Iris Wildthyme is a fictional character created by writer Paul Magrs, who has appeared in short stories, novels and audio dramas from numerous publishers. She is best known from spin-off media based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who, where she is sometimes depicted as a renegade Time Lady.
Her stories are in the New Wave mold, characterised by nonlinear, sometimes stream of consciousness narrative, intertextual references to the rest of Doctor Who and popular culture, and themes of unreliable narration. She has a playful, mischievous personality, delighting in baiting the Doctor and getting into trouble.
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A character named Iris Wildthyme first appears in one of Magrs's non-genre novels, Marked for Life. 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.
| Doctor Who universe character | |
|---|---|
| Iris Wildthyme | |
| Affiliated | None |
| Species | Time Lord? |
| Home planet | Gallifrey? |
| Home era | Rassilon Era |
| First appearance | Old Flames |
| Last appearance | Ongoing |
| Portrayed by | Katy Manning (voice) |
Iris's first Doctor Who-connected 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 Routemaster double-decker bus (the No. 22 to Putney Common), which is, in reality, her TARDIS.
Iris made her first full-length novel appearance in The Scarlet Empress, and went on to appear in several more short stories and novels in the BBC Books range, the most recent being Mad Dogs and Englishmen in 2002. In that year Iris started appearing as an occasional crossover character in audio plays by Big Finish Productions, where she is voiced by Katy Manning, who had previously portrayed Jo Grant, a companion of the Third Doctor, in the early 1970s; resultant from the casting of Manning in the role, imagery of the character used by Big Finish and, later, Obverse Books on packaging and covers now depicted Manning's likeness.
Iris has since been the subject of a Big Finish short story collection, Wildthyme on Top, edited by Magrs, and two audio plays, Wildthyme at Large and The Devil in Ms Wildthyme. A second series of four Iris Wildthyme CDs was released in February 2009. Each of these releases is intended as a pastiche of a decade of televised Doctor Who, from the 1960s through to the 1990s. They are entitled The Sound of Fear, Land of Wonder, The Two Irises and The Panda Invasion. A further adventure, The Claws of Santa was released at Christmas 2009.
In most of her solo Big Finish appearances Iris is accompanied by her companion Tom (who first appeared in Verdigris and is played on audio by Ortis Deley), her 10 inch tall sentient, stuffed Panda (played by David Benson) or both.
Iris has appeared in several short stories (by Magrs and others) published in non-licensed, charity Doctor Who story anthologies. Several of these stories are archived at the Welcome to Wildthyme website.
A short story anthology, Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus was published in May 2009 by Obverse Books.[1][2][3] A follow-up anthology, The Panda Book of Horror, was published in December 2009. This was followed in May 2010 by a collection made up of four novelettes titled Miss Wildthyme and Friends Investigate and further short story collections Iris: Abroad in December 2010 and Wildthyme in Purple in November 2011.
A full-length novel by Magrs featuring Iris and Panda, Enter Wildthyme, was published by Snowbooks in 2011.
Iris claims to have been raised by a House of Aunts (as opposed to Cousins) in the mountains of southern Gallifrey, 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), 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).
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. 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.
Her TARDIS is a double-decker red London bus, the number 22 to Putney Common. 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, and there are hints that Iris is aware of her status as a fictional character. 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. 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.
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