For Deborah Watling

Welcome to ‘The Robots of Lonmar’. This is a special adventure that I wrote after attending the ‘Memorabilia Birmingham’ event in November 2011. That is an occasion I’ll never ever forget! 🙂

‘The Robots of Lonmar’ was born out of inspiration I had from a group photo taken of me with four ‘Doctor Who’ companions – Sarah Sutton, Deborah Watling, Sophie Aldred and Katy Manning. I saw myself as Billy Walker with Nyssa, Victoria, Ace and Jo having a big adventure in time and space.

So I had the inspiration, but how could I turn that into a ‘Doctor Who’ story? Well I had to think about that one a lot and I can tell you it took me some time. But it was worth it in the end, as I enjoyed the experience of creating a ‘Doctor Who’ story featuring five companions on an adventure.

At one point, I was originally going to call this ‘Doctor Who’ story, ‘The Uprising’. I don’t know why I called it that at first, but I guess it had something to do with the five companions getting involved in some political crisis on an alien planet. That was more or less the basis for what my story was about.

At the same time I was developing this story, Big Finish had their own ‘five companions’ story called…‘The Five Companions’ with Nyssa, Ian, Steven, Sara and Polly. This was a special release to Big Finish subscribers and I had it as a free gift within my CD subscription containing ‘Army of Death’.

So I had to make sure that I didn’t copy anything that was in ‘The Five Companions’ when I wrote ‘The Robots of Lonmar’. I listened to ‘The Five Companions’ over the Christmas period in 2011. I enjoyed the story very much. Thankfully it didn’t resemble my initial plot for ‘The Robots of Lonmar’.

I wrote ‘The Robots of Lonmar’ from January to February 2012. I did plenty of research into Ace, Jo and Victoria as well as Nyssa and Billy by re-watching the ‘Doctor Who’ TV stories featuring them as well as listening to Big Finish audio stories that included the audio dramas and ‘Companion Chronicles’.

Writing for Victoria was a challenge, since her TV stories were limited due to them mostly being wiped from the BBC Archives at the time. This was before ‘The Enemy of the World’ and ‘The Web of Fear’ was found in 2013. Thankfully Debbie had done a few Big Finish audios to compensate for that.

I enjoyed writing for Jo as she’s one of my favourites from the ‘Doctor Who’ TV series. It helped that I’d seen Jo in ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ story, ‘Death of the Doctor’. Beforehand, I listened to the Companion Chronicle story, ‘Find and Replace’, which was wonderful in getting to know Jo’s character.

Ace was another exciting challenge for me to write for in ‘The Robots of Lonmar’. I hadn’t read any of the books she featured in from the 1990s and 2000s. But the TV stories and the Big Finish audios were enough for me to get into her character and I only hope I’ve done her justice during this story.

Nyssa and Billy were already in my mind when I wrote them in ‘The Robots of Lonmar’, since I’d previously written for them in ‘The Fifth Doctor by Tim Bradley’ series. I obviously had Billy based on me as a character and Nyssa was already my favourite ‘Doctor Who’ companion as I wrote the story.

I did struggle in trying to figure out who would be the monsters for this ‘Doctor Who’ adventure. I decided not to use Daleks as they featured in ‘The Five Companions’ and I didn’t want to do Cybermen. In the end, I decided to have robots. They’re always good to have in a ‘Doctor Who’ tale.

Of course, this story would never have happened if I didn’t meet Sarah Sutton, Deborah Watling, Sophie Aldred and Katy Manning and have that companions group photo with them. They were lovely ladies when I saw them and it was joy to reflect that in the writing of this ‘Doctor Who’ story.

By the way, I also met Kai Owen, Arthur Darvill, Catrin Stewart and Alice Krige when I attended that ‘Memorabila Birmingham’ convention in November 2011. For the supporting characters, I based the names of them on the four actors’ surnames. I also cast them in the roles for this story’s cast list. 😀

Before posting this story to my blog, I had a dilemma about whether to release this in its scripted form or whether to convert it into prose. This was following the sad death of Deborah Watling in July 2017. In the end, I decided to release it in its scripted form and tribute this tale in Debbie’s memory.

I hope you’ll enjoy ‘The Robots of Lonmar’. It’s a mind-boggling adventure featuring Nyssa, Billy, Jo, Victoria and Ace on an exciting adventure without their Doctors. But you never know, the Second, Third, Fifth and Seventh Doctor may turn up in this story. Would you like to find out? Then read on!

TIM BRADLEY, December 2017

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