Andrew Gilhooley's Blog

One thing I imagine people who have grown up with BBC iPlayer, DVR or even VCR would find hard to understand about growing up in the 1970s is the notion that if you missed an episode of a TV series, you had missed it. End of story. The only way you would ever be able to see that episode would be if it was repeated, so you might have a long wait.

In the case of Doctor Who, repeats were a rarity, saved for a special occasion. Luckily, we had the Target Books novelisations to help us catch up on the stories we had missed. I vividly remember going to WH Smith on a Saturday afternoon and perusing the titles to see if they had any that I hadn’t read.

The Target books were short (128 pages maximum, per company policy) and written in simple, punchy sentences by a range of authors, notably script editors Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. The titles of the books tended to follow the pattern “Doctor Who and…”, so some of the story titles were different from those broadcast.

One thing I liked about these books was that they often embellished what had been broadcast, adding additional scenes that might have been difficult to film or giving the thoughts of the characters. Some books were illustrated with line drawings.

The Target books also, of course, gave me a chance to read the stories that I was too young to have seen. They so vividly recreated the adventures of the Doctor and his friends that, on rewatching some old episodes, I realised that some of my strongest memories of the series were actually a combination of what I had read and what I had watched.

The Target novelisations were launched in May 1973, with three stories featuring William Hartnell’s Doctor: Doctor Who and the Daleks, Doctor Who and the Zarbi (broadcast as The Web Planet) and Doctor Who and the Crusaders (broadcast as Crusade). The response was so positive that in January 1974, new books started to be released featuring the then-current Doctor Jon Pertwee’ stories as well as those of his predecessors. Tom Baker took over the lead role in December of 1974, and by March 1975 Doctor Who and the Giant Robot (broadcast as Robot) had been published.

Target carried on publishing Doctor Who books until 1994, when the Target brand, now owned by Virgin, was closed down. The brand was revived by the BBC in 2018 and continues to publish Doctor Who books featuring the post-2005 adventures.

It’s nice to know that reading a Target novelisation can still be a part of the young Doctor Who fan’s experience!