Art Gallery: Snakedance

Art Gallery 5

The very first two Target Doctor Who novelisations I purchased were Kinda and Snakedance, bought from a little shop (‘You’ve got a little shop. I like a little shop!’) in Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, when I was about twelve and my brother had been admitted as a patient, suffering from pneumonia. There were about seven or eight books to choose from, but I only had enough money for two. I vaguely remembered Kinda from its broadcast a couple of years earlier and the photo cover helped me place the story. Snakedance, though, had been broadcast on days when I was out at various clubs and tennis tournaments. I had missed it in its entirety and actually chose to buy the book because of its front cover. It was a complete fluke that it happened to be the sequel to Kinda.

I suppose it’s another example of a lurid cover pulling me in, just like Terror of the Autons. A giant snake, mouth unhinged and gaping, ready to swallow a planet that looks remarkably like Earth, and depicted against a lurid purple background that just feels wrong.

The cover, by Andrew Skilleter, captures the Mara’s desire to devour worlds through its evil and rationalises it as actual world-swallowing. It takes the premise and boils it down into a simple pulp image designed to hook in its target audience. That it grabs hold of script-writer Christopher Bailey’s subtle themes and mature explorations and bludgeons them to death with a giant rubber snake is neither here nor there. The cover does the job for which it is intended, and leaps out from the bookshelf, as it did for the twelve-year-old me back in that hospital shop.

At the time, novelisations of Peter Davison stories were being issued with predominantly photographic covers that didn’t really sell the concepts of the stories they were representing. Nor were the images particularly heroic shots of the Doctor, and in the case of Arc of Infinity actually gives away an important plot point. The proliferation of photographic covers was initially down to Peter Davison’s agent rejecting a piece of art from David McAllister because it was not a good likeness of Davison. In fairness, I can see why it was rejected. It’s not the greatest painting in the world and is clearly taken from a publicity still that could do the job far more effectively. Plus Peter Davison looks as if he has about five chins, as if he has turned into Colin Baker three years too early.

Thereafter, Target adopted the use of photographs for Fifth Doctor tales, feeling it gave the range a more modern look, until they realised they had to pay the actors on the covers for the use of their photograph, which was prohibitively more expensive than artwork.

So the remainder of the Davison stories were given covers featuring their principal monsters or villains, and in actual fact the Fifth Doctor, Tegan, Turlough, Peri and Adric did not feature on any cover in painted form. Kamelion adorned the cover of The King’s Demons, meaning that he was the only TARDIS traveller between 1982 and 1987 to adorn the cover of a Doctor Who novelisation (Nyssa managed to make the cover of The Keeper of Traken, but that was of course Tom Baker’s penultimate story). Before anyone points it out, I know that technically Peter Davison appeared on the cover of The Five Doctors, but this was only in a tiny silhouette image and therefore not a true likeness of his face.

Snakedance was the first of those Davison era stories to feature an art cover, despite the Fifth Doctor lurking in the Doctor Who logo, so it had immediate power as being different from those stories that preceded it. It was quite probably the best cover on a Target novelisation since Terror of the Autons, and heralded in a new era of higher quality artwork, spearheaded by Andrew Skilleter and Alister Pearson, that would see the range through the remainder of the eighties until its eventual demise. No wonder I bought it then.

Two days later, when my brother was ready to come out, my Dad gave me five pounds to go to the shop again as a reward for behaving myself during the long hours in the hospital. This time I bought Earthshock and Four to Doomsday. It was the pivotal moment I moved from being a watcher of Doctor Who to a fan.

(Image of The Visitation reproduced from The Target Book  by David J Howe (Telos Publishing) Find it on Amazon if you've never read it!).