Barry LettsReviews

It's disappointing that the writers originally involved with the show seem least able to adapt to this format. But, for some reason, it also seems that nobody can write a good Third Doctor book. Nobody seems to have a handle on the character, or the ability to balance the camp without adding terrible humor.

The Third Doctor with Sarah Jane Smith and the Brigadier investigate the cult of Skang after some mysterious deaths occur.
The plot is thin and the characters are even thinner, Sarah comes across as both incredibly stupid and equally privileged.

re-read 4/18/2023

QUE COISA HORROROSA!!!

The Ghosts of N-Space is a six-part Doctor Who adventure. It's not a soundtrack from a TV adventure. It was actually written for the radio and recorded in 1995. Jon Pertwee provided the voice of the third Doctor, as he did for the radio drama The Paradise of Death, but his own death prevented more third Doctor radio serials.

Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, head of the UK contingent of UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, is in Sicily. He drops by the castello (castle) of Mario, whom he calls 'Great-Uncle,' but he's really a several-times removed cousin. Mario is the current Barone, or Baron in English. The Brigadier is next in line for the title, which he doesn't want. Mario is having a problem with Vilmio, a mobster who wants the castle and is not planning to take 'No!' for an answer. The castle's ghosts don't bother Mario that much, although the Brigadier sees one that gives that stalwart solider pause.

In fact, the Brigadier phones the Doctor to come help out. The poor man is rattled enough by what he saw that when he sees reporter Sarah Jane Smith, he assumes she's not there. Sarah Jane thinks the Brigadier is pretending he doesn't know her and is determined to find out why, vacation be hanged. Her co-worker, Jeremy Fitzoliver, who was traveling with her, is roped into following the Brigadier. Too bad they don't know they've just taken the last ferry of the day to the island where Mario's castle is. (The Doctor arrives by T.A.R.D.I.S., which is handy, because he'll be needing it.)

The Doctor explains that there's a crack between our world and N-Space [Null-Space] where spirits who can't move on are trapped. The crack is why they're able to see the ghosts. He's got to find out what caused the crack. After some research it's T.A.R.D.I.S time.

Sarah Jane nearly gets herself killed when she sees the re-enactment of a 19th century tragedy. She and the Doctor get to travel to that time more than once. Now that Sarah Jane has met Luisa (Louisa?) in the flesh, she's more determined than ever to prevent the romantic young lady's death, even if you aren't supposed to change history. Her efforts are hampered because she can't tell Luisa that she's from the 20th Century and the very thing Luisa expects to make marrying the handsome young gardener acceptable to her guardian will lead to her terrifying demise. (It's nasty enough to be worthy of the Gothic romances Luisa loves.)

Another time the Doctor and Sarah visit is the 16th century. Sarah is not best pleased to have to play the Doctor's male servant, Jack. There they run afoul of an evil alchemist named Vilmius. Could he be Vilmio's ancestor? He's certainly up to No Good. Can the Doctor and companion prevent his scheme and thereby fix the castle's problem?

Don't feel sorry for the Brigadier and Jeremy for staying in the present. They aren't going to miss out on all of the excitement. Vilmio sends his mistress, Maggie, to find out what she can. The Brigadier doesn't fall for Maggie's charms, but Jeremy is more susceptible. I don't want to give too much away, but it would take more than a rubber mask or two to manage the 20th century perils. As it is, give your imagination a workout.

The action switches among characters and time periods. Sarah Jane does some screaming, but Jeremy is our 'damsel' in distress. I enjoyed the Brigadier's attempts to deal with Mario wanting to fire his antique blunderbuss.½

I have never watched 'Doctor Who [:] The Mind of Evil,' because it is one of the Third Doctor storylines, but listening to it was quite entertaining. Richard Franklin, who played Captain Michael Yates on the show, handles the narration for when the episodes were just showing visual action. We get a bonus interview with Mr. Franklin that I enjoyed, particularly the bit about the dashing scene where Captain Yates had to ride a motorcycle after the missile thieves.

The Mind of Evil is only the main plot. We also get an old nerve gas missile that's supposed to be safely dealt with AND a World Peace Conference. If you're a fan of the Master, he has a very evil finger in every plot pie.

The main scene of the action is an old fortress that has become Stangmoor Prison where some particularly nasty prisoners are held. The Doctor and Jo Grant go there to see a Professor Kettering demonstrate the Keller Machine, invention of Emil Keller. The machine removes the evil/negative impulses from its subjects, which have been hardened criminals. Barnham is the evil prisoner selected for the demonstration. He survives, but his mind has become that of a good child. The Doctor is not impressed. He wants the use of that dangerous machine stopped. Some non-criminal individuals might still be among the living had the Doctor had his way.

UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) is providing security for a World Peace Conference being held in London. The conference is not going as well as the Brigadier could desire. He's getting complaints from a young woman of the Chinese delegation, Captain Chin Lee. Then things start getting weird in ways that the viewer gets to see, but not the Brigadier.

Of course it's fun when the Master shows up. He has a use for the Doctor, but almost gets him killed in the process.

There's plenty of action and betrayal and tide turning to keep fans listening.½

Daleks learn to become invisible.

It has no plot or ideas or anything along those lines.

Concept: F
Story: F
Characters: D
Dialog: D
Pacing: D
Cinematography: D
Special effects/design: F
Acting: C
Music: C

Subjective Rating: D

Objective Rating: 0.9/4 (Bad).½

There's an evil plot to set two planets at war.

Pretty bad for 70's Who, but at it's worst it's corny and heckle-able.

Concept: B
Story: C
Characters: D
Dialog: D
Pacing: D
Cinematography: D
Special effects/design: F
Acting: C
Music: C

Enjoyment: C plus

GPA: 1.5/4

Intrigue, as alien delegates visit a backwards planet.

Nothing really worth seeing, but I was reasonably entertained - often for the wrong reasons.

Concept: C
Story: C
Characters: D
Dialog: C
Pacing: C
Cinematography: C
Special effects/design: D
Acting: D
Music: C

Enjoyment: C plus

GPA: 1.7/4

The Doctor returns to Peladon, where the working classes are being exploited to further an intergalactic war effort.

I kind of hate planet Peladon, but it isn't nearly so bad this time around.

Concept: D
Story: B
Characters: C
Dialog: C
Pacing: D
Cinematography: C
Special effects/design: D
Acting: C
Music: B

Enjoyment: C plus

GPA: 1.9/4

The Master manipulates time to summon an ancient, powerful creature.

There's not anything especially wrong with it, except for the general lack of anything good about it. It's fairly dull and unimaginative (except for episode four, where two TARDISes are each one inside the other, which I think is kind of brilliant), but it's watchable.

Concept: D
Story: D
Characters: C
Dialog: B
Pacing: D
Cinematography: C
Special effects/design: F
Acting: D
Music: D

Enjoyment: C

GPA: 1.4/4½

A planet's inhabitants are exploited by imperial humans.

Slow and unoriginal. The Doctor is passive. There's a lot of hanging out in mines. What is it with mining in classic Doctor Who? They were crazy about mines.

Concept: D
Story: F
Characters: C
Dialog: C
Pacing: D
Cinematography: C
Special effects/design: D
Acting: D
Music: D

Enjoyment: C minus

GPA: 1.3/4 (Bad)

Spiders from space use Buddhists to invade Earth.

Very badly made, but mostly entertaining. You can tell they were at least trying hard to make it exciting.

Concept: D
Story: C
Characters: D
Dialog: D
Pacing: C
Cinematography: F
Special effects/design: D
Acting: C
Music: C

Enjoyment: C plus

GPA: 1.4/4

The Master helps plastic-controlling aliens invade Earth.

The Master's introduction to the series. Sadly, the fact that he's a renegade Timelord has no relevance to the plot. If you could call it a plot. Apart from a handful of nice character moments, everything is done quite badly. But it's a campy sort of bad that's entertaining.

Concept: B
Story: D
Characters: B
Dialog: B
Pacing: C
Cinematography: F
Special effects/design: D
Acting: C
Music: C

Enjoyment: C plus

GPA: 1.9/4

Poor colonists and a mining corporation want the same planet

Sloppy and unimaginative. There is no redeeming value, except for the fact that it is associated with a usually good show. It's not nearly as bad as the worst Doctor Who stories, though (and that is a testament to just how bad Doctor Who can get).

Concept: D
Story: D
Characters: C
Dialog: D
Pacing: D
Cinematography: C
Special effects/design: D
Acting: D
Music: F

Enjoyment: F

GPA: 1.0/4½

Time travelers from a dystopian future want to change history

It could have been a really good story, but the execution is terrible. The "action" is unintentionally funny, the villain can't act, and the Daleks have no business being there at all.

Concept: A
Story: C
Characters: D
Dialog: C
Pacing: C
Cinematography: C
Special effects/design: D
Acting: D
Music: C

Enjoyment: C plus

GPA: 1.9/4

Alien invaders use android doppelgangers.

There are lots of little good ideas here and there, but overall its sloppily and lazily written. It just wouldn't be a Terry Nation script without at least one twisted ankle.

Concept: B
Story: D
Characters: D
Dialog: C
Pacing: C
Cinematography: C
Special effects/design: D
Acting: C
Music: C

Enjoyment: C minus

GPA: 1.8/4

A pagan cult summons the devil, who is a space alien.

It's hard to say (since I've been watching them over such a long stretch of time), but this may be the worst Doctor Who I've ever seen. Yes, I think it probably is.

Concept: C
Story: F
Characters: F
Dialog: F
Pacing: F
Cinematography: D
Special effects/design: F
Acting: D
Music: F

Enjoyment: F

GPA: 0.4/4½

Astronauts returning from Mars are kidnapped as part of an elaborate conspiracy.

At its best, it's suspenseful and intelligent. At its worst, it's campy fun.

Concept: C
Story: B
Characters: C
Dialog: B
Pacing: C
Cinematography: C
Special effects/design: C
Acting: C
Music: C

Enjoyment: B

GPA: 2.3/4½

A man who looks like the Doctor is trying to take over the world.

Having Troughton play two characters should have been great, but in six episodes, they only bothered to have any fun with it in two or three scenes.

Concept: B
Story: D
Characters: D
Dialog: D
Pacing: C
Cinematography: C
Special effects/design: C
Acting: D
Music: D

Enjoyment: C

GPA: 1.6/4½

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2293711.html

Barry Letts' last novel, published in 2005 just after New Who began, but taking the Third Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith and the Brigadier to investigate a strange cult based around a mind-altering drug and rescuing Sarah's gormless assistant Jeremy (from The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space). It's not great, to be honest; the story rambles and characters make rather arbitrarily stupid decisions in order to prolong the plot. But we should take it as what it is, a farewell note to the series from one of its veteran producers.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2263969.html

I thought the original story was pretty poor; the novelisation brings out its strengths and reduces some of its weaknesses. It still feels like a lot of half-thought-out scenarios jumbled together, but there is a better consistency of tone. Letts did a lot for Who, but writing plots that actually made much sense was not really one of his strong points.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2175900.html

Letts needs no introduction to Who fans; he was producer of the show for the entire Pertwee era, plus a story or two either side. Apart from the usual set of anecdotes of personalities (including quite a shrewd dissection of Jon Pertwee), He includes detailed accounts of how making a TV programme at the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s actually worked, linked with his own career progressions from actor to director to producer. His heart was clearly in directing, and it's there that we get the most vivid descriptions of what he was doing; in particular, it's surprising to read his low opinion of The Enemy of the World, the first Who story that he worked on - I have always found it interesting enough, and Philip Sandifer calls it "an absolute triumph". (I'll note that another story Letts feels particularly unhappy about was The Ambassadors of Death, also a David Whitaker script.) He also writes about his attachment to Zen Buddhism, managing to convey his deep personal commitment to it though not quite so much what it is all about.

Very sadly, this book is only half the story, taking us up to the end of Letts' second of five seasons as producer of Doctor Who. It looks rather as if there were no notes, and Letts reconstructed it from memories cross-referenced with other sources, so presumably there is little or no primary material for the second half of the story to be told. But it's good that he got the first half done.½

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2103685.html

This is the first in internal chronology of the Third Doctor / Jo spinoff novels, though in fact the last to be published, in 2003. Veterans Dicks and Letts return to the theme of The D��mons, but this time invoking Ancient Greek deities as aliens disputing their rule of Earth. Almost half of the book is taken up with a lengthy prequel where the younger Lethbridge-Stewart, in the margins of the 1946 Corfu crisis, falls in live with the goddess Persephone and must rescue her from the Underworld, which is accessed via southern Albania. (I bet that this is the only Doctor Who story set in Albania - actually, I'm pretty sure it is the only one that even mentions the country.) The book is fairly clearly divided between Letts' work on this opening section, and Dicks' reshaping of The Dæmons for the rest of the book. It is fun, especially for those of us who grew up more on Dicks' novelisations of the Pertwee era rather than the original TV broadcasts.
Prequel stories for companions are fairly rare (I can think offhand of Harry in The Face of the Enemy, Erimem in The Coming of the Queen, Mel in The Wrong Doctors and the brief glimpse of Rose at the end of The End of Time - Amy/Amelia is in a different category) but on reflection I find it surprising that there are no others featuring the Brigadier. The screen Brigadier is a bit older than Nicholas Courtney (who was 17 at the time of the real Corfu incident), so there are plenty of possibilities for military back-story, in which perhaps he just misses being confronted with the sfnal elements of the plot and solves problems without ever really being aware of their causes. Just a thought.½

I was inspired to read this volume of memoirs after watching the documentary on Barry Letts's life on The Daemons DVD. It was clearly designed to be the first of two volumes of memoirs, as it only goes up to The Daemons (though with a few digressions to later periods, e.g. Planet of the Spiders and producing the BBC classic serials in the later 70s and early 80s). However, he sadly passed away just after it was completed. It's easy to read, though with relatively few insights into the author's life and retelling a host of anecdotes, many of which will be familiar to Doctor Who fans who will surely make up the bulk of this book's readership. I hadn't realised before watching the documentary and reading the book, though, quite how significant a TV actor he was in the 50s before going behind the scenes. 3/5

Whether or not you like Target novelization of "The Daemons" is going to depend a lot on whether or not you like the televised story itself. Held up by many as the quintessential story of the third Doctor's era, it has just about all of the earmarks of the era--UNIT, the Master, a threat to Earth. Fans will argue that it's got all the elements that make for a good third Doctor story while detractor will argue that its exactly all those elements coming together, plus a bit of padding to bring the whole affair out to five episodes, that hold the story back.

One interesting thing about the novelization is that, for years, it was the only official way fans could experience the story (outside of bootleg, n-th generation copies of the story on VHS). I have a feeling a lot of fans read the novel and created a lavish tapestry in their minds of exactly what this story could and would look like on-screen, only to be shockingly disappointed when they saw the real thing. (The fact that the n-th generation VHS bootlegs could be blurry probably only helped things to not conflict too much with the images created in eye of your imagination).

Of all the various eras of "Doctor Who," it's interesting that the third and fourth Doctor's era are those that benefit the least from the Target novels. Yes, all the stories are out there in Target novel form, but there were few instances in which a story was substantial expanded on or deepened by the novel. Outside of a couple of Malcolm Hulke stories, the Pertwee novelizations rarely strayed out of events portrayed on-screen or tried to beef up or add more to the storylines.

And "The Daemons" is in the mold of the depict what we saw on TV without adding much to it. Writer Barry Letts (who helped co-write the story on television) adds a little bit of local color to the villagers in the opening pages, but once the story takes off, it's really no more or less than your average tell the story in novel form of other novelizations of this era. If you're hoping that Letts would add a lot to the story or expand some things or maybe even compress certain scenes for the sake of a novel, you're going to be disappointed. If you're looking for a nice telling of a good story that is, in my opinion, a classic of not only its era but all of "Doctor Who," odds are you'll like the book. But after listening to "The Daemons" again, I found myself wanting to return to the televised version again. Which thankfully in our era of "Doctor Who" we can easily do with the restored VHS edition.½