By Frazer Hines (with Mike Tucker and Steve Cole)

BBC Books, out now

Jamie is forced to relive his struggle against the evil Daleks at their most powerful and calculating.

Frazer Hines’ novelisation (Mike Tucker and Steve Cole are also credited) of the David Whitaker seven-part serial from 1967 is a curious, though not unwelcome, addition to the range of Doctor Who adaptations.

At the end of Episode 6 of Season 5’s The Wheel in Space, potential new companion Zoe Herriot stows away on the TARDIS. Before he consents to letting her join him, the Doctor gives her a taste of what she should expect, by projecting images from his mind onto the view screen. These images are a clip from the previous year’s The Evil of the Daleks, with the episode concluding with the promise of telling the whole story. Rather cleverly, this set up a repeat screening of the seven-part serial, and when the new season began the following year, the Doctor professed to being a little tired from all the mind projection, and Zoe had clearly agreed to stay on board. So, what exactly happened when she watched the serial?

That is the intriguing premise to this novel, which takes the form of first-person narration from Jamie as they set up the screening of the story, discussing what they’ve just seen in interludes between the episodes. This is of course very hokey, suggesting that the Doctor has split up his story into seven equal-length chunks, each with a cliffhanger. It would have been even more amusing if the trio gave a running commentary in Googlebox / Behind the Sofa style during the episode recalls, rather than just in between each.

The episodes themselves are standard third-person retellings, lacking the added detail that John Peel bolstered his 1993 adaptation of the serial with. The writing is crisp and has a good pace to it, but ultimately we’re here for the in-between moments, and that’s where the writer shines and gives us something a bit different. We even get an explanation as to how the Doctor and Jamie can refer to exchanges that happened when they weren’t in the room.

Verdict: By no stretch essential, this is a fun way to fill in a narrative gap that was created to enable the repeat a story rather than for artistic purposes. 7/10

Nick Joy

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