Doctor Who: Jubilee

Doctor Who: Big Finish novelisations #1

by Robert Shearman

"The Doctor and the Daleks. Have you never thought they are really both the exact same thing?"

It is time to celebrate! Let all the citizens of the glorious English Empire come together and give thanks to that mysterious soldier in time and space known only as the Doctor. For 100 years ago he destroyed a Dalek invasion force without mercy, and became the saviour of us all.

We have just one real Dalek left. Kept alive in the Tower of London, all these years our prisoner. And tomorrow we are going to blow it up, just for you! So put up your Dalek bunting and raise a glass of Dalek Juice. Who knows, there may be a special guest in attendance – the Doctor himself! Oh, you lucky people! Time to get this party started...

Award-winning author Robert Shearman has penned a brand new, radical reinterpretation of his classic Jubilee - the best-selling Big Finish audio play that became the basis of his Doctor Who TV episode, Dalek.

This special edition hardback comes with cover artwork and line illustrations that are not in the standard edition, and is strictly limited to 500 copies.

Genres: Doctor Who, Time Travel, Science Fiction

240 pages, Hardcover

First published October 9, 2025

About the author

Robert Shearman has worked as a writer for television, radio and the stage. He was appointed resident dramatist at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter and has received several international awards for his theatrical work, including the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the World Drama Trust Award and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity in association with the Royal National Theatre. His plays have been regularly produced by Alan Ayckbourn, and on BBC Radio by Martin Jarvis. However, he is probably best known as a writer for Doctor Who, reintroducing the Daleks for its BAFTA winning first series, in an episode nominated for a Hugo Award.

His first collection of short stories, Tiny Deaths, was published by Comma Press in 2007. It won the World Fantasy Award for best collection, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. One of the stories from it was selected by the National Library Board of Singapore as part of the annual Read! Singapore campaign. In 2008 his short story project for BBC7, The Chain Gang, won him a Sony Award, and he provided a second series for them in 2009.

He is now at work on his first novel.

Reviews

[Kieran McAndrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A trip to 1903 for the Doctor and Evelyn goes sideways and they end up in 2003: in a London celebrating a century of freedom from the Daleks, who were defeated by the Doctor in an event he doesn't remember.

Shearman's novelisation of his 'Big Finish' audio drama has power. The Sixth Doctor is majestic and Evelyn is empathetic, working better in many ways than the Ninth Doctor and Rose in a similar plot. The ultimate realisation that the Doctor and the Daleks are indeed two faces of the same coin is interesting and metatextual. A free flowing novel, it works well whether or not you've experienced "Jubilee" or "Dalek" in their dramatic forms.

[Zélicoptère · Rating 5 out of 5]

and you're telling me Dr Who used to be THAT good???

[Jack Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every bit as brilliant as the iconic Big Finish play it's been adapted from.

[Jason Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novel of the audio story that became the tv episide Dalek . A good conceit that puts Daleks , our concepts of history and tradition and time lords under a caustic scanner . You can see how this became a battle between Daleks and doctor who were the last of their kinds on tv and caused both to question themselves . And I’m a sucker for alternative universes . The conundrum is deeper here - if absolute power is self destructive so real power and survival lie in it being all powerful where does that leave a race bred for nothing else?

[Stuart Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a Whovian since (almost) birth, I don’t spend much time reading Who fiction. I did as a child and teenager, with books from my local library during those 90s Wilderness Years; I’ve forgotten almost all of them.

An unforgettable writer, however, is Robert Shearman, who got into recent media-fabricated 'hot water' when he was quoted as declaring the show ‘as dead as it’s ever been’. In the days since, the BBC have announced the show has a future from 2026 – that’s all well and good, but it’s obvious the show is in a bad place. Shearman’s fair point was that, for the first time, we don’t have a ‘current’ Doctor in any new media.

Instead, our new media for 2025 includes his novelisation of Jubilee; originally a 2003 audio drama starring Colin Baker as good ol’ Sixie, and Maggie Stables as Evelyn Smythe. It’s one of the greatest audios the show has. So great, in fact, it was adapted into the TV episode ‘Dalek’ in 2005, when the show returned and reintroduced its iconic villain to audiences old and new for the first time since 1988.

Us lucky fans; Shearman wrote the ‘Dalek’ Target novelisation, published in 2021. Having read it a few weeks ago, I gave it 5 stars for sheer enjoyment. This is because Shearman is a great, natural writer; anyone who’s read his short story series ‘We All Hear Stories in the Dark’ can tell you. Shearman gets dark in his material, mostly around human nature. Jubilee is no exception.

What makes a Doctor Who novel great? Sure, you’ve got to get the Who part right. But this is subjective in fandom. Much of the writing around Who since the 90s has been about creating and expanding on a lore, an expanded universe – I’m far less interested in that. Doctor Who on TV was always best as an anthology series, telling different stories – sometimes a historical, sometimes a soft fantasy, sometimes a harder sci-fi. What Shearman does is tell a dark tale with soft science fiction elements around the characters and world of Doctor Who.

Jubilee is primarily about the darkness of human nature, and English arrogance, and reactionary sexism, and historical mythologising. It’s also about the Dalek – the absolutist hating, racist, and genocidal alien civilisation. Human societies can, as we know, become the Dalek in real life; after all, it was invented in the 1960s as a very conscious stand-in for Nazism. It’s also about the Doctor – why he travels with companions, why he interferes in events, and how the consequences of that interference are not always heroic or good. Because that is the nature of time travel – interrupting and interfering with lives and societies. It’s also about Evelyn, a character I knew very little about despite the audios, but whom Shearman imbues with a deep but conflicted passion for academic History – and how time travel itself interferes with that core part of her identity.

Shearman writes a dedication to the late Maggie Stables, and to Colin Baker – whom he calls the best Doctor to write for. I can see why. For a long time, the Sixth Doctor was my least favourite (not these days). That style of 80s-Who during his run is just not for me; but the BBC also treated Colin rather abysmally at the time. His tenure was remarkably short and controversial – attempting to strangle his companion in his first story is perhaps a lesser crime, however, than his costume. With decades of audio dramas, however, Colin’s Sixie has built upon essentially an almost-blank canvas, and become the greatest Doctor on audio alongside Paul MacGann’s Eight.

Shearman writes this Sixth Doctor as a conflicted, and slightly tragic, figure; this story feels like his darkest hour. It’s hard to place this Doctor in that context while also picturing his insanely eye-sore costume, but Shearman even addresses this more than once. And it works - Shearman writes the Sixth Doctor exactly as he should be written. In media beyond television and in my imaginings, Colin Baker's Doctor is one of my favourite characters in the Whoniverse, and Evelyn is the perfect companion for him.

It leaves me to say that no one writes the Daleks better than Shearman. With him it’s not the ‘villain of the week’; it’s not a lazy stand in for any old baddie. The Dalek is a philosophy of hatred and purity and taking orders and murder as its primary function. Telly viewers of ‘Dalek’ got some of this too, but Jubilee takes it to more engrossing and deeper level.

And what of the English Empire, with its banned contractions and oppression of women and subjugation of the Earth, and it’s obsession with the Daleks and the Doctor as the twin foundations of its civilisation? Read and find out.

Isn’t this nerdy? Doctor Who as literature!? Well, with Robert Shearman we get excellent fiction and great Doctor Who all in one. Next up: The Chimes of Midnight (2025)!

[Matthew Kresal · Rating 5 out of 5]

There was a time when there was no Doctor Who on television. During what’s come to be known as the Wilderness Era, Doctor Who lived on via novels and audio dramas. It was as part of the latter that saw the release of Jubilee in 2003, heralding in the series 40th anniversary with a script by Robert Shearman featuring Colin Baker’s Doctor and Maggie Stables as Evelyn Smythe. A story that was so strong that, when the Doctor came back to TV two years later, it became the foundation upon which the series best known villain received their 21st century screen debut. More than two decades later (and four years on from that TV episode itself being novelized), Shearman has revisited Jubilee as a novel to produce a curious piece of Doctor Who fiction.

Curious in part because it’s the first novelization of an audio story since, what? The Ghosts on N-Space thirty years earlier? As that might suggest, the track record for such novelizations isn’t exactly a winning one. Victor Pemberton spent years promising he could deliver a first-rate novelization of The Pescatons, only to deliver a subpar and padded expansion of a 45 minute audio drama. Eric Saward tried to pastiche Douglas Adams with both the radio and prose versions of Slipback to less than stellar results. Then, in the 1990s, Barry Letts offered hit and miss adaptations of both The Paradise of Death and the aforementioned Ghosts of N-Space that tended more towards the latter than the former. Perhaps it’s no wonder that it’s taken this long (and having a writer of Shearman’s caliber) before any of Big Finis’s prodigious output has made it to the page.

And the results? Superb.

It no doubt helps that Shearman’s original script for Jubilee stands head and shoulders over any of the above (though The Paradise of Death’s radio version worked as Letts doing an early nineties update of the Pertwee era). All of its strengths are preserved here: the Doctor and Evelyn, a dystopian Britain built on defeating the Daleks a century earlier with a lone Dalek in the Tower of London, and a temporal paradox at its heart. 2003 Shearman’s darkly comic sensibilities remain intact here, as well, as demonstrated by the Rochesters with husband Nigel as the mad leader of a notionally republician British empire and his wife Mariam. If you’re a Big Finish listener, particularly of the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn audios, there’s also a certain thrill in reading the two of them on the page together, doubly so in getting to have Evelyn spending time on her own coming to terms with this alternate version of what is her own recent past. So much of what made Jubilee the instant classic it became have made it to the page, and Shearman has even restored some moments cut from the original owing to time constraints.

But the blurb promised “a brand new, radical reinterpretation” of the audio. From the opening pages, it’s clear that this isn’t quite the same Jubilee that listeners have been enjoying since early 2003, given that the opening scene of the audio doesn’t appear until the second chapter. The opening episode is essentially re-sequenced as a result, but it also shows that Shearman wasn’t going to play it safe. This isn’t going to be a cut and paste, “x said” with the odd bit of description style of novelization.

Shearman breaks the curse of audio noveliations that doomed Pemberton, Saward, and Letts by understanding that, like his novelization of Dalek, this version of Jubilee needed to be built to stand on a new foundation. Not to mention doing so in an entirely new medium. Sometimes to work better in prose (such as the actually jubilee “celebration” late in the narrative where Shearman is able to better explain exactly how the paradox comes together at a crucial moment), but also to take advantage of what prose can offer. As well-realized as the lone Dalek was on audio, the portions where Shearman takes readers inside the casing to explore its captivity and what drives it towards its end are among the best pieces of Doctor Who prose you’re ever likely to come across. Shearman’s vision of a dystopian imperial Britain likewise builds not only upon the original script but how the world has gone since it was written, exploring both the power of nostalgia as a political force and the dangers of ignoring or making light of the darker chapters of history. Not to mention how Shearman takes the darkly comedic “Daleks do not sing!” scene from the original audio and rebuilds it to an even more devastating conclusion, all the while making a meta reference about the Dalek operators on-screen. The results are familiar but revelatory, illuminating the original audio but allowing this to be a standalone read.

It’s also something which makes this version of Jubilee more than a belated artifact of the Wilderness Era. Even if you’ve heard Jubilee more times than you can count or care to remember, there’s something in Shearman’s prose here to make this a worthwhile read as a piece of fiction in its own right. Or, in other words, a first-rate novelization and an excellent read to boot.

[Jacob Licklider · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jubilee more than The Chimes of Midnight, is Robert Shearman’s real tribute to the Target novelizations of his childhood. Despite being published in a hardcover format and boasting a more standard 200-page count, Jubilee is short. Publish this as a paperback and it would be the length of the standard Target novelization. That doesn’t mean Shearman is a slouch with writing, far from it, but it does mean that he is distilling his story down to not so much the base components, that was essentially what Dalek was, but down to the emotions and the rage at the world that has gotten worse since 2003. It is palpable on practically every page that Shearman is writing this in a world that has freely, through election given up so much of its own control over its government. Nigel Rochester hasn’t changed in the 22 years since Big Finish Productions released Jubilee on CD, he is still the madman who believes he is the hero in his own story: he is only pretending to be evil, you see, he would much rather be off on his own selling apples. Miriam Rochester wishes to overthrow the regime only to install a Dalek so she doesn’t have to make any of her own choices. Evelyn Smythe is given an almost negative light at the beginning of the novel, she really does believe by the end that her history is the better one than this fascist 2003 regime. The Doctor is the passive observer, slowly bleeding into his other self that has gone insane and to see the mocking, sexy parody of the dozens of incarnations on-screen.

The lack of choices being the source of humanity’s problems is central to Shearman’s thesis of Jubilee. There is a moment when describing the elections that instilled this fascist dynasty was a simple yes/no referendum in a reference not so subtly pointing towards the United Kingdom’s referendum to leave the European Union. Much of the story is framed through this lens of complete inaction and lack of identity: the names given to many of the supporting characters in the original audio are stripped away, this society doesn’t have need for names, names must be earned after service to the state. The citizens of Britain are bodies to be led to the slaughter, crowds to jeer, workers to control the best of all possible worlds. In removing the names, it is certain that some of the cruelties from the original audio are removed, but in their place is that smoothing over of identity that feels somehow more cruel. It certainly makes the Dalek more pitiable when Shearman explores what the Dalek life is, this Dalek is one of the oldest as it has been kept alive. The average Dalek lifespan is six months of hate followed by a swift death continuing to poison the universe. This means in the adaptation of the fourth episode, when the Dalek invasion reasserts itself, Shearman has the Dalek slowly feel a sense of superiority to the Supreme leading the invasion.

Overall, Jubilee again feels somehow more powerful in the format of prose because Shearman is making the reader sit with the ideas at play. It’s somehow more harrowing with that writing style that while full of wit, lacks much of the comedy. 10/10.

[James Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this mostly on a whim as I had a free day in between books. I own the special editions of both this novel and The Chimes of Midnight; however, I wasn't sure when I would get around to them. Today, well, yesterday was the day.

Earlier this year, I listened to the original audio drama of this story and loved it, possibly the best 6th Doctor story. I think there is certainly a space for this novelisation, and I am glad it exists, but I find the performances of Colin Baker and Maggie Stables to really add something. That being said, the benefits of this format were used well.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never heard the Big Finish Audio drama for this but was aware that the 2005 Doctor Who episode "Dalek" which was nominated for a Hugo award, also by Robert Shearman was based on the ideas in this story.
I enjoyed reading this, once I started, I struggled to put it down. Robert's writing is always good, and his sense of humor comes through so well. His characterization of the sixth Doctor comes across exactly like the Sixth Doctor, you can hear Colin Baker speaking as you read it.
A delight to read and definitely 5 stars.

[SuperPiggy5000 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good adaptation of the original audio drama. Wouldn't call it my favorite Dalek story like some, but still a darn good story that kept my interest all the way through despite knowing the original story.

[Dylan-man · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's good. Some changes from the audio, but I think the differences add to the book probably

[Chris Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite as good as the audio - the cast in that raised it a notch - particularly Martin Jarvis who really gave a perfect performance as Nigel.

I wish Rob would do more Doctor Who!

[Steve Matthewman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very enjoyable book 📖

[Keef · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still one of the best Who stories and the book adaptation feels even darker, not to mention incredibly prescient at this time.