The Tamaras Crisis – Writing the Script

It’s been fun reading through the original script for this story again after nearly 15 years – a very nostalgic experience indeed!

I can’t really remember how or why we came up with the storyline that we did, but what I do recall is that Andrew and I worked out the rough story between us and then wrote a separate episode each, collaborating together on the final episode. As you can see, neither of us was a budding Holmes or Dicks, but it works reasonably well if you don’t try to analyse it too much.

The problem we had was to try to come up with a script which we’d be able to make into a story fairly easily with our very limited resources, but still make it as interesting as possible. We’d have loved to have had space ships and ray guns and all the usual sci-fi trappings, but there was no way we could have stretched ourselves to that extent with any sort of success. The resulting story has plot holes the size of craters in it but it’s just a bit of fun, eh? There’s also far too much running back and forth to the TARDIS but this was mainly due to the fact that this was our only real prop and set and we were bloody well going to get our money’s worth out of them both!

As I’ve been reacquainting myself with the script it’s nice to see that we really did try our best to write some good dialogue. There’s some particularly good stuff when the Doctor is grieving over the death of his companion – it’s just a pity that we were so incapable at putting any emotion across through our ‘acting’!

The script itself was initially hand-written and then typed up properly by yours truly. This was years before home PC’s were generally available and/or affordable, so I borrowed an electronic typewriter from one of my mum’s friends. I’d never really typed anything previous to this, but I managed to get it all done fairly quickly and with very few mistakes, though I’ve now noticed a few which I’d missed all those years ago!

We had to make several copies of the script; one for each cast member, one for the cameraman, a shooting script with my ‘directors’ notes on it, and also a copy for Andrew to use for his incidental music. I vividly remember taking the original to work and trying to copy it on one of the photocopiers as surreptitiously as possible, and being constantly interrupted by a particularly nosey and annoying colleague who was desperate to know what I was copying.

Tomorrow I’ll begin a detailed look into how the story was put together. The point is not to say ‘How clever were we?’ or ‘I bet you wish you could have done this!’, but just to share with you some memories of what turned out to be one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

Next Episode: The Tamaras Crisis – In Production!