John Lavalie: Created page with "{{article | publication = The Times | file = 1980-03-05 Times.jpg | px = 450 | height = | width = | date = 1980-03-05 | author = Philippa Toomey | pages = | language = Engl..."

2014-11-21T23:49:55Z

Created page with "{{article | publication = The Times | file = 1980-03-05 Times.jpg | px = 450 | height = | width = | date = 1980-03-05 | author = Philippa Toomey | pages = | language = Engl..."

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{{article
| publication = The Times
| file = 1980-03-05 Times.jpg
| px = 450
| height =
| width =
| date = 1980-03-05
| author = Philippa Toomey
| pages =
| language = English
| type =
| description =
| categories = books
| moreTitles =
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| text =
Terrance Dicks : [[broadwcast:The Invasion|Doctor Who and the Invasion of Time]] : Doctor Who and the Underworld : Junior Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius (W. H. Allen, £3.75 each, and £2.50).

"Look out!" they cry to one another, "Are you all
right?"—a cry common to every television programme, it seems, except the News. Of course, they are not all right. Something extremely nasty is crawling out of the woodwork and will shortly get them--except that it is now time to move over to Jim Will Fix It.

The lack of the alarming sight of Jim, fixing it, also provides a loss of dramatic tension. Terrance Dicks has a hard task transferring the Dr Who tales to the printed page. The programme relies very heavily on special effects, on the characterization of the Doctor and his female sidekick, and only lastly on the words.

Terrance Dicks, unfortunately, sticks rather close to the scripts. "Affirmative ion drive" may be all very well as dialogue on the screen, but pages of non-functioning space ship are a dreadful bore. Even the Doctor's famous ad libs come over rather flatly—though I enjoyed K9, the computer-dog being offered, as an alternative, dog biscuits or ball bearings. Leela, the beautiful savage, is extremely tiresome (even dim-witted) in print (in [[broadwcast:Underworld|Doctor Who and the Underworld]]) and we see the last of her, thank heavens, in Doctor Who and the Invasion of Time, on the Doctor's home planet of Gallifrey.

Junior Doctor Who is aimed at the 5 to 8-year-olds, and [[broadwcast:The Brain of Morbius|the Brain of Morbius]] is a particularly gruesome one about a head transplant for a brain which has been marinating in a tank of some kind of nourishing soup until a suitable humanoid came along. With a shudder one wonders what the more ambitious of our hospitals are doing. Just right for the little ones, and it has some really unlikeable illustrations to go with it.

With a wheezing, groaning sound, this reader vanished.

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Who Goes There (1980) - Revision history

John Lavalie: Created page with "{{article | publication = The Times | file = 1980-03-05 Times.jpg | px = 450 | height = | width = | date = 1980-03-05 | author = Philippa Toomey | pages = | language = Engl..."