Doctor Who - Attack of the Cybermen by Eric Saward

Published: April 1989

Edition read: Target first, 1989

Coolest Cover: I’m not particularly fond of Colin Howard’s cover, but it at least has more impact and energy than the Pearson "Colin and a Cyberman" offering.

Purple Prose: "Charlie Griffiths had not led a particularly good life. Until he had met Lytton, neither had he been very successful. But in all his wildest dreams he never believed that he would die on an alien planet with two million pounds’ worth of uncut diamonds in his pocket. He hadn’t wanted to die, but whatever else could be said, he had done so in some style." (p.135)

Crimes Against Literature: The dedication to "the splendour of the indigenous Peoples of the Americas" is, well, odd.

Ramblings: The circumstances surrounding the writing of ‘Attack of the Cybermen’ are, quite frankly, notorious; they are also, for the purposes of this review, immaterial, because this is Eric Saward’s ‘Attack’, not Paula whoever’s, not some monstrosity written by committee and realised by a director who would have been much more at home on ‘The Sweeney’. In some ways it’s strange that Saward should have chosen to come back to ‘Doctor Who’ so soon after the upheavals of 1986, particularly with the books still passing through the series’ production office, and there’s a distinct sadness at the end of the book when Peri wonders whether she’ll be able to adapt to the eccentricities of a Doctor long gone on screen. On the other hand, he clearly invests so much attention in the story and the characters that he evidently didn’t come back to the story completely cold, or as nothing more than a piece of work- characters (or the human characters at least) have back stories and a real sense of personality, and this helps the book to hang together as a whole rather better than the televised story.

The story is pretty much as on television, with the rather odd exception that Threst is called Thrust throughout (presumably an over-enthusiatic copy editor), and the emphasis very much on action rather than ideas, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that Saward chooses to emphasise a humour missing from the transmitted story and the inner lives of his characters in order to flesh out the scripts. His best work is with Griffiths, whose home life with his mother and her cat really does lift the character off the page, as does the moment where he sees Mr Patel the grocer on the way to the bank as Griffiths is setting off on Lytton’s job, but it’s also slightly surprising that although we come to know Charlie Griffiths as the sort of hired muscle who has a soft spot for kittens, his death isn’t depicted as a blow but as the punchline of a slightly black joke. Equally, a character like Payne is described in terms which really do give a sense of the man, but it’s unfortunate that Lytton doesn’t come off quite so well- the absence of ‘Resurrection of the Daleks’ from the range meaning that Saward has to devote the time he might otherwise have spent developing Lytton’s character simply explaining who he is and why the Doctor knows him- and come to that, Saward doesn’t refer to the point in the televised story where we see Lytton’s policemen in the process of being turned into Cybermen.

I’ve said a few times in these reviews that some stories which didn’t have the best reputation from the transmitted episodes have turned out to be more rewarding in print, and ‘Attack of the Cybermen’ is definitely one to add to that pile. Its closest companion in the Target range is probably ‘The Twin Dilemma’, again where Saward took an unloved story, injected some depth to the characters and a little humour, and the end result was much improved. It really does feel as if Saward has taken the story as written and decided to make it a much more enjoyable reading experience, and in many ways it’s a shame that he didn’t have another opportunity to write for the range, as his Target adaptations do show a certain skill for creating character and incidental humour which his Doctor Who scripts didn’t always cultivate.