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Discuss this article by @M_Kresal here
I remember Clements writing that the girl from Slough was based on a real incident, when he was talking to a girl of Chinese descent and someone came over to ask LOUDLY AND SLOWLY how she was enjoying the country. "I'm from Colchester."
Great article on one of my favourite Big Finish audios.
I discovered this during the time I was getting into both Classic Who and alternate history so it really fell at the intersection of those twin obsessions.
It's a great point you make about the weight with which events are mentioned gets over the severity of them. It's what distinguishes them from rattling off a list of references to classic storylines as "fanwank". When Brimmicombe-Wood mentions the lake in London it carries just as much gravity as when the Master mentions several real-life atrocities when confronting the Doctor. Those lines about Mao ("When I knew him he was a librarian!") and the one you mention about Pol Pot really stay with you long after listening.
Did not know about the original brief, and with that in mind it makes what we wound up getting all the better. It's one of the darker tales in Doctor Who no matter what the continuity and that's without going needlessly grimdark; it's success in that regard probably lies somewhere in what you mention as very believably fitting into our own world history as much as the fictitious one of the programme.
Looking forward to your review of Full Fathom Five, which is another favourite from the Unbound range.
It occurred to me after I wrote the review that another reason why they dropped "Silurians overrunning the world" was because that idea had been not once but twice before in both prose and comics. Ironically, due to the lack of communication between Virgin Books and the DWM team, at basically the same time! Even so, I think you're right that that deciding to get away from that was 100% the right decision and it produced a far better story out of it.