Last week I mentioned that while I was on a break, I was reading a new book called Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale. And this is quite a large book to say the least and for $75 you expect some value for money. I haven’t counted the number of pages as yet but being about halfway, through guessing at around 600 the mark.

Now as the title may suggest, this book is about the TV series Doctor Who. But if you are thinking this book is strictly for the fans, then you'd probably be very wrong. You see, the book is a combination of e-mail messages by the producer the book and Russell T Davies, who up until the end of series 4 was the senior writer and producer of the series. Interspersed with the dialogue, are sidebars of further explanations of scenarios, thoughts from actors in the series, and other material that is sideways to the commentary between the two main players.

From a production point of view, what I find is extremely valuable insight into the way that Russell T Davies thinks about how to put a series together and going further into the book may give even more insight, but it strongly comes through he thinks of a central theme for a series. This theme is then segmented down into episodes that in themselves have a central theme. So, you end up with a series where all the episodes are intertwined, but are standalone stories in their own right. SO at the end of a series, whilst you have enjoyed 12 separate stories, they are woven together in eposide 13 to wrap up a whole bunch of loose ends you may not even have been aware of!

Another good example of this technique is Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Before he died, he very cleverly tied together all of the Foundation books and the Robot series - which off memory about 13 books in total - into one grand finale that tied everything across all these books together.

What I am suggesting is that if anybody is/has a budding writer, and of course even better if you're a fan of Doctor Who, then this book. I consider a very valuable tool to get an insight into how a major writer in today's world thinks and puts together his thoughts for others to interpret the storyline into a TV series. It also gives them a look into past projects Russell T was/is involved with, such as Queer As Folk, Bob and Rose, and of course the parallel series to Doctor Who, Torchwood.

At the very least, it is a great present for anybody who is a Doctor Who nut. And there are a lot of us about.