The Web Planet

Target novelisation Doctor Who and the Zarbi

Author	Bill Strutton
Published	1965
ISBN	0 426 1134 1
First Edition Target Cover	Chris Achilleos

Back cover blurb: DOCTOR WHO lands his space-time machine Tardis on the cold, craggy planet of Vortis. The Doctor and his companions, Ian and Vicki, are soon captured by the ZARBI, huge ant-like creatures with metallic bodies and pincer claws; meanwhile Barbara falls into the hands of the friendly MENOPTERA who have come to rid Vortis of the malevolent power of the ZARBI...

• Novelised by numbers by Tim Roll-Pickering

Novelised by numbers by Tim Roll-Pickering 19/11/03

The television story The Web Planet was once hailed as an all time classic by fandom but then took a terrific nosedive in many fans' estimations after it was released on video. Before that time this novelisation, only the second ever written and widely available throughout the 1970s and 1980s, was for many fans their only way to experience the story. Whereas the televised story had many contributors, including a director who now admits he thought that the author couldn't write, the novelisation is a product of fewer people and might thus stand a better chance of reflecting Bill Strutton's original vision for the tale.

Unfortunately this book feels very much like a straightforward rendition of the scripts and little more. Each chapter covers an entire episode and uses the same title with one exception (the final episode goes from The Centre to Centre of Terror). Little effort has been made to rearrange the order of scenes or to show events that could not be shown on television for one reason or another, such as material with Barbara during Escape to Danger the third episode/chapter where on television Jacqueline Hill was on a week's holiday.

Strutton also declines the opportunity to flesh out the characters or the back story of Vortis. What we're left with feels very much like a description of the scenes on television with few alterations. Consequently the tediousness of the plot stands out, with Doctor Who and Vicki spending an eternity in the control room trying to foil the Voice, whilst Ian and Barbara both wander around Vortis with different Menoptera. Ian's entire segment of the story is ultimately redundant to the plot since the encounter with the pigmy-menoptera makes no real impact at all on the eventual outcome. The result is that the story fails to work as much on paper as on television.

Some of the names used may surprise modern readers. The space-time machine is called 'Tardis' not 'the TARDIS', the Menoptra have been renamed 'Menoptera' for no obvious reason and the Optera are now called pigmies or pigmy-menoptera. Oh and the lead character is called "Doctor Who". Back in the 1960s this was extremely commonplace and it is entirely possible that had the 1970s Target novelisations followed the lead of this one rather than Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Crusaders then it is highly likely that fandom may never have "decided" that the Doctor Who isn't the character's name at all.

This book was originally written in 1965 when there were hopes to create "Zarbimania" on a similar level to "Dalekmania". But whereas the parrallel Dalek novelisation, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, is a strong read that still enthralls to this day, Doctor Who and the Zarbi feels like a rush job to simply turn a set of scripts into a novel for the mass market. The television story did not set the world on fire and neither does this novelisation. Whilst not as tedious as the video it remains a mystery how this story came to be considered a classic by so many given that this was available at the time. 4/10