Target Book Club 2026

Art by 
Gürkan Özer

On Saturday, I was in London to speak at Target Book Club, reading Chapter 4 of my forthcoming Doctor Who novelisation The Six Doctors, which I have adapted from scripts and surviving paperwork from the archive of Terrance Dicks.

You can now listen to that and all the other speakers, care of the Hamster Book Club podcast: Target Book Day 2026. List of speakers and their speakings below.

As well as reading from my book, I also announced that my biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be published on 30 November. We will be open for pre-orders soon. Promise.

00:01:40 “Chapter One” by Bruce Nicholson, read by Una McCormack (a woman!)

00:07:25 “Father in the Mirror” by Julian Richards, about his later father Justin

00:21:54 “Zarbi-Ye-Ye!” by Robert Crighton, on the oddness of Doctor Who and the Zarbi

00:38:24 “And the Mysterious Imagery” by Jason Thompson

00:54:19 “Lyle and a Time Lord” by Matthew Sweet

01:14:21 “Exterminations in the Library” by Gary Brannan, on the archive of Terrance Dicks

01:29:17 “The Revolting Rutan Will Not Be Television” by Paul Kirkley

01:43:07 “Literal Targets” by Jonathan Morris, who has posted a transcript and missing bits

01:49:29 “The Stallslady is BBC Enterprises” by Stephen Wyatt on how fans interpret his work

02:02:01 Reading from The Power of Kroll novelisation by Robert Shearman

02: 08:37 “Young Men Are Dying For It” by James Goss, on his novelisation of The Armageddon Factor

02:22:30 “Bargain Hunt / On Target” a game with Steve Cole and 02:32:52 a few words from Albert dePetrillo off of BBC Books

02:36:01 Reading from An Unearthly Child novelisation by Nigel Robinson

02:47:38 Reading from The Six Doctors novelisation by Simon Guerrier

02:59:00 “Drawing Inspiration” by Paul MC Smith

03:14:25 “Et zut! Ca recommence!” by Phil Pascoe

03:28:21 “The Changing Face of Doctor Who” by Andrew Orton

“The Timeless Pieces” by James Cooray Smith

“Revenge of the Blurboids” by John Grindrod

“A New Target At Last” and a reading from The Vampire Mutation novelisation by Steve Cole

“The Five-Fingered Bookmark” by Professor Esther MacCallum-Stewart (she was a woman, too!)

Hideous Kinky, by Esther Freud

I can see why this strange, disturbing novel had such an impact when first published in 1992. It’s the semi-autobiographical account of a childhood trip to Morocco in the early 1970s, at once exotic adventure and horror story.

In the opening pages, the young narrator is in a van driving from the UK to Marrakech with her elder sister Bea, unnamed Mum, Mum’s boyfriend John and a silent, sullen woman called Maretta who we then learn is John’s wife. The implication, unrecognised by the narrator, is that Maretta is unhappy with the relationship between her husband and the unnamed Mum. There’s something odd and uncomfortable going on, to be teased out by the reader from the narrator’s account. 

The only words the girls have heard Maretta ever say are “hideous” and “kinky”, which they work into the rules of their game of tag, I think unwittingly taunting her. Then Maretta is seriously ill, and covered in lice, and suddenly we learn that John has taken her back to London. Much later, we briefly hear news that Maretta previously suffered the loss of a child but is now pregnant by John again… We don’t hear of them again.

The point is that the narrator shares with us events as they happen — the chaos and feelings and textures of this adventure with her Mum — but doesn’t quite grasp what they mean. As readers, we must deduce the things not said or understood: connections, desires, what characters are escaping. Bit by bit, we piece together that the narrator’s Mum is as much escaping the “rules” laid down by her strict mother in Tunbridge Wells as searching for some kind of freedom or meaning. Yet she depends — desperately — on the connections she’s escaped, reliant on regular payments sent out by the girls’ father.

The effect, I think, is to invite us to pass judgment. Some of what’s described here is very funny, such as the local women who regularly steal clothes from a washing line, including nappies, and then flaunt them whether or not they fit. The children briefly had a pet chicken while living in a hotel; the chicken stalks the other rooms and shits on people's stuff.

But much of what is described made this hapless parent jittery with apprehension. At one point, Bea is seriously ill and fears all her teeth will fall out, and the adults acknowledge that yes, her lips have gone blue — and don’t do much else about it. On another occasion, Mum gives away the previous talcum powder that prevents the narrator’s rash. The narrator can’t read, is prevented from going to school, and is conscious of missing out.

Then Bea refuses to go with Mum and younger sister on yet another jaunt, so stays behind with a neighbour. When Mum and narrator eventually return, days and days later, Bea is no longer where they left her, has spent time living with a man Mum doesn’t even know, and is now somewhere else, ultimately tracked down to the home of a woman who refers to her as an orphan. 

Part of what makes this all so affecting is that the book offers few clues to the ages of the two children, beyond them being very young. In the film version, Bea is eight — younger than my own daughter now — and her sister Lucy (the unnamed narrator of the book) just six. The book is compelling because I found myself worried for their welfare. 

I couldn’t resist the signed copy of this spied in my local Oxfam bookshop, not least because Esther Freud played Threst, one of the Cryons, in Attack of the Cybermen. As a kid, I used to be terrified of that period of Doctor Who; as an adult, a story about a wayward parent with young children in potential peril is way, way more disturbing…

The School for Scandal and Other Plays, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I bought this Penguin Classics edition second-hand an age ago because David Whitaker (about whom I wrote a book, which I never mention) had played Sir Oliver Surface to great acclaim in a 1957 production of A School for Scandal at the Theatre Royal in York, the cast including John Barrie, Derek Martinus and Titus Oates, who later changed his professional name to Simon and was in Doomwatch. 

Skimming through the script of that particular play, I got a sense of the farcical comedy, and the kindly, authoritative role. The book comprises three plays by Sheridan: The Rivals (1775), The Critic (1779) and The School for Scandal (1777). Reading them all now, at a more leisuredly rate and without an agenda, I've been delighted by the modern-feeling pace and the quality of gags. In The Rivals, for example, Lydia races to tidy up her salacious novels before posh visitors walk in, and asks her servant to help:

LYDIA: Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books - quick, quick - fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilet - throw Roderick Random into the closet - put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man - thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa - cram Ovid behind the bolster - there - put The Man of Feeling into your pocket... (p. 48).

Sat in a quiet library last week, "Put The Man of Feeling into your pocket" made me snort out loud.

Likewise, The Critic has an amazing sequence in which abominable playwright Sir Fretful Plagiary insists he never reads reviews in papers. The mischievous Mr Dangle says this is just as well, as the reviews are particularly awful. Plagiary can't resist asking what is said, so Dangle provides a whole page of different example, ripping into every aspect of Plagiary's work, and Plagiary must pretend not to be offended.

We then visit rehearsals for a play, The Spanish Armada, into which the author has inserted a romance between the daughter of the head of the English fort at Tilbury and one of the Spanish sailors, no matter how improbable this might be. This sailor has the most amazing, authentically Spanish name: Don Ferolo Whiskerandos. Scenes of this terrible play out with critics commenting on further outlandish devices: characters telling each other things they already know, or the overuse of research (one character, known to have been a good dancer, duly enters a supposedly tense scene with his toes turned out). You could make a checklist of this stuff and use it to teach creative writing.

The School for Scandal is very Bridgerton, involving society gossips who then get caught up in their own scandals, and various people donning different person to find out what people are really like. The morality is all a bit twisted, which makes it surprising and fun. There is a ridiculous scene involving two people both hiding, separately, in the same room which often seems to have been performed as a standalone scene, such as in the 

The plays are peppered with references to contemporary people and things, which need a bit of explaining in footnotes. I'm not sure how funny these would have been, even at the time - it's a lazy kind of placeholder comedy, where you trick a laugh from the audience by naming something they recognise. Sometimes, Sheridan does something a bit more witty than that, such as in The Critics where it seems the famous actors being praised or critiqued in a scene are the very men who'd have been on stage in it.

For all the wit and zip feel up to date, the plays are oddly unstructured and they each just sort of stop. I was prompted to read up more on Sheridan, and discovered his private life was even more scandalous than the intrigues staged here. What a binfire - and knowing this, you can feel the chaos in his writing.

If We Tolerate This, by Daniel Trilling

On Monday, the Dr and I had a day trip to Oxford. She went to the new Aphrodite exhibition at the Ashmoleon, and I spent an afternoon in a university library reading a 60 year-old pamphlet for a thing I am writing. On the way there and back, we listened to Rory Kinnear reading this short book which seems to have two subtitles: "How the British establishment made the far right respectable" and, "The rise of the far right and what we can do to stop it."

As Trilling argues, what were at the time of the 2010 general election considered rather fringe, extreme views, on immigration especially, have since shifted into the mainstream. He charts why and how, threading together austerity, neoliberalism, unregulated social media and political opportunism more generally. 

Along the way, he asks key questions, such as why there was a sudden surge in the numbers of immigrants attempting to reach the UK by small boats after January 2021, aka the "Boriswave." But he does more than just ask questions; he does his best to provide the answers, too. In answering this question, for example, he explains why efforts by governments both blue and red have struggled to meet their own targets to reduce such numbers (and why such targets were a hostage to fortune anyway). 

It's at once a depressing read and yet also empowering, in part by making sense of the apparent chaos and in part because he identifies a number of positive ways forward. Concise, cogent and pragmatically optimistic, it's a good primer on what the heck is going on, and what we can and should do next.

I'd been keen to read this since meeting author Daniel Trilling at the Festival of Ideas in York earlier this year, where we were both speaking - on YouTube, you can watch him on the panel "Democracy on trial: the promise of democracy" and my talk on writers David Whitaker and Terrance Dicks. But I knew Daniel's work already, not least his brilliant piece on Alexander Baron for the LRB (in case of interest, I've previously written here on Baron's memoir Chapters of Accidents and novel The Lowlife.)

The Doctor Who Production Diary - 2. The Troughton Years, by David Brunt

This engrossing, 774-page brick of a volume details the day-by-day production of Doctor Who in the late 1960s, when Patrick Troughton was the Doctor. It follows the magnificent first volume in perhaps even more exhaustive detail, covering the period Monday 18 April 1966 (when ‘significant’ changes to Doctor Who were mooted, which surely included the recasting of the lead character) to Monday 4 August 1969 (and the issuing of an audience research report on reactions to the final episode of The War Games). I have delighted in every page.

A lot of histories of Doctor Who tend to focus on one given story at a time. Brunt’s approach coveys the dizzying chaos of multiple stories being in different stages of development all at once. Seeing things presented in this way sparks a lot of new thoughts and connections.

For example, The Evil of the Daleks was broadcast as the final story of Season 4, the last episode airing on 1 July 1967. After a summer break, Season 5 began with The Tomb of the Cybermen, the first episode broadcast on 2 September. That gap, I think, helped to hide the fact that these two consecutive serials, recorded back to back, have a number of similar features. The Doctor visits the planet of his enemies and meets a larger-headed leader version whose plan is to brainwash humans. The Doctor defeats the villains but, in the closing seconds of the final episode, we see that something survives… 

That surely can’t be a coincidence, so I suspect story editor and co-writer Gerry Davis consciously sought to mirror the Dalek story in what he wrote for the Cybermen. Something similar then happened in a subsequent Cybermen story, The Invasion (1968), in which the villains are seen stalking around landmarks of London, mirrors something similar in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964).

Another connection I’d not made before is that the first approval to wipe an original videotape recording of Doctor Who (boo, hiss) was issued on Thursday 9 March 1967 (p. 198), two days ahead of the broadcast of Episode 1 of The Macra Terror, which debuted a new title sequence. It’s boggling — to me — to think that the videotape archive of Doctor Who remained complete for the entire span that the original title sequence was in use. The wiping of episodes and the commissioning of new titles are also both, I think, signs of a production team looking forwards, not back — at a time when they were also jettisoning what had once been a fundamental part of the series format, stories set in the past. It is all part of a consistent mindset.

As with the first volume, I must declare an interest in that I liaised a bit with David Brunt as he assembled this extraordinary compendium. Especially with the later bits, we scrutinised many of the same sources as I worked on my imminent biography, Written by Terrance Dicks. We discussed and debated various points where the sources aren’t entirely clear, and he read over my draft chapters and caught some of my more glaring errors.

As he explains in the introduction here, his approach has been to work chiefly from the BBC paperwork held at the Written Archives Centre in Caversham — his list of the files there that he looked through takes up two whole pages (pp. 771-2). From this, he lays out, as objectively as possible, what happened on what date. Along the way, he makes a number of shrewd deductions to tackle discrepancies in the primary sources or to plug gaps in the record. 

Even so, his emphasis is on evidence from documentation. Where no documents survive, he is warier than me of using things said in later interviews by cast and crew. For example, there are several accounts that script editor / associate producer / producer Derrick Sherwin organised a screening or screenings of the Quatermass serials from the 1950s for himself and his team (Terrance Dicks and Trevor Ray) ahead of commissioning the first Doctor Who stories involving the new Earthbound format. In discussing that with Brunt, we think this must have taken place in late December 1968 — but, unable to be surer than that, he leaves it out of his production diary.

There are a few instances where I disagree with his conclusions — not that he’s wrong, but I interpret things another way. For example, in his entry for Tuesday 18 October 1966, he provides a summary of an early version of Part One of The Power of the Daleks, detailing how it varies from the episode as broadcast. That surviving early script is not dated, but Brunt suggests it’s the version issued to the cast for the start of rehearsals, which began on this particular Tuesday. I think the very different and much wordier version of the Doctor in this script suggests that this is the script written by David Whitaker, before — on Friday 7 October, as detailed by Brunt — Dennis Spooner was engaged to rewrite it. I think a now-lost Spooner rewrite was used in rehearsals, prior to a final (surviving) camera script being drafted.  

Likewise, Brunt thinks “on or around” Tuesday 20 February 1968 that Terrance Dicks was interviewed for the job as assistant story editor on Doctor Who, and at the same attended the video playback of the most recently recorded instalment of Doctor Who, Episode 6 of The Web of Fear. My sense from Terrance’s own (brief, not entirely clear) accounts of what happened is that this playback was among the first things to happen once he’d been appointed.

This isn’t meant to quibble — it’s a delight to engage with this stuff and puzzle out the nuances as best we can. Brunt’s different perspective has made me look again at what I’ve come up with and in a couple of places I’ve been able to correct small details in my own book, just in time. What’s more, something here prompted a new line of thought and on Monday I’m off on a research trip to dig out what I hope will be new information for an article in DWM...

I look forward eagerly to the next volume.

Doctor Who Magazine #635

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out today, and comes with a free Target novel: Doctor Who - At Childhood's End by Sophie Aldred.

In among the other treats, Chris Bentley talked to me about my forthcoming audio novel The Missing Hour, which is released next week. And on p. 8, reader Lloyd Peterson from New Jersey, USA, responds to my recent article about Star Trek. It's nice to make such far-reaching connections...

Trailer for The Missing Hour

Big Finish have posted a three-minute excerpt from my forthcoming, six-hour Doctor Who audio novella, The Missing Hour, which is due for release in full on 22 October.

To hear the excerpt, read by Barnaby Edwards, visit The Missing Hour page on the Big Finish website and click "Listen to the trailer" or "Download Trailer" just below the cover image.