Something that I don’t think I’ve stressed nearly as persistently throughout the course of these reviews as I perhaps could have done is the simple fact of just how odd it is, from the perspective of a Doctor Who fan living in 2023, that a company like Virgin Books was ever in a position of sufficient power that it could be credibly considered one of the chief custodians of the franchise’s future, if not the only major claimant to that title for the bulk of its existence.
Admittedly, it’s not as if there haven’t been some weird footnotes to be found among the weeds of Doctor Who prose fiction. Long before there were Target novelisations, for instance, there were the adaptations of The Daleks, The Web Planet and The Crusade, published by Frederick Muller Ltd. Folks looking for a general overview of Frederick Muller Ltd’s other output, however, will be fresh out of luck, as even the imprint’s listing on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database suggests a certain dearth of definite information, positing that the company “must have been quite big in the 1950s and 1960s,” a declaration that seems to lean rather more heavily on the “speculative” aspect of the site’s name than on that of the “database,” if you ask me.
The rest of the page offers only the broadest summary of the elusive imprint’s history, including one of those great “God I wish I knew the whole story here” moments in the course of my research for Dale’s Ramblings, where reference is made to the company having been sold by HTV – presumably Harlech Television, the old name for an ITV franchise area which has since been split into ITV Cymru Wales and ITV West Country – to an “Anthony White” for a whopping £1 and seemingly little-to-no fanfare, since all signs seem to point to its having been subsumed into Random House and almost completely forgotten about by the close of the decade.
(If for no deeper reason than my own amusement, I’ll also mention here that the Royal Academy of Arts’ website is marginally more helpful than the ISFDB, revealing that Frederick Muller was behind such erudite literature as Gretta Allan’s Goosie Gander Plays His Part, to say nothing of the monumentally-entitled 1950 tome Blackadder: a tale of the days of Nelson as told by some of those who played parts in it, the various documents collected and edited by Stephen MacFarlane and the whole now presented for the first time in book form by John Keir Cross. With illustrations by Robin Jacques, naturally. Who else could it possibly be, I ask you?!)
Beyond that, discerning 1960s readers could choose to pick up the regular Doctor Who Annuals courtesy of Manchester publishing stalwart World Distributors (“Pembertons” to its friends), or the first – and for a quarter of a century, only – original novel to feature the Doctor, J. L. Morrissey’s delightfully generic-sounding The Invasion from Space.
All of which is without even touching upon Dalekmania-tinged titles like The Dalek Book from Souvenir Press, an independent publishing house stewarded by the late Czechoslovakian émigré Ernest Hecht which is, in fact, still going strong and has maintained its independence more than seventy years after its initial founding in spite of the titanic gravity exerted by Penguin over the British publishing scene. If you were so inclined, you could probably coax out a reasonably interesting history on the subject through the lens of Souvenir’s weathering of the many trials and tribulations that must invariably besiege such publishers, but for our purposes, the example of The Dalek Book – and its two sequels, The Dalek World and The Dalek Outer Space Book – is pretty much all we’re going to be concerned with today.
Published in the thick of the programme’s first season, hitting shelves at the very tail end of June 1964 and about five months after the broadcast of The Daleks‘ seventh and final episode, The Dalek Book can lay an extremely strong claim to being the first ever work of Doctor Who spin-off fiction, at least if we’re operating under the definition of “a story featuring concepts and characters introduced in the original television series, but without the presence of the Doctor themselves.”
This, in turn, brings us to that perennial quirk of Doctor Who, or more broadly of British copyright law as a whole. If you, as a writer, just so happened to hit upon that fortuitous combination of coming up with a genuine smash hit of an idea while not being a contracted BBC employee, you could look forward to retaining the licensing rights on that idea for any independent production that might come along.
(Of course, if you were Raymond Cusick, you’d just have to make do with an ex gratia payment of £100 and a few decades’ wait to achieve proper recognition for having played a pivotal role in devising one of the most famous and enduring designs in science-fiction history, but that’s neither here nor there, really…)
For much of the programme’s original twenty-six year run, the significance of these spin-offs proved rather peripheral. After the publication of The Dalek Outer Space Book in 1966, Souvenir Press quietly abandoned any notions of a Dalek annual, although the concept would be temporarily revived by World Distributors in the mid-to-late 1970s with four instalments of Terry Nation’s Dalek Annual.
Even in this instance, the power of the spin-off ultimately proved rather limited, as confirmed by a quick glance at the total failure of Nation’s efforts to port the Daleks to American television in the wake of the genocidal pepperpots’ “final end” in The Evil of the Daleks. And lest you think that the production and broadcast of a full-on television pilot was by any means guaranteed to secure a full series commitment, there also exists the cautionary tale of 1981’s K-9 and Company, denied a commission thanks to a change of management among the higher-ups of BBC One despite securing better ratings than all of Doctor Who‘s eighteenth season, and in a rather unfavourable late December slot to boot.
No, the dawn of the Doctor Who spin-off as a broadly sustainable artform in and of itself is, by and large, a phenomenon of the Wilderness Years. As with any sufficiently complex question concerning a long-running franchise of this nature, the particulars of this trend’s genesis are somewhat fluid and subject to debate, but it seems that any argument on the matter will inevitably gravitate towards Reeltime Pictures’ Wartime.
One might well choose to quibble on this point, and note that a direct-to-VHS film from January 1988 does not technically fall within the typically-accepted definition of the Wilderness Years’ parameters, but such an argument is rather pedantic, even if we decline to bring up some of the more salient points like writer Andy Lane’s subsequent status as one of the more prominent New Adventures authors. If we can accept a slightly looser definition of a historical period like “the 1990s” as referring more to a general societal vibe that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and ended with the attacks on the World Trade Center rather than the cold, hard dictates of the Gregorian calendar, then surely we can apply the same logic to Doctor Who‘s own history.
For all that I obviously love the McCoy era very dearly, the fact remains that it was a period in which the series was effectively dead in the water, due in no small part to the BBC’s rather underhanded decision to schedule it opposite the immensely popular Coronation Street. It’s telling that the eventual 1989 cancellation wasn’t framed in such explicit terms, but instead as the BBC simply declining to produce a twenty-seventh season. It’s a passive wording, analogous more to taking the programme off of life support rather than consciously choosing to shoot it in the back of the head.
To all intents and purposes beyond the most obsessively literal-minded, then, the McCoy era absolutely qualifies as a de facto part of the Wilderness Years – to be honest, the cut-off point could feasibly be argued to fall around the time of the original 1985 hiatus, which would also confer a similar status upon The Trial of a Time Lord – and so too does Wartime.
Once it became clear that there was to be no televised Doctor Who for the foreseeable future, though, Reeltime very rapidly found themselves competing with other players in the fan production market. In 1997, this only really means BBV, with both Big Finish and Magic Bullet being some way off their respective beginnings.
Virgin, of course, always existed at something of a tangent to this sphere. On the one hand, they were Item #1 on the infinitesimally small list of non-BBC companies who had an official license to create original Doctor Who fiction. In the novels’ heyday, this was a list that really only included Marvel UK’s ongoing Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, which initially deferred to Virgin by incorporating key New Adventures characters like Benny before wandering off into a morass of past Doctor stories.
(Yes, in the final months of the NAs’ lifespan the comic had started to forge its own path with Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor, but it seems fair to say that much of fandom’s attention was initially focused on the launch of BBC Books’ Eighth Doctor Adventures, before people actually got to read The Eight Doctors and subsequently got very, very confused indeed… but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.)
And yet for all that Virgin were manifestly official in a way that Bill Baggs and his comrades weren’t – even if Baggs had them beat on the whole “actually having Doctor Who actors to play out the stories” front, before gradually pissing off most of those actors so much that they never wanted to work with him again – they always kept one foot planted in the strange and heady world of fandom, too.
The company’s open submissions policy became a rightfully lauded part of their legacy, giving voice to budding young writers from fan culture like Paul Cornell, Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat. As you’re hopefully aware by now, those are all names that would go on to have a pretty big impact on the television series upon its revival in 2005.
Outside of that, there’s also the demonstrable cross-pollination between the Virgin and BBC Books pool of writers and that of the more overtly fannish BBV. Baggs’ Audio Adventures in Time & Space series – which is admittedly about a year out from launching at this point, but we’ve already chosen not to argue over such paltry trifles as “the calendar,” so please do pipe down – boasts a number of credits from established stalwarts in the world of Doctor Who novels, from Mark Gatiss to David A. McIntee.
What’s more, writers like Lance Parkin and Lawrence Miles would port over concepts like the I and Faction Paradox from the Eighth Doctor Adventures line, and BBV’s output could pretty reliably count on being reviewed in the pages of DWM, a gesture that served both as a stamp of legitimacy and a concession to the shared audience that existed between the two worlds.
Even if Baggs’ subsequent antics and general irrelevance have helped ensure that he’s barely ever remembered in broad-stroke accounts of the Wilderness Years – and on the occasions that he does get a mention, it’s rarely especially complementary – it’s pretty indisputable that, at the time, audiences would very much have seen his work as being of a piece with that of Virgin, BBC Books and eventually Big Finish, comparative quality of each company’s oeuvre notwithstanding.
Still, none of this really touches upon the central point, which is that a world in which Virgin Books were a major player in the history of Doctor Who seems almost unimaginable nowadays. Judging by many, many conversations I’ve had with people in real life trying to explain exactly what it is I write about – and you have no idea how difficult it is to tell someone that you review a novel series named the “Virgin New Adventures” without having them leap to some rather lurid and unflattering conclusions about your work – I’d be willing to bet pretty good money on most members of the general public being totally unaware that Richard Branson’s commercial behemoth had ever tried to get a foothold in the mystical realm of publishing, to say nothing of the fact that said publishing house was handed the proverbial keys to the kingdom with respect to one of the BBC’s most enduring franchises.
This, in its own peculiar way, is indicative of the vast and nigh-incomprehensible perceptual gulf that unavoidably impinges upon any attempt to recapture the strange spirit of the Wilderness Years from a modern standpoint. In 2023, we might well see Doctor Who as an enduring, sixty-year titan of British television that has almost become an institution in its own right within the larger corpus of the BBC, but when Virgin acquired W. H. Allen & Co. – holders of the Target Books imprint, and by extension of the license to novelise televised Doctor Who stories – in the mid-to-late 1980s, it was, as we’ve discussed, anything but.
The BBC’s decision to allow Virgin to expand their artistic remit into the publication of original full-length novels based on the series must therefore be seen as what it is: a reliable indicator that the broadcaster was no longer especially concerned with maintaining the sanctity of their hold on Doctor Who as a brand.
It’s not for nothing, after all, that a similar proposal by one of the Target imprint’s previous editors, Nigel Robinson, had been decisively shot down by the Beeb, with the company subsequently arriving at a compromise in the form of the short-lived Companions of Doctor Who spin-off series, which published one original novel each featuring the characters of Turlough and Harry Sullivan, as well as a novelisation of the aforementioned failed K-9 and Company pilot.
Peter Darvill-Evans was really just lucky enough to be the man left holding the reins of Target at the point in time when the BBC were least likely to make a grand show of resistance on behalf of Doctor Who. This is not something I say to downplay or dismiss Darvill-Evans’ contributions, but rather to allow those contributions to sit in a broader context. Indeed, some might well argue that the fact that the New Adventures came about through such a mundane and prosaic bit of begrudging BBC licensing only serves to further enhance their eventual metamorphosis into a rather wondrous, inventive and fruitful niche within Doctor Who, as good an example of a butterfly spreading its wings and outgrowing the earthly ties of its chrysalis as ever there was.
But as we’ve been not-so-obliquely gesturing at for quite some time now, we know how the story ends, so it’s time to break out the butterfly nets, and damn any piddling hurricanes that might crop up as a result.
In a rather ironic twist of fate, the New Adventures ultimately ended in much the same way as they began, brought down by the BBC’s realisation that the McGann movie’s achieving a ninth-place ranking with its UK broadcast was probably a pretty good sign that there was a market for more Doctor Who, and simultaneously finding that BBC Worldwide was in a much better shape than its predecessor BBC Enterprises had been in the late 1980s, allowing them more than sufficient pretext to fold the licensing arrangements for the series back into BBC Books.
So here, then, over a decade later, Virgin finds itself returning to much the same territory as The Companions of Doctor Who, producing a spin-off series based on a character who had once been a regular travelling companion of the Doctor. Having lost the license, their options were naturally limited to those characters that were originally creations of the New Adventures themselves, and in such circumstances, Bernice Surprise Summerfield is the only choice that can really be said to make sense.
(If we’re being frank, as far as “NA-original companions who were well-developed enough to feasibly support their own stories” are concerned, the only other option open to you would probably be Roz Forrester, but her death obviously puts something of a kink in any such plans. Unless you wanted to split the difference and dive into the Forrester family writ large, about which more next time, incidentally. Also, given the launch of the Cwej series in recent years, Arcbeatle Press clearly wish to voice their disagreement with my thesis here, but I’m writing the blog, not them, so I don’t really know what to tell you…)
Talk of choices, though, and of outlining the rationale behind said choices, allows me to rather neatly segue into today’s object of discussion, namely Oh No It Isn’t!, and to hopefully clarify some of my own reasoning in the process. Because there’s one rather big question hanging over all of this, isn’t there?
(Oh no there isn’t! Sorry, I was contractually obligated to do that bit, got it out of my system now. Oh no I ha- right, let’s stop that.)
That question, of course, is “Why on Earth are you even bothering to cover the Benny novels at all, Dale?” It’s a good question, even if the answer seems rather obvious from my perspective. After all, even if Big Finish are still releasing Bernice Summerfield stories with a pretty passionate following some thirty years after the publication of Love and War… well, it’s Big Finish, and people are probably going to keep buying their stuff for a while yet.
Of all the companies I cited in my exploration of the weird and wonderful corners of Doctor Who in the Wilderness Years, they are far and away the ones that have come out of the intervening decades the healthiest, even if they don’t actually exist yet in May 1997. BBV and Magic Bullet might still be taking payments on their respective websites, but the latter haven’t released a new production since 2013’s The Time Waster, as far as I can tell, and the former is embroiled in Bill Baggs’ rather tarnished legacy of treating the talent in his employ like garbage and just generally being an all-around shifty operator.
If the Wilderness Years are the Time War, then Big Finish is almost certainly the victor, and if we’re limiting ourselves to the audio drama scene then it becomes well-nigh inarguable. On the other hand, Virgin Books, as I hinted at earlier, is not so well-off, being basically non-existent. Between these two choices, it doesn’t take a genius to see which is the more accessible avenue for fans to get their fix of Bernice stories.
I bring all of this up to make the point that I could probably quite happily jump straight from The Well-Mannered War to The Eight Doctors, and still feel pretty confident that the bulk of my readers wouldn’t really have a problem with it at all. If the New Adventures can be characterised as a niche property within a niche property, then they undeniably fit that mould even better after their loss of the Doctor Who license, which was always their main draw, historically speaking.
So I definitely understand why most long-form critical engagements with the New Adventures kind of tail off after The Dying Days; if you’ve already pored over even half of the sixty-one total novels released between June 1991 and April 1997, tacking on a weird coda in which you’re talking about novels that never meaningfully represented the future of Doctor Who just seems like overkill. If any books do get touched upon from the Benny years, it’s almost always the two Lawrence Miles novels or, appropriately enough, Oh No It Isn’t! itself, being the one that laid the foundations that were subsequently studiously ignored by most authors to come.
In much the same spirit, however, we are going to steadfastly refuse to adhere to the weight of expected precedent. In what might well be a spectacular failure of common sense, I fully intend to cover not just the twenty-three New Adventures featuring the escapades of Bernice Summerfield, but also the two remaining Decalogs, which should be especially interesting in the case of Wonders, where Virgin all but gives up the facade that their stories must have anything to do with Doctor Who or its contingent fictional worlds.
(Still not sure how I’m going to handle that one, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it…)
In part, this is because I do kind of bristle at the hidden premise nested within the frequent eagerness to brush past the Benny novels. Perhaps I’m just a cynic, but it does occasionally feel as if, on some level, the post-Dying Days novels are treated as something of a dead end for the Virgin line’s wider cultural relevance vis-a-vis Doctor Who.
It’s not even that this is necessarily wholly untrue, but I do feel like measuring a series’ worth on no deeper axis than “How many people experienced it?” is the sort of thinking that Doctor Who fans – especially those with a hankering for the Wilderness Years – should really know better than to engage in. I mean, if we follow this argumentative thread to its natural conclusion, we’re left with some rather dubious deductions of the kind that treat a film’s box office returns as a direct correlate to its quality, and unless you’re willing to make the case that, say, Transformers: Age of Extinction was the absolute peak of Hollywood’s filmmaking craft in 2014 by dint of its being the only movie of the year to crack a billion dollars, that’s a position that should give any reasonable critic pause for thought.
What’s more, the Bernice-led New Adventures represent something that we’ve never really seen in the history of Doctor Who novels before or since. If nothing else, they tell the story of a Wilderness Years company being forced to actively contend with its newfound status as the proverbial second fiddle, consigned to a space just a meagre few rungs above an outfit like BBV and acting in accordance with those same nebulous operating principles that have provided the impetus for many a spin-off series since time immemorial.
In all likelihood, BBC Books are never going to allow the Doctor Who license to be leased out to a company like Virgin again, even in the event of a hypothetical second Wilderness Years. As a part of the Random House empire, the company is just too established a feature of the publishing landscape to allow their limelight to be hogged to such a degree, and so the example of Virgin’s pivot in the aftermath of The Dying Days is surely an interesting enough saga in its own right.
(Admittedly, the other significant piece of reasoning I’m using to justify my argument here is that I spent about $150 on a copy of Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story a few months back, and it would be rather silly to suddenly decide to so drastically shift gears and refuse to cover any of the Benny books, but that’s all by the by…)
So with all of that being said, how do they choose to usher the audience into this brave new world, that has such archaeologists in’t? In the only way they could have, really: with Paul Cornell. And, as the old aphorism goes, why not? After all, that’s how it all started. It’s frankly something of a no-brainer to get the man who created Bernice Summerfield – not to mention one of the most acclaimed and influential writers ever to work on the New Adventures – on board to give the new series some much-needed verve and legitimacy right out the gate.
Indeed, it’s worth noting that, since the novel saw print some two and a half weeks before the launch of the EDAs, this is the one moment in time at which the Benny novels could unequivocally be said to be the standard-bearers for Doctor Who-adjacent prose, even if they really only acquire that title thanks to a rather arbitrary quirk of BBC Books’ publication schedule.
The only problem, or at least so the standard narrative has it, is that Cornell didn’t exactly see fit to make many concessions to such paltry considerations as “allowing the books to maintain a decent audience of Doctor Who fans, and maybe even bring in some new converts in the process.”
Now’s the point at which I’m forced to concede that there’s certainly more than a grain of truth to be found in these claims. This is, as most readers are probably aware by now, a novel that serves as a forceful and unrepentant love letter to the British pantomime, an artform so inherently and absurdly localised that putting a geographical determinant in front of it almost seems like the very heights of redundancy. There are certainly other places in the world where you can still find pantomimes done with a reasonable degree of frequency, but the United Kingdom is exceptional in the sheer prominence afforded panto within its culture.
The logical corollary that everyone points out in relation to Oh No It Isn’t!, then, is certainly accurate. Pantomime is such a strange niche that it serves to severely curtail the capacity for people who have never experienced a performance to understand it on anything but the most intellectual of levels, and as I’m pretty sure even the most avid panto-goers would tell you, adjectives like “intellectual” are a very poor fit for this particular brand of theatre.
I mean, I live in Australia, a country where we are more than willing to poach parts of British culture for our own, to the point of still incorporating the Union Jack in our national flag, and maintaining the sport of cricket as such a beloved and revered athletic institution that we’ve basically chosen to observe a de facto national holiday for nearly one hundred and fifty years that consists entirely of trying to beat the snotters out of our erstwhile kinsmen in said sport, all for the sake of a janky old cup with some ashes in it and, most importantly, general bragging rights.
(This is usually the point where people like me tend to pop in with a snarky comment on the intrinsic silliness of trying to claim bragging rights in a sport as paralysingly dull, boring and tedious as cricket, but instead I’ll just leave you with an anecdote concerning the fact that I have only ever been to one cricket match in my life, which my eight-year-old self promptly fell asleep at. I am far prouder of this fact than I perhaps should be.)
Even in the face of this valorisation of the nation’s British antecedents, well beyond the point of all credible reason, pantomime still feels like such a distant and peculiar cultural institution to me that it might as well hail from the Moon for all that I understand it.
Taking all of this into account, it’s difficult to quibble too stridently with the judgment of reviewers like DWM‘s Dave Owen or SFX‘s Anthony Brown upon the novel’s original publication, both of whose evaluations leaned rather heavily on adjectives like “self-indulgent,” and bemoaned “the weight of in-jokes, parodies, and pointless contemporary references.” It’s not hard to detect a strain of genuine befuddlement here, and if we’re speaking from a purely financial perspective, Oh No It Isn’t! must absolutely be acknowledged as a stumbling block that probably hobbled the Virgin line’s chances at long-term survival.
But equally, we’ve already established that we’re not all that interested in talking about the base economics of the situation to the exclusion of all other factors – this is Dale’s Ramblings, thank you very much, not the Wall Street Journal – and as much as any attempt to read Oh No It Isn’t! with the benefit of hindsight must inevitably acknowledge that it marks the beginning of a dead end for Virgin, it’s also impossible to avoid talking about the precise “self” who is doing all the “indulging” here, namely one Paul Cornell.
The indulgent and almost decadent aspects of this novel are pretty readily explained once you realise that this is self-evidently structured as a “last hurrah” for Cornell’s engagement with the New Adventures, and indeed for Doctor Who as a whole. Yes, that’s actually something that was equally true of the last two Cornell novels we looked at, but this pseudo-departure comes much closer to sticking than Human Nature or Happy Endings ever did.
Breaking down the numbers reveals the starkness of this particular divide. Oh No It Isn’t! is the ninety-ninth book I’ve talked about as a part of this series, a figure which takes into account oddities like Who Killed Kennedy and the Decalogs. Over these first hundred books, Cornell has written seven full-length novels, and contributed a short story to each of Virgin’s first two Decalog anthologies.
Over the next hundred – a period spanning roughly from Dragon’s Wrath in June 1997 to The Turing Test in October 2000, for those playing the home game in a particularly obsessive manner – the only Cornell novel to speak of is The Shadows of Avalon, nearly three years from now. Past that, we’ll have another four years to wait before getting around to his novelisation of Scream of the Shalka. Obviously even that isn’t the end of Cornell’s involvement with Doctor Who, but for our purposes, this is the point at which the man largely exits the narrative.
One could perhaps continue to mount a repudiation of Oh No It Isn’t! even in the face of this, making the point that it’s perhaps a shame that one of the New Adventures’ most influential and talented writers should choose to take his bow with a piece of frocky, silly fluff, but even this is something I personally find rather unconvincing.
For one, if you want a heartfelt farewell from Cornell to the NAs that at least makes some occasional stabs at being serious, well, Happy Endings is right there, but more importantly, I just can’t muster up the energy to tether myself to a position that brushes uncomfortably close to a full-chested declaration of “Quit having fun!” Sure, I’m also not the biggest fan of said position’s logical inverse – the “Let people enjoy things!” mentality, if you will – but the fact remains that if there’s one writer who’s earned the right to be a little silly goofy like in their NA swansong, it’s probably Paul Cornell.
And this gestures at the thing that’s quite easy to lose sight of when you’re making supremely strange decisions like cooking up about five thousand words talking about the state of various Doctor Who publishing houses from the Wilderness Years, which is that Oh No It Isn’t! is, once you really drill it down to its bare essentials, eminently enjoyable. While taking this stance does perhaps require us to shear the book of the weight of its perceived obligations to the establishment of this new phase of the New Adventures, the passage of more than twenty-six years in which to recontextualise the novel means that I really don’t consider that to be an especially unconscionable breach of the reviewing principles that I’ve historically stuck to.
In fact, it’s to Cornell’s credit that he does actually devote almost the entirety of the novel’s first chapter to the task of fleshing out St. Oscar’s University and the planet Dellah. Bernice’s frantic bicycle-bound search for Wolsey is a pretty blatant way of allowing her to cross paths with as many members of the wacky faculty staff as is humanly possible, but it’s smoothed over considerably by Cornell’s talent, finely honed over the course of seven novels, for effortlessly infusing a potentially mundane and rote sequence of housekeeping with copious amounts of charm and wit.
Of course, this also gets at one of the biggest problems with the worldbuilding of Oh No It Isn’t! in hindsight, namely the degree to which many of these myriad facets of life at St. Oscar’s end up going virtually unacknowledged by later novels.
In this regard, there is perhaps no greater illustration of my point than the inclusion of Menlove Stokes, a character woven into the story of Dellah at the close of Gareth Roberts’ The Well-Mannered War. Despite being quite a major player here – he even gets to be the sole academic besides Bernice mentioned by name in the blurb, the lucky sod – he never appears in the flesh in any of the twenty-two subsequent New Adventures, though various authors will name-check him here and there throughout the series.
(This, at least, is more than can be said for the other character to be ported over from another author’s work, namely Professor Arthur Candy, late of Steven Moffat’s rather wonderful short story Continuity Errors, and who is sadly never again mentioned past this point. Ah well, his presence here at least serves as one last heartwarming reminder of the ongoing thematic congruity between Cornell and Moffat.)
Mind you, it’s hard to fault Cornell for any of this, since by all reasonable definitions he more than rises to the brief he was given. To quote the instructions of editorial impresario Rebecca Levene, by way of The Inside Story, Oh No It Isn’t! was directed “to create a huge cast of eccentrics and locals for the rest of the team to explore,” and the fact that the rest of the team singularly failed to explore said cast doesn’t negate the effort put into its development.
Unfortunately, however, it does help to ensure that the metatextual pantomime stuff is the only part of the novel anyone really talks about, particularly when the Big Finish adaptation – by far the most accessible version of the story for modern audiences, as we’ve said – makes the decision to just skip the Dellah sequences and open with Bernice’s expedition on Perfecton.
This is, to be fair, a completely reasonable change, and the type of thing that is always going to crop up in transposing a story from prose to audio, but while the audio version is largely pretty fantastic – as you’d expect from the release that almost single-handedly helped put Big Finish on the map, and distinguished it from the rather cutthroat and cutprice pragmatism embodied by BBV – I think it inevitably loses some of the thematic context embodied in these early sequences, context which is pretty crucial to parsing what Oh No It Isn’t! is actually trying to do.
Cornell is hardly subtle here, a point he seemed to concede in conversation with Simon Guerrier years after the fact when he confessed that he felt “[the novel’s] subtexts overwhelm the text quite a bit.” To illustrate my point, I think I should really just quote the description of the dream we’re told Bernice has just woken up from immediately prior to her first appearance:
The bad dream last night had been unusual. It wasn’t one of the regular ones about missing the last spaceship, dropping valuable vases over cliffs, not catching the elephant that had leapt from the other trapeze. It was about being on stage. An audience was watching her, bored and grumbling, as she tried to reach out to them with a dramatic piece. She knew that what she had to say was passionate and profound, but on her lips the words had become too concrete and crude. She died on stage, and started to cry, asking the watchers just what they expected of her.
Asking how much longer she had to go on, how much harder she was expected to try.
Now, look. Autobiography is perhaps one of the easiest, and some might say laziest, methods of contextualising an artist’s work, and we would perhaps do well to heed the advice given by PJ Harvey when the music press suggested that her classic 1993 album Rid of Me should be read in such a manner, rejoining that “[she] would have to be 40 and very worn out to have lived through everything [she] wrote about.”
But equally, I mean… sometimes these things are practically gift-wrapped for me, y’know?
It’s very hard to escape the impression that, like Emily Hutchings’ constantly stymied attempts to pen the ending of The Unformed Heart in Happy Endings and free herself from the “hackwork” of romantic fiction, Cornell is pretty clearly signifying his belief that he’s reached the limits of what he can do within the world of Doctor Who or, as the case may be, the world of Bernice Summerfield, if the two can be said to be meaningfully separate beyond the directives of such trivialities as “copyright” and “licensing arrangements.”
And so, in that context, the fact that he immediately sets about breaking that world and crashing it together with some particularly quaint English theatrical traditions actually becomes supremely unsurprising. As the man himself wrote all the way back in No Future, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. This time, it’s panto.
So I guess what I’m trying to argue here is that this shouldn’t really be read as “the first Bernice-led New Adventure” at all, really, but as “the last Cornell-penned New Adventure,” even as I fully admit that it was never feasible that that reading would be fandom’s default choice. Perhaps, contrary to the author’s later assertions, the wider text of Doctor Who was always going to subsume any subtextual injections from Cornell.
Nonetheless, even the academics on the Perfecton expedition get in on the thematic action. When Professor Epstein waxes lyrical about the mark of a sane society and a sane person being the ability to laugh at oneself, and how some people assume melodrama to be the only valuable form of entertainment, it’s pretty clear he’s not actually talking about the Chelonians, but making a not-so-veiled stab at those readers who wanted the New Adventures to be nothing more than a series of gloomy, angst-ridden monologues on the psychological failings of its central characters or what have you. Much the same principle applies to Stokes’ surety that Perfecton is possessed of “a dark heart that [can] be divined only through the artistic impulse,” a piece of gloriously overwritten internal monologue that clashes with supreme dramatic irony against the panoply of pantomime to come.
Again, we could have a conversation here about whether making these kinds of attacks – though really that’s a bit of a strong word, and they feel much more like light-hearted jabs in the context of a very light-hearted book – in the novel designed to introduce your audience to the new state of affairs was the wisest decision in the long-term, but, like I said earlier, The Eight Doctors is right around the corner, so why should we start repeating ourselves like some particularly pretentious parrot living off a diet of tacky synthpop, gloomy post-punk and half-baked media criticism?
Even once the action shifts from the relatively grounded world of the twenty-sixth century to the wacky pantomime hijinks for which it’s most remembered, Cornell is simply too skilled an emotionsmith to not at least present the audience with some semblance of an emotional arc for both Bernice and Wolsey, even as it’s very obviously not supposed to be the “main attraction,” as it were.
Benny’s grappling with the wreckage of her separation from Jason in Eternity Weeps at least manages to avoid playing into some of the more tired and uninteresting pop cultural depictions of divorced women being consumed with a deep fear of their own age or what have you, bar a few moments of lingering doubt at the emotional low points of the whole Perfecton ordeal, and there’s something absolutely heart-warming and poetic in Cornell choosing to take his bow from the New Adventures while affirming that the character he created will never grow old in the final “proper” scene of the novel.
(It is, perhaps, a little redolent of a wonderful conversation between Peter Boyle and Gillian Anderson in Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose over on The X-Files, but quite frankly, there are far worse places to pull inspiration from than the works of Darin Morgan, so I’ll allow it.)
Not only that, but it’s a perfectly serviceable emotional hook for an introductory novel like this, suggesting that Oh No It Isn’t! might not actually be as strange a choice for this slot as fan consensus would have you believe.
It feels supremely fitting that Bernice’s horrified reaction to the presumed pantomime afterlife in which she finds herself after the destruction of the Winton should be formulated not in response to the prospect of her death, but rather the notion that Heaven might simply be a stultifying and oppressively static, not to mention sickeningly twee, kind of place. Even after she realises the nature of the Perfecton simulation to be less heavenly than she had initially assumed, it’s pretty clearly this same fear of stasis that drives her madcap scheme at the ball to break the narrative logic of the world around her by accepting the proposals of all her suitors and thereby avoiding the ironclad closure of a “happily ever after.”
There’s a sense that this kind of environment is just totally anathema to a dynamic protagonist like Benny – and once more, one can’t really avoid the sense that Cornell is also working through his own fears of his career trajectory becoming intractably tethered to the New Adventures, in a barely-even-subtextual-at-this-point fashion – and that’s precisely the kind of mission statement that a novel like this should be making, insofar as it serves to illuminate the type of protagonist with which the series will be concerned, and, by extension, hopefully offer up a potential reason for readers to stick around. As we know, the audience ultimately declined that offer, but I don’t think it’s necessarily for lack of trying on the part of Cornell and Virgin.
This leaves us with only one other major character to talk about, that being Wolsey. It should go without saying that he’s been hanging around the New Adventures for about two years now, but being a cat there haven’t exactly been too many opportunities for deep and revealing insights into the depths of his psyche to this point.
Here, then, Oh No It Isn’t! makes up for lost time, as it were, by having the character transformed by the Perfectons’ missile into an anthropomorphic, talking catman, a manoeuvre which would almost certainly have caught the attention of furries worldwide if this story had been released some twenty years later in a less niche setting than this non-televised spinoff of a non-televised spinoff, but I digress.
Even if the character’s gradual, creeping unease at coming to recognise the unreality of his surroundings might not have a hope of matching some of the writer’s past emotional tours de force – whether it be the romance between John Smith and Joan Redfern in Human Nature, the gnawing emptiness plaguing Phaedrus in Love and War, or even Bernice’s own conflicted feelings on her looming marriage in Happy Endings – a Cornell novel that seems reluctant to unleash the full scope of the writer’s emotive grandeur still ranks quite favourably when placed against the best efforts from plenty of other authors, and one does truly feel for Wolsey’s conflicted state of mind as to the restoration of his former, less sentient self.
It should also be noted that the audio adaptation here threatens to intrude once more onto our consideration of the original novel, given Big Finish’s frankly pitch-perfect decision to cast Nicholas Courtney as Wolsey. For modern-day readers, for whom a copy of the audio drama is, yet again, infinitely more accessible than the novel upon which it was based – well, unless you opt for pirated/scanned copies, but I can’t even imagine such a thing… ahem – it becomes very hard to separate the lines as written from Courtney’s rather wonderful performance.
By all accounts, Cornell was rather uninvolved in the production of the audio adaptation, with his input mostly being limited to casting an eye over Jacqueline Rayner’s scripts and giving her formal approval to tweak the story for the change in medium, so the casting of Courtney is really something that can only feasibly be laid at the feet of director Nicholas Briggs or other Big Finish producers like Jason Haigh-Ellery and Gary Russell.
Still, for all that it’s perhaps not strictly relevant to how the novel would have been read in May 1997, it winds up feeling strangely apropos that Courtney, an actor most associated with a character who had, at this point, firmly metamorphosed into the role of one of the Doctor’s oldest and dearest friends – a characterisation nudged along in no small part by Cornell himself, since the material reality of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart in the Pertwee Era was considerably different from what we might identify as his post-Battlefield incarnation – should be cast as the character closest to being an old and dear friend of Bernice.
But the gaps are, inevitably, all the more telling. Although Levene had apparently stipulated in her notes on Cornell’s initial synopsis for the novel that the agents of the People should be specified as having some relation to Kadiatu, no such identification occurs within the text of the novel itself, an omission which one can only assume was made out of a fear of referencing the Lethbridge-Stewarts in even the most oblique of fashions.
And ultimately, it is this which proves the most enduring legacy of Oh No It Isn’t! to the Benny novels that follow, even if individual elements like Menlove Stokes or the colourful cast of St. Oscar’s might fade into the background. From this point forward, Virgin are effectively operating at the very fringes of the Wilderness Years, with Big Finish eventually being able to upstage them on the Bernice Summerfield front by contracting established Doctor Who actors even before they received an official Doctor Who license from the BBC, and the New Adventures can’t help but reflect a certain cognizance of that newfound status.
Seeds of that awareness are visible even here, with the Blues Brothers-esque agents of the People feeling themselves unable to elucidate on the nature of their mission from the Worldsphere while trapped in the Green, or Bernice’s briefly checking her surroundings to make sure that she “got away with” floating the rather familiar concept of a ship whose interior dimensions are considerably more spacious than might be suggested by its external appearance.
For all that Oh No It Isn’t! is frequently positioned as the start of the Virgin novels’ slide into irrelevance, increasingly eclipsed by the scattershot madness of BBC Books, its themes of metatextuality and of wilfully blurring the line between fiction and reality would be picked up as something of a running theme throughout the Benny novels, particularly in those books written by Lawrence Miles and Dave Stone. From a financial perspective, it may be a stretch to suggest that we can be reassured that the future is in safe hands.
It’s undeniable, however, that it is in a supremely interesting pair of hands…
Miscellaneous Observations
Apparently Gareth Roberts objected to the characterisation of Menlove Stokes in Oh No It Isn’t!, claiming he was completely unrecognisable. Apart from the slight blip here and there like his suddenly having hair when he had been bald in both his previous appearances, however, I didn’t find him to be especially jarring or distracting, even having just come off of reading The Well-Mannered War. Perhaps this is just another manifestation of my general aversion to agreeing with Gareth Roberts on any vaguely controversial point as a matter of principle these days, but I don’t much care if it is, so we’re going to move on now.
I do rather admire Rayner’s adaptation of the novel for Big Finish, as I said earlier, but I do think the audience who have only ever experienced the audio drama version have been sorely robbed by the excision of Candy’s “I’ve always preferred blur to oasis” joke, a line which must surely be in serious contention with No Future‘s “Chap with Wings there” for the title of Most Atrocious Pun in a Cornell Novel, and which I consequently love to bits.
Conversely, though, I’m not going to lose much sleep over the loss of the Spice Girls “cameo,” one of the few occasions where I completely agree with Anthony Brown’s prediction that the novel’s sense of humour is “going to date at a rate of knots…”
Final Thoughts
Well, today was an end and a beginning, folks. It’s deeply sad to see Paul Cornell go, but given all the contributions he’s made to the New Adventures over the years, affording him the opportunity for a graceful exit seems like the least that the range could do, and even if he didn’t offer up one last masterpiece, it was still a fun time.
Speaking of endings, this should be going up on the sixth anniversary of Dale’s Ramblings, so that’s deeply surreal and almost panto-like in its own right. 2023 has been yet another amazing year for the blog, and the site has been viewed more times in the past ten-ish months than it was over the entirety of 2021 and 2022 combined, which is one of those facts that I simply refuse to believe is real. Hello to any new members of the audience! I hope you aren’t too grotesquely disappointed with all of this nonsense, and I hope you’ll stick around for the seventh year of the blog.
And, as I hinted at earlier in the review, this is the ninety-ninth book I’ve covered as a part of this ongoing foray into the Wilderness Years, which means that next time will mark the one hundredth book. If everything goes like I hope it will, I’ll see you back here just in time for Doctor Who‘s own sixtieth anniversary as I make the frankly baffling decision to venture even further into the fringes of canon than I usually do, as we trace a thousand years of Forresters with the fourth Decalog, Re:Generations. But until then…
Kind regards,
Special Agent Dale Cooper
Dale's Ramblings 
7 thoughts on “Virgin New Adventures Reviews: Oh No It Isn’t! by Paul Cornell (or, “The Pantomime at the End of the University”)”