March Books 11) The Doctor Who Annual 1981

A very short annual in this series - only 63 pages, of which only 41 are fiction (and the factual stuff is desperately earnest, including a sympathetic piece on UFOs and another on the Dogon tribe's knowledge of Sirius B).

But I can forgive its brevity and the dubious artwork (Romana is mostly brunette, except in the comic strip where she is as shown here), because the stories are actually rather good - for once, we have humour, characterisation, even an in-joke about The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy being a better show than A Midsummer Night's Dream; and the stories actually make sense on their own merits, with occasional nods to continuity. This is the best Doctor Who Annual since 1970, and well worth obtaining if you can - I hope that it gets made available on one of the DVD releases.