As some of us are apt to do, in this age of computers and smartphones, I was recently ripping my quite sizable audiobook CD collection onto the Apple Books app. Within all the Big Finish, BBC Audios, AudioGo etcetera, I picked up the 2017 release of Jon Culshaw reading Terrance Dicks’ Target novelisation of Genesis of the Daleks. It’s always been one of my favourite stories, but I then wondered if Genesis is the story that has had more releases, in varying formats than any other Doctor Who. Of course, most Classic Who stories have been released in several, but Genesis seems to have had more than its fair share.

Generally, a classic Doctor Who story would have followed a general set of releases: Target novelisation, VHS, DVD, audiobook, and possibly a soundtrack. Latterly, we can add Blu-ray to that list.

Now, just to be pedantic, I haven’t included Target reprints as all Target books were reprinted, but I have included differing versions of audios if there was something different or noteworthy about it. If I may…

1. Target Novelisation — 1976

Of course, the first release was Terrance Dicks’ Target novelisation. A striking cover by Chris Achilleos and a wonderful read: this was the first book that I ever read from cover to cover in one day (aged about 15). Not having yet seen the television version, my only previous experience was the BBC Records’ release. This opened the story more than what I was familiar with and I just couldn’t put it down.

2. BBC Records and Tapes — 1979

Alerted to this release by the cartoon-strip advert in Doctor Who Weekly, I saved up some of my paper-round money and went to Readings Records in Clapham Junction.

Wonderful; the nearest thing we had to an out-of-date repeat. A couple of years later, I even found the tape cassette version (I’m not counting the tape as an extra release as all BBC records were released as a dual format).

I never understood why BBC Records didn’t do any more Doctor Who releases of adapted stories at that time. Having said that, I can’t think of any other vinyl drama release at all making this quite unique; lots of comedy or theme tune compilations, but no drama (The Archers, maybe?).

Tom Baker and the BBC revisited this narration style in the early 1990s with the Missing Stories range of cassette tapes with the stories The Power of the Daleks and The Evil of the Daleks.

3. BBC Radio Collection: Slipback — 1988

The 1979 audio edit of Genesis was re-released along with the Radio 4 transmitted Sixth Doctor story, Slipback. Unlike the old BBC Records and Tapes’ days, BBC Radio/Audio Collections were nearly always a double tape package. This leads to suspicion that Genesis was added as a filler as Slipback wasn’t long enough to fill two tapes.

Although Slipback was the radio programme and the most recently transmitted, at the time of this release, it was Genesis that hogged the cover. Daleks always sell, but the cover wasn’t particularly inspired.

4. BBC Video VHS — 1991

The Beeb waited eight years, since the first video release of Revenge of the Cybermen, to release Genesis on video. It was also double packaged with The Sontaran Experiment. Not too much of a problem, but the photographs on the spine of the video box did spoil the shelf display a tad.

5. BBC Radio Collection: Exploration Earth — 2001

Another BBC Radio Collection release, this time sharing with the 1976 school’s radio drama, Exploration Earth. Just like Slipback, this version of Genesis is the same as the original BBC Records’ version.

Collectors would have bought this because it was the first time that Exploration Earth was commercially available, but, to be fair, this is noteworthy as this was the first time that the audio edit of Genesis of the Daleks was released on CD.

6. BBC DVD — 2006

Genesis on DVD was released 15 years after the VHS version, minus the Sontarans, but this time packed with extras and much restoration/correction work carried out by Steve Roberts’ Restoration Team.

7. Doctor Who DVD Files No. 31 — 2010

A second DVD release for Genesis was during the run of the Doctor Who DVD Files part works magazine. I don’t know anyone who collected these, but I would say it was quite ambitious to release a DVD set of Doctor Who seeing as most fans would have been collecting the BBC DVDs anyway. I have included this in the list as it wasn’t strictly a BBC title.

8. Daily Telegraph/BBC Audio — 2010

The BBC Radio Collection release from 2001 was re-packaged and released on a single CD, as a giveaway from the Daily Telegraph, during a series of Doctor Who giveaways which included Slipback, Exploration Earth, and Mission to the Unknown. I did wrestle with the notion that this didn’t count as it doesn’t offer anything new, but it was the first time that Genesis was available on a single CD and not as a support for another story.

9. AudioGo — 2011

Only a year after the Daily Telegraph release, AudioGo re-released the audio version, but this time digitally remastered. At the same time, other ’70s BBC albums were re-released; Doctor Who Sound Effects included.

What was particularly nice about this version was that it included the original ’70s artwork and the CD itself was printed to look like a vinyl record. For anyone that had (or in my case still has) the original vinyl, this was a must.

This was also available as a digital download for the first time.

10. Record Store Day — 2016

Released as part of Record Store Day 2016 – a celebration of independent record shops – this was a vinyl re-release of the 1979 package right down to the original sleeve and record label. On the face of it, this was a simple re-release of the original from 1979, but this was not a BBC issue, this being from Demon Records. Oh, and the vinyl was blue.

11. BBC Audio/Audible — 2017

The release that prompted this article: the audiobook. Here we have an unabridged reading, by Jon Culshaw, of the 1976 novelisation by Terrance Dicks and using the same Chris Achilleos cover artwork as the original novel. Book to audiobook in 41 years!

12. Season 12 Blu-ray Box Set — 2018

Packaged within the first Blu-ray season box set was an up-scaled version to High Definition. This also contained the omnibus version which has never been released before. All we need at some point is the Doctor Who and the Monsters edit from 1982 to complete the set.

13. Tom Baker Vinyl Boxset — 2023

And to bring us bang up to date, Demon records have released Genesis as part of a limited-edition vinyl boxset. The inclusion of the Tom Baker-narrated State of Decay audiobook is a nice touch as this hasn’t seen any kind of release since around 1985.

That’s 13 releases of versions of Genesis of the Daleks. Have I missed any? But it’s highly unlikely that any other version of a Doctor Who story is going to receive as many individual releases as this. Or does anyone beg to differ? Was there anything I’ve included that shouldn’t be in the list? Answers in the comments section…

The only other story that could get near is The Power of the Daleks. I think it comes close, due to two versions of the soundtrack (narrations by Tom Baker and Frazer Hines), a black and white DVD and colour Blu-ray of the original animation, and a second animated version, but I believe that Genesis of the Daleks still wins the title. However, if the original episodes of Power ever turn up, that could contend.

But I ask the original question: how many copies of Genesis of the Daleks do we actually need…?

“Psst. Oi mate.”

“Yes? What d’you want?”

“Want a video?”

“… Depends what’s on it.”

“Cybermen. Tobias Vaughan. The Edge of Destruction in Arabic.”

“No way!”

“Straight up. Would I lie to you?”

“What’s the exchange?”

“You see me right with your camera copy of Terror of the Autons and I’ll bung in The Sunmakers gratis.”

“Four episodes or edited?”

“Edited, mate. No titles. What do you take me for? You want complete episodes, you have to bung me your Colony in Space as well.”

Yes, such were the conversations that were not really had in the Seventies and early Eighties in pubs and local groups up and down the UK. I speak of a time when Tom Baker was the Doctor and Graham Williams the producer; when Time Life television had sold his first four seasons to PBS stations in the USA; and Australian television endlessly reran the Pertwee and Baker episodes. This was the time when VHS and Betamax video recorders were penetrating suburban homes; when old stories in the UK meant two summer repeats of stories from the season that had just finished; a time before John Nathan-Turner sanctioned repeats featuring the non-current Doctor on BBC 2; a time even before Queen Xanxia ruled Zanak and Mrs Thatcher ruled Britain, and long before you could buy The Brain of Morbius and Revenge of the Cybermen on commercial VHS. It was a dark time, of endless rain and fog, when fans scratched secret signs on doorposts and, after dark, took delivery of a brown paper bag from a certain man in an anorak who did not speak but nodded and went on his way into the night. Furtively, the fan checked the contents of the bag: a Boots VHS video labelled, The Daemons…

This was the time when Simon (my twin brother) and I were teenagers and the 1970s spooled out on the cosmic video tape of life. It seems strange to think of now, when we can watch any story we want just by clicking a few times on a mouse on Britbox, or by slipping a disc into a slot, but for British Doctor Who fans in the mid-Seventies, you just couldn’t access the old stories. We only knew what happened in, say, The Dalek Invasion of Earth because we’d read the novelisation by Terrance Dicks (I read it in hospital after an appendicectomy and took a heck of a long time to finish it because I was full of anaesthetic). We’d also seen the pictures in the 1973 Radio Times Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special: these, and the Peter Cushing movie, which aired every couple of years on Saturday morning BBC TV, helped the imagination with the imagery. The Target novelisations were our main source of revisiting old stories, which explains perhaps why they are so loved by fans who grew up with the original series.

Then came… the cassette recorder. Miracles of technology, the cassette miniaturised the reel-to-reel tape recorder and sealed the spools in a credit-card-sized plastic envelope of fun. Cassettes were affordable even when you didn’t have much pocket money and, if you dangled the microphone next to your television speaker, you could record the sound of an episode of Doctor Who. No pictures: just sound. O rapture! I think Simon and I started doing this in 1978, as my almost total recall of dialogue from The Ribos Operation and the Key to Time season dates from endless listenings to the recordings. Of course, you had no idea what was happening during the incidental music and sound effects sections: these played like happy intermissions while the dialogue paused. At least it gave you a chance to appreciate Dudley Simpson’s music. The only issue was the microphones recorded the buzzy television speakers of the period so every episode played through a 25 minutes raspberry of static.

PHHHHHRRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTTTTT and now on BBC one, Tom Baker stars in a new adventure for Doctor Who PPPPPPPPPPPHHHHHHHRRRRTTTTTT dumble de dum! Dumble de dum! Dumble de dum de dum WHOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOO PHHHHHHHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTT…”

You get the general idea.

Time-Life television offered this brochure to American PBS stations in 1978: they syndicated Tom Baker’s first four seasons.

Most fans recorded Doctor Who onto cassette in the later Seventies. The Doctor Who Appreciation Society even sold little cardboard covers for your cassette boxes, with the old shield logo on the front and space for you to write the title in tiny letters. Swapsies were common. A few years later, there would be problems of compatibility in exchanging videos with American fans, but cassettes were compatible on both sides of the Atlantic. Simon and I had some kind and generous pen pals who sent us cassettes of early Tom Baker stories, and we listened, open mouthed, to Genesis of the Daleks and Pyramids of Mars – stories we hadn’t seen for three or four years which, when you are 14, seems like half a lifetime ago. These American recordings had additional, twinkly incidental music which I initially took to be extra bonus material by Dudley Simpson but eventually realised were the leads-in to advert breaks (“Doctor Who – back in a moment!”). Each episode was intriguingly introduced by a voice over from gravel-voiced American actor Howard da Silva, who welcomed in a montage of clips from the episode we were about to see – or hear, rather.

“On a distant planet, a giant sandminer combs the desert for minerals. Inside, it is fully manned by robots, with a skeleton human crew. But when the DOCTOR arrives, with LEELA, his new traveling companion, they seem to bring catastrophe…” Cut to Uvanov screeching, “What are you doing on this mine?” and Tom Baker’s unfussed response, “Well, we’re travellers, we came here by accident.” Back to da Silva: “A human overseer finds out that the Doctor and Leela are not responsible for the deaths. Unfortunately, the secret will remain his…” Cut to Chub the crewman, “No, there, you electronic moron… what are you doing?… No! No! Get away from me! ARRRRGGGGHHHHHHH! AIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” And the end of each episode would cut from the end title’s scream to clips for the next episode. Da Silva on Leela facing a robot: “But if the huntress cannot defend herself… who can?”

Are there any American fans out there who remember the da Silva voiceovers? These were added to each episode when Time Life television distributed Tom Baker’s first four seasons in 1978, presumably to bump up the running time from 25 to 30 minutes, and many Stateside fans hated them – not least because several seconds of action in each episode were pruned to make way for the narration. But to a British fan in his teens back then, the voiceovers were exotic and exciting. (Look, it was the Seventies, mate. We had to take what excitement we could.)

Video recorders were starting to appear in the mid-1970s, usually in the clunky and unreliable format of the u-matic system, whose cassettes were the size of a brick and only ran for (I think) one hour. They were impossibly expensive for most homes and tended to appear only in schools. Simon and I once bought a u-matic cassette for school and asked a friendly teacher to record episode one of the new television version of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy for us. I think he did so, but we never saw it: I think we baulked at spending more time in school than we had to, even to watch more Douglas Adams, and the TV version wasn’t as good as the radio version anyway. We eventually donated the tape to school.

Not quite our first VHS video recorder because this one has the fancy new fangled remote control, complete with cord connection!

The home video market really took off when VHS and Betamax machines came down in price sufficiently for families to consider buying them. A kind friend invited Simon and me to her home to watch The Key to Time season on video, recorded off air in 1978: aged 13, we binged 10 episodes a day and were in heaven. British families often rented expensive electronic equipment at the time, rather than buying it, which gave them the advantage of free servicing and upgrades. Simon and I clubbed our savings together to buy a Ferguson Videostar in 1981: it cost £400, which was hugely expensive. It was a mechanical beast sans remote control; when you pressed the eject button, the top sprang open with the noise and force of an ejector seat, and you had to press the play and record buttons simultaneously (a la the contemporary sound cassette recorder) if you wanted to record anything. How we cursed when the Ferguson electronic video recorder – complete with remote control! – came out a few months later. This boasted a long play feature which meant you could get 14, not seven, episodes onto a three-hour tape. And tapes were not cheap: about £10 each in 1980, which was a lot of money for two sixth formers who also had to buy beer and cigarettes.

But we bought the Videostar when we started A levels, mindful of the fact that we would soon be going away to college and might be wasting our time in freshers’ discos when we could be watching Doctor Who instead. We bought it in time to tape The Five Faces of Doctor Who at the end of 1981 and I still have the recordings. These were repeats sanctioned by John Nathan-Turner at the end of Tom Baker’s seven-year reign as the Doctor, stripped across the week in the early evening on BBC 2. The rationale was to remind viewers that there had been other Doctors than Tom and to get them used to the idea of a new Doctor, to be played by Peter Davison, who had just sat up at the end of Logopolis. JN-T won praise, love, and applause from fans for arranging the repeat season which, I am sure I don’t need to remind you, consisted of: An Unearthly Child (the whole story, not just Part One); The Krotons; Carnival of Monsters; The Three Doctors; and Logopolis – the latter containing Tom Baker and Peter Davison and taking the number of featured Doctors to five. Logopolis was considerably less exciting than the other stories as we’d seen it recently on BBC1, so it had the feel of a summer repeat – albeit, one held over to the end of the year. It was welcome to us but not to Frazer Hines, who exclaimed, “Oh, not The Krotons!” when told of the choice of Troughton repeat at that year’s Panopticon. Frazer explained that he, Troughton, and Wendy Padbury had all disliked it heartily at the time and, inevitably, called the monsters The Croutons, but it was the only complete Troughton four parter in the archives at the time and so The Krotons it had to be. (Mindful of releasing the stories on commercial VHS, BBC Enterprises would soon start to invite TV stations across the world to return the old Doctor Who episodes which littered their vaults. But that was not yet.) The first new episode of Doctor Who which Simon and I were to record off air was Castrovalva in January 1982.

Owners of the new Betamax and VHS machines immediately twigged that you could hook two machines together to make a copy of a tape, and a huge and thriving industry of international swapsies of Doctor Who stories began. Australian TV stations were still showing the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker stories at the start of the 1980s and copies winged their way across the water. Of course, every time you made a copy, there was a fall-out in quality; even taping an episode directly off air led to a noticeable reduction in picture and colour quality. (I remember watching a first generation Betamax copy of Logopolis and was quite dismayed by how the colour bled from the frame of the actors’ faces. How evolutionarily right and proper it was that VHS kicked out that inferior Betamax system!) Once you got to seventh or eighth generation, the picture was distinctly ropey and the sound farted as much as the cassette recordings we had made years before. There were some distinctly rubbishy copies doing the rounds. Single episodes of The Daleks and The Edge of Destruction were knocking about, looking as though they’d been copied 40 times with a picture quality far worse than early silent films. Some of the episodes were of strange provenance: The Edge of Destruction was available to the discerning fan dubbed into Arabic or redubbed into English, presumably from someone’s private audio recording. The lip synching was wildly out, as it was on The Daleks episode one. Even I, a fan as dedicated to the programme as a medieval knight to his lady in a courtly romance, found sitting through 25 minutes, eyes streaming and straining, pretty hard going.

We all experimented with recordings. If you cut out the title sequences from the end of Part One to the beginning of Part Three, you could fit two four-part stories onto a three hour tape. So what if the picture jumped at the edit with a little SQUEAL and green lines snaked down the screen for the next two minutes? Purists would get wise to the merchandise being offered them. “Right,” said a mate at the end of negotiating a deal with me – “so this is your Invisible Enemy and The Sunmakers in exchange for my Terror of the Zygons and Horror of Fang Rock?” “Exactly so,” I agreed. “The episodes to be complete and not edited or adulterated in any form?” he pressed. “Ah, no, we clipped out the title sequences to fit them onto the tape.” “Then,” my contact growled from his bunker in deepest Somerset, “it’s NO DEAL, my friend,” and crashed down the phone.

Some Pertwee and Baker episodes had slipped off the repertoire of Australian repeats, so some stories were sourced from the United States. Australia had the same TV system as the UK, so direct swaps of videos were possible: Simon and I sent copies of Castrovalva to an Australian pen friend who hadn’t seen the Peter Davison stories yet. It wasn’t to be for the USA, whose television system used 525 lines rather than our 625 lines, so the systems weren’t compatible. Enter the Camera Copy. An American video recorder would play an American off-air recording onto an American TV: there to capture the action was a British video camera recording onto a British video recorder. And if you think that would give you a ropey quality copy, you’d be right. I remember watching a camera copy of Terror of the Autons back in 1981, when what I recall most vividly was the rounded edges of the American TV set at the extremes of my picture. Finding my attention wandering, I tried to puzzle out the reflection of the American living room in the said TV’s screen.

So that was the thriving world of swapsies and cassettes, third generation and 12th generation recordings. It was a happy time of excitement and delirious joy, when you suddenly could see a story you dimly remembered because you had last seen it as a tiny tot, and you built up your video collection, episode by episode. It was also a great way to meet girls, as ladies you had never met smiled at you in the school corridor and said, “You’re Frank, aren’t you? Elizabeth said you had a copy of The Green Death on video. I’d love to see that again, I haven’t seen it since I was little, gosh you’re so sweet.” (Maybe my memory is a bit hazy on the details here.) The commercial and professional world had to come nosing into the amateur scene, of course, and BBC Enterprises asked fans at the 20th anniversary Longleat celebration which story they’d most like to see released on home video. Ho ho, said the fans, writing The Tomb of the Cybermen on their forms: a story which was missing without trace in 1983 and enjoyed a reputation (deserved) as one of the greatest of Who adventures. BBC Enterprises responded by issuing a story which they thought was as close as possible to the fan choice because it only had one different word in its title: Revenge of the Cybermen. Be careful what you wish for, we thought, as we eyed the cassette in video rental shops and WH Smith: the cover featured the wrong Cybermen, from the recently transmitted Earthshock, and the stars from the contemporary titles sequence.

In accordance with the received wisdom that people didn’t want to sit through episode titles, the BBC removed all except the opening titles of episode one and the closing titles of episode four: thus we had the usual effect of Doctor Who edited into movie format, when things build to a climax every 22 minutes and then relax quickly. BBC Enterprises speedily followed Revenge of the Cybermen with a genius one hour, edited version of The Brain of Morbius, perhaps thinking that fans wouldn’t want to sit through a whole 90 minutes. We all scorned and avoided it. The first commercial VHS that Simon and I bought was The Seeds of Death, again edited into a movie and priced at the ludicrous figure of £40 or so: this practically bankrupted us and left us beerless for weeks. Fortunately, our local video rental shop started to stock some of the new releases and we were overjoyed to see Day of the Daleks again. (Note: you could rent video tapes from shops for a small fee and some public, free libraries stocked them too. But where is Blockbuster video now? Swept away by streaming, that’s where.)

It is wonderful to have almost every episode of the classic series available to us for a few pounds a month, courtesy of Britbox in the UK, or for rather more pounds per DVD. But I remember the excitement and joy of being young: when a new story plopped through the letter box in a jiffy bag; when you built up your collection slowly and when you met with the geezer in the pub who would slip you Doctor Who and the Silurians in a brown paper bag if you saw him right with The Time Monster and then slip away into the night.

It’s 26th June 2010, and the Big Bang is about to happen. The TARDIS is about to be destroyed and the universe is going to be rebooted to ensure the future can exist. But not only that. Something else exciting slipped through the cracks in time during that period that we’ve since forgotten about: the circulation of Doctor Who Adventures magazine was on the up, and by some margin too.

In publishing, you are very unlikely to see an increase in circulation when you remove or replace one of the most popular elements of your product: that can be a design style, an A-list columnist, a printing size (broadsheet is not a cost-efficient way to work), or something integral to the subject matter of the publication itself. In fact, you usually see your readership and advertising revenue drop big time.

In DWA’s case, it lost the major selling point of David Tennant’s portrayal of the Tenth Doctor at the end of 2009. And if you cast your mind back to the late 2000s, Doctor Who memorabilia was at levels that have not been seen in anyway near the same quantity since.

This was, of course, at a time when the ratio of available iPads (and equivalent gizmos) to children was not really a consideration in marketing, and a weekly magazine aimed at school-age kids was a genuinely successful method of brand exposure.

DWA’s circulation unsurprisingly took a hit during 2009 when there were just four television stories (yes, we’re including Dreamland), sinking from a reported and very respectable figure of 150,000 to under 45,000 within a year. And there were fears that the picture wouldn’t get any better when the Tenth Doctor disappeared from screens entirely.

But Matt Smith’s portrayal of the Eleventh Doctor in Series 5, from his first seconds in the role in the closing moments of The End of Time, resonated with audiences. And unlike some of the series that have succeeded it, it was marketed well too.

The time between Smith’s first scene, and his last in series finale, The Big Bang, fitted into a single circulation window for the Audit Bureau of Circulations. While he was on TV, DWA readership jumped up to 53,559, a massive 20% increase on the previous figure. Earning back an audience is seen less often than finding a new one, so chances are, the increase in numbers came from brand new viewers of the show – and the power of hearsay on school playgrounds.

It only got better, as the momentum continued after Series 5 concluded. From July to December, DWA circulation grew even further to 56,648 (+5.8%). The figures decreased as expected – but remained steady – in 2011, then started to decline rapidly again as the show’s broadcasting format was broken up, digital entertainment became more prevalent, and the UK started to spend more on activities besides reading as a double recession started to ease up and the 2012 Olympics brought a feel-good atmosphere that didn’t have to be fulfilled by tales of fiction.

So what of the adventures the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond went on during that final golden moment for the magazine before it got taken by one of the cracks in the universe (and several years of declining readership)?

The very first magazine comic strip featuring the new Doctor coincided with the rebranding of the show and Series 5 opener, The Eleventh Hour, in April, with the Tenth Doctor and Scottish student Heather McCrimmon (who may or may not have been related to Jamie) holding the mantle until then.

Attack of the Space Leeches kicked things off over two issues, with part one avoiding any appearance of the Doctor himself as he had yet to make his TV debut. The lead actors perhaps weren’t immediately drawn to a life-like degree, but the visual acting of Smith’s Doctor was caught on the page and that continued through future stories… although his dialogue did often come down to ‘Geronimo!’ and having an over-reliance on quick-fix gadgets such as the sonic screwdriver while Amy provided the brains to resolve the plot.

Highlights of this run of stories includes bodyswapping tale About Face, just after The Vampires of Venice had been on TV; historical UK rail travel adventure Track Attack; the return of an old DWA villain in Money Troubles; Attack of the Gatebots! (at which point the art quality was really picking up); and the odd traditional school-based Pencil Pusher.

Back issues of DWA can now only really be found on eBay or local libraries, and believe me when I say I spent 100s of hours of my childhood doing just that. I rarely actually made an online purchase, given I would have been spending others’ money, but while working abroad last summer, I struck unbelievable gold.

I was cycling to Belgium for my day job (long story), and I was staying with a colleague in Brussels for two nights. I have had a life-long interest in Tintin, and so my friend took me to some local comic shops so I could get a taste of the Belgian culture for strip-based stories. In one of the second-hand shops, and I couldn’t quite believe my eyes, was a paper-wrapped haul of DWA issues ranging from its creation in 2006 to issues up to the show’s 50th anniversary celebrations in 2013.

There was no way I could take these magazines with me as I continued my journey to the east of Belgium, so I spent a bargain €30 (from memory, it was paid for in cash) and left them at my colleague’s apartment for several days. On my return trip, I was taking the Eurostar back to England, so I collected the comics, then had some thrilling reading on the train ‘home’.

Do you have any memories of reading Doctor Who Adventures? Do you miss it, the magazine having ended unceremoniously in the past couple of years? Let us know in the comments below.

This all seems like a very long time ago now, but every January, I churn the loft. For those who don’t know, ‘churning’ refers to the act of sorting out your stuff, but instead of throwing stuff out (or better, taking that stuff to the local charity shop) you just move things from one place to another. It’s usually sparked by putting the Christmas decorations away and noticing all the mess from throughout the year: the displaced suitcases, empty cardboard boxes (just in case the item they contained broke down), and general put-it-up-there-out-of-the-way clutter.

In among the storage there are the boxes with my Doctor Who things: my Target books, BBC Books, VHS covers, and a few vintage toys. But every year I always find something that I had forgotten about. This year, it was a copy of the CD-ROM of the tele-snaps re-construction of The Power of the Daleks and the audiobook of Doctor Who and the Daleks read by William Russell.

These were both part of a short-lived range of CD-ROMs/MP3-CDs.

Released from 2003 to 2005, seven Doctor Who sets were issued; five of the seven were audio and in MP3 format. The other two were audio/visual.

The range was predominantly Doctor Who, but Fawlty Towers (audio only), Dead Ringers, The Hobbit, and the radio version of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy initially joined in.

In the first few years of the new millennium, it made a lot of sense to try and cash in on the boom in home computers and exploit emerging newer audio types. The then-popular audio compression codec MP3 was used which allowed, according to the CDs’ sleeve notes, 25 hours of audio to fit onto one CD.

However, this information is contradicted on the BBC Press Office release, where it claims that it’s 15 hours. Nevertheless, the initial draw was for fewer discs per release at a “comparably lower cost to a standard CD”.

Today, despite newer codecs being more efficient at audio compression like AAC, MP3 still remains popular; for example, Big Finish still offer MP3 as a download option.

The Releases

The Daleks Master Plan (2003)

Where the original release was a five-disc bundle, The Daleks’ Master Plan was a single CD with a running time of five hours and 20 minutes and, as the cover states, includes Mission to the Unknown.

This is a tad hard to get hold of without laying out silly money on auction sites and as a result, I haven’t yet been able to add this to my collection.

The Abominable Snowman/The Web of Fear (2003)

This was a two-disc release featuring one story per disc; a Great Intelligence boxset as it were.

The total runtime of each disc is four hours and 20 minutes and when looking at the data side of the CDs, it is clear that only about a third of the disc contains any data. This makes it very obvious that both stories could have easily fitted onto one disc. At a potential of 25/15 hours (delete as applicable) per CD, small boxsets of entire season soundtracks were entirely possible.

You may notice that the cover exclusively features The Abominable Snowman; not to worry, dear collector, each disc has the artwork lifted from the conventional CD release printed on it, and a clean version (i.e. no lettering or logo) of The Web of Fear cover bags the inside, behind the CD tray.

Tales of the TARDIS Vol. 1 (2004)

This was a compilation of previously released material, mostly on cassette tape (Out of Darkness had a CD release), but with a very generous running time of nine and a half hours! And for our entry price (£25, if memory serves me right), we got the following:

• The Curse of Peladon read by Jon Pertwee
• Kinda read by Peter Davison
• Attack of the Cybermen read by Colin Baker
• Out of the Darkness, three stories read by Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant
• Short Trips: six stories read by Nicholas Courtney and Sophie Aldred

Just to note, that Curse, Kinda, and Attack are not the full Target audiobooks (that would have been incredibly impressive for a single disc), but abridged versions.

The CD_ROM content amounts to “a special TARDIS-themed viewer screen, images from the original series, excerpts from other Doctor Who CD releases, web-links, and additional features.” Obviously, after 16 years, the web-links are a bit out of date.

Tales of the TARDIS Vol. 2 (2004)

As with volume one, all of the contents of volume two had been previously released, but this had a slightly longer running time of 10 hours. Volume two presented:

• Planet of the Daleks read by Jon Pertwee
• Warriors of the Deep read by Peter Davison
• Vengeance on Varos read by Colin Baker
• The Novel of the Film (sic) read by Paul McGann
• Earth and Beyond: three stories read by Paul McGann

Again, Planet, Warriors, Vengeance, and The Novel are abridged versions.

The CD-ROM content was pretty much as volume one, but I have to admit that I had a bit of a hard time trying to get access to the CD-ROM content on the discs; my Mac just refused to even acknowledge them and my Windows laptop would let me access the files, but not run the disc properly. I could have pursued it more, but I present the gist from the screengrabs I was able to take.

Both of the Tales of the Tardis volumes were re-released on conventional CD box-sets in 2016/17. The number of CDs per box was eleven for volume one and twelve for volume two. That was some serious compression going on for the MP3s! The same artwork, minus the MP3-CD AUDIO banner, was used for the covers.

Doctor Who and the Daleks (2005)

The only audiobook in the range was David Whittaker’s original novel, read by William Russell, and compressing the conventional CD release’s five discs.

What was unusual about this release is that it can be easily mistaken for the conventional release. All the others, although having the same artwork as their CD counterparts, have MP3 AUDIO very prominently on the cover. With Daleks, the only area it’s flagged is where it states the number of CDs at the bottom right-hand corner. However, the physical box size would have been a bit of a giveaway.

The CD-ROM content is small. Effectively, there were a few screen-shots from the TV serial and a gallery of the pen-line drawings from the original book release.

On a personal note, I’ve got a very soft spot for this audiobook. It was one that BBC4 Extra transmitted as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations and which accompanied me on my two and a half mile walk home from the office where I worked at that time. Nicholas Briggs may not appear as the voice of the Daleks, but he did introduce this audiobook on BBC4 Extra.

It’s worth a mention that the conventional CD version was also released in the same year.

I am quite surprised that Doctor Who and the Daleks was the only Target novelization released. Audiobooks were perfect for presentation on MP3-CD as spoken word doesn’t require the same levels of bitrate as for music. After all, the BBC’s short-lived range did get ambitious when it later released Tolstoy’s War and Peace!

Death Comes to Time (2004)

The remaining two releases, although not in chronological order from the above, featured visual content as well as audio and were designed to play on a PC.

Death Comes to Time was quite a luxurious release as it also featured… well… let the back-cover’s blurb explain:

“This Special Edition combines MP3-CD and CD-ROM elements to include, for the first time, the original BBCi webcast animation Death Comes to Time plus the award-winning remastered CD version, cast video interviews, outtakes, spoofs, online character biographies, full colour illustrations and initial artwork ‘roughs’, a TARDIS-themed web viewer, and excerpts from other Doctor Who CDs.”

That’s practically a DVD’s worth of content, but this is another release that is hard to buy at a reasonable price and another I don’t own as a result.

Oddly, this was still advertised on the cover as a MP3-CD, with a small insert saying that it ‘includes’ CD-ROM content. I would argue that the CD-ROM content – the BBCi webcast – would be the main draw. Was Death Comes to Time animated enough for a DVD release? It would appear not; Scream of the Shalka was the only BBCi content to warrant its own DVD.

Sadly, most of the BBCi output didn’t get prominent releases: the visual version of McGann’s Shada was only an extra on the 2013 Shada reconstruction DVD (accessed by computer only) or the more recent Shada Blu-ray steelbook; Real Time remains an audio-only on Big Finish; and BBCi’s non-Doctor Who webcast, Ghost of Albion, is gone and forgotten (although it is still up on the abandoned BBC cult website, as are all the others).

Doctor Who Reconstructed: The Power of the Daleks (2005)

To the prospective purchaser, there was no doubt that this The Power of the Daleks release was different from the conventional soundtrack CD; the artwork differs and it states that this is “reconstructed” and a “soundtrack with pictures”.

Interestingly, the blurb on the back seems to indicate that this was intended as the first of a series of reconstructions:

“In Doctor Who Reconstructed, the narrated soundtrack of a ‘missing’ Doctor Who serial is matched with a slideshow of rare off-screen stills, taken by the photographer John Cura. Together these elements make the closest possible simulation of the actual film recording.” That statement does appear to indicate that this was the beginning of a range of ‘Doctor Who Reconstructed’.

As it says on the tin – or rather, the back cover – to be able to watch the reconstruction, a PC was needed

Why Was This Range So Short Lived?

As I’m unable to find any specific reason why the MP3-CDs didn’t take off, I can only surmise as to the reasons that this range was so limited.

Audiobooks and Soundtracks:

Battling Established Releases

If a collector is buying the conventional CDs (and is still doing so to this day), an MP3-CD doesn’t really offer any benefit other than a tiny bit of extra shelf space. It is essentially the same format (CD), just in a different playback method.

Is there really any attraction to re-buying what is effectively the exact same release again?

Digital Downloads

Downloads were on the horizon as digital download media on iTunes was launched around the same time as this range began. But although it was a while before Doctor Who content was available, it was conceivable that many of the computer buffs would have expected them at any time.

MP3-CDs fall down a hole somewhere in the middle of the physical/download divide; it’s a physical media, but in download quality.

Sound Quality

As was discussed in one of my previous articles, audiophiles want the superior sound quality of a CD. Arguably, the MP3-CD’s compressed downloads have to sacrifice quality for high-storage (that is to say, fitting as much as possible onto one disc) which doesn’t sit well with many.

It probably doesn’t matter that much for the spoken-word only releases, but where the 1960s soundtracks are not hi-fi, as good as they are, any compromise in presentation can be detrimental.

CD Players Around the Turn of the Millennium

The sleeve notes warn the prospective buyer that up to date CD or DVD player will be required, but many people, like myself, may not have had recently-released playback equipment, around the time of the launch of these discs, as our tech used to last a bit longer.

My CD player was a 1993 Technics SL-PG420A and it was superb. It only played conventional CDs but I had no reason to replace it. In fact, I haven’t; it’s still going strong.

Therefore, would there be any benefit to buying up to date players just for this range when the user was quite likely collecting the conventional CD versions anyway?

Audiobooks, Soundtracks, and CD-ROMs:

The Early 2000’s Home Computer Boom

Ah, but what about PCs? Yes, this was the best and a very good argument for the MP3-CDs/CD-ROMs – to take advantage in the uptake in home computers, which started the MP3 craze in the first place. In theory, it’s a brilliant idea; a set of Doctor Who themed CDs with picture content as well as audio that can be accessed on your home computer.

In practice, not so much: PCs could still play conventional CDs and a user could rip them to MP3 themselves at whatever bit-rate they wanted, plus the telesnaps and BBCi (i.e. visual) content were available on the then BBC Doctor Who website to view for free.

Nice Try (The Obligatory Opinion Piece)

The problem is that the MP3-CDs/CD-ROMs ultimately had nothing new to offer. Indeed, the press release states that the initial MP3-CDs were best-selling titles. Best-selling does tend to indicate titles that consumers already had!

There may have been some monetary benefit – the Yeti set is a two-for-one – but all the constituent parts had been released before or were available elsewhere. All the lovely shiny new visual content was being made for the DVDs, which left nothing for these and the prices were not too far behind the DVDs themselves.

It’s worth a mention that, although not a consideration at their release, 10 years down the line, the rise in tablets and cheaper laptops/netbooks meant that the humble CD-ROM is practically no more; CD/DVD drives are no longer a feature of most hardware.

The bottom line is that these couldn’t have sold well, otherwise they would have continued. But nevertheless, these are still interesting; a little oddity that tried to cash in on the times.

Oh, by the way, actually about 10 boxes went to the charity shop this year.

Nearly 50 years after its first appearance on screen in 1967’s The Ice Warriors, and decades after it was last on display to the public at the Blackpool Doctor Who exhibition, an original Ice Warrior head has been found in the hands of a private collector, after it was apparently rescued from a skip.
The collector, who had had the prop stored in a box, untouched for 30 years, contacted Matt Doe of Toybox Treasures (dealers of old toys, merchandise, and screen-used props) to inform him that he had the head in his possession.
Since this incredible discovery, the Ice Warrior head has been worked on by BAFTA award winner Mike Tucker, who restored many of the props on display at the Doctor Who Experience in London and Cardiff.
Instead of restoring the prop, it was decided that the best way forward would be to preserve it, thus keeping the item as close to its original form whilst reducing the risk of the whole thing falling apart. Tucker created a stand for the helmet to reduce the need for handling and got to work.
The result is astounding: a well-preserved prop to which no new latex has been added to, close to its original TV appearances – specifically, the orange-eyed version of it which appeared in The Monster of Peladon (1974) – whilst acknowledging its age.
According to Richard Molesworth’s article on the discovery for issue 513 of Doctor Who Magazine (highly recommended), Toybox Treasures’ Matt Doe hopes to have the newly preserved helmet seen by as many fans as possible, perhaps being put on display at the Doctor Who Experience before it closes later this year. Doe says:

“It was a fantastic experience and gave me great pleasure in seeing how far Richard went into his research, each day showing me fantastic never seen before images, history on the prop and so much more. Without Richard this wouldn’t have been half as much fun.

“At one point Richard was able to even tell me where one scene was shot with the Ice Warrior, Lime Grove Studio D on Saturday 11th November 1967.”

To find out more about restoration genius Mike Tucker’s work, check out the DWC’s exclusive interview with him discussing his new Doctor Who novel, Diamond Dogs.

It’s a story most fans are depressingly familiar with now – how a short-sighted approach to archive material combined with the costs involved in storing recordings resulted in the junking of whole swathes of Doctor Who’s past. But back in 1981 it certainly wasn’t common knowledge and those who were aware that early material was missing wouldn’t have known exactly which stories had been cast into the vortex.
So it fell to Doctor Who Magazine (or Doctor Who Monthly as it was back then), then still a relatively new publication but one which was for many their primary and perhaps only source of news about the programme, to tell fans in detail about just how episodes had come to be junked, together with a guide to what remained in the BBC archives. They did this in their Doctor Who Winter Special of 1981 (sadly, the magazine has lost the habit of assigning a season to its special issues) and it’s since gone down in fan lore as something of a ‘ground zero’ for the missing episodes, being the first time a mass publication had made us aware of the scale of what had been lost.

The information is presented rather starkly in a one-page list which gives chapter and verse on the status of what was left in the archives and what was gone (although DWM later issued a correction to the list, using Matrix Data Bank – a very handy Q&A feature in the pre-internet era – to tell readers that Wheel in Space Part Six did exist but The Invasion Part Four didn’t). Many long-term fans can recall to this day their sense of shock when they first learned that a whopping 136 episodes (roughly a quarter of the total number transmitted up to that date) were missing. Classic stories from the show’s early years were gone in their entirety and just the odd episode or two was left from many others. Even the colour era hadn’t escaped the purge, with several Jon Pertwee episodes stored only in black and white and Part One of Invasion of the Dinosaurs unfairly singled out and falling victim to a mistaken dumping.
In truth, the magazine rather underplays the despair that its editor must have known would be felt by the readership at learning the grim news. As a licensed publication DWM would have been reluctant to indulge in criticism of the BBC, and the magazine seeks to explain rather than condemn the circumstances that led to this sad state of affairs. An interview with Sue Malden, then Archive Selector for the BBC’s Film Library and one of the unsung heroes of Doctor Who’s long history, gives a detailed overview of how the episodes came to be lost in the first place before turning to more positive matters (‘Since taking up her post… Sue Malden has made the hunt for missing Doctor Whos something of a pet project’). The interview concludes with a very understated rallying cry to readers to pass on any leads that may enable missing material to be returned, with Sue taking care to stress that no payment could be made.

One of the joys of reading the special now, of course, is to do so knowing that the grim toll of missing episodes is now considerably shorter (97 at the last count) with the intervening years having seen an impressive effort to recover the programme’s past by following trails both at home and overseas. And the creative work done to fill in the gaps in the programme’s history via soundtracks, colourisation, animation, and all manner of technical wizardry to clean up and restore ageing archive material would have been unthinkable back in 1981, before any stories had been released on video and when the best hope of watching archive Doctor Who was via very rare repeat screenings such as The Five Faces of Doctor Who season, coincidentally trailed in the introduction to Sue Malden’s interview in the magazine.
Doctor Who Magazine has certainly played its part in the recovery process, not least via publishing the 1960s telesnaps, even if they did give us a terrible shock back in 1981.

For all that his best known role saw him journeying through outer space, Paul Darrow comes across as a down to Earth type in this, the newly released audiobook of his 2006 autobiography. An opening anecdote sees him seated in a make-up chair alongside the academic, director, and performer Dr Jonathan Miller who cheerfully tells him that life has no meaning, that human beings are born, live and die, and that we shouldn’t place any greater significance than that on our existence. As Darrow says, it’s a rather bleak thought (“No wonder people turn to drink…”) but the story is just his way of telling us that he’s not going to be making any grand claims about the importance of his art.
Darrow is realistic enough to know that the vast majority of those buying this book are going to be fans of Blake’s 7 – the BBC1 sci-fi drama created by Terry Nation which ran from 1978-1981. The fact that his best-known role, that of the self-serving anti-hero Avon, was decades in the past doesn’t seem to bother the writer, who gives the impression throughout that he’s grateful for whatever success came his way in the notoriously insecure profession he opted for against the wishes of his father, who would have preferred him to be a lawyer.
As his many fans will surely have hoped, a fair chunk of the book is devoted to Blake’s 7 and there are some interesting recollections of what it was like to be there at the start of the cult show. After a less than encouraging start when he found that the script for the opening episode didn’t feature his character at all, Darrow quickly realised he was on to a good thing and that his part offered far more material for an actor to get his teeth into than that of the series lead Blake, played by Gareth Thomas. He recounts how Thomas’s departure after two series led to great concern among those who remained that the plug would be pulled on the show (in the event there would be two further series) and he has considerable praise for Terry Nation and series script editor Chris Boucher, the two driving forces behind the programme’s success in terms of its premise, storylines, and scripts.

Darrow is honest about the series’ limitations (as he says himself, they weren’t making Shakespeare): the chronic shortage of money to spend on special effects which made it the butt of many jokes; the thinly written roles for the female crew members; and the fact that some episodes haven’t stood the test of time too well. But given the continuing enthusiasm for the show among its fans he’s surely correct in arguing that Blake’s 7 offered a new spin on an old format and that the lead characters were no mere stereotypes.
It’s not all Blake’s 7, however, and Darrow’s memories of his early life in post-war Britain and his journey to becoming an established actor (including his days sharing a flat with John Hurt and Ian McShane) make for an engaging listen. He stresses the importance that luck plays in an acting career but in doing so perhaps undersells his own gifts as an actor. There’s a rather moving chapter where he remembers how he was persuaded by theatre impresario Bill Kenwright to play Elvis Presley on stage in Alan Bleasdale’s Are You Lonesome Tonight? After overcoming his initial reluctance that he could pull it off, Darrow found the role one of the most rewarding experiences of his career but, ever honest, openly admits that the play’s writer didn’t rate his performance very highly.
Paul Darrow has appeared twice in Doctor Who, of course, although he doesn’t devote a lot of time to it here. His primary recollections of his appearance in Doctor Who and the Silurians are of Jon Pertwee’s wicked habit of making actors laugh just before a take and of being half-deafened filming a cave-based shoot out. Like many who have watched it, he found Timelash difficult to take seriously and offers as his defence for his OTT performance as the story’s villain that he was just trying to inject a little oomph into the proceedings by giving his take on Richard III.
There are, however, some fun stories from convention appearances including (my favourite) one about how he and Peter Davison declined to go for a run with Star Trek’s George Takei, opting instead for a leisurely breakfast – a second cup of coffee for Peter and a fag for Paul.
This kind of amusing anecdote makes Paul Darrow good company in an unabridged audiobook that fills seven discs. It’s possible that his less than wholly serious approach to the book stops us from getting to know the man behind the voice as well as we might have hoped but, while You’re Him, Aren’t You? may not qualify as an essential purchase, it offers a fun journey through the life and career of one of British sci-fi’s most recognisable personalities.
You’re Him, Aren’t You? by Paul Darrow is available from Big Finish for £15 (CD) and £12 (download).

One of Doctor Who Magazine’s great strengths has always been it interviews – over its 500 issues the magazine has spoken to just about everyone it possibly could have who has been involved in the making of the show. And it has to be said that the most memorable conversations written up in the pages of our favourite magazine tend to be those where the interviewee gives a, shall we say, full and frank description of their experience making Doctor Who.
I’m thinking of production manager (and partner of John Nathan-Turner) Gary Downie giving it both barrels to just about anyone he felt had ever crossed him in an interview that made for uncomfortably gripping reading not too long before his death in 2006. Others which spring to mind, though far less vitriolic than that example, include Colin Baker arguably doing himself few favours by protesting at the kind of polls which tend to place his debut story, and indeed his Doctor, at the bottom of fans’ favourites lists. Last year good old Peter Purves certainly wasn’t in the mood for sugar-coating his comments when he described someone from his time on the show as ‘totally incompetent. He wasn’t a very nice man – I had no rapport with him, I didn’t respect him, I didn’t think he knew what he was doing. He was stupid.’

Phew! Tell it like it is, won’t you Peter? The person Purves was directing his ire at was producer John Wiles, who succeeded Verity Lambert in 1965 and oversaw just four stories: The Myth Makers, The Daleks’ Masterplan, The Massacre and The Ark. Wiles was a cerebral character, more at home with writing (his list of televison credits is considerable) and directing for the stage than producing a show in a genre he had little time for. Wiles spoke to DWM back in 1983 for that year’s Winter Special:
“I was never happy with the role of a producer. A producer is really a desk person, deriving pleasure and satisfaction from battles in the office. This was very frustrating for me as I am much more a writer and a director. I want to get down onto the floor and pull it together; to make it work with the actors and the crew.”
Wiles himself felt he was a poor fit for the job, though his task was surely made vastly harder by his difficult relationship with the show’s star. It’s fair to say that Wiles and William Hartnell didn’t exactly hit it off…
“He wasn’t as old as he thought he was. When he was with me he treated himself almost as a seventy-five year old. It may well have been that he was physically not in the best of health and so he could not learn his lines. Consequently, studio days could be absolute purgatory for everybody. If Bill was in an unhappy state then it put everyone into a terrible state.”
Oh dear… It’s worth stressing how unusual it was to read this kind of insider detail back in 1983, and indeed it may be that this edition of DWM was one of the first examples of someone who had worked on the show being quite to honest in describing their time in negative terms.

Wiles’s recollection of the programme’s dressers walking out on strike in protest at Hartnell’s rudeness to one of their number encapsulates the image of an unhappy production and a spell in his career that Wiles, who walked away from his job (‘I’m one of the few producers ever to resign from the BBC’), preferred to forget. Interestingly, the antipathy Peter Purves felt for his producer wasn’t reciprocated, with Wiles saying:
“He was very supportive and helped as much as he could. I imagine it must have been very nerve-wracking for him in that he never knew, from one day to the next, what was coming from Bill.”
There are snippets of detail that give an indication of the direction Wiles would have taken Doctor Who if he had had the chance – increasingly adult-oriented, a more serious tone with stories that veered towards the kind of science-fiction Star Trek pursued. He had little time for the ‘fantasy romp’ of the mammoth Dalek serial he was left with by the previous production team, poetically describing it as ‘an enormous rock in the middle of a sea, and one on which any boat we were going to run would be submerged’.
John Wiles died in 1999 and would probably be uncomfortable at the thought that his best-remembered credit was for a period which had, in his words, left him ‘heading very rapidly for a nervous breakdown’. Being in charge of Doctor Who plainly isn’t a job that’s going to suit everyone, and you can sense the sigh of despair in Wiles’s closing thought:
“I do remember suggesting to Bill that we take the TARDIS to a planet where there is no gravity and no oxygen – where he would have had to wear a spacesuit. You never heard such an uproar in all your life…”
 

Published during those 1990s ‘wilderness years’ when Doctor Who was off the air, the Virgin New Adventures rightly hold their place in history (I can’t bring myself to write ‘Whostory’…) for keeping the programme alive at a time when there was no programme to watch. The books gave writers such as Russell T. Davies, Paul Cornell and Gareth Roberts their first paid work writing Doctor Who and enabled authors to explore more mature themes in broader settings than a television production had ever allowed.
The novels weren’t to everyone’s taste but those who loved them really loved them so if you’ve never tried them perhaps now, in this gap year for the series, is as good a time as any to track them down and revisit a time when these novels were the future of Doctor Who. But how easy are they to get hold of? How collectible are the books? Which are the key ones to look out for?

Heading over to eBay, as we surely must on these occasions, it quickly becomes clear that building up a complete set of the 61 titles published would set you back a few quid. A relatively niche product in their day and published at a time when the programme seemed unlikely to return, the New Adventures were never going to sell in the kind of quantities as the Target novels had before them and consequently there are far fewer copies around today.
The most sought-after books can have prices upwards of £50, with £10-£20 being a ballpark figure to keep in mind. But there are bargains to be had and, as always with eBay shopping, it’s always possible to strike it lucky and log on just as someone is having a clear out of their shelves.

The New Adventures story which most fans could probably name is Human Nature, Paul Cornell’s 1995 novel which he later adapted into a two-part episode for Series 3 with David Tennant’s Doctor. With its irresistible premise of ‘what would happen to the Doctor if he gave up being a Time Lord?’, it’s easy to see why Russell T Davies was so attracted to the idea of bringing this story to the screen and it remains an excellent read. If you’re not too bothered about owning an original edition go for the reprint from BBC Books published last year.
You’re probably aware that Big Finish have produced audio adaptations of a number of New Adventures in recent years, starting with Paul Cornell’s Love and War in 2012. It looks unlikely that Big Finish will work their way through the entire range; their approach so far has been to go for the more highly-regarded novels, including those from writers who have since gone on to write on-screen Doctor Who, so we’ve had audio adaptations of Damaged Goods by Russell T Davies, Nightshade by Mark Gatiss and The Well-Mannered War and The English Way of Death, both by Gareth Roberts. Original copies of Davies’s book jumped in value the moment he was named as Doctor Who showrunner and have stayed high ever since. Roberts’ novels were adored by those who loved his take on the Fourth Doctor and second Romana pairing with its Douglas Adams-influenced flights of fancy and tend to get snapped up for high prices when they become available.
The English Way of Death, however, was also reprinted by BBC Books last year, so it’s worth a look.

Should you have a wad of notes burning a hole in your pocket and a quest to own the very rarest New Adventure novels, there are a couple of titles likely to come out top when you filter your eBay results by price. Lungbarrow by Marc Platt is controversial among some fans to this day for exploring the Doctor’s origins and was intended to wrap up the continuity of the New Adventures in advance of the 1996 TV Movie. Today, it can easily go for three-figure sums – perhaps people who rejected its version of Gallifreyan history have been burning copies?
Virgin’s sole take on the Eighth Doctor, The Dying Days by Lance Parkin, was the last book released before the publisher lost their licence to produce original Doctor Who fiction to BBC Books. Today the range’s last hurrah (at least with the Doctor – further titles were published centring on Bernice Summerfield) can easily match Lungbarrow in the stakes for costliest New Adventures purchase. Both The Dying Days and Lungbarrow were later available on the BBC Doctor Who website, accompanied by new illustrations and extensive author notes, but have since been withdrawn.
If you were savvy enough to print copies off you could probably do a roaring trade online now…

Chris Achilleos is an artist and illustrator who designed the covers of over 30 Target Doctor Who books in the 1970s. The Doctor Who Companion spoke to him on the publication of seven new editions of classic-era Doctor Who novelisations: The Zarbi; The Web of Fear; The Dinosaur Invasion; Genesis of the Daleks; The Visitation; Vengeance on Varos; and Battlefield. The last three titles have completely new cover illustrations. To coincide with the reissue of the books, The Cartoon Museum in London will be hosting Doctor Who: The Target Books Artwork, a display of original cover artwork from the classic novels by Chris and other artists from the range, from 28th April to 11th May 2016.
DWC: How do you feel about the new covers? Was it exciting to go back and do some new work on Doctor Who?
Chris: First of all it was very surprising after all these years to get a call like that. I used to get calls from the BBC for the audio CDs; I’ve done quite a lot of those so at first I thought it was about that. They told me they were re-publishing some titles and also they wanted to commission new ones. I thought ‘really?!’ (laughs)
How did it feel to do new work?
Well, it’s not that I haven’t done one since the seventies, I have been doing others. For instance, SFX magazine commissioned me to do some covers a couple of years ago – I did a new one for The Green Death and one for Blink. And I’ve done a few private commissions once so it was not difficult for me to do these three new ones.
That style of having the Doctor in black and white and different characters from the story in colour – there’s something about that that works really well for Doctor Who; it’s very unusual, very distinctive I always thought.
Well, I always saw them as graphics rather than paintings. They were very small book covers and you had to do something very impactful to grab attention and that worked very well. But it wasn’t always the Doctor’s face in black and white on them, I did some colour ones to try and move on a little bit rather than doing the same theme all the time. I took a chance and did different things, like using the work ‘Kklak!’, or even leaving the Doctor’s head off altogether, stuff like that to make it interesting. It was not always appreciated!
That one you mention – The Dinosaur Invasion – it shows you must have loved your comics…
Oh yeah, if you know anything about me you know how much I was influenced by comics.

It’s such a great action image. Were the publishers not very keen on you using that word ‘Kklak!’ on the cover?
No they were not! I always submitted the work to the art director but then later on I used to go straight to Tandem Books which was Target – I always knew them as Tandem because I used to do lots of other work for them. They were under the same label; they were just in different rooms. I used to take the Doctor Who covers in there and sort of unveil them. It was always ‘Wow, it’s great Chris!’ but on that occasion there was silence, then ‘What’s this “Kklak!”?’ I said ‘What do you mean? It’s part of the design’, I thought kids would love it.
That’s one of the most memorable ones!
It’s not my favourite cover but it’s the one that people talk about the most. There were some problems with that, they wanted me to take it out but I refused to do so. I can’t remember exactly what happened but I got away with it! Then they got all the fans letters coming in from people saying they loved it and they realised I was right. Later when I left the Doctor’s head off some covers they asked ‘Where’s the Doctor?’ I said he didn’t fit in, like on The Ice Warriors, that’s my favourite design now. I’ve moved on: it used to be Genesis of the Daleks; now I prefer that because it’s such a perfect design. I could not bring myself to ruin a perfect design just so I could show the Doctor’s head.
So when you were planning the images, was it more or less up to you what you included and then the publisher would give their views after; is that how it would work?
I got no briefing at all. I did so many over the years. The first ones were the ones where we worked out the style and the content of the covers. I did Doctor Who and the Zarbi and there was no reference material for that – in those days it was just two or three black and white photos, if you could use anything you were lucky. I would get a synopsis and read through that, I was used to doing book covers so I would copy the action. I did a rough image with some real ants but they came back and said ‘No, you have got the wrong idea, Chris – the BBC want the real characters, the real models to be shown,’ and of course my reaction was ‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’ It happened a lot when I was freelance, you would get the wrong brief or there would be no brief, or they would change their minds. At first I was pretty annoyed about it but I went and got some reference photos and I realised that was the way to go.

They’ve picked some nice ones for these reissues. The Genesis one is there – that always seemed quite an unusual one, almost photographic, particularly the Dalek and the Doctor.
Yeah, like I say the Genesis cover used to be my favourite. I just enjoyed doing that one very much. It had a Davros in the middle; it felt like a very good design, it was a nice one to look at. And the way I did the Doctor, not using the dots, in a watercolour kind of way, with the Dalek at the back… it was a very satisfying design. We’d changed the format by then so the pictures would go to the top behind the logo.
And we’ve got The Web of Fear as well, with the web going right up behind the logo as you mention – that’s a really striking image.
Yes, I did a few Patrick Troughton ones and I really loved those.

The thing I remember from buying the books when I was younger is that you didn’t have videos then and if you’d never seen the story the cover really told you what the story was about – it was the only thing you had to tell you what the images were in the story.
Exactly, you had to encapsulate the whole story in the picture on the cover. It’s not an easy thing to do, and that’s what I try very hard to achieve on any book cover, not just Doctor Who, and also stay faithful to the author’s description of things – the characters, whatever was portrayed. But also you have to bear in mind that this was not editorial illustration where you have a captive audience and they want to look at the details. This is a miniature poster to attract the attention of people passing by so you have to make it very attractive and punchy, and make it stand out from the rest and that’s what I was good at.
Some of your designs will be in the new exhibition – will you go along to have a look yourself?
Yeah, why not? It wouldn’t be complete without me! (laughs) It’ll be nice to see my work; some of it’s in other people’s possession now.
So you’ve sold some of the originals?
Yes, in the eighties. The eighties was like the dark ages and nobody wanted the artwork. I was going through a bad spell and needed to earn some money so a lot of them went for very little. You can’t keep these things forever. I still have a lot of my work here, I have a few new Doctor Who’s like the ones I did for SFX and the three new ones I just did. The three new ones are going to be at the exhibition and the older ones will also be coming from various collectors.
Finally, Doctor Who is just one thing you’ve done among lots of other things – there’s all your fantasy work, the film posters, you did the Star Trek books – how do you feel about your Doctor Who work now?
At the beginning I was quite happy to be doing them. The demand was so great and they were selling so well. I had to do one every month. A Doctor Who cover would take me a whole week to do while a fantasy piece would take me two to four weeks; I used to put a lot into them. I began to think it was too many and I couldn’t do them all so they got Peter Brookes to do some which didn’t go down very well, I was told. But I continued to do them, I was happy to do them, it was steady work and I enjoyed doing them until something happened which came between the publisher and myself and it had to end. Just as well – I was more into the fantasy thing my then. But now they’re great fun to do. I’ve been doing conventions for many years and I get people coming up asking ‘Why aren’t you doing more covers Chris? Why aren’t you doing the DVDs?’ like it was my fault that I wasn’t doing them! My answer is always ‘Well write to the BBC or to the publishers and tell them that’. We’ll see how they go, I’m hoping they’ll ask me to do some more.
For more on Chris’s work visit his website. Full details on the forthcoming exhibition available at The Cartoon Museum.