My earliest memory of television that I can clearly identify is the ending of the Doctor Who story, The Green Death, Episode 1, in which The Doctor races into a mine to discover that his companion, Jo grant, has plummeted down a mineshaft to what is almost certainly her doom.
I’m fairly confident that I’d also watched a ton of Sesame Street and Playschool by this point, as well as a plethora of British cartoons that played on the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Channel 2 back in the early 1970s in Hobart, Tasmania. But this is the only one I clearly remember.
Doctor Who was my gateway into science fiction. The program itself played pretty much continuously during my childhood, Monday to Thursday at 6:30 every evening. I happily watched the same slowly-increasing number of stories week in, week out, until the early 1980s when the ABC didn’t have any new stories for almost two years (they wanted to air Tom Baker’s final season back-to-back with Peter Davison’s first season). It was during this time that I became a huge fan of the Target novelisations.
Novelisations are considered a bit of a freakish offshoot of literature. Before the days of home video, if you wanted a reminder of a movie you had seen you had to buy the novelisation – the “book of the film.” They are a comparatively recent phenomenon – you can make an argument that Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel was the first such beast, given that it was based on her stage play of the same name – but the genre really took off with the advent of silent movies, with popular films given an extra lease on life with the added release of a novel based on the property.
They exploded again in the 1960s with popular TV shows like Star Trek and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. boasting some high-profile book series based on their stories. Isaac Asimov even wrote a novelisation of the movie Fantastic Voyage, leading many people to believe that it was based on his story rather than the other way around.
Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of 2001: A Space Odyssey was the most famous novelisation for a few years, but Alan Dean Foster’s ghostwritten version of Star Wars soon toppled it from its summit, with a host of other books-of-the-film in its wake (many of which were also written by Foster).
Many novelisations were written from a late (but not usually final) version of the screenplay, which allowed the author to have a version of the script that was pretty close to what was produced and allowed them to put together a book to coincide with the film’s release, although this didn’t always lead to an accurate retelling of the proper story.
Anyway, in the mid-1960s Frederick Mueller Ltd. published three novelisations of Doctor Who stories based on stories from the first two seasons: The Daleks, The Zarbi, and The Crusaders. Interestingly, these were not the original titles of the TV stories, but that is another story…
At any rate the books were published, became briefly successful and fell into obscurity until 1972 when Universal-Tandem Publications wanted to release a children’s range. They called it Target and, among other titles, they managed to secure the rights from Frederick Mueller for the first three Doctor Who books. They published a few novels based on stories from the most recent incarnation of the Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee, and the rest is history.
I came to the Target series a few years after they began publication. I’d read a few books from my school library, but I soon began to build up a collection of my own. I read them for several years until I became interested in branching out into other types of literature, which had more pages, giving greater value for my money.
And when my family moved house in 1987, I sold a large chunk of them at a garage sale. I kept a couple that had sentimental value to me, or which I thought were especially good, but I thought I was properly done with the book series because I hadn’t bought one for nearly three years at this point and had begun losing interest in the TV series partly because of the changing direction of the show in the mid-80s, but mostly because my own interests were beginning to go in other directions.
But I came back to it: in 1988, after a couple of years of watching the show out of habit and the hope that it might become as important to me again as it once had been, I watched the first episode of Ben Aaronovitch’s Remembrance Of the Daleks (the opening story of the show’s 25th season) and fell in love with it all over again. Of course I sought out the novelisation of this story once it was published – and adored it – and began another small collection of novelisations.
What was important to me, that I didn’t realise until much later, was how much of an introduction these books gave me to the world of literature and history. Doctor Who began as a show with some lofty educational aims, hoping to teach or inspire children to learn about science and history. The show lost touch with some of that ambition as time went on but in the books there were always nods to the classics or to things that had happened in days gone by. As an example, in Terance Dicks’s novelisation of Chris Boucher’s story Image Of the Fendahl, a hiker is wandering through a forest. He hears a noise behind him:
He could feel something, some presence, some threat, looming up behind him. An old verse began running through his head. How did it go?
‘Like one that walks a lonely road
And dares not turn his head
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread…’
Something like that, anyway.
When I finally got around to reading The Rime Of the Ancient Mariner some years later, I had quite an “a-ha!” moment when I recognised where I had first read that verse. It’s depressing, but novels used to do that sort of thing all the time; inserting quotes or images from other texts to highlight their own imagery or to make a point far more succinctly than they probably had space for. It doesn’t seem to happen as often as it used to in popular literature, alas…
Anyway, while not all the books were as blatantly educational as that, there quite a few times when the author would make a note of something and it would set off echoes of familiarity in me years later when I chanced upon a reference to it elsewhere or, by some happy coincidence, I read the original version of it.
Unfortunately, Doctor Who was cancelled in 1989, but there was still a trickle of novelisations that flowed out of Target. Overlapping that last trickle were a range of original novels known as New Adventures, which were a set of stories “too broad and too deep for the television screen.” These books featured the last (as he was then) incarnation of the Doctor, as played by Sylvester McCoy, and began a series of, well, new adventures that were written by a host of new and largely untried authors mixed with some more seasoned writers. I read the first few of them but found that the quality was too uneven for me to really enjoy them. And they were taking the characters and ideas of the show in directions that I didn’t really like. There was an awful lot of backwards-looking continuity that showed off how much the authors knew about the show, as well as a lot of retconning of events from the show’s history that showed off how little the authors knew about life.
I’d also moved out of home by this point and was living with the girl I would soon marry, so I didn’t really have a lot of disposable income for books, let alone books that I couldn’t be sure that I would enjoy. So I had to choose what books I bought very carefully for several years.
Then we got Paul McGann’s rather lovely portrayal of the Eighth Doctor in 1996 in Doctor Who – The Movie. I didn’t think much of it, though: there seemed to be an awful lot of scenes that felt like they had been introduced so that producers could say they’d had a hand in it if it went on to become a success.
There was a novelisation of that, too, which I dutifully bought and then discarded a few years later. Not because it was badly-written, but because I just didn’t really like the movie beyond the performance of McGann, so I didn’t feel the need to hang on to a reminder of it.
Then the show came back properly in 2005 and my feelings changed yet again. My kids were fans of this new incarnation of the show for a few years and they – we – collected a fair bit of memorabilia related to the new version of the show and, whenever possible, to the original. This included a couple of books, but they were getting harder and harder to find as the show became popular again, so “our” collections grew at a snail’s pace.
Until one day in 2023 when I was perusing Facebook Marketplace and found someone who was selling a box containing nearly all the novelisations as well as a few extra books based around the show. It was priced at something that didn’t give me a heart attack, and I was lucky enough to be the first person to ask about it.
It’s taken me from that time to this to get through the Original Series and the novelisations that were in the box from the Revived Series. I’ve also plugged the few gaps that were there and I’ve continued to get novelisations based upon the new version of the show (which is now more than twenty years old!) when and where I could.
Hence this new blog project. It’s a look at the books in an order that not many people would consider to be sensible: publication order. I normally read a series this way, but the Doctor Who stories were published in such a haphazard manner that most people just start at the beginning (An Unearthly Child, first published in 1981) and make their way through to the end (Survival, 1990). That way can be confusing, though: several stories were published featuring companions of the Doctor who hadn’t been written about previously, despite having had many adventures with the Doctor and each novelisation tried to introduce them in their own way (Dodo Chaplet, I’m looking at you). Then, at some point in the early 1980s, some marketing genius at Target had the brilliant idea of numbering the series. Since not all the stories had been published, it was decided that the best way to do it would be… in alphabetical order!
So, the spines of many Target books feature numbers that make no sense when you look at them in a row. Or, as a demonstration, there are three stories from the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) that are consecutive in order of broadcast but are numbered 155, 66 and 1. This system was instituted roughly halfway through the series so that any future volumes could be guaranteed to mess up the order if they were published with titles that promised to skew the alphabet and numbering system further. To confound the alphabetical system further, once all the existing novels had been reprinted with a spine number, the novels that came out afterwards were numbered in the order that they were published in. And to really prove that nobody cared about this idea at all, the series also has two books numbered 127.
But the main reason I want to go in publication order is for the name of this blog series: it only makes sense that a series about time travel should not proceed in a linear fashion, so reviewing the series in the order that they were published rather than the order they were screened fits the most famous description of time travel that the show gave us (from the episode Blink) and which, in a very happy case of serendipity (which is a word I learnt through that first story I watched around fifty years ago), matches the name of my blog.
Without further ado, Reader, I give you… Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey Stuff Ian Likes.
