Ghost Light: Ranking - 94

                                                      Ghost Light

(Season 26, Dr 7 with Ace, 4-18/10/1989, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Andrew Cartmel, writer: Marc Platt, director: Alan Wareing) 

Rank: 94

  'I don't know what it is about my style

But every time I walk with a question mark umbrella the passers by all smile

I lost myself in Kensington about a week ago today

Or did I find myself in Skaro? No one can really say

But that's the way in the Tardis

That's the way in the Tardis

The monkeyhouse is bigger on the inside

And I've had everyone as a companion by now except for Martin Jarvis

Take a bus to Coal Hill School, make haste before it shuts

You don't have to be alien to get into here but it helps if you're all nuts!'

And so it ends, after twenty-six (more or less) unbroken years, the entire original run of Dr Who ending here in production terms, not with a bang but with...a bonkers tract about evolution set inside a spooky Victorian manor house invaded by an alien manifestation of light that’s been hibernating for thousands of years (the very final scene ever recorded for ‘old’ Who is the one of Mrs Pritchard and Gwendoline on the staircase). Where other series get into a rut after a couple of years this one has enough to it that makes it keep evolving – and evolution is the key word in this one. Though it’s quite unlike anything the series had ever tried before, ‘Ghost Light’ feels very much like a return to the early ambitious days of the series where you never quite knew where it was going to go week by week. Even though nobody intended this to be the final story at the time (Dr Who never officially being cancelled, just delayed then quietly dropped) it’s the perfect bookmark to where we started back in 1963 with ‘An Unearthly Child’ and its tale of cavemen discovering fire and trying to evolve – even though their tribal warfare seems remarkably like the cold war, two tribes throwing sticks and stones at each other. Here too evolution, as it turns out, is a cul-de-sac and man is just an animal with ideas above it’s station. All that in a supposedly children’s show on a Saturday teatime: if Dr Who had to end at all then I’m glad it ended like this, still ambitious, still breaking new ground still refusing to talk down to its audience, still the most bonkers thing on TV. 

 Writer Marc Platt was only the second proper fully paid-up fanclub-badge owning scarf-waving Dr Who fan to write for the series in its original 26 year run (unlike nowadays when the fans are in charge of the asylum), but unlike Andrew Smith in ‘Full Circle’ Marc had started writing fiction for fanzines before falling into TV and writing for lots of series other than Dr Who alongside his ‘day job’ at the BBC archives cataloguing radio programmes. He’d sent many an ambitious script in to different production teams before script editor Andrew Cartmel realised that he was just the sort of young talent he wanted to promote: these include ‘Fires Of The Star Mind’ a tale set on Gallifrey, ‘Warmongers’ that finally saw the Rutans and Sontarons in glorious cosmic battle, ‘Shrine’ a tale set in 1820s Russia that featured a race of aliens looking for their God, ‘Cat’s Cradle’ in which the Tardis is turned inside out (which duly became one of the first ‘New Adventures’ books) and ‘Lungbarrow, which looked at the childhood of timelords in general and the Doctor’s in particular (which duly became the last ‘New Adventures’ books).Had Platt started writing in the 21st century chances are any or all of these fan-friendly concepts would have been considered but in the late 1980s Dr Who was such a no-go area that only Daleks or Cybermen were considered as monsters and even John Nathan-Turner and Andrew Cartmel weren’t quite prepared to give away quite so much about the Doctor’s past. They loved Marc’s ideas though and kept pushing him to come up with new concepts that had never been seen before so the writer took another view: one of his favourite aspects of timelord society was how they acted like Victorians, aloof and cold, while one of his favourite Dr Who stories was ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ in which the Doctor ended up in a Victorian gothic mansion. Combining the two Marc came up with a new plot, one that looked at Victorian society through modern, maybe even alien eyes, and found it wanting despite their smugness (he may well have been enough of a fan to know about the first draft of the story, in which instead of Jamie it was a cave boy named Ugg who was put through trials in order to study how mankind can evolve and grow). 

 Like Smith on ‘Full Circle’ you can tell that Platt is a fan not because there are endless continuity announcements or recycling from past ideas, though, but because he knows that this is a series that doesn’t have to be like it was last week and how wonderfully elastic the DW format can be at its best, saying things no other TV programme could. Other script editors might have toned such ambition down but luckily Marc was writing in an era when the script editor is Andrew Cartmel, who might not have been as big a Dr Who fan when he first got the job but who shared similar ideals about making the scope of the series bigger and bolder. Instead of having his wings clipped, the way a few writers did submitting Dr Who scripts in the 1970s and early 1980s, Platt was encouraged to go further and further. The result is a real one-off that isn’t so much a story as an extended allegory, one where we can’t accept anything at face value and every character – even the 7th Doctor and Ace – are being defensive or lying or simply talking in coded references to other programmes for one reason or another and where, instead of explaining things, everyone keeps asking more questions. It’s all so very new but even though ‘Ghost Light’ is utterly unlike anything else the series tried before or since it still feels recognisably Dr Who-ish, a story whose reach is so ambitious it outstrips it’s grasp but which demands we try to push ourselves to enjoy it anyway. Which is exactly where we came in back in 1963 and one of the big reasons Dr Who lasted so long. 

 It could have become wearing - and at a couple of points it is – with ‘Ghost Light’ the sort of story that’s more fun to think about at leisure in the bath afterwards than it is when you’re actually watching it, when all that exposition and artificialness of the characters can become a bit much. Mostly, though, its utterly compelling as the usual sort of Dr Who creatures (a lost alien whose stranded on Earth) in a fairly typical sort of Dr Who setting (Victorian England) go about things very differently to the usual divide and conquest we see. Light isn’t killing mankind to rule them by force – he’s dispassionately cataloguing a species he considers beneath him, the way the Victorians archive their dead moths and butterflies (and a reaction to Platt’s day job cataloguing other people’s work, one which seemed to be neverending given how many new radio programmes were being made even without historical ones). The local inhabitants of Gabriel Chase aren’t your usual Victorian manor house but a cover for the experiment. There’s a butler of course – but he’s a Neanderthal taken out of time and dressed in Victorian finery. There’s a vicar – but he’s, erm, not himself. There’s a hunter too but we don’t mention him in polite society as he’s gone a bit bonkers. There was a policeman kicking around from the outside too until he became reduced to soup. At least you can count on the Doctor and companion for normalcy eh? Except the Doctor’s in full manipulative sod mode, taking Ace back to face a memory from her childhood she’s suppressed the past few years – and neither of them are telling the truth about why they’re there. 

 The main story is a discourse on evolution - a suggestion by Cartmel who picked up on this thread in Platt's other storylines-and the question of whether passing down your genetics higgledy-piggledy to your offspring means that mankind is getting smarter or just falling further down a rabbit-hole of denial about our true purpose as an animal with ideas above our station. Fittingly for the last story predominantly made in England (as opposed to Wales or America/Canada) we have a family of stereotypical Englishmen at a time when we were at our most ‘English’ in the 19th century: reserved, haughty, austere. They all thought they were so clever at the peak of the British Empire, with their gadgets and explorations and scientific knowhow, but to an alien civilisation that’s advanced enough all humans just look like primitive monkeys that got too big for their boots. There are two big ironies about the Victorian era that have always fascinated me (and Platt too apparently): this is the age of the pious devout Christian, that believed the Bible to be sacrosanct and saw it as the backbone of their civilisation, with God clearly blessing the English for their belief. And yet it’s also the era of two big historical discoveries that directly contradicted the Bible, both of them Englishmen. William Buckland was your epitome of the Oxford-educated upper class Brit when he discovered the first dinosaur in 2824 (technically just before the Victorian age, but the repercussions were felt all the way through the era) and proved that life had existed on Earth long before man and long before the Bible. The results caused an outcry, divided society between those who trusted the science and those who trusted their faith. And then there was Charles Darwin, who was so spooked by the discoveries that led to his book ‘Origin Of Species’ (which doesn’t make any references to our real ‘creators’ Fendahl or Racnoss, surprisingly) that he abandoned it for years, until he heard that another scientists was on the same lines and backed up his ideas, giving him the confidence to publish his papers. If the dinosaur question was big this was a scandal: I mean, those dear Victorian ladies in their bonnets, the Vicar who swore an oath of celibacy, the posh Victorian gentlemen who lives in that big mansion on the hill: to think they were all descended from monkeys! Most Victorians spent the rest of the 19th century in denial and it was only in the 20th, as more and more facts were unearthed (often quite literally) that evolution became accepted over creationism (except in some Southern parts of the United States). 

 ‘Light’ is playing with evolution, toying with Josiah, the very archetypal Victorian gentleman who owns Gabriel Chase, speeding his evolutionary process up so that he leaves husks all over the place (sadly the director cut a classic McCoy ad lib ‘didn’t he seem a bit…husky to you?!’) The cast-offs, at least until a late re-write when they became characters in their own right, are like the parts of a human family tree that get left behind with each new generation, although they’re not really us evolving – more an accident of nature (Cartmel took many names in this script from his own family tree incidentally: his mum was named Gwendoline, his father Ernest like the policeman and Josiah was a grandfather. Other names came from Victorian fiction: ‘Mrs Grose’ is a character in Henry James’ ‘The Turn Of The Screw’ and Redvers Fenn-Cooper is from Rider Haggard’s ‘King Solomon’s Mines’). Note, too, his ‘punishment’ to his servants if they let him down: they’re turned to stone, unable to move – to think, to grow, evolve, because to a being whose lifetime is spent in a constant state of change to stay still is the ultimate crime of all. Light has also brought along a being named ‘Control’ for good measure – the name given to scientific experiments who are kept the same and not allowed to evolve or adapt. ‘Control’ is your typical Eliza Doolittle character, a gruff ill-mannered oath who nevertheless learns, under her own steam, to become civilised up to the level the Victorians would have considered ‘proper’. It’s ‘Light’ who changes the most though - just to confuse things, ‘Light’ him/her/itself is the Biblical depiction of an Angel, all shimmery lights and with an ability to pass through people (two details sadly toned down on screen for budget reasons; alas the costs in this era evolved even when BBC money didn’t). This story is very much about an alien named Light, surrounded by ghosts of humanity’s ancestral past: even the flipping title isn’t what fans would have been expecting (Cartmel explained the story once as ’an alien invasion pretending to be a ghost story’ which is spot on; the German version re-titles this story ‘The House Of A Thousand Frights’, which sums it up pretty well too). 

 Everyone in this story is in denial of the truth – and as with most Dr Who stories those who remain in denial, instead of changing with the times, are doomed to lose out. There’s a scene, dripping with wicked humour, where Reverend Matthews comes to talk to these weird neighbours about reports of strange goings on seeking to convert them to the right path only for him to be devolved back into a monkey. Let’s not forget the policeman, regarded as one of the most intelligent men on the force and described as ‘the cream of Scotland Yard’ – only he ends up the cream of a primordial soup after contact with the aliens of the house (there’s an in-joke, too, in that he’s played by Frank Bellamy, famous as an inspector on ‘Z Cars’, the series that till Dr Who beat it’s record was the longest running on British TV and yet never evolved with the times and stayed religiously the same from the 1950s to the 1970s). They’re the guests, but what about the original Victorian inhabitants? Well, Redvers the game hunter thinks he can deny the facts about evolution by acting like the top of the food chain he is and shooting other animals but his denial of the truth is enough to force him to go mad, confined to a straight jacket. He’s also always eating (I a joke added by Sylvester McCoy at rehearsals) a reminder that he’s still an animal that needs fuel in order to survive. There’s one person who seems to cope with his surroundings quite well and he’s the butler, a refined servant with good manners. Who just happens to be a Neanderthal named Nimrod (in the Bible as the grandson of Noah and therefore close to the ‘source’ of mankind if you take the Bible as, well, ‘gospel’). He’s got a handle on this evolution lark though: he’s evolved with the times and proves to be the smartest person in the room (when the Doctor isn’t around) even though as a servant he’s subservient, knowing his place and staying in it without homo sapiens’ illusions of grandeur. Nobody in this story, no matter how ‘respectable’, is spared from being devolved to their animal form, be they the policeman the vicar or the lord and lady of the manor and several ploys are made of how everyone acts as if the British Empire is at its peak when to the aliens mankind has barely got going from our monkey past. As for poor Josiah, he becomes increasingly lucifugous (and yes, ‘Ghost Light’ is the sort of story where a word like that seems perfectly natural), increasingly afraid of Light’s ‘light’ and the change it presents, resisting the changes that will have to be made for him to become his true evolved self. 

 So there we sit, smug in our 1989 houses at the time of transmission, watching this on telly and laughing at the poor Victorians. Except, what’s this? There are a couple of digs at us too, which suggest that we aren’t the peak of evolution we might hope either but a combination of past genes that got lucky. Like so many Cartmel stories this one takes pot-shots at Margaret Thatcher who, in a big speech in 1983 when seeking re-election for a second term, talked about what she thought was wrong with modern society: that we’d moved away from the ‘Victorian principles’ where people were left to rise or fall on their own merits without intervention from the state and where life revolved round family and respect. Platt, who’d been working at the BBC for minimum wage, clearly doesn’t agree: he knows that the Victorian age was one that seem barbaric from a modern point of view in so many ways – a time of great divide between rich and poor, low life expectancy, no job protection against exploitation and no safety net against misery and abject poverty. A return to Victorian values wouldn’t be evolution, but devolution to most people on a servant level, unless you happened to be one of the idle rich, the way Josiah appears to be. And then there’s Ace and the reason she burned Gabriel Chase down long before meeting the Doctor: she sensed it was ‘creepy’ and was in an angry mood after the death/serious injury (it isn’t mentioned in this story and other Who works contradict themselves) of her friend Mannisha, her house fire-bombed by white kids in a racial attack. Is that really progress, Platt asks? A world where we’re still fighting like animals – the industrial evolution may have changed the backdrop against which we behave but it really hasn’t changed ourselves. 

 Like all the best 7th Doctor stories this one focuses on the companion and Ace has one hell of a story, the Doctor forcing her to face her fears to a point that almost breaks her. We never quite learn why either: does he know that Ace has picked up on an alien energy? Is her helping her as a form of therapy? Is this an early chess game with Fenric? (probably not given that the two stories were intended the other way around, until JNT recognised what a publicity coup it would be if ‘Curse’ was broadcast at Halloween). Is the Doctor just in a grumpy mood? Notably he bites off more than he can chew, complaining at one stage that even I can’t cope with this many things going on at once’ (a feeling the viewer rather shares by that point!) Whatever the motive, it’s hard to imagine any other companion in this story: maybe Tegan would have the same sense of vulnerability and strength but with the others this would have been far too cruel: I mean, just imagine the same story just a couple of years before with Mel screaming the place down, it would have been awful. Sophie Aldred is at her best as the Doctor pushes her emotionally like never before and across the three episodes she goes from her usual confident spiky teenager to a scared little girl, haunted by the ghosts she felt in the grounds of Gabriel Chase. Lots of Dr Who companions go through really hard things during their time on the Tardis (so much so the Doctor has a nerve sometimes taking them with him), but she’s arguably the first to suffer from trauma long before she even meets the Doctor – and he’s unique in using that trauma as part of the plot. The great ironical twist, though, is that Ace is the only person in this story who does evolve naturally, the way mankind is meant to – by learning from mistakes and facing phobias and coming out the other side a wiser and better adjusted person. 

 The 7th Dr too is at his best, cold and calculating and even his characteristic quips and puns come over with the darkest of humours while he manipulates more than anyone in this story to achieve his final victory. It’s quite astonishing to think that this is only the tenth 7th Dr story as transmitted, which also means we’re only ten stories on from the high camp comedy of ‘Time and The Rani’ where this Dr’s biggest role was to play the spoons and only six from the not much lower camp of ‘Dragonfire’. While poor Colin Baker never got the chance to soften and strengthen his Doctor over many years as planned, McCoy’s Doctor evolved at high speed, from a natural clown to the most intense and serious of all the Doctors, intuitively sensing it was the right path to follow. Considering this wasn’t the job McCoy was hired for at all he’s excellent, making the Doctor just manipulative enough to be convincing but not so much you want to punch him (though Ace is, understandably, most annoyed at being used). 

 Platt’s script is dripping with clever lines, so many that you only pick up on a few the first time round (being a 1989 baby by a young-ish writer this is arguably the first Dr Who story written by someone who knew that fans would be able to record the story and re-watch it at their leisure – and that a video might be out as part of the Who range that had started a few years earlier too). ‘See a man about a God’ is like the McCoy malapropisms of season 24 but far funnier; Ace’s ‘Is this an asylum with the patients in charge?’ is a highly quotable response to the madness going on around her, Ace’s comment ‘cholesterol city!’ when provided with a cooked breakfast is met with the maid’s uncomprehending reply ‘No, I got it from the village shop this morning’ and best of all there’s the Doctor’s speech about all the things that give him the ick: burnt toast, bus stations, unrequited love, cruelty and tyranny…all that potential of humanity wasted and thrown away in an endless repeated cycle that affects every generation (well, every generation since the inventions of the toaster and buses I suppose). A mention too for the ‘lucky accident’ with the genuine Victorian music hall song ‘That’s The Way To The Zoo’ which really could have been something the real Gwendoline could have played on the pianola: as a BBC employee Marc dropped in on the music department one lunchtime and asked if they could provide him of a list of Victorian songs in stock containing the words ‘zoo’ or ‘animals’; the resulting song, by J F Mitchell, sounds as if it could have been written with the story in mind, with a similarly wicked sense of humour. There were lots of verses in the original, apparently, though it’s so obscure the internet can’t agree what they are – Platt chose the best one. The costumes are strong too, though it’s quite the shock to see Ace, of all people, in a corset! (in a cost-saving measure her dress was made for ‘The Onedin Line’, a show with a far bigger costume budget than Who, but never actually used). What’s more ‘Ghost Light’ all looks so good: it was a financial decision to keep the action to studio filming, with just the one establishing shot of Gabriel Chase filmed on location as part of Survival’ in Weymouth (although again, even the excellent resource ‘Doctor Who Locations.Net’ doesn’t know precisely where). That works nicely, giving us a real sense of claustrophobia, but at the same time set designer Nick Sommerville really uses every square inch, with a variety between basement and floors and period props galore that really do make it feel as if they filmed this story on location in a real life Victorian house – and a plausibly haunted house at that. 

 There’s a quite brilliant four-part story in ‘Ghostlight’ somewhere or even more; unfortunately this is the year when Dr Who is down to three episodes for most stories and so much of the story got cut in the final edit that the plot becomes nonsense at times, a lot more surreal than even writer Marc Platt intended it to be, going from a tale of metaphors and high concepts to a story where people seem to know things without being told them and have made jumps in their knowledge off screen we don’t get to see (the DVD adds all sorts of scenes but even this doesn’t feel like it has the room to contain enough to tell the full story and it’s frustrating that the low quality they survived in means they’re lumped together rather than added back into the plot in sequence; apparently they did this for the blu-ray but it’s a similarly bumpy ride). This is one of those stories that reads better in novelisation or even script-book form (how I first got to know it) rather than being watched: not that anyone does badly and indeed most people seem to be working over-time to make all this good, it’s just that so many compromises have to be made to get this on screen and even a Hollywood studio with a blockbuster budget would have struggled to make this. The two husks in the basement, for instance, look cheap and tatty – perhaps because they weren’t originally part of the script at all but added at JNT’s suggestion that the story needed a ‘monster’ (as much as I’ll stick up for the producer given the notoriously bad press he always receives and doesn’t always deserve, he really did mis-read the stories under his care at times – this is one of them). It’s a particular shame that a story full of typically stunning BBC Victoriana, with sets as expansive and expensive as anything in the show’s heyday, ends up being a low budget grapple in a cellar by the time of the finale, while the intended effects on ‘Light’, to make him/her/it glow like a supernatural angel, end up being a man walking around in a light coloured costume and talking in a squeaky voice. I guess some things really do stay the same over time after all. The acting is rather variable too – notwithstanding the fact that a lot of the dialogue is meant to sound disjointed and stilted, you still can’t help but feel that some of the acting is just poor: Sylvia Sims is particularly mis-cast as head maid (one of the many stunt guest casting in the 1980s that went awry) and Ian Hogg doesn’t do much as Josiah other than stare blankly through sunglasses, while John Hallam needs to be giving an epic performance as ‘Light’ , a being whose as close to a God as any we see in the series, and chooses this of all moments to go small. Even that fits though: this is a story that, more than anything, is about mankind’s ambition outstretching his ego and abilities and how we’re doomed to be flawed, even as we reach for perfection. 

 I wouldn’t say the end result is a story I really love, or watch for fun. ‘Ghostlight’ is more an exercise in pushing the envelope as far as it will go and one that leaves you to do most of the work – a bit too much if I’m honest, even for a fan like me who (as you can probably tell a thousand and fifty pages into a series that’s only got as far as ‘G’) likes Dr Who stories that make me think. I can totally see why the response confused so many fans on first transmission, annoying fans who wanted a plot they could properly understand, a hero they could relate to and a script that actually hinted at what was going on rather than couching everything in hints and metaphors. You wouldn’t want every Dr Who story to be like this one and its more something to admire than love I find, with every scene seeming to pause as if waiting for applause for fans to say how clever it is. However, that cleverness is earned because it is clever, if you have the patience to sift through it and work out the full extent of what the story is hinting at. We needed at least one Dr Who story to be the sort of thing people study in film studies class rather than enjoy (this story just winning on points from ‘Dragonfire’, which is maybe even more self-conscious about how clever it is, with its names of film theorists thrown into the mix) and even if ‘Ghostlight’ spends more time trying to be clever than it does trying to be outright good, it genuinely is clever enough to earn that respect. .‘Ghost Light’ is just too much hard work at times and it’s one of those stories that’s very like my all-time favourite in the series – imaginative, surreal and deeply deeply weird – but without quite matching the ‘so very me, what did I just see?’ highs of ‘Mind Robber’ or ‘Warrior’s Gate’. I still love it dearly though, even when (perhaps especially when) I don’t quite understand what’s going on. What a truly colossal shame that Dr Who got cancelled here, in 1989, when it become a series everyone should have been watching again at last (stuff Coronation Street on at the same time and killing Who in the ratings - this is true and far more believable drama, even with aliens and Neanderthals!), at just the moment when all but the show’s biggest fans had stopped watching. Perhaps the best summary is from Sylvester McCoy, who called this his favourite of all the stories he worked on before adding ‘though God knows what it was all about!’ Dr Who at its most sophisticated, sometimes a little too much so – and nothing says sophistication like realising just how unsophisticated we really are. 

 POSITIVES + Nimrod is such a strong character I wish they’d given him more to do. Carl Forgione’s genteel acting, combined with some really impressive make-up, is entirely convincing as the animal turned servant, the irony being that the Neanderthal is arguably the nicest and most evolved character here (besides Ace) whose doing what he does out of kindness and thought for other people besides himself and a classier act than the supposedly more respected humans and aliens alike around him. He kind of reminds me of Bellal in ‘Death To The Daleks’ – nobody listens to him either, but they should. And if kindness isn’t the real way to measure evolution, enabling man to look after the old and infirm and stand up against injustice happening to other people, I don’t know what is. Forgetting our humanity might seem the clever thing to do in our modern age of society, gangs and wars as technology pushes us that way but, well, that’s the way to the zoo that is, of going back to being apes – however clever our inventions might be. A very Dr Who message, yet one quite unlike any the show has ever delivered before, delivered in its dying breaths.

 NEGATIVES - This is one of those stories where you wish somebody would talk normally for just a scene – any scene. What with half the cast brainwashed, ‘Light’ as alien as aliens get with a modus operandi so entirely different to ours we find it hard to relate and the Doctor acting all dodgy it’s left to the ever-excellent Sophie Aldred to be our eyes and ears and she’s being asked to push Ace further than ever before, making her into an emotional mess, so that most of her lines are either accusations or bitter memories of her past. 75 minutes of this is utterly exhausting, no matter how good it all is.

 BEST QUOTE: Ace: ‘Scratch the Victorian veneer and something nasty will come crawling out’. 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: While the plot itself couldn’t be more different Gareth Robert’s 9th Doctor and Rose novel ‘Only Human’ does feature more fun with Neanderthals (amazing really, given how long our ancestors lived for and the way the Tardis travels at random, that they’ve only got two entries across sixty years of time travel but hey ho). This is one of the earliest novels in the Dr Who ‘comeback’ range of the 21st century and it’s a triumph featuring lots of it’s author’s best and funniest ideas. The plot starts with a Neanderthal turning up in a London club a mere 28,000 years after his kind died out. The Doctor tries to take him home, only to discover that poor Das will disintegrate if he travels through time again (for reasons linked to the plot but would take another three paragraphs to explain). So poor Das has to live out the rest of his life in contemporary Britain, with the Doctor for some reason thinking that Captain Jack is just the person to teach him! The best parts of the book come from their increasingly confused diary messages, as Das falls into a ridiculously unhealthy diet, dates an ugly fat girl with body hair everyone else thinks is ugly but he considers beautiful (he’s really not into modern trends of stick-thin women) and most of all struggles with the concept of lying, of ‘deliberate untruths’ (it takes three chapters to work out that televisions aren’t real recordings of things happening to fellow ‘tribes’). Of all the many many supporting characters from all the many any Who novels down the years Das might well be my favourite: he’s as scientifically and anatomically accurate as he could be made and feels like a believable ‘real’ person with it. Captain Jack, meanwhile, is quietly tearing his hair out as a mentor who thinks Humans in the 21st century are pretty primitive too. That’s only half the plot though: the Doctor and Rose trace where Das came from and find a group of time-travellers from the future, all of whom have come to study the early Humans and Neanderthals. They consider the people they see savage, driven by emotions they can’t control, but Roberts cleverly switches things round so that it’s the Neanderthals who feel closest to being true ‘Human’ – these pill-popping people from the future are so afraid of feeling anything that they block everything out with special medicine. The book loses its way in the last third or so, as it becomes yet another showdown with a baddy, but before then this is a really moving work questioning what it means to be Human and how thin the veneer of civilisation really is. Along with ‘The Stone Rose’ the very best of the ‘modern’ run of books and, along with ‘The Plotters’, Roberts’ masterpiece far more than anything he wrote for TV.         

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