by Tat Wood

Mad Norwegian Press, out now

A close examination of the first three seasons of Tom Baker’s Doctor…

If you’ve not encountered About Time before, then check out the various reviews that we’ve run over the years, singing the series’ praises. It’s not as controversial as some other long-running volumes of analysis, nor does it go into the detail that the Black Archives have over the past few years. We’re still waiting for the books to venture into more recent years’ Doctor Who output (there are increasing hints as to the essay titles – I still want to know about the Bolognese sauce), but for now, we get a redux version of Volume 4, which originally covered the Hinchcliffe and Williams eras as producers (the last season is covered in Volume 5).

Reaching the end of this, I did wonder how much, if any, of the original version has made it to the new edition. Certainly, a lot of the topics that are covered in the sidebars kick off from a similar premise, but there’s now a lot of 21st Century Who mythology, not to mention real world scientific progress, to add into the mix. Under The Brain of Morbius, for example is a discussion of the Time Lord’s past lives… which inevitably now has to take into account everything that was said in The Timeless Children. There are whole new sections based on information that simply wasn’t available originally – a detailed account of the genesis of the Scratchman movie, for example – and a reassessment of what still remains established.

The idiosyncratic voice of the books has inevitably changed a little bit with the shifting authorship – this one is credited to Tat Wood alone – but the series’ capacity to make even a hardened Who fan reassess things that they thought they knew (or provide an interesting new way of thinking about them – I’m not sure I’ll see Harry Sullivan quite the same way again) has been its strength from the start. If you’re preaching to the choir – and things like these books, the Black Archive, or dedicated magazines (DWM/Star Trek Explorer) are doing that really – then you’ve got to have something new to say!

And of course, inevitably, things have moved on since this book was sent to print; the three specials last year, whatever treats RTD has in store, and the revelation of Lucarotti’s original scripts for The Ark alter our perspective  on this period once more…  but first, we have the second half of the Baker era to come!

Verdict: As always, a thought-provoking fascinating read. 9/10

Paul Simpson

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