Donald Cotton (1928–1999)

A thoroughly silly First Doctor adventure, one of his "history" stories. This time he materializes on the plains outside of Troy and contributes in a minor way to the death of Hector at the hand of god-fearing Achilles, who is convinced that the Doctor is Zeus. Gotta love stories of mistaken identity and circumstances where the Doctor turns out to have played a part in making history (or myth, in the case of The Iliad).

The story actually differs significantly from the episode of the show as show more it aired on TV, but if you don't have access to the show -- and let's be honest, few people do at present because it was a First Doctor one and I'm not sure how much of it is still extant -- you won't notice. The gimmick here is that Homer, the creator of the Iliad, is our faithful narrator and actually had a hand in events himself. He's an amusing narrator and very observant, but some of his turns of phrase were a bit anachronistic in my mind, like when he talks about Odysseus caulking the bilges on his ship, or the Tardis bouncing around N-dimensional space (that was particularly odd). But I did like his descriptions of the stench of the Greek camp (it was the olden days and they didn't have soap, so yeah, B.O. and rotting animals/dead soldiers would be a problem) and his very good pacing. It was also neat how the author wrote the narration to allow for only one guy seeing the events unfold (although later on the poor guy didn't literally see anything...), with presumably either the Doctor filling in the blanks later with regard to names, or Homer himself making a few key deductions after the fact.

And I must say Vicki was a somewhat useless companion at points, or at least in this story she was. Poor Steven was a bit better, but still. Perhaps I need to see them in more stories to appreciate their personalities, but for a first outing it was rather bland on the companion front.

As for the actual historical/mythological characters, Odysseus was a hoot, all cunning and violent, and Prince Paris seemed very much a Wodehouse kind of upper-class twit. Priam also had a few good lines, like when Paris came in with the Tardis, which he captured -- Paris has a fanfare and crowd cheering him on, and Priam comes out going "What the hell's all this racket?!" Priam is a character to watch, for sure, and Cassandra also gets some good repartee with her brother Paris. And there was some excellent rationalization for how Homer became blind. Poor guy.

Overall, this is a very good story if you're in the mood for some light reading and like Dr Who and the Trojan War, and can forgive a few anachronisms in the narration. show less

Donald Cotton was chosen to novelise this story on the basis of the original author being dead, and his novelisations of his own comically inclined Hartnell stories. Cotton chooses to tell the story in an epistolary format, including delightfully ridiculous conceits such as Ian writing letters home. He plays up the absurd at every opportunity, from the Doctor’s delusions of his musical prowess to the farcical moments where characters just miss each other. Like the best comedies it has the show more benefit of brevity, giving us a short but sweet routine before getting off the stage. show less

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1021250.html

I had been looking forward to this one, famed as one of the best Doctor Who novelisations, and I was not disappointed. Cotton has recast the narrative of Dennis Spooner’s TV script into epistolary/diary form: letters from Ian Chesterton to his headmaster, the Doctor’s own diary, letters from Ascalis the assassin and Locusta the poisoner, and contributions also from Barbara, the Emperor Nero, and Nero’s wife Poppæa (but not Vicki); the whole thing show more framed in a covering note by Tacitus (obviously written several decades later). Eye of Heaven, the best of the spinoff novels featuring Leela, also featured multiple first-person viewpoints, and I’ve read first-person narratives in other First Doctor stories, but this is the only case of the whole thing being ostensibly done from written records (the Doctor having compiled everything and then left it behind in the villa for the archivists to discover).

Admittedly, as an actual story it’s no great shakes, and purists will be disappointed that we lose a lot of the funny lines from the TV version and one of its major comic elements (the two pairs of time travellers not actually meeting each other in their wanderings). But the whole thing is done for language and laughs; it’s meant to be fun, and it is fun, and that’s all you can really ask.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-romans-by-jacob-edwareds-and-dennis-spooner-...

Now that I’ve read almost all of the Doctor Who novelisations (apart from the very latest ones), I appreciate even more the imaginative flexibility that Cotton was allowed to bring to the story. But it’s interesting that the Ian Chesterton of the novel is clearly a teacher at a minor public school, rather than the secondary modern or comprehensive Coal Hill that we see on screen. It’s also regrettable that the women characters don’t get as much bandwidth on the page as they did on screen. show less

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1026018.html?#cutid1

Once again, Cotton produces a memorable Who novel through a first person narrative: this time he has the poet Homer telling the story of how he witnessed the Doctor and friends interfering with the outcome of the siege of Troy. Homer didn't appear at all in the story as broadcast (though Cotton has him absorb the silent role of the Cyclops played by Tutte Lemkow); constricting the whole narrative to a single viewpoint character does create some show more difficulties in telling the story, but basically it is a really good story anyway, and while it's not Cotton at the utter peak of his form, it is surely one of the top ten novelisations. Cotton has taken the opportunity to restore as chapter titles some of the punning episode titles scrapped by the production team (eg "Doctor in the Horse"). show less