Don’t give up on the resurgence of quality signalled by Doctor Who and the Robots of Death quite yet. It turns out this was written already a relic of a past phase by the time of publication.

    According to David J Howe, the Junior Doctor Who range was originally slated to launch in July 1978, though admittedly with Junior Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius, Junior Doctor Who and the Giant Robot being announced as a second title when the launch date was shifted to April 1979 (3). Things then get a bit murkier as the release schedule for the books sees the first title announced for the range becoming the second planned for release, despite the fact that this (now) first book apparently ran into trouble with Graham Williams, possibly causing the delay in its release

(4). Presumably, having decided to add an adaptation of ‘Robot’

to the range, they felt it, as the fourth Doctor’s first story, should

launch the range.

    Quite how much hope Target had for the range is unclear. The

books’ own blurb suggests adaptations specifically aimed at ‘5 to

8 year olds’ had been commissioned in response to ‘popular

demand’ (5), but Target editor Brenda Gardner seems to have a

different memory of events when quoted in The Target Book: ‘I'm

sure Terrance may have suggested them’ (6). These aren’t

necessarily incompatible reasons – maybe Dicks had received

requests for something aimed at younger readers and passed

that on to Gardner – but the idea that there was a groundswell

for a Junior range does rather fly in the face of Gardner’s feeling

that, by the late 1970s/ early 1980s, Dicks was already, with a readership in mind aged 11-14, aiming a bit young (7). All the postponements certainly feel as if they’d already twigged before even the launch of Junior Doctor Who and the Giant Robot that there wasn’t much of a market out there eagerly waiting.

    All of which aside, what does it turn out Dicks thinks is beyond an 8-year-old? Well, pronouns for a start. From the ambiguous ‘It’ that opens the original novelisation (7), replaced with ‘A giant metal figure’ in the Junior version (8), names and nouns prevail right through the new adaptation (though that, to be fair, is often thanks to the shortening of sequences removing the option of pronouns). More comprehensively, ‘WEAPONRY’ (9), ‘depressing’ (10), ‘overjoyed’ (11), ‘ecology’ (12), ‘intelligent’ (13), ‘perimeter’ (14), ‘aloud’ (15), ‘Immersed’ (16), ‘CORRUPT’ (17) and ‘some alien life-form’ (18) are all out, as are ‘sympathetically’ (19), ‘activated’ (20), ‘desperately’ (21), cricketing vocabulary (22) and a lot of synonyms for big (23). Oddly, Benton’s promotion is also judged beyond the comprehension of the under-9s (24), and, perhaps more understandably, Harry’s wrists no longer bleed as he and Sarah escape their bonds in the bunker (25).

    Possibly more revealing is what Dicks thinks is disposable when faced with a tighter word count. For example, the majority of

Sarah’s interactions with the Brigadier, the

Thinktank, Kettlewell and, most notably, the robot

all pretty much culled. As a result, come the final

act of the story, it’s not at all clear why the robot

should choose to kidnap Sarah and generally try to

keep her about. Indeed, not only has its affection

for her been barely acknowledged (26), the robot’s

verycapacity for affection has gone pretty much

missing from the story thanks to the loss of material

detailing the thefts it conducts – though both

incidents of it catching the sentries it encounters

are preserved (27), the tenderness with which it

treats their bodies is gone (28). As a result, the

reasons why events pan out the way they do is at

the very least obscured.

   In fact, almost anything that doesn’t involve the

Doctor is at best trimmed to within an inch of its existence. In contrast, details that do involve him but have little to do with the story as a whole, such as his recent regeneration, are preserved, even as much of the business that surrounded it, the other characters’ reflections on it and the Doctor’s own desperate desire to get back to the Tardis and get away, is gone – he even only gets to try on one inappropriate costume, the Viking get-up. This could be more a reflection Target’s desire to not deviate too far from the TV stories rather than any verdict on Dicks’s part, but that would make the massively shortened ending, which in no way puts Harry aboard the Tardis ready for the next adventure (29), hard to explain. Instead, then, it seems to hint that Dicks views the Doctor as the main attraction in a Doctor Who story, rather than, say, the exploration of ideas, such as the possibility that emotion might arise through artificial intelligence, the odd moral message (30) or the spectacle of humanity encountering alien or technological threats.

    The thing is, you could argue that this is an entirely appropriate way to adapt ‘Robot’, a story whose job was to introduce the new Doctor and persuade the audience he’s worth sticking with – of course the new Doctor should be pushed to the forefront. It may make a little less sense to adapt it in this manner in 1979, but it still fits with the story and with the possibility, however dim that might already have been at the time of publication, of Junior Doctor Who and the Giant Robot functioning as the first book in a whole new range. However, that abrupt ending makes this a trickier reading. In the original adaptation, and indeed on TV, the ending shows the Doctor and Sarah emerging from the story, a story in which they’ve had more-or-less equal roles, with the same sense of sadness and deciding together to jack it all in and head off into the universe; in the Junior adaptation, Sarah’s just a hanger-on, someone who’s lost much of her role in the story, has no response of her own to how it’s ended and will just get swept along by the Doctor’s desire for a change of scene. Of course, it might just be that Dicks ran out of words and simply lopped the ending off in desperation, in which case none of this really matters. Only, and I do mean only, Junior Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius can tell…