Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, by Terrance Dicks

The four-part Doctor Who story Pyramids of Mars was originally broadcast in October and November 1975. It was then repeated, in a one-hour omnibus version, on Saturday, 27 November 1976, where it was watched by 13.7 million people — the largest audience ever achieved by Doctor Who to that point. 

(Since then, just five episodes have beaten that record, all in autumn 1979 when ITV was affected by industrial action.)

The novelisation was published simultaneously in paperback and hardback three weeks later on 16 December, so the repeat would have been fresh in the minds of readers who received this book for Christmas. They would have been conscious of quite how much Terrance added to the version on TV — much more than in his previous novelisations. I’ll dig into what he adds and why presently.

The cover is, I think, one of the best by Chris Achilleos. The focus is the monster — or robot Mummy — standing impassively upright, its legs breaking out of the lower edge of the frame. The closest reference photograph I’ve been able to find crops the lower half of the Mummy, so Achilleos may have worked from a separate photograph to provide more of the body.

Photo care of the Black Archive

ETA, Paul MC Smith sourced this, care of the tragicalhistorytour.com:

The Mummy is flanked by portraits of the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, their expressions suggesting a deadly serious book.

The slightly stippled portrait of the Doctor is similar in composition to Achilleos’ previous illustrations of this incarnation, the hat on his head with brim angled upwards to the right, one loop of scarf under his chin. But the glowering countenance is unlike the beaming, even laughing, versions we’ve seen before. Whereas in the reference photograph the Doctor is staring away into space, here he glowers at the Mummy.

Photo care of the Black Archive

Sarah also looks in towards the Mummy, but points her rifle over its shoulder, pointing away to something out of frame. 

Photo care of the Black Archive

She is slightly angled compared to the reference photograph; this, the rifle and overlap all add dynamism to the whole, so the cover is at once serious and exciting. A white oblong arranged vertically behind these three characters helps connect them — separate photographs made into one entwined image, a cruciform with the vertical Mummy. 

But without that oblong, I think there’s a triangular structure to the arrangement of the three characters, fitting for a story about pyramids. Was that the original plan, and then Achilleos thought it looked wrong within the wider rectangular frame? If so, did he add the oblong to square the whole thing off?

The sepia tinge suggests an old-fashioned photograph and helps to convey a story set in the past (in 1911). The radiating orange background is suggestive of the heat of Egypt, or perhaps the landscape of Mars, though at best the connection is subtle. The bright, white heart of this energy is slightly off centre, to the right of the Mummy’s head, again creating a more dynamic, three-dimensional effect. The title and border are deep purple, adding to the sombre tone. 

Inside the book, there’s the usual list of titles “Also available in the Target series”, which for the first time includes Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, published 18 months previously. As discussed before, I think the late addition of that book to the schedule meant it got missed from these lists. But here it is at last, alongside The Making of Doctor Who, which was published the same day as this novelisation. 

A third book by Terrance also published on this day, The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, isn’t listed. I think this and some other things suggest that the book was a late commission, written after this novelisation. I shall dig into that in a subsequent post.

By now, there were so many Doctor Who titles from Target that some were left out to fit the list on one page. I wonder how decisions were made as to what to omit. Among those missing are Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders by Terrance, and Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon and Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion both by Malcolm Hulke, who I’m sure would have taken the omission gracefully.

Then we get into the book itself. As usual for Terrance, the novel comprises 12 chapters but here there are also a prologue and epilogue, both of them additions to what is seen on TV. The prologue draws from a single line of dialogue in Part Two:

DOCTOR WHO:

He destroyed his own planet, Phaester Osiris, and left a trail of havoc across half the galaxy. Horus and the rest of the Osirans must have finally cornered him on Earth. 

From this, we get three pages of epic legend, the kind of big mythic stuff more commonly seen in and around 21st century Doctor Who. As we get into Chapter 1, Terrance continues to embellish what we see on screen.

Marcus Scarman, for example, wears a suit and public school tie despite the heat in Egypt. This, we’re told, is because,

“The year was 1911, and Englishmen abroad were expected to maintain certain standards.” (p. 10)

In fact, stage directions in the camera script for Part One tell us Scarman wears a “Wykehamist tie” — that is, in the brown, navy and red of Winchester College. But Terrance makes it a point of character and context, and refers to the tie again on p. 45, where it help us to recognise Professor Scarman when he reappears in the story. 

In the TV version, Scarman is the first person for millennia to enter a particular “blind pyramid” somewhere in the region of the real-life Saqqara. Indeed, Part One begins with stock footage of the distinctively shaped stepped pyramid there, which my late friend John J Johnston identified in his comprehensive article on the story:

“Establishing shots of the Fifth Dynasty pyramids of Abusir and archaeological excavations at Saqqara … hailing from the documentary The Catacombs of Sakkara, first transmitted under BBC2’s Chronicle strand on 11 April 1970, which focused on the work at this most ancient of sites by W B Emery, then Edwards Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology at University College London.” John J Johnston, “Excavating a Television Classic: Pyramids of Mars (1975)”, Mummy Stories 

In the book, it’s a “Black Pyramid” (p. 10) and in “Sekkara” (p. 57), the spelling as per the camera script — where the smaller typeface suggests that the place name was a late addition, perhaps after the production team had secured the stock footage.

We learn from Terrance of the “long years” Scarman has spent tracking down clues to the location of this hidden pyramid, “many” fellow archaeologists having scoffed at him. We’re also told how Scarman bribed his local guide Ahmad,

“whose love of gold had finally overcome his fear” (p. 10).

This, we’re then told, is Ahmad’s,

“fear that he was blaspheming the ancient gods of his people” (p. 11).

There’s some local colour, with “half-naked Egyptian labourers squatted patiently by the tethered camels” (p. 10), a pen portrait akin to the stock footage to establish setting. I don’t think this is any worse than, say, in The Daemons (1971), when the stock archetypes of an English village know the pagan legends related to the local barrow and are variously frightened or scornful.

We get a bit more detail in Chapter 2, where Terrance provides a potted history of another Egyptian, Ibrahim Namin, “High Priest of the Cult of the Black Pyramid” (p. 19). Namin has served the cult his whole life, the latest in a line of ancestors in the same role, stretching back millennia. Having heard of Scarman’s expedition to the Black Pyramid, Namin and his fellow priests descend on the site and kill Ahmad and all the labourers — a detail not shared on screen.

At this point, Namin and his cult are loyal to the other “Great Ones” and keen to keep Sutekh securely imprisoned in the pyramid for all time. They know the consequences of failure:

“In the Secret Writings of his cult it was laid down that the Pyramid must never be broken into or the most terrible disaster would overwhelm the world” (p. 20).

It is only on entering the desecrated pyramid that Namin is taken over by Sutekh, who softly explains that there has been a misunderstanding and promises that Namin and his priests will be “exalted” for loyal service — to Sutekh. Terrance tells this from Namin’s perspective, where this all seems very reasonable. He therefore switches sides.

We then learn how Namin has loyally followed Sutekh’s instructions, packing up artefacts from the pyramid and shipping them in crates first to Cairo and then England. He also posed as Scarman’s servant to obtain the professor’s luggage from a hotel in Cairo.

This extra detail makes for an unusually long chapter for a novelisation by Terrance, comprising 15 pages. With the lore-filled prologue, there’s a lot of added material in this first section of the book. We don’t reach the moment that marks the end of Part One on TV until p. 44 — more than a third of the way through the book. Based on his previous novelisations, it’s unusual for Terrance to embellish what happened on screen to such an extent. Why did he feel the need here?

Well, Terrance addressed this very issue when he was the guest of the newly formed Doctor Who Appreciation Society at an event held on 29 April 1976 — when he was surely still writing this book:

“Mr Dicks explained that in books more explanations are necessary and any loose ends, which would pass by on television, must be tied up for the printed page. He quoted the forthcoming adaptation of Pyramids of Mars — which he himself is penning — as an example. In it the whole [backstory] about the character of the Egyptian Namin and his relevance to the plot will be explained. Explanations are taboo for television drama.” (JJ Bentham, “Terrance Dicks report — part one”, TARDIS vol. 1 no. 8 (July 1976), p. 17.)

Pyramids of Mars is a great, atmospheric story on TV, propelled by forward momentum. It works on visuals and feel. But in adapting it for the page, Terrance found — I think more than with most other Doctor Who stories — that its shortcomings in logic were rather exposed.

Why, when people have got into his prison in Egypt, does Sutekh send them and a whole load of artefacts back to England? It’s not explained on screen or in the book. 

(I can suggest an explanation: Sutekh needs them to set up various technical means to free him, but doesn’t want to do that in Egypt where local people know his name; better to do it well out of sight, and he’s just possessed a man who owns a private estate where such operations can be carried out in secret.)

Why does Sutekh appear in the TARDIS at the beginning of the story, not least given that — according to the Doctor — “nothing can enter” the ship? Is Sutekh even aware he has done so, given he doesn’t speak of it later? 

(A few people have been in touch to suggest this is the TARDIS overlapping with Sutekh trapped in the Vortex at the end of the story. That would make a neat bootstrap paradox but is, I think, complicated by the trip to 1980 midway through the story; it is a closed loop then, then it isn’t, then it is. Yes, we can marry up that idea of trapped Sutekh invading the TARDIS with his return to the series in 2024, but my focus here is on what Terrance did and didn’t address in his novelisation.)

Why do both the Doctor and Sarah Jane don outfits suitable for 1911 before they know that’s where they’re headed? Even the on-screen explanation makes little sense: Sarah is wearing an Edwardian dress but the Doctor says it belonged to his companion Victoria, who was from 1866. It looks great — and the Doctor’s first ever frock coat became a signature look for this and later Doctors. But the logic is at fault.

Something similar is going on when Sutekh sends the possessed Marcus Scarman to the house in England and he arrives as a “black-robed figure” with a “shining globe” for a head (p. 43); a “burnished globe” in the script. On screen, I think the idea was to up the stakes at the end Part One by having the nominal villain, Ibrahim Namin, killed off by an even worse, alien monster. It wouldn’t be quite so scary, or linger in the minds of viewers for a week, if this were Marcus Scarman from the off. On the page, without the cliffhanger, it is odd.

Then there are the remarkable coincidences all through the story. Why do events take place on the site of the future UNIT HQ — last seen in Robot almost two years previously? Or there’s Laurence Scarman having conveniently “invented the radio telescope forty years early” (p. 39). In fact, it’s more like 20 years early, with Karl Guthe Janke’s array dating from 1932. (Presumably, out of shot behind Laurence’s cottage, there’s a large set up of dipoles and other technical gubbins for this contraption to work.)

How convenient that the Osirans broadcast a warning in a cipher of English, enabling the Doctor to translate it by assuming that the most commonly occurring letter is “E” (p. 41). (It’s the most commonly occurring letter in other languages, too, such as French, German, Italian and Spanish, too, but “A” is more common in Icelandic, Polish, Portuguese and Turkish. In Finnish, the most frequently occurring letters are “A”, “I”, “N” and “T” and then “E”. My point is that no thought has been given to the Osirans writing in, say, Egyptian hieratic or demotic, let alone hieroglyphs. The logistics of translation are very different to decoding a cipher. 

The production team seem to have been aware of some of the contrivances here, as we can see from the Doctor’s response to a convenient hiding place in the Scarman house:

Again, the smaller typeface suggests a late addition, the nonsense perhaps picked up in rehearsal.

These are all issues of the TV story. The issue in a novelisation is how much to fix this stuff. The more you tinker, the more you alter the on-screen story or hold up the action — and it is then a less faithful translation of what occurred on screen. I think Terrance’s approach is the right one, adding some backstory to the beginning to give the whole thing some weight and history, and then breezing through the rest with relatively small fixes that don’t disturb the flow.

So, for example, we learn how Sarah happens to know, very conveniently, about the 740 gods listed on the walls of the tomb of Thutmose III (that is, the real-life KV34) — a relatively obscure bit of information with which I used to impress Egyptologists when the Dr worked at the Petrie Museum. Terrance tells us, twice, that Sarah knows this because she once researched Egyptology for an article in an educational magazine (p. 41 and p. 83). He also has the Doctor chuckle at this display of one-upmanship from Sarah — so it’s not just a fix, but reveals a fun side of their relationship, too.

Then there’s what Terrance does with the Doctor and Sarah being chased by slow, lumbering Mummies, which they could surely outrun. With Sarah, he simply hangs a lantern on the problem:

“Somehow it had got ahead of her” (p. 33).

With the Doctor, he increases the burden of carrying wounded Dr Warlock. On screen, Warlock is played by the relatively slight Peter Copley. Here,

“Warlock was a big heavy man, and with such a burden even the Doctor couldn’t move very fast” (p. 33).

Terrance sets this up earlier on, introducing Warlock as “a burly figure in country tweeds” who “shouldered his way” rudely into a room:

“Namin looked thoughtfully at the ruddy-faced balding figure in front of him. A typical English country gentleman, with all the unthinking arrogance of his kind.” (p. 22)

Making Warlock more physically powerful ups the tension, and makes it more difficult for the Doctor to carry him, but also Namin’s perspective of Warlock is revealing of character.

When the possessed Marcus Scarman confronts Warlock and asks him about the Doctor, Terrance adds a bit of explanation as to why Warlock doesn’t simply share what he knows with his old friend:

“I’d just been shot when I met him, so my memory’s a bit hazy” (p. 53).

Terrance is especially good at adding connections between these various characters. On screen, Warlock lives in the nearby village and “Professor Scarman is my oldest friend”. Here, Warlock is also a “good friend” to poacher Ernie Clements (p. 53), occasionally buying a rabbit or partridge from him. Ernie also lives in a cottage in the village (p. 82).

Clements’s first name isn’t used on screen but does appear in the script. Here, he’s got some pride, preferring to think of himself as a kind of unofficial gamekeeper rather than poacher (p. 49). He’s intelligent, too, working out the contours of the invisible barrier round the estate (p. 50). Like Harry Sullivan before him, he’s allowed to swear, with a single “ruddy” (p. 55).

Clements also knows “old Collins”, the servant at the house. We’re told Collins wears “the formal black clothes of an upper servant” (p. 21) — my italics — and has been in service all his life. Just before Collins is killed, we’re told he’s known Marcus Scarman since childhood (p. 26), a bit of human connection that makes us feel more of his death.

Terrance also explains Clements shooting a man in cold blood: initially feeling a “sudden surge of furious rage” at the murder he has witnessed, then,

“He was suddenly appalled by what he had done” (p. 58-59).

Our understanding of Clements adds to the effect of the poacher then being hunted — an irony Terrance doesn’t spell out but I think is implicit in the script. On screen, his predicament is played a little for laughs; here, he gets more respect.

Laurence Scarman doesn’t get these added biographical details, but doesn’t need them; he is perfectly written and played on TV. We learn a bit more about his family: his father was a big game hunter (p. 68), explaining why there are “several” guns on the property (p. 42). But Terrance makes Laurence’s death distinctly more horrible:

“With horror Laurence saw that his brother’s hands were black and charred. Their touch seemed to burn, he felt smoke rising from his jacket. ‘Marcus’, he choked, ‘your hands…’”

On screen, Laurence clearly says “Your hands” because they are hurting him; here, there’s maybe a sense that he’s concerned for his brother’s hands being in such a state. Then, on screen, we cut away while Marcus is holding Laurence’s shoulders. Terrance adds an extra gruesome touch, as Marcus,

“shifted his grip to Laurence’s throat” (p. 86).

There are several examples of this kind of addition to the horror. When Sutekh is seen in the TARDIS and the controls spark, Sarah wonders, “Was the TARDIS on fire?” (p. 16). When a Mummy traps its foot in one of Clements’s snares, it snarls (p. 49) — an odd response for a robot. Unlike on TV, there is a ferret in the cage in Clements’ hut (p. 83). Whereas events on TV take place in the daytime, night falls on p. 42. And when the Doctor enters the time-tunnel to Sutekh’s pyramid, he loses consciousness (p. 95), suggesting a more taxing, less instantaneous trip. 

When, possessed, the Doctor returns up the tunnel sitting “cross-legged like a Buddhist in meditation” (p. 103), whereas on TV he is standing, his eyes staring blindly upwards. On the next page, Terrance describes the Doctor as a “mindless puppet”, but he doesn’t go into further detail, whereas in previous novelisations he’d shown disquiet at stuff about mind control. Perhaps through over-use it had lost its horror.

The depiction of the Doctor is doing something new. The TV story begins with the Doctor brooding in the TARDIS; here, Terrance conveys this but notes how at odds it is with the Doctor’s “usually cheerful features” (p. 13). On TV, Laurence asks if his hunting rifle could be of use and the Doctor responds, “I never carry firearms.” Terrance extends that and makes it more emphatic:

“Certainly not… I never carry fire arms” (p. 41)

But he also has the Doctor ready to defend himself with a fallen branch as a club (p. 35), and has him speaking “practically” (ibid) and “impatiently” (p. 36), so he’s more brusque and potentially violent than normal. Perhaps that’s to be consistent with, as on screen, the Doctor’s cool response to the murder of Laurence Scarman. But it’s not the only odd thing. On screen, the Doctor knows about “sweaty gelignite”; here he explains how it's used in fishing (p. 83) — an odd thing for him to know. When Sarah makes a reference to the events of Death to the Daleks (1974), his response is terse:

“The Doctor was in no mood to discuss his adventures, particularly those which had taken place in other incarnations” (p. 110).

Yet there are signs that this is the same, jolly character as before. He chuckles at Sarah while searching for explosive, he calls Laurence “old chap” more than once (p. 67 and p. 69), and there’s an odd, repeated gag where, despite the crisis, he rushes off to recover his hat and scarf (p. 36 and p. 93). It’s oddly goofy behaviour, more like Terrance’s Robot than TV Pyramids of Mars.

More than anything, Terrance underlines that this is the same Doctor from previous other adventures when introducing him. First, there’s a variation on familiar words:

“Through the swirling chaos of the Space/Time Vortex, the strange continuum where Space and Time are one, there sped the incongruous shape of a square blue police box, light flashing on the top”. (p. 13)

I’d query the use of “square”, but the “swirling chaos” is interesting. On screen, the police box spins through a simple starfield. Did Terrance imagine swirling chaos would be more dramatic, or more in keeping with earlier depictions of the TARDIS in flight? Could he have meant to link this to Sutekh, god of chaos, as the TARDIS spins into his grasp?

The opening TARDIS scene on TV references UNIT, the Brigadier and Victoria, and Terrance concisely explains all this stuff, as well as what the TARDIS is (p. 14). He also includes a footnote to another of his own novelisations, Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster (p. 16).

Some continuity he cuts. There’s no mention of Sarah being from 1980, as on screen. At the end, the Doctor doesn’t mention having once been blamed for starting a fire in 1666. But notably, there’s a historic moment here. On p. 97, for the first time, Terrance refers in print to Gallifrey, planet of the Time Lords, giving — as per the TV story — its galactic coordinates and location in the “constellation of Kasterborous”. 

Terrance would go on to novelise all the 20th century TV stories set on Gallifrey — The Deadly Assassin (20 October 1977), The Invasion of Time (21 February 1980), Arc of Infinity (21 July 1983) and The Five Doctors (24 November 1983, and based on his own script). His later, original Doctor Who novels dig ever more into Time Lord mythology. For all he co-wrote The War Games and script edited The Three Doctors, this is where that starts, with him grappling with history and the Proper Nouns.

As on screen, Sutekh refers to the Time Lords as a “perfidious species” (p. 104) but Terrance adds a slight qualification from the Doctor:

“I come of the Time Lord race, but I renounced their society” (p. 97).

Technically, race isn’t the same thing as species; it’s a more cultural than biological distinction, and now an outmoded term. This, I think, plays into ideas later suggested in both The Deadly Assassin and The Invasion of Time, that there are many different peoples on Gallifrey, the Time Lords just one social order.

Sarah, meanwhile, is, “a slender, dark-haired girl” (p. 14) — not, as in earlier novelisations by Terrance, simply “dark”. As well as drawing on the magazine piece she wrote about Egyptology, she also recalls “childhood visits to the Science Museum” (p. 37) in London; there’s an analogy later,

“like a child on its first visit to the Science Museum” (p. 62),

as if this is a universal rite of passage. The Doctor doesn’t know how good a shot Sarah is (p. 88), but she seems highly competent, knowing to “cuddle” the rifle butt into her shoulder (p. 91) when readying her aim. She dismisses the Doctor’s mention of Madame Antoinette as “cheerful nonsense”, as if she doesn’t take his name-dropping too seriously. But there’s a touching moment, as he goes to face Sutekh, where they both acknowledge that he might not come back (p. 94).

Sadly, this is followed by the distracted, careless Sarah getting captured — explaining a detail that is missed from the TV serial, but not the most heroic moment. Likewise, when Sutekh appears in the TARDIS at the start, Sarah screams (p. 16).

Terrance describes this vision of Sutekh as “half human, half wolf or jackal” (p. 16), and later refers to,

“Sutekh’s true visage, the snarling, bestial jackal” (p. 115).

This isn’t quite right: the production team on the TV story seem to have made a point not to make Sutekh’s exposed head like that of an animal on Earth. While other Egyptian gods had heads like recognisable animals — jackal-headed Anubis, hippo-headed Tarawet, falcon-headed Horus — the strange, square-eared “Tythonian beast” of Sutekh/Set has not been matched to a real creature.

As on TV, Sutekh refers to the “main pyramid” on Mars (p. 105), suggesting a community of pyramids, plural — thus giving the story its title, even though we see only one. It’s a shame there’s no description here of what exactly is sitting up there on Mars: is it a relay station, or was it once a whole populated town?

Again, Terrance is good on small detail: he explains why the possessed Marcus thinks nothing of the police box in his house (p. 62), and when the Doctor reaches the tomb in Saqqara we’re told the tapestry is still smouldering (p. 95). But it’s odd that Terrance has the paralysed Sutekh able to turn his head and then swing back (p. 96), as if the only part of him fixed in place for eternity is his bum.

The TV scripts are peppered with rich vocabulary, but “stertorously” (p. 34) and “vitreous (p. 84) are both Terrance’s. Even so, some of the descriptions aren’t quite right. He speaks in one instance of the “machine-like persistence” of the Mummies (p. 67), which is hardly surprising given that we know they are robots. 

There’s something odd, too, when the Doctor races back to the TARDIS on Mars and Sarah has to shout “Wait for me!” and leap through the closing doors behind him (p. 117). Would he really leave her behind? On the same page, we’re told they “journey back to the Earth of nineteen eleven”. But the vital plot point of there being a distance of eight light minutes between Earth and Mars hinges on this all happening in the same relative time: the TARDIS can make the trip in an instant, so gets ahead of Sutekh. It suggests Terrance hadn’t understood the physics of the story. 

Likewise, on TV Sarah refers to “tribophysics”, the real science of friction. Terrance renders it “triobyphyics” (p. 107), which I think translates roughly as the physics of 3 and 2. Again, the suggestion is that he thought this was something invented for the TV story.

There’s some handwaving over the physics of the organ on which Namin plays in Marcus Scarman’s house, which we’re told is performed as a “kind of prayer, a tribute to his gods” (p. 16). On TV, the organ in the script means an organ in Dudley Simpson’s incidental music, giving a particular flavour to the extradiegetic sound. Here, the organ is clearly diegetic — heard by characters in the story. Sarah even hears it inside the TARDIS (p. 17), and it serves a purpose in masking the Doctor’s footsteps (p. 42). 

So is the organ used in summoning Sutekh, or making a link to the time-tunnel? Is it an ordinary organ, and particular kinds of music have this effect on the Vortex? Or has Ibrahim Namin specially built an organ with some kind of technical, physicsy qualities? Is that why he had to come to England? We are not told.

The significance of this organ is also uncertain. As usual, Terrance capitalises words of import: Mummy (p. 34), Casket (p. 65), Warhead and Phase One (both p. 89). But the room of the house with the organ in is both organ room (p. 118) and Organ room (p. 121).

Then we get to the end. As on TV, the Doctor traps Sutekh in the time tunnel, effectively weaponising time to age a god to death. A fire duly breaks out in the house, and history seems back on course. On TV, the Doctor cracks jokes and he and Sarah hurry back to the TARDIS. Here, we get a scene inside the TARDIS with Sarah mourning the loss of the people who have died and wondering if word will get out to the wider community. It’s a brilliant idea, continuing the themes of the TV story, as to whether she and the Doctor have left a footprint in history.

There’s then an epilogue, set “Later, much later” (p. 122) in which Sarah visits the offices of the local paper in the village near UNIT HQ to look up reports from the time. That qualification “much later” suggests this is not around the time of the next TV adventure, ie The Android Invasion, but some way beyond that. When this book was published, Sarah had just left the TARDIS for the last time on TV, so I imagine her dealing with her grief after being abandoned by following up on loose ends.

There are some lovely touches here. We learn Collins’s first name, Josiah, and get a sense of Sarah acknowledging what she accomplished in helping to save the world. We’re told she emerges into “summer sunshine”, so different from that fearful night back in 1911. It’s the opposite of the poem “Ozymandias”, which connects Ancient Egypt to the present day and suggests despair. Sarah gains peace and perspective.

And no doubt she looked in on her friends at UNIT. Perhaps they went for a nice meal.

*

Next time: the last of these long posts (for the time being), and the last of the three books by Terrance published on the same day in December 1976: The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book.

In the meantime, you might like my piece for the Doctor Who Figurine Collection on Sutkeh’s costume on the TV story Pyramids of Mars.  

Here’s a bit more by me on the TV story,  and an introduction I wrote for a screening. And here is the list of 236 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to long posts on many titles.

The Feast of Steven on YouTube

Another YouTube video, this time by my excellent friend Gav Rymill and based on a piece he, Rhys Williams and I put together for Doctor Who Magazine #559 in 2020. We tracked down clues to reproduce the studio sets of the missing Christmas Day 1965 episode The Feast of Steven.

That piece for DWM got a mention on Countdown. I also wrote about The Feast of Steven earlier this week for the Daily Telegraph.

Bernice Summerfield documentary

The team at Big Finish has posted a video on YouTube to celebrate 25 years of space-travelling archaeologist Bernice Summerfield. 

For this, on 26 June 2023 (which was 25 years to the day since they were recording their first audio production, Oh No It Isn't!) they convened Lisa Bowerman, Paul Cornell, James Goss, Gary Russell Nicholas Briggs and Jason Haigh-Ellery, plus - to represent younger fans - er, me.

I bought the tee-shirt especially.

The Feast of Steven in the Telegraph

I have a piece in today's edition of the Daily Telegraph, "Exterminated! The daft Dr Who festive special lost in time" (Arts, pp. 10-11). It's about the episode The Feast of Steven, broadcast 60 years ago on Thursday, and digs into why it was so odd.

The online version went live on Sunday under the title "The story of Doctor Who’s first-ever, and profoundly daft, Christmas special" (£).

Nine days ago, I had another piece in the same paper on writer Malcolm Hulke and the Sea Devils.

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

The first edition of The Making of Doctor Who, published by Piccolo in 1972, was credited — on the front cover — to Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks. The title page then reversed the names, suggesting an equity of credit. Yet, as we saw last time, I think Hulke did most if not all of the writing and took 75% of the royalties.

Four years later, Terrance produced a revised edition of the book for Target, published on 16 December 1976 alongside two wholly new books also by Terrance: the novelisation Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars and the largely non-fiction “magazine format” The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, illustrated by George Underwood. I’m going to conclude this series of long posts by looking at these three books in turn.

Of the three titles published on the same day, I think Terrance worked on The Making of Doctor Who first, and entirely without Hulke’s involvement. In early 1976, when keen young fans Paul Simpson and David J Howe visited Hulke at home to interview him, they knew more about the revised edition than he did:

“According to Mac at the time, he knew nothing of the Target Making of and was going to ask Terrance about it after we left!” — Paul Simpson to me, 8 December 2025.

There are two good reasons why the team at Target might not have wanted Hulke involved. First, he’d fallen out with them. On 15 September 1975, Hulke wrote to his friend Jean Tate to say he’d had to get his agent Harvey Unna to “bludgeon” the publisher over the copyedit on Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion. “Much of it no longer makes sense”, he said, while also admitting, 

“I don’t have a degree in grammar [and] what if the rewrite is better?” (Cited in Michael Herbert, Things Are Not Always What They Seem, p. 397)

Despite this admission that the copyedit might have improved the manuscript, and that it would take him an estimated 70 hours to re-edit it into something more like its original form, Hulke set out to do exactly that — doggedly sticking to a point of principle that I suspect didn’t win him many friends. He didn’t write for Target again until Doctor Who and the War Games in 1978 (published posthumously in 1979).

Secondly, in commissioning Terrance to revise The Making of Doctor Who, I think the team at Target — and perhaps Terrance himself — wanted to excise some of Hulke’s more, ahem, fanciful notions from the first edition. Out went the philosophy and the sermon. Out went the long “in-universe” entries on past adventures, which were more fiction than fact. The new version keeps the non-fiction history of the television series Doctor Who, summarising the plots of old stories in much more straightforward form, and retains the analysis of how one story was made. Everything else got cut. 

Excitingly, we know exactly what Terrance did on the book because he detailed it in a letter to Harvey Unna (his agent as well as Hulke’s) on 22 April 1976. He told Unna that the manuscript of the revised edition had been accepted by the publisher — meaning he’d completed the main bulk of the work on it, bar approving a copyedit. Then, “as requested”, he listed how it differed from the original: 

Chapter One — How it all began — Based on original, revised and updated with additional material from Radio Times [10th anniversary Doctor Who] Special (hereinafter RT) 

Chapter Two — The Daleks — Based on original, revised with additional RT material. 

Chapter Three — Who is Doctor Who — Partly based on original but mostly on my own Doctor Who Monster Book. 

Chapter Four — Tom Baker is Doctor Who — New chapter. 

Chapter Five — The First Three Doctors — As original, revised and updated. 

Chapter Six — Monsters Galore — new chapter. 

Chapter Seven — The men from UNIT — New chapter. 

Chapter Eight — The Good Companions — new chapter, based on RT. 

Chapter Nine — Some Regulars Old and New — new chapter, based on RT. 

Chapter Ten — The Adventures of Doctor Who — new chapter, RT material with additional material by me. 

Chapter Eleven — Inside a TV studio — as original, slightly revised. 

Chapter Twelve — Diary of a Production — new chapter. 

Chapter Thirteen — How to make a Monster — as original. 

Chapter Fourteen — A New Life for the Doctor — new chapter. 

Glossary of terms — as original. 

This breaks down into: Chapters from original book 3, Chapters wholly or partly based on original 4, Entirely new chapters 8. Total 15. (The original book’s royalties were divided 75% to Mac Hulke and 25% to myself.) We await the judgment of Solomon! Best wishes, Terrance

Unna seems to have been left to arbitrate the division of royalties from this new edition between his two clients. He decided to reverse the earlier split, so Terrance now got 75%. That was good news for Terrance as this version seems to have sold well, and was reprinted in 1980, 1984 and 1986. I have worked from my 1986 reprint, but Paul Simpson kindly shared photos of his first edition so that I could verify how little changed in the decade between them. 

On the front cover of mine, the Target logo on the top right is a black-on-white outline; on the original edition, the logo was in colour: concentric red, yellow and blue circles. Artist Chris Achilleos incorporated that version of the logo into his cover art, framing a portrait of Tom Baker’s head, hat and part of his scarf. On the first edition it’s clearly the Doctor’s head within the established Target logo; by 1986, that link between Doctor and publisher is perhaps not quite so explicit.

The artwork doesn’t convey, in any sense, the “making of” Doctor Who; the Doctor is not surrounded by cameras, lights or a PA with clipboard. I suspect the idea was to commission a piece of artwork that Target could also use to promote the Doctor Who titles more generally. They would have been able to do so because Achilleos was paid a flat fee for each commission, rather than royalties:

“It was £95 per cover artwork, you had to sign a job acceptance form which basically said, ‘you surrender the original artwork and whole copyright over to the publisher’” — Achilleos to a “shocked” Terrance Dicks, interviewed by Russell Cook for his piece, “Doctor Who — The Neverending Stories”, Geeky Monkey (July 2016), pp. 41-42.

The portrait of the Doctor is similar to but not the same as Achilleos’s work on both The Doctor Who Monster Book and Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, the hat at the same angle, the same single ring of scarf around the neck, suggesting he worked from the same reference photographs, or ones from the same shoot. Of the three, I think this is the most accurate likeness of Tom Baker, the face better illuminated than the rather shadowy Monster Book version. It feels like his definitive portrait.

ETA Paul MC Smith has shared the reference photos, which do seem to be from the same shoot; look at the tones of the stripes on the scarf, in the same position relative to his chin. The photo used for the cover of The Doctor Who Monster Book is also reproduced inside the book; the shoot may have been done especially.

The illustration for The Making of Doctor Who sits under a bright green version of the logo, the colour in contrast to rather than complementing the logo, as if to make the effect brighter.  Above the Doctor Who logo, the words “The Making of” are presented in — well, what exactly is that typeface? ETA: Paul MC Smith thinks it is Balloon Extra Bold. 

It gives the impression of having been written in marker pen by hand, the sort of typeface you’d use on a book about how to draw comics or caricatures. I suppose that’s the closest match to how-to-make-TV, but it’s not very Doctor Who of this era. Why not employ the usual, perfect Futura Condensed ExtraBold? 

The back-cover blurb is a good indicator of the different approaches taken by the Piccolo and Target editions. The 1972 Making of boasts 116 words:

What happened when Doctor Who was put on trial by the Time Lords? 

Why did he agree to help UNIT? 

This fascinating book tells you everything about the Doctor and his adventures, the points in Space and Time he has visited, the aliens and monsters he has defeated. 

One of the most famous and longest running BBC serials of all time, Doctor Who depends for its success on the enthusiasm of everyone working on the show. 

Come inside the TV studio and meet them, learn how the Daleks and the Cybermen came into being and how the special effects work. 

What happens in Doctor Who often seems impossible. But is it? Could it all be true?

Quiz questions about old continuity, interesting bits of in-universe history and then, only in the fourth paragraph, a reference to the behind-the-scenes business you’d expect in a making-of. It’s all a bit woolly about the remit of the book.

In the 1976 edition, the blurb was condensed to 81 words and is a lot more direct and focused:

Here it is... the story behind one of television's most successful, longest-running shows. Come with DOCTOR WHO on a trip through time... to the early days of the programme when it all began... meet actors, authors and television staff... see inside a TV studio and watch a production take shape... learn the secrets of the monsters... relive every ‘Doctor Who’ story since the beginning... follow the Doctor through four incarnations and — perhaps — begin to discover just WHO is DOCTOR WHO?

“Here it is,” is a brilliant gambit: this is the book you’ve been longing for. While the first edition offers to answer “fascinating” questions, the revised version is more immersive, promising to take the reader “on a trip through time” where “perhaps” we’ll get answers. Perhaps! It’s at once more direct and focused, and more thrilling and intriguing.

Opening the pages, the first thing to note is the indicia. In his letter to Harvey Unna, cited above, Terrance happily acknowledged the debt he owed to the Doctor Who special published by Radio Times in 1973. Here, there’s no mention of that publication but we’re told:

“Parts of the material in this new edition appeared in The Doctor Who Monster Book by Terrance Dicks, Target Books 1975”

It’s odd that the debt is acknowledged to Terrance’s own work for Target but not to stuff written by someone else for another publisher. Was that material used under licence, and paid for?

Then there’s the “Thanks” page. Jack Kine, Barry Letts, Sydney Newman and David Whitaker are listed in both versions of the Making of, though I think they were consulted solely for the first edition. But they were not the only people consulted for that first edition — Donald Wilson, Verity Lambert, Shaun Sutton and various cast members also contributed. In revising the book, Terrance didn’t take the opportunity to add names left out of the acknowledgements in that first version.

Charles Bowman, Catherine Dale and Lauraine Palmeri are credited only in the first edition. We know Palmeri worked through old scripts to produce the plot summaries from which Hulke wrote his in-universe synopses for the first edition. These were cut from the revised version — hence her acknowledgement was cut, too. That may suggest that whatever Bowman and Dale’s contributions might have been to the book, they were also cut from this new edition. If so, my best guess is that they helped Hulke with the philosophical chapter, “Could It All Be True?”

For the new edition, Terrance thanks then-current producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, who presumably provided the outlines of Doctor Who stories broadcast since the Radio Times special, as well as offering other such assistance. Terrance doesn’t seem to have interviewed them for this book.

Lastly, Terrance credits Jan Vincent-Rudzki and Stephen Payne. We’re not told in what capacity they assisted, but they were fans and founder members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, established just as Terrance wrote this book. Exactly one week after writing his letter to Harvey Unna about completing work on it, Terrance was the guest of DWAS at an event held at Westfield College in London. 

This is, I think, the first evidence of fans contributing to what Terrance was writing. In years to come, he borrowed VHS tapes of stories he was going to novelise, and he recommended particular fans to his publisher and other authors, as expertise to draw on. The corollary of that, I think, is that he couldn’t avoid hearing the views of some of these older fans, who objected to Terrance writing books aimed at 8-12 year-olds at the level of, er, 8-12 year-olds. 

(In that context, I once made Terrance laugh by quoting a favourite gag from The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4, in which he complains that this year’s Beano annual is a bit childish.)

Then, at last, we’re into the body of the book itself.

Terrance begins the revised edition of The Making of Doctor Who with the boggling fact that the series is 12 years old (p. 7), though it was 13 by the time the book was published. In mulling over Doctor Who’s “incredibly long life”, he notes that there are now schoolchildren “unable to remember a time when there wasn’t Doctor Who.” Today, some of those schoolchildren are drawing pensions.

He then recounts the creation of Doctor Who by Sydney Newman and Donald Wilson, who handed the project to producer Verity Lambert and “script editor” (sic) David Whitaker, who cast William Hartnell in the title role, commissioned Anthony Coburn to write the first story and Terry Nation to write the second — which featured things called Daleks and made the series a hit.

It’s pretty much as per Hulke’s version but Terrance corrected a few details. Hulke says Newman and Wilson devised Doctor Who in 1962; Terrance says, more accurately, that Newman was appointed Head of Drama at the BBC in 1962 (he didn’t start work there officially until 14 January 1963, and the first documented evidence of him thinking about a new teatime serial for children is from March that year).

Terrance also corrects a claim about where the word Dalek came from, quoting Terry Nation directly: 

“In a desperate attempt to satisfy [journalists], I told them I was inspired by the letters on a volume of an encyclopaedia. But the fact is that no encyclopaedia in print covers those letters, DAL-LEK. Anyone checking the facts could have found me out.” (p. 16)

There’s more from Nation on what makes the Daleks successful: “The Daleks must always be totally evil.” This isn’t in the original; Terrance interviewed Nation for the revised book.

Terrance is keen to note that,

“It would be a mistake to attribute all the success of Doctor Who to the Daleks” (p. 17).

Yet he acknowledges that they are inextricably linked to the Doctor, 

“Like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, like Chauvelin and the Scarlet Pimpernel” (ibid).

I wonder how many 8-12 year-olds understood the latter reference. Older readers might have recalled the BBC’s 10-part version of The Elusive Pimpernel shown on Sundays at teatime in 1969, or there was the Powell and Pressburger movie starring David Niven (1950) — or even the Carry on spoof, Don’t Lose Your Head (1967). But I think this is Terrance assuming his young readers had an interest in and knowledge of adventure fiction. Or it was a prompt for more assiduous readers to go and investigate.

Chapter 4, “Tom Baker is Doctor Who”, boasts all-new information. The biographical details must have come from Baker himself, though he’s not directly quoted. Of particular interest to me are the details Terrance reveals about himself, such as why he left the job of script editor on Doctor Who, reported in the third person:

“Terrance Dicks wanted to return to writing his own scripts rather than editing other people’s, and was now increasingly involved with Target’s Doctor Who paperback series” (p. 24).

So the novelisations were part of the reason he left. He also tells us about the “lengthy and intense” (p. 25) search that he and producer Barry Letts undertook to find a successor for Jon Pertwee. I knew that having been recommended Tom Baker and met with him, they assessed his acting by going to see The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (if memory serves, at the Odeon on Tottenham Court Road). But here we get what they saw in that film:

“Tom Baker played the wicked magician [Prince Koura], a man worn out by the exercise of his own evil powers. Each spell left him a little older and more exhausted, and he was searching desperately for the Fountain of Youth to renew his failing strength. The character was sympathetic as well as villainous, and it was impossible not to feel saddened at his eventual defeat.” (p. 26)

Terrance doesn’t make the connection himself, but this account chimes with what he later tells us about the origins of Robot, the story he wrote for Baker’s debut in the role of the Doctor. Having been commissioned for a story about a robot,

“The writer [ie Terrance himself] remembers a remark by a famous film critic, to the effect that in most monster films one ends up on the side of the monster. Like in King Kong—one of the earliest and best monsters of all. … So—a sympathetic robot then, not so much evil in itself, as misguided, or misused.” (p. 104)

Annoyingly for my purposes, Terrance doesn’t provide dates for when this story was conceived and developed, and there’s not much in the way of surviving paperwork to narrow it down. That means we don’t know if Terrance already had this sympathetic robot in mind when he went to see The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, where his thoughts about the story may have informed what he saw in Baker’s performance on the big screen. But perhaps he saw the film and then had the idea of a sympathetic villain, in which case in Robot Tom Baker battles a version of himself.

Another fun thing revealed here is mention of changes made by director Christopher Barry to make the location shoot more manageable:

“An extended sequence in which Sarah, in her car, is attacked by the Robot, is reluctantly dropped altogether” (p. 106)

I wonder if this chase sequence explains why, in the story, Sarah drives a gold-coloured Midget MG sports car (registration RMF 654L) — quite a fancy motor for a freelance magazine journalist.

There’s a further sense of roads not taken, too. The original version of The Making of Doctor Who covered the making of a story that was in production as the book was written, and which aired just before the book was published. This new edition covers a story that aired almost two years prior to publication. 

Terrance explains that Robot is of interest as Baker’s debut story. But surely the original plan had been to base the revised version of the Making of on a more recent production, also written by Terrance. The Brain of Morbius was in production in October 1975 and broadcast in January 1976 — but credited to the pseudonym “Robin Bland”. Terrance asked for his name to be taken off the story after it was extensively rewritten by script editor Robert Holmes. 

There’s no mention of this in the book, written in March / April; the chapter summarising all TV stories to date includes the broadcast version of Morbius, credited to Bland, with no sense of Terrance being involved. I can understand why Terrance wouldn’t cover what happened in a book like this — it’s not as fun and positive as the making of Robot, for all its a more interesting behind-the-scenes story. 

While Terrance cribs from the earlier edition, the Radio Times special and his own Monster Book, plenty here is new. For example, he tells us that there are three distinct types of Autons: basic Autons who resemble shop-window dummies, more sophisticated Replicas of real people and the spider-crab-octopus Nestene consciousness that is their true form (p. 37). He also recounts the career of UNIT’s Captain Mike Yates from Mike’s own perspective (pp. 42-43), and makes him a hero who gains full redemption following his wobble in Invasion of the Dinosaurs. 

Many of the details are consistent with Terrance’s novelisations: Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart (no middle name) has a “neatly trimmed moustache” (p. 40), as per Doctor Who and the Web of Fear. Terrance cuts the reference to the Brigadier’s ancestor who fought at Waterloo — a detail not gleaned from the TV series. Benton is a Warrant Officer (p. 43) as per Robot and Terrance’s novelisations but not Terror of the Zygons. Though the summary of stories tells us, definitively, that Susan “is the Doctor’s granddaughter” (p. 55), Terrance says earlier that,

“It is possible that this was simply a title of affection” (p. 45).

That doubt is as per the Monster Book.

What’s really striking here are the numerous small errors. Of course, when Terrance wrote this there weren’t the wealth of websites, reference books and magazines with which to check such details. But the result is that this is not the authoritative source it first appears, and the story being told isn’t quite right.

For example, Donald Wilson is credited as the BBC’s “Head of Series and Serials” (p. 8) and David Whitaker as “Script Editor” (p. 10), when they were Head of Serials and Story Editor respectively, in both cases, less powerful positions. Terrance used the job titles of their successors in 1976, who each wielded a bit more authority. [ETA: Paul Hayes points out that the post of Head of Series and Serials was created in 1981, with David Reid the first incumbent; I will check how Wilson is credited in the first edition.]

Both posts — Head of Serials and story editor — were introduced by Newman when he joined the BBC, so the two men were new in post in new ways of working, assigned to a new series. The sense from Terrance is rather of business as usual in the way telly is made.

He says the audience of the first episode of Doctor Who was a modest “two or three million” (p. 11), but that things changed with the start of the second serial “on 28 December 1963” (p. 12). Again, this isn’t quite right and presents a story that isn’t quite true. The second serial started a week earlier; on 28 December, in the second episode of the story, viewers got their first full sight of the Daleks, only glimpsed in the previous instalment — which was part of the draw.

The leap in viewing figures wasn’t quite as Terrance makes out. The first episode of Doctor Who was watched by twice what he suggests, 4.4 million viewers, and the numbers rose over the course of the first serial to 5.9, 6.9 and 6.4 million. Terrance doesn’t mention that the first episode’s figures were affected by events in the news that fateful weekend; the wider socio-political context isn’t really covered here.

In fact, the first two episodes of the Dalek story got the same figures as the end of the previous serial — 6.9 and 6.4 million. Then the numbers rose, reaching 10.4 million by the end of that first Dalek story. The series started more robustly than he suggests and there was a steady rise in figures, which continued after the Dalek serial. Terrance’s version is more legend than reality.

Other details aren’t quite right. Terrance recounts, as per the Radio Times special, Deborah Watling’s anecdote about acting with her father in Doctor Who, which conflates the two stories in which Jack appeared — one in which they filmed on location on a mountainside, another in which he was made up in “grey bread and white hair” (p. 51). Terrance also misquotes a line of dialogue on which he himself was script editor, adding an extra last word: 

“Chap with wings. Five rounds rapid, fire!” (p. 40).

Some of this stuff could have been picked up in the copy edit, such as where the recently published Doctor Who and the Space War being is missed from the list of adventures featuring the Master (p. 39), the mis-spelling of Carole Ann Ford’s name as “Carol Ann” (p. 45) or the unfortunate split of a word over two consecutive lines:

“Other travellers in the TARDIS included Vicki, survivor of a crashed spaceship, Steven, a spaceship pilot, Ben, a cock-

ney sailor, and Polly, a scientist’s secretary” (p. 45)

Likewise, there’s an unfortunate choice of word when describing the Sea Devils as being, “Aroused from their long hibernation” (p. 38). 

Less rudely suggestive but still the wrong use of a word is where Terrance describes the space station Nerva Beacon in Revenge of the Cybermen as “a kind of galactic lighthouse” (p. 92), as if its light or signals can be detected well beyond the Solar System, when its in orbit round Jupiter.

Even so, “lighthouse” is a good way of conveying what the space station does. He’s keen on straightforward analogies like this. We’re told a TV studio is as big as a football pitch, a director has “homework” and that TV cameras are Dalek-like, all on p. 98. In the glossary, he has a rather grand definition of a TV producer:

“He is as a general is to an army” (p. 127).

Is that how Terrance saw it, a decade later, when he became a producer himself? And what rank did he think was the equivalent of script editor?

My nitpicking went into overdrive in the long chapter of plot summaries from old adventures. The 1972 edition includes a list of credits per broadcast story, citing writer, director, producer and script editor. Here, Terrance only credits writers, effectively making them the primary creative input. In other chapters he mentions the roles of directors, producers and script editors, as well as heads of department and people in make-up and special effects, but the sense is that they’re all in service to the real authority. What a delightful fantasy, the writer as king.

Then there’s the detail of what these writers wrote. On p. 71 we’re told of The Evil of the Daleks that “ancient Edward Waterfield” has to “travel through time as Maxtible”, which isn’t what happens in the story at all, and of The Tomb of the Cybermen that people are “Evacuating the last remains of the now-extinct Cybermen” — the first word should be “excavating”.

It’s not just the facts; the varying levels of attention paid to different stories is odd, too. The synopsis for the four-episode The Underwater Menace is far longer and more detailed than the four sentences allotted to 12-episode epic The Daleks’ Master Plan, where Terrance doesn’t even mention villainous Mavic Chen. 

His summary of The Curse of Peladon likewise fails to mention that the Ice Warriors are in it, when he makes a point of mentioning returning monsters elsewhere — and lists the novelisations in which they appear. He makes no mention of Lethbridge-Stewart in the summary of The Web of Fear, whereas he had underlined the significance of that first encounter with the Doctor in his recent novelisation.

He’d also just novelised Planet of the Daleks, so its odd that the summary here is basically the version as per Radio Times, Terrance simply changing the reference to “Doctor Who” to “the Doctor” and adding that Jo is saved from the fungal disease by a friendly native. The summary here and in Radio Times refers to an “ice volcano”, not “icecano” as in the novelisation and Terry Nation’s Dalek Annual 1977. How odd, to synchronise novelisation and annual, then not be consistent in your very next book.

As per Radio Times, the summary here also suggests that the Doctor “falls gravely ill” after arriving on the planet Spiridon (p. 86). I wonder if that was how the story originally played out, perhaps with the Doctor spat on by the planet’s deadly vegetation before Terrance revised the ending of Frontier in Space and had the the Doctor gravely wounded there. Even so, it’s odd he didn’t amend the details here to fit the story as broadcast.

There are other indications of early drafts of TV stories. Here, the villain of The Hand of Fear does not die at the end but is left “to his solitary fate” (p. 96). His name is also given here as not Eldrad but “Eldred” — the name of a character in The Seeds of Death, on which Terrance was script editor (and uncredited writer). This is the last story summarised in the book; it had not entered production when Terrance delivered his manuscript.

That means he he doesn’t summarise the events of the next TV story, The Deadly Assassin, which was set on the Doctor’s home planet. The story had been broadcast by the time this book was published, so readers may have been surprised to find that The Making of Doctor Who does not mention “Gallifrey” by name. That name features in Terrance’s novelisation Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, published on the same day as this book. It’s the first time Terrance used “Gallifrey” in print, which I think is evidence that he wrote the novelisation after completing work on The Making of…

I know that picking over this stuff is pedantic, but today the writers of magazine articles, books and documentaries sweat over this stuff, knowing people will write in if we get it wrong (also, sometimes if we get it right). So I raise these small errors as indicative of another age, when the history of Doctor Who was more folk memory than documented history.

That goes hand in hand with the myth-making here. The chapter “Who is the Doctor?” repeats much of Terrance’s pithy account from The Doctor Who Monster Book, though he corrects the spelling of “crotchety” in reference to the First Doctor. But he also adds something to this lore.

First, perhaps by accident, he establishes what I think may be the first example of how we tend to refer to the Doctor’s different incarnations. It’s in marked contrast to previous forms of address. In The Doctor Who Monster Book, he speaks of “the Doctor”, the same person in each incarnation, just with a different face. In his novelisation Doctor Who — The Three Doctors, he refers to “Doctor One”, “Doctor Two” and “Doctor Three”, though sometimes the latter term is used for the Hartnell incarnation, and sometimes it means Pertwee.“The Changing Face of Doctor Who” on the first page of the early novelisations speak of, for example, “the fourth DOCTOR WHO”, the ordinal in lower case.

The original version of The Making of Doctor Who is almost the same, with chapters titled “THE FIRST DOCTOR WHO WAS WILLIAM HARTNELL” (p. 34) and “THE SECOND DOCTOR WHO WAS PATRICK TROUGHTON” (p. 36). On the contents page, these titles are given in title case rather than all caps: “The First Doctor Who Was William Hartnell”.

In the revised version, these two chapters and a piece on Jon Pertwee are all contained in one chapter, “The Three Doctors” (pp. 28-33), with subheadings in italicsed title case: “The First Doctor Who was William Hartnell”, etc. Terrance is consistent with the earlier version of the book, referring to the character in subheadings and the text as “Doctor Who” rather than “the Doctor”, though this was a point he picked up with other writers while script editor on the series. 

Correct that small detail, and this is the earliest example I’m aware of where the different incarnations are referred to as the First Doctor, Second Doctor, etc, the ordinal capitalised as part of a proper noun. It originates in the first edition of the Making of, but it’s the revised version that puts “First Doctor Who”, “Second Doctor Who” and “Third Doctor Who” into the same chapter, one after the other — and so makes a point of that being their proper names.

Then there’s what Terrance adds to the end of the chapter on “Who is the Doctor?”. I said of The Doctor Who Monster Book that he describes each incarnation in a way that makes them heroic and consistent — the same person just with a different face (even though they are different heights etc). Here, he underlines that idea.

Again, what Terrance says is following the lead set by Hulke, in this case in response to a quote from Shaun Sutton, the BBC’s then Head of Drama, referring to Doctor Who’s “quality of moral indignation”:

“Put in simpler terms, the Doctor always cares about people: he believes in good and fights evil. He is never cruel, and he never carries a gun or other weapon. He is often in battles, but he hates war” (p. 8).

Terrance takes this, adds it to his point about the character being consistent throughout his different incarnations, and produces magic:

“He is still [in his new incarnation] impulsive, idealistic, ready to risk his life for a worthy cause. He still hates tyranny and oppression, and anything that is anti-life. He never gives in, and he never gives up, however overwhelming the odds against him.

“The Doctor believes in good and fights evil. Though often caught up in violent situations, he is a man of peace. He is never cruel or cowardly.

“In fact, to put it simply, the Doctor is a hero. These days there aren’t so many of them around…” (p. 23).

Benjamin Cook dug into this a bit when he interviewed Terrance for Doctor Who Magazine #508, with Terrance’s friend Paul Cornell noting the similarity to Raymond Chandler’s description of a hero in his 1944 essay “The Simple Art of Murder”; go read it in full if you haven’t but I will quote the best-known line:

“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

Terrance certainly saw the link between his view of the Doctor and the idealised hero in that essay, quoting from Chandler directly to open his 1994 Doctor Who novel Blood Harvest and naming a 1997 novel Mean Streets. But did he know he was riffing on Chandler back in 1976?

I think back then he drew on something else, and the clue is in the words, “He never gives in, and he never gives up.”

That’s in line with something in Terrance’s second Mounties novel, Massacre in the Hills: “the soldier’s motto [of] Never explain, never complain” (p. 25), which he later echoed in his semi-autobiographical novel:

“Never explain, never complain, as Dad always said” (Prisoners of War (1990), p. 67).

The suggestion is that this is something Terrance heard while his father was a quartermaster-sergeant during the war. I have a piece in DWM’s new Unit Declassified special about how this and Terrance’s own time in National Service influenced his approach to the Doctor Who stories he worked on.

“Never complain, never explain” is a pretty well known phrase, with its own entry on Wikipedia detailing how it was used and then rejected as the public relations strategy of the royal family. It was originally attributed to the 19th century Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who in turn seems to have fashioned it from one of 11 “Maxims for a Statesman” (1873-76) written by Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College:

“Never quarrel, never explain, never hate, never fret, never fail.”

That’s the sentiment Terrance is expressing, isn’t it? So it’s a late Victorian idea of heroism, the kind he knew from the adventure stories he’d grown up on, such as Kim by Rudyard Kipling. There’s something, too, of Kipling’s poem “If—” (1895), which Terrance had a copy of on the door of the office where he wrote these books.

“If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…”

All of that, I think, Terrance made into “Never cruel or cowardly”, which has now become part of the fiction of the character, quoted by the Doctor on screen — the hero s/he wants to be, if not always attaining this ideal. 

The irony is that that’s in stark contrast to the way this book concludes. Whereas the first edition promised “The Shape of Things to Come”, as if setting out a blueprint of the future in the manner of HG Wells, here the final chapter is “A New Life for the Doctor”.

“At the time this book is being written, the Doctor seems to be loosening his connections with Earth, returning to his earlier role of the mysterious wanderer through the strange world of Space and Time” (p. 124).

The suggestion is that the Doctor will be less knowable and more of a mystery; yet this book sets out exactly who the Doctor is, the promise at the core of the character. Indeed, by detailing what we know about the Doctor in a book like this, and by setting a TV story on his home planet, the Doctor became much more known and less mysterious. 

Terrance concludes this book by saying that the ever-growing list of novelisations — as many as 27 so far! — are preserving Doctor Who for posterity, allowing readers to relive adventures or catch up on ones shown before they were born. This comes in the same heart-stopping paragraph that he reveals that the BBC wiped tapes of old programmes and many Doctor Who episodes “are gone for good” (p. 124), which I think adds a sense of urgency — read the books or lose Doctor Who.

This underlines something implicit in this version of the book. Much more than the original edition, it continually prompts readers to get more involved. In the summaries of stories, Terrance tells us where novelisations are available so we can search them out and read up on these adventures in more detail, tick them off, collect them. He mentions the “hundreds of children” who meet Tom Baker at “Target book-signing sessions” (p. 27), the implication being that we could do the same — if we haven’t already.

In his chapter on how monsters are made, Terrance recommends the book The Techniques of Special Effects in Television by Bernard Wilkie, suggesting we borrow it from the library. It’s a book for grown-ups, largely aimed at those already working within the industry, but Terrance challenges readers aged 8-12 to give it a go. 

In that context, The Making of Doctor Who as a whole is more than a book; it’s a challenge. Explore the fictional lore of Doctor Who. Explore the way the programme is made. Go out, be an active participant.

I know a load of people — me included — who did just that. In doing so, they made careers, forged friendships, met life partners, even had children. Terrance began this book by boggling that there were children who’d never known life without Doctor Who. Even more boggling is that, thanks to this book and what it started, there are children who would never have been born without Doctor Who…

Not bad going for a book.

*

Thanks so much to everyone for your support for these long posts about the books written by Terrance Dicks, whether by reading them, sharing them, responding and/or contributing to costs. But I’m afraid I have some exciting news for all readers.

I’m going to write two more long entries in this series, one on Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars and one on The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book. After that, I need to focus attention on some other biggish projects, not least the biography of Terrance. But I hope to be back for some longer posts again in future.

The Games of Kings, by Dorothy Dunnett

First published in 1961, this enormous historical novel - volume 1 in a whole enormous series - is set in the late 1540s and concerns the roguish but charismatic Francis Crawford of Lymond, the younger son of a landed Scottish family who may also be a cad, murderer and English spy. Or perhaps he is none of these things and is, in fact, a hero.

Among the friends he makes, and potentially compromises, is kindly blind girl Christian Stewart. But many of the characters here are real figures from history, and part of the fun is that we know much of what is coming, such as the plot to marry off Mary of Guise's young daughter - i.e. the later Mary Queen of Scots.

It is a long, long book and takes a while to kick into gear, much of the early part involving long, long scenes with characters going about their business with little - I felt - at stake. Yet as we get to know the characters and their world, we pick on up interconnections, misconceptions, and that things are not quite as straightforward as first presented. 

There are some thrilling moments - late on, Dunnett abruptly kills off one leading character, which completely took me by surprise. This is swiftly followed by Lymond being blamed for the death, when we know he is innocent, and making a break for it to pursue a fiendish spy. He ends up leading a single-handed assault on an English castle. Things get especially thrilling when, in the midst of the ensuing chaos, Lymond trains his last arrow on where the spy is hiding, hoping to catch a glimpse of and kill him, while someone else lines up a shot at Lymond. It is incredibly tense and exciting. But that only serves to underline how slow the book is in other places.

The ending involves a long, long trial. We have, by this time, made our own minds up about Lymond, so have to hang around waiting for characters to catch up. The vital piece of evidence is somewhere tantalisingly just out of reach, which adds some suspense. It's all good, just a bit long, long.

The audiobook is ably narrated by David Monteath - not, as I thought when I downloaded it without having my glasses on, my mate David Monteith. It's been very good company on some long drives recently. And this was a favourite book of Terrance Dicks - he even wrote Dorothy Dunnett a fan letter. I shall have more to say on how he first discovered this book and Dunnett, and what he saw in her writing.

Doctor Who UNIT Declassified

I have just received my copy of Doctor Who UNIT Declassified, a 114-page whopper from the makers of Doctor Who Magazine, timed to coincide with TV spin-off The War Between the Land and the Sea. 

Among the many treats, it boasts two things by me:

pp. 34-37 "The Private Life of Terrance Dicks"

Many of the classic UNIT stories were overseen by a writer and script editor who drew extensively on his own experience of National Service. 

pp. 76-79 "Chasing Cars"

UNIT was mobile right from the start, with a fleet of vehicles at its disposal. But which models of vehicle, exactly?

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, specially 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 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, independently: he had effectively deduced 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 Dotrice 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 — just 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 fallout 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 the fourth episode of Hancock’s, broadcast on 1 July 1967 with Vicky Carr singing “Here’s That Rainy Day” on the nightclub set. The tape was intercut with brief moments from an episode of Hancock called The Bowmans, originally broadcast in 1960 but — thinks Gary — taped from the repeat on 16 March 1966, with glimpses of Tony Hancock fronting a campaign of (fake) adverts for Grimsby Pilchards, which young women seem unable to resist. By chance, there was also more from Christopher Gable, this time giving a ballet performance with Maryon Lane to Debussy’s “Petite Suite” as part of an episode of Melodies for You. (Thanks to Gary for correcting what I originally posted here!)

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 that evening, too. 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, as 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, the excitement of the imminent hospital fete, and the prospect of new uniforms for staff. But most of the episode is about old faithful Albert (Howard Douglas) having been 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 excited 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.