Doctor Who and the Deep Breath

In the olden days, when some people still had black-and-white telly, and Wagon Wheels were bigger (they were) and your mum and dad used to ask people, 'Are you on the phone?' and people still believed in TV detector vans, and you could pop down to the Post Office for a quarter of aniseed balls (insert nostalgic music here), there was a magical range of Doctor Who novelisations from Target Books.

A 'novelisation' was a necessary thing in the pre-video age - it was the only way of catching up on episodes you had missed, or of experiencing again those which you had. Because Doctor Who was so rarely repeated. It must be one of the BBC's few hit programmes of the 1970s and 1980s which never got a full series repeated on terrestrial TV. I'm pausing to think about that 'never', but... no. I'm prepared to be corrected here, but I'm pretty sure of this: not once has a full series of Doctor Who been repeated on 'normal' television - that kind of thing only started happening with the 2005 relaunch, when the BBC3 repeats became the norm. Only individual stories were repeated, often 'stripped' across the week on consecutive days.

The Target novelisations were a wonderful way of 'owning' the programme before one could ever do so on video or DVD. Terrance Dicks did a sterling job, novelising the bulk of them in the 1970s, but later on - largely thanks to the efforts of editor Nigel Robinson - some of the original scriptwriters came in to adapt their stories into prose.

The covers ranged in quality, from the wonderful to the puzzlingly bad. Many fans have a great affection for the work of Chris Achilleos, but I want to put in a word for the very talented Jeff Cummins too - perhaps I am biased, as he produced the stunning cover for my first novel The Dimension Riders in 1993, for which I am eternally grateful. The back cover blurbs were an odd mixture too. I don't mind a bit of melodrama, or a teasing blurb which deliberately avoids giving away a lot of the plot, but we did get the odd blurb which didn't do justice to the story at all. (Take this one for Mawdryn Undead, for instance, or this for The Awakening.)

I've started using the idea as the basis for school workshops, in which I get children and teenagers to 'mini-novelise' the openings of recent Who like 'The Impossible Astronaut' and 'The Day of the Doctor' - and even, if I am feeling brave, 1970s classic 'Horror of Fang Rock'. It provokes a lot of interesting discussion about the different ways in which stories are told in various media.

Sadly, the new stories broadcast since 2005 have not been novelised - the medium is seen as redundant in the post-DVD age. BBC Books don't think - rightly, I'm sure - that they'd sell enough to make them worthwhile. That doesn't stop people having a bit of fun with the idea, though.

So I wonder how that master of crisp and sturdy prose, Terrance Dicks, would have described the appearance of the new Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi, in a novelisation of his first story? Based on his previous work, would it perhaps be something like this?...

Inside the Police Box which was not a Police Box, but in fact a Time and Space vessel known as the TARDIS, was an impossibly huge, dimly-lit room full of books and scientific apparatus, with a many-sided console at its centre. At the controls stood that mysterious traveller in Time and Space known only as the Doctor. Now in his twelfth incarnation - although, in truth, the Doctor himself did not bother counting - he was tall and lean, with a hawkishly imperious, high-cheekboned face and elegantly swept-back grey hair. Authoritative blue-grey eyes were framed by dark, imposing eyebrows, while his mouth was set in what could have been determination, or perhaps grim amusement. He was elegantly attired in a high-buttoned white shirt and a dark blue Crombie coat with a blood-red lining, matching blue trousers and sturdy, polished black shoes...

Apologies to Sir Terrance if that's nothing like the way he'd do it nowadays...