Doctor Who - Delta and the Bannermen (or is it Bannerman?) by Helmut Kohl

Published: January 1989

Edition read: Target first, 1989

Coolest Cover: Alister Pearson tries to convey the feel of the story while using as few actual likenesses as possible.

The BBC Budget Wouldn’t Run To: Ooh, the Chimeron brood world, the Supreme Law Lord and so on...

The TARDIS materialises with ...a sigh and a hiss

Childhood Recollections: I don’t honestly think I’d ever actually read this until now.

Ramblings: I make no bones about the fact that ‘Delta and the Bannermen’ has never been one of my favourite stories- I took against it on first transmission when we went out for my Uncle Frank’s birthday and the first episode failed to record, and ever since then it’s always felt like a sketchy tug-of-war between a camp exercise in faux-Fifties nostalgia and the cruelty and nihilism of the Bannermen. So it wasn’t with a great deal of enthusiasm that I picked up my copy, although the prospect of a three-hour train trip to Edinburgh gave me an incentive to make a start. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to find that Malcolm Kohll turned in a good adaptation of his scripts, with perhaps some of the more outrageous elements toned down (it actually comes across better having the Tollmaster specifically described as an alien rather than putting Ken Dodd in a story for the sake of it) and a little more explanation put in- all those minor characters who are identified in the credits but not named as such in the story are properly distinguished from each other.

If there’s one thing that makes the story difficult viewing for me, it’s always been that it’s a very crowded story for its length- over the course of the three televised episodes, there are an awful lot of supporting characters and the pace of the story means that most of them are sketched in fairly broad strokes and you never really get to know them. Kohll rectifies that to some extent in the book- Burton Burton’s inclinations towards amateur psychology, for example, or the depth of Ray’s crush on Billy- and characters like Hawk and Weismuller come off rather better on the printed page than as portrayed by names from the musical theatre who don’t really have a handle on what they’re doing. The reverse is true of Gavrok, however- without Don Henderson’s particularly savage interpretation, the character does tend to slip into a generic gun-toting maniac. The Doctor’s role is more curious- personally I think it’s in this story and the climax of Part 2 in particular that the Seventh Doctor’s modus operandi really came into its own, standing up to the bullies and dictators and using moral authority and a belief in life itself as weapons against the darkness, although again I have to say that the physical and visual sides of Sylvester McCoy’s performance are underplayed in the adaptation.

There’s another specimen of the tendency of Target at this stage to ground the events of an adventure in the Doctor and his companion’s ongoing travels- the story begins with the Doctor and Mel enjoying a cup of tea and ends with the Doctor enjoying a humbug and Mel reaching for the vinyl collection. Similarly, we’re privileged to see how Delta and Billy’s story ends, the surviving Bannermen turning to weaving and Ray heading off into the sunset on the Vincent- apart from Ray’s destiny, it all seems a little contrived, but the story bears a certain amount of finishing. For the first attempt the Target range had at adapting a three-part story, it’s a creditable effort and certainly expands the televised story, not least pulling it slightly more in the direction of conventional Doctor Who. And for that we can forgive the director’s credit for Michael Ferguson. And the title on the spine.