Who's the Doctor?

Foreword by Duncan

Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space

No, not the 2009 roleplaying game of the same name, this is a book from... well, I don't know for certain how old this book actually is. My copy is missing the first 4 pages inside the cover, which, I presume, would have provided this information to those of us who care to know such things.

There are, however, several clues. The appearance of Peter Davison's face on the front and back covers, but the lack of any stories with him inside combined with the emphasis on Tom Baker, these all suggest it dates from around the period where Davison had been cast as the Doctor, but not yet taken over from Baker in the show (save, perhaps, from the regeneration scene at the end of Logopolis).

If I am right then this dates the book to sometime around 1981, which makes it almost as old as I am!

This book, and its companion Doctor Who: Journey through Time, contain a mix of text and comic-strip stories which are even older than the books themselves. Stories featuring the first and second Doctors date back to the '60s - and it's not just the appearance of Hartnell and Troughton that give this away!

The quality and style of the stories, and the accompanying art, are immensely variable, as you might expect from an anthology such as this. Big Gay Longcat is going to be looking through these books and giving his own reviews of the stories and pictures within.

Who's the Doctor?

Review by Big Gay Longcat

This is the first story in the book, and if you didn't know anything about Doctor Who, this story would tell you all about it. Of course I know all about Doctor Who already because I have the internets, but this is an old book from before the dawn of internets so it could have been quite useful then.

It is 3 pages long, which makes it easy to read even for me. It explains about the Doctor and regeneration and Time Lords and Omega and Metebelis Three and Sarah Jane Smith and Daleks. And obviously that covers all the important parts of Doctor Who.

It says a few things that make me a confused cat, such as this bit:

"He was accompanied on his travels by a young girl called Susan, who called him grand-father."

That seems to me to be a very strange way of saying things.

Later on it also says:

"The present Doctor is aided in his adventures by Sarah Jane Smith, a young and intelligent girl journalist, who happened upon the first adventure quite by chance, and who has remained with the Doctor to share all the strange and mysterious adventures which have followed."

Now I'm not so silly that I can't tell that this book was made a long time ago and doesn't keep up with the Doctor's latest Companion, but even so it is obvious to me that it was made after Sarah Jane had left because there are stories in the book with Leela in them and the next Doctor appears on the cover and he came along much later.

It seems to me that the makers of this book were being lazy when they put this story in because it was already old and they did not write a new version that would have been more right.

Tom Baker looks like he's going "ugh" in the picture [above], as if even he is appalled at the laziness of the makers of this book.

"They're not halfwits you're talking to," he's saying.