Doctor Who The Making of a Television Series (1982)

Title – Doctor Who The Making of a Television Series

Authors – Alan Road
Publisher - Andre Deutsch.
Format - hardback
Year - 1982
Original Cost – £4.95

I only picked this book up a few weeks ago.  I've thought about it for years although my expectations as to how good it might be have always been quite low.  That's why I never quite got round to it until now.  I would like to say that after all those years of delay, presuming the worst, that it was in actual fact a great little slice of Who history but it really isn't.

Its biggest crime is that its dull, boring even, and it really shouldn't be.  This is a Doctor Who adventure about time travel and alien reptiles and crashed spaceships and human history being subverted.  Plus its an introduction to what was then a relatively new incarnation of the Doctor.  And on top of that its a book about making a TV show.  About how the BBC works and about costume and sets and special effects.  And despite all of that potential to be fascinating and magical, it somehow fails to raise its game above the level of a Sunday Supplement magazine.

In fact, if i had to guess to the authors background I would imagine its the lighter side of journalism, working on pay per word rate that might just about explain some of the nonsensical, irrelevant and cliched sentences that push up the word count.

There's maybe a handful of interesting moments, odd snapshots into some of the lesser known TV production roles but on the whole its all little more than an overgrown magazine article with delusions of grandeur.  Its not a keeper.  Not worthy of back-filling a place in the archive.  And so its back off onto eBay whence it came.

All of which has got me thinking about Doctor Who in the early 80s.  On reflection I think there is something just a little bit too commercial about that era of the show, where choices made for branding and product identification seem slightly prioritized over the job of good story telling and just being entertaining. The Making of a Television Series is a really good example of exactly that issue.  Now you could argue that that was quite a prescient move of the shows producer at the time and helped to keep it in the public eye and talked about by newspapers but there is a cost.  With the benefit of hind-site, a lot of the Davison era can feel quite flimsy and inconsequential. That's not to say it doesn't have its moments with Kinda, Earthshock, Snakesdance and The Caves of Androzani but over all, its batting average is pretty poor..

....did you see what I did there?!

Steve