It Takes You Away

Chapter The 132nd, which is as mad as a universe of frogs.

Plot:

The Doctor, Graham, Ryan and Yaz arrive in Norway in 2018, and investigate an isolated cottage, where they find a young girl has been barricaded in, alone. This is Hanne, a blind teenager who believes her Dad, Erik, has been taken by a monster that roams outside at night. Investigating, the TARDIS team find a mirror in Hanne's home that is a portal to another world. Leaving Ryan to look after Hanne, the others go through the mirror and find a world of dark and scary caves populated with strange creatures. They meet one of these, the only one with a lantern, who is called Ribbons of the Seven Stomachs. He offers to take them to Hanne's Dad in exchange for payment, but is trying to trick them, then falls victim of his own trap and is devoured by flesh moths. Meanwhile, Ryan finds that there is no monster outside the cottage, it's just a loudspeaker playing a recording.

The Doctor, Graham and Yaz escape through another portal that leads them to a mirror world where Erik is living with Hanne's Mum, Trine - but Trine died quite a while ago. Erik had boarded up the cottage and left Hanne alone, with the monster recording to make her stay safely inside. But he can't find any way of bringing her Mum back into our world. Trine isn't the only dead person somehow still alive in this world: Grace is there too. The Doctor realises that they are in a reality created by an ancient consciousness called the Solitract, which is incompatible with our universe but wants to engage with us; it has created versions of Graham's and Erik's dead partners to keep them in the mirror world, but it is already unstable due to the incompatibility and is breaking apart. Graham realises that this isn't Grace, and - heart-breakingly - leaves her behind, but Erik still wants to stay. The Doctor offers herself so that the Solitract lets Erik go, and she makes friends with it. Even with only the Doctor in it, though, the worldscape is not sustainable, and the Solitract lets the Doctor go. Hearing what he's been through in the mirror world, Ryan calls Graham 'granddad' for the first time.

Context:

Towards the end of August, after a rather marvellous break in Majorca, the family headed home on an evening Easyjet flight. I'm ambivalent about the budget air travel revolution of recent years. For many reasons, including environmental ones, our family avoided such travel, holidaying only in the UK for a period of about 15 years; this led to some inventive and fun breaks. That banked a bit of carbon, I hope, to allow some travelling more widely of late: the Better Half and I thought it was time that the children got to experience other countries and cultures, and relatively inexpensive flights are a good way for them to do that, as long as it's not taken for granted, and treated with the necessary respect. The other thing that I like about the no frills approach is that - if you're cheapskates like me and my lot - you get to personalise your journey. I don't think we could order a dull sandwich and short stack of Pringles from the trolley anymore, when we can make our own packed lunch (we snacked on rolls with choritzo and local cheese, pastries and Spanish oranges on our journey back to London Gatwick). The same homespun approach can also be applied to the in-flight entertainment, of course, and I had prepared by downloading this story onto my phone using the BBC iplayer app, specifically for the journey home.

First time round:

Watched live on the BBC1 transmission last Autumn, with the whole family except my youngest (girl of 7 now, but who was 6 at the time) who had taken against the new series at the exact point that Tim Shaw revealed his true face, including its additional sets of teeth, to the nation. We have been able to tempt her back to watch the odd few episodes, but she's not watched this one as yet. It's unlikely that she'd get past the scary monster sounds coming from the woods at the start, which is a shame as she'd probably like the bit with the frog.

Reaction:

In the last blog post on The Web of Fear, I mentioned that Web’s distinct phases of plot fixed around ‘islands’ of set piece action seemed similar to an approach Stanley Kubrick was reported to take in constructing his screenplays and films. I can picture It Takes You Away patiently waiting for its turn before boldly saying “Hold my beer”. If ever a story has shifted through phases, abruptly changing genres every few minutes of its running time, it’s this one. As an illustration of this, try an exercise: watch the opening scene of four travellers investigating a mysterious cottage in the wilderness, then watch the climax scene with a time traveller talking to a frog on a chair in a white void, then imagine writing a plot to join up those two scenes. The beginning of the story, and its conversational title, promise a chilly modern Scandi horror, where the scenario will be depicted naturalistically and menace will be unseen except in glimpses. And so it indeed seems to be for a few scenes, but then a magic mirror is found, and the adventurers and the plot enter a completely different genre altogether.

Stepping through the mirror, we leave naturalism and restraint behind (you don’t hire Kevin Eldon for naturalism or restraint, after all). With dark mysterious caves, a glowing balloon-like lantern, flesh-eating moths and an avaricious goblin, we’re into full on surrealistic monster horror with more than a dash of Grand Guignol. It’s OTT, but it’s just as good in its new way as what went before, and Eldon’s performance as Ribbons is ripe but rewarding, if you can go with it. That’s probably the challenge of any piece that makes such jarring genre shifts – it either feels a little bit wrong-footing or just plain wrong, depending on the individual viewer.

It’s obviously intentional though, as it isn’t long before things shift again. Now, if you’ve been enjoying Eldon’s performance – as I was – it feels like he’s gone too soon, just as if you’re a real fan of the style of the early scenes, you’ll be annoyed that the monster in the woods is revealed to be fake so early on. With this story, you can’t dwell too long, as it’s moving fast – you just have to hold on tight and try to enjoy the ride. On the other side of the mirror, we’re into yet another style of story -  more sci-fi, chilly again and much less gothic fairy tale, plus there’s big dollop of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. The attention to detail of the mirror world, with backwards T-shirts and hair parted on the opposite side, is good, but the real reason we’re here is for the emotional plot – building on themes for the whole season. I’ll come back to that in a moment, because even that’s not the final phase.

At this point, the script does some inventive heavy lifting, dramatically tying all the disparate phases together, and swinging us off into a new direction: it’s all a honey trap, and they have to get out of there. The script also makes a quite abstruse concept easily digestible to the audience: it’s a sentient universe that is destructive but not malevolent - it’s a kid with chicken pox that just wants to play. This sets up that final sequence with Jodie Whittaker speaking to the aforementioned frog. It’s magnificently, operatically bonkers, and I mean that as a compliment. This is challenging material for Whittaker, and she makes it look easy. It shouldn't be taken for granted just because it doesn’t have the feels of what Bradley Walsh and Sharon D Clarke get to do elsewhere, it’s just as excellent: a quiet sorrow at having made a new friend, but now having to say goodbye (like a holiday romance after the Doctor’s trip to a new universe… or maybe that’s just me finding connections with the circumstances in which I watched it).

Going back to the Graham and Grace plot, and, well, look... I…  I’m not crying – you’re crying!  Maybe it was the circumstances of my viewing affecting me again. If you listen to Kermode and Mayo’s film review radio show / podcast, you’ll probably be familiar with AALS – Altitude Adjusted Lachrymosity Syndrome – that many listeners have reported over the years. Apparently, it may even be scientifically plausible: the theory is that one is more likely to blub watching drama when eight miles high. I don’t know if it’s true, but I can report that I did shed tears as Graham has to say goodbye to his dear departed all over again. Then, I shed a few more when the Graham and Ryan’s long-running arc was resolved as Ryan finally accepts Graham as his Granddad.

It’s a very clever script to cover all that and keep things coherent while still finding room to feature a resourceful but not perfect teenage character, played by a blind actor (Ellie Wallwork), satisfactorily round off the emotional plot between Hanne and her Dad, and also round off a small subplot of conflict between Ryan and Hanne too. This is probably the aspect I’d lose if I had to lose anything: it’s reminding us of Ryan’s issues with abandonment by his own father, but it doesn’t significantly add to proceedings. Some of the quirky Doctor dialogue early on, where she eats soil and talks about sheep, could be snipped out too, and I wouldn’t be bothered.

Connectivity: 

Apart from the Kubrickian style, there's more disembodied forces taking the form of humans, including a human who's already dead, and a touch more being stalked by unrelenting monsters in the Flesh Moths sequences.

Deeper Thoughts:

Balearic Story Beats. The family were in the S'Arenal area of Majorca in August. I took a lot of Doctor Who related entertainments with me this time. Not just It Takes You Away and The Web of Fear, but also the novelisations of Rose and City of Death. None of it was particularly linked to the holiday locale, but to find something that was connected was a pretty tough task: there have been no Doctor Who stories filmed in Majorca or any of the Balearic Islands. If I had wanted to override the random selection and pick something close to being apt, there are quite a few now that have been filmed in Spain or Spanish territories. The closest I suppose would be Planet of Fire, which was also filmed on an island - Lanzarote; in the new series, Kill The Moon and the Zygon Invasion / Inversion were also filmed in the Canaries. I have, though, already blogged two out of those three and I'm in no hurry to see Kill The Moon again (is anybody?!). Mainland Spain - which is geographically closer - was the location for The Two Doctors, but I wasn't really in the mood for that one either.

Without my really registering it, in recent years several more stories have been filmed in Spain: Asylum of the Daleks, A Town Called Mercy, Smile and Demons of the Punjab. The production of Doctor Who has got more and more international as this decade has gone on, and the makers of it clearly like to escape to the sun just like me and the family do. Would any of these count, though? It would be silly to visit Spain and watch Demons of the Punjab or A Town Called Mercy, as Spain is masquerading as India and America respectively. And the other two stories use very specific locations as alien planets; there's no sense of that particular place in the narrative. The best Doctor Who foreign locations, to be honest, are the few classic era stories that in their excitement at getting away from Blighty revelled in this and splashed the location all over the screen. Unfortunately, I blogged Arc of Infinity, City of Death and Planet of Fire pretty early on in the blog's life from no further away than my own living room, before this idea of immersive location blogging occurred to me. I am just going to have to go to Seville at some point, and watch The Two Doctors. Someone has to do it, I suppose!

Enthusiasts carry their fandom with them wherever they go, anyway; Doctor Who is never far behind whenever I travel. It isn't particularly connected to the region, except that I was drinking a very nice Spanish Red and listening to some ambient chill-out music when the thought occurred, but reading a novelisation of Rose in 2019 is the equivalent of reading a novelisation of The Web of Fear in 1982, when Peter Davison was the Doctor and I became a regular viewer for the first time: it has been an astonishing 14 years since the series returned. It's massively impressive that the post-2005 run has endured long enough to have distinct eras of its own: the Christopher Eccleston series seems a world away from the Jodie Whittaker run last year. With all those years of success banked, no wonder they get to gallivant around the globe these days, though I'm not holding my breath for a story set in Majorca or Ibiza, with zombie podium-dancing ravers or something, any time soon.

My chilled out holiday couldn't last forever, and having avoided much in the way of news while we were away, being back in the UK and catching up was a hell of a bump. I realised very quickly that I was going to have to learn how to pronounce the word 'prorogue'. (I'll always be more anti-rogue when it comes to the UK's current prime minister - do you get it? Oh, you've heard it... oh well!) The more horrible the world seems to get, the more I am thankful for a little escapism, so my advice is: carry your fandom with you, wherever you go.

In Summary:

One of the most successful stories, and certainly the most value - as it's four stories in one, really - of 2018.

The Web of Fear

Chapter The 131st, which is quite the underground hit.

Plot:

The TARDIS is forced to land in the London Underground, c. 1975. A web-like fungus is everywhere up top, London has been evacuated, and robotic Yeti are on the prowl. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria team up with Professor Travers, whom they previously met when he was approximately 40 years younger during their last encounter with the Yeti. He is working with the army alongside his daughter Anne in an HQ underground at Goodge Street. Our heroes seem to be blocked at every turn: bombs laid elsewhere in the tunnels to blow up the Yeti are covered in web fired from guns the Yeti carry, and the explosion is contained. Extra ammunition is brought in, but the troops bringing it are ambushed. Slowly but surely, the web / fungus / foam encircles the HQ, trapping our heroes. Mutual suspicion reigns: someone is being controlled by the Great Intelligence, sabotaging things, and planting cute mini-Yeti on people that the bigger more ferocious kind home in on. Could it be one of the two soldiers who turn up allegedly from the ambushed ammunition party: cowardly Welsh driver Evans, and some fellow called Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart (whatever happened to him?)?  People are picked off one by one, and Professor Travers and Victoria captured, to force the Doctor out into the open. The Intelligence wants to drain the Doctor's mind and use his abilities to conquer time and space. The Doctor has a plan and has reprogrammed a Yeti to work for him by remote control, and he also opportunistically manages to reverse the Intelligence's brain-drain machine; but, he doesn't inform anyone of this, so his friends intervene and the Intelligence is merely banished not totally defeated, leaving open the possibility of a final rematch...

Context:

In mid-August, while packing and preparing for a very welcome holiday in the sun (10 days in a villa in Majorca - just what the Doctor ordered), I wondered what Who story or stories I could take with me. It has become a tradition to watch and blog a serial on my hols since I stayed in the location where a Tom Baker story was filmed a few years back. In the old days it would involve bringing along a DVD in my suitcase, but more recently - even on holidays in cottages within the UK - the provision of a DVD player in amongst the mod cons has become less than guaranteed. Everyone carries a screen around these days which can provide downloaded or streamed entertainment, even in the Balearics, but it does limit the choice of material - essentially, it's only usually going to be stories from 2005 and after that are accessible to me, and nothing before that.

Last year, I lucked out that the stories coming up randomly for blogging for the period when I was in Tenerife happened to be in the post-2005 batch and were downloadable from iplayer. I fancied some classic Who this time, so was even more lucky that the selection was pretty much the only pre-2005 serial that I owned in a portable form. I had bought The Web of Fear on itunes when it was returned to the archives and released in 2013 (see First Time Round section below for more details). It was reminiscent to me of another holiday I went on years before where I brought along the CDs of the audio version of the story and listened to it abroad (see First Time Round section below for more details). As I was watching on a tiny iPhone screen, I did not gather the family around me, but waited until people turned in and watched with a glass or two of vino, an episode per night. The last couple of episodes had to be viewed through a fearful web of cracks after my screen lost an argument with a tapas bar floor, but it was all watchable and enjoyable (and I know the plot inside out anyway).

First time round:

I always seem to be out of the country during significant moments regarding The Web of Fear. It was Lanzarote we went to, if I remember rightly, around 2002 - myself, the Better Half and another friend. I had a new Discman (even writing that sentence makes me feel old!) and wanted to take something to listen to on the plane or during quiet moments, so packed the three CDs containing episodes of The Web of Fear as well as music. I'd had the audio version - released by the BBC from cleaned-up off-air recordings and with Frazer Hines narration - for a year or two, but the first listen didn't register enough to be remembered. I do though strongly recall my holiday listen, snatching the odd moment - on the coach transferring us from the airport and so on - to hear noisy Yeti vs. army battles and such.

Then, just over a decade later in Autumn 2013, I was on a working trip to Paris for the day job, checking an online message-board in the hotel one evening, when I first saw rumours of an imminent announcement that some old episodes of Doctor Who had been recovered. For weeks before that, a different rumour had been circulating that a massive haul had been made in the region of 90 episodes (which would have been 90 percent of what was missing from the archives at the time). This was presumably exaggeration of the whispers that must have been around about this legitimate find - not only four of the five missing episodes of The Web of Fear, but all the five missing episodes of its preceding story The Enemy of the World had been returned. Alas, the rumblings preceding it made what should have been miraculous - it was after all the most episodes found in one go ever - seem a little underwhelming in comparison to the crazy fantasy.

It wasn't long before one could obtain the episodes themselves, but only as itunes downloads. DVDs were only available after a number of months had passed. In marketing terms (that I just made up) this is called a Combined Options Narrative... or con, for short. The DVDs were no frills, and could easily have been got ready in advance, but an opportunity was obviously spotted to sell desperate fans like me the same thing twice. Yes, I fell for it hook line and sinker. On a night a few weeks after the announcement, a night when I had work the next day, I stayed up until midnight when the episodes became available. I couldn't stay up all night long, so had to choose which few episodes I could watch before I got too tired. I viewed the first couple of episodes of Enemy of the World, and episode 2 of Web of Fear, just to cram in as much newly found stuff as I could, sampling both stories; I then watched the full serials over the following couple of days.

Reaction:

It’s not just the eerie Bela Bartok music used prominently in episode 1 (which is also famously used in the movie of The Shining), The Web of Fear reminds me of Stanley Kubrick’s work in another way too. I remember seeing an interview with a colleague of his explaining that Kubrick liked to find several ‘islands’, sequences or set pieces within a story, and the screenplay would be constructed to string a connection between these. This was an explanation offered for why Kubrick’s films tended to happen in distinct phases or chapters, and The Web of Fear is similar. The first part is a full on 1930s-style monster horror of the Yeti coming alive with the aforementioned sinister underscoring, noir-ish shadows, and our heroes creeping around dark, silent tunnels with all escape routes blocked, finding cobweb-covered corpses. The middle three episodes, with less film inserts, switch to something with a very different feel, much more naturally lit, performed and scored - it’s an isolated professional outpost horror, as people are picked off one by one (conforming to the ‘Base Under Siege’ formula of many Patrick Troughton stories).

These three episodes are also interspersed with militaristic action sequences that feel like a different genre again, although they’re very successful and you can feel that Douglas Camfield is having the time of his life directing them. Everything peaks with the impressive Covent Garden attack sequence, where the last of the soldiers under Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart’s command is killed. The Colonel returns to the base and gives a haunted speech to the ragtag band of survivors about their unstoppable enemy - some of Nicholas Courtney’s best work incidentally - and that’s that. The problem is that there are still another two episodes to go. The final phase of The Web of Fear is a bit less successful. The last two episodes do seem to involve a lot of scenes of the cast standing around on tube platforms, waiting for some plot to arrive. On first watch – and it was only designed for one watch, lest we forget – you’re carried through this by the mystery of who exactly is under the control of the Great Intelligence and who isn’t. I’m not going to spoil here exactly how that is resolved, because some people may not know, and it’s a genuine surprise, I think. I’ve experienced the story too many times now to ever forget the twist, but even someone who doesn’t know suffers a mild spoiler compared to those seeing this on broadcast in 1968: one of the suspects is Lethbridge-Stewart, and alas anyone who knows anything of the history of the show will realise he’s not going to turn out to be the bad guy.

Once the big reveal has happened, the climax is a let down. The cast and production team give it their all, but coming after the magnificent sequences in the first four episodes, the fumble and scrabble and abruptness of the end is a disappointment. But but but: this is forgivable when seen in context, as this was only ever intended to be the middle part of a trilogy. The Yeti were planned to feature again, and the Great Intelligence be finally defeated, in The Laird of McCrimmon, a proposed storyline by writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln set back in Jamie’s original time and place that would also likely have written out the plucky Highlander. It sounds like it would have been excellent, and it’s a shame that it got kiboshed by a backstage falling out between the writers and the production team.

Those writers manage to produce probably the most vivid and memorable set of characters to be trapped together in a base under siege of any Troughton story. Obviously, the Brigadier is introduced here (pre-promotion), but a lot of the other characters were of sufficient quality that they could have become long-running semi-regulars too. Professor Travers returns, of course; his daughter Anne, played by Tina Packer, is a prototype of future companion Liz Shaw and could easily have returned also (I believe there were plans for both professor and daughter to return with the Brig in the next season's The Invasion, but the actors weren’t available). All the other squaddies are distinct and interesting, and it’s very shocking when they meet their different ends. Best of the bunch for me is Driver Evans. Evans is not just a coward, he is a relentlessly clever and tenacious character always slipping out of trouble and looking after his own skin. He’s played by Derek Pollitt with such likeability – there’s no side to him, and the script is careful to keep his behaviour on the right side of acceptable – that you can’t blame him for doing as he does. It was an interesting and refreshing choice; Evans doesn't die, but neither does he learn or grow, not ending up in the hackneyed and obvious climax where, when up against it, he turns out to be brave after all - Evans stays consistently cowardly all the way through.

Even with the last two episodes treading water a bit, the serial as a whole is still something very special. There's a few other little negatives, though: is it a web, or is it a fungus? The characters and the script don't seem to have made up their mind. Also, web and/or fungus don't have anything to do with Yeti symbolism at all, but then neither do the glass pyramids and silver balls featured in the Yeti's first outing The Abominable Snowmen, I suppose. One really needs to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the tube map to follow the significant movements of the encircling fungus wall, even with visuals as an aid (I seem to remember the BBC Audio team wanted to print a tube map in the inlay sleeve of the CD box, but couldn't as it's a image under copyright and so would have cost them). And did I miss something, or was there never a real opportunity for the Intelligence to retrieve the web sample from the tobacco tin? Did Evans maybe just smoke it by accident?

Connectivity: 

Both The Web of Fear and The Curse of Fenric feature members of the armed forces, most of whom get killed; both contain a disembodied evil force that takes over multiple people during the course of the narrative; also, both are of the admittedly common sub-genre of Doctor Who stories where people are stalked through subterranean tunnels by unrelenting monsters.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Guv'nor. At this time of year, I normally indulge myself writing a bit of travelogue to detail the lovely sunny context in which I watched the Doctor Who story I’ve smuggled in to another country. Events, though, have postponed that, as there is only one person I want to write down my deeper thoughts about right now - Terrance Dicks, who very sadly passed away within the last week at the age of 84. Many, many wonderful and talented people who’ve worked on Doctor Who have died since I started this blog, and I haven’t felt it necessary to give them a mini-obit (it’s not really the point of proceedings, and others could no doubt do it better), but Uncle Terrance is a special case. That affectionate nickname clues you in to the special regard in which he is held by Doctor Who fans worldwide.

Reading the news in a tweet on Monday, I felt a metaphorical sucker punch. It felt very similar to the moment I found out Jon Pertwee had died in 1996. As then, there was shock, sadness disproportionate to the death of someone I didn’t know personally, but also a total lack of inevitability. Call me naive, but - just like with Jon - I don’t think I ever expected Terrance to die. If it had been Tom Baker, I doubt I’d have felt like that: Tom’s always had a particular darkly comic obsession with mortality, and talks about his own death a lot (although he may well outlast us all, who knows). Terrance just lived, just was: solidly, unpretentiously, marvellously, he was always there.

This is why I didn’t need to worry about how I would link Terrance in to the randomly chosen story at hand. The Web of Fear was made just before Terrance joined the production team of Doctor Who, but he novelised it, of course: the first time I experienced the story would have been courtesy of his prose. There was no era that he didn’t connect with in some way. He wrote or edited TV scripts for the first five of the classic series Doctors, and wrote novels for all of the classic series Doctors. And he did it so so well. It is no exaggeration to say that his input saved Doctor Who from cancellation around 1970, and turned it into the long-running series it became, all the way through to post-2005 Doctor Who which was heavily influenced at the outset by the style of stories that Terrance was making alongside producer Barry Letts in the early 1970s. He may not have added his name to any of them during his days as a script editor, but every script contains a large amount of his input.

All that TV work, though, as important as it was, pales into almost insignificance when stacked next to the novels Terrance produced for the Target range. These were books that taught quite a few of us to read, and taught a more select few (but nonetheless a significant number) to write. They were a publishing phenomenon of the 1970s and 80s and that is down to Terrance, pretty much 100%. Other writers may have their name on more TV stories, or more well thought of books, yes: Terrance was never a lead guitar sort of person, but he was the dependable, professional and accomplished rhythm section of Doctor Who, providing that background beat that you can still hear echoes of in the stories being made today. He never stopped loving Doctor Who, as is clear from every interview he ever gave. That this was all done with an almost careless modesty only makes it that much sweeter an accomplishment. It would be very easy to take him or his work for granted, but we should not. He was and is the guv’nor of Doctor Who, and I’m very sad that he’s no longer with us.

In Summary:

Down in the tube station at midnight, oh-woh-oh-oh! Don't wanna go down in the tube station at midnight, oh-woh-oh-oh...

The Curse of Fenric

Chapter The 130th, which is really really good - let's cancel the series!

Plot:

The Doctor and Ace, posing as visiting officials from the War Office, visit a top secret naval base in 1943, where Alan-Turing-tippexed-over-and-retyped-as Doctor Judson is working on his Enigma-hastily-crossed-out-and-replaced-in-biro-as Ultima machine. The camp commander, Millington, has an unhealthy obsession with Viking folklore and in particular a local legend about a curse. Judson is using his machine to decipher some Viking carvings in the crypt of the local church. Meanwhile, a squad of Russians arrive, on a secret mission to steal the Ultima machine, the local vicar is having doubts about his faith during wartime, and a couple of evacuee girls - who befriend Ace - want to have a swim in the local bay, Maiden's Point, even though it's forbidden as it's a metaphor for sex. The Doctor discovers the church also has a secret laboratory beneath it, as it is built upon a source of natural poison that can be used as a chemical weapon. A vial of this poison is built into the Ultima machine, and it's been booby-trapped to explode when the Russians, who Millington knows all about and has been expecting, take the machine and try to use it back home. But, the same trick Millington is planning to play on the Russians is played on him. When Judson decrypts the final Viking rune stones, it runs a program on the Ultima which wakes the dead, or undead rather, as creatures emerge from the sea and ground.

These creatures are Haemovores, creatures into which human beings will evolve in thousands of years time, and they're also the original Viking victims of the curse and their descendants that settled in the area risen from the dead, and they're also any new victims who they convert, if they decide not to drain them of blood... Look, they're vampires, basically - no point trying to wangle some scientific explanation for them, they're bloody vampires. Anyway, the vampires attack the Doctor and Ace at the church, but with some help from the Russians, and a neat little trick where having faith in something creates a psychic shield, our heroes escape back to the camp, finding an ancient flask in the underground laboratory first. This flask contains an ancient evil force, Fenric, who escapes and takes over the body of Doctor Judson. Judson/Fenric's henchman is the ancient leader of the Haemovores, who'd been brought back in time to 1943 to create his own future, or something... Look, he's Vlad okay, he's supposed to be bloody Dracula, that's all you need to know. Anyway, they're going to kill all the humans, but first Fenric has to solve a chess puzzle that the Doctor set him millennia ago, which he's previously failed and that's why he got trapped in the flask in the first place. (As an aside, if I were an ancient evil force, and a Time Lord challenged me to a chess puzzle, and I lost, I think I'd just kill him and not get in the flask - Fenric is clearly an ancient evil force of his word.)

Ace inadvertently helps Fenric to solve the puzzle, but this turns out to be all part of the plan: Fenric can manipulate anyone who's touched by the curse, and Ace's Nan turns out to be a local - one of the the WRENs who works at the camp, and whom Ace rescued earlier. The Ancient One looks like he's going to come in for the kill, so Ace protects them using her faith in the Doctor as a psychic shield. But the Doctor undermines her faith in him by saying some nasty things, and the Ancient One is released; surprisingly, the Ancient One attacks Fenric instead, as the Doctor's persuaded him that Fenric is the bad guy. The Doctor explains to Ace that he only said the nasty things to break the curse once and for all, and Ace seems to have surmounted all her teenage demons.

Context:

Watched from the DVD with the whole family (the Better Half, boys of 12 and 10, girl of 7) over a few evenings. I considered which version to share with them: the DVD has the original four episode version, and an extended feature length presentation, knitting together all the episodes, updating the special effects and reinstating twelve - twelve! - minutes of cut footage. That updated version certainly makes the plot flow better and adds some nice character moments, but - as we didn't have time to sit down and watch it all in one go, it really had to be the original, as broadcast on BBC1 in 1989. Everyone really enjoyed it. Eldest boy, on seeing the introduction scene of Commander Millington, with his office mocked-up to look like how his Nazi counterpart's digs would look, said "Is that Hitler?" Then, whenever, Millington appeared, he'd say "Oh look, here comes Hitler again". It may be that he was just trying to wind me up, or it may be that he likes being mentioned on the blog, I couldn't say for sure. The Better Half pointed out that McCoy's umbrella was useful for the only time ever during a storm scene, and highlighted that Ace had laddered her tights in the church attack scene.

Addition: we finished the story just before swanning off for 10 days in Mallorca, and during this holiday it became clear to me that The Curse of Fenric had had quite an impact. Whenever anyone was standing by the side of the swimming pool and not getting in with the rest of the family, someone would say "You shouldah come intah the wartah wiv us, then we'dah bin tuggevah". I should mention that we were lucky enough to find an airbnb with a private pool, so this wasn't in front of strangers, but even so...

First time round:

A Wednesday evening in autumn 1989, and I'm crouched by the TV; a video cassette in the slot of the VCR, my fingers are poised to hit record. Anticipation rises. The continuity announcer talks about Bergerac being on in 25 minutes, and I ready myself. "But now..." he finally says - and I press record, breathing out - "It's Doctor Who". Blank tapes were always scarce in our house, at least until the 1990s when they became a bit cheaper. A whole season of late 80s Doctor Who, all fourteen episodes worth, would fit on a single 180 minute tape, on long play mode, which sacrificed quality but doubled the capacity of the tape; but one had to be careful not to include too much spool either side of the episodes themselves. The last thing I wanted was to miss the last few minutes of the final episode of the year because I'd left in too much blather about Bergerac. I've mentioned previously about my ineptitude where programming - or even operating - the VCR is concerned, and this razor's edge of pressure brought on by needing to conserve tape did not help matters. By the 1989 season, I'd got better, and I only failed to record (and see) one episode of the fourteen that year. The Curse of Fenric was not the impacted show, so I was able to watch it in full, over and over again, over the next couple of years, until the commercial VHS came out. That version reinstated a few minutes of footage, and that version was the one that I then watched over and over again until the DVD came out. I didn't find the DVD version quite so compelling, or I was just more busy, and so the extended VHS version is probably my default - I certainly noticed the 'missing' bits of this recent watch.   

Reaction:

From the off, it's clear this story is something very special. Filming on the water, a sense of scale and atmosphere achieved with mist effects, the first lines of dialogue being in Russian with subtitles - at the time, and even now, it screams out at the viewer about a level of sophistication that's rare for Doctor Who. Having watched this quite soon after another 1980s story, Frontios, which was the previous watch for the blog, the vast difference in approach - after only 5 short years have gone by - is phenomenal. Frontios was a studio only affair, yes, and Fenric has the luxury of being all on location. They're all really good locations too - the perfect church, bay, and camp. There's expensive-looking underwater filming too (done by a second-unit - it has a second unit, this is almost unheard of - helmed by producer John Nathan-Turner, and bloody atmospheric it is too). It's not just how it looks, though, as a lot of that's just down to budget. The script has such a density of rapid fire information being conveyed, it makes Frontios - a pretty good story, lest we forget - seem plodding by comparison. Now, stories from Sylvester McCoy's previous season often had a lot going on, lots of characters chasing around - but they didn't manage necessarily to make all those things cohere. Fenric, the first story filmed for the year, marks an evolution, as everything has been integrated well in order that the piece as a whole builds to a fantastic conclusion.

Keeping up a break-neck pace while still remaining coherent is smoothed by some clever stylistic choices: lots of inter-cutting between events, with dialogue running over multiple short scenes as narration; there's also some wonderful touches that add character and depth while not necessarily being slaved to unfolding plot - moments like the Reverend Wainwright reciting 1 Corinthians 13 to an empty church, or Millington's haunted look as he explains that the code word that will detonate the Ultima machine is 'love', or the Doctor quietly reciting his companions names, as he has faith in them. A lot of the heavy lifting is done by the fine set of actors that's been assembled, and they are more than up to the job. Every small guest role is expertly cast, with only the two young girls giving anything slightly less than believable (and they're fine pre-conversion - if they're a little wooden once they've been made undead, it's forgivable, I think). Whether star name or newcomer, everyone gives their all. Anne Reid, earlier on in her career, has a smaller and less showy role than she got when she appeared in post-2005 new Who, but she's just as excellent here. Nicholas Parsons is a miracle - his casting was pre-announced and caused a shiver of fear to run through the collected fandom of the day (perceptible even in those pre-internet days), but it was all unfounded as he comports himself excellently. Sophie Aldred also does very well with some stretching material, which dances coyly around what would be more overt sexuality in a more traditional vampire tale.

There's a confidence on display here, that - had they got another series - might even have developed into a deserved swagger. At the start, the two lead characters are at the height of their powers, Ace and the Doctor are completely unbowed by being surrounded by armed shoulders "What would happen if the Germans attacked now?" "In fact, how do you know we're not Germans?" - it reminded me of the Season 10 blu-ray box set stories that I've been watching recently, containing Katy Manning's last stories as Jo Grant. Just as in the 1970s, when Jo's character was allowed to develop and mature, so here. The final scene, where Ace is finally allowed to swim in waters loaded with metaphorical baggage, probably irritated a lot of fanboys at the time, but by golly Doctor Who needed stuff like this. It helps that the scene is accompanied by the best cue in possibly the best score of the period. Composer Mark Ayres managed to produce something in his bedroom on his keyboards that is the equal or better of any incidental music made for Doctor Who to this date, and it's just another reason to feel sad that this era didn't carry on, to see what great music he would have undoubtedly provided for future stories.

It's not perfect, of course. I've watched too many episodes of Foyle's War in the interim, which has made me conscious of the historical errors, including signposts to coastal locations still being up, Kathleen's tie being very wonky when she's addressing her C.O., an older man and a younger woman being billeted together... There's insufficient defences on the shoreline too, but that might have something to do with the deliberate opening up of an opportunity for the Russians to steal Ultima, so I'll let them off that one. There's probably quite a few logic issues with the plot too, but it moves fast enough that these don't really register. The big one that stood out for me on this watch was the Ancient One, on Fenric's orders, killing off all the Haemovores just before the end, so that the climax can be more focused on Fenric, the Doctor and Ace.  A more elegant solution to achieve the same aim should have been found, as it doesn't make sense for Fenric to ask it, nor for the Ancient One to agree to do it, nor of him having the power to do it. Also, I'm presuming that Ace's Nan remarried, as it would stretch credibility for Ace to know her maternal grandmother's home address but be ignorant of her mother's maiden name!

Connectivity: 

Four more episodes of 1980s goodness produced by John Nathan-Turner. Both The Curse of Fenric and Frontios are from their respective Doctor's final season, and in both the Doctor has donned a new version of his usual costume - Sylv has his darker jacket, Davison has his slight variant on the cricket outfit worn in his first two years. More monsters emerging from below, more focus in the narrative on records about people being a key to a mystery.

Deeper Thoughts:

Don't mention the war! The Curse of Fenric was the penultimate story of classic Doctor Who, the last but one tale of the show's first 26-year stretch, and it's the first time ever that a story has been set - wholly or partially - in World War Two. This fact struck me on this watch, and seems very unusual. As someone wise once posited, if you've got a time machine, a thought that will rapidly occur is "Let's Kill Hitler", or at the very least, let's pop back and have a look and see how accurate Downfall was. Stepping the other side of the fiction, one might wonder why it never occurred to anybody making Who for the previous 25 years that there might just be stories worth telling in the rich seam of 1939 to 1945. Why did a succession of production teams ignore what seems to be such an open goal? Partially, it must be that near history was a no-no. I don't think this was ever an official policy written down anywhere, but there must have been some reason, some blocker in the collective unconscious, as until the Sylvester McCoy era (the last three years of the original run) the nearest time period to the war depicted was 1935, then a big gap before the contemporary and future Earth-based stories.

The couple of other Sylvester McCoy near-history tales broadcast before Curse were set later (in 1959 and 1963), sidestepping the WW2 period, and would have been seen as contemporary when Doctor Who started, and perhaps too close to contemporary in the years the show ran after that. Also, the story set in 1935, the Abominable Snowmen, could have been set at any time really, as it focuses on an isolated community away from anywhere, and doesn't focus on anything that was happening in the 1930s. It is also only from that story's later sequel that it is retrospectively dated so firmly. Chronologically before that there are a couple of outings to the 1920s, but never for a whole story. You have to go back in time another thirty years or more to find regular historical stops for the Doctor - the show seems most comfortable in Victorian and Edwardian periods, plus a smattering of renaissance trips, and a handful of earlier historical periods visited, mostly in the William Hartnell years. The Second World War falls in a section of history that they just didn't want to go near.

The main reason, though, is that Doctor Who was doing WW2, but not in historically set stories; instead, it was playing it out allegorically in those contemporary and future stories. The Daleks were used multiple times as Nazi analogues, most notably in The Dalek Invasion of Earth which borrows liberally from World War Two action film tropes. UNIT too, for all it's post-war style of pan-nation cooperation, was from its inception heavily influenced by the experiences - direct or indirect - of soldiering between 39 and 45. That aforementioned Abominable Snowman sequel was The Web of Fear, and the soldiers depicted within it, though they are supposed to be from the near future of its 1968 broadcast, draw heavily on wartime or at least movies of wartime. People sheltering in underground train stations from a menace above would have been a scenario familiar to those watching who were alive and in London during the war, and the story's wider situation - the whole of London evacuated - would certainly have been something that was imagined as a possibility in those terrible times. There are dozens of other examples from classic Who, which is not surprising when one considers the experience of those of the age making the show in the 60s and 70s, and the long shadow that the war cast over all UK culture. In those times, to have done proper historical stories set during the war as well as it permeating everything else must have seemed like overkill.

In Summary:

The only problem with watching The Curse of Fenric is all the while thinking, "What will they do next series to top this?!!" and remembering that they didn't get another series, and there wouldn't be another one for 16 years. Boo.

Frontios

Chapter The 129th, where the Doctor appreciates the gravity of a situation.

Plot:

The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are brought down onto the barren planet Frontios in the far future, where the final few humans, escaping from a terrible catastrophe, are struggling to survive. Supplies are low, and discipline is at the point of collapse, with people abandoning this society to become Retrogrades or Rets. On top of this, Frontios appears to be at war with another assailant, assumed to be on a nearby planet, who has been bombarding them with missiles for decades. But the danger, as a few of the colonists have suspected over the years, is not from above but from below. The TARDIS is blown apart during an attack, and the leader of the colony, Plantagenet, is sucked into the Earth. Finding a covered trap door in a research centre, the Doctor, his two companions and various colonists venture below into an abandoned quarry and find that giant woodlice-like creatures called Tractators are hollowing out Frontios so they can use their gravity powers to pilot it around the galaxy and plunder other planets. Turlough, who has encountered the creatures before, knows that the way to defeat them is to separate the other Tractators from their leader, the Gravis. The Doctor tricks the Gravis into gravitating the broken bits of TARDIS back together around them.The Gravis, trapped inside the TARDIS, is whisked away to a far off uninhabited planet by the Doctor, and everyone lives hungrily ever after on the edge of societal collapse.

Context:

Back to random selection after a planned detour to Canary Wharf. This one was watched by the whole family (me, the Better Half and three children - boys of 13 and 9, girl of 7) over the course of a few evenings. The Better Half remembered watching the story back when she was a child, when it first went out, but has no memory of seeing it since. There would have been at least two opportunities (when the video and DVD releases came out, and I bought them and watched them) but somehow she missed out on both of them. Things started promisingly with the children engaged and TBH vaguely appreciative, but the final episode alas lost them all.

First time round:

I don't know what I was so busy doing on weeknights in late January and early February of 1984, but this is one of the few stories where I missed not just one but two episodes on their first BBC broadcast, the first and the last. Imagine trying to piece together what was going on in Frontios from just the middle episodes, 2 and 3; I presumably thought it was mostly about Turlough having a nervous breakdown in some caves. I have very few memories of what I did manage to catch, nor of what I was doing at the time. I can very clearly recall a few weeks earlier, getting into position in front of the dining room TV on my own, before the first episode of the season went out (meaning that the rest of the family was in the living room watching something else). I have clear memories of watching the story after Frontios, and the later stories of the season. But my only recollection of the time around this specific story was talking to a friend at school about the finale, and him explaining to me how the TARDIS had come back together at the end. He made the effect sound much better than it was!

It would have been just over 13 years later that I finally got to see the whole thing, and be slightly disappointed by that effect. In a double pack with preceding two-episode story The Awakening, Frontios came out on video early in 1997. This release was of minor significance as being the last VHS with a painted artwork cover, which had been the house style for the whole of the 1990s up to that point; everything after this would be adorned by a photo montage with somewhat unimaginative swirly photoshop effects applied. This was also one of the earliest stories to come out in the relaunch year for the VHS range, 1996 having seen releases suspended to make room for the Paul McGann movie. I would have snapped up the video as soon as it was on the shelf in Volume One in Worthing, starved as I was of my usual regular fix of non-McGann Who, and watched it in the little studio flat I was living in at the time (presumably without the Better Half, who came back for holidays, but was away at university the rest of the time). Probably because half of it was brand new to me, I remember very much liking it on that watch.

Reaction:

Frontios was the fourth Doctor Who story directed by Ron Jones, whose first directing job (not just for Who, but ever) was the early Peter Davison story Black Orchid. This was followed by Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity. It's fair to say that none of those three earlier products of his directorial efforts is very well thought of by Doctor Who fans. But how much of that is down to him? Imagine being given the scripts to Black Orchid to make sense of when you're fresh off the BBC director's course. Imagine getting a call some weeks' later to be invited back and finding that visualising the next script was pretty much impossible, involving as it did a depiction of Concorde crash-landing into a prehistoric wasteland. And the less said about Arc of Infinity, the better. Frontios might have been the first time he got to show what he was made of with a script that was half decent, or maybe he was just getting better. Whatever the reason, sitting down and watching the initial episodes of this story, it is in a different league, and maybe even a different sport, to those previous efforts.

Despite this story's budget not stretching to any location filming, the 'exterior' scenes are dressed and lit well, with the ominous darkening skies before the bombardment convincing one (pretty much) that the characters are outside. The action of the bombardment is choreographed well too, with extras running to and fro, and good practical effects  Despite the earth being fairly obviously made of polystyrene in some close-ups, the effects of people being sucked down into the ground are good too, though the final stage of their disappearance being done with a video effect spoils it just a little. There's some creditable use of mattes to give the illusion of space to some sets. Costume and production design combine to give an effective vision of a desperate outpost, with a real grit and danger to it, making the first episode's small-scale challenges of generating light and power sufficient to help the wounded feel nonetheless dramatic. It is definitely a very 1980s vision of the future (the shiny plastic file with description written on in day-glo crayon, or the silver disco covering for the acid jar are good examples of this), but that's part of the fun. The depictions of the future in 1960s and 1970s Who could not escape their times either. Even the Tractator costumes, while impractical, are still well-designed and imaginative, and more mobile than this season's later giant creepy-crawlies, the slugs in The Twin Dilemma.

Jones gets great performances too. The style might be a bit declamatory, with a few characters staring through an imaginary proscenium arch and delivering cod-Shakespearean speeches (I'm looking at you, young Jeff Rawle), but it works, in the same way that the much more lauded Caves of Androzani does, with similar asides aimed at imaginary groundlings. The characters are well-written, and multi-dimensional: the gruff exterior of Officer Brazen conceals the heart of a canny politician; Range's fussy scientist has shades of grey, withholding evidence and risking others to save his daughter. All are brought to life by an excellent cast. Mark Strickson as Turlough gets an opportunity to go over the top (he's frothing at the mouth at one point), but it just about holds together. Best of all, though, somewhat surprisingly, is Peter Davison. His performance is incendiary, finding - with only a few stories left before he leaves - new found energy in the role: he's manic, he's playful, he's stern, he's bloody excellent, and it may well be his best acting in the series (although a few weeks later, he'll equal or maybe even better it in his swansong). 

But, all of this excellence just can't be sustained, and the story falls apart at the end. Some fault lies with the script: writer Christopher H. Bidmead is very keen on the scientific method, and pitches science versus politics in the early episodes (a throwback to the many 'science versus' stories that were made when he was script editor - science versus religion, science versus a backward aristocracy, science versus giant green mafia lizards, and so on). No method, though, scientific or otherwise, is used to discover the Tractators' weaknesses and therefore power the climax, it's just an arbitrary bit of luck that Turlough happens to know the answer. Jones' previous fleet-footedness in the studio abandons him for episode 4: the action scenes are ramshackle, Brazen's self-sacrifice is not shot nor performed adequately, and it therefore seems thrown away. The scenes of the TARDIS coming together are clumsy compared to the action of the earlier episodes, and the story seems to just stop, with the final sequence a little too twee and sugary given that these people still look like they're not going to make it without starving.

It also annoys me that the Doctor takes the Gravis off to an uninhabited planet at the end, as if that's going to make things alright. Wasn't Frontios an uninhabited planet when the Gravis arrived on it? And he made enough trouble there. He doesn't have the other Tractators now, so does he no longer have gravity power enough to crash land a ship there? If that's the case, why? How did this race evolve with this power that requires the presence of a specific one of their number alongside the others? Or have the Tractators not evolved like this, but the Gravis been specially engineered somehow, and if so how? Is there only one Gravis, and so this is the same group that attacked Turlough's home planet, or are there others? It's such a shame that this doesn't stand up to scrutiny, as the rest of the script is very good. The world and people of Frontios are well thought out, and there's nice little touches like the subtle introductions of both the hat-stand and the block and tackle, before they take on a different relevance later on. It's not the first or last time that a Doctor Who story has a great opening, build up, twists and turns, but can't pull off the ending, and it likely won't be the last; this time, though, the story's start was so startlingly interesting, that it seems more disappointing.

Connectivity: 

In both this story and Army of Ghosts / Doomsday, the monsters manifest themselves from where they are hiding into another space, and are misinterpreted by those that witness this manifestation. In both stories, the Doctor is youthful, a bit manic, wears plimsolls and occasionally dons glasses.

Deeper Thoughts:

Can't think of a title punning on something to do with 'Target' that hasn't been done before by everyone ever writing about these books ever. I said above that I had to wait over 13 years to watch the whole of Frontios. I didn't, of course, have to wait that long to experience the full plot. That came in the form of a novelisation on the Target imprint, one of a series which - after starting in the early 70s with reprints of three pre-existing novelisations of Who stories from the previous decade - carried on for another twenty years, covering almost all the classic series. Sometime in 1985, by my estimation, I would have obtained the Frontios paperback, which had a rather good artwork cover by Andrew Skilleter. This felt at the time like the beginning of a new phase in Target's long run of releases, the fourth and penultimate phase of the range to my mind. The first phase went through to 1976-ish, and included the early new adaptations, starting with Doctor Who and The Auton Invasion (based on TV story Spearhead from Space) in early 1974. These were primarily done by erstwhile Who script editor Terrance Dicks and writer Malcolm Hulke, alternating, with other writers only occasionally getting a look in. They were fairly fat books, the prose fleshing out characters and plots, and they tended to have new and more exciting titles than their TV templates (Colony in Space became Doctor Who and The Doomsday Weapon, Frontier in Space became Doctor Who and The Space War, etc.).

The second phase towards the later 70s and into the early 1980s were thinner, with no deviations from the usual page count nor from the original TV scripts; they were being turned out regularly on something of a production line by Terrance Dicks solo (with other writers only occasionally getting a look in) and kept the same title as their TV show inspiration (though still in the 'Doctor Who and the...' format). It was during this period that I first encountered them as a nipper. Durrington Library had a number of hardbacks, mostly phase 2, but a few phase 1. Even before I was a fan, they held a certain fascination - the covers were definitely intriguing - and by the time I started watching the show, I had got them all out and read them multiple times (with the exception of Doctor Who and The Robots of Death, which I saw once when I'd maxed out my library card, and could never find again!). As I matured in my fandom, the books also changed. A subtle but significant change happened as the 1980s wore on, phase 3 started, and I began to buy and collect the books: the titles were no longer 'Doctor Who and the...' anything, but were instead, for example, 'Doctor Who - Full Circle'. Something about this reminds me of the decision made at around the same time to stop crediting the main character of my favourite show as Doctor Who, and start crediting him as The Doctor. This wasn't necessarily something fun for any kid to pick up any more, it was aimed at the enthusiast, who maybe took things a little bit more (too?) seriously.

Phase 3 looked different to the previous phases too, as - coincidentally, because of Peter Davison not being happy with the likenesses of artwork depicting him - the books adopted photographic covers for a while. Other writers were more involved by this stage also. But, with a few notable exceptions, the writing style stayed the same - short, sweet and faithful to the original show. That started to change with phase 4. As Davison was no longer playing the part by that time, the artwork covers came back with a vengeance, and the writers started to divert a little from being so faithful to the source material. Frontios, for example, has a gruesome description of the Tractators' excavating machine having been assembled from severed human body parts (it's just a grey box on the telly). Also, as there were fewer stories in production, but an appetite for regular book releases had grown, the range looked more and more to the back catalogue, filling most of the gaps in the first two Doctors' tenures, often getting the original script writer back. Terrance Dicks was only getting to write one or two per year by then, poor thing. I, like many fans at the time, fell in love with those early eras through some wonderful books, including my absolute favourite, The Myth Makers by Donald Cotton.

Phase 5 was the mop-up, finishing what could be finished through the late 80s and into the early 1990s. The latest scripts were being pretty much 100% novelised by the current series writers (Terrance still got to do a few old ones) and they were letting rip, expanding the stories and the page count. One of the absolute best, and probably my second favourite, is Ben Aaronovitch's Remembrance of the Daleks. And it wasn't just the new kids on the block either: 1960s writer Victor Pemberton had, a year or two earlier, converted his story Fury from the Deep into a magnificent novel (and my third favourite Target book) that was about double the size of any other at that point. There is a sort-of phase 6 as well, I suppose. When the range officially ended, there were four (or five, if you count Shada) titles outstanding. These were the two (or three, if you count Shada) written by Douglas Adams, who didn't want to write them for the money the publishers were offering, and didn't want anyone else writing them for all the money in the world, plus the two Eric Saward Dalek stories (which were caught up in some rights issue or other). Over the last few years, all of these have finally been written and released, though not all in paperback yet. Then, last year, four post-2005 series stories were published in paperback with imitation Target covers.

All these phases are covered in the recent Doctor Who Magazine special on Target books, which I highly recommend. It so inspired me, I have decided to obtain a couple of the books I haven't got. I have purchased City of Death by James Goss (Douglas became more relaxed about other writers covering his work once he died) and Rose by Russell T Davies. I'm heading off to the sun with the family soon, and they should make perfect holiday reading. Unfortunately, even if I get them all, I won't have completed my collection. I have one of each text (I have by no means tried to get every edition or cover design) with the exception of the phase 6 stories and two others. The final two Target TV novelisations were by John Peel (not that one): The Power of the Daleks and The Evil of the Daleks. They came out while I was at university, when any spare cash I had was used for buying Doctor Who videos. Being absolutely brassic, I didn't buy them. They're long out of print, and it would cost me about thirty quid per book to obtain them now. If you ever find out that I have done so, you'll know one of two things: either they were reprinted, or the Better Half has become a lot more forgiving than she is right now!

In Summary:

It's very good for the first three quarters, then sinks without a trace.