Written by Terrance Dicks, based on Bob Baker & Dave Martin’s scripts for the 1978 TV serial.

Underworld is one of the great unloved Doctor Who stories. While it was a miracle it was made at all, thanks to late-1970s budget pressures, the production team persevered, and then probably wished they hadn’t bothered. Sadly, their Herculean effort resulted in a serial that has repeatedly come bottom of the DWM poll of Fourth Doctor episodes.

However, remember that Terrance Dicks was a past master at editing scripts by Bob Baker and Dave Martin. And remember that some of the biggest issues with Underworld were its under-running episodes, which meant many repeated sequences, and more bluescreen work than a Marvel movie – both of which were easy fixes for the book.

Dicks rightly perceives that the most interesting and successful episode of Underworld was Part One. Accordingly, much more of the novel is devoted to it than the subsequent three parts. This allows Dicks to flesh out the backstory of the R1C and its crew’s hundred-thousand-year mission to rediscover Minyos’s missing Noah’s Ark, the P7E. It also allows him to include a prologue which is scintillating. It’s the story, only alluded to in the TV script, of Gallifrey’s first tentative steps into Time Lordship; the earliest Time Lords’ interference in the Minyan civilisation, and the dreadful consequences of their arrogance.

Having led the Minyans down a garden path to planetary destruction, the Time Lords retreat to their mighty glass capitol and swear never to interfere again, leaving the desperate survivors of their meddling to seek a new home. Except, there’s one Time Lord who never plays by the rules. Dicks introduces the Doctor, Leela and K9 in style, having the Doctor redecorating the TARDIS (explaining why he’s dressed as a painter in the TV version – an example of one of many small fixes and clarifications Dicks makes as he goes along). While the Doctor waxes lyrical about the edge of creation, “the boundary between is and isn’t’, Leela is more watchful of the TARDIS, which she treats “like a minor god”. In a few pithy sentences, Dicks tells us everything we need to know.

It’s one of many joyous turns of phrase that make this a much more digestible, even enjoyable way to tackle Underworld. Note Dicks’ description of the horror of endless regeneration: “Once again, Tala had been sentenced to life.” Spot how he can’t help but fix the TV script’s dodgy grasp of science: a sequence involving anti-gravity is explained as a result of this being a “newborn planet on the very edge of creation”. He only falters when he has to deal with the Minyans’ forlorn descendants the Trogs as the scriptwriters have left him nothing to build on. Grade 4.

Next Time: Doctor Who And… The Invasion of Time.