Doctor Who - Slipback by Eric Saward

Published: August 1986

Edition read: Target first, 1986

Coolest Cover: Paul Mark Tams- it’s...different and a bit more expressive than the usual slavish attempt to recreate specific design elements.

The BBC Budget Wouldn’t Run To: Visuals.

The TARDIS materialises with..."a sound similar to that of an actively flatulent herbivore with undertones of distressed musk".

Childhood Recollections: I’m fairly sure I’d never read this until now- after all, I’ve only listened to the tapes once as far as I can recall.

Ramblings: ‘Slipback’ seems to be somewhat ignored these days- perhaps strangely, seeing as we have more audio-only Doctor Who nowadays than ever- but then practically everything about it is peculiar. It’s an odd mini-story, over and done with so quickly that the Doctor and Peri never even meet the Captain, and one in which the Doctor does next to nothing and is ultimately prevented from even doing that- and so it’s a brave step on both Target and Eric Saward’s part to attempt to novelise something so slight.

Saward’s answer is to continue in the same vein he used for ‘The Twin Dilemma’, in his own micro-universe populated by Terileptils, Mastons and speelsnapes and where (rather oddly) the Doctor has a healthy appetite for the consumption of alcoholic beverages. In fact, he spends 47 pages setting up the back story of Shellingborne Grant and the Vipod Mor- but then again that’s not inconsistent with the way Doctor Who was written in Colin Baker’s era, with the Doctor and Peri getting involved with the action at a late stage when the supporting characters have had an opportunity to establish themselves. The trouble is, ‘Slipback’ is almost entirely about the supporting characters and barely about the Doctor and Peri, who have next to nothing to do except interacting satirically with a couple of sub-Wodehousean caricatures and leave. Like no other adaptation since ‘Terminus’, it feels more like an original novella into which the Doctor Who regulars have wandered- the difference is that the humour is largely forced and the rest of what passes for a plot simply doesn’t have enough to it to sustain the story.

That’s not to say that the book isn’t often entertaining- when Saward is channelling Douglas Adams or P.G.Wodehouse (the former in the digressive style of the first section of the book, the latter with characters like Barton, Seedle and Snatch) it’s undemanding fun. But the Doctor and Peri are practically unrecognisable (although the Doctor’s "why does she always ask the same cretinous question everytime we arrive somewhere new?" internal monologue raises a smile, not least because it’s Saward reflecting on the basic mechanics of any and every Doctor Who story, the story seems to actively prevent them from becoming involved in the story- and then at the end of it all, the plot is shown to have been academic because it’s always happened this way. Ultimately Saward’s decision to pad the story out with humour is probably the best which could have been made in the circumstances, but you can’t make something so acutely flawed into a classic novelisation no matter how much you try.