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Doctor Who: The Missing Episodes #1
Doctor Who: The Nightmare Fair
'How often do I have to win before you give up?' the Doctor demanded with a sigh. 'Oh, lots,' replied the Mandarin...
In February 1985 the BBC announced that their longest-running SF series, Doctor Who, was to be suspended. Anxious fans worldwide, worried that this might put an end to the Time Lord's travels, flooded the BBC with letters of protest. Eighteen months later the show returned to the TV screen.
But missing from the Doctor's adventures was the series that would have been made and shown during those eighteen months, and contained in this volume is one of those stories:
The Nightmare Fair
Drawn into the nexus of the primeval cauldron itself, the Doctor and Peri are somewhat surprised to find themselves at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
Is it really just chance that has brought them to the funfair? Or is their arrival somehow connected with the sinister presence of a rather familiar Chinese Mandarin?
In February 1985 the BBC announced that their longest-running SF series, Doctor Who, was to be suspended. Anxious fans worldwide, worried that this might put an end to the Time Lord's travels, flooded the BBC with letters of protest. Eighteen months later the show returned to the TV screen.
But missing from the Doctor's adventures was the series that would have been made and shown during those eighteen months, and contained in this volume is one of those stories:
The Nightmare Fair
Drawn into the nexus of the primeval cauldron itself, the Doctor and Peri are somewhat surprised to find themselves at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
Is it really just chance that has brought them to the funfair? Or is their arrival somehow connected with the sinister presence of a rather familiar Chinese Mandarin?
144 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1989
2 people are currently reading
129 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
October 3, 2020
Be careful what you wish for, as the old saying goes. And so it comes to pass.
Earlier this year (or last, who knows anymore?), while watching the Colin Baker Dr Who bluray special edition doowacky I was made aware of some scripts that had been written and submitted for the series that turned out not to be.
Rather than waste them, they were turned into novels.
Clearly these were things I needed in my life. And not just because I'm a Who fan, run a Who podcast, and used to love the books back when I was first rebelling against shorts in summer.
But also because if 2020 has taught me anything it's that nostalgia is a safe haven from All The Everything.
And so books were found, ordered, added to The List, moved about on The List when we then found out there was an actual order to them (you can't just read them as you fancy, that's madness), added to the pile and the waiting began.
And I won't lie, there was a bit of giddy anticipation. New Who stories? With an old Doctor? This was going to be great...
Only, it wasn't.
And not because they are written for readers many years younger than me. A good book is a good book, a well-told story is a well-told story.
This is neither.
The problems start with the fact it's not until chapter five that you get a passage of prose more than four/five paragraphs long.
The opening chapters hop about so much it is impossible to settle in and get to know the world we're exploring – even if that is Blackpool in the '80s.
Now this may well work in script form. Dancing about between scenes is fine and adds pace to the drama. But not in a book.
Which leads to the second problem. As with the feel of many a late-period Classic Who story, you can feel the lack of care and attention. The writing is a bit loose, there's no depth to any of the characters, and the Toymaker is revealed almost by accident.
The Toymaker.
And all this is before you realise Williams really doesn't like Scousers. He's not even subtle about it.
By the end, rather then revelling in a great adventure you're willing every page to be the last (and there are only 120 of the buggers) while wishing they'd just made the damn thing after all.
Oh well. One down, two to go...
Earlier this year (or last, who knows anymore?), while watching the Colin Baker Dr Who bluray special edition doowacky I was made aware of some scripts that had been written and submitted for the series that turned out not to be.
Rather than waste them, they were turned into novels.
Clearly these were things I needed in my life. And not just because I'm a Who fan, run a Who podcast, and used to love the books back when I was first rebelling against shorts in summer.
But also because if 2020 has taught me anything it's that nostalgia is a safe haven from All The Everything.
And so books were found, ordered, added to The List, moved about on The List when we then found out there was an actual order to them (you can't just read them as you fancy, that's madness), added to the pile and the waiting began.
And I won't lie, there was a bit of giddy anticipation. New Who stories? With an old Doctor? This was going to be great...
Only, it wasn't.
And not because they are written for readers many years younger than me. A good book is a good book, a well-told story is a well-told story.
This is neither.
The problems start with the fact it's not until chapter five that you get a passage of prose more than four/five paragraphs long.
The opening chapters hop about so much it is impossible to settle in and get to know the world we're exploring – even if that is Blackpool in the '80s.
Now this may well work in script form. Dancing about between scenes is fine and adds pace to the drama. But not in a book.
Which leads to the second problem. As with the feel of many a late-period Classic Who story, you can feel the lack of care and attention. The writing is a bit loose, there's no depth to any of the characters, and the Toymaker is revealed almost by accident.
The Toymaker.
And all this is before you realise Williams really doesn't like Scousers. He's not even subtle about it.
By the end, rather then revelling in a great adventure you're willing every page to be the last (and there are only 120 of the buggers) while wishing they'd just made the damn thing after all.
Oh well. One down, two to go...
September 16, 2024
Originally planned for the screen, it's great to have this book fill a little gap. There were a few bits that left me wanting but the start of the book was great and the characters are fantastic; really captures Colin's doctor.
October 30, 2021
The first of several unmade Colin Baker stories to be novelised, The Nightmare Fair is written with a spring in its step thanks to Graham Williams. He produced Doctor Who during a whimsical period when Douglas Adams came aboard as script editor and occasional writer, and you can tell his interests lean towards humour. Some of the characters’ internal thoughts (and some of the dialogue) can be a bit florid, but as the story never got made (thanks to a hiatus of about 18 months) it makes sense to approach this as a novel where possible. It’s still as refreshingly short as most Target books.
There’s not a huge amount of plot: the Doctor and Peri find themselves in Blackpool which is secretly in the thrall of his old foe, the Celestial Toymaker. People have been kidnapped, including the young brother of Kevin who is desperate to investigate. Somewhere nearby the Toymaker is working on a final game for humanity - and hopes to defeat the Doctor at last.
There are lots of fun ideas here, such as a spooky trek through the innards of a disused fairground ride, and a motley crew of alarming-but-friendly aliens that would have been difficult to realise on screen. There are moments of pathos, such as the fate of one of the Toymaker’s elderly servants, and the fate of the Toymaker himself, which (though terrible) seems to come at a cost to the Doctor. But there’s also quite a lot of padding, as the Doctor and friends conspire in a prison cell for half the book. Peri’s journey through the fairground ride, it turns out, was pretty much just something to do. And any time spent with Kevin is arguably wasted, as he’s thoroughly uninteresting.
It culminates in the Doctor playing a shoot ‘em up video game; the mind boggles what that would have looked like on screen, and combined with his calculated dispatch of an evil henchman, it’s up to the reader whether this violent streak is typical of the Sixth Doctor or misses the mark of the character as a whole. (The inclusion of the sonic screwdriver, destroyed years earlier on screen, suggests Williams may not have had the current era too specifically in mind, though he writes Baker with the wordy bluster he deserves.)
It’s a quick and jolly read, despite some odd periods of inactivity. Also it makes a refreshing sequel to the Toymaker’s first story, resisting the obvious temptation to once again pit the Doctor against a load of random games before inevitably winning.
There’s not a huge amount of plot: the Doctor and Peri find themselves in Blackpool which is secretly in the thrall of his old foe, the Celestial Toymaker. People have been kidnapped, including the young brother of Kevin who is desperate to investigate. Somewhere nearby the Toymaker is working on a final game for humanity - and hopes to defeat the Doctor at last.
There are lots of fun ideas here, such as a spooky trek through the innards of a disused fairground ride, and a motley crew of alarming-but-friendly aliens that would have been difficult to realise on screen. There are moments of pathos, such as the fate of one of the Toymaker’s elderly servants, and the fate of the Toymaker himself, which (though terrible) seems to come at a cost to the Doctor. But there’s also quite a lot of padding, as the Doctor and friends conspire in a prison cell for half the book. Peri’s journey through the fairground ride, it turns out, was pretty much just something to do. And any time spent with Kevin is arguably wasted, as he’s thoroughly uninteresting.
It culminates in the Doctor playing a shoot ‘em up video game; the mind boggles what that would have looked like on screen, and combined with his calculated dispatch of an evil henchman, it’s up to the reader whether this violent streak is typical of the Sixth Doctor or misses the mark of the character as a whole. (The inclusion of the sonic screwdriver, destroyed years earlier on screen, suggests Williams may not have had the current era too specifically in mind, though he writes Baker with the wordy bluster he deserves.)
It’s a quick and jolly read, despite some odd periods of inactivity. Also it makes a refreshing sequel to the Toymaker’s first story, resisting the obvious temptation to once again pit the Doctor against a load of random games before inevitably winning.
September 12, 2014
There aren’t many Doctor Who books I haven’t read. In fact I’d forgotten I had this – a novelisation of a story which was planned for 1985 but which was cancelled along with the season it was intended for. Far be it from me to credit Michael Grade with making a sensible decision, but I don’t think the world is a sorrier place for ‘The Nightmare Fair’ never making it to the screen.
It’s too derivative – almost as if the producer and script editor had a shopping list of elements they wanted to include. A writer who used to work on the show (Graham Williams)? Check! An already-agreed location (Blackpool)? Check! A returning villain (the Celestial Toymaker)? Check! An over-enthusiastic schoolboy who finds reserves of courage he never knew he had? Check! A lot of bickering between the show’s leads? Check!
And the latter is the biggest problem. A lot of people don’t like the season that replaced this one – the overarching ‘Trial of a Time Lord’ story – but where it scores over the stories whose place it took is the way it refined Colin Baker’s Doctor as a good-natured hero rather than the bombastic, argumentative, verbose leading man he started life as. Yes, Virgin Books, BBC Books and Big Finish took enormous strides in making the character more likeable than his early TV incarnation would have suggested, but I’d argue that the process began in what turned out to be Baker’s final set of episodes. There’s no real sign of that here, though – the Doctor has moments of real spite, grumpiness and verbal diarrhoea, and although, in print form, we’re spared that awful costume he was forced to wear, we don’t have the inherent likeability of Baker’s performance to pull things through.
But I can’t blame a story for doing what it could only have been expected to do, in context. It’s very much of its time, and few would argue that that time was a good one for Doctor Who as a whole! What I find less easy to accept is, having decided to bring back the Toymaker, we don’t learn anything new about him. Nor does he *do* anything of note. So what was the point?
I so much wanted to like this one. But I can only suggest you give Big Finish’s full-cast audio adaptation a go instead. This isn’t a bad novelisation, but there’s no disguising the lack of clarity which seemed to inform the original story.
Unremarkable.
It’s too derivative – almost as if the producer and script editor had a shopping list of elements they wanted to include. A writer who used to work on the show (Graham Williams)? Check! An already-agreed location (Blackpool)? Check! A returning villain (the Celestial Toymaker)? Check! An over-enthusiastic schoolboy who finds reserves of courage he never knew he had? Check! A lot of bickering between the show’s leads? Check!
And the latter is the biggest problem. A lot of people don’t like the season that replaced this one – the overarching ‘Trial of a Time Lord’ story – but where it scores over the stories whose place it took is the way it refined Colin Baker’s Doctor as a good-natured hero rather than the bombastic, argumentative, verbose leading man he started life as. Yes, Virgin Books, BBC Books and Big Finish took enormous strides in making the character more likeable than his early TV incarnation would have suggested, but I’d argue that the process began in what turned out to be Baker’s final set of episodes. There’s no real sign of that here, though – the Doctor has moments of real spite, grumpiness and verbal diarrhoea, and although, in print form, we’re spared that awful costume he was forced to wear, we don’t have the inherent likeability of Baker’s performance to pull things through.
But I can’t blame a story for doing what it could only have been expected to do, in context. It’s very much of its time, and few would argue that that time was a good one for Doctor Who as a whole! What I find less easy to accept is, having decided to bring back the Toymaker, we don’t learn anything new about him. Nor does he *do* anything of note. So what was the point?
I so much wanted to like this one. But I can only suggest you give Big Finish’s full-cast audio adaptation a go instead. This isn’t a bad novelisation, but there’s no disguising the lack of clarity which seemed to inform the original story.
Unremarkable.
Read
March 21, 2022Funny to think that there was once a time that I found the idea of the ‘missing’ Season 23 utterly thrilling and a dreadful loss compared to the more prosaic Trial of a Time Lord that we got. The Celestial Toymaker! Ice Warriors! Autons! To a young fan it sounded far more like a ‘proper’ season of Doctor Who than the drama-less courtroom drama we ended up with.
And in a way it’s a shame that we’re not allowed to enjoy those illusory fantasies any more. These days we are blessed (or cursed) with an overabundance of cold, hard facts, the ‘missing stories’ realised with full underwhelming clarity by Big Finish. I have listened to that adaptation and frankly been baffled by what seemed to me a noisy mess; so finally, I picked this up – and in a way, this is where the death of uninformed imaginings all started, a 1989 novelisation by the story’s original writer, arguably the closest we will get to an impression of what it would actually have been.
…which is a noisy mess. The period in which the story would have been made is effectively evoked, all too well at times – you can see the garish, hyperactive sets, hear the vulgar, overloud incidental music, and an unrepentantly loud and rude sixth Doctor absolutely leaps off the page. No small part of this impression is due to the lurid verbosity on display, part Eric Saward, part Pip and Jane Baker: ‘the resulting washing of impurities from his several subconscious levels should have done wonders for his powers of concentration, but it wasn’t working out that way and the present state of sublimity he had achieved was driving him potty’. Absolutely nobody talks like a real person in this novel, least of all the narrator, and that too is entirely authentic to 1985 Who. (I am, incidentally, a fan of this era, but find its excesses a little hard to stomach, and this appears to be the work of somebody who has overdosed on them.)
Even so, I find myself left with more questions than answers. The first of which is: why on earth was Graham Williams asked to write it at all? A former producer, responsible for a season that was still considered by fans in 1985 to be the worst atrocity ever committed in the name of Doctor Who, is hardly an obvious choice of writer, particularly as he appears to actively dislike what the programme has become – he writes the sixth Doctor with barely contained distaste (though since he also writes the Doctor with a sonic screwdriver it’s not clear how well he has followed the series at all). Perhaps JNT and Saward assumed that a former producer would be well placed to manage to the restrictions of budget and resources, in which case they were presumably aghast to see the man responsible for the Creature from the Pit landing them with no fewer than four unrealisable monsters (though the book cover does quite a convincing job of depicting how rubbish at least one of them would have looked).
Perhaps Williams was seen as a safe pair of hands for a story that began with a clear ‘shopping list’ – but why that shopping list in the first place? Why Blackpool?! There is some irony (again) in the man behind City of Death completely failing to exploit a location; as if consciously setting itself up as a shit version of that earlier story, this begins at the top of the Blackpool Tower, before completely failing to make any use of the setting. Sure, you can see how the opening of this story would have resembled a promo for Blackpool Pleasure Beach – the Doctor and Peri on a rollercoaster is more Late, Late Breakfast Show than Doctor Who, along with the repeated punchline where an apparent threat turns out to be just a ride, but there is no real attempt to give this story a sense of place or even to make use of the arcade setting that is the tenuous reason for the Toymaker’s presence there.
Ah yes: the Toymaker. The ultimate shopping list ‘why?!!’. Bringing back a one-off character from four never-repeated episodes of a story broadcast 20 years earlier might have made sense to Ian Levine, but as decisions go its even more bonkers than Attack of the Cybermen’s reliance on stories from the 60s – at least young viewers would probably recognise the Cybermen. (Any fans devoted enough to recognise Michael Gough would most likely have assumed he was Hedin from Arc of Infinity, further confusing the matter.) And yet the story seems to assume that we are already aware of the character, eschewing any kind of explanation or back story. The book takes that assumption one step further, largely referring to him as ‘The Mandarin’, so you need to look at the cover for clues (whilst turning a blind eye to some awkward racism).
Most glaringly of all: where is the story?! Slight spoiler alert: after the bit where the-Doctor-enjoys-Blackpool, he spends most of the story in a jail cell, while Peri wanders around some caves. There’s not enough here to sustain a single 25-minute episode, let alone the two 45 minute chunks this would have been broken into, and the climactic Doctor-plays-a-computer-game sequence might have seemed like a good idea on paper, but… no, actually even on paper it doesn’t seem like a good idea. A man sitting at a games console doesn’t make any more dramatic sense than a revelatory showdown with a villain we know nothing about.
In the context of an era of Doctor Who that was sometimes a bit messy but nevertheless packed with incident, it’s hard to imagine any of this working. Yet by all accounts this was the most developed of all of the Season 23 ideas, with studio sessions booked – so perhaps Colin Baker really would have been stuck in a prison set talking to himself endlessly, or trying to sell a ride on the rollercoaster as entertainment.
As it turned out, by the time the sixth Doctor had a climactic engagement on a computer, he was fully immersed in a surreal fantasy landscape in the Matrix: and if this book is anything to judge by, thank goodness for that.
And in a way it’s a shame that we’re not allowed to enjoy those illusory fantasies any more. These days we are blessed (or cursed) with an overabundance of cold, hard facts, the ‘missing stories’ realised with full underwhelming clarity by Big Finish. I have listened to that adaptation and frankly been baffled by what seemed to me a noisy mess; so finally, I picked this up – and in a way, this is where the death of uninformed imaginings all started, a 1989 novelisation by the story’s original writer, arguably the closest we will get to an impression of what it would actually have been.
…which is a noisy mess. The period in which the story would have been made is effectively evoked, all too well at times – you can see the garish, hyperactive sets, hear the vulgar, overloud incidental music, and an unrepentantly loud and rude sixth Doctor absolutely leaps off the page. No small part of this impression is due to the lurid verbosity on display, part Eric Saward, part Pip and Jane Baker: ‘the resulting washing of impurities from his several subconscious levels should have done wonders for his powers of concentration, but it wasn’t working out that way and the present state of sublimity he had achieved was driving him potty’. Absolutely nobody talks like a real person in this novel, least of all the narrator, and that too is entirely authentic to 1985 Who. (I am, incidentally, a fan of this era, but find its excesses a little hard to stomach, and this appears to be the work of somebody who has overdosed on them.)
Even so, I find myself left with more questions than answers. The first of which is: why on earth was Graham Williams asked to write it at all? A former producer, responsible for a season that was still considered by fans in 1985 to be the worst atrocity ever committed in the name of Doctor Who, is hardly an obvious choice of writer, particularly as he appears to actively dislike what the programme has become – he writes the sixth Doctor with barely contained distaste (though since he also writes the Doctor with a sonic screwdriver it’s not clear how well he has followed the series at all). Perhaps JNT and Saward assumed that a former producer would be well placed to manage to the restrictions of budget and resources, in which case they were presumably aghast to see the man responsible for the Creature from the Pit landing them with no fewer than four unrealisable monsters (though the book cover does quite a convincing job of depicting how rubbish at least one of them would have looked).
Perhaps Williams was seen as a safe pair of hands for a story that began with a clear ‘shopping list’ – but why that shopping list in the first place? Why Blackpool?! There is some irony (again) in the man behind City of Death completely failing to exploit a location; as if consciously setting itself up as a shit version of that earlier story, this begins at the top of the Blackpool Tower, before completely failing to make any use of the setting. Sure, you can see how the opening of this story would have resembled a promo for Blackpool Pleasure Beach – the Doctor and Peri on a rollercoaster is more Late, Late Breakfast Show than Doctor Who, along with the repeated punchline where an apparent threat turns out to be just a ride, but there is no real attempt to give this story a sense of place or even to make use of the arcade setting that is the tenuous reason for the Toymaker’s presence there.
Ah yes: the Toymaker. The ultimate shopping list ‘why?!!’. Bringing back a one-off character from four never-repeated episodes of a story broadcast 20 years earlier might have made sense to Ian Levine, but as decisions go its even more bonkers than Attack of the Cybermen’s reliance on stories from the 60s – at least young viewers would probably recognise the Cybermen. (Any fans devoted enough to recognise Michael Gough would most likely have assumed he was Hedin from Arc of Infinity, further confusing the matter.) And yet the story seems to assume that we are already aware of the character, eschewing any kind of explanation or back story. The book takes that assumption one step further, largely referring to him as ‘The Mandarin’, so you need to look at the cover for clues (whilst turning a blind eye to some awkward racism).
Most glaringly of all: where is the story?! Slight spoiler alert: after the bit where the-Doctor-enjoys-Blackpool, he spends most of the story in a jail cell, while Peri wanders around some caves. There’s not enough here to sustain a single 25-minute episode, let alone the two 45 minute chunks this would have been broken into, and the climactic Doctor-plays-a-computer-game sequence might have seemed like a good idea on paper, but… no, actually even on paper it doesn’t seem like a good idea. A man sitting at a games console doesn’t make any more dramatic sense than a revelatory showdown with a villain we know nothing about.
In the context of an era of Doctor Who that was sometimes a bit messy but nevertheless packed with incident, it’s hard to imagine any of this working. Yet by all accounts this was the most developed of all of the Season 23 ideas, with studio sessions booked – so perhaps Colin Baker really would have been stuck in a prison set talking to himself endlessly, or trying to sell a ride on the rollercoaster as entertainment.
As it turned out, by the time the sixth Doctor had a climactic engagement on a computer, he was fully immersed in a surreal fantasy landscape in the Matrix: and if this book is anything to judge by, thank goodness for that.
January 31, 2011
Another under-rated classic...this time, a classic that NEVER happened. This is former-Doctor Who producer Graham Williams' novelization of his own abandoned story for the 1986 season that was put on hold, in favour of "The Trial of a Time Lord".
Williams suffered many brickbats as producer during the tumultuous late 1970s...but this novelization reveals that he's a fantastic writer, with a keen turn of phrase, and a surprisingly powerful command of the bombastic 6th Doctor, as played by Colin Baker. Not to have seen this filmed for television means we were robbed of something wonderful. Thankfully, this thoroughly enjoyable, sublime book has been left behind for fans to cherish in its place.
Williams suffered many brickbats as producer during the tumultuous late 1970s...but this novelization reveals that he's a fantastic writer, with a keen turn of phrase, and a surprisingly powerful command of the bombastic 6th Doctor, as played by Colin Baker. Not to have seen this filmed for television means we were robbed of something wonderful. Thankfully, this thoroughly enjoyable, sublime book has been left behind for fans to cherish in its place.
August 25, 2024
4.5 stars!
Astonishing that Williams doesn’t have other writing credits like this. It’s great!
I was worried about revisiting this novelization, thinking the time between first reading it and now would reveal that “the memory cheats.” In other words, did I love it as a kid for reasons it doesn’t really deserve in 2024? This was the first DW novel I bought with “my own money.” I was on vacation and found a bookstore (Waldenbooks, probably), and had only a small amount of time to decide. The fact that it was a “lost” adventure appealed hugely, since it challenged the “I know all of Who” mentality that’s all too easy to adopt. I remember devouring it and enjoying it, but over the decades the lasting impression was just “Mandarin”/arcade/crunchcrunchcrunch.
But the memory does not cheat! Even though this was published years later, it feels authentic to this era of Who. Colin’s Doctor is very recognizable, Peri is outwardly herself, and I can hear Gough, age-appropriately, in the Toymaker’s dialog. The plot works like and is paced like stories from the season leading to the hiatus, with mini-act breaks at the end of each chapter, with cliffhanger-ish major breaks every few. Heck, it even more or less holds to the usual page count!
Since this was never produced for television, it can’t suffer or benefit from “changing” things. There are definitely effects in the plot that would have been disappointingly/hilariously rendered in that medium. “The Mechanic” might have been deliberately designed in response to this. The other prisoners _had_ to be “difficult for tv” by design, and are all the more endearing for it. The Cotton Candy Monster idea does seem like a lot of fun to attempt in reality, though. The “video game” is integral to the plot, and could have gone any number of ways, but who knows, maybe an enterprising fan at the time would have volunteered some lost sleep and rendering hours to produce something avant-garde. This novel knows its medium, and plays with that lack of limitation to good effect.
There are a few time-capsule moments, of course, where cultural sensitivity has thankfully improved since. There’s a nod to the idea of appropriation in a line of the Doctor’s, unfortunately balanced out by re-use of the word “inscrutable.” Kevin’s “accent” is inconsistent to the point that I thought it was deliberate, and backtracked a little once the mind-control/duplicate concept was brought up, to double-check. Other characters have odd, but thankfully minimal inconsistencies. Peri’s inner monologue across all the novelizations has no consistency, which is understandable, and here is no different. It’s a wash when inwardly she’s witty, because she’s not phrasing things the way an “american” would, let alone her character up to that point. The Doctor gets a few Generic Condescending Edwardian moments, but it was funny to see it echoed in “SB”’s dialog soon after, and Peri even gets an “old chap” at his (oblivious) expense!
What doesn’t work? “Video game panic” would have been dated by 1989, and arguably would have seemed repetitive rather than novel in 1985/6. It has become quaint, which I didn’t really find distracting. It isn’t over-used in the novel, and instead the focus is really on the adventure. The Toymaker’s Grand Plan is slowly revealed but doesn’t really make any sense at scale, nor is it a Big Reveal In Hindsight. The Doctor and Peri get their own separate adventures for most of the book, so we don’t get as much page-time for their relationship as I would’ve liked.
That said, the Doctor finally understanding the Toymaker, _that_ relationship is where the book goes above and beyond. There’s typical Master-Doctor chummy-respect-despite-enemies dialog throughout that I enjoyed. But the moment where the Doctor comprehends the loneliness is beautiful. Finding a very human, universal truth in a setting as silly as this is a difficult tone and moment to pull off, and it does so in the right moment, with the right amount of surprise.
Well done Williams!
Astonishing that Williams doesn’t have other writing credits like this. It’s great!
I was worried about revisiting this novelization, thinking the time between first reading it and now would reveal that “the memory cheats.” In other words, did I love it as a kid for reasons it doesn’t really deserve in 2024? This was the first DW novel I bought with “my own money.” I was on vacation and found a bookstore (Waldenbooks, probably), and had only a small amount of time to decide. The fact that it was a “lost” adventure appealed hugely, since it challenged the “I know all of Who” mentality that’s all too easy to adopt. I remember devouring it and enjoying it, but over the decades the lasting impression was just “Mandarin”/arcade/crunchcrunchcrunch.
But the memory does not cheat! Even though this was published years later, it feels authentic to this era of Who. Colin’s Doctor is very recognizable, Peri is outwardly herself, and I can hear Gough, age-appropriately, in the Toymaker’s dialog. The plot works like and is paced like stories from the season leading to the hiatus, with mini-act breaks at the end of each chapter, with cliffhanger-ish major breaks every few. Heck, it even more or less holds to the usual page count!
Since this was never produced for television, it can’t suffer or benefit from “changing” things. There are definitely effects in the plot that would have been disappointingly/hilariously rendered in that medium. “The Mechanic” might have been deliberately designed in response to this. The other prisoners _had_ to be “difficult for tv” by design, and are all the more endearing for it. The Cotton Candy Monster idea does seem like a lot of fun to attempt in reality, though. The “video game” is integral to the plot, and could have gone any number of ways, but who knows, maybe an enterprising fan at the time would have volunteered some lost sleep and rendering hours to produce something avant-garde. This novel knows its medium, and plays with that lack of limitation to good effect.
There are a few time-capsule moments, of course, where cultural sensitivity has thankfully improved since. There’s a nod to the idea of appropriation in a line of the Doctor’s, unfortunately balanced out by re-use of the word “inscrutable.” Kevin’s “accent” is inconsistent to the point that I thought it was deliberate, and backtracked a little once the mind-control/duplicate concept was brought up, to double-check. Other characters have odd, but thankfully minimal inconsistencies. Peri’s inner monologue across all the novelizations has no consistency, which is understandable, and here is no different. It’s a wash when inwardly she’s witty, because she’s not phrasing things the way an “american” would, let alone her character up to that point. The Doctor gets a few Generic Condescending Edwardian moments, but it was funny to see it echoed in “SB”’s dialog soon after, and Peri even gets an “old chap” at his (oblivious) expense!
What doesn’t work? “Video game panic” would have been dated by 1989, and arguably would have seemed repetitive rather than novel in 1985/6. It has become quaint, which I didn’t really find distracting. It isn’t over-used in the novel, and instead the focus is really on the adventure. The Toymaker’s Grand Plan is slowly revealed but doesn’t really make any sense at scale, nor is it a Big Reveal In Hindsight. The Doctor and Peri get their own separate adventures for most of the book, so we don’t get as much page-time for their relationship as I would’ve liked.
That said, the Doctor finally understanding the Toymaker, _that_ relationship is where the book goes above and beyond. There’s typical Master-Doctor chummy-respect-despite-enemies dialog throughout that I enjoyed. But the moment where the Doctor comprehends the loneliness is beautiful. Finding a very human, universal truth in a setting as silly as this is a difficult tone and moment to pull off, and it does so in the right moment, with the right amount of surprise.
Well done Williams!
November 27, 2023
In 1987, Doctor Who was put on hiatus, and the original plans for Season 23 were scrapped. However, a few of these scrapped stories were destined to be reborn as novelizations, namely "The Nightmare Fair," "The Ultimate Evil," and "Mission to Magnus." "The Nightmare Fair was especially notable for featuring the return of the Celestial Toymaker, who hadn't been seen since 1966.
The Celestial Toymaker is a problematic character. Casting a white actor as an Asian character may have been acceptable in the 1960s, but it has aged poorly, to say the next. Unfortunately, over twenty years later, this unsavory choice had still not been corrected, as Michael Gough was placed on the cover of the novelization, suggesting that the Toymaker looked the same as he did in the original serial. The problem here lies in the fact that Williams constantly refers to the Toymaker as "the Mandarin," even after his identity is revealed. This left a bad impression, which I was unable to remove, no matter how much I thought about the book.
The story is good. The Doctor at a funfair is an original idea, and it is fun to see his interactions there with Peri. All in all, this story has the makings of a strong Sixth Doctor story, something difficult to find in 1989. There are even new alien races that are actually fascinating to read about, yet the story is let down by its writing. Williams' constant scene jumps keep the story confusing, and this is only furthered by his decision to cut information, leaving it up to the reader to fill in the gaps in the story when characters appear or disappear from places they hadn't been before. This ultimately ends up being a confusing read, and I'm not entirely sure it was worth it, despite how much I did enjoy the story itself.
A large part of the fun of the original serial featuring the Toymaker was watching the Doctor and his companions play the Toymaker's games. Unfortunatley, we don't see much of that here. A single game is played: an arcade game which the Doctor plays at the end of the story, and which we never see the Toymaker himself play. This was rather disappointing as it felt like the Toymaker could have been replaced by any other villain and the story would have been the same.
Review from my Doctor Who review site at https://wanderingwhovian.weebly.com/h...
The Celestial Toymaker is a problematic character. Casting a white actor as an Asian character may have been acceptable in the 1960s, but it has aged poorly, to say the next. Unfortunately, over twenty years later, this unsavory choice had still not been corrected, as Michael Gough was placed on the cover of the novelization, suggesting that the Toymaker looked the same as he did in the original serial. The problem here lies in the fact that Williams constantly refers to the Toymaker as "the Mandarin," even after his identity is revealed. This left a bad impression, which I was unable to remove, no matter how much I thought about the book.
The story is good. The Doctor at a funfair is an original idea, and it is fun to see his interactions there with Peri. All in all, this story has the makings of a strong Sixth Doctor story, something difficult to find in 1989. There are even new alien races that are actually fascinating to read about, yet the story is let down by its writing. Williams' constant scene jumps keep the story confusing, and this is only furthered by his decision to cut information, leaving it up to the reader to fill in the gaps in the story when characters appear or disappear from places they hadn't been before. This ultimately ends up being a confusing read, and I'm not entirely sure it was worth it, despite how much I did enjoy the story itself.
A large part of the fun of the original serial featuring the Toymaker was watching the Doctor and his companions play the Toymaker's games. Unfortunatley, we don't see much of that here. A single game is played: an arcade game which the Doctor plays at the end of the story, and which we never see the Toymaker himself play. This was rather disappointing as it felt like the Toymaker could have been replaced by any other villain and the story would have been the same.
Review from my Doctor Who review site at https://wanderingwhovian.weebly.com/h...
December 12, 2019
This is a novelization of the sole Doctor Who script independently written by controversial former Doctor Who producer Graham Williams. Often criticized for an overly jokey style with too many "let's send up Doctor Who" moments, Williams' story is a welcome relief from these excesses. The script was scheduled to be part of the second season for Doctor Six, which was scrapped. Then producer John Nathan-Turner decided to go a different, and equally controversial, route once the show started up again with the ill-fated "Trial of a Timelord." Williams' "The Nightmare Fair" is evidence that Nathan-Turner should probably have stuck with his original commissions. "The Nightmare Fair" features the return of The Celestial Toymaker, who would have been played by Michael Gough reprising his 1966 role. This time, the Toymaker is making mischief at the fair grounds in Blackpool. It seems small consequences for the Toymaker, but Williams has supplied fairly good reasons for this. This novelization is very readable. Williams writes it as if it were intended to be a novel, and not as a reformatted script. He still uses a humorous approach to much of the writing, but not with too many jokes that stop the flow of the story, and with no out of place poking fun at the show. His writing for Peri is especially good compared to how she had been written in the TV series up to that point. Here, she is more active in the plot, and generally more intelligent, not merely the young woman who gets captured and rescued. There are a few places where the story could be tightened, especially at the beginning with the police, who get one scene and then appear no more, and with a few too many loose ends at the close. In total, however, this is a very entertaining read.
July 27, 2021
A definite step up on Mission to Magnus, as doesn't have the drawbacks that one does, though I think the actual underlying story of the prior one had more potential than this one.
This one is good at giving more backstory to the Celestial Toymaker, albeit I think it has been contradicted in more recent tales, and the Toymaker does make for an interesting antagonist I think, though I preferred the somewhat more metaphysical style of the original Toymaker story than this one that seems to want to give it a bit more of a scientific bent.
The Doctor and Peri are in pretty good form here I think, both being proactive, and both taking the damsel in distress roles at times, though Peri a bit slower off the mark at times than normal I think, and their interactions with the Toymaker make for good scenes.
The other one off characters seem a bit more one dimensional though, and the overall plan for the Toymaker just doesn't quite hang together for me, seems a lot of effort for something he could likely readily achieve more easily in other ways.
Overall though, not a bad read.
This one is good at giving more backstory to the Celestial Toymaker, albeit I think it has been contradicted in more recent tales, and the Toymaker does make for an interesting antagonist I think, though I preferred the somewhat more metaphysical style of the original Toymaker story than this one that seems to want to give it a bit more of a scientific bent.
The Doctor and Peri are in pretty good form here I think, both being proactive, and both taking the damsel in distress roles at times, though Peri a bit slower off the mark at times than normal I think, and their interactions with the Toymaker make for good scenes.
The other one off characters seem a bit more one dimensional though, and the overall plan for the Toymaker just doesn't quite hang together for me, seems a lot of effort for something he could likely readily achieve more easily in other ways.
Overall though, not a bad read.
February 3, 2020
While it was nice to see the return of an old villain, the story is very slow moving with a lot pages wasted on Perry running away from ride automatons like look like Old West gold miners. Ends with the Doctor in a dated video game battle.
Overall, a disappointment from the late Graham Williams, one my favorite Dr. Who producers.
Overall, a disappointment from the late Graham Williams, one my favorite Dr. Who producers.
September 9, 2020
I picked up this book because I enjoyed the the Doctor Who episode that introduced the Celestial Toymaker. I did not like this book as much as I liked that story. The characters were superficially created and I was not invested in their well being. The story was a bit chaotic and the only thing that allowed me to finish the book was that it was not very long.
July 6, 2021
One of the "lost" Doctor Who stories in which the villain is no-one else but the good old Celestial Toymaker. The prose is a tiny bit bumpy and the story start slow but for fans (especially for the fans of the 6th Doctor - I know that they exist) is a must. After reading the book highly recommended to listen to the audiodrama format made by Big Finish which is even better it that`s possible.
November 27, 2023
Read this because it concerns a character we are about to see on TV.
Very enjoyable. I listened to the audiobook (the written copy is hard to track down) and it was well done.
Will be interesting to see if they treat any of this as canon in the show. I doubt it.
Very enjoyable. I listened to the audiobook (the written copy is hard to track down) and it was well done.
Will be interesting to see if they treat any of this as canon in the show. I doubt it.
February 16, 2024
This was only a so-so adventure. I like how the 6th Doctor is written differently from his on-screen version, but the side characters aren't particular memorable, and the plot is a little all over the place. Like the setting of Blackpool though.
June 22, 2017
meh
It was Dr. Who, so that gives it 6 six out of ten, but the writing was poor to bad.
It was Dr. Who, so that gives it 6 six out of ten, but the writing was poor to bad.
April 11, 2021
Really nothing special about this story.
September 1, 2023
A brilliant return of the celestial toymaker in a missing story from the 80s that was never made a great story
September 6, 2025
Colin Baker
Spotify
they should have done these for his TV stories
big finish rules
Spotify
they should have done these for his TV stories
big finish rules
Read
April 8, 2009http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1287541.html#cutid1[return][return]This is a comeback story in a couple of ways: Williams had been the producer of Doctor Who in the later Tom Baker era, now returning to try his hand at writing a script for the show; and the villain is the Celestial Toymaker, who had featured in a 1966 story turning William Hartnell's Doctor invisible and subjecting companions Dodo and Steven to playing a series of deadly games. This time round the Toymaker has set up shop in Blackpool, and the Sixth Doctor and Peri have to pursue him through a deadly amusement arcade to prevent him from Taking Ovar The Wurld, helped by a young man named Kevin Stoney (who must have been named for the actor who had portrayed the two great early Who supervillains, Mavic Chen and Tobias Vaughn).[return][return]It's not hugely inspiring stuff, but no doubt would have been rescuable with decent performances and effects (and coming at the start of the season it would probably have got them). I have heard a fan-produced audio version which is utterly deflated by the poor performance of the person playing Peri, and of course didn't have the resources that Big Finish will bring to it. Fans of the Toymaker, if there are any, will probably find The Magic Mousetrap, the recent Big Finish play with the Seventh Doctor, more satisfying.
February 10, 2011
Missing Episode with the sixth Doctor and Peri. Worth reading for the sake of reading but not if you're looking for something with any weight. Not much actually happens and the ending is a rushed deus ex machina. There is one two-page bit that is the very essence of the Toymaker; it's the most effectively written part of the book. Peri is well served even though she doesn't get much in the way of character. The prose is somewhat overdone, so it's more of a slog than I like, but plenty of popular books have thicker. Some sentences could do with some rearranging of their clauses. There's a sonic screwdriver cum magic wand that wouldn't be present. The resolution is too convenient, as we were given no grounds to buy into it. (A simple 'The Doctor fiddled with the device for a moment.' would have been an improvement.) And just what WAS Geoff doing during all this?
May 23, 2008
The 'Missing episode trilogy were all books that were supposed to be part of Colin Baker's run as the Doctor. Due to various shenanigans at the BBC it never happened.
Shame as it's a fun story that would have made a good episode. Colin could have used a few more of those. He was a great Doctor but did not have the best stories.
Nightmare Fair features the Celestial Toymaker, an omnipotent trouble maker, similar to 'Q' from Star Trek. The Toymaker should have been brought back more as he was a cool character, nicely different from the usual 'wants to take overt the universe' types.
He also has an nice assortment of minions.
Setting the story in an amusement park was also a fun idea.
Shame as it's a fun story that would have made a good episode. Colin could have used a few more of those. He was a great Doctor but did not have the best stories.
Nightmare Fair features the Celestial Toymaker, an omnipotent trouble maker, similar to 'Q' from Star Trek. The Toymaker should have been brought back more as he was a cool character, nicely different from the usual 'wants to take overt the universe' types.
He also has an nice assortment of minions.
Setting the story in an amusement park was also a fun idea.
May 14, 2016
I honestly don't know how I managed to finish this stupid book. It's literally a hundred pages of the Doctor being imprisoned and Peri walking around aimlessly. THEN once the Doctor confronts the Mandarin (ugh), Williams spend 25 pages having the characters talk about squaring off.
That leaves about ten pages of ACTUALLY plot development.
How is it possible that this was even considered as a possible script to be shot and produced? How is it possible that someone was able to create an even WORSE product than 80's Doctor Who had been producing?? How is it possible that I'm still thinking about this atrocity??
That leaves about ten pages of ACTUALLY plot development.
How is it possible that this was even considered as a possible script to be shot and produced? How is it possible that someone was able to create an even WORSE product than 80's Doctor Who had been producing?? How is it possible that I'm still thinking about this atrocity??
July 1, 2013
The prose was somewhat overly verbose, though that could conceivably be construed as appropriate for the Sixth Doctor's era. Overall it was fun seeing the Doctor go to the fun fair and enjoy himself. The scenes where people are imprisoned go on far too long. In fact, the whole book seems to go on too long. This could have benefited from Terrance Dicks' prose style. But I enjoyed finding out what happened, and I really liked the villainous Toymaker and the righteous indignation of the Doctor.
October 28, 2013
SHORT REVIEW: Reads exactly like a Sixth Doctor adventure because it was, it was just never filmed. Now, imagine the Doctor in the black suit that he wanted to wear (instead of that late 80's music video monstrosity) and play the Series 6 soundtrack while you read, and entertainment happens.
Bonus shorty: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/thebatgr...
Bonus shorty: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/thebatgr...
September 4, 2015
A novelization of one of the unproduced Sixth Doctor scripts from the original series. Unfortunately, it feels very much like an early draft of the story it was meant to tell. It's almost got a dreamlike feel, but rather than being by design, one assumes it was from incompleteness. Bit disappointed.
April 9, 2013
So far, so good.
Decent story, the characters do sensible things, and the Doctor manages to trap the villain in a satisfying manner.
Perfectly fine for reading while I'm pinned down and not otherwise occupied.
Decent story, the characters do sensible things, and the Doctor manages to trap the villain in a satisfying manner.
Perfectly fine for reading while I'm pinned down and not otherwise occupied.
July 19, 2016
This would have made a great episode if it had been put in to production. Not as good as Divided Loyalties but a satisfying enough read. Makes a nice conclusion to the trilogy of The Celestial Toymaker (if you include the target novelization of the episode and the PDA Divided Loyalties).
May 30, 2012
Very enjoyable, Williams captures the 6th Doctor excellently, a great shame this was never made into a TV serial.
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