INTERVIEW BY MARK WRIGHT
Pat Mills has long since acquired legendary status as one of the guiding lights of British comics. In 1977 he created and edited 2000AD, still known 40 years later as ‘the galaxy’s greatest comic’ and home of Judge Dredd. Then in 1979, he and co-writer (and Dredd co-creator) John Wagner wrote the very first comic strips to grace the pages of Doctor Who Weekly, including the classic The Iron Legion.
Around the same time, the duo attempted to step from the printed page to television Doctor Who with an imaginative adventure called The Song of the Space Whale. The idea was destined to become one of the series’ mythical ‘lost stories’ and would be three decades in the making…
“John Wagner and myself submitted a story to [Doctor Who script editor] Anthony Read which got turned down”, recalls Pat from his home in Spain. “And then along came Doctor Who Weekly and we got rooted in that direction.” But this didn’t stop Pat and John from having a second crack at the TV series. “We thought up this space whale story and I mentioned it to my then-wife, Angela. She thought it was great and that we should submit it to the BBC, which we did. It was read by the script department, who referred it to Christopher H Bidmead who had just taken over as script editor on Doctor Who. Chris responded very, very positively to the story.”