What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow

"One Sally Sparrow is quite enough."

Writer: Steven Moffat

Format: Short Story

Released: September 2005

Printed in: Doctor Who Annual 2006

Featuring: Ninth Doctor

Synopsis

Sally Sparrow is a child who is contacted by the Ninth Doctor after he gets stuck at her aunt's party after the TARDIS burps. The Doctor proceeds to write messages under Sally's wallpaper in her room and send her a video containing messages to Sally from Sally's aunt party. 

Verdict

What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow is a magnificent short story to conclude my reading of the 2006 Doctor Who Annual! I honestly couldn’t believe that I hadn’t blogged this one before as I was sure I had read it back around the time I first started Doctor Who Verdict, but after a combination of word searches on the blog and after reading I’m not entirely sure I have! I find that baffling as I’ve known about this story for a very long time and that’s no surprise given that it served as the influence for Blink which is an iconic episode! There was actually a feature in the latest Doctor Who Magazine issue about spinoff media creating television stories as we prepare for the broadcast of The Star Beast, and this was prominent. It’s a delightful adventure. I think there may some prejudice with my rating as I do wonder if I would give it top marks if I read this back when it was released in the lead up to Christmas 2005, but I didn’t even know what Doctor Who was then. The imagery is brilliant throughout and for this kind of story I think the visuals not only help but are crucial. Seeing the writing on the wallpaper does so much instead of just being words and the visual of the photograph from Christmas Eve 1985 is tremendous. It’s quite fun to get a lone outing for the Ninth Doctor. There’s no mention of Rose or Captain Jack as companions so I think we can assume this story is set prior to Rose which is really good and intriguing. I’m not usually a big fan of stories in the first person but I don’t think this story works from any other perspective. We get to learn a lot about Sally Sparrow and expand on her family. She’s only twelve here which is much younger than the Sally the Tenth Doctor would meet, but it’s lovely for the Ninth Doctor to place absolute trust in her to bring him back the TARDIS. I love the use of a VHS player rather than DVDs as we’d see on screen and that really dates the story which I love. Having Sally refer to her relative as her fat Aunt was a bit weird, but the familial relationship was nice. She had her own room and the flowery wallpaper and the tear reminded me a little of my own bedroom at my grandparents’ house. Except mine wasn’t a big tear and certainly didn’t have any writing beneath! Sally’s assumption that there was another Sally in the family that wasn’t talked about was quite humorous but you can’t blame her for thinking that the wallpaper wasn’t actually communicating with her. But that’s the audacity of the script and it works so well. It really is a stellar contribution from Steven Moffat. The pace flows so well and I was a big fan of some of the descriptions he provided like writing your homework on the bus or not believing a writer in book that hairs would stand on end. Everything just felt so relatable which was really impressive. The conversation through the video at the end is lovely and I liked that the woman the Doctor was given her Christmas homework by was an older version of Sally herself! And she’d travel as the Doctor obtained it in Istanbul. Quite the adventure! The paradox humour with the two versions of Sally talking was really fun and a nice way to round things out. Overall, a marvellous story!

Rating: 10/10