Edition read: Target first, 1986- with half price credit when returned to Stephen’s and Philip’s Book mart in Bracknell.

Coolest Cover: David McAllister doing a fairly good attempt in the Skilleter style, although certain elements- the edge of the Borad’s chair and the glow of the Timelash- look slightly unfinished.

The BBC Budget Wouldn’t Run To: Scenes set on the surface of Karfel rather than in the caves.

Crimes Against Literature: "Activating the view-screen, the Borad showed Peri’s impending date with a female Morlox". Now there’s a fairly major lifestyle decision- this isn’t Torchwood, you know.

Childhood Recollections: I had the hardback of this from a comparatively early date. In the summer of 1986 I took it on our school choir holiday to St Albans and on the coach journey my friend Mike read it out of boredom and ended up becoming a fan.

Ramblings: As it happens, I was reading an interview with Eric Saward the other day, and the one criticism in particular which he levelled at ‘Timelash’ was that Glen McCoy’s background was entirely in writing for soaps with established characters, which meant that McCoy had no experience in building his own original characters from the ground up. It’s sadly a flaw which is perpetuated into the book, but more on that later- because from reading McCoy’s adaptation of his own scripts, the basic premise (for Doctor Who, at least) isn’t that bad. In fact, a story where the Doctor picks up the young H.G. Wells and takes him on a trip which inspires him with the basic idea of The Time Machine isn’t a bad pitch at all, and it’s one which most production teams would have removed several limbs for. And it’s one which could have been made to work if it had been restructured more ruthlessly and if Glen McCoy had had a slightly less eccentric command of the English language. Consider the following :

"The largest of all the surface structures, towering well above the multi-constructed triangular buildings, was the Central Citadel..."

Multi-constructed? Is that even a word?

"Like seals to be culled, the maces were angled over the heads of the cowering group."

No. "Like seals to be culled" refers to the cowering group rather than the maces. Television writing may be a notoriously difficult game to break into, but I’m reassured by the way in which somebody managed to do it without knowing the difference between the subject of a sentence and the object.

While a certain amount of the cheese has been removed from the story- McCoy almost certainly didn’t intend Tekker to overshadow things in the way that only Paul Darrow can- a lot of the pointless silliness is still present. The scene with the TARDIS safety harnesses is still in, although as written it was clearly intended for spectacle as much as anything else given that here the Doctor and Peri are thrown into mid-air. And the Borad clone business (a particularly transparent way of keeping the story up to length) is also kept in, albeit signalled a few pages before the real Borad shows himself, when the Doctor and Mykros come across the frozen clones. To his credit, McCoy has tried to re-work some of the sequences which didn’t work particularly well on screen, and has the luxury of being able to populate Karfel with android armies, and the book does read as rather less excruciating than the televised story, but it’s not difficult to see how with the same basic premise we could have had a much better story which in turn would have adapted better to the printed page.