Featured Review

Periodically I shall highlight a review from this site due to some relevance that I perceive as being appropriate.

29th October 2023 - 

As I write this, the 60th Anniversary of Doctor Who is less than a month away.

I've loved Who since I was a child, terrified of the monsters of the era of Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor (not to mention developing my first celebrity crush on Sophie Aldred's Ace).  I was delighted when Russell T. Davies revived the series in 2005 and have been an avid viewer of every story since (the good and the bad).

I'm currently nearing the end of a year-long rewatch of the entirety of New Who (Christopher Ecclestone, David Tennant, Matt Smith, Peter Capaldi and Jodie Whittaker) and as the countdown to the 60th begins I've decided to spend the next month reading nothing but Doctor Who books as well.

For my featured review I was tempted to repost my review of 'The Day of the Doctor', the 50th Anniversary Special and my favourite Who story, by Steven Moffat but in the end I felt it would be much more appropriate to revisit my review of Who legend Terrance Dicks' novelisation of the very first Doctor Who story:

Doctor Who And An Unearthly Child

by Terrance Dicks

Dicks' novelisation of the very first Doctor Who story, from 1963.  Teachers Ian and Barbara become curious and concerned about their pupil Susan, who acts strangely and seems to have knowledge beyond her years.  Deciding to follow her home one day, they discover a police box in a junkyard and a strange, irascible old man.

For a minute I was going to write a proper blurb about who the old man is and what the box does, but then I realised that you'd probably have to be as alien as Susan to not have some sense of those things (particularly if you're reading an amateur science fiction book review website).  So, what we get here is where the 50+ year sci-fi phenomenon began and, I have to say, it surprised me by how strong a story it was.  Knowing that the first TARDIS trip was back to meet cavemen (and cavewomen, of course) hadn't filled me with excitement, but its actually handled in quite an interesting way; taking the Doctor and company to the turning point where things like the making of fire and the idea of community are brand new to the primitive humans.  Luckily, these aren't the dumb, grunting cavemen of so many other old TV shows and movies, either, with them still being complex and human, despite being primitive.

The really interesting thing for me was seeing the way the Doctor of this story differs from the Doctor we know and love.  To begin with he's a crafty, superior and, occasionally, malicious entity who feels like an antagonist to Ian and Barbara.  His characterisation definitely taps into the folklore idea of wizards and sorcerers etcetera being untrustworthy even when they're helping the heroes.  At first this feels, in hindsight, like maybe the writers just hadn't hit on the right formula for the character yet, but as the story goes on, you realise that it is specifically having Ian and Barbara there that begins to humanise the Doctor.  It makes a nice thought to think that the difference between this mean-spirited antagonist Doctor and the empathetic heroic one we know now is due to having had companions for so long.

4 out of 5