Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-45314928-20200606025128/@comment-6032121-20200606140743

C very much has a beginning, middle and end, at least as much as a lot of Brief Encounter short stories.

"The Monk is listening to some music; then he gets frustrated with the bad sound; he tries to change it; fails egregiously; in the end the proud Time Lord gives up and decides to go listen to some LPs instead."

- A pretty good story.

It's a narrative, and a funny one.

You could argue it fails Rule 1 if it's a deleted scene from a wider story that isn't meant to be read on its own. But on its own merits — in terms of beginning, middle and end — it can easily be its own story, it's just a matter of whether Harness intended it that way.

T:OFF REL also doesn't say anything about promotion and Twitter accounts. If this wasn't "officially released" because it was released on Twitter with little-to-no-promotion, then neither was Incoming Message! In truth, T:OFF REL has nothing to do with this. It's meant to rule out early leaks like what happened with some episodes of Series 8, and also early preview copies available to select individuals. If it was made available to the public by someone with rights to do so, that's Rule 3 covered.

So the questions that remain are really just a variant on Rule 1 (did the novelisation ever exist?), and Rule 2.

But it's not as easy as putting a Scratchman header on How The Monk Got His Habit (short story), since that page is about the story (or "story") about Roger and his hi-fi system, it's not actually describing the full unproduced novelisation. It'd need a complete rewrite, and a rename, if we were to make it about the unproduced novelisation.