Sigh. No I'm not angry about it at all. Just fatalistic about the lack of first person narratives like The Myth Makers and Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, the revelatory Doomsday Weapon and Cave Monsters and larger, more informative novelisations such as Rememberance of the Daleks and Fury from the Deep. Dicks was a (is a) very workman like adaptor; you'd send him off with someone else's script on the Monday and he's be back with the draft on the Friday, probably. And once the novelisation was in the Target library, that'd be it. No second chances. If the Nation and Adams estates ever get their acts togeather over Resurrection and Revelation of the Daleks, and The Pirate Planet, City of Death and Shada then judge for yourself how they would have compared to the same books adapted by Dicks.



Yes, it's Holmes. Reads a bit differently to the rest of the book, hmm?

Martin date=13/09/2006 12:44 : Yes, it's Holmes. Reads a bit differently to the rest of the book, hmm?

It certainly does!!!!!

I've got The Two Doctors, and I'm saving it for a rainy day.

Is that the Two Doctor's First Edition or Second Edition Martin ??

Hmmm. I suspect it's a first edition, but I'd have to check.

A past Grand Master of the SAFWFC once advised my mate and I the First Edition was 'quite collectable'. Luckily I had the First Edition and he had the Second Edition hahahah



Each Edition is actually quite a different read in some sections from memory

This is only a second edition; and in not the best condition either! But it is Holmes' only book--and that's why I bought it!

Colin Baker Target novels are very rare - I've been to over 10 secondhand bookshops in Adelaide, and he's the only Doctor that they have had no books of.

.............but you can find the Peter Davison ones everywhere!

Hmmm. There's only eleven Colin TV adventures (and another three "missing season" stories), and one of those was Revelation--making ten Colin novelisations! This may be a factor, then again maybe Colin fans won't part with their books...



Or a related note IIRC Time and the Rani is the rarest Target in Australia, thanks to a dock fire destroying the shipment.

I have the Target Time and the Rani..........is this the one you're talking about?

I wouldn't have thought Time & The Rani in any format was worth having anyway!!!!!



The Dr Who books in the 70s were great, especially the cover art.

I agree totally, dude!



Reading the ones NOT by terrance Dicks is a real pleasure - when you read Christopher H Bidmead's "Frontios" or Victor Pemberton's "Fury From The Deep" for example, you really get a good story - something with a bit extra than what we saw (or heard, in the case of missing stories!) on TV.



Dicks's novels are ok, but he stays right on the scripts like Martin pointed out, and therefore gives nothing extra.

When you read the ones done by the authors themselves, you get more about the story and more character development - that makes them so special to read!

I believe that's the book, although I could be mixing it up with Mindwarp, another red hot story--we had one guy come to every meeting for years looking though the Target box for it...never asked us, or we'd have told him it was the same books month after month! There's another rare version of this; the first print run had the cover illustration upside down! The artist had drawn a Tetrap hanging from a cave roof, and the printer thought it was standing on a cave floor.



Intrinsic value doesn't necessarily make things valuable, scarcity can as well. At the moment I'm reading Andrew Cartmel's Script Doctor (and thus finding out more than I'd ever really want to know about Time and the Rani and how much worse it could have been), and he points out the broadcast version of Paradise Towers was cut to remove a knife threat. Ordinarily, a clip of somone being threatened with a knife in a season 24 story wouldn't really be interesting, but when the script editor happens to have the clip in his collection and it went unbroadcast...that's worth something.

Even if Cartmel has a deleted scene from Season 24 in his possession, would that have necessarily made the story any better???



No amount of editing or further script re-writes could have saved that season, since the powers that be at the BBC and JNTs mucking about doomed the show.



I think Cartmel has spent the last few years apologising for his own inexperience - at that point Dr Who needed an experienced script editors, but of course didnt get it.



I agree about Dicks being a very workmanlike novelist, the ones I liked best were other authors books.

It could certainly have been worse--check out Cartmel's own damning of Time and the Rani in Script Doctor! And it's not Paradise Towers which becomes worth more due to his clip, but the clip which becomes valuable as it's rare.

I Just got Timelash (Hardcover) and 2 Doctors (1st Edition) for 6 bucks for both.

The hardcovers are a pleasure to read, even Timelash. The Adelaide lending library bought most of the really good original author Targets in hardcover when they were comeing out--and have few of them left.

I want to complete my collection - again I ask all and sundry that if they have any to sell, I want them!!!!



Except you can keep any McCoy novels!!!!

They suck!!!

I have no idea why I bought 4 of them!!!!

Mc Coy was useless! Ace was a first class dork! Cartmel was a bloody idiot - and JNT deserves all the abuse under the sun for what he did to Dr Who from stuffing around Colin Baker through to the travsety that was the McCoy years.



Hey, on another note, some of Dicks's novels are very good. He did a good job with "Kinda", "Planet of the Spiders", "Death to the Daleks", "the Caves of Androzani", and "The 5 Doctors"



>Although he did make a blundering continuity error in  "The 5 Doctors" - he writes about how the 1st Doctor is in his garden, relaxing and preparing himself for his regeneration before he is then caught in Lord Borusa's time scoop!

Whoops!!!!!!

How could Dicks screw that up? Where were Polly and Ben? Why was the Doctor in 'his garden'? Where is the Doctor's garden? In the frigging TARDIS? Or has he bought some land on Earth - or another planet????????

I disagree with your assessment of the McCoy novelizations, if not your opinion of his tenure...There is one name which calls out from this period, makes us think of opportunities lost, and in the evolution of series is as important as anyone from that decade: Ben Aaronovitch.

His output's been small--two scripts, one of which he novelized, three original Virgin novels, and one Big Finish novel. But they're as influential as anything in the last twenty years.

Ever wonder what McCoy's era would have been like if Aaronovitch had been the script editor?



What you've run into with the Hartnell continuity is not an error, but quite deliberate. He's grabbed from a garden in the episode/movie version of The Five Doctors, despite there not being such a scene in Hartnell's era. It's because there's a problem with where to have the point of interference--in Antarctica? Possibly episode three of The Tenth Planet?--so Dicks just made one up. Or if you wish, they could simply ignore the issue the way Baker and Martin did with The Three Doctors--which is no better.

The black and white stories tended to run together, making shoe horning another story in between them difficult. This becomes even more apparent with the "Missing Adventures/Past Doctor Adventures" novels. The first person to come to grips with this was Barry Letts in his radio play The Paradise of Death, set between The Time Warrior and Invasion (of the Dinosaurs). There is no such gap--but there is one now!



As a footnote, Dicks appears to feel guilty about what he did to Borusa in The Five Doctors--he's rehabilitated him twice--and the two versions aren't compatible...

I agree that Aaronovitch would have been better suited than Andrew Cartmel, who was too inexperienced for such a demanding job.



But it didnt matter who the script editor was - JNT was still the producer then, and he still had total control over everything.



I honestly believe that had JNT not been Producer then, and had left when the 5th Drs era ended, things would have been more 'settled'.



Most of the dramas that occured during the 6th Drs era was the personality clash between Saward and JNT.



The only seasons that JNT really did very well were the 18th & 19th ones.  After that things went off the boil.



Thats my anti-JNT rant for the day....but for everything that he did right, he got so terribly wrong as well.