Matt Barber, The Daemons, The Black Archive, 26. Edinburgh: Obverse Books, 2018.
Reviewed by Stephen Basdeo
Doctor Who scarcely needs any introduction. He is the person with two hearts who flies around space and time in a battered old police box that is bigger on the inside than on the outside, and the subject of one of the most popular sci-fi television series in the UK and USA with a cult following. Obverse Books have in the last couple of years commissioned brief book length examinations of each Doctor Who story, and it was a pleasure to read a companion to one of my favourite serials, titled The Daemons (which aired in May–June 1971), written by Matt Barber.
Perhaps, however, ‘companion’ is the wrong word. Yes, at the beginning of the book there are the usual production notes. We know who the director and producers of the serial were, who were the minor uncredited actors, but the really special thing about this book is that the main part of it is actually an analysis of the story itself. To my knowledge, Obverse’s series of books represent the first attempt to analyse the narratives of this popular five part Doctor Who story which, so Barber points out, garnered an average of nearly 9 million viewers per episode and remains among the top 20 ‘greatest ever’ Doctor Who stories according to fans.
Most Doctor Who stories from the 1960s and 1970s, when all is said, were produced on the cheap and suffered routinely from bad acting. READ FULL REVIEW HERE