By Eric Saward

BBC Books, out July 18

 

The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough face off against a Dalek task force in 20th Century London, searching for their imprisoned creator.

Remember the time when some slender Target Doctor Who adaptations were little more than the shooting script with basic descriptions of locales to set the scene? That was understandable with short deadlines and the need to churn out product, and after a 35 year wait, many fans would no doubt have been satisfied if Eric Saward had merely dusted off his old scripts and added a little exposition. But he hasn’t done that all, he has rewritten the story from the bottom up.

Back in the day, Target unsuccessfully tried to broker an agreement between Saward and Dalek creator Terry Nation to allow Saward or A N Other to novelise the script. A subsequent attempt by Virgin Books in the 1990s also failed, and for some time we’ve had to rely on an unofficial version by Paul Scoones. Finally, we get the real deal, and one of the two gaps in the Target library is now plugged (Revelation of the Daleks will follow in November this year, with both books getting the requisite paperback Target format in 2020.)

I know that a certain section of fandom will balk at some of the changes, such is often the resistance to any deviation from the critical path, and yet right from the first novelisation, David Whitaker’s Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, liberties have been taken to expand, improve or correct – and so too has Eric Saward, who has refashioned his own exciting adventure with the Daleks.

On first reading this version of the Season 21 serial, transmitted in February 1984, it doesn’t seem that different, and clocks in at a reasonable 190 pages. It’s only when you read it in tandem with a screening of the transmitted episodes that you spot just how much the book is its own thing. Anonymous characters like the vagrant and the metal detectorist now gain names and back story (Mr Jones and PJ respectively) and odd things happen like the blue van now being white. But more than that, scenes appear in different orders, they may run longer (less cutting between other concurrent scenes) but also with new start and end points.

Here’s a typical example of a change. Rula Lenska’s Styles says on TV: ‘My only concern on this station is the medical welfare of the crew and the prisoner’ and this becomes ‘My duty is to simply look after the physical wellbeing of the prisoner, the crew and the ship’s cat.’ Not a big deal, but a decisive change, and what I don’t know is if the novel represents an earlier subsequently rewritten draft, or if the changes are contemporary.

One particularly memorable scene is Stien’s exploration of the TARDIS, with Saward having great fun in describing its art gallery, gym, cinema, garden shed and concert room. Some of the sentences are delightful – ‘The atmosphere was now ghostly, as if a vampire had caressed the soul of a saint’ and who can resist ‘Like Florence Foster Jenkins aiming for a high C, he [Davros] squawked: “The Doctor has interfered for the last time!”’

Chapters don’t conclude on the cliffhangers that ended the episodes (two or four part versions), Tegan doesn’t get to say ‘Brave heart’ at the end, and she even has a coda with Lytton’s menacing policemen. Lytton himself was apparently last known to the Doctor as running a ‘high-class jazz club in Old Compton Street’ – yes, really – and maybe this will link into Saward’s recently completed graphic novel around the further adventures of Maurice Colbourne’s character.

Verdict: As much a delight as Russell T Davies’ and Stephen Moffat’s Target novelisations of their Rose and The Day of the Doctor, Eric Saward gives us Resurrection of the Daleks Redux, immortalised as he wants it. Thirty-five years was a bit of a wait, but it doesn’t disappoint. 9/10

Nick Joy

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