Doctor Who - The Greatest Show in the Galaxy by Stephen Wyatt

Published: December 1989

Edition read: Target first, 1989

Coolest Cover: Alistair Pearson, of course, but the detail is something special on this one.

Childhood Recollections: Quite specific, really, as I bought my copy on a school trip to Stratford to see Charles Dance in Coriolanus.

Ramblings: It shouldn’t come as a surprise to many of you that this particular strand is coming to a natural end fairly shortly, as the number of Target books left for me to review will shortly drop into single figures (and those at the more expensive end of the eBay and Amazon Marketplace range), but with this book in particular it’s difficult not to feel a particular sense of things coming to a close. It was, you see, the last Target book that I bought at the time of publication; when ‘Planet of Giants’ came out the following month, I was in to the last few months of the Upper Sixth and, having been turned down by Oxford, turned all my energies towards my A-levels and quite frankly, having discovered "real" books, didn’t have any time for Doctor Who. Not only that, it’s also the last Target book to have come out while Doctor Who was being transmitted on BBC1, as the remnants of the black and white years and the remaining McCoy stories were adapted during the beginning of the series’ years in the wilderness.

But enough about me- ‘Greatest Show’. It’s probably fair to say that in this book Stephen Wyatt finds his Target voice much more readily than he did with ‘Paradise Towers’; there’s a strong authorial voice in the first couple of chapters which helps to establish a sense of the universe in which the Doctor’s adventures happen, although this is faded out as time passes. That’s probably not a bad idea when the intent of the story is quite as satirical as ‘Greatest Show’ turns out to be; satirical characters do need a certain amount of space to breathe otherwise the satire becomes didactic and patronising, and while we can all recognise in the Whizzkid the kind of 1980s fanboy who used to coo over the likes of Deborah Watling without having seen any of her surviving episodes, it’s much more effective when he’s seen through Morgana’s eyes. If anything, the story seems to be structured around the Doctor and Ace encountering the various supporting characters in turn and allowing them to come to life before rejoining the satire at the story’s conclusion, where the Gods of Ragnarok are revealed as the ultimate focus group. With this, it ceases just to become a satire on the way Doctor Who was being received and expands to take in the way that the changes in television in the 1980s were affecting the way that programmes were made, with an ever-increasing move towards ratings and non-stop entertainment rather than the original conception of the Psychic Circus as a group of people fulfilling their creative potential by developing their skills and producing things for others.

By today’s standards, of course, that’s a relatively complacent way to visualise how any medium should be, as if television were invented to gratify the creative impulses of those who worked in it and nothing more. It’s to Wyatt’s credit, then, that he doesn’t follow the satire to its logical conclusion but (ironically) recognises that the primary purpose of his book is precisely to entertain the reader. If anything, though, it’s tempting to imagine how the book would read if it pushed at the fourth wall a little more and perhaps treated the reader as one of the Gods to be entertained, with a more conscious authorial voice desperate to please. What we have, however, is a good adaptation of an intelligent story which shrinks back somewhat from some of the directorial touches (the Ringmaster in particular is rather more vague and subtle than in the televised story) and while Stephen Wyatt’s subsequent disappearance from the radar is to be regretted, his two Target books are a fair testament to a talent for writing subtle and multi-layered stories which didn’t perhaps receive the best treatment from the production team at the time.