Iris Wildthyme

Iris Wildthyme first appears in one of Magrs's non-genre novels, Marked for Life,[4] as a lesbian novelist who has lived for far longer than a normal lifespan.[5] At the end of the novel, Iris Wildthyme seems to die and then become a baby in a scene reminiscent of regeneration. The infant Iris appears in later books by Magrs taking place in the same Phoenix Court setting, and an apparently adult version re-appears in the story "Hospitality:, in the collection Iris: Abroad.

Iris's first Doctor Who appearance is in the short story "Old Flames", where she meets the Fourth Doctor and Sarah. The Doctor already knows Iris as an "old friend", and she is seen to be travelling in a 20th-century London AEC Routemaster double-decker bus (the route 22 to Putney Common), which is, in reality, her TARDIS.[6][7]

The character was described as "a studied affront" to existing Doctor Who texts[8] and "an ethical challenge" to some of the series' "main inconsistencies".[9] In 2011, SFX called Iris Wildthyme one of the 'Top 5 Spinoff Companions' and said 'her adventures (with the Doctor, and in her own line of books) are a joy'.[10]

Iris was featured at length in The Scarlet Empress[11] and The Blue Angel,[12] and went on to appear in several more short stories and novels in the BBC Books range, most recently Mad Dogs and Englishmen in 2002.[7][13][14]

Since then the character has been the subject of a number of short story anthologies, edited by Magrs and others, published by Obverse Books and one by Big Finish Productions,[15] and two novels published by Snowbooks.[16][17]

In 2001, Philip Purser-Hallard submitted a proposal for a novel, Iris Wildthyme in the City of the Saved, which would have seen Iris in a hedonistic artificial world at the end of time where all people are resurrected and made immortal. It was rejected as an Iris Wildthyme novel range was considered unviable at the time. Purser-Hallard reused elements of the story in 2002's The Book of the War (in which Iris appears as an unnamed traveller) and 2004's Of the City of the Saved....[18]

In 2002, the character started appearing as an occasional crossover character in audio plays by Big Finish Productions, where she is voiced by Katy Manning.[19][20] Following the casting of Manning in the role, imagery of the character used by Big Finish (and, later, Obverse Books) on packaging and covers now depicts Manning's likeness.[21]

The character has appeared as the main character in five "seasons" of audio dramas, released respectively in 2005, 2009, 2012, 2013 and 2015,[21] along with a 2009 Christmas special.[22][23] Each release of the second season is a pastiche of a decade of televised Doctor Who, from the 1960s through to the 1990s. The 2012 release Iris Rides Out is a crossover with the out-of-copyright character Carnacki the Ghost-Finder.[24]

Although in some of her early appearances (including Verdigris and Wildthyme on Top) Iris is accompanied by her companion Tom (played on audio by Ortis Deley), her usual foil in her Big Finish, Obverse Books and Snowbooks appearances is Panda, a 10-inch-tall sentient, stuffed toy (played on audio by David Benson).[25]

Iris claims to have been raised by a House of Aunts (as opposed to Cousins), in the mountains of southern Gallifrey,[26] and also that she has erased all of her records from the Matrix, explaining why the Time Lords know nothing about her. She is known to have survived the destruction of Gallifrey and the apparent retroactive wiping of the Time Lords from history that took place at the end of the novel The Ancestor Cell.

Iris regenerates at the end of The Scarlet Empress (into a form resembling Jane Fonda in Barbarella),[6][27] and is known to have at least six other incarnations. One of these, Bianca (voiced by Maria McErlane), appears in the Big Finish Productions audio play The Wormery and is similar to the Doctor's villainous Valeyard incarnation. Iris has also apparently worked for UNIT as a Scientific Advisor, and for the Ministry of Incursions and Ontological Wonders (MIAOW).[27]

There is no indication of what relationship the character has with the new television series. In "The End of the World" (2005), the Doctor states that his homeworld had been destroyed and that he is the last of the Time Lords.

Attempting to pin down the exact details of Iris's history is problematic because such details are not only kept deliberately vague by Magrs and other writers, but also because the accounts of her adventures may not be reliable, in whole or in part.[27][28] For example, some of her claimed exploits bear a remarkable similarity to those of the Doctor's, and some have suggested that it is the Doctor's adventures that are plagiarised from Iris's life, rather than the other way around.[27]

Her TARDIS is a double-decker red London bus, the number 22 to Putney Common.[6] In contrast with other TARDISes, hers is slightly smaller on the inside, a fact attributed to the fact that her TARDIS was dying when she found it. She also claims to have stolen the TARDIS, and to be on the run from her "mysterious superiors".

Iris has also argued that her adventures are more "true" than the Doctor's recollections because she writes them in her diaries while the Doctor does not. Magrs has explicitly stated that Iris "knows — of course she knows — that she's a very deliberate parody of Doctor Who. That's why she loves him so."[27] In postmodernist style, Iris is portrayed as playfully aware that she is a character in a television programme (or a series of books and audio dramas spun off from a television programme).[29] Even more so than the Doctor's TARDIS, Iris's bus is a device for moving her between fictional genres and even texts. In the context of the Doctor Who universe, all this may be explained by Iris's claim in the novel The Blue Angel that she is from the Obverse, a surreal parallel universe with radically different physical laws.[26][28] More recently in both Big Finish audios and Obverse Books short stories, she has claimed to come from The Clockworks, a planet in the Obverse, ruled over by a race not unlike the Time Lords.[26]

• Big Finish Productions, publishers of Iris Wildthyme audio plays
• Obverse Books, publishers of Iris Wildthyme short story collections
• Snowbooks, publishers of Iris Wildthyme novels
• Iris Wildthyme on Tardis Data Core, an external wiki