Published: October 1987

Edition read: W.H. Allen hardback, 1987

Coolest Cover: Tony Masero’s cover has a nice combination- and an extra Ambassador who isn’t on the cover of the paperback- although it’s nice to see that they had their Ready Brek before they set out.

Crimes Against Literature: Not a crime as such, but when Dicks describes the Mission Control voice as heavily-accented and keeps referring to Cornish, it’s hard not to imagine the British space programme in the hands of Jethro.

The TARDIS materialises... This is ‘The Ambassadors of Death’- it doesn’t. The console makes a sudden wheezing, groaning sound, though.

Childhood Recollections: I think that by late 1987 I was pretty much polishing these off the same day they arrived in the post- certainly it feels as if I read this in a single night even if I didn’t.

Ramblings: It’s difficult not to feel that this little project of mine has started to turn the corner into the final furlong now that I’ve reached the first book in the Target range to complete a Doctor’s era. Yes, thanks in part to the rate at which Jon Pertwee’s stories were adapted in the early years, in 1987 Target reached the milestone of adapting the last outstanding story from the Third Doctor’s five seasons. ‘Ambassadors’ tends to lag behind in practically every aspect- technical problems kept its VHS release until late on, and it’s certainly one of the less well-known stories generally, which is a shame for a tale with such a strong central premise. Adapting it into a 144-page prose novelisation would present some challenges of its own, however-following the story across its seven episodes is a bizarrely disorientating experience, as the story follows one blind alley after another and characters such as Taltalian and Heldorf are introduced for no other reason than to add to the air of mystery and the body count.

So it’s a good thing that Terrance Dicks took on the last remaining story from his tenure as script editor, and also one with substantial input from his occasional collaborator Malcolm Hulke. It has to be said that Dicks is on absolutely top form here, and totally in control of his material- and what he does with it is really quite brilliant, because the end result is one which keeps all the mystery and paranoia of the original story, seems to lose nothing from the televised episodes and yet has far more pace and focus than the original story ever did. Equally interesting for a Terrance Dicks adaptation, there are a few subtle changes inserted into the story- the Mars Probe missions are explicitly part of a European rather than British space programme, so Van Lyden becomes Van Leyden, presumably to make him sound more Dutch (Vennegoor oor Hesselink probably being a bit OTT in the circumstances) and Taltallian (notice the extra L) is, without being outed as a Frenchman as such, often described as "heavily-accented", i.e. shorthand for "foreign". Similarly (and perhaps aware of an ambiguity in the direction of the original story), Dicks is at pains to show that Sergeant Benton isn’t the soldier who administers the isotope to Lennox, and Reegan changes nationality from Scottish to Irish.

The beauty of Dicks’s adaptation, though, is that it’s such an enjoyable read and very difficult to break off- what had been a seven-part script with a tendency to meander just to fill the episodes out, becomes an atmospheric conspiracy thriller. None of the complexity of the original story is lost, and the important sense of the ambassadors’ alienness and unknowability is still very much there (although Dicks inserts a comment to the effect that the humans and aliens have given each other such a fright that they’ll probably keep out of each other’s way from now on) so that the deeper themes of the original story are still very much there. It’s an excellent rendition of a story which really doesn’t get the recognition it should have, and one which any of the writers who supposedly tinkered with it at different points in its evolution would probably consider a top-notch account.