Customer Reviews

Doctor Who: Paradise of Death (BBC Radio Collection)

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For Doctor Who's thirtieth anniversary, the BBC commissioned a 5 episode original radio play featuring Jon Pertwee, Elisabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney reprising their roles as the Doctor, Sarah and the Brigadier. Written by former Doctor Who producer and sometime author Barry Letts, the story had all the potential to be something great. It wasn't.

This novelisation is the last in the long running Target series of Doctor Who books (number 156). In adapting his radio play, Mr. Letts seems to have found a better medium for his story.

In essence, UNIT is called in to investigate a death at Space World - a theme park whose owners, the Parakon Corporation, have inveigled themselves with the highest powers on Earth (up to and including the Secretary-General of the UN). Imagine everyone's surprise when the people running the company turn out to actually be aliens! Who could possibly have predicted that?

In keeping with the spirit of the third Doctor's era, political messages are somewhat ham-fistedly thrust forward, and the whole thing is wrapped up in a quasi-Star Trek storyline that is somewhat out of step with Doctor Who as we know it.

With more room to expand upon the contents of his radio play, Mr. Letts makes them more in line with Doctor Who - and possibly this is in part because the radio production was very brash and noisy, so the book seems sedate.

If you want to experience 'The Paradise of Death', this book is the way to go.