Target: Planet of the Spiders

Possibly my favourite Terrance Dicks Target. He's put a lot of care and attention into this.

There's a prologue showing us Josephine Jones and her husband (not named, but still Welsh) in the jungle, deciding to send the crystal back to UNIT. Then we cut to 'another ex-member of UNIT' hiding in the monastery cellar, watching Lupton and his friends carrying out the ritual.' They're wearing robes, which I'm sure they aren't on screen. And Mike's walk through the rural idyll isn't there.

At the 'music hall' (a mis-step here - either Terrance thought the halls were still big in 1973, or they made a comeback in the futuristic UNIT eighties) the Brigadier's joke about adapting the exotic dancer's exercises is completely deadpan - the Doctor thinks he's serious until he sees his moustache twitching.

It's the Brig who spots the word-code between Clegg and his assistant - one of the bits that Terrance often puts in that make him look sharper and more competent.

When Mike Yates spots the tractor, he prevents a crash by driving the car through a gap in the hedge, into a field and back onto the road.

Benton knows that the Brigadier is in the room when he makes his joke about hairdressing. When the Doctor reads Jo's letter, he reflects that 'neither Jo's handwriting or her grammar had improved since she left UNIT'.

Tommy is a 'hulking' young man. And he's generally a bit less unpredictable and strange on the page.

I always had the impression that Lupton was a younger man in the book, but that just shows I didn't read the description of him as a middle-aged man with haggard, bitter features (a bit like me now in fact).

'The Dharma that can be spoken is no true Dharma!' chuckles Cho-Je when Sarah tells him she doesn't understand a word he's saying.

Sarah's speech about Liverpool docks is omitted. I think Terrance expects us to be used to her as a companion if we're bothering to read the books.

Yates doesn't give Tommy a necklace.

The UNIT Medical Officer is a Dr Sweetman. The autogyro is in the car park, not at an airstrip. It's Lupton who notices that the fuel is running out, not the Spider.

The policeman's delivery is much better on the page. "'Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, eh?' he asked, in tones which suggested he suspected it of being an alias."

Teleportation is 'child's play to a true Master', not a 'master sorceror' (thus reclaiming Buddhist magic for the good guys). There's a wonderful exchange of texts in this conversation: 'Time is the element we are born into - we swim in it like a fish in a bowl of water,' says the Doctor. Cho-Je counters that the fish would be happier if the bowl were tipped into the ocean. 'Or better still, the ocean into the bowl!' the Doctor replies, which I used to think was the cleverest thing I'd ever read.

Lupton turns the tables on his Spider while she's still attacking him. There's none of the DS 'say please' stuff.

Tommy's intelligence-expanding experiences are compressed, and put together after the initial Metebelis Three action, not intercut with it. (This is the sort of pacing improvement Terrance doesn't bother to do in his lesser books). It wasn't Tommy's mother who gave him the reading book. It poignantly dates from the time 'before people had given up trying to teach him anything'.

Sarah arrives on Metebelis with her eyes closed, TD presumably despairing of being able to reproduce the wonderful dissolve between cellar and alien landscape on paper. 'Corda' (sp?), the village that the Spiders' guards destroyed, is not named. The stones in the fields, checked by the Doctor, are mainly gemstones, not just bits of rock.

Neska doesn't have a word of dialogue. Make of that what you will. Arak's dash for the machine is made much more tense, and he distracts a group of guards by throwing a fortuitously loose cobblestone in the opposite direction.

Lupton is initially well treated on arrival on Metebelis, and given fiery blue wine to drink. We're told in the council scene that the main feature of a spider coronation is the eating of the previous Queen by her successor.

The Doctor doesn't tell Mike about the hardwired co-ordinates for Metebelis, he just thinks about the arrangement.

The spider cocoons are vertically arranged, not horizontally. There's no banter about being eaten, spiders getting 'something to chew over' etc. The 'Houdini' name sequence is a shorter, three-card trick, which I think works better.

When Sarah 'agrees' to the Queen's plan, her aim is to buy time - she's worried that the Queen will find out that the Doctor is behind the rebellion.

The Doctor is not humiliated by the Great One, nor are we told that he's particularly afraid at that point, though it's referred back to later.

When Sarah transports the Doctor back to the TARDIS, he feels 'the characteristic snatching sensation of teleportation'.

The bit where the plotters cosh Mike is seen entirely from the latter's point of view.

The rebellion doesn't fail - Arak and Tuar just ventured too far into the mountain, and the concentration of crystals there allowed the Council to take them over.

Lupton tries to stamp on the new Spider Queen, not crush her with his hand. After being killed, he's then eaten by the spiders in one last feast.

The Brigadier tells Sarah that the Doctor once disappeared for years, not months. He reflects on the visit he paid to the monastery when it was all over: 'four chaps with complete nervous breakdowns ... had to be carted off in ambulances.' Tommy was set for university, Lupton was missing, and 'there was also some story about the Abbot disappearing, but since no-one seemed very sure if he'd ever been there in the first place, the Brigadier proposed to let that one strictly alone', which always made me laugh.

Finally, after the 'While there's life' line, the Brigadier goes to phone the Medical Officer (not named), but Sarah says that the Doctor is dead. Fortunately Cho-Je turns up to give the process a little push just as on screen.