- See my list of all 235 books written by Terrance Dicks
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A novelisation of the TV story Carnival of Monsters (1973), adapted from scripts written by Robert Holmes, had been on the Target schedule since at least August 1975, when it was planned for publication in June 1976 — as per the “Advance information on Doctor Who books in preparation” reproduced on p. 92 of The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol 2 by Keith Miller. That list doesn’t name the authors assigned to each book, but Terrance had novelised Holmes’s two previous TV stories, Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, so I suspect he was always attached to this one, as a matter of course.
So why was publication delayed by six months? My guess is that Gerry Davis was originally assigned to novelise his own TV story Revenge of the Cybermen (1975) but when the scripts were largely rewritten by Holmes — now script editor on the TV series — Davis declined to adapt them in that form and Terrance duly took over the book version, which had originally been scheduled for publication in April 1976 and was published on 20 May. Terrance then returned to the book I suspect he had always been assigned, Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks; this had been scheduled for May 1976 and was published on 22 July. The early schedule then listed Carnival of Monsters (Jun 76) and World’s End (Dalek Invasion of Earth) (Jul 76), but these were pushed back down the list. Instead, Terrance skipped ahead to Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, originally scheduled for Aug 76 and published on 19 August, and Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks, scheduled for Sep 76 and published 21 October.
I think we can explain this swappage on the basis that Target had decided to capitalise on the Christmas market by publishing three books on the same day in December: Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars (a novelisation of a recent TV story featuring the (then) current Doctor; a revised The Making of Doctor Who; and The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book. To accommodate this, they could have pushed the whole schedule of novelisations back, but I think they prioritised titles. They must have thought The Web of Fear, featuring the popular Yeti as well as the first appearance of regular character Lethbridge-Stewart, would sell better than Carnival of Monsters, and that the linked novelisations of Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks together would sell more copies than the solo World’s End, for all it also featured Daleks.
Given my estimated 7.5-month lead time, Terrance must have delivered a manuscript for Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters by the end of May 1976 for publication in January, so I think he wrote it after delivering his first draft of what was originally called Brainstorm and then became The Lambda Factor — his episode of the TV series Space: 1999.
He may well have completed work on it before beginning the late-commissioned The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book. That book surely explains the cover artwork on this novelisation: the TV story Carnival of Monsters briefly features a plesiosaurus but it is this real-life monster rather than the story’s original creation, the Drashigs, that is depicted by Chris Achilleos. That choice is odd given that the back-cover blurb describes it simply as a “prehistoric monster”, suggesting that the name plesiosaurus was not considered a sufficient draw for punters. So, was the cover commissioned with the idea that this illustration could also be used in the Dinosaur Book, along with the dinosaurs that had already featured on the covers of Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters and Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, in the same way that the successful The Doctor Who Monster Book had repurposed cover art?
The cover illustration is a more convincing, dynamic creature than the one seen in the TV story. In producing his striking artwork for the covers of these books, Achilleos had previously made use of reference material such as photographs and old comics. I suspect the same was true of the plesiosaurus and the SS Bernice seen here — though I’ve not been able to identify sources. He did not use reference from the TV story, or from the dinosaur books that George Underwood cribbed from for The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book (namely Album of Dinosaurs illustrated by Rod Ruth and the Ladybird book Dinosaurs illustrated by BH Robinson).
Digging around, I thought the films King Kong (1932) and Son of Kong (1933) may have been a source — either the “sea monster” battling Kong by a cave in the former, or the one that attacks a boat 1:04:19 into the latter on YouTube.
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| Screengrab from Son of Kong (1933) |
Yet when I put this frankly brilliant theory to Paul MC Smith, author of new book Screen Printed — The Definitive Guide to the Exciting Adventures Based on the Popular TV Serial and a skilled detective in tracing Achilleos’s sources, he was unconvinced. He shared with me a close-up of the creature from Son of Kong, which seems much frillier and bobblier than what Achilleos drew.
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| Production still from Son of Kong |
Paul thinks that, like with other covers for Doctor Who novelisations, Achilleos probably drew inspiration from old comics he had at hand, but we’ve not yet been able to identify which. Do get in touch if you have suggestions…
We don’t know the source Achilleos used for the SS Bernice either, but his stippled portrait of the Third Doctor is taken from a BBC photograph of Jon Pertwee stood back-to-back with Patrick Troughton in front of the police box prop on the set of the Doctor’s laboratory at UNIT HQ from The Three Doctors. We even know that this picture was taken in Studio 1 at TV Centre on Tuesday, 28 November 1972. I think Achilleos makes Pertwee look a bit darker-haired and younger than the photograph. It’s not quite the “shock” of white hair described in Terrance’s prose.
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| The lads |
The yellow border is a new innovation, and makes the whole cover a lot brighter and more striking. Achilleos used the same trick with a later novelisation, Doctor Who and the Ark in Space by Ian Marter, published in May the same year, and Mike Little seems to have appropriated the idea for his cover of Terrance’s Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius, published the following month. Perhaps yellow borders were a short-lived way of maintaining visual continuity in the range despite a change in cover artists, prompted by Achilleos leaving the range.
Let’s get into the book itself. Until now, I’ve largely worked from first-edition paperbacks but this time I reread a 1984 reprint I’ve owned since it was published. It begins by telling us that the Doctor has just recovered his ability to travel in “Time and space”, only the former capitalised, with a footnote referring to the events of the previous TV story, The Three Doctors, as already novelised by Terrance. The Doctor is now attempting to visit the planet Metebelis 3 — a name than meant little when the TV story was first broadcast but by the time of publication had new meaning because it had been seen in two further TV stories. The mention of it on the first page here foreshadows significant events to come for the Doctor in Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, also by Terrance, and Doctor Who and the Green Death by Malcolm Hulke — both already published.
As per the TV story, the Doctor tells us that on Metebelis 3, “the air was like wine”, which makes me wonder if the atmosphere there has narcotic properties and provides a natural high. Terrance adds some practical detail about the Doctor’s new-found abilities to pilot his spaceship:
“I don’t drive the TARDIS, I programme it” (p. 8).
The house style today would be “program” for a computer, and the TARDIS would probably be “she”; indeed, in Terrance’s next-but-one novelisation, Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos, he has the same incarnation of the Doctor refer to the TARDIS as “the old girl” (p. 139), not a phrase used in the script.
When the action moves to the planet Inter Minor, Terrance draws from a line of dialogue by Pletrac to explain the division between the two types of indigenous being. On screen, Pletrac refers to himself and his colleagues, “as members of the Official species”, distinct from the Functionaries. Strictly speaking, that word “species” suggests that while Officials and Functionaries are both grey-skinned humanoid creatures that look rather like one another, a pairing of one with the other cannot produce any offspring. On p. 10, Terrance reiterates that idea, telling us that the two groups, “had gradually evolved into two different [ie distinct] species”. Yet on the same page he also speaks of a more cultural kind of division, differentiating the minority “Official caste” from the “larger class” of Functionaries. This is muddling up kinds of categorisation, biological with ideological (see also Doctor Who’s tangled history of using the word “race”).
There’s an in-joke in the description of the Functionaries as looking “coarse, lumpy, unfinished”,
“As if they’d been slapped together out of rough clay by a rather poor sculptor” (p. 11).
On screen, the Officials are played by guest actors in close-up, while the Functionaries grunting about in the background are supporting artists / extras. The make-up and costume budget seem to have been applied accordingly.
As is typical with a script by Holmes, the dialogue sparkles, and a character’s manner of speaking and the vocabulary they use demonstrate their personality and worldview. Terrance largely keeps the best lines, but peppers the prose with telling details. For example, there’s this about Official Kalik:
“Like all officials, he had no inhibitions about stating the obvious” (p. 12).
He spells out some of the class-conscious stuff in the dialogue for younger readers who might miss the point:
"It did not occur to Kalik that it was not the rebellious Functionaries who were abnormal, but the conditions under which they had to live and work” (p. 15).
Or there’s what a closer look at the glamorous outfits worn by performers Vorg and Shirna reveals about their existence:
“Many neat darns and patches showed a desperate attempt to keep up appearances” (p. 12)
The analogies are simple and relatable: at the climax of Chapter 3, a giant hand picks up the TARDIS as though it were a box of matches (p. 35), and I particularly like the ravenous Drashigs crashing through the walls of the miniscope as easily as “opening a sardine can” (p. 73). That works especially well because it’s Jo who observes this — so it’s revealing of her perspective. But sometimes Terrance veers into a kind of authorial analogy. For example, when the TARDIS expands back to normal size, we’re told it reaches “the size of a Police Box — which is what it was, at least on the outside” (p. 62). Yet none of the characters who witness this moment would recognise a police box, let alone suspect it wasn’t what it appeared.
Stage directions in the script describe Vorg’s Miniscope device as “a large gaudy cylinder, a cross between a juke box and a samovar”. We come to learn it’s like a TV set, only one with miniaturised people inside performing live entertainments without realising they are on show. Terrance describes it as like a What the Butler Saw machine (p 13), and I wonder how many young readers when this was first published knew what that meant, let alone readers now. “The scope was a kind of peepshow,” he continues. I know Peepshow was the working title for the story, but that name suggests something risqué if not outright pornographic, and not really suitable for a family audience or young readers. That was surely why the title of the story was changed for broadcast. Indeed, Terrance also quotes the line of dialogue that inspired the title used on TV — “a whole Carnival of Monsters” (p. 22).
When the Doctor and Jo are apprehended on the SS Bernice, the Doctor explains himself away by making up a pulpy adventure story of the kind Terrance loved to read — and which no one believes (p. 26). It’s a rare example of Terrance adding to the source material. Largely, he transposes each 25-minute episode into three chapters, each chapter comprising about nine or 10 pages, so there’s a little over a minute of screen time per page.
That’s fine because the source is so rich. The characters from 1926 drop references to real-life musicals Lady Be Good and Chu Chin Chow, and there are self-reflexive in-jokes about the TV series Doctor Who, such as Jo’s observation that “[I] suppose we’re due for [another] monster bit any minute now.” There’s an extra joke of that kind in the book, when Vorg tries to justify the lurid entertainments in his peepshow by saying they’re, “not only amusing but educational too” (p. 42).
Terrance makes the analogy plain: once inside the workings of the miniscope,
“Jo felt like an ant that had wandered inside the back of a television set” (p. 51).
But this is a special kind of TV set, with an especially powerful effect on its audience: Terrance tells us that the miniscope produces something like a hypnotic effect, putting the viewer right in the midst of the action (p. 43).
There is, though a limit to the in-jokes. When the Doctor is all set to box with Lieutenant John Andrews (Ian Marter), there’s a reference on screen to real-life boxer John L Sullivan (1858-1918) — but Terrance resisted the urge to play on the fact that Marter had gone on to play a companion with the same surname, Harry Sullivan. Other writers of Doctor Who books would not have been so restrained!
Terrance’s additions are much more about character. When, in the script, Jo complains about her lot to the Doctor, Terrance gives her an extra sentence to underline that she’s generally more fun: “Sorry to be such a misery” (p. 60). As he’s done before, he shares practical tips he may have learned in National Service, like the need when landing from a height to bend the knees and roll like a parachutist (p. 89). Likewise, he adds the detail that Major Daly had, 10 years before the events here, “seen action on the Western Front” (p. 79), thus explaining his prowess using what Terrance specifies as a Thompson sub-machine gun with a magazine of .45 calibre bullets.
There are some other additions: we learn that the Miniscope includes Tellurians (humans), Ogrons, Drashigs and Cybermen — all as per the TV story — but also Ice Warriors. Still, it’s odd Ice Warriors and Cybermen would collapse when exposes to airless cold (p. 117).
He also modifies the way in which the Doctor survives his first encounter with the Drashigs. On TV, he uses his sonic screwdriver to ignite the marsh gas around the creatures. Here, on p. 66, he draws a flare pistol from his pocket instead. This has been mentioned only briefly before, on p. 48 and p. 50, when the Doctor takes it from a wall rack on the Bernice. Presumably, this was to avoid any suggestion of the Doctor using the sonic as a weapon, but was that imposed by someone else on Terrance or, since script editing the TV story, had he devised that rule for himself?
Terrance provides us with some insights into the Doctor’s scheming mind as he works to rescue Jo:
“The Doctor’s own behaviour had been calculated from the very first. As long as Jo Grant was inside the Scope, she was still in great danger [so] he had to dominate these Minorans from the start, force them to help him.” (p. 95)
In this,
“He was gambling, that like all authorisations, they would harass and bully anyone who seemed weaker than themselves, while responding favourably to a display of force and bluster” (p. 97).
Notably, Terrance does not embellish what I think is a key moment in the TV story, and Doctor Who more generally, when the Doctor tells Jo that he “had a great deal to do” with persuading the Time Lords to ban the use of miniscopes. As I argued in my article “Who Connections — Star Trek”, for Doctor Who Magazine #632 (August 2026), pp. 44-49, this is news to Jo, so it must have happened sometime before the Doctor met her, and the sense is surely that it happened before his exile to Earth, so in a previous incarnation. It is changing the role of the Doctor, from itinerant traveller to intergalactic diplomat and campaigner in the same vein as Captain Kirk, and suggesting that, despite the lack of evidence in TV episodes from the 1960s, that the Doctor has always been like that. The lack of embellishment to this scene in the novelisation suggests that Terrance didn’t recognise it as a big change in the lore of the series.
Other small changes make the Doctor more dynamic, powerful and in charge. He carries Jo on his shoulders (p. 116) and they later materialise back beside the TARDIS, “just as the Doctor had planned” (p. 121), though it seems to have been down to luck. Terrance also acknowledges a plot hole in the story: Jo realises that the Doctor recalled the name of the SS Bernice in the first place because it famously disappeared; by sending it and the crew back to their own time, haven’t she and the Doctor changed history? “Only in a few very small details,” handwaves the Doctor.
The book concludes with Vorg — who, like Daly, fought bravely when occasion demanded — “surrounded by an admiring audience of Officials and Functionaries … telling the story of his valour for the hundredth time” (p. 123). In his review of this novelisation for Escape to Danger, my friend Jim Sangster sees this as meaning that the different classes/caste/species of Inter Minorans now live on equal terms, with “no sign of the lower caste being ushered away.” I’m not sure I’m convinced that there really has been a redistribution of power. The (unseen) president is still in charge, the Officials still command. As with the Doctor sending the SS Bernice home, I don’t think there’s much evidence that a lot has really changed.
All in all, it’s a great TV story, full of wit and excitement, and it’s a good novelisation. But I think it’s perhaps a more run-of-the-mill entry than Terrance’s previous novelisations, which up to this point tended to fix on big-event stories — the first adventures of particular Doctors or companions, battles with Daleks and other big-name monsters, and major events affecting series lore. This book was the last novelisation of the five stories from the 1972-73 series on TV, and perhaps marks the beginning of something that will become a lot more prevalent with Terrance’s books for the range: a novelisation that is less a top-notch, must-have story, and more just filling a gap.
But there were still plenty of classics to come. Terrance’s very next book is a corker and among his own favourites. Next episode: Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth.
Other pals writing about this novelisation:
