This is what Doctor Who looks like when all bets are off!

After a recent meeting with Alexander the Great, the Doctor, Scientist Ian Chesterton and Susan English are back in the Tardis. They’re mourning the loss of their close friend Barbara, who died thanks to the radiation poisoning they got on Skaro. That all changes, however, when Barbara suddenly walks into the room. But this Barbara is not the secretary and tutor they knew. This Barbara is a teacher from Coal Hill school. Something going wrong in time and space…

In case you didn’t really get that little summary: This book starts not with our regular cast, but with their book adaptation from “Doctor Who and an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks”. Several details were changed between the book release and the tv run, like the original origins of each character. Campaign’s use of these alternate origins early on can be seen as a mission statement: It’s going to challenge every assumption and attempt at canonicity, and it is going to get weird fast! You can constantly expect character to change names, personality, origin and behavior. Combine that with eventual bouts of long-term exile and some existentialism, and you’ve got a challenging read ahead of you.

Yet in a sense, it always feels grounded, because we constantly take the perspective of one of the characters. No matter what happens, the emotions are presented as is. Which is an interesting anchor as the world constantly shifts and shapes around our crew.

At times, this book is almost more of a creative writing exercise and less of a story. It feels unconstrained in both a physical sense and as a Doctor Who story. It is a story that will suddenly change fonts, use facts from old Doctor Who annuals, turn into a comic, give you a chapter with some drawings of robots and much, much more. In that way, it might just be the most Doctor Who story to ever exist. It can go everywhere and do anything.

Which brings me back to the reality of the book, which has to be addressed: Campaign was never officially released as part of the Doctor Who “brand”. It was planned as a Past Doctor Adventure novel, but because of deadlines, medical emergencies and changes in leadership it never came to fruition. Which is a massive shame. As far as I can tell, it also caused writer Jim Mortimore to never work for Doctor Who again, which is an even bigger shame.

However, eventually Campaign saw the light of day in an unofficial capacity, with all proceeds going to charity. For modern readers, that means you can go online and find a free pdf pretty easily and legally. So it’s not hard to get a copy of your own. It even has writer commentary for every chapter!

When reading Campaign, my brain constantly got tickled with what-ifs: What would this have looked like if made for tv? What if it had been published? Would it have influenced other writers? Would Steven Moffat have changed the way he approached time travel shenanigans if he read Campaign?

And I think that is the essence of the novel. At the very edges of this show, there exists a little book that did its own thing and went creatively wild. Even more creatively wild than Doctor Who as a series dared to go. It lives in infamy as one of the strangest pieces of media, but by being strange, it also constantly reminds you of what Doctor Who can be. If you’re ever lost in the deep fan minutiae and every piece of Doctor Who media starts to feel the same, give Campaign a go and be surprised at how many directions this show can actually take.

So..yeah..that happened.

Where to begin?

Actually, I’m going to begin at the end and this is spoiler territory so look away if you haven’t read Campaign yet.

And it was all a dream.

As some of you know, I’m a primary school teacher. I’m also an English Lit graduate. So English is my subject. When I teach writing to the little oiks in my charge, there are two golden rules. Don’t start with ‘One sunny day’ and don’t end with ‘and it was all a dream’. What’s worse, though, is when to counter that ending, children write: ‘or was it?’ That’s basically what Jim Mortimore does and I don’t remember the last time I’ve felt so let down by a novel. It felt like such a cop out, childish ending for what had, up to that very last page, been intriguing, frustrating and mind-bending in equal measure.

Campaign starts in an ordinary way but very quickly makes it obvious it’s going to be playing with Doctor Who. Ian is dead. Barbara is dead. Then they are both alive again. And then the universe outside the TARDIS disappears. The tensions between the crew echo the early days of the the series and this is extrapolated to extremes. The story is written as Ian and Barbara’s tale, and mainly from their points of view, and that fits perfectly with the era it is set in.

Within an increasingly bizarre narrative landscape, Mortimore weaves in aspects of the series from ‘outside’ the canon: Cliff and Lola from the original character breakdowns; David Whitaker’s rewriting of the character’s backgrounds in his novelisation of The Daleks; the 17th Century Mortimer family from Doctor Who and the Invasion of Space; John and Gillian; even Butch the dog from one of the early annual stories.

This is fun and cleverly done and I think this is why I was expecting a better resolution than, as it turns out, the real TARDIS crew (the one’s from ‘our version’) playing a fancy computer game. Inevitably, it reminds a genre TV fan of the Better Than Life episode of Red Dwarf – a story which I think handled this concept far more adeptly than Mortimore has here.

I think I expected something about alternative universes; infinite possibilities and the like. Maybe, to some, that would be as equal a cop out but, for me, it would have been more in keeping with the series in this era, than ‘virtual reality’.

The main focus of the book (if it can be said to have one) is of an adventure the crew have had with Alexander the Great. Campaign was written before Big Finish breathed life into the lost story, Farewell, Great Macedon (which is an excellent audio) but there are a few vague echoes of that story. The take on a historical adventure in Campaign, though, is very similar to that from the Short Trips collection, A Universe of Terrors that I read recently. The characters are ‘put through the mill’ (a Mortimore standard) and there is no happy outcome. Even the dramatisation of the Great Fire of London in the latter part of the book (involving the aforementioned Mortimer family) is unforgiving including not only death and destruction but domestic abuse.

And this is probably another issue I had with the book. There is some quite unsavoury stuff: Ian/Cliff commits murder because he is infatuated with Olympia, Alexander’s queen; Barbara/Lola rams a knife into Ian/Cliff’s heart; Susan gives birth to Alexander’s son; Ida and Alan (the Mortimer children) grow up alone inside the TARDIS and form a sexual relationship; Ian/Cliff slits his own throat.

Campaign is written poetically. There are whole sections which play with words and formatting on the page. There are some engaging passages but, in equal measure, are sections which are frustrating in their deliberate obscureness. I lost count of the sections where I had no idea, for quite a while (and occasionally, at all), as to whose thought processes I was privy too. Part of this, of course, is the point as we encounter different aspects of the same characters; Ian and Cliff; Barbara and Lola; Susan, Sue, Bridget,….

I’m not sure I want to read a full-length Doctor Who narrative poem which, in a way, is what Campaign felt like to me. It did lots I liked. I admire the weaving in of the show’s rich, difficult birth and those formative years of spin-off material which worked from a springboard of a series which hadn’t as rigidly defined itself as it would begin to do as the years progressed. It’s fan service and relatively well done (aside from the ending). But the willful obscureness of various sections seemed self indulgent. It was difficult to shake the feeling that this was written with a bit of an agenda.

As I understand it, Campaign was pitched to BBC Books as one thing and when Mortimore delivered something rather different (I’m assuming something similar to this eventual version) they baulked at the idea and sent him packing. If this novel is what he gave them, I have to side with BBC Books. This would not have fitted into the range of Past Doctor Adventures, rightly or wrongly, and is very different to most Doctor Who fiction – even the more ‘experimental’ works. It’s even far beyond the experimental pieces of Big Finish such as The Natural History of Fear or Scherzo.

Maybe I’m being too harsh, but there was a juvenile attitude behind the accomplished prose. It is written well, but the motivation seems to be to stick two fingers up at the stuffed shirts who turned it down. Too many times it smacks of arrogance and self-indulgence and it’s a shame because, as I say, there were so many concepts I thought were brilliant.

I know I was told I was ‘in for a treat’ by the locals round here who have already sampled this book’s delights, but I’ve come away frustrated and not a little disappointed. Part of me also feels a little ‘dim’. Did I miss something? Have my literary skills and scholarly judgement been stunted by years of mainly reading Doctor Who and children’s books? Are people going to come wading into this thread (Mr Mortimore, included) and tell me off for being so dismissive and just ‘not getting it’? I don’t know, but I can’t help the way I feel. It’s the same way I sometimes feel after reading a particularly obscure short story or when I listened to stories such as …ish or The Natural History of Fear from Big Finish; or when I’ve looked at certain examples of ‘Modern Art’. I can’t shake that feeling that the artiste is saying ‘look at me; look how clever I’m being’. That could be my hang-ups and nothing of the sort was intended but we respond to art at our own level and on our own terms. I’ll admit that, for the latter third, I’m not sure I even understood what was going on which probably didn’t help my disposition to the fairly blunt ending.

I didn’t hate Campaign. I didn’t love Campaign. I did enjoy parts. I was frustrated by others. I’m glad I read it (I’m always glad to experience a Doctor Who story in whatever form it takes) but I won’t be recommending it without a health warning. Approach with caution and with all your faculties at 100%.