By Dene October

Obverse Books, out now

A key missing Doctor Who story is put under the academic microscope.

Many episodes of the early Doctor Who stories are missing, infamously ‘junked’ by the BBC who took the short-term view that television was an ephemeral medium. In some cases, whole stories are lost – and in the history of Doctor Who one of these, Marco Polo, is a very early story from the first year of the programme and the very first historical time travel adventure. This is a significant absence as the series was still finding its form, and as Dene October points out in his Black Archive on the story, its loss – and how to recreate it – is the subject of much concern within traditional Doctor Who fandom.

October’s account is something of an archaeological project in this respect. He explores the extant material (shooting scripts, recreations of the episodes from telesnaps and audio recordings, the Target novelisation) to perform an in-depth textual analysis of the story. This is complemented by a comparative analysis of the account of Marco Polo’s real-world travels in the book The Travels. The analysis is also seasoned by a touch of living history (of Doctor Who, that is) by drawing on memory – October’s own and a little bit from other fan accounts. I say ‘a touch’ because, despite the undoubted benefit to fan studies of this approach, it is not given a great deal of prominence in this book.

Where the strength of it lies is in the extremely detailed unpacking of the extant material, including the soundtrack and especially the sound effects, in creating the sense of travelling across unknown, dangerous, and sometimes frightening landscapes, and the camera movements, editing, and mise-en-scene in creating a sense of space, period, and location. The comparative analysis serves to contextualise the story in terms of the medieval travelogue, but more importantly as a reminder that all narrative is remediated. Polo’s account, October emphasises more than once, is not as much an accurate record as one later recounted and thus subject to omissions, additions, or revisions. Neither is it his as much as it is the original person who likely wrote his stories down and the many people who potentially copied, edited, rewrote, and embroidered the accounts. Like the account of Polo’s travelogue, October’s analysis of Marco Polo is both drawing on and in a sense is itself a remediation of the original Doctor Who story.

This is an interesting project, though the book could have done with a little more editing and polishing. On a minor note there are a small number of somewhat jarring typos, but this minor complaint is more in the line of the organisation of material. An engagement with the nature of memory comes in the middle and seems to artificially interject in the more substantive and detailed textual analysis. And it would have been helpful for readers not already familiar with the fan reconstructions to have these introduced from the start (they are mentioned several times in the analysis, but not discussed in full until the very end). As someone far more interested in reception I would have liked more development of both these aspects, but these are minor asides in an otherwise thorough account of the story. The kind of fan who loves collecting detailed information on every aspect of production will find much of interest here.

Verdict: In-depth discussion will be welcomed by those looking for a methodical analysis of Marco Polo. 7/10

Brigid Cherry