everything’s renewed and revitalised.

Books Justin Richards has been a writer in and editor of the Doctor Who spin-off range of novels for some years. Here he talks honestly about the process of tearing the main story arcs and the quality of his own books:

"I think the ones that work best are those first few books where the Doctor is trapped on earth, not knowing who he really is. Especially as the character and his situation are such a contrast to the epic scale and events of The Ancestor Cell. Really what i was trying to do was to make it all rather more personal, and to get away from the mass of continuity and narrative baggage that had built up in the books over the years. It’s no one’s fault that this happens – it just does. And as soon as we ‘reset’ everything, we started building it up again! Typically, on TV, a regeneration has a similar effect – everything’s renewed and revitalised. Finding a way to do that in the novels without being able – or allowed – to regenerate the Doctor was a challenge. And in The Burning, I got to write the first ever Doctor Who story. Sort of. How great is that?!"

The Burning certainly achieved that and a lot more. I'm slightly concerned about what he means when he says that future past Doctor novels "will happen soon - though perhaps not in the way that people expect".

What we expect is two or three hundred pages with a beginning, middle and end about familiar characters. Admittedly there is the usual range issue in terms of delineating them with nu-Who books and where to put them in the book shop and how to pitch them in terms of content but these aren't insurmountable.

It's just a shame they can't at least go about reprinting the Virgin and BBC Books from the nineties and later perhaps in special editions of linking Doctor/Companion groups in chronological order, perhaps by classic season. Those old novels are about the only classic material that isn't being resurrected.