Doctor Who - The Caves of Androzani by Terrance Dicks

Published: February 1985

Edition read: Target first, 1985

Coolest Cover: I’ll go for Andrew Skilleter’s second version (the video cover)- Sharaz Jek really doesn’t look quite right on the original, and the subliminal Colin Baker is only good when you spot for yourself.

Purple Prose: The second paragraph of the book is classic Terrance Dicks- tells you everything you need to know and brings the Doctor right into the action.

The TARDIS materialises with..."a wheezing, groaning sound"

Childhood Recollections: Mainly of sitting and reading this straight through in one evening.

Ramblings: The interesting thing about reading an adaptation of ‘The Caves of Androzani’ is that we’re dealing with one of those stories where the received wisdom is that all the aspects of the production came together and the story is consequently one of the highlights of Doctor Who in the 1980s. And so the opportunity arises to see how well the story translates to the printed page without Graeme Harper’s direction or one of the strongest casts assembled in the series’ original run. By this stage it was taken as read that Terrance Dicks would adapt a Robert Holmes script (although there was one major exception on the horizon), allowing the dialogue to stand up for itself while elaborating usefully on areas such as motivation which Holmes tended to imply rather than demonstrate.

The end result is good but unspectacular- it’s recognisably ‘The Caves of Androzani’, but what Dicks’s adaptation does is to emphasise the strength of the script without the impact of the visuals, direction, acting and so on. There used to be a criticism in mid-1980s fandom that Peter Davison was playing an identikit Doctor without his own real identity, and while the argument doesn’t really stand up (being based on fans more used to Tom Baker’s performance not adjusting well to subtlety and gentle irony), there’s a certain amount of that feeling in the early sections in particular- the Doctor is Doctorish but could really be any incarnation- although this is probably as much due to Holmes’s unfamiliarity with the way the production style had changed since 1978 as anything else. Shorn of Maurice Roeves’s disturbingly borderline psychotic Stotz, the impact of Morgus’s asides to camera or Christopher Gable’s obsessive yet tragic Sharaz Jek, Dicks finds other things to bring out. For example, he makes a point barely implicit in the televised story, that Spectrox is used by one particular generation of the Androzani political elite to maintain their hold on power indefinitely, and also emphasises that Morgus’s murder of the President is based primarily on an incorrect assumption that the Doctor is acting for the authorities on Major. If any one character comes out differently from the television story, it’s General Chellak, who seems originally to have been conceived as a military buffoon- in which case all the more credit to Martin Cochrane and Graeme Harper for making him into a haunted man in an impossible position.

There can’t be that many books written for children or teenagers which advertise on their back cover that the hero is going to die at the end, but this is one of them. It could hardly fail, being built on a solidlly-constructed script, structured for maximum impact so the vast majority of the supporting characters are killed off in the final episode as the various plans for revenge coincide and collide, however in the main this is Terrance Dicks on home soil, knowing that with a Robert Holmes script all he has to do is fill in the blanks between the lines and he’ll have a book that works. It’s interesting, then, that it should have been preceded by two examples of script writers trying to enlarge on their televised stories, as Dicks’s adaptation shows that when the source material is good enough, a decent adaptation can be produced with the minimum of interpolations.