Doctor Who: The Giggle

“The first time she’d met the Doctor, she’d told him to stop. He’d stood there, surrounded by fire and the screams of giant spiders, and back then he’d looked like he could go on burning for ever. Now he was a cheap tealight.”

“That was the thing about the TARDIS. It had a drag queen’s sense of timekeeping, always making a big entrance, just a bit late.”

Yes, thought Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, maybe I am a Nepo Baby. She’d grown up watching her father save the world. Well, she would have done if he’d ever been around. But he’d been too busy. Saving the world. It had been a strange childhood. Spent waiting for glimpses of him. That tired smile on his face after a long day. Patiently listening to her excited babble about finger painting while he’d been – well, she’d read the files. Gel guards. Axons. Devil Goblins from Neptune.

Once he was down to pick her up from school. Late, of course. She’d been standing alone at the gates, bored as ever, and glancing around to make sure no one saw him roar up in a military jeep. Instead, it had been a yellow clown car driven by a wizard. ‘You should never get in cars with strangers,’ he’d told her as she’d got in. ‘But Alistair’s a bit busy.’ Funny, hearing her father’s name. She pulled the face. She’d spent her whole life being told her father was a bit busy.

They’d roared off down the road, the man next to her smiling and talking and somehow passing her a bag of sweets while holding his hat on his head. ‘Little bit of a problem with giant cockroaches and Didcot power station,’ the man had laughed. ‘Can’t be bothered with that. So I said I’d drop you off at Ballet Class. Which I absolutely can, of course.’ A pause, and a friendly wickedness lit up his features. ‘Or … we could go dancing with Anna Pavlova?’ And that had been the first time Kate Lethbridge-Stewart had met the Doctor. Now she’d inherited the family firm. Holding the world together with duct tape and the most brilliant people she could find. Just in case, this one time, the Doctor didn’t turn up and do what he did best.

Save. The. World.

Did you know you can only fold the same piece of paper in half seven times otherwise the universe breaks? Well, on the eighth fold, those lovely theatre seats were sucked in, along with the floorboards and the joists.

On the ninth fold, all those spiffy corridors the Doctor and Donna were running through – they got pulled in too, in a splinter of doors and a tearing of carpet and a shattering of light bulbs. Ah, well, guess I’d never have got round to changing them.

On the tenth fold, the Toyshop went – dolls and trains and trucks and skittles and dice all squeezed down from four dimensions to one, my puppets only having time for one final wave before they were gone.