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.
Joining host Richard Smith are astronomy writer Giles Sparrow, Rick aka @brickpandorica and me.
“Informed public opinion is infectious, even to governments.” (p. 149)
“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.
“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)
“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)
“little more than another text book, and heavy going at that.” (Robin Turner, “Nuclear penguins and others”, Birmingham Post, 8 August 1964, p. 5.)
“Thought provoking … easily read but thorough” (John Berrie, “Woman’s angle”, Nottingham Evening Post and News, 7 August 1964, p. 10.)
“Everything factual has been checked by scientists whose knowledge is far more than equal to the task” (p. 7).
“She likes variety in writing and is now doing something in Science Fiction,” (p. 1)
“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)
"a perfect gift for curious minds, young and old alike."
Out today, The Story of the Solar System - A Visual Journey, is a sumptuous big book of space infographics written by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock off of The Sky at Night with some help by me and design/illustration by Emma Price. Exactly what you and everyone you know wants for Christmas, if you even dare wait that long.
It's a fast-moving, quick-witted caper, full of pithy one-liners but grounded in the real history of the jazz and drag scene, prohibition, racism and homophobia. That makes it sort of Dashiell Hammett as written by PG Wodehouse, with some magic mixed in - and not nearly as easy to pull off as Ben makes it look.
Of course, he has form here. That use of a specific time and place to add some heft to the adventure is the same trick as in Ben's Remembrance of the Daleks (which I adore). Just as that story hinted at hitherto unknown secrets in the Doctor's past, this novella provides some tantalising clues about the early life of Thomas Nightingale.
There's another link to Ben's TV Doctor Who in that Peter Walmsly is, here on p. 29, a reverend who led prayers at Casterbrook school of wizardry, decades before his stint as an archaeologist for the Carbury Trust.
I found it compelling and read it in a day. It closes with the prospect of many more such adventures for some of the principal figures here. Yes, please.
Rivers of London novels I've also blogged about:
I've not read The Left-Handed Hummingbird since it was first published in November 1993 - the official publication date was December, but there's a moment in this that I suddenly, madly remembered first reading the night before my driving test so it must have been out the month before. Yet this odd, extraordinary book scored its way into my brain. Reading it again after more than 30 years, it was immediately, vividly familiar, like catching up with an old friend.
Two things surprised me. First, for what I remember as Kate Orman's radical debut, the plot is quite straightforward, even slight. The Doctor and his pals Ace and Bernice are on the trail of "the Blue", ie Huitzilin, which has the power to take people over and make them violent. That includes the Doctor and his friends - all providing Huitzilin with fuel so that he can become corporeal once more. But the more the Doctor is taken over, the more he can see what Huitzilin thinks and feels. And the more Huitzilin becomes corporeal, the more he can be tackled head on...
What makes this so different is the way that it's told, beginning in 1994 - the future, when the book was published - and then dancing back to multiple points in time to piece together the story. Telling a story out of order was a big innovation, perhaps oddly for a long-running series about gadding back and forth in time. And then the novel makes us realise that the pieces don't quite fit because time is in flux and changing. I'm conscious now, as I wasn't at the time, how big an influence this was on my debut novel.
The way it's told includes things we'd never do today. The violence is horrific and vivid, rather than PG or 12A. The Doctor takes magic mushrooms and LSD to communicate with his enemy. One of his companions is a gun-totting solder who kills people with little qualm and reneges on her agreement with the Doctor not to use violence; the other companion kills a man by bashing him with a cooking implement. This book is all set on Earth and yet reading it is a journey to another world.
Secondly, the book is chock-full of references to other Doctor Who, on TV and in print. That's not a criticism - these were books squarely aimed at fans, and I ate up this continuity with greed at the time but was grateful to the entry on this novel in the Cloister Library when trying to remember other books I've not read in more than 30 years. For the most part, you don't need to be able to place these references to enjoy or be caught up in the story. But then there are the exceptions.
I think the assumed/required knowledge of the reader is 1964 story The Aztecs, which was readily available to fans at the time of publication having been released on BBC Video on 2 November 1992, and 1974 story Death to the Daleks, released on video July 1987. These TV stories also inspired two of the best novelisations, too. This kind of thing occupies my head a lot in what I write day to day - how much we can assume fixed points of Doctor Who, the nodes by which we all navigate, as opposed to the obscure stuff that is manna for the dork hardcore (my people). See, for example, what I said about authority as it relates to The Unfolding Text.
But also, amazingly, there are several references to other Doctor Who stories here that the Cloister Library doesn't cover. Perhaps fittingly for a story that plays with chronology and the unfixedness of time, there are the references in this novel to multiple Doctor Who stories from after it was published. When the Doctor is gravely wounded, his friends are asked why they don't rush him to hospital.
"'Because he's from outer crukking space,' spat Bernice. 'A crukking twentieth-century hospital would probably do a crukking brilliant job of killing him.'" (p. 177)
Which, of course, is exactly what happens to kill off this incarnation of the Doctor in the TV movie Doctor Who (1996). Later in the novel, Ace pulls out her gun only to find that the Doctor has swapped it for a potato, years ahead of him pulling the same trick (with a banana) on Captain Jack in The Doctor Dances (2005). Then the TARDIS lands on Abbey Road (p. 201), as it does in The Devil's Chord (2024).
A few other small things occur. Bernice Summerfield, a 26th-century archaeologist of the 20th century, doesn't know what pizza is (p. 71) or how to open tins (p. 73), and doesn't have much to do. When she reveals, at the end, that she doesn't get to do much archaeology while travelling in time and is thinking of leaving the TARDIS, I could well understand why. I doubt I was conscious of all this when I first read the novel; now I'm all too aware of the note from my editors to ensure the regular characters are always well served.
Something very of its time is the frequency with which the author refers to the Doctor as "the Time Lord". Yes, she also refers to Bernice as "the archaeologist" (p. 238) and Cristian as "the Mexican" (p. 259), but there are far more second mentions of the Doctor as Time Lord, which I don't think a Doctor Who novelist would do now. If nothing else, this incarnation of the Doctor, in the crumpled linen suit of the novels, is one of the least assuming Doctors visually, a man we'd fail to notice in a crowd who is yet a near god-like alien in our midst. Referring to him, a lot, as "the Time Lord" is a convention, a fashion, of the time when this novel was written but I think it'a also the wrong cue for what we "see" - as if this unassuming fellow were wearing a big robe and collar.
And then there's the other strong visual elicited by this reread: of me, aged 17, utterly absorbed by this book, this series, this gang of authors I so much wanted to be part of. There's a bit towards the end of the novel where the Doctor handles a powerful book that glows with light. It's been fun to return to this book that shone so brightly in my formative years and has stayed with me so long after. Thank you, Kate.
See also:
Just one episode of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle survives - the very odd The Mystery of Cader Ifan, which I saw for the first time last week at Kaleidoscope's "The Play's the Thing" event in Birmingham. But Mark Jones' comprehensive study details production of the series, based on Hawkesworth's extensive archive at the BFI, paperwork in the BBC's Written Archives Centre, press reports from the time and interviews with cast and crew. It offers a wealth of detail and insight, with plenty of photographs, clippings and illustrations from the original stories helping to conjure a vivid sense of what has been lost.
As Jones explains, for rights reasons the series had only a limited release overseas, which means there is perilously little chance of copies of the missing episodes ever being found. Doctor Who fans can torture ourselves with the promise that some of the missing 97 episodes might yet be out there, somewhere. There's endless discussion of the various possible leads and of which episodes we'd most want returned - the Missing Episodes podcast is very good on this - which makes me fidgety with stress. It's almost refreshing to start from the basis that stuff has gone for good.
Among the fascinating things here is the influence of other anthologies of old stories, notably Granada's Saki (1962), Maupassant (1963) and The Liars (1966), in which the original sources were reworked so that characters would recur through the run. The BBC's head of serials, Gerald Savory, who'd worked on some of these series, advised Hawkesworth to do the same (pp. 17-19). We then seen the problems this caused for production, with clashing schedules for filming and rehearsals.
Some practicalities are surprising: on The Lift, it turned out to be easier to film in Paris than in Blackpool. And how extraordinary to see the viewing figures for a "successful" series on BBC Two of the time: an audience of 450,000 watched The Willow House School on 26 February 1967 (p. 154); just 250,000 watched The Mystery of Cader Ifan on 12 March (p. 194). Eleven of the 13 episodes were repeated on BBC One between August 1967 and June 1968, in a mixed up order that played havoc with the continuity of the recurring characters. It would be interesting to know the viewing figures, those these don't appear to survive.
Other things struck me because of overlaps with my own bits of research. In romantic episode The Chemistry of Love, one of the recurring characters, Tom Crabbe (Keith Buckley) goes to a posh reception disguised as the vice-principal of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, one Anton Mikhailovich Asimov. This character is not in Doyle's original story, "A Physiologist's Wife", so is an invention of Hawkesworth and the name of the invented scientist is striking. At the time that the title of the TV episode was changed (2 November 1966, p. 90), production was under way on a Doctor Who story that directly referenced the work of science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov: in Episodes 2 and 3 of The Power of the Daleks, the scientist Lesterson speaks of the Daleks having "positronic" brains. (In Episode 5 of The Evil of the Daleks (1967), positronic brains containing the "human factor" are added to three Daleks.)
Isaac Asimov was a well known figure, with several of his works adapted for British television: "Little Lost Robot" shown as part of Out of this World (1962), The Caves of Steel adapted for Story Parade (1964) and six stories adapted for Out of the Unknown (1965-69, four of them prior to the broadcast of The Chemistry of Love. Why would both Doctor Who and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle connect themselves to Asimov at roughly the same time? My guess is that both were in response to his epic Foundation novels winning the Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series at the Tricon world science-fiction convention in the first week of September 1966. Foundation was originally a series of short stories that the author then reworked, which may have appealed to Hawkesworth doing something with Doyle.
There's another connection to The Evil of the Daleks, in that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle filmed at Grims Dyke house on 20 January 1967 (p. 171), three months before the Daleks were there; I've added the details to my list of filming at Grims Dyke. There are further connections between Doctor Who and this Doyle series simply because several cast and crew worked on both. Richard Martin, interviewed by Jones on 12 July 2022, recalls using vaseline on "special fronts to the camera" (p. 57) to achieve a ghostly effect on the mummy seen in Lot 249, having pioneered this technique - to resistance from the crew, he says - on Doctor Who (for the strange atmosphere of planet Vortis in The Web Planet). Martin also recalls his working methods:
"I was always fairly well pressed to do the camera script in time. ... I used to go in my study at home and would consume most of a bottle of whisky. I'd be up to four o'clock in the morning, and maybe just have a little bit of rest before having to go in and deliver this script. The real problem was trying to get enough rehearsal time. I'm a rehearsal addict. I love seeing what the actors do with the script and capturing what they do correctly." (p. 57)
In assessing these lost episodes, Jones asks how closely they kept to Doyle's original stories, how effective they were as drama and in conjuring an atmosphere, and how sharply we should feel their loss. My sense is that he'd most like to see the spooky episodes returned. But if we're playing the game of which of thee lost stories I'd most like to see, I'm haunted by The Croxley Master.
Medical student (and recurring character) Philip Hardacre is a medical student, forced to work for the pompous, lazy Dr Lichfield as the only means to pay his own university fees. Then Philip learns of a boxer pulling out of a forthcoming fight. Encouraged by surgery maid Mary, Philip agrees to take the man's place and go 20 rounds against the "Croxley Master" for a prize of £100.
This "master" is the tough and dishonest Silver Craggs. Against all odds, and by fighting fairly, Philip knocks out his opponent. Whereupon Craggs' mistress, Anastasia, played by brilliant Alethea Charlton,
"storms into the ring and lands Philip a tremendous blow on the jaw which fells him to the boards. As Mary and Anastasia start fighting, the two heroes of the fight are forgotten, lying side by side, unconscious on the canvas." (p. 69)
See also:
There's also a review of Deathworld, the story I script edited for Big Finish, which Jamie Lenman finds "surprising, and really quite touching". In Galaxy Forum, reader Bill Silver says nice things about the work Gav Rymill, Rhys Williams and I did on recreating the sets of missing episodes in the recent special issue.
And I think Eddie Robson's fun "This month in..." column (p. 49) uses an image of Doctor Who creators Sydney Newman and Donald Wilson that I spotted in an old issue of BBC in-house magazine Ariel, snapped on my phone and then cropped - those are Judi Dench's hands (and wine glass) in the bottom left.
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| Aerial, December 1967 |
The obvious influence, of course, is the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet, which the BBC broadcast at 6.35 pm on Wednesday 6 November 1974 - just right to inspire the development of the Doctor Who stories that became Planet of Evil and The Brain of Morbius. I dig into that and also how the same film influenced early Doctor Who as well as other sci-fi such as Star Trek (citing the excellent ‘Gene Roddenberry’s Cinematic Influences’ by Michael Kmet from 2013) and Star Wars (see the 2012 Wired interview, ‘Ben Burtt on Star Wars, Forbidden Planet and the Sound of Sci-Fi’ y Geeta Dayal).
Hinchcliffe says on the documentary made for the DVD release of Planet of Evil (by my friend Ed Stradling) that he suggested the ‘flying eye’ drone seen in the story, having read of something similar in a science-fiction story at the time. The Dictionary of Surveillance Terms in Science Fiction at the Technovelgy site helped me suggest some candidates for that story.
I also mention Isaac Asimov’s own timeline-of-the-future for his various short stories and novels, which I drew from ‘A page from Isaac Asimov’s notebook’, Thrilling Wonder Stories, vol. 44 #3 (Winter 1955), p. 63.
Edited by Gary Russell and published by Gareth Kavanagh at Roundel Books, you can buy The DNA of Doctor Who - The Philip Hinchcliffe Years from the Cutaway Comics site.
The BBC made 50 episodes, only one of which survives. But Doctor Who was devised to fill the same Saturday teatime slot and I think owes a significant amount to Halliday, which I'll tease out as I go through the history.
As with Doctor Who, there were novelisations of Garry Halliday's TV adventures. I now have copies of all five Garry Halliday books, and have already posted reviews here of the first three of them:
You can now download for free the four-page postscript to my biography of David Whitaker, detailing some of the things I've learned since the book was published last November.
The postscript is included in The Who Shop's exclusive paperback editions of the book, and will be added to future versions of the standard paperback at some point.
To accompany the release of the postscript yesterday, I posted a thread to both X (formerly Twitter) and BluSky, and here it is in full:
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| Terry Nation and pals at Lynsted Park, source |
Writer and Dalek creator Terry Nation was born on 8 August 1930. OTD in 1964, he hosted a big birthday party at his newly acquired home, Lynsted Park — an Elizabethan mansion in Kent.
You can watch footage of Nation interviewed at home by Alan Whicker in 1967 on the BBC website. But my interest is in that party.
This party haunts my imagination, symbolic of Nation becoming a big showbiz success story after years of toil in light entertainment.
But, like most of these things, the more I’ve looked into it, the richer and stranger the story gets.
I wonder about the logistics. Did Nation provide everyone’s drinks? Was good laid on as well? Given Lynsted Park was quite remote, was there a lot of drink-driving back to London?
But also, who was at this party? While in the Doctor Who production office, Nation sent an invite to actress Carole Ann Ford. (The office kept a copy: Nation to Ford, 31 July 1963, WAC T5/648/2 General)
Nation was at the time hard at work writing The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the serial that would see Ford leave Doctor Who after a year playing the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan.
On the DVD / Blu-ray commentary for The End of Tomorrow (the fourth episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth), Ford and her colleagues recall Nation’s lavish birthday bash.
In fact, Ford remembered that Nation’s grand new house was in a bit of a state. In particular, she recalled that the swimming pool couldn’t be used; it was full of rubbish.
Co-star William Russell said Nation told him that he hadn’t bought the house because he was suddenly rich from inventing the Daleks (whose debut story had concluded earlier that year).
Instead, Nation said he’d taken out an ‘enormous mortgage’ as a spur to keep busy writing. It was a means to success, rather than a marker of success having been accomplished.
Who else was at the party? Given that Ford and Russell were there, Nation probably invited Doctor Who’s other stars — William Hartnell and Jacqueline Hill.
Hill’s husband Alvin Rakoff told me he remembered going to Lynsted Park but wasn’t sure if it was for this particular party.
Producer Verity Lambert also remembered being at the party, according to the DVD/Blu-ray commentary.
Nation’s invitation to Ford said story editor David Whitaker could help her find the house, implying Whitaker was there, too.
At the time, Whitaker was working with Nation on the new Dalek TV story. They were also co-writing The Dalek Book for publication in September. (And Whitaker was novelising the first Dalek TV story.)
Given all these Doctor Who luminaries at the party, they surely tuned in to watch that evening’s episode — the first instalment of The Reign of Terror by Dennis Spooner.
(To this, my esteemed publisher Stuart Manning added: "Hazel Peiser, the partner of would-be Doctor Who Meets Scratchman director James Hill, recalls attending a party at Nation's mansion where the guests watched Doctor Who go out on TV. James was working on The Saint around that time, so it probably checks out.")
Spooner shared an agent with Nation, who’d recommended him to Whitaker. Two days before the party, it was confirmed that Spooner would join the BBC staff to shadow then succeed Whitaker.
The chances are that Spooner was at the party, too. In his biography of Nation, Alwyn Turner says Roger Moore also attended *one of* Nation’s parties at Lynsted Park, wearing a blue jumpsuit.
I like to imagine them all there together: the current Doctor Who, the future James Bond plus Jackie Hill — who was responsible for Sean Connery’s first big break. For more on the latter, see my post on I’m Just the Guy Who Says Action, by Alvin Rakoff.
At the time of the party, Moore was the star of The Saint, for which Nation wrote (for higher fees than Doctor Who). A week after the party, Whitaker met Saint script supervisor Harry Junkin.
A week later, Whitaker met with Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint, to discuss a potential musical. Nothing came of these meetings but they were surely instigated by or through Nation.
(Whitaker refers to both meetings in letter to his new agent, Beryl Vertue, at Associated London Scripts, on 14 August 1964, a copy held in Doctor Who production file WAC T5/648/2 General)
In throwing the party and in putting Whitaker and Spooner up for potential jobs, Nation was sharing his largesse. He could afford to be generous — couldn’t he?
As I imagine that party, I wonder what was going through Nation’s mind and how much he felt able to enjoy it himself. He’d certainly had a good few months since the debut of the Daleks.
‘The Daleks have transformed Mr Nation’s life,’ reported Andrew Duncan in Women’s Mirror just over a year later on 30 October 1965, ‘and he could eventually make £1 million from them.’ (NB, he hadn’t yet.)
Then Duncan quoted Nation’s own insecurities about this success. ‘I’ve got this enormous fear that one day a man is going to come and take back all the money.’
Cut to the Chase, pp. 20-23
To accompany CG recreations by Gav Rymil, me and Rhys Williams detail the Dalek Pursuit Ship, mentioned in episodes 3-5 of The Daleks's Master Plan and then seen in episode 6, "Coronas of the Sun".
The Hole Story, pp. 32-35
There are 97 missing episodes of Doctor Who and, to date, 786 episodes existing in the BBC archives. But there are still bits missing from the latter - stuff broadcast but since lost, and stuff recorded but never shown...
The Final Countdown, pp. 44-49
Gav, Rhys and me again, this time on the sets for the last of the missing episodes, The Space Pirates Episode 6.
We've previously recreated sets from a bunch of missing episodes, so here's the list so far:
Sadie Green meets Sam Masur (later Mazur) in hospital when they’re both children. They’re each going through some horrible, serious stuff at the time but bond while playing computer games. Sadie has also not been entirely honest with Sam. Despite a falling out, they reconnect during college and collaborate on a game of their own…
We follow them for two decades through the highs and lows of their lives, the loves and losses and games.
It’s beautifully written and wryly observed, noting changes to games and the surrounding culture over the period. It’s also full of nuance: we can see Sadie’s tutor is a manipulative predator; she learns to see that, too, but remains his friend. For all he’s a monster, he’s a person, too.
At the heart of the novel is Sam and Sadie’s sparky relationship. At best, they are funny and supportive; at worst, they are jealous or brood on perceived slights. There are several recurring jokes, such as one — based on an old computer game — that Sadie has died of dysentery, which is part of their childhood banter and then gets dropped to blinding effect again on page 440.
In fact, it is constantly smart and funny, the wit all from the perspective of particular characters so also revealing about them and their understanding of the world. For example, there’s Sam in a particular crisis wishing he could reprogram his brain in the way he might fix a game.
“Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.” (p. 228)
There’s lots of telling details, too, on the games these characters play — real and imaginary — and on their respective, mixed heritage: Sam’s Korean grandparents run a pizza place in K-Town, a district Sadie has never heard of when she first meets him, though she lives in a nearby part of LA. Later, they make a game out of separate but intersecting worlds.
The novel isn’t quite in chronological order, which allows it to tease the reader with key revelations to come. We jump ahead to interviews with Sam and Sadie looking back on their life and work. Or there’s the moment on page 190 when, in a scene set in the pizza place run by Sam’s grandparents, there’s the briefest mention of a poster on the wall: a 1980s advert showing a woman drinking a Korean beer. Twelve pages later, we learn the significance of this photograph — a gut punch of a revelation.
For a book about something as apparently unserious as playing games — a viewpoint it addresses several times — it is richly profound. More than once, we see the way games help people in real-life crisis. Sometimes, games have other impacts on real life, which I won’t spoil here. But it’s all utterly compelling; I read the last 100 pages on a plane yesterday, my heart in my mouth.
On that point, I can understand why the blurb and publicity don’t make a thing about this all being about games. That might put off readers who aren’t into games (I’m not, especially) — but can still be enthralled by the story being told.
One last idle thought. In her notes and acknowledgements at the end, author Gabrielle Zevin says that in referencing life-life computer games throughout the novel,
“I chose the games that made the most sense for the story, even when the dates were slightly wrong.” (p. 481)
That may illuminate an early reference that caught my eye. We’re told that Sam’s possessions in 1995 include,
“an aging desktop computer with a Doctor Who sticker on one side and a Dungeons and Dragons sticker on the other” (p. 67)
I wonder when Sam, aged 21 at this point, got into Doctor Who — a year before the TV movie kindled a new fandom and brought many lapsed fans back from the fray. I assume he was watching late-night on PBS. Did he find other like-minded fans, in real life or online, in the way he played Dungeons and Dragons with others? And when did his interest wane? Doctor Who never gets mentioned again.
The new DWM also has news of something I've been involved in: six boxes of papers belonging to the late David Whitaker - first story editor of and prolific writer for Doctor Who - have been donated by his niece Melanie to the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York. The Borthwick Institute website boasts more details and a catalogue of the David Whitaker archive. I've also written a piece on the papers in this collection relating to Doctor Who for DWM's Print the Legend special, currently in shops.
The Borthwick Institute is a very good fit for these papers because it already holds similar collections, including an archive relating to David's great friend producer Ernest Maxin. I visited the archive while researching my biography of David, as Maxin had kept two of his unproduced screenplays (see Maxin, box 14). I'm grateful to Gary Brannan at the institute for all his help.
"'Big one,' the Doctor nodded. 'Well, small in scale, but big in everything else. The final bust-up between the invading Duchy of Estonia and the republic of Novgorod. Marks the end of the Northern Crusades in this region, and cements Prince Alexander Nevsky as a national hero.'
'I've never heard of it,' said Ruby.
'Your planet's had too many wars for anyone to know them all,' said the Doctor sadly. 'Still, here we are.'" (p. 30)
The distress signal has been sent by Ranavere, a 16 year-old girl from an alien culture of warriors, who has been sent to the battle as part of a coming-of-age ritual. Ranavere doesn't to fight - but it soon turns she may not have a choice. There are other aliens on the ice, some of them more of Ranavere's warmongering people and then there's something more monstrous as well...
I really enjoyed this fast-moving, lively adventure by first-time novelist Georgia Cook (who I know a bit). It deftly captures the pace and verve of the recent TV series. In fact, it's packed with set-piece moments that would be great to be able to see. This is a book that would really suit illustration - which should come as no surprise given that the author is also a designer and artist.
Ruby and the Doctor are captured well, and Ranavere is a character we can relate to; she and her family are well drawn. Like Ruby, I'd never heard of this moment in history but it makes for a rich, arresting backdrop. It's all great fun, not least towards the end when, after all the ice and cold, the Doctor emerges from the TARDIS with a pile of big, fluffy towels for the surviving burly warriors. Their resistance to such comfort quickly melts, in a moment that's perfectly daft, funny and true to character.
Blurb as follows:
Experience a year from the Doctor's perspective with an exciting new release from BBC Books.
“The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour and the entire planet is hurtling round the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, and I can feel it.”
– The Doctor
Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac is your essential companion to a Time Lord’s ‘Year’. You’ll learn how to feel the turn of the Earth under your feet (hurtling round the sun at 67,000 miles an hour), the times each day that Sea Devil attacks are most likely (depending on the tides), how to avoid disturbing dangerous faeries (distances measured in yards), and why, despite all the invasions and Goblins, Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year.
Releasing later this year, The Time-Travelling Almanac is a must-have guide with useful tips and information provided by the Doctor and friends – and occasionally his enemies.
Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac is out in hardback on October 3rd 2024. You can pre-order here.
I was in London for a bit on Saturday to attend the live recording of the final Eggpod, where I caught up with several good friends. Having allowed a bit of extra time for the usual snafu of trains, I had half an hour to retread a couple of streets relating to David Whitaker and the early days of Doctor Who.
Doctor Who is generally seen as the creation of BBC head of drama Sydney Newman and his head of serials, Donald Wilson. As detailed in the production diary, having agreed a format for the new series in May 1963, on 4 June Wilson sent Newman an outline for the first four-part serial, The Giants, written by staff writer CE Webber. The Doctor's companions in this were school pupil Sue and her teachers Lola [McGovern] and Cliff.
Newman objected to this storyline and another staff writer was brought in to write the first story. In Coburn's first draft script (reworking CE Webber's original), Lola became Miss McGovern and Cliff became CE Chesterton, with Sue now "Susan Forman" and established as the Doctor's granddaughter.
In Coburn's next draft, Miss McGovern became Miss Canning and Susan became Susanne Forman, though it was also revealed that she was in fact an alien princess called Findooclare. Story editor David Whitaker wasn't sure about this last element, as he explained in an undated note to producer Verity Lambert. But he added that Coburn "agrees to the change of any names we wish."
By the time the episode was recorded in September, the characters were established as Susan Foreman (granddaughter of the Doctor but her origins left a mystery), Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton.
A detailed analysis of these different drafts was published in Doctor Who Magazine in 2013, written by my friend Graham Kibble-White (who I sat with at Eggpod on Saturday). This included an interview with the son of the late Anthony Coburn, in which Stef Coburn claimed that his (Catholic) father had based the character of the Doctor on his "cultural hero St Paul" and had named one school teacher after another of his heroes, the flamboyant writer GK Chesterton. The feature went on to speculate that GK Chesterton's The Ballad of Saint Barbara (1922) was an influence on the name of Ian's colleague.
I'm not so sure about this, not least because the characters in Doctor Who aren't really anything like St Barbara, GK Chesterton or St Paul. In researching my book on David Whitaker, I walked the streets of Kensington where he'd lived for much of his life, and spotted an alternative. I contend that this fits with Whitaker's note to Lambert, which implies that they - not Coburn - changed the characters' names.
On 8 June 1963, Whitaker married actress June Barry, who lived with her mum in Cheniston Gardens, W8 - the doorway in the extreme right of this picture I took on Saturday.
But what’s that straight ahead?
Turn left up Wrights Lane and you’re heading north, just a hundred yards or so to Kensington High Street. That's in the direction David lived at the time (with his parents, on nearby De Vere Gardens), and also in the direction of Peel Street, home to David’s brother Robert and his wife Barbara…
In making the shortish walk to Peel Street, you cross Kensington High Street and on to Hornton Street, home to this well-established estate agent.
In 1963, it was based at 116 Kensington High Street, so would have been even more prominent. David Whitaker and his bride may well have used Chestertons, their local estate agent, to find a place of their own to live - after their wedding, they moved to Russell Gardens Mews and lived there until 1970.
Keep going up Hornton Street and you get to a road running parallel to Peel Street; there's a plaque at no. 32 Sheffield Terrace marking the fact that GK Chesterton was born there on 29 May 1874. So Chesterton in Doctor Who may well have been named after the writer, but through this local connection.
All of this is a stone's throw from St Mary Abbots Church:
This is where David and June married, James Beck and Trevor Bannister among their ushers, Alethea Charlton their bridesmaid - as seen in the film clip included in our Looking for David documentary on the Doctor Who Season 2 collection. Charlton, of course, played Hur the cavewoman in Coburn's opening serial for Doctor Who.
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| Issue 43 |
