Bloody repeats...

In tandem with Robert Perry, Mike Tucker has thus far been responsible for three entertaining, forgettable novels. Seriously; how much can you recall about them? Prime Time, Tucker's first solo offering and a three part story which effectively concludes the first Tucker/Perry seventh Doctor "season", inverts this pattern. Not only is it rather less effective than the work Tucker produced in collaboration, it will undoubtedly be remembered - unfortunately, though, as "the one which is a bit like Vengeance on Varos".

Perhaps this is unfair. After all - although Prime Time shares with that sixth Doctor adventure a core concept of a society unhealthily obsessed with television and a tendency to locate the reader as part of a largely unseen audience within the story - the plot and characters of the novel bear little resemblance to those of that particular set of episodes. However, they are so comparatively uninteresting that it is those more familiar aspects which linger in the mind.

Prime Time also continues the recent trend in the BBC range of being in some sense about the experience of watching Doctor Who - there is an abundance of sly digs about the production standards of the TV show, both during and after the seventh Doctor's era, which are not bad, merely uninspired - although admittedly the asides about this particular Doctor's lack of star quality compared to his adversaries are appealingly audacious. But Prime Time had the chance to comment on, say, the predictable nature of Doctor Who's structure, or the state of broadcasting in the UK today, and the opportunity is wasted. To call the novel satirical might be to confer on it subtlety it does not possess; for instance, the notion of an entire galaxy watching Doctor Who is an unconvincing - if amusing - obvious piece of wish-fulfilment fantasy...

A mild disappointment, then, after Tucker's engaging earlier work, Prime Time remains perfectly acceptable entertainment, striving for significance but stifled by a dearth of originality and style, as if perhaps the audience is being taken slightly for granted. A bit like Vengeance on Varos, in fact.