Published: December 1985

Edition read: Target second, 1985 (with thanks to certain individuals who provided me with said copy)

Coolest Cover: You’d have to say that this came from Andrew Skilleter’s "less inspired" phase.

The BBC Budget Wouldn’t Run To: The luxurious interior of Oscar’s restaurant (here called La Piranella)

Purple Prose: There are a few nice touches, but particularly Shockeye’s tendency to break into song and a few good moments with the Sontarans.

Crimes Against Literature: "Suddenly she was down on all fours, hungrily sniffing and licking the life-liquid." (p.126). You’re making your own jokes up now...

The TARDIS materialises with..."a slight shudder"

Childhood Recollections: Buying the W.H.Allen hardback of this (it has stylish blue endpapers like a proper book) in the last summer of the Blackpool exhibition.

Ramblings: As John Nathan-Turner’s foreword emphasises, the Doctor Who production team had no special anniversary in mind when ‘The Two Doctors’ was commissioned, however as an exercise in bringing together the old and the new it was an eminently suitable candidate to become the 100th entry in the Target range, particularly as Robert Holmes had finally been persuaded to adapt one of his own scripts (ironically just as he was busier with Who scripts than he’d been for several years, with six episodes of the Trial commissioned). There’s more than the normal sense of occasion, then, as ‘The Two Doctors’ would also be the first of the Sixth Doctor’s full-length stories to be adapted, albeit by the time the book hit the shelves qualified by the ongoing uncertainty over the series’ future.

The first thing to be said is that, unlike his prologue to ‘The Time Warrior’, Holmes has scaled down his prose style to meet the requirements of 159 pages of prose. It’s a sensible length for a story which on television sometimes struggled to fill its length, and which suffered from sudden changes in motivation inflicted on the characters in an attempt to keep things moving. Holmes also deals with the latter issue by using characters’ internal monologues to give them motivations within motivations, to the extent that Chessene obtains her coronic acid from the Rutans and therefore presumably intended to double-cross the Sontarans all the time. But when one thinks of the strengths of Robert Holmes’s writing, it’s the creation of three-dimensional characters which comes first to mind, and while his customary double-act device isn’t really present to the extent that it appears in his other scripts, there’s clearly more of a satirical intent in his Sontarans than the televised production picked up on; there’s a particularly good conversation where Varl assures Stike that his stroke of tactical genius is sure to make him the next commander-in-chief, and also the Sixth Doctor’s discussion with Stike about the thickness or otherwise of the Sontaran private.

Unfortunately most of the other characters don’t quite come alive to the same extent- part of the problem, I think, stems from the fact that Holmes was writing to order and so can’t be blamed if the end results come out somewhat less inspired than his best script writing. I don’t get the impression that he’s particularly comfortable writing for the Sixth Doctor and Peri, bar adding a few references to Peri’s athletic prowess and a reference to her having been in Kansas (I’m sure that if anybody ever collated all the places in the US that Peri’s supposed to have been, she must have been constantly in motion since birth) and while the more edgy satire involved in Shockeye is still there, I suspect that the character was originally conceived as rather more brutish and even darker- here he has tasted Sontaran flesh, which makes it all the more disturbing when he’s carrying on conversations with them. Whether it was Peter Moffatt’s direction or the production office’s anxiety, the excesses of Holmes’s conception of the story seem to have been roped in, and the televised story’s reputation suffers as a result. If the book has one flaw, it’s the sense of an imagination like Holmes’s working under restraint and to somebody else’s agenda- the story cries out for more darkness and for direction willing to work with the satire rather than against it, and while Holmes’s adaptation adds moments of charm and brilliance, it’s a patch-up job on a story which was never really allowed to be what he intended.