I had heard good things about this book.  I had also heard intriguing things about this book.  Not least, the fact that it is, deliberately, impossible to place accurately within the ‘canon’ of Pertwee stories.  It also features the first ‘chronological’ appearance of Iris Wildthyme as far as the Doctor is concerned.

Verdigris is everything that Dreams of Empire wasn’t.  It’s vibrant, funny, ingenious, original, pacey, well-plotted and above all, fun.  That’s always what I look for in Who.  All those fans getting their knickers in a twist because this isn’t right or that isn’t what it should be, whether it’s the TV, the audios or the books, get right on my wick – Doctor Who is, after all, a TV programme and I watch it as entertainment.  If I’m entertained, frankly, that is all I care about.And Verdigris is very entertaining.  The plot is enormous fun – an alien intelligence brought into being by Iris seeks to find a way to allow the Doctor to escape Earth and in doing so impersonates the Master, invents the Tomorrow People and turns Mike Yates into cardboard.

Along the way, characters from 19th century novels turn into green dust, robot sheep attack a small village and we get an insight into what it is like to be a companion of a time traveller.

Iris Wildthyme is a true love/hate character as far as fandom is concerned.  For some reason, fans find her brazen personality rubs them up the wrong way – much like she does the Doctor.  However, I quite enjoyed her first appearance in The Scarlet Empress but have fallen in love with her since Katy Manning brought her to life in Excelis Dawns and the subsequent Iris spin-off series.  As a consequence, it was impossible to imagine anyone other than Katy Manning performing the role in Verdigris, even though it was written many years before she took on the role.  And Iris is enormous fun in this book, barrelling around with her companion Tom and generally getting up the Doctor’s nose.

Tom is interesting too as he experiences a world only 30 odd years from his own time that is almost as alien as those weird and wonderful planets Iris usually takes him too.  His interactions with the Tomorrow People…sorry – Children of Destiny are very cheeky (there isn’t even a thinly veiled attempt to disguise their inspiration – one of them is so obviously Elizabeth from the Tomorrow People (and she turns out to be Tom’s mum!).  The various little digs at the production values of the Tomorrow People are hilarious and whilst Destiny’s Children are fairly unimportant in the grand scheme of things, they are a fun addition to the book.Jo doesn’t get a huge amount to do (although she does get a nightmarish sequence at UNIT HQ and carries a folded-up Mike Yates in her handbag) but the reader is having so much fun it doesn’t really matter.

The Doctor is a perfect Jon Pertwee and his relationship with Iris is hilarious.UNIT are very much in the background, although the image of the Brigadier as the manager of a supermarket is hilarious (particularly as I’d been watching Hot Fuzz around the same time as reading this scene and couldn’t help but envisage the supermarket as Timothy Dalton’s homicidal branch of Somerfield).

Utter, utter delight from beginning to end, I can’t recommend Verdigris highly enough.