'The shadow of my past and of your future.'
Representative of Doctor Who at its most experimental, narratively and visually, Warriors’ Gate
(1981) was the rich by-product of a producer seeking to modernise the
series for the 1980s, a radio writer and novelist who had never written
for television, and a film director with one television drama to his
credit.
Examining television authorship in the 1980s, and using archive
research and new interviews, this Black Archive traces the development
of writer Stephen Gallagher’s scripts and their onscreen realisation by
producer John Nathan-Turner, script editor Christopher Bidmead, and
director Paul Joyce.
Similarly, it explores the story’s complex blend of absurd
tragicomedy, quantum theory, randomness and entropy, within the context
of British New Wave SF, the philosophy of science, modernist theatre,
film and television, German Romantic painting, pop video, and the
development of electronic video effects. Many ‘authors’ contributed to
the transmitted version of Warriors’ Gate and the book also considers
whether it can be claimed as the work of a single author given the
collaborative nature of its troubled production.
