Smuggled Up
The Smugglers by J.R. Southall
It was a little after my twentieth birthday, and to be honest, my interest levels were subsiding fast.
I had absolutely adored the Target novelisations when I’d been ten. I’d soaked them up, reading and re-reading them over and over again until The Auton Invasion and The Cybermen and Day of the Daleks were etched on my brain, even in spite of the fact that the televised versions of these stories were still something I had never experienced (nor ever thought I would). But as the books became thinner and my years more advanced, life took over and my tastes changed, and although I kept up with the Target purchases and – probably due to the fact that they were so thin, ironically – even managed to read them all, it was more out of a sense of duty than desire. By the late 1980s the television series itself was something I was struggling heavily with, and the fact that Target were now novelising stories I hadn’t even particularly enjoyed quite soon after I hadn’t particularly enjoyed them meant that I tended to skim through the adaptations as quickly as possible, just so that I could tick them off the list and consign them to the shelves, knowing that the OCD part of my brain would be satisfied and I’d never have to retrieve them again.
But Target were also now heavily into novelising all the old black and white serials that they’d never dared go anywhere near during their mid-1970s heyday. Such authors as Ian Marter (infamously adding a swear-word to The Enemy of the World), John Lucarotti (adapting his own stories from 25 years previous) and Nigel Robinson (editor of Target books, and the man responsible for this two-pronged attack on the adaptations) were at least attempting to stir my conscious mind into reengaging with Doctor Who, and even Philip Hinchcliffe (a name that meant a lot even if I couldn’t at the time have quite explained why) had got in on the act, while Donald Cotton’s three books had been enough to make a lot of people revise their opinions on stories that hadn’t at that point been terribly well thought of. None of these books made more than a passing impression upon me, perking my interest levels but failing to sustain them.
And then Terrance Dicks, the man whose awfully thin adaptations had been one of the reasons I’d been losing interest in the first place, novelised The Smugglers. I devoured it in a single sitting, utterly losing myself in a plot that, bar the inclusion of the Doctor and friends, had nothing whatsoever to do with science fiction, monsters, or time travel. And that was it, my passion was reignited.
For about another year or so.
I had absolutely adored the Target novelisations when I’d been ten. I’d soaked them up, reading and re-reading them over and over again until The Auton Invasion and The Cybermen and Day of the Daleks were etched on my brain, even in spite of the fact that the televised versions of these stories were still something I had never experienced (nor ever thought I would). But as the books became thinner and my years more advanced, life took over and my tastes changed, and although I kept up with the Target purchases and – probably due to the fact that they were so thin, ironically – even managed to read them all, it was more out of a sense of duty than desire. By the late 1980s the television series itself was something I was struggling heavily with, and the fact that Target were now novelising stories I hadn’t even particularly enjoyed quite soon after I hadn’t particularly enjoyed them meant that I tended to skim through the adaptations as quickly as possible, just so that I could tick them off the list and consign them to the shelves, knowing that the OCD part of my brain would be satisfied and I’d never have to retrieve them again.
But Target were also now heavily into novelising all the old black and white serials that they’d never dared go anywhere near during their mid-1970s heyday. Such authors as Ian Marter (infamously adding a swear-word to The Enemy of the World), John Lucarotti (adapting his own stories from 25 years previous) and Nigel Robinson (editor of Target books, and the man responsible for this two-pronged attack on the adaptations) were at least attempting to stir my conscious mind into reengaging with Doctor Who, and even Philip Hinchcliffe (a name that meant a lot even if I couldn’t at the time have quite explained why) had got in on the act, while Donald Cotton’s three books had been enough to make a lot of people revise their opinions on stories that hadn’t at that point been terribly well thought of. None of these books made more than a passing impression upon me, perking my interest levels but failing to sustain them.
And then Terrance Dicks, the man whose awfully thin adaptations had been one of the reasons I’d been losing interest in the first place, novelised The Smugglers. I devoured it in a single sitting, utterly losing myself in a plot that, bar the inclusion of the Doctor and friends, had nothing whatsoever to do with science fiction, monsters, or time travel. And that was it, my passion was reignited.
For about another year or so.