The Christmas Invasion

Target novelisation Doctor Who - The Christmas Invasion

Author	Jenny T Colgan
Published	2018
ISBN	978 1 785 94328 7
First Edition Cover	Anthony Dry

Back cover blurb: Earth is under attack by power-hungry aliens. This is no time for the Doctor to be out of action. When a British space probe is intercepted by a sinister alien vessel on the eve of Christmas, it marks the beginning of an audacious invasion of the Earth by the Sycorax - horrifying marauders from beyond the stars. Within hours, a third of humanity stands on the brink of death with not a single shot fired. Our planet needs a champion - but the Doctor is not fit for service. He's just regenerated, delirious in a new body and a dressing gown. Forced into his battered shoes is his friend, Rose Tyler, a girl from a London council estate. Will she save the world from this nightmare before Christmas - or see it destroyed?

• Loving the Alien by Niall Jones

Loving the Alien by Niall Jones 12/1/26

My memories of watching Doctor Who for the first time are rather hazy. Subsequent viewings, along with the passing of time, have blurred the impact of the original experience, but there are still a few moments that I can remember making an impression on me: lines of people standing on roofs, David Tennant emerging from the TARDIS clad in a dressing gown, a swordfight atop a spaceship. I was seven at the time and had been wanting to watch Doctor Who more or less since I first heard about it. My parents, however, thought that I would find it too scary, but relented in time for Christmas. How frightening I found The Christmas Invasion, I don't really recall, but I know that I must have enjoyed it, as we then went back and watched Series One on DVD.

I say this in part to emphasise the episode's significance --- I can't have been the only person for whom The Christmas Invasion was their first experience of Doctor Who --- but also to illustrate the difficulty of trying to reconstruct early memories. I've been watching Doctor Who for so long that it's hard to remember the time before, when I only had the vaguest sense of what the show was about. But while it may be impossible to rewind the clock, there might just be a way to once more experience the story for the first time.

Jenny T Colgan's novelisation of The Christmas Invasion doesn't deviate much from the episode it is based on. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise. The Christmas Invasion has a very strong story in which there are relatively few obvious points for elaboration. Colgan's changes are generally small: giving a larger role to the Guinevere One team and adding lines of dialogue that were scripted but cut from the broadcast. The story works because it uses a familiar formula --- aliens try to invade the Earth --- but renders all its elements unconventional. Christmas trees prove deadly, Santas attack, and the hero is unconscious for most of the story. Even the Sycorax, with their swords and voodoo science, are a far cry from typical aliens. The plot scaffolding is there, but the story is so inventive that you don't notice it.

Doctor Who - The Christmas Invasion similarly uses a conventional form. The novelisation is plainly but vividly written, with short chapters, each named after a Christmas song. Colgan also writes mainly in the third-person, but occasionally slips into the second-person to address the reader directly. She doesn't necessarily re-imagine the story, but she does provide new insights into it.

The novelisation begins with a moment of terror. Readers may be familiar with regeneration, but Rose Tyler is most certainly not. The Doctor's regeneration marks the sudden end of a dream: 'the reality is, somebody --- something --- in the shape of a man has eaten your best friend, and it's standing right in front of you and it's talking about Barcelona, of all things'. This is only the start of a long, paragraph-length sentence, whose numerous 'ands' (five in total) and commas emphasise Rose's sense of being overwhelmed. The chapter ends with Rose feeling 'more frightened and alone than she'd ever felt in her life'.

The chapters set aboard the TARDIS don't feature in the original Christmas special, which instead opens on the Powell Estate. They are not, however, entirely the product of Colgan's imagination, instead being derived from The 2005 Children in Need special, which follows directly on from the end of The Parting of the Ways. These chapters might not be necessary for understanding the overall plot, but they form a vital part of the novelisation's emotional story. How does Rose go from being terrified of this strange man, scared that he might be a Slitheen or even about to eat her, to not just accepting the new Doctor but being in love with him?

That the novelisation teases out the emotional undercurrents of the story should come as no surprise. Outside of Doctor Who, Colgan is a bestselling writer of romantic comedies, the author of 'feel-good phenomena', including "Meet Me at the Seaside Cottages" and "Midnight at the Christmas Bookshop". Doctor Who - The Christmas Invasion might belong to a completely different genre, but, if you squint a little, you can see the outline of a boy-meets-girl plot, so is perhaps not as far from Colgan's usual fare as may be initially thought. Colgan describes herself as 'a lifelong Doctor Who fan' --- one who 'grew up on the Target novelisations' --- and has also written two full-length Doctor Who novels, as well as several scripts for Big Finish. Having a dual career as a romance novelist and as a Doctor Who writer may sound unusual, but it shows the degree to which love for the series extends beyond the stereotype of socially inept young fanboys. As an aside, while she has often been credited for her sci-fi work as Jenny T Colgan, she doesn't actually have a middle name; in a podcast interview with the Guardian, she revealed that the T stood for TARDIS.

Rose's burgeoning romantic feelings for the Doctor --- or, more prosaically, her sexual desire for him --- aren't given undue prominence, but they do surface throughout. Her first, bewildering encounter with the new Doctor is laced with innuendo. 'Rose nearly tripped over backwards, a million questions burning in her brain [...] Could he dance now?'; later, after the Doctor emerges from the TARDIS and wonders in what ways he is now different, Colgan writes that Rose 'didn't want to discuss how different. How much younger. How much...' These changes to the nature of their relationship are present in the original episode, but their emphasis is Colgan's innovation.

The character for whom Rose's changing relationship with the Doctor has the biggest impact is Mickey. Towards the end of the novelisation, Colgan describes Rose looking at the Doctor and focalises it from Mickey's point of view:

She couldn't take her eyes off him, Mickey thought. Not for a minute. And that other guy. That guy had been old, and a bit weird looking. This one... this one was young. And handsome. And she stared at him like he was chocolate cake.

Doctor Who - The Christmas Invasion may not be radical, but, like Colgan's romantic comedies, it provides an enjoyable, easy read. In foregrounding Rose's relationship with the Doctor, she also highlights another reason why The Christmas Invasion makes for such a good introduction to the series --- it's a story that doesn't take the title character for granted. Like Rose, we have to learn to love the Doctor.