Doctor Who - Castrovalva by Christopher H Bidmead

Published: June 1983

Edition read: Target first, 1983

Coolest Cover: Neither attempts have that much to recommend them, but I’ll go for the original semi-photographic version if I had to.

The BBC Budget Wouldn’t Run To: The weird escalator thing the Master climbs whenever he wants to speak to Adric. Thankfully.

Crimes Against Literature: "(the Doctor) was rapidly running out of clothing to drop. Now he was left wearing only his shirt, which proved to have a very long tail, like some ancient item of night attire." (p.13). Underwear, please. Personally I always imagined the Fifth Doctor having boxer shorts in the same striped pattern as his trousers.

The TARDIS de materialises with..."a familiar chuffing sound".

Childhood Recollections: My first copy of this came from the old W H Smith in Harrogate, which was an Edward’s bar the last time I was there.

Ramblings: Having been less than completely enthralled by Christopher H Bidmead’s adaptation of his own ‘Logopolis’, it comes as something of a relief to find that before coming to adapt ‘Castrovalva’, he seems to have gone away and thought about how to turn an ideas-heavy script into readable prose. That said, there are differences between the two stories’ aims and functions which account for this- while ‘Logopolis’ was intended to be earnest and doom-laden, ‘Castrovalva’ is comparatively lightweight. It’s almost Doctor-neutral, in that or much of the story the lead role could be played by any actor finding his feet before finally coming to himself in the last episode. There’s not so much a threat as a puzzle to be solved, while the story also sees the beginning of the use of the Master as a standby villain for whenever the story was too slight or undemanding to justify an original character.

But to go back to Bidmead’s adaptation- Castrovalva itself is fine, it’s just the getting there that’s the problem. Mirroring the original story, the emphasis in the first half of the book is on the regulars and Bidmead’s approach often threatens to become claustrophobic. References to Romana and to Vicky (sic), as well as to Alzarius, help ground the story in the early-JNT era sense of an ongoing story and of the series’ own continuity, which would in 1982 have been refreshed by a series of repeats, although the average reader of 1983 only had the chance to know Vicki through the ancient adaptations Doctor Who and the Crusaders and Doctor Who and the Zarbi. For obvious reasons it’s Tegan’s internal monologue which comes off best, although Bidmead is also surprisingly good at getting under Adric’s skin when the book calls for it. Once in Castrovalva, however, there’s the distinct impression that Bidmead’s heart is in it again; clearly the ideas which stimulated him were the ones surrounding the consciousness of the Castrovalvans, such as Shardovan’s discovery that he is a created being in a false society, or the way in which the inhabitants cannot perceive the inconsistency of their surroundings. These concepts of perception make the difference between a humdrum story and a special one, and while on their own they don’t propel ‘Castrovalva’ into the first rank, they do give the story an extra dimension. It has to be said that Bidmead isn’t particularly good at bringing his supporting characters to life, but then that’s probably a flaw of Bidmead’s writing rather than anything else- he’s an ideas man first and a script writer or novelist second. So it’s refreshing to see that in this case, fewer ideas and a simpler story make for better reading than an overload of obscure pseudo-science shoehorned into four episodes.