Doctor Who and the Disruptive Coup

For 1986, Doig and Clegg had a clear plan of action: a whole year of returning monsters, to make it clear this was ‘normal’ Doctor Who, and a new companion, preferably a well-known actress, to get ratings back up. This was not what they’d initially wanted to make and having to fire David Yip and Pamela Salem was going to be awkward, but the BBC was expecting change. It’s been rumoured for years that some of the upper management had hoped to replace Lenny Henry but dared not say so out loud for fear of ‘looking racist’. Due to changes in TV, they also decided to do 45-minute 2-parters even though the BBC would not yet pay for more stories; the schedule was made weekly again, to ensure they still were on for ten weeks.

Ironically, even as Doctor Who came under pressure, The Lenny Henry Show saw increased ratings and was duly renewed for another series. [1] It was even sold abroad to the United States, as the Who distributors felt they could exploit the growing African-American fandom. One convention in New York invited Henry and showed one of the Show episodes – a lot of the British jokes went over people’s heads.

None of the TARDIS cast were happy about the idea of changing the companions but Yip & Salem were used to being jobbing actors, and had been on the show two years anyway. Replacing them was light entertainment star Bonnie Langford [2] as the 21st century computer scientist and rocketeer Melania Bork (given an Eastern European name to imply future détente). While Henry wasn’t happy at the change, he made sure to be as friendly as possible to Langford to ensure he had an ally in case, as she suspected, the show tried to replace him.

A butcher’s bill of monsters was drawn up by Doig and Clegg, starting with the Daleks, and hopefully including the Mara, the Ice Warriors (to reuse the costumes from last year), the Autons, and the Cybermen. Due to the popularity of the recent Doctor Who repeats, the opening story would be a crossover between the Sixth and Second Doctors. All this needed now was actual stories, which meant five writers willing to put up with this.

Eric Saward had left Doctor Who behind but was coaxed back at the thought of using Troughton. His pitch saw both TARDISes land on a cemetery planet, where a charismatic cult leader has taken over – both Doctors arrive twenty years apart, the Second and Jamie (Victoria was added when Watling turned out to be free) when the “Great Healer” arrives, and the Sixth when everything’s gone wrong, with damage to the TARDIS causing the Second Doctor to appear in the Sixth’s timezone in Part 2. While Saward had hoped to use the Daleks, he was given the Ice Warriors and so made the Ice Warriors be the first to fall to the Great Healer’s manipulations, forming his dark honour guard.

The Autons would appear in Singapore, the setting for writing Lee Chang and Professor Laird out, as there was a flourishing plastic trade in Asia at the time [3]. Robert Holmes agreed to write this semi-sequel to Chang’s first story and included a swarm of Auton infiltrators, while throwing in alien conmen Sablom Glitz and Dipper to amuse himself. Yip and Salem were asked and turned down having their characters leave as a couple.

Melania was to be introduced in the same story as the Cybermen, with Clegg (who’d been wondering how best to do it) asking for it to be an Agatha Christie story in space after a discussion with her friend Saward. [4] Chris Boucher was given the nod after he floated around his Star Cops idea and he planned to use this story as a proof-of-concept; rather than Orient Express, his model would be And Then They Were None, and Ten Little Spacemen saw the crew of a 2050s freighter being picked off by a lone Cyberman, trying to work out who among the guilty crew was a collaborator (in the end, neither, as paranoia dooms them). Clegg made sure he didn’t make Melania guilty of anything too grim, allowing it to be simple fraud.

For the Mara, Christopher Bailey reluctantly added the entity to a long-delayed, structure-lacking story about the Byzantium Empire called May Time. [5] Adding the Mara as a threat allowed the story to have a menace and something for the characters to work against, but Bailey felt this wasn’t a proper use of the creature and the scripts began to drag. [6] Clegg put a lot of work into helping Bailey tighten them up, but the stress of it ensured she wouldn’t seek him out again.

The Daleks would be the year’s final villain and hoping to reclaim the glories of The Bridgehead, Doig and Clegg called up Ian Marter. The former companion and novelist was much in demand now as a writer of thrillers and low-budget films [7], but was willing to return for old time’s sake. He pitched a Cold War thriller involving stolen bioweapons and a retired Brigadier being framed (he thought of bringing back Harry Sullivan but felt that would be a bit much), with the Gold Dalek making another attempt to alter the timeline. Learning who the new companion was, he made his femme fatale spy Samantha into a Polish agent and grandmother of Melania.

Production went smoothly enough until Robert Holmes, after a short illness, died during the filming of City of the Autons. A dark pallor went over the rest of the shoot and Clegg would have to do any needed rewrites herself. Shortly after that, fan consultant Ian Levine – who had expected more access than Doig and Clegg were willing to give – broke off with the show and joined the fans opposing the ‘Doig Era’, using what he knew of the show’s new series to trash it in advance. [8] Due to his prominence, many fans believed his claims and in particular his exaggeration over how much Clegg was rewriting Holmes.

Halfway through production, Doig announced this would be his last year. Officially it was down to three years being enough but in private (and in later interviews), he admitted it was due to frustration that he couldn’t get his vision to fully stick and fear that the show’s ongoing problems would become an albatross around his career’s neck. [9] Clegg became worried her own job may not last without him and quietly approach Henry and Langford, hoping to join their clique.

When the show finally aired, ratings had a slight jump for the Daleks and Cybermen but otherwise stayed at 1985 levels. The critical reviews were more mixed than they had been in years, with criticisms that the show was relying too much on old glories – the opposite of what Doig had hoped would happen. Fandom would have been mollified by the return of the monsters but instead had a minor civil war over Levine, as it was now clear many of his claims were not true.

A final moment served to mar the year: Ian Marter died suddenly, on his 42nd birthday. The Dalek Affair would air with a dedication to him and the last thing Doig & Clegg would ever work on was a hastily filmed scene (filmed in Courtney’s actual house) of the Doctor and the Brigadier calling Harry Sullivan to tell him what he’d missed.


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[1] OTL it skipped a year and would come back retooled as a sitcom. Becoming the Doctor gives Lenny Henry a boost.



[2] Doig goes for her for the same reason JN-T does. In both timelines, Langford’s desperate for drama roles to broaden her career.

[3] The reason for “Yellow Fever” going to be set there, but obviously that title won’t ever happen with Yip around

[4] The same suggestion an under-pressure Saward gave the Bakers to get Vervoids.

[5] He retracted the story OTL as he was unable to get the structure right.

[6] Bailey had been not quite happy with either of his times writing for the show.

[7] ITTL, he’s associated with a highly popular story and in multiple countries, at that.

[8] Levine had been hanging around since the Williams era to the strained tolerance of everyone on production. He fell out with Nathan-Turner OTL, in part over things like casting Bonnie Langford, so it won’t take much to turn him more violently against Doig and Clegg.

[9] As indeed it was for JN-T.
 
Fans have jokingly blamed Ken Clarke for killing Doctor Who ever since the cancellation. (This even made it into a Spitting Image sketch in the 1992 election, where Labour add this to his list of political crimes) As conservative fans point out, the culprits are all at the BBC.

The heights of the Colin Baker years and the growing profit for BBC Enterprises had slowly changed the Corporation’s view on the show – instead of embarrassing children’s show they didn’t understand, it was a popular children’s show that they understood made money. While management under Jonathan Powell and the incoming Michael Grade still didn’t like the show [1], they would tolerate it. All this had changed under the Doig years, as the PC accusations, fan civil wars, and perception of damaged ratings (and real ratings issues in foreign markets) all allowed these men to say that it had been Douglas Adams, a man known to be a genius, who had briefly elevated Doctor Who. Now the show was back to its natural state. The return of so many old monsters only ‘proved’ this.

In the end, two factors gave it a final push – all the fan aggro, which greatly embarrassed the BBC, and Doig leaving. The latter gave them an easy opening, able to cancel the show due to ‘staff issues’ and before any pre-production could make it too costly to end. [2] The former killed any chance that they’d try calling this a ‘hiatus’. [3] Nobody wanted to care or pretend to care about the anoraks anymore.

Barbara Clegg, Lenny Henry, and Bonnie Langford found their alliance had failed before it had started. Henry and Langford still had other jobs and in any case, Langford had not yet made any emotional connections with the show. It was Clegg who’d suffer the most, losing her script editor job and finding no new jobs open now she had the mark of a ‘failed show’ on her. She would have to return to freelancing. (Doig returned to work soon after but was seen as past his prime)

News about the cancellation trickled out first into the fan press, then later into the mainstream. It garnered a few stories but nothing dramatic, and Powell and Grade both made noises about how the show had just reached the end of “a long, successful run”. The main anger came from the black independent media, who saw a rare black children’s hero getting cancelled. If anyone with media savvy had been ready to go to bat for the show and win the tabloids over, it may have survived [4], but only Lenny Henry himself could have done this and he had no need when he could fall back on The Lenny Henry Show.

Other than Target Books and Doctor Who Magazine, 1987 was a dead year for the show. The foreign markets would soon follow, as the last episodes of the Lenny Henry era reached them. When Ken Clarke did take power, the show was already dead. Ironically Clarke’s own speech writer, Tim Collins [5], would pen an angry letter to DWM lamenting that the show was gone.

1988, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Who, may have seen nothing new at all on the telly if Powell hadn’t grown tired of John Nathan-Turner [6] and punted him sideways to Enterprises.



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[1] The reasons both men get promoted and hired, respectively, are not changed by the wider events. Both men didn’t like the show OTL and Powell has explicitly said this was a common view in the BBC.

[2] The writer is wrong as OTL the BBC ate the costs already spent on the lost Season 23. But if you didn’t know that, why would you think it could happen?

[3] Powell has said that they panicked at the last moment about officially cancelling an ‘institution’. This changes that – and OTL, upper management hated having to put up with fan scandals and Doctor Who Bulletin issues.

[4] John Nathan-Turner’s contacts and friends with contacts won the day, but JN-T is long gone from the show here.

[5] A big fan of Doctor Who in real life, as well as a speech writer for Thatcher, Major, and Hague.

[6] An OTL animosity
 
A discussion of Doctor Who after the Day of the Jackboot is not complete without discussing Doctor Who Magazine (nee Weekly). There had been comic adventures for “Dr Who” since 1963 but Marvel UK broke new ground by giving him his own dedicated comic-cum-magazine. Dez Skinn, chief editor at the company, planned to launch with four stories by the 70s comic dream team of John Wagner and future Space Whale scribe Pat Mills, who recycled failed pitches they’d sent to the BBC.



The attempted coup knocked out the first two stories, The Iron Legion and City of the Damned, for their dystopias and dictatorships just as had happened with The Armageddon Factor. Artist Dave Gibbons had to near-kill himself finishing The Star Beast, the planned third story, in time for the March launch. Both removed strips would be released in a “Doctor Who Album” trade paperback in 1980 but the loss soured Mills and Wagner, who only produced a third strip after: Metalzoic, a tale of a world of robot dinosaurs. [1] Steve Moore was placed on the main strip, with the unrelated and still novice Alan Moore as a recurring backup writer.



When the show returned in 1980, it came with a new Doctor and the two Moores were asked to team up on a suitable epic debut to give sales a bump. The Doctor, Romana, and “Pug” (instead of the Fourth’s comic-only companion Sharon) were thus sucked into a Time War against the Black Sun, a foe from the future that is attempting pre-emptive attacks on the past Time Lords. [2] 4-D War! ran for ten issues, with the first two including the back-up strips, which showed the Black Sun attack on Omega and Rassilon. The follow-up to this had the Doctor meet back-up star Abslom Daak Dalek Killer for Nemeses of the Daleks, a four-part story comparing Daak’s bleakness and obsessions with the Doctor’s own. [3] Fans have lamented that this ‘golden age’ of sorts was undone by a change in editor, when Steve Moore was told his characters were being taken for use by Alan McKenzie and both Moores quit over it. [4]



The new writer was Steve Parkhouse, who after the bleak End of the Line tried to continue the ‘epic’ run with Knight Time, pitting the Doctor (now back with comic-only companion Sir Justin) and a far-future Arthurian group against the time-warping demon Melanicus. By the end of the ten issues, Doctor Who Weekly finally went Doctor Who Monthly (later Magazine) [5] and Parkhouse adjusted with more surreal, moody tales. When the Fifth Doctor era finally came to an end in the comics, the Doctor and his talking penguin chum Frobisher had just encountered the living nightmare Voyager, run through a Rupert the Bear homage, and seemingly killed Parkhouse himself. The writer could bow out with pride and leave things for the next writer to take on the Sixth Doctor.



Simon Furman, assistant editor and jobbing writer, managed to squeeze in the door and threw in the story Raiders of the Last Ark!, [6] the Doctor getting involved in an Ice Warrior war over the last of their great colonisation arks. His fast-paced, pulpy tales were a world removed from the Parkhouse years and fitted well with Henry’s first year, and in 1987 he and Geoff Senior introduced the recurring comic villain Death’s Head. [7] That same year, Marvel in the States began to reprint Sixth Doctor strips in miniseries form and on the back of that, the Furman/Senior UK series Dragon’s Teeth got US distribution.



A short-lived run of two-page backup strips ran in 1984, featuring the Rick Myall young First Doctor and Don Worthington Master in their student adventures, with writing and art by Lew Stringer.





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[1] An idea Mills alone would write up for 2000 AD later.

[2] Steve and Alan were mates and Alan was already full of ideas, so Steve brings him in and unleashes the beast.

[3] The core of Daak as Steve Moore saw it was his unrequited tragic loss of Taiyin, which Alan would likely have seen use in a parallel.

[4] OTL as well. McKenzie denies this and Paul Neary may have told a porkie.

[5] The new Doctor gave the comic a sales boost and this (and the Moores) kept it from going monthly for longer.

[6] Remember that Reagan did not take office in 1980, which means the deregulation that allowed toy cartoons has not happened yet and thus Transformers is not a cultural juggernaut getting its own special UK title. Furman is thus still a novice in 1986.

[7] Different circumstances leave Death’s Head tied to Doctor Who and not able to be spun off for Marvel
 
John Nathan-Turner was a popular man at the BBC and considered a golden boy to watch. His two years running Doctor Who were immediately followed by Catwalk, the infamously trashy soap opera about a fashion house that ran for three years and featured Anthony Ainley as the predatory manager. It’s considered to have resurrected the soap opera format at the BBC and led to the creation of its polar opposite in Eastenders. [1] Following that, Nathan-Turner had launched Sherlock in 1985, starring Tom Baker as a modern-day Holmes (and bringing Ainley back as Moriarty) [2]; while Catwalk was only a domestic hit, the slyly campy Sherlock was one of BBC Enterprise’s best assets and was sold all over the world.

What caused him problems was that his personality, his attitude, and his products rubbed up Jonathan Powell and his team the wrong way (as did his habit of using his partner, Gary Downie, as a staffer despite Downie’s mediocre skills). [3] Powell would have preferred to not have Nathan-Turner around but he’d made two hits for the BBC and was a master of promoting himself & his wares to the press, and he was too committed to the BBC to leave on his own. In the end, Powell arranged for Nathan-Turner to be shifted to BBC Enterprises as soon as a job opening came up. This ensured the two men would have little contact and Nathan-Turner, who was always popular when he travelled to America, could put his promotional skills to new use.

Doctor Who fandom called this “the Second Coming” and were only half-joking. ‘JN-T’ had turned the show around and left it in better shape for the Douglas Adams run. Now the man announced that 1988 would see the Doctor return to TV in an America-filmed special.

Nathan-Turner was a genuine fan of the show and liked the adoration he’d got when he sometimes visited US fan events. If the Corporation didn’t want to make Who at home, even on its 25th anniversary, he would – this could further penetrate the US market, give BBC Video a hit (he didn’t expect the special to air at home), and be a springboard for future US productions by UK staff. He tasked one of his protégé writers, David Roden, to whip up an American set crossover between the Fourth Doctor and the Sixth, with Sarah Jane Smith and Mel returning as companions. Elisabeth Sladen had retired and Bonnie Langford was busy, but JN-T schmoozed them into agreeing.

Dimensions in Time would see both Doctors drawn into the classic days of Hollywood musicals, battling both Daleks and a female Time Lord heavy, the Executive, played by Dynasty’s Kate O’Mara in full soap-opera villain aplomb. Plans were made for several Star Trek alumni to appear as the Hollywood stars and singers, with Nichelle Nichols and James Doohan from the old series and Wil Wheaton, Marina Sirtis, and Denise Crosby from the then-new one. Sirtis adlibbed a line about a Navy boyfriend called “Jean-Luc”, referencing Avery Brooks’s captain [4].

All of this had to be done in 45 minutes, all with a much lower budget than JN-T had expected – while a master of stretching his budgets out, this would prove challenging and restrict sets – and all done in a short amount of time to accommodate the cast. On top of that, Roden was instructed to put in a musical number for as many of the cast that would do it (in practice, only Henry, Nichols, Langford, and a Baker who at least gave it his all).

Unsurprisingly, Dimensions in Time is a mess. A key divide in Anglophone fandom is whether it is a fun mess or an embarrassing one. The bulk of American viewers saw it on TV and took it as a celebration, both of the show and of the American fandom – the second story filmed in America, this time about something iconic for the country. British (and Australian) fans paid horrendous 1980s video prices to see a potential return for their favourite show and got Baker singing.

British fans were disappointed by the Second Coming but luckily this was not the only new material. Doctor Who Magazine was still going on, still relevant thanks to Dimensions, and editorial had decided to treat 1988 as a tenth anniversary of the Key to Time as well. Simon Furman and John Ridgeway began a year-long serial, Time Quest, in which the Doctor again searches for the fragments in homages/knockoffs of Furman’s favourite films. [5] This was his last work before taking over Alpha Flight and others. [6]

Target Books, meanwhile, were panicked at the upcoming loss of Who novels and asked Barbara Clegg if there were any unpublished scripts, just like how they’d done Armageddon Factor. She had received two pitches, Ben Aaronovitch’s Arthurian corporate satire Knightfall [7] and Stephen Wyatt’s Ballard-style Paradise Towers, and arranged to have them turned into original novels with a small fee for herself included. She also claimed to have a script of her own, a historical set in the British Raj, and once Target gave her a contract she did indeed have that story (Evening in Empire) in writing. There was room to be an optimist for fans. Surely, with this continuing material, a revival on TV can’t be far away.

John Nathan-Turner was thinking the same thing but knew that the BBC would not be the ones to yet make it. So he turned to the overseas markets to see if any of them wanted to do it.

He found two.





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[1] Catwalk was a rejected pitch JN-T made (he loved soaps and wanted to make a UK Dynasty or Dallas) but here, he’s making it when not tied to Who and under a different management regime; people who’ve seen the pitch say it looked like it’d be dire but didn’t stop Dynasty being a hit. Ainley had worked with JN-T before Who OTL. (Eastenders would exist anyway but ITTL people don’t know that)



[2] A real pitch that JN-T got involved in. I’ve given it this title to be evil.



[3] All OTL

[4] A black Doctor has a knock-on effect on the in-production TNG but as Roddenberry never says he was following another show’s lead, most people are unaware

[5] Or Matrix Quest, to Transformers fans.

[6] Working on a comic that gets a higher profile in America, and getting US distribution for Dragon’s Teeth (nee Claws), gives him a boost onto Marvel’s mainstream earlier, during a boom.

[7] Never produced but it won him the Remembrance of the Daleks gig.
 
The first foreign remake was a direct result of Doctor Who courting the Malaysian and Hong Kong markets. While there was no official Japanese release, bootleg tapes had made it there. Japanese overseas students and workers had seen the show in Australia, America, and Britain (and some Target books had briefly been available years before), but it was the underground bootleg market that went around sci-fi fandom and attracted Toei’s interest. John Nathan-Turner did not speak a word of Japanese and his outlandish nature left Toei bemused (expecting the British to be more reserved), but money crossed all divides.

A deal was struck in which Mysterious Time-Traveller Doctor Who?, a broad remake of the show, would be a Japanese and South Korean exclusive while BBC Video could release it in Australia, Britain, and Ireland. Toei decided not to use any of the existing monsters to save money and instead, showrunner Toshiki Inoue [1] created a recurring foe called the Zone Empire, an alien force that would keep trying to attack Earth throughout time.

Mysterious Time-Traveller Doctor Who? ran for 26 episodes in 1990, with the intention of more. The elderly Doctor Who (Toshio Takahara) is hiding out in present day Japan as a history teacher and in a parallel of An Unearthly Child, he heads off into time and space with the brawny, red-blooded Gym teacher Ken Hoshikawa (Kei Sindachiya) and honour student Reme Miyata (Ryo Narushima), where they encounter early cavemen and the Zone Empire’s first colonists. Each story was a 2-parter, with adventures in the Edo samurai period, the Russo-Japanese War, the 1960s, and far-future locales and alien worlds.

One of the embarrassingly dated stories was episodes 5-6, “Defending the Shape of Things Yet To Come”, set in the 2060s – a partial Gerry Anderson homage – where Japan and China united are the dominant power. When this story was created, the Cold War was having its last gasp as the newly hardline USSR tried to ensure no further nations fell out of the Warsaw Pact like Hungary, East Germany, and Poland had. [2] While Europe was in reversal, President Bush, Prime Minister Asukata, [3] and others had looked to China, where the reformist Hu Yaobang had just died [4] and clashes between young reformists and the old guard looked likely to end in blood. This intervention helped Premier Zhao Ziyang stay in power and begin China’s gradual transformation. At the time, this caused a huge wave of pro-Chinese sentiment in the West and Asia (and inevitably a blowback like Tom Clancy’s 1994 book The Twin Dragons), and Mysterious Time-Traveller Doctor Who? was one of many stories to show a Sino-Japanese alliance. The economic and political rivalry between Japan and the new China from 1994 onwards make this story quite funny to modern viewers.

In the end, Mysterious Time-Traveller Doctor Who? only lasted a year. There were some ropey scripts and some confusing elements for the target audience – the TARDIS still being a British police telephone box was one [5] – but a key failure was regenerating the Doctor partway through episodes 7-8. Inoue had seen the regeneration as a key thing to adapt but had done it far too early, when the audience was still getting used to the show. Suddenly the quirky old man was turned into Yukijirō Hotaru’s Troughton-esque rural schlub. Ratings dropped and did not recover.

The final story was loosely based on The War Games, as the Zone Empire hires the War Master – combining War Chief with the Master, with his Time Lord status as a cliffhanger reveal – to grant them time travel so they can finally take Earth. As the Empire fell, the War Master regenerated and the scene was set for a run of stories that never happened, where the War Master would pursue the Doctor.

Dubbed video releases – the Hotaru Doctor was given a broad Welsh accent by Andy Secombe – came out in 1990 and 1991, and were hoovered up by hungry fans. Many Western fans fondly remember the show for its (to them) bizarre twists on what they knew, and for a playful dub. The American Sci-Fi Channel would later broadcast the show in 1995 and gave it a completely different dub by Saban (Hotaru becoming Paul Schrier), which has not been repeated since.

Meanwhile, Doctor Who Magazine got a wealth of features out of the Japanese remake but the strip was still about the Sixth Doctor. After a run of strips by various writers, 1990-91 saw Pat Mills return to the strip (with co-writer Tony Skinner) to write a series of black comedy stories with a new companion, a robot witch called Morrigun. Mills had been left disgruntled with his usual employers at Fleetway [6] and pitched to Marvel UK to find employment elsewhere. Eighteen months of material would be created, all then collected by a pre-bust Marvel US.

1990 also saw the start of Doctor Who: The New Adventures at Target (later at Virgin). After the success of the 1988 original books, Target decided that this was a good way of bringing money in while the show was still dead. Barbara Clegg was headhunted to be a co-editor on the line and to help attract more young readers to the line, the first three books were written by established children’s authors [7] (Gillian Cross starting with The Pig’s Empire, about a craze TV show driving people to violence and fascism [8]).







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[1] One of their old reliables for anime and sentai – the Zone Empire is from Chikyu Sentai Fiveman OTL.

[2] The different political leaders of the early 1980s meant a slow, gradual end of the Cold War – and an inevitable backlash against it, as the Soviet Union isn’t as overwhelmed by events.

[3] Bush is in a second term here while the Japanese left have formed a (shaky) alliance, thanks to lesser Cold War tensions. Bush and the socialist Asukata aren’t going to be friends but both have a vested interest in cooperating over China.

[4] As in OTL, but this time in office – different political events have helped him cling on.

[5] This was part of the show’s iconography and so would be kept

[6] Skinner and Mills buddied up in real life, and Mills had felt Fleetway (and especially 2000AD) were deliberately trying to kill Toxic!

[7] The different circumstances mean that the NA’s are targeting the YA market, rather than the hardcore sci-fi fans, and will be quite different

[8] AKA the third Demon Headmaster book
 
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