I've been thinking a lot this year about political bias, the BBC and its supporters, who have a powerful nostalgic bond with some of its output. I live in a country which is wedded to the long-dead imperial past of another. Many of my contemporaries seem to think they lived through World War Two- hardly surprising since it's been won in our popular culture every day since I was born (and before that, too). "Regaining control" of some kind of historical power and glory has been the narrative of the UK and the US since the appearance of those twin blights, Trump and May. One transparently deranged and the other craven and transparent.
Is everything I write about here just about retreating into a comforting cocoon of the past, like much of the rest of the UK? Is it gently mourning the life I used to lead ? I wouldn't like to think so but yet again, today's post is about BBC time travel.
In the 70s, in the days before VHS and DVD, if you missed an episode of Doctor Who, it was virtually impossible to see it again-outside of the occasional daytime Christmas compilation, or towards the end of the decade, week-night summer repeats. The Target novelisations were really the only way to experience a DW serial you'd never seen.
I wrote previously about how my goal in attending the 1983 anniversary celebration at Longleat was to see b/w episodes. Aside from the legendary Blue Peter sequences of 1973 and 1978, the 1977 Lively Arts documentary ( which I taped off-air and memorised) was a hugely exciting trove of clips from stories I'd read in Target books - and others which hadn't been adapted yet.
Terrance Dicks wrote slightly more than half of the 150-odd Targets- including the first one I ever read. I can also remember exactly where and when I got many of them: Chapelton in bed with mumps and The Tenth Planet; Dalek Invasion of Earth in Kilmarnock; Death to the Daleks in Dunfermline; The War Games in Morecambe; The Dominators in East Kilbride...
Coincidentally, in my serious, insalubrious 20s, I was becoming less comfortable with buying Target books. I think the rather juvenile expression "bumper volume" really put me off and I got out of the habit. The "broad and deep" New Adventures novels of the next decade did their best to provoke and shock in a rather adolescent way; to reclaim silly, cheap old Doctor Who as "serious" sci-fi. Now that I'm middle-aged, I don't care about things like that any more.
Happily so: in recent years, Targets were reprinted, with new covers and introductions by the likes of Michael Moorcock and Charlie Higson. Even more excitingly, this month four brand new Targets were released, novelising episodes from the 2005 revival onwards. They don't have coloured spines or illustrations but you can't have everything.
Because none of the three bookshops in Elgin stocked them on the release date, I ordered them on Amazon and of course I read them in chronological order.
Naturally, we begin thirteen years ago, with the debut of gritty Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper. I remember the billboards in Parkhead. I used to say it was like being a Mormon and waking up to find everyone was now polyamorous.
RTD slyly invokes Uncle Terrance with the story of guilty Bernie Wilson, lottery numbers and Chris Rea's birthday. There's a playfulness at work and a glee for the old days: the "silly monsters, cheap robots, daft aliens, fake dinosaurs"; the plastic menace of "cables (that) yearned to strangle. Dolls grinned in anticipation of murder"
Uncle Russell also makes references to his own work throughout the book, sometimes hilariously: the Bad Wolf band; the spacecraft crash at Mount Snowdon from the Sarah-Jane Adventures; Jimmy Stone from the 2005 Doctor Who annual; Donna Noble, sleeping off the vino collapso after cooking a "truly disgraceful" birthday tea for Sylvia.
Most amusingly of all, there are naughty cameos for Doctors-to-be: the man with the fantastic jaw; the older, angry man; the blonde woman in braces; the bald, black woman with the flaming sword; the girl or boy in the hi-tech wheelchair and robot dog. Wicked.
In lieu of a "pleasant, open face", the Ninth Doctor is depicted as "tough, hard as nails...his head bracketed by two splendid ears". Interestingly, Rose, "the most ordinary girl in the world" isn't described until the second-last page. It's pacy, exciting and a perfect love letter to the crisp, direct style of Terrance Dicks.
I wasn't keen on Colgan's 2016 novel In The Blood but The Christmas Invasion is a charming evocation of the beginning of what the author terms DW's "Second Imperial Phase". The author is, for a Whovian, a little inaccurate about BBC2 repeats, which didn't begin until the early 90s. But she writes charmingly of borrowing plastic-covered Targets from Prestwick Library ( which I visited last July) and the "occasionally mixed results" of DW Xmas episodes. .
The book begins with the 2005 Children in Need mini-episode and each of the twenty chapters has the title of a Christmas song.
There's a UNIT joke about the Gherkin in London; RTD's cut lines about Rose's accent imprinting on the Tenth Doctor; and confirmation that Ford Prefect and the Doctor had wild nights out together when at college.
Colgan also deftly characterises Number Ten and his companion: "he -quite wrongly- did not consider himself a vain man...the screen was fuzzy...he supposed this was payback for the slim-cut suit and luxuriant hair." "(Rose) stared at him like he was chocolate cake". I wonder if the "young, beautiful woman" the Doctor failed to save from the Tower of London was the Queen of Scots?
This was probably my third favourite of the quartet. We'll return to the other two new books in a future post. Back to work on Monday, where I'm going to present a talk in the library on Target books, using some of this post.
Coming soon: the next universe but one
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