Sick Building.

Books Despite suffering one of the least inspiring titles in the franchise's history, Paul Magrs's Sick Building (I mean what next? The Flytippers? The Wheelie Bin? Dutch Elm Disease?) is the very definition of an enjoyable romp with just the right mixture of humour, action and inventiveness. The Doctor drags Martha to Tiermann's World to warn its sole inhabitants, a family of settlers that their idyllic lifestyle is about to be swept away by the Voracious Craw, a cosmic hell beast with the munchies that'll eat literally anything that exists. But instead of a Swiss Family Robinson, the time travellers discover a brood in thrall of a paternal-proto-Prospero blind to the impending doom that will inevitably befall their so-called Dreamhome as the Craw nibbles away at the wilderness (wouldn't Attack of the Voracious Craw been a much better title?).

A fairly traditional base under siege story with a ticking clock (a day and half until the worm turns and takes them along with everything else) with a small cast. The family are realistically drawn, the reclusive Professor Ernest Tiermann who has tyrannically dragged is family to this empty world in the back of beyond, his doting Stepford Wife Amanda and their pubescent son Solin who hasn't met anyone but his parents and whose only company has been Servo-furnishings, domestic appliances imbued with personalities in order to fulfil all of the family's wishes. It's been a feature of the new series that everyday objects could be imbued with some fantastical or frightening facets (see the statues in Blink) and this is a wonderful extension of that -- kids throughout the land will now be trying to get a decent conversation out of a vacuum cleaner.

These kid-friendly plastic pals really are fun to be with, especially those who are given speaking roles - the PIXAR-like knockabout double act of a vending machine called Barbara and a sun-bed called Toaster. As Tiermann prepares to leave he only has enough room on the escape ship himself and his family and doesn't consider his mechanical creations important or worthy enough to be saved, despite their years of loyalty. One of the discussions in the book, taking a cue from Isaac Asimov, is the extent to which machines can be given the same rights as their human masters. Predictably, the servants eventually turn on their master but it makes a change for the machines to have the moral high ground.

The Doctor here is mostly in full on shouty-shouty-blah-blah-blah mode even to the point of being shushed by Solin when his mouth starts running away with itself. Magrs captures most of Tennant's mannerisms perfectly allowing the darkness seep in at just the right moments especially in an effective incident in which the Professor hits several nails on a number of heads regarding the loss of family and home. If Martha isn’t quite as vivid it’s perhaps because she’s given far less to do, as with Gridlock providing reassurance to her captors that the Doctor will save the day. She does have a rather lovely scene with Solin though in which the boy’s attempt at male-female interpersonal relations is just a bit too uncomfortably familiar for those of us who didn’t understand girls at his age either.

This, then, is latter day Paul Magrs being called upon to produce a sleek, well paced, family-friendly, fairly generic Doctor Who fiction totally unlike the ingenious flights of fantasy and mythological investigations from the turn of the millennium which is just right considering that these are supposed to ape the television series in much the same way as the past Doctor novels of the past. Which isn’t too say it doesn’t have some suitably Magrsian moments -- perhaps only the writer of an audio story called The Horror of Glam Rock would go on to have the Doctor use one of Queen’s greatest hits to calm one of the planet’s predators and the final defence of the realm from the bite of the Craw is about as ludicrous as anything in The Scarlett Empress and will infuriate parents which is just the way it should be!

Sick Building, by Paul Magrs, is released by BBC Books on 6 September. ISBN 9781846072697.