Time-Flight

Target novelisation Doctor Who - Time Flight

Author	Peter Grimwade
Published	1983
ISBN	0 426 19297 4
First Edition Cover	Photographic

Back cover blurb: The Doctor and his companions arrive on Tegan's home planet at a moment of crisis: a Concorde aeroplane has inexplicably vanished while in flight. The Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa, together with the TARDIS, join the crew of a second Concorde that sets out to simulate the fateful journey of the missing supersonic jet... Coming back to Earth is not the return to normality that the rescue team might reasonably have expected. Seeing is believing, people say. The Doctor and his friends begin to realise that it just isn't as simple as that...

• It Takes You Away by Jason A. Miller

It Takes You Away by Jason A. Miller 21/3/22

Here's an unusual bit of personal trivia about Time-Flight the novelization. It's the only Target novelization that I ever gave away.

True story. I bought the book fairly early in my fandom, read it, liked it, but didn't love it. One day, one of my two other 7th-grade friends who collected the books, wound up with two copies of Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen. He offered me a trade, but I didn't have any doubles to trade off my own shelf, so I just straight-up gave him Time-Flight, which at the time I didn't anticipate wanting to read again.

Well, I ended up buying a second copy shortly thereafter. Even at age 12, I couldn't escape the pull of my genetic completist code.

Looking back, I can understand why I literally gave up on this book 34 years ago. In general, I'm a big fan of Peter Grimwade's writing; I have great things to say about all three of his TV stories (Time-Flight on TV has problems, but most of them can't be laid at Grimwade's typewriter), and I'm quite fond of his other two novelizations. But this one, his first novelization, has some structural oddities -- oddities that could have been fixed, had there been a longer allowable page count, or longer turnaround time for the editor.

In the era of the twelve-chapter book, with cliffhangers reliably set at the ends of Chapters 3, 6, and 9, Grimwade chooses to enter the Target world with a ten-chapter book -- but the Part Two cliffhanger comes at the end of Chapter 7, and after having lavished seven chapters on the first half of the televised story, he fits all of Part Three into a single chapter, and then gives just two chapters over to the Part Four material. Grimwade has a keen sense of character, though. The supporting cast in Time-Flight is pretty memorable, with Captain Stapley and his officers Bilton and Scobie basically being a ready-made set of companions (I'm surprised Big Finish hasn't given them a long-running series yet), and with Professor Hayter being a feisty thorn in the Doctor's side, who has great cynical thoughts about our hero: "The world was full of Doctors with woefully inadequate qualifications; there were several at his own university." All the guest characters get to commandeer a bit of the POV, and give us interesting perspectives on what's going on. But... Grimwade never tells us what any of them looks like. Seriously. We can guess that Stapley is supposed to be a square-jawed action hero, and that's what director Ron Jones was thinking on TV by casting Richard Easton in the role, but Grimwade gives us nothing at all to distinguish Bilton from Scobie - no physical description, for one, and no real sense that these are two different characters (on TV, one has a mustache and one doesn't, at least). You figure that would have been important for a first-time novelist.

The biggest sticking points to enjoying Time-Flight on TV are the low budget and the presence of Khalid. Theoretically, that shouldn't be a problem in the book, but as Grimwade sets most of the Jurassic sequences inside a featureless stone building, there's not a lot of authentic period detail to make the time-travel part of this book sing. As Jon Blum pointed out in his essay on Time-Flight for the first Outside In volume, the previous story ends with Adric's spaceship crash-landing on Earth during the time of the dinosaurs, and this story opens in the time of the dinosaurs next to a wrecked spaceship -- and nobody says anything. Of course, Grimwade had been dead for years by the time Blum wrote that essay, so we can't ask him if that connection ever occurred to him, but the book could have been so much better if only it had.

As for Kalid, this is written in the early '80s, within my lifetime -- probably within most of our lifetimes -- but societal and cultural norms have changed so much, and I still flinch when Kalid is repeatedly described as "oriental", and also with a "yellow" and "bloated" face. And Grimwade never really does give us a satisfactory explanation for why the Master needed to disguise himself as Kalid in the first place; I counted three separate rationalizations, but they're all mere guesses by the Doctor. It would have been nice to use the book to more definitively explain a confusing bit of business from TV. Things improve when the Master enters the story proper and also gets flashes of POV, as he ponders "a thousand and one exquisite tortures he would like to inflict on the Doctor", but you have to wade through a lot of unpleasantness re: Kalid in order to get there.

The prose, apart from the casual racism and the failure to describe the principal guest characters, is mostly quite witty. Grimwade enjoys mocking the stuffy Airport Controller, Douglas Sheard ("Things had come to a pretty pass when he was obliged to discuss a major crisis with junior cabin staff"). Other lines, though, don't hold up. Nyssa thinks it's "a chance in a million" that the TARDIS would bump into another time-traveling ship -- but then Grimwade will give us the exact same scenario in his next story, Mawdryn Undead, so, really, Nyssa should have said "two chances in two". I do like that there's a lot of continuity, with the references to Adric and UNIT and with Tegan having a few POV flashbacks to (the Grimwade-directed) Logopolis.

Good Lord, though, is this thing a paid commercial for Concorde. Seriously, check this out, and then tell me that Grimwade wasn't getting an endorser's fee:

"In her travels with the Doctor, Tegan had seen many remarkable things, but as she stepped out of the car onto the hard-packed snow and looked up at Concorde she caught her breath. The aeroplane dazzled in the sunshine, brighter than the frost. She saw why it was so often compared to a bird -- a wild creature of the upper air, with graceful swept-back wings, but, for all its power, a thing tamed to the use of man. With its lowered visor and long, elegant legs, it looked a touchingly submissive beast, patiently waiting for its master to arrive, and command it to soar to the borders of space."

At other times, though, Grimwade's power of concise descriptions is worthy of the great Terrance Dicks himself. Breath "misted in the cold air", footsteps "cracked on the frosty earth". This is a worthy book to read aloud. As the Doctor pierces Khalid's hypnotic suggestion that Concorde has in fact landed back in 1982:

"All around them, layer upon layer of what they had taken to be Heathrow was peeling away to reveal an infinite void. The wind rose to a hurricane. The whole air screamed. The airport ripped apart, as if it had been nothing but a painted cloth. Then there was darkness."

Even if you hated Time-Flight on TV -- and, truth, it's not a story with an army of defenders -- and even if Grimwade never quite makes the plot work in print, I think this one ends up as an enjoyable read, for the effective prose (mostly), the solid vocabulary, and the flashes of wit, even attributed to walk-on characters ("[T]he younger man [wondered] if the Day of Judgment was at hand. His older colleague suspected a few too many at lunch-time." Maybe at age 12 I was too young to appreciate the wit, but I sure get it now. On the whole, I'm glad I have the book again, and I know that, where Grimwade's novelizations are concerned, he'll do even better the next two times out.