The Target Book

Lest We Target

The Target Book -
A History Of The
Target Doctor Who Books
by David J Howe
Telos Publishing
ISBN: 9781845831844

Just a quick shout out of a review to a wonderful book my cousin got me for Christmas. The Target Book - A History Of The Target Doctor Who Books will, I’m sure, bring back lots of memories and rushes of childhood nostalgia for many fans of Doctor Who, above a certain age. I think I had maybe around 60 of these as a nipper (I gave up buying these when I felt I’d outgrown them, very soon after the first few Peter Davidson adaptations were released). Although, the point is made in the book that many of the authors and readers thought of these as being a bit more pitched at an older audience than just the kiddies, as evidenced by the fact, perhaps, that during the Tom Baker era of the series, two of the Baker adaptations, Robot (aka Doctor Who and the Giant Robot) and The Brain Of Morbius were also reissued as separate, ‘dumbed down’ junior editions.

This book is a long and loving look at the history of Target which, despite having a few other titles on its books, became a publishing phenomenon purely on the Doctor Who titles, which sold millions. This takes you right through the history of the company - the rise and fall, so to speak - starting off with a guy called Richard Henwood joining the Universal Tandem publishing company, initially based at Gloucester Road in South Kensington, in the early 70s and starting off a new imprint of the company which he called Target (and which had that distinctive logo that was a sign of quality and adventure to the... um... ‘target audience’ everywhere. The rights to the three Doctor Who novels previously written for the BBC and based on William Hartnell stories were, perhaps somewhat hesitantly, purchased by Henwood and reissued in new covers and... within a month he knew he needed to commission loads more to feed that very popular furnace... they sold like the proverbial hot cakes.

And so it was a deal was struck by the BBC and he approached writers to novelise various existing stories, many of them earmarked by Terrance Dicks, who was synonymous with the Target books and who has written a nice foreward to this very tome. He and other writers delivered the goods and the series went from record sales to more record sales.

The writer then charts the full history of Target up until its demise, when all the stories they were able to get (which was almost all of them) had been adapted and the well ran dry, at which point they semi successfully started commissioning both ‘new’ and ‘missing’ adventures when they were owned by Virgin (the missing ones being stories that existed as scripts for the show but then weren’t, for whatever reason, produced).

The book is absolutely chock full of colourful illustrations including the entire range of Doctor Who Target books up until they were acquired by Virgin and the decision was made to stop using the imprint (it’s back now, with new Doctor Who adventures put out in covers imitating the style of the ones used in the early seventies, by original artist Chris Achilleos no less... who sadly passed away back in 2021, after this book was first published). There are also many previously unpublished illustrations such as various original cover sketches, many of them nothing like the final covers which adorned the finished books.

In addition to this there are constant sidebars throughout, covering the writers - such as Dicks, Malcome Hulke, David Whittaker etc - and the various cover artists - such as Achilleos, Jeff Cummins and Andrew Skilleter - not to mention the odd member of the production staff through various eras of the company. There are also some interesting nuggets such as tables of the various alternate titles used, when the original story title was not deemed exciting enough to capture the imagination of the reading public. I’d forgotten about this and there were a fair few than I’d remembered but, for example, Spearhead From Space became Doctor Who And The Auton Invasion, The Web Planet became Doctor Who And The Zarbi, The Silurians became Doctor Who And The Cave Monsters, Terror Of The Zygons became Doctor Who And The Loch Ness Monster... and so on.

My only criticism with this wonderful tome would be two glaring omissions in terms of the stories behind the novels. One was... well most fans of the series would know when I say KKLAK! Yes, the time Chris Achilleos experimented with using a comic book style piece of onomatopoeia on the cover and made himself unobtainable so the art department at Target, that hated the idea, had to run with it. 

The other was when former screen companion Harry Sullivan... who was played by actor Ian Marter, who wrote a fair few Target adaptations himself (and who tragically died in his forties) introducing something which is almost a swear word into one of his books. Now, I’ve never seen this discussed anywhere but, when his adaptation of the Patrick Troughton story Enemy Of The World was published, a decade or more since the story first aired, I distinctly remember Marter having one character call another a ‘bastard’. This caused a sensation in the playground because, for one, everyone assumed Target was an imprint for children and secondly... and much more controversially for me... since it was a BBC family show, there was no way that word would have been used on the original broadcast (and since tapes of the original broadcast version of that show were happily discovered a decade or so ago, I can confirm that the word is definitely missing from the televised edition). So, yeah, I always wondered if there was any controversy within the headquarters of Target at the time but, this book doesn’t shed any enlightenment on that one, I’m afraid.

But even so, The Target Book - A History Of The Target Doctor Who Books is an outstanding tome for fans of the show who were buying these things in the 70s and 80s (and beyond although, the novelisations stopped becoming special when home video arrived, obviously) and it also gives a fascinating insight into the thought processes and contract deals behind the release of these, once very popular novels. Not to mention some little panels called VWOORP! VWOORP! which reprint various Target writers’ descriptions of the noise the TARDIS makes when it materialises and dematerialises. And, also, it was nice seeing the cover of The Doctor Who Monster Book again (although I might have actually hung onto that one, somewhere, maybe in the loft).