Aliens of London/World War Three, like many episodes in the first series of New Who back in 2005, was groundbreaking. 

The first two-part episode of the new show, it doubled down on the potential of Rose to bring alien threats to a modern, 21st century world by vividly showing an alien spaceship crashing through Big Ben.

It showed the potentially catastrophic consequences of the Doctor being “slightly” out in his navigational computations, with Rose having been missing for a year, and the real-world effect of that on people like Jackie, her mother, and Mickey, her boyfriend.

It delivered the first new big “People in big rubber suits” monsters to be deemed worthy of a two-part run-time, and at several points it both updated and satirised the UNIT stories of the early Seventies, from gathering all the world’s alien experts in one place, in a riff on The Time Warrior, to there ultimately being no clever, Doctorish option left, requiring the firing of a missile straight at the big alien baddies to blow them to hell, as in The Seeds of Doom.

A Long Time Coming

It’s been a long, long time since Aliens of London/World War Three hit our screens, and it’s fair to say that in all likelihood, much of the horror, and threat, and alien chicanery, was a little overlooked at the time,  overshadowed by some of the story’s camper, more childish elements – aliens wearing the skin of larger or fatter people as camouflage, the zipper that magically appears in those skin-suits’ foreheads, allowing for quite the most laboured alien reveals in the history of the show, alien menaces that can be destroyed by a dousing in vinegar, annnnnd of course all the farting.

So how does the novelization, and the audio novel, make the story feel fresh, feel relevant, feel perhaps just a little less silly in 2026?

Number one, step forward Joseph Lidster. He’s a writer who understands comic potential all the way to the bank, but he also has an eye for balance, and moments of poignancy that can take some of the giggles out of the story and let us appreciate quite how callous the Slitheen family and their plan really is.

Also, with the gift of significant decades of hindsight, he’s able to tell a much fuller story than the one we got on TV.

A Pig’s Life

For instance, we get the life story of the pig who was hideously operated on to be the decoy pilot – and, in a postscript that would only really work in this format, we get the Doctor and Rose nipping back to take his family to a safety and a future to which they could not realistically look forward on our bacon-hungry world.

We get Captain Jack, who of course we hadn’t met yet when the TV episodes aired, sending Toshiko Sato to London to meet the Doctor, and we witness something that we never saw in any episode – how Blon Fel Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen escapes at the end to re-emerge in Boom Town as the mayor of Cardiff.

There is an absolute feast of these moments: Jackie and Mickey and the history of the missing year, when he knew what had happened with Rose but wasn’t able to say so; a long-term friend of the Doctor’s, dying in the name-badge massacre of Downing Street (and the sobering realisation of course that had this been a Seventies UNIT story, the Brigadier might well have been wearing a security pass of his own…); a little of Blon’s history as the younger sister among a clutch of bullying brothers, and so on, and so on.

Some Serious Slitheen

We get moments from the male news reporter (who’s divorced from the reality we observe in the show and renamed) on the luckiest day of his career. We get a look-in with Trinity Wells, the American reporter who would become something of a legend over the course of New Who. And most touching of all, we get a battle in the mind of someone whose job it is to obey orders in Downing Street, but eventually has to disobey the country’s Prime Minister in order to prioritise the lives of people in danger. 

As this list probably shows, the novelization and audiobook of Aliens of London is a much more rounded, evenly weighted affair than the TV version ever got the chance to be. All of this rebalancing has an additional side-effect – it lifts the Slitheen above the farce of their original story, accentuates their cold, callous disregard for life compared to profit, and underscores their nature as a family and a species for whom hunting even sentient beings for sport is a fundamental part of their lives. 

For possibly the first time, you can take the Slitheen entirely seriously as a credible global threat in this novelization.

The Shock of the New

But perhaps, some 21 years on, Lidster’s best service to the story is rendered by focusing on the absolute newness of everything to everyone, which decades on might be hard to re-appreciate without sensitive writing.

Jackie Tyler is scared for her daughter, in a way we now know works out, but at the time, her fear was real, and sharp, and pointed enough to make her lash out at Mickey during the missing year. 

Mickey too is deeply uncertain he can trust this weird alien, and we get more of a sense of his action to look up the Doctor in histories and lists of weird occurrences over the course of the missing year. That’s barely a couple of lines in the thrumming clock-ticking drama of the TV version, but here, with the slightly different pacing of the novel, it helps re-assert the strangeness of the setup – an alien surrounded by death who takes his girlfriend into time and space – as well as the moral core of Mickey Smith.

Even the Doctor’s moment of existential honesty on the phone to Jackie, where he admits he could save the world but potentially kill Rose, is given a freshness, a fear, and a real sense of moment here, because it feels like this is a Doctor who is acting on old instincts that might well be rusty after the Time War, like he might be genuinely uncomfortable having both the fate of the planet and the fate of people about whom he’s genuinely starting to deeply care on his shoulders again.

Best. Version. Ever?

It all makes for what a more enjoyable experience of Aliens of London than the original TV story was. 

That’s a factor of the additional poignancy, pathos and weighting of the storytelling in this version, along with the more sharply-drawn callousness of the Slitheen family. 

But it comes with the added bonus that if you’re a fan who thinks that, for instance, the visuals of the Slitheen, or their emergence from their human suits, were a little clunky, or that they no longer hold up 25 years of CGI development later, you’re entirely free here to envisage them in a more satisfying way, along Lidster’s fairly loyal lines. And if you’re a fan unconvinced by the farting comedy, there’s enough additional context here to mollify you, too, because the more other content you add, the more… erm… diffuse the fart-gags become. 

When it comes to reading duties, there are a handful of potential candidates for this story, and it would certainly have been fun to have a Penelope Wilton reading, but in fairness, while Lidster adds plenty of additional context, he doesn’t over-expand the role and history of Harriet Jones, so she’s not in any sense the most necessary character voice to hear.

Annette Badland, who played Blon Fel Fotch, has been no stranger to audio drama in the Doctor Who universe at Big Finish, and would have given this audio novel a very different and additionally creepy shiver.

But step forward Camille Coduri, whose Jackie Tyler is absolutely one of the most necessary character voices we need to hear in this story, specifically because it happens so early in her relationship with the Doctor and because she’s as much of a prime mover in it as either the Doctor or Rose.

Coduri of course is equally familiar with audio work, and here, she gives the whole cast the benefit of enough distinctive differentiation to make you forget that Camille Coduri is actually behind the microphone. We hear plenty of Jackie Tyler as and when she’s front and centre, but Coduri is accomplished at filling the room of your mind with individual characters, which speeds the read along very well.

No one can take away the impact and the importance of the televised version of Aliens of London/World War Three. The sheer scale of its worldwide storytelling in a modern style does more than enough to make it immortal as a marker of what New Who would be about, and what it would be like. 

But as an actual story, Joseph Lidster and Camille Coduri deliver a much more roundly weighted, satisfying experience of that same immortal story. Tony Fyler 

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