Cartmel writes up the diaries of his time as script editor on Sylvester McCoy's run of Doctor Who. He doesn't come across super well considering these are all his own words - it's always the production people who ruin the stories and never the guy who commissioned stuff they didn't have the budget for and who couldn't time a script to 25 minutes if his life depended on it, and he can't seem to resist dropping in references to the physical attractiveness of any woman he had to work with, which may have been how you did things in the 80s but comes across a bit creepy in the 21st century. Still, it's fascinating to see how the BBC was run in those days and go behind the scenes for the shooting of some of the stories. It's a wonder anything ever got made at all. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3183264.html

I found this a really refreshing book. It's fascinating to read it in contrast with Matthew Waterhouse's account of the early days of the John Nathan-Turner era, and indeed Richard Marson's account of JNT's career and life. Like Matthew Waterhouse, Cartmel was already a fan before being recruited as the script editor for the last three years of Old Who, coinciding with Sylvester McCoy's time as the Doctor. But he was a bit older, he wasn't as invested in it, and although this was his first job in television, he already had had a bit of a career and also had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do with Who.

Most of the Who first-person books I have read situate the writer's experience on the programme in the context of a longer (and often happier) career; this one is unusual in that we get little insight into Cartmel's life before 1986 or after 1989. But it pays off in terms of interesting detail. One person who looms very large in Cartmel's narrative who I don't think I had even heard of before is Kate Easteal, the production secretary, who was clearly crucial to keeping the show together and is almost unmentioned in other writing.

Cartmel gets very much into the weeds of the production of each of the twelve stories produced on his watch, including some interesting gossip on the personal frictions (not least in his own love life), but more particularly on the challenges posed by an unsympathetic BBC hierarchy and a political situation where Cartmel was doing his best to displace various established writers and other stakeholders. Each story is taken as a narrative unit, which means that the book ends up being not completely sequential, as in real life the production of various stories often overlapped. But the payoff is that we follow each story from start to finish, and basically we fans are more interested in how The Happiness Patrol came to be than in knowing exactly what was in the production office in-tray in July 1988.

Anyway, I enjoyed this more than I expected, and learned more than I expected as well, so we can score that as a win. ( )