One of the most surprising things about the decline of Doctor Who in the 1980s is the speed with which it happened- there’s less than six months from The Five Doctors to the abortive cancellation announcement- and looking at Target’s 1984 list, there’s a confidence in the series and the brand which would never quite be the same again. And yet again, the output splits fairly evenly down the middle into the adaptations of the Fifth Doctor’s stories, bringing all Peter Davison’s stories up to and including ‘Frontios’ (barring the two-parters) into print, with an interesting selection of tales from earlier eras- in fact, given the fairly comprehensive approach with which the Third and Fourth Doctors’ stories had been adapted down the years, of the four "previous Doctor" stories, three of the four were from the 1960s and only ‘Inferno’ had been made in colour. It may well be deliberate that of the stories adapted, all feature companions who had been revisited in ‘The Five Doctors’- Susan, Jamie (twice), Zoe, Liz and the Brigadier- while ‘The Dominators’ had also had an airing at the Longleat celebration. For the second year running, Terrance Dicks was limited to four entries in the range- Ian Marter making his annual contribution with ‘The Dominators’, while Peter Grimwade, Barbara Clegg, John Lucarotti and Christopher H. Bidmead adapted their own scripts. Special mention, however, must be reserved for Gerry Davis, making a return to the Tagret range after several years to adapt ‘The Highlanders’, a set of scripts which (if the records are to be believed) Davis more or less wrote himself, and which in the absence of much visual reference material, he was surely best placed to turn into prose.

After a few experiments of limited success, by the end of 1984 the photographic element had been firmly ditched from the covers. ‘Mawdryn Undead’ must surely be the least inspiring, using a dull photograph of Peter Davison rather than attempting to give the prospective buyer a visual key to the story- when a recent story is involved, the point is surely to remind the casual purchaser which story we’re looking at here. ‘Kinda’ is scarcely better, however Target clearly wanted to enable readers to identify the current Doctor’s adventures and so next attempted to incorporate a photograph of Peter Davison into the series’ logo. This must have been particularly tricky with low-tech 1980s graphic design resources and detracts from two rather good covers, however the experimen can’t have been a success as the photos were dropped entirely for ‘The Dominators’ (although it would have been nice to have had one merging Patrick Troughton with the logo) and ‘Warriors of the Deep’ is a stronger cover precisely because it’s missing. Nick Spender’s interlude at the end of the year brought a different approach- although ‘Inferno’ is very much in Skilleter’s style, ‘The Aztecs’ relies on a description of Tlotoxl from the book and presumably Spender’s own research rather than the televised story, and it’s only in retrospect with the release of certain BBC photographs from the relevant productions that we can see just how much Spender did work from these resources. In contrast, Andrew Skilleter’s style focuses firstly on the monster or other dominant image from the story in question, and then setting it into an appropriate and evocative background.

So there’s an air of confidence about 1984’s releases; the series (and Peter Davison) remained popular and the first steps in a systematic adaptation of the series’ buried past are generally successful. Adapting ‘The Highlanders’ in particular must have been no mean feat, even for Gerry Davis- with a handful of photos and his own 17-year-old memories of the story, he still turns in a creditable rendition of a story which remains missing from the archives. And with a new Doctor, no doubt Target set about 1985 in much the same spirit, although as it would turn out, the 1985 list would become very interesting indeed...