#33
Prime Time
By Mike Tucker
I’ve read this one before, years ago along with all the other Mike Tucker/Robert Perry books. I liked how they all followed on from each other; it felt like finally getting Season 27. (Someone should tell this guy about the New Adventures…)
I wasn’t very impressed with Prime Time back then. I felt that it was a trad exercise and little more. And look, it certainly is that first thing: the central conceit is that the Doctor and Ace end up on a cruel television show broadcast to a fairly apathetic audience. Vengeance On Varos says hi! Revisiting it now though, I found enough odd little touches to mark this one out as, at the very least, Mike Tucker’s trad exercise.
For starters, the landscape of television has changed since Vengeance On Varos. Although there is a TV show in this dedicated to violence, there’s an altogether more psychological nastiness on display too — a sort of dark half of Jerry Springer that breaks people down with awful revelations. The kind of all-pervasive telly culture in Prime Time is also more insidious than Philip Martin’s all-out Orwellian nightmare: people on Blinni-Gaar aren’t forced by violence to watch TV all the time, they were just tempted into it, and now they’re trapped. There are TVs everywhere. Tucker can’t possibly have known this, but the sense of this planet’s citizens being unable to go two minutes without goggling at the box is eerily recognisable now as mobile phone addiction, especially when we see them at dinner. I wish it was a wild stretch of the imagination.
There’s also a meta quality to Prime Time that heightens its ideas. As well as breaking the book into TV “Parts” (pretty standard stuff there) Tucker throws in a trailer, a pre-titles sequence, a tag scene and even commercials. Even better, the story engages with the Doctor and Ace as famous people in-universe: they are desirable targets for a TV show because their exploits have been noticed. Yes, this is a cheeky excuse for Tucker to make reference to stories such as Storm Warning (and in a thrilling bit of intertextuality, The Genocide Machine — Big Finish is canon!), but why not? It makes sense that events in Doctor Who are commented upon afterwards, and it makes a virtue of Tucker’s (and Perry’s) potted history. It’s continuity, sure, but used in a way that you don’t see often.
This is also a neat excuse for the Seventh Doctor to get out-played for a change. His success has led to fame, and that contributes to his being on the back foot for a lot of this: the villains have plenty of evidence and footage to work with, therefore they can predict his behaviour. Hoist by his own petard, for once. Of course it helps that there are two insidious forces at work here, both particularly on the ball — that spells bad luck for the Doctor, however clever he is. Before you start wondering though if Tucker has mischaracterised the fella in the question mark pullover (as if), he pulls a few brilliant switcheroos near the end, having thoroughly re-affixed his manipulator’s hat. The fake-out involving the TARDIS made me hoot.
There’s continuity to spare elsewhere — of course there is, it’s Tucker. (No offence.) For instance, the Master’s in this. At first that feels a bit like token key-jangling for the fans, as the character seems unusually minimised, being manipulated by the same evil TV show as the Doctor. But Tucker manages to use this as a fake-out to then reintroduce the real, meaner Master later on, allowing the reader to get the initial “oh here we go” eyeroll over with first. (The real one has also been manipulated, but it’s a bit easier to see why.) There are some good scenes with the Doctor and the Master(s), the former earnestly wondering if he can trust the latter again, and considering whether a new body and an end to the cheetah virus might finally balance him out. You can probably guess how likely that is in reality, but to be fair, so can the Doctor. For a minute there they somewhat believably work together.
Ace gets a lot of the book’s hard knocks. While the Doctor is trapped in the Master’s disfigured TARDIS (that setting is an amusing bit of convergent evolution after Campaign and Heart Of TARDIS) and on the run from predators, Ace gets stuck with the Jerry Springer equivalent: paraded in front of gleeful unquestioning viewers, she is shown images of her distressed elderly mother, stirring up a familiar source of mental anguish. Then she’s shown her own gravestone. All of this serves to make her into a frayed nerve by the book’s end, almost executing several of the people responsible. And there I was thinking Tucker could have gone further with the TV satire. (He probably still could, to be fair: with the exception of Gatti, Ace’s friend who doesn’t even watch TV, we don’t spend time with any viewers on or outside of Blinni-Gaar.)
There’s somewhat of a theme here about people’s true natures. The Doctor’s heroism leads to a lot of trouble for him and Ace; Ace’s mistrust of her mother is inevitably questioned, and her violent tendencies are severely tested; the Master is still battling his animalistic tendencies (although does he really mind those?) and he must briefly ally himself with the Doctor, bringing out the old question of whether there’s still a friendship underneath; the Zzinbriizi are a race of jackals that have been granted intelligence by the Fleshsmiths, and they’re constantly struggling to maintain it; diminished TV guy Greg Ashby is converted into a monster, again by the Fleshsmiths (we’ll get to them), and now he’s battling to stay remotely human; prominent TV personality and old flame of Greg’s, Rennie Trasker, now does morally bankrupt work for Channel 400, which she eventually comes to question.
I say “somewhat of a theme” because apart from that the book is essentially all incident. There’s not much to unpack and I didn’t make a lot of notes: Tucker is here to move the plot along and if possible, ick the reader out a bit. Being a monsters guy, his imagination gets right to work there, providing us with the slavering Zzinbriizi and the revolting Fleshsmiths. (The latter charmingly depicted on the cover.) Here we have a sort of organic equivalent of the Cybermen, crossed with Star Trek’s Vidiians: ruined by their planet’s atmosphere, they capture other life-forms and use those materials to stay alive. This gives them an impressive aptitude for manipulating living things, as well as an upsetting larder of captured beings and animals. This fact disgusts the Doctor so much that he has no qualms about killing them all at the end. No need for “do I have the right” this week.
The Fleshsmiths and the satirical Channel 400 both make for compelling antagonists, but it would be fair to say that the combination is a bit random. Still, it’s amusing that both are secretly planning to screw over the other — which also applies to the Master, another villain in the mix. Perhaps the unexpected combination is part of why the Doctor is so discombobulated at first. And perhaps that’s being generous — but hey ho, it works.
Once you’re past all the rock-em-sock-em action Tucker turns out to have an ace up his sleeve. (Sorry.) I dimly remembered from reading this years ago that Ace dies in the book. That’s not quite accurate. (Although thinking so made the climax a lot more exciting!) The Doctor is made aware of impending doom for his young protege, and he is determined to investigate and prevent it — even to the bizarre extent of secretly digging up and lugging around her coffin. This is quite bold in terms of that potted continuity unique to Tucker and Perry. It’s a plot gauntlet-throw that demands to be resolved — and it would be, almost two years later in the duo’s next book, Loving The Alien. It’s a nice little button on the Seventh Doctor’s duty of care for Ace, which he knows he has let lapse during these events. (See, that awful TV show dressing her down.) It’s also a nudge away from the somewhat “safe” continuity of Past Doctors, which ironically is just the sort of thing you could point to as a consequence of Interference, a state of affairs that BBC Books had by now done away with.
It’s hard to rate this as Mike Tucker’s first solo novel because, now that you mention it, I don’t know what was Perry and what was Tucker before. It’s tempting to point to the weirder bits of Matrix as being Perry, since there’s little of that here. Regardless, Prime Time is a solid fleshing out (ahem) of its central idea. The writing is often good, with some neat descriptions like “The planet Scrantek hung in the wastes of the Brago Nebula, black and ugly, like an inkblot on a masterpiece.” Tucker’s familiarity with the era is beyond question, and he’s good at layering that in, such as this jolly moment during the Doctor’s TV interview: “[He] suddenly reached into his pocket. ‘Of course it’s not all just about saving the universe. I am quite musical.’ Ace buried her head in her hands. ‘Oh, no.’” There are occasional limits to his descriptive powers — too many references to fingers “dancing” over controls, a popular crutch for TARDIS scenes — and there’s a lot of that short scene writing I hate. However, in a world completely obsessed with TV, that’s almost appropriate. All told this is solid, suitably icky stuff, with a decent bit of promise for next time.
7/10
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