Black Sheep Black Sheep was the company that produced all of the BBC ' s novel covers throughout the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures and the BBC Past Doctor Adventures ranges . They also produced covers for a majority of the BBC ' s later BBC Video releases . According to Mark Clapham , BBC Books had informed him that " under no circumstances was any author ever , ever allowed to contribute ideas to the cover . " However , other authors such as Craig Hinton successfully submitted mock - covers to Black Sheep , such as his mock cover for " Synthespians™ " , whose initial print run had to be pulped . This was down to Black Sheep ' s carelessness with images and copyright . Hinton had worked with a fan James Gent who had mocked up a cover for Black Sheep to reference . Based on Hinton ' s idea of " I asked for Spearhead from Space meets Dynasty " Gent used actual Dynasty images for the mockup . However Black Sheep interpreted this directly and created an cover using images from Dynasty again , breaching several different copyrights . After this another cover was approved , but after the first print run had to be pulped due to the mirrored female Autons . The BBC ' s position on authors submitting ideas appeared to have developed as the range did as in 2001 according to Jon de Burgh Miller for " Dying in the Sun " he was asked by Sarah Lavelle ( who was copy editing the book ) at the BBC what he wanted on the cover . He sent her a package containing a sketch of what the cover should be in pencils and crayons , along with a text description of what he was aiming for , plus a couple of photos from LA to illustrate the street scene . Lavelle passed them on to Black Sheep who followed the suggestion closely , but , as de Burgh Miller describes " with so little creativity that the original cover was legendarily awful ( it had a Muppet on the front ) " He recalled he " wrote back and said it wasn ' t good enough " and then he " did a detailed breakdown of what I wanted changed , and the next draft that came back was the final one - I loved it , it was perfect . They ' d even scanned a palm tree from one of my holiday snaps . " Designs . For much of the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures novels the covers had a central circular motif beginning with the first novel in the series " The Eight Doctors " novel which had the circular Seal of Rassilon on the cover . With this design motif in mind for his first novel " Dominion " author Nick Walters " suggested to Black Sheep the image of “ a wormhole in the midst of a Swedish forest ” " . Criticism . Black Sheep have in the past been criticised for their lack of quality control and attention to detail , by authors and artists alike . Some observers such as freelance artist Daryl Joyce have observed that many of the covers showed " Bad choice of colours and photos ( with inconsistant resolution ) " , whilst other covers displayed a lack of common sense of knowledge of the story such as the VHS release of " The Tenth Planet " which had trees on the cover , despite the story taking place in Antarctica . Authors ' opinions . Several authors have in the past expressed their opinions and criticisims of Black Sheep ' s work , many did so on the now defunct and inaccessible GallifreyOne forums . Craig Hinton . In the case of Craig Hinton works that had covers by Black Sheep ; " The Quantum Archangel " and " Synthespians™ " he stated that the company " forgot " to do the covers and so both were done at the last minute . This lead to mixed results with " The Quantum Archangel " containing all the elements he requested ( minus Mel on the cover ) and that the Archangel should have looked like which " Phoenix from the X - Men " . Mark Clapham . According to author Mark Clapham " The final ' boyband ' cover of " Hope " was actually arrived at through a process of knocking back the draft covers a couple of times . The fey young lads at the front were in the cover from the beginning , but I got two original variants of the landscape - one which looked like ' Emmerdale ' , with farm buildings and such , and another which bore an unfortunate resemblance to an Afghan village . The latter was especially unfortunate considering the events of the time , but neither bore any resemblance to the Anton Furst - esque city in the book . In the end the Towers of Disco on the finished cover are about as good as we were ever going to get . At least they looked vaguely urban . " Jonathan Morris . Jonathan Morris has said that he ' d bee " " been very happy with each of my covers . Maybe I ' m lucky . For ' Festy ' I dimly recall asking for something in black , with Tom and Lalla looking moody and with a skull - faced angel doing something exultationy . I also asked for an iguana wearing sunglasses but , alas , poor Hoopy did not make the grade . Nevertheless it was stunning and fabulous . For ' Anachy ' I mocked - up a rough idea of what I wanted , by photoshopping a Magritte , and the finished article was similar but not quite as copyright - infringing . Originally the clock was a little too big and the tie was blue with white clouds ( very Magritte , but not very sinister ) . Still have these about somewhere . For ' Windy ' I just sent them the paragraphs from the book describing the Church of the Holy Prophet Moop . And it turned out rather more beautiful than I had imagined it . " Martin Day . According to Martin Day for " The Devil Goblins from Neptune " " we just provided the BBC - and thus Black Sheep - with Paul Griffin ' s artwork , and they , er , did what you see . . . I don ' t think the clash of styles ( black ink illustration , photograph of Pertwee ' s face ) really works . Hollow Men is much better : we sent chunks of prose description of the scarecrows through to the beeb , and thus to Colin Howard , and I really like what we ended up with , although again - because we were adamant that we wanted a scarecrow on the front - you do have a bit of a clash of styles . For Bunker Soldiers I asked a good friend of mine , John Williams , to come up with something . He produced a vista of the Mongol army advancing , which - on the back cover - had become an alien army , as viewed from the warped perspective of the eponymous ' bunker soldier ' . This was probably a bit esoteric for the beeb / Black Sheep ( and , to be fair , there ' s very little alien stuff in Bunker Soldiers ) , so they took the basic idea of John ' s forground image , and so we ended up with a picture of a Mongol soldier ' s skin breaking up to reveal something alien underneath ( nothing like my description from the book , but hey ho ) , with the Mongol army marching towards the spine of the book in the background . ] I think this is one of my favourite covers - it ' s quite striking - but I had a devil of a job getting them to put a Mongol on the front . " "