Published: November 1984

Edition read: Target first, 1984

Coolest Cover: Nick Spender- that’s a particularly good Alexander, but it’s a shame he went to such trouble on a character who doesn’t last a couple of chapters.

The TARDIS materialises...slowly. That’s it.

Childhood Recollections: Nothing specific, but the finger marks on the pages suggest that I made it at least two-thirds of the way through at some point.

Ramblings: Here’s a poser which many fans would,I suspect, struggle to answer. What happens in ‘The Highlanders’? Because apart from it being Jamie’s debut story and featuring Hannah Gordon in a supporting role, it’s one of those stories about which fans in general seem to know comparatively little. Even the few surviving Australian censor clips aren’t too specific, showing Alexander slaughtering a Redcoat and a selection of feet of the male cast as they’re about to be hanged, and so it’s become one of those little-known and overlooked tales. Nevertheless, the task of adapting the scripts lured Gerry Davis back to the Target range and so it was with a certain curiosity that I started on the book.

The first thing to note- and it’s quite a striking one- is that Davis makes absolutely no concessions to the reader’s knowledge of the regular cast. There isn’t the slightest indication from the text that this is only the second outing for this Doctor, and Ben and Polly are, well, Ben and Polly. It’s only as the adventure develops that we find out that Polly is from the 1960s and that Ben is a Cockney sailor; while this may reflect the characters coming back to Davis with comparative ease, the vast majority of the intended readership of the book would have had no meaningful memory of a 1967 transmission, so it’s also perhaps a further sign of Target aiming their adaptations at the fan market rather than the general young adult age group, who would probably in any case pick something with a monster on the cover in preference to a fresh-faced Frazer Hines. And to be honest, I can only imagine that this particular story was adapted precisely because it was Jamie’s first appearance and because Davis was prepared to do it- although Target were starting to move into the historicals at the time, the paucity of reference material available probably means that anybody other than Davis wouldn’t have had a similar familiarity with the material.

Otherwise, the story is unusual in several respects, although it sticks firmly to the traditional story pattern of most of the historicals, splitting the regulars up and having them experience different aspects of the period in question. But compared with most, the major personalities of the period are absent, and the main villains of the piece are minor league material- Grey and Trask are products of a society based on institutional corruption and bribery, and act accordingly but never become compelling villains in their own right. In only his second story, the Second Doctor has yet to become the recognisable personality of his later adventures- here, he’s at the centre of some broad comedy and fancy dress, but he, Ben and Jamie are saved from hanging not by any innate resource or initiative, but by Grey’s need for able-bodied workers in the plantations, and Sergeant Klegg’s willingness to look the other way in return for a bit of cash in hand. It’s an odd situation, because the regulars are immersed in events and reacting to them rather than initiating them for most of the story, and it’s only in the later chapters that they enable the Highlanders to set themselves free. So while Davis’s adaptation is a readable account of the televised story, the scripts themselves aren’t exactly what one would expect and the book can’t help reflecting that.