Published: December 1988

Edition read: Target first, 1988

Coolest Cover: Is it me, or does it seem as if Alistair Pearson was waiting for Sylvester McCoy to come along?

Childhood Recollections: Mainly of being slightly gutted that there wasn’t going to be a hardback version of my favourite story from Season 23.

Ramblings: I make no bones about it, ‘Paradise Towers’ was almost certainly my favourite story from Sylvester McCoy’s first season; I think it was probably the first time (and I was more or less the right age) to pick up on a lot of the wit in the script and appreciate the way in which the faultlines in the Paradise Towers society were reflected in the Caretakers’ obsession with the Rulebook and the Kangs’ corrupted language. As a story it achieves a kind of balance; the intelligence of the script survives a certain lack of subtlety in the execution, as the fact that Richard Briers is perfectly cast in the first three episodes (as essentially a satirical extension of his ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’ persona) compensates for a badly misjudged performance in the last. And so I picked up the book expecting to find something of the same cocktail of ideas, homage and an underplayed message about what happens when societies become divided- as somebody once said, if we fight like animals, we die like animals, not least when Tabby and Tilda are after you with a toasting fork.

The first thing that needs to be said is that this is one of those Target adaptations which does at least feel as if it was written by a real professional- by which I mean somebody with an understanding of the differing needs of prose fiction and television scripts. There’s an unmistakable feel of quality to Stephen Wyatt’s prose, and an understanding of structure, so that the cliffhangers demanded by the weekly serial format aren’t used as chapter endings. If this has a down side, it’s that the prose sometimes feels too poised and uninvolved, as if the finished production was itself more satirical than the writer himself intended. That’s not to say that the book misses a lot of the humour of the original script, more that it distances itself from the more obvious comedy, so that the humour in the Caretakers’ addiction to the rulebook is allowed to be more subtle and isn’t signposted with large neon signs saying "You Are Now Approaching A Joke", followed shortly afterwards by another neon sign saying "Thankyou For Laughing At Our Joke".

If there’s one particularly strange thing about the book, it’s that the Doctor is such a void in the middle of it. As a story, ‘Paradise Towers’ is structured so that the Doctor and Mel spend most of the story separated and only come together again in the final episode, so that Mel ends up carrying a lot of the book. It’s difficult not to conclude, however, that whereas Pip and Jane Baker wrote ‘Time and the Rani’ based on Sylvester McCoy’s persona as the manic clown from children’s television and the O-Man from Jigsaw, Wyatt was writing to a different brief and instructed to leave as much space as possible for McCoy to find his interpretation of the role, but this transfers badly to the printed page where McCoy’s tendency to fussy and exaggerated physical gestures is lost. It’s interesting, however, that Wyatt’s attitude to Pex is rather different in the book- seeing him through Mel’s eyes, he’s more physically imposing and therefore more deserving of either pity or contempt, and certainly not treated as sympathetically as on television; similarly, the Kangs are evidently meant to be teenage girls, so the BBC naturally cast women in their twenties. It’s by no means a bad adaptation, but it’s one of those which emphasises subtle differences between the script writer’s and director’s visions of the story, and generally to Stephen Wyatt’s credit.