The no-longer-Celestial-because-wow-the-racism Toymaker recently made a triumphant return to the TV version of Doctor Who, in the body of Neil Patrick Harris in The Giggle.

Understandably, that has sparked interest in the first time the character crossed philosophical swords with the Doctor and his friends, back in 1966. A suitably whacky animated version of the story, missing episodes and all, was subsequently released.

That’s all very well and good, and the legendary Michael Gough embodied the creepy game-player with a positively sinister tone back in the day, but here’s the thing: the audiobook of the Target novelisation, out now from BBC Audio, is just that little bit special.

The reasons why are explained in a special foreword here by Gerry Davis, co-creator of the Cybermen and script editor of the transmitted story.

The original script by Brian (creator of the Ice Warriors) Hayles included a number of elements taken from George and Margaret, a play by Gerald Savory. The playwright initially allowed the usage, but suddenly revoked that permission once actors had been cast and initial scripts written.

That resulted in a situation where large chunks of the script were rewritten from scratch in three-hour sprints by Davis and sent to studio while the ink was still wet. 

Did we mention William Hartnell, the First Doctor, was on holiday during the majority of the filming period? 

There was that too.

The Charisma of the Toymaker

Davis had the elements of the Tardis crew, the Toymaker, and a trio of leading additional players. And the Doctor was mostly on holiday.

All of this helps to account for the frankly weird nature of the story on screen, with the additional players doubling and tripling up in various game scenarios, the Doctor invisible but for one hand for whole episodes, and largely only Gough’s charisma and magnetism left holding the script together.

The fact that he not only succeeded but went on to create a villain who has been the cause of regular calls for a rematch is a testament to Gough’s enigmatic portrayal. And yes, he would have likely returned to reprise the role during Colin Baker’s time had the show not been put on hiatus and the script been scrapped.

The point of all of this is that when writing the novelisation, Davis and Bridgeman restored some of the sequences, and certainly the descriptions of some of the settings, that were originally envisaged for the adventure, but which have not seen the light of day since, from transmitted version to narrated audio scripts, to animated version.

This, if you like, is the original Celestial Toymaker as you were more or less meant to see it, but with some of the fortuitous accidents, like the tripling up of actors in different game scenarios, left in to underline the creepiness of the ideas that eventually made it to the screen.

It’s as close as we’re ever likely to come to the OG Celestial Toymaker.

What that delivers is a sense of grandeur and scale to the weirdness, a significantly more believable sense of Toymaker malice behind the Disappeared Doctor, and if on occasion the prose descriptions of some of the more esoteric dangers, like the real-life game of snakes and ladders, could have gone further, what you get here is a much more tangible sense of body horror behind the Toymaker than would ever have been allowed in the mid-Sixties.

That body horror was pushed further in The Giggle, where we saw human beings before they were turned into puppets, with the Toymaker later, Freddy Krueger-style, giant and terrifying and playing with their strings.

The Toymaker of Hell

Here, Davis and Bingeman give us glimpses of those on-screen-hidden body horrors from the Sixties, with the living playing card royals burned and charred to death, dolls with saws scything through them from behind, and Cyril, the obnoxious schoolboy who (side-note!) was not actually supposed to be a riff on Billy Bunter, his feet electrically devastated when he loses a game. 

There’s even a sequence where Steven Taylor, the Doctor’s trustworthy if short-tempered space pilot friend, is stuck in a plastic tube, and the question is asked: “What happens if he gets stuck in there?” 

The answer is more chilling in audio than it ever manages to be on screen: “Then we just tie off both ends and make a Steven Sausage.”

Imagine Doctor Who meets Cliver Barker’s Hellraiser movies and you get a sense of the shuddering horrors conveyed by the audiobook of The Celestial Toymaker.

This is certainly true to the Toymaker’s return in The Giggle, where people were briefly turned into bouncing balls with screaming faces of realisation before they were burst out of existence. And having had the on-screen return of the charismatic Toymaker, diving into the audiobook of the original adventure allows us to feel the grand scale of the terror the character evokes, all while grinning that sickly, dark-hearted grin.

One thing the audiobook maintains is at odds with The Giggle though – when the First Doctor arrives in the Toymaker’s realm, it is explicitly referenced as being the Doctor’s second visit, albeit the first was fleeting, and nothing like as complicated as this second sojourn. That rather makes a nonsense of The Giggle’s mathematics, in terms of the Doctor winning the first round and the Toymaker the second, leading to the (already-nonsensical) notion that his third battle has to be with the next Doctor.

But these are quibbles with a novel that builds a deeply creepy atmosphere into a story that, with the best will in the universe, is held together on screen by the dedication of its actors more than by any coherent scripting logic.

A Vocal Workout For Peter Purves

Peter Purves, who played Steven Taylor on screen, delivers a believable version of the older, occasionally pettish Hartnell Doctor here, and even takes a creditable stab at Jackie Lane’s Dodo Chaplet. That’s harder than it sounds, because Lane’s performance was very particular to the actress, making it tricky to properly hit – particularly by a male actor some sixty years after the story in question was broadcast.

Purves throws his voice around the ring quite a lot here, delivering various incarnations of the Toymaker’s prisoners, and making Cyril the schoolboy in particular suitably mischievous and intensely, almost parodically nasty. 

But perhaps most importantly, without ever doing an impersonation of Michael Gough’s Toymaker, he delivers him with a vastness of presence and a classical scorn that sells the concept, and therefore the cataclysmic potential of the danger through which you the listener are dragged along with the Tardis crew.

The result is among the masterpieces of the format, which – while not written in anything like so modern and anarchic a style – can stand proudly alongside James Goss’s novelisation, and Dan Starkey’s reading, of The Giggle. 

The importance of that comparison is that The Giggle is, pound for pound and syllable for syllable, probably the best audionovelisation of a Doctor Who story.

Ever.

Go back to where the Toymaker first began in Doctor Who, in a novelisation that expands his world, and a new reading that paints it in vivid, primary vocal colours and colossal power, to drag you through the grinning wringer and leave you panting on the other side. Tony Fyler 

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