So, Neil Gaiman has been on a book tour for his new adult novel, "The Ocean at the End of the Lane"; if you're reading this you've probably heard about it by now. Consequently he's been doing lots of entertaining and odd things in the UK: attending a road-sign dedication ceremony in Portsmouth (he was born near there, they have a lane not far from the ocean, the council thought it'd be nice), preparing for an appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, that sort of thing. (Steven Moffat is going to Edinburgh as well. To do stand-up comedy.)

Anyway, Gaiman's going to be on BBC Radio 6 this Friday at one o'clock to talk about the book, which ought to be insightful and informative and suchlike. But also, Stuart Maconie is going to be the first BBC interviewer to talk to Gaiman since the Coming of the Capaldi. Which means that Maconie is more-or-less required by law to ask about our programme, the stories Gaiman wrote for it, and thoughts on the new hire, especially with Gaiman's publicly expressed opinions on the topic. (The last time they interviewed Gaiman it was back in June, and he barely had time to hint that he preferred "The Doctor's Wife" to "Nightmare in Silver" before Stephen Smith was asking for a one-liner about Doctor Who and sex. He had quite a good answer about how it should be "properly repressed", but hopefully we'll have better questions this time.)

Edit: well, you can't win them all. As it turned out, Maconie asked lots of intelligent literary questions instead. Gaiman worked in a Doctor Who reference anyway, calling his new book Fortunately, the Milk... a "wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey" story for kids, so call it half a point.