9 JUNE
BLINK
The Weeping Angels are coming for Sally Sparrow. Marooned in 1969 without his TARDIS, all the Doctor can do is issue the warning: “Don’t blink.”
By ALAN BARNES
Touched by an Angel
The rapacious production schedule of the relaunched Doctor Who required two episodes to be recorded more or less simultaneously – meaning that one of them could feature the Doctor and his main companion only minimally. With Russell T Davies having authored The Long Game in 2005 and Love and Monsters in 2006, Steven Moffat volunteered to devise a so-called ‘Doctor-lite’ episode for 2007… drawing elements from a timebending short story he’d originally written for Panini’s Doctor Who Annual 2006.
In What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow (above), the eponymous 12-year-old heroine recalled finding a mysterious message from the Ninth Doctor hidden beneath the wallpaper at her aunt’s house… then a VHS tape from 1985 in which the Doctor asked Sally to help him retrieve his TARDIS from her present. It didn’t, however, feature any monsters – so Moffat found inspiration in the playground game ‘Statues’, or ‘Grandmother’s Footsteps’, plus his recollection of a figure he’d glimpsed in the overgrown graveyard of an abandoned church while on holiday in Ickworth, Suffolk. Through the chained-up gates, he told interviewer Simon Guerrier on stage at the Fairford Festival of Fiction in June 2017, he’d seen “all these leaning gravestones and one lamenting, weeping angel. I thought that was really creepy and strange…” (Postscript: when Moffat returned to the same graveyard a few years later, long after Blink had gone out – the angel was gone.)