The main motive for writing Time Rogues was to show Chrístõ with his students again, but to get them out of the classroom. I have already done several stories that focus on the classroom, and it is starting to get a bit too much like those episodes of the Bionic Woman (the superior 1970s version, of course) when Jaime was home from her work as a special agent and back to teaching again. The idea of him taking the students on a field trip through history appealed. My first idea was simply to have them visiting various interesting time periods. But really, there isn’t much of an adventure in that. So I came up with the idea of some sort of threat that had to be dealt with in each of the locations.
The Time Rogues DO seem to be related in some way to The
Trickster, the creature that causes problems with timelines in the Sarah
Jane Adventures. But no, I wasn’t really thinking of that at all.
What I had in mind was a completely new creature. One that may well turn
up again at another time, if I can think of another spin on the erasing
people from time idea. But at the moment, it’s just a one off.
Seeing the Beatles at the Cavern Club was always going to be my first location for Chrístõ and his young friends. It was interesting to research exactly when the Beatles played there and what the atmosphere was like. More importantly, whether there were seats in rows, tables, or if people just stood. As far as I can tell, the latter. The pictures I managed to find of the original Cavern show crowds of young men and women standing shoulder to shoulder to watch the Beatles.
I'm not sure how serious the licencing laws would have been in 1962. I assume that most of Chrístõ’s students were actually too young to be in there. But anyway, assuming their membership cards were in order and they got in, I think the atmosphere was about right.
Of course Chrístõ is a Beatles fan. Any die hard Doctor Who fan could confirm that right back in the 1960s the First Doctor called them his favourite ‘beetles’ when he found them on his strange gadget at the start of The Chase.
Trying to erase John Lennon from history, something I wouldn’t like to see happen. I’m not a huge Beatles fan myself. I can take them or leave them. But I do appreciate their impact on music. It probably surprises no Theta Sigma fan that I really like Across The Universe. But I got to appreciate them through the girl in the bedspace next to me who was a major fan in the same way I was always a fan of Doctor Who. She especially loved John and was devastated by his assassination in 1980. But if he had not existed I think the world would have been a darker and less colourful place. He was one of the people who brightened it. So of course, Chrístõ had to step in and save him for now. Of course, he could do nothing about his true fate. That sad day, the anniversary of which is very close as I write this in early December, 2008, is one of those fixed points in time that Time Lords could never interfere with.
Having written the first section, I had to think long and hard about where else Chrístõ could chase the Time Rogues. I really wanted to do a sequence which explained how Janis Joplin came to give him a coat – the one the Tenth Doctor is so fond of. But looking at a brief biography of Janis, it was difficult to find a period of her life that wasn’t so bedevilled with drink, drugs and depression that I could write the sort of story Theta Sigma is usually about. It was certainly not a world that Chrístõ would bring his impressionable students into.
CS
Lewis, however, was an easy choice. I think I first heard The Lion, The
Witch and The Wardrobe read at ‘reading time’ at school just
about the same age I started to watch Doctor Who on a Saturday night.
The world inside a wardrobe had the same magic as a police box that was
bigger on the inside. I didn’t get to read the full set of stories
until I was an adult. But inbetween, I went to a school in Northamptonshire
that was endowed by Magdelen College, Oxford, C S Lewis’s alma mater,
and once saw a fascinating lecture in Oxford about how Lewis embraced
Christianity and wove it into his fantasy stories. Much later, I also
got to read the Cosmic Trilogy, and, as a long-standing Doctor Who fan,
was fascinated by his view of the universe as a place which was actually
much nicer and more innocent than planet Earth. Doctor Who, in common
with most other pre-ET fiction tended to think of aliens as bad and other
worlds as hostile. Lewis begged to differ, and I think somebody like Chrístõ
would appreciate that.
Charles
Darwin takes me back to my schooldays, too. When I was at boarding school
in 1978, the BBC made a series which I thought was called They Voyage
of The Beagle, but which IMDB insists is called The Voyage of Charles
Darwin. Anyway, it was a good way of introducing teenagers to the tricky
subject of Evolutionary theory in its Victorian infancy. I got quite interested
in it and read the modern digest versions of Darwin’s books. I’ve
since read the original texts and argued the pro-evolutionary corner in
a recreation of the Tenessee Monkey Case when I did history of science
at undergraduate level.
So Darwin seemed a perfect choice for the third victim of the Time Rogues, somebody who’s thinking really did revolutionise Human society in huge ways. I thought at first of them all meeting up with Darwin in the Galapagos Islands, but that really wasn’t a practical idea. A nice picnic in Kew Gardens made more sense.
My last subject was always going to be Adolf Hitler. The idea that Chrístõ would consider finishing him off himself, risking a time anomaly for all the ‘right’ reasons was in my mind from when I had the first party of the story written. The fact that Hitler spent some time in Vienna, unemployed and living in a hostel, was ideal. It allowed me to set this section of the story in the lovely Wiener Prater, home of the Reisenrad, still among the largest Ferris wheels in the world. I had used it as the opening scene of the Unfinished Business story, An Ordinary Man, which also touched on Nazism. It is a very beautiful location in any era of the 20th century.
Of course, Chrístõ had to be stopped from erasing Hitler. Sadly, that would be another fixed point that Time Lords can’t interfere with. Hext’s intervention was necessary.
http://www.cavernclub.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cavern_Club
http://www.rarebeatles.com/photopg2/caverns.htm
http://www.mathew.st/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis
http://cslewis.drzeus.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Trilogy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_darwin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Descent_of_Man,_and_Selection_in_Relation_to_Sex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_of_the_Beagle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riesenrad
http://www.ukrides.info/Praterreisenrad.htm
http://www.wien.info/prater/index-e.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prater
http://www.praterservice.at/en
