In 1987, it’s probably fair to say that televised Doctor Who was in crisis. Continuing uncertainty over the series’ future, the unceremonious replacement of the lead actor and a season of stories which reflected the creative instability behind the scenes all conspired to make it an unnerving time to be a fan. And Target responded to this...by going back and adapting a batch of Hartnell stories.

That’s an overstatement, of course, but what’s striking about the 1987 output is that of eleven books, only two adapted stories originally made in colour. Both ‘Black Orchid’ and ‘The Ambassadors of Death’ do however plug important gaps and given Terry Nation’s antipathy to the Eric Saward Dalek stories, ensured that the Third and Fifth Doctor’s eras were completed in print. Similarly, ‘The Mind Robber’ completes the sixth season in print, and ‘The Faceless Ones’ and ‘The Macra Terror’ address the comparative neglect of the fourth. However, to look at the year as a whole, the covers tell most of the story- it’s all about Hartnell, with fully six of the eleven books taking on stories from the First Doctor’s era. To be fair, stories like ‘The Reign of Terror’, ‘The Ark’ and ‘The Massacre’ have enough ideas and drama to justify their inclusion, while a take as good as Donald Cotton’s ‘Romans’ almost certainly deserved a wider audience than just the Doctor Who readers. Terrance Dicks’s versions of ‘The Faceless Ones’ and ‘The Ambassadors of Death’, together with Ian Stuart Black’s adaptation of his own ‘Macra Terror’, wave the flag for more conventional storytelling, while the other notable achievement is that ‘The Ark’, ‘The Mind Robber’ and ‘The Space Museum’ were all adapted by their original script writers, for whom their respective stories were one-off contributions to the series.

There are probably a number of reasons why the 1987 schedule so comprehensively turned its back on the series then in production and recently transmitted- for one, the fragmented nature of the Trial format would have discouraged any publisher from starting the story until they could be sure of completing it. I’m not sure that there’s any overt sense of a lack of confidence in the most recent stories, although it’s telling that the first volumes of the Trial wouldn’t appear in print until nearly a year and a half after their transmission whereas the Target of 1983 couldn’t get ‘The Five Doctors’ out quickly enough. In retrospect, however, it’s telling that whereas the fans of 1987 were cooing over adaptations of black-and-white stories they could never hope to see, Target’s 1987 output as a range does come across as increasingly obscure and aimed at fans rather than casual buyers. A casual purchaser in 1980, say, could walk into W H Smith, pick up any Target book and almost certainly be sure of buying a fairly direct adaptation of a conventional Doctor Who story- but would such a buyer be satisfied with ‘The Massacre’, or feel cheated by ‘The Romans’? The same market may not have existed for the Target range in 1987, but as with the televised series in production, it’s difficult not to feel an increasing emphasis on continuity and the past. So. some very good adaptations indeed, but also an unsettling emphasis on looking backwards which perhaps pointed to a range coming up against the limitation of the number of stories available to fill an intensive release schedule.