Published: January 1985

Edition read: Target first, 1984

Coolest Cover: Andrew Skilleter- particularly for the way he captures the light being refracted onto the Master’s forehead.

The BBC Budget Wouldn’t Run To: Seems a bit churlish when they were filming in the Canaries, but there are two off-screen shipwrecks in the first three pages.

Purple Prose: "..Dimitrios continued to embrace the marble boy, as if it were a lover." (p.8) Steady on there...Also Turlough’s memories of Weston-super-Mare.

Childhood Recollections: I’m fairly confident I had this, just not sure that I read it.

Ramblings: Peter Grimwade seems to have been one of those people- Robert Sloman and Anthony Read would be two others- who had a strong association with a few years of Doctor Who’s history which didn’t extent beyond that short period. As a writer and director, Grimwade was involved with most of the crucial stories from the eighteenth season onwards, overseeing in one capacity or another the majority of the arrivals and departures during those years and, not unlike Robert Sloman, becoming the production team’s favoured writer when a serial was needed to order. ‘Planet of Fire’ being Grimwade’s farewell to Doctor Who, the novelisation is perhaps his opportunity to round off his connection with the series and do justice to a busy story in which the narrative sometimes seemed to come second to the need to have a clear-out of the Davison era companions.

Grimwade rises to the task fairly well and concentrates on bringing his themes out and giving Turlough a decent leaving story. Less a critique of organised religion than an outright rejection, the point of ‘Planet of Fire’ is that religion is used by those in power to conceal the truth and maintain the privileges of a few, and the Logar worshippers no more spiritually enlightened that the cargo cults in the Pacific islands who worship Prince Philip. The political themes are brought out with rather more thought- not only is the idea of Turlough being an aristocratic exile from a planetary revolution a good one, it leads to a genuinely unsettling atmosphere when he is faced with the decision to call for help from Trion at the potential cost of his own freedom. The conclusion would have been even more impressive if Turlough had been forced to return to exile or prison, however for a less ambivalent age the idea that the revolutionary regime would ultimately become a more forgiving one is reasonably satisfying.

The characters are perhaps not the strongest by comparison- Grimwade’s take on Peri rather suggests a slightly younger and brattier character than we were ultimately given, and Timanov something of a non-entity without Peter Wyngarde’s presence, although it’s hard to imagine that a children’s book in 2006 would be allowed to refer to a religious zealot as variously a mullah and an ayatollah as Grimwade does. The Doctor’s early allusion to Paradise Lost does however give an insight into one of the ideas at work in the story- for a tale so intent on debunking religion, it’s also fascinated with the polarity between the Doctor and the Master, the former’s anguish at having to apparently destroy the Master contrasting with the latter’s lack of remorse at the numerous bodies which litter his path as he attempts to gain control of the numismaton gas, not least Kamelion, who is exposed as having been something of a Trojan horse all along.

One of the better Davison era adaptations, ‘Planet of Fire’ takes advantage of its increased length (143 pages) to take a little more time to develop characters, situations and atmosphere, and the overall result is very satisfying. Given that Peter Grimwade was capable of turning out a solid Doctor Who story with a simulating balance of ideas and character, it’s tempting to wonder whether one of the factors in the series’ sudden creative decline in the following year wasn’t made all the more dramatic by the loss of his input. But however you look at it, ‘Planet of Fire’ is adapted so well that it’s difficult not to feel the strength of Grimwade’s original conception and appreciate the way in which his contributions over a period of years helped to shape the series in the first half of the 1980s.