The Art of... The Myth Makers

Donald Cotton elected to novelise his own Doctor Who stories, and took the opportunity to adapt them as he saw fit, injecting a lot more humour than we saw on screen and having the story narrated. For the book of Dennis Spooner's The Romans this had seen him employ many voices, as different characters relate events through letters and journals. Here there's just the one narrator, and that is Homer. Despite supposedly living 150 years after the Trojan War he's actually present at these events, describing them as he sees them - until he loses one eye and then the other, that is.

The book was published in September 1985, with a cover by Andrew Skilleter. He elects to concentrate on the image of the famed Wooden Horse, with a (de)materialising TARDIS in the foreground. All the covers across the media use the Horse, since it's such visual shorthand for the Trojan War.

The soundtrack was released on CD, with the usual photomontage cover, in January 2001, with narration by Peter Purves. It was rereleased in a box set of three historical stories ("Adventures in History") in 2003, and again as part of the Radio Collections (Volume One - 1964 - 1965) in 2010.

The soundtrack was reissued on vinyl, with a striking crepuscular cover depicting the horse in front of the city, in August 2021, courtesy of Demon Records.

Cotton's novelisation was released as an audiobook in March 2009. Unusually for the time, the reader is not one of the cast but Stephen Thorne, who featured in a number of Doctor Who stories throughout the 1970's. As a regular radio drama artist, and who was often selected for Who roles because of his vocal talents (being hidden under masks as Azal, Ogrons, Omega and Eldrad) it was only natural that he be selected for narration duties somewhere in the range. Unfortunately, the use of Skilleter's original book cover is rather spoiled by the design layout. It's a golden rule in art when depicting a person or animal that the head does not get obscured, as that is where the viewer's eye goes to first. The Wooden Horse has the logo slapped over it. It's all a bit messy.

Finally, as another missing story with no DVD sleeve to depict, the movie database (moviedb) produced a colourful photomontage to illustrate it, based on the UK DVD range cover designs.