The Pirates...!

...in an adventure with Terrance Dicks.

Now then. Many of you will be going to see The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists this weekend, maybe because David Tennant plays Morph-Darwin, maybe because it's hard not to go and see a film with credits that include the words "Pirate King - Brian Blessed". You may be aware that to mark its release, the Guardian has been giving away copies of Gideon Defoe's original let's-pretend-it's-for-children novel. And this has piqued my interest, primarily because of the description of the Pirate Captain on the second page:

"He was all teeth and curls, but with a pleasant open face."

If you don't understand why this is funny, then you probably won't be reading this blog anyway. But just as notable is the plot, which sees the villain abducting young women from the streets of Victorian London and using a diabolical machine to drain their life-energy, before dumping their shrivelled husks in the Thames. (This part of the story is apparently absent from the film, we assume for aesthetic reasons rather than for fear of a plagiarism case.)

However, we also note that the author seemed to appear out of nowhere when he began the Pirates! series in 2004, and that he's written nothing else apart from a lesser-known work about animals having sex. It seems odd, somehow, that a man so clearly born to fandom might have failed to leave footprints in our world. Then there's that name: Gideon Defoe, the ring a pseudonym that isn't trying particularly hard to sound credible. We know that Doctor Who authors get up to this sort of mischief all the time. Stephen Cole used to have a whole gang of imaginary friends helping him to churn out the EDAs, while both Matt Jones and Gareth Roberts wrote for Virgin Publishing's gay porn line under false names, the latter even naming one of his books after episode two of "The Keys of Marinus".

Are there fan-shenanigans - shefanigans, if you will - going on below-decks? We should be told, probably.