Ian Potter's Blog

Already nearly two weeks into 2019 and no updates.
Deary me.
Anyway in product out there to buy news...
The New Counter-Measures- The Hollow King is out there to buy! Yes! From here in fact (other shops will follow in a month or so, but you won't get the offer of a download and I'll be surprised if it ends up cheaper)
It's had a couple of lovely reviews as well which I'm delighted by. Here and here.

It's a stand alone story but there are continuity Easter Eggs for the very keen- the company Rachel's lab's with has been mentioned in passing once before in a Guy Adams Counter-Measures , the museum referred to is one invented for a John Dorney Doctor Who story (I suspect so utterly ghastly things weren't alleged to have once happened at the British Museum), there may even be a nod to Clifford Jones of Llanfairfach and a little bit of chat about the UN and a Royal Institute that might even be discussing UNIT and Torchwood. That's even before you get to the OTHER STUFF.
There- you simply have to buy now.

In other news, this month I am absolutely full of something virulent, have just delivered the audio component of a new Rifftrax piece with Matthew J Elliott and have written a short play.

I accidentally went a tiny bit viral on Twitter this week.
Just before bed one night an advert came on the TV for Pepsi which featured exciting young things surfing with neon boards in the middle of the night in what would obviously be freezing sea.
"Make new traditions" the ad concluded. It's sort of a tacit admission that Pepsi can't compete on Christmas fizzy drinkness with Coca Cola which has the modern image of Santa as some stupid trucks delivering pop every year at the core of its brand. Pepsi, in brand terms, is always the second one you think of.
I tweeted a thing which has often occurred to me that Pepsi should use this underdog thing a lot more, particularly in the UK because we love a bit of self-deprecation here. We're the third best at it in the world.

Why does Pepsi never advertise using its official UK slogan as used by all British pub landlords?
"It's Pepsi. Is that alright?"— Ian Potter (@ianzpotter) December 19, 2018

Responses were a lot faster and more plentiful than I'm used to. I primarily tweet to quite a small group of people but I soon realised what was happening because it happened similarly but on a larger scale to a good friend earlier this year.
The main difference is her tweet was actually very funny and very her.

Dear Amazon, I bought a toilet seat because I needed one. Necessity, not desire. I do not collect them. I am not a toilet seat addict. No matter how temptingly you email me, I'm not going to think, oh go on then, just one more toilet seat, I'll treat myself.— Jac Rayndeer (@GirlFromBlupo) April 6, 2018

You can read her response to going viral here. It mirrors mine but is better, like she is, and I am apparently Pepsi to her Coke.

The main thing I've learned from the experience is how unpredictable and unplannable going "viral" is (only in retrospect did I realise talking about big brands has a mass appeal I never normally reach for). I'm sure there are key times of day to tweet and all the rest of it if you want this kind of thing but it seems to me there's a lot of luck in how the snowball rolls down hill.
I've also learned how overwhelming a wall of replies can be, blocking out other communication for hours.
I think this may go someway to explaining why some famous people on Twitter end up either really quite weird or virtually unresponsive- they must get this noise constantly and there's no great way to deal with the volume.
I've also noticed quite a lot of people seem to have read the tweet as a personal attack on Pepsi which is odd because I'm a soda water with ice and lemon man, and have very little truck with any colas (holidays are coming, holidays are coming). That seems to confirm just how common confirmation bias is to me (ha, ha, I am clever).

Beyond that, responses boil down to people telling me-
The observation is accurate.
The phrase is universal but with some regional variants.
They work in a bar and the staff there recite it like a mantra.
This would be a good advertising approach (I agree).
It has actually been done in Brazil (well done, Pepsi Brazil people).
Someone else has thought this before.
I probably should have said bar staff not landlords.
Bar staff habitually use the phrase to avoid being accused of passing off one product as its competitor.
Which of the broadly indistinguishable drinks they prefer.

I'd like to reply to about half of them but there isn't time (I have Christmas presents to wrap- holidays are coming, holidays are coming). If any of you happen on this blog, I am genuinely grateful for your replies (unless you were a bit strange, but if you were I doubt you'll realise).

Another friend, Alistair McGown suggested this morning the tweet's unexpected popularity may be down to a Russian plot to destabilise cola brands and thus the entire US way of life. He may be right- it will also explain why Jac 'Coke' Rayner's anti Amazon tweet is 7 times more impossibly popular than mine. Curse her.

I'm editing a RiffTrax recording on the PC at the moment (mainly just noise clean up etc.) and to make sure the riffing soundtrack and video matched up I opened up the film in Sony Vegas and found the last project on there still unfinished.
So, I finished it as simply as I could. It was meant to have much more going on but there's no longer much point. The thing was started as an April Fool's Day joke for Doctor Who fans so long ago that reality has pretty much superseded it. Tom Baker has finally recorded The Iron Legion and this little flight of fancy is a bit redundant.

Enjoy (if you're silly enough). There are four or five little bits of animation in there I have to say I'm pretty pleased with.

There’s now a trailer, cover, blurb and cast list up for The New Counter-Measures: The Hollow King an audio drama I wrote due for release from Big Finish Productions in January 2019.It’s an Earthbound 1970s science fiction adventure featuring characters spun off from a 1980s Doctor Who serial, though no knowledge of that is expected or required. It stars Karen Gledhill, Hugh Ross, Pamela Salem and Simon Williams as a team investigating the strange and unusual and this is the third play I’ve written for them (you can find the first two here and here).

We often talk about The New Counter-Measures as being an audio in the style of the globe-trotting ITC film adventure series of the late 60s and early 1970s though, to tell the truth, I’ve imagined this one slightly differently. I thought it’d be fun to think of it as an episode of the 1970s TV series Thriller , which is set in a slightly skew-whiff England as an American tourist might imagine it or a UK TV company might present it when trying to make something you could sell to America and show at home.  
A lot is still on film (though mostly mute), but whenever you go into the village pub or the local lord’s country estate where all the dialogue breaks out you’re definitely on video in a studio set…
Anyway, that is sort of the world of this play. Don’t worry we’ve not sound designed it to feel like a video and film mix, there’s no out of place US guest star and people do talk outside. It's just there’s slightly more chance of sparring dialogue over large tumblers of whisky than you’d get in The Champions . 
It’s rural England with top 1970s concerns laced through, UFOs, the counter-culture, quaint folk tradition and scary analogue synthesisers.

Major influences include Sutton Hoo, an episode of Project U.F.O. I adored in 1979, the gloriously eccentric musician and writer, Desmond Leslie, a rather lovely festival of ideas I was invited to in 2016 and the sub-genre of 70s British film and TV we’ve come to call Folk Horror.
I hope I’ve managed to serve both our cast’s beautiful way with dialogue (they can all land a gag superbly) and audio’s power to disturb.

This play was originally planned for the second series of The New Counter-Measures released last year but around the start of March of 2017 the writers working on scripts were told one of our stories would be bumped to make way for a late addition to the box set. We later found out this would be a story featuring the Doctor Who adversary, The Great Intelligence. Big Finish's executives had just negotiated permission to use it and dropping it into The New Counter-Measures set would allow Big Finish to mark the 40th anniversary of its first TV appearance.

Once our first drafts were in it was decided my play (it's the closest in tone of the four initially planned to an Intelligence story), should be the one held back for recording in series 3. I thought that’d be that for a while until I got an email on holiday in the July of 2017 asking if I could do a second draft to get my play ready for recording with the others after all. So, over a couple of days swapping notes with script editor John Dorney, that’s what I did.
I think, reading between the lines, getting my play studio ready was just to give flexibility in case anything dropped out late in the day. No one wants to hire actors for a week and not fill all their time!

Unfortunately, the sales of the second New Counter-Measures box last year weren’t quite strong enough to automatically greenlight a third, so unusually my play’s ended up being released on its own. I’m delighted it has because if it hadn't been squeezed into that recording week it could very easily not have seen the light of day at all.

If you’re clever, and I suspect you are, you might spot a couple of elements in the play that we’d intended to pay off down the line in further stories. It’d be wonderful if one day that can still happen.
Fingers crossed. I’d love to think that there could be more adventures if this accidental one-off sells well enough to make them viable.

Since I was last here (previous post excepted) a few things have happened, often despite me, but I've also managed to do a bit of work in between them.

Matthew J Elliott and I have written and recorded a few more riffs for Rifftrax- Hangar 18 , Planet Outlaws and Snowbeast (and as I mentioned in the last entry we've more ready to go). I think we've hit quite a nice vein now and I'm very excited about the upcoming riffs which I think include some of the funniest work. Do not feel you have to pop in here and tell me if you later disagree.


I also wrote a book. A whole book on a single four episode Doctor Who story. Seriously, it's longer than the script and the novelisation. The Black Archive 16: Carnival of Monsters comes from those excellent people at Obverse books and is full of analysis of the story and its themes, thoughts on empire, class, race, language, writer Robert Holmes' life and how it may have influenced his work, and important things you didn't even know you didn't know about the production, like the proper order it should have been shown in and how very, very different the first script was.


For Big Finish I wrote an episode of Survivors , the post-Apocalyptic story of people trying to be decent and thrive in a ruined world which I was quite pleased with. I tried to follow the 1970s series tone quite faithfully, and also had fun populating an insular village entirely with family names from a local 19th century census in pursuit of a genuine small town feeling. That was already written when I mothballed the blog, but hadn't been announced.
That was followed by my Doctor Who Short Trip The British Invasion which had been announced but wasn't scheduled at the time. That was a joy to write and research, all the history and geography is true and everything I say about the alien menace is defensible(!). It's also blessed with a rather beautiful reading from Wendy Padbury.

 
After that came a further episode of the Doctor Who spin-off The New Counter-Measures which comes out next year after being recorded in July 2017, an episode of the revived 1980s Hard SF police series Star Cops , and a Doctor Who Early Adventure- An Ideal World . I'll probably talk more about all of those later.

I've also audio edited and sound designed some projects for them again- three of their Short Trips Doctor Who stories, How to Win Planets and Influence People , Mel-evolent and the forthcoming The Devil's Footprints .


It probably looks more like the sum of an afternoon's work to you than 20 months but you can only take the work you're offered and only do it if you have the time!

I have decided to quietly resurrect this weblog.
The main reason is so some people I know who’ve have left Twitter and don’t do Facebook can still see I’m alive, charming, eminently employable and enviably modest.
This week’s fun fest should see me giving blood, recording some Rifftrax, working on a second edit of a sound design project and ideally getting some writing done.  I’ll probably tell you next week how that went.

Hello,
I hope you are well. I've had a rotten year following things I believed in being systematically destroyed and people I loved and admired dying. Professionally, it was much better, damn that faint praise.

So last year, after Vienna series 3 came out, I had another Rifftrax Presents release with Matthew J Elliott Flight to Mars , which was a lot of fun and I think strikes the nice balance of being a movie that's just about watchable without a riff over the top and having some nice silly jokes layer on it.
You may disagree. I'd not be surprised or disappointed. There's another riff close to recording right now. We'd have liked to have got it out last year, but life kept getting in the way.

I also wrote three Doctor Who audio stories, one released, two due for release in 2017, The Becoming, The British Invasion and Cortex Fire , an episode of the Doctor Who spin off The New Counter-Measures , a play for another audio series that hasn't been announced yet and two episodes of the audio reconstructions of missing episodes of The Avengers, Death on the Slipway and Dragonsfield .

The last project is a really interesting one, because in the case of both stories I did the scripts are missing and the reconstructions rely on TV listings, brief synopses and surviving photographs, primarily tele-snaps, an off air record of the show as it went out, in the case of these episodes about 80 over an hour of TV.

Obviously, they will never be the same as the original show, and there has to be a lot of educated guess work involved but my aim with the two I adapted was to mirror the approach of the episodes of The Avengers that survive or we have scripts for from that first year of production and to adhere closely to the style of the two original writers James Mitchell and Terence Feely, looking at how they approached both their later Avengers episodes and their other work before and after this period.
It proved instructive and when an additional season 1 episode was recovered later in the year I was quite pleased by how stylistically close it was to what we'd done. I hope if you listen to the plays our deep respect for all the cast and crew for this incredible series comes through.

Oh, and I did my half marathon. Not as quickly as I would have liked but I got there.

Happy New Year!

There's a few of these, I'm afraid.

Number one, I've been writing a fair bit recently which means there are things I need to beg you to buy, things to reassure you are in the pipeline and things to darkly hint at that I haven't actually finished yet.
Anyway, there are two Doctor Who spin-offs (in the very loosest sense of those hyphenated words) that I've been involved with out now.
They're both built around female supporting characters from Doctor Who , but when they're at the centre of their own stories they inhabit quite different universes.
The first of these is the Iris collection I mentioned last time edited by Paul Dale Smith.



You can buy that here or go and read Paul talk about it in detail over here. It's a very quirky, British kind of literary fantasy that enjoys messing about with the nature of fiction. It's playful, it's weird, it gets dark now and then and it also gets very silly.

The second is Vienna- Series 3 . Vienna's an audio science fiction series about a once ruthless assassin and bounty hunter who's become something a little more morally complex. She's the titular Vienna and is played with great wit and cool by Chase Masterson who some of you may work for her Star Trek appearances.
Vienna is Jonny Morris' baby, but this third series he kindly invited three other writers to work with him as script editor. He came up with a clever series arc and some basic situations and let us fly with them.
One great thing about Vienna for me is how it manages to feels a very natural melding of those great Robert Sheckley and Philip K Dick era literary SF books and the big action SF movies based on them (except Freejack which is the most monstrous wreck you could possibly make out of Sheckley's Immortality Inc. ). There's action, satire, spectacle and a willingness to follow through on hard SF concepts. Vienna's always been interesting about identity, and that's something I've wanted to play with in my story, as you will discover if you buy it...



You can do your buying here, or read Jonny mentioning this as one of his many things coming out here.

Pipeline and as yet unwritten projects definitely involve more Doctor Who , submarines, a RiffTrax Presents release recorded last year, some short fiction, the Festival of Britain and a lengthy piece of factual writing. More later...

Number two, I'm running the Hadrian's Wall Half Marathon again this year- but this year I'm going to be faster. Training's going well and my weight's coming down nicely after quite a sedentary period in 2015.
I'm seeking sponsorship again too, for three charities this year.
They are the Cystic Fibrosis Trust and Invest in ME as before, and the Sheffield Hospitals Charity. The first two have supported friends and people in positions like them and the latter is to assist the hospitals who are helping my wife walk again after her severe leg injury in January 2015. There's a lot the hospitals do that isn't covered by core NHS budgets, and I want to support anything that makes that work easier for them.
If you can sponsor any of these causes you'd make me very happy indeed, and probably make me run quicker. There's a sponsorship link here.

Number three, the National Media Museum is under fire again. It is losing vital funding, staff, and collections, and the Science Museum management that should be working to make it stronger seems intent on stripping it of its assets, broad appeal and curatorial expertise, making it a shadow of the organisation it once was. It feels like a closure by stealth to be honest, and it makes me angry.
I worked at the Museum under its previous name and what's being done to do it at present feels like an insult to its audiences and all those people I worked with.
There's some background here, and petitions you might sign if you'd care to here and here, but I'm afraid signing petitions isn't going to win this battle. This is just the beginning of a long hard fight against philistinism in high places.

Right, that's my bits done. Any other business?

I notice I've not been using this blog at all.
Sorry, Twitter seems to have absorbed a lot of my spare "writing things on the internet that hardly anyone looks at" time.

So, what's been happening?

Well, I've had a slightly rotten five months because my wife had a really nasty injury on holiday in January that's put life a bit on hold while she's been recuperating. She's had it worse, of course, she's had me nursing her. Luckily things seem to be getting on track now and there are jollier things in life happening. For example, there are things I've written to plug shamelessly.

So, since we were last here together, two Rifftrax Presents titles with Matthew J Elliott have been released , Scared to Death and Warning From Space .


It seems to be quite an American phenomenon "riffing". Basically, it's talking over films in a manner that hopefully won't spoil the movie for anyone watching it, so you're trying to make jokes in the gaps, so viewers won't miss any plot. We seem to be the only British people doing it, which makes for an interesting balancing act, doing things that make us laugh while trying to keep a largely US audience happy.
I think we're getting better at it. We're working on a fourth title at the moment which I'm rather enjoying.

I've also written another Obverse Books Iris Wildthyme story, which will be out this Autumn. This one's for the hugely talented and ridiculously patient Paul Dale Smith, who trusted me to write a story based on a very vague and partially worked through pitch, and make sense of it as I went along. I think we got there.
That's for The Perennial Miss Wildthyme which sounds like it's going to be a fun collection. It's set in a strange Northern town called Samhain, where all sorts of unlikely beings and events jostle together under slate-grey skies.


I think my story is going to be titled Self Possessed . It's called Doppler Shift on the pre-publicity material, largely because the starting point was doing a sort of homage to Alan Garner's Red Shift , but it's drifted off quite a way from that.

Finally, I've a couple of things happening with Big Finish Productions , as yet unannounced and have just had a Doctor Who play for them released. It's in a collection of Companion Chronicle plays set in the William Hartnell era of Doctor Who , with the other plays written by the brilliant Martin Day and Simon Guerrier. Martin is writing for Carole Ann Ford as Susan, Simon is writing for Peter Purves as Steven and I've done one for Maureen O'Brien as Vicki. Great talents to be working with. You can check out further details here.


Because it's in a set with a shared sleeve, my story, The Unwinding World , doesn't have its own cover, so for those who fancy one, I think it should be something like this.


It's a bit rough and ready and missing all the lettering and so on, but there you are. I'm sure you can do better and I'd love to see your versions.

Hello, you've been very polite about not caring much about what I've been up to recently, so to reward you I'm going to tell you in tedious detail.
There's no winning, is there?

1) I've been writing something else for Big Finish, and the first draft is finally away, so I'm looking forward to licking that into shape over the next few weeks.  Also, while you've not been looking here there's been a splendid cover released for my Big Finish Doctor Who audio coming later this year.

 
You can pre-order it here at it a reduced price before November. I heard a little trailer using some of the audio from it recently and the actors sound in fabulous form. I'm really looking forward to hearing the finished product.
2) I've written a story for the forthcoming Obverse Book story collection edited by Philip Purser-Hallard as well. This has a rather fabulous cover too, and a lovely list of contributors I'm delighted to be part of.


Iris is a fun character to write for, she's a bizarre force of nature who barges into other people's stories and tidies or messes them up as suits her.  This collection has a brilliant idea behind it, with Iris exploring a succession of fictional representations of Mars. I picked the most contrary one I could think of for my pitch.. It seemed right.
Obverse haven't put an order link up for the book yet (I think it's out in August), but you can read more about it at Phil's site here.

3) I've had a nice little running gag sketch recorded for Radio 4's That Show What You Wrote. I'm rather pleased about this because I had to come up with ideas very quickly over a few days to get them in before deadline, and this was one of two sketches I came up with that I really loved. More on that later whether it survives to the broadcast edit or not. I've missed writing radio comedy.

4) A few weeks ago Matthew J. Elliott and I recorded another RiffTrax commentary, which is currently in the States for approval. Fingers crossed. We had a few technical issues with our last one which made it a bit fiddly, and took a bit of the spontaneity and fun out of proceedings, so I'm hoping this has gone better and needs less post-production work.

5) I ran a half marathon for charity. This one.



You can still donate and help my good causes now if you'd like to. They're excellent causes, as you can see here.