Customer Reviews

Doctor Who: The Romans

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This book is important to finish up that Dr. Who novelization collection, but lacks as literature.
The televised show used wit and humor with a nice dose of slapstick. Some of this does not translate as well to the written word but most could have (as evidenced by other authors in the same genre).
The writing is wordy and sometimes difficult to follow if you are reading this like most Dr. Who novels. (They usually are simplistic in vocabulary.) Cotton's use of the "journal format" of telling the story (ie Bram Stoker's Dracula) does not seem to work well for a Dr. Who novelization. While a good try, it does not seem appropriate for this story.
I would reccomend instead, for the sci-fi consumer, the film version of this story (availible on VHS and PAL) which I found far more enjoyable.

This historical story, set in the rule of Nero not long before the burning of Rome, had the distinction of being an experiment in a comedy in Doctor Who. This how included some props (and even cast members!) from "Carry on Cleo".

The trick for Donald Cotton, who wrote the original script and also the novelisation, is that the televised story relies on both witty commentary and slapstick. Slapstick doesn't translate to the written word, so Mr Cotton plays up some of the witty wordplay and adds a new level of comedy by producing this as an epistolary novel rather than a straight novelisation.

Extracts from the journal of Ian Chesterton, the diary of the Doctor, Nero's scrapbook and other sources combine together to lay out the televised story, but in an interesting format.

It is a good strategy, which helps this book stand out amongst the many simple and straightforward novelisation of Doctor Who serials.