The Art of... The Edge of Destruction

 

The Edge of Destruction was a very late addition to the Target book range. It was written by the range's then editor, Nigel Robinson. He, Ian Marter and Terrance Dicks were at this time mopping up the remaining stories which their original authors were unwilling or unable to novelise.

To flesh the story out for the usual Target page count, there is a lot of character description plus two new sequences - Ian and the Doctor descending to the TARDIS power room, and Barbara visiting the laboratory, where books fly off the shelves by themselves.

It's a Hartnell story, set entirely in the TARDIS - so artist Alister Pearson gives us a cover featuring the TARDIS and Hartnell. 

The picture of the Doctor comes from a well known publicity shot, but unusually he gives us the TARDIS interior rather than the Police Box shell. This is the only cover to feature the TARDIS interior, until they started using photographs for many of the Peter Davison stories.

The audiobook, read by William Russell, went with the same Pearson artwork as the novelisation.

The story was released on VHS in May 2000 with a rather bland photo-montage cover - the Doctor, Susan and clouds. It was coupled with the unscreened Pilot Episode of An Unearthly Child. 

Above are the US and Australian variants, using the same main image of the Doctor and Susan. The former was coupled in a box set with the "Missing Years" documentary which looked at the episodes missing from the archives and the efforts being made to locate them. In the UK we got this with The Ice Warriors VHS.

The Edge of Destruction was released on DVD in the UK in January 2006, as part of a box set called The Beginning, where it was grouped with An Unearthly Child and The Daleks.

As DVD Extras it included Origins - a major documentary about the creation of Doctor Who - and a drastically cut down version of Marco Polo, comprising 30 minutes of audio material coupled with telesnap images.

Clayton Hickman utilised publicity photographs taken during the making of this story for his montage cover - though the images have been edited to make it look like Ian is holding Barbara, whereas the original images were taken of them separately. Ian is holding an astrolabe in the original image, and he never wore a cravat on screen.

The US DVD elected to combine this story with The Daleks as part of a two disc The Beginning set, rather than the UK three disc version. There is no imagery from the story itself on the cover, front or back.