Planet of Fire, the penultimate story of Peter Davison’s TV time in the Tardis, had a lot to get done.

It had to:

1. Bring back Anthony Ainley as the Master, last seen trussed up like a turkey and presumably being taken back to Gallifrey for punishment by the Time Lords at the end of the 20th anniversary story, The Five Doctors.
2. Write out the big production team error that was Kamelion, the shape-shifting robot from The King’s Demons. The prop was due to become a full companion, but could hardly do anything, and had been conveniently sent to a cupboard and forgotten about for the whole of Season 21. It had to have one more outing before it was quietly destroyed and rarely spoken of again.
3. Also write out Mark Strickson’s companion character Turlough, while giving us, finally, an idea of what his deal was, and why he went through the universe largely with a gigantic chip on his shoulder.
4. Introduce a single new companion to make up for the loss of the other two – in this case, Nicola Bryant’s American botany student, Perpugilliam (Peri for mercifully short) Brown.
5. And justify overseas filming in Lanzarote – overseas filming being a mini-obsession of then-Producer John Nathan-Turner.

It did all that with varying degrees of success, while also delivering on screen a cogent delineation of the battle between facts and faith, science and religion at a turning point for a civilization, and allowing the troubling legend that was Peter Wyngarde a hypnotic role in the show that still reeks of quality four decades on.

Flat On The Page

The novelisation, by Peter Grimwade, was always less successful than the TV version, because many of the elements that made the TV version so hypnotic can’t be rendered particularly well in prose. The sheer unusualness of being in Lanzarote is minimised on the page. What’s more, very little of Wyngarde’s portrayal of silken religious fervour under strain comes through, which means his character, High Priest Timanov of the planet Sarn, is automatically reduced to what presumably was on the script-page, which is mostly bluster and power plays.

Which just goes to show why sometimes, you need a Wyngarde to elevate the material.

Similarly, Anthony Ainley’s performance in Planet of Fire was one of his best as the Master, and proved that if you gave him a solid, Master-centred script, he could stand toe to toe with Roger Delgado’s original incarnation and deliver the devilish goods. But in the novelisation, almost too much is made of the accident that saw him reduced to the size of a mouse, so a lot of Ainley’s energy is drained out of the story in its novelisation.

Where the book does work well is in its expansion of the political backstory to the tale, adding in elements of the history of Turlough’s people, the Trions, for which there was no time on screen, and a prologue on the Trion ship that starts off both a bunch of legends and an aristocracy with the power of life and death over people on Sarn.

But Grimwade, who wrote the original on-screen story more or less from the set of bullet-points with which we began this review, fails to seize any of the opportunities the novelisation offers him. Kamelion was beyond useless on screen, but the novelisation would have been the perfect opportunity in a handful of lines of “The Doctor remembered…” or “Turlough still hadn’t forgiven Kamelion for…” to add substantively to the robot’s legend as a companion that had actually been present for some adventures, in which it had played a significant role. 

Instead, he prints pretty much the behind-the-scenes truth – Kamelion had been given a room and then more or less forgotten about, with plug-in privileges to the Tardis data banks and not much more.

A Location In Search Of A Plot

The whole… as it were… plot of Planet of Fire – planet with supplies of a gas that can either burn you to a crisp or magnify, heal and generally Ready Brek your body and your life, Turlough’s people as the chosen leaders because of a brand on their bodies and an imperial history, religion versus science, etc, is rather crunched down in the book to allow for the focus on a couple of the more traditional elements of the episodes – running around a hot place, a Tardis component swap more or less lifted wholesale out of Grimwade’s previous Fifth Doctor vs the Master story, the generally execrable Time Flight, and Kamelion having a meltdown-cum-identity crisis, continually becoming someone else when the plot needs a boost. 

Even when the plot goes to an interesting Time Lord place, with the Doctor feeling genuine vast remorse at what happens to the Master, there appears to be no page-space left for anything resembling memory-mining, so that their one-time friendship can stand a little proud and add weight to the good versus evil primary colours in which their current relationship stands.

Nope. Just a bit of “I hate what I had to do” – and then Kamelion’s coming to an action figure end, Turlough’s off home with little more than a manly handshake, and Peri joins the Tardis, despite a Doctor who, by this point in his life, is beginning to feel increasingly bogged down with the weight of the universe.

A Good Voice, Wasted

All of this, on screen, makes a certain sort of sense at the time. The novelisation doesn’t particularly have the tools to bridge the gaps it needs to bridge, so the whole thing feels more shrugworthy than it should for a story in which lots of the actors are on the top of their form.

The audiobook version of the story is read by David Banks, famously the CyberLeader throughout the whole of the Eighties, and no slouch in vocal power or technique. And make no bones about it – Banks is a perfectly good reader for Doctor Who audiobooks. But there’s little that any reader can do to elevate the flat and basic writing of the novel to even the camp, dark wonder of the TV version of Planet of Fire. 

Ultimately, that’s on Grimwade, rather than on Banks. Banks shows up and does what he can, but the novelisation of Planet of Fire just shows how much good will and investment from some genuinely fine actors can lift a premise off the page and make you believe in it.

That means the audiobook ends up being a disappointment through no fault of anyone involved in the making of it, bar the original writer. 

If you want to enjoy Planet of Fire, you’re better advised to binge-watch the episodes than to indulge in the handful of hours it takes to listen to the audiobook version. Tony Fyler