Spotted in next week’s Radio Times, and soon to be found in my Radio Downloader folder, an item that should be of interest to those classic Doctor Who fans who collected and read the Doctor Who books in the 1980s [me].
Speaking of the 1980s and Doctor Who … did I ever tell you that I once got to shake 3 of Jon Petwee‘s 10 fingers?
It’s all true!
You envy me now don’t you?
On The Outside It Looked Like An Old-Fashioned Police Box
By Mark Gatiss
1 Broadcast – Approx. 30 Minutes [DOCUMENTARY]
Broadcaster: BBC Radio 4
Broadcast: Tuesday 23rd June 11:30-12:00
Mark Gatiss, Doctor Who writer and fanatic, explores the hugely popular Doctor Who novelisations of the 1970s and 80s, published by Target books. Featuring some of the best excerpts from the books and interviews with publishers, house writers, illustrators and the actors whose adventures the books tirelessly depicted.
In an age before DVD and video, the Target book series of Doctor Who fiction was conceived as the chance for children to ‘keep’ and revisit classic Doctor Who. They were marketed as such, written in a highly visual house style. Descriptive passages did the work of the TV camera and the scripts were more or less faithfully reproduced as dialogue.
The books were as close to the experience of watching as possible, and were adored by a generation of children who grew up transfixed by the classic BBC series. Target Doctor Who books became a children’s publishing phenomenon – they sold over 13 million copies worldwide. From 1973 until 1994, the Target Doctor Who paperbacks were a mainstay of the publishing world.
A Brook Lapping production for BBC Radio 4.
[Thanks Roy!]
Posted by Jesse Willis