World Distributors The 1975 Annual

Published	1974
SBN	7235 0244 7

Starring the third Doctor, Jo Grant, Sarah and the Brigadier

• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Finn Clark 21/2/04

These annuals keep getting shorter! This time barely half the page count is devoted to short stories (though there are still two comic strips of course) and even those have big, big illustrations. The 1975 annual is a quick read if you're not interested in filler articles, though you'd be missing comedy gems like Earth of the Future. Yes, by the 21st century the only acceptable buildings will be skyscrapers two miles tall! It's hard to believe that these articles were deadly serious and at the forefront of scientific prediction in the seventies.

As for its Doctor Who content... well, it's a throwback to the old days! With Pertwee's Earth exile over at last, World Distributors could return to sixties goofball fantasy. (However it looks as if they sacked the drug-addled hippy who'd presumably been writing for them since 1967, which suggests that the 1974 annual could have been too offbeat even for World Distributors. Now that's a scary thought.) These stories can't get off Earth fast enough, only popping back briefly for the comic strip Dead on Arrival and otherwise taking us on an Alice in Wonderland trip through impossibly strange places as in Hartnell's and Troughton's time.

There's no discernable theme or philosophy, but this annual proves that's not always important. The best of these stories (Revenge of the Phantoms, The Battle Within) are packed with creepy high-concept weirdness that you'll remember for a long, long time. Revenge of the Phantoms confronts us with a little doll-figure in his house of a million paintings, while The Battle Within is a hallucinogenic mood piece set in a Timewyrm: Relevation-like psychic dreamscape. It's effectively the Valeyard ten years early. That was bloody sinister! The Battle Within might lodge itself in your hindbrain and never let go; for me, it's the single most memorable story to come from World Distributors.

Fugitives from Chance has pirates transformed into solid gold, glass, water, marble, etc. and forced to fight warships from other periods of Earth history for the degenerate amusement of the alien Melovians. It's not a historical but it's also not a pseudo-historical... should the term be "neo-historical"? Then there's Dead on Arrival, a fully painted comic strip in which Jo Grant lands on Earth as a ghost and attends her own funeral. (After that things get even weirder.)

And then there's The House That Jack Built, written by a chap called Keith Miller, then head of the Doctor Who Fan Club. Apparently this was the first fan-written professional Doctor Who fiction. It's reminiscent of The Celestial Toymaker, except that it has hypnotic mirror balls and killer chess pieces with buzz-saws and electric shocks. It's great fun, actually. It sets up the tone of the annual by serving up non-stop weirdness whose only goal is to make you go "cool!". At that it succeeds. It even harks back to the sixties annuals by having a silly plot twist, in which the Doctor blows up a computer with what we'll politely term the Captain Kirk school of computer logic.

[That's not the only bit of comedy plotting, by the way. The Time Thief pits the Doctor against a rogue Time Lord called Madrigor who wants to conquer Gallifrey with his robot army of Terrestoids. He even has his own planet, Lunargov III. The Doctor returns to the TARDIS on p31 and suddenly the author decides it's time to end the story... "The Doctor pressed the final button. The Tardis lurched and bumped and outside everything spun in a myriad of colours, and then Madrigor and Lunargov III were no more and the Tardis was once again Earthbound." WHAT THE HELL?]

This isn't the awesome, mystical universe we'd seen in recent Dr Who annuals, but a wacky cosmos of idiots, goodies and baddies. At its best it's a blast, but elsewhere it's just random fantasy that doesn't go anywhere much. Scorched Earth is kinda dull. The Doctor and Sarah Smith (sic) work at a laboratory bench and save stupid people! After the Revolution is chiefly remarkable for calling its planet Freedonia, thus justifying Terrance Dicks's shoehorning of planets called Freedonia and Sylvan(i)a into Warmonger. No, it's not a Marx Brothers gag - it's a reference to the 1975 Dr Who Annual! And finally Before The Legend blew my mind by putting arrogant aliens called Lantans on ancient Earth, then wiping them out in earthquakes and tidal waves as the continent sinks below the sea... but never, not once, does the story hint at an "At" before the "Lantans".

I should discuss the art. Edgar Hodges does okay on the comic strips, though he ain't no Steve Livesey. However the short story illustrations contain the worst likeness of any companion in a World Distributors annual. I realise that's quite a claim, but check out Scorched Earth. Is that Sarah Jane Smith? Did Liz Sladen even have blonde hair? I think not. A few minutes' perusal reveals that the artist thought he was drawing Jo Grant throughout, but the text of a few stories was changed at the last minute and Jo's likeness was so poor that the editor didn't think anyone would notice. (The pretty girl being passed off as both Jo and Sarah looks like neither of them, but she might be mistaken for Katy Manning in bad light by someone who hadn't seen a human being before.)

One puzzling point: these Dr Who annuals were behind the times. The 1974 annual had an Earthbound 3rd Doctor despite the fact that The Three Doctors began airing in 1972. Similarly the 1975 annual mostly stars the 3rd Doctor and Jo (with Sarah cut-and-pasted into a few stories that weren't originally written for her) despite the fact that The Green Death and The Time Warrior both began in 1973. Admittedly the cover date on World Distributors annuals was always a year ahead of the copyright date for the sake of the Christmas market, but this is a two-year lag. Bizarre.

Overall, this book is a lot of fun. It's World Distributors doing what they do best, putting out completely daft stories that are nonetheless full of energy and entertainment value. It combines fannish detail (Gallifrey, Time Lords, the sonic screwdriver, 'the Doctor' instead of 'Dr Who') with fantastical surrealism, a seasoning of stupidity and a couple of really freaky stories. It's a bit hit-and-miss in places, but its best stories are among my favourites from all the annuals. And every fan should read The Battle Within.