On New Levels of Fannishness

I had to write up a product description for something Doctor Who-ish — Creation is doing some Who shotglasses with the TARDIS and the series logo.

I needed something catchy. Something the Doctor would drink.

It came to me.

I typed it up, giggling all the way.

Something along the lines of “If you’re going to put away a Gallifreyan Tickler with the Doctor, you’ll want these shotglasses yadda yadda yadda.”

A Gallifreyan Tickler? What’s that, you say?

There’s a Doctor Who fan audio from BTR Productions entitled “The Monopoly Pub Crawl of Doom” — the Doctor and his two companions land in London on Christmas Eve and get involved in a pub crawl. At one point the Doctor, very sloshed, asks for a Gallifreyan Tickler.

Yeah, it’s obscure. The number of people who would recognize the reference probably numbers under a thousand. The number of people who would recognize the reference and see the product listing? Could probably count that on a single hand.

But don’t think I didn’t enjoy writing that up. 😉

The text came back from Purchasing this afternoon, and it’s gone to Layout. The Gallifreyan Tickler, it’s going in the catalog. 🙂

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

6 thoughts on “On New Levels of Fannishness

  1. I’m impressed. You managed to listen to more than two episodes of BTR Productions!

    (You are already the top Google hit for “Gallifreyan tickler”.

  2. I think I’ve listened to at least ten or twelve of BTR’s Who audios.

    All of the Christmas stuff, the Teletubbies story, and I started on the “main” line, but somewhere around “Tragical History Tour” I bogged down.

    Their production design is very good, but the repetoire casting hurts if you’re listening in quick succession.

    One of these days, I’ll finish listening to the series.

  3. I think I made it through three or four. It was Matthew Kopelke’s English accent that killed it for me. I could do better, and mine’s crap!

  4. I’m glad you enjoyed my first and only foray into writing for Dr Who, and I look forward to seeing the Gallifreyan Tickler in print!

  5. Thanks to Allyn for using a BTR reference in his publishing work – am really pleased it was of help to him!

    As for Steve Mollmann’s criticism of my voice, well, certainly in our first 2-3 stories I was desperately trying to put on an English accent. But from ‘Magical History Tour’ onwards, I basically dropped the attempt, and went to using my own natural accent.

    My performance certainly improved from that story onwards, as I focused more of my energy into giving a half-decent performance, as opposed to a half-decent accent!

    Hopefully, both Allyn and Steve are able to plug away at more of our stories, as I really think there’s some great material there (and amazingly, a lot of our audios forshadowed things RTD would do with the new series!).

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