Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, by Terrance Dicks — II

PART TWO

Following part one, this post concludes a great plunge into the novelisation Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster by Terrance Dicks, first published on 15 January 1976. Here, I’ll focus on what Terrance added to the TV story Terror of the Zygons written by Robert Banks Stewart and script edited by Robert Holmes.

The opening scene of the TV story is set on an oil rig at sea. Munro speaks by radio to an unseen, unheard person called Willie — pronounced “Wullie” — asking him to send over some haggis as the chef “doesnae ken” about it. This subtly conveys to the viewer that we are off the coast of Scotland. 

There’s then a disturbing, electronic sound and the oil rig is destroyed by something unseen — though the title of the novelisation is a bit of a giveaway. 

(Nine year-old Lady Vader helpfully summarised the story for me this morning: “The Loch Ness Monster isn’t good or bad, it’s just a big puppy and they’ve hidden it’s treat.”)

So, what does Terrance do with this? He tells us in his first sentence that this is the oil rig Bonnie Prince Charlie, though it’s not named on screen until much later in the story, where it’s just “Prince Charlie”. In his first draft, Terrance called it the Ben Nevis, which is another rig destroyed in the story, suggesting that the simple effort to underline exactly where we are at the start of the story took more effort than we might expect. 

Jock Munro, his first name Terrance’s coinage, is drinking “rum-laced cocoa” and his internal monologue is a little spicy:

“Grinning to himself, he waited for Willie to demand how the blankety-blank he was supposed to find haggis for twenty-odd men at a few hours’ notice.” (p. 7)

Strong liquor and swearing in a book for children, and we’re only on the first page! (Reading this as a child, I thought blankety-blank was a reference to the TV game show, but Blankety-Blank didn’t air until 1979).

Terrance gives Munro — and the reader — a glimpse of the titular monster, “something huge, incredible” at this early point. But he doesn’t explain the term “RT”, used several times here and later. Perhaps these were more common in the mid-1970s, or it was felt that given the setting is the radio room of an oil rig we’d know that RT means “radio transmitter”. Still, it’s unusual for Terrance not to spell it out.

We cut from this monstrous attack to the arrival of “the blue police box” — definite article — with its “strange, wheezing, groaning sound”, the phrase Terrance coined in his first novelisation (where it’s “a strange wheezing and groaning”) and would reuse many times after this. 

In fact, several phrases here are repeated from other books. “That mysterious traveller in Time and Space known only as ‘the Doctor’” (p. 9) is word-for-word the opening sentence of The Doctor Who Monster Book (although there “the Doctor” is in bold). Here, as there, Terrance explains the acronym TARDIS (“dimensions” plural). This stuff is the essential lore of Doctor Who and Terrance repeating it in different books etched it into readers’s brains.

Harry Sullivan, a companion Terrance created, is — as per his Doctor Who and the Giant Robot — “handsome” with a “square jaw, frank blue eyes and curly hair.” We’re told Harry is “conventionally dressed in blazer and flannels” and is “like the hero of an old-fashioned adventure story”. It’s the same method Terrance used in the Monster Book to pithily describe the four Doctors: facial appearance, clothes, the kind of heroics in evidence. 

By contrast, Sarah here is simply a “slim, attractive girl” (p. 9). Still, when Harry’s medical skills and Sarah’s journalistic prowess are useful to the plot, Terrance tells us about the mechanics of doorstepping local people as Sarah gathers her “harvest of gossip” (p. 20). He had first-hand experience of this kind of thing, having once had a job going door-to-door to ask people their habits in shampoo and dog food. 

Reference is made briefly to the “many strange things” Sarah and Harry have seen in their adventures in Time and Space (with capitals), but Terrance doesn’t cite examples. When we’re told the Doctor has been summoned urgently back to Earth, there’s no asterisk and footnote saying “See Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen”, the adventure immediately preceding this one and the novelisation that Terrance wrote next. As we’ve seen, Doctor Who and the Giant Robot includes a footnote citing the then not-yet published Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. The fact that the same thing doesn’t happen here may mean a novelisation of Revenge of the Cyberman hadn’t been scheduled when Terrance wrote this.

Terrance also says that the Doctor gave the Brigadier the “recall device” — not “space-time telegraph” as in Revenge of the Cybermen — “just before this latest trip” in the TARDIS. That implies that the gift was given not long prior to the end of TV story Robot, ie during the events of that story. In Terrance’s later novelisation Doctor Who and the Face of Evil (1978), we learn that during the events of Robot the newly regenerated Doctor takes a quick jaunt in the TARDIS to a planet in the far future where he attempts to fix the broken computer of a survey team from Earth. I’m rather taken by the idea of the TARDIS landing back in the laboratory at UNIT HQ late one night, only for the Doctor to be caught by the Brigadier who takes him to task for sneaking off in the midst of a crisis.

But I can’t see the Fourth Doctor conceding, or giving the Brigadier this kind of electronic leash. It’s surely more likely that the recall device was a gift from the Third Doctor, prior to the events of Planet of the Spiders. We saw in the novelisation of The Three Doctors that, despite being granted his freedom to travel in time and space again, the Third Doctor felt tied to his “home” at UNIT. Maybe he and the Brigadier swapped gifts just before heading out for the night together to watch a magic show and erotic dancer.

I didn’t mention it in my post on Doctor Who and the Planet of Spiders, but that novelisation suggests its own scene not included on TV. We’re told at the end that the Brigadier has been to the meditation centre to help with the mopping-up, alongside Sarah and former UNIT captain Mike Yates. The Brig and Yates don’t share a scene in the TV story, but I like the idea that they had a chance to clear the air, Mike earning some redemption because he helped to thwart the spiders. Perhaps they shared one last pint. 

The loss of Captain Yates from UNIT led, in the next TV story, to the promotion of Sergeant Benton. As he explains to Sarah in Part Two of Robot:

“That’s promotion, Miss, to WO1. … Warrant Officer. You see, technically speaking the Brig should have a major and a captain under him. The UNIT budget won’t run to it so they settled on promoting me.”

This may have been a late addition as it was missed in the closing credits, where he’s still credited as “Sergeant Benton”. But the promotion was picked up in Doctor Who books, and he’s “Warrant Officer Benton” in The Doctor Who Annual 1976 (published September 1975) and again here, on p. 47 of Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster.

But he’s not “Warrant Officer Benton” in the TV version of this story: he’s “Mr Benton” in dialogue, and “RSM Benton” in the credits — that is, a regimental sergeant major. This isn’t wrong; “RSM is the most senior rank held by a Warrant Officer,” clever Paul Scoones explained to me on Bluesky. I suspect the hand of director Douglas Camfield in this maximised promotion; a stickler for military matters, he also cast his friend John Levene in the role of Corporal Benton way back in The Invasion.

There’s an unnamed corporal played by Bernard G High in Terror of the Zygons who, in Part Two, features in a fun scene where he responds “Sir” to everything the Brigadier says. Terrance gives this “super-efficient” and “invaluable” corporal a name — and its one we’ve seen before. In Terrance’s previous book, Doctor Who — The Three Doctors, Corporal Palmer is the first to respond to the attack on UNIT HQ by antimatter jelly.

Palmer is also named on screen in the TV version of The Three Doctors, where (unlike the book) his first sight of the jellies is met with the words “Holy Moses!” He was played by Denys Palmer, who surely gave the character his name. But this character was at least in part the creation of Terrance Dicks. 

We can deduce this from surviving paperwork included on the Blu-ray release of the story. On 9 November 1972, just after production began on The Three Doctors, Terrance sent writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin copies of the scripts, which he had had to revise at the last minute. He explained the various changes he’d made.

“Firstly because of a contractual mixup Frazer Hines became suddenly unavailable and we had to substitute Benton for the Jamie role.”

It seems that as originally written, the Second Doctor and companion Jamie McCrimmon turned up in the TARDIS in Part One, to the surprise of the Third Doctor and Jo. In the rewrite and as broadcast, the Third Doctor and Jo are accompanied by Benton, who has entered the TARDIS for the very first time. This change meant that Benton couldn’t also be, as I think originally written, outside UNIT HQ when it vanishes at the end of Part Two. His astonished reaction was duly assigned to a subordinate, ie the corporal whose more-prominent role in the story meant he now deserved a name. 

I think Terrance must have recalled this as he novelised The Three Doctors and then reused Palmer here, in his very next novelisation. Palmer’s reappearance is, then, a result of the order in which Terrance happened to write these books — and I’ve only spotted the connection by reading them in the same sequence. 

The efficient, kindly Palmer later offers to fetch Sarah some tea, even if he has to make it himself (p. 58); observing that she’s now alone, the Zygons choose that moment to attack. That neatly explains why there aren’t any soldiers closer at hand when Sarah calls for help, an example of Terrance script editing a story a good year after he had left that job on Doctor Who.

A cup of tea being a plot point is also very Terrance Dicks. An innocuous moment in which Benton offers to share a bar of chocolate with Sarah while they’re waiting for news is as per the TV version but Terrance adds three whole meals to the story. Chapter 1 ends with the Doctor informed of suspicious deaths and “briskly” asking “where do we start” with the investigation — as if eager to get moving. On the next page, we’re told that he and his friends enjoy “a large and filling lunch first” (p. 18). 

They also enjoy a proper Scottish breakfast, with Terrance telling us how our heroes take their porridge.

“The Doctor, in true Highland fashion, ate his with just a sprinkle of salt, saying something about having acquired a taste for it during the Jacobite rebellion” (p. 79).

With Terrance taking ever more professional interest in the history of Doctor Who, that may well be a conscious reference to the events of 1966 TV story The Highlanders. But there is also something a bit Ian Fleming / James Bond (of which Terrance was a fan) about telling us that our hero eats the local delicacy in the most authentic manner.

Then, having told us about lunch and breakfast, we get a reference to dinner. After his near-death ordeal with the Skarasen, the Doctor says he wants “a hot bath … then a very large meal, and a nice long sleep” (p. 75).

It’s odd to think of the Doctor soaking in the bath — when he takes a shower in Spearhead from Space, it’s part of a daring escape. Dinner, bath and sleep are all so... ordinary, especially for this particular Doctor. However, we soon learn that a long sleep to the Doctor is just three or four hours and next morning he bangs on doors early to rouse his friends. We’re told that,

“Sarah groaned as she struggled into her clothes” (p. 79). 

Again, it’s an odd mental image. Is she — like the bathing Doctor — naked? Perhaps, at some point between doorstepping villagers and being locked in a decompression chamber, she popped back to the TARDIS for a nightie. Perhaps that always-useful Corporal Palmer was dispatched to source a toothbrush and clean knickers.

There are other odd things of this sort that result from Terrance filling gaps between scenes or explaining details. We’re told twice — on p. 24 and p. 90 — where the Caber got his name. On p. 40, we’re blithely informed mid-paragraph that Sister Lamont is really a Zygon rather than it being a big revelation, and in the next paragraph reference is made to Broton, a page before we’re introduced to him as leader of the Zygons.

The sense is of a book written and revised in some haste, and a light-touch editorial process. Yet many additions are skilful and great fun. Terrance makes Broton a much richer, more memorable character than we see on screen. On TV, John Woodnutt gives the human-form Duke of Forgill a delicious, withering disdain, but the Zygon-form Broton is a more generic monster, saved by amazing costume design and the choice to speak in a whisper. Terrance, brilliantly, makes Broton a vain show-off, bothered when Harry doesn’t “show the proper terrified reaction” (p. 53), and explaining a lengthy bit of exposition as his “need to tell someone of his cleverness” (p. 105).

The other Zygons don’t fare quite so well. On screen, the design makes each Zygon visually distinctive and the dialogue gives them individual names. Terrance uses one of these, “Madra” (p. 61) but omits “Odda” — the Zygon who takes the form of Sister Lamont, named by the Duke-form Broton towards the end of Part Three. Otherwise, little in the way of character is revealed among these Zygon underlings. It’s not in the TV story either, but Terrance often takes care to ensure that groups of people (or aliens) are not uniform, adding bespoke desires, feelings and fears.

See, for example, what he does with the Doctor, with a pause to acknowledge that our hero “hated” having to blow up the Zygon spaceship and its crew for all he understood the need (p. 117). There’s a nice character moment for the Brigadier when he explains the best means of searching for the Doctor out on Tulloch Moor, which sums up his whole outlook: “System and method, Miss Smith” (p. 74). The fastidious, old-fashioned Brigadier also expresses distaste for the slang term “bug” (p. 63).

Even peripheral characters benefit from this kind of thing. We get a vivid sense of the Fourth International Energy Conference in London — whose delegates we don’t see on screen — when Terrance tells us they “muttered and grumbled over their Government champagne” (p. 120).

(“Government” is more usually lower case when employed as an adjective. “Champagne” is a proper noun so should have a capital letter. For some reason, this novelisation also puts “land-rover” in lower case when it’s a brand name. I wonder who subbed this. Can it have been the same person who oversaw “Land-Rover”, capitals, in both Doctor Who and the Giant Robot and Doctor Who — The Three Doctors?)

There are further examples of well-chosen, evocative vocabulary. On screen, the Duke of Forgill drives a Range Rover. Here, it’s a “muddy shooting brake” (p. 11), conjuring something more old-fashioned and characterful. The interior of the Zygon spaceship is all “fibrous” with “protuberances”, “nodules” and “tangles … of roots and vines”, vividly conveying the impression before Terrance puts it more plainly: 

“Somehow the place looked as if it had been grown rather than made” (p. 41).

The terms he feels need explanation are also interesting. Broton says on screen that the Zygons live off the lactic fluid produced by the Skarasen, as per on-screen dialogue, to which Terrance adds, “so the monster was also a kind of milk cow” (p. 43). But a page before this, Broton uses the term “regenerated” and it isn’t explained — because Doctor Who readers could by now be expected to know.

Some additions add to the horror and suspense. The Zygon signalling device doesn’t just stick to the Doctor’s hand as on TV, put attaches itself with tentacles that “made weals in the flesh of his wrist” (p. 71), so the bathing, naked Doctor is also badly wounded. By explaining the workings of a decompression chamber and how long a human can survive without air, Terrance underlines the threat facing the Doctor and Sarah (pp. 39-40). Angus McRanald spends his last moments alive “emptying ashtrays” in the pub, a mundane detail that I think makes his sudden death all the more unexpected and brutal. (It also means that this novelisation for children features smoking as well as boozing and nakedness.)

Terrance further dials ups the suspense when the Doctor and his friends visit Forgill Castle for the first time by describing it in gothic terms as, 

“like that place in Transylvania where Frankenstein carried out his dreadful experiments and Count Dracula flitted around the battlements at sunset” (p. 79).

A pedant might object that the novel Frankenstein is not set in Transylvania, but Terrance is surely evoking the horror films made by Universal which gleefully teamed up Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula. He clearly knows the source material well enough to use “Frankenstein” here as the name of the one conducting the experiments — ie the doctor, not his creation. This reference may also be an echo of conversations with Doctor Who script editor Robert Holmes around the time Terrance was writing this novelisation, about a new TV story drawing from Frankenstein, which became The Brain of Morbius.

Our hypothetical pedant (not me, guv) might also object to the moment here in which Sarah spots the fake Harry Sullivan — really a Zygon — because his forehead is not grazed (p. 59), which isn’t in the TV version and doesn’t make sense if the form of fake-Harry is drawn live from real-Harry’s body-print. Much more logical is what happens next, when Sarah knows that this Harry is a wrong ‘un because his manners are lacking (p. 60). The effect of these additions is positive, giving Sarah some agency while being attacked, though Terrance underlines that for all she defends herself, she doesn’t mean “Harry” to fall to his doom. As with the Doctor, she takes no pleasure in her deadly enemy’s death.

In the TV version, the Zygon is killed by this fall. Terrance adds a touch of irony: the would-be killer is skewered on its own pitchfork. When the dead Zygon is then teleported away, the pitchfork protruding from it doesn’t go too and clatters to the ground. It’s such a vivid image, I thought I’d really seen it and was a bit surprised to find, on watching the new Blu-ray the other night, that this doesn’t happen on screen.

Likewise, I love Terrance’s vivid description of the Zygon spaceship concealed in the nook under a cliff-face “like a crab under rock” (p. 103), a suitably aquatic analogy, for all it’s nothing like the TV version where the ship lands in the midst of an open quarry. In fact, it’s so different to what we see on screen, it suggests that Terrance didn’t get to see footage from or a rough cut of these TV episodes, even after completing his first draft of the book. If so, he’d have surely corrected the description to align with what we see on screen — not least because the explosion of the spaceship was so effectively achieved. 

Likewise, Terrance would surely have delighted in the joke ad-libbed by Nicholas Courtney when the Brigadier addresses the Prime Minister as “madam”. In the novelisation, it is “Sir” (p. 110), as per the script. Part of that joke is that this “present-day” Doctor Who was set a little in the future and Courtney thought Shirley Williams might have a chance in the coming election. 

But Terrance has his own eye on the near future. Almost as an aside, we’re told of,

“The development of Man’s technology to the point where the moon [lower case] had already been reached, with interplanetary travel an inevitable next step” (p. 10).

That’s surely foreshadowing UNIT’s next TV adventure, The Android Invasion, broadcast a month before this book was published, which involves a crewed mission to Jupiter. Given this effort to tie up UNIT continuity, I note that Terrance could not acknowledge in this novelisation something that became clear only in retrospect. 

Due to other commitments, Nicholas Courtney was unable to appear as the Brigadier in The Android Invasion as planned. The story features Benton and Harry Sullivan, but it was the last on-screen appearance of both. The Brigadier wouldn’t be back on screen until 1983, by which time we would learn he had left UNIT long behind him. If Terrance hadn’t novelised Terror of the Zygons quite so close to production, he’d have known that this turned out to be the Brigadier’s last story for years, and the end of an era Terrance had helped usher in.

With that in mind, there’s something poignant about the ending of this book. As on TV, the Brigadier and Harry each decline another trip in the TARDIS. Here, the Brigadier recalls his own previous trip — and we get the only footnote in the book directing us to another novelisation, which is the one Terrance wrote most recently. Sarah takes up the Doctor’s offer and off they both go. No one says goodbye or notes the fateful moment.

Terrance adds a little to what we see on screen. The TV version gives the last word to the Duke of Forgill, to which the Brigadier responds with a quizzical look. In the novelisation, that is followed by him wryly wondering where the Doctor and Sarah will end up next. They’re off to their next adventure and all the ones beyond that — but without him.

*

These long, long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks take time and effort, so I am busking. Throw some coins in the hat and I can keep going.

Next time: the first of the Mounties books, The Great March West, and Terrance’s first original novel — which features an unexpected appearance by the Doctor...