Ian Cragg's Target Books Guide

Doctor Who - The Celestial Toymaker by Gerry Davis and Alison Bingeman

Published: November 1986

Edition read: Target first, 1986

Coolest Cover: Apparently a sole contribution by one Graham Potts- sadly the shortage of reference material shows it up.

Crimes Against Literature: "The Toymaker was lounging in a black Chinese chair behaind a lacquered Chinese desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl and scenes of Chinese life, after the Willow pattern." (p.13) Eating a Chinese takeaway, no doubt.

The TARDIS dematerialises with... "the familiar sound of the TARDIS dematerialising". Fair enough.

Childhood Recollections: Not sure I ever read this one- it was so comprehensively panned at the time that I may not have bothered.

Ramblings: There’s always been something of a cloud surrounding this adaptation of ‘The Celestial Toymaker’, ever since it was credited to Gerry Davis and Alison Bingeman. The relationship between the two was much speculated upon at the time- it was variously suggested that Davis had farmed the work of the novelisation out onto a hack, or that Bingeman was Davis’s significant other; the series of Doctor Who Magazine articles which form my first line of reference for these pieces have Bingeman as a nom de plume for Alison Beynon, an American science-fiction author of whom both Amazon and Wikipedia appear to be unaware. For this reason, it’s often been suggested that the main body of the novelisation was by Bingeman, with Davis contributing a foreword which elaborates on the circumstances of the original story’s production- an impression which is reinforced when the occasional Americanism (such as the Toymaker’s toy theatre having "bleachers"- are we suddenly in Yankee Stadium?) creeps into the prose.

That said, given that the original story went out with Brian Hayles’s name on it in spite of having been comprehensively rewritten by Davis himself, does it really matter who adapted it? Regardless of whether it was Davis or Bingeman/Beynon, the task does seem to have been undertaken with a good understanding of the story’s strengths and weaknesses and the best way to adapt them. The characters, such as they are, are either caricatures like the clowns and the King and Queen of Hearts, or in the Toymaker’s case, an unknowable superbeing with a completely different scale of values, and given the Doctor’s absence from much of the proceedings, it falls on Steven and Dodo to keep the plot going and provide some identification figures. This comes across well enough- Dodo is spirited and compassionate, even if occasionally a little too upright for her own good, while Steven is headstrong but practical. The other consequence of the Doctor’s absence for a good half of the story is that there’s no real subplot as such, just the Doctor playing the Trilogic Game, and so the pace of his companions’ adventures comes across as cranked up a notch when translated into prose- this is no bad thing, as it turns the book into a much more engaging and straightforward read, which I think I must have finished in about an hour and a half. It’s all very well criticising the adaptation for not developing the televised story, but with a story like ‘The Celestial Toymaker’, which relies for much of its effect on familiar characters from popular imagination, nursery rhymes and storybooks, it’s perhaps less obvious what’s there to develop in the first place. Better perhaps to use the reader’s familiarity with such broad-brush caricatures and get on with telling your story.

I suspect that a lot of the original disappointment when the adaptation was published came from the feeling that, having produced the impressive Cybermen adaptations in the 1970s, the Los Angeles-based 1980s Gerry Davis didn’t have the same interest and had taken the money and run. Closer analysis of the soundtrack and surviving episode have suggested that perhaps the original story wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, however, so perhaps there was something to be said after all for taking the shorter and more compact approach, producing a novel which doesn’t drag and, if it doesn’t create atmosphere particularly well (except in the occasional moments which highlight the predicament of the Toymaker’s playthings), neither does it keep you hanging around long enough to have to worry about it.