The Trouble with Harry Sullivan

Last weekend, during the half-term, I was in a drookit Glasgow. On the trains down and back to Moray, I was listening to the audiobook of Doctor Who: Scratchman, read by the author, Tom Baker himself.

Doctor Who Meets Scratchman aka Doctor Who and the Big Game was a cinema film devised, nearly forty-five years ago, by three people. They were Fourth Doctor Tom; Ian Marter ( who played UNIT's  Harry Sullivan and was also the author of several grisly Target books);  and James Hill, director and producer, amusingly enough, of Worzel Gummidge, which of course starred Jon Pertwee. Vincent Price and Twiggy were also proposed to co-star, in this big-screen spin-off.

James Goss has written novelisations of Douglas Adams scripts City of Death, The Pirate Planet and Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen as well as his own DW novels and audios. He has collaborated with Tom on the novel of Scratchman, streamlining or removing some of the wackier elements from the Seventies treatment.

The novel begins with the Doctor on trial for his life on Gallifrey, again, With the Sword of Never pendant above his head and a waspish Zero Nun conducting the prosecution, the Doctor recounts the adventure that brought him to this fateful inquiry.


The Tardis materialises on a beach on a Scottish island, at some point after the First World War, where the Doctor, Sarah Harry have a picnic and play rounders. Soon, however, they are defending the inhabitants of a small community from an invasion of living scarecrows. The Doctor creates a defence by genetically engineering moths to attack the invaders.


This lengthy sequences climaxes in the emergence of a troop of Cybermen (voiced by Nicholas Brigg) emerging from the sea. They have entered a pact with a mysterious mastermind to transform the islanders into scarecrows and wooden effigies.
In order to discover the prime mover of this plot, the Tardis crew pass through a rift into a Hell-dimension. In his castle in the sky, they confront the infernal Scratchman and his duplicate board of directors.

The self-styled Scratch wants to uncover the Doctor's deepest fears and having failed to undermine his sense of self ( thanks to a cameo by the Jodie Whittaker Doctor) traps the three friends in monstrous games of chess and pinball.


The adventure climaxes in a war with wicker replicas of the Fourth Doctor's tv enemies and of his first three incarnations. The Doctor triumphs, of course and denounces his Time Lord accusers. It is their fear of change and death that was really Scratch's objective.

In the epilogue, the Doctor has another encounter with his Thirteenth incarnation and she expresses admiration for his scarf.  James Goss might well be responsible for the tie-ins to the present day series but Doctor Jodie fits very snugly into the canon, after only one season.


Then there's a couple of lovely codas: a dedication to Ian Marter, a "good egg" and a postscript from Sarah Jane Smith.

Scratchman is really too long, of course, at eight discs on audio and takes ages to get underway. There's something of a Seventies, Moorcockian flavour since the death-games remind me of The Final Programme and Arcade's Murderworld and of previous Who stories: from Hartnell's sojourn in the Celestial Toyroom and its unmade sequel The Queen of Time to The Tides of Time in Doctor Who Monthly.


Thanks to Tom's delight in imagining his own performance and at his own imagery ( The Tardis humming " like an aunt in a butcher's queue"), however, it's also often very funny, charming and sweetly nostalgic. 4/5 Talmars


Coming up: The Master, universally; justice, like lightning; and the ballad of Jessica Jones


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