The Land of Fiction

None of this is real.

I'm hoping you know that, I really do, as many of those in here with me don't. I am a fictional character, played on TV by Paul McGann. I look like Paul McGann, I have his voice and mannerisms, but I am not Paul McGann.

This is a Land of Fiction, a place where fictional characters end up when they are no longer of any use. They bide their time, in various retirement homes until the day they may be called into action again. Some go away and come back looking like a totally different person - it happened to my friend John Watson a little while ago. He was young and dashing and then when he came back he was about a foot shorter and wearing modern clothes. He went again this morning; he'll probably come back looking different again.

So I am not real, and yet I am the Eighth Doctor. I have two hearts, knowledge of Time Travel and Daleks, I fought the Master in San Francisco on December 31st 1999, I kissed Grace, I ran barefoot in the park, I saved the Earth. The experiences are as real to me as yours are to you. I think, therefore I am.

Yet there are several other versions of me here too! In the fiction I change, I become a new person, and now, when I change, the old version turns up here too. Most cling onto the image that they're real, although some suspect. It's a huge thing to accept that you are fictional, that your every thought and utterance was written and performed by someone else. I think Doctor Seven knew and he ended up in the nutty wing, in a strait jacket, with only an hour a day's freedom to play his spoons under armed guard.

Why am I different? I think it's because I was only Doctor Who for a brief time. I did one episode, a pilot for a proposed revival by the Americans (that's why I like tea so much, because that's what our cousins believe we are like). The show wasn't picked up and so that was it, here I was. I was the one hit wonder, the George Lazenby of Doctor Who. I wasn't even in the first half hour! I think because my character was so new, so untouched, that there was more room for me to develop here. I had fewer foibles written into my character, less backstory. As an almost blank slate I have more free will than the others. Or maybe it's because I'm half human on my mother's side.

So I am not real, yet I exist, and a life's a life, even if it is fictional. We're well looked after, by pleasant nursing staff, although I can look after myself. My room resembles my TARDIS control room from when I was the Doctor. I have an endless supply of jelly babies...things could be far worse.

Yet I'm uneasy. There's a change afoot. One characteristic my Doctor has is a nose for these things: something's wrong. I heard a rumour this week that Dr Legg, the man who manages our home, has mysteriously moved on. No one has seen his replacement yet, but we can hear things, things behind closed doors. And this morning the nurses were different. I mean they looked the same, but they weren't the same. They don't smile anymore and their faces are strangely shiny...

THE DOCTOR