Turns out that the next release in the BBC's Doctor Who: The Collection deluxe Blu-ray range will be Season 23, aka The Trial Of A Time Lord, on September 23.

The final series of Colin Baker's reign as the Sixth Doctor, Season 23 presented itself as one epic 14-part story, albeit divided into four individual stories within the overarching courtroom tale.

This afternoon, I'll upload a special mid-week YouTube video, in which I look back at the whole season, the new Blu-ray set's packaging and of course the special features. Subscribe here and hit the notification bell, so as to be sure not to miss it! 

Here's the list of special features for this set:

• Extended edits - of all fourteen episodes
• Terror of the Vervoids - four-part standalone edition with updated Fx
• Immersive 5.1 surround sound & isolated scores - on all 14 broadcast episodes
• Behind the Sofa - new episodes with Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Bonnie Langford, Mark Strickson, Frazer Hines and Matthew Waterhouse
• The Writers’ Room - Eric Saward, Philip Martin, Christopher H Bidmead & Waly K Daly discuss the ‘Lost’ Season 23
• The Doctor Who Cookbook Revisited - brave cast members tackle their original recipes from the 1980s official cookbook
• The Doctor’s Table - join Colin Baker and friends for dinner
• In Conversation - Matthew Sweet chats to companion Bonnie Langford
• Unseen studio footage
• Rare archive treats
• Convention footage
• Blu-ray trailer
• HD photo galleries
• Scripts, costume designs & more in the PDF Archive

Don't miss my YouTube video, in which I discuss all of the above in much more detail.

Check out the box set at Amazon UK

You know, sometimes I’m very slow indeed. I've only just realised one of the most important purposes of my YouTube channel.

Through making (hopefully) fun, funny and entertaining videos on my channel every week, I get to reconnect with the things I love. Sometimes our data-addled brains need a reminder of these important things, because we’ve somehow managed to lose sight of them over time.

There will always be a special place in my heart for Doctor Who Target books. These beautiful things played a big part in getting me into Doctor Who AND writing. That’s why it’s been so good to reconnect with them across a couple of YouTube videos. Not to mention laying them all out on my living room floor. If you collect stuff, I highly recommend laying it all out across your living room floor and just taking it all in for a moment. You can then apply the Marie Kondo method if you like (as you can see from the picture above, for instance, I have a few doubles), but it's far from obligatory.

For these latest YouTube videos, I’ve chosen my Top 10 favourite Doctor Who Target book covers, IN ORDER, which was no easy task at all. In fact, I switched the Number One and Two choices at the last minute and re-edited the video.

My Top 10 Target book covers are spread across two videos, each of which is 15 minutes along. If you’d like to start the countdown at either Number 10 or Number Five, then the links are below. Enjoy - and be sure to let me know your own favourites over there in comments.

What’s an example of something that you love but have reconnected with over time? What prompted you to reconnect - and how did you feel when you did? Let's go against the grain and actually get a few comments posted onto a blog in 2019... :D

Part One of My Top 10 Favourite Doctor Who Target book covers (Numbers 10 down to 6)

Part Two of My Top 10 Favourite Doctor Who Target book covers (Number 5 down to 1)

Want the overview? Here's my main channel page, where you can see playlists of my videos on things like horror, VHS and retro video games.

Ho ho ho!  My new novelette Auto Rewind is now available to one and all, and it won't cost you a penny, a cent or whatever your tiniest unit of currency happens to be.

Yes, to celebrate the March 2016 release of my Orbit Books novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, I'm giving away short stories, every couple of months.  Auto Rewind is the first.  Set at Christmas, it's a dark thriller awash with 80s iconography, psychological horror and nail guns.

Stephen Skipp loves his mother, who he thinks is “really old” at the age of 27. They have a great time in their London home, renting films on VHS and watching TV, even if Stephen can hardly ever get her to watch Doctor Who on Saturday nights.

If their life is so very ordinary, though, then why is a dead body slumped in the corner of their living room – and another in the downstairs toilet?

Here's where to get Auto Rewind for free RIGHT NOW:

iBooks (epub): Grab it in your local iBooks store

Nook/Barnes & Noble (epub): UK | US

Kobo (epub): UK | US | CA

Smashwords (all formats incl Kindle): Click here

Inktera (epub): Click here

Scribd: Click here

Any problems with links, downloads etc? Let me know.

Enjoy!  Well, hopefully you will.  And if you're suitably moved, you might consider helping me out in one of three ways:

• Spread the word, either by quacking on social media, recommending the book to friends or leaving a review at your favourite retailer. All that stuff is so very helpful.
• Support me over at Patreon: the site which allows people to make a recurring pledge for each new thing a creator makes, starting at $1 per thing. In return, pledgers get exclusive perks. James Moran and I made a ludicrous two-minute pledge video over there for all to see.
• Whack me over some cold hard e-cash, via PayPal!

Needless to say, none of the above kind actions are in any way obligatory.  Auto Rewind is a free book, and I want you to have fun with it.  If fun's quite the right word.  Merrrrrry Christmas!

Want to interview me for your website?  Contact me here.

Wondering who designed that lovely cover?  It was Caroline Fish, whose site Mad Old Cat Lady you must visit.

(With thanks to this Tools For Authors page.)

​Once, when I was very young, I asked my mother a question which understandably bamboozled her.

"Mum... did we ever go hunting for The Master?"

I dearly wish I could remember her exact reaction.  As it is, I can vaguely recall her kindly humouring me by taking a brief moment to think it over.

"No," she said.  "No, I don't think we did".

Turned out I'd had a dream, you see, in which my family crept around our own house, searching for The Master, cowled nemesis of TV's Doctor Who.  The Master had recently scared me witless in The Deadly Assassin, by dint of having bulbous ping-pong ball eyes, the most theatrically malevolent voice imaginable and lurking beneath Gallifrey's political chambers like some horribly decaying Satan with a creepy grandfather clock for a time-and-spaceship.

Contact had been made. Doctor Who had taken root in my subconscious mind and flourished, until I could no longer distinguish between dreams and reality.  The show had engaged and ignited my imagination, fanning the flames of creativity.  Me and my folks hunting The Master in the darkened corridors of our home in Suffolk's Carlton Colville was almost certainly the first fictional story I ever 'wrote'.

If Doctor Who had never existed, I don't doubt that my brain would have been inspired by something else.  I do doubt, however, that it would have been something which encouraged such infinitely fertile imagination as Who - a show which spans all of time and space. 

That dream about The Master led directly to this:

​And this, in which TV's Doctor Who does battle with the, ahem, 'Sontans':

According to my mum, I "never stopped writing".  There are books and books of these Doctor Who tales, all of which feature the word "suddenly" quite a lot.  I still find myself deleting the word "suddenly" from second drafts of things all the time.  It's an affliction which affected me suddenly, over time.

Those books eventually led to the lovely headmistress and English teacher at my middle school conspiring to have my stories put together in a couple of bound volumes and placed in the school library.  Halfway through my teens, rock journalism swept me off on a violent side current, but it always came back to stories of one form or another.

Ultimately, Doctor Who and the dreams it spawned have led me, via a fairly circuitous route, to write fiction for a living.  I've written prose for the Fourth Doctor, audio adventures for the Fifth, Seventh and Eighth, and came bang up to date with the Eleventh Doctor for the BBC audiobook Doctor Who: The Gemini Contagion and The Brilliant Book Of Doctor Who 2012.​

My first produced feature film Stormhouse (2011) rightly drew the odd Doctor Who comparison from reviewers - it was, after all, essentially about a terrible entity in a cage and fit the show's classic 'base under siege' template.  Stormhouse had its world premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival, its London premiere at Leicester Square's FrightFest and its US premiere at the Los Angeles Screamfest.  Lionsgate Home Entertainment bought it for US distribution and cut a trailer which I still love greatly for its Classic Sinister Trailer Voiceover.  There's no doubt that I can thank Doctor Who for a great deal of all that stuff.

Then came the deal with Orbit Books.  My forthcoming novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, my first for Orbit, definitely employs a few Doctor Who elements, some of which it would be spoilery to identify.  I can say, though, that Doctor Who instilled in me a fascination with bodily possession which would be intensified by the cinematic likes of The Exorcist.  There's a fair deal of possession in this novel, including two very different exorcisms (the first of which you can witness in the first chapter of the book.)

Why am I quacking about all this?  Because it's important to stop, take stock, and never forget where your career really began.  In my case, hunting for the Master in our old house.

I've so much to thank Doctor Who for, beyond the considerable entertainment it has brought, and continues to bring me.  

You see, Doctor Who isn't just a show you watch.  Doctor Who isn't just for Christmas. 

It's a show which combines with your DNA, coils tendrils tightly around it and informs your entire creative life. 

You'll never be the same again.  Thank God for that and thank God for Doctor Who.

Hey there, you!  Stop doing that, it's illegal.  I've written a whole load of stuff for the new Doctor Who Magazine, out today.  Thirteen whole pages of it.  As I always say, this is a shame for me, because it means there's less DWM for me to read.  There's still a great deal written by other people, mind you, including a big chat with Steven Moffat about Davros and Part Two of Simon Guerrier's interview with Millennium FX's Kate Walshe.  

Here's how my 13 pages break down:

Nine pages: my bumper interview with Toby Whithouse, the writer of recent spooky two-parter Under The Lake/Before The Flood (as well as previous stories like The God Complex and School Reunion) and the creator of Being Human and The Game.  This was the product of a chat which ended up being literally three hours long.  That Whithouse is a very patient man.

Two pages: my preview of this Saturday's Viking spectacular The Girl Who Died, with chatter from its co-writer Jamie Mathieson (who wrote last year's Flatline and Mummy On The Orient Express).  Like his mate Toby, Jamie lives in Brighton, which made it even more of a pleasure to stroll up London Road and quiz him for hours too.  There'll be much more from Jamie in next month's issue.

Two pages: my preview of highwayman-tastic The Woman Who Died, with quotes aplenty from scribe Catherine Tregenna, who previously wrote several episodes of Torchwood.  Infuriatingly and inconsiderately, Catherine does not live in Brighton, which meant I had to physically get a train and travel to Cardiff.  Outrageous. But she's lovely and, again, there'll be more from her next issue.

Yesterday, I interviewed another Series Nine writer at length, who was also lovely.  I also read a brilliantly mad script from later in this run, which flat-out blew my mind, but I won't even say which one, because Confidential.  Bye then!
​

My Doctor Who audio story The Demons Of Red Lodge aired on BBC Radio 4 Extra this weekend, and you can still hear it via BBC iPlayer for the next five days.

This was the title-story of Big Finish's 2010 anthology, starring Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor and Sarah Sutton as Nyssa.  It was also my attempt to bring a little Blair Witch Project atmosphere to Doctor Who's world.

I wanted to see what would happen if I dropped the Fifth Doctor – the most fragile and vulnerable of them all – into Blair Witch territory, complete with scary woods, no compass, no short-term memory and no TARDIS. What if he woke up in darkness, in the middle of nowhere, alongside a similarly petrified Nyssa? Without even a Blair Witch-esque legend to focus his imagination on, the Doctor would have no idea of the nature or magnitude of the threat he’s facing or even a recollection of where or when he is.

That’s the initial premise of The Demons Of Red Lodge. The Doctor, afraid in the dark, without even knowing why he’s afraid.  He and Nyssa have nothing to fear but fear itself.  Or do they?  While attending the story's recording, I was happy to see how Peter and Sarah seized the script and made it all look so effortless, aided and abetted by director Ken Bentley.  Susan Kyd is great in two roles here and it was also lovely to have a contribution from Duncan Wisbey - a great voice artist who starred in one of the sketches I wrote for Radio 4's Laurence & Gus: Hearts & Minds a while back.

On the day of recording, Peter had something of a gravelly throat from shoutingalot in the West End's Spamalot.  This almost certainly helped him lend the Doctor's voice a nicely raw edge during the Demons sessions.  I was delighted with the results and proud to be a part of such a consistent release, which seems to have gone down quite well with fans.

You can hear The Demons Of Red Lodge on BBC iPlayer here, for the next five days.  Looks like the anthology's other stories - The Entropy Composition (Rick Briggs), Doing Time (William Gallagher) and Special Features (John Dorney) - are set to follow on BBC Radio 4 Extra on a weekly basis.

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is a 100-page monster, with countless Daleks on the cover from various eras of the show.  As you'd expect, it's full of exciting stuff to read, including my first piece of writing for the magazine since my two-part interview with the director Rachel Talalay earlier this year. 

As the Doctor Who Magazine page of my site testifies, I love writing for this magazine, which leads right back to my childhood.  I just don't get as much time as I might like to put my old journalist hat back on, due to writing novels and the like.  Recently, though, I've found time to get involved, interviewing a few of the writers for the imminent Doctor Who Series Nine. 

One of these writers has been poor Toby Whithouse, whose Brighton home I recently invaded in order to quiz him for literally three hours.  The first fruits of that epic conversation are in this issue, in the form of a preview of Toby's first ever Who two-parter, Under The Lake/Before The Flood, which is a great and ghostly tale.  Next month's DWM will feature my full interview with Toby, which I wanted to make as comprehensive as possible.

I've known Toby for a while now.  Back in about 2008, when his show Being Human was green-lit for BBC3 production, I ran a fairly extensive three-part interview on my old blog, which can still be read there.

Hey - brand new Doctor Who starts this Saturday on BBC1, 7.40pm!  Oh, it's a good life.