Why Patrick Ness is perfect for Class

It started around two years or so ago, with a refusal: Patrick Ness was asked to write an episode of Doctor Who, but declined, on the basis that he was writing a lot for other people, and wanted to devote more time to his own projects. Fair enough, as I’m sure all would agree. Not long after, though, the BBC re-approached Ness with a new pitch: they were planning a school-based spinoff of Doctor Who, and wanted to know if he’d be interested in running it. The answer, as you can imagine, was a resounding yes.

Which is, in fact, rather fantastic, because Patrick Ness is the perfect candidate for this series. He’s got a long and established history of writing for YA properties, and can be considered one of the foremost authors within the genre – his Chaos Walking trilogy is quite highly regarded, as is his novel A Monster Calls, a movie adaptation of which, starring Liam Neeson and Felicity Jones, will be released later this year. However, it’s one of his more recent novels that makes it really clear how apt a choice Ness was to spearhead this spinoff, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Class shared more than a few similarities with said book…

I’m indulging in a little bit of clickbait with this one, admittedly – you can’t see which book it is unless you click the link! Still, though, I imagine it’d be easy enough to guess for anyone who’s reasonably familiar with Ness’ works.

(With a degree of hindsight, having now seen Class, I think it could have done with being a little bit more like The Rest of Us Just Live Here, and actually maybe a bit more like Release as well.)

(Oh, that undoes my clickbait. Whoops.)

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