Doctor Who: The Pescatons has come a long way, baby.

It began life in 1976, not on TV, but as the first real standalone audio-only Doctor Who adventure. It had just two episodes, was initially available as an LP record, which today’s youth (and today’s beardy old blokes in sweaters, come to that) would call “vinyl,” and ran to just 46 minutes in length.

It was subsequently novelised in 1991 with considerably more complexity, depth and action by its originator Victor Pemberton as the last of the “Classic” Doctor Who novelisations in the traditional format by Target.

And now, in 2026, the novelisation has been given the audio treatment in a nearly five-hour reading by the master of mimicry, Jon Culshaw, proving that there’s life in the old walking shark-monsters yet, some fifty years after they first emerged out of the Thames Estuary.

So what we have here is the audio version… of a novelisation… of an original audio story from fifty years ago. Like we said, it’s come a long way.

Forget Almost Everything You Think You Know

The first thing you need to do if you’re old enough to remember the original two-episode version of The Pescatons is immediately forget mmmmost of it.

There are sequences lifted directly from the original, to be sure, but Pemberton approached his novelisation with a sense of practicality, as if he’d pitched a four-episode story and it had been made, and it was that story the novelisation was recording, rather than the two-episode fly-by that had first brought the Pescatons to life.

That leads to some drastic changes in experience – the first time the Doctor and Sarah Jane encounter a Pescaton, for instance, is a huge deal in the initial recording, with lots of creepy sonic build-up a la Jaws. In the audionovelisation, it’s treated very much more as a wet weekend on a British beach, and oh look, there’s a creepy walking shark-like alien thing, here we go again…

The Pescatons themselves feel a little diminished in the novelisation from their pure-audio presence on the original release. They are part shark, part piranha, part man, which takes them away from the terrifying hugeness of their initial presentation, rendered both by exceptional sound design, a kickass album cover depiction, and the rumbling vastness of the voice of Bill Mitchell who played Zor, the Pescaton leader. 

They also become much more heavily an environmental lesson in the novelisation than they were in their 1976 adventure – a mark of shifting times and concerns, in all likelihood.

Never Mind The Quality, Feel The Depth

In fairness, Pemberton builds up the role of a UNIT-style-but-for-legal-reasons-not-actually-UNIT response force to both enable the Doctor to treat the Pescaton invasion threat seriously, and to fill pages and minutes with real people at risk of imminent threat and death from the Pescaton menace. 

He also expands upon the original’s vaguely War of the Worlds vibe of “meteorites” arriving all over the planet, which are actually Pescaton escape craft, as the planet of Pesca blows up in real-time during the course of the adventure.

We’re not about to talk about relativity, light, visible space effects and all that, OK? We’re just not. We’re about to let Victor Pemberton have his fun with his fishy aliens, thank you very much. Though occasionally, clunky lines like “His escape took less time than it took to run a four-minute mile” will probably still raise a smile.

Hell-No, Dolly?

Naturally, the novelisation also does away with some of the more fun parts of the initial release. Here, there is no rendition of Hello Dolly by the Doctor to distract a Pescaton, though there is a slightly morbid-feeling flute solo from the Time Lord once everything is said and done, and all the Pescatons are either dead or rendered harmless. He practically whistles while standing on their grave, which is either some hardcore Revenge of the Cybermen-style Tom Baker Doctoring, or just a needlessly callous addition.

There’s also no need for the Doctor to explain to a crowd of listeners about his first time on the planet of Pesca, when he met the shark-aliens’ leader, Zor (voiced impeccably, as we mentioned, in the original recording by quintessential trailer-voice guy Bill Mitchell). Here, we just go into the Doctor’s memories and have the scenes on Pesca play out as practically a whole mid-adventure episode, to give context to the invasion that’s about to go down on Earth.

If anything, the novelisation falters in its combination of over-hype of the Pescatons and the need for them to have at least one fatal flaw.

Pemberton, best known to Doctor Who fans for his other watery terrorfest, Fury From The Deep, back in Patrick Troughton’s era, gives them a handful. The Pescatons are described as both a superior species, well versed in advanced technology, and the most deadly species the Doctor has ever encountered – a punch in the eye-stalk for the Daleks, and no mistake!

But then, Pemberton has them destroy their own planet by ignoring an ozone layer crisis, and bring about their own ruin in the process because too much sunlight can kill them.

That means the original resolution to the Pescaton menace from 1976, which involved high doses of sonic energy directed at Zor is rewritten in a post-Warriors of the Deep, Myrka-killing age, to involve Zor being blasted with three arc lights while he’s squatting in a London Underground tunnel, which feels very anticlimactic once you’ve heard of Pescatons arriving in oceans all over the world, and terrorising London. It’s an adventure which goes a very long way to a very abrupt and fairly forgettable ending, which renders the Pescatons jusssst a little pathetic, despite their build-up of greatness and savagery.

Pyramids of Pesca

There are solid expansions of the original material here too though – the Pescatons’ breeding pyramids are a good visual extension of their audio beginnings, and their abilities as mimics, able to speak to humans in the voice of anyone they’ve captured, gives a creepy “Bodysnatchers” vibe to the action here, to go with their War of the Worlds-style invasion by “meteorite.”

In fact, that ability plays particularly well in the audionovelisation. As mentioned, Zor, the leader of the Pescatons, was originally played by trailer-voice guy (and also the man who convinced a generation that Carlsberg made drinkable lager) Bill Mitchell. 

His voice, as much as Tom Baker’s and Elisabeth Sladen’s, is responsible for the original success of the Pescatons album, because he makes the character frankly and unapologetically more terrifying than Zor should be on paper. Seriously, there are lines in the novelisation where Zor tells the Doctor to look into his eyes. “THE EYYYYYYYES, DOCTOR!”. Mm-hmm.

The Money Shot

Bill Mitchell then was a vocal master at scaring the bejesus out of people. We thank him for his shudder-making service.

But in the novelisation, Pemberton goes to extraordinary lengths to underline the Pescatons’ vocal mimicry skills, which Zor uses in the “Last time I was on Pesca” memory section to make the Doctor hear his own voice coming from Zor’s mouth.

What that means is that when you give the reading duties of the audionovel to one of the UK’s finest impressionists, who made his name in part on his frankly flawless Fourth Doctor, you get ONE. Shimmering. Perfect. Bowel-clenching line of a match-fit Jon Culshaw channelling Bill Mitchell like an absolute badass, and then a gradual shift into a Pescatonised Fourth Doctor voice, as the Doctor and Zor trade lines.

Forget everything else – forget the expansion of the background against which the story is delivered. Forget the bag-of-flaws nature of the “superior” Pescaton species. Forget pretty much anything that gets in your way en route to enjoyment. 

That right there is why the audionovelisation of Doctor Who: The Pescatons is worth your money, and why it will always, always, always be superior to the standard printed novelisation of 1991. 

Jon Culshaw, doing Bill Mitchell, and sliding into aggressive, alien Tom Baker arguing with standard, alien Tom Baker. 

That, as some of the less reputable industries would have it, is the money shot of this release.

Yes, the ending is rushed and deeply anticlimactic, but by the time that comes along, you’ve already had more than your money’s worth out of The Pescatons. 

Grab the new audionovelisation of Doctor Who: The Pescatons today for the sheer joy of Jon Culshaw’s rendition of a story with a complicated history. 

And then, just for additional fun and completism, grab the downloadable original, because Bill Mitchell once walked, and stalked, and rumbled his magnificent way among us, and that needs to be celebrated more than it currently is.  Tony Fyler

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