The Missing Targets - Douglas Adams

When I first encountered organised fandom in the mid-1980s, the name of Douglas Adams was regarded with very mixed feelings indeed. ‘The Pirate Planet’ and ‘City of Death’ were regarded as superior examples of Doctor Who in the then-disdained Graham Williams era, the incomplete ‘Shada’ remained infuriatingly unknowable and above all, there was a certain amount of reflected glory in knowing that a writer who had honed his art on Who was now a popular and successful novelist whose Hitch-Hiker universe had gained a fandom all of its own. On the other hand, however, Adams resolutely refused to adapt his scripts for the Target range, or allow anybody else to adapt them, and so the infuriating gap in the Target range (and particularly in their Key to Time series) remained, the best story of Season 17 by a country mile would never be novelised and much of the detail of ‘Shada’ would not be generally available until the early-1990s video release (of which more later).

The main reason for this (at least according to M.J. Simpson’s biography Hitchhiker) seems to have been money. Target’s modus operandi at the height of the range’s popularity, at least according to the Adams anecdote which Simpson quotes, was to offer a standard fee of £600 for the adaptation. The figure was presumably based on (a) the books selling in the children’s/young adult market, with a correspondingly lower profile and selling price than a full-scale adult novel and (b) their writers either being professional television script writers, to whom the fee would effectively be a bonus and a guaranteed opportunity to add a book to their CV, or Terrance Dicks, who wrote enough in a year to make a living at it. However, by the time Adams was approached in the wake of the initial Hitch-Hikers boom, he had established a certain amount of form as a bestselling author and commanded fees to suit; Adams and his agent couldn’t have afforded to accept work on Target’s scale and for Target to have met Adams’s going rate would have set the precedent for other adaptors to be paid according to their professional standing rather than Target’s fixed fee. And so the prospect of adapting Adams’s scripts remained on hold; apparently Virgin, probably flushed with success in negotiating an agreement for David Whitaker’s two Troughton-era Dalek stories to be adapted, approached Adams at a later date, but without improving their standard offer and therefore met with a similar response.

So what impact did this have on the Target range? The most obvious, of course, is that their attempt to adapt the Key to Time season into good English prose would forever be incomplete, and it’s tempting to think that some of the convoluted plotting and rushed ending of ‘The Pirate Planet’ might have derived some benefit from being elaborated in print. I’m not so convinced about ‘City of Death’, though; so much of the brilliance of the original story comes from the location filming, incidental music and performances that on the printed page it may well have fallen flat or come across as laboured and self-indulgent. And Adams’s own misgivings about ‘Shada’ may only have been confirmed by a novelisation drawn out across the whole six episodes. Pillaging the latter two stories for their good ideas and working them into the Dirk Gently novels may not have been the worst thing Adams could have done and does perhaps show that he valued some of the concepts, however it also seems that any reservations he may have had about ‘Shada’ not being his best work were amplified by the traumas of its non-production. Adams later claimed that the surviving material was only released on video because he was given several contracts to sign at once and didn’t realise what he’d been given, hence the absence of a writer’s credit on the printed sleeve and his royalties going to Comic Relief; while this perhaps seems a harsh attitude for a professional writer to take, it may well reflect a fear of inferior work going out under Adams’s name and damaging his earning capacity.

The result for the reputation of Adams’s Doctor Who stories themselves, though, was rather better, as all three acquired a certain cachet precisely because of their unavailability; coming to ‘City of Death’ initially through audio copies and then ‘The Pirate Planet’ and ‘Shada’ on video, it was difficult not to see them as somehow special. It’s precisely the quality of Adams’s writing, especially when combined with Tom Baker and Lalla Ward colluding to improve on the script as written, which leads to the practically inevitable conclusion that nobody (with the possible exception of David Fisher) could ever have adapted Douglas Adams’s scripts as well as Adams himself, and the delayed gratification of finally seeing his stories several years later more than makes up for the loss of what may have been an uninspired novelisation.