Marco Polo was novelised by its writer, John Lucarotti, and first published in April 1985.
We have fairly good likenesses of cast members Mark Eden (Polo), Derren Nesbitt (Tegana) and Zienia Merton (Ping-Cho) down the right hand side of the image, but the main figure in the centre appears to be John Wayne, from the 1956 Hollywood movie The Conqueror, in which he played Genghis Khan...
(This is the movie that was filmed 137 miles downwind of a US atomic bomb testing site. Many of the cast and crew later died of cancer - including Wayne himself).
The artist is David McAllister.
Merton read the novel for its audiobook release in December 2018, which reused McAllister's artwork. Sadly, this proved to be a posthumous release, as Merton had passed away in September of that year, at the age of 72.
At this point we would normally move on to the artwork for the VHS and DVD releases but, due to this story being absent from the archives and never animated (at least at time of writing), we need to turn to the soundtrack. Every lost story was thankfully recorded directly off air by a number of fans, in the days when video recorders were the stuff of science fiction. Often this would be achieved by the person simply placing the microphone of a tape recorder next to the TV speaker, then hoping that their family would keep quiet for 25 minutes. The more technically minded actually hard-wired their recorder into the TV set - a potentially very dangerous procedure.
The soundtrack release was on CD from the BBC Radio Collection, and utilised a photo-montage cover, which managed to include all the main guest artists. These soundtracks could sometimes utilise recordings from more than one source - the producers choosing the best audio available for each episode.
The cover design was by Max Ellis, and the soundtrack was narrated by William Russell. The 3 disc CD set included a copy of Marco's map.
A condensed (30 minute) version of the story did see a DVD release - as an extra on The Edge of Destruction DVD. This combined soundtrack and telesnaps, as well as photographs taken in studio during the production. This particular story is very well represented by photographs, many of which are in glorious colour.
Recently, thanks to the resurgence in interest in vinyl records, a lot of the soundtrack CDs are being re-released in this format. Marco Polo arrived as multiple discs from Demon Records, in September 2021. The colour scheme for the vinyl itself was described as " Desert Sandstorm" - referencing action from the second episode. As with the earlier CD set, the collection included a copy of Marco's map outlining their journey.
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