By Steve O’Brien

Published: Wednesday, 15 June 2022 at 12:00 am

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Until the last few weeks, Beep the Meep was a name known only to the most hardcore of Doctor Who fans. A character first witnessed in the pages of the nascent Doctor Who Weekly in 1980, he w​​as, at first glance anyway, a furry, eyelash-fluttering ball of heart-melting cuteness.

It was only later in that story – penned by the writing duo that created Judge Dredd, Pat Mills and John Wagner (and drawn, fact fans, by future Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons) – that we discovered that Beep wasn’t quite the adorable saucer-eyed critter that we thought he was, instead being a merciless, gun-toting killer on the run from the Wrarth Warriors.

So why are we suddenly talking about Beep the Meep and that strip, ‘The Star Beast’, all these years later? Well, it’s because something looking very like it has been recently spotted in Cardiff, leading to fevered talk that the currently lensing David Tennant episode (or episodes) may be some kind of adaptation of that comic strip classic.

What gives some weight to this theory is that aliens that look somewhat like the Wrarth Warriors (a sort of biologically constructed police force bred specifically to deal with the dreaded Meeps) have been papped clomping down a residential road in Cardiff.

In the original story, Beep crash lands on Earth and is befriended by two school kids, Sharon and Fudge, before the Doctor, in the shape of Tom Baker, turns up. Could this Russell T Davies-penned episode be substituting Sharon and Fudge for the Noble clan and could it be David Tennant’s Doctor who will be facing off against this homicidal furball?

This, of course, is all highly speculative. Nothing’s been confirmed by Bad Wolf or the Beeb, and the presence of UNIT troops and various armoured vehicles suggest that, even if that **is** Beep the Meep and those **are** Wrarth Warriors, this isn’t likely to be a panel by panel, speech bubble by speech bubble adaptation (UNIT wasn’t anywhere to be seen in the original ‘Star Beast’).

Still, if it is the case then this isn’t the first time RTD has cribbed from a Doctor Who story from another medium. Season 1’s Dalek (above) was very much a small screen rewrite of writer Rob Shearman’s own Jubilee, from the Big Finish range of audio stories. Similarly, the Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel two-parter owed a chunky debt to Marc Platt’s Spare Parts play from 2002.

Season 3’s Human Nature/The Family of Blood, meanwhile, was an unapologetic adaptation of Paul Cornell’s 1995 Doctor Who novel, Human Nature. Even Steven Moffat’s Blink was based on a short story written for the 2006 Doctor Who Annual, titled ‘What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow’.

And if this episode is some kind of big-budget riff on ‘The Star Beast’, it also won’t be the first time that Doctor Who has leaned into the comic world for inspiration. That strip that started in issue 1 of Doctor Who Weekly is still roaring now, in the since remonikered Doctor Who Magazine, and there are various instances where eagle-eyed and eared TV viewers will have clocked some reference to comic Who.