"I chose him because I felt I had the most room to manoeuvre"

Books It's August, finally, and so the author who's taken on the challenge of writing the Eighth Doctor e-short Puffin thingy has been revealed. Let's unpick the press release...

TimeRiders author Alex Scarrow has penned the eighth adventure in our exclusive series of short Doctor Who ebooks.

I've heard of TimeRiders. Oh no, hold on, I've heard of Time Riders, the 1991 television series directed by Michael Winterbottom. So no, as with most of the other authors in this range, I've never heard of him or his books. But that's due to my ignorance.  Probably.

Spore, featuring Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor is set in a small town in the Nevada desert:

"Spore" Pretty direct title and actually in-keeping with many of the Eighth Doctor's previous adventures which have tended towards the single word, things like Endgame, Kursaal and Neverland. "Small town in the Nevada desert" - so it's set in the US just like the TV movie. Again, we'll reserve judgement.

An alien pathogen has reduced the entire population to a seething mass of black slime. When the Eighth Doctor arrives, he realises this latest threat to humanity is horrifyingly familiar – it is a virus which almost annihilated his entire race, the Time Lords...

Which all sounds very The X-Files, very Fringe, very much like people assumed Doctor Who would be like if the TV movie had been a goer. But hold on, what about the other alien virus which actually did wipe out Gallifrey in the Big Finish Gallifrey spin-offs? Well ...

Alex Scarrow commented: “I am squeeing like an over-sugared toddler at the thought of being part of this project. Doctor Who is an export this country can be proud of. We OWN time travel. My small part in this project was to breathe life back into the least known, Eighth Doctor, played by Paul McGann. I chose him because I felt I had the most room to manoeuvre, to explore a lesser known Doctor and add flesh to his character. In my story entitled Spore, we're getting a particularly grisly tale of an intelligent virus that liquifies and absorbs any creature it infects. All in all... quite gross - liquified people an' all.”

Oh hello question mark the size of my Eighth Doctor collection. We won't really know until he puts out the inevitable YouTube hostage statement if he's aware of the character's illustrious history, but just a couple of months on from the release of Dark Eyes, it's still bizarre seeing an author tasked with writing a project featuring the character saying things like "I chose him because I felt I had the most room to manoeuvre" and "explore a lesser known Doctor and add flesh to his character" as though McGann himself hasn't been playing it for the past decade. It is true that he is the "least known", the connoisseur's choice, but nevertheless ...

... we'll see what happens.  It could be amazing or it could be another A Big Hand For The Doctor.  At this point I'm assuming we're going to get a generic Doctor in the TV movie costume travelling alone that has nothing to do with what's been established in the past couple of decades.  Sigh.

Updated! 07/08/2013  The Guardian have uploaded their customary extract and actually, I've read worse versions of the Eighth Doctor, there is a TV Movie reference and the description of his costume is on the nose, the external details are fine.  But it's unfair to pass judgement on just a page or two...