Meet the authors: Paul Kirkley

My life as a Hopeless Ming Mong recently came full circle* when, during the New Who team’s Five Doctors commentary, “Clever” Phil Collinson admitted he had once been for a ride in Bessie around the car park of the Cross Gates Arndale Centre. Because it was buying the Radio Times 20th Anniversary Special in the week of The Five Doctors that marked my ascension from casual viewer who didn’t know his Aridius from his elbow to fully-paid up footsoldier of the TARDIS army.

(To give you an idea of how much of a transition this was, I will admit to you here that, like many an impressionable young spod at the dawn of the 1980s, I forsook the dense explorations of Tachyonics and Charged Vacuum Embointments of Sir Tom's final season entirely for the flashy disco sci-fi of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century; a mere four years later, I was the sort of Who Fan who would happily re-read every issue of Celestial Toyroom 10 times, even though it was mostly just full of people I’d never heard of writing stuff like “Hi, not much to report from the Reference Department this month, I'm afraid”. All or nothing – that’s me).

But I digress. The point is I bought that Radio Times special from McColls newsagents in the Cross Gates Arndale Centre (that’s in Leeds 15, for any Sat Nav-equipped fans thinking of embarking on a Collinson Pilgrimage), and it was this low-rent shopping Valhalla that went on to feed my Who addiction for the best part of a decade – snapping up Uncle Terrance’s Target novelisations (a word I’m convinced doesn’t exist outside fandom, incidentally) from Stringers the Bookseller and, at the height of my madness, even paying £25 for a Day of the Daleks VHS from Woolworths.

So here I am, 25 years down the line, having stuck with Who through thick and thin (or Colin and Sylvester, as I like to call them) without any practical hope of a cure on the horizon. But it’s fine, it’s cool, because us Croggy boys have made good: Phil Collinson went on to produce Doctor Who, and I went on to become one of the Tachyon TV team. So who’s the real clever one, huh Phil?

In real life, I’m a newspaper features editor – so if these blogs are total shit, I really have no excuse – and you might recognise my name from SFX Magazine (but only if you’re the sort of person who cares about who wrote stuff… oh, what am I saying, you’re Who fans!). I now live in the frankly lovely city of Cambridge where my frankly lovely wife Rachel is due to give birth to our first child in two months’ time. Which is beautiful and life-changing and exciting and all that but (and I know you’re way ahead of me here) yes, it does look set to coincide with the season four finale. But that’s okay: I’ve told Rachel I can video it and watch it later (the birth, that is – I got burned once by the Buck Rogers thing, and I won't be making that mistake again).

*This is ironic as, of course, I totally missed Full Circle.