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It all seems so long ago now. After a couple of disappointing attempts at making Doctor Who videos, I started thinking about making audio stories instead. It was the end of the eighties and I was already a great fan of the Audio Visuals series. Whilst listening to Endurance I decided I would give it a go. Now I am not a musician and at that time I knew next to nothing about how recordings were made. So I did some research and eventually bought a four track Tascam Portastudio, which has stood me in good stead over the years. I still use it for some recordings and the rest of the time it now works as a microphone pre-amp for my PC. At the same time I was visiting music shops I was also approaching my friends in my local group to see if they were interesting in acting. I've been very lucky that several people in that group are excellent performers and not only that but over the years they've been excellent script readers as well with plenty of ideas about how to improve the scripts.

The story draws from several sources. Homelessness had risen to the top of the news agenda and anyone who walked around Manchester couldn't help but notice the many beggars on its streets. I noticed there was a lot of prejudice against them even though they clearly needed help. In fact there was prejudice against the poor in general caused in part by the Thatcher government and I wanted to address that. Not so long ago I had read Consider Phelbus by Iain M Banks and had already thought that the sequence involving a gambling game which used volunteers as living stakes would be the good basis for a Who story. Once I had started writing it, other influences included an interview with Clive Barker about pain and pleasure and vague ideas about what I enjoyed about Doctor Who itself. The first draft was not bad but the Doctor came out as a rather bland straight man to everyone else, merely asking questions. So I tried to bring in a literary element to his personality. Another problem was that he talked to himself far too much, so I added an extra tramp called Silus to help with the exposition. The original version also involved a battle across a time distorted London but others felt that was one climax too many.

The main recording session took place in Adrian Hudson's living room with some follow up recordings in Joe Bink's bedroom. They went fairly smoothly considering that only one or two of the cast had acted before. Paul Worth felt that the villain, Rand Gerling, was too camp and kept trying to tone down his lines but I wanted him to be a bit flamboyant, like a Bond foe. Adrian made an excellent Doctor whilst Joe and Lawrence impressed me with their personable readings. I borrowed two sound effects records, including the Doctor Who one, made up other effects back home and copied the TARDIS effect from Slipback. James Brailsford kindly let me use some of his music which he had written for his music course and his dark instrumentals added enormously to finished production.

For the theme tune I turned to a friend of my dad, Malcolm Woods, who was a bit of a composer in his spare time. He provided an upbeat theme which suggested the famous Who music without copying it, something which the Audio Visuals had done and I was keen to copy the idea.

Although it sounds crude in places and we are all much younger, I still feel pretty happy about our debut story. Its got a drive to it and some of the dialogue is quite snappy if I do say so myself!