Published: March 1988

Edition read: Target first, 1988

Coolest Cover: Tony Masero again, although the sun appears to be setting over the North Sea, which is interesting...

Purple Prose: "A Savile Row jacket and a Size 3 shoe are hardly the most effective weapons against one of the deadliest creatures in the Universe. But the Doctor and Vicki had very little time to consider the irony of the situation as the door swung slowly open." (p.15)

The TARDIS materialises with..."a trumpeting shriek"

Childhood Recollections: My greasy teenage fingers left enough of a mark to show that again I read this all the way through.

Ramblings: The curious thing about ‘The Time Meddler’ is that it falls so neatly into most people’s sense of a good traditional Doctor Who story should be (Doctor gets wrapped up in aliens’ attempt to interfere in historical events) that it’s easy to forget that it was the first story to try it. Dennis Spooner’s original scripts mix an unprecedented amount of comedy with physical danger and violence appropriate for the period, so in some ways the story must have seemed highly experimental at the time- it’s only in retrospect that it became something of a template for later adventures. Following on from ‘The Sensorites’, Nigel Robinson once more puts on his writing cap and sets about turning a particularly well-constructed Hartnell story into an equally engaging book.

The comic aspects of the story are, particularly without the performances of William Hartnell and Peter Butterworth, probably the most difficult aspect to transcribe and yet Robinson makes a good job of it, incorporating a number of humorous touches in his descriptions; whenever the Monk appears, he’s usually accompanied by a variety of anachronisms and humming a Beatles tune. The book also repeats one of the original story’s ambiguities, in that the Monk is often a more attractive figure than the Doctor, and it’s only towards the end of the book when the Doctor explains just how dramatic the impact of the Monk’s plotting could be on the universe that it’s brought home just how dangerous he is, although it’s equally reassuring that the course of the Doctor Who universe depends crucially on the English-speaking races. If anything, however, Robinson’s humorous prose sharpens the comic action of the story and adds substantially to the enjoyment value of the book.

To turn to the darker side of the story, then- this is, after all, a story which includes a strongly implied rape and a bloody revenge being meted out on the Viking perpetrators. In a sense, this is where ‘The Time Meddler’ remains faithful to the previous historically-set adventures and follows the series’ established rules with scenes such as the one where the Doctor deduces the year from his conversation with Edith. The Viking threat belongs, unlike the Monk, to the time and place of the story’s setting and interacts only minimally with the main action of the story featuring the regulars and the Monk, allowing the time meddler to escape from the Doctor’s capitivity. When it comes to the attack on Edith, however, Robinson’s adaptation is particularly skilful- he doesn’t trivialise what happens, and the details aren’t made explicit, so a younger reader could simply assume that Edith had been beaten up, but what he does emphasise is the sense of the Saxons’ community surrounding her and, in the final chapter in particular, the sense of the Saxons being able to endure anything life throws at them. It’s less comfortable, however, when it comes to the Doctor’s response, which rather shows up the differences between 1965, 1988 and 2007- whereas in 1965 a family television programme could imply rape in broad terms, it couldn’t have the victim show anything other than a traumatised response and her husband’s response is to slaughter the perpetrators. In the last twenty years we’ve become much more used to rape as a dramatic device in soap operas and the like- and in equal measure, we’ve become more used to Doctors who can show empathy, so while it’s entirely in character that when the First Doctor visits Edith again, he accepts her hospitality while remaining immune to her non-verbal signals, it’s not a response which would cut the mustard today.

But that’s to find fault in what, by anybody’s standards, would be a difficult task for anybody adapting the story and remaining faithful to the script while remembering that it is after all Doctor Who. It’s also effectively Steven’s debut story, and a lot of the character’s energy and level-headedness come through- at the same time, it’s also something of a small-scale reboot for the series, as for the first time since ‘An Unearthly Child’, the Doctor is without any of his original companions, and it’s through Steven’s eyes that the reader is introduced to the series’ basic concepts. If ‘The Time Meddler’ laid down some of the basic structural ideas by which future stories would be written, perhaps another of Nigel Robinson’s several achievements with this book is that it feels as fresh as ever and sits comfortably next to later stories which used it as a template.