Saturday, 10 November 2018

Who Reviews The Caves of Androzani Audiobook by Tony J Fyler



Tony commits heresy.

There’s a problem with really, really good TV.

The more times you reproduce it in a different form, the more potential weak-spots you drill in something that’s already probably as good as it can be.

That’s an issue when it comes to the audiobook of the Target novelization of The Caves of Androzani.

The Caves of Androzani on TV is widely regarded as the Fifth Doctor’s finest couple of hours. Finally free of his frequently overstuffed companion-roster and travelling with just Peri, he gets caught up in a ‘pathetic little local war’ on a pair of worlds where no-one – but no-one – appears to have any redeeming qualities at all. Neither the Doctor nor Peri have much personal agency throughout most of the story, being buffeted back and forth from military forces to gun runners to the hideaway of lead rebel, Sharaz Jek, a kind of space Phantom of the Opera who takes a shine to the ‘beeeeautiful’ Peri as his version of Christine Daae, even as she turns all wan and sweaty and close to death. But when the Doctor gets his chance, this is where Peter Davison’s version of the Time Lord shines brightest. Battling not only the enmity of almost everyone he meets, but a planet boiling up to explode into bursts of superheated primeval mud, a roaming monster, an eventually fatal disease and the simple option of giving up and dying, The Caves of Androzani gives Peter Davison the chance to show his Doctor’s mettle, more than practically any other story during his time in the Tardis.

It’s frankly magnificent.

And here, in the audiobook version, perhaps inspired by quite how well regarded the TV version is, it’s Davison who reads the book, bringing a solid if never spectacular range of voices to bear to people the worlds of Androzani.

So what’s the problem?

I’m…going to commit Who-heresy here. Bear with me, we’ll get through it together.
The problem is with Terrance Dicks.

Terrance Dicks of course is the former script editor and writer for the show, who went on to keep the memory and the reality of Doctor Who stories alive by writing enormous numbers of Target novelisations of stories  that – in an era before VHS or DVD copies of the stories were widely available – were often the only way fans got to experience decades worth of Doctor Who. He is, among much else, Mr Target.

But that works against the novelization of The Caves Of Androzani. Because Dicks’ approach to writing Target novelizations was almost journalistic, in the same way his script editing was. There were deadlines, there was an original version to work from, and you didn’t get paid if the novel wasn’t delivered, so your main job was to render what was on the screen in an engaging written way and show the story as it appeared, with perhaps just a tweak here or there to whet the appetites of readers.

And, to be fair to him, that’s what he did to The Caves Of Androzani.

So…wait, where’s the problem again? I’ve just spent paragraphs saying The Caves of Androzani was great on TV. If you translate that almost slavishly to the novelisation, surely it’s still great?

Nnnnot really.

It’s not bad, by any means. But the novelisation actually goes to prove what a debt Androzani owed to its cast and more particularly its director, the almost equally legendary Graham Harper, to bring the sneering, poisonous atmosphere of a world of people obsessed by eternal youth while their souls essentially rot inside them to bear. The flattened out, simple reportage style of the novelisation makes The Caves of Androzani depressingly ordinary Doctor Who, which any viewing of the story itself denies at every point along the journey. Had the novelisation been written by a less regular, less mechanically journalistic writer, it might perhaps have evoked more of the sticky atmosphere of encroaching venality of the Androzani system that the TV version under Harper’s eye, and the originating pen of Robert Holmes, put on the screen.

Peter Davison, for his part, works valiantly to invest his reading with Androzani’s original dark brio, and sometimes succeeds – an elder Davison makes a surprisingly creepy Jek, for instance, and gives his Doctor some of the youth which he seemed to possess on screen, but handles the sections where the Doctor displays his mettle and his command with a certain firmness that was only hinted at in the broadcast version. But that flattening out, that sense of this being an ordinary four-episode slice of Doctor Who, is difficult to get past, and ultimately, listening to this audiobook will send you diving for the televised version, to make sure it’s as good as you’ve always remembered.

It is, don’t worry. It’s just a shame that the audiobook version loses so much of the threat, the personality and the atmosphere that make The Caves of Androzani a fan favourite to this day

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