Block Transfer Computation appears in the Fourth Doctor's final story Logopolis, and he clearly knows a bit about it then.

The food machine turns in The Daleks and The Space Museum in the Hartnell era.

I mention these, not just as continuity references for the sake of it but  to point out that, even disregarding the fact he can travel to anywhere in creation at any point in time, the Doctor has pretty much everything he could desire potentially on tap.

Maargan is an anagram of something.

the name Sanctogull is a play on the idea of the Holy Fool.

p164 The Randomiser's mention tells us we're either at the very back end of season 16, the very front of Season 18, or somewhere in the middle.  I personally think the unspecified incarnation of Romana here behaves most like the Season 17 one played by Lalla Ward and a couple of references Paul popped in to Paul Beardsley and Jonathon Morris' stories earlier in the book pretty much set that in stone.

The Doctor's gesture comes out of something I seem to recall Doctor Who author Jonathan Morris once mentioned somewhere as the key to writing the Fourth Doctor. You have to first write the scene as you imagine it, and then rewrite it as you imagine Tom Baker would have performed it, adding business, rewriting the dialogue, putting bizarre stresses on lines so the reading goes against the writer's intentions and so on.  There's a fair bit of this in here- taking my inner Tom for a walk so to speak.

K-9 waggles his ears a lot, it is after all one of the few things the prop could actually do.  I put it down here to his rather affected and vain personality.

The 9 times out of 10 line and the Doctor's inappropriate bellowing are both examples of my inner Tom taking over and surprising me.

I suspect this shield once belonged to Perseus. Season 17 did a bit of this, featuring the Doctor with items that once belonged to both Moses and Theseus at the start of The Creature From the Pit, and given that season gives us our third and fourth takes on the Minotaur in Who terms, I thought it'd be nice for my prose Season 17 to give us our second Who take on Medusa...

The Saint Houllier schism, well, I think the man's been unfairly criticised, others don't.  I don't see the argument  resolving in a hurry.

Initially, the crown sang Beach Boys numbers, specifically it had been taught the whole of Pet Sounds, knew all the vocal parts to Good Vibrations and sang God Only Knows in a quiet lull later.  Paul reckoned this was a bit outside the Doctor and Romana's cultural range and suggested I replace them, the genius that is Simon Forward suggested Gilbert and Sullivan and I made Ruddigore my new Pet Sounds!

Venusian power ballads are a rather obvious play on the Venusian lullaby so beloved of the Third Doctor.  My inner Tom would have probably rewritten this line if he'd been given it, but my inner Lalla was told by inner production unit manager John Nathan-Turner that this was a fun little reference that the fans would like, and inner script editor Douglas Adams agreed, although he did argue that the idea of a power ballad wasn't really going to make masses of sense to my inner 1979 TV audience.  Some of them later wrote in to my inner production office saying they didn't really mind because the story was really for a much smaller audience of Doctor Who fans to read twenty five years later.  As you can see decision making in imaginary television can sometimes be quite involved.

p165 My inner Tom unexpectedly added the idea in this second draft that it had been the Doctor who'd engineered the Sanctogull situation he exploits in this story.  I was surprised and delighted to take up his idea.  Of course the addition resulted in a change in viewpoint character (I'd written the piece with a narrator who didn't have access to the Doctor's thoughts and then shoehorned in a bunch of his thoughts later!) which I didn't spot at first.  Thankfully, Ian Farrington was on hand at Big Finish to point it out and I was able to offer a couple of ways to keep the material without a glaring jump! 

Have old Blinovitch spinning in his cradle that would.

I liked this line enough to have stopped my inner Tom rewriting it. Blinovitch is the Doctor Who expert on temporal paradoxes so it's quite a fitting little gag.

Time screens.

This aside is mainly here to suggest the Doctor knows the Time Lords can spy on him, and is a shameless attempt to justify a peculiar moment in the 1965 Christmas episode of Doctor Who, The Feast of Steven in naturalistic terms.  Shameful really.

The time screens, often seen in the series, are named here by me after the fantastic magazine put together in the 80s by a group of TV enthusiasts in South Yorkshire. As a lad, I used to attend their meetings in the Howard's Hotel opposite Sheffield train station and wonder at their in-depth knowledge of Adam Adamant Lives!  Happy times.

the trials 

It appears to be an absolute no-no to mess with time in this way, unless of course the Time Lords themselves decide to do it.  This peculiarity seems to have rather annoyed top Doctor Who scribe Robert Holmes.

'Merry Christmas.' was at one point 'Merry Otherstide', a Galifreyan holiday much like Christmas mentioned it the Virgin Doctor Who novels, but I changed it because it felt wrong for a Season 17 Romana to say and I worried that it would be in poor taste to suggest that the Gallifreyan Other and Christ could be interchangeable, particularly as the Doctor is in some way a reincarnation of the Other...

The  Zero Room turns up in the first Peter Davison story as an area for tranquil recuperation.

The Doctor there claims not to know why it smells of roses, he may have forgotten of course, possibly deliberately...

The rose garden  is probably the one we see the First Doctor in at the beginning of The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors, incidentally.

The invasion of Oadby tomorrow.  

I lived in Leicester when Season 17 was on screen, so for me that year of Who is inextricably linked to the city.  I also like the idea of the Doctor occasionally foiling the invasion of somewhere quite small.  Not all alien aggressors can be up to London at their first go can they?

figgy pudding.  

K-9 first sings 'We Wish You A Merry Christmas' in a sketch for a BBC in-house Christmas show called White Powder Christmas which was put together by the VT department to amuse other BBC staff.  His replacement K-9 Mark 3 does it again in his own spin off show K-9 and Company (and probably to a smaller audience). To confuse matters further though if this shortest of shorts is set in Season 17, he sings it with a noticeable different voice this time....

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