Missing Believed Wiped 2025

I had a happy time on Saturday at the BFI’s annual Missing Believed Wiped, where we get to see clips and full episodes of old TV recently returned to the archives by teams of ruddy heroes. Last year, I wrote a post on what was shown and a pal asked if I could do the same this time for those who couldn’t attend. So…

The first session began with a trailer, originally shown on BBC One on Thursday 15 December 1966 between the end of The Illustrated Weekly Hudd (of which we saw a closing bit of credits) and Sports Review of 1966. The trailer was for a thriller series called Vendetta, but Presentation clearly had no footage from the series, or wanted a generic trail for the whole series not just a given episode. Instead, speciality shot material shows a hand with a syringe, a hand with a knife, a letter in which “Vendetta” is written in cut-out letters from newsprint. How amazing to advertise a series with, “This is roughly the gist…”

That was followed by a full episode of Vendetta, The Running Man, originally broadcast on 30 December 1966. It wasn’t at all what I’d expected from doing some reading in advance. The Radio Times of 27 October previewed the first episode of Vendetta with a profile of the series’ star, Italian actor Stello Candelli. His character, Danny Scipio, is a Sicilian who,

“fights the Mafia with his own methods … In the course of his unending vendetta Scipio will will be confronting the Mafia in places all over the world: in the American south, in France, in Sicily, and in metropolitan Italy. But for tonight’s opening episode, written by the originators of the series, Brian Degas and Tudor Gates and called The Sugar Man, he travels to London.”

Scipio is not in or even mentioned in The Running Man, which is largely set on the Devonshire moors, with a bit of action in Cornwall. Agent Angelo James (played by Australian actor Neil McCallum) goes to Dartmoor Prison to bully prisoner Johnny Barbiere (Sebastian Breaks) into testifying against one of the notorious Pulito brothers. But Johnny is in prison with the other Pulito brother, who then tries to kill him. Johnny escapes and goes on the run — there’s quite a lot of location filming as he runs about the scenery and scrambles over stone walls, while stock footage shows groups of policemen on what are clearly different hills.

Johnny then breaks into the house of Patricia Rattan (Janet Munro), just as she’s leaving a note for the husband she is walking out on. Against her will, she must now drive Johnny out of the area and through the police checks, pretending to be his loving wife. Things don’t go to plan, and they end up having to spend the night together…

Janet Munro — who I knew from playing opposite Sean Connery in the Disney musical Darby O’Gill and the Little People — is amazing in this, with a lot of wide-eyed close-ups as she is variously terrified, brave or intrigued. There are some nice visual touches, such as the way the runaway sequence involves handheld shooting to give Johnny’s point of view. 

Sometimes the writing is deft. Johnny tells Patricia that he wants to get to the Isles of Scilly, where he can sit and watch the few boats coming in and — if he sees anyone that concerns him — lie low for a bit. Later, agent Angelo says pretty much the same thing, effectively deducing Johnny’s motives and movements.

Yet we’re led to believe that the story will hang not on whether Johnny can escape but who will catch up with him first — the ruthless but good-guy Angelo or the ruthless, deadly Pulitos. The latter get largely forgotten. Johnny shares with Patricia how he got mixed up with the Pulitos — the vital evidence agent Angelo needs — but this isn’t picked up at the end, either. It’s as if a chunk of plot got left out. I wonder how much the logistics of filming on a ferry for the climax determined what featured in the resolution.

After Vendetta, Chris Perry from Kaleidoscope shared some fun stuff. First, a cinema trailer for a 1964 stage pantomime starring Cliff Richard as Aladdin, with the Shadows, Arthur Askey and Vanessa Howard.

Then there was a reconstruction of the dramatic final moments from the first season of Doomwatch, with material from the otherwise missing episode Survival Code (11 May 1970) recovered from the recap at the start of the next episode and from an edition of Blue Peter (where it could be seen on a screen in the background of an item about the band, the Scaffold). The editing was done by Jon Coley and gives a good sense of the mounting tension — and the shock twist ending, decades before similar stuff in Spooks and Line of Duty. It’s good, too, to see something of Hugh David’s tense, enthralling work as director (all 10 Doctor Who episodes that he directed are missing). 

Then there was a full episode of legal sitcom AP Herbert’s Misleading Cases, this one The Negotiable Cow (20 June 1967). Roy Dorice was — as ever — aged up, in this case to play Albert Haddock, an old pedant who objects to a bill from the Inland Revenue for £68, 1s and 3d. Reading up on obscure bits of old law, he decides to deliver a cheque in person to the bureaucrat in question. But he does not write the cheque on paper: he daubs it on the side of a cow.

The case as to whether he can pay by cow, and whether he can tie up said cow at a parking meter, goes to court, with Alastair Sim presiding. This was quite a coup, and Radio Times credited Sim first and ran a photo of him not Dotrice. On screen, Sim seems delighted by the daft, witty script, such as when he asks of this particular, unusual cheque, “Were you afraid it might bounce?” It’s all good fun. Plus, for Doctor Who fans there was the bonus sight of John Levene — prior to playing a Yeti in The Web of Fear — as one of the jurors, seen clearly in one shot. 

Next up was a compilation of clips from Ed Stradling at the TV Museum, which included an unused take from Attack of the Cybermen (1985), a Top of the Pops performance of “Ships in the Night” by Be Bop Deluxe and a song from Play School (30 March 1983). You can see more from the TV Museum, and support its work, at https://www.patreon.com/TheTVMuseum

The second session began with The Best in TV, Michael Aspel presenting coverage of the Guild of Television Producers' and Directors' Awards held earlier the same day — 14 February 1969 — at the Dorchester Hotel in London. This forerunner of the BAFTAs had a chequered history. The bigwigs of the BBC were all at the event in November 1963 when news came in from Dallas that President Kennedy had been shot. This meant there was no one senior enough on duty to authorise changing the pre-agreed TV schedule. I’ve read about the fall out from this in Competition by Asa Briggs and A Survey of Television by Stuart Hood.

At the awards in 1969, host Kenneth Horne suffered a heart attack midway through the show and died. The show continued without him, and the TV version still went out that evening, but the footage of the ceremony was kept noticeably brief. Instead, the programme showed extended clips from the winning TV shows — many of them otherwise missing. We got to see Marty Feldman as a policeman using his cloak to “bullfight” with cars, Max Adrian and Christopher Gable at the piano in a (surviving!) film about Delius by Ken Russell, and an aged-up Roy Dotrice — him again — tell bawdy stories about Sir Walter Raleigh in Brief Lives. The show ended with a standing ovation for the Czechoslovakian TV Service, awarded in absence. 

Afterwards, in the bar, I think this was the material shown to us that was mostly hotly debated. The strangeness of it, the ethics of carrying on with the broadcast after the death of the host, how posh it all was… I realised that just a month after this the same venue hosted the Writers’ Guild Awards, which honoured many of the same shows and recipients. (You can see, in the opening moments of Marty Feldman: No, But Seriously… Feldman receiving his guild award from David Whitaker and Marius Goring.)

Next up, my pal Gary Brannan from the University of York presented footage from a videotape found within the archives of writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. This comprised brief fragments of programmes, some silent and in poor quality, including some of Hancock’s from 1 July 1967, with Vicky Carr singing on the nightclub set and Tony Hancock fronting adverts for Grimsby Pilchards, which young women seem unable to resist. By chance, there was more from Christopher Gable, this time giving a ballet performance.

The date in question is curious. 1 July 1967 was the day BBC Two starting broadcasting in colour — some two years ahead of BBC One and ITV. It was also the day on which BBC Two broadcast the final episode of The Forsyste Saga in its original run. I know this because June Barry, who starred in Forsyte, hosted a party the same night at the home she shared with her husband David Whitaker, whose serial The Evil of the Daleks concluded the same night. Stars from both series attended, filling up their small mews home that looked out on to railway tracks and was illuminated by the lights from passing trains. So, as Hancock advertised Grimsby Pilchards, the Second Doctor and Soames Forsyte may have been out on the balcony, smoking.

The fragments on this tape also included some tantalising glimpses of Alan Bennett’s otherwise missing series On the Margin (1966), with Bennett as vicar giving a sermon, then breaking the fourth wall by removing his dog collar to one side of the set, and the studio lights went out. The sound held long enough for one good gag about the BBC closing down for the night— the make-up woman has put away her lipstick, the wardrobe man has just put on his. What a shame, though, not to have sight of one of his costars in the series, Prunella Scales.

Oh, and this stuff was introduced by a clip from some 30 years of Bennett saying there wasn’t much to miss.

Next was Hank Rides Again, a mix of puppetry and animation for children made by Francis Coudrill for Associated-Rediffusion. It concerns the adventures of a cowboy and his horse, and their battles with the villainous Pete. From what I’d read in advance — Hank features quite a lot in Paul Hayes’ forthcoming book, When Saturday Came (Telos, 2026) — I thought this was some kind of Western. But the setting is contemporary, the villain driving a modern car, so I think it owes more to Roadrunner cartoons, with the same kind of stylised backdrops of Monument Valley. We also got to see a documentary about the series, with Christopher Frayling as appreciative fan and Coudrill’s son demonstrating how he provided the sound effects for different vehicles on his trumpet.

I wrote quite a lot of notes about all this but, in the darkness of the screening, they ended up on top of each other so whatever insights I had have been lost. You are rarely so fortunate. Besides, episodes of Hank Rides Again are now being shown on Rewind TV so you can watch and judge for yourselves.

Lastly, those heroes at Film is Fabulous shared one of the 53 episodes of Emergency Ward 10 they’ve recovered, which includes all six episodes from 1964 in which Annete Andre plays an actress who is severely sunburned. We got to see the first of these (tx 7 July 1964), in which there was a lot going on. One big element was the aftermath of surgeon Louise Mahler (Joan Hooley) walking out on dinner with Dr Giles Farmer (John White) and his father, after the latter said something inappropriate — presumably about her ethnicity. I’m not sure if this was just before or just after the couple were seen to kiss, which was only the second time a white actor and black actor had been seen to kiss on British television.

Then there’s the doctor who doesn't think the lamb chops served on the wards are good enough, and the excitement of the imminent hospital fete, and the prospect of new uniforms for staff. But most of the episode is about the old faithful Albert (Howard Douglas) who is electrocuted by touching a plug socket with wet hands. There’s a fun scene where the poor bloke struggles to tell the nurses that he wants something, and we realise he’s missing his ‘choppers’. One of the doctors is asked about this, acts surprised and then, er, remembers that he’s put the man’s teeth in a drawer. It’s an odd thing to forget!

Another plot involves a new locum with an eye for the nurses — though they seem exciting by the attention, rather than warning each other about him. And then there’s Annette Andre, wheeled in face down wearing only her underwear and a smearing of dark make-up. Later, she’s topless. Although she’s always seen lying on her front, her bare back is a bit risqué for an early evening soap of the time — and pre-empts the notorious sunbathing scene in Triangle by almost 20 years.

The episode ends on a cliffhanger: Annette’s character has second-degree burns and has been told that she might be permanently scarred. In the closing moments, she has some kind of blob on her face. But what kind of blob? The credits roll…

Afterwards, Annette Andre was on stage to answer questions. She remembered one of her episodes of Emergency Ward 10 being broadcast live because something had gone wrong — implying that pre-recording was done very close to broadcast anyway. She also recalled a night playing poker with other cast members where she won £20.

And then out we tumbled into the bar, to compare notes and gossip.

Malcolm Hulke in the Telegraph

I've written a short piece for the online Telegraph about writer Malcolm Hulke, "The communist who turned Doctor Who into an eco-warrior". It's behind a paywall but the opening line is,

"Last Sunday, as the whole world watched on tenterhooks, an ordinary man made an impassioned speech to a fish..."

(Yes, I then go on to explain that Salt is not actually a fish.) 

The Making of Doctor Who, by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke — I

The Making of Doctor Who by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks — their names in that order — was published in paperback by Piccolo on 20 April 1972. It was the first book with Terrance’s name on the cover, but I decided not to begin this series of posts on his 236 books with it because it’s not really his “first book”. 

Terrance certainly didn’t think so:

“The Auton Invasion [published in January 1974] was the first book of any kind I’d written, and I worked very hard on it.” TD interviewed by Peter Griffiths, “Author! Author!”, Doctor Who Magazine #273, cover date 12 January 1999, p. 46.

In April 1976, Terrance mentioned in a letter to Harvey Unna — the agent he shared with Hulke — that royalties on The Making of Doctor Who had always been split 3:1 in Hulke’s favour. But that doesn’t mean Terrance did 25% of the writing. So what did he do on this book?

Hulke mentioned in a letter while working on The Making of Doctor Who in September 1971, that Terrance was due to interview the show’s original producer, Verity Lambert, about the early days of the series. Hulke, meanwhile, interviewed Donald Wilson and corresponded with Sydney Newman and David Whitaker. (The correspondence with Newman survives, and includes a transcript of the interview with Wilson.) 

That suggests that the bulk but not all of the material here on the origins of Doctor Who was researched and compiled by Hulke. In the process, Newman’s account of first conceiving the Doctor as, “a senile old man 745 years old from an un-named planet” (Newman to Hulke, 28 September 1971) was changed to the kinder, more heroic, “Let’s make him a crotchety old man … at least 745 years old” (p. 3). We don’t know if it was Hulke or Terrance who made the substitution, but Terrance used “crotchety” again in both The Doctor Who Monster Book (1975) and the revised version of The Making of Doctor Who (1976).

I suspect that Terrance also conducted the interviews with then-current cast members Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning, Roger Delgado, Nicholas Courtney, Richard Franklin and John Levene, as well as with former Doctors Who William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, and with Jack Kine of BBC Visual Effects. Their contact details would have been kept on file by the Doctor Who production office, where Terrance worked as script editor, so it would have been relatively quick and easy for him to ring round — perhaps a morning’s work.

(Hulke interviewed Donald Wilson and made contact with Newman in September 1971, so Terrance probably rang Hartnell and Troughton around this time, too. One of them, surely, mooted the idea that perhaps the actors might like to reappear in the series. Then, at the end of February 1972, writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin attended studio recording of their Doctor Who story The Mutants and Terrance must have raised with them the prospect of a new adventure involving all three Doctors. On 3 March, they duly sent Terrance an outline for Deathworld, eventually made as The Three Doctors.)

As well as conducting a share of the interviews, Terrance facilitated some of Hulke’s research, such as loaning him the production office’s scripts of all previous Doctor Who stories — Terrance wrote to ask for them back on 23 November 1971, in a letter included among the PDFs on the Season 9 box-set (10-03 — Frontier in Space production documentation, p. 2). Hulke’s sometime partner Lauraine Palmeri worked through these scripts, making summaries of plots from which Hulke then wrote his in-universe narrative of all of Doctor Who so far, as recounted by the Time Lords and by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart in the 24-page chapter “The Travels of Doctor Who”. 

This is by far the biggest chapter in the book, accounting for just over 20% of the 115 pages. Add to that the in-universe chapters on everything we’ve learned about the Doctor (13pp), an account of his trial (4pp) and a doctor’s report on his physiognomy (3pp), and just over 38% of this non-fiction guide to the making of Doctor Who is, er, fiction. 

What’s more, this stuff is riddled with small errors. The first chapter quotes a line of dialogue written by David Whitaker that was never used in a broadcast episode (p. 8). The book claims that the Cybermen originate from Telos and “first appeared on television on February 11th, 1967 in a Doctor Who story set on the moon” (p. 14), entirely ignoring the existence of and events depicted in The Tenth Planet (1986). The “Travels of the TARDIS” section correctly says Cybermen feature in The Tenth Planet, but adds that events take place in the year 2000, not 1986 (p. 49). 

On 30 May 1972, fan Richard Landen wrote to Hulke and Dicks listing such errors over two pages, in the hope they could be corrected in the next edition. Terrance kept a copy of this letter and, indeed, corrections were made to the manuscript of the 1976 version. This is the first example I’ve found of fans advising Terrance on Doctor Who history and lore.

Hulke was on steadier ground writing the 19-page chapter “Diary of a Production”, since its about the making of his own story, The Sea Devils, which was in production at the time he wrote this book. He provides information not found in other sources — exactly what he was briefed to write by Terrance and producer Barry Letts, the changes made at different stages of commissioning, details of elements that were lost such as the Doctor waterskiing. He also shares passages from otherwise now-lost original storyline and scene breakdown for the story. 

It’s a shame there isn’t more of this — longer excerpts from paperwork, more detail on exactly what happened and when, with dates. There’s an interview with Jack Kine about making monsters (4pp), but it might have been nice to hear, directly, from director Michael E Briant and other members of the cast and crew about what was involved day-to-day, in the thick of production.

Instead, we get a chapter exploring some real science and philosophy suggested by Doctor Who, entitled “Could It All Be True?” (9pp), in which Hulke — an atheist — cites the books of Joshua and Ezekiel. This is followed by what’s basically a sermon, contributed by the Rev John D Beckwith AKC, Chaplain to the Bishop of Edmonton. This has caused me a bit of a headache.

The see of Edmonton was new, having been created in 1970, with Alan Rogers appointed as first bishop. Prior to his appointment as chaplain, the Rev Beckwith, born c. 1933, had been senior tutor of Ijebu-Igbo Great School and Molusi College in Nigeria (1960-62), assistant curate of Bedale (1962-63), Mottingham (1965-69), house tutor at Eltham College (1964-69), and chaplain of St Andrew’s Gothenburg, with Halmstad and Jönköping, Sweden (1969-70) — source. 

He had worked in schools, so had some qualification for contributing to a book aimed at children. But he doesn’t seem to have made a habit of this sort of thing, such as writing for other publications or appearing in the media. Sadly, the current Bishop of Edmonton doesn’t hold records going back to 1971 (I did ask!), so I’m a bit stumped as to how Hulke might have known the Rev Beckwith. Do please write in if you know.

(I’d also be grateful for any information about Charles Bowman and Catherine Dale, who are named at the top of the page of Thanks.)

While I don’t know the connected between Hulke and Beckwith, I can guess why Hulke might have wanted a closing word from such a figure. In early 1971, Doctor Who had been widely criticised for being too scary and unsuitable for children. Then, as Barry Letts detailed in his memoir, his boss Ronnie Marsh, Head of Serials at the BBC, objected to the “blasphemous” use of a church in The Daemons, requiring last-minute rewrites to a story already in production. I think Hulke effectively tried to head off this kind of criticism by obtaining the church’s blessing for Doctor Who.

I also think he was keen to show the scientific and social value of the series because The Making of Doctor Who had originally been conceived by science-fiction writer George Hay in light of the success of two books published in the US: The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry (1968), and The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 by Jerome Agel (1970). These were both aimed at adults. Subsequent editions of the Star Trek book sought to reach more widely than fans of science-fiction by claiming to be,  

“The book on how to write for TV! … The only book of its kind! The complete history of a top TV series — how a television show is conceived, written, sold and produced.”

The book on 2001 also took a broad view, digging into the ideas in and related to the film — at once making-of and quest for meaning. Jerome Agel had form in this, having previously worked with Marshall McLuhan on both The Medium is the Message and War and Peace in the Global Village, as well as cowriting I Seem to Be a Verb with Buckminster Fuller. 

Hulke, I think, fancied some of this chin-stroking stuff. His final, short chapter, “The Shape of Things to Come”, shares some hints about that might be coming up in future stories, hinting that the Doctor might recover the use of his TARDIS. But the title of the chapter is from HG Wells, a 1933 novel — then a film — that laid out a future history spanning hundreds of years, in some ways a kind of fictional sequel to his non-fiction A Short History of the World. 

There’s something of this long view of history in Hulke’s approach to “The Travels of Doctor Who”, which is largely related by the Time Lords — who are very like the super-elites favoured by Wells.

George Hay was, like Wells, interested in the idea of using fiction as a kind of blueprint for the future. I recently wrote about the book he edited, The Disappearing Future (1970).

So all of this stuff went into the mix, and I think helps explain the structure. But the result is not very much about the actual making-of Doctor Who. The cover, showing a photo of Jon Pertwee and a Sea Devil, is from a TV story that had only finished being shown on TV on 1 April 1972; the book was published just over two weeks later. It promises Doctor Who of the immediate now but that isn’t what this book is.

It also isn’t exactly a how-to guide for wannabe writers or crew. There’s no tacit encouragement to readers to try and get into the industry, no tips for young readers who might write their own adventures. That’s notable given Hulke ran a course for writers, had edited two editions of the Writers’ Guide for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and would go on to write the hugely influential guide Writing for Television in the Seventies. 

But I’ve spoken to a whole load of people who now work in TV and publishing for whom this book lit a spark. For them, it was a blueprint for the future. Job done.

And then Terrance rewrote it, without Hulke, for Target. We’ll get into that in Part II — but maybe not for a few days as I’m off doing things this weekend.

Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks, by Terrance Dicks — II

In Part I of this two-part epic, we looked at the way that this novelisation does — and doesn’t — follow on smoothly from the preceding adventure, Doctor Who and the Space War by Malcolm Hulke. I concluded that Terrance did not confer with Hulke as they wrote their books, despite them being friends and neighbours. The result is a mismatch between the end of Hulke’s book and the start of this one.

Yet there is evidence that in writing Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks Terrance swapped notes with another writer, and as a result ensured continuity with a book from a completely different publisher.

As I reread this book, I was also conscious of Terrance in dialogue with himself, in that it is a novelisation of a TV story on which he had been script editor. He fixes some things here that he didn’t fix then, but he also avoids the temptation to tinker too much.

More than anything, I was conscious of pace. On TV, Planet of the Daleks is a fast-moving action adventure, full of incident and forward momentum — what a delight it was to watch some years ago with my young son. But in that haste, some elements of the plot that we rattle past don’t hold up if we stop for a proper look. The novelisation addresses some of this, but I think we can also see a similar fast-paced, forward momentum at the typewriter. There are things here I would fix...

As usual in this period, Terrance worked from the camera scripts rather than rewatching episodes as broadcast. We can see this from the opening page of the novelisation, where Jo helps the wounded Doctor. In the script, she presses a button in the TARDIS, a,

COUCH SLIDES OUT FROM THE WALL & HE FALLS ONTO IT.

It’s a “couch” in the novelisation, too (p. 7). But on TV, it’s a pull-out bed, part of a unit of cupboards and drawers. Once on it, the Doctor directs Jo to a “locker” above the bed, in which he stores the audio log for the TARDIS.

But in the script, the Doctor says the log is, “In a locker under … here”. Stage directions say he points to it, but don’t specify where this locker is or what it is under. Terrance rationalises this by placing the,

“locker in the base of the [TARDIS] control console” (p. 7).

A little later, the script specifies that Jo “goes to a locker”, presumably a different one, from which she “pulls out a suitcase” containing a change of clothes suitable for the conditions on the planet Spiridon, where they have just landed. Terrance makes this a,

“clothing locker in the wall” (p. 10).

On screen, we don’t see from where she gets her change of clothes. (Lockers are clearly de rigueur in a spaceship, as the Thal ship also has a wardrobe-like locker (p. 17), named as such in the script.)

The audio log recorder is more than a simple Dictaphone; we’re told here that it has eternal batteries and unlimited capacity (p. 7), making it a bit more sci-fi than ordinary secretarial equipment. 

As per the TV story, the vegetation on Spiridon spits liquid at the TARDIS and at people. This is meant to be horridly visceral, and Terrance makes them “spongy, fleshy plants” (p. 10), with the results of this “rubbery spitting” (p. 20) at once “viscous” (p. 11), meaning thick and sticky, and readily familiar: 

“The plant spat milky liquid at her” (p. 14).

I suspect a modern editor would cut either “fleshy” or “milky”; both is a little suggestive.

When the TARDIS is covered in rubbery plant spit, no air can get in from outside, leaving the Doctor at risk of suffocation. It is nuts that the TARDIS relies on external air, not least because the ship travels through the Space/Time Vortex where there isn’t any. But this jeopardy is all as per the TV story, the fault of writer Terry Nation and, er, his script editor at the time. Terrance at least has the Doctor here acknowledge that he shouldn’t have let his emergency air supply run low (p. 13). Bad captain of the ship!

The Doctor then tries the TARDIS doors which, because of the rubbery spit outside, 

“yielded but would not give way” (p. 18).

This is a rare example of Terrance employing the wrong word, as “yielded” means to stop resisting. (Writer Jonathan Morris suggests “yielded a little” would work better.) There’s something similar when the Thals first see the TARDIS:

“they realised that the tall, oblong shape was the ‘Space-Craft’ they were seeking” (p. 19).

Why would a space-faring crew capitalise and hyphenate “spacecraft” as if it were some exotic new concept? ETA: My pal Dave Owen suggests that the quotation marks are there to emphasise how unlike a spaceship the TARDIS seems to these Thals. Hmm, maybe.

I love the word “oblong”, too, but it means a two-dimensional shape. The TARDIS is, roughly, cuboid or a rectangular prism. A more apposite word is “box”, which would also convey limited size.

We’re told early on that,

“Jo had often heard the Doctor say that the TARDIS was invulnerable to outside attack” (p. 10). 

This invulnerability is restated on p. 124, this time not as something Jo has heard but as fact care of the author. Terrance should have known better from TV stories on which he was script editor. For example, the TARDIS is destroyed in The Mind Robber (1968). It has only just reassembled itself when, in the opening moments of The Invasion, missiles are launched at it. The Doctor desperately works the controls to move his ship out of the way, surely because he doesn’t expect the TARDIS to survive the encounter. 

In Death to the Daleks (1974), again written by Nation and script edited by Terrance, the TARDIS is subject to eternal attack by a sentient city, which drains away the ship’s energy — the Doctor then struggling to open the door of the TARDIS is a direct echo of what happens here. In the very next story Terrance was to novelise, Pyramids of Mars (1975), a psychic projection of Sutekh is able to enter the TARDIS. In novelising that, he didn’t — or wasn’t able to — amend the lines here. He moved forward, not back.

I’m not the only person to nitpick such stuff. Based on my estimated lead time of 7.5 months, Terrance wrote this novelisation in March 1976. The following month, he received a letter from fan Richard Landen listing errors in the original version of The Making of Doctor Who (1972), in the hope that these could be corrected for the revised edition — Terrance’s next writing assignment. On 29 April, he was the guest of the newly formed Doctor Who Appreciation Society at Westfield College in London. As Jeremy Bentham reported in the fanzine TARDIS in July,

“The evening commenced with a slightly nervous former script-editor explaining that he was often dubious about talking to dedicated Dr Who fans, since they tended to know more about the show than he did.” (Vol. 1, no. 8, p. 8.)

Soon, this scrutiny would change the way Terrance approached his novelisations.

For the time being, we can see other influences on the novelisation of Planet of the Daleks. Terrance describes the jungle of Spiridon, with its varied flora and fauna, as “one gigantic beast” (p. 9). That idea of a whole ecosystem being a single, complex lifeform was relatively new; Robert Poole suggests in his book Earthrise that it’s a consequence of the space age, and people — starting with the crew of Apollo 8 in 1968 — seeing the disc of the Earth for the first time.

Real space travel seems to inform Terrance’s description of the Thal spaceship, too. In the script for Episode One, stage directions say it is has a “HULL AND FINS” but is,

SHAPED RATHER MORE LIKE A GUIDED MISSILE THAN ANYTHING WE HAVE SEEN IN U.S. SPACE MISSIONS … A DESIGN THAT SHOULD APPEAR STRANGE AND ALIEN TO EARTH.

Terrance doesn’t use the analogy of a missile:

“The ship was small and stubby, vaguely cigar-shaped. Hull and fins were badly damaged” (p. 14).

The hull is, he says, “picked out in blue and gold” (ibid). The script describes, simply, an “interior”. But Terrance has Jo explore the “nose-cone” and “flight deck” (p. 15). Nation wanted the ship to be alien and unfamiliar; Terrance made it seem a more like a real, contemporary rocket — something readers could easily visualise.

The book is peppered with analogies that do something similar, likening the strange, sci-fi elements to things readers would know. The prone Doctor at the start of the story is like an effigy on a Crusader’s tomb (p. 10) — not just any stone effigy, but a heroic knight. Jo likens the alien temple she finds to something from Brazil (p. 11). The exposure of an invisible Dalek is like something from a children’s “magic” drawing book (p. 25). 

Jo later hides from a Dalek behind an instrumental panel, where there is a,

“gap, rather like that between a sofa and a wall” (p. 52).

That is, of course, exactly how many readers would respond to seeing Daleks when watching Doctor Who. The enormous ventilation shaft in the Dalek base is like a “chimney” — a word used several times — from which the Doctor emerges like a cork out of a bottle (p. 76). The Thals behave, at one point, like children in a playground (p. 84), while the Doctor’s efforts to recover a bomb from between massed ranks of Daleks is,

“like a ghastly slow-motion football game” (p. 116).

This is a simple, quick means to convey meaning to younger readers — the intended audience of these books. But I think it also serves to make the events seen on screen a bit less strange and scary. 

That’s not to say this is a wholly bowlderised version. On screen we’re told twice in dialogue that the Thals are on a “suicide mission”. The word “suicide” appears much more frequently in the novelisation, and not only in reference to the Thals. At the end of the story, Terrance gives Jo a moment to acknowledge the earlier “self-sacrifice” of brave Wester (p. 123), whereas on TV his death is a relatively quick, sudden shock and then we move on, without a backward thought.

Wester and the other Spiridons are invisible, which on screen makes for some fun visuals as stuff floats about via the magic of roughly fringed yellow-screen. Terrance makes the scenes — the un-scenes — with these invisible people suspenseful and involving; Jo’s first encounter with them (p. 17) is deftly, atmospherically told, and more tense than the TV version.

The Daleks insist that the Spiridons wear big furry coats to make them visible. Terrance, working from the script, doesn’t mention the colour (p. 46); on screen, they are a distinctive shade of purple. Wester abandons his coat to go unseen when he attacks the Daleks (p. 104). The implication, surely, is that he attacks them naked — but Terrance doesn’t spell this out.

Well, no, that might not be appropriate. Yet we’re told that the Doctor “cursed fluently in a Martian” (p. 109), and when our heroes succeed in one part of their mission,”,

“Jo and the Doctor joined the jubilant Thals in an orgy” (p. 100)

All right, it’s an “orgy of hand-shaking and back-slapping”. But is that really the appropriate word?

Many of the more technical words used here — “allotrope” (p. 47), “hermetically” (p. 86), the frequent use of “catwalk” and “arsenal” in the final part of the story — are as per the script. But Terrance adds some of his own: “flush” (p. 52), meaning to be fitted perfectly, or the way confused Daleks “milled about” (p. 66 and p. 104).

The young Thal called Latep, a potential romantic interest for Jo, is introduced as a,

“tall muscular man with a fresh open face” (p. 45). 

That word is used again — on p. 81 it’s a “cheerful open face”. Terrance later employed “open” to describe the Doctor, again as a synonym for young.

Then there’s Terrance’s idiosyncratic approach to capitalisation, which we have seen before. Here, that includes Space/Time Vortex (p. 7), the study of Space Medicine and the threat of Patrol (both p. 16), “Space-Craft” (in quotation marks, p. 19), Time (p. 21), Command Centre (p. 35), Thal Communications (p. 44), and Galaxy (p. 78). 

The Daleks on Spiridon are led variously by a Dalek Commander (p. 42), Dalek Expedition Commander (p. 84) and Expedition Commander (p. 108) — all the same single Dalek. His subordinate is the Dalek Scientist (p. 84), aka the Dalek Chief Scientist (pp. 93-4). But there’s no capital letter for the Dalek scientific section (p. 42).

The Expedition Commander answers to the Dalek Supreme (p. 108) from Dalek Supreme Command (p. 44), who we’re told here — but not in the TV version — is second only to the Emperor (p. 109). That’s surely Terrance recalling something of the Doctor’s encounter with the Dalek Emperor in The Evil of the Daleks (1967), a story repeated on TV just as he joined the production team of Doctor Who. But I think it is also doing something with the lore of the Daleks, to which I will return in a moment.

Taron is a Thal doctor, lower case (p. 19), for all that Space Medicine is up. The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver is also lower case, as is the “some kind of pterodactyl” identified by Taron (p. 83), who seems to know a lot about the history of life on Earth, given that the Thals think it is a legend, not a real place (p. 16). Terrance also hyphenates “wild-life” (p. 86).

The Thals are equipped with the latest futuristic kit: plastic beaker, plastic notebook and plastic carton (p. 17), plastic cape (p. 19), plastic box of food concentrates (p. 22), plastic wrapping for bombs (p. 42), and plastic rope (p. 75). On Earth, most plastic is derived from fossil fuels, whether gas or petroleum. The implication, then, is that oil is abundant on Skaro. Why, then, do the Daleks employ static electricity?

Terrance also tells us a bit more about Thal culture; they prepare their “rubbery cubes” of food (p. 22) on “tiny atomic-powered stoves”.

“Soon they were all washing down the tough, chewy food-concentrates with delicious hot soup” (p. 78).

It’s characteristic, I think, that what Terrance adds to this suspenseful, thrilling story, is a bit where they have a nice meal.

The Thals aren’t exactly the most liberated bunch. Rebec, the sole Girl One, adds little to the story beyond aggravating Taron, because being in love with her means he can’t think straight. That’s in the TV version, but Terrance doesn’t exactly improve things by having Rebec “sobbing with fear” (p. 67) as they all escape from the Daleks, and then again on p. 79, when the Doctor dispatches Jo to console her. 

That said, the male Thals are also under pressure here. Terrance uses these moments to underline that the Doctor is a kind and canny hero: he makes allowances for Vaber’s rudeness because he knows the man is tired and lashing out (p. 21); when he sees that Codal needs cheering up, he thanks him for earlier bravery (p. 38). The Doctor is shrewd, but also takes time to form an opinion — such as when he acknowledges to himself that he,

“knew too little of the situation on Spiridon to form a proper judgment” (pp. 28-9)

There’s a fair bit added here about positive thinking. The Doctor is “cheerful and confident” (p. 107) as he heads into danger, and “as always, making the best of things” (p. 28). He tells the Thals, in a sequence not in the TV version, that they must guard against self-doubt — the “enemy within” (p. 84).

Terrance underlines other heroic aspects of the Doctor. For example, when running away from the Daleks at one point, we are told his route is not “completely at random” (p. 55), but purposefully leading him and his friends back to the lift so they can escape. We’re told that there is nothing the Doctor can do to save a Thal called Marat; even so, the Doctor is compassionate, with an “anguished look” (p. 60). When the bomb they need falls into a pit of 10,000 Daleks, the Doctor hurries after it “without hesitation” (p. 115) and emerges, triumphant, by climbing up the side of a Dalek then performing a “flying leap” (p. 116). 

Sadly, Jo isn’t similarly bolstered in the prose version of the story. She’s described simply as “very small and very pretty” (p. 7), and her smallness comes in useful several times. She’s loyal and brave, as in the TV story, but all the novelisation really adds is that she has a dream about a holiday on the French Riviera (p. 85).

This is a rare hint of Jo’s life outside the events seen on screen. We learn all sorts of incidental details about the Doctor, too. For example, while he is down among the 10,000 Daleks,

“Talk about Daniel in the lions’ den, he thought” (p. 115).

So he’s familiar with the Old Testament. At this point in his lives, the Doctor has not been hot-air ballooning (p. 66). He cups his hands over his ears because of the changing pressure in the lift (p. 37), a rare example of this incarnation of the Doctor not having superhuman powers. 

Yet it is uncharacteristic of this Doctor to be clumsy, stepping on and breaking the modified audio log recorder that proved so useful a weapon against the Daleks (p. 51). That weapon is possible because the Daleks imprison the Doctor and the Thal called Codal without “really” searching them. As well as the recorder, the Doctor has his sonic screwdriver and Codal an atomic-powered motor (p. 41). It is as per the TV version, but not typical of Daleks, and Terrance makes no attempt to explain it away.

By contrast, when a Dalek doesn’t immediately blast the Doctor, we’re told that it was “astonished” (p. 55) by his sudden appearance. That makes the moment more credible. There is more in this vein when the Doctor and his friends escape from a locked room (by floating up the chimney) and,

“The astonishment of the Daleks was almost ludicrous” (p. 66).

I think Terrance meant that their astonishment was funny, with the Daleks in “utter confusion”. But “ludicrous” suggests foolish, unbelievable. “Hilarious” or “surreal” might be better; “ludicrous” is not quite on the mark.

When the Doctor returns to this locked room later in the story, he notes the ruins of the Dalek anti-gravitational disc, but there’s no reference to the Dalek that tumbled down the chimney with it, or the other Daleks it crashed into. Did those Daleks survive — or is there a rank of Dalek that does the tidying up, and prioritised clearing the bodies before tackling the wreckage?

We glean other bits of Dalek lore here. The Doctor, for example, knows they build,

“bases underground wherever possible [as] daylight and open air meant nothing to them, and they flourished best in a controlled underground environment” (p. 37), 

This is new information, but consistent with the bunker from Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, which (as we saw) Terrance linked to the city seen in the Daleks’ first TV story. The Doctor also refers here to the“first Dalek war” (p. 20), ie the events of that story, but there is no asterisk to “See Doctor Who and the Daleks”. On TV, that was simply “the Dalek war.”

In adding an ordinal, perhaps Terrance simply meant to differentiate the events of that story from the conflict going on around this book — ie the “space war” against Earth and Draconia. But I think adding “first” implies a series of wars, the Daleks a recurring menace in considerable force. It’s not what we’ve seen in TV adventures, which tends to involve small numbers of Dalek in small-scale machinations. 

It’s much more like the kind of thing we see in media other than TV — the comic strips and annuals in which the Daleks conquer whole star systems. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

In the TV version of Planet of the Daleks, the Daleks are on the planet Spiridon to exploit a rare geological feature: what dialogue refers to as “ice volcanoes”. In the novelisation, Terrance uses a shortened term, “icecano”. But I don’t think that’s his coinage. The word was first used on p. 21 of Terry Nation’s Dalek Annual 1977, published by World Distributors in September 1976 — a month before this novelisation. Here it is as per that book, describing a feature on the Dalek planet Skaro:

My sense is that these lavishly illustrated annuals, printed on good quality paper to a high standard, had much longer lead times than prose-only novelisations on regular newsprint. That surely means that “icecano” was coined for the annual, before Terrance even started on this novelisation. 

Somehow, the term was then shared with him. My guess is that Terry Nation, working on the annual and knowing that Terrance was going to novelise this story, suggested he use the word. It was Nation, then, who encouraged Terrance to join up terms and lore, building an expanded universe of the Daleks far more rich and spectacular than we could ever see on screen.

The irony is that, in Planet of the Daleks, Terrance made his own massive contribution to Dalek lore. His amended ending to Frontier in Space, in which the Doctor is shot by the Master, leaves our hero in no state to set the controls of the TARDIS in pursuit of the Dalek army. Instead, in Terrance’s version, he uses the telepathic circuits to ask his own people for help.

For the first time in their long history — to the best of our knowledge — the Time Lords intervene against the Daleks. In doing so, they help prevent a space war but spark a wholly different conflict. This is the start of the Time War…

* 

Thanks for reading, sharing and responding to these huge long posts about the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks. I am glad they are still popular, though they take a fair bit of time to research and write, and incur various expenses. With other pressures and commitments, and the freelance world a bit sparse, I can only justifying continuing with your kind support. So do please show your appreciation…

Next time, more Mac collaboration (or not) with The Making of Doctor Who, a book that is very largely about anything but the making of Doctor Who… 

Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks, by Terrance Dicks — I

First published in hardback and paperback on 21 October 1976, this novelisation opens with an attention-grabbing first paragraph:

“The tall white-haired man lay still as death. The girl leaning over him could find no pulse, no beat from either of his hearts. His skin was icy cold to the touch.” (p. 7)

This is the Doctor, near-dead on a couch in the TARDIS following the events of his previous, thrilling adventure. The girl — his friend Jo Grant — helpfully recounts for our benefit what’s been going on. Sometime “far into the future”, she and the Doctor had stumbled on,

“a plot to cause a space war. The Doctor discovered his old enemy the Master involved in the plot — and behind the Master were the Daleks. Although the Doctor managed to defeat the Master and prevent the war, he was seriously wounded in a Dalek ambush. I managed to get him into the TARDIS.” (p. 8)

There is no asterisk and footnote to “See Doctor Who and the Space War” by Malcolm Hulke, which was the Doctor Who novelisation published directly before this one — on 23 September. And that’s probably just as well, because Jo’s summary is not at all what happens at the end of that book. There is no Dalek ambush; the Doctor is in perfect health when he leaves in the TARDIS.

In part, I think the mismatch is because Mac and Terrance both worked from scripts, not the stories as broadcast. But working through this discrepancy is revealing of other things, too.

Doctor Who and the Space War is based on a 1973 TV story called Frontier in Space, which was written by Malcolm Hulke and script edited by Terrance. The Daleks appear in the final episode but depart long before the end. They are not even on the same planet when the last few scenes take place so there is not even a chance of an ambush. Instead, in the closing moments, the Master confronts and tries to shoot the Doctor. The Doctor switches on a machine that makes nearby Ogrons think that a monster is attacking. In the confusion, the Master’s hand is knocked just as he fires his gun.

In Hulke’s script for the episode, this meant that the Master entirely missed the Doctor. The Master then ran off, pursued by other characters. The Doctor, in perfect health, decided not to follow, telling Jo that they needed to prioritise going after the Daleks. We were to see them both enter the TARDIS, it would dematerialise and the credits would roll.

This was how the scene was recorded on 31 October 1972. But then producer Barry Letts decided that the end of the story needed reworking, not least because the monster had not been realised well. Terrance, as script editor, was tasked with reworking the sequence. He was able to add new material so long as it involved solely the Doctor and Jo. Actors Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning recorded this new material on 22 January 1973, on the same day as recording Episode One of the next story to be broadcast, Planet of the Daleks.

In the revised and broadcast version, when the Doctor switches on his machine and the Ogrons react, we don’t see to what. They bump into the Master but his shot now hits the Doctor, who falls to the ground. As the others rush off, Jo leans over the prone Doctor, amazed to discover that he is still alive; jogging the Master’s arm meant it was only a glancing blow. Jo helps the Doctor to his feet and into the TARDIS. We see the interior, with the gravely wounded Doctor on his feet at the console, sending a telepathic message to the Time Lords to ask for help in pursuing the Daleks.

In novelising his own TV story, Hulke worked from the camera scripts — ie the last versions used in recording of the episode in October 1972. But these, obviously, included the monster, and the Doctor not being hit. What’s more, Hulke further amended the closing moments of the story to address something else. 

Due to the untimely death of actor Roger Delgado in June 1973, Frontier in Space had been his final onscreen appearance as the Master. On screen, he is rather lost in the confusion of the amended scene, but it wasn’t much of an exit for such a significant character, played by such a well-liked man. In the novelisation, Hulke gives Delgado a proper send off.

As per the script, the Doctor working the machine makes the Ogrons see a monster — Mac describes it as a “giant, Ogron-eating lizard, rearing up its great head”, not the pink fabric bag featured in recording. The Ogrons rush off, bumping into the Master so that he drops his gun — which the Doctor now picks up. The Master, his “face contorted with fear”, asks if the Doctor will shoot him. Jo says he can’t, not in cold blood, but the Doctor ushers her into the TARDIS. He has to tell her twice before she complies.

The two Time Lords are now alone, one at the mercy of the other. The Master thinks the Doctor will shoot. It’s a tense moment as we turn to the very last page of the book, where the Doctor says that he won’t kill his old enemy. He should really take him prisoner but has to get after the Daleks. So he throws the gun harmlessly to one side.

“The Master grinned. ‘Perhaps we shall meet again, Doctor.’

‘Yes, perhaps we shall.’

The Doctor closed the door of the TARDIS. The Master watched as it dematerialised. Then he went back to his big table and started to collect his star charts and other papers. ‘Oh well,’ he said to himself, ‘there’s always tomorrow.’” (Doctor Who and the Space War, by Malcolm Hulke, p. 142).

It’s a lovely send-off, perfectly capturing Delgado’s Master and the relationship with Pertwee’s Doctor. That last line is funny yet bittersweet if we know that there wasn’t a tomorrow, and the two never met again. What a deft bit of writing. 

Of course, it doesn’t match what happens at the start of Planet of the Daleks — on screen or in the book. As broadcast, the first episode begins by reprising the closing moments of Frontier in Space, ie the revised ending that Terrance wrote. Our first sight is of the Doctor lying on the floor outside the TARDIS having just been shot, with Jo leaning over him. Amazed he is still alive, she helps him to his feet and through the door. Inside, he sends his telepathic message, then collapses across the console. Jo finds him somewhere to lie down: a pull-out bed rather than a couch. 

Terrance keeps that opening shot — the Doctor lying prone, Jo leaning over him — but simplifies the action by having this happen inside the TARDIS, the telepathic message already sent. This means he doesn’t have to explain where the TARDIS is when the Doctor is lying outside it. He can quickly bring us up to speed on what’s happened and concentrate on what happens next.

This simplification of action may explain why he has the Doctor wounded by an ambush of Daleks — the antagonists in the story to follow — and not being shot by the Master, who doesn’t feature in what’s to come.

The alternative is that Terrance didn’t recall his own rewrite of the closing scene of Frontier in Space. Hulke — his friend and sometime neighbour — might have reminded him, if they’d consulted one another in writing their novelisations. But it doesn’t look as though they compared notes. Other examples include the fact that Terrance is vague about the setting of his novelisation beyond it being, “far into the future”  (pp. 7-8), while Mac’s opening sentence is definitive: “The year 2540.”

But then why wasn’t the discrepancy between the end of Hulke’s novelisation and the start of Terrance’s picked up by the editorial team at Target? 

I wonder if, in fact, the brief from the publisher was not to collaborate, to ensure that each book could stand on its own. Neither book features a plug for the other, either in a footnote or among back-page ads. 

On p. 2 of my first edition of Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks, the preceding Doctor Who and the Space War is cited last in the long list of other novelisations available, but with no indication that it has any particular link with this book. (Poor Doctor Who and the Giant Robot is still absent from the list.)

Nor is there anything in the cover art of these two books to suggest a link between them, though they are by the same artist and presumably completed one after the other.

1982 reprint of Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks;
1984 reprint of Doctor Who and the Space War

Doctor Who and the Space War is the first novelisation to feature the Third Doctor where he doesn’t appear on the cover. The focus is an Ogron, all the more imposing for being seen from below and dramatically lit, and more detailed than the photograph on which it is based:

Reference photo used for the cover of
Doctor Who and the Space War
c/o Black Archive

Behind the Ogron is a vista of planets and twinkling stars. The planets are lit from one side, the crescent of the light making them three dimensional. We can see the traces of craters and other surface detail.

Below this are two inset images: the head of a Draconian and a spacecraft in a cloud of steam. The Draconian is pale green — matching the logo of the first edition. The rest of the image is in tones pink and purple-brown. The muted colours, the fine linework and airbrushed colour are, I think, in the style of grown-up science-fiction titles of the time. Not quite Chris Foss, but in that direction.

By contrast, the cover for Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks is in a much more comic-strip style, with the blasts of energy, thunderbolts and stippled effects characteristic of Achilleos’s early work for the series. Instead of looking up at a single central figure, we look straight on at a Dalek framed on either side by the Doctor and the Thal called Taron. The Doctor is leant forward, face in profile; we see more of Taron’s agonised face. It’s a much more dynamic composition, the Doctor’s posture leaning into the Dalek, as well as the direction of the sucker arm and gun stick, giving a sense of movement from left to right.

ETA Richard Long on Bluesky suggests the photograph that Achilleos worked from, as below. We can see how Achilleos has reworked elements of the composition, notably the eyestalk. Also, compared to what we see on TV, where this moment happens in a beige-coloured quarry in winter, it’s all much richer and brighter. 

The bright red logo is in contrast to the blue background (for some reason, we can’t see the blue through the middle of the “O” in “Who”). The illustration is otherwise variously brown, green, orange, purple, red, yellow, as well as grey, black and white. It’s full of colour and there are details to pick over — such as the orange sparks dripping vertically from the Dalek gunstick as it fires a blast of energy off the right of frame. Yet above Taron’s head, a planet is depicted as a simple red spot.

The difference in styles between the two covers is, I think, comparable to the difference between the work Achilleos did on the first 12 novelisations for Target and the new look brought in my Peter Brookes. It has to be conscious, doesn’t it? Why would the artist — and publishers — want to keep these two books separate?

I think we can understand why. It’s one thing to say at the end of Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen, when the Cybermen have been entirely defeated and the story wrapped up, that the Doctor’s next adventure will take place in Scotland, with a footnote “See Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster” — a wholly new adventure. Likewise, the first edition of Doctor Who and the Giant Robot contains a footnote referencing the as-yet unpublished Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. This directly precedes the events of the Robot story, but each book is its own, self-contained adventure. You don’t miss anything by reading just one of the books.

The TV stories Frontier in Space and Planet of the Spiders are something different: two halves of a an epic single story. In commissioning them in the first place, Terrance partly had in mind the example of the 12-episode The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965-66), also written by two writers taking half the episodes each.

That was fine on TV, where no further payment was required. But I can see why the publishers might have been nervous about conveying any sense that a book, or two books, contained just 50% of a story. These were novelisations that children bought for themselves, often from their own pocket money. It would not do to be seen to exploit that. 

One other thing to note about Doctor Who and the Space War before we dig into the book that Terrance wrote: it is the last novelisation to change the title of the story as used on screen.

Now, Frontier in Space is perhaps not the most thrilling title, and a frontier is steeped in old-fashioned ideas of empire. But the story, notably, doesn’t feature a space war — it is threatened but avoided. As we’ve seen, previous changes to the titles used on TV emphasised the names of the monsters in the story. So why not call this “The Ogron Plot” or something similar?

In the handwritten list of forthcoming novelisations included on p. 92 of Keith Miller’s The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol. 2, and written a little before August 1975, the story is listed as “The Frontier in Space” — apart from the “the”, as on screen. It had changed by the following year, when it was listed as “The Space War” in the July 1976 issue of fanzine TARDIS.

By then, there was news of a big-budget science-fiction movie being filmed in the UK for release the following year. For example, the London Evening News reported on 24 March 1976 that,

“one of the most expensive films ever to be made in Britain begins shooting this week — at a cost of more than £7 million. … The title: Star Wars. The theme: a war between three worlds [sic].” (p. 5.)

The same paper had another story on the film on 19 April (p. 15), and I’ve found accounts in other papers. There was, to some degree, hype. 

And note that detail in the new report about the war between three worlds. That’s also the plot of Frontier in Space, with a conflict between planets Earth and Draconia being plotted from the planet of the Ogrons. Did the publishers, or the canny Malcolm Hulke, make that connection? If so, was the title and style of cover art used on Doctor Who and the Space War an attempt to cash in on Star Wars — more than a year before its UK release?

It would be very Doctor Who to pinch ideas from the future...

*

In Part II, I dig deeper into what Terrance wrote in Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks. There is swearing, fleshy parts that spit milky liquids, and also an orgy…

The Disappearing Future, edited by George Hay

“A thirteen-course brain banquet” boasts the back cover of this 160-page anthology from 1970, comprising six short stories and seven essays — four of the latter republished from elsewhere. 

It is, promises the cover, a “symposium of speculation.” That’s in line with editor George Hay’s firmly held view of the valae of science-fiction as a kind of blueprint for tomorrow — or, as the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia puts it, 

“that sf provides an armamentarium of mostly technological tools for coping with the future, and that a – or even the – main role of sf was to educate us for that future”.

This was the basis on which Hay helped to establish the Science Fiction Foundation, originally at North East London Polytechnic, and the journal Foundation. (The Encyclopaedia says that this was in 1972, but on 10 June 1971 Hay sent a letter on SFF-headed paper to Barry Letts, producer of Doctor Who…)

A second blurb on the inside first page here suggests that this is exactly what the book will contain: “versions of the future we are now storing up for ourselves” sourced from “practising scientists and well-known sf authors”. Hay — I’m sure he wrote this, for all he refers to himself in the third person — goes on that,

“we have recently begun to to criminally destroy our ancient life-giving relationship with external nature … The Disappearing Future insists that Mother Earth is urgently giving us, her children, the red alert, and that we have very little time left in which to take even evasion action. The decision is ours.” (p. 1)

That sense of urgency, that sense of the whole Earth as environment and as nurturing mother, is surely an example of the impact of the “Earthrise” photograph taken in December 1968 by the crew of Apollo 8, seeing the world as a whole, single organism, as explored in Robert Poole’s book Earthrise. So it’s odd that, having brought up Mother Earth and imminent environmental catastrophe on p. 1 of this anthology, pretty much nothing further is said on the subject.

In his foreword, Hay tells us that the theme on which he submissions was, “the future, as the writer saw it, as derived from present events and trends”. He wanted a mixture of fiction and non-fiction to allow ideas to be explored in detail without holding up the action (or requiring clunky exposition). But he also says that this book is a response to the “paucity” of so many other tired and cliched anthologies of SF, not least in the shadow of the Moon landing,

“Now that space has finally cracked open, now that we know we can make it” (p. 9)

If not the whole-Earth environment, then, the promise is of a practical, useful ideas about what happens next, how we prepare for and embrace the future. Something to build on and with — or, if you will, a foundation…

But what follows is nothing of the sort. 

The anthology opens with “The First Forecast of the Future” by Professor IF Clarke, Head of the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde — and, er, not a scientist. It’s a short history of predictions, mostly focused on the anonymously written The Reign of George VII, 1900-1925 (1763), with references to Ini by Julian von Voss (1810) and the work of Jane Webb (he doesn’t mention the title but he means The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827)).

Well, yes all right, it’s not really about what the future might hold, but gives us some context for how long we’ve been thinking this way. Fine.

Next up is “The Show Must Go On” by David I Masson, in which a character called Piitasan — his name taken, I think, from the marxist Karl Peterson — wanders through urban streets full of squalor and violence. He shares his views on the economics of labour as he steps over a “meths drinker”, ignores a rape in progress, refers to “spastics” and “mongols” and things then don’t end well for him. There’s some sort of analogy in this nasty mess, something a bit Clockwork Orange but not as fedt or insightful. It just left me feeling grubby.

Ophthalmologist and media boffin Kit Pedler’s “Deux Ex Machina?” was apparently first published in the Listener. It’s a bit dry and technical, positing some ideas about the future of robots, or “biological mimics” / “biomims” as he calls them, because why use the perfectly good and understood “android”? He doesn’t use “Cyberman” either; his biography mentions his work on Doomwatch with “Jerry” Davis, but not that they met on Doctor Who. 

Then we get “Political Science — Mark II” by John W Campbell, which Hay’s foreword suggests has been published elsewhere but doesn’t say where. This is more editorial than essay. Campbell starts by laying out his own scientific credentials:

“I have over the east few years brought up the subject of psi, and the facts of dowsing, and protested that scientists refused to apply the scientific method of open-minded experiments — and have been lectured by many kindly people on the subject of how little I understood” (p. 32). 

Yes, the “facts” of dowsing. But this is just the preliminary to his main point, which is to object to the vote taken by members of the National Academy of Sciences, decided 200 to 10, against making “scientific studies of genetic differences of intelligence among racial groups” (p. 33). Campbell thinks people voted out of fear of embarrassing results — which suggests he already felt he knew what those results would be. As with psi and dowsing, he seems to see the value of science as validating what he thinks or would like to be true. And it’s not really about the future at all.

“The Thorns of Barevi” by Anne McCaffrey is the sole contribution from a woman. It is told from the perspective of Cristen Bjornsen, a young woman from Denver who was abducted by alien Catteni and spent some time as a slave on the planet Barevi. In the nine months she has been there, it has been warm like summer on Earth, but the story begins with her worried that this will change as she only has the one outfit.

“Her sleeveless, single piece tunic was made of an indestructible material but it would not be very warm in cold weather. The scooped neckline was indecently low and the skirt ended mid-way on her long thighs.” (p. 35)

She then eats a red-coloured pear, with,

“its succulent juices dribbling down her chin on to her tanned breasts” (p. 36)

This is especially odd as the story is told in the third person from Cristen’s own perspective; this is how she sees herself.

Then she meets an alien Catteni who is humanoid, and “almost good looking” as he has an aristocratic nose and not the “thick, blubbery lips” of others of his kind. “She’d heard rumours…” she begins to tell us while admiring this handsome specimen, but we’re not told what part of his anatomy she has heard rumours about (p. 38). It’s not exactly subtle in the racial coding.

They run away from some other Catteni, taking refuge in a “flitter”. The handsome alien then says he hasn’t had a Terran before and, as if out of curiosity, rapes her — Cristen attempting but failing to resist his advances. 

“Her struggles only seemed to aid his efforts and just as she was certain she would be split apart, a surging emotion far more powerful and overwhelming replaced fear and pain” (p. 43).

Afterwards, they talk a bit and then, on more friendly terms, have sex again. End of story. I’m not really sure what this has to say about the future; I don’t really want to think what it says about the author.

Next up is “Sleep, Dreams and Computers" by Dr Christopher Evans, originally published in the Sunday Times Colour Magazine. He dismisses three theories about why we dream — to rest, to enter some realm of the fantastic, to be free of societal pressures and rules (the reason dreams are of use in psychoanalysis). Then he puts his own theory, based on a computer going offline from the exterior world to back up and sort data. It’s a compelling idea but not really about what the future holds.

Christopher Priest’s short story “Double Consummation” is based on a fun reversal where, in the Britain of the future, the social norm is not to have lasting or monogamous relationships. A man who works in politics is surprised to be dumped by one of his girlfriends, then finds out his other girlfriend has not taken her pills, is now pregnant and wants to get married — which he fears will end his career. It’s neatly set up and the ending works well, but it’s yet another story about sex without consent (in this case, concerning contraception). 

“The Temple Scientists” by Edward J Mishan — LSE staff member and author of The Cost of Economic Growth — muses on the differences between SF and FS, the latter his term for “future society” stories. I didn’t feel there was much of an argument here, really, more technicality than thesis. But it’s the only contribution, apart from George Hay’s foreword, to address other contributions: Pedler’s essay is “stimulating and thoughtful (and occasionally cynical)”, Masson’s short story “barely qualifies as SF” and Chapdelaln’s — which we’ve not got to yet! — is “perhaps too clever”.

“The Sunset Perspective” by Michael Moorcock is another outing for his achingly trendy / sexy time agent Jerry Cornelius, a character introduced in 1965 novel The Final Programme. Here Jerry struts around in “brown velvet bellbottoms” (p. 79) and “black car coat” (p. 80), while tackling an incursion in time that makes people revert to old, superstitious ways. For example, at one point he finds Miss Brunner — also from that first novel — busy burying a goat.

“He watched as she mumbled to herself, hitching her Biba miniskirt up to her thighs and urinating on the new mound of each” (p. 81)

I do not claim to be an expert on the logistics of miniskirts, but wouldn’t it already be around her thighs? Jerry then tries to help this victim of the time incursion in a manner thematically consist with other stories in this collection:

“He flung himself on top of Miss Brunner and began to molest her” (p. 87)

The story, set in the future, is peppered with headlines and fragments of news from the New York Times of 16 October 1969 and the November 1969 edition of Flying Review International, which I think was meant to convey a connection between the then-now and the future. Some 55 years later, it does not have quite the same effect, but gives an indication of exactly when this was written.

“Future Recall” by James Blish is an essay that largely refutes Hay’s whole thesis that science-fiction can and does prepare us for the future. I liked this a lot: it is engagingly argued and full of top facts — that the term “gas giant” is Blish’s own coinage (p. 102). Blish, whose novels I have long enjoyed, is full of shrewd insight. For example, he speaks of a vogue for mysticism in science at the time he was writing.

“When astronomers only a few years ago discovered the strange celestial objects called pulsars, the first explanation they suggested and published was that they might be navigation beacons for an interstellar civilisation. Had pulsars been discovered in 1935, a scientist here and there might have hoped that that was what they’d turn out to be (they didn’t), but he’d never dare to say so aloud.” (p. 103)

This is followed by “Someday You’ll Be Rich!” by Perry A Chapdelaine, about a PhD cyberneurologist who tries various different schemes to make money, and comes up with a means of rapidly churning out long strings of text using up every combination of keys on a typewriter, so that he can claim copyright on all stories as yet to be written. It’s a bit over-cooked and over-long, but striking to read now in the age of interminable techbro lifehacks and AI.

In “About Five Thousand One Hundred and Seventy Five Words” by Samuel R Delaney, originally published in Extrapolation (ed. Thomas D Clareson), the author presents a brilliant, original view of science-fiction based on the way meaning emerges incrementally as we read each word at a time. Every new word conditions what has come before, he says. If we’re introduced to a science-fiction object or idea — a thing that we know is invented — that shapes our sense of everything else in the story, even if it is part of our recognised world. It’s a really compelling idea, engagingly argued and great fun; that perfect mix of clever and funny and boggling. Hay admits in his foreword that it is “somewhat off-course” from the remit of the book; I rather wish more of the book was like this one.

Finally, “Welcome to Wesbloc/Wesbloc” by Anthony Haden-Guest is a report by the teaching machine Merlin:Merlin in the future city of Ecumenopolis, the gag largely being that many things in the future are named after things from the past — one computer called Orwell, another Lenny Bruce. But it ends with the teaching machine looking backward to “now”, so we get more contemporary headlines and fragments of real news, at the time a connection to the present, but in retrospect a weird snapshot of a historical moment. 

All in all, it’s a very odd collection that doesn’t really deliver on what Hay says in his blurb and foreword that he set out to do. It’s too open, too lacking in discipline, and far too often too nasty. Nerds, get over yourselves. 

Yet it has provided a blueprint for the future. Samuel R Delaney’s piece has got me thinking hard about the way meaning is constructed by the precise deployment of words. That has already changed the way I am reading Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks. I think it will shape how I read and how I write from now.

Vortex #202 - Bret Vyon Lives!

The new issue of Big Finish's free magazine Vortex includes a feature on the forthcoming audio boxset Space Security Service - Bret Vyon Lives!, on which I was producer and wrote one instalment: The Man Inside.

The feature by Kenny Smith includes an interview with me and fellow writers David Llewellyn and James Kettle.

Space Security Service - Bret Vyon Lives! is released in February 2026 but available to pre-order now.