Published: October 1990

Edition read: Target first, 1990

Coolest Cover: The slashed canvas effect is good, although I also like the early version of Alistair Pearson’s cover with Anthony Ainley’s face in the cat’s bottom. I thought about rephrasing that but decided against it.

Childhood Recollections: None whatsoever, perhaps unsurprisingly as I didn’t have a copy until about a year ago.

Ramblings: By the time Rona Munro’s adaptation of her own scripts hit the bookshelves, the televised ‘Survival’ was nearly a year in the past, and the supply of stories waiting to be adapted had pretty much run dry, with only the tail end of the very last television season to come. In itself, adapting the final story of the 1963-1989 run feels a bit like one of those tombstones at the beginning of a Simpsons Halloween episode and it’s difficult not to feel for Rona Munro approaching the task in the knowledge that another commission was unlikely and that adapting ‘Survival’ could easily, for a professional writer, have been little more than an entry on the CV and a slightly bigger cheque than would have been the case if she’d allowed another writer to adapt the story. Instead, although Munro’s adaptation isn’t particularly stylish, distinctive or lengthy, it’s a good development of the essential themes of the story and also a more fluid one which doesn’t take quite such a cut-and-dried approach to its subject matter as the televised episodes.

With the privilege of having been able to watch the DVD, information text and all, it’s interesting to see Munro correcting some of the changes which were made for television- Paterson, for instance, is a police sergeant rather than ex-Army, and it’s interesting to see the effect that has on his dialogue, which sounds rather more hollow in consequence. Similarly, there’s an effective sequence towards the end of the story, where the Master, Midge and the rest of the self-defence class pursue and kill Derek, the Master having previously disposed of Harvey and Len with the aid of a kitling. Indeed, one of the improvements the book makes is to clarify the relationship between the kitlings and the Cheetah People; the intention was for the Cheetah People to be the hunters and the kitlings, the vultures who sit on the sidelines to wait for the carrion and have been doing so throughout human history.

The main theme of the story- whether the rule of the survival of the fittest (a phrase which Munro unfortunately ascribes to Darwin) is an adequate morality, and the extent to which human society reflects our animal origins, comes across in a more coherent way than on television where, given that it was made in the late 1980s, it was given a specific political thrust. The topicality is still there but the approach is more even-handed; Harvey and Len bemoan having to open the shop on a Sunday because the supermarkets are open and they’ll lose trade if they don’t open themselves- but at the same time, in retrospect the book does a really good job of evoking the utter pointlessness of 1980s Sundays when you couldn’t do anything or go anywhere and the most anybody could aspire to was washing the car. Similarly, Midge is built up as the typical smartly-dressed yuppie of the time, however the Master points out that the law of tooth and claw is part not only of the human race but of most animal life since the dawn of time; the instinct to kill or be killed is at some level deep within us all, and while Midge’s death is even more powerful in print than on screen, the book is clear that the 1980s ethic he represents is just one manifestation of some very deep-rooted impulses. One of the most compelling qualities of Doctor Who in the last few stories to be made in the 1980s is the ability to take an idea, or a collection of ideas, and weave a story around them while not losing sight of the importance of discussing issues- from a personal point of view, it was ideal to have stories like this in the background during my A-level years, and Rona Munro more than does justice to her scripts, even if it does feel at times like a first attempt at writing a prose novel. The afterword courtesy of Peter Darvill-Evans reminds us just how short-lived this last flowering was, but also of the new adventures to follow...