Why?

‘By the mid-‘80s, the Target books had become […] pure merchandising, aimed at the semi-adult fans who wanted to Collect the Set of the Doctor’s adventures […] nobody really bought them to read them. Certainly nobody under the age of fourteen’

Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles: ‘How Important Were the Books?’ in About Time I

Around the mid-80s, well under the age of 14, I started reading the Target books. I imagine I started buying them reasonably soon after. Considering my earliest memory of Doctor Who on TV is Colin Baker going through chest freezers on a Vogon spaceship looking for anything useful before noticing the Babel fish, I’m not entirely sure why I did, but do I did (I should point out that this is all almost certainly untrue. The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy was broadcast in 1981 – when I definitely didn’t see it – and I can’t work out when it might have been repeated for me to confuse it with The Trial of a Time Lord but, looking back, this was definitely how I remembered it).

My earliest memory of an actual Target book is making up quotes from The Wheel in Space for my school reading log because I didn’t think they’d quite got the parallels between Zoe and the Cybermen quite on the nose enough for my liking (whilst this detail is sadly true, this almost certainly wasn’t my first Target book as it wasn’t published until 1988 and I was definitely reading them when Delta and the Bannermen was on).

Miles and Wood observe that ‘the books were a kind of prototype home video’ but they were so much better than that. Whilst I had managed to get Episode 2 of Delta and Episode 3 of Remembrance of the Daleks on a Betamax tape and took every opportunity to give it another look, those opportunities were few and far between. And then the TV series went and ended with my only having managed to add a few more random episodes to that collection.

There was always the opportunity to read the books though and there were more of them than seemingly any one bookshop or library could hold. And they contained complete stories rather than episodes that just ended with Sylvester McCoy blinking at camera. So whilst older fans were gorging themselves on Australian recordings and BskyB broadcasts, I, and I can’t surely have been alone, was uncovering the patchwork history of Doctor Who through the Target books, much as the children of the 70s remember doing.

And that’s the point. I’m pretty sure the novelisations were how at least two decades of Doctor Who viewers experienced and/or re-experienced Doctor Who so I’m going to try and recapture that vision of the series by working through the old Target books. I just hope it’s not as disappointing as discovering that Ford Prefect wasn’t Doctor Who.

#DoctorWho