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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #55: The Secret Life Of Doctor Who (In Novels)

As Steven Moffat's first season as showrunner on Doctor Who ended, I found my suspicions confirmed: the new show under Davies and now Moffat has continued the viewpoint of the novels published by Virgin Books in the Nineties. Moffat and Davies were both part of the group of writers who wrote for the Virgin novels line, even through their own day jobs writing and producing TV shows made it hard for them to contribute more than one entry each, and in Moffat's case, that one entry was a short story that got voted as one of the best Doctor Who stories ever. Since the show was revived under Davies, he and Moffat have not only kept the more sophisticated thematic tone from the books intact, but also hired several of the books' writers to write episodes, going so far as to commission an adaptation of one of the books itself. The lunatics have taken over the asylum, and that's a good thing.

The Virgin books evolved out of the old Target novelisations of the TV show that were published regularly during the 70s and 80s. These were usually straight transcriptions of the shooting scripts of each story into a single thin novel, often by the original scriptwriter or former WHO script editor Terrance Dicks, who knew a good regular paycheque when he saw one. The beauty of these books was that they could be used to encourage kids to read, and you could imagine the scenes of vast alien worlds and scary monsters as vividly as possible without the naff rubber costumes and sets that looked like they cost 50p to build on the show. And in the case of the episodes that the BBC had erased from their archives, the novelisations were the only chance to access the stories. By the time the show was cancelled, Target was running out of the old episodes to adapt and the line's editor Peter Darvill-Evans tried to acquire a licence from the BBC to publish original stories only to be turned down. He got his chance again when he went over to Virgin Books a few years later when the BBC agreed to grant the licence for new stories to be published starting in 1991.

In the decade the show was off the air, the Virgin novels became the only source of new original stories. The novels were split into two lines: the New Adventures, which would continue the 7th Doctor's adventures beyond the show, and Missing Adventures, which published new "untold" stories featuring past Doctors and their companions. Both lines would employ the same pool of writers who would regularly write for them for the next six years. It's a testament to the power of fandom if a franchise is big enough to sustain an entire line of novels for a whole decade without the parent show being on the air. The books drew on a new bunch of writers who were active in the WHO fandom and fanzine scene and gave several of them their first breaks on their way to writing to comics, television and original novels. They were all comics readers and admirers of the work of Alan Moore, and opted to take WHO in a more adult and self-aware direction, dealing with sex, drugs and violence directly in ways the show never could because it was, after all, still a family show.

The New Adventures took as their inspiration and starting point the persona of the 7th Doctor, who spent his last two TV seasons as a mysterious proactive fixer who usually knew who he was going after even before he arrived at a particular place and time. He viewed every player in the crisis as a piece on a chessboard and proceeded to manipulate them into the place where they would end up doing exactly what he expected, and the bad guys would be defeated, often by their own hand. This was established by the show's last script editor Andrew Cartmel, who had a long-term plan that hinted at The Doctor's increasing mystery and nature that would have been revealed and resolved if the show had been given another season at the time. The writers of the New Adventures decided to explore the implications of The Doctor being a crusading manipulator and the fallout and price it would entail, which immediately pushed the stories in darker and more mature areas than the show did. It was the New Adventures that made The Doctor face the emotional consequences of his actions far deeper than the show ever did, the loneliness of his immortality, and Davies and Moffat chose to continue those themes on the show.

It was Paul Cornell's first novel in the line, TIMEWYRM: REVELATIONS, that pulled an Alan Moore-style reconfiguration and explanation of how The Doctor's different regenerations could have different personalities and even different ways of solving problems. Past companions would make guest appearances, and some of them would even get killed off. The Doctor would lose Ace when he gets a boy she was in love with killed in his machinations, and she would storm off in disgust. When he sheepishly seeks another companion to replace her, he picks a former soldier-turned-archeologist from the future named Bernice Summerfield, telling her the story of the boy and his magic dragon: the dragon needs the boy to be brave for. That was the first exploration of The Doctor's need for a companion that Davies would emphasise and elaborate on in the revived show. The New Adventures pushed to the surface The Doctor's loneliness and his need for companions to humanize him and keep him from going too far as he plays God with entire worlds and civilizations. Sounds familiar? Davies played with that theme throughout his run on the show, and if you look at the footage of him being interviewed at home, you'll see entire rows of New Adventures books on his shelves. Bernice Summerfield became so popular that she spun off into her own line of over 20 novels after Virgin lost the licence to publish Doctor Who, and now Big Finish Productions continues to produce new prose and audio adventures featuring her and her supporting cast, many of whom were originally introduced in the New Adventures, including her ex-husband, whom she met and married back in those books. The Doctor would pick up more companions like the cops from a fascist future Chris Cwej and Ros Forrester, and the books became as twisty a soap opera as EASTENDERS, only with lots more aliens, shagging and things blowing up.

The New Adventures was run like a TV show with ongoing storylines that carried from one novel to the next on top of the main plot of the book on hand, until the arcs were resolved. As time went on, the books developed their own increasingly convoluted continuity and attempts to make it all make sense with the show's past continuity to the point where if I tried to sum it all up, it would take thousands more words and I might suffer a brain seizure before I even finish.

When the BBC took back the print rights and launched their own line of Doctor Who novels in the late 90s featuring the 8th Doctor as played by Paul McGann in the TV movie, most of the same writers moved over to write his adventures, and a new set up companions and continuities were established. The BBC line didn't have the drive of Cartmel's masterpiece to fuel the character, and the 8th Doctor, having only been seen in one TV movie, was something of a blank slate that never truly came into focus in the books, nor were his companions quite as vivid as the likes of Benny, Chris and Roz. You could easily see the BBC line as an extension of the same continuity established by the Virgin books, and it has its own increasingly convoluted arc and mad ideas like the companion who had been genetically engineered to be a living Tardis. The BBC line even had their own version, and the first iteration, of the mythic Time War that Davies would use as the background to his revamp of the show, except the BBC didn't have the Terry Nation Estate's permission to use the Daleks at the time, and they couldn't be mentioned by name or directly depicted. It was reset, of course, so it wasn't the Time War that Davies would use as backstory for the new show. Of course, when Davies revived the show with a new Doctor, the 8th Doctor line came to an end. The current novels the BBC publishes are mainly standalone, but still written by the same group of writers who got their start with the Virgin line. I'm trying not to regurgitate what you can find out by reading the wikipedia entry on the New Adventures or various forums here, so bear with me.

Suffice to say, the New Adventures were not perfect, and often uneven, but if you were a fan of Doctor Who or became a fan of these books, you couldn't help but keep up with them, no matter how bad you thought some of the plots or the general direction of the series went. In hindsight, the books were a training ground for new writers breaking into the industry. Writers like Paul Cornell, Gareth Roberts, Matt Jones, Mark Gatiss, and so on got their first professional commissions writing for the New Adventures. They also bridged a link between the British Science Fiction community and comics community, as several of them also wrote for 2000AD, and often shared mutual friends and acquaintances. In Britain, it's as if everything in Science Fiction and Comics have links to Doctor Who one way or another. And now the show comes full circle, cherry-picking from the New Adventures when it pleases, adapting Paul Cornell's novel HUMAN NATURE for David Tennent's 10th Doctor, River Song reminding some of us of Bernice Summerfield, reviving Gareth Roberts' theme of everything being a story kept alive by its remembrance and its retelling. The Tardis had been blown up more and then reconstituted than once in major plotlines during the course of the books. You could say the Virgin novels have become a kind of Research & Development project for the writers who would end up taking over the show. The Virgin books are now out of print, as are the majority of the BBC 8th Doctor novels, and it's strange to consider the current landscape where they're absent and the only evidence they ever existed is in echoes of themes, moments and characters in the current show. I suppose it's just as well. Hardcore fans still argue whether the books were canon in conjunction with the show and Davies and Moffat have wisely kept schtum. Paul Cornell sensibly mused that the universe gets retconned everytime The Doctor got into the Tardis and took off anyway, so you can pretty much treat every contradictory bit from both the old show and the books as both canon and retconned out of continuity. I'm amazed at how much the old Virgin books go for on ebay these days. If you've never read them and want to try them out, the BBC now offer several of them as free downloadable e-books on their Doctor Who website.

Rich and I are still waiting to see if Moffat will adapt his own story "Continuity Errors" for the show. As for me, the only new Doctor Who novel I'll be buying will be the one Michael Moorcock has written for the 11th Doctor that will be published later this year.

Moving forward in time at lookitmoves at gmail.com

© Adisakdi Tantimedh

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