Doctor Who - The Chase by John Ravenscroft

Published: July 1989

The first thing to be said, then, is that this doesn’t feel like a fan-authored book at all; Peel is very disciplined when it comes to continuity, and while numerous adventures from Doctor Who’s first couple of seasons are alluded to, it doesn’t feel forced at all. Similarly, when taranium is mentioned (the Daleks’ time machine is powered by the only sample they possess, for the record), it’s not in a context which points overtly to the following two books, and in a strange way it feels right that Steven should know about the Draconian War. Peel’s introductory note makes clear that any departures from the televised story (and there aren’t that many) arise because he’s preferred Nation’s scripts over the episodes as recorded, but by and large the same things happen to the same people in the same order. The regulars are depicted with a great deal of consistency and an ear for the original actors’ delivery- in fact, when it comes to the robot duplicate Doctor, the book is if anything more convincing- and it’s also a nice touch that Peel chooses to adapt the sequence of Ian and Barbara rediscovering London as best he can.

If one thing makes ‘The Chase’ particularly special as a story, it’s the way in which it exploits Doctor Who’s early formula and the sense of not knowing how long a story would last or where the regulars would end up next week. Building on his earlier ‘Keys of Marinus’, Terry Nation was the first (and one of the few) writers to realise that the main reason for most stories staying in one place for four or six weeks was budgetary rather than narrative, and so he constructed a story with two episodes each set on Aridius and Mechanus bookending two weeks of travelling through Earth’s history- comparatively easy to do when you can call on stock sets and costumes from the BBC cupboards. And if there’s one thing John Peel’s adaptation does very well, it’s to capture this sense of a journey into the unknown, where anything can happen- Aridius isn’t simply a desert planet, but a dying planet whose amphibious residents live in what were underwater cities of glass but are now their only protection against the Mire Beasts and the inevitable end of their planet, while it’s also a nice touch that the TARDIS crew are quite happy to write off their experiences in the haunted house as nightmares come to life (which also rather neatly allows the Daleks to become part of the human race’s collective unconscious!) when there’s a much more rational explanation which they don’t encounter. It’s also a darker adaptation too-the fate of the Aridians has been mentioned, with their civilisation slowly winding down and beyond help, but Peel also emphasises the fate of the passengers and crew of the Mary Celeste and the very low likelihood of their being rescued from the Atlantic after abandoning ship.

In short, it’s all that the televised version of ‘The Chase’ should have been, but was too rushed, overstretched and unimaginative to become. Writing in 1989, Peel expressed the wish that the televised version of ‘The Chase’, complete with its badly-dubbed robot double of the Doctor and Daleks hiding poorly-concealed at the back of the set waiting for their cue (which sometimes doesn’t come until the next scene) might be seen by British audiences again, but of the two versions of the story, it’s Peel’s adaptation which retains a uniquely Hartnell-era sense of wonder, possibility and adventure. A misrepresentation of the original story, perhaps, but also a pointer as to what the writer of a much-mocked story originally intended.