A Doctor Who Random Story Generator.

TV Back in mists of time which look somewhat like the 90s, author Paul Magrs produced one of my favourite scenes in all of Doctor Who in his novel The Scarlett Empress.

 For reasons suitably too complex to explain here, the Doctor is trapped by a flock of birds who will only be satiated if he tells them stories and so influenced by cultural historian Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Fairy Tale, he offers them a set of typical items which appear in the kinds of adventures he has which they can then use to make up their own.

 I may have mentioned this before.

Yesterday, Paul expanded the idea on his blog and has produced one of the best piece of writing about Doctor Who I've ever seen, laying out, in some detail, the processes one must go through in order to produce a decent Doctor Who adventure with all of the necessary elements.

 To an extent it's a structure for making good drama in general, but it nicely captures just how mad and eccentric and beautiful Doctor Who can be at its very best and worst and how you really can do practically anything with it but that it's also still possible to make a complete hash of the thing also if you don't know what you're doing:

"The Doctor is captured by the enemy, doesn’t even try to escape, generally larks about until they show him their doomsday device which, depending up the relative sophistication of the story, can be either a machine that looks like a teasmade or a long, impossible explanation of the whole season’s accumulated storylines. The Doctor will stare in outrage and slight bafflement either way."

See what I mean? It's brilliant. The NOTE ON VILLAINS is especially superb.