Authenticity and Innovation in Audio Drama with Lisa McMullin and Alfie Shaw

My guests today are Lisa McMullin and Alfie Shaw, both of whom write for Big Finish Productions, creators of audio dramas ranging from established series like Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes, and Dark Shadows to original dramas featuring the Air Transport Auxiliary from World War II and Marcus Tullius Cicero in Ancient Rome. Lisa started her career as a drama teacher before moving into dramatic writing—she’s written for TV series like Death in Paradise and the Sister Boniface Mysteries as well—and Alfie, who is also a producer for Big Finish, dabbled in stand-up comedy.

We talk about Big Finish’s apparently magical ability to redeem characters—including villains—who were less than beloved, the challenges and opportunities of recasting familiar characters, the way Big Finish finds new writers (including the best ways to do that), what the writing process looks like for an audio series, and a lot more. While there’s a lot of Doctor Who in this conversation, there’s also a lot of insight into the creative process, too. We apologize for being a bit vague about particular stories so as not to spoil them for those who haven’t heard them.

Episode breakdown:

00:00 Introduction

01:39 Lisa’s creative childhood

09:22 Alfie’s early passion for stand-up.

11:03 Alfie worked at BBC after making dentist websites.

21:10 Lisa met writers, felt impostor syndrome, networked successfully.

23:19 Mixed interests: Paul McGann, river, Big Finish’s “Survivors.”

27:46 Amused student challenges English class symbolism interpretations.

34:57 AI affects creativity more than expected.

42:27 Exploring creativity within set formats is valuable.

44:13 Big Finish enhances characters like Sixth Doctor, Daleks.

50:54 Varied reactions to piece on religion, conversion.

57:04 Balancing new ideas and classic elements creatively.

59:44 Anonymous entries processed for judging panel selection.

01:05:56 Balancing established and new talent in writing.

01:14:58 Audio parallels theater through character-driven dialogue.

01:21:24 Recast Doctors’ strength: unique, non-traditional portrayals.

01:23:24 Continuously innovate and explore new creative possibilities.

01:28:25 Eleventh Doctor and Jacob Dudman.

Show Links: Lisa McMullin and Alfie Shaw

Lisa’s Twitter

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Transcript: Lisa McMullin and Alfie Shaw

Please note: This is an unedited transcript, provided as a courtesy, and reflects the actual conversation as closely as possible. Please forgive any typographical or grammatical errors.

Nancy Norbeck [00:00:06]:
Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity. Ordinary people, extraordinary creativity. Here’s how to get unstuck. I’m your host, creativity coach, Nancy Norbeck. Let’s go. My guests today are Lisa McMullin and Alfie Shaw, both of whom write for Big Finish Productions, creators of audio dramas ranging from established series like Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes and Dark Shadows to original dramas featuring the Air Transport Auxiliary from World War II and Marcus Tullius Cicero in ancient Rome. Lisa started her career as a drama teacher before moving into dramatic writing. She’s written for TV series like Death in Paradise and the Sister Boniface Mysteries as well.

Nancy Norbeck [00:00:49]:
And Alfie, who is also a producer for Big Finish, dabbled in standup comedy. We talk about Big Finish’s apparently magical ability to redeem characters, including villains who were less than beloved, the challenges and opportunities of recasting familiar characters, the way Big Finish finds new writers, including the best ways to get their attention, what the writing process looks like for an audio series, and a lot more. While there’s a lot of Doctor Who in this conversation, there’s also a lot of insight into the creative process, too. We apologize for being a bit vague about particular stories so as not to spoil them for those who haven’t heard them. Here is my conversation with Lisa McMullin and Alfie Shaw. Lisa and Alfie, welcome to Follow Your Curiosity.

Lisa McMullin [00:01:37]:
Thank you for having us.

Nancy Norbeck [00:01:39]:
So I start everyone with the same question, and I think what we’ll do is, since I see Lisa on my left and Alfie on my right, we’ll start with Lisa and then we’ll switch over to Alfie. Were you a creative kid or did you discover your creative side later on?

Lisa McMullin [00:01:56]:
Oh, no, I was definitely a creative kid. Yeah, I’m. But I think most kids are, aren’t they? Or I hope they are, that as soon as you read the line the Witch and the Wardrobe, you’re immediately in your own wardrobe, your own closet, trying to find your way into Narnia, that. That sort of thing. And I was writing. I’d write plays for my friends to perform at primary school. I would. I don’t know.

Lisa McMullin [00:02:25]:
I can’t remember what you. What you call primary school. Elementary school.

Nancy Norbeck [00:02:30]:
Yeah.

Lisa McMullin [00:02:30]:
I would. I’d always be writing plays and making the teachers put them on in assembly.

Nancy Norbeck [00:02:38]:
Yeah.

Lisa McMullin [00:02:38]:
So I was probably annoyingly creative. Always writing and always putting on little, little shows for anybody who’d be willing to suffer it, really.

Nancy Norbeck [00:02:54]:
Someday I want to see a survey of how many kids did that, because I know I did that when I was a kid. I have A few. You know, most kids do that.

Lisa McMullin [00:03:03]:
They do. My nieces still do it. There’s something innate and I think it’s something that maybe people lose when they get older. Except for people like us who just never grow up. I think all creatives are Peter Pans. We’re just clinging on desperately to childhood because, well, the adult world is scary, right?

Alfie Shaw [00:03:29]:
Yeah, Quite similar really. I mean, I have very distinct memories from a very young age writing a series of short stories about two bears called Pimto and Mimto. Don’t know why they were called that. One time they were on a beach and they dug under the river and found themselves the other side of the river, even though it was a beach. I have a lot of notes on my previous work and I used to draw a lot of comics with stickman figures and would name them after my friends. And there was one that was sort of against. I think it was meant to be called the Jelly Monster, which was a sort of big thing of jelly with a.

Lisa McMullin [00:04:08]:
A beak coming soon from big finish.

Alfie Shaw [00:04:12]:
I still couldn’t spell back then, which I appreciate is a very weird way of phrasing that. So it was called the Jelly Monter. And so I. Yeah, I used to do that and I used to draw comics on. I had yellow walls as a kid and I used to draw comics on the walls. Yeah, well mine, mine did. And then just couldn’t really stop me, so just let it happen. It was all wallpaper, so it was fine.

Alfie Shaw [00:04:41]:
It could also come down quite easily. But yes, I think I’d say I’ve also been creative but instead of hiding in the wardrobe, I was drawing on the wardrobe.

Nancy Norbeck [00:04:56]:
Oh man, you’re reminding me of the time that I took white crayon to the coffee table of my parents house.

Lisa McMullin [00:05:03]:
The coffee. Oh, that’s furniture’s worth.

Nancy Norbeck [00:05:06]:
Yeah, yeah, it didn’t. It didn’t go over well. So then what was the journey like between creative kidhood and what you do now?

Lisa McMullin [00:05:24]:
I. So when I was at elementary school I wanted to be an author. I thought I wanted to write books. It didn’t. In my. It didn’t occur to me that I could write drama as a. As a job. And then when I was in high school I really loved acting and I got into local theater groups and I really wanted to be an actor.

Lisa McMullin [00:05:47]:
So I went to university to do drama. I was the first person in my family to go to university. My poor parents, they must have been beside themselves. Grief that I chose to do drama rather than medicine or law. But to their credit, they just. They let me do what I wanted to do, even though they must have been thinking, the first person with a chance at a good career. But I was a terrible actor. So bad.

Lisa McMullin [00:06:17]:
So bad. So I did a couple of years of really awful community theater and school touring shows. And we have something called pantomime over here, which is larger than life fairy tales on stage. It’s a Christmas show. And it dawned on me very quickly that I was never going to be able to sustain myself as an actor. And I thought I didn’t know what to do as an alternative with a drama degree. So I became a drama teacher because I was the only thing I could think of to do. And I’d completely forgotten at that point how much I loved writing, even though I was still writing, but for myself, just for fun.

Lisa McMullin [00:07:10]:
Never didn’t twig until I’ve been teaching for quite a few years that, oh, I’m teaching other people’s plays. That means people do this for a living. That means I could write drama for a living. And then it was a friend of mine who was somebody I went to. I’d studied drama with at uni, was still trying to be an actor, but hadn’t had any work, and so asked me to write a play so that he could be in something. And so together we. I wrote a play and we produced it at a tiny fringe theater in London. And I.

Lisa McMullin [00:07:44]:
I just loved the whole process and I directed it as well. And so it was just joyous to create something that was entirely mine for other people to come and watch. And the idea that that could be a job. But then suddenly I thought, oh, this is what I should be doing for a living. But it took me a long time to get there. And then I quit teaching. I quit my good job with a decent salary and good benefits and just threw caution to the wind and thought, all right, I’ll try and be a writer.

Nancy Norbeck [00:08:25]:
Yeah, that. That noise is required when you do.

Lisa McMullin [00:08:29]:
I mean, it’s all right now. But I had some hairy, scary a couple of years where I didn’t know if I’d be able to. To keep up the payments on my mortgage. And just my bank phoning me up saying, why don’t you go back to teaching?

Nancy Norbeck [00:08:46]:
Wow.

Lisa McMullin [00:08:47]:
And me telling the bank manager, but I’m following my dream. And them saying, yes, but you can’t pay the bills. But, yeah, I clung on in the. And big finish rescued me. They gave me my first job and made me think, okay, I can do this. Wow, that was neat.

Nancy Norbeck [00:09:07]:
Came first.

Lisa McMullin [00:09:09]:
Yeah, that’s the first proper writing job I got.

Nancy Norbeck [00:09:15]:
Well, it certainly turned out well but we’ll talk more about that.

Alfie Shaw [00:09:22]:
Yeah, I mean I had a fairly similar ish journey. I always remember secondary school, there would be kind of creative writing modules in English and then we would go back to, you know, analyzing other people’s texts and I was going very bored going, this is, this is not my work. Why are we, why are we focusing on somebody else? Pure egomania even from a young age. But I started to want to be a stand up comic from quite young and I started performing at about 16 and went through doing that until I was about 21 but I never had the memory for it. So I never really quite got it. Doing one because of the never being able to quite remember the lines, which is quite important. And not quite having the admin minds to kind of book enough gigs. You really have to kind of do it almost every night if you can to sort of get that going.

Alfie Shaw [00:10:15]:
And I just never quite managed that. So that kind of, that was the goal for about five years or so. And off the back of that I made and produced my own sitcom that I put out as a podcast, like a full half an hour six parter thing which did moderately okay. And I on itunes for a day got to the top 10 and then just disappeared again. And I then recently re listened to it and went oh, I’m just going to take that down, that’s not good. But so then I saw, I did, I did English at university mainly at my parents behest just to sort of, they went, you know, you needed, you need a degree. Which I think is sadly kind of true. Ish.

Alfie Shaw [00:11:03]:
And from there I went to work for a company that made websites for dentists. That was an interesting experience, I’ll put that politely, so no one can sue me. But after surviving there for about a year and a half, I got on the BBC production trainee scheme which is sort of, I think the BBC runs where they train you on how to be. I think it’s meant to be like a researcher, entry level gigs and various things. And one of the things there was working on Radio 4 presentation who do various things, but one of which is they run a radio station that was called Radio 7 is now Radio 4 Extra. And during that I met Nick Briggs, said I’m a massive Doctor Who fan. Which was, I didn’t need to say because my producer has said hello, this is the person going to producing you. I think he’s your biggest fan because I got into big finish when I was about seven, I think.

Alfie Shaw [00:12:07]:
No, not. That’s a lie. That’s when I first got into Doctor Who, but very young and I’d always wanted to do it. And so off the back of that, a few months later, both from the short trips gig, and that was also my first professional writing. And here we are.

Nancy Norbeck [00:12:27]:
Well, I’m curious, you know, since you mentioned doing stand up, that has to have influenced how you write.

Alfie Shaw [00:12:36]:
I suppose I never really considered really. I’ve always quite like a joke. I do love a joke. You know, I loved Hitchhikers growing up and all the. And all the old school Rey for comedies. Clithero Kid, the Navy Lock, all that sort of thing. So I used to listen to a lot of Radio 7 back when I was there and they did a thing where they had a writer in residence, I can’t remember who for a week. And they had kids ring in and give them ideas.

Alfie Shaw [00:13:04]:
And I was one of the people who got an idea on for that. And it was something really meta like the way they solved the problem was that they actually had a backup script and the whole thing was. It was something like that. Everyone else has been suggesting quite sort of standard story beats. What if this was just nuts? And kind of from that. I mean, the. The sort of, you know, Doctor Who stuff I’ve really chimed with has been the Steven Moffat stuff that’s quite dark, but with jokes and anything. Even my tasting games that I enjoy.

Alfie Shaw [00:13:37]:
The Fallout series is incredibly dark with jokes. So I suppose it has. I kind of have always. I always like putting humor in stuff. My sister says I can’t write anything without putting a joke in it. In the same way she said I could never write a kitchen sink drama because the kitchen sink would eat someone. Which I think is quite fair. But yeah, I.

Alfie Shaw [00:14:01]:
I always think kind of jokes are important and should be used in drama. I think you can overuse them and sometimes some films mentioning no Marvel franchises will put jokes at the wrong moment. But people do make jokes in dark situations, dark situations. So I think it’s actually quite realistic to have someone say jokes.

Lisa McMullin [00:14:27]:
Yeah, sometimes the. The funniest moments can happen in. In the darkest scenarios, darkest situations. I don’t think anyone’s ever been to a funeral without there being some moment. Sometimes I think if an atmosphere is so oppressive it almost needs it in order to give people some light relief. I’m very like you and I can’t write anything without putting some humor in it. I have to be. Yeah.

Lisa McMullin [00:14:58]:
I have to be told Quite often to dial down the jokes.

Nancy Norbeck [00:15:02]:
Well, and there are jokes and then there’s just clever wit that’s also funny.

Lisa McMullin [00:15:08]:
Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:15:09]:
And I know there’s, there’s plenty of that in Big Finish. I can’t tell you the number of times that. Because I listen a lot when I’m driving and I’ll be driving along somewhere and I’ll go, that was a fabulous line. And I want to remember that I’m driving my car and what am I going to do? Yeah, so. So yeah, I think, I think that, I think that that is a more, more of a characteristic of British writing in general too, than American writing. I don’t think we do the clever, witty thing quite, quite as well or quite in the same way that.

Lisa McMullin [00:15:43]:
I don’t think that’s true. But I think my favorite American drama has that, has that wit that, that’s that, that banter that, that, that, that sharp. We’ve been re. Watching the West Wing just gonna say, yeah, yeah. And the way Aaron Sorkin writes dialogue is just, it’s, it’s fast paced and everybody’s witty. Everybody is the best version of themselves. And it’s not realistic because people don’t talk like that in real life. But it’s entertaining drama and I love that.

Lisa McMullin [00:16:14]:
I, I’m not really keen on drama that’s totally realistic, totally naturalistic because we have real life and sometimes you need something that’s a bit more aspirational, something that takes you. Something that makes you think, okay, maybe humans could be this. Yeah, let’s have something to aspire to rather than just mirroring ourselves. I think art should be more than a mirror.

Alfie Shaw [00:16:44]:
I think a lot of big American shows, and I say that by probably, by which I should probably mean like big streaming shows. I think they’ve kind of. We know there’s been so much of a sort of hodgepodge of culture that all the American writers have watched a fair bit of British tv. All British writers have watched a fair bit of American tv. So it kind of is starting to.

Lisa McMullin [00:17:06]:
Look at succession, which I think of as an American show, but it’s British writers, but it, but an American Australian, actually. It’s a real international cast, isn’t it? But that’s also got that fast paced, witty dialogue where everybody is much cleverer than real people are. Although not the. I wouldn’t say those characters are aspirational.

Nancy Norbeck [00:17:31]:
Yeah, no, I. Since, since Alfie mentioned Hitchhiker’s Guide. I mean, I was 12 or 13, I think, when I first read that. Which reminds Me, my nephew is about to be that age. I need to get him a copy.

Lisa McMullin [00:17:43]:
Yes.

Nancy Norbeck [00:17:45]:
Yeah. But, you know, like, his kind of wordplay, when I first encountered that, I was just like, whoa, I don’t know what this is, but it’s amazing, you know? And then a couple years later, when I kind of stumbled onto PG Wodehouse after seeing some of Wodehouse Playhouse on the tv, and I went to the library and I picked up the book and I started reading, and I was like, if Douglas Adams never read any of this, I will eat my own shoes.

Alfie Shaw [00:18:16]:
He definitely bust himself. Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:18:18]:
It has to be, you know, but. And that’s that kind of style that maybe we’re picking up on it.

Lisa McMullin [00:18:25]:
Yeah, Right. About people like Aristotle, essentially British, I think, isn’t it that human?

Alfie Shaw [00:18:29]:
Yeah. Terry Pratchett is a more kind of race.

Lisa McMullin [00:18:32]:
Does Terry Pratchett try. Do you. Is he as big over there as he is over here?

Nancy Norbeck [00:18:39]:
I don’t know enough about how big he is in either place to compare, really, in a meaningful way. But he’s pretty popular here.

Lisa McMullin [00:18:47]:
Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:18:48]:
Yeah. In fact, I remember somebody telling me, you know, when I had run out of Douglas Adams, you should try Terry Pratchett because you’d probably like him. So, you know, that that will be the next thing that will slip into the nephew’s reading list.

Lisa McMullin [00:19:06]:
Good. We like your style.

Nancy Norbeck [00:19:10]:
Well, you know, if you’re gonna. If you’re gonna try to. And I shouldn’t use this word because now it’s been used in all sorts of horrible political ways, but if you’re going to try to indoctrinate the child, you’ve got to give them.

Alfie Shaw [00:19:22]:
That was exactly the word I was thinking of. Yes. Yes. That is it.

Nancy Norbeck [00:19:25]:
You have to give them the good stuff.

Lisa McMullin [00:19:27]:
Exactly.

Nancy Norbeck [00:19:28]:
You just have to. Yeah, yeah. So big finish saved you, basically, or led you down a path.

Lisa McMullin [00:19:37]:
Yes. Certainly gave me the start for. It made me think I could actually do it for a living, that this could be an actual career, because up until that point, it had been. Just felt like throwing stuff into the wind and hearing nothing back. It’s very difficult to break. It’s a very hard industry to break into. I don’t know what it’s like in the us, but in the UK it feels very much like a closed shop. We don’t have writers rooms like you do.

Lisa McMullin [00:20:10]:
So most TV shows tend to be all written by one writer who. Who’s the. The creator of the show and that.

Alfie Shaw [00:20:20]:
That shop. To try and carry on this metaphor is losing departments. So there are fewer and fewer opportunities to get in as well.

Lisa McMullin [00:20:27]:
Yeah. So. And a Big Finish was a. I sort of stumbled into it by. Not quite by mistake, but I didn’t target them to apply for jobs initially. I met somebody at a. An interview for another TV show in uk TV show that I’d flagged my way in into the short list for by pretending I’d already had TV credits and just lying, basically, because I thought, well, what else do you do until you’ve got some experience, nobody will look at you. But how do you get experience into.

Lisa McMullin [00:21:10]:
So I lied. I found myself in a room with other writers who’d all done loads of other stuff, and I was feeling really imposter syndromey and worried about that I was going to be found out. And I got chatting to a guy called Richard Dinick who was talking about he’d been writing for Big Finish, he’d written lots of Doctor Who books and comics. And I said, oh, I’d love to do that. That’s amaz. And then he introduced me to Matt Fitton, script editor at Big Finish, at a birthday party, just in a social way, just. This is my friend Matt. This is my friend Lisa.

Lisa McMullin [00:21:48]:
And then I worked out who Matt was and the poor man, I stuck to him like a leech the whole party, just chewing his ear about Big Finish and desperately pleading to be allowed to write. And then after several. I’ve told this story so many times, so several points, parties and glasses of wine, he finally said, oh, send me a script. So I sent him a spec script and then he went, oh, okay, you’re not just a nutcase, can actually write.

Alfie Shaw [00:22:25]:
All right, then you’re a nutcase as well, but you can also write, so it’s fine.

Lisa McMullin [00:22:29]:
Yeah.

Alfie Shaw [00:22:30]:
How much Fukunish did you actually heard?

Lisa McMullin [00:22:33]:
I’d read some, but I was. This is terrible.

Alfie Shaw [00:22:36]:
You’ve read some?

Lisa McMullin [00:22:36]:
No, I’d read. Did I say red? Yes.

Alfie Shaw [00:22:39]:
All right.

Nancy Norbeck [00:22:41]:
Okay, okay.

Lisa McMullin [00:22:41]:
No, I’d listened to some, but I’d only. I bought it illicitly and illegally off ebay because it’s quite expensive to buy. I was. I was getting it secondhand, which I think I advised somebody to do at a Big Finish panel once and.

Alfie Shaw [00:22:58]:
Yes, you did. Yes.

Lisa McMullin [00:23:00]:
That’s not a good idea. I’m terrible. Yeah. So don’t do that. Fired from the website. So I’d listen to a fair bit, but not huge amounts of it. I listen to lots of Paul McGann stuff and river stuff. Okay.

Lisa McMullin [00:23:19]:
Because I wanted more Paul and I love river, so I was sort of oscillating between those two mostly. But then my first job at Big Finish wasn’t Doctor Who, it was Survivors, which is a spin off from a 70s TV show about a virus that wipes out most of the human race, which I think they rebooted again during 2020, which was excellent timing. So, yeah, that’s why I was tested. I think they were a bit worried I was too manically obsessed with Doctor Who, which, now that I know the other writers, seems ridiculous.

Alfie Shaw [00:24:02]:
All right. Yeah.

Lisa McMullin [00:24:03]:
Because we’re all manically obsessed with Doctor Who. Yeah.

Alfie Shaw [00:24:08]:
More so than others.

Lisa McMullin [00:24:09]:
Yes.

Alfie Shaw [00:24:10]:
I’m very. We’ve got a WhatsApp group, and I will just keep going and going these things. Have we used these things before? What, What. What do they do? And people just know about. Thank you very much.

Lisa McMullin [00:24:22]:
You think you’re a Doctor Who fan until you work for Big Finish, and then you realize you know nothing compared to the encyclopedic knowledge that some of them have.

Alfie Shaw [00:24:31]:
A few people are sort of there discussing which who’s their favorite sound recordist from the 1970s stories, and go, well, I just about remember the titles, right. I know what the monsters are, but no, I don’t know who. Who was operating the boom that day. I’m sorry.

Nancy Norbeck [00:24:47]:
Doctor Who is an interesting fandom that way. You know, because you really do. You think you know your stuff and then you meet somebody and drop a name and they’re like, oh, they directed this thing. You’re like, how do you know that? Yeah, yeah. And, oh, man, to be surrounded with so many other people like that. I don’t know if that would be, like, heaven or if it would be slightly nightmarish. And you don’t have to answer that question if it’ll get you in trouble. It’s totally okay.

Alfie Shaw [00:25:18]:
Well, sometimes you’ll find yourself in a conversation and someone will start making a 20 minute passionate defense of the Kraals, and you’re sort of nodding along going, which ones are the Kraals again? Okay. Yeah, yeah. Yep.

Lisa McMullin [00:25:31]:
Great. It’s amazing and it can be terrifying. I’m always terrified at things like Galley, where you’re on a panel and I think the audience know more than I do. Why am I sitting up here while they’re sitting down there when they’re going to ask a question? And I go, I don’t know the answer. Well.

Nancy Norbeck [00:25:52]:
And I interviewed Sarah Sutton two years ago, I think, at Long island. Who. And when I talked to her beforehand, she said, just don’t ask me anything about Doctor Who, because I don’t remember anything. And I’m like, okay, it’s got to be interesting. And you know, what she really meant was the questions that are like, so in the second scene in the third episode of Arc of Infinity, when you do this, you know, what were you thinking? And she was.

Alfie Shaw [00:26:23]:
I feel particularly bad for the actors as well when people got them and discussed the audios because they literally come in, we’ve done like a night’s prep, maybe record it in one to two days if it’s a two parter. And they will forget it completely.

Nancy Norbeck [00:26:38]:
Yeah.

Alfie Shaw [00:26:38]:
And then, you know, the writers at least have kind of sat with it and the producers sat with it a bit, and obviously the. The fans are hearing it completed, and then when they ask questions about it, these poor people go, it was a day I didn’t have to learn it. I’m so sorry. Yeah, it just kind of comes in and out. It’s a really rapid process that.

Nancy Norbeck [00:26:58]:
That came up with her too, because I wanted to ask her about the one she did with David Tennant, and she was like, wait, was that, was that. Wait, I’m not sure which one was that? Kind of could remember it, but yeah.

Lisa McMullin [00:27:10]:
And some of them do so many as well. I mean, I forget sometimes I forget what I’ve written, even in between, even while writing it. So because we. We write usually got several stories, several scripts on the go, and there’ll be varying lengths of time to. Between writing them and recording them. And I had a question the other day about something I wrote six months ago. What did you mean by this line? And I don’t know, I’ve got no idea. Then I made something up.

Lisa McMullin [00:27:42]:
And whether it was what I originally intended, who can say?

Nancy Norbeck [00:27:46]:
Who can say? Right, Right. Which is what has always amused me when I was my poor 10th grade English teacher, who may or may not still listen to this podcast, suffered greatly having me in class for a year and then having me come back and visit regularly for the two years and after that before I graduated and, you know, it was all. All those questions that you get in high school English classes about, you know, what does this symbol mean? And what does. What is all of this? And I was just kind of like, really? Really? And then I read Isaac Asimov’s story the Immortal Bard, which is like two pages, but it basically just blows that whole thing out of the water. If you’re listening and you have not read the Immortal Bard, you should go find it. You can find it online. It will take you 3 minutes to read it. It’s great.

Nancy Norbeck [00:28:39]:
And I think I took it in and showed it to him. You need to read this.

Lisa McMullin [00:28:44]:
Oh. As a teacher, I can tell you, I bet she was very lovely and smiled politely and went home and put herself around really large glass of wine.

Nancy Norbeck [00:28:55]:
Well, I’ll tell you, he. He made. I call it the mistake. I don’t know how he thought of it. He obviously managed to put up with me for three years and then beyond when I would come back to visit. But he made the mistake early on in the year that I was actually in his class of, when he overheard me mentioning that I had been writing something, asking if he could read it. Oh, and. And this was.

Nancy Norbeck [00:29:22]:
This was. So it would have been like 1987, 88, something like that. So it was dot matrix printed. And I think I had five or six pages of my story. That was me and my friend Marjorie, who had introduced me to Doctor Who the year before in the TARDIS with the fifth Doctor and Tegan and Turlow.

Lisa McMullin [00:29:49]:
Amazing.

Nancy Norbeck [00:29:50]:
And I brought it in and I gave it to him. Him. And then I went home that night and I wrote like three more pages and printed them out and brought them in and gave them to him. And it just kept growing. So there was a running joke about the folder on his bookshelf that had my thing, and I would just come in and put new pages in it, and I have no idea how many of them he actually read. He may have read all of it. I don’t know.

Lisa McMullin [00:30:15]:
I bet he did. Probably did, yeah.

Alfie Shaw [00:30:19]:
I did. Like my English teacher, when someone made the very. You know, when we’re analyzing a play, is one of the students very fluently went, do you think the author intended this at the English teacher?

Nancy Norbeck [00:30:28]:
God.

Alfie Shaw [00:30:28]:
Police force. But obviously, of course, it’s all intended things. Having written a lot of stuff. No, probably a lot of it was quite accident. Why did this theme emerge accidentally?

Nancy Norbeck [00:30:38]:
Well, and that. I remember a conversation like that when I was doing my mfa, when I was working with Rachel Pollock and we had small advising groups and she. She talked about that in one of our meetings and she said, look, you know, you think you know what your book is about, but somebody else is going to read your book and they’re going to say, oh, but there’s this theme of this. And you’re going to go, what? And yet when you stop and look at what they’re talking about, you can say, oh, yeah, I can see where you see that. But I didn’t do that intentionally. So, you know, when you teach? Because I did teach for a while too. And, you know, the. The ninth grade teachers would have their short story unit with their kids, and then they would tell them to write a short story.

Nancy Norbeck [00:31:18]:
And all these kids knew about writing a short story was there’s a setting and there’s a theme and there are symbols and there are characters and. Which doesn’t really equip you to write a short story. And so, you know, they’re sitting there trying to make a theme happen, and they’re, you know, 13 or 14. And so if you get lucky, you get a couple of good ones. But, you know, it’s kind of. It’s kind of a doomed exercise from the start, because I don’t. I think the best themes emerge on their own.

Lisa McMullin [00:31:46]:
They do, but you need to know what story you want to tell. And the. Yeah, the theme becomes apparent, and it’s usually the reason why you want to tell that story, but you don’t necessarily. You’re not necessarily conscious of it when you sit down to write it.

Alfie Shaw [00:32:01]:
That’s why it’s quite useful when we do stuff like outlines, because we have to outline everything because it’s tying word. So you. As you start going through the outline, you go, oh, actually, this has emerged. And then you can redo the outline to pretend that it was always about.

Lisa McMullin [00:32:13]:
Yeah.

Alfie Shaw [00:32:13]:
Whatever it may be. But I always try and make sure that when we get outlines that the theme is kind of there and the emotional arc is kind of there. Because sometimes outlines can be very much. I mean, mine are as well, especially sort of blueprints. This happens, this happens. That happens. That goes through there.

Lisa McMullin [00:32:32]:
Why not? Mine are. Mine are like the. The recipe that you jot down after tasting a slice of cake and you think. I think there’s that in there that might be in it. There’s some of this, a little bit of this, and there’s some ingredient that I can’t quite work out. But I’ll. I’ll figure it out as I go along and I. Yeah, yeah.

Alfie Shaw [00:32:52]:
But even then, you’re trying to make sure that the. Because you don’t want to just put out something that’s not about anything. You kind of. As you go.

Lisa McMullin [00:33:02]:
Yeah. About the time it’s written, I know what it’s about.

Alfie Shaw [00:33:05]:
Yeah.

Lisa McMullin [00:33:05]:
But I don’t always know when I start.

Alfie Shaw [00:33:08]:
No, that’s true. I just try, always try and avoid hitting draft, the end of draft three or four, and going, oh, this is what it’s about. Right. Page one. So you kind of can discover it along the way rather than right before the end. That’s always.

Lisa McMullin [00:33:22]:
That does happen though, sometimes. Yeah. I wrote the Audacity. That drove me nuts.

Alfie Shaw [00:33:28]:
Yeah, I did what that was about.

Lisa McMullin [00:33:30]:
I wrote so many drafts of that and then it was recording it before. A week later I still hadn’t quite worked out what it was about and something just clicked. I went, oh, that’s what it’s about. And went right back to the beginning. Threw out what I’d done before.

Alfie Shaw [00:33:48]:
And I had the reverse problem with the inheritance. I knew exactly what it was about, but not the best way doing it. So I did about 60,000 words, which is about basically six versions of the script before I got to the end of draft one.

Nancy Norbeck [00:34:03]:
Wow.

Alfie Shaw [00:34:04]:
Came the proper one, which then didn’t need that many more drafts. Thankfully. That one really went around the houses. But that was a thing that we kind of knew what it was going to be but wasn’t quite nailing the execution. So sometimes you can do. If you, if you come up with something that’s kind of idea or concept led, you kind of know what the theme is. I find generally anyway, because it sort of explains itself.

Lisa McMullin [00:34:30]:
Yeah.

Alfie Shaw [00:34:32]:
But then you kind of tricky kind of the execution. Whereas if you’re kind of exploring, you’re sort of discovering the explanation as you go kind of clearing the gap and you’re finding the way and what’s there.

Nancy Norbeck [00:34:44]:
Well, and I’m wondering because I have listened to a lot of the behind the scenes stuff for Big Finish, you know. So you know when you guys.

Alfie Shaw [00:34:54]:
Oh no, what did we say? We can’t remember those either, Alfie.

Nancy Norbeck [00:34:57]:
Well, you’re not the person, and I’m not exactly sure who said it on the episode of the Robots that I was listening to last week that they were sure that the last thing that would be affected by AI would be all of the creative fields. And I was like, you were really wrong about that one. Unfortunately, you were really wrong about that. But. And I don’t know who it was and it’s okay because nobody knew. But you know, when, when people are talking about, you know, I was given this idea or we worked out this idea, it kind of sounds when you listen to it like, oh, I had this conversation with, you know, the producer or whoever it is that’s coming up with ideas with you. And then I went home and wrote it because this was a great idea. And I know enough from my own experience as a writer that it doesn’t really work that way.

Nancy Norbeck [00:35:50]:
But it makes me wonder like how much room is there to Say, okay, I’ve worked with this idea and it turns out it’s actually about this other thing. Do you have that kind of flexibility? I mean, I don’t even know what the timing is usually like, so I don’t know how much time you usually have to play with things.

Lisa McMullin [00:36:08]:
I mean, it depends. With some Rangers more than others, with some stories more than others, sometimes there’s a very tight arc across a series that you really can’t deviate from, or there’s not room to deviate from. Sometimes stories are more standalone and you get a chance to something I’ve just. That is that I’ve just written and will be recording it will.

Alfie Shaw [00:36:43]:
We promise.

Lisa McMullin [00:36:44]:
It’s so it’s a. Is very, very far from the actual pitch that I originally pitched. When I sat down to write it, It. It went off on its own little journey over the hills and far away. And it’s better than the original outline that I submitted. But, yeah, it really depends.

Alfie Shaw [00:37:06]:
It does depend. I mean, I was quite fascistical on Dylan Dr. Series, especially for the last set, because due to various reasons, the options of the stories we could tell were basically eroded away until there was the one. The one thing. What it turned out to be that we so poor John and Flick on that were going, oh, we could explore these other interesting. No, no, no, no, no, we could, but we. We need. We need you to go from there to there, so then that person can go from there to there and there to there.

Alfie Shaw [00:37:39]:
And it’s all these little intricate things and, you know, it’s a house of cards. It all has to absolutely fit perfectly for this one. Whereas anything that’s more either standalone or if you’re earlier in an arc. Yeah, generally at the kind of either throwing ideas up in the air stage or next week’s episode doesn’t totally rely on, you know, a certain ending. So, yeah, that kind of, as you say, is a bit more. More freedom to it. Yeah, but.

Lisa McMullin [00:38:11]:
But by and large, you. You come up with a paragraph of an idea and your script editor and the producer will say, okay, expand it more. So then you’ll come up with a 1, 2 page pitch. So you have a couple of pages, but it goes back and forth a couple of times between script editor and writer, and then to Nick Briggs, who the exec who has an eye over all of them, making sure we’re not bringing the company into this review.

Alfie Shaw [00:38:42]:
And then the B, despite my best.

Lisa McMullin [00:38:44]:
Efforts, then the BBC have to look at it as well to check that, you know, we’re not Destroying the good.

Alfie Shaw [00:38:51]:
Name of Doctor Who, despite my best effort.

Lisa McMullin [00:38:57]:
So you have. Yeah. How long is a piece of string? So, yeah, you. Sometimes you have a lot of freedom. Sometimes it’s quite constricted and so many different goalposts in play that are movable.

Alfie Shaw [00:39:10]:
But also some. Some series are. We will sit down and have a meeting and we’ll basically thrash out the entire series arc. Was that Stranded? You had a fairly.

Lisa McMullin [00:39:20]:
Yeah, Stranded. We sort of knew where it was going for we had a big meeting because it was quite different to what they’d done before. So we sat down in 2019 and said, right, let’s set this 2020.

Alfie Shaw [00:39:37]:
What could go wrong?

Lisa McMullin [00:39:38]:
The Doctor Strange. Okay. Little did we know. So we had a rough idea of the shape of the story over the four box sets.

Alfie Shaw [00:39:49]:
Did you have the ideas for the actual story, like the paragraph versions for each book?

Lisa McMullin [00:39:55]:
No, no. So the individual stories, the stories within the story, they were made up as we went along. But the. What I’d call the serial, the sort of ongoing story of the regular characters that was loosely mapped out from the beginning.

Alfie Shaw [00:40:20]:
Yeah. Because that’s sort of what we did with. Well, actually with 11, we planned it all out entirely and then had to drop most of it due to behind the scenes shenanigans. But we kept. We knew the sort of emotional arc for the companion and not even specifically actually we sort of always knew they were gonna. It was gonna end in a wedding because it was going to be at the beginning. They lose their family, they travel with the Doctor, they gain a family and that would be their emotional arc. But we didn’t have anything sort of planned beat wise.

Alfie Shaw [00:40:59]:
In fact, the other. The big arc for the Doctor was. Was entirely pulled out and which is why if anyone’s heard that series, the Doctor sort of gets a character arc halfway through when it suddenly really, really becomes about the Time War. Otherwise we’ve just. It’s sor. About the companion and setting things up, which is fine because that’s sort of how series of new who can generally be. You know, you focus on the companion and bits of the Doctor, but you can shove it one way or the other. But that in that kind of circumstance, when you’re coming down, coming down, coming together and having a big meeting to plan it, you will generally hammer out almost log line versions for some future stories.

Alfie Shaw [00:41:40]:
So there’s one we. I’m working on at the moment where we have one line descriptions for almost every story in the set. Sorry, every story in the. In the run. Specific things for Certain sets at the moment, but that has generally been. We’ve gone to people and said, what do you want to do? And they’ve gone, oh, I’d like to do a. Gone.

Lisa McMullin [00:42:08]:
To the writers.

Alfie Shaw [00:42:09]:
You mean go to the writers. What would you like to do? Here’s our character, here’s their arc. What would you like to do? And they’ve got, ah, well, I’m going to do a episode in the style of blank, or I’m going to do an episode set in blank and we’re going to do the entire thing in the style of blank. Was that vague enough?

Lisa McMullin [00:42:25]:
Good.

Alfie Shaw [00:42:27]:
But all of those are true. And trying to do kind of slightly different things with the format, but we said to people, what’s the kind of thing that you really want to write? Don’t worry about, you know, bringing people back or whatever. And that’s always quite useful just to go, if you could do anything, really, what would you do? And we can see if we can try to make it work. But sometimes. And do stop if I’m rambling because I’m wearing. I’m going on sometimes with Doctor Who, when they go, hello, we need you to do this villain, whatever it may be, that can be quite useful because you then go, what’s special about this villain? How do they work? So having a starting point sometimes is actually quite useful.

Lisa McMullin [00:43:19]:
I love a steer. That’s my worst question is, what would you like to do? If you can do anything at all? My mind just goes blank.

Nancy Norbeck [00:43:27]:
Yeah, I know that feeling. Yeah. Too much possibility is sometimes.

Lisa McMullin [00:43:32]:
Yeah. Where do you start? I need somebody to narrow it down for me.

Nancy Norbeck [00:43:38]:
Yeah, well. And, you know, I’ve been thinking, like, Big Finish has this reputation for redeeming so many characters or situations that didn’t seem to go so well on tv. I mean, most notably the sixth Doctor, suddenly everyone loves because he’s so fabulous on Big Finish, you know, where he generally comes in at the very bottom of everybody’s. Which is your favorite Doctor poll, which I never take because I can never rank them, but no, me either.

Lisa McMullin [00:44:09]:
It’s the same character. How can you pick one?

Nancy Norbeck [00:44:13]:
But, you know, at the same time, like, I don’t know how. I don’t know how you do it, because when I sit down and I listen to a sixth Doctor audio, I’m thinking, well, what’s actually different about him on audio? You know, like, the character is still essentially the same, and yet somehow I like him better, you know, so, like, how maybe it’s just some weird big Finnish magic that you can’t really put your finger on. But I think that the same thing kind of can happen, you know, with villains who, you know, I’ve seen people talking online recently about, you know, can we not have any Daleks for a while? We’ve had too many Daleks. They, you know, the Daleks are great, but they kind of become one note after a while if you’re not careful, you know.

Lisa McMullin [00:45:00]:
But then you get the other side of going, can we have more Daleks? Where are the Daleks?

Alfie Shaw [00:45:06]:
It’s really, it’s really interesting, that debate, because we. We did Daleks for 11 and I was dreading it because I. Exactly for that reaction, oh, God, everyone’s going to go to Daleks again. We were given the Daleks by the BBC. The BBC went, use this, they’ll solve everything. I was like, okay, cool. But because we were using the Rainbow Daleks and they’d never been done before, people went mad for it. And I was not expecting that at all, because I was expecting, as you say, oh, God, no Daleks.

Alfie Shaw [00:45:35]:
And there were some people going, well, I don’t like Daleks, but it is those Daleks, so I’m okay with this.

Nancy Norbeck [00:45:41]:
Which is funny because when they first, you know, debuted on tv, everybody was like, what is this? This is stupid and crazy.

Lisa McMullin [00:45:49]:
Yeah, you definitely redeemed those Daleks.

Alfie Shaw [00:45:51]:
But I, I just. I thought they were a bit like the Andrew Garfield Spider man films. Everyone sort of now retroactively loves them, but everyone at the time went, these really.

Lisa McMullin [00:46:01]:
This is what we’re doing.

Nancy Norbeck [00:46:02]:
Yeah.

Alfie Shaw [00:46:03]:
But they seem to be a slight kind of nostalgia factor. And also because we were on audio and they did have a great voices.

Lisa McMullin [00:46:10]:
Yeah. Poor Nick Briggs.

Alfie Shaw [00:46:11]:
Oh, yes, he did.

Lisa McMullin [00:46:12]:
He lost his voice.

Alfie Shaw [00:46:14]:
Seven to eight unique Daleks on there. And I did just say, blame Stephen. I didn’t come up with them. I worked given because he was the Prime Minister as well. It was all of them, it was just. Yeah, Daleks are tricky. Daleks are surprisingly tricky to write and you do really have to focus on how to write them and what to do with them. That’s new.

Alfie Shaw [00:46:40]:
Otherwise they can be quite screamy. Just scream. But sometimes you need just screamy tanks. They’re quite a useful shorthand if you’ve got a full story, full of other stuff. And they endure for a reason. Yeah, I think, you know, that’s thing.

Lisa McMullin [00:46:55]:
Is, that’s such a unique villain, aren’t they? There’s nothing. I can’t think of anything else like it. They’re just so peculiar, their form is so unthreatening, but their voice is so chilling and the. It’s just a lack of any empathy at all. Just. They are the perfect villain. I love a Dalek, but I’d prefer a Cyberman, I think.

Alfie Shaw [00:47:23]:
Oh, I love a Cyber. They were my favorite. They’re my first Doctor Who. Never done a Cyber VHS double Tin.

Nancy Norbeck [00:47:29]:
Wow.

Alfie Shaw [00:47:30]:
It was a Simon VHS double Tin, which I took into school because it turned out my history teacher, Mr. Ready, was sort of exactly like Colin Baker, which was very weird. No, but I’m glad you’re enjoying it. But, yeah, you do constantly have to. Every time you kind of have to try and earn using that classic villain. And there’s a few of them that I’ve slightly given up on because I just can’t think of anything.

Lisa McMullin [00:48:01]:
And what do you do?

Alfie Shaw [00:48:03]:
Yeah. Which isn’t to say there aren’t new things to do with them. I just can’t think of them.

Nancy Norbeck [00:48:08]:
Well, you did.

Lisa McMullin [00:48:10]:
Yeah, I was gonna say.

Nancy Norbeck [00:48:10]:
Yeah, with the Eleventh Doctor series, you definitely did, because.

Alfie Shaw [00:48:15]:
Oh, yes. Sorry, I. I’m just. I was thinking more stuff like the Weeping Angels. I’m like, I don’t know what I would do the so and so again. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Well, yes, this is that probably my sole Cyberman story because it went down really well and I went, well, they’re my favorites.

Alfie Shaw [00:48:29]:
Never touching them again. I did them good once. Doctor Who fans are happy. Let’s not mess with that. There we go. Run.

Nancy Norbeck [00:48:37]:
Yes. The story in question, I think, is called Sins of the Flesh, as opposed to Sins of the Father, which is where my brain wants to go. That’s not what it’s called. And it was just such a fabulous way of using them to do something completely different. And, you know, the. The thematic elements of that story could not have been a great big mystery to you either.

Alfie Shaw [00:49:02]:
No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t subtle, nor was it really meant to be. No, I don’t do subtle with slime. And sometimes you don’t need to be subtle. I always find it very interesting online just to do a real tangent, that, you know, all these very sort of angry, right wing, really, really far right, hateful people go, oh, well, you know, you must not put open themes in your work. You must be subtle with these things. But we’re going to be very open and aggressive with all of our stuff. Well, I’m not sure if I can swear on this to you we’ll be as subtle as you are.

Alfie Shaw [00:49:37]:
Thanks very much, Sunny Jim. But, you know, that one I Can’t remember how it came about because I remember having vaguely having the idea and then watching. There’s a documentary on Netflix, Netflix, I think, called Pray Away. And in the opening of that, which I think I do talk about in the extras of the CD version, there is someone who is leading a religious ceremony in their own home. And they all started stomping in unison while praying. And I just went, oh, God, it’s the actual cyber, Cybermen. So that opening scene with them praying is just ripped straight from that documentary. And that’s when I went, I’ve got to do this.

Alfie Shaw [00:50:24]:
And this is how we’re going to do it. And that’s all. And then that one actually come together quite quickly.

Lisa McMullin [00:50:30]:
I remember you sent me your script while you were writing that, and I just looked at it and went, oh, it was one of those moments where you think, why didn’t I have this idea? Why didn’t I write this? It’s just. It was just seemed, what a perfect story for the Cybermen. It just. Yeah, what a way to tell that story as well. I just thought it was.

Alfie Shaw [00:50:54]:
And we went, we sent it past a lot of people to make sure it was read and, you know, done properly. And it was also interesting, the reaction to that. There were some people who didn’t like it because it was about religion. And some people, some religious people thought it was unfair because their, you know, their church wasn’t like that. And some people went on the other end of it, went, well, it’s about religion, but it’s not really attacking religion enough. And I said, well, it’s not really about religion at all. It’s about those people, specifically conversion therapy, people who are using religion, you know, to sort of perpetuate, and they’re this horrific thing. So sometimes you do, when you see.

Lisa McMullin [00:51:39]:
Reactions, you were saying about people, you write something and what you intend and what people take from it.

Alfie Shaw [00:51:44]:
Yeah, always same thing. And then you have to take heart as the creative going, well, fine, I understand your point, your various points of view, but it was very specifically about. In this one thing about this. And it’s that sort of weird thing of there is death of the author, but there is also almost solace of the author going, it was about this, but, you know, so that. Understand that. But I don’t have. I don’t have to have my ego or opinion of my own work or those bits of criticism. I can accept them without having to take them to heart, if that makes sense.

Nancy Norbeck [00:52:24]:
Yeah, yeah. Because you can’t control what people are.

Alfie Shaw [00:52:26]:
Going to say about it as much as we’ve tried. Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:52:30]:
Now that we’re talking about it. God, yeah, that’s. That’s kind of a terrifying thing to throw out into the world, a story like that, that is about something that really shouldn’t be controversial but still is, and then kind of go, well, you know, I hope that most people like it and I hope that nobody comes after me in some horrible way because they thought it was terrible.

Alfie Shaw [00:52:53]:
Yeah, no, yes. Didn’t have any particular direct nastiness. Someone anonymously gave it a four, which everyone else was giving it. Super high score. So I just. But I wonder what’s behind that out of ten? It’s five out of five or nothing, darlings. We. And then we got another review on someone else, which was really just.

Alfie Shaw [00:53:22]:
I mean, so offensively awful that it was. It sort of swung round to being funny, you know, like, break out the popcorn. Because this person was like, well, this has lesbians in it. Okay, bear, you seek help. But yes, no, it hasn’t had anything. But what was quite nice is then there were a couple people came up to me at various conventions and thanked us for doing that story. And that was really. That was.

Alfie Shaw [00:53:58]:
That was a sort of really big thumbs up of this was absolutely worth doing. And we should definitely try and do things that are engaging with actual problems and sort of slightly darker material, which my stuff tends to skew towards anyway. But again, had some great jokes in it, wonderful one about regeneration that I will not stop banging on about.

Nancy Norbeck [00:54:22]:
Yeah, well, that one just hits on so many different levels because it’s clever all on its own as an idea for something different to do with a Cybermen, and then it has such a massive emotional punch, you know, like, as soon as you realize what’s actually going on in that story. And I want to apologize to people who are listening because we’re being vague so that we don’t spoil anybody. But. But yeah, once. Once you figure it out, you’re just kind of going, yeah, whoa, whoa. This is like, this is not your typical Doctor Who story. This is. This is operating on like five or six different levels all at the same time.

Nancy Norbeck [00:55:00]:
And. Holy cow. So. So, yeah, there’s. There’s a reason why it sticks in your head.

Alfie Shaw [00:55:07]:
Thank you. As I said, that’s true.

Nancy Norbeck [00:55:14]:
So, yeah, but that’s part of why I find the Cybermen scarier than the Daleks, because they want to turn you into one of them. But at the same time, even with that, after a while, they tend to be all kind of doing the same thing. So when a story like that comes along, it’s like, oh, we can still do something different with these guys. Oh, yeah.

Alfie Shaw [00:55:40]:
That’s the trick that you’ve got to try and find with all of the new stuff. So I generally have a rule on my. The stuff I produce, which is no prequels, no sequels and no classic monsters. And it’s there mainly because we will have discussed what we want to do with classic monsters beforehand. And it will be like when we have the big meetings for series, we will go down and go, okay, we’re going to use. We’re going to do this interesting thing with this classic learning, because we can do this, this and this, but then we don’t really want anyone else because otherwise if you just say open submission, you get a lot of stuff that is. Can we do a sequel to Terminus? Why? I like Terminus.

Lisa McMullin [00:56:24]:
Oh, you shouldn’t.

Alfie Shaw [00:56:26]:
No, no, just in terms of writers and stuff, because everyone has the kind of, you know, pet love monster that they. They just want to sort of use rather than kind of push. And so we always sort of say we’re generally looking for new and if we’re doing old, we’d have had a big chat about it to do, to do something new with. But yeah, it’s also that kind of old thing with. When you’re doing a series of Doctor Who, there is a sort of push and pull between. I mean, people, you know, people say, oh, well, there too many Dalek stories. People will generally can say that with this. Too much classic monsters in general.

Alfie Shaw [00:57:04]:
And it is that slight push and pull of going, we want to do lots of new stuff. But you are in the Doctor Who toy box as a creative. So part of the joy is getting to play with the existing toys. People kind of like it when you bring back classics up, especially if you can find something new with it. That’s really the sweet spot. But you kind of have to balance not using them all the time with too much of them and not kind of the kind of dynamic of the thing in the same way that the TV show. I always think it’s interesting that they generally will use a classic monster or so for most series just to kind of go, hey, this is the. This is the same thing that you remember.

Alfie Shaw [00:57:48]:
This is still Doctor Who. So it is a kind of not only just considering what you can do with new stuff, but who’s the best fit for this storyline. And then the thought escaped me and left and went on holiday for three weeks and had a glorious time and never Came back because he married someone out there. Yes. Next question, please. That really went away. I’m sorry.

Nancy Norbeck [00:58:14]:
That’s okay.

Alfie Shaw [00:58:15]:
Welcome to my brain. Just throwing things out.

Nancy Norbeck [00:58:18]:
It happens to all of us. Right? Yeah. Well, since. Since you mentioned Paul Spragg, I’m. I’m curious to know, like, I mean, I don’t know how much you guys have to do with that competition, but there was. There was someone on a forum I was looking at maybe, I don’t know, like a week or so before submissions ended for this year’s contest. So whenever that. That was not too long ago, and the conversation had kind of steered into, are Americans allowed to write for BBC Doctor Who tv? And a lot of people were saying, I’m not sure.

Nancy Norbeck [00:58:58]:
You know, like, there are. At the very least, there are all of these rumors that they’re not. And somebody replied and said, man, you know, I’ve always wanted to write for them. And a bunch of us were like, well, so write for big Finish. And they were like, I can do that. And I said, well, I’m pretty sure at the very least, you can enter the competition and you got a week to write something and send it in.

Lisa McMullin [00:59:18]:
And see what happens.

Nancy Norbeck [00:59:19]:
So, I mean, what’s the experience like with people submitting to that contest? Do you guys have enough to do with it to have any idea?

Lisa McMullin [00:59:27]:
I have nothing to do with it at all.

Alfie Shaw [00:59:29]:
I have all to do with it. I am the person that does the initial sifting, so I am the person who makes the shortlist. So unfortunately, if you’re listening to this and you’ve been rejected by Paul Spragg, you’ve probably been rejected by me, for which I can only apologize.

Lisa McMullin [00:59:42]:
It’s all anonymous.

Alfie Shaw [00:59:44]:
It’s all anonymous. So the process is people will email in the one for Karen in the office, then puts them on an internal storage system, but without names and contact email, all of that filed off. I then read all of them. I start I did it one year in three days, which did nearly kill me. I generally now will, as they come in once a week, sift through this year. I think about 40% of the entries came in on the last day. That last day is a real rush. And from there, once I sorted them, they will go on to the shortlist, will go onto the judging panel who will then pick their top tens and then their respective winner.

Alfie Shaw [01:00:40]:
But yes, you can absolutely enter from anywhere, all over the world. There is no. I’m pretty sure Selim is American or Canadian. I’m for. Sorry, Salim. I’m forgetting the man who wrote Battle Scars, who also won for laps. I think it’s called lamb bound. The third doctor 1.

Alfie Shaw [01:01:08]:
Apologies, my brain forgets things. But yes, it is. It can be. It can be quite intense and there’s a. There’s a lot of them. There’s a lot of. It’s interesting. Certain themes kind of emerge sort of naturally.

Alfie Shaw [01:01:32]:
Not so this year specifically, it was themed about the Time War, so you’d have certain types of Time War stories emerging, which I thought was interesting. Just the kind of. That repetition of ideas by people who clearly had not spoken to each other because otherwise you wouldn’t enter this.

Lisa McMullin [01:01:46]:
I have a question.

Alfie Shaw [01:01:47]:
Okay.

Lisa McMullin [01:01:48]:
Do they. Do you find that the themes that people are writing about and the stories they’re wanting to tell have. Do they resonate with what’s going on in the world?

Alfie Shaw [01:02:00]:
Some of them do. I mean, this year, not so much, because people were really leaning into the Time Warrior of it all and getting to use the Daleks. A lot of people put Daleks in. But yes, there’s a lot of covered ones. There was a lot of Doctor Who Solves Covid. That was the main one really for that year. There was a lot of that and a lot of people being in isolation and that sort of thing. But not, not so much other than that, really.

Alfie Shaw [01:02:30]:
There are certain. Every year someone will enter a story from the point of view of the tardis, without fail, trying to know what else I can say. Yes, ask me questions and I’ll see if I can answer. But yes, I’m. I’m. I’m very insult, very involved because it’s part of my production coordinator office job. So I, I’m the one who sorts all of those.

Lisa McMullin [01:03:00]:
So send your complaints to us if you’re not already.

Alfie Shaw [01:03:06]:
But I can’t do feedback.

Nancy Norbeck [01:03:07]:
Email in the show notes. No, we won’t. So do many of the people who, who win that competition end up writing more for you guys?

Alfie Shaw [01:03:18]:
I certainly made an effort to when they. When I was doing short trips and could pull things through. There is. There is. Writing prose and writing drama are two different skill sets, which was why during my tenure on short trips, I introduced the mini dramas because we could sort of use them as testing grounds for people a bit more effectively than pros. But some of them do. Some of them I just sort of take a leap with and just. They get a bit more kind of hands on support.

Alfie Shaw [01:03:54]:
But yeah, I try to, just because it’s sort of meant to be a way to. To break into the company. And we had A few really, really brilliant people come through that, but.

Lisa McMullin [01:04:08]:
And not always the winners.

Alfie Shaw [01:04:09]:
Not always the winners, no. Yeah.

Lisa McMullin [01:04:11]:
The runners up.

Alfie Shaw [01:04:12]:
So Felicia barker, who wrote one of my 11 Dalek stories and the 11 Valerie short trip, plus my master short Trip, a subscriber Short Trip, and I think that’s her complete things under my commissioning, basically made the shortlist every year. She basically came second about two or three years in the running. And we just went, oh, well, you’re. You know, there’s clearly something here that we can use. So I think Matt Fitton got into the company by not winning consistently. I think so, yeah. And there are people who go on to be used in short trips. I think if they didn’t win as well, sometimes we.

Alfie Shaw [01:05:02]:
People will be in touch and kind of develop from there. But, yeah, I. Yeah, we’ve. We’ve had a few people come through that way, and some really brilliant people as well. But it’s that also, that sort of thing that you’re. I mean, I have as a producer, I think is less of a problem for you because you don’t have to commission anyone, is that you are aware that there are a certain number of writers who are established within the company, really know what they’re doing, are, if you put them in a set, are very popular, really easy to use, great balancing. That is the desire to bring in new people and new ideas, and even really brilliant new people need a lot more work than an established person who really just knows the ropes. So you do have that to kind of balance getting new people in versus established people.

Alfie Shaw [01:05:56]:
But you do want to constantly have that sort of new stream of people coming in balanced on top of that is also a problem some people have, which I have, and James Goss has a similar thing where they are writer producers and are effectively showrunners for whatever series they’re doing. So it’s then, how much do you get established people in? How much do you get new people in? Because you always want to get new people in? How much do you write yourself because it’s the series arc or because you’ve got a thing that you really want to do, which was Me and the Sideman one. At one point, I wasn’t even going to write the finale until Emily Cook went, that is insane. What are you doing? Write it. You will hate yourself forever if you don’t do the finale. But it is that kind of juggling act and getting people in through the short trips. You know that we do have that kind of transition between prose and drama, which can be A stumbling block for some people, but it is a good way of discovering people who at least have a proven understanding of the show and have a proven understanding of character and how to do some guest characters and have their emotional arc. So there is.

Alfie Shaw [01:07:15]:
At least when I was. I was there, I imagine whoever has taken it over. I’m not sure if it’s been publicly announced. Not. I think it probably has, but I’ll play it safe, just not. They’ll probably do a similar thing as well. You know, I’ve taken people over from pros to drama and will probably try and do so when if I have the option. Lots of able to me, I think the thing I’m producing at the moment might be my last one for a while, but we shall see.

Alfie Shaw [01:07:44]:
I can ramble, can’t I? I’m so sorry.

Nancy Norbeck [01:07:47]:
It’s okay.

Alfie Shaw [01:07:48]:
The one bloke on the. On the podcast, he dominates the conversation. I mean, nothing changes.

Nancy Norbeck [01:07:54]:
Well, here I am sitting here thinking, you know, Lisa could have just submitted to the contest and gotten in that way instead of, you know, latching onto Matt.

Lisa McMullin [01:08:02]:
You know what I’m not sure I would have done. I think I’m much better if I just approached someone with a glass of wine than if I actually have to. Could be.

Alfie Shaw [01:08:11]:
I will say it’s much harder. People should take heart in this. It’s much harder to get a commission through Paul Spragg than it is any other way through the company. Because every other time when you pitch, the producer can go, I like that bit of the idea. That bit needs working. That bit doesn’t work. You can do this. Paul Spragg, it’s literally.

Alfie Shaw [01:08:29]:
You have got to be a bullseye first time. So it is a. It’s a harder way of getting in. So if people have not made it through so far, I would say keep going. Because you are essentially trying to enter through the hardest path.

Nancy Norbeck [01:08:45]:
Interesting. That’s probably not what most people would guess.

Lisa McMullin [01:08:49]:
No, but then it’s. Yeah, but then people would say, well, then what are the easier ways in.

Alfie Shaw [01:08:57]:
Oh, make your own work. That’s always a big one. If you can prove that you can write. Specifically if you write your own audio drama. We can’t look at anything that stops who because we might be doing something similar. That’s a substantial rule across IP work. But if you can write your own scripts, write your own prose, if you’re looking to try and do the short trip stuff, that’s always much, much better and is. Because then people can look at your work and assess It.

Alfie Shaw [01:09:23]:
I would say that it’s a weird thing. A lot of people go, I want to write, talk to who. And the advice we always give is, okay, go and write literally anything else.

Lisa McMullin [01:09:31]:
Yeah, write something else. Yeah. I mean, that’s the same. That’s a difference, I think, in the US and the uk. Is that a UK show? If you want to write on a show over here, you absolutely do not send them a spec script for their. They don’t want to see it. They want to see something original that you’ve written. And yeah, that works for Big Finish as well.

Lisa McMullin [01:09:51]:
You never, ever would send the Doctor Who script to Big Finish because it won’t get looked at, just be deleted immediately.

Nancy Norbeck [01:10:01]:
Well, that’s good for people to know too.

Lisa McMullin [01:10:03]:
Yeah.

Alfie Shaw [01:10:04]:
Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [01:10:04]:
Because I’m sure lots of them send stuff and have no idea why it. Why it never went anywhere.

Alfie Shaw [01:10:12]:
Probably if it did, it went to someone else. No one ever really sends us.

Nancy Norbeck [01:10:16]:
Yeah.

Lisa McMullin [01:10:17]:
I would hope they’d get an email saying, thank you. We can’t look at this.

Alfie Shaw [01:10:20]:
Yes, yes, there would be a reply.

Nancy Norbeck [01:10:22]:
Yeah. Yeah. But still, it’s. It’s a lot of effort to go to. To have that kind of reply.

Lisa McMullin [01:10:28]:
Yeah, yeah, we just can’t look at.

Alfie Shaw [01:10:31]:
Yeah. I mean, speaking of, my favorite Paul Spragg entry ever. And this. If this was you, well played. Someone once just submitted the entire shooting script of Heaven Sent, which I loved reading because I haven’t before. This is good. Unfortunately, Stephen, if it was you, you did it already and you did it pretty well, so we can’t do it again. But I did enjoy that and it might have been sort of.

Alfie Shaw [01:10:57]:
It was presumably sent in as a joke and there might have been the sort of setup in the email because it was stripped of that. It was just by mistake uploaded to the internal system. This is that. Oh, cool.

Nancy Norbeck [01:11:09]:
Wow.

Alfie Shaw [01:11:10]:
A copy of this now. Okay, great.

Lisa McMullin [01:11:14]:
Maybe it was Moppet who sent it.

Alfie Shaw [01:11:16]:
Yeah, this was really good. Make it again. People liked it. People need to know how good I am.

Nancy Norbeck [01:11:21]:
Yeah. Wow. Would that even. Would that episode even work on audio mail me? I guess it would because these an awful lot of it.

Lisa McMullin [01:11:30]:
Very visual. I mean, it’s.

Nancy Norbeck [01:11:31]:
Yeah, there’s a lot of.

Lisa McMullin [01:11:34]:
It’s voiceover, isn’t it? A lot of it. And yeah, I don’t know.

Alfie Shaw [01:11:40]:
You could probably do a version of it. That’s another thing we get a lot of you get when you working with newer people. You get people who send very visual ideas to go, this would be wonderful on the telly. Really not so Suitable for audio.

Lisa McMullin [01:11:53]:
I mean, sometimes I’ll write something and think, this is really not meant for audio. What am I doing?

Nancy Norbeck [01:12:00]:
I was going to ask you, you know, like, since you’ve written for TV as well as for audio, like, what. What’s the, you know, how much of a difference is there?

Lisa McMullin [01:12:09]:
So different. Yeah, it’s very, very different because with TV and film, so much of the storytelling is visual and less is more in terms of dialogue. But then with audio it’s the reverse. And you. You’ve got to use the dialogue in a way that helps to set the scene and to clarify what the sound effects are. The sound effects are so good, though. Like the big, I think, big finish. The sound designers are just fantastic.

Lisa McMullin [01:12:44]:
What they do, what they do with the ridiculous directions that we give them.

Alfie Shaw [01:12:50]:
What’s. What’s your most ridiculous. I think my most ridiculous stage direction for fx. Fx. Their universe implodes. What’s your most ridiculous.

Lisa McMullin [01:13:00]:
I once asked for the sound of a fun fur exploding or like things like the sound of utter dread and fear going down a plug hole. Like ridiculousness like that. And then you go. And they do it. They go, ah. Do you mean this? Yes, that’s exactly what I meant. But it’s brilliant. I once had.

Lisa McMullin [01:13:32]:
I wrote a Paul McGann one with. There was an army of giant skeletons.

Nancy Norbeck [01:13:39]:
I listened to that not long ago.

Lisa McMullin [01:13:42]:
Then she’d made the. The skeleton army using wooden coat hangers.

Nancy Norbeck [01:13:48]:
Oh, wow.

Lisa McMullin [01:13:50]:
But you listen to it and you’re like, oh, wow, that sounds amazing. And then you know that what he’s doing, he’s just in his studio going, I think they have a lot of fun with that. Sort of.

Nancy Norbeck [01:14:02]:
I bet they do.

Lisa McMullin [01:14:03]:
Yeah. But, yeah, so different to writing TV because. And I. And it’s hard to switch your brain from one to the other and to get. So you get used to writing for audio and then you write a TV script and suddenly it’s so dialogue heavy and you like. Then you’ve got to be stripped down, strip it down. You’ve got to direct the. Tell the actors where they’re moving, tell the director what we’re meant to be focusing on.

Lisa McMullin [01:14:31]:
Where’s the camera meant to be looking? What are we seeing? And then you go back to writing audio and you’re, ah. You start writing something visual and thinking they can’t see it. How am I going to present that in a. In an audio way? But it’s fun. I like the difference between the two. It’s challenging. I write or I’ve not. I haven’t done much, but I’ve done some theater as well.

Lisa McMullin [01:14:58]:
And I always think that audio is so much closer to theater than it is to television because it’s characters talking and the story is told through, through dialogue more than anything. Even though some theater today can be really visually spectacular, I think it’s still, for me, my favorite theater is when it’s, it’s intimate and you feel like you’re almost part of the, the drama yourself as a, as a spectator rather than. I thought. I think too much visual stuff and crazy special effects for me distances me from, from theater. I like to be sucked into it through the, just the, the actors on stage. I like to lean in and feel like you’re actually, you’re in the, you’re in the same space with them, which you don’t get with TV or audio or, or any other medium really. You’re, you’re there and it’s live and whatever happens, it will only ever happen exactly like that, that one time. Every performance will be different, even if it’s in an.

Lisa McMullin [01:16:14]:
In tiny, tiny, tiny, infinitismal way. But yeah, but I love, I love that about theater. You don’t get it anywhere else. That feeling of you’re part of something you’re all experiencing something that will never, ever be repeated exactly the same way.

Nancy Norbeck [01:16:30]:
Yeah, yeah, it’s true. It’s very true.

Alfie Shaw [01:16:39]:
Jump in. I thought I’d spoken too much. I thought I just hide away.

Nancy Norbeck [01:16:44]:
No, no, you’re fine. You’re fine.

Alfie Shaw [01:16:47]:
You do get a lot of theater writers in, that is how. Yeah, especially the Tim Foley, Stuart Pringle, Lauren Mooney faction. Bring in a lot of theater people then. Yeah, I think they are. They find the leap a bit easier than the pros people.

Nancy Norbeck [01:17:05]:
That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. Is there anything we should talk about that’s not big Finnish? Because my brain is sort of locked into big Finnish territory.

Lisa McMullin [01:17:18]:
We find it, you know, wherever we are. As soon as, if you get one person, if you get more than one Doctor Who related person in a room, or if you get more than one big Finnish related person in a room or in a conversation, even if you’ve met, to discuss world politics or as.

Alfie Shaw [01:17:37]:
We often do, or horticulture, as we.

Lisa McMullin [01:17:40]:
Often do, the conversation will always, always. I think even. Actually you don’t even need two people. You need one person connected to Big finish or Doctor Who in any situation. And somehow the conversation.

Alfie Shaw [01:17:57]:
Suddenly you’re listening to a 20 minute defense of the crowds, wondering who they are.

Nancy Norbeck [01:18:04]:
Is it terrible to Admit that I do know who they are. When you mention Android Invasion. Android Invasion.

Alfie Shaw [01:18:13]:
I did listen for the first two minutes.

Lisa McMullin [01:18:17]:
Do you?

Alfie Shaw [01:18:18]:
Well, I’m. I do a lot of nothing else. All my other, all my other work is very speculative and in early stages. So you, you’re the one with.

Lisa McMullin [01:18:29]:
And I do random things. British television that probably your audience hasn’t. Haven’t encountered unless they have Britbox or they come across it in some strain. Although I will occasionally talk to somebody in America about something and I think it’s so British. I write on a show called Sister Boniface, which is a murder mystery solving nun. It’s like Agatha Christie, Miss Marple in a wimple. And then somebody will say, oh, I’ve been watching it on britfox America. Okay, who knew? That’s a quintessentially British show.

Lisa McMullin [01:19:09]:
I’d like to. I’d love to write on an American show and I’d love to get my own stuff. I’m in a constant process of development with different production companies trying to get things green lit and. Ah, it’s. Yeah, it’s so funny when you first. You think about what you wanted to do when you start out and you continually move the goalposts. So If I’d known 10 years ago that I’d be doing what I do for a living, I’d have thought all my wildest dreams have come true. This is the pinnacle of what I want to achieve creatively.

Lisa McMullin [01:19:49]:
But now that I’m here and I. Oh, but then there’s other things up there that I, I want to do now. So you’re continually. I don’t think you ever get. I don’t think you’re ever satisfied as a creative person. I think there’s always something else that you want to do. I think that. And I think that’s right.

Lisa McMullin [01:20:10]:
I think if you, once you become satisfied, you might become, I don’t know, bored of what you do. There’s got to always be something to.

Nancy Norbeck [01:20:22]:
Aspire to, I think, I think that’s right. Because you can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again.

Lisa McMullin [01:20:29]:
No. Well, you can.

Alfie Shaw [01:20:31]:
I mean we’re definitely. I mean we’re working for the right company to do.

Lisa McMullin [01:20:37]:
But it’s the same thing. And not the same.

Alfie Shaw [01:20:39]:
It’s the same thing. But also. Yes, I joke before Jason sends out.

Lisa McMullin [01:20:44]:
The headband, continually find new ways to do the same thing. So it’s. It’s the same but different. Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [01:20:53]:
Yeah. Well, it’s just like we were talking about with that Cyberman story, You know, it’s a totally different thing to do with them. And, you know, how many other people could have watched that same thing on Netflix and seen that scene and maybe even had a similar idea, but weren’t in a position to do anything with it?

Lisa McMullin [01:21:10]:
Yeah, yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [01:21:13]:
And somebody probably was like, oh, you just think about Doctor Who too much. That may or may not be true, but you had a chance to actually do something with it.

Alfie Shaw [01:21:24]:
Yeah, it is. It’s interesting. Since we’re back on Big Finish, we’ll crack on. It’s really interesting working on Recast Doctors because I think they have a. I’m aware that they are a thing that divides the audience, but they do have a strength that they are not really people. Like, there isn’t really a desire, for instance, if we had, I don’t know, Jake doing 11 to do Jake as 11 with Amy or Clara or Rory or. I’m sure there were some people out there who wanted that, but, you know, then most people would go, if we are going to do 11 and the ponds, you would like the TV versions, because that’s part of the charm of having those characters back. So what the real strength of doing Recast Doctors is it.

Alfie Shaw [01:22:15]:
It really forces you to do new stuff, which is what really interests me, because there’s a freedom to it. Like, you don’t have to go, I’m working with these characters and. But we know due to a story in 1987, this is where they end up. There is a real freak. Like, we can do whatever we want with our companion. No one knows what’s going to happen to them. We can make loads of guest characters and nobody knows what’s going to happen to them. And there’s just a real chance to kind of explore gaps.

Alfie Shaw [01:22:50]:
And also, because we’re doing recast, we’ve kind of got to them first, so we have that fresh pick of where we want to put these. These new series gaps. And it is like the early days of Big Finish, where, you know, so much of the. The universe had not been mapped out and explored. There are still sort of unexplored pockets. And because we are, you know, using recast, there is a. Almost a kind of obligation to go, well, if you’re going to do this, you know, in my view, with those. Is always recast as little as possible to make the story possible, which is really the Doctor.

Alfie Shaw [01:23:24]:
Once you’ve got that, do something new, give the audience something new, Give it a. You know, bring new people on board, try and do weird, weird things with it. Really stretch. Because one of the, one of the joys of Big Finish Doctor Who is going, oh, I loved Sylvester McCoy. And so if you ordered a Seven of Ace, I really want to do a Seven and a Story and, and doing those and getting to write those characters. But on the flip side, those characters are now very thoroughly explored and you’re constantly, you know, comes back to trying to find something new to do with them. Whereas if you’re doing the recast stuff, it is a lot easier really and a lot more kind of liberating as a producer because you just go, oh, great, that big gap there, we’ll just put it all in there and we can kind of do almost whatever we want, really. So there is a real kind of freedom, I don’t think really gets considered a lot online.

Alfie Shaw [01:24:26]:
People just because people are, you know, wanting. We want Matt or we want Peter or whoever to come back and do the role. There isn’t really that kind of consideration because a lot of the feedback we got from 11 is, oh, I really want more new series stuff to be like this. I want it to be like a new TV series. The TV show. We have the freedom to do that. Because I went to Jake and went, this is the plan. And he went, great, by the way, I will leave at the end of the plan, but let’s do the plan.

Alfie Shaw [01:24:54]:
Whereas if it was Matt, Matt just might want to do 12 box sets of 11 and river, which would be great in its own way, but it wouldn’t be that kind of long form storytelling that part of the audience wants, which we can actually do with more ease with a recast.

Nancy Norbeck [01:25:14]:
Yeah, yeah, well, and I think that the 11 recast is kind of the pinnacle of recasting. There was a conversation on Blue Sky a couple weeks ago where that came up in the One who Feed. And you know, the person who hadn’t listened was like, oh, but it’s not really Matt Smith. And isn’t that kind of jarring? And a whole bunch of us were like, no, you have no idea. It’s not Matt Smith.

Lisa McMullin [01:25:45]:
You just can’t tell the difference, can you?

Nancy Norbeck [01:25:47]:
It’s so freakishly uncanny that, you know, if you listened to it and you didn’t know, you’d swear it with him.

Lisa McMullin [01:25:53]:
Yeah.

Alfie Shaw [01:25:54]:
I mean, there is also a real pressure on them because it’s, you know, not even. These things have to absolutely be essential listens or they are dead in the water. We have no, you know, oh, it’s got that person from the tv. Obviously no one is trying to make Something that’s bad. I do love it when you see people online go, oh, they moved to box set so they could commission one in the middle. That’s bad. Like the commissioning process goes, we need an all time classic from you, an experimental one from you. And you just whatever you can, the worst thing you can, please.

Alfie Shaw [01:26:27]:
Obviously everyone’s trying to do their best, but sometimes you try things and they just don’t quite end up how you like them. That’s the nature of the creative part. But with the recast, it really does have to be well, especially for 11 and 12 because, you know, with the other, recasts it’s generally because sadly, the original actor’s no longer with us. It really. There is a real pressure and I do put myself under quite a lot of pressure. Poor Lisa is like, yes, I have to live with it. But they really do have to be absolutely top tier. I said it was like the line has always got to be, yes, it’s not insert original actor here, but the stories are so good that you have to get them anyway.

Alfie Shaw [01:27:16]:
And it does, it does drive me a bit insane, which I think is probably why I can only do one series of it as a time before I step off. But it’s that kind of weird pressure of these absolutely have to fundamentally be essential. And you, again, you’re trying your best, but there’s no way you can guarantee that, like, that’s, that’s insane.

Lisa McMullin [01:27:39]:
But the two acts, I mean, Jake.

Alfie Shaw [01:27:40]:
And Jake and stuff, we, I mean, we’re very fortunate there. Just go, yeah, but going forward, you’ve got to try and do that again. And yeah, it’s a real, it’s a real, any, the slightest thing and people will go, well, never mind, I’ll just go and buy something with Tom Baker instead. It is a really kind of high, high risk, high reward thing, as I was saying, with the opportunities. But it is also, these had better be absolutely the gold standard or we’re gone. So, yeah, they are quite a unique opportunity, but they are also quite creatively stressful.

Nancy Norbeck [01:28:25]:
Well, having finished finally the 11th doctor, which I will admit that I was putting off, and then when we had you on the schedule the first time, I was like, oh, now I have to finish them, dog. I was like, I don’t want them to end. They’re so good, you know, because it was one of those things where I tried it and I was like, well, we’ll see, you know. And like I listened to the trail and I mean, everybody had seen his, you know, Jacob Dudman’s YouTube video and everything where we all went, holy crap, how does he do that? You know, so it wasn’t really a huge surprise, but it was still. It’s one thing to do somebody’s voice, it’s another thing to somehow get all of those mannerisms and everything else, especially just in your voice. Holy.

Lisa McMullin [01:29:10]:
He’s a great actor. It’s not just an impression.

Nancy Norbeck [01:29:12]:
Yeah.

Lisa McMullin [01:29:16]:
He’s acting.

Nancy Norbeck [01:29:17]:
Yeah.

Lisa McMullin [01:29:18]:
Every, every word. Not just pretending to be Matt Smith.

Nancy Norbeck [01:29:23]:
He’s right.

Lisa McMullin [01:29:24]:
Just. And if you watch him in, if you watch him in the recording booth, he, he moves and gestures. It. It’s bizarre.

Alfie Shaw [01:29:33]:
He.

Lisa McMullin [01:29:34]:
It’s like this being embodied by the spirit of Matt Smith.

Alfie Shaw [01:29:38]:
We’re still alive, currently working at hbo. Maximiz.

Lisa McMullin [01:29:42]:
Yeah.

Alfie Shaw [01:29:43]:
I do find it interesting though that I think, like, weirdly, Doc, the Doctor Who fandom is more. I mean, this might be because I’ve got an outside suspect from other fandoms. They seem more suspicious of recasting, but other sci fi things. And I do wonder if it’s because the idea of regeneration is anyone could play and do their version of it.

Nancy Norbeck [01:30:03]:
Well, I, I will admit when I found out that, you know, you guys were bringing back the Brigadier, I was like, oh. You know, and then when I found out who was doing it, I was like, oh, okay, that might work. That might work.

Alfie Shaw [01:30:19]:
Yeah.

Lisa McMullin [01:30:19]:
It’s always difficult, especially if an actor’s died as well, because you don’t want to do anything that might sully the. Their memory or the way that they performed a part or created a part. I think, I think with Harry Sullivan as well, that big finish have done really well in the casting because he plays it just beautifully. Christopher Naylor is just got that, that quality. And again, it’s not, it’s not impersonating anybody. He’s performing it. I always think the people. I don’t understand why people.

Lisa McMullin [01:30:55]:
I kind. I do understand why people would prefer the original actors, but obviously that’s not always possible. Right. Especially if somebody’s deceased. But it’s a character. And I think with other, other plays, other stories, you recast characters over and over again.

Alfie Shaw [01:31:13]:
Well, this is why I was wondering about the regeneration thing because, you know, Star Trek has now three spocks. One of them is hotspot. Star wars has the animated series where loads of other people voice the same characters and all. That’s all canon and everyone seems generally quite happy with all of them. It seems to be quite an interesting, Quite specific. Yeah, Doctor Who or somebody else is playing this person. And maybe it is because it could be. Well, Actually, you know, shoot.

Alfie Shaw [01:31:47]:
He could regenerate into Jacob or, you know, or Jonathan Kali or maybe, but.

Lisa McMullin [01:31:52]:
But with characters. So not the Doctor characters like the Brigadier and Harry and.

Nancy Norbeck [01:31:59]:
Yeah, with the Brigadier, I think with. For me, at least, and I can’t speak for anybody else, just Nicholas Courtney had such a distinctive voice. Yeah. To have someone else come in and try to do that, I was like, how is that going to. Gonna work until. Well, okay. If anybody could do it, Jon Culshaw could do it.

Alfie Shaw [01:32:16]:
Yeah. Oh, Jon.

Lisa McMullin [01:32:17]:
Yeah.

Alfie Shaw [01:32:20]:
It’s an interesting one.

Lisa McMullin [01:32:21]:
And there’s no ego with Jon either, as well. I think that’s always important is that actors come in and they’re not saying, oh, this is how you actually play the part. I’m gonna stamp my thing on it. He comes in with such humility and he wants to pay homage to the.

Alfie Shaw [01:32:37]:
And so. But also so keen in a sort of quiet way. He’s such a massive Doctor Who fan. He’s the only actor who, when I said to him, oh, hi, Jn, I’m a producer. I’m considering, you know, this story what ended up being awol. The short trip, if you’ve heard it, between where he plays the Brigadier and the third Doctor myself. And, you know, Angus has got this idea and he sort of went. He went away and then came back about 20 minutes race went, yes, this sounds like a good idea.

Alfie Shaw [01:33:04]:
Then arranged a meeting off his own back with the writer and myself to discuss it, which I think is the first time any actor has gone. I would like to organize a meeting to discuss the story we’re going to do. I was very confused by it and, you know, put forward some ideas that were used. He’s. He’s a wonder to work with.

Nancy Norbeck [01:33:26]:
Well, I think, you know, the fact that you guys are so respectful of those characters and those actors, I think makes it easier for people to say, okay, you know, it’s not. It’s not ideal. We’d all much rather, you know, have Nicholas Courtney around to do this, but we’re gonna. We’re gonna give it a shot because it’s done from such a place of respect and admiration. So I think that comes through too. And, you know, when you are talking about Jon Culshaw, I’m just thinking, he’s the guy who once called Tom Baker as Tom Baker. I mean, that. That, that is so, so nervily hilarious.

Lisa McMullin [01:34:11]:
Yeah.

Alfie Shaw [01:34:13]:
The danger with all these people who can do impressions, this is. This is. This might get me to a small amount of trouble, but never mind, is when we do the Wild Tracks, at the end of the day, you know, people make making crowd noises and things. Jacob and John both try to get like Trump in the background of alien planets. Boris Johnson and some of them made them. If you listen out quite carefully and these, there’s an alien congress that I think the twelfth Doctor takes Oscar. And if you listen out, there’s definitely Trump and Boris in on that planet.

Nancy Norbeck [01:34:46]:
We’ll have to listen for that now. Even if you’ve heard it already, you’ll have to listen for that. Wow. Well, I feel like I have taken up a good chunk of your time, but this has been so much fun. So thank you so much.

Lisa McMullin [01:35:05]:
Thank you very much.

Nancy Norbeck [01:35:08]:
That’s this week’s episode. Thanks so much to Lisa McMullin and Alfie Shaw, and to you for listening. Please leave a review for this episode. You’ll find a link in your podcast app so it’s really easy and it’ll only take a minute. If you enjoyed our conversation, I hope you’ll share it with a friend. Thank you so much. If this episode resonated with you, or if you’re feeling a little bit less than confident in your creative process right now, join me at The Spark on Substack as we form a community that supports and celebrates each other’s creative courage. It’s free and it’s also where I’ll be adding programs for subscribers and listeners.

Nancy Norbeck [01:35:45]:
The link is in your podcast app, so so sign up today. See you there and see you next week. Follow Your Curiosity is produced by me, Nancy Norbeck, with music by Joseph McDade. If you like Follow Your Curiosity, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to tell your friends. It really helps me reach new listeners.