Day 20 - My Favourite / Least Favourite Non-Fiction Doctor Who ...

I haven't really read much in terms of non-fiction Who but I have read a couple of gems. The two that spring to mind are "Regeneration" (the expansive story behind the TV Movie and other concepts explored at the time) and "The Writer's Tale" (behind the scenes of the RTD era with RTD emailing Ben Cook about everything and anything Who).

I adore both books. "Regeneration" goes into amazing depth and detail, presenting pretty much every detail surrounding the TV Movie, and it's a great book because it details the stuff we never, thankfully, saw. The ideas and the storylines banded about were terrible, but this book is like a Bible of rich stories and it's a fascinating in-sight to the most isolated era of Doctor Who.

But then I equally love "The Writer's Tale" because it's, again, so detailed and interesting. I also love it because it's behind the scenes of Who I've grown up with, live on TV. I've watched the RTD era unfold and then been able to read all about it just a couple of months later. Ben Cook also helps the book massively, giving RTD someone to bounce off and share ideas with. And it's not just full of emails either; there are draft script extracts, doodles of scenes by RTD, character profiles, dropped ideas, the works. And it even explores RTD himself, as a writer, and the pressures and stress he had to deal with. And it's terribly fascinating to me, someone who wants to become a writer in the future.So they're both my favourites.

(A *huge* mention has to go to the "About Time" books by Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles too; they provide really insightful commentaries and details about every story, and I found it really quite hard to sell them on. I'll probably seek this series back out again in the future because they were so good.)

I don't have a least favourite non-fiction book, really. Those, plus DWM, are the only books I've read that feature behind the scenes tidbits etc. So I'll end this post here.

I'd really like a Moffat version of "The Writer's Tale", actually, in the future, but I won't hold out hope.

Source: http://tardismanual.blogspot.com/2011/07/day-20-my-favourite-least-favourite-non.html

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