Vortex #202 - Bret Vyon Lives!

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

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

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

Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, by Terrance Dicks

My first edition paperback of this novelisation, published on 22 July 1976, has clearly been well loved. The pages are dog-eared, the front and back covers are creased and the spine has faded to white, so you can no longer read the title. The effect of this love is that, on my shelf of Terrance’s books, it matches the white spine of Terrance’s previous novelisation, Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen. 

But a pristine copy looks very different. As this image from eBay shows, the spine of the first edition was bright red, the title in white. 

This is very different to Doctor Who novelisations of the time. In fact, it matches the red spines of Terrance’s three Mounties novels; putting his books in order of publication you would see two red spines, then white Revenge on its own, then two more red spines (followed by the purple-spined Doctor Who and the Web of Fear). 

But surely the reason for giving the Mounties novels bright red spines and back covers was to match the distinctive red coats worn by Mounties — so distinctive that they’re key to the plot of the third book. That’s obviously not the case with Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks. Something else is going on.

Here, the spine and back cover match the red logo and title on the front cover, which were unusual for the time: Genesis is the 23rd Doctor Who novelisation published by Target and only the second to feature a red version of the logo. On Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, I think the red logo is there to add some zing to the otherwise muted grey-green colour scheme of the illustration, helping to make the Fourth Doctor’s debut in print stand out as something special. The same does not apply to Genesis.

This is also only the second of 23 Doctor Who novelisations to feature a red spine. On Doctor Who and the Crusaders, that and the colour used for the title match bits of red in the cover illustration showing the clash or armies. Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks was the first novelisation since that book to be set in the midst of a war. In both cases, then, I think the red signifies blood.

Artist Chris Achilleos seems to have known the logo would be red because his cover art is sympathetic: the tunic worn by Davros has a reddish tinge, the inset portrait of the Doctor is sepia tinted rather than the usual black-and-white, and the background of the main image within the border is a brownish-red. 

The illustration is also much simpler and more muted than Achilleos’s previous work for the Doctor Who range: there are no laser blasts, cosmic phenomena or radiating energy. Perhaps he felt the red logo would provide sufficient zing. Or perhaps he took his cue from the dour-looking production stills from the TV story that he used for reference.

Photo reference for the Doctor
image c/o the Black Archive

Photo reference for Davros
c/o the Black Archive

Then again, other evidence suggests that the team producing this book knew it was something different from and more grown-up than the usual fare. The back-cover blurb takes an unusual format:

The place: Skaro

Time: The Birth of the Daleks

After a thousand years of futile war against the Thals, DAVROS has perfected the physical form that will carry his race into eternity – the dreaded DALEK. Without feeling, conscience or pity, the Dalek is programmed to EXTERMINATE. 

At the command of the Time Lords, DOCTOR WHO travels back through time in an effort to totally destroy this terrible menace of the future.

But even the Doctor cannot always win…

The blunt statement of fact at the start of this, giving the location in time and space, underlines that this is a big moment in history. That use of “Skaro” is surely meant to resonate with the reader — a name they would recognise, having been steeped in the lore of Doctor Who by previous books. And how extraordinary to tell us, up front, that this is an adventure in which the Doctor doesn’t win.

This is also the first book Terrance had published since Doctor Who and the Giant Robot to have more than 128 pages; this comprises 144. The very handy Based on the Popular BBC TV Serial by Paul MC Smith gives a wordcount of 33,549 words — some 3,500 more than the novelisations Terrance wrote either side of this. Yet look at the graph I produced before, of the wordcounts of the first 12 Doctor Who novelisations (in dark orange) compared to the second 12 (in light orange). 

The 144pp Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks comprises fewer words than the 128pp Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons and 128pp Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. It is also noticeably shorter than the novelisations shown above by authors other than Terrance. These aren’t labelled in the graph but are, from left to right, Doctor Who and the Green Death by Malcolm Hulke, then — after the three books by Terrance — Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion by Hulke, Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet by Gerry Davis and Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors by Brian Hayles. They are all 144pp.

I suspect the publishers wanted this book, the third Target novelisation to feature the Daleks, to be just as long — and so more of an event. If not, Terrance could easily have cut this six-part serial down to 128pp, as he did with his next book, Doctor Who and the Web of Fear. Here, the Doctor standing on a land mine, him and Harry escaping the Kaled base only to be immediately recaptured, the two sequences with bitey giant clams, the scene (pp. 94-96) in which Nyder cosies up to Gharman before the scene in which Nyder betrays him... They could all be deleted without harming the plot or structure. In fact, I’m used to versions of this story that excise this stuff — I think I had the condensed, audio cassette version before I saw the condensed, omnibus TV version in 1982, a decade before getting to see the full thing on VHS.

Terrance may well have watched a condensed version of this story as he completed the novelisation. I’ve previously estimated a lead-time to publication of 7.5 months; supporting this, on 28 March 1978, Terrance told the DWAS local group in Surbiton that,

“From when I deliver a manuscript, it takes six to eight months to get the book into the shops.” — David J Howe, “Terrance Dicks Speaks”, Oracle vol 2, no. 2 (November 1978), p. 6.

That means that Terrance probably delivered the manuscript for Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks at the end of December 1975. On the afternoon of Saturday, 27 December, an 85-minute omnibus version of the story was shown on BBC One. 

Perhaps this enabled him to add some visual detail to the manuscript. Even so, it seems he largely worked from the scripts. As scripted, Part One opens with “fog-shrouded desolation”, from which soldiers wearing gas-marks emerge before disappearing back into it. This is how Terrance opens his novelisation, too. But in filming this sequence, director David Maloney decided to start things more arrestingly: the soldiers emerge from the fog and are mown down by machine guns.

Likewise, there’s this stage direction on p. 21 of the camera script for Part One:

“THE KALED TROOPS PULL OFF THEIR GAS MASKS. WE NOW SEE THAT THEY ARE ALL VERY YOUNG, FIFTEEN OR SIXTEEN YEARS OLD.”

Terrance tells us, on p. 21 of the novelisation, that when the Kaled soldiers remove their gas masks, they look “little more than boys”; on screen, the actors are young men. We can also see Terrance embellishing details in stage directions. For example, on p. 25 of the camera script for Part One, the Doctor is taken to a headquarters, some distance from the front lines, where he meets Ravon,

“A YOUNG OFFICER OF EIGHTEEN, SLIGHTLY BETTER DRESSED THAN THE TROOPS WE HAVE THUS FAR SEEN”

In the novelisation, Terrance underlines this: Ravon is “a tall, very young officer, elegant in his gold-braided uniform”, and we get a wry comment from the Doctor’s point of view:

“He noticed that the guards were smartly uniformed here, their weapons modern and well cared for. Strange how all wars were the same, thought the Doctor. The staff back at HQ always had better conditions than the men actually out fighting…” (p. 23)

There are other examples of Terrance working from the script. Chapter 10 ends as per the script of Part Five, with the Doctor asking his friends if he has the moral right to destroy the Daleks, and not — as per broadcast — with him being throttled by some slime; again, a last-minute change made by the director. 

But Terrance doesn’t simply copy out what’s in the scripts. For example, on p. 1 of the camera script for Part Five, the Doctor tells Davros that,

“The Dalek invasion of the planet Earth in it’s [sic] year two thousand was foiled because of the attempt by the Daleks to mine the core of the planet…. The magnetic properties of the Earth were too powerful.”

Terrance amends this slightly:

“The Dalek invasion of Earth in the year Two Thousand was foiled because of an over-ambitious attempt to mine the core of the planet. The magnetic core of the planet was too strong, the human resistance too determined” (p. 103)”.

The repetition of “of the planet” is a bit awkward, but look what else he’s done. In the script and TV version, the Daleks were defeated by natural, intangible forces. In just a few words, Terrance has made that defeat the result of two other things: the Daleks’ over-reaching themselves and human agency. In his version, the bombast of the Daleks was thwarted by heroic action.

Note that Terrance keeps the year in words, as per the script — for all he puts it in capitals — and does not amend the date. The date given in the script surely came from writer Terry Nation, perhaps having checked his own story outline for 1964 TV story The Dalek Invasion of Earth, which was originally to be set in the year 2000. That date features in some other production paperwork and was used in the TV trailer to promote the serial ahead of broadcast. 

But at some point the production team pushed the story further into the future: in Nation’s draft script for the first episode, the Doctor’s friend Ian finds a calendar dated 2049; in the camera script and episode as broadcast, the calendar is dated 2164. The late 22nd century is therefore the date more usually ascribed to the serial. For example, the Radio Times special published to mark 10 years of Doctor Who says the story takes place in “London in 2164” (p. 9), but see my post on the economics of the Daleks for more on invasion dating.

Intriguingly, no date is given for the events of the Dalek invasion in the summaries included in The Making of Doctor Who (1972) and The Doctor Who Monster Book (1975). But when Terrance wrote his novelisation, Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977), he included the calendar and date of 2164 (p. 21), as per p. 16 of the camera script. The implication is surely that he’d not read that script prior to this, as he would otherwise have included this detail in his previous books, such as the novelisation of Genesis.

That’s interesting (to me) because Terrance was scheduled to novelise The Dalek Invasion of Earth before he even began work on novelising Genesis of the Daleks. The list of “Advance information on Doctor Who books in preparation” reproduced on p. 92 of The Official Doctor Who Club vol. 2 by Keith Miller, begins with The Green Death by Malcolm Hulke, due for publication in “Aug 75”; though the list itself is undated, it was surely written before that date. It includes the following:

The Cybermens [sic] Revenge [ie Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen] Apr 76

Genesis of Terror [ie Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks] May 76

Carnival of Monsters Jun 76

The World’s End (Dalek Invasion of Earth) Jul 76

The Web of Fear Aug 76

Planet of the Daleks Sep 76

No authors are ascribed to these but they were all ultimately written by Terrance. The schedule changed, with the novelisations of Carnival of Monsters and The Dalek Invasion of Earth pushed back to 1977, and other books added before them. But by the time Terrance started work on the novelisation of Genesis of the Daleks, around December 1975, The Dalek Invasion of Earth had been on the schedule for months.

This all rather implies that the story had been selected and presumably cleared with Nation’s agent without Terrance having read the scripts. The selection of stories to novelise was therefore done on the basis of what Terrance and the editorial team remembered as being good and/or key stories, rather than by reading the scripts to be sure. 

Anyway, back to what Terrance wrote in this ‘ere novelisation…

As we’ve seen, by working from the camera scripts rather than the episodes as broadcast, Terrance omitted some of the more violent moments seen on screen — such as the machine-gunned soldiers in the opening moments. But that doesn’t mean he presents a bowdlerised version of the TV story. We could certainly understand why Terrance or his publishers might have wanted to do so in books aimed at readers aged 8-12, not least given the concerns raised when this serial was first broadcast. For example, Mary Whitehouse gave her view between broadcast of Parts Three and Four:

“Cruelty, corpses, poison gas, Nazi-type stormtroopers and revolting experiments in human genetics are served up as teatime brutality for the tots.” (The Mirror, 27 March 1975, c/o Cuttings Archive) 

But Terrance didn’t censor Genesis of the Daleks. In some places, he makes things more harrowing than on screen, such as when a shell of poison gas is fired at the Doctor and his friends, and there’s only one place for them to get gas masks:

“It wasn’t particularly pleasant grappling with the stiff, cold corpses, but things were too desperate for any fastidiousness” (p. 20)

There’s more on similar lines a bit later:

“Sarah had one of the most horrifying awakenings of her life. Buried beneath a pile of rapidly stiffening corpses, she could feel her face wet with blood. At first she felt confusedly that she must be dead too, or at least badly wounded.” (p. 33)

This, I think, is similar to what we saw in Terrance’s novelisation of Revenge of the Cybermen, where by describing events from the perspective of Sarah (or Harry), they become more horrible and haunting.

Yet Terrance also makes things more palatable by making the Doctor less brusque than on screen. On p. 17, he has the Doctor apologise to Harry and Sarah for the predicament they find themselves in. He then explains the situation and “seemed so genuinely distressed” that his friends assure him it is all right and that they will gladly help.

During the gas attack, our heroes are set upon by soldiers. Terrance tells us that,

“The Doctor and Harry closed ranks to defend Sarah. They put up a splendid fight. Harry had boxed for the Navy in his time and he dealt out straight rights, lefts and uppercuts in the best traditions of the boxing ring. The Doctor fought in a whirl of long arms and legs, using the techniques of Venusian Aikido to drop one opponent after another” (p. 21)

The word “splendid” makes this all sound quite fun, not the confused, brutal scramble on screen. In this version, Harry is more competent and heroic than seen on screen, and the Doctor is more Jon Pertwee than Tom Baker. It’s a moment of Genesis of the Daleks as if script edited by Terrance, not by Robert Holmes. While the Fourth Doctor on-screen in this period can be sombre and brooding, we’re told here that, “Characteristically, the Doctor wasted no time in regrets” (p. 104). He is a man of action.

There’s another example later, when the Doctor tells Harry to go first into the ventilation shaft of the Kaled bunker — even though there might be dangers lurking. On screen, this is played rather at Harry’s expense. Here, we have Harry’s perspective that if the Doctor really suspected any danger, he would of course go first himself. As with the change in Doctor Who and Revenge of the Cybermen where Terrance has the Doctor call Harry an “idiot” rather than the more unpleasant word used on screen, the change makes both the Doctor and Harry more heroic. 

Sadly, I don’t think the same is quite true with Sarah. She’s brave and resourceful as on TV, and yet there’s an odd moment in the novelisation when she asks the Doctor if he really needs to go back to the Kaled bunker to complete his mission, given the evident dangers. He says he must, not least to recover the Time Ring with which they can get back to the TARDIS.

“That was reason enough to convince even Sarah” (p. 93).

It’s an oddly uncharacteristic bit of self-interest. Until this moment, Sarah had been heading to the Kaled bunker anyway, and later she is the one who insists the Doctor completes his mission while he dithers over morality. 

There’s another bit of sexism earlier on, when the Doctor is told that “Davros is never wrong — about anything”, and responds, “Then he must be an exceptional man” (p. 31), assuming a gender. Terrance should have know better, having previously made a joke of this sort of assumption in  his own TV story Robot. 

Better, I think, is Terrance’s handling of the Thal woman Bettan, and the way in which she is persuaded by the Doctor to fight back against the Daleks. When they meet, the Doctor is a prisoner — and enemy — of her people, but we’re told she finds him “curiously compelling” (p. 86) and pauses to speak with him about the friends he has lost in the war. We’re then told Bettan is “an efficient and hard-working young woman, with an important official position” (p. 87) and plenty of work to do, yet she can’t help thinking of this strange, charming man and what he told her. It all helps to explain how, when they meet again, the Doctor is able to persuade her to join him (p. 90).

While the Doctor charms Bettan, he is more withering about other characters, for example diagnosing Ravon’s “basic insecurity” (p. 24) in needing to boast to his prisoners. That’s similar to what Terrance did with Broton in Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, covering the slightly clunky exposition by making it a point of character.

That said, there aren’t many examples of particularly well-chosen words here, as there are in Terrance’s previous novelisations. The Doctor attempting to befriend the Kaleds by speaking in German, “Kamerade” (p. 30) is as per the camera script. Terrance refers to the sucker arm of a Dalek as a “tactile organ” (p. 43), which makes it sound more like a tentacle than a stick with a sink plunger. Sometimes his descriptions are vague, such as when “some kind of field communications equipment” (p. 23) is swiftly followed by “some kind of central command post” (p. 24). Or there’s this:

“Harry and Sarah ran to the doors [of the bunker] and held them back by force. The Doctor came tearing along the tunnel, a patrol of Daleks close behind him. Just as their strength failed, the Doctor reached the fast-narrowing gap and squeezed through.” (p. 137) 

He mentions a patrol of Daleks then refers to “their strength”, but means the strength of Harry and Sarah from the previous sentence. This lack of clarity is very rare for Terrance and may mean the book was written and edited more hurriedly than usual.

More typical of Terrance is the eating. The TV story has a fun scene in which the Doctor is horrified, during an interrogation, not to be offered tea. That is retained here. But Harry also wants “a bite to eat” (p. 73) before he and the Doctor go in search of the missing Sarah. Priorities, man! She’s more important than a sandwich! 

When the Thals destroy the Kaled dome, they celebrate with “wine” (p. 85). I should like to know more about the viticulture of Skaro. In fact, some of the most interesting additions here are to the lore of Skaro and the Daleks. Here, we learn what happened to disfigure Davros:

“An atomic shell struck his laboratory during a Thal bombardment … His body was shattered but he refused to die. He clung to life, and himself designed the mobile life-support system in which you see him” (p. 42)

This makes explicit what is implicit in the design seen on screen, that the Daleks are an extension of Davros’s own life-support system, but there’s also the suggestion, I think, that the conception of the Daleks is Davros imposing what happened to him on everybody else. The atomic shell was presumably radioactive, which may mean Davros has — or had — cancer, so the conception of the Daleks was born out of a sense of his own body wasting away. They are an embodiment of his own desperation to survive.

As on screen, we’re told that Davros has been researching for 50 years (p. 70). Even if he began in his teens, he must be pushing 70. Did the atomic shell strike when he was a young man, so he’s spent 50 years developing Daleks, or did the strike happen some way into his career and diverted the course of research?

There’s a clue in the broadcast Part Two, in which Davros says he has been working “for some time” on the “Mark III project”, which Ronson confirms is a “Mark III travel machine” — later named a Dalek. Three stages of the project does not suggest it has been going on for very long.

But it seems that before working on travel machines, Davros looked at organic methods of getting about. That, at least, is the conclusion of the Doctor, Sarah and Harry when they encounter giant clams. On screen, Harry says Davros “obviously” rejected these for being too slow-moving. 

In the novelisation, it’s the Doctor who ventures this theory, but says “maybe” rather than “obviously”. Terrance also omits the references to the “Mark III” project and machine. That suggests a conscious decision to keep the genesis of the Daleks a bit vague. 

In other places, he adds to the lore. While the Kaleds understand and favour democracy (as on screen, but pp. 116-117), Terrance adds a suggestion of the way power is organised among the Daleks:

“One of the Daleks seemed to be speaking for the others, as if they had already evolved their own leaders” (p. 137)

That word “evolved” is interesting; it suggests leadership developed by nature not vote. In this Dalek’s final speech, vowing to emerge from the buried bunker stronger than ever, Terrance adds under promise / threat:

“We shall build our own city” (p. 139).

That’s surely joining up this story to the first TV appearance of the Daleks, when they are trapped within the confines of their own city. Yet there is no helpful footnote here, telling us to “See Doctor Who and the Daleks” — perhaps because Terrance only put in such references to his own books. Even so, I wonder if the conscious effort to be more vague about Dalek origins was a way of better joining up these two books.

Thinking about this sort of thing makes me realise something odd about Genesis of the Daleks — on TV and in the book. The war between Thals and Kaleds has been fought for thousands of years, but their domed cities are within walking distance of one another. There’s no suggestion that a night passes while the Doctor and co make this journey. The Doctor and his friends are not not trained walkers, so their maximum range in a day — not counting mountain-climbing, attacks by Mutos or giant clams — is probably a maximum 40 km / 25 miles, or about the north-south diameter of London, between Enfield and Croydon.

Another thing I noticed by studying TV version versus book is the irony of poor Ronson, who saves the Doctor and Harry from being the first victims of a Dalek — and then, later in the story, is the first person ever to be exterminated. Terrance didn’t pick on this irony, but he did add a nicely menacing touch not in the TV version: here, Davros claims that it was Ronson who gave the Thals the chemical formula they needed to destroy the Kaled dome (p. 85). It’s a classic technique of the tyrant, accusing someone else of the crime you yourself committed.

At the start of the story, the Doctor is given three ways in which to complete his mission successfully: avert the creation of the Daleks altogether, affect their genetic development so that they become less aggressive, or discover some inherent weakness that can be used against them. He fails on all counts. At the end of the story on TV, Sarah acknowledges this: “We failed, didn’t we?” The Doctor’s response comprises the last words of the story:

“Failed? No, not really. You see, I know that although the Daleks will create havoc and destruction for millions of years, I know also that out of their evil must come something good.”

This is, of course, great comfort to everyone who has ever suffered under the Daleks. It’s also… well, a bit of an anti-climax.

The novelisation tackles this head on, not least by warning us in the blurb, before we’ve even started reading the book, that “even the Doctor cannot always win”. But Terrance also works to make those closing sentiments of the TV serial work a little more effectively. In recruiting Bettan, in getting her to team up with the Muto Sevrin, there’s a sense of him galvanising people to stand up up to the Daleks. 

He underlines this in what the Doctor says when dithering over his right to destroy the Daleks. 

“the evil of the Daleks produced counter-reactions of good” (p. 120)

Terrance also adjusts those closing words from the Doctor. His response to Sarah’s question is that they’ve “not entirely” failed, as they’ve given the Daleks “a nasty setback” (p. 139). This is a “kind of victory”, which is also the name of this closing chapter, and surely an echo of “A Kind of Justice”, the epilogue to the second Mounties novel with its shock last twist. 

The closing words of the novelisation modify the last words of the serial:

“Disappointed, Sarah? No, not really. You see, although I know that Daleks will create havoc and destruction for untold thousands of years… I also know that out of their great evil… some… great… good… must come” (p. 140)

Again, a well-chosen word can make a significant difference to the stakes. The Daleks’ evil and the potential good have both become greater than on screen. It doesn’t entirely fix the anti-climax, but it’s a much more satisfying end. 

One of the best ever Doctor Who stories on TV and Terrance simply, subtly improves it.

*

I’m very grateful to those who have kindly chipped in to support these long, long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks. Writing them takes time and incurs some expenses, but I’ll press on while that support continues. 

Next time: counting the cuts when a six-part serial is squeezed into 128 pages, with Doctor Who and the Web of Fear… 

Oh, and also announced today: the family of Terrance Dicks have donated his archive of papers to the Borthwick Institute. 

Bret Vyon Lives!

Big Finish have announced the details of Bret Vyons Lives!, the second volume of adventures for the Space Security Service. This time, as well as being producer, I've written one of the three stories. 

The set is out in January. Blurb and puff as follows:

Bret Vyon Lives!

Jane Slavin and Joe Sims encounter some familiar faces in the second volume of full-cast Space Security Service audio adventures, due for release January 2026. 

The guardians of the Solar System – agents Anya Kingdom (Jane Slavin), Mark Seven (Joe Sims), and Sola Akinyemi (Madeline Appiah) – return for three thrilling original adventures. 

Their most dangerous enemies, the Daleks (Nicholas Briggs), are back, in greater numbers than ever, exterminating their way across the cosmos. And when she becomes their prisoner, Anya encounters a man she used to know and love – her uncle Bret Vyon. 

This Space Security Service agent was originally played by Nicholas Courtney in 1965-66 Doctor Who TV serial The Daleks’ Master Plan, and here is voiced by Jon Culshaw. Anya knows her uncle is dead, so who is this living, breathing Bret Vyon? 

The Worlds of Doctor Who – Space Security Service: Bret Vyon Lives! is now available to pre-order for just £19.99 (as a digital download to own). 

The three exciting interplanetary adventures are: 

The Man Inside by Simon Guerrier 

Anya Kingdom is a prisoner of the Daleks on a very peculiar space station orbiting a very peculiar star. The Daleks don’t want to kill Anya; they want to break her down psychologically.  

One way to do that is to lock her in a cell with someone Anya knows is a fake. Whoever, whatever, this man really is, he cannot be her beloved uncle. Bret Vyon is dead, end of story. 

But if Anya is to survive, she will need his help… 

The Wages of Death by David Llewellyn 

Furiosa 237 is a remote world in the hinterlands of the galaxy. Anya and Mark teleport in and quickly take jobs on a cargo shop. They’re undercover – on an urgent, secret mission. 

Their task is to locate a device called a Progenitor, then drop it into the nearest black hole — and quickly, before it can hatch. 

But at least one person on board is determined to save the Progenitor and unleash its deadly contents: a whole army of Daleks. 

The Sky is for Sale by James Kettle 

A huge satellite mines the atmosphere of Saturn. Following a number of threats, agent Sola Akinyemi of the Space Security Service is on board, tasked with keeping the workers and their families safe. 

Meanwhile, Anya Kingdom is at Triple-S headquarters, working to expose and eradicate corruption in the service. But just as she’s making progress, HQ is attacked. And then the mining satellite is invaded – by a different hostile force! 

In the desperate battle that follows, Anya and Sola will have to make impossible choices. Who can they really trust? And what horrors are they willing to sanction if it means defeating the Daleks? 

The guest cast of Space Security Service: Bret Vyon Lives! includes Shobu Kapoor (We Are Lady Parts), Forbes Masson (The High Life), and Louiza Patikas (The Archers), plus further names yet to be announced. 

Producer and writer Simon Guerrier said: “Anya Kingdom faces her greatest challenge yet as a prisoner of the Daleks. But help is at hand from the least expected person – Bret Vyon, traitor of the SSS and Anya's long-dead uncle! With this second batch of adventures, we really wanted to raise the stakes. With the Daleks on the warpath, Earth's future depends on alliances – but who can Anya really trust? 

“What a delight it’s been working on this set of three thrilling adventures steeped in the rich lore that Terry Nation created all those years ago. I’ve loved every stage of collaboration with John Dorney and Barnaby Kay on this compelling, fast-paced series. 

“The one I've written is a particular treat. An age ago, I worked on stories featuring SSS agent Sara Kingdom as played by the brilliant Jean Marsh. So it's been a particular pleasure to revisit Sara’s brother Bret and tell something of his side of their fateful story. And then there's what David and James have written to follow... Oh, just you wait!” 

Big Finish listeners can save money by pre-ordering Bret Vyon Lives! in a multibuy bundle with the previous volume of Space Security Service (June 2025’s The Voord in London) for just £38 (download to own). 

All the above prices (including pre-order and multibuy bundle discounts) are fixed for a limited time only and guaranteed no later than 28 February 2026.

Space Security Service

Big Finish have announced that June 2025 will see the release of Space Security Service, a series of audio adventures produced by me and starring Jane Slavin and Joe Sims. Press release as follows:

The Space Security Service return!

Jane Slavin and Joe Sims star as Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven in two brand-new box sets of full cast audio drama from The Worlds of Doctor Who, coming soon from Big Finish Productions. 

They’re the guardians of the Solar System and Earth’s first line of defence. But now the agents of the Space Security Service face their greatest ever threat… 

Having joined David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor in the popular Dalek Universe series, the heroes of the Space Security Service will soon defend the universe once again in their own exciting adventures. Jane Slavin will return as Anya Kingdom, a special agent from the 41st century, alongside Joe Sims as her android colleague Mark Seven. 

These star-spanning escapades will take inspiration from the imaginative creations of Terry Nation. Nation devised the Space Security Service for the 1960s Doctor Who TV serials Mission to the Unknown and The Daleks’ Master Plan, and expanded upon them in the Dalek annuals and comics, as well as a never-made TV spin-off series, The Daleks. 

The fast-paced new adventures will see Anya and Mark encounter monsters from across the universe, from Voord in the Thames to a rogue Thal scientist. 

There are two box sets of The Worlds of Doctor Who – Space Security Service to look forward to, each comprising three thrilling episodes of full-cast audio drama. The first volume, The Voord in London, is due for release in June 2025; details of the second volume, due out in January 2026, will be announced at a later date.

Space Security Service: The Voord in London is now available to pre-order for just £19.99 (as a digital download to own), exclusively from Big Finish. But see the bargain offer below for both sets.

The three episodes in this first box set are: 

• The Voord in London by LR Hay 
• The Thal from G.R.A.C.E. by Felicia Barker 
• Allegiance by Angus Dunican 

Producer Simon Guerrier said: “This series has long been in the works – arguably since Terry Nation tried to launch his Daleks TV show back in the 1960s. We've taken that as our cue and come up with a fast-moving, fun series of adventures for Space Security Service agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven, who were such a hit in the Dalek Universe range. 

“We start with Anya back in London in the 20th century, working undercover as a police officer on the trail of one group of aliens - and then getting caught up with another. Soon the action moves to... well, just wait and see!” 

Big Finish listeners can save money by pre-ordering both volumes of Space Security Service in an exclusive multibuy bundle for just £38 (download to own). 

All the above prices (including pre-order and multibuy bundle discounts) are fixed for a limited time only and guaranteed no later than August 2025. 

The director of Space Security Service is Barnaby Kay, the script editor is John Dorney and the cover art is by Grant Kempster. 

Daleks: The Ultimate Guide

Out today, this massive and comprehensive 224-page bookazine from the makers of Doctor Who Magazine is full of everything you could possibly want to know about Daleks.

With Dalek expert Gav Rymill, I’ve written 28 entries on different models of Dalek, charting their evolution from the very first Dalek story in 1963-64 to their more recent full episode, 2022’s Eve of the Daleks. There are some new facts and insights included, such as my outlandish theory about when and why writer Terry Nation decided to make them look the way they do.

Each entry is illustrated with a CG rendering of the particular model by Chris Thompson.

The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation, by Margot Bennett

“Informed public opinion is infectious, even to governments.” (p. 149)

Thursday, 30 July 1964 saw publication of two paperback “Penguin Specials” from Penguin Books both looking at the same subject. At four shillings, Nuclear Disaster by Tom Stonier,

“was based on his 1961 report to the New York Academy of Sciences which dealt with the biological and environmental effects of dropping a 20-megaton bomb on Manhattan”. Geoffrey Goodman, “Obituary — Tom Stonier”, Guardian, 28 June 1999.

Alongside this, at a slightly cheaper three shillings and sixpence, Margot Bennett’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation is, according to the back-cover blurb, a “first reader in the most uncomfortable subject in the world”. 

The title is surely a riff on The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism by George Bernard Shaw, first published by Constable & Co in 1928 and republished in 1937 as an inexpensive two-volume paperback — the first Pelican Book — under the revised title The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Fascism. 

Of course, that was timely given the ongoing civil war between Republicans and Fascists in Spain, and the growing power of the Nazis in Germany. I’d be surprised if Margot Bennett wasn’t aware of the book, given that in 1937 she was in Spain. It was the year that Margot Mitchell (sometimes known as Margot Miller) married English journalist Richard Bennett while both were working for the Government — that is, Republican — radio station. Bennett, who also worked as a nurse, had been machine-gunned in the legs the previous year and at the time of her engagement had recently broken her arm when the ambulance she was in crashed under shellfire.

There’s nothing very militant in her book on atomic radiation, written 27 years later. “Politics is not the concern of this book,” she tells us in her introduction (p. 10). The focus is instead on the cause and effects fallout,

“addressed more to women than to men [because] the mother is far more intimately concerned with the health of the family than the father. It is the mother who sees that the children have green vegetables and milk, and who nurses then when they have measles.” (p. 11)

This still holds, she says, even if the mother has a career; a woman with no family, “still has a tenderness to children that is different in quality from the feelings of a man.”

It’s not exactly the most feminist stance but this is a politically active woman writing in the mid-1960s for a small-C conservative readership, the emphasis on presenting just the facts rather than on what we should think. The book concludes on a broad political note:

“Science affects us all; so far, overwhelmingly to our advantage. If there are times when we feel this is not so, as members of a democracy we have some kind of duty to find out what is happening.” (p. 154)

But there’s no sense of a particular party or ideology being favoured. We’re left to make up our own minds.

The domestic perspective — the way radiation affects milk and green vegetables, and our children — might imply this is rather lightweight or condescending to the ordinary housewife. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed one contemporary review thought it was, 

“little more than another text book, and heavy going at that.” (Robin Turner, “Nuclear penguins and others”, Birmingham Post, 8 August 1964, p. 5.)

A more generous review found it,

“Thought provoking … easily read but thorough” (John Berrie, “Woman’s angle”, Nottingham Evening Post and News, 7 August 1964, p. 10.)

It’s certainly thorough, covering the ground in detail in just 154 pages (not including appendices, glossary and index). After the introduction, the first three chapters give us a grounding in the physics involved in atomic radiation — “Inside the Atom”, “Neutrons and Nuclear Energy" and “Fission, Fusion, and Fallout”. We then switch to biology for “The Message in Our Cells”.

Chapter 5, “The Subtle Enemy”, then applies the physics to the biology to explain the damage atomic radiation can do to us and to future generations. The next chapter, “The Influential Friend”, puts a counter case, outlining all the beneficial ways atomic radiation can be applied. “Pollution and Protection” addresses what can be done to mitigate potential fallout. Bennett then provides a conclusion, making the case that even statistically “negligible” numbers of people wounded or killed would still be tragic for those concerned.

A lot of this is very technical. Promotion for the book at the time said that Bennett wrote in “plain English” (for example, “For Your Bookshelf”, Halifax Daily Courier and Guardian, 31 July 1964, p. 4). Even so, I found it quite hard going and made slow progress. 

Two things really bring it alive. First, Bennett peppers her book with vivid real-world examples of the way radiation can affect people’s lives. Hauntingly, she details the stages of radiation sickness suffered by early pioneers, from skin rashes and hair loss through anaemia, sterility and useless, deformed fingers to the fatal cancers (pp. 96-97). Or there’s the awful story of the Radium Girls (pp. 100-101). 

I’d be interested to know more about the Russian scientist who claimed to be able to cure the effects of radiation on DNA via a simple pill (p. 114), or about the Scottish boy discovered playing in a “pile of radioactive dust” and the factory making luminous dials that proved so radioactive that the Radiological Protection Service had the whole site buried (both stories p. 146). Frustratingly, there are no notes or bibliography to guide us to more information.

Secondly, throughout the book Bennett uses relatable, often domestic analogies to explain the complex ideas. She likens electrical charges — the way positive and negative attract one another but two positives or two negatives repel — to attraction between people, where a talker will fall for a listener (p. 17). She describes atoms of different elements as being like different breeds of dog (p. 22). Compounds and molecules are likened to marriages (p. 24).

Sometimes those analogies show how far we have come. On page 83, she refers to the cumulative effect of exposure to radiation over “the long days of our lives — 20,000 days if we live to be about sixty”, which doesn’t seem very long at all. (Bennett lived to 68).

But on the whole the effect is to make a complex, technical subject more tangible. The central, political idea here is the responsibility to be better informed: nuclear weapons are devastatingly powerful, but knowledge is also power — one to hold the arms race at bay.

*

Obligatory Doctor Who bit

Since the book was published at the end of July 1964, Bennett must have delivered the manuscript no later than, I’d guess, the end of May. Given the technical detail, it can’t have been a quick book to write. As well as the time taken to research it, a note just ahead of the introduction tells us that, 

“Everything factual has been checked by scientists whose knowledge is far more than equal to the task” (p. 7).

We’re not told who these scientists were or what the editorial process involved, but writing and editing surely took some months, which means work on the book overlapped with Bennett’s conversation(s) with BBC story editor David Whitaker about potentially writing for Doctor Who. As detailed in my post on Bennett’s novel The Furious Masters, that seems to have happened in late February 1964. She was being considered to write a story comprising four 25-minute episodes as a potential replacement for what became Planet of Giants — but nothing further is known about what her story might have entailed, or whether she even submitted an idea.

I partly read this book in the faint hope of finding some clue as to what she might have discussed with or submitted to Whitaker. The short biography of Bennett on the opening page is suggestive:

“She likes variety in writing and is now doing something in Science Fiction,” (p. 1) 

That “something” may have been The Furious Masters, published four years later. Or Bennett may have completed work on her study of atomic radiation and then turned to Doctor Who, only to discover that she was now too late and Planet of Giants was going ahead after all…

Then there’s one of the allusions she uses. At the end of her introduction, Bennett says that there’s no point wishing that the atom had never been cracked open.

“Man can’t afford to retreat; it is by discovery and invention, from fire and flint axe onwards, that he has survived. The axe is dangerously sharp, and the fire has grown as hot as the sun.” (p. 13)

Unlike most of the analogies she uses, this isn’t contemporary or domestic — it’s making a link between modern technology and the ancient past. 

The first ever Doctor Who story, broadcast 23 November to 14 December 1963, involves a tribe of cave people where authority is dependent on the ability to make fire (I think this owes a debt to The Inheritors by William Golding). “Fire will kill us all in the end,” opines the Old Mother of the tribe.

In the next story, we see something of this prophecy come to pass when the TARDIS materialises in a petrified forest that Barbara initially thinks is the result of a “forest fire”. It turns out that the devastation is the result of a neutron bomb, leaving the ground and atmosphere “polluted with a very high level of fallout”. Beings called Daleks are among the survivors.

I’m not the first to suggest that the Doctor Who production team deliberately juxtaposed the role of fire in the prehistoric tribe and the role of nuclear weapons on this futuristic world as part of a wider ambition to have the time travellers witness key moments of societal change. And it’s exactly the same connection made by Margot Bennett.

Did she and David Whitaker discuss it? And who exactly informed whom?

Doctor Who and the Time-Travelling Almanac, by me

It seems like only a week since my last book was out. But today sees publication of Doctor Who - The Time-Travelling Almanac, billed as the official guide to the Doctor's year. It is written by me and illustrated by brilliant Emma Price.

What is an almanac anyway? Why do we have August? How do the histories of the Beatles and the Doctor overlap?

Where exactly did the Doctor mean to take Romana instead of that beach at the start of The Leisure Hive? What are the tides on Kastarion 3 like?

All this and Dalek horoscopes, banana penguins, the best time of day for Sea Devils to invade and much more... 

HARDBACK

ISBN: 9781785949173

Length: 256 pages

Dimensions: 224mm x 23mm x 143mm

Weight: 355g

Price: £16.99

PAPERBACK

ISBN: 9781473533943

Length: 256 pages

Price: £8.99

Vworp Vworp! #6

The latest issue of ginormous Doctor Who fanzine Vworp Vworp! is now available, with 180 glossy pages devoted to the very first episode, An Unearthly Child, plus a DVD with added wonders.

My piece, "David the Goliath" (pp. 23-25) is on the thesis that without David Whitaker as story editor, Doctor Who would never have survived its first year. I endeavoured to be objective in my biography; here, I was asked to let rip.

The DVD includes an animated version of "A Meeting on the Common", the first chapter of David's 1964 novelisation Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, itself adapted from the TV serial that comprises Doctor Who episodes 5-11. The animation, effectively a new opening for all of Doctor Who, is directed and animated by Mel Meanley, adapted by Ian Winterton and stars Stephen Noonan as the Doctor, Adam Grayson as Ian, Helen Stirling-Lane as Barbara and Kerry Ely as Susan. Here's the trailer:

In my book, I discuss why this meeting takes place on Barnes Common and the elements of David Whitaker's real life that fed into it. In fact, the new animation is not the first dramatised version of this material, as I learned from The John Nathan-Turner Production Diary 1979-1990 by Richard Molesworth (Telos, 2022). Richard was then kind enough to let me have sight of the original paperwork.

In the summer of 1981, Philip Lewis - a BBC employee based in Room 4, 16 LS at Broadcasting House in London - wrote to Doctor Who producer John Nathan Turner about a script he (Lewis) had written for 'Episode 1' of Doctor Who and the Daleks, adapting the early chapters of David Whitaker's novelisation as an audio play. Lewis wanted the producer's permission to allow the Studio Amateur Dramatic Group (SADG) of the BBC Club to record this, on the proviso that it would be made by and played for club members only, and was not intended for broadcast. The idea was to use it as an exercise in adapting a novel for radio. Lewis assured the producer that the Daleks didn't feature - i.e. the episode concluded before they made their first appearance.

Replying on 4 June, Nathan Turner agreed in principle that this project could go ahead but wanted to check with Martin Hussey, merchandising assistant at BBC Enterprises, whether the project needed the blessing of Roger Hancock, agent of Dalek creator Terry Nation. The producer forwarded Hussey the script the following day; a copy of his covering memo survives. There's no record of a reply and the script doesn't seem to have been returned, so is not included in the Nathan Turner archive.

Staff at the BBC's Written Archive Centre were unable to locate a copy of the script or any further details about this production. No recording, cast list or other paperwork is known to survive. I've also drawn a blank in trying to trace Philip Lewis; he's surely not the man of the same name who was a long-serving TV producer for BBC Midlands and created Pot Black.

But if SADG recorded a version of the script by Lewis, it may well have been technically accomplished. SADG helped BBC staff learn key skills in production. For example, Bob Wood was a senior clerk working in the current recordings retention unit at Broadcasting House in the 1960s, but joined this (and other) groups:

"At SADG, I learnt to be a radio studio manager and producer, eventually becoming their technical training officer and winning a technical trophy ... In 1970, after successfully completing the POA/SM training course, I left London and moved to Glasgow as a radio studio manager at BBC Scotland." (Bob Wood, "BBC hostels & the summer of love", Prospero issue 6 (December 2018), p. 8.

UPDATE!

I’ve been in touch with Philip Lewis, who now works as a voice artist with credits including a radio announcer on Emmerdale. You can find out more (and employ him!) via his website. 

So, what about his adaptation of Doctor Who and the Daleks?

“As far as I know, it never got recorded,” Philip tells me. “At least not with my involvement. And I don’t have a copy of the script. In the intervening years I’ve moved house a number of times.”

But why adapt this particular Doctor Who novelisation, which was then 17 years-old? “The answer to that lies in the letter I wrote to the then producer – basically it was an exercise in adapting a book for radio. I seem to remember around that time I did several partial adaptations of other books and Doctor Who was just one of them.

“And no, I’m not the Philip Lewis who produced Pot Black, although I did meet him once.”

Thanks to Philip, and also to Richard Bignell.

The Daleks in Colour and Kennedy's "Survivors"

Watching the glorious The Daleks in Colour last night, I was especially struck by the bleakness of the story and world, a tale of nuclear holocaust made in an age when that was a stark possibility. As my chum Toby Hadoke pointed out to me a while ago, the second episode of the original serial, “The Survivors” (in which we first see the Daleks), was recorded on the evening of 22 November 1963, just hours after the cast and crew learned of the assassination of President John F Kennedy and the whole world seemed poised on a knife-edge.

This week, a post by Letters of Note started off a chain of thoughts. Following Kennedy's death, his widow Jacqueline wrote to Nikita Khrushchev, Premier of the Soviet Union:

“I know how much my husband cared about peace, and how the relation between you and him was central to this care in his mind. He used to quote your words in some of his speeches - 'In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.'”

Khrushchev seems to have been credited for this evocative phrase in the 20 July 1963 issue of Pravda (I've not been able to check this but it says so here). Whatever the case, President Kennedy quickly picked up on the phrase, quoting it on 26 July in his radio and television address to the US people on the nuclear test ban treaty - a transcript and recording can be found on the website of the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. 

“A war today or tomorrow, if it led to nuclear war, would not be like any war in history. A full-scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes, with the weapons now in existence, could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors, as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, 'the survivors would envy the dead.' For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot even conceive of its horrors.”

These words were very widely reported, such as in the Daily Telegraph the following day (it's a front-page story, but the line about survivors is on p. 16 where the news story continues). That was on Saturday, 27 July 1963 and, despite what Kennedy said, I think people could very well imagine the horrors. Surely it can't be a coincidence that this was probably also the weekend over which Terry Nation wrote his 26-page storyline for a Doctor Who serial at that point entitled "The Survivors".

The storyline does not include a date but we can deduce when Nation wrote it from two surviving documents in the BBC's Written Archives Centre. On 30 July, BBC Head of Serials Donald Wilson produced notes for a preliminary meeting about the promotion of Doctor Who and listed the first three serials then currently planned: the caveman adventure The Tribe of Gum aka An Unearthly Child, the ultimately unmade The Robots and the story that became Marco Polo. 

The following day, story editor David Whitaker produced one-paragraph synopses of these three stories - plus a newly commissioned fourth one: Nation's serial was now under the title “The Mutants.” So: Nation wrote the storyline over the weekend, surely influenced by the leading news story and Kennedy's evocative phrase, then met with Whitaker on the Monday or Tuesday and was commissioned for the story.

One more thing, which I mentioned yesterday in my interview with BBC News (and tweeted back in July). Nation’s thrilling, 26-page storyline, on the basis on which scripts were commissioned, used the words “execution”, “elimination” and “extinction”. Whitaker summarised the plot in one paragraph for his colleagues, and used a word Nation had not: “exterminated”. 

Source: Asa Briggs, Competition, p. 418. My book David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television is out now.

Three Counties Radio and Doctor Who @60

The first episode of Doctor Who was broadcast 60 years ago today and there's a whole load of stuff on TV, radio and online to mark the occasion.

This morning, I joined Andy Collins on BBC Three Counties radio to talk about David Whitaker, first story editor of Doctor Who, and how his childhood in places such as Knebworth, Cheshunt and Nasty (as well as living in London) fed into those early adventures - and explains why the Daleks invaded Bedford of all places. You can listen here:

• Andy Collins: Doctor Who is 60! (my bit starts at 1.54.00)

ETA: Danny Fullbrook also interviewed me for the BBC News website about David Whitaker's connection to the area - see Doctor Who: Bedford writer's childhood influenced the Daleks.

The second part of my contribution to the Something Who podcast is also now live. Having tackled 1965 story The Rescue (written by David Whitaker) in part one, me, Richard, Giles and Paul get to grips with 2010's The Eleventh Hour.

More of me rabbiting on about Doctor Who here:

• Architects of Doctor Who - David Whitaker by his biographer Simon Guerrier
• Who's Views: Merchandise Paradise - Simon Guerrier
• Corner to Corner: Peter Anghelides and Simon Guerrier

Doctor Who Magazine #591

I've a couple of things in the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine out today.

In "Location, Location, Location", assistant location manager Alex Moore tells me all about his job on the new series - which isn't all bins and car parks.

(I've been chatting to Alex anyway as his excellent article on the late director Frank Cox, published in the new issue of TARDIS (vol 7 no 5), has been very useful for my forthcoming book on The Edge of Destruction.)

I've also written the "Sufficient Data" infographic illustrated by Ben Morris looking at the winners of the readers' poll into best Fifth and Sixth Doctor stories.

And the back cover is a big ad for Daleks! Genesis of Terror which is out today. Rob Ritchie has produced the most amazing video trailer.

Daleks! Genesis of Terror

The terrific trailer for Daleks! Genesis of Terror is out now.

• Listen to the trailer for Daleks! Genesis of Terror
• Download the trailer for Daleks! Genesis of Terror

The new CD and download release is something very special - though I suppose I would say that, as producer. It features Tom Baker and a full cast performing Terry Nation's original draft of the first episode of Genesis of the Daleks, once voted the best Doctor Who story of all time by readers of Doctor Who Magazine.

I've found it fascinating to work on and hope you'll enjoy it when it's out later this month.

• Buy Daleks! Genesis of Terror from Big Finish

Blurb as follows...

In a paved garden outside time, the Doctor is presented with an awful prophecy: the conquest of all time by the Daleks. To prevent this terrible fate, the Time Lords have decided on a radical course — to weaponise time themselves, and destroy the Daleks before they were ever created. And they want the Doctor to carry out this extraordinary task!

Soon, he and his companions Sarah and Harry are on the battle-ravaged planet Skaro, where a war has been raging for centuries. The war is now waged by teenagers using the last surviving weapons. Everything is desperate. But the Kaled’s chief scientist has a new weapon that he thinks might just change everything…

Disc 1:

Full cast version of Terry Nation's first draft of episode one of Genesis of the Daleks, with Nicholas Briggs providing the stage directions, plus readings by individual cast members of the storylines for the other episodes.

Disc 2:

BBC broadcaster and journalist Samira Ahmed interviews Philip Hinchcliffe.

Cast:

• Tom Baker (The Doctor)
• Sadie Miller (Sarah Jane Smith)
• Christopher Naylor (Harry Sullivan)
• Peter Bankolé (Time Lord / General Grainer)
• Samuel Clemens (Nyder)
• Alasdair Hankinson (Ravon / Kaled Leader)
• Terry Molloy (Davros)
• James Phoon (Kaled Boy / Operator)

Crew:

• Narrated by Nicholas Briggs
• Featured Guests: Philip Hinchcliffe and Samira Ahmed
• Senior Producer: John Ainsworth
• Additional dialogue by Simon Guerrier
• Theme arranged by David Darlington
• Cover Art by Ryan Aplin
• Director: Samuel Clemens
• Executive Producers Jason Haigh-Ellery and Nicholas Briggs
• Music by Nicholas Briggs
• Producer: Simon Guerrier
• Sound Design by Jaspreet Singh
• Written by Terry Nation

Radio Free Skaro #893

On Saturday, I spoke to Steven and Chris from Radio Free Skaro about my research into the life of David Whitaker. I'd just given my talk on Whitaker at the Gallifrey convention, and you might be able to detect the buzz of adrenaline.

NB that Radio Free Skaro recorded lots at the convention, including an insightful interview with Chris Chibnall that they'll share next week!

Doctor Who Magazine #586

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine boasts an interview with Millie Gibson, who'll be joining the series as companion Ruby Sunday later this year, and the production team behind the new series. So it's a bit of a surprise to see my own gurning head in the midst of the editorial on page 3, where some nice things are said about Looking for David, the documentary about David Whitaker made by Chris Chapman and Toby Hadoke with some consulting and talking by me.

"Remarkable ... meticulously researched and ultimately poignant."

There's more praise for the documentary in Richard Unwin's review of the Doctor Who: The Collection - Season 2 (the Blu-ray box-set it's part of).

"... nothing short of extraordinary [with] jaw-dropping revelations provided by biographer Simon Guerrier".

So that's nice.

Elsewhere in the magazine, I lavish praise on the new edition of Doctor Who and the Daleks (the first ever Doctor Who novelisation, first published in 1964) which boasts 58 illustrations by Robert Hack and is a delight. I also slip in a couple of new facts about author David Whitaker, too. 

Plus, in "No Time to Die", Rhys Williams and I dig into the sets and production of missing 1965 episode The Traitors, with the sets recreated in CGI by Rhys with Gavin Rymill and Anthony Lamb. By chance, yesterday I realised that two elements of The Traitors may originate in something also written by Whitaker - but more on that in due course...

Doctor Who Magazine #584

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is, of course, devoted to the return of David Tennant as the Doctor, with plenty of exclusive chatter with the new cast and crew. How lovely to see Scott Handock is script editor on the new series - an age ago, I gave Scott his first writing gig.

Also in the mag is "Factory Records", in which me and Rhys Williams look at the set used in filming the Dalek production line sequence from the end of Episode 4 of The Power of the Daleks (1966), written by David Whitaker. So often in Doctor Who, limited time and money mean what the writer intended must be cut down to something less thrilling, but this is an example of the opposite happening. The CG recreations are by Rhys, Gav Rymill and Anthony Lamb.

There's also a Sufficient Data infographic by me and Ben Morris, this time looking at the Doctor's regenerations. I'd not seen The Power of the Doctor when I wrote the brief, or I'd have squeezed in the regeneration/deregeneration into the Master and back.

Penelope Fitzgerald - A Life, by Hermione Lee

Last year, when I asked what books by Penelope Fitzgerald I should read, a few people suggested this very good biography by Hermione Lee. Lee knew Fitzgerald personally; in the final pages of the book, she scrupulously lists exactly how. With access to Fitzgerald's papers - those held by the family and those at the University of Texas - plus interviews with huge numbers of those who knew and worked with her, the result is a richly detailed portrait of the good, bad and peculiar.

"Dillwyn had his fiftieth birthday party at the Spread Eagle Inn at Thame, a chaotic event at which the notoriously grandiose and eccentric landlord locked up all the lavatories, so that the guests had to pee in the gardens, pursued by ferocious bees, and the only food provided was a dish of boiled potatoes. (This story may have grown in Penelope's telling of it over the years.)" (p. 40)

This Dillwyn, Fitzgerald's uncle, is the Dilys Knox whose work on codebreaking at Bletchley during the war I also ready knew about. His brother Ronald is the Ronald Knox whose writings on Sherlock Holmes I've noted in the Lancet. Their brother Evoe Know, editor of Punch, was also a name I'd seen before, but I'd never made the connection between these Knox brothers, or that Fitzgerald was Evoe's daughter. The book is full of such connections - Fitzgerald's children friends with the young Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, Fitzgerald's family close to that of EH Shepard, illustrator of Winnie the Pooh. 

By chance, I went to see Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD at the cinema about the same time as reading the section about Grace, the canal boat on which Fitzgerald lived in the early 1960s, and on which she based her novel Offshore. Lee tells us (p. 144) that Grace was moored opposite St Mary's Church, Battersea - which is where Peter Cushing is standing when he sees a Dalek emerge from the Thames. So the background of those shots is what inspired a Booker prize-winning novel. I initially hoped that perhaps Grace was one of the bleak-looking boats visible in the film, but Fitzgerald's modest home sadly sank in 1963, taking with it many of her prize possessions just when she had so little left to lose.

(There's another Doctor Who connection: in about 1969, Fitzgerald owned an "old 1950s car" called Bessie (p. 219), just as Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor was first motoring about in his vintage-looking kit car of the same name.)

Lee tells us when she doesn't know something, or at least can't be sure. And she's brilliant at using Fitzgerald's fiction to tease out details of the author's real life - not that anything in a novel must be based on real experience, but that the narrative is revealing of a state of mind. At one point, Lee cites the owner of the shop on which The Bookshop was based, writing to Fitzgerald in praise of the novel but underlining differences between fact and fiction (real life was, apparently, more benign). Elsewhere, we close in on a man who may be the older, married colleague we know broke Fitzgerald's heart. Lee names her suspect, and presents a good case for him being the one, then admits there's not really enough here but tantalising fragments.

There is still plenty that's unknowable - and, as Lee admits at the end, plenty that Fitzgerald kept to herself to the end. But there's a vivid portrait here, a sense of Fitzgerald as a real, complex and contradictory person. I feel I know Penelope Fitzgerald now: the person, the work, the extraordinary, often difficult life. This is more than portraiture: it is vivid history; it is animation.

I'm keen to read Fitzgerald's own work of biography, The Knox Brothers, about her father and his brothers. And I'm keen to read Human Voices, a novel based on her own experience working at the BBC during the war. And Hermione Lee's Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing looks very good, too.

Doctor Who Magazine #580

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine boasts a cover by Anthony Lamb showing the Daleks as they blaze into action. There's lots of coverage of the two Dalek movies from the 1960s - and of the never-made third movie, too. In "Mine Craft", me, Rhys Williams and Gavin Rymill detail - and reconstruct - the sets from the second Dalek movie.

(An odd thing to study the movie in such depth, and then go and see it on the big screen at Home in Manchester. I saw all sorts of details I'd never seen before, such as the glistening lava on the exploded Dalek castle at the end...)

There's also another "Sufficient Data" by me and Ben Morris, this time on distances Doctor Who has fallen.