World Distributors The 1981 Annual

Published	1980
SBN	7235 6594 5

Starring the fourth Doctor, Romana II and K9

• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Finn Clark 27/3/04

It's as if someone threw a switch. After years of going through the motions since Tom Baker took over, suddenly the Dr Who annuals turn the corner with a book that's bloody good. No, it's better than that. This is fabulous stuff - clever, witty and entertaining in all the right ways.

For starters there's been a shake-up behind the scenes, putting a proper writer at the helm. According to The Completely Useless Encyclopedia, a de-Doctored version of one of these stories (Sweet Flower of Uthe) was performed as a play at Manchester's Contact Theatre, with the cast getting proofs of the upcoming annual to work from. Personally I'm not surprised at all. This volume's stories aren't just good, they're sparkling. Every Dog Has Its Day is witty, taking the ultra-restrictive format of a six-page comic strip format and transforming it into a vehicle for an elegant bubbling of bon mots. (Mel Powell's art is somewhat cartoonish, but he's better suited to this kind of storytelling than Paul Crompton would have been.)

The 4th Doctor, Romana and K9 are astonishing, with The Voton Terror giving us an all-time classic K9-Doctor exchange that had me laughing out loud. Something about Season Seventeen seems to inspire writers, even with authors of Virgin and BBC Books. Last year's 1980 annual didn't even approach this level of quality. I salute whoever penned these stories and I wouldn't at all mind seeing more from him. There's a playful quality about this writing. A Midsummer's Nightmare tosses in a Douglas Adams reference, with Romana rating Shakespeare below The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Colony of Death opens with an attempt at futuristic speech patterns. Even the title Sweet Flower of Uthe is a literary pun.

However there's also strong plotting on display. The best example is Alien Mind Games, which kicks off with the TARDIS in mortal peril and proceeds to follow up on its threats by killing the Doctor and Romana! The weakest is probably A Midsummer's Nightmare, if only because I don't understand what happened at the end, but even that's head and shoulders above any short story in the annuals since Pertwee's time. There's even a sense of place and future history, with New Worlds Incorporated in the late 23rd century selling new lives far from Earth for five million dolas each. The Voton Terror even has plenty of those wacky World Distributors aliens, including "representatives of the sub-microscopic universe" which gave me happy flashbacks to Atoms Infinite and A Universe called Fred circa 1970. These stories contain nothing I don't like.

Even the art is fantastic. They can't draw Romana (the only decent likeness is on p31, while the picture on p14 looks like Sarah Jane Smith!), but at least they've realised. There's a suspicious tendency for the pictures to show the back of her head. With Mel Powell drawing this year's comic strip, I don't know who did the other illustrations... it could be Paul Crompton. Maybe. Comparing this with last year's book, it's not impossible - and if so, it's his best work by miles. You'd never, ever identify this artist as the deranged, over-stylised loon of 1976 who produced amazing paintings but couldn't illustrate worth a damn. These are strong, fun, characterful, highly coloured paintings that serve the writing. There's no undercutting of jolly stories with disturbing imagery. Whoever produced this work was a consummate professional who knew exactly what they were doing.

I can't praise this annual highly enough. It's not just the best Tom Baker annual to date, but one of the highpoints of the World Distributors output (if not the highpoint). I'd easily rank it up there with David Whitaker's 1966 effort. It's a slim book, like the others of its era, but it's as fresh and bubbly as strawberries and champagne. Almost perfect in every way. (My only complaint is the loss of one comic strip, dropping down from two to one.) Read it!