NA #45 Shakedown

Shakedown by Terrance Dicks

In Brief: The Tardis crew are chasing a shape-changing spy who carries a "terrible secret" Hot on their heels are everybody's favourite potato-heads, The Sontarans.

What to say about Shakedown? Well, other than that it's written by Terrance Dicks. It's a typical Dicks effort in being a competently-written if extremely straight-forward book. Still, he knows how to put together an efficient Doctor Who story and really make it tick. Of course that's hardly a surprise considering the many many TV-stories he had involvement with through writing or script-editing from the 1960s through 80s.

And at least the novel never reaches the "no more than minimal description" depths of a Target novelisation.

However, what's notable about Shakedown is that it's partially a novelisation of a filmed story, albeit one that originally had no involvement at all from The Doctor.



Back in the wilds of the mid-1990s, with it obvious that no new show was liable to ever appear in TV, some fans with resources at their command managed to produce several direct-to-video stories with a Doctor Who link. So with rights to some aspects of the show available (certain monsters and/or characters, but not The Doctor or Tardis) several videos were made which were semi-officially in the Who "universe". One of the more notable (as in having somewhat (comparatively) of a budget) was "Shakedown: The Return of the Sontarans", which was written by Terrance Dicks and starred several Doctor Who (and Blake's 7) actors, albeit none in their original roles.


And some weird looking Sontarans.

The other video of this ilk worth mentioning is "Downtime", although it's a big mess of Yeti, computer viruses, The Brigadier, The Brigadier's daughter, 2nd-Doctor companion Victoria and Sarah Jane Smith. There were also a series out there concerning the X-Files-like investigations of one Liz Shaw and another featuring Autons.

In terms of quality (as memory serves, I should probably try to track down a copy to re-watch) "Shakedown: The Return of the Sontarans" wasn't great, mainly due to the severely low budget of the production (of course we *are* dealing with the Doctor Who universe here) . However despite this hindrance many of these videos were quite fun and better than they should have been, mainly through being very obvious labours of love for all involved. These were productions by fans who wanted to make Doctor Who like they remembered (which explains tendency to use aspects from the 60s and 70s rather than the more recent stories) since the BBC obviously weren't interested.

It could be argued that the show we've been getting out of Wales since 2005 is the ultimate version of this sentiment.

So using an author like Dicks makes sense and the style of story (straight forward action-adventure in space) is quite a contrast from the at times confounding plotting of stories from the 1980s.


Some familiar faces in unfamiliar roles.

In order to turn a 50-minute show featuring no Doctor or other parts of the show itself (other than the Sontarans) into an official Doctor Who book, Dicks has stuck the plot of the video itself into the middle of the novel. So while the crew of the solar-sailer Tiger Moth are being menaced by Sontarans and a shape-changing Rutan The Doctor & Co. are waiting on nearby planets and space-stations to rejoin the story-proper. If one didn't know about the video the seams aren't *too* visible, well except that a couple of characters who are killed at the climax of the middle-section show up again later in a "Ha Ha! I wasn't really dead!" manner in order to extend the story up to the needed 250 pages. Still, greater crimes of writing have been committed during The New Adventures.

Also, after the mature character-study of The Also People this book is a major step down in terms complexity of writing-style, nothing here is above a 12-year-old's reading level. However one of the appeals of Doctor Who is how the style of story one gets can change wildly from week to week, so it's not really a complaint, just something worth noting. So as such all of Shakedown's characters are fairly broad. And I doubt that it would really be possible for anyone to write an introspective Sontaran.

So, overall Shakedown is a fun if slight book. Terrance Dicks definitely knows how to keep the pages turning. So in the great scheme of The New Adventures I'd rank Shakedown as being good but a trifle disappointing since it never reaches the quality of his earlier Timewyrm: Exodus but is nowhere as awful as his vampire & gangsters opus Blood Harvest.