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Past Doctor Adventures #70
Doctor Who: Match of the Day
There were the contracts, the agents, the local sponsors, the pay-per-view broadcasts, the independent verification of results, the laws which made murder legal in carefully defined circumstances... It had taken a long time for the system of freelance duelists to be established, and an even longer time to develop the league of interplanetary superstars the others fought to reach and to challenge. And just when it was all working satisfactorily and profitably someone or something started interfering with the set up. Famous fighters died in private duels. Up-and-coming professional fighters began to fall victim to casual, one-time challengers - the sort of psychos and testosterone-addled drunks who would themselves be expected to die quickly and routinely. When Leela is challenged to a duel to the death, the Doctor realizes that there is more to the situation than simple murder and mayhem. But before he can sort it out, he needs to save his client - Leela. How long can she survive on a planet where not to kill is an offense punishable by death?
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 3, 2005
1 person is currently reading
217 people want to read
About the author
Chris Boucher
18 books13 followersChristopher Franklin Boucher was a British television writer, best known for his frequent contributions to two genres, science fiction and crime dramas. Prior to becoming a television writer, Boucher had worked at Calor Gas as a management trainee and he also gained a Bachelor of Arts in Economics at the University of Essex.
In science fiction, he wrote three Doctor Who serials in the late 1970s: The Face of Evil, The Robots of Death and Image of the Fendahl. Perhaps his most durable contribution to Doctor Who mythology was the creation of Leela, the savage companion played by Louise Jameson. Boucher was commissioned for the programme by Robert Holmes, who would suggest that Boucher be appointed as script editor of new science fiction series Blake's 7. He served in this role for the entirety of its four season run from 1978 to 1981, also writing several episodes himself, including the well-remembered final episode. In 1987 he created his own series Star Cops, which combined the science fiction and crime genres, and lasted only nine episodes.
In the genre of police dramas, between working on Doctor Who and Blake's 7, Boucher was the script editor on the second season of the drama Shoestring, which followed the investigations of private detective and radio show host Eddie Shoestring. In 1982, following the end of Blake's 7, Boucher script edited and wrote for the third season police drama Juliet Bravo. He later moved on to script edit the detective show Bergerac, working on the programme throughout the 1980s.
In science fiction, he wrote three Doctor Who serials in the late 1970s: The Face of Evil, The Robots of Death and Image of the Fendahl. Perhaps his most durable contribution to Doctor Who mythology was the creation of Leela, the savage companion played by Louise Jameson. Boucher was commissioned for the programme by Robert Holmes, who would suggest that Boucher be appointed as script editor of new science fiction series Blake's 7. He served in this role for the entirety of its four season run from 1978 to 1981, also writing several episodes himself, including the well-remembered final episode. In 1987 he created his own series Star Cops, which combined the science fiction and crime genres, and lasted only nine episodes.
In the genre of police dramas, between working on Doctor Who and Blake's 7, Boucher was the script editor on the second season of the drama Shoestring, which followed the investigations of private detective and radio show host Eddie Shoestring. In 1982, following the end of Blake's 7, Boucher script edited and wrote for the third season police drama Juliet Bravo. He later moved on to script edit the detective show Bergerac, working on the programme throughout the 1980s.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 26, 2021
It was a real slog to finish, I remember now why I had no recollection of this one.
This Past Doctor Adventure has the distinction of being the last released prior to the revival in 2005.
There were a few more hit and misses as the range pettered out during the rest of the year, once the Eccleston series had end.
So it's quite conceivable that this was the first PDA I brought, as I was starting to collect the merchandise once the show was back.
From memory most of the Fourth Doctor ones were pretty poor, so I'm not surprised that I didn't enjoy this one too.
One of the best things about this one is the characterisation of the TARDIS team - which you'd expect as Boucher wrote 3 scripts for them including introducing Leela as a companion.
It's not surprising that is was a very Leela focused tale, the idea of them arriving on a planet where killing is legal when two people are ingaged in conflict.
The former warrior of the savage Sevateem Tribe shows how travelling with the Doctor has made her civilised and questions this world they have arrived in.
The premise was great but a lot of repetition felt like padding, these would have been far more interesting as a short story.
This Past Doctor Adventure has the distinction of being the last released prior to the revival in 2005.
There were a few more hit and misses as the range pettered out during the rest of the year, once the Eccleston series had end.
So it's quite conceivable that this was the first PDA I brought, as I was starting to collect the merchandise once the show was back.
From memory most of the Fourth Doctor ones were pretty poor, so I'm not surprised that I didn't enjoy this one too.
One of the best things about this one is the characterisation of the TARDIS team - which you'd expect as Boucher wrote 3 scripts for them including introducing Leela as a companion.
It's not surprising that is was a very Leela focused tale, the idea of them arriving on a planet where killing is legal when two people are ingaged in conflict.
The former warrior of the savage Sevateem Tribe shows how travelling with the Doctor has made her civilised and questions this world they have arrived in.
The premise was great but a lot of repetition felt like padding, these would have been far more interesting as a short story.
April 4, 2016
There’s a great deal to admire in Chris Boucher’s ‘Match of the Day’; a lot that he gets right while treading a path where others once went so wrong. Although it ostensibly harks back to the brief 1970s period when Boucher himself wrote for the TV show, it’s actually more of apiece with the less loved early 1980s. The setting is a brutal and barbarous society, one of the major characters is a professional killer, and there’s an oppressive air of nihilism hard-wired into the tale. But without a doubt this is a lot better than early 1980s Doctor Who. Whereas Eric Saward’s mercenaries frequently interested the writer more than The Doctor did, the trained killer here does not occupy the centre of the story. Yes, he’s crucial, but it’s not as if Boucher clearly wants to write more for him than he does The Doctor. Furthermore it’s setting is a violent and deadly world, but – unlike when Peter Davison and, in particular, Colin Baker were The Doctor – this violence is there to be kicked against, rather than embraced. This isn’t ‘Doctor Who’ being subsumed by darkness, but instead The Doctor being used as a light to shine through the darkness. This is a book with a lot of hope, and in the context it’s thoroughly refreshing.
The Fourth Doctor and Leela arrive on a planet where duellists/gladiators are the sports stars of the day, and to turn town a duel is a crime punishable by death. The two of them actually fit in well: Leela is of course a proud warrior and so swiftly becomes a duellist herself, while The Doctor is a man who likes to subvert such societies and in this incarnation does so with a lot of charm. It’s a great set up for a book, so it’s a shame that it loses momentum in the middle and ends on such an anti-climax. So rather than coming away thrilled as I wanted, it was more with a sense of frustration at unfulfilled potential.
The Fourth Doctor and Leela arrive on a planet where duellists/gladiators are the sports stars of the day, and to turn town a duel is a crime punishable by death. The two of them actually fit in well: Leela is of course a proud warrior and so swiftly becomes a duellist herself, while The Doctor is a man who likes to subvert such societies and in this incarnation does so with a lot of charm. It’s a great set up for a book, so it’s a shame that it loses momentum in the middle and ends on such an anti-climax. So rather than coming away thrilled as I wanted, it was more with a sense of frustration at unfulfilled potential.
Read
April 8, 2009http://nhw.livejournal.com/1014841.html#cutid2[return][return]In a society obsessed with fighting (reminiscent of The Game, which came out at about the same time) Leela becomes, believe it or not, a duelling champion, with the Doctor rather implausibly her agent. A few well-aimed digs at the cult of celebrity, and the effective portrayal of Leela, rather sink into a peculiar writing idiom (adopted only for some passages, but still very annoying), the very unevenly sketched world and society in which our heroes find themselves for this adventure, and a plot which barely hangs together.
January 22, 2011
It starts off so promising -- especially as Chris Boucher has complete command of the 14th season's depiction of the Doctor & Leela. But the plot just dies of boredom halfway through...and when you stop caring about the plot, no amount of interesting characters is going to help.
July 25, 2013
Boucher continually finds himself part of a rare category, that of writers who once penned episodes for the show now turning around and churning out books for the BBC line. He doesn't come anywhere near the output of that old standby and our old friend Terrance but I can't think of any other former show writer who managed to whip out four different novels featuring the same two characters. Most at best manage one or two. You get the feeling that Boucher could have written an entire season if the producers had let him.
As usual, the novel focuses on his the characters he seems to like best, the Fourth Doctor and Leela, thrusting the two into yet another strangely hostile world while our mismatched buddies strive to make sense of things and the Fourth Doctor tries to keep Leela from killing too many people. Ha ha, put the knife down, girl! Leela, meanwhile, remains confounded by technology but is still the equivalent of dropping an Army Ranger into unknown territory: even if she doesn't know exactly where she is, she'll figure out soon enough how to use it to her advantage. And then stab you.
Previous Boucher novels had suffered from feeling like notes for television scripts that were never filmed, skimmed by all too quickly and barely registering in the mind. Here he seems to be trying to make up for the sketchy details of previous works by attempting to give us a world that seems to extend off the page the way his scripts for "Robots of Death" and "The Face of Evil" did. The Doctor and Leela land in a place where everyone has taken "Fight Club" to heart, where a ritualized system of fighting has been set up and pretty much encouraged and the skilled ones are treated like celebrities. Except someone is now offing the celebrities. It's a fascinating concept in how it sets up a world not unlike ours but tilted toward the nightmarish end of things, giving the proceedings a bit of a looking glass feel as the Doctor tries to argue against laws that seem to defy logic and common sense but have been codified by years of inertia. They fight because that's how it's always been done.
Boucher does an interesting thing here by going against expectations. Dumping Leela into a world where you would think she would thrive, he goes out of his way to ensure she doesn't fight, with the rationale that warriors don't go looking for trouble but are always prepared to deal with it when they find it. Immediately arrested for not killing someone, the Doctor manages to finagle himself the role of Leela's agent and the two of them embark on a quest for survival.
Unfortunately here the journey is worth a bit more than the destination. The book reads fantastic, as Boucher has gone out of his way to give us a world that functions while built atop an absurdity (tellingly, he doesn't seem to be too interested in the root causes of HOW the world got there beyond assuring us that the world of the squared circle wasn't built in a day) and details all the moving parts that make it tick as we see it, from the fighters to the bureaucratic individuals that keep it going, he seems to have put more thought into even the minor characters. Part of that is necessity because half the book involves following around on-the-run fighter Keefer as he tries to stay alive and figure out why people want to kill him. It helps in a way because it gives us the sense of the world moving on its own instead of only coming to life when the Doctor is in the room. Yet it also means that half the book has seemingly tangential relevance to the plot at hand.
He's also regained a bit of a gift for dialogue, with many scenes of rapid-fire back-and-forth crackling, peppered with quite a few witty lines and observations. His constant use of homegrown swearword "scuffling" does get a bit tedious after a while, with it appearing at least once every page (not unlike Battlestar Galactica's "frak"), making it seem like he's writing "Doctor Who" by way of David Mamet. But there seems to be no point to the proceedings other than staying alive, something that doesn't become apparent until the very end where the plot strands decide to meet up, with an explanation to the climax coming out of nowhere and the ultimate rationale for all the events of the book coming off as a bit contrived and overcomplicated, not to mention not worth all the fuss we went through to get there. Moreover, the resolution to this climax seems to arrive from everyone involved in the plot agreeing to just stop because the book is over.
Boucher puts himself in a bad position by coming up with this world, hammering it in to us that the habits are ingrained in the culture and then tries to have his knife and cut his cake with it too. A world where fighting has become ritualized and regimented isn't going to change in the course of a sub-three hundred page book, no matter how amazing the Fourth Doctor is (it's not even his goal), but you have to have some sense of victory beyond watching the Doctor and Leela depart safely. A scenario like this would require taking an already well established situation and throwing the Doctor's unique brand of anti-authoritarian anarchy at it and watch it try to react to his absurdities, watching the domino effect of chaos that erupts in his wake. Here, it seems like most of this stuff would have happened even if he didn't arrive, which makes for an interesting read but not a real satisfying one.
He still writes a great Leela, as expected, and if nothing else his four novels have given us a far better glimpse of a character that most people just wanted to write as eye candy in a loincloth. His Fourth Doctor seems off, often saying random things for the sake of random things and not having a plan to back up the nuttiness. It always seemed to me that the Fourth Doctor especially was one of those people that put you off your guard by saying or doing bizarre things to give himself a cover for his actual cleverness, whereas here he just seems scattered. The end result is still a decent read, even if it sometimes reminds you of a concept that Boucher had sitting around that he rewrote as a "Doctor Who" story, but if anything is going to impress you, it's the getting there, and not the arrival.
As usual, the novel focuses on his the characters he seems to like best, the Fourth Doctor and Leela, thrusting the two into yet another strangely hostile world while our mismatched buddies strive to make sense of things and the Fourth Doctor tries to keep Leela from killing too many people. Ha ha, put the knife down, girl! Leela, meanwhile, remains confounded by technology but is still the equivalent of dropping an Army Ranger into unknown territory: even if she doesn't know exactly where she is, she'll figure out soon enough how to use it to her advantage. And then stab you.
Previous Boucher novels had suffered from feeling like notes for television scripts that were never filmed, skimmed by all too quickly and barely registering in the mind. Here he seems to be trying to make up for the sketchy details of previous works by attempting to give us a world that seems to extend off the page the way his scripts for "Robots of Death" and "The Face of Evil" did. The Doctor and Leela land in a place where everyone has taken "Fight Club" to heart, where a ritualized system of fighting has been set up and pretty much encouraged and the skilled ones are treated like celebrities. Except someone is now offing the celebrities. It's a fascinating concept in how it sets up a world not unlike ours but tilted toward the nightmarish end of things, giving the proceedings a bit of a looking glass feel as the Doctor tries to argue against laws that seem to defy logic and common sense but have been codified by years of inertia. They fight because that's how it's always been done.
Boucher does an interesting thing here by going against expectations. Dumping Leela into a world where you would think she would thrive, he goes out of his way to ensure she doesn't fight, with the rationale that warriors don't go looking for trouble but are always prepared to deal with it when they find it. Immediately arrested for not killing someone, the Doctor manages to finagle himself the role of Leela's agent and the two of them embark on a quest for survival.
Unfortunately here the journey is worth a bit more than the destination. The book reads fantastic, as Boucher has gone out of his way to give us a world that functions while built atop an absurdity (tellingly, he doesn't seem to be too interested in the root causes of HOW the world got there beyond assuring us that the world of the squared circle wasn't built in a day) and details all the moving parts that make it tick as we see it, from the fighters to the bureaucratic individuals that keep it going, he seems to have put more thought into even the minor characters. Part of that is necessity because half the book involves following around on-the-run fighter Keefer as he tries to stay alive and figure out why people want to kill him. It helps in a way because it gives us the sense of the world moving on its own instead of only coming to life when the Doctor is in the room. Yet it also means that half the book has seemingly tangential relevance to the plot at hand.
He's also regained a bit of a gift for dialogue, with many scenes of rapid-fire back-and-forth crackling, peppered with quite a few witty lines and observations. His constant use of homegrown swearword "scuffling" does get a bit tedious after a while, with it appearing at least once every page (not unlike Battlestar Galactica's "frak"), making it seem like he's writing "Doctor Who" by way of David Mamet. But there seems to be no point to the proceedings other than staying alive, something that doesn't become apparent until the very end where the plot strands decide to meet up, with an explanation to the climax coming out of nowhere and the ultimate rationale for all the events of the book coming off as a bit contrived and overcomplicated, not to mention not worth all the fuss we went through to get there. Moreover, the resolution to this climax seems to arrive from everyone involved in the plot agreeing to just stop because the book is over.
Boucher puts himself in a bad position by coming up with this world, hammering it in to us that the habits are ingrained in the culture and then tries to have his knife and cut his cake with it too. A world where fighting has become ritualized and regimented isn't going to change in the course of a sub-three hundred page book, no matter how amazing the Fourth Doctor is (it's not even his goal), but you have to have some sense of victory beyond watching the Doctor and Leela depart safely. A scenario like this would require taking an already well established situation and throwing the Doctor's unique brand of anti-authoritarian anarchy at it and watch it try to react to his absurdities, watching the domino effect of chaos that erupts in his wake. Here, it seems like most of this stuff would have happened even if he didn't arrive, which makes for an interesting read but not a real satisfying one.
He still writes a great Leela, as expected, and if nothing else his four novels have given us a far better glimpse of a character that most people just wanted to write as eye candy in a loincloth. His Fourth Doctor seems off, often saying random things for the sake of random things and not having a plan to back up the nuttiness. It always seemed to me that the Fourth Doctor especially was one of those people that put you off your guard by saying or doing bizarre things to give himself a cover for his actual cleverness, whereas here he just seems scattered. The end result is still a decent read, even if it sometimes reminds you of a concept that Boucher had sitting around that he rewrote as a "Doctor Who" story, but if anything is going to impress you, it's the getting there, and not the arrival.
October 12, 2024
It took me a month to read this one because life had just pulled me away from it. That and the fact that, honestly, the font was so small that I struggled to read continuously. I don’t know this Doctor or his alien(?) companion Leela, so it was also an introduction to them. It may be early on in their adventures, too, since they just seemed to be getting to know each other. Other than that, it was what you expect from Dr Who — adventure, interplanetary civics lessons, intrigue, misunderstandings, and death.
May 19, 2018
42 WORD REVIEW:
Anyone considering this novel should take note that its strength lies entirely in the journey, not the destination. Boucher, who created the companion Leela, develops her (and the Doctor) with charming authenticity, but the scenario nosedives into a rushed, barely coherent ending.
Anyone considering this novel should take note that its strength lies entirely in the journey, not the destination. Boucher, who created the companion Leela, develops her (and the Doctor) with charming authenticity, but the scenario nosedives into a rushed, barely coherent ending.
August 23, 2025
Interesting premise with some nice Leela moments but it felt like there was a lot of focus on other characters that were never properly resolved.
August 26, 2016
I have liked the Chris Boucher Doctor Who books I have read until this one. The premise is that the Doctor and Leela land on a world on which half the population is devoted in some way or another to death-match dueling contests. Leela accidentally gets mistaken for a challenger and the Doctor has to become her agent and try to keep her clear of getting into trouble. All this is happening against a background involving a fighter named Keefer who escapes an assassination attempt and then goes looking for his would-be killer. Boucher here has attempted a kind of parody of sports by accepting the exaggeration that fans only want to see athletes hurt each other and then making an entire world based on that concept. Thus, there are elaborate rules that no one fully understands, players and agents, training schools, and so on. One funny bit involves a trial that drags on for ages while the tribunal watch instant replay from nearly every angle over and over again. There were a few things that for me were fundamentally wrong with this novel. The first is that clearly on this planet the people understand that there are off-worlders, so why don't The Doctor and Leela simply say that they are and so avoid all the mess they get themselves into? The second is that the plot takes far too long to identify the key problem to be solved. Why was Keefer attacked? What has it to do with the Court of Attack? Is the Doctor supposed to change this weirdly unethical society? And so on. Because the main problem is not identified, the main characters seem to be getting nowhere for most of the novel. After 200 pages, the reader still has no idea where this is going or that any of the three principals - The Doctor, Leela, and Keefer - are anywhere near to identifying who is manipulating events and why. The third problem for me is that for the first time Boucher succumbs to the trap of writing the Fourth Doctor in a novel. He is too scatter-brained and uncertain. It is alright for him to be a little scatter-brained and uncertain, but in this novel that is his principal mental state. Boucher manages to keep the pace moving, and writes Leela well, but I really could not find this novel to be structured enough.
March 12, 2021
So after reading Psi-Ence Fiction, I thought to myself, so I have read all of Chris Boucher's other WHO novels how about I give Match of The Day a go so then I have experienced all of his WHO work? (apart from Kaldor City of course.) And I must say even though it's not quite what I was expecting it's certainly very good!
Chris Boucher's novels I find to be some of the most underrated Who novels out there. His characterizations of The 4th Doctor and Leela are superb and he is really good at science fiction settings and world-building and here he is built upon a brutal civilization where it is illegal to bow out of an official match which leads our Tardis Crew through going into court too soon find themselves on a mission to find a mysterious Keefer who has mysteriously vanished. It is however a very slow-paced novel with another disappointing climax. But it has plenty of fight scenes, superb characters, and a story that fits perfectly with Leela and has some very intriguing ideas to go along with it.
Whilst it may not be quite as good as Corpse Marker and Psi-ence Fiction it is most certainly much better than Last Man Running! An enjoyable adventure if a bit slow that I did enjoy! 7/10
Chris Boucher's novels I find to be some of the most underrated Who novels out there. His characterizations of The 4th Doctor and Leela are superb and he is really good at science fiction settings and world-building and here he is built upon a brutal civilization where it is illegal to bow out of an official match which leads our Tardis Crew through going into court too soon find themselves on a mission to find a mysterious Keefer who has mysteriously vanished. It is however a very slow-paced novel with another disappointing climax. But it has plenty of fight scenes, superb characters, and a story that fits perfectly with Leela and has some very intriguing ideas to go along with it.
Whilst it may not be quite as good as Corpse Marker and Psi-ence Fiction it is most certainly much better than Last Man Running! An enjoyable adventure if a bit slow that I did enjoy! 7/10
August 11, 2010
Another of those Doctor Who novels that leaves you thinking 'would they story have ended any differently if the Doctor hadn't been involved?'
Decent characterization of the 4th Doctor, Leela and their relationship, as well as an attempt to create a culture that feels alien to our ideas, rather than create a funky alien race, but the story meanders and really wasn't that interesting.
Decent characterization of the 4th Doctor, Leela and their relationship, as well as an attempt to create a culture that feels alien to our ideas, rather than create a funky alien race, but the story meanders and really wasn't that interesting.
September 1, 2015
I didn't really like this one, it was hard to get into at the start and I didn't like the way it went into the Doctors thoughts as they didn't seem to fit him well. Then ending was also really confusing, leaving a lot of questions unanswered. Overall it left me completely unsatisfied.
September 4, 2015
This Fourth Doctor novel starts out well enough, with a feel reminiscent of 1970s dystopian films. Unfortunately, it loses its way towards the end of the book, and the final revelations and conclusion pile on too quickly to really satisfy. At least the author did a good job with Leela...
April 30, 2017
One of the most long winded, pointless and boring books I've read in a while.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews