Q&A with Jay Eales
Today we have a Q&A with Forgotten Lives contributor Jay Eales, whose story ‘The Other Side’ features the Robert Holmes Doctor, and starts like this:
‘ It was a bumpier landing than anticipated. They might as well have let him pilot the time ship manually if this was the best they could manage. It was almost as though they did not trust him.
‘ The Doctor picked himself up and righted his upturned chair. Despite the incredible internal dimensions of the craft, the console room contained just a single chair, and a single occupant. By choice.
‘ He retrieved his pipe from under the console where it had lodged itself beneath one of the carved legs. Undamaged, thankfully.’
FL: Tell us a little about yourself.
JE: During daylight hours, I’m one of those civil servant types that the government likes to demonise. With my other hat on, I’ve written/edited/published comics, prose and journalism. With Selina Lock, I run the publishing imprint Factor Fiction, home to our comics anthologies Violent! and The Girly Comic. I edited the Doctor Who charity fanthologies Perfect Timing 2 (co-edited with Helen Fayle), Walking in Eternity and Shelf Life (co-edited with Adrian Middleton & David McIntee). I’ve written a few stories for Obverse and edited Burning With Optimism’s Flames for their Faction Paradox range. I also designed the Obverse Books logo, trivia fans! For more info: www.factorfictionpress.co.uk
FL: What attracted you to this project?
JE: I’ve always liked the question mark surrounding the Morbius Doctors. The story seemed very clearly to be telling us they were a whole bunch of Doctors we knew nothing about. Afterwards, the show studiously avoided it like an incontinent elderly relative at a family gathering, while talking about them behind their back. The chance to build a personality from scratch for one of the embarrassing uncles? Yes please!
FL: Each story in the book features a different incarnation of the Doctor. Tell us about yours.
JE: My Doctor is modelled on Doctor Who Script Editor/Writer Robert Holmes as he briefly appeared in The Brain of Morbius. He’s a Doctor that walks alone. The nearest thing he has to a companion is his cloudband, a sort of Gallifreyan Tamagotchi. This is the Doctor as spy. He gets to travel and see the galaxy, and in return, does his duty for the homeworld. Over time, the bargain shifts and the ratio of missions to explorations tilts against him, to the point he starts to resent it, but he’s on the hook. He’s done questionable things for the greater good and will do them again. But he has questions of his own.
FL: These Doctors only exist in a couple of photos. How did you approach the characterisation of your incarnation?
JE: We were given a lot of leeway with how we approached the characters, up to and including changing the costumes if we wanted. The way I looked at it was that if this had been an ongoing character for TV, the costumes for most of the Morbius Doctors, chosen on a whim as a bit of a giggle for the team, would have soon become a liability and been scrapped for something more practical, but for this single appearance, I’d work round it. In fact, I leaned into it quite heavily, and it became one of the first elements from which I built my Doctor. What better distraction tactic for a spy than to appear as a strutting peacock figure? Everyone sees the clothes, but not the man. He has an eye for detail, filing everything away for future advantage. He also keeps a tally, positive and negative, to tell him if he’s doing more harm than good. As he’s the penultimate incarnation of this cycle, I felt that he’d be a bit closer to ‘Doctorish’ than the earlier ones, and tried to seed a few things to suggest that he’s on that path, but still has a way to go.
FL: What's your story about?
JE: An alternative title for ‘The Other Side’ might be ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Time Lord’. The city state of Falantir is marked as a potential future threat, so the Doctor is assigned to seek out that threat and remove it. Split in two by an impregnable alien Barrier more than a decade previously, Falantir and Uhmber, the newly formed republic on the other side of the Barrier, have existed in cold war stalemate ever since. Falantir’s paranoid Council of Reeves spy on their citizens, looking for dissidents, while Uhmber’s Prex broadcasts propaganda at the Falantiri. But who are the mysterious alien Harudograft, and is the grass always greener on the other side?
FL: What were your main influences?)
JE: Thematically, John le Carré, but I can’t write in his voice. There’s a lot of the DNA of Alec Leamas, (the protagonist of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold) in my Doctor and the scenario he finds himself in. Other than that, I’d say the work of Bob Holmes, for the visceral physicality he gives to the Doctor he’s writing in The Deadly Assassin.
FL: Who would be your ideal casting for a pre-Hartnell Doctor?
JE: Margaret Rutherford (though that might make for a confusing crossover with Iris Wildthyme, who if I remember rightly, also snaffled her likeness for one of her incarnations), as a force of nature with a twinkle in her eye.
Other than that, Alec Guinness, with his ability to subsume himself inside a range of characters. Impossible to predict which way he’d play the role, but it would be great to see.
FL: What's your next project?
JE: I’m currently knee-deep in a supernatural prison novella written as a series of monologues.
