Who Reviews The Monster of Peladon by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s goin’ down the mines.

The Monster of Peladon was that reasonably rare thing in Doctor Who – a sequel story, showing the advancement of an alien world which acted as a mirror of political events here on Earth, and most particularly in Britain.

The Curse Of Peladon, its predecessor in Season 9 (1972) played out the traumas of a relatively backward planet with a good heart, an overweening love of its own traditions and superstitions, and a feudalistic monarchy, attempting to join a larger trade federation and fit its idiosyncratic rough edges into the federation’s more uniform, more technologically advanced and more fundamentally civilized self.

It was of course a metaphor for Britain’s dithering original entry into the EEC as it then was (the body that became the EU). When we returned to Peladon for Monster, things in the UK had gone from struggling to worse, and Peladon was ripe for another visit to explore the fundamental to and fro of commerce and its impact on the lives of working people.

Peladon, as well as being a feudal society with a medieval reverence for monarchs and lords, was a mining community, and in 1974, that was resonant with Britain as the country faced a miners’ strike, a battle between those who produced the country’s wealth and those who spent it.

The Monster Of Peladon on-screen is rather fun, certainly, but it wears its social conscience right up front on its sleeve, in a way that makes it mystifying when Classic Who fans criticise the ‘liberal agenda’ of 21^st century Who.

If anything, the joy about the novelization of the story by Terrance Dicks is that it mellows the social politics out a bit and foregrounds the adventure. It does that with a subtlety that wasn’t usually Dicks’ forte, but here, it works by keeping you focused on the mystery, so that your nose, like that of journalist Sarah-Jane Smith, perks up at the smell of something rotten in the state of Peladon, rather than at man’s immortal economic inhumanity to man.

Visions of Aggedor, the ceremonial beast of Peladon, are being used to stir up trouble among the miners of the planet. There’s a young, relatively inexperienced queen on the throne of this mighty and decidedly macho kingdom, there are the usual Federation busybodies about (including everyone’s favourite, Alpha Centauri), the Federation is at war with Galaxy Five, and Peladon isn’t entirely sure it wants anything to do with such conflicts, despite being the best source of Trisilicate, a mineral which is crucial to fighting and winning that war. And then of course, there’s something extra nasty and complicated going on in the catacombs of Peladon with a breakaway group of aliens, who are behind the whole shebang.

They’re on the cover, which really rather blows the suspense of the thing...

Fine, it’s the Ice Warriors, are you happy now?

Except it’s not so much the Ice Warriors as some Ice Warriors. In a relatively early stab at moving away from the notion that all alien species have a single agenda, what we have here is a breakaway group of Ice Warriors, more or less demanding a rewrite of The Curse Of Peladon, where [spoiler alert] the Ice Warriors, previous stalwart villains of two Troughton-era stories, turned good.

Part of the pleasure of the novelization of The Monster Of Peladon is that it’s less intense political thriller, more roaring good fun with aliens, while still getting in a little feminism around the edges, as Sarah-Jane delivers the immortal line ‘There’s nothing only about being a girl’ to get Queen Thalira to buck up her ideas about what’s happening in her kingdom and what she can do to affect the tide of events.

It’s a story that includes some classic Pertwee toing and froing as power changes hands time and time again, but it handles the shifts better than many did, and certainly in the audiobook version, it’s never quite enough to make you weary of the back and forth.

That’s partially down to Terrance Dicks’ writing style, which seems to have been encapsulated in the notion that you only embellish when it improves the original, and partially to do with a glorious, sympathetic reading by Jon Culshaw.

Yes, the multi-talented impressionist who perhaps first came to geeky prominence for his scarily accurate Fourth Doctor impression.

Since he did the reading of the Five Doctors audiobook (Got that one yet? If not, give yourself a treat), his facility with the Pertwee lisp, not to mention his ability to deliver other characters with a resonance that makes them uncanny has brought Culshaw’s talents more and more to bear in the Doctor Who universe, and here, he’s faultless throughout, even when given quite the range of characters to voice, from haughty beardy Peladonian counsellors, young Queen Thalira, the fanatically fretful and squeaky Alpha Centauri, the Third Doctor, Sarah-Jane Smith, and both an Ice Lord (low but oily) and an Ice Warrior (whispery and sibilant).

Oddly then, while his Pertwee is perfect, one of the most effective voices Culshaw contributes to the whole thing, and certainly one that makes the pace of the reading belt along, is that of an ordinary human by the name of Eckersley.

Eckersley’s so plausible, and so gloriously, slappably Seventies, frequently calling Sarah-Jane ‘love’ in a demeaning way, you almost yeeeeearn for him to turn out to be a bigger league wrong ’un right from the start, for the sheer moral superiority it would bring. He’s never an eminence grise, but he is eminently greasy all the way through, while being unfortunately excellent at what he does, and Culshaw captures the sense of him wonderfully, making him an unexpected stand-out of the reading.

Bottom line – The Monster Of Peladon audiobook whips along, making you chuckle along the way, and never lets you get too confused by a plot which is, at least on the face of it, quite impenetrably complicated. It’s Doctor Who does Scooby Doo, certainly – monster sightings plaguing business as usual and the Doctor and Sarah-Jane getting to the bottom of it – but along the way, there’s so much context and power-swapping even within the adventure, before you even contemplate the political resonances with the Britain of the day, it would have been easy for the book to have become a seething nightmare of ‘Who did what-now?’ It not only doesn’t become that, the combination of Terrance Dicks and Jon ‘Staggeringly Good Value For Money’ Culshaw makes it great mysterious fun which never becomes a drag. Given the right number of hours alone (What isolation protocols?), you can absolutely listen to The Monster Of Peladon at a single sitting.

And if you can, you absolutely should.

Who Reviews At Childhood's End by Tony J Fyler

Tony meets up with an old friend.

We all want to know what happens to our favourite companions once they leave the Doctor (assuming of course they’re that lucky).

Ace, the companion who was with the Seventh Doctor when the axe fell on the continuous run of Classic Who, is in a particularly odd situation as far as her ultimate destiny is concerned, in that because she was never given a proper destiny on-screen, she’s been given, ultimately, several in different alternative media.

In comic-books, she died a hero’s death at the hands of one of her own cans of Nitro-9 explosive in Ground Zero. In books, she stayed behind with a population she felt the Doctor had betrayed, ending her time with the Seventh Doctor somewhat acrimoniously. And in audio, she’s done several things – been trained at the Time Lord Academy, popped back for adventures with the Doctor now and then, and so on.

But those who believe only on-screen references count as canon – and then, only sometimes – probably did a bit of a squee when, in an episode of The Sarah-Jane Adventures, she got a destiny reference point when Sarah-Jane said ‘That woman, Dorothy McShane? You know, the one who runs A Charitable Earth…’

Boom.

There it was, on-screen. Ace’s name had been established elsewhere, but even if it hadn’t, the co-incidence of ‘A Charitable Earth’ being ‘A C E’ would have been quite enough of a giveaway, thank you. So there she was, in our imaginations, growing away quite nicely, running a charitable organization to probably, knowing Ace, save the world in a thousand ways at once, every day in every way.

Of all the destinies of Ace, this is one which has been gradually climbing towards legitimacy ever since that episode of The Sarah-Jane Adventures. Older Ace, now Dorothy, running her charitable foundation. It was used as the basis for a fandom-melting trailer to the blu-ray release of Season 26. It’s recently been added to the Big Finish canon in stories like Dark Universe, and now there’s this. A novel of Ace and the Doctor, written by Sophie Aldred, who has always been the face, the voice and the body of Ace, not only showing us some of the things she’s been getting up to in the decades since we last saw her on screen, but also bringing the relationship between Ace and the Doctor slap bang up to date.

Awesome – sounds like a must-buy. But does it work?

Well, yes, it does. There’s a certain degree of formula followed, a formula more or less laid down by the recent Doctor Who Meets Scratchman novel by Tom Baker (with help from a Big Finish author). But while there’s absolutely a story, and more or less one as convoluted as you’d expect of the Seventh Doctor and Ace, including, for all you continuity-fans, a fairly mind-blowing additional revelation about how Ace was spirited up to Iceworld through the influence of Fenric, it’s important to understand one key thing. In Doctor Who, there are stories where the plot is the key thing and the characters serve the action, and then there are stories where the plot is more or less just the thing that reveals the characters and their journeys.

At Childhood’s End is very much the second kind of story – the plot’s there, and it’s suitably bonkers, with New Whoish centaur aliens and more Classic Who relatively incorporeal aliens, and a network of transport stations to zip people across vast distances, without, as Douglas Adams would have said, all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace. There’s a plot which resonates all the way back to Fenric and Iceworld and which threatens to twang forward into a new era of transgalactic kidnappings and much much worse, but it’s all more or less the stuff which needs to be worked through to show us Ace as she was, Dorothy as she is, her relationship with the Doctor then and now, and how Dorothy deals with both her 21^st century life with A Charitable Earth, and the understanding that the Professor has got some new help in.

It’s absolutely glorious, frankly.

Yes, there’ll be moments when you peer behind the character development at the plot and go ‘Wait. Hang on, what’s happening now?’ but for the most part, you’re with Ace, and Dorothy, and both of them are brilliant and will keep you as safe as they can.

It’s a tale of growing up, coming back from ‘over the rainbow’ and living your life tinged with the magic of the trip, in spite of some darker moments along the way. A tale of making the most of your abilities, putting yourself between slimebags of every sort and the people just trying to get on with their lives, and how you might have the best teacher in the universe, but what happens to you depends on your synthesis of their teaching and your application of it in your real life. Just as much though, it’s a tale of reawakening, reconnection with a side of yourself you might have put behind you. Not so much a journey to find your Inner Child as a journey to find your Inner Teenager Quite Prepared To Hit Things With Sticks, appreciate the broken bits of her, realise you’ve healed those up, but rediscover the bolshy energy of that girl when faced with a universe of sleazeballs and bilgebags.

As with the Scratchman novel, there’s an almost too liberal scattering of casual references to Who stories and villains and elements in At Childhood’s End, and they’re there both to tie the story into the continuity of the Who universe but also, let’s face facts, to give your Inner Fan a bit of a thrill when you recognise them. And it’s important to note that they’re almost scattered too liberally – but not quite. By the end of the book, your inner fanboy or fangirl has been tickled to the point of spangles and giggling, but never quite to the point of wishing it would all just stop.

There’s one biggie in terms of references, and without spoiling it for you, it’s really difficult to talk about much of the second and third act character developments. But we’re not going to break that moment for you, because when it happens, it’s absolutely glorious, and you don’t want to go into it knowing or expecting it. Suffice it for now to say that the Dorothy we meet in this story has seen the breakdown of Torchwood, and is in a very particular relationship to the development of UNIT, which has consequences for meeting up with the Doctor again after all those years.

And in a very sensitive moment, the multiple destinies of Ace and Dorothy are actively addressed, rather than swept under the carpet of storytelling, leaving us with a Dorothy McShane who’s utterly modern, properly at home in this 21^st century, and entirely believable as a potential anchor to her own spin-off series. The Inner Ace might be worth re-igniting in this novel, but Dorothy McShane has a centred worth all of her own, and it’s that that’s really hypnotic in this story.

The audiobook reading is of course by Sophie Aldred (Who else would it be? Even during her TV time as Ace, Aldred was in demand as a voice actress and reader). Her reading ties everything together, the writing and performance, and it’s fun to hear what she makes of some of the other voices in the story. More or less, she makes joy out of them. Joy is very much the sense with which this book and its audio reading will leave you – some of it pure nostalgia, some of it sparkling fresh and as current as can be.

Childhood may have its end, absolutely. But the blend here between the pleasure and the power of childhood, the not-knowing when you’re outclassed or outgunned and stepping forward anyway, and the more grown-up assessments we need to make, the power and the pleasure that comes with having things sorted out and still stepping forward anyway, turns At Childhood’s End into more than just a nostalgic catch-up with a favourite companion. It turns it into a hymn both to having the right kind of role models in your life, and having to take the responsibility to make your mark on the world, your way.

At Childhood’s End is a thing of beauty, a thing of joy, a thing of centaur aliens and backgrounded mysteries and at its beating heart the story of someone we know, someone we loved for her spirit when she was young, and someone we love now for the way in which she’s melded her experiences together to make the right kind of difference in the world.

It’s absolutely Ace, but much, much more besides.

Who Reviews Combat Magicks by Tony J Fyler

Tony engages in mortal combat.

There are sentences which, used as one-line pitches for a story, make the Doctor Who fan’s heart quicken.

The Daleks – on Earth! The Cybermen marching past St Paul’s Cathedral! Giant maggots! Shop window dummies that kill!

You get the idea? OK, try this on for size:

The Doctor meets Attila the Hun.

Yyyyeah, you’re in, aren’t you? Just the idea of those two forces meeting and clashing and maybe even finding ways to work together against an even greater threat – that’s a thing you want to see or read or hear.

Welcome to Combat Majicks, by Steve Cole, read by Yaz actress Mandip Gill.

Attila the Hun and his hordes of…erm…Huns are facing one of the biggest battles of their lives when a strange blue box materialises in the forest into which they’re running, many of them wounded and fleeing. Perhaps the arrival of these new witches will be the thing that turns the tide towards Attila, against the forces of witchcraft deployed by his enemies.

Oh yeah – did we mention the witches? The enemy have witches, who re-animate the dead and send them surging toward the living.

So, that’s nice…

The Doctor and Yaz are obviously powerful witches themselves, emerging from thin air, and producing a medical gel that seals wounds, saves lives and otherwise beggars about with the would-be causes of death in Attila’s day. And so begins the central battle of Combat Majicks – on the one hand, battle to survive and keep Attila and his soldiers alive so they won’t slit the throats of the Tardis crew, annnnd on the other, work out who the other witches are, what they’re doing on the battlefields of Attila the Hun and just possibly what it will take to make them naff off and leave history alone.

All in a day’s work for the Doctor and her Fam.

There’s something of an issue with this audiobook, in that it begins to feel overly similar to The Witchfinders, the TV episode which had people being brought back to life in the mud through the powers of an alien kind of witchcraft, for the purposes of the alien witches. And it also feels like a loooooong listen as there’s the surface battle between Attila and his enemies, the behind-the-surface battle between the witches and…well, life, essentially, and then a whole extra phase of ‘sorting out what to do about the witches’ which if you’re a fan of the modern show will feel too much and too slow – akin to the last two episodes of The Invasion Of Time, you know there’s a purpose to them, but you guess the ending fifty minutes early, and then you’re just watching the clock, waiting for that ending to unfold. That’s the sense of the final act of Combat Majicks – the villains feel muddy in several senses of the word, and while there’s a clarity to their ambitions, the fact that they take quite so long to get around to achieving them feels a touch contrived.

That said, there’s plenty to love about Combat Majicks – including, incidentally, a kind of Imperial Roman Torchwood, which is a sheer joy to hear Ryan stumble across, and a resolution which comes about almost inadvertently, but as the result of an act of unthinking kindness on the Doctor’s part early in the action. In itself, this innovation from Steve Cole feels like it could be a useful direction for the characterisation of the 13^th Doctor to follow when the show returns to TV – a Doctor torn between not getting involved and her own native compassion, not so much the Time Lord Victorious as the Time Lord Compassionate, leading to complications down the line. It’s a simple thing, but it feels like a stab at defining an arc of characterisation for the 13^th Doctor, which could bear productive fruit.

Mandip Gill, as Yaz, is interesting and vibrant and brings a youthful energy to the show. Mandip Gill as a reader, taking on a host of characters, including a mighty warlord and several of his chiefs and captains, feels a little out of her vocal depth, and if you’re among the fans who have trouble with the Sheffield accents on the show, you’re probably best getting this one as a visual book, rather than an audiobook, because the run-time of this reading is a lot of Sheffield for your buck.

Overall though, Combat Majicks is a solidly atmospheric 13^th Doctor story with alien shenanigans hiding in relatively plain sight alongside Attila the Hun and his armies. And while it devolves into the alien storyline and seems to take a while to do the things you know it has to do, you’ll still come away, as fans used to back in the Hartnell era, feeling like you’ve learned a significant amount about a figure and a battle that you might not have been especially aware of before the Doctor took you to live alongside them for a while.

Who Reviews Molten Heart by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s heart is melted.

The first three 13th Doctor novels are each impressive in their own way. The first, The Good Doctor by Juno Dawson tackled religion, sexism, #NotMyDoctor thinking, all while delivering a proper, almost Classic-style Doctor Who story with power structures, literal underground rebellions, much crawling through tunnels and Graham taking centre stage.

The third, Combat Majicks by Steve Cole, takes many of the beats of The Witchfinders, but pits the Doctor and her fam against Attila the Hun, in a long, muddy, glorious nod to the pure historicals of the Hartnell, and uses a particular quality of the Doctor’s to save the day from some death-addicted aliens who’ve tagged Attila as a death-magnet.

Molten Heart, by Una McCormack is probably the most vividly imagined of the three, taking us to a subterranean world with a climate change problem, and a society of living rock-people, living in isolation from the outside world, feeling the appalling consequences of the hopeful expansion of a race from Somewhere Else. 

So, there’s the sci-fi equivalent of fracking with a Chicken Little inversion here – when you live under the surface of a planet, a big drill coming down at you can make the sky fall in. There’s a clear climate change allegory in the fact that the rock people encountered by the Doctor and fam are split, with all the scientific evidence proving that their world is in imminent danger of catastrophe, but power structures and the people within them being invested in the notion that everything’s just fine – and in crushing or supressing the scientifically obvious truth. There’s the danger of optimistic colonialism on indigenous tribes who happen to live in the place you want to be. And yet, above all, there are all the makings of a solid Doctor Who adventure story – a young innocent, a relative who’s gone missing in peculiar circumstances, a ticking clock and a quest, beset by good old-fashioned political and power-based wrangling. Can the Doctor and her fam find the missing scientist, prove the inherent danger, contact the people behind the danger, potentially topple an empire of ignorance, work out a compromise that can save the underground rock-people and just possibly give them a broader horizon for future generations?

Wellll that would be telling, but what’s certain is that Una McCormack gives us quite enough emotional and social realism to believe entirely in her world and its people. That’s saying something fairly major, given that her rock-people and their jewel-encrusted world would need the CGI budget of a major Marvel movie to do it justice on screen, but McCormack jumps the gulf of the technically achievable and takes us effortlessly into the world of the purely imaginable, where Doctor Who as a storytelling medium can really fly. 

Dan Starkey, everyone’s favourite 21st century Sontaran, is on reading duties for this one, and while he’s a master of tone and vocal pitch, he’s possibly not the ideal choice for a Tardis with so strongly northern a crew. Nevertheless, he gives the story energy where it needs it in the ‘let’s go questing’ sections, while giving the characters a quietness when they need it – particularly Yaz and Ryan, giving them the time and space to have moments of growth on their individual quest-strands within the bigger story.

The thing that perhaps stops Molten Heart being quite the success it could be is listening to it after Juno Dawson’s Good Doctor. Where Dawson throws us straight in and delivers arguably a stronger, more clear characterisation of the 13th Doctor than arguably Series 11 managed, in McCormack’s book of rock-people and their underground world, at least initially there’s a level of slightly earnest explanation which reminds listeners of the rubric Terrance Dicks used to put into his Target novelisations, explaining the basic set-ups of Doctor Who – the Tardis, the Doctor, the companions and so on. Arguably of course it’s not too shabby to either do the things that Terrance Dicks does or to be compared to him, and equally arguably, finding the explanations earnest is the complaint of a crusty old fan with – ye gods – nearly forty years behind the time rotor, whereas McCormack’s story covers the ground that would allow young newbies who’ve been living under rocks or too busy counting their toes to come to the book and not at any point feel lost in the technobabble or why these people are doing what they do. So perhaps the thing that stops Molten Heart being quite the success it could be is not listening to The Good Doctor first. Perhaps the thing that stops it being the success it could be is simply Some Fans Being Old And Jaded.

Some fans – particularly the older, more jaded ones - will see this as damning the book with faint praise, but this story would fit in well with Series 11 – there’s a distinct air of familiarity about the characters, the dilemmas, the pulling together through several threads of adventure towards the overall solution. Though it would have to be set after It Takes You Away, because Ryan quite freely calls Graham ‘Grandad’ in this book, which in hindsight seems fine, but given how long before transmission the book was probably written, feels like something of a happy accident.

Overall, there’s something warm and rich and very firmly ‘Doctory’ about Molten Heart – it delivers a cracking adventure, lots of climbing, lots of being chased by forces of suppression, lots of telling truth to power and twiddling with gubbins and being extra-specially clever in a bid to save a world from a danger that resonates with us, while also having the benefit of freshness. You finish the audiobook feeling like you’ve experienced a Series 11 Easter egg episode that could never be made because of the enormous CGI budget – or even, come to that, like you’ve heard at least the basis of a modern, 13th Doctor feature-length movie. Doctor Who, made by Marvel – now there’s a dream to melt many a heart…

Who Reviews Warriors' Gate by Tony J Fyler

Warriors' Gate is a real ‘Love it or hate it’ Doctor Who story. It has fans, absolutely, who rave about the concepts of the void, the mirrors between universes, the time winds. It has fans who point out the serious issues it tackles in terms of slavery, torture, and the wheel of fortune, with kings and conquerors becoming powerless against creatures fundamentally lesser than themselves, and their struggle for freedom against men who despise them and other who back them out of of venal greed and lazy self-interest. It has fans even who applaud the magnificent boldness of choice of setting a story in an environment of almost pure nothing.

Then there’s me.

Me, fan, notsomuch.

The Target audiobook novelisation by the original author has been, we’re advised on the cover, extended and ‘restored’ by the author.

Let’s say this immediately – the Target audiobook novelisation is significantly better than the TV version, but not for the reasons you might expect. What really makes Warriors’ Gate on TV such an uninspiring watch is that none of the world from which the slavers and the Tharils have come really makes it to the screen.

In the extended and restored version, will we get the backstory, the depth, the characterisation we’ve always craved?

Erm…no.

With the exception of a relatively inconsequential moment in the prologue, the novelisation delivers all the flaws of the TV version, strips out the characterisation achieved by some quality actors on screen and makes the slavers a crew of nondescript insignificants who seem entirely bored to be there and appear to follow their captain’s orders more readily once it’s clear he’s gone stark raving bonkers than they ever do while he’s trying to sound sane.

So essentially, a version of Warriors’ Gate that comes in at over five hours retains both the feeling of being underwritten in terms of backstory, and underpowered in dwelling on the boring minutiae of some aspects of crew life on a slaving spaceship. Nothing is really done to expand on the pre-void life of the Tharils, no additional scope is given to their slavery by anyone remembering other slave-ships. And the whole of the actual threat in Warriors' Gate is still driven by a captain going suddenly, seemingly inexplicably and suicidally mad, giving the whole thing a sense of 'Hurry up, wait and explode in the middle of literally nowhere.'

One thing’s distinctly better though – the hurried departure of Romana and K9. It’s not by any means much better, but Romana is at least given some moments across the course of the story when we get to hear her thoughts and ponderings on Gallifrey, on her tendency to be a follower rather than a leader or an individual, and at the end, we get the Doctor’s bewilderment, his reading of her being that she’s always criticised him, always scolded him for his lack of purposeful travel. It makes for a much more believable and poignant ending of their time together than the thoroughly Tom Baker but quite cringy ‘Noblest Romana of them all’ line in the televised version, and that at least is something for which to be grateful to this audiobook version.

Overall, while Jon Culshaw’s reading is universally excellent, five hours of Warriors' Gate on audiobook delivers all the issues of the TV version, and uses its double run-time to deliver a couple of extra flaws of crew characterisation, then redeems itself somewhat by the rewriting of the Romana ending. The audiobook version is lifted somewhat both by Culshaw's uncanny Fourth Doctor and his startling impressionist abilities, replicating the vocal tones of the actors who played the slavers and the Tharils. It’s also lifted by his heroic and valiant attempt to give the storytelling some pace – an effort against which the extended and restored version of the story kicks at every possible turn.

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

Who Reviews The Dominators Audiobook by Tony J Fyler

The Dominators.

Ahh, The Dominators. For Who-fans of a certain age, The Dominators holds a special place in our hearts, along, bizarrely, with The Krotons. They were among the stories chosen for a rare celebratory black and white repeat in the Eighties, and so, for some of us, The Dominators is one of the first times we actually got to experience Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor.

So, score one for nostalgia.

What’s more, The Dominators of course was originally written by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln (under the pen name of Norman Ashby), and they were the people who brought us The Abominable Snowman and The Web Of Fear, so there’s some solid Troughton-writing pedigree there.

What’s even more, the Target novelisation was written by Ian ‘Harry Sullivan’ Marter, who had a distinctive, often highly evocative style, with which he frequently brought stories to very vivid life.

And if you want a kicker, the audiobook is read by Michael Troughton, who, like his brother David, has a distinct knack of imitating his father Patrick’s delivery.

So, what could possibly go wrong?

Honestly, one or two important things.

Nostalgia is great in and of itself, but it does odd things to the memory. You begin to remember some things through rose-tinted glasses. The Dominators’ storyline of the ultra-passive Dulkians and how they cope with the invasion of aggressive bully-boys from outer space was an idea which had a resonance on every playground in the country – the mean boys coming to basically steal the nice boys’ lunch money, push them over and…well, blow up their planet, but it’s a story that suffered somewhat by the fact that the Dominators land on an isolated island, on which the Dulkians don’t actually live, so to get any interaction between them, you have to endure a shuttle ride which eats up time while characters chew the scenery. It was a story that also suffered from budget issues, with the result that the Quarks, the robotic servants of the Dominators, by whose destructive power we’re told they’ve conquered ten galaxies, look utterly illogical, and like they’d only take one good shove to put out of action with no hope of righting themselves. There’s some evidence too that Haisman and Lincoln were not on their top form here – indeed, this was the last story they wrote for Doctor Who, and a whole episode was cut out of the story. It’s unfathomable what they would have ultimately filled another 25 minutes with, because as mentioned, The Dominators is a story that depends on busing the Dulkians in to be menaced, or on one important occasion, having the Dominators take a shuttle ride to shout at them where they live.

And, perhaps more than anything, the Dominators’ defeat is made a certainty not really by anything clever the Doctor or his companions do but by their own gullibility, sloppy methodology, and in the case of the Trainee Dominator, Probationer Toba, his anger management issues. The Dominators is a kind of science fiction version of a visit from your old school bullies.

The novelisation, to be fair to it, smooths out several of the rougher and more ludicrous edges of the story – the Quarks in particular are notably improved by Marter’s descriptions of their semi-humanoid giggles and speech patterns, making the somewhat ridiculous visual impact of their appearance on screen blur into intriguing acceptability, making you think ‘Ten galaxies, with these things? Yyyyeah ok, maybe.’ This is a thought that never, ever, ever occurs to anyone watching the Dominators on TV, so it’s another point in favour of experiencing it as an audiobook.

Here’s the rub though. While Michael Troughton does a good job of rendering his father’s Doctor, and also of his companions, Jamie and Zoe, there’s very little in his voice that reaches the levels of viciousness you need to be a Dominator, leaving you rather aware that with their entirely demented plan (stolen, incidentally, more or less wholesale from the Dalek Invasion of Earth, and later recycled almost wholesale again for a strand of Attack of the Cybermen), their gruff male power struggles (imagine going on holiday with the most petty driving instructor in the world and then add guns to get an idea of the dynamic), and their deeply unusual visual rendering, with enormous shoulder-pads dwarfing their heads so they looked – as Marter describes them more than once in the novelisation – like upturned turtles, the Dominators themselves, played by Ronald Allen and Kenneth Ives, are an absolutely vital part of keeping the viewer, the reader or the listener engaged throughout the run-time of the story, and if you fail to properly capture the oomph, the arrogant macho oomph of those characters, you invite the listener’s mind to wander through what is actually a rather pedestrian story.

In fairness to Troughton, there are a couple of key moments when he gets the gruffness and rage of the Dominators into his voice, which helps to get you through – in his rendering of Toba’s gleeful rages of destruction, he hits it squarely, and in potentially the most crucial scene of the story, when Dominator Rago schlepps over to address the Dulkian council, the arrogance and hubris is in full flow, which it needs to be – the scene is the crisis-point of idea-clash in the story, where if the Dominators had just asked for help, the Dulkians (a singularly uninspiring bunch in every version of the story, and intentionally so) would have given it to them freely, but Rago announces he takes what he wants, and what he wants are slaves. That intransigence, that sense of superiority, is why the Dominators can’t have nice things – not only are they mean boys who won’t play well with others, but hey have no manners either! Again, it’s clear that The Dominators is a story told on every playground, a spacefaring fairytale where the wizard and his friends help the villagers defeat the bullying giants.

Does it work as an audiobook?

Yes and no is the honest answer. Ian Marter’s prose does two contradictory things - it makes the Quarks more interesting than they were on TV, and the Dominators less so. Troughton’s reading, likewise, gives good spacefaring hero and good innocent Dulkians, but only occasionally really gets the growl that makes the Dominators such interesting, misanthropic, quarrelsome gits on screen. The overall balance feels off, and while there are very many worse ways of spending four-and-a-quarter hours, the pedestrian story and the lack of the vocal commitment to its central villains makes The Dominators audiobook feel like more of an also-ran title than it should be.