By Rob McCow

Teenage Kicks

Teenage Kicks was a text adventure for the Doctor published in August 1990, in issue #163 of Doctor Who Magazine. It was reprinted in full colour (that is, the accompanying illustrations were in full colour, the text remained in classic black and white) in the Mark Of Mandragora graphic novel from August 1993.

Story – Paul Cornell

Illustrations – Cam Smith

Ace is a well wicked companion of the seventh Doctor. Don’t diss her or she’ll get narky and sort you out, you toerag scumbag bilge-bag bog-brain. Her teenage rebel years have been extended far beyond their natural length through her travels with the Doctor. In truth, although she affects a working class ethic Ace (or Dorothy, to use her real name) is as middle class as an Ikea sofa.

In this story we find a little bit more about her days spent with a gang in Putney and discover how she got her name. She knows that one day the Doctor’ll leave her behind, though she is happy to tag along for now.

The Universe was created in a conversation between Lou Reed and Lester Bangs, as Ace keeps trying to tell the Doctor. She wants to tell him that it is ‘all rubbish’.

They arrive downstairs in a pub. They head upstairs and the Doctor tells Ace to go and talk to a boy in mirror shades and leather jacket. She does so and offers to buy the boy a drink, while the Doctor orders a brandy and sinks into a dark corner by the Jukebox.

The Doctor may have looked funky, but he couldn't see a thing with the black contact lenses in

Three people enter the pub, with jackets saying ‘Jack’, ‘King’ and ‘Queen’. They recognise Ace and tell her that the boy she is speaking to is Liam O’erspace. Ace asks her old Putney gangmates what happened to Joker and Jack explains that Joker died through drug abuse. When Ace berates them for being toerags, Queen kicks her in the stomach. Ace lashes out in return, slapping Queen in the face.

Jack tells Ace that Liam O’erspace wants their help getting back to his home. Liam takes off his glasses to show that he has fiery pits for eyes. In order to power his signalling device, Liam needs to sacrifice someone. King holds a knife up to Ace’s back. Ace calls out for the Doctor, but a girl in a party frock fires a gun through a bunch of red carnations that catch fire, melting the gun and causing it to jam when she tries to shoot the Doctor.

Come an' say 'ello to ol' Worzel!

The girl in the party frock is Arishma. Liam tries to pull a gun too, but Ace is able to throw King at him and take King’s knife and use it to threaten the rest of the gang, who all run away like frightened babies. The Doctor enters a battle of wills with Liam, which he wins and Liam and Arishma disappear into spacetime. The Doctor and Ace leave via the TARDIS before the police arrive and Ace tells the Doctor that everything is rubbish.

The Doctor tells Ace that he found Liam and Arishma through economic analysis – they had been making bets on which they knew the outcome because they were time travellers.

Teenage Kicks isn’t a story that could have been attempted on TV due to it’s adult content. It would be more suited to an episode of the adult-orientated Doctor Who spin-off, Torchwood.

Ace mentions her friend Midge, who appeared in Survival.

The Doctor has visited the occasional pub on TV. There was The Sinking Ship in the Reign of Terror; a tavern in the Massacre; The Inferno Nightclub in The War Machines; another tavern in The Highlanders; The Cloven Hoof in The Daemons; The Fox Inn in Terror of The Zygons; The Fleur de Lys in The Android Invasion; the Gore Crow Hotel in Battlefield and the Water Guard Pub in The Runaway Bride.

In The Celestial Toymaker there was a King, Queen and Knave of Hearts.

There are two illustrations to go with Teenage Kicks, one a general shot of the pub and the other a portrait of Liam. They look tacky and horrible, which is probably intentional. It’s a fine line between being innovative and being revolting, but the acid test is whether the illustrations make you want to read the story. In this case, I think most readers would turn the page just so that they wouldn’t have to look at the pictures.

On the other hand it was a new style of art for the magazine and anything’s worth a try once.

Throughout his novel-writing career Paul Cornell has bounced between producing genius and less worthy efforts, usually alternately. With his previous Doctor Who comic strip Stairway To Heaven nudging into the first category, Teenage Kicks takes the dive and plunges into the murky depths of mind-searing awfulness. From the unbearably adolescent opening line to the ponderously painful ending, this story takes us through some of the most incomprehensible descriptive dialogue I’ve ever read.

"Woomphh! That was a bunch of red carnations exploding in a jet of flame that blew from above the Doctor’s brandy glass. The lost-looking girl in the party frock was jumping up, throwing aside the flower ashes and pulling a gun from inside them, pointing it straight at the Doctor, twitching the trigger and throwing it aside when the melted thing didn’t work."

The first time I read it I thought Ace had been punched in the face and that the red carnations were some kind of metaphor; the second, that the Doctor’s brandy glass had melted; and the third that the Doctor had shot Ace.

The seventh Doctor’s mysterious side appears in its worst form here too. He knows what’s going on and it’s all his plan from the very beginning, but because this is a short story there’s never any time to doubt this. Far from surprising and unsettling the reader as it can do, the Doctor’s foreknowledge of events is exceedingly irritating in this case.

Teenage Kicks was a nice try to bring Doctor Who fiction into the ‘real’ world of pubs and violence, but reads like a first draft. To put it in a positive light, everything that Paul Cornell has written since has been better than this.

Liam is from Algol. Algol is a computer programming language - ALGOrithmic Language. It was invented by computer programmers, not poets.

The fictional school ‘Grange Hill’ is also mentioned.

Outside of Brief Encounters and Preludes, this would be the last original text story until Andrew Cartmel’s Meridians, a three-part story starting in Doctor Who Magazine Issue #227. It was also the last time that the magazine would run a short story instead of a comic strip.

As usual for a DWM text story, the amount of information available online about Teenage Kicks will increase dramatically once this article goes up.