Audiobook Review | Doctor Who: The UNIT Collection by Terrance Dicks & Malcolm Hulke

Despite being a generation too young to be swept up in the Targetmania of the late 1970s, I was fortunate enough to have an older brother and an uncle more than a decade older than me who, between them, handed down a modest library of Target’s Doctor Who novelisations encompassing many of the greatest stories from the second and third Doctor’s eras. From the claustrophobic terror of the London Underground to the besieged oil rigs of the North Sea, these clever and challenging little books captured my fledgling imagination with the force of few things before or since. As I had only the assaulting colour of the late John Nathan-Turner era as a reference point for the series on screen, these thin paperbacks’ tattered edges and yellow pages only added to their allure. Their near-monochrome covers and dull accent hues made them feel like a more adult rendition of the TV show that I loved, which, I suppose, they were. And along most of their broken spines ran the same name: Terrance Dicks.

It’s tough to explain to someone who isn’t a Doctor Who nut just how colossal a literary figure Terrance Dicks was. Few under forty will have even recognised his name when glancing at his well-read obituary on the BBC News website, but for many children of the ’70s and ’80s he was the kingpin of child literacy. He may not get the same sort of respect as the phizz-whizzing Roald Dahl or other notable children’s authors of the era, but he was just as responsible for hooking tens of thousands of youngsters on reading as they were. Even at nearly forty years old, I’ve still read more Dicks than I have any other author in my life, and in so doing I’ve barely scratched the surface of his prolific output.

I’ve recently been enjoying the resurgence of Target-style Doctor Who novelisations with my eldest daughter, the continuing publication of which serve as a testament to the great man. Expanding and embellishing already fantastic stories, these new books continue Dicks’ legacy by making the Whoniverse deeper and richer than it already is. Yet reading Jenny T Colgan’s introduction to Doctor Who and the Christmas Invasion, I was reminded that Dicks didn’t just entertain; he inspired others to write too. Colgan herself is living proof that it wasn’t just little boys with their noses buried in his books for hours on end, dreaming of becoming authors. But ever since Dicks’ passing, enjoying new stories given new life hasn’t felt like enough for me. I’ve felt a need to revisit his golden age, and with time sat on my backside at a premium, but time out on my feet in abundant supply, I decided to dive into BBC Audio’s highly-regarded range of unabridged Target readings, starting with The UNIT Collection download.

Priced at just £9.99, the value offered by this bundle is staggering. Running to nearly twenty-two hours, it includes Caroline John’s fabulous readings of three of the third Doctor’s seventh-season outings along with her husband’s sibilant performance of Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons and Katy Manning’s lively delivery of The Three Doctors. To purchase these five books on CD would have cost me £100.00 or more, and of course I’d have been faced with the laborious prospect of transferring them onto my iPhone. 

Particularly with the more recently recorded stories like Inferno, the production values are comparable to Big Finish’s - these are not just talking books, but vibrant soundscapes populated with engines, explosions and rapid UNIT fire; only the over-use of each story’s custom musical refrain blights the aural splendour. Better still, each of the narrators truly gives life to the piece, as opposed to just reading it. Caroline John’s range, already evident to listeners of her Companion Chronicles, has to be heard to be believed - from Silurian to Australian, she makes every single character unique. Geoffrey Beevers’ delivery is altogether more contained, but no less interesting for it. It’s mesmerising to hear him play Roger Delgado’s suave Master more in line with his own, calcified iteration. And, of course, Katy Manning needs no soundbite of endorsement from me – she’s a walking one-woman show, as anyone even remotely familiar with her work will attest.

The five adventures on offer are an emblematic offering of not just UNIT adventures, but UNIT according to Dicks. His adaptations of the two Robert Holmes’ Nestene scripts (retitled Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons both here and in print) actually improve upon the iconic television serials. He takes the already delightful supporting characters dreamt up by Holmes and expounds upon them and their little worlds, all the while using precision prose to evoke the titular terror. Seeley the poacher and his ever-suspicious spouse, Meg; General Scobie the shy, reluctant leader; the doctor charged with safeguarding an apparently alien patient – a patient his boss is looking for any excuse to slice into; Luigi Rossini, the parsimonious “international showman”, whom Dicks reveals was born Lou Ross and built his little empire on violence and subjugation. These expansions, these digressions, make the stories feel all the more real; all the more relatable. For the children who grew up watching wide-eyed, these books allowed them to enjoy these once ephemeral adventures all over again, cementing rose-tinted memories in witty words and monochrome illustrations.

“He was our video recorder. He was the person that

got us reading, and, in some cases, writing.”

- Gareth Roberts, screenwriter and author

Even Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, adapted by Malcolm Hulke from his own scripts, has Dicks’ fingerprints all over it as its most fundamental premise belonged to him. Determined to prove his erstwhile writing partner’s assertion that he had just two options for Earthbound Doctor Who stories (“mad scientist and alien invasion”) wrong, Dicks commissioned Hulke to write a serial about native, sentient life forms that evolved before mankind who are now looking to reclaim their planet.  

Hulke’s book fits in beautifully amongst Dicks’ four, despite taking a very different approach to adaptation. Whilst a beautiful and tragic tale, on TV Doctor Who and the Silurians was marred by its undue length and poor realisation – two things that Hulke sets straight in his reimagining along with the monsters’ misnomer of a designation (there’s not a Silurian in sight here - these bad boys are Reptile-Men). Tighter, faster and with much greater emphasis on supporting players, Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters is another example of the adaptation eclipsing the original offering. Its focus on the Reptile-Men’s viewpoint is key in dividing our sympathies and heightening the inexorably tragic feel. Taking us from the height of the Reptile-Men’s empire – something never shown on the telly – to the madness of Barker and the intimate musings of Miss Dawson, who lives in silent terror of people replacing the question, “Why don’t you get married?” with “Why didn’t you ever get married?, Hulke’s novel also boasts the same sort of depth as Dicks’ four, whilst simultaneously addressing just about every complaint ever directed against the original serial that spawned it.

Dicks takes a similar approach with Inferno, a surprisingly late entry in the Target range - particularly when we consider that Dicks’ was heavily involved in the writing of the original serial. Memorable for its forays into a parallel universe, a concept reportedly introduced into Don Houghton’s scripts by Dicks, Dicks reworks the story to cut a hell of a lot of narrative fat as he balances out the story across the two universes. Many a child’s memory will have been cheated by Dicks’ streamlined, action-packed take on what was, let’s face it, a languid if occasionally dazzling serial.

The collection’s final story is its weakest despite probably being its best known. Strong on concept and character, Bob Baker and Dave Martin’s script for The Three Doctors was high on stakes but thin on substance (no pun intended). Just as he was television, Omega remains a bombastically tragic figure in the book, albeit one blighted by an overreliance on “Blob Men” to convey his supposedly superlative will. Here Dicks blesses these avatars of Omega with limbs, but even such an additional to their arsenal doesn’t make them sufficiently menacing to carry the countless action sequences that they are charged with.

What made the story so popular on television were the inimitable performances of Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton, whose unexpected bickering enlivened an otherwise repetitive runabout, ultimately setting the stall for every subsequent multi-Doctor caper. In the novelisation, though, that same magic proves elusive. Even with Dicks’ knack for concisely conveying complex ideas, the inevitable clumsiness that comes with constant disambiguation kills the flow of the banter. 

At times, the author does use his medium to do what the television serial could not, however, offering us insight into the third Doctor’s thoughts on his preceding incarnation, interestingly comparing “Doctor Two” to an annoying little brother whose irritating habits the third Doctor has long-since grown out of, but overall The Three Doctors is an aberrant entry in the range that feels like less rather than more. Nonetheless, as Mark Gatiss pointed out in the recent Doctor Who Collection documentary, Doctor Who and the Third Man, The Three Doctors was more than just the series’ first multi-Doctor adventure – it carried the show into a new era, re-establishing its title character as a wanderer in time and space in its final act. As such, it provides a fitting end to this UNIT Collection of Earthbound adventures.

Unfortunately, the digital delivery of this cut-price collection leaves much to be desired. Rather than making five separate audiobooks available for download (as they make separate movies available when purchasing a film bundle), Apple have amalgamated all five stories into one super-dense file. Not only does this take up a lot of space on a device (well over a gigabyte), but the DRM prevents the more obsessive of us from separating and retagging the five audiobooks with story-specific artwork and sort names. This lack of care extends to the division of the download file into nameless tracks rather than chapters ( or even books!), making navigation of the bloated file even more torturous. Worse still, whoever created this massive digital file apparently did so from the physical releases’ masters, as evidenced by their failure to remove all of the jarring “End of disc …” links from the download (such as half-way through tracks 37 and 41). Even the PDF booklet promoted in the listing is conspicuously absent. The need for a digital equivalent to the Video Packaging Review Committee grows by the day – this whole release smacks of being lazily cobbled together to be offered as a cheap lure for new listeners.

Of course, it has to be said, that lure is effective – thanks in no small part to the late, great Terrance Dicks.

Doctor Who: The UNIT Collection is available to download from Apple Books for the preposterous price of just £9.99, though as I’ve warned it is delivered as a single m4a file and without the digital booklet offered in the description. However, at least the latter fault has been corrected with Doctor Who: The Second UNIT Collection, which I downloaded last night, digital booklet and all. The collection is also available to download from Amazon for £14.08.


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