Rite of Transference is a story with some very strange origins. It started with a conversation in my favourite café, Mocha in Fishergate, Preston, which has some very nice light jazz music, good coffee and very nice decorations. One of those decorations was a tall vase full of rushes and strings of lights that leant a nice ambience. Looking at it, I planned how it could become a non-humanoid alien in a story. I made them good people, the S-Delte-Riousalons, hosts of an intergalactic conference. But they would be a reminder that not all aliens look like us.

Christopher’s proposal that Jackie might receive the Rite of Transference, he sacrificing one of his Time Lord lives to give her longer life and health, and the chance to bear him children even though in Earth years she is approaching her late 40s and getting too old for it was kicking around in my head for a while. The Doctor gave up his lives to Rose by a different method, by the grace of Rassilon. To perform the rite is dangerous. The Doctor is reluctant to risk Christopher OR Jackie’s lives and in fact I cannot think of any way he would do that merely as a whim. The way it happened, as a necessary way of saving Jackie’s life after she was badly hurt by the intergalactic terrorists was the only possible way it could happen.

Time Lord rites are something I have introduced in all my stories. There was always the idea that they had a lot of them. But we rarely saw them on the TV series. I invented the Rite of Mori in which a dying Time Lord can give his soul, his knowledge and skills to another, younger, Time Lord, the Rite of Transference which his lives are transferred, and the Rite of Progression, compulsory at the age of 1,000, as well as Transcension, when a Time Lord actually becomes a Time Lord. I have hinted at many others as well. One day I might write about a few more. On TV we were recently shown in The Sounds of Drums one very sinister Time Lord ritual that involves taking eight year old Gallifreyan children to look into infinity to determine their fitness to become Time Lords. They can be a cruel lot!