Behind The Sofa Archive.

TV In February 2005, I received an invite from Tachyon TV's Neil Perryman, perhaps best known now for his Adventures with the Wife in Space, to join "Waiting for Christopher", a group weblog dedicated to Doctor Who or more specifically the revival which was due to begin within a few months.

With little idea of what this would lead to I accepted and a couple of weeks later posted my first, slightly weird missive on the subject of the 60s story, still missing, Marco Polo and then persisted to post slight weird missives there for the next five years, a total, as far as I can tell of five hundred and eighteen posts.

Within a few months of show's debut it was renamed Behind The Sofa and became pretty well known around fan circles and beyond.  We were even mentioned in The Guardian's The Guide one Saturday.   The comments sections were certainly buoyant (an understatement but it will do) and a few people even mentioned reading the site to me offline.

Eventually, by 2010, most of the writers had drifted away to their own projects and although a few of us were still plugging away, it was obvious the site wasn't what it had been so Neil decided to end it with the final set of review of that year's Christmas special.  It's still there if you want to have a look.  As ever I think everyone else's writing is better than mine.

Since then I've always thought it would be a good idea to absorb my writing from there into this blog, but with so much text and slight embarrassment about a lot of the earlier stuff, I never did get around to.  But lately I've needed a project so decided to have a go and over the past few weeks, I've copy and pasted every single one of those five hundred and eighteen posts to here.

My Behind The Sofa archive is here, every review of Doctor Who and Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures I posted there across those five or six years, along with a couple of hundred news stories and other bits and bobs because I didn't know when to stop.  A lot of broken links because the web's ephemeral.  I've substituted some of the good stuff, ignored the rest.

The process of copying them over has reminded me of just how much writing I did then as the television franchise constituted three series on top of which I was review various radio broadcasts and the Eighth Doctor novels and various other freebies were being sent to the blog for the purpose of producing promotional writing.

Some of it seems pretty good.  A lot of it seems pretty bad.  There's also a lot to be embarrassed about as my opinion of various things has changed over the years or I've said something rather rash about the work of someone I'm now friendly with online, well ok, Twitter.  During these blog transfer computations, I've posted links to the odd thing on there and well, you can imagine.  Eep.

But I'm pleased that there's now another copy of all this somewhere else, especially as this blog reaches its fifteenth birthday, I'd like it to reflect my life online.  You will have noticed I've also absorbed in The Hamlet Weblog too.  Heardsaid will be next I expect, once I finally work out how to just copy over just my contributions.  Oh and completing Off The Telly and I don't even know where to begin with that.  Blimey.

And thank you to Neil for inviting me in the first place.