This selection of Fifth Doctor adaptations is possibly
remarkable for not having any contributions from Terrance Dicks! He was still
very prolific at the time but slowly more and more of the TV writers were
taking the opportunity to novelise their own work rather than leave it up to
Dicks who, by this point, had honed his story adaptations to a short, concise,
fine art.
These three stories, Mawdryn
Undead by Peter Grimwade, Terminus
by Stephen Gallagher and Enlightenment
by Barbara Clegg , are a wild mix of everything that was endemic in 1980s Doctor Who. They are at times
challenging, disturbing, garish, gorgeous and disappointing - occasionally all at the same time. They are often
directed in a workmanlike way and over-lit to the point where the drama really
struggles to assert itself and some very strange costume and design
choices are inflicted on the viewer. Fortunately on the printed page one doesn’t have the same kind of up
and down experience.
Mawdryn Undead is
a perfect example, by Peter Grimwade, of how the writer can meet the publisher’s
restrictions whilst still elaborating on the script to a greater degree than merely giving basic
descriptions. The representation of the undead mutants, in a way that TV could
never have convincingly managed at the time (nor the BBC allowed, I expect!)
and the introduction of Turlough as an alien boy stranded on Earth at the
beginning of the narrative are areas that stand out from the rest. Also Grimwade uses the novel
format to overcome that continual problem for everyone about how Turlough is
supposed to be trying to kill the Doctor but doesn’t. So we get Turlough’s inner
thoughts, his indecision, those moments where he realises that he’s signed up
to evil and that he likes and agrees with the Doctor. We don’t get any of that
on TV – due most likely to the restricted format of the show and its mode of
production at the time, which concentrated on telling a story through action
and visuals, not through inner monologue or adventurous foregrounding of
characters other than the Doctor (prime exceptions to this of course being the
two Christopher Bailey stories Kinda
and Snakedance, but that’s exactly
what they were: exceptions).
But even with all of this going on, showing how much the
author has really thought about how he could get the most out of the novel
format (and the publisher’s restrictions) to the benefit of the story, the
story really whips along at great pace and with an easy, flowing style. The
novelisation is, as it should be, something similar but different to, and
complimentary to, the televised version and it’s quite surprising at times that
aspects of the story lend themselves more easily to prose narrative than TV. I
found it a short but highly enjoyable read, definitely one I’d pick up again.
Terminus, by John
Lydecker (pen name for Stephen Gallagher) is a different kettle of leprosy-infested
fish altogether. Gallagher is a ‘real’ sci-fi writer, bringing to Doctor Who the kind of legitimacy that Tanith Lee brought to Blake’s 7 and effectively merging TV drama and high-concept sci-fi prose. Unlike Douglas Adams a couple of
years before, Stephen Gallagher was willing to adapt his TV work for the page
on Target’s conditions, but as he was established by this point he assumes a
pseudonym - presumably to help protect his main ‘brand’. Fair enough. He’d used
it before with Warrior’s Gate. But
there seems to have been some compromise agreed – for the first time in a long
while we have a book that isn’t bound by the usual maximum 127-odd pages, so Lydecker is able to expand on what was shown on screen, and write
around the story and the action a bit more. It’s a reasonably faithful
adaptation with a few additional story elements that were presumably cut from
the TV scripts for timing or practicality – the sort of thing he was prevented
from doing when novelising Warrior’s Gate, alas.
Whereas Grimwade selected a few aspects to develop in his Mawdryn Undead, Lydecker gives us more of everything in Terminus (even down to the ‘Terminus’
installation being referred to as The
Terminus instead of just plain Terminus!) so you’d almost think that the novel
came before the TV version. Lydecker wrote Terminus
as one long unbroken narrative, as he did with Warrior’s Gate, rather than breaking it down into the more usual
Target house style of bite-size chapters. Aside from being frustrating for
reading on my commute (first world problems!) it gives the book a cohesive sense of wholeness,
a kind of organic, natural flow from start through to finish. For a story
that’s all about people being trapped and enclosed this is a very apposite
stylistic decision; chapter breaks give the reader a chance to break free of
the narrative if they choose, to come up for air. Taking that comfort blanket
away gives the reader a whole new relationship with the text, where the text is
in control of the relationship instead. It’s disconcerting trying to work out
what the best place is to stop reading as you near your train stop or your
lunch break is over, and one finds oneself having to back-track at times to
find your way back in to the narrative. This sounds like a negative, like the
text is not reader-friendly; I don’t look it at as a negative, I look at it as
a timely reminder to readers not to take narratives for granted.
Terminus is a much
maligned TV story. Pretty much all of its failings, though, can be attributed
to those factors I listed at the beginning of this piece: it’s very flatly
directed, over lit with little sense of claustrophobia or jeopardy, the space
raiders Kari and Olvir look like backing dancers for Spandau Ballet and the
Garm might as well have a pink tutu and wings for all the subtlety with which
he is used and directed. Of course on the page we lose all these drawbacks. The
Garm in particular is written how Gallagher had hoped he’d be realised and directed
– like a huge shadowy presence, not a garish, oversized RAF mascot. Nyssa
doesn’t lose her clothes at an alarmingly quick rate in some sort of confused
pseudo-sexual diseased miasma. You lose the distracting plastic ‘clack clack’
of the Vanir armour in the background the whole story feels more trapped and
enclosed on the page – giving synergy with the reader experience. It’s a great
book written by an accomplished sci-fi author. It never feels like an
adaptation of anything, even though it’s the middle helping of a wider story
arc and it has to manage a changing team dynamic by losing one of the key players in the
TARDIS crew; it feels like it was written to be a book in its own right, to
exist on its own terms. I came away from it thinking what a shame it was that
Stephen Gallagher didn’t contribute any further stories to the TV series or
that John Lydecker didn’t contribute to Virgin’s New Adventures of Missing
Adventures series in the 1990s when this kind of hard sci-fi was much more the
norm.
Barbara Clegg’s Enlightenment
book stands out for several reasons. Firstly this was the first Target
novelisation by a female writer (with Rona Munro’s Survival being the only other sole effort aside from Alison
Bingeman and Jane Baker’s co-writing credits), and secondly this is the only
one of the three books in this article to have anything like an interesting front
cover! Mawdryn Undead and Terminus both suffer appallingly from DPCS:
Dull Photo Cover Syndrome. Here we get a smashing illustration of the racing
yachts and the shining harbour, with the Doctor’s photograph artfully entwined
within the logo instead. Great idea! I
know we take photo editing and image enhancement for granted these days, but
it’s really a shame that more thought and effort wasn’t put into getting round the refusal by
Peter Davison or his Agent to have his likeness represented by the usual cover
artists. For many of us back in the day it was the cover that initially engaged
us into wanting to purchase and read these books, after all.
I wondered early on why the appearance of the Black Guardian
was removed towards the beginning of the story, when the White Guardian is
asking for power from the TARDIS and scares the bejesus out of
the Doctor. I must assume that Clegg thought it dramatically more powerful to
only have him appear to the Doctor at the very end of the story arc. We also
don’t get Jackson’s sober reactions to being sent aloft. We know he’s taken the
pledge against alcohol so he won’t take his grog, but he doesn’t seem to have a
problem with being aloft in space here, unlike on TV where it’s a major character
point for him and the cornerstone of his relationship with Turlough. In fact
the human sailors tend to be underwritten here in favour of the Eternals and
their race. That may have been a decision Clegg took to streamline the
narrative, make it less cluttered in order to meet the publisher’s page and length restrictions.
It’s a loss, I’ll admit. The major strength of Enlightenment is in its characters which
are all drawn with such care and brilliance. But does it spoil the book? Does
the story lack a vital aspect by not having Jackson think that the officers are
drugging the crew? I think not, in all honesty. It’s still a joy to read because
the story is so engaging and the empty, despairing Eternals and the TARDIS crew
are so endearingly written (for empty Eternals that’s quite an achievement!)
Again I feel it was a shame that Barbara Clegg didn’t write more stories for
the series – thought-provoking narratives and characters of this calibre were
rare within the show at the time.
These three books weren’t written with any level of unity or
continuity between themselves to unfold a broader narrative and story arc. This
was true of the TV stories they are based on, with the only tenuous link being
Turlough under the thrall of The Black Guardian. However despite this they tell
an engaging, on-going story each in their own highly individual way, expressing
many of the strengths of the Target range of books, least of all its massive
variety.
