Following an experiment in Doctor Who  publishing a couple of years ago which saw BBC Books reissue a number of the 1970s novelizations of classic serials from the legendary Target imprint – the bedrock of most fans’ knowledge of the show’s history years before VHS tapes, DVD and downloads – the BBC have now, thrillingly, commissioned a new run of adaptations of episodes from the 21st century reinvention of the series.

With access to archive TV now easier than ever before, novelising modern TV episodes might seem a bit anachronistic, if not entirely unnecessary and self-defeating. Yet a forty-five minute script offers enormous potential for writers to return to the source material and add colour, character backstory and incident to episodes which, with the best will in  the world, often seemed to dash breathlessly through their narratives with little room for subtlety and nuance.  This is never better demonstrated in this new run of four novels than in ‘Rose’, magnificently adapted and expanded by Russell T Davies from his own screenplay for the introductory episode of the first new series back in 2005.

‘Rose’ might not be the best episode of Doctor Who ever made but it’s almost certainly the most important. In one episode Davies was required to reintroduce the whole mad Universe of the Doctor and the TARDIS to a staid British TV audience who, for the most part, had never seen anything like it. The fact that the show is still on air, battered and bruised, thirteen years later, is a testament to how well he pulled off his near-impossible mission.  As a novel, though, ’Rose’ is something else again. Davies has reinstated excised scenes and characters, deftly expanded on the histories of his characters, added violence and spectacle the TV could never have imagined (the Auton attack on London at the story’s climax is powerful, often quite explicitly-violent stuff) and he’s allowed himself the opportunity to play in the show’s continuity sandbox in ways he could never dared  back in 2005.

This is the story of bored nineteen year-old London shopgirl Rose Tyler, whose going-nowhere life is jump-started when she’s chased by living plastic mannequins in the basement of the department store where she works and rescued by a man in a leather jacket with a bomb in his pocket. It’s the Doctor and it’s the start of an adventure of a lifetime for Rose. You know the rest, of course, but you don’t know it quite like this. Davies has added so much gorgeous new material that this almost feels like an entirely different story. Department store electrician Bernie Wilson, unseen on screen and killed off in the first two minutes, gets the first chapter of the book to himself before he meets his grisly fate and elsewhere we discover more about Mickey Smith’s tragic past, Jackie Tyler’s ramshackle lifestyle and  meet Mickey’s flatmates (the TV budget couldn’t run to them) and their struggling band, Bad Wolf. There are call backs to the classic series, teasing links to events in series to come (a certain supertemp from Chiswick gets a quick look-in), Graham Norton (who notoriously invaded the transmission of the episode thanks to a BBC technical hitch) is now officially series canon and Davies wilfully hurls a sack of cats into the pigeons of the Doctor’s own timeline as conspiracy theorist Clive shows a curious Rose images of Doctors past, present…and future.

Davies writes like a man who is absolutely in love with his story and his characters and their characterization, concise, throwaway and yet wonderfully detailed, is as joyous here as it was right across his five year reign in the show’s modern Imperial Phase. Is ‘Rose’ great literature? Of course not, it’s an adaptation of a TV episode; but as such it’s a brilliant, energising read full of the joy of great Doctor Who and, perhaps most importantly, it’s a big rollicking reminder of the glory days of Target Books. As the big man himself would undoubtedly say, ‘Rose’ is marvellous.

DOCTOR WHO – ROSE/ AUTHOR: RUSSELL T DAVIES / PUBLISHER: BBC BOOKS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW