By the end of 1988, in spite of the Silver Anniversary celebrations, it must have been clear to anybody with a more than tangential interest in Doctor Who that some of the wheels were starting to come off the bus, and indeed one had already been spotted in the rear view mirror bouncing gleefully off into the distance. Having said that, one of the interesting things about Target’s output over the course of this year is the breadth of stories covered- three Hartnells covering very different aspects of the First Doctor’s era, a couple of neglected Troughtons, four adventures for the Sixth Doctor (including three-quarters of the Trial) and the Seventh Doctor’s first two outings. After the uncertainty of 1986 and 1987, the range clearly returned to the televised series’ present with renewed enthusiasm and a commitment to having the original script writers adapt their own stories. It’s not a bad career move to adapt your own script into a book- it gives you two bites at the cherry, essentially being paid twice for the same work, and it bulks out a writing CV- but given the muddled style of story telling prevalent in late-1980s Doctor Who, it’s also an opportunity to make subtle corrections to bad casting or ideas which didn’t survive the production process and the director’s ideas as to how the story should turn out.

The adaptations for 1988 show the increasing influence of range editor Nigel Robinson, who himself adapted three stories- ‘The Time Meddler’, ‘The Edge of Destruction’ and ‘The Underwater Menace’. It’s probably fair to say that these are stories which wouldn’t have particularly interested another writer, although Terrance Dicks could probably have been persuaded to have adapted them sooner or later, but equally true that in the series’ 25th year there would naturally be a certain amount of interest in the Hartnell era in particular. Nevertheless, Robinson sets out on the important task of turning these superficially unattractive stories into very readable books- there are certainly better stories which have been adapted less convincingly. Terrance Dicks is on slightly unfamiliar territory this year, taking on the Sixth Doctor for the first time, while naturally rather closer to home with the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe in ‘The Wheel in Space’ and again with the short-lived First Doctor, Ben and Polly team in ‘The Smugglers’. Pip and Jane Baker weigh in with three of their own stories, while Stephen Wyatt and Philip Martin (adapting their own scripts) and Ian Marter’s final contribution to the range round out the programme. It’s a schedule marked by its extremes, however- there’s nothing adapted which was broadcast between 1968 and 1985, and while that’s largely due to the absence of much being left to adapt, there’s a curious feeling of Doctor Who’s best years being absent.

The uncertainty surrounding the series’ future on television can’t have been far from the minds of those behind the range, and indeed Target went into 1989 with barely a dozen stories left to be adapted, barring those being produced for transmission that year. It’s difficult not to respect the commitment behind the principle that every story should ultimately be adapted for the range- again, from a publishing point of view, it would have been very easy to have sat back on a range of, say, 125 novels and left it at that. It’s a large backlist for any publisher to keep going, particularly when some of the titles had been in print for fifteen years and relied on completists and the very rare new fans to keep it going. There’s a certain absurdity in the idea that the first title likely to greet a curious new fan walking into their local bookshop in November 1988 would have been the (Hartnell-featuring) ‘The Smugglers’, but at the same time it has to be remembered that the BBC’s own very ambiguous approach to the series consisted of muted celebrations and a subtle ratcheting-up of the number of releases in the nascent VHS range. Although Target’s 1988 output did have some of the first inklings of desperation about it, there’s equally a commitment to its earliest years and to its present which certainly wasn’t reflected by the corporation making the programme.