This is Who We Are -- Wait. Worry. -- Who Cares?

Millennialism in The Keeper of Traken

"The original idea I had, was uh -- 

-- and this, I Think, was 1980 --

--but it was based on the notion that 

every thousand years, there are 

HUGE disturbances in 

The Social and Political 

universe, as we know it -- 

If you go back to The Time of Christ, that was a huge disturbance; back a thousand years beyond that, to The Fall of The Hittite Empire and everything that flowed from that; and more recently in our time where Islam and Christianity were in conflict and The Dark Ages and The Vikings and all that time of turmoil and stress, so it seemed to have a very respectable precedent --

And so all of these stories need something solid to hook into, and that was the hook for The Keeper of Traken. 

"At the heart of this ancient civilisation, which had worked out a way in which they could remain in harmonious union as -- I don't know whether it was Chris Bidmead's line, or my own but he says, um -- "A thousand years of people, just being terribly nice to each other --" and it's true, they were very nice to each other except, at the end of the thousand years, they started being not so nice to each other --"

Byrne's original concept featured at its centre a villain called Mogan, and the Trakenite people were divided into two factions -- 

"When I first submitted the idea, it had something that was more like The Japanese shogunate, rather than the  Shakespearean type-model that we later developed and it had two contending groups. 

The two groups were the scientific Grays and the spiritual Blacks with The Keeper in overall control 

"While the position of Keeper was one that controlled a great deal of power. it was one where The Ego-Itself, had to be buried in order for it to be successful, and therefore the choice of who was going to be Keeper was crucial and only the very best would be elevated to this -- 

If issues of personal ambition and power-seeking ever crept into the equation, the results would be catastrophic and of course it so happened, purely by accident that these elements of personal ambition and things, became mixed up in The Transition from one Keeper to The Next, in my story"