Doctor Who - The Mind Robber by Peter Ling

Published: April 1987

Edition read: Target first, 1987- with a nod to the Hart/Alexander household

Coolest Cover: Evidently feeling uncomfortable with the likenesses of the main cast, David McAllister here uses a nice TARDIS/unicorn/D’Artagnan/Medusa/Sir Lancelot motif. Have a close look at that TARDIS- we’ll be seeing it again later...

The BBC Budget Wouldn’t Run To: Jungles, mansions, underground caves...basically anything that isn’t a white cyclorama or the forest of words, really.

Purple Prose: The last couple of paragraphs are perfect.

The TARDIS materialises... It doesn’t so much dematerialise as fall to bits...

Childhood Recollections: I have the hardback of this, bought at the time and very pleased with it I was too.

Ramblings: In one of those little coincidences which make life worthwhile, I found myself reading this at the end of a week in which the Children’s TV on Trial strand on BBC4 strongly suggested that Peter Ling had been smoking something he shouldn’t have been when he wrote ‘The Mind Robber’- a curious assertion, given that the most out-there episode of the five is Derrick Sherwin’s minimalist opener. Nevertheless, in spite of its wonderful feats of imagination, I’ve always felt that there was something slightly off about ‘The Mind Robber’, as if in spite of its generally good reputation, there was something that didn’t quite hang together- or that it was so wrapped up in being imaginative and unpredictable that the need for a Doctor Who plot and conclusion felt as if it had been forcibly tacked on. Fortunately Ling’s adaptation overcomes some of these issues and lends the serial a greater coherence than it showed on screen, even if it doesn’t quite fulfil its potential as a novel.

Ling’s grasp of the characters is solid if not exceptional- the Doctor himself doesn’t particularly feel like Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, his Jamie is a little too spick and span and he doesn’t see the incongruity in Zoe turning into Alice in Wonderland for a single scene. It’s difficult to discuss the other characters as, apart from the Master in the last couple of pages, they’re either stock responses or under the control of the Master Brain (although it’s a good touch that Ling refers to the existence of the otherMaster, which if nothing else shows that he was aware of the ambiguity of the title to a 1987 reader. Bearing in mind that several episodes ran short, however, the adaptation is studded with Ling’s own little additions to the story, whether these were ideas which didn’t make the shooting script or occurred to him after the fact. Rather than following on from ‘The Dominators’, the story begins on the slopes of an erupting Vesuvius (who needs Season 6A or 6B or whatever they call it?), and apart from the Alice in Wonderland episode, there’s an excursion to Miss Havisham’s room from Great Expectations and an additional puzzle to solve immediately before the Unicorn cliffhanger. Where the book falls down is in making it just as apparent (if not more so) than the television story that the plot is a series of encounters with little or no rationale, and the ultimate revelation of the "invasion" plot is so vague and rushed that it feels like a last-minute bit of justification to make the story work on Doctor Who terms.

But then again, there are some touches of brilliance here, not least on the one or two occasions (such as the very end and the very beginning) where Ling relishes the position of being the author of a story about fictional characters who think they’re real and are trying to avoid being turned into fiction. For the most part, the book avoids being quite so postmodern (although the New Adventure ‘Conundrum’ embraces the idea with gusto) but when it happens it comes across as clever and charming without too much pretentiousness. Ultimately there’s more a story like ‘The Mind Robber’ can achieve as a book than on television- there’s no concession to the limits of the 1960s studio here, and Ling can write about underground lakes and forests with joyful abandon precisely because books allow the reader to create all that in their own imagination- but at the same time, some of the two-dimensional characterisation emphasises just how important David Maloney’s casting of the original story was. So it’s probably churlish of me to point out a few defects when an adaptation like this adds seamlessly to the original story, plays one or two jokes on its readers and emphasises its own identity as a book along the way.