Episode 207: Paul Cornell
In Episode 207, “Paul Cornell,” Flourish and Elizabeth talk to the eponymous writer (of a bazillion different things) (seriously, look at his Wikipedia) about his journey from fan to pro—and about continuing to be a deeply fannish pro. Topics discussed include how his Doctor Who fanfiction became both an official novel and a pair of episodes on the show, the enormous flurry of creative fandom activity in the 15 years Doctor Who wasn’t on TV, depicting fans in a loving way while writing on Elementary, and, among his many current projects, Con & On, a comic that chronicles the changes over the years at a totally 100% fictional large comic-book convention in Southern California.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:46] First things first: Paul’s Linktree has much of his current work and places to find him on social media. You can also look at Wikipedia for his EXTREMELY long bibliography.
[00:02:35] Our interstitial music throughout is “Tech toys” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:03:35] The Doctor Who Appreciation Society—the “the longest running Doctor Who fan club in the world”—was formed in 1976 and is still going strong.
[00:04:47]
[00:08:35] Translating for Americans (and others who don’t use these terms), A4 and A5 are paper sizes (A4 being roughly “letter” size, A5 being a bit smaller). Fanlore divides these zine classifications into “full size” and “digest size.”
[00:13:52] That’s Episode 195: “Fandom Life Cycles.”
[00:23:05]
[00:39:01] Elizabeth’s favorite episodes are in fact the story that began as Paul’s fanfiction and then the official novel: “Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood” from the third season of New Who. And Joan was played by Jessica Hynes.
[00:41:37] That’s Gallifrey One, the largest Doctor Who con in the world.
[00:46:41]
[00:52:16] That’s Faiza Hussain:
[00:52:52] Con & On, which we are DEFINITELY checking out as longtime attendees of a completely different large comic-book convention in California by the sea.
[00:56:18] “Hammer House of Podcast”
[00:55:25] Night of the Gnomes!
[01:02:24] We’re editing the friendship Tropefest episode now, so that should be out for Patrons next week! In the meantime, if you’re not a Patron yet, pledge $3 to start listening to the Tropefest back catalog; our most recent was “Fake Relationships.”
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish.
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining! The podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #207, “Paul Cornell.”
FK: And we are super excited to have Paul Cornell on this podcast. If you don’t know, he is an extraordinarily prolific writer who has worked in TV, and in comics, and…I don’t know, you, you were the one who brought him to us. Tell us, tell us—
ELM: Yes!
FK: Tell me. [laughs]
ELM: I met Paul at Comic-Con this year, via the, uh…God, what does he wanna be called, the Tom Hanks of Fansplaining? That’s right. [FK laughs] Javi Grillo-Marxuach. I was trying to remember which celebrity various people wanted to be called.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And he was a delight to talk to, agreed to come onto the podcast, and I had known of him before this, primarily as a Doctor Who person, and in fact the writer of my favorite episode of Doctor Who ever. [FK laughs] So, that’s exciting for me. I think, an episode that’s very beloved.
But yeah, I’m super interested to talk to, as always I feel like we’re both interested in people who kinda straddle the fan-to-pro line, and especially kind of…not necessarily…I often think that sometimes people talk about it in a binary, like there’s fans and then there’s people who make the TV show, but he’s very much in the like, the tie-in novels, and radio plays, and all this different stuff that exists within that full spectrum. So, I’m curious to know about how he feels about these different kinds of creative endeavors.
FK: Yeah, me too. And he’s also worked across so many media, I mean you just said some of it, but uh, he’s done runs on major superheroes, he’s been on Batman and Robin, and Wolverine, and Young Avengers, but he also has a bunch of his own comic series, and he’s done—like you said—audiobooks, and he’s done a fantasy novel series, and he’s written for adult TV and for children’s TV, so it’s just like, he’s seen this from many many many angles.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And, he started off as a Doctor Who fan, which he then got into—so I’m really excited to hear about all of this.
ELM: OK, well, why don’t we call him?
FK: Let’s do it.
[Interstitial music]
FK: It’s time to welcome Paul to the podcast! Welcome, Paul!
Paul Cornell: Hello!
ELM: [laughs] Thank you so much for coming on!
PC: Well, thank you for inviting me, I’m delighted to be here.
ELM: So, we usually have a starting point for guests, and that’s where we ask your fannish origin story. And especially for people who have used or use fandom in their careers, we’re especially interested in that kind of arc.
PC: Well, it’s different to my Doctor Who origin story, and to my fanfiction origin story, honestly. But, specifically—
ELM: [overlapping] Oh my goodness. [laughs]
PC: But specifically for fandom, it was really hard, when I became a watcher of Doctor Who, to find other Doctor Who fans. And I finally found, in Starburst Magazine, the address of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society.
FK: WHAT. [ELM laughs]
PC: And I wrote off, and they completely ignored me. [ELM laughs]
FK: Stop. [laughs]
PC: Because I later heard that a huge number of entry forms had been lost down the back of a sofa—no seriously, down the back of a sofa. [all laugh] Anyway, I finally found it in another place, and tried again, and got in. And that was where I discovered, in a column in their newsletter, fanzines. [FK laughs] And I was like, “Oh, these look like the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.” [all laugh] And so I wrote to one, and said, “Could I write you a regular column about Doctor Who?” [laughs] And in, this is, you know, a completely unknown fan who’s never written anything before. [FK laughs]
ELM: [laughing] This is amazing.
PC: And they wrote back saying “Absolutely!” [all laugh]
FK: “Yes, because of course, we just need content, please give us something to print!” [ELM and PC laugh]
PC: Yes! Yeah. Yeah. And that was called Cygnus Alpha. And so through them, I met other fans, I went to the enormous Doctor Who Celebration at Longleat in 1983, which is our Woodstock, you know. [FK laughs]
ELM: Wow.
PC: A hundred thousand people. Basically this was an event designed for about 500 people, and the BBC advertised it after Doctor Who on BBC One in prime time. [ELM and FK gasp, FK drawn out as ELM and PC laugh] And it was, it—
FK: [overlapping] Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the organizers’ meeting… [all laugh]
PC: It was, actually it was more like Altamont than our Woodstock, but it was, it was like the Somme after a couple of hours. [ELM and PC laugh] But nevertheless, I knew people, so I got my first, I got given my first illicit old Doctor Who on videotape there. [ELM and FK laugh] And, wow. You know, I couldn’t quite believe these existed. [FK laughs]
And you know, that’s where I met, started to meet, because everyone was there. And I started to make connections in fanzines, started to write for more fanzines, started to write, put my fanfiction in fanzines, and get that very slow internet of, six months later you’d get a reply in a letters page telling you they hated it. [all laugh]
So um…you know, that’s my fandom origin story. But I started to write fanfiction as a result of, well, basically being bullied at school, that I started to write stories, and they, characters from those stories went into my Doctor Who fanfiction, which got into the fanzines. And there’s a direct line, really, because some of that fanfiction became my first Doctor Who book, for Virgin, and a later Doctor Who book became a Doctor Who TV episode, so I’ve got a ladder all the way from my fanfiction to the show.
FK: I feel very tender about your, like, childhood self being bullied and sort of wish [ELM and PC laugh], I’m just imagining, and I would love to go back in time and be like, “It’s OK, kiddo, you’re gonna—” [all laugh]
PC: Wow, well, I remember that encounter, and now it all makes sense. [all laugh]
FK: Oh right, we’re talking Doctor Who! There’s an opportunity, yeah.
ELM: [simultaneous] There’s a time travel, time travel, yeah.
FK: Sorry, I do, I have seen Doctor Who, but I’m not a, I’m not like a Whovian who’s always thinking in these terms, so you’ll have to forgive my… [PC laughs]
ELM: That’s a failing, on your part.
FK: Yeah, I know, I know. [sighs]
ELM: That’s fascinating. So then, when did you, when did you start to like, I know there’s a direct line, but when was that kind of flip into the money space, basically?
PC: It was really quite gradual, in that at the Fitzroy Tavern, where Doctor Who fans gathered, I kept on at John Freeman, the editor of Doctor Who Magazine, to let me write the comic strip. And he finally said yes, and he sort of led me through it, and sort of…gave me, you know, guide rails and helped me write my first comic strip, because I was an enormous comics fan as well. And I think John recognized that there wasn’t that big a crossover, that he didn’t have a great big pool of Doctor Who fans who were also comics fans. [FK laughs]
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
PC: But around the same time, I’d also been commissioned for that first novel. So it was sort of all starting to happen. Fanfiction was hot at that point, you know, there was a whole movement of, a kind of rebellious A5 fanzine fandom—and the size of the fanzine was important, because the A4 fanzines were prestigious and serious, and the A5 fanzines were sort of fighty and iconoclastic—and fiction was a part of that.
And that attitude kind of moved over into the books, because Peter Darvill-Evans, the editor of those Virgin novels, he’d been in charge of editing the Doctor Who novelizations, ran out of stories to novelize, the program went off the air, and thus he decided to continue Doctor Who in novel form, and with an incredible leap he decided to go and find fanfiction writers to write them. So he put adverts in the, um, in the fan press, and it was sort of like The Right Stuff, gradually all my peer group took flight, you know? And there was one guy who didn’t, who was perhaps the best of us.
It was wonderful to have a peer group to compare oneself to, that you’re in competition, and it’s friendly, but it’s also that big sense of, well, if they can do it, I can do it. And that’s a really great way to all sort of nudge forward together. When we got people like Steven Moffat, who’d already had a show on television, a really good show, Press Gang, on Children’s ITV, you know…there’s Mark Gatiss, and up North, there’s Chris Chibnall. It’s kind of…this is where it all comes from. It’s this, this origin story of a huge bunch of folk.
It must be said, mostly male, mostly gay, which nobody says now. Almost all of the positions of power in that fandom were gay men. [laughs] Ironically, Russell T. Davies getting in charge of Doctor Who made the culture around it a lot straighter, because of course it pulled it out of being a niche thing, into a, a mainstream thing. And suddenly the mainstream gets interested, and many more different people flood in.
But I remember counting in my address book, when I was a kid, you know, when I was a late teen, in my 20s, and I don’t think many straight young men have the names and addresses of 60 gay men in their address books. [all laugh] It’s, um…I’m quite glad of that, actually. It was a good culture to be part of. But very, very few women. There was a sort of, a dividing line that—Blake’s 7 fandom was where women were.
FK: Yeah. [laughs]
ELM: Mmm hmmm.
PC: And in the States, I know, that Doctor Who fandom was very female. It’s just British—though there’s an awful lot of, oh God, laddishness in 1990s Doctor Who fandom. [FK and ELM laugh] A lot of, uh, a lot of grinding, set-in-our-ways-ness. A lot of autism as well. You know, I was diagnosed as autistic when I was a kid, and my mum and dad never told me or anyone else. So I’m in this weird situation of having been raised mainstream, while flapping all my life and not knowing what that was.
FK: Wow.
PC: Yeah!
ELM: When did they tell you? When you were an adult?
PC: My mum told me when she had Alzheimer’s. [ELM and FK both make surprised/sorrowful noises] She suddenly said, “That’ll be your autism!” [laughs] It was one of a number of extraordinary revelations during that period.
FK: Wow.
PC: Anyway, there’s a big autistic strain in Doctor Who fandom. It comes out in a lot of different ways.
ELM: I have so many questions for you. One of them is, do you think—so for people who don’t know about the history of Doctor Who, you know, there’s…well, I’m gonna Doctor Whosplain to you right now. But like, you know, you have these various actors playing the different Doctors, but—
FK: [overlapping, laughing] You can Doctor Whosplain to me. You can do it to me.
ELM: This is for Flourish. I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it. But there was this period that you’re talking about, where they weren’t, there was no new iteration, right?
PC: Yeah.
ELM: Before they brought it back. So what, like, from 1990 to…
PC: Yeah, 1990 to 2005, with only the Paul McGann TV movie in the middle.
ELM: Right, so, and this is when, it was in that fallow period? Or was it even earlier that you were coming in—
PC: Oh, oh, I’m sorry, I’m gonna stop you there.
ELM: I’m sorry, is fallow not the right word? [laughs]
PC: [laughing] It’s really not.
ELM: [laughs] I’m sorry, the time when it’s not on TV, you know what I mean though, we were just talking about the mainstream thing. I know what you mean.
PC: But Doctor Who fans love a catchphrase, and they tend to call it “The Wilderness Years,” which I hate. It’s the theme park years—it was packed with stuff! You know, this is when, this is when creativity in Doctor Who was actually at its highest!
ELM: Yeah.
PC: It may not have been on TV, but it got an incredible refit in dry dock, ready to go on TV again. Through all these other mediums, through the fans diving in and changing it. You know, so yes, that’s what happened, there was a gap.
ELM: Yeah, well, I mean this is partly why I’m asking, because we talk a lot about…you know, fandom—we’ve been talking a lot recently about fandom life cycles, and, like, fan creativity in hiatuses, and you know, Flourish is a Star Trek fan, and there is now never one week of your life when there’s not new Star Trek, [FK gasps] and what, you know? Sorry, was there a week recently where there was no new Star Trek? [PC laughs]
FK: Uh, thank you to the writers and actors strikes, [ELM laughs] after this set of Lower Decks episodes, we will once again have some time to think about Star Trek instead of just receiving Star Trek. [ELM and PC laugh] And I’m actually kind of excited about it, because like, I might be able to write some fanfiction without having it immediately be like, [laughs] you know, superseded by something.
ELM: Right. But it sounds like, I mean this is a long period when, yeah, and also I think your point of saying, too, that the fans were very active and it wasn’t—the mainstreaminess that came with it coming back on the air, right, that’s very interesting to think about, when it was kinda really just a fan thing, you know? What happens, as opposed to being part of mass culture.
PC: [overlapping] Yeah. Well it was a fan/pro thing, because we initially had the books, and the comic strip, and then we had the Big Finish audio plays. So there’s three sometimes cooperative, sometimes competing iterations of Doctor Who professional fiction across that 15 years. And they are, they are full of energy, and so many writers, so many concepts that kept going into the new series. I started to do a list once, and I got to 100 different concepts and phrases that were originated in that time that made it to the new show. It’s…just an amazing time to look back on, a time of extraordinary youthful energy. And I kind of think that all shows should sort of have a period like this, where they are…they are thought about, and the thoughts are fought over in a kind of safe space, that there’s competing versions that gain traction.
FK: It is kind of funny, from the perspective of somebody from the outside though also, because so much of that was in fanzines and it was in…Britain, a lot of it, but also just in fanzines in the U.S. too, you know, for me—again, I’m not a Whovian, I have seen new Who—so it’s really interesting to have kind of reaped the benefit of that period but, you know, also feel like…how would I even go about excavating a lot of what happened or learning about it, you know? Unless I went to a zine library or something like that, it’s sort of…it’s really precious to have people who were there, like yourself, talking about it and sharing it with people who couldn’t have accessed it at the time or didn’t know about it, and later are looking back.
PC: Well, so, so many versions, I mean, I do think that as many different narratives from those of us who were there as possible should be preserved. You read the occasional article in Doctor Who Magazine about, say, the fanzines of that time, and I recognize maybe half the fanzines. It really depends on what bit of the fandom you were in—this is a big fandom! And you know, also there were very different perspectives on what was important. A couple of books have been written about the era, where, you know, I fundamentally don’t agree. And so, it’s all still a bit fighty-fighty, a bit raw. [FK laughs] And Russell—
FK: [overlapping] Imagine a fandom being fighty-fighty. [all laugh]
PC: Russell absolutely refutes this, this thesis. He thinks that 2005 Doctor Who basically invented itself, in reaction only to the old show. And you know, I respect the man hugely, but he’s wrong about that.
ELM: That’s fascinating. But wasn’t he a part of this whole scene, too?
PC: He was at a slight distance. He’d already had some mainstream success.
ELM: Sure.
PC: I think he was on Coronation Street at that point. And some of us knew him, certainly, but much more so Moffat, and up North, very much Chibnall. And sometimes Gatiss. One needs to talk to a lot of different people about this. And dear God, especially the five women involved. [all laugh] I barely exaggerate, seriously.
FK: Yeah. It is interesting, thinking about that though, because that makes me think about how when we went to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which…was not our favorite, you know, one of the things that we noticed about it is how it felt like it was so reflective of so many things that people had written in fanfiction over the years, and to some extent—I mean I don’t know how much it’s like, convergent evolution, you know, and how much it’s—
PC: Yeah.
FK: That can be hard to parse out too.
PC: Oh yes, some things are just the zeitgeist waiting to happen, just the obvious way to do it now. And I would say that one thing is really important, that in the old show, the Doctor was always an asexual character, and possibly the only asexual hero on British TV, and certainly on American TV, I would’ve thought. But when Russell brought the show back, he wanted to get as big an audience as possible, and thus, you know, romantic subplots that make the Doctor a romantic lead. Which is fair enough, but—and this had also been sort of toyed slightly with in the TV movie with Paul McGann, although in a very timid way.
But that was sort of anathema to the fandom in between, and I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. I think that for closeted gay men, having a hero who doesn’t care about getting the girl is really important, and much less so in 2005, when the show came back. But also there’s that, that bullied child thing, that autistic thing, that, you know, these are the things that we have been denied. Romance, pop music, sport. And those are the things which Doctor Who fans, and I think other sort of fans, too, these are difficult areas for them.
For us, I should say, I’m not leaving myself out of this description. With my strange double life, I’ve come to learn aspects of all three of those things. And I find the whole fannish “sportsball” thing a little irksome, because, goodness, sports fans are exactly like us, do all the same sorts of things, [ELM and FK laugh] I really don’t like looking down on them, I really don’t like fan culture looking down on mainstream culture, because you know, I have to live that awkward life on the border.
But um…anyway, yes, so having the asexual hero, quite important to a bunch of awkward straight boys as well as our gay men friends.
ELM: That’s very, very interesting. I mean, do you—I’m so interested to, like—I feel like there’s—now I’m just gonna talk to you about Doctor Who—but there was such a difference, too, between from the 10th Doctor to the 11th, and I’m now thinking about how much audience, I mean I’m sure you’re talking about audience expectations influencing even starting with the new Who era, right, changing, and it seemed like that was an additional thing, because the budget seemed so much larger, right, [FK laughs] and it was suddenly like a global fandom being acknowledged, too, the idea that it was a big export.
PC: Yeah.
ELM: And I’m wondering, yeah, if you feel like…I mean, looking at that arc, how the big structures around it have changed even the heart of the story, you know?
PC: Well, you mean across the Doctors?
ELM: Yeah, or just in terms of the show itself, right? Beyond character, but you’re talking about somewhat broader forces than one guy’s interpretation in a writers’ room, you know what I mean?
PC: Yeah. I mean, I think, broadly speaking, Russell, an incredible eye for popular television, detail about what will attract the general public. The absolute best person to relaunch the show. Steven, he would hate me to say this, but in his way, a lot more fannish. A lot more concerned with nerdy detail. And wheels within wheels, intricate plot mechanisms, the flourish, the pay off, the prestige, the conjurer. And some of it is quite abstract, and…sometimes he gets a huge audience, and sometimes he doesn’t, because it’s all on his own terms. Chris Chibnall, it’s almost hard to tell, because his era was pummeled by circumstance. And budgetary concerns, COVID, all sorts of things got in the way. But I think at the end, he sort of…I don’t know, but he seemed to have the thought of doing the Russell, doing a very pure, very easy-to-get-into show. And then at the end just thought, “Damn it, I’m just gonna do all my fannish stuff.” [all laugh]
And Chris Chibnall is a desperately nice man, a really kind, considerate person. And Moffat’s a really good friend of mine, and Russell is somebody I’m friends with, but whom I’m slightly more distant from. And I think across the arc of those three, we went from big British success to, with Matt, Matt Smith, breaking America. And that’s when it went boom. I think maybe it’s the tweed? [ELM and FK laugh] And I think David Tennant had kind of lit the fuse, and it was just that point where it hit.
ELM: Yeah.
PC: And then Capaldi, which is actually my favorite, bit audience, some hate it, bit more difficult, and I think Capaldi is kind of the biggest reflection of the 15 years in between old Who and the new, that that’s sort of the inheritor of all that stuff. And that’s probably why I like it so much. Again, I speak from no authority here, this is just a fan’s opinion. [laughs]
ELM: It’s just very, very interesting. And I don’t know, it’s relevant to other franchises, too, this idea—I’m sure, Flourish, you, not just seen this in your personal fandom but in other ones you’ve worked on—the idea of how broad to make it, how accessible, the idea that anyone could show up in any episode and ground themselves, versus rewarding that sort of…and maybe, maybe, raising the bar and gatekeeping, and saying, “You gotta have seen these 40 years of television to understand this reference,” you know?
FK: Absolutely, and even tonally, I think a lot with this about the Battlestar Galactica reboot, which there was a passionate group of Battlestar Galactica fans who continued—not to, I mean even aside from like, the people that you occasionally meet who are like, “Yeah, I remember that show”—but there were a passionate group of Battlestar Galactica fans who really hated the reboot. You know? [laughs] And yet, the reboot was the thing that people now, when they say Battlestar Galactica, they usually mean the 2003 reboot. Actually I think around this time there was a bunch of that in the air I guess, the 2003-2005 like, there was a period where a lot of, maybe the first round of mining old franchises was happening [laughs] and some of this got pulled in.
But it is interesting to think about, yeah, how much, how intricate can it be? Because I mean for Doctor Who, I may be fannish in other ways, but I’m not a Whovian, so for me Moffat was too intricate sometimes, you know? I was, I was occasionally going, “I…I don’t care enough,” [FK and ELM laugh] you know? “I would, I love that many of my friends care this much, but I don’t, and I’m a little bit confused right now, so maybe I’ll go watch something else,” right, and it’s interesting to like, see things…because like with Star Trek, it can never be too intricate for me. [laughs] So. [ELM laughs] It’s totally about your orientation to the thing, right?
PC: Yeah, yeah. I do think there’s a, there are certain things about fannish nature, about Doctor Who fannish nature, there wasn’t that much of a classic Who fan revolt against Russell’s new version, almost immediately, because it was clear that this was a continuation, not a reboot. [FK and ELM both hum agreement] And Doctor Who fans, the worst reaction was kind of, I mean there were reactions about tone, sure. But because we had 9 different producers across 26 seasons before the gap, Who fans always kind of regarded the gap as, you know, just a slightly irritating interlude, that it would obviously come back. [ELM and FK laugh] And it would have to continue from where it left off! And now, oh good, it has, so there will be, other producers will come along, it will eventually be something we like, normal service has been resumed. [laughs]
FK: That’s one of the strengths of Doctor Who as a franchise, right?
PC: Yeah.
FK: Is that if you don’t like the current Doctor, you know there’s gonna be another one, so you can just come back, whereas with a lot of other shows it’s like, there’s no…you know, there’s no in-built sort of rejuvenation or change of direction that happens.
PC: But the extraordinary thing, and I think this is the heart of it, is that—and I feel this myself, I’m not putting myself above this—we have a show which is all about change, where change happens all the time, it’s part of the format. There are so many things about the show that, of which we have to be uncertain. We don’t have all the episodes, some are missing. We don’t know what certain things looked like. We don’t even know what certain episodes are properly called. [FK and PC laugh] And we have, we have—
FK: [overlapping] This is kind of unique in the fandom universe, it’s just, do you want to be a completionist? Too bad. [FK and ELM laugh]
PC: Until recently, we had no canon, and this is something I maintain, where a lot of fans would argue with me. [FK laughs] But the thing about a canon is, everyone can, can agree as to what is in the canon. There are rules—you know, if you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan, if it’s written by Arthur Conan Doyle, it’s in the canon. Or if you’re a Star Wars or Star Trek fan, there are official bodies who say, “This is canonical, this is not.” This has never happened in Doctor Who, and it’s a huge strength of the show. [ELM laughs] That basically, anything can happen, and we just have to sort of remember what happened a couple of years ago, and it’s time travel! It all gets rewritten!
Except, we’ve suddenly acquired a canon, in that Russell has said that the latest comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine is an official continuation of the end of the last episode of the TV show, and will go up to the start of the first episode of his. And so that comic strip is canonical, and nothing else in Doctor Who is. [all laugh] But anyway, we have all this, this uncertainty, all of this extraordinary flux and change, and Doctor Who fans hate it! They want, they want certainty! [ELM laughs] They want lists, and order! [PC laughs] And it’s, it’s an autistic fandom with a program that’s about change, can you imagine! Can you imagine! [all laugh]
ELM: That’s very funny.
FK: That’s kinda great, right? That’s the Henry Jenkins fascination and frustration, it’s just in a different, like, you know, mode than I think people usually apply that, right? A lot of times people will apply that to like, “Oh, if only this was better, if only I liked how it was written more,” but what you’re saying is, it’s not about even necessarily the writing day-to-day, it’s about the fundamental nature of this, why can’t I put it in a shoebox? [all laugh]
PC: Yes! We don’t know who’s a companion and who’s not, because there was never a rule for that, and any one fan’s list of companions will be different from any other Who fan’s list of companions. But one thing Doctor Who fans complain about is when it’s written “Dr. Who.”
ELM: Oh yeah. [FK laughs]
PC: Despite the fact that it was done like that on the TV, in the end credits, quite often! [FK laughs]
ELM: Nope, it’s not, his name is not Mr. Who and he became a doctor, come on!
PC: And I think this is why— [ELM and PC laugh]
FK: Elizabeth has yelled at me for this in the past, to be clear.
PC: Oh. Oh…
FK: You absolutely have! [FK and ELM laugh]
PC: OK. This is, this is purely fetishism. [ELM laughs] This is, it isn’t, he—
ELM: [overlapping] Yes! I’m a style pedant. Yes.
PC: [overlapping] It’s like, it’s like—
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, you, she really is. [ELM laughs] I mean, you just, it is, it is like her, one of her greatest joys, is pedantry around this stuff, don’t take it away from her.
PC: I, I’m sorry, Doctor Who fans should thus insist on people being called Mister, and write that out fully as well! [ELM and PC laugh]
ELM: Nope. Not lettin’ this go. [all laugh]
PC: I have no idea why. I have no idea why. It’s like, um…Doctor Who fans who insist the name of the character is The Doctor, not Doctor Who. Apart from the many times on screen he’s been referred to as Doctor Who, and um… [laughs]
ELM: That’s really funny.
PC: And Peter Capaldi loved to call himself Doctor Who. [ELM laughs] And OK, in the media, when an actor is saying “Oh, and I played the Doctor,” there’s still, what, you mean a doctor in All Creatures Great and Small? [ELM and FK laugh] You know, “Doctor Who, I played Doctor Who.” And fans are fine with that, because there’s this little, uh, ontological gap between that use of “I was Doctor Who” and the character, who is not Doctor Who, except in the end credits, when he’s Doctor Who.
ELM: That’s so funny.
PC: This is the energy, [FK and PC laugh] this conflict is where the energy comes from.
ELM: Would you, I’m not gonna like, I’m not gonna other you right now, but don’t you think there’s something very British about all of this? [FK laughs]
PC: …yes??? [all laugh]
FK: I so wish that this were a video podcast right now, because the level of facial expression that is happening in this conversation between the two of you—I mean it’s just, it’s peak. [PC laughs]
ELM: No, I’m just saying, it is a very idiosyncratic nation, this all tracks. I mean I guess now we’re all globally culpable in this fandom, but yeah.
PC: Well, we are a nation that’s got a very particular relationship with autism. No, no, seriously, you know, the Diogenes Club in Sherlock Holmes, potting sheds, confirmed bachelors, those quiet uncles who never say anything, you know. [laughs] It’s, um…cricket! Trainspotting!
FK: Almost everything in the Anglican Church, which I am totally allowed to say. [laughs]
PC: Yes. [laughs]
ELM: Oh, Flourish is becoming a priest, I don’t know if you knew this.
PC: Wow! My wife’s an Anglican priest.
FK: Yes, so I hear! I was just talking with one of my friends who’s in discernment—you know, in the Church of England, and she was describing this entire thing as “Well—” you know, she was saying, “Someone asked me why I was in this denomination, and I said ‘I think it’s because I’m quite English.’” And I just laughed and laughed and laughed. [all laugh] It’s like, this is the difference between the Church of England and the Episcopal Church.
PC: So you’re, you’re Episcopalian?
FK: Yes.
PC: Excellent. Excellent. [ELM laughs] Well done. Well done. [laughs]
ELM: We’re—no, all right, no more Christian talk now.
FK: [overlapping] Thank you! But, but it is true, this is an aside to just say yes. Yes. This all tracks.
ELM: [laughing] That’s really funny. Um, OK. So I wanna, I wanna go a few steps back, I have a question. OK. So, you said a while ago that your fanfiction, a version of it then became a Doctor Who novel, and then eventually made its way onto the show, and I’m wondering what it felt like for you to see it in those different ways. Because I think, especially for the two of us, and a lot of our listeners, are fanfiction writers, not particularly interested in being the creator of—you know, I don’t think, Flourish, I don’t think you’d wanna go write for Star Trek, I’m assuming.
FK: No, there have been many times when people in the entertainment industry have asked me about, “Oh, when are you gonna start writing xyz?” And I’m like, absolutely never, no, goodbye. [FK and ELM laugh] Sorry, I don’t want an agent, I don’t want any of that, go away. [laughs]
ELM: So, so you know, and obviously like, people’s attitudes towards this really vary, but I’m wondering if you feel like, I’m wondering what the experience of that was like, to have it in these different forms.
PC: Oh, um…mind blowing. I mean, to actually get there, how many people do that? It was sort of like I achieved my end goals, really quite early in life.
FK: But, so that was always your goal, that was always your dream, it felt like it was a continuation?
PC: Yes, exactly. I became a TV writer, and wrote for the medical show Casualty in order that I would be qualified, that when Doctor Who came back I would be able to write for it.
ELM: I love it.
FK: Oh, wow. [laughs]
PC: And there was no sign at that point of Doctor Who coming back. [all laugh]
ELM: You knew it would.
FK: [simultaneous] You just knew that you had to position yourself so that when the stars aligned…
PC: Mmm hmmm.
FK: Wow.
ELM: [overlapping] That’s interesting. But even the, I’m curious even about the, the particulars of each of these different mediums, it’s like you’re telling a similar sort of story, I’m wondering if that felt different, you know? It’s something that we’ve talked about with people who write fanfiction or read it and also write comics, you know, and saying like—or, or tie-in novels, like, anything that’s sanctioned, and if that feels different. Because obviously you care a lot about the characters, right?
PC: Well, the fanfiction, Doctor Who fanfiction in Britain at the time, in fanzines, was all about filling in awkward continuity gaps. [ELM laughs] And you know, plastering over the cracks and making sure everything made sense. And I was part of a movement that kind of was like, “Can we tell stories? [ELM and FK laugh] You know, actually write adventures?” Again, it’s a very, it’s a very male idea of fanfiction—in both ways, actually. The whole idea of Star Trek fanfiction, that model didn’t influence Doctor Who fanfiction at all, for the longest time. I’m sure it was in America. There’s…before, pre-internet, there’s a brick wall between American and British Doctor Who fandom. These, they evolved separately.
So writing stories and kind of overturning the status quo, very swiftly starting to write for, you know, doing different things with the characters. You know, stuff that couldn’t have been on TV, which is exactly what Peter Darvill-Evans was looking for, because he wanted novels that felt like novels. So I was kind of ready to write a proper novel, and as something that did things that you do in novels, that you don’t do on television.
And that worked, and the leap to television was of course the hardest part. Of course, it should be. And it still sort of leaves its imprints in my head to this day, it was…a traumatic process in the sense that that’s not going to be a smooth sailing, to land that. But at the same time, how many people are privileged enough to have their dream come true? It’s, uh…still kind of amazes me that I did that. [PC and ELM laugh]
FK: So, I’m really interested in what you were saying about, you know, the kind of fanfic—at first when you were describing the kind of fanfic that you were writing, the Doctor Who fanfic of the time, I was thinking oh, so it was more like, Sherlockian pastiches, in the sense of being, you know, sort of canonical, but then you were talking about how you were doing things in novels that you aren’t doing on TV, and I was like, oh, OK, so it’s like the topics, the content in certain senses, is the same as what you would see on TV, but the way that you’re telling it is novelistic, and so that’s obviously going to be stuff that you couldn’t ever do in that medium. Is that, is that what you were describing, did I get it?
PC: Yes. Yeah.
FK: OK. [laughs]
PC: The first thought is, in the fanfiction, we’re allowed to write adventures, we don’t have to just tie together missing bits.
FK: Right. [FK and ELM laugh]
PC: And then if we’re allowed to write adventures, we can change the characters a bit, and do extra stuff with them, and maybe…I wrote a different Doctor, a new Doctor at one point. And then to do stuff in novels, like interior monologue.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Sure.
PC: Things that, even in the novelizations of the TV shows, there’d been this odd barrier, you don’t hear the Doctor’s thoughts—except all the times you do. Because there is simply no tradition in Doctor Who that is not countered by counterexamples. [all laugh] But you know, doing proper novelistic length, and proper novelistic structure, and of course a lot of that, again, had to go out the window to take that to television. It’s a whole thing. [ELM and FK laugh]
ELM: Is this the part where I put you on the spot—not on the spot—and tell you that your episodes in the third season of Doctor Who, my favorite episodes of all time.
PC: Oh, oh my goodness, thank you. [ELM and FK laugh]
ELM: Yeah! I didn’t know if I was gonna say this, but since we’re talking about this right now, I’m gonna say it. [laughs]
PC: I remember sitting at the read-through, and I think it was, um…that amazing actor who played Joan, forgive me. She had actually got people a little tearful, around the table. And I remember sitting there, thinking wow, this is dynamite! This is going to go over so well! [all laugh] And you know, a lot of that’s down to Russell, shaping the material, adding scenes, adding stuff, good stuff. I’m in the awkward position of, the bit people quote the most, you know, “he’s like fire and ice,” I didn’t write that. [all laugh]
ELM: Don’t worry, that wasn’t my favorite part, don’t worry about that. [laughs]
PC: Aww, thank you.
FK: [laughs] Aww, thank you, thank you— [FK and ELM laugh]
ELM: All the other parts, though, yeah.
FK: Excellent awkward response, we’re just maximally… [all laugh]
PC: But yeah, I, I sort of realized that this was going to work out OK, and yeah, it’s afterlife has been huge and wonderful, and I’ve got toys out there based on my work, wow.
ELM: Oh my gosh.
FK: That’s so cool.
ELM: So what is your relationship—I mean, I know you go to like, Gallifrey One and stuff like that, what is your relationship with the fans now, because you really, I know you’d say you are still a fan, but you really are on the pro side of this world, I feel like.
PC: I’ve stopped writing Doctor Who for many years now, and I did it very deliberately, because I want, I want to put together a pile of work, I want a, a meaningful back catalog of stuff in all sorts of things. And it was a crutch, for me. I feel, without arrogance, that I could probably get work in pro Doctor Who in its forms like audio plays…forever if I wanted to, I don’t think that’s too big a claim. No, for one thing it’s my duty to get out of the way, and let the kids in. And also, that means that when I go to Gallifrey One, I don’t want to be that person who’s just talking about three episodes from ten years ago. [ELM laughs]
So I do infrastructure, I do game shows, I provide stuff, I do new stuff for that show. That’s really important to me. Thus my relationship with the Doctor Who fan audience is a little awkward, because they want me to do Doctor Who again, and I don’t! [all laugh] And um, every time I announce something on social media, like, ooh, big announcement coming tomorrow, somebody will say “Is it Doctor Who?” so I’ve started to put in brackets, “It’s not Doctor Who.” [ELM and FK laugh] There was once an exchange that summed it up, somebody put “Is it Doctor Who?” and I went, “No, no, it’s something else, something exciting.” And the reply was, “Oh well, maybe next time.” [all laugh]
FK: [laughing] OK, I’m gonna do you a solid and ask you about something that you’ve done that’s not Doctor Who.
PC: [laughing] Thank you, thank you.
FK: Because, you know…um, so I was a big fan of Elementary, and you wrote an episode of that show, and this also relates to that question of relationships with fandom, because in that episode of Elementary, it’s about, among other things, comic book fans. And I felt like it was a really loving look at comic book fans, which is not always how fans are portrayed.
So I guess I’m curious about how, how that process is for you, so you just said a little bit about the way that you function in fan spaces, awkwardly but you’re still a fan of things and so forth, but then how does that work when you’re in, you know, pro spaces, not to say that no one else is a fan of anything, but it is a different thing, particularly in the United States, there’s a big gap between usually people who are fans of things and people who are creating them.
PC: Yeah. I always felt that there’s an awkward gap between the way I’m a Doctor Who fan and the way anybody working long-term professionally on Doctor Who is a Doctor Who fan. It’s like the terms mean something different, [FK and ELM laugh] and maybe it’s just, maybe it’s just imposter syndrome on my part, because these are Doctor Who fans, except they also seem to have a distance, a professional distance, which I can’t quite achieve. And honestly I would if I could, I’d like to. [FK laughs]
But Rob Doherty on Elementary, the showrunner, complete genius, and unheralded—that’s such a good show! That’s such an all-time great, top-100, in-the-Library-of-Congress-good show, Elementary. That’s got some of the best…
FK: Thank you, I agree! [ELM and FK laugh] It is obviously the superior, it like, how can you possibly take Sherlock Holmes and make it into a procedural, and yet make it feel like Sherlock Holmes and good? Like, I can’t, sorry, I really love that show. [FK and ELM laugh]
PC: And I, so many great TV writers of that generation worked on that, and I was delighted to be included, and I was included because Rob Doherty’s a comics fan. And a thoroughgoing comics fan, and he initially asked me to be in the first season writers room, and I said no, because I—in Britain, we’d just had a baby, I couldn’t go and work in—and I actually said no before walking down the stairs to even mention it to Caroline. And…heartbreaking.
FK: Good husband award! [all laugh]
PC: But he’d heard of me through comics, and he didn’t know, even, that I had a connection to Steven Moffat, that Steven was my best man. And I thought at the time, “Oh, is he trying to poach somebody close to Sherlock, is that what’s—” No, not— [ELM and FK laugh]
ELM: His friends, not people working on Sherlock. [laughs]
PC: Yeah! Not at all. He was completely unaware. So yes, the treatment of fandom in that episode, a lot of that’s down to Rob, because you know, he knows of what he speaks. He sent me a crate full of props from the comic company offices that his prop people had created, these amazing bits of absolutely spot-on merch, for the characters [ELM laughs] that are on the shelves there.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, because it really looked like…you know? It didn’t look like, cheesy, like someone who doesn't know what a comic publisher office looks like, it looked like a slightly amped-up version of what they really look like, right? [laughs]
PC: Yeah. Yeah.
ELM: That’s really funny.
PC: I’m immensely privileged to have worked with Rob, he’s, his contributions to that script are through-the-roof amazing. I didn’t get to write for John Noble, because all the Lucy Liu-John Noble scenes are Rob. He had an ongoing plotline to service that. It’s something I’m desperately proud of, that episode.
ELM: Now I need to watch this. I haven’t watched Elementary.
PC: [gasps] You need to watch Elementary!
FK: [simultaneous] Yeah, you should, you should watch it!
ELM: No…as you know, I watched Sherlock. It’s not an either or, you could watch both.
FK: I’m glad that—you can watch both, I watched both! [laughs]
PC: [simultaneous] No, it’s not, they are both great! Yeah! They are actually, they are actually nothing to do with each other, [ELM laughs] they’re, they are incredibly, two modern Sherlock Holmes shows that barely intersect with each other. [laughs]
ELM: Um, and I did love House, and that is a Sherlock Holmes procedural, in its way, so.
FK: It’s true. It is, in its way.
ELM: I’m curious, because you, you know, you’ve done a lot of comics work, right?
PC: Mmm hmmm.
ELM: And for like, you know, DC, Marvel, these big properties. I’m assuming not everything you’ve done comics for is something that you feel fannish about.
PC: That’s very true, actually. You know, there is, one does take on stuff just because, you know, you think “OK, I can do a job there,” and one is professional. [ELM laughs] Vampirella, couldn’t do a job there, turns out. Dear me. [ELM laughs]
FK: [laughing] Oh no!
PC: [laughs] They, oh, I just, I’m, turned out I was very much the wrong writer, and…oh, I just fell flat on my face.
FK: [laughing] Oh no…
PC: Sometimes that happens, but sometimes you discover—I would’ve said I was a Superman fan, but during my run on Action Comics, which starred Lex Luthor at the time, I had an amazing time. And I got to know Lex really well, and got to write Superman at the end, and discovered a love for that, and really wanted to do that. So that was something where, one goes in thinking this is a good job, and then one discovers love for it. And that’s happened to me a few times. There was also…craft doesn’t necessarily have to be born out of fannishness, and I think learning that is really important. You know, I’m still painting the fence, I’m still getting in my 100,000 hours or whatever it is. [all laugh]
ELM: Do you feel like your fannish life, and the kind of ways of thinking and loving things that you’ve had, you know, all along in this—I mean is that what, when you do find yourself kind of falling for the jobs that you are just doing, you know…like, is it the same sort of thing, or does it feel different because it’s a different way in?
PC: It feels different. Like, there are things I’m a fan of that I don’t really aspire to write. I’m not gonna name any of them, because you never know who’s listening. [all laugh] And um, and if they do call up, I’ll be, “Yes! Yes, I’ve been loving it, and I would really like to write it, too!”
But there are, there are things I absolutely can’t do, as a music fan, I cannot do music at all. And so there’s a whole fannish area where, you know, one can only ever be a fan. I do like to express, when I go to Gallifrey, that I am a fan, I am actually enjoying being back in the audience. You know, it’s, not knowing what’s gonna happen next, and having the ability to sort of be surprised by the show—that’s very valuable.
ELM: That’s actually, it’s lovely that you can recapture that, right, you know? It’s just like…I don’t know, it’s like quitting a job and realizing you can still like—I don’t know, like using your computer or something. That’s a weird example, but you know what I mean? [laughs] If you…
FK: Yeah, that’s actually particularly heartening for me, having just left, a couple years ago, having left the entertainment industry, and now doing this new thing, and Elizabeth knows, I’ve been having angst about like, “Ugh! I just feel really disconnected and I don’t know, I imagine someday I’ll feel interested in fandom in these ways again, but it’s just not right now for me” and buh buh buh buh and all this. So it’s nice to know that, like, time heals all wounds, and/or all experiences? Maybe not a wound. You know.
PC: Yeah. Yeah. One thing I can’t do is, when I’ve been writing an ongoing comic, I can’t read the run immediately after mine. [FK laughs] That, that feels, that feels too intimate, it’s sort of like, you get divorced and yet you wanna sort of, uh, go hang out, [ELM and FK laugh] see how they’re doing. It feels stalkery. [laughs]
FK: And like, what they reverse that you did, right, you’re like, “I liked that bit!” You know? [FK and ELM laugh]
PC: Yeah! Yeah, actually the thing about ongoing serial fiction is that you kind of get really pleased when a bit you created is kept, like Faiza Hussain from Captain Britain and MI13 is still around, and I’m delighted that she’s still about.
FK: OK, we’re getting close to time, but I would like to know what you’re working on right now, before we leave. [laughs] Because we’ve just made you go down memory lane, you know, many years ago. What’s happening now?
ELM: I don’t think we made you, but. [ELM and FK laugh]
FK: A little bit.
PC: Well, I’ve just been commissioned for a new comic I can’t talk about yet, but right now I’ve got a comic coming out, third issue of five, called Con & On, which is actually quite relevant in that it’s 30 years in the life of a big comics convention, [FK and ELM gasp] and we’ve had about seven years every issue, and it’s about the pros and the fans, and how the culture changes across that time. It’s my big Robert Altman movie about big comic conventions. [ELM laughs]
FK: Literally about fandom!
ELM: [overlapping, laughing] I feel like you buried the lede here.
FK: You buried this lede! [laughs]
PC: And it’s, uh—
FK: I wanna hear all about this comic now! [laughs]
PC: It’s from Ahoy Comics, the artist is Marika Cresta, it’s a satirical comic. One of the things I really like is that, right at the end, I do a commentary track from a historian of the future, who knows what’s gonna happen.
ELM: Oh my gosh.
PC: So there are little boxes—there are two dealers pictured getting older and older in every issue, and they always say “This is my last year,” “Yeah, I’m not coming back next year.” And then the commentary always says, “They came back next year.” [all laugh] It’s, it’s about how the industry has changed across that time, and how it damn well hasn’t. And there’s an awful lot about the abuses of the comic industry, and the—it’s also about success and failure, it’s about, there’s two kids who get into the industry at the same time at the start, and their wildly contrasting paths. And some of that is about privilege. And there’s also, I’ve got three comic, three Brit comic creators, part of the first wave of British comic creators arriving in the United States, and they are: a dapper gentleman in a suit, a cosmic explorer, and a wild man. And I think that’s everyone. I think I haven’t met anyone out there… [all laugh]
FK: The only kinds of people. [laughs]
PC: The only kinds of British comic creators in the 1990s. [all laugh]
FK: So which one are you?
PC: Well, I was at that time rather much a wild man, and a bit of the cosmic explorer as well. [all laugh] But um…the…no, it’s sort of both my love letter to those big conventions, and it’s set at a completely fictional convention that is not based on any real convention. And it’s also by the sea, kind of in California, [FK and ELM laugh] and it’s also, um…it’s also about the awfulness, and about failure. And I’m desperately proud of it. And we’re getting a collected edition early next year, please give it a look.
I’ve also had a story out in an anthology called Project Cryptid, which is a funny cryptid anthology, and I’ve got a story called “Wormy and Me” with artist P. J. Holden about a man and his Mongolian death worm. [ELM and FK laugh] That’s all the comics right now. There’s always other stuff going on in the background, and…yeah, that’s me. Thank you for asking. [laughs]
ELM: And you still, you still podcast though, right? If people wanna hear, hear you speak more, yeah?
PC: [overlapping] Oh yes! Yep. I am, uh, myself and Lizbeth Myles run “Hammer House of Podcast,” we watch the Hammer horror movies in release order, and we’ve done five years’ worth of them so far. And we, for our patrons we have an entirely other episode every month where we talk about other horror movies of the same time. I’m also running, on my Substack, a sequel to one of my novella series, The Witches of Lychford, which is called Night of the Gnomes, it’s about a small Cotswolds town under siege by gnomes. [ELM and FK laugh]
ELM: This sounds fantastic.
FK: [simultaneous] This is all so delightful. [laughs]
ELM: All right, we’ll put all the links to everything in the show notes.
PC: Thank you.
ELM: And where everybody can find you, and…thank you so much for coming on, this was such—
FK: Yeah, this has been wonderful.
ELM: So good, yeah. I didn’t, I mean, I don’t know if we’ve ever really talked about Doctor Who at length on this show, even though it was, like, one of my main fandoms for years, you know, so it’s like, perfect person to talk about it with.
PC: Oh, thank you so much, I really enjoyed myself, I worry about the effects of this podcast in the outside world—will any of the digital news sites be able to get some kind of spin on the headline about current Doctor Who? I’m sure they will, but... [FK laughs]
ELM: Loudly saying no, there’s no information on that topic in this episode.
PC: Yes.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s official. That’s legal, right there.
PC: Yep.
ELM: That’s legal. Yeah.
FK: Right. [all laugh]
ELM: All right, well, thank you again. [laughs]
FK: [simultaneous] Thank you so much for joining us.
PC: Thank you for having me.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back. I say it every time, I’m gonna say it again. [laughs] Total delight.
ELM: It was a total delight! Yeah. The first time we don’t say it was a total delight, you’re gonna know we hated that person.
FK: No! No, that’s not how this works, I’ll just… [laughs] Oh no, oh no. I have painted myself into a corner.
ELM: Yeah, I’m just sayin’. Just sayin’. No, I’m kidding.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Very, very interesting. So much about that conversation was interesting to me. I was especially, like…really struck by the part where we were talking about—I’m not gonna call it the fallow period, because I got in trouble, [FK laughs] but you know, the period in which there was no new Doctor Who being created really, for the most part—being this time not only when there was a flourishing of creativity, but also kind of…structurally creative? Like, you know, fans created the—it wasn’t like, happening in isolation, and it wasn’t just like, people sharing stories, it was like, they were building something within that, right? And then that transferred then into the revival of the series.
And I just feel like the pace of media now, and franchise ownership, doesn’t allow for this in any way whatsoever. Like I can’t imagine that happening to any franchise right now, the idea that it could be off the air for ten years, and people would feel compelled to build a big fannish structure around it, you know what I mean, that could easily translate into when it came back. And then the actual, when the rights holders brought it back, then those people being the creators of it on the pro side, like…I just can’t, it seems so…not quaint, but like, old-fashioned to me at this point, you know?
FK: Yeah, I mean I, obviously I can definitely imagine a group of fans really like, loving something and wanting to stick with it, and hold on to it, and creating things in a period when things are off the air.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But the idea of the crossover into professional, of those fans? They’re not gonna be putting up enormous numbers, that’s the part that seems to me, maybe to you too, so…[laughs] actually kinda nice.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, I also think there’s an element here too, of, and Paul talked about it too, of the gendered bit of it, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And there’s a kind of idea of…within female-dominated transformative fandom, you know, it doesn’t—like huge—yeah, absolutely the structures are being built, but it doesn’t feel ever like, it feels like it exists in a different realm, maybe in an overlapping one, with the way that people will think about a show that they want to come back, which would be more like lobbying the creators, right? It’s, it’s not like, “Oh, we’re gonna build the scaffolding within fanworks,” you know what I mean?
FK: Right.
ELM: Also this is like a unique…Doctor Who is a unique kind of franchise, because it’s kind of this, like, cultural institution for a particular kind of creative, national arts creative entity, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Like, we don’t have, it’s not like PBS is over here, you know what I mean? And PBS never had that role, we don’t have a state broadcaster that creates something that we all watch, that we all affiliate, all that stuff that we all have, you and I have as—well, you didn’t watch TV when you were growing up, but like [FK laughs]—the things people our age have as touchstones, were made by like, these commercial entities, right, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: Whereas there is an element of the BBC that feels different.
FK: Yeah, absolutely.
ELM: I don’t know, it’s interesting, it’s just interesting to—I’m bringing up these comparisons to say like, I try to imagine different ways that these stories could inform, of how things went down could inform some of the conversations we’ve been having recently, but it feels so different that it’s just…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s more like a counterpoint than anything I would see parallels with.
FK: Yeah. But it’s, it’s fascinating.
ELM: Yeah, absolutely.
FK: And I don’t know, I, I guess I also find it…maybe not inspirational for me, like, my career is not going to be like this, but I hope that somebody else might find it that way, hearing somebody say like, “Yeah, my goal was to work on this franchise, and I achieved the goal.” Like, that can happen, that does happen, and you know, with a particular kind of interest, if that’s what you want to do, just knowing that that’s not, you know, that’s not an impossibility. Which I think for me it felt like that was totally impossible when I was a teenager, right? [laughs] And seeing people doing it is, is cool.
ELM: Yeah! I mean, it’s not something that occurred to me as a teenager, and not something I would want now, but I do think also too, to your point, this has historically been seen as a very male sort of path, too. But I do think now people of all genders, if you’re really into a franchise, there is that pathway that exists for you. And that’s interesting.
FK: I think that’s true.
ELM: And that’s a difference between now and 25, 30 years ago.
FK: Absolutely. All right, well, on that note, should we do our wrappin’ up?
ELM: [doing a Southern accent for some reason] Our wrappin’ up!
FK: [also doing a Southern accent for some reason] Our wrappin’ up.
ELM: OK. [laughs] You said it one more time, that’s great.
FK: [laughs] Well, you seemed to be inviting it. All right, all right, all right.
ELM: OK. You stop talking now. Ah, so. This podcast, [laughs] Fansplaining, is supported by pledges from listeners and readers like you. That’s via patreon.com/Fansplaining. We have many many rewards, including, at $3/month, we have so many special episodes at this point, I think 30 or so? I say this every time, I should just write it down. I have it written down, I should just look at it every once in a while.
And we’ve recorded a new one in the Tropefest series, which we, has almost ten installments at this point, on friendship within fanfiction. So, friends with benefits, friends to lovers, and non-romantic non-sexual friendship dynamics. And the kind of complicated interplay between all of those things within fanwork spaces. So, that’s for $3/month, you get access to that, and all the other Tropefest episodes, and all the other special episodes.
And if you have more than $3, you can get all those things plus a cute tiny pin in the mail, your name in the credits, $10/month you get a Tiny Zine, and we will be doing one of those this fall, we have started brainstorming for that. So yeah, if you have even a couple dollars to spare, it really makes a huge difference, helps us pay our hosting costs, helps us pay for transcriptions to be done every episode, to be released at the same time as the audio.
FK: And, if you don’t have money or don’t wanna give your money to us, you can still support us by spreading the word about the podcast, about our transcriptions, and by writing in! Sending us your comments, your questions, ideas for episodes, these things really help us out. So you can do that by emailing fansplaining at gmail.com; by using the ask box on our Tumblr; by using the comment form on our website, Fansplaining.com; or by contacting us on social media, if that’s how you wanna roll. We’re Fansplaining pretty much everywhere. And! You can call us. We have a voicemail box. 1-401-526-FANS, which is the very best way to contact us, because then we can potentially play your voice on this podcast, saying whatever insight you brought to us.
ELM: I think we may be doing that in the next episode, you can also send a voicemail just by sending an audio file to our gmail as well. We ask that you keep it under three minutes, please.
FK: All right, I think that’s it!
ELM: Yeah, that’s it. We’re done. We’re finished.
FK: [laughs] Talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: OK, bye!
[Outro music]