Kate Orman enters the Black Archive

Tomorrow I'll finally be cracking open Kate Orman's Black Archive book on Pyramids of Mars and I'm mightily looking forward to it. If you asked me for the top three most influential Doctor Who authors of my lifetime then its obviously Russell T. Davies at the top, Steven Moffat right behind and the number three spot can only be decided in a steel cage match between Paul Cornell and Kate Orman.

Cornell and Orman were both authors on the New Adventures novels which were, from 1991 to mid-1997, the only Doctor Who going. Cornell was the first new voice in the range, the first to write a second novel and very much responsible for setting the style of the line. Orman, meanwhile, was the first woman to write for the range, the first non-English author (she's Australian) and wrote a huge number of novels in the final two years of the line which was a magnificently creative period that produced some of the series' most interesting novels.

Now she's writing a book length examination of a stone cold classic... that I'm just not that sold on. I mean, it is at least one of the sacred cows you're allowed to slaughter these days and I don't imagine Orman is going to be kind to either the rushed ending or the character of Namin.

Still, she might surprise me. This series has a tendency to bring in interesting critical perspectives on the stories it examines.

Also, Orman being Orman, I'm interested to see if she can somehow slip a torture scene into an academic discussion. 

Black Orchid: a Black Archive experiment

I've not read three of the Black Archive series: The Massacre, The Evil of the Daleks and Ghost Light. So far they've all offered interesting perspectives on their given stories and I'm more than sold on the series. However, with my next purchase I decided to change things up a bit in order to present the series with a bit of a challenge.

You see, those first three books were all on stories with, shall we say, interesting pre-existing debates. The Massacre is a story we know to have been rewritten several times so the actual facts of the narrative are a bit fuzzy. The Evil of the Daleks is largely missing from the archives so there's a lot of mileage to be gained from the book's angle of trying to reconstruct the most authentic version of the story (though, interesting as that was, I fear the angle might become rather trying if replicated for other missing stories). Ghost Light, whilst the only complete story of the three, nevertheless has a story traditionally thought of as hard to follow, at least in received fan wisdom. Plus, all three are set at interesting points in history with two of the three dealing with political debates of those times (the Catholic/Huguenot schism in The Massacre, evolution in Ghost Light).

As you can imagine, I was quite confident all those purchases would get me a riveting read.

So what, I wondered, would this series produce on a less contentious subject? Of the available titles perhaps none offer a less controversial subject matter than Black Orchid.

Now, it isn't that Black Orchid is dull. Its not the most exciting two episodes Doctor Who ever produced but it passes the time pleasantly enough. Its just that I'm not sure what there is to say about it. It exists in its entirety, its from perhaps the most analysed portion of the classic series which is also the era least interested in being “about” anything. Its a simple murder story (not, in any real sense, a mystery) set in an Agatha Christie-esque stately home. There's some crass casual racism, some equally crass casual ableism and a rather dull attempt to give one of the companion actresses something to do by having her play one of the guest roles as well.

There's no great debate about what the story is about, the story is pretty simple. There's no debate about its quality, its neither particularly loved or particularly hated (except, in the latter case, by Peter Davison), its just a one-week filler story between The Visitation and the big Cybermen return of Earthshock.

So I eagerly look foeward to finding out what Ian Millsted will think of to fill his hundred-odd pages.

Delving into the Black Archive (The Massacre)

I have something of a soft spot for Doctor Who criticism. I love Philip Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum, Robert Shearman and Toby Hadoke's Running Through Corridors, Will Brooks' 50 Year Diary and so on. A lingering effect of the show's sixteen year hiatus is that the fandom had a long time to go back and analyse and discuss and research the series' past.

The Black Archive is a series that started just over a year ago: novella length discussions of single Doctor Who stories from the full length and breadth of the TV series. Potentially overkill on the word count front but I thought I'd give the series a go. Looking at the titles available I went for James Cooray Smith's analysis of The Massacre which the back cover describes as “a serial of disputed authorship […] produced during a fractious transitional period” which is one of the biggest undersells you will ever read.

Now, one of the things I look for in these things is evidence that real, original thought is going into the analysis. Doctor Who being Doctor Who just about any story has a set of standard talking points. Smith takes two of the most usual talking points, the debate over the story's title and whether the Anne/Dodo ancestry thing makes any sense, and not only exiles them to the appendices but finds new and interesting things to say about them.

The main thrust of the book concerns what is actually happening on screen and what the various authors who contributed to the story intended to be happening. The entire footage of the story is missing, the photographic record is limited, the audio doesn't match the camera script, the script was significantly rewritten and the novelisation was written twenty years later by the original scriptwriter who admits to doing new research to write a revised version debatably based on his original script.

Its actually a pretty fascinating archaeology of who wrote what and how the different versions pile on top of each other to form a story that makes very little internal sense but is still usually considered a classic of the era.

There's also an extended discussion of the historical events the story is based on: the days leading up to the mass killing of the Parisian Protestant Huguenot population in August 1572. I've got some serious grudges about how history is taught in this country and a glowing example comes from the fact I learnt more about the French Wars Of Religion from a book analysing a 1960s Doctor Who story than I did from twenty years of formal education.

James Cooray Smith has certainly done a lot of research, not just in the BBC archives and legitimate history books but into the other film and literature that has dealt with the Bartholomew Massacre. Its interesting to see the variety of influences Smith either flat out discovers contributed to this story or claims as probable influences.

I certainly see myself prioritising any of these books about the historicals in future as well as Smith's return to the range for The Ultimate Foe this coming November. I mean, if there's any story that needs a deep dive into the archives to work out the hell is going on in it then its The Ultimate Foe. On that subject, I'm also looking forward to the next release in the series which will have Kate Orman, one of the greatest Doctor Who novelists of all time, writing about Pyramids of Mars.