Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, by Hulke, features the villainous Master and also introduces us to companion Jo Grant (even though this was not her debut story on TV). Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks, by Dicks, pits Jo and the Doctor against — well, guess.
I think you can see that these follow-up novelisations were written pretty quickly. The phrase, “You’re right, of course,” is used two-thirds of the way down page 11 of Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks and then again at the top of page 12, which is just the sort of thing a copy editor ought to catch if missed by the author.
Later, we’re told three times within about a page of text (pp. 101-102) that the futuristic trikes are specially designed to race across a landscape strewn with rubble — for all that this is a neat explanation of why there happens to be a trike conveniently parked out in the wilderness. When the Doctor sees this vehicle,
“He jumped into the driver’s seat” (p. 102).
On to, surely, when it’s a trike. Or there’s the awkward alliteration and repeated “recent” here:
“I have been studying the recent reports of resistance activity. It has reached a peak in recent weeks.” (p. 14)
That’s a shame because Terrance, who spent five years in advertising before his time on Doctor Who, had a particular gift for the pithy, vivid phrase. There are plenty of those here, too. The Controller of Earth Sector One sums up the Third Doctor as the,
“tall lean man with the shock of white hair” (p. 99).
Or there’s the poetic moment in describing,
“the Time Vortex, that mysterious void where Time and Space are one” (p. 39).
Generally, this is a cracking prose version of a cracking TV story in which gorillas (p. 9) battle guerrillas (p. 17) at the behest of the Doctor’s arch-enemies. While the Daleks, on screen, don’t appear until the closing seconds of Episode One — that is, a quarter of the way into the story — Terrance brings them in after just seven pages, and there’s a big illustration, too. The book promises and delivers.
It also includes the ending excised from the TV version, in which the Doctor and Jo appear to their earlier selves, the first half of which otherwise doesn’t make much sense. The trike sequence is a great deal more thrilling than on screen, with Ogrons pursuing on their own trikes and the Doctor driving up the side of a house and doing cool skids and jumps, in the way you imagine a chase when you’re a child.
I’m amused by 22nd-century guerrilla Anat not having seen a telephone before but knowing how it works (p. 63) — I’m not sure my own children would — and Boaz having read “history books” (p. 73) so that he knows all about servants. The mechanics of future, Dalek-conquered Earth also include gruel for most humans but “real wine in a real china cup” for the Controller (p. 12). Who grows the grapes and presses wine in the Dalek Empire? Who makes fancy cups? (I have wanged on before about the economics of the Daleks.)
Other added details include the mechanics of changing future history. At the end of the novelisation, the Doctor explains that,
“I was able to intervene and put history back on its proper tracks.”
And Jo responds:
“I know … because you’re a Time Lord.” (p.138)
That, I think, is tying this up with what happens at the end of the TV story Invasion of the Dinosaurs, which had just finished broadcast when this book came out.
Then there’s the way this novelisation ties in with one of Terrance’s later TV stories. We’re told that the Daleks’ Mind Analysis Machine — with capitals — has previously left its human subjects,
“shambling idiots with all their intelligence drained from them” (p. 100).
The Doctor is badly hurt by his experience, though recovers after,
“a little food and wine, and a chance to rest” (p. 109).
Terrance’s next book, Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen, also has stuff about the dangers of tampering with people’s minds, all almost a decade before his TV story The Five Doctors features the dreaded Mind Probe. The implication is that Terrance — who helped created the evil, hypnotic Master — found mind control rather disturbing.
I think this novelisation also helps reveal something that Terrance really liked about the Master’s debut TV story. In Episode Three of Terror of the Autons (up on iPlayer), Captain Yates bravely commandeers’ the Brigadier’s Austin Maxi and drives it straight into an Auton. The creature goes flying, somersaulting down a hill — and then, all in the same shot, gets back up and starts climbing.
It’s a brilliant stunt and Terrance has something like it happen in three of his first four books: on p. 139 of Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, again on p. 77 of Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks (in this case, the Brigadier driving into an Ogron) and then on p. 75 of the fourth book he wrote, Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons.
In each case, the vehicle being driven is referred to as a “jeep”. The word “jeep” is used a lot in TV Doctor Who overseen by Terrance as script editor, from Episode 7 of The Invasion (1968) — the first story on which he received a screen credit — to Part Four of Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974); Terrance’s successor, Robert Holmes, began shadowing him from the next story.
(“Jeep” is also used in Part Four of The Curse of Fenric (1989) and in Doomsday (2006); I wonder if there’s a correlation between script editors / show runners who don’t drive, just as Terrance didn’t.)
Of course, what’s seen on screen in these stories and what would be used by the British Army or its UNIT spin-off is not the distinctive US Army general purpose vehicle but instead the British Land-Rover, inspired by the American jeep but a notably different car. Someone must have pointed this out to Terrance or the Target editorial team at some point between the manuscript of Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons being delivered around the end of May 1974 and then typeset, and the publication of the next book Terrance wrote, Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, published the following March.
In the latter, the “Brigadier’s Land-Rover” first appears on p. 24 and then throughout. But it is “jeep” throughout the novelisation of Terror of the Autons. Terrance surely didn’t correct the error in one book and then return to the wrong name in his next, so this misidentification of the Brigadier’s make of car is further evidence to support my wheeze that Terrance wrote the novelisation of Terror first and then wrote Giant Robot, though they were published the other way round.
More of this stuff to come as I write up my forthcoming biography of Terrance Dicks, due for publication some time next year. In the meantime, you might like my biography of David Whitaker, the author of the very first Doctor Who novelisation.
No comments:
Post a Comment