Review: Doctor Who: Books: Time and Spaces

By Yee Jee Tso

Miwk, out May 2016

A very different book about the filming of the 1996 Doctor Who TV Movie…

Whatever else you may think about the Fox TV Movie that introduced Paul McGann’s Doctor to the world, it was filmed with a large amount of style – and considerably more money than the BBC had been spending on the series in its later years. In many ways both creatively and production-wise, it turned out to be a halfway house between the classic and the new series, although much less attention has been paid to it over the years than perhaps it deserves.

To add to Gary Russell’s long out of print book, and the articles that DWM is now running periodically comes this small-scale guide from Yee Jee Tso, who played Chang Lee in the TV Movie. I had the pleasure of MC-ing one of the first conventions that he attended as a guest, and it was clear then that he had an understanding of what made fans tick, and how to interest them. His book, therefore, isn’t a “on Monday, we went downtown and shot in the rain, and I had three gorgeous sticks of sushi” type memoir that focuses on his role – it’s a photographic guide to Vancouver, with memories of the filming, alongside production documents, and comparisons of the scenes as they are now and they were then. There are plenty of shots and angles that I’ve not seen before as well as reminiscences from Sylvester McCoy and Daphne Ashbrook that add considerably to the overall feel of the book as a high quality souvenir of the TV movie.

Verdict: If you’re planning a visit to Vancouver and want to follow in the footsteps of the movie cast, then this will be invaluable; to everyone else, it’s a glossy and beautifully put together guide to a pivotal part of Doctor Who history. 9/10

Paul Simpson