Fun story. It felt like someone dared the author to write a Doctor Who book about the animated furniture from Beauty and the Beast. ( )

“I picked up the last Doctor Who Magazine and it said ‘Paul Magrs's Tenth Doctor novel is gonna be called The Wicked Bungalow’. And I sent an email saying, ‘No it isn't!’. And I love Paul Magrs, he's a great novelist – I know how clever and ironic Paul Magrs is. But if you're a Times journalist who wants to have a pop at BBC merchandise — which is an article that's dying to be written any day now, we're very lucky we haven't had one of those yet — and you went into Waterstones and you walked past a book called The Wicked Bungalow demanding £5.99 of your kid's money, that's genuinely damaging the brand.”

So said Russell T. Davies in an interview a couple of years ago. I found these three sentences intriguing, perhaps more intriguing than the novel itself, which is mediocre at best and, to be fair, mediocre at worst. But back to the quote, what was so wrong with The Wicked Bungalow? I know Russell T. Davies' successor Stephen Moffat is fond of slipping filthy innuendos into any gaping holes he finds in Doctor Who scripts, but maybe Davies was more prudish, and maybe “wicked bungalow” is a euphemistic term for a brothel or something similarly lewd. But no, the authority on these matters, Urban Dictionary, suggests otherwise. Indeed, as far as I can tell the only meaning of “a wicked bungalow” is a one-storey house that is evil. Or possibly a one-storey house with a wick. But probably the former.

This would have been a fairly apt title, since the story concerns the Doctor attempting to warn the only family on an entire planet about an incoming Voracious Craw—a continent sized beastie that eats everything on the surface of a planet then flies off to find another world to snack on. The Voracious Craw isn't really the story's foe, though, rather it provides a time limit, it's a ticking bomb. The real antagonist is the family's (one-storey) house, their dream home, which has been given artificial intelligence by the father and now doesn't want to let them go. Really then, a wicked bungalow.

“Sick building”, on the other hand, sounds like an old fashioned term for a hospital, or maybe how a 90s teenager would describe some particularly impressive architecture (“Dude, have you seen the Nationale-Nederlanden building in Prague? That is totally one sick building.”) Anyway, I'm dithering over the issue of the title because I don't have a whole lot to say about the content of the book. Its cover is lovely and lured me into the purchase, although it's also wrong in every detail. The Doctor and Martha act very much like they do on screen, which is always good since it's hard not to imagine David Tennant and Freema Agyeman playing them in my head, and if they started acting differently than I'm used to then it'd be all the more incongruous. Perhaps if I was younger I would have enjoyed the novel more, but I suspect even young readers would notice that the book is somewhat lacking in characterisation and plot. ( )

“I picked up the last Doctor Who Magazine and it said ‘Paul Magrs's Tenth Doctor novel is gonna be called The Wicked Bungalow’. And I sent an email saying, ‘No it isn't!’. And I love Paul Magrs, he's a great novelist – I know how clever and ironic Paul Magrs is. But if you're a Times journalist who wants to have a pop at BBC merchandise — which is an article that's dying to be written any day now, we're very lucky we haven't had one of those yet — and you went into Waterstones and you walked past a book called The Wicked Bungalow demanding £5.99 of your kid's money, that's genuinely damaging the brand.”

So said Russell T. Davies in an interview a couple of years ago. I found these three sentences intriguing, perhaps more intriguing than the novel itself, which is mediocre at best and, to be fair, mediocre at worst. But back to the quote, what was so wrong with The Wicked Bungalow? I know Russell T. Davies' successor Stephen Moffat is fond of slipping filthy innuendos into any gaping holes he finds in Doctor Who scripts, but maybe Davies was more prudish, and maybe “wicked bungalow” is a euphemistic term for a brothel or something similarly lewd. But no, the authority on these matters, Urban Dictionary, suggests otherwise. Indeed, as far as I can tell the only meaning of “a wicked bungalow” is a one-storey house that is evil. Or possibly a one-storey house with a wick. But probably the former.

This would have been a fairly apt title, since the story concerns the Doctor attempting to warn the only family on an entire planet about an incoming Voracious Craw—a continent sized beastie that eats everything on the surface of a planet then flies off to find another world to snack on. The Voracious Craw isn't really the story's foe, though, rather it provides a time limit, it's a ticking bomb. The real antagonist is the family's (one-storey) house, their dream home, which has been given artificial intelligence by the father and now doesn't want to let them go. Really then, a wicked bungalow.

“Sick building”, on the other hand, sounds like an old fashioned term for a hospital, or maybe how a 90s teenager would describe some particularly impressive architecture (“Dude, have you seen the Nationale-Nederlanden building in Prague? That is totally one sick building.”) Anyway, I'm dithering over the issue of the title because I don't have a whole lot to say about the content of the book. Its cover is lovely and lured me into the purchase, although it's also wrong in every detail. The Doctor and Martha act very much like they do on screen, which is always good since it's hard not to imagine David Tennant and Freema Agyeman playing them in my head, and if they started acting differently than I'm used to then it'd be all the more incongruous. Perhaps if I was younger I would have enjoyed the novel more, but I suspect even young readers would notice that the book is somewhat lacking in characterisation and plot. ( )

The Doctor and Martha go to Tiermann's World to warn the family living there of the oncoming attack of the planet-devouring Voracious Craw. Doctor Who stories are supposed to be exciting and a little bit silly and this one has both, but the silliness takes over a little too much in this one. The pair are assisted by a living vending machine and a tanning bed and the monster (or one of them) is thwarted by the team burping through a PA system so that the monster gets scared and runs away. The character of the Doctor is a little inconsistent as well, although Martha is en pointe, and the audiobook reader, Will Thorp, is good, but not outstanding. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1427777.html

This is a Tenth Doctor and Martha novel, set on a wilderness world where a crazed scientist and his family are holding out against a monstrous creature which is devouring the planet's entire surface, helped by a domestic computer (which is also derganged). I thought it was a pretty poor effort. I hate cute robots, and this book has too many of them; Magrs is self-conscious in his writing down to the presumed young reader's level, and the prose style is pretty awful; his characterisation of the Doctor is annoying and inconsistent; and the monster is called, I kid you not, the Voracious Craw. One to skip. (I think I got it for 50p on eBay.) ( )