There’s been a theme, recently, in the releases of Doctor Who audiobooks coming out of BBC Audio. 

Along with new novelizations of 21st century Who stories from both the RTD2 era and earlier years in the 21st century, there has been a trend towards releasing audio versions of the novelisations of stories that did not in any way originate on TV.

We’ve had Victor Pemberton’s novelization of The Pescatons, which started off as the first experiment in audio Doctor Who expanded universe content back in 1976 (yes, audio Who is now, like many of us, 50 years old and counting!). We’ve had Mission To Magnus by Philip Martin, based on a script for a season of on-screen Who that was scrapped. Before long, we’ll have Wally K Daly’s The Ultimate Evil from the same never-filmed season.

And in the meantime, there’s Slipback.

Slipback started life as Doctor Who’s first official foray into producing the show on radio in its own right. NB – pedants will tell you that title belongs to Exploration Earth: The Time Machine, which starred Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen as the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, but pedants frankly need to get out more.

Slipback was the first radio Doctor Who that felt like it was actual Doctor Who, because in the grim days of 1985, when the show was on hiatus for a year, and when neither Mission to Magnus nor The Ultimate Evil were going before cameras, Slipback was all the new Doctor Who there was, and we clutched it to our bosoms like a long-lost friend.

It was a strange time – we also bought and sang along to Doctor In Distress with absolutely no demonstrable sense of irony, what can I tell you?

The original audio of the six ten-minute episodes of Slipback, by writer and script editor Eric Saward are available separately, and a deucedly odd experience they are, each episode too short to take any noticeable breath, ramping up and up towards any one of the handful of demented conclusions to which the story comes en route from A-B. 

When it came time to novelize the story though, Saward delivered a book that – like most of his other novelizations of his own work – massively expanded the story, sometimes in interesting ways, and sometimes in ways that were, to put it kindly, intensely whimsical.

Saward Plays Adams

Slipback has been described as Saward channelling Douglas Adams, and there’s some justice in that idea, in that the story, the setting and the characters feel very much like the sort of things that would have flown in Season 17, when Adams was script editor. 

From a computer with a split personality, to a butler-bot working for a force it doesn’t understand, to a bodyswapping intergalactic criminal hiding out among the officers of a galactic survey ship, and a captain of unparallelled viciousness who has the unusual ability to cultivate diseases and spread them to people around him without ever getting fatally sick himself, Slipback exists in a whole different universe of imagination to both Colin Baker’s first season and his second, meaning it feels oddly, if not negatively, unconnected to either of them. 

Add its radio inception into the mix, and Slipback feels entirely like its own thing, in its own bubble-universe – which is handy to know going in, because, for instance, there’s not so much as a flash of the Doctor’s multi-coloured coat until a full third of the way into the book.

A Substantial Background

Instead, Saward gives us the history of a solar system, the development of both carbon and silicon-based life-forms side by side, and an ancient myth of a Time Lord who appeared to warn the civilisation never to develop time travel… at a point in its history when no one was anywhere close to developing time travel.

He also gives us surprisingly complete information about the history of the criminal who is masquerading as an officer on board the survey ship Vipod Mor, and the rise to prominence of the ship’s captain, Orlous Moston Slarn, dwelling in particular on his discovery of his gift for incubating horrible diseases and passing them on, without dying of them himself.

When the Doctor and his young American friend Peri finally arrive in the story, they are both crucial to the elevation of the plot, but they also spend an irritating length of time confronted by the kind of ordinary dilemma that, when included in an on-screen story, would be recognised by fans of all ages as padding. Doors that can’t be opened, cargo holds to be traipsed through while being pursued by apparently impossible monsters, that sort of thing.

I Fought The Law…

The major threads of the story advance quite neatly without their involvement – so the criminal and a couple of classic Saward ne’er-do-well space police get into a shoot-out, the ship’s computer has something of a mental breakdown and starts talking to itself, and the captain, in a fit of monumental pique, begins brewing up a dose of the most deadly infectious disease in the galaxy as a way of getting rid of all his idiot subordinates.

There is also an element of time travel nonsense – and we mean that in the best of senses – but by the time it arrives, it’s very much an escalation too far, in that everybody’s going to die when the captain’s buboes pop in any case, so to threaten the whole of the universe feels like overkill.

It also feels like a specific kind of overkill that Classic Who fans will recognise from a couple of Peter Davison stories – think Terminus and to a lesser extent, Four To Doomsday and you’re in the right area. 

Miserablism With A Twinkle

While in 1985, we took what we could get and voluntarily blinded ourselves to the weaknesses of Slipback in its short-bite format, the novelization goes to such lengths to establish the reality of its universe that it raises the stakes on which it needs to deliver to be considered a satisfactory experience.

How well the book itself manages that will depend on your tolerance in 2026 for Saward, whose fundamental nature as a writer tends towards grim miserablism, trying to do frothy dark whimsy. There will be people who can’t get enough of this tap-dancing balancing act, and will laugh their faces off all the way to the end. And then there will be those who tire of it before the Doctor even appears.

An Audio Ace

Where the audiobook plays its ace is in giving reading duties to Jon Glover.

Glover has a vocal dexterity that can make this world of mostly-unpleasant people and sentient things solidly varied and entertaining – which is hugely helpful in a Doctor Who story where the Doctor doesn’t appear until a third of the way through, and then spends an awful lot of time beggaring about behind locked doors. 

Glover paints Saward’s universe with variety, gruffness, twinkly, sardonic humour and a not-half-bad Colin Baker that, while it stops short of an impersonation, does enough to convince your brain you’re in the presence of the Sixth Doctor.

If you love the comedy Saward, Glover’s reading will just be the icing on the cupcake that is Slipback.

If you’re less of a fan, the genius of hiring Glover kicks into play, because his vocal dexterity will keep you interested, amused, and where necessary, more than a little grossed-out, lifting the material into a more cohesive, coherent experience than the bare text itself might otherwise do.

Is Slipback the best Doctor Who story in the world? No, and it never was. 

Is the novelization amazing? That depends – it will likely divide fans about as much as anything in the second Russell T Davies era did. 

But is the audionovelization on balance better than any previous iteration of Slipback? 

Yes – and the magic is at least as much down to Glover’s intelligent reading as it is to Saward’s dalliance with science-fiction silliness. Tony Fyler

If you like what we do and want to help us keep the lights on and the podcasting mics warm, we’d appreciate it if you bought us a cup of coffee