By Robert Shearman

BBC Books, out now

The Dalek invasion of 1903 was repelled – wasn’t it…?

For many, many years, people have asked whether there would ever be book adaptations of the Big Finish Doctor Who audios. The standard response has been that they are stories written for one medium which wouldn’t necessarily work in another (although that’s something that applies to pretty much every novelisation ever!). Script books were released in the early days of BF, and for a time, scripts were available alongside the main range audios. Other audios have been adapted – Victor Pemberton produced an interesting version of The Pescatons; Barry Letts novelised his two radio serials – but the fertile ground of Big Finish hasn’t been touched.

Until now.

Robert Shearman has penned novels based on two of his most acclaimed audios, Jubilee and The Chimes of Midnight, and done so in a way that reminds me of the attitude taken by Leslie Charteris to the adaptations of the TV scripts of The Saint – the original scripts are simply taken as the starting point and then fleshed out and expanded in ways that you might never have expected.

Jubilee, of course, is best known for inspiring the Series 1 story Dalek, and there are echoes of that still here – including a very deliberate nod to it that reflects the clear differences between the Sixth Doctor and the Ninth. As with his novel based on the TV episode, Shearman has a gift for getting inside the mind of the lone Dalek, and we also get insight into this incarnation of the Doctor as well as Evelyn Smythe, one of the greatest of the BF original companions.

It’s many years since I last listened to Jubilee and although most of the beats of the story are familiar, Shearman has a way of looking at the world, honed over many decades of writing that makes you see things rather differently. There are a number of occasions in this that may make you sit back and reconsider what you’ve just read – and you realise that this is, after all, much more than just a story about a Time Lord…

Verdict: A fabulous reinterpretation of Jubilee. 9/10

Paul Simpson