World Distributors The 1982 Annual

Published	1981
SBN	7235 6628 3

Starring the fourth and fifth Doctors, Adric and K9

• A Review by Finn Clark

Doctor Who Annual (1982) Published by World Distributors in 1981 Starring the 4th & 5th Doctors, Adric and K9 SBN 7235 6628 3 (not ISBN) A Review by Finn Clark 29/3/04

Many old books tend to lose a page or two over the years, but the 1982 Doctor Who annual is infamous for having pages that fall out. I've owned more than one copy and this problem has afflicted them all. However I'm not here to criticise shoddy binding...

This annual has much in common with last year's, but one big problem stops it from hitting the same heights. It's Adric. The 4th Doctor and Romana dazzled in the 1981 annual. Even bog-standard story ideas were made to look like a monkey-barrel full of fun, while good concepts were made to look fantastic. Unfortunately the 1982 annual stars the Doctor and Adric, who just don't have the same snap to them. The writer Clive Hopwood (whom I'm presuming is the same chap as last year) tries so gamely that he produces what's hands-down the best use of Adric in Doctor Who to date, in any medium, but the stories don't quite measure up to last year's.

But make no mistake, Adric doesn't get better than this. He's a hero in Inter-galactic Cat, complete with backstory references to his dead brother from Full Circle! Planet of Paradise is a whole story built around JNT's Artful Dodger conception of the character, letting Adric's light-fingered tendencies save the day, while he's modest and impressively brave in Just a Small Problem. He even has witty banter with the Doctor! He'll never be Romana Mk. III, but it's still better material than we're used to with the character. If only Adric could have been this well written on television! The TV show had Matthew Waterhouse, unsympathetic scriptwriters and an overcrowded TARDIS to contend with, but this 1982 annual could have shown them how it's done.

This year's stories are quite clever, but they labour somewhat under the burden of their TARDIS crew. Inter-galactic Cat and Conundrum are superb, but of the others... Planet of Paradise and Just a Small Problem suffer from being written to showcase Adric, while The Key of Vaga is basically rubbish. Just a Small Problem also wimps out with a magic gadget solution, though it redeems itself somewhat by continuing with an added plot twist. Planet of Fear isn't bad, but it's a beat-by-beat rehash of 1976's The Psychic Jungle. (Maybe it's coincidence, but the only difference I could see is that Paul Crompton's spiders are now earwigs.) However if you haven't read the 1976 annual, you'll probably enjoy this.

One peculiarity is that two of these seven stories star the 5th Doctor, despite the fact that our only glimpse of Davison back then was at the end of Logopolis. This was the first official 5th Doctor fiction - but you'd only know that from the illustrations. It's written as "the Doctor", with Davison's pictures being exclusively head shots since his costume hadn't been designed yet. The result of all this is that the 1982 annual stars two separate TARDIS crews, neither of which ever appeared on TV. One is the 4th Doctor, K9 and Adric (but not Romana), while the other is the 5th Doctor and Adric without Tegan and Nyssa. Bizarrely this feels completely natural and works well.

One point of interest is the comic strip, again drawn by Mel Powell. It's called Plague World and initially appears to be a low-rent State of Decay. However according to The Completely Useless Encyclopedia, it's a thinly disguised attack on World Distributors. Over to Howarth and Lyons... "On the planet Publius, the villainous Bemar (a partial anagram of World editor Mae Broadley) sucks the life force from people like Auctor and Stylo (meaning 'writer') to feed the Druden (meaning 'five', as did Pentos, the name of World's parent company). Even the title is only just subtle enough for staff writer Clive Hopwood to get away with it."

Overall the 1982 annual doesn't quite live up to its glorious predecessor, but it's still an impressive piece of work. It even has a Who-related filler article: Secrets of the TARDIS! The best stories here are simply top-notch, while even the lesser offerings outclass most of the seventies Tom Baker annuals. If nothing else, Conundrum teaches you cool stuff about Mobius Strips!