…and it just so happens that Logopolis, is the perfect rebuke to the fan mythology around a Bidmead/Adams divide.

    In the context of the Target novelisations, it’s the echoes of Doctor Who and the Leisure Hive that are first apparent. Just as that framed the opening events on Brighton beach with a day in the life of a deckchair attendant, Logopolis introduces events on the Barnet bypass – and it is here specifically the Barnet bypass (3) – through the eyes of Police Constable Donald Seagrave. What’s more, Bidmead’s interest in the pleasures of mundanity matches pretty closely too: Seagrave is enjoying the sun while riding his recently overhauled bicycle (4) and looking forward to an earlier-than-expected tea (5) and ‘a relaxing afternoon in the garden potting out the sweet-peas’ (6). Unlike in Fisher’s opening, this is a character seen onscreen and with an actual if slight connection with the plot, so these reveries are spoilt by a loss of phone connection closely followed by an abrupt shift of tone as Seagrave’s murdered (7), but the embrace of normal ordinary everyday detail stands out.

    At the time, I saw Fisher’s novelisation as a corrective, a reclaiming of his Williams-era self and a vision for 80s Who that embraced The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a model for British science fiction. I’m not completely dismissing that reading, but I suspect the gap between the broadcast episodes and the novelisation might have had more to do with Lovett Bickford and/or John Nathan-Turner than Chris Bidmead now Logopolis has attempted more-or-less the same trick.

    Surprising in the wake of the fan consensus is the fact that Bidmead’s not only funny but employs a specifically arch, comic narrative voice of a type with Adams and Fisher. Aunt Vanessa, for example, is introduced by means of her ‘battered sports car that was almost old enough to have been new when she was a girl’ (8) and is later described, thanks to her all-enveloping coat, as an ‘elderly bundle of fur’ (9). This uncanniness isn’t just for levity; it’s providing an otherworldly view of these early scenes on Earth, perhaps explaining Bidmead’s decision to introduce readers to ‘a place called Earth’ (10). The clearest demonstration of this cosmic perspective might be how the police attending the disappearance of Seagrave are portrayed: initially events are related through their eyes, such as the Doctor transparently being ‘an odd one’ (11); by the time the Doctor’s departed, their reason and ‘Intelligence’ are woefully inadequate, ridiculously mistaking ‘the police box for a police box’ (12) thanks to lacking ‘certificates in time flow mechanics’ (13).

[There’s a slight complication in that the pivot from the down-to-Earth to the sci-fi seems to be when Adric throws a bike at the police car. That ‘No reasonable person could have anticipated’ (14) such an occurrence feels more in service of the Doctor’s earlier dismissal of ‘people in uniforms’ (15), baffled the universe over by both the mundane and the cosmic, but the jist holds true.]

    Other more definitively Adams touches include the manner in which what appears to be the Doctor speaking gibberish is in fact ‘the exact and literal truth’ (16), making the workings of the universe baffling and inscrutable and, weirdly, casting Adric as Arthur Dent to the Doctor’s Ford Prefect, plus the way Bidmead’s use of capital letters suggests the cosmos has rules concerning ‘Panic’ in much the same way Earth does gravity and thermodynamics (17). This might all feel a bit tenuous, but then Bidmead closes the book with a Monty Python reference, the fifth Doctor announcing ‘the beginning of something completely different’ (18).

    But let’s be honest – the whole following-in-the-footsteps-of-Hitch-Hiker’s thing is largely just the whole Jackanory thing we’ve been monitoring, chiefly in the ‘Are You Sitting Comfortably?’ boxes, since Doctor Who and the Zarbi but with a sardonic tone and a universe’s-eye PoV. All the chatter, when the Doctor does his short hop to materialise around the Barnet bypass police box, of ‘Passers-by in cars’ with ‘their own small immediate destinies’ not being ‘misled’ thanks to not noticing events in the first place (19) is, all said and done, just a way of translating into prose what was achieved simply on the screen without resorting to mere stage directions. It’s stage directions with personality.

    What this means, as Logopolis becomes increasingly doom-laden and the comic tone melts away, is that the Jackanory-style passages simply come to resemble Doctor Who novelisations. There are sarky narrative comments like Tegan’s ‘powers of prophesy [being] as underdeveloped as her geography’ (20); mischievously facetious asides like ‘there was no blue police box inside the cloister room’ (21); Lofficier-style info dumps like ‘The Master's […] chameleon circuit was working perfectly’ (22); and almost entirely unadorned stage directions like ‘Quite suddenly, the stool where the Logopolitan had been sitting was empty’ (23).

    Inevitably, as Bidmead echoes Target Who, he echoes – in what might be a second surprise if you remember the battle between Bidmead and Terrance Dicks over the scripts for ‘State of Decay’ – Terrance Dicks, not just when he’s playing Jackanory but also with a Dicksian opening line (24), all inviting intrigue and easy-reading eloquence. Less inevitably, Bidmead also seems to be channelling Malcolm Hulke. So incidentally as to be almost pointless, the conflict between Logopolis and the Master is described in terms of a socialist ‘people driven not by individual need’ (25) crushed by contact with the Master’s capitalist ‘spirit of free enterprise’ (26). Even more specifically Hulkian, though, is reference to Christian story-telling and the explicit parallel drawn with science fiction. In Logopolis, this comes thanks to Adric’s encounter with Milton’s Paradise Lost, during which he’s first perplexed (27) then quickly won over (28) by the sheer concept of poetry. Adric recognises the Master in Satan (29) and consequently identifies Gallifrey as Heaven (30) and becomes ‘riveted’ because of ‘this central correspondence with the truth’ (31).

    That Bidmead is invoking the origins of the Target range looks less accidental as it becomes clear he’s presenting a sort of Grand Unified Theory of Who, or more specifically of the Doctor’s nature, in Logopolis. It all starts off with the odd idea, as on television, that Time Lords in some way ‘have the same mind’ (32) and are a ‘family’ unto themselves (33). Unsurprisingly, the Doctor and the Master represent oppositional forces within that clan; surprisingly, those forces appear to be ‘concrete’ ideas on the Master’s part and ‘poetry’ on the Doctor’s (34), with the Master suggesting the Doctor’s arguments are based on little but ‘abstract nouns’ (35), things that sound right, and is ‘a poor scientist’ (36). Crucially, this isn’t just the Master sneering. His diagnosis of the Doctor’s scientific acumen and ‘Woolly thinking’ (37) is mirrored by Adric’s realisation ‘that the Doctor wasn't very sure of his ground theoretically’ (38) and twice also thinking the Doctor ‘woolly’ (39).

    Of course, the Master can’t be right about what’s important – but that means being a good scientist isn’t what matters. The Doctor’s immediate defence against the Master’s barbs are his ‘friends’ (36) and that he’s ‘comforting’ (37). But it’s his initial poetic argument that’s most important and to which Bidmead keeps returning – the Doctor stands for ‘A positive response’ (39), insisting on pursuing ‘a positive approach’ (40) however hard one is to find, for the persistence of ‘optimism’ (41), indeed ‘facile optimism’, even when fed by only ‘one small ray of hope’ (42). Not only is this the Doctor’s approach to his adventures, but it seems it’s also how he approaches everyday activities, as when he apparently sits down and only by fortune finds himself on a tone bench (43). Whether deliberately or not, this trait is clearest when he guesses ‘the Master [is] still on Logopolis’ because ‘a dematerialising TARDIS would have to create a major disturbance to the unstable landscape’ (44); this is after the Watcher has dematerialised the Doctor’s own Tardis without any obvious effect. And it should be stressed that this isn’t just the Doctor muddling through and finding solutions through persistence – this seems to be an actual outlook upon the workings of the universe: at least as far as he’s concerned, this doom-laden adventure is the confluence of ‘bad luck’ (45).

    This treatise on the Doctor’s nature lends added poignancy to his death here. Before that, there’s a bit of Dicksian tidying-up of TV events to make it the Doctor’s choice to head to the gantry, edging towards the door not because he’s intimidated by the Master’s weapon (46) but because he’s realised how he can undo the Master’s plan (47). Once in place, the Doctor’s actions are made inevitable: he knows what he’s about to do will lead to his death (48) but the decision is unavoidable once pulling out the lead is described as the ‘positive’ action (49). Through his Grand Unified Theory of Who, Bidmead’s managed to structure Logopolis as tragedy.