Philip Purser-Hallard
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purserhallard.com
Philip Purser-Hallard
@purserhallard.com
1.2K followers 200 following 3.1K posts
I write stuff -- most recently Sherlock Holmes: The Monster of the Mere. Posting about writing, TV, SF, Doctor Who, politics, language, crosswords, things I like, things I'm interested in, things. He/him.
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purserhallard.com
January 10, 2026 at 11:05 PM
purserhallard.com
Details:
THE BLACK ARCHIVE: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FROM AUTHORS OF COLOUR AND DISABLED AUTHORS The Black Archive is a series of monographs about individual Doctor Who stories, published by Obverse Books. The editors recently ran a general call for open submissions, which we’re now following up with a specific call for book proposals from authors of colour and disabled authors. We’re proud of the books we’ve published, and of the diversity of their authors in many respects, but we’re aware that our contributors to date have been skewed heavily, though not exclusively, towards being white and non-disabled. We’d like to change that if we can. We want to expand the diversity of our authors in general, and will consider proposals for any available story, from anyone meeting the criteria of being disabled or a person of colour. We’ll give particular consideration to proposals from authors whose heritage or impairments might give them specific insight into a Doctor Who story – for instance, by a wheelchair-using author on Genesis of the Daleks, an author of Indian or Pakistani heritage on Demons of the Punjab, a Deaf author on The Well, a Nigerian author on The Story & the Engine, etc. We have already published or commissioned Black Archives on many Doctor Who stories, and these are no longer available for submissions. A full list of available stories can be found here [https://obversebooks.co.uk/blackarchivesubmissions/available-black-archive-stories/] on the Obverse website. Note: If we can do anything to make the following process more accessible for you, please contact us as soon as possible on blackarchivesubs@obversebooks.co.uk. What We’ll Need to See We’d like you to send to send us, by the end of June 2026, a single Microsoft Word document containing the following: * A detailed chapter breakdown showing the structure of your proposed Black Archive title. This isn’t just the contents page, but must include a précis of each chapter. * A long sample of the book. This will need to be 8,000 to 10,000 words long and should not include the overview or synopsis of the story. (Alternatively, you may substitute an unpublished piece of similar length, subject matter and style.) We ask for a sample of this length because experience has shown that sustained writing at the length of a Black Archive is not a skill that can be measured on the basis of a single short chapter. If you’re not sure what the above should look like, you should read some of the published Black Archive titles on similar stories. The projected length of the final book (excluding synopsis, bibliography etc.) should be not less than 20,000 words and not more than 40,000. The Process Please email submissions to blackarchivesubs@obversebooks.co.uk by 30 June 2026, with ‘Black Archive submission: ’ and the name of your chosen story in the subject line. Your covering email should mention any particular qualifications you may have to cover this story. Please include a single Microsoft Word document containing your detailed chapter breakdown and your long sample. Participants are limited to one submission during this time. We will consider your submission and get back to you by the end of September 2026. We’ll pick submissions based on their merits and in relation to the overall balance of the range. Based on prior experience, we anticipate that many submissions will be rejected. We’ll inform you of our decision, but we won’t be able to give specific feedback or enter into further correspondence. If you are commissioned, we will set a deadline for completion in 2027 or 2028. It may be some time after that before your title is published. Commissioned titles will be announced in due course as part of our standard publication schedule. We’ll discuss the writing, editing and publication process in more detail with participants whose submissions are successful.
January 2, 2026 at 11:56 AM
purserhallard.com
Mars will never be free until the sands run red with Earther blood.
December 29, 2025 at 4:05 PM
purserhallard.com
Manic Piscine Dream Girl.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Salt in The War Between the Land and the Sea.
December 21, 2025 at 10:53 AM
purserhallard.com
Ouch. Difficult to say "Our previous CEO was protecting a sexual predator" more explicitly than this.

www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...
The decision to sever ties came after HarperCollins’ former chief executive, Charlie Redmayne, suddenly stepped down in October and was replaced on an interim basis by Kate Elton. In a statement to the Guardian, a HarperCollins spokesperson said: “After careful consideration, and under the leadership of its new CEO, HarperCollins UK has decided not to publish any new titles by David Walliams.”
December 20, 2025 at 7:46 AM
purserhallard.com
This year's Christmas story is called "Guided Mistletoe", and I'm about to start signing 80 of them, to go in our (rather late) Christmas cards. If you're on our list, you should have one soon. Thanks to local printers Out of Hand Print for their help getting the copies printed.

www.outofhand.co.uk
Me, a haggard-looking white man at a messy desk, signing pleasing green printed booklets with "Guided Mistletoe" on the cover in mock-runic script.
December 18, 2025 at 2:44 PM
purserhallard.com
Withnail and Marwood in the cafe. Marwoed says, "We are not drunks. We are multimillionaires."
December 16, 2025 at 1:23 PM
purserhallard.com
Glad to see the new edit of The Sea Devils still passes the Bechdel Test.
Third Officer Blythe brings Jo Grant a plate of sandwiches, sayding "Only cheese, I'm afraid. The best the steward could do."
December 16, 2025 at 11:09 AM
purserhallard.com
Ah, "middle-class Oxfordshire". An entire county where all the cleaners, security guards, shop staff, porters, bus drivers and binmen are exactly as posh as the Warden of All Souls, like one of those planets in Star Trek where everyone's Irish.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Josh Simons, the MP for Makerfield, said: “This decision throws mud in the face of my working-class constituents in Bickershaw, Wigan, but also of people across the country suffering from toxic, illegal dumps that don’t have the privilege of living in middle class Oxfordshire. I am so angry about it.”
December 12, 2025 at 4:03 PM
purserhallard.com
So is the idea now that the Sea Devils are one (of three?) species in a collective civilisation of marine sapients, or are the Big Fish meant to be related to the Silurians somehow? They certainly don't look much like ichthyosaurs.
A Piscimorpha grandis and a Homospondyl erectus, supposedly, aka a Big Fish and a Sea Devil. Salt, the "Homo aqua" ambassador, played by the very splendid Gugu Mbatha-Raw.
December 12, 2025 at 9:05 AM
purserhallard.com
I adore this episode from the life of St Columba, found in Amy Jeffs' book Saints. Experimental research theology worthy of Terry Pratchett.
[...] In his early medieval Life by Adomnan, Columba agrees to bless a slaughter-knife for one of his brethren while preoccupied with copying out a text. Without looking up from his parchment, Columba points his quill at the knife and makes the sign of the cross. The brother goes out and tries to use the knife to kill a bullock, but it will not pierce its skin. Upon discovering that the knife will not now cut any flesh at all, the monks melt it down and coat the monastery's sharp tools in the sacred metal, rendering them harmless to all living things. [...] The cover of Saints: Legends of Heroes, Humans and Magic by Amy Jeffs.
December 11, 2025 at 7:57 PM
purserhallard.com
The really alarming thing is that both The Handmaid's Tale and Children of Men posited the pressures created by a catastrophic reduction in human fertility as the driving force behind their dystopias. That hasn't happened, yet here we are.
Headline from the Guardian website reading "Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale has become 'more and more plausible'". Bluesky post, quoting another post that in turn quotes (with images) Home office posts describing restrictive treatment of immigrants. The earlier post reads "this is really grim". The quote post reads "Again I am reminded that Children of Men is set in 2027".
December 7, 2025 at 1:45 PM
purserhallard.com
Given that Babylon 5 borrowed the "open gunports" backstory from Frontier in Space and applied it wholesale to the Earth-Minbari war, it can bardly be a coincidence that there's also a Centauri ambassador with six tentacular genitalia. I'm wondering what else B5 took from Pertwee-era Doctor Who.
The ambassador from Alpha Centauri to Peladon in the Doctor Who episode The Curse of Peladon (1972). They look, as Doctor Who fans have occasionally noted, like a giant willy decked about with six smaller willies. Wearing a cloak. Londo Mollari, the Centauri ambassador to Babylon 5, in the operating theatre in MedLab following his cardiac arrest in The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari (1998), with his surgical gown open to reveal four of his six tentacular genitalia.
November 30, 2025 at 11:30 PM
purserhallard.com
Install a life-size Krynoid sculpture.
The Krynoid in the 1976 Doctor Who story The Seeds of Doom, a gigantic tentacular vegetable monster, draped over most of a highly taxable mansion.
November 27, 2025 at 4:19 PM
purserhallard.com
OK, they've erratumed it now.
This article was amended on 25 November 2025 to remove an incorrect description of Kenneth Clark as being a Tory politician.
November 25, 2025 at 9:28 AM
purserhallard.com
Got it. No erratum though, which is a bit naughty.
(Also, it no longer makes sense. "Plus ça change"? When did you last see a TV presenter in a trilby?)
The first, less-close-to-the-bone Civilisation aired in AD1969. An equally un-self-aware era when it was totally fine for a Tory politician in trilby and tie (Kenneth Clark) to chart western culture’s triumph over the barbarians. (Some may say: plus ça change.) Next, in 2018, came its well-intentioned successor fronted by Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga. Which, like a weak emperor, was trying to be everything to everyone and thus, not unlike ancient Rome’s Honorius, suffered mixed reviews and plunging ratings. Now the sumptuous threequel strides into the arena, all fire, war, disease, disaster and slick Netflix-era dramatic re-enactments. It also comes, somewhat aptly, at a time of deep existential crisis within the BBC itself. Which in less ancient times was the instrument of another empire that fell … The first, less-close-to-the-bone Civilisation aired in AD1969. An equally un-self-aware era when it was totally fine for a man in trilby and tie (Kenneth Clark) to chart western culture’s triumph over the barbarians. (Some may say: plus ça change.) Next, in 2018, came its well-intentioned successor fronted by Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga. Which, like a weak emperor, was trying to be everything to everyone and thus, not unlike ancient Rome’s Honorius, suffered mixed reviews and plunging ratings. Now the sumptuous threequel strides into the arena, all fire, war, disease, disaster and slick Netflix-era dramatic re-enactments. It also comes, somewhat aptly, at a time of deep existential crisis within the BBC itself. Which in less ancient times was the instrument of another empire that fell …
November 25, 2025 at 8:16 AM
purserhallard.com
A movie that takes place where you're from.
Emily Lloyd doing her best to look vivacious on a depressing Worthing seafront in Wish You Were Here. There's a seagull flying past.
November 23, 2025 at 8:35 PM
purserhallard.com
In The Story & the Engine, the Doctor refutes the Barber's claim to be Anansi, Dionysus, Sága, Bastet and Loki with personal memories of the first four. He leaves out Loki: a hybrid trickster, liar and shapeshifter, normally male but sometimes female, who lives among gods but isn't one of them. Hmm.
The Barber (Ariyon Bakare) in The Story & the Engine. Projected image of Anansi in The Story & the Engine. Projected image of Sága in The Story & the Engine. The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) in The Story & the Engine.
November 22, 2025 at 4:53 PM
purserhallard.com
Good God. How can this not be a parody?
"I would take a bullet for you,” the Politician said. He always said that. “Please don’t say that,” I said. I always said that. From his mouth the bullet theoretical launched the bullet possible. I did not like to think about it. About the armed man at his speech. Or the armed man who broke into his home. Or the armed men he paid to guard him from armed men who sought to harm him while the federal government denied his pleas for protection from the security agency whose modern protocols were carved by the same bullets that cut boughs from his family tree and cut the track of the American experiment.
November 17, 2025 at 8:18 PM
purserhallard.com
Based solely on what they say and do onscreen, Ruby and Belinda seem to be the first long-term female companions to be exclusively opposite-sex-oriented since Amy.

(And even Amy wasn't impervious to her time-travelling self in "Space" / "Time". So possibly the first since the first RTD era.)
November 14, 2025 at 11:00 PM
purserhallard.com
Repost with an iconic fictional band (if you feel like it)
Text from the BBC TV series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, reading: NOISE LEVELS DISASTER AREA DISASTER AREA, A PLUTONIUM ROCK GAND FROM THE GAGRALACKA MIND ZONES ARE GENERALLY [Nothing beside remains.]
November 12, 2025 at 6:55 AM
purserhallard.com
www.theguardian.com/media/2025/n...
Text reads "Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, is expected to resign after a former adviser to the corporation accused it of “serious and systemic” bias in its coverage of issues including Donald Trump, Gaza and trans rights." The Anakin and Padme meme. 1. Anakin is saying the text in the previous image. 2. Padme says "You mean a bias in favour of Trump and against Gaza and trans rights, right?" 3. Anakin is silent. 4. Padme looks concerned and repeats, "Right?"
November 9, 2025 at 6:25 PM
purserhallard.com
I guess it could just be that both the other attempts to revive the Sea Devils since their original story have been terrible.
A Sea Devil in Warriors of the Deep (1984). On the whole, rather less sexy and fishlike. A Sea Devil in Legend of the Sea Devils (2022). Doesn't do it for me at all, frankly.
November 5, 2025 at 11:18 AM
purserhallard.com
I'm not seeing much interest on here in The War Between the Land and the Sea. Is this because Doctor Who fandom has turned on RTD like a scurry of rabid chipmunks, or because Doctor Who spinoffs are never very popular and are probably a bit of a bad idea? Or both?
Three Sea Devils, I guess, from The War Between the Land and the Sea. Although the middle one looks more like a mildly sexy humanoid fish.
November 5, 2025 at 11:15 AM
purserhallard.com
From December next year we should start to see the commissions from this year's open subs process coming through, covering the whole range of Doctor Who from Season 1 to Season 1.
William Hartnell in Doctor Who season 1 (1963-64). Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson in Doctor Who season 1 (2024).
November 4, 2025 at 1:07 PM