Releasing collections of short stories translated from comic-strip and short-form stories in the Doctor Who Annuals of days gone by into audiobook format, read by leading figures from the Doctor Who world, might be considered an oddish thing to do. 

Clearly, they are aimed at a fairly niche audience, mostly composed of fans who had the original annuals at least forty years ago. And equally clearly, they prod a very particular nostalgia button for fans of that… robust vintage. 

There are not, as yet at least, any such collections from the 21st century annuals to balance out the Classic era nostalgia, so you either have to be a very curious younger fan, or a heavily nostalgic older one to fit within the demographic for these collections.

What’s more, the stories from ye olde annuals are often slightly curious affairs in their own right. But while usually somewhat more stylised than anything that appeared on TV, and usually more formal, too, just occasionally they show sides to the Doctor that went relatively unexplored in the mainstream show.

In The Vampire Plants & Other Stories, we get four annual stories, but with a bonus twist. 

While usually, the BBC releases these stories under its own “authorship,” here, the four stories have been expanded and translated by Paul Magrs, the writer who, for instance, created the Nest Cottage Chronicles (enticing Tom Baker back to the Doctor after decades away), Baker’s End, Iris Wildthyme, and a host of other adventures for everybody’s favourite Time Lord in print and audio. 

That means there feels like a more significant guiding hand across the tales than is often the case when the BBC simply attributes authorship to itself, without giving a by-line to the original writers from the annuals. 

Don’t Feed The Plants!

In this collection, we get a single Second Doctor story, The Vampire Plants of the title, read by Jon Culshaw, two with the Third Doctor and Jo Grant, read by Katy Manning, and one with the Fourth Doctor, Adric and K9, read by Matthew Waterhouse.

The Vampire Plants is a story which, viewed from 2026, feels almost redundant, because its essence was at the heart of later on-screen creations like both The Seeds of Doom and Terror of the Vervoids. 

Magrs, from his position in the here and now, plays into those memorable stories in rendering the story of an intelligent plant breaking out of confinement, eating flesh, growing to the size of at least three Tardises stacked on top of one another, and ultimately only being defeated by violent physical intervention. There’s even a retro-precursor for The Seeds of Doom’s Harrison Chase in the Doctor’s friend Professor Vane, who has been cultivating the plant known as a Galea Tintipocus to the exclusion of all other concerns. 

Because, obviously, that’s a good plan.

Magrs gives us an origin story for this deadly plant which will also already sound familiar – it floated to Venus, where the story is set, as a seed, riding the winds of space until it was captured by a planet. And he gives the ending a frisson of foreboding – which in at least some degree, he pays off one Doctor along in Menace of the Molags. 

A Molag-ulous Affair

Menace of the Molags? A Third Doctor and Jo story, read by Katy Manning, in which the scenario subsequently played out in everything from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy to V to Independence Day to (sort of) The Christmas Invasion comes to pass. Giant spaceships hovering over all the cities of the world – we’ll have some of that existential threat, thank you very much, it’s never actually been known to fail.

When it turns out that the ships are filled with a species that look enormously similar to a creature the Doctor and Jo recently encountered as an alternative to getting caught up in a morris dance, the good sense of the original writer is shown in terms of capitalising on a recent hit. When it further turns out that their fierce appearance is belied by benevolent intent, it sets up a fascinating dilemma for humanity.

The front-and-centre story involves spores from Galea, though, in a classic piece of Doctor Who sleight of hand which displays Magrs’ understanding of the show, “probably a different kind” to the ones he encountered a lifetime ago. These are the Molags of the title, and once they get awoken, all Godzilla-like hell will be unleashed on the planet.

Which is a solid piece of “Threat of the Week” writing, but actually serves a broader point, the exploration of how exactly human beings would behave if aliens that looked scary as hell turned up trying to be all kinds of helpful? Would we listen, obey, and save ourselves, orrrr would it be torch-and-pitchfork time and to hell with the future of the world?

Up From The Depths…

Needless to say, there’s some gruesome Godzilla-like stompy action before the Doctor, UNIT, and the visiting aliens in the sleek spaceships pull our collective posterior out of the toaster-oven.

It’s glorious, this slightly deeper riff on the original material, and one that remains fairly central to the heart of most UNIT stories to this day – whether humanity is in any sense ready to step into a universe in which it’s just one of many intelligent life forms… or not. See the recent War Between The Land and the Sea for a 21st century example of how this story plays out. 

While the set is named after The Vampire Plants, that story feels weirdly in limbo between the original comic-strip which preceded later TV versions, those highly memorable TV versions, and the newly written version of the original story, which feeds all the gracenotes of those TV stories in, meaning it feels a touch too familiar to be as original as it actually is. 

Menace of the Molags on the other hand does lots in the way of touching familiar points of nostalgia – not least the helpful aliens, but also the expansion of the spaceship arrival which now feels familiar, but which when the original story was written would have had only a handful of precedents like HG Wells’ War of the Worlds. But in its deeper contemplation of human smallness and fear and reaction to the look of people, rather than the content of their character, it remains both depressingly relevant and impressively fresh.

The Peasants Are Revolting

If The Vampire Plants gives retroactive Seeds of Doom vibes, then After The Revolution, the second Third Doctor story of the collection and still in the Jo Grant era, gives retroactive precursors of The Brain of Morbius – but only eventually. 

Magrs crams a lot into this story of the Doctor, not long after winning his temporal freedom back in The Three Doctors, popping to see an old revolutionary pal who overthrew a hateful empire. 

Arriving, he finds a slightly strange set of super-sophisticated locals, a pit full of relative savages, a roaring, vaguely familiar Godzilla-style monster, and an uprising against the man who led the uprising. And all before teatime.

It’s an action-packed adventure, while never skimping on the philosophical moments with which Pertwee adventures were occasionally graced, and which linger perhaps as long in the memory of the era as the dirt bike chases and helicopter shenanigans.

Only in the final act do we get our Morbius on, as the Doctor’s old revolutionary friend faces the consequences of his post-revolutionary actions and evolutions. There’s a heavy riff on the idea that he must survive for the moral direction of his people, even though that has clearly been sacrificed for some time, and there are even riffs back to the Morbius source material, Frankenstein, to deliver a dramatically satisfying, if somewhat saddening final note to the piece. 

Ironically enough, as the story ends, the rebels who’d been revolting against the revolutionary leader come inevitably to power, giving one last, almost Macbeth-style tinge to the story – what comes around legendarily goes around, and we’re left wondering whether this revolution will break an apparently unbreakable cycle of tyranny.

Annnd cue theme tune.

Plaaaaaaaague!

Finally, there’s Plague World, which is exactly as relentlessly grim as it sounds. 

The Fourth Doctor, Adric (Matthew Waterhouse, who reads the story) and K9 arrive on Publius, frankly a desolate hole in – guess where? – yep, the Galea galaxy, where the Earth empire came, dumped off a bunch of colonists, took one look around and ran the hell away forever.

So what we have is a straggling band of survivors in a single encampment in the middle of a big old stellar nowhere. The colony is ailing.

Annnd that’s before the horrifying metallic insectoids and their… well, let’s just say their very hungry caterpillars and leave it at that.

There’s a distinct grimness to all of this before the plague of the title hits, and before the human treachery, and before the whole feeding humanity to the larva thing which probably counts as a bit of a hefty spoiler.

That gives the story a very different feel to the other three tales in the set, despite there being vampire plants the size of houses, and dinosaur-like sea-based aliens, and the political starving and feeding of people to monsters in those stories. 

Plague World is grim on a whole other level, but it’s a level that resonates with Season 18 stories like State of Decay, which means it feels true to the period in which the annual was released. 

Happy-Happy

Naturally, there’s a rebellion to be had here, and the Doctor and Adric are key to its success, while the Doctor is befriended by one particular rabble-rouser. That… goes about as well as late-stage Tom Baker stories allowed.

There’s quite enough for the Doctor, Adric and K9 each to do, given a textbook separation, and despite K9 being offline for a chunk of the mid-section. And while there’s what passes for a happy ending, happy remains entirely relative on Plague World, meaning that the set ends on a distinctly downbeat note.

As sets of annual stories go, Magrs brings a strong sense of authorship across the course of The Vampire Plants, while allowing each era to live and breathe with its own sense of time.

The Vampire Plants then ends up being one of the better, more absorbing sets of annual stories from the BBC in recent years, and one that feels like a longer and more involving journey than most. Tony Fyler 

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