James Goss, Dan Starkey, and modern Doctor Who stories about mad gods have a good thing going on.

Previously, the three were united on the audio novelisation of the final 60th anniversary story, The Giggle. 

At the time, that audio novelisation and reading went screaming to the top of my chart of all-time best and favourite adaptations of a story from the screen. That’s no mean feat – it beat Robert Shearman’s Dalek and Ben Aaronovitch’s Remembrance of the Daleks. It beat Steven Moffat’s The Day of the Doctor and Russell T Davies’ Rose. It beat the three joyous novelisations of Donald Cotton, even.

Top of the class, that chap Goss. And Dan “King of Sontar” Starkey? Splendid fellow. All of them.

Part of what set that novelisation in a league of its own was the wild and demented liberties it took with what appeared on screen, while staying very much in the spirit of the Toymaker.

So do Goss and Starkey reach similar heights of madcap malevolence this time around, given the similarly rule-breaking powers of the godlike villain in Lux?

Not quite. But they’re not far off.

Script Restrictions

In fairness, they only don’t score an equal hit because the nature of Lux Imperator feels inherently smaller than that of the Toymaker. With the latter, the story had things to prove – not least that the Toymaker could work in the 21st century, bringing both the mayhem and the horror. Russell T Davies and Neil Patrick Harris achieved that in spades in The Giggle, and Goss and Starkey riffed wonderfully off the text of the on-screen adventure to create something glorious and beyond mind-bending.

With Lux, there’s almost too much restraint placed on the time and place and stakes of the story to go too madly wild – 1952, American picture house, cartoon comes to life, wants to become “real” in the physical sense, etc. 

It’s no accident that Lux, or Mr Ring-a-Ding as he’s also known, has never gone outside the movie theatre, because that helps to keep the whole of the drama contained – for all there are flights of invention that give us an animated Doctor, a flight through film frames, and the ultimate breaking of the fourth wall to bring the Doctor and Belinda into the world of a bunch of long-term Doctor Who fans.

If the novel has a flaw, it’s that the creepy bizarreness of the idea of a cartoon character coming out of the screen doesn’t come across as well in the written version as it did on-screen, because it’s fundamentally a visual idea, and writing it down (and then, in this case, reading it out) takes the reader or listener away from the central conceit, becoming a reported idea, rather than one fed directly into your eyeballs.

That is of course the case with any novelisation of a TV story or a movie, but simply because the story is explicitly focused on the breaking of conventions of the visual media, the gap between the TV version and the novel is both greater and more noticeable in terms of suspending disbelief.

But that’s quite the minimal quibble, because – did we mention – Goss and Starkey have a good thing going on when it comes to translating RTD2 Who to the page and then into the lughole?

Killing The Elephant in The Room

Goss, like Una McCormack in her translation of The Robot Revolution, addresses one of the big elephants in the on-screen room – the relatively light sketching of characters about whose death or endangerment we are clearly expected to care.

In The Robot Revolution, McCormack practically wrote a whole additional episode, showing us the lives of Manny and Sasha before Belinda arrives on the planet with her name on it, allowing their struggle to live for real, and their sacrifice to hit home as it should have done on-screen, but didn’t, due to the rush of the edit.

Here, Goss builds up the lives of two core groups of people who exist in the on-screen version merely as stakes in the adventure.

The first group, the people who were watching Mr Ring-a-Ding when it came out of the screen, are given at least some full background here, so we care about them as the three-dimensional people they are. 

And when it comes to the fans, Goss walks a joyous line, adding to their reality and their banter, while maintaining them in their relative two-dimensional, one-named lives. 

If you liked the idea of the fans in the episode, this bulking up will only make your life better, because Goss knows his audience for this product, and includes elements like one of the fans claiming the series arc villain for the story about Lux “will be the Rani.”

It was always going to be the Rani, another fan reflects. 

It was never the Rani, they add sardonically. 

That’s just a whole other level of joy when it comes to a story from this season, because… well, because of course it was the Rani.

Let The Geek-Gags Roll

When the Doctor and Belinda join the fans for a chat, there are a lot of additional geek-gags in Goss’ novelisation, and as we say, if you liked the fourth wall-breaking element of the story on-screen, you’ll laugh extra hard at them. For instance, the Doctor names all the fans’ action figures, and gets one of the pronunciations wrong, and when offered a mug of tea in any of a whole range of Doctor-faced mugs, the Fifteenth Doctor ends up drinking his beverage out of the head of Peter Capaldi. 

Joy. Pure joy. 

Along the way, there are elements on which Goss embroiders or improves, using the advanced expenses budget of your imagination to bring in some film-pastiche sequences that even the Disney dollars couldn’t stretch to rendering on-screen. But to balance that, scenes like the various versions of the animated Doctor and Belinda fall a little flat because of that expanded gap between the visual experience and a report of that experience.

Perhaps best of all though, Lux Imperator itself grows here beyond god-villain of the week status, which is how it felt in the on-screen version, into a creature learning minute to minute, by experience, by additional information, by interaction. That makes the ultimate plan of becoming the ultimate light of the atom bomb click, and make a lot more delicious sense in the novelisation.

And in turn, with the connections connecting more effectively, the switch of plans to become a “real person” by draining all the Doctor’s Artron energy feels bigger and more serious, like, dare we say it, a real Doctor Who threat probably should, than the intentionally “evil cartoon” vibe that came from the TV version.

The Imaginative Connection

The bottom line of which is that while the TV version serves up a bunch of eyeball-specific treats and conceits that work better in that medium than they do in either novel or audio form, the audionovelisation feels on the whole much more like the “real boy” version, because it engages more effectively with the imaginative and emotional parts of your brain than the TV version did.

Oh and for what it’s worth, the novel gives us a more “mean Tenth Doctor” vibe to the ending than ever became apparent on-screen. In the TV version, we see Mr Ring-a-Ding almost ascend into the heaven of light as he heads towards the sun, and into space generally. In the novel version…

Well, we won’t exactly spoiler it for you, but suffice to say Douglas Adams was right when he wrote that “Space is big. Reeeeally big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” Which means the last we hear from Mr Ring-a-Ding is a gently pleading, sleepy, childlike certainty that as he disperses ever thinner into the immensity of space, a new sun will be along shortly… surely?

Shudders

A Question Of Dimensions

The final sequence with the fans has additional depth compared to the TV version too, in ways that in fairness, it would have been clunky to add into the show, but which the novelisation delivers easily by dropping into the omnipotent narrator style, giving a much more satisfying underlining of the point.

Ultimately, then, the novelisation is bigger, broader, and with fantastic extra sequences that make the fans feel like people about whose sudden non-existence we would care, just as the novelisation of The Giggle added that sort of weight of context to the “toys” of the Toymaker. 

Which is ultimately “better” for you will depend on how far you commit to the bit in terms of the story being about a two-dimensional cartoon in a two-dimensional world becoming two-dimensional in a three-dimensional world and then trying to make the jump to three-dimensionality itself.

If the facts of that are key for you, the TV version is your definitive Lux. 

If having a reason to care about the people harmed by that godlike entity on its journey, and the people who love the show known as Doctor Who within the show that is Doctor Who is more important to you, you may feel a little let down by the TV version, and in that case, the novelisation is the way in which you’ll get the most value out of the story.

In fact, with the always impeccable Dan Starkey on reading duties, the audiobook is actually the best way to commit to giving a damn about the people endangered by a god trying to achieve its full manifestation in a 1952 American picture house. 

Ultimately then, you pick which is more important to you, and you make your choice. For me, the duo of Goss and Starkey don’t just inch ahead of the television version, they romp it home in time for tea by their focus on making real the people about whom we’re supposed to care, and making sure we invest in their stories.

While the TV version is gorgeously visual and a triumph of the animator’s art, Goss and Starkey deliver an audiobook that makes you care about the people involved because you know a lot more about them. Their struggles are real, their fears are real. And in the case of the fans of Doctor Who, their bravery in the face of oncoming oblivion is real, because they’ve been made better human beings by their exposure to the Doctor’s example.

Yes, they say almost all of this in the on-screen version, but compared side by side with the Goss and Starkey audio version, the TV episode ends up feeling a little (you knew this was coming, right?) two-dimensional. Tony Fyler