After I’d submitted the final draft of The Albino’s Dancer to Telos, I was thinking about anything else I could pitch to them now I had a relationship. The Time Hunter series was already cancelled, so it couldn’t be another of those, and Telos were more known for their factual books than their fiction. For reasons that are hard to understand, I decided that I would pitch them a history of UK Hip Hop: I had been a fan of it since my teens, and I knew there was a gap in the market for such a book. I think I knew it was unlikely they’d take it, but I felt a strong pressure to capitalise on the fact that I could pitch something straight to Telos without actually having anything suitable. Unsurprisingly, they turned me down, but the idea of a book about UK Hip Hop stayed with me, and indeed is something I’d still like to do.
Years later, just before I wrote my Black Archive on The Talons of Weng-Chiang, I sat down to rewatch The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and realised that the story served as a pretty strong allegory for 80s Doctor Who. At the time, I made a snarky comment in a WhatsApp chat and moved on, but in the back of my mind the idea that I’d thought of something I hadn’t seen anyone else say stuck. While I was writing my first Black Archive, the idea came back to me, and along with it the realisation that the rapping Ringmaster made The Greatest Show in the Galaxy pretty much the only story in Doctor Who’s long history where you could legitimately talk about the history of rap in the UK. It wasn’t quite enough for a whole Black Archive, but it was a start.