Timeless Adventures

by Brian J. Robb

  With the cancellation of the Doctor Who TV series in 1989, the range of spin-off novels expanded dramatically beyond the original Target novelisations of television stories. These new Doctor Who adventures were largely created by fans who’d cut their fiction-writing teeth on various fanzines, among them new series’ scriptwriter Paul Cornell, script editor Gary Russell and showrunner Russell T Davies.

  For much of the run of the original show, starting in the mid-1970s and running beyond the 1989 cancellation, Target (initially a subsidiary of Universal-Tandem, then WH Allen) produced an ongoing series of novelisations of the Doctor Who television adventures. Many of these slim volumes were written by Terrance Dicks and aimed at younger readers. In a pre-video age, the Target novels were the only way to relive Doctor Who adventures (they allowed repeatability through rereading), with the books and the cover images becoming the defining aspects of certain serials for many fans. It could even be argued that the Target books helped in increasing the literacy of an entire generation. By 1993, when the series of novels adapted from TV episodes finally concluded (four years after the TV series itself had ended, and now published by Virgin), all but a few TV adventures had been novelised (the missing stories were scripts by Douglas Adams and Eric Saward). Spin-offs, like radio serial Slipback, TV one-shot K-9 and Company and unmade stories (such as stories from the originally planned version of season 23), were also novelised, bringing the Target total to 157 books.

  Once the TV adventures had been exhausted, Virgin extended its official licence for Doctor Who novels, splitting the range into two series: New Adventures and Missing Adventures. The New Adventures range (from 1991 to 1997, 61 books) continued, and greatly expanded, the adventures of the Seventh Doctor (as portrayed on TV by Sylvester McCoy), while the Missing Adventures (which ran from 1994 to 1997, 33 books) featured stories for ‘past’ Doctors, the First to the Sixth.

  The first of these fan-authored books consisted of two trilogies: the Timewyrm trilogy and the Cat’s Cradle series. Edited by Peter Darvill-Evans (later replaced by Rebecca Levene and Simon Winstone), the writers included Marc Platt (TV’s Ghost Light) and Andrew Cartmel (the McCoy years’ script editor), in addition to Cornell. The series continued with standalone adventures by writers including Mark Gatiss (later a writer for, and actor in, the revived version of Doctor Who), Ben Aaronovitch (writer of Remembrance of the Daleks), Gareth Roberts (The Shakespeare Code, The Unicorn and the Wasp), Gary Russell (former Doctor Who Magazine editor and later a script editor on Doctor Who and spin-off Torchwood) and even 1980s Cyber Leader actor David Banks, whose Iceberg naturally featured the Cybermen.

  Heavily influenced by the ‘cyberpunk’ movement in SF literature, often attributed to William Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy of the early 1980s, the New Adventures series was described by Virgin as featuring ‘adventures too broad and deep for the small screen’. They were more adult in content than the earlier Target range of novels, reflecting the core audience for Doctor Who in the 1990s: men in their 20s and 30s who’d grown up with the programme, but had outgrown the work of Terrance Dicks that they’d devoured in childhood. Sex, violence and strong language all featured – elements that would never have appeared on screen (although the debate about violence in Doctor Who had run for as long as the show was on air). The fan authors took their opportunity to develop the character of Ace, the Seventh Doctor’s streetwise 1980s companion, far beyond her origins. Separated from the Doctor for a period of years, she returned to him a somewhat harder and more cynical character than had appeared on TV. This was evidence, along with the harder SF space-opera stories, that the fan writers were using the novel range to produce the kind of Doctor Who (heavily influenced by Star Wars and the new wave of British space-opera SF authors, including Iain M Banks) they wished they’d seen on TV in the 1980s.

  Many elements featured in the spin-offs novels would heavily influence the series when it returned to TV. Throughout the New Adventures novels there is a ‘lonely Doctor’ motif, a portrayal of the Doctor as alien to human emotions and condemned to remain alone in the universe, despite a series of temporary companions. Pop-culture references abounded within the novels, and would feature heavily in the revived TV show, with the Doctor seemingly very aware of elements of British pop culture (like EastEnders, referred to in The Satan Pit). Russell T Davies drew on several elements of the New Adventures when formulating the new series, not least of which was his own Damaged Goods, set on a grim housing estate. Paul Cornell’s Human Nature was adapted directly for TV, changing the Seventh Doctor to the Tenth (in Human Nature/The Family of Blood in 2007). The novels had an obsession with continuity, inherited from the John Nathan-Turner years, although the novel authors had more justification for this approach as the books were aimed squarely at committed fans, rather than a larger, more mainstream casual audience. A deepening of continuity led to a desire to wrap up loose ends left over from the TV show or blend together previously disparate elements of the series. This process became known as ‘fanwank’ (a term coined by one-time DWAS co-ordinator and Doctor Who novelist Craig Hinton) and was especially visible in the work of Hinton and Gary Russell. New series showrunner Russell T Davies would be accused of ‘fanwank’ himself, first when he faced off the Cybermen and the Daleks (a long-held fan dream) in Doomsday in 2006 and then when he reunited many elements of his own Tenth Doctor continuity in The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End in 2008 (see chapter seven).

  During his time on the show, script editor Andrew Cartmel had developed a vague notion of making the Doctor ‘more than a Time Lord’ – as revealed in dialogue from a cut scene that didn’t see transmission. Fandom developed this into a full-blown ‘masterplan’ after the series’ conclusion. Building on this, the New Adventures continued the Seventh Doctor’s manipulative nature, dubbing him ‘Time’s Champion’. With Cartmel, Platt and Aaronovitch all writing New Adventures novels, there was an obvious temptation to continue to develop the ideas they had envisaged for the TV series in its final days, including making the Doctor more mysterious (and throwing doubt on the few ‘facts’ the TV series had established about him). The ongoing book series also removed the Time Lords. Russell T Davies built upon these two elements in his version of the revived TV series. As well as exploring the Doctor’s character and motivations in the novels, the TARDIS was also expanded with elements such as an alternate console room made of stone. New companions were invented solely for the novels, resulting in characters the like of which would never have been seen in the TV series, as were new monsters and villains, including the Gallifreyan ‘gods’. The New Adventures series climaxed with Marc Platt’s novel Lungbarrow, which explored the Doctor’s mysterious origins (linking him to the founding of Time Lord society). The novel explained the Time Lords’ non-sexual reproductive system using genetic ‘looms’. The final novel, The Dying Days, acted as a coda to the range and featured Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor.

  The parallel Missing Adventures, written by many of the same professional and fan writers, were freer to draw on the Doctor Who canon, providing sequels to several TV stories. Among these were fan favourites Pyramids of Mars (which resulted in The Sands of Time), The Talons of Weng-Chiang (The Shadow of Weng-Chiang) and The Web Planet (Twilight of the Gods). Various characters and monsters were explored in more depth by the Missing Adventures novels, including the Master (The Dark Path), the Cybermen (Killing Ground), Silurians (The Scales of Injustice) and Sontarans (Lords of the Storm), among others. Notably absent were the Daleks, due to difficulties in negotiating with the Nation estate. The Missing Adventures could not make the sweeping changes to characters and continuity offered by the New Adventures as they were intended (in theory) to fit into narrative gaps between TV adventures.

  In 1997, following the Paul McGann-starring TV movie (see below), the novel ranges were brought in-house by BBC Books and re-branded as the Past Doctor Adventures (76 books) and the Eighth Doctor Adventures (continuing the exploits of McGann’s TV movie character, and prod
ucing a further 73 books). The Eighth Doctor novels further developed the McGann portrayal and introduced several new companions and new complications for continuity. The arrival of the new TV series in 2005 saw the range of books reformatted to focus on stories featuring the new TV Doctors and characters (and dropping any complicated continuity). Once again, they were aimed at a younger audience, just as the original Target novels had been. The series of novels featuring adventures of past TV Doctors was dropped. The BBC range and those published after the arrival of the new TV series often used many of the same authors who had risen to prominence through the Virgin novels.

  The post-Target Doctor Who novels showed that the series’ concept could thrive in a new medium. They allowed fans – who’d grown up watching the TV series, reviewing, lampooning and criticising it in fanzines and writing their own versions of it in fan fiction – to control the production of official, new Doctor Who adventures. Much more so than any other media fandom (even Star Trek), Doctor Who fans have been heavily involved in prolonging the life of the object of their obsession, ultimately becoming involved in its return to TV. Their work would interrogate and deconstruct the show, in non-fiction and fiction, taking it apart and rebuilding it in their own preferred format. It was an opportunity to (re)create the show they’d watched and the series they wished they’d seen (or hoped to see, with several writers attempting to explore what Doctor Who would be like on the big screen or with no budgetary limitations). Some would attempt to reproduce ‘traditional’ Doctor Who stories (‘trad’ stories, like The Visitation), while others explored the more outré opportunities the series offered (‘oddball’ stories, like The Happiness Patrol). This ownership and control of the ongoing narrative by fans would lay the foundation for the triumphant return of Doctor Who to television.

  Answering a letter in the Radio Times in November 1989, The BBC’s Head of Series and Serials Peter Cregeen had promised that the Corporation would ‘take Doctor Who through the 1990s’, while warning that ‘there may be a little longer between this series and the next than usual’. The series was simply resting, a bit like Monty Python’s famous parrot. This uncertainty about the show’s future, and the BBC’s commitment to it, prevented any effective organised fan outcry. It seems clear that, while they expected the show to take a break, the BBC honestly didn’t anticipate the series being off air for 16 years (apart from the one-off McGann TV movie).

  In the dying days of the BBC series there had been interest from various parties interested in taking on Doctor Who as an independent production, the direction that much television drama was moving in during the early 1990s. Among those either contacting the BBC or simply expressing interest in Doctor Who were former scriptwriter Victor Pemberton, one-time series script editor Gerry Davis, Dalek creator Terry Nation (Nation and Davis were presented as a team who between them co-owned the rights to Doctor Who’s biggest monsters, the Daleks and the Cybermen), and even CBS Television in the US (thought an attractive option by Cregeen and fronted by Doctor Who fan and US TV producer Philip Segal). Also in development at this time (and regular fodder for increasingly speculative tabloid newspaper reports throughout the decade) was a big-screen Doctor Who feature film to be produced by Daltenreys (an organisation alternatively known as Coast to Coast and Green Light at various times). Speculation on the casting of a new Doctor for the proposed big-budget movie became a favourite game played by the tabloid newspapers throughout much of the 1990s, and one they found difficult to give up even when David Tennant had played the role for several years.

  With no solid developments announced by the BBC during 1990, the eventual fan campaigns against cancellation (including letter writing, phone-ins and even threatened legal action) proved ineffective in securing the early return of the series. At the end of that year, the head of BBC Enterprises (then charged with looking after the show), James Arnold Baker, announced: ‘The property is an old one, it’s had its day and is no longer commercially viable.’ Enterprises rapidly repudiated this view, keen as they were to continue to exploit Doctor Who as a licensing property, even if there were no new episodes made. Terrance Dicks, script editor in the 1970s, explained the internal BBC confusion thus: ‘Never put down to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence.’ Later, BBC Drama Publicity spokesperson Alan Ayres stated that a decision had been taken to ‘rest the programme for an extended period so that when it returns it will be seen as a fresh, inventive and vibrant addition to the schedule, rather than a battle-weary Time Lord languishing in the backwaters of audience popularity. Doctor Who is too valuable a property for us to re-launch until we are absolutely confident of it as a major success once again.’ Fans saw these announcements, and the stories of on-again, off-again movies and proposed independent productions, as a series of delaying tactics by the BBC, who hoped that Doctor Who could be quietly forgotten. However, it turned out that Alan Ayres’ comments on the series’ potential were uncannily prescient.

  The view of Doctor Who as ‘battle weary’ changed with the approach of the show’s thirtieth anniversary in 1993, when the BBC was suddenly keen to mark the occasion. BBC Radio 2 had already committed to a series of Doctor Who radio dramas starring Third Doctor Jon Pertwee, alongside Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier and Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. Within BBC Home Video (part of Enterprises), there were Doctor Who supporters keen to explore the possibility of a straight-to-video newly made drama for the thirtieth anniversary. This led to the early stages of work on a show entitled The Dark Dimension, co-scripted by fan writer Adrian Rigelsford with Graeme Harper lined up to direct. The plan was to reunite several past Doctor Who leading actors, but with the main role reserved for Tom Baker. The project was reportedly cancelled when the other Doctor actors realised they would be playing supporting roles to Baker, although, later, Philip Segal, producer of the eventual 1996 TV movie, claimed he’d been instrumental in the abandonment of The Dark Dimension as he felt it would conflict with his in-preparation comeback for Doctor Who as a brand-new, US-focused production.

  British-born Segal had been in touch with the BBC since 1989, and had carried his hopes of reviving Doctor Who through several jobs in the US, including periods working for CBS/Columbia, ABC and, finally, Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Productions. He’d overseen the launch of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks at ABC and helped develop SF TV shows seaQuest DSV and Earth 2 at Amblin, which involved a co-production deal with Universal. His ability to drop Spielberg’s name into conversations with new Controller of BBC1 Alan Yentob (a Doctor Who supporter) led to new interest within the BBC about a US-led co-production (so much so that Yentob pulled a Nathan-Turner-style publicity stunt by popping up at the end of a thirtieth-anniversary documentary, 30 Years in the TARDIS, and dropping tantalising hints that Doctor Who may have a definite future after all).

  After years of on-and-off negotiations with the BBC, and alongside their own sporadic attempts at reviving the show, Philip Segal was the one who finally secured the rights to Doctor Who. Development work started in 1994. A co-production deal was set up between the BBC, Amblin and Universal while a script was written. The initial TV movie was being regarded as a showcase (‘back-door’ pilot) for any future TV series, while an outline of the proposed series (the ‘bible’) outlined characters and locations, as well as proposing key stories from the past that could be remade. By 1995, Amblin had dropped out (and Spielberg with it), but Segal had secured Fox as the US broadcaster for a proposed made-for-TV movie. Segal had also dropped earlier draft scripts that set out to give the series a new beginning, deciding instead to tie the proposed new series directly back to the original by featuring Seventh Doctor actor Sylvester McCoy in an opening regeneration sequence (despite worries that this might confuse US viewers new to the show’s concept). Matthew Jacobs (whose actor father had featured in the William Hartnell adventure The Gunfighters) was hired to write the script, and actor Paul McGann signed on as the Eighth Doctor (after an audition process that had involved Liam Cunningha
m, Tony Slattery, Mark McGann [Paul’s brother], John Sessions and Michael Crawford, among others). The director was Geoffrey Sax, whose previous experience of Doctor Who had been directing a sketch parody of the show called ‘Dr Eyes’ for 1970s sketch series End of Part One that had featured Jim Broadbent as the Doctor (he’d reappear in the part – briefly – in The Curse of Fatal Death for Comic Relief in 1999).

  The TV movie was eventually shot in Vancouver, Canada in January 1996 with the addition of Eric Roberts (brother of Julia) as a new version of the Doctor’s arch-enemy, the Master. Also in the cast were Daphne Ashbrook as surgeon Grace Holloway and Yee Jee Tso as Chang Lee, the TV movie’s companion figures. Set in San Francisco, on the eve of the millennium, the Doctor battles the revived Master (following his own regeneration) for control of the Eye of Harmony (the black hole that seemingly powers the TARDIS), to save the Earth and prevent the Master absorbing the Doctor’s remaining lives.

  The result was a garbled mix-and-match production that slavishly followed 1990s American television norms, while attempting (in Segal’s words) many ‘kisses to the past’ of Doctor Who that only hardcore fans would spot or care about. Opening with an info-dump voiceover from McGann, the film introduced Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor at the helm of a vastly redesigned TARDIS (the interior at least; it’s still a British police-box exterior), with no explanation offered for the dimensional contradiction between the tiny box shown flying through space and the vast, now gothic-inspired interior). An encounter with an armed gang after an emergency landing in San Francisco in 1999 sees McCoy’s Doctor mortally wounded, operated on by a confused Grace Holloway and then regenerated into McGann’s Eighth Doctor.

  If nothing else, the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie proved to many TV-industry sceptics and the BBC that the show could be produced using modern production techniques and appeal to an audience (it attracted over nine million viewers for its UK debut screening, more through the novelty factor as there’d been no new Doctor Who for seven years). In the US, the movie attracted 8.3 million viewers (only nine per cent of the available audience), opposite the final episode of venerable sitcom Roseanne.