By Rob McCow

Salad Daze
 

The Collector

Salad Daze was published in DWM #108 to #110, July to September 1986. It has yet to be reprinted.
 

The World Shapers

Script – Jamie Delano

Art – John Ridgway

Letters – Annie Halfacree

Editor – Sheila Cranna
 

Fellow Travellers

Peri has taken to wearing her new outfit from The Trial Of A Timelord this month, indicating a new phase in her relationship with the Doctor. She is still keen on health and is very worried about the Doctor’s diet of junk food. She also has an interest in the works of Lewis Carroll. A typical Peri salad appears to include sliced boiled egg, pepper, celery, lettuce, artichokes, cucumber, cress and peas.

There’s no Frobisher this month, he’s in the console room and apparently flying the TARDIS.
 

The Deal

On board the TARDIS, Peri has prepared a salad for the Doctor. But the Doctor would prefer some nice unhealthy junk food. He has been working on a device called a ‘Personal Reality Warp’, a small portable machine, while Peri has been reading an omnibus of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. Frobisher beeps the Doctor from the console room, telling him that they have reached the Herabin Planetoid Cluster, where the Doctor wants to take some readings. He tells Peri not to touch the Personal Reality Warp and heads to the console room.

Peri immediately touches the Personal Reality Warp and finds herself cast into a woodland grove, where she finds she is wearing strange clothes. A half-human rabbit with curly hair and a multi-coloured jacket runs past complaining that he is late. Peri then spots two large, round characters with ‘Dum’ and ‘Dee’ written on their collars. Dum and Dee are both turnips and they start to read Peri some of their poetry, specifically ‘The Walnut and the Cauliflower’.

Perhaps he'd like some carrot juice?

Quickly leaving, Peri decides she is having a bad dream, but is still careful not to wake the enormous, slumbering red cabbage.

She finds a table set up for the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. The Hatter is a giant celery stick who has a tomato and a carrot for company. The carrot offers her tea, but pours it onto the head of the tomato and hands her an empty cup instead. The Hatter tells her she is overweight. Peri tells them that they are all vegetables and she should know, she’s eaten enough recently.

The surreal vegetable fantasy continues

The Hatter’s Party are horrified, except the tomato who isn’t a vegetable. Peri runs off again, but is cornered by the Queen of Artichokes and the Knave of Spuds who prepare to chop off her head for murdering vegetables. ‘I didn’t meat to eat vegetables!’ Peri screams as the rabbit runs past again, ‘I’ll never do it again! I promise!’

Suddenly she finds herself back on the TARDIS, with the Doctor. She tells the Doctor that she hasn’t touched the Personal Reality Warp, she just had a bad dream. They sit down to their meal again, but Peri is horrified by the sight of the salad and offers to go and make the Doctor burgers and chips.

As the door slams shut, the Doctor looks down at the Personal Reality Warp machine. Then he smiles, broadly.

Mmm... Burgers...
 

TV Action

This is another comic strip adventure that recalls the surreal fantasies of The Mind Robber or The Deadly Assassin. Although as most of the action takes place in Peri’s mind, it’s probably closer to Kinda.

In The Five Doctors, the Doctor claimed that, like Alice, he tries to believe three impossible things before breakfast.

This story was printed around the same time as Trial Of A Timelord started on TV. Publicity photos of Peri’s new outfit had been available beforehand, so they were able to match her new costume in the comic.

4-Dimensional Vistas

Ridgway’s aversion to drawing TARDIS roundels continues. Most of the backgrounds of the TARDIS are completely blank. Contrast that with Peri’s visit to Wonderland, where he’s quite happy to draw trees in the background all the time.

The surreal fruit and vegetables come across very well in Ridgway’s style, looking comedic but also slightly menacing. Peri’s ‘Alice’ outfit looks great and I’m sure the fans would have been delighted to see her wearing it on screen. It’s moderately less ridiculous than her clothes in Mark of The Rani anyway.
 

End of The Line

This is an entertaining but slight story, almost a comedy sketch about Peri’s apparent love of healthy food. Although the Alice motif is possibly over-familiar, it works well in this context as Peri finds herself cast into various well-known scenes from the book. Substituting all the characters for vegetables is fun and some care seems to have been taken to make them into appropriate shapes. The Hatter is a tall and arrogant looking celery and Tweedledum and Tweedledee are nicely rotund as a pair of turnips. Although giving the Queen of Hearts an enormous artichoke head is a satisfying pun, it doesn’t look so great.

Best of all is the last page, where the Doctor expresses his polite surprise that Peri has gone off salads. How on earth could that have happened, we wonder? She didn’t’ touch the personal reality warp machine, surely?
 

Follow That TARDIS!

Looks like the food machine is on the blink again.

Doctor Who Magazine received correspondence from ‘Neithan, Havant, Hants’ in their ‘To The TARDIS’ section: For the first time, the excellence of DWM (Issue 117) has inspired me to voice my views. The variety of photographs is great, the Salad Daze strip very amusing (I loathe salads and I love Lewis Carroll).

Various Doctor Who stars have appeared in TV versions of Alice In Wonderland over the years. Sarah Sutton played Alice in a 1974 BBC production, appearing with Geoffrey Bayldon and perennial Dalek operator, John-Scott Martin. In 1986, Elisabeth Sladen appeared as the Dormouse in a Barry Letts production of Alice.

This is the first one-part comic strip adventure since The Neutron Knights, back in Doctor Who Monthly #60.

Another Alice-inspired Doctor Who adventure is Big Finish’s Ultimate Buggeration of The Entire Universe, Zagreus.

Jamie Delano went on to script Hellblazer for DC Comics. Hellblazer starred a character called John Constantine, who was played by Keanu Reeves in a film adaptation called Constantine.

 http://www.jamiedelano.co.uk/entrancepage.htm