Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen has a long and complicated genesis – much of which is chronicled in the appendices of this new paperback release. The core story started off as a pitch presented to the BBC in the mid-1970s; rejected as too wildly ambitious (or just too wild depending on your point of view), its author – the hugely influential and iconic Douglas Adams – refashioned some of its concepts (sans Time Lord) for Life, the Universe and Everything, the third in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel series.
James Goss, who has previously novelised Adams’ transmitted 1978 adventure ‘The Pirate Planet’ and classic 1979 mongrel adventure ‘City of Death’ (famously cobbled together over a weekend by Adams at the behest of the show’s then-producer Graham Williams and transmitted under the pseudonym David Agnew) and thus has considerable previous form with Adams’ archive, has pieced together the story of the Krikkitmen from the original pitch, a proposed film script, and various other bits and pieces the notoriously chaotic author worked on over the years. The result is as arch, ridiculous and imaginatively outrageous as we might expect from the man who gave us Oolon Colluphid, Slartibartfast, the supercomputer Deep Thought and, eventually, postulated the idea that the number 42 is indeed the secret of Life, the Universe and Everything.
The Krikkitmen does, however, sit uneasily as a Doctor Who story – if only because, although it shares the ‘quest’ format the show has used on several occasions, it rarely actually feels like a Doctor Who story at all. Goss has clearly worked hard at writing in the Douglas Adams style; ideas leap and bound across the page, characters talk in immaculately-crafted witty soundbites, the mundane rubs shoulders with the extraordinary, death is just another thing that happens – either on a cosmic or offhand scale. The scope of the story is absolutely enormous and it’s not hard to see why it made little headway in the micro-budget world of 1970s Doctor Who.
The fourth Doctor, Romana and K9 (all captured perfectly by Goss, with Baker’s fourth Doctor perhaps even more expansive and otherworldly than he appeared on TV) are at Lords (Time Lords at Lords… why not?) watching cricket when a spaceship arrives containing a contingent of death-wielding robots dressed in cricket whites who slay everyone in sight. The Doctor realises that the legendary Krikkitmen – android creatures created by a warlike race appalled by the existence of other lifeforms in the Universe – have returned, their planet having long ago been hidden in an envelope of Slow Time by the Time Lords. Returning to Gallifrey, the Doctor and Romana enter the Matrix, the repository of all Time lord knowledge, and become embroiled in a frantic and pell-mell chase across the Universe to stop the marauding Krikkitmen destroying all Creation.
High stakes and high concepts go hand in hand in Goss’s breathless and often dizzying text which throws around characters, locations and ideas with such reckless abandon that it’s often hard to keep up with what’s going on, much less why it’s going on. The Krikkitmen can be an infuriating and slightly tiresome experience as endless quirky asides and observations and random divergences take the reader away from the throughline of the story and into the odd narrative dead-end, possibly to ensure that as much of Adams’ original vision is presented to the reader as possible.
The Krikkitmen is a fascinating glimpse into the wild imagination of one of the show’s most extraordinary creative talents, and if it doesn’t always read much like anything Doctor Who has ever been before or since it’s an intriguing time capsule in its own right and a reminder of what we lost when Adams tragically passed away in 2001.
DOCTOR WHO AND THE KRIKKITMEN / AUTHOR: JAMES GOSS / PUBLISHER: BBC BOOKS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
