The latest in the BBC’s run of packaged-up stories from Classic era Doctor Who annuals is a motley collection, but it does one thing that many of its predecessors haven’t done: it includes a story from each of the first six TV Doctors.

That means that the Caught In the Web collection feels like solid value for money, and gives a real sense of how the stories in the Doctor Who annuals evolved over the decades.

Perhaps oddly, because it’s both the most distant from us in time and the most out of sync with traditional TV Doctor Who, the first story, The Devil-Birds of Corbo carves itself out of the collection as a stand-out piece. 

It’s an expansion of a comic-strip story from the 1967 annual (only the second in the history of the show), and as such, despite technically showing a Doctor who was out of a job and an incarnation by the Christmas for which the book was released, it’s a First Doctor that still feels distinctly fluid in terms of what we know about him.

That Mysterious Traveller In Time And Space…

This is the First Doctor travelling alone, and picking up a couple of gently objectionable, Lost In Space-style human children to join him on his adventure. It is, though, some solidly plotted “Doctor wandering into an existing space squabble” storytelling, with the Devil-Birds of the title giving it some pterodactyl energy, controlled by a giant leader bird with conquest plans of his own.

There’s also a species of potential invader who, because they’re at least a little more humanoid, we’re invited to side with – and they have power-swords. 

Yes, they do. 

A decade before the lightsabers of Star Wars, let alone any talk of He-Man and his power sword, the Doctor Who annual was delivering aliens with edged weapons of astounding, technological, more-than-metal power. 

And then of course, there’s a delegation from “Earth-Mars”, a proto-Federation, led by the father of the two children who become the Doctor’s companions in the story.

Naturally, it’s up to the Doctor to defeat the Devil-Birds and their leader, Ulla, stop the kids’ dad, Harold Strong, from being executed, and give the humans a lift out of Dodge before the aliens with the power-swords arrived to decimate the place.

All of which of course the Doctor does, and he’s written here very much in his “citizen of the universe” guise, like he’s wandered into a pathetic local squabble, and is having none of it. You almost get the sense that were it not for the biological awkwardness of the move, he’d smack Ulla’s big bird bottom for his impudence.

“I am the Doctor…”

In fact, the best moment of the story is one of those seconds which New Who has almost demanded be delivered for every incarnation – when the Doctor, imprisoned, about to witness an atrocity, stands up, stops the action, and comes fully into his own power. 

Here, the moment is when he stops the execution of the children’s father in front of their eyes with a neat piece of cane-work, and it’s both entirely impish First Doctor, and entirely steel-spined “We must defeat them” First Doctor all in one – a moment that makes The Devil-Birds of Corbo stand out in the set.

Grip Of Ice from 1970 stars the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe, and isn’t quite on the same level in terms of delivering thrills and excitement.

For one thing, it’s set on an icy world (Cough, cough called “Glace,” naturally), similar to an Ice Warriors-style Earth, so it feels almost like we’ve been in the scenario before. 

The science in the story is interesting, and sets up notions similar to those of the villains in The Return of Dr Mysterio – people disembodied and in this case turned into sentient ice cubes, to avoid a climate catastrophe. There’s a mad scientist (isn’t there always?) called Cosmos, who plans to use all the sentient ice cubes to power his rocket off this nowhere world, but apparently, he’s stuck there because all of the cubes don’t add up to enough mental power to break free from orbit.

Enter Jamie, Zoe and above all, the Doctor.

The story does give the Troughton Doctor (here read by his son David) something of an action sequence as he fires death-rays at a bunch of robot henchbeings, and having done a deal to save his companions, the Doctor does a much more Doctorish thing, surrendering himself to power Cosmos’ ship – but that’s where the limitations of the annual format come into play. 

The sequence which essentially “solves” the problem of Cosmos and his escape plans takes place off-screen, with Jamie and Zoe, alone on the icy world, hearing a huge explosion and then seeing the Doctor running towards them, having overloaded Cosmos’ ignition circuits and made the whole rocket go kablooey.

Dude, Where’s My Ending?

David Troughton’s reading is both powerful and warm, and there’s plenty of Second Doctoring in the story, but that ending reeks of having only a few panels left in which to wrap up the story and taking just one short-cut too many, robbing the reader, and now the listener, of their moment of Second Doctor triumph.

Caught In The Web, the Third Doctor story here from 1971 is read by Jon Culshaw, who of course throws the voices of the Doctor and the Brigadier in as if for free.

It’s a story very heavily rooted in the atmosphere of the UNIT years, with the Doctor called in to essentially supervise the work of another leading scientist when it turns out the work is with dancing alien dust. Yes, since you’re asking, dust, not web, making the title a little bit of a farce. 

The actual nature of the danger posed by the dust is interestingly vague, though the Doctor can name its planet and reacts to it with deep foreboding. But in typical early Pertwee style, there’s as much drama in the UNIT protection surrounding the scientist, the Earthly forces who might want to make evil use of the alien dust, and the hubris of the scientist whose work is disrupted, as there is surrounding the actual threat posed by a largely visually uninspiring alien “monster”.  

While in the absence of an understanding of the threat posed by the dust, the story ends weakly, for the most part it’s strongly and effectively written, and with the added pleasure of a Culshaw-reading, what you get is what feels like the first three parts of a potentially amazing Pertwee six-parter.

Blink. Blink, Blink…

The Eye-Spiders of Pergross.

Just… just sit with that title for a second. Because sure, why should anyone ever sleep again?

It’s a Fourth Doctor, Sarah and Harry story, read by the loveliest man with the creepiest voice, Geoffrey Beevers, and for some slightly odd reasons, it’s probably the story in the collection that works least well.

The team are heading to see a Greek scientist friend of the Doctors when they are unceremoniously slammed through the vortex and dropped off on a jungle planet, with a construction showing memories or experiences… ssssome of which belong to the scientist in question.

Then the eye-spiders show up.

There’s really not much more to tell that won’t spoiler you, except that the eye-spiders – literally big eyeballs, a la the Atraxi from The Eleventh Hour, but on giant spiderlegs – have a really thorny problem, and the Doctor, finding a way to communicate with a species that’s basically all eyeball and legs – is able to solve it for them. But he does it in a way that seems to fly in the face of everything that the transmitted show had by then established as its Bible of ‘How Things Work in this televisual universe.’

That means that you get to the end of it and you’ve had a lovely-ish time listening to the silken barbed wire of Geoffrey Beevers’ voice, and you’re trying not to fixate on the viscerality of the eye-spiders, but it really rather bugs you how the solution was arrived at. It’s a qualm that never really leaves you when you think of the set, making The Eye-Spiders of Pergross an unintended low-point in this collection.

The Aww Factor

There’s no such challenging malarkey with Winter On Mesique, though, from the 1984 annual, read by the Eighties’ favourite CyberLeader, David Banks.

Before you get ideas, cool your cyber-jets – like most annuals, the 1984 issue steered clear of the show’s TV big hitters, because oh, the rights kerfuffles.

But Banks has a voice that’s up there in the Beevers class for listenability, and the tale itself is overwhelmingly… apologies for this milquetoast of a word… nice.

The Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough find themselves on Mesique, a planet the Doctor has visited before, looking for a friend of his who, since he was last here has become an old friend of his, and a tribal elder too.

It’s winter, and bitter, and things and just occasionally people are dying, apparently due to some wild beast in the hills.

When one such beast – think alien Sasquatch and you won’t go far wrong – is caught, the village is at a loss how to deal with it. To kill it would be cruel, especially if, as seems likely, it’s the last of its kind. But it also can’t be allowed to continue roaming free, a clear and present danger to Mesique’s population.

The Doctor proposes a novel solution, and when his old friend adopts it, you expect all hell to break loose, for legions of villagers to turn up with torches and pitchforks and turn the creature to jerky.

The Other Way

We’re not going to spoil the ending of this one for you, but it has the vibes of The Beast Below or even Partners In Crime, especially at the end – extreme peril of several kinds that are smoothed out to a reasonably positive result in the end.

When the Doctor says at the end of Warriors of the Deep, broadcast in early 1984, that there “should have been another way” to ensure peaceful co-existence between different sentient creatures on the same planet, after hearing this set, it might well become your headcanon that the “other way” he’s thinking of is the way the people of Mesique handle a not-dissimilar problem.

And lastly in this set, we join the Sixth Doctor and Peri on a trip to Edwardian England to solve a locked room murder mystery in Day of the Dragon.

Semi-military scientist Colonel Lathom is found in his own study. Stone dead, burned to a crisp by what to all intents and purposes feels like… a disappearing dragon?

There’s a solid amount of Sixth Doctor Sherlock Holmesing in this story from the 1985 annual, read by Peri actress Nicola Bryant, and it develops a Mark of the Rani vibe, until the Doctor jumps ahead to the obvious-to-him solution that yes, actually, of course it was a dragon. An alien dragon who the Doctor last encountered three centuries earlier, and who was bought off by being given a whole empty planet to burn and rage through.

Dragonfire

The solution to this incendiary character, who killed Lathom because his scientific investigations posed a threat to his life, would later prove useful when banishing the Gelth from Victorian Cardiff. Gas taps and dragons are a nasty combination, and the Doctor hurries the remaining staff at the Colonel’s house into the Tardis to avoid the conflagration.

As the topper of the set, it’s by no means bad – there’s mystery, investigation, action and a big old sentient dragon in Edwardian England, which you have to admit is peak Doctor Who. But the sudden skip-forward of the process to the Doctor almost slapping his head and remembering the evil dragon-guy he once knew shows the shortcomings of the annual format and feels like it lessens the impact of the story.

As a set of stories, Caught in the Web is something of a rollercoaster, from the Devil-Birds that kick it off with a rich science-fiction story with a pure shining Doctor moment, through a mid-point highlight in the imaginative if unfinished-feeling Caught In The Web, to the festival of loveliness that is Winter On Mesique. 

There are many ways in this life to spend what money you have. There’s more than enough in Caught in the Web & Other Stories to convince any fan of Classic era Doctor Who to buy it, and more than enough to reward them for their life-choices, too. Tony Fyler 

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