis for a story, and created the idea of a festival of light on a planet that is only rarely in darkness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Light