I'm rather excited about Gareth Roberts' Doctor Who: Shada novelisation - but then so seems to be everyone. 'Finishing' an incomplete Fourth Doctor / Douglas Adams story? There's masses hanging on it; I'd be bricking it if it was me. Sounds like he's done a good job though, if the raving is to be believed. I haven't read it yet - my copy hasn't arrived, and although it's on my wife's Kindle I'm not sure I want to go down the e-book avenue just yet; I'm still back with Caxton...
But in the build up to it (not getting too excited, honest!) I've been prepping myself good and proper. I've watched the 1992 Shada video release, which tantalisingly shows how brilliant the complete show would almost certainly have been. I've watched A Matter of Time, the Graham Williams era documentary on the Ribos Operation DVD, which I adore no matter how many times I watch it, and I've read a couple of Gareth Roberts' Season 17 Virgin 'Missing Adventures' for the first time: The Romance of Crime (1995) and The English Way of Death (1996).
I didn't give these any attention at the time they were published. I'd not got on very well with the 'New Adventures' at that point and I'd foolishly believed the MAs would tread similar ground and not recognisably represent the programme I loved. So I focussed on catching up with old episodes I'd never seen on video instead and years and years of creative, inventive fan fiction passed me by.
I'm slowly correcting that years later...
I've read a few of the MAs published prior to The Romance of Crime. John Peel's Evolution is my favourite from those simply because I couldn't put it down [cracking read, not a glue-related incident - note]. State of Change and The Crystal Bucephalus are the other two. They're OK at best, but never great, and they never really feel like the era they're 'missing' from. I found both Craig Hinton's and Christopher Bulis' prose tough going; I just wanted them to relax a bit and stop trying so hard to impress all the time.
The beauty of The Romance of Crime is that Gareth Roberts is capable, confident and relaxed, and the book is TOTALLY season 17 Doctor Who. The tone is spot on: a really good yarn, with larger-than-life characters, moments of real humour & sudden seriousness, and some familiar lumbering monsters to boot. It's also pretty much studio-bound. It was very easy to visualise this story throughout and the regulars are depicted perfectly. Having gained the reader's trust, Roberts can then stretch us a bit with The English Way of Death. Here we have the Doctor, Romana and K9 clearly in season 17 mode and again with some eccentric supporting characters, but this time the canvas is grander; boundaries are pushed a bit further. This is largely a story set on location, and the subject comes much more from the horror genre than the production team of the time would have accommodated, counter-balanced by the whimsical notion of future humans choosing to retire back in time to 1930s London. This is the comedy / drama / horror interplay that Douglas Adams aimed for in his Doctor Whos, each heightening the impact of the other. What this does is remind us all that beneath the bluster of the latter-day Fourth Doctor he's still brooding and horror-struck by grotesque power and zombies - but it's not simply a Hinchcliffe / Holmes-era yarn with Romana, K9 and some Blue Peter design-a-monster competition winners thrown in for good measure. Again the story is no less difficult to visualise in the house style of season 17, and Roberts coaxes us to allow our imaginations to wander a bit further without it feeling out of place with Creature From The Pit or Nightmare of Eden. In both novels K9 is well-used as a character and as a practical tool (not a get-out-of-jail-free-card); Romana gets plenty to do and spends a lot of time separate from the Doctor. The Doctor gets to be funny, witty, heroic and dramatic - in much the same way as he does in the new series these days on TV.
These books came highly recommended and, I feel, with good reason.
I'm looking forward to Jonathan Morris' PDA Festival of Death and Roberts' other MA The Well-Mannered War after Shada. If they're anything near as good as the other Season 17 'missing' adventures then they'll be a cracking good read.
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