The battle of Spion Kop happened during the Second Boer War, in January 1900, a recent historical event for the local characters.

Chapter Seven

In this chapter in the original novel, I have Joan use a racially-abusive word. It’s there to show the gap between the era depicted and the here and now, an echo of Smith’s lecture about how complicated the assigning of good and bad can be. Joan is a good person, but in 1914, this language was in the mouths of some good people.

It also makes Smith realise that, in finding the language objectionable, he has a set of ethics which come from nowhere, that he’s not quite a product of his own time, a feeling with which many on the fringes of mainstream opinion, (those of the left, when the book was written) could sympathise. Ultimately, it’s there to make an anti-racist point.

I’ve never worried about its presence in the book, but now it’s on the net, which can be trawled through by search engines, BBCi were worried about the sort of attention it might attract, and I must say I agree completely. We’ve replaced it with ‘N-’. I think it still makes its point.

Tim’s thoughts in the tree echo the Cad Goddeu, a Welsh poem attributed to Merlin. Post Battlefield, I really took up the theme of the Doctor as Merlin, and followed the parallels as far as they went. For instance, the wink in the title sequence echoes Merlin’s (and many other mythological heroes’) loss of an eye to gain wisdom.

That Doctor Who Magazine poster of the Seventh Doctor hanging from some wreckage looks like the Hanged Man tarot card. I went so far as to propose a Who tarot pack to Peter Darvill-Evans. He looked at me sagely and went on his way.

Interventionists, as Greeneye calls them, are agents of the Gallifreyan Celestial Intervention Agency (as mentioned in The Deadly Assassin), to which he assumes the Doctor and Bernice belong. The Time Lord they encountered on Apertsu almost certainly was one.

The Time Lords meddling in the natural history of Earth is a thread that surfaces often in the New Adventures, one of those team narrative things we were vaguely putting together between us. I link it here to the race’s sterility, as established by the Cartmel writers.

And ‘periodic’ here could only be used over a vast timescale. Time Loops are first mentioned as a Time Lord weapon in Image of the Fendahl, and Greeneye stumbles on the same way to get out of them that the Doctor uses in Meglos. A Time Space Visualizer is first seen in The Space Museum, and it seems an apt description for what the Time Lords are seen using to watch the affairs of other worlds in various stories.