And so to the second of these latest Doctor Who novelisations, based on the scripts of the original Doctor Who series. (My review of the first, Stones of Blood, also by David Fisher, is HERE.)
The Androids of Tara was the story that immediately followed The Stones of Blood in transmission. Starring the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker), the television series was transmitted between the 25th November and December16th 1978. It was the 101st story transmitted.
Like Stones of Blood, this story had an overreaching arc, in that the Doctor, with companion Romana (played by Mary Tamm in the series) and loyal robot K9 are in search of six segments of The Key of Time – the object that will, when assembled, maintain balance between the Black and White Guardians of Time and thus create universal harmony. This particular story deals with the search for the fourth part.
Also like Stones of Blood, this novelisation is an expansion of the original script. An earlier novelisation by Terrance Dicks, published in April 1980, is much shorter, and mainly sticks to the dialogue of the script.
The Doctor and his company land on the planet Tara. They find a world straight out of science fantasy, combining elements of ancient history with degraded technology. The population, decimated by a plague years ago, now survive with a combination of feudal society norms and ancient technology. Much of the food needed to survive, for example, is produced by androids. The style of clothing is straight out of a King Arthur novel, the society securely based on the feudal and hierachical rule of the male.
To this scenario, the arrival of the Doctor, Romana and K9 happens as there is about to be a marriage between Prince Reynart and Princess Strella, but something that Reynart’s cousin, Count Grendel of Gracht is trying to halt, so that he can take the throne himself. The Doctor and Romana, who rather conveniently is the spitting image of the currently-captured Strella, find themselves inadvertently involved when Romana finds the fourth segment of the Key of Time.
- It should not surprise well-read readers that this is a variation on one of the most famous classic novels – The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope. (Reminds me of that adage, “If you can’t invent, copy.”) In this “sci-fi Ruritania” the emphasis is very much on swashbuckling adventure rather than anything of great portent. The fourth segment of the Key of Time is a very minor part in the story, and seems rather inconsequential here.
With this idea of a swashbuckling adventure in mind, I found The Androids of Tara to have a much jauntier style than The Stones of Blood. The whole story is suffused with a general sense of amusement, which leads to dialogue that feels like something from the Douglas Adams era. This is entertaining, although the downside of this is that at no real point is there a sense of true malice, although the aristocracy are as mean, nasty and vindictive as you can get. Even the point that Grachtian nobles wall up their wives to die when they tired of them is given with a certain glee. This is not a Doctor Who tale to be taken too seriously.
As a romp though, it is great fun. The Doctor and Romana almost bounce their way through the plot, with Romana being not just a female Time Lord but the doppelganger of another character as well. Similarly, as Tom Baker’s Doctor usually did, his Doctor always has a quip or an humorous rebuke close to hand, which again feels very much like the television character.
At the end of the book there is an Afterword, which tells us how this version of the story is slightly different from the audiobook version. Doctor Who afficionados will no doubt find this snippet of Whovian history interesting.
In short, this is a livelier tale of the Fourth Doctor that is pleasingly different from the more serious tone of the previous. Reading them back-to-back, as I guess I would have seen them on television in the 1970’s, this novel shows how the series could be mercurial in its manner and broad in its variety. This novelisation reflects that admirably and is another crackingly entertaining and graciously short read.
Doctor Who – The Androids of Tara by David Fisher
Target Collection, published by BBC Books, July 2022
160 pages
ISBN: 978-1785947926
Review by Mark Yon
