Steven Moffat’s The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone was among some of the first filming Matt Smith did during his time as the Eleventh Doctor. Looking back at the story today, you’d never tell as much: the man is insanely assured in the role, completely the Doctor from the word Geronimo!

As well as being the fourth of Smith’s stories to be broadcast, it was also to act as a proving ground for two of Moffat’s Russell T Davies-era creations, both out for their second showing, to see whether they had the appeal to become returning features. 

Moffat told a story that expanded the range, abilities and all-round creepiness of his Weeping Angels (first seen in Blink), and deepened the mystery of Doctor (and eventually Professor) River Song, played by Alex Kingston, who knew the Doctor’s real name for reasons that, at the time of broadcast, were enigmatic.

The story also introduced the idea of military clerics, a notion that would go on to be of paramount importance in A Good Man Goes To War, and which Moffat would revisit in the time of the Fifteenth Doctor with his story Boom.

The Things It Didn’t Say

What it didn’t do was hint at any biological connection between Amy Pond of Earth and River Song of Elsewhere. That connection would eventually be explained, also in A Good Man Goes To War, but The Time of Angels was far too soon to start dropping hints about it.

Except of course, The Time of Angels was broadcast in 2010. 

Steady – we know it’s a shock.

And the novelization has been written in 2026, which gives hugely accomplished writer Jenny T Colgan access to all the spoilers that would have been in River Song’s head while she was throwing herself out of the airlock of spaceships and then marching through temples full of statues with the Eleventh Doctor and Amy in Time of the Angels.

That means the novelization does what some of the best in the field have done before it, not least Matt Jones’ recent novelisation of his own story, The Satan Pit. It absolutely records the flavour and the beats of what appeared on screen, for those who want an evocation of the story they watched. But it also goes behind the audience’s understanding of what was shown in the TV version, to add richness, depth, perhaps a smidgen of pathos where it’s judicial, and to put the whole story that we saw alllll those years ago into a wider, harder-hitting context.

Expansion By The Book

While the insights into what River knew at the time of this adventure is by far the most affecting element of additional context we get in the novelization, Colgan is in no sense afraid to add meat to some other elements of the story which, in fairness, you may never have realised were missing until they were added.

Remember the book? The source of the whole “whatever carries the image of an angel becomes itself an angel” mythos that comes back to bite Amy Pond in the brain?

Colgan gives us an origin story for that book, and its author, and it’s more than a little glorious, mixing modern political idiocy with a wicked, Douglas Adams-style time-travel twinkle. We very badly want to spoiler you about that in the spirit of effervescent fan-sharing, but we won’t, because Colgan does such a joyous job of making that plot-element make some sense and give it some resonance, it would be an absolute disservice to her to blow the secret.

But it’s another example of the way in which a writer with an understanding of Doctor Who and a gift for mischief can, with the benefit of hindsight, expand the reality of an on-screen story into something bigger and stranger and a touch more fun than you ever imagined it was, having only experienced the version that was tightly timed for television.

A Voice To Hold Your Hand

What is perhaps the more unusual thing about the audiobook release of The Time of Angels is its reader. 

Let the record show that Maureen O’Brien (TV’s Vicki back when the world was black and white) is a wonderful actress, more than capable of making a solid fist of any reading you put in front of her. The proof of which is that she does precisely that here, evoking both the adventure and pacing of 21st century Doctor Who and the heart-wrenching knowledge of a daughter seeing a mother who hasn’t had her yet, and not being able either to tell her of their connection or, as would be natural, to simply run into her arms on this first occasion on which Amy meets River Song.

Throughout all of that, Maureen O’Brien absolutely has your back, and very quickly her skills as an intelligent, dramatic reader sweep you up in both strands – the adventure and the emotional drama. 

The only issue comes if you start thinking about who made the connection between emotional hard-core “timey-wimey” 21st century adventuring… and Maureen O’Brien. 

As I say, once you understand that it’s Maureen who’ll be holding your hand through the adventure, there’s absolutely no disconnect, and you go on Colgan’s expanded emotional adventure easily and fast. 

But until it’s a fact, you wonder about the connection between the actress who brought one of the show’s earliest companions to on-screen life (and who by all reports had a pretty grim time of it with the press as a result) and this early Eleventh Doctor adventure. The connection does not seem in any sense immediately obvious, and there will be fans out there who will have not picked up the audiobook on that basis.

How To Stop Worrying And Enjoy Your Life

At which point, you have a question to answer: do you want a happy life?

If you decide that you do, life becomes very simple in a heartbeat. Put the shadow of Vicki out of your mind, stop worrying about connections, take Maureen’s outstretched hand, and go back in time to the early days of the Eleventh Doctor. 

The combination of the original script by Steven Moffat, Colgan’s superb additions and expansions, and O’Brien’s performance, which matches pace with yearning, will give you all the angels you could wish for, and an appropriate emotional weighting for the moments when you see the story from River’s perspective in light of the eventually unfolded truths. That’s a significant bonus on top of the original TV episode. 

The Time of Angels was always going to be a belter of a book – it was too good a story to fail in any especially heinous way. 

But with Colgan’s enormously astute expansions, and Maureen O’Brien’s intelligently emotional reading, what you have in the audio novelisation is a story that is both recognisably the same as the one that aired on TV, and simultaneously, a whole lot more joy and angst than you ever bargained for. Tony Fyler

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