When Heritage first came out, one of the most gushing reviews was from a man called Robert Smith? (the question mark is part of his name), who was at the time one of the most respected online reviewers of Doctor Who things. In 2008, a little while after Time and Relative Dissertations in Space had been published, Robert and another Who acquaintance Graeme Burk got in touch to say that they were compiling a series of books for Mad Norwegian Press. The intention was that they would be a mixture of articles from old Doctor Who fanzines that deserved a wider audience and new articles written to discuss aspects of the show and its merchandise in a modern context.
The series was Time, Unincorporated, and was intended to have four volumes: the first would be the collected fanzine writing of Lance Parkin, the second and third focusing on the TV series and then a fourth that explored the wider world of merchandise and spin-offs. Knowing that I’d written for fanzines when I was younger, they asked if I had anything that might be suitable. I told him that as most of my factual writing about Doctor Who had been done online, the only things I had were the articles I’d written for the Doctor Who Appreciation Society’s Celestial Toyroom: at that point, they had all been online for over a decade, but if there were any he wanted he was welcome to them.
Robert and Graeme agreed that as they’d been widely available, my articles probably didn’t fit the bill. So they asked if I had any ideas that I might pitch for one of the original articles instead.