For those who are new around these parts, first there were Doctor Who story novelisations from Target.

Then, years later, in a more civilised age, there were audiobooks of those novelisations, read (at least usually) by someone with a connection to either the story or at the very least, the show. 

Then, just around the point where audio Whophiles had collected quite a number of these single-story releases, the folks at BBC Audio decided to bundle bunches of stories together, sometimes with strong themes, sometimes weak ones. 

The rest is predictable history, which is how we come to be three releases deep into a bundle called The Earth Adventures.

Spoiler – The vast majority of the Doctor’s adventures are Earth adventures, so we’re not likely to see this range stop any time soon.

The Third Earth Adventures is a mixed bag (as, in fairness the first and second instalments were), but here, at least four out of the five stories will be at least one person’s stone cold favourite, or favourite of its type, or at the very least, be remembered fondly.

And then there’s The Faceless Ones, but we’ll get to that.

Marco Polo

First up in this instalment, there’s Marco Polo, which was only the fourth story in the show’s history, and the first example of what would become known as the “pure historical” story. 

Attempting to mix time travel with educational history, the pure historicals were part of the very fabric of Doctor Who in its early years. 

Not only did they serve the BBC’s mission to inform, educate and entertain, but they meant the production team didn’t have to spend money creating bespoke monster costumes, but could avail themselves of scenery and costumes from the drama department, while devising entirely human-based dilemmas for our time travellers to face.

That tended to mean quite a lot of running around from place to place, being locked in dungeons, threatened by natives, and separated from the Tardis by a variety of factors. 

Marco Polo was the archetype of that sort of adventuring, and it made the most of its budget with sumptuous scenery and costumes as the team encountered legendary explorer Marco Polo on his way to Cathay (China) to report in to his patron, Kublai Khan. 

Somewhat miraculously, this drama of natural hazards, undercover warlords, competing Khans, a high-born Cathay maiden with a ghastly nuptial destiny, and a stubborn explorer who wants to gift the Tardis to his lord so he can go home to Venice was stretched out of seven episodes – the same length as the original Dalek serial.

Which is fine if you like that sort of thing, and in the dim black and white days, audiences found that they did, which meant the first epic historical was not the last epic historical.

When it came to the novelisation and the audio reading, we were lucky, at least in the authenticity stakes. John Lucarotti, who wrote the original script, was still around to write the novelisation, and Zienia Merton, who played the high-born maiden Ping-Cho in 1964, was able to read the story for audio.

There are two issues with the audiobook of Marco Polo. The first is that Lucarotti, while he had a certain stolid style of scriptwriting that could keep you tuning in for seven episodes at a time, wrote surprisingly turgid prose when it came to the pages of a novel. 

That’s an issue that hits you early on, despite Merton’s spirited attempts to add light and colour to the reading. There is in fact only so much she, or anyone, can do to lift the prose.

The second issue is that the novelisation makes it clear how much of the sumptuousness of the story was devised by the costume and set departments. Lucarotti makes little mention of the glorious fashions or locations, and so, one of the key attributes that pulled viewers on through seven episodes is lost to us, and Marco Polo becomes largely a long ride, occasionally spoiled by barbarians, assassins, sandstorms and games of backgammon. That said, it remains a solid example of an entirely different way of “doing” Doctor Who that we’ve largely forgotten today.

The War Machines

Next up is a classic with much longer resonance. The War Machines, by Ian Stuart Black, tells the story of the First Doctor on his first return to contemporary 1960s Earth, where his former companion Ian Chesterton has made him famous in scientific circles. 

That cuts through a lot of introductory flim-flam and gets us straight into the heart of a battle against a supercomputer, connected to every other computer in the world. The computer takes one look at humanity and decides it’s better than human beings, and constructs self-driving tanks (the war machines of the title) to wipe us out.

So – the internet…AI…self-driving tanks…

It’s slightly sobering to realise that all the world-threatening elements of The War Machines are more or less our daily reality today. And piquant to realise that we’re significantly more concerned today about the humans who remain in at least nominal control of all the technology.

Nevertheless, The War Machines was a bracing story on broadcast, with its evil machine threat housed in the recently completed Post Office Tower, and it remains a bracing story so many years on, because it really brings the Doctor front and centre, on a relatively modern Earth, tackling evil techno-forces, with the aid of the British Army. 

People like to think of The Mar Machines as the prototype for the UNIT era, and while it was never necessarily intended to be that, it works well in that role when observed down the long lens of history.

Ian Stuart Black’s novelisation of his own story, based on an idea by Kit “Creator of the Cybermen” Pedler, is exciting, fast-paced and threatening, and corrects one ghastly aberration from the on-screen version (anyone who’s seen the story will know it), while adding an odd sense that Stuart Black had a different version of the actual war machines in mind when writing it, as they are referred to as being significantly more humanoid in the novel than they were on-screen.

Famously, companion-actor Jackie Lane’s contract ran out halfway through this story and wasn’t renewed, so as the Doctor gains two new young friends from Sixties London, Ben and Polly, for the first and last time in the history of the show, a companion, Dodo Chaplet, disappears from the story halfway through – annnnd is never heard from again. That’s always going to be weird, but Ian Stuart Black does a solid job of keeping the story moving and the tension ramping up, so you always have something to listen to.

On reading duties here we have gorgeously well-known actor Michael Cochrane, whose two appearances in on-screen Who were in the Fifth and Seventh Doctors’ eras. But he’s perfect here, not giving a Hartnell impersonation, but joyous for the scientists who are taken over by mega-computer WOTAN (pronounced here with the German V-sound), and the military types who try and restore order before the world falls into techno-oblivion.

It’s a belter of a story, delivered with gusto, and it opens up the Doctor’s world – and particularly, fittingly for this box set – his role within the Earth’s bureaucracies, paving the way for future Earth adventures.

The Faceless Ones

By the time of the Second Doctor and The Faceless Ones, the Doctor’s clout seems forgotten, as he, Ben, Polly, and relatively recent recruit Jamie McCrimmon run around an airport for an altogether unfeasible amount of time.

Something about Doctor Who and airports always seems like a good idea at the time, but it has rarely worked in terms of delivering memorable Who – we’re looking at you, Time-Flight.

While there are plenty of good things in The Faceless Ones – not least the evidence that while the First Doctor was busy defeating WOTAN, on the very same day at London Airport, a bunch calling themselves the Chameleons were long-embedded on their plans to steal teenagers, take them to space, miniaturise them, and drain them of their life energies.

The Chameleons themselves, in both the broadcast version and the novelisation by past master Terrance Dicks, have enough about them, visually and in backstory, to make a great one-off villain.

What drags The Faceless Ones down is all the running around to very little point, and ultimately the craziness and convolution of the Chameleons’ plot. Some humans they’re replacing with themselves, as they work towards the overall plot of kidnapping and essentially juicing teenagers on board a space station in orbit. 

It all gets a bit confusing – and sadly not in the good, Steven Moffatt way. 

Anneke Wills, who played Polly on TV, is an effective mimic, delivering a dark-voiced Second Doctor, a cheeky chappie Ben, and a broad Scottish Jamie, as well as all the many other voices here. But the danger The Faceless Ones runs is that you stop caring long before the end of the story.

There’s a neat symmetry here though, in that we move straight from the story in which the Doctor picked up Ben and Polly…to the story where he leaves them on their home world, on the very same day he found them. 

The Ambassadors of Death

The Ambassadors of Death was always a troubled story, to the point where it had three writers across its seven-episode length, which means it rarely settles on what it wants to be. 

The novelisation by Terrance Dicks pays a degree of tribute to the on-screen version, but at least delivers a step-by-step ratcheting of the tension in a story that rarely makes any sense. What it does have is a solid central monster-image – a handful of spacesuits with closed visors, able to deliver fatal electric or nuclear shocks. 

Steven Moffatt shamelessly plundered that image in future decades, but in Ambassadors, one character goes as far as to express the sentiment that “everything is taking just that bit too long” – and that’s a textbook diagnosis of the one main thing that remains wrong with it after Dicks’ smoothing out treatment.

To the rescue though rides Geoffrey Beevers on reading duties. Famous as a later incarnation of the Master, Beevers is exactly the voice you need to make The Ambassadors of Death work. In fact, practically without meaning to, he gives an eerily perfect rendering of Ronald Allen’s performance as space commander Ralph Cornish, with the kind of voice you could use as ASMR to send you off to peaceful sleep.

Stories of internal treachery, charismatic leaders and hopeless, believing pawns driving the Earth to the brink of destruction, which is ultimately what The Ambassadors of Death is, might well seem timely, all these decades later. But ultimately here, it’s Beevers who makes the long audiobook of a long story anything like a good time.

The Seeds of Doom

Philip Hinchcliffe was producer on Doctor Who when The Seeds of Doom aired.

It’s one of those stories that’s hugely venerated, and it’s easy to hear why in Hinchcliffe’s novelisation of the story, which zings with vivid (not to mention gruesome) phrasing. The body horror epic of plants eating animals, growing to enormous size and eventually sporing is not perhaps entirely original – everything from The Little Shop of Horrors to The Day of the Triffids had covered the ground before. 

But in Robert Banks Stewart’s six-part Who story, and in Hinchcliffe’s novelisation of it, the whole concept takes on a grand, dark horror of exceptional creepiness, not least in the person of Harrison Chase, millionaire recluse and plant adict, played on TV with deliciously little subtlety by Tony Beckley.

Here, reading duties fall on Michael Kilgariff, whose own history on Who is not exactly overstudded with subtlety of performance, but includes two outings as the CyberController 20 years apart, and one in the middle as the first monster Tom Baker’s Doctor ever faced, the “giant” K1 robot.

But picking Kilgariff for this job turns out to be a moment of casting genius, because in a certain light and in particular chunks of dialogue, Kilgariff and Tom Baker are very, very similar. And for Beckley’s Harrison Chase, Kilgariff tightens his throat to sound almost as though the dialogue is being choked out, which works very well for an egomaniac recluse.

One impressive thing about the novelisation is that while on TV, The Seeds of Doom has a tendency to seem like two stories cut together – a two-part Antarctic story, and a four-part follow-up in an English country house, here Hinchcliffe smooths over the joins very effectively, delivering a Seeds of Doom that works as a single continuous story.

So is The Third Earth Adventures Collection worth…collecting. 

For our money, it is – the high-points would be The War Machines and The Seeds of Doom, but Geoffrey Beevers and Terrance Dicks deliver a version of The Ambassadors of Death that’s probably more coherent than the on-screen version, and at least Marco Polo elevates the story on-screen to a level that feels real.

The Third Earth Adventures Collection has lots of drive, lots of fun, and some fantastic readers that let you experience some classic Doctor Who stories in a brand new way. Tony Fyler

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