Bryan McCormack
Born 1966 in Ayr, Scotland. Sees Doctor Who for the first time in 1972, becomes a fan, remains one [mostly] until Peter Capaldi regenerates.
The Sea Devils is as far back as I can remember watching Dr Who, although I might have been watching before that. It was always my favourite show as a kid and I stuck with it up until 2017. After that, it turned into a show I didn’t want to watch anymore. There’s no Daleks in The Sea Devils, no TARDIS, none of the iconography the public associates with the show. Just the Doctor versus the Turtlemen and the Master. So what was the appeal? What got me hooked? Jon Pertwee’s Doctor. Like me, he was an outsider, an individual, he was different. And he was a hero. Who wouldn’t want to be a hero?
Starts performing in 1974 by winning the Scottish Schools Excellence in the Recitation of Burns Poetry competition. Wins again in 1977 & 1981.
All the 1974 winners from Ayrshire schools were invited to take part in an evening “concert” where we would all perform our poems. Mine was called “The Corbie” which is the old Scots word for a crow. That was the night where I discovered two things about myself. One, I was a natural performer who could stand up in front of an audience without fear or intimidation. And Two, I could make people laugh. For an eight year old, that was an amazing discovery, and that was where I first got bitten by “the acting bug”.
Voices first radio commercial in 1982 for Moray Firth Radio, volunteers as a presenter for local Hospital Radio in Inverness.
With the family having moved from Ayrshire to Inverness, I got involved with The Florians, the local AmDram group. Since one of the group was a member of the Pringle family, famous for their knitwear, he introduced me to the local radio station, where I voiced my first commercial at the age of sixteen. That in turn led me to Hospital Radio where I co-hosted the Saturday Night request show. As someone who had always had an ear for accents and mimicry, working in radio helped me develop my vocal skills. Looking back, I was always more of a voice actor than a stage or screen actor, but sometimes you have to learn what you’re not before you can discover who you are…
Joins Cumbernauld Youth Theatre in 1983. In 1984 performs his first devised One Man Show ten days before his 18th birthday. Gains his Equity Card in 1987 for A Christmas Carol with Cumbernauld Theatre Company as an Acting ASM.
The family weren’t in Inverness for very long before we were on the move again, this time to Cumbernauld. After four years of spending so much time there that I was almost an unofficial member of staff, having applied for the RSAMD but failed to be offered a place, which devastated me, the night Robert Robson, the Artistic Director, offered me my Card was the only time I’ve ever been speechless. And who was in the audience the one night I had to go “on” for an ill member of the main cast? None other than Pat Lovett, who became my agent. The old theatre building is closed now, but the memories I made in that place, of the things I did and the people I met, have never left me.
Voices radio commercials for Oxfordshire’s Fox FM, 1990-1992.
By the early Nineties, I had relocated to Oxfordshire to pursue my acting career, which didn’t go very far, hindered, I think, by having not gone to drama school. But I did get work doing more radio commercials, this time for Fox FM, where my producer was Paul Daniels, a weekend DJ at the station, not the magician off the telly. It was about this time that I drifted away from the profession, realising that Talent alone is not enough, you need Timing and Connections too. Over the years that followed, I worked in various jobs where I would almost always find a way to use my performance skills, which would pay off when I eventually moved back to Scotland…
By 1995, it was obvious that the career as an actor that I had dreamed of since I was eight wasn’t going to happen. And so I began thinking about writing as an alternate creative outlet. I had written my own stage shows and helped edit others that had been workshopped, so maybe an author was who I should be, rather than an actor?
By 1995, Dr Who had been off air for six years, and looked like it was never coming back. Since I’d always loved those types of escapist time travel adventure stories, that was the sort of thing I wanted to write, as that was the sort of story I liked to read. I wanted to write something a bit like Dr Who, inspired by my love for Dr Who, but different enough so as not to be accused of simply being derivative. Which meant no TARDIS-like time machine for a start. And so I started buying Writing Magazine and signed up for The Writing School correspondence course, but I never got very far with it, mostly because they wanted to me to write all sorts of other things instead of teaching me how to write a novel. But the seed had been sown…
In time, I came up with the idea for Valentine and Milo, who would be the heroes of what would become The Paradox Club series. When I first thought of it, the series was titled “A Girl Called Valentine” but, although I knew I wanted it to be a time travel fantasy romance, [the term “romantasy” hadn’t been invented yet] I had to work out how the mechanics of how time travel worked in the stories I wanted to write. That’s the main reason why I didn’t write the first book until 2020. But the good ideas are the ones you don’t forget, they keep popping up now and then to remind you that they don’t exist yet…
Becomes a non-fiction author in 2010 when Sell Your Self! is published by Bookshaker.
By 2007, following Dr Who’s triumphant return to the telly two years earlier, I’d become part of the Glasgow Who fan group, and it was there that I met Rintu Basu. He suggested I write a non-fiction book, like he had about NLP, which became “Sell Your Self!”, about acting skills for sales people, the sorts of skills they employ on QVC. Rintu sent off the manuscript for me, and it took Bookshaker [now ReThink Press] three days to say yes, they’d publish it. That kick-started a chain of events that would see me going back into full-time education as a mature student, events that would eventually result in The Paradox Club book series…
Writer, Director & Star of the fan film Doctor Who – Project: Fifty, made while an undergrad student at UWS Ayr. Production lasts two years, from 2012 to 2014, a childhood ambition finally fulfilled over 12 episodes.
1st Class Honours Degree in Contemporary Screen Acting from the University of the West of Scotland in 2014.
Writes The Fandom Menace, awarded Best One Act Play of 2014 by UWS.
Masters Degree With Merit in Playwrighting & Dramaturgy from the University of Glasgow, 2016.
One act play Mrs Mackintosh, written while a postgrad student at UoG, shortlisted for The David MacLennan Award 2016.
Becomes a Self-Published Non-Fiction Author in 2019 with A Fan Film Adventure In Space And Time.
I went to university thinking that I was still an actor, but over time I revised my opinion of myself, thanks to both the writing elements of my Screen Acting course at UWS, and doing Playwrighting at Glasgow. [I didn’t really want to do Playwrighting, I wanted to do TV Fiction at Caledonian, but I didn’t get in, I suspect because I was the wrong gender for the all-female selection panel..]
First, I thought “I am an actor”. Then I changed that to “I’m an actor who can write”, before finally settling on “I’m a writer who can act” as my definition of myself. And since self-publishing, unlike acting, didn’t require the permission of a gatekeeper, what better thing to start with than the Making Of book about the Dr Who fan film I made at university? I then took what I’d learned from all the mistakes I made putting together that first book, to finally do something with that idea I’d had back in 1995…
Becomes a Self-Published Fiction Author in 2020 with his debut novel The Valentine Trap, Book One of The Paradox Club series.
When I realised that 2020 would be twenty-five years since I’d first had the idea for Valentine and Milo, I knew that if I didn’t do something with it now, I never would. And, having never forgotten it, I knew it was too good an idea to let go. And so I wrote what became Book One of The Paradox Club, an epic time travel romantasy series that only took me 25 years to start writing!
As someone once said, a straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting.
If the journey IS the destination, then I’ve finally found my way home…
BRYANMACKBOOKS.COM 