Doctor Who - Terror of the Vervoids by Pip and Jane Baker

Published: February 1988

Edition read: Target first, 1988

Coolest Cover: Rather like the story itself, Tony Masero’s cover has a certain gaudy fascination.

Crimes Against Literature: Either Pip and Jane were subconsciously pitching for Torchwood, or there are some serious double entendres here, viz:

"Two waxy, olive-green arms were humping the lifeless Kimber between the inner and outer shells of the space ship’s bulkhead." (p.85)

"...Mel had headed unerringly for Janet’s cabin in the crew’s quarters to seek the missing audio tape. Avoiding detection, she approached a door marked STEWARDESS, and knocked. Getting no reply, she thought her luck was in."(p.106)

The TARDIS materialises with..."a wheezing bellowing and a flashing light"

...and dematerialises with..."the familiar wheezing of dematerialisation". And a bit of On with the Motley to boot.

Childhood Recollections: Quite surprisingly, I appear to have read this one from cover to cover, although I can’t remember doing so.

Ramblings: After what feels like a long stretch in Doctor Who’s black and white years, it’s with something of a jolt that your reviewer found himself back in Colin Baker’s era, with the first adaptation of one of the Sixth Doctor’s stories since ‘The Mark of the Rani’ over a year and a half previously. Having previously failed to complete the Key to Time sequence due to the absence of ‘The Pirate Planet’, it clearly made sense to somebody at Target to begin their version of the Trial season in the middle, although it may simply have been a case of Pip and Jane Baker finishing their book quicker than Terrance Dicks finished his (and Pip and Jane knowing that they would be asked to adapt their story and being able to prepare it as they went). So there’s a curious feeling of disorientation which comes from reading a story which doesn’t really have a beginning or an end- it’s like reading ‘The Two Towers’ in isolation or ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ on its own- they make sense up to a certain point, but if you didn’t know what came before and what followed, you have to take a lot of the story on trust.

What everybody knows about ‘Terror of the Vervoids’ is that it’s an attempt to do Murder on the Orient Express in space. Trouble is, compressing 100 minutes of television into 144 pages of prose, apart from anything else you lose the visual clues which now have to be described rather than shown- so for a start, a reader would have to be particularly dim to miss Grenville/Hallett leaving the ship and disguising himself as a Mogarian before re-embarking, because we’re taken through the whole process. It also has to be said that the characters don’t exactly leap off the page either- the trouble with the Bakers’ twisted and artificial dialogue is that it doesn’t help to create an impression of character, although clearly they had less of a Saga cruise in mind as both Lasky and Rudge are described as somewhat younger than they appeared on screen. The most challenging part of both the original story and the book is however the way that the Vervoids, having been given intelligence, quickly reason that human beings will either destroy or enslave them and conclude that they have to destroy animal kind out of self-preservation. It’s a worthwhile idea and a shame that it only crops up towards the end, not least when the Vervoids look on as the humans and Mogarians kill each other (a process which is made much clearer in prose than on screen, as the Bakers are at pains to clarify exactly who killed whom and when).

The Trial scenes, however, have very little impact because the context isn’t particularly well-evoked- we’re just expected to take the courtroom, Valeyard and Inquisitor as given- which just emphasises the peculiarity of adapting this story first. The book’s main difference from the televised story, however, is one of tone- shorn of a certain garishness of execution and some rather odd and occasionally successful casting, what remains is a more even and somewhat less embarrassing adventure- in fact it’s not difficult to see how the story might have been cast and directed in the exact opposite way to what the Bakers intended. Unfortunately, this also means that a lot of the televised episodes’ bizarre fascination is lost, and while the ripe and unnatural dialogue remains, we’re denied a lot of the strangeness of acting and atmosphere which made the original story as seen on television quite so compelling if not actually very good.