Second paragraph of third chapter:
No one else seemed to notice it. No one mentioned it, at any rate. He supposed they wouldn’t dare. And he didn’t like to ask. It would be absurd to draw deliberate attention to such a weakness in his own body. But sometimes he looked at it in the mirror and he’d prod at it with his finger and it felt spongy and weird, and if he clenched his teeth hard he could even make it throb.
This is another novelisation of a classic Big Finish audio by its author. Jubilee dates from 2003, starring Colin Baker as the Doctor, the late Maggie Stables as companion Evelyn Smythe, and husband and wife team Martin Jarvis and Rosalind Ayres as the dictator of England and his wife. I’ve written the original audio up twice here, once in 2007:
Jubilee was of course the basis for the superb Ninth Doctor story Dalek. I was surprised, though, by how different it was. There are similarities – the first confrontation between Doctor and imprisoned Dalek, the relationship between Dalek and companion (done more convincingly on TV), the Dalek’s quest for orders (done more convincingly here); but there is a huge difference in setting, the audio play taking place in an alternate 2003 where the world is ruled from London by the villainous Mr and Mrs Martin Jarvis, thanks to the Doctor’s intervention a hundred years earlier. And yet this doesn’t fall into the category of Doctor-returns-to-the-scene-of-a-previous-adventure stories, because the earlier Sixth Doctor is still there. It’s a good one, but the TV version is I think better (not always the case; see Spare Parts).
And again in 2023:
I confess that on this listening I didn’t feel that it worked as well. The two core moments – when first the Doctor and then his companion meet the imprisoned Dalek – are both very good and ended up much less changed for the TV story. The first half is fine, as we get dug into the horror of an parallel timeline where the UK’s dictatorship maintains its position by whipping up fear of the Daleks; but I felt it lost the run of itself at the end, with too many cases of characters revealing that their real motivations are completely different to what we had been told; and I did not feel that all the plot strings were tied up. There is some great humour – especially the opening sequence which parodies the whole concept of Doctor Who – but some dark shifts of tone which seemed to me dissonant rather than masterful. It’s probably fair to say that fannish expectations were different back in 2003, when it looked like the Wilderness Years would last for ever.
I didn’t listen to it again before reading the new novelisation, as it was still pretty fresh in my mind from last time round. And I should say perhaps that although the story is the basis for the superb Ninth Doctor story Dalek, it is a very different thing, with just a couple of key scenes in common – though even then, the beats of Baker / Stables are very different from Eccleston / Piper.
Jubilee is a good Doctor Who book, firmly recasting the story into novel form rather than just being an adaptation of the script. A lot of the rough edges are smoothed off here, and in particular I felt that the unfolding of narrative revelations was more under control than the original script had been; but also the feeling of the fascist, hi-tech but nostalgic British regime came across even more viscerally on the page. Shearman has always been clear that the story was written in reaction to the rise of the hard right, and unfortunately the last two decades have given him plenty more material to draw from.
Perhaps more so than The Chimes of Midnight, it might be a handy gateway book for Who fans who aren’t yet sure about Big Finish – this is a good book based on one of the best of the plays.
