Advent day 2: Annuals!





A big part of my reading at the very start of the year was all about continuing my marathon read of twenty years’ worth of Dr Who Annuals, as published by World Distributors between the mid-Sixties and the mid-Eighties. What a wonderful, nonsensical, psychedelic odyssey that was! I’d take a different Annual with me each day into town and sit in the cafes of Manchester trying to figure out what each and every one of those stories was actually about. I realized how all those Annuals had somehow stayed in my mind, and were an indelible part of not only what I think of as Dr Who, but also what I think about narrative and how to tell a story… which was slightly scary.

One of the best things I discovered – as I turned all this reading and research into a book – was that the Annuals were created right here, in Manchester, in a street in the very centre of the city, very close to where I was reading them every day during last winter.

(The book that came from all of this – ‘The Annual Years’ – is available from obversebooks.co.uk)




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