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
