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Doctor Who: Time’s Champion was an ambitious tribute to a particular era

By James Aggas

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Following the release of The Final Game, we look back at another ambitious piece of Doctor Who fan fiction: Time’s Champion, an alternative take on the Sixth Doctor’s final adventure.

Earlier this week, a fan-made adaptation of The Final Game began. This was originally meant to be Jon Pertwee’s last story as the Doctor, and was to feature a final battle against the Master, as originally played by Roger Delgado. However, Delgado’s sudden death meant that the originally planned story was replaced by Planet of the Spiders. Unsurprisingly, the story has never been adapted in any medium.

So when I heard that a fan-made audio production was being made, I was intrigued. Especially when I found out who the story’s writer was: Chris McKeon.

This wasn’t the first major piece of fan-fiction that McKeon had written for, after all. In 2008, he wrote Time’s Champion – an alternative take on the Sixth Doctor’s final adventure.

While he had a difficult run on television, the Sixth Doctor has always been well handled in the expanded universe, including the Virgin Missing Adventures novels.

(Photo credit: Doctor Who/BBC.

Image obtained from: official Doctor Who website.)

Ending a trilogy

Like The Final Game, this was a completely unlicensed piece of Doctor Who fan fiction, but it was also more than that. It was meant to mark the ending of a trilogy that had begun with Millennial Rites and The Quantum Archangel. Both of which were official books written by Craig Hinton and both were absolutely full of continuity references.

Time’s Champion was based on Hinton’s outline for the final novel – a regeneration story for Six in which he once again faced the Valeyard. After Hinton’s death, McKeon wrote virtually most of this final novel, despite the fact that a book had been officially published by the BBC – Spiral Scratch – which focused on the Sixth Doctor’s regeneration already.

When it was published for charity, it was limited to just a few hundred copies. I not only bought it immediately, but read it within two days. And honestly, it was a brilliant tribute to Hinton’s work as well as the Sixth Doctor. It was full of continuity references, but it also used them in a huge and epic final story for the Sixth Doctor – while still finding a way to acknowledge the events of Spiral Scratch!

Like Time’s Champion, The Sixth Doctor: The Last Adventure by Big Finish also featured the Valeyard in Six’s regeneration story.

(Image credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions.

Image obtained from: Big Finish Productions.)

Setting up the New Adventures

Perhaps even more impressive is how much the book had been deliberately designed to act as a prequel to the Virgin New Adventures novels. These books gave us a noticeably darker Doctor, one who saw the bigger picture and acted as “Time’s Champion”. The titular novel didn’t directly lead into those books – after all, three TV seasons with Sylvester McCoy took place between them – but there was clearly a lot of love for those Nineties novels.

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In fact, Alister Pearson – who has given us so many fantastic pieces of Doctor Who artwork across video and book covers – actually handled the artwork for the cover of Time’s Champion. Unsurprisingly, it captures the spirit and nostalgia of the Virgin books brilliantly, particularly The Missing Adventures novels, which focused on telling stories with previous Doctors.

An ambitious epic

I must admit, I wasn’t caught up on the mythology of those novels when I bought and read Time’s Champion. Over a decade later, and there’s still only a few novels I’ve read from that period. (Although I’m currently in the middle of Human Nature, which really is a fantastic read.) But that didn’t stop me from reading Time’s Champion or enjoying it greatly.

It was everything you could ask for from such a novel. It was a glorious continuity fest, but it also resolved the Sixth Doctor’s story with the Valeyard very nicely. Very different to what we later got from Big Finish’s The Sixth Doctor: The Last Adventure, which also featured a reunion between Six and the Valeyard, but just as satisfying, in its own way.

Sadly but unsurprisingly, it’s very hard to find a copy of Time’s Champion. But it was a very special novel, and worked beautifully well as a tribute to both a much loved era of Doctor Who as well as a great Doctor Who author. Chris McKeon had a really difficult job when he had to write that novel, but he handled it brilliantly. I suspect The Final Game will be equally brilliant when it’s completed.

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Were you a fan of either The Missing Adventures or The New Adventures novels from the Nineties? Do you think the Sixth Doctor was better handled in the expanded universe than on television? Did you ever get a chance to read Time’s Champion? Let us know in the comments below.

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