Written by Terrance Dicks, based on Chris Boucher’s scripts for the 1977 TV serial.

On TV, The Robots of Death is one of the showcase serials, understandably selected as the first regular DVD release. Its brilliant production tends to gloss over one of the script’s basic flaws: it’s meant to be And Then There Were None in space, except it’s obvious from the outset that the robots dunit. Yes, it later turns out the real question is “who is Taren Capel?” but it might have been more interesting to get there through more deduction than the script offers up.

So, Dicks’ adaptation is a bit stymied. You sense he’d love to do this like a proper Agatha Christie, with suspects galore as the body count mounts. But his sense of duty to reflect what was shown onscreen precludes that. And while he does his best to cast suspicion on Borg, or Uvanov (found with his hands around Zilda’s throat) – when we already know the robots are the killers it’s impossible to preserve the mystery. Boucher was torn between doing an Asimov and an Agatha, and his story falls entertainingly between the two.

But then, if he’d plumped for one or the other, The Robots of Death would have been a different proposition, and I like what we saw well enough. I suspect so did Dicks: this is very well written. He makes the most of the social backstory of the Sandminer crew ansd the massive chip on Uvanov’s shoulder: “There had been twenty families in the Earth expedition that had colonised this desert planet many hundreds of years ago. Since then, other colonists had followed in their thousands, but the descendants of those original Founding Families still enjoyed a kind of aristocratic status profoundly irritating to a self-made man like Uvanov. His family had been one of the last to arrive.” And he makes more of the threatening letters from Capel, the blot on Uvanov’s record, and Uvanov’s crush on Zilda. He also includes some lovely turns of phrase: “a fortune was rushing towards them at a thousand kilometres an hour” for example.

In the end, it’s a very solid novelisation of the story. But I think Dicks could have made more of it had he been less intent on following Boucher’s hedged bets. Grade 2.

Next Time: Junior Doctor Who And… The Giant Robot.