If 1982 had, for Target, been a year of catching up with the televised stories, then 1983 brought them more or less bang up to date. Apart from a couple of Yeti-themed reprints keeping Andrew Skilleter in work, there’s an overwhelming emphasis on the backlog of Fifth Doctor stories waiting to be adapted. With the exception of ‘Meglos’, everything is adapted from Peter Davison’s first two seasons and the anniversary special, and there are precisely two artwork covers among them. Exactly half are authors adapting their own scripts (although again that includes Terrance Dicks adapting ‘The Five Doctors’), the slight oddball being Ian Marter’s ‘Earthshock’.

Such a concentration on recent stories, while enforced by the available material, does rather leave the range looking a little flat, not helped by an unimaginative selection of photographic covers. While likenesses of Peter Davison are no doubt a good thing in their proper place, it has to be said that hardly any of them are distinctive; while ‘Time-Flight’ is "the one with Concorde" and ‘Four to Doomsday’ is ‘the one with Stratford Johns as a frog person", ‘Castrovalva’ is "the one with Peter Davison’ and the failure to have a Cyberman on the cover of ‘Earthshock’ is by turns bizarre, self-defeating and unforgivable. If you’re going to have photographic covers, then for pity’s sake, use pictures of the most interesting images from a story rather than just a picture of the lead. Given that the oldest story adapted (‘Meglos’ coming in a rather sorry last in the Fourth Doctor’s prose adventures) was just over two and a half years old at the time of publication, it also raises an issue which the range hadn’t really had to confront before- with the home video age dawning, does a recent story need anything different in the adaptation from an older, half-forgotten one?

To an extent, it does- the unpredictability of 1980s Who being what it was, scripts didn’t always reach the screen with the kind of care and emphasis that the writer intended, and the increasing tendency for writers to adapt their own teleplays allowed for some correcting of the balance. "John Lydecker" in ‘Terminus’, given a broader canvas free from the demands of the 4x25 minute format, produces something more sophisticated and complex than the televised story, while Terrance Dicks’s adaptation of ‘The Five Doctors’ is to all intents and purposes footnoted with reference to previous adventures. But such a dependence on recent stories couldn’t be good for the range either and does leave one wondering just how many people were prepared to pay for stories they’d seen on television a year or so previously- the "spoiler" distribution of ‘The Five Doctors’ apart. The twentieth anniversary, however, provided one indication as to how the range could develop- what better time to look back at the series’ past and the many stories which hadn’t yet reached print? It’s perhaps no coincidence that in reviewing 1983’s books, I’ve become more aware of the somewhat flawed "Doctor Who Library" numbering system, and the sheer ambition of keeping a range of 80+ books going; to keep up an enterprise of this size, the range was going to have to look back, and the anniversary no douby provided an ideal pretext.