Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, by Terrance Dicks

The four-part Doctor Who story Pyramids of Mars was originally broadcast in October and November 1975. It was then repeated, in a one-hour omnibus version, on Saturday, 27 November 1976, where it was watched by 13.7 million people — the largest audience ever achieved by Doctor Who to that point. 

(Since then, just five episodes have beaten that record, all in autumn 1979 when ITV was affected by industrial action.)

The novelisation was published simultaneously in paperback and hardback three weeks later on 16 December, so the repeat would have been fresh in the minds of readers who received this book for Christmas. They would have been conscious of quite how much Terrance added to the version on TV — much more than in his previous novelisations. I’ll dig into what he adds and why presently.

The cover is, I think, one of the best by Chris Achilleos. The focus is the monster — or robot Mummy — standing impassively upright, its legs breaking out of the lower edge of the frame. The closest reference photograph I’ve been able to find crops the lower half of the Mummy, so Achilleos may have worked from a separate photograph to provide more of the body.

Photo care of the Black Archive

ETA, Paul MC Smith sourced this, care of the tragicalhistorytour.com:

The Mummy is flanked by portraits of the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, their expressions suggesting a deadly serious book.

The slightly stippled portrait of the Doctor is similar in composition to Achilleos’ previous illustrations of this incarnation, the hat on his head with brim angled upwards to the right, one loop of scarf under his chin. But the glowering countenance is unlike the beaming, even laughing, versions we’ve seen before. Whereas in the reference photograph the Doctor is staring away into space, here he glowers at the Mummy.

Photo care of the Black Archive

Sarah also looks in towards the Mummy, but points her rifle over its shoulder, pointing away to something out of frame. 

Photo care of the Black Archive

She is slightly angled compared to the reference photograph; this, the rifle and overlap all add dynamism to the whole, so the cover is at once serious and exciting. A white oblong arranged vertically behind these three characters helps connect them — separate photographs made into one entwined image, a cruciform with the vertical Mummy. 

But without that oblong, I think there’s a triangular structure to the arrangement of the three characters, fitting for a story about pyramids. Was that the original plan, and then Achilleos thought it looked wrong within the wider rectangular frame? If so, did he add the oblong to square the whole thing off?

The sepia tinge suggests an old-fashioned photograph and helps to convey a story set in the past (in 1911). The radiating orange background is suggestive of the heat of Egypt, or perhaps the landscape of Mars, though at best the connection is subtle. The bright, white heart of this energy is slightly off centre, to the right of the Mummy’s head, again creating a more dynamic, three-dimensional effect. The title and border are deep purple, adding to the sombre tone. 

Inside the book, there’s the usual list of titles “Also available in the Target series”, which for the first time includes Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, published 18 months previously. As discussed before, I think the late addition of that book to the schedule meant it got missed from these lists. But here it is at last, alongside The Making of Doctor Who, which was published the same day as this novelisation. 

A third book by Terrance also published on this day, The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, isn’t listed. I think this and some other things suggest that the book was a late commission, written after this novelisation. I shall dig into that in a subsequent post.

By now, there were so many Doctor Who titles from Target that some were left out to fit the list on one page. I wonder how decisions were made as to what to omit. Among those missing are Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders by Terrance, and Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon and Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion both by Malcolm Hulke, who I’m sure would have taken the omission gracefully.

Then we get into the book itself. As usual for Terrance, the novel comprises 12 chapters but here there are also a prologue and epilogue, both of them additions to what is seen on TV. The prologue draws from a single line of dialogue in Part Two:

DOCTOR WHO:

He destroyed his own planet, Phaester Osiris, and left a trail of havoc across half the galaxy. Horus and the rest of the Osirans must have finally cornered him on Earth. 

From this, we get three pages of epic legend, the kind of big mythic stuff more commonly seen in and around 21st century Doctor Who. As we get into Chapter 1, Terrance continues to embellish what we see on screen.

Marcus Scarman, for example, wears a suit and public school tie despite the heat in Egypt. This, we’re told, is because,

“The year was 1911, and Englishmen abroad were expected to maintain certain standards.” (p. 10)

In fact, stage directions in the camera script for Part One tell us Scarman wears a “Wykehamist tie” — that is, in the brown, navy and red of Winchester College. But Terrance makes it a point of character and context, and refers to the tie again on p. 45, where it help us to recognise Professor Scarman when he reappears in the story. 

In the TV version, Scarman is the first person for millennia to enter a particular “blind pyramid” somewhere in the region of the real-life Saqqara. Indeed, Part One begins with stock footage of the distinctively shaped stepped pyramid there, which my late friend John J Johnston identified in his comprehensive article on the story:

“Establishing shots of the Fifth Dynasty pyramids of Abusir and archaeological excavations at Saqqara … hailing from the documentary The Catacombs of Sakkara, first transmitted under BBC2’s Chronicle strand on 11 April 1970, which focused on the work at this most ancient of sites by W B Emery, then Edwards Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology at University College London.” John J Johnston, “Excavating a Television Classic: Pyramids of Mars (1975)”, Mummy Stories 

In the book, it’s a “Black Pyramid” (p. 10) and in “Sekkara” (p. 57), the spelling as per the camera script — where the smaller typeface suggests that the place name was a late addition, perhaps after the production team had secured the stock footage.

We learn from Terrance of the “long years” Scarman has spent tracking down clues to the location of this hidden pyramid, “many” fellow archaeologists having scoffed at him. We’re also told how Scarman bribed his local guide Ahmad,

“whose love of gold had finally overcome his fear” (p. 10).

This, we’re then told, is Ahmad’s,

“fear that he was blaspheming the ancient gods of his people” (p. 11).

There’s some local colour, with “half-naked Egyptian labourers squatted patiently by the tethered camels” (p. 10), a pen portrait akin to the stock footage to establish setting. I don’t think this is any worse than, say, in The Daemons (1971), when the stock archetypes of an English village know the pagan legends related to the local barrow and are variously frightened or scornful.

We get a bit more detail in Chapter 2, where Terrance provides a potted history of another Egyptian, Ibrahim Namin, “High Priest of the Cult of the Black Pyramid” (p. 19). Namin has served the cult his whole life, the latest in a line of ancestors in the same role, stretching back millennia. Having heard of Scarman’s expedition to the Black Pyramid, Namin and his fellow priests descend on the site and kill Ahmad and all the labourers — a detail not shared on screen.

At this point, Namin and his cult are loyal to the other “Great Ones” and keen to keep Sutekh securely imprisoned in the pyramid for all time. They know the consequences of failure:

“In the Secret Writings of his cult it was laid down that the Pyramid must never be broken into or the most terrible disaster would overwhelm the world” (p. 20).

It is only on entering the desecrated pyramid that Namin is taken over by Sutekh, who softly explains that there has been a misunderstanding and promises that Namin and his priests will be “exalted” for loyal service — to Sutekh. Terrance tells this from Namin’s perspective, where this all seems very reasonable. He therefore switches sides.

We then learn how Namin has loyally followed Sutekh’s instructions, packing up artefacts from the pyramid and shipping them in crates first to Cairo and then England. He also posed as Scarman’s servant to obtain the professor’s luggage from a hotel in Cairo.

This extra detail makes for an unusually long chapter for a novelisation by Terrance, comprising 15 pages. With the lore-filled prologue, there’s a lot of added material in this first section of the book. We don’t reach the moment that marks the end of Part One on TV until p. 44 — more than a third of the way through the book. Based on his previous novelisations, it’s unusual for Terrance to embellish what happened on screen to such an extent. Why did he feel the need here?

Well, Terrance addressed this very issue when he was the guest of the newly formed Doctor Who Appreciation Society at an event held on 29 April 1976 — when he was surely still writing this book:

“Mr Dicks explained that in books more explanations are necessary and any loose ends, which would pass by on television, must be tied up for the printed page. He quoted the forthcoming adaptation of Pyramids of Mars — which he himself is penning — as an example. In it the whole [backstory] about the character of the Egyptian Namin and his relevance to the plot will be explained. Explanations are taboo for television drama.” (JJ Bentham, “Terrance Dicks report — part one”, TARDIS vol. 1 no. 8 (July 1976), p. 17.)

Pyramids of Mars is a great, atmospheric story on TV, propelled by forward momentum. It works on visuals and feel. But in adapting it for the page, Terrance found — I think more than with most other Doctor Who stories — that its shortcomings in logic were rather exposed.

Why, when people have got into his prison in Egypt, does Sutekh send them and a whole load of artefacts back to England? It’s not explained on screen or in the book. 

(I can suggest an explanation: Sutekh needs them to set up various technical means to free him, but doesn’t want to do that in Egypt where local people know his name; better to do it well out of sight, and he’s just possessed a man who owns a private estate where such operations can be carried out in secret.)

Why does Sutekh appear in the TARDIS at the beginning of the story, not least given that — according to the Doctor — “nothing can enter” the ship? Is Sutekh even aware he has done so, given he doesn’t speak of it later? 

(A few people have been in touch to suggest this is the TARDIS overlapping with Sutekh trapped in the Vortex at the end of the story. That would make a neat bootstrap paradox but is, I think, complicated by the trip to 1980 midway through the story; it is a closed loop then, then it isn’t, then it is. Yes, we can marry up that idea of trapped Sutekh invading the TARDIS with his return to the series in 2024, but my focus here is on what Terrance did and didn’t address in his novelisation.)

Why do both the Doctor and Sarah Jane don outfits suitable for 1911 before they know that’s where they’re headed? Even the on-screen explanation makes little sense: Sarah is wearing an Edwardian dress but the Doctor says it belonged to his companion Victoria, who was from 1866. It looks great — and the Doctor’s first ever frock coat became a signature look for this and later Doctors. But the logic is at fault.

Something similar is going on when Sutekh sends the possessed Marcus Scarman to the house in England and he arrives as a “black-robed figure” with a “shining globe” for a head (p. 43); a “burnished globe” in the script. On screen, I think the idea was to up the stakes at the end Part One by having the nominal villain, Ibrahim Namin, killed off by an even worse, alien monster. It wouldn’t be quite so scary, or linger in the minds of viewers for a week, if this were Marcus Scarman from the off. On the page, without the cliffhanger, it is odd.

Then there are the remarkable coincidences all through the story. Why do events take place on the site of the future UNIT HQ — last seen in Robot almost two years previously? Or there’s Laurence Scarman having conveniently “invented the radio telescope forty years early” (p. 39). In fact, it’s more like 20 years early, with Karl Guthe Janke’s array dating from 1932. (Presumably, out of shot behind Laurence’s cottage, there’s a large set up of dipoles and other technical gubbins for this contraption to work.)

How convenient that the Osirans broadcast a warning in a cipher of English, enabling the Doctor to translate it by assuming that the most commonly occurring letter is “E” (p. 41). (It’s the most commonly occurring letter in other languages, too, such as French, German, Italian and Spanish, too, but “A” is more common in Icelandic, Polish, Portuguese and Turkish. In Finnish, the most frequently occurring letters are “A”, “I”, “N” and “T” and then “E”. My point is that no thought has been given to the Osirans writing in, say, Egyptian hieratic or demotic, let alone hieroglyphs. The logistics of translation are very different to decoding a cipher. 

The production team seem to have been aware of some of the contrivances here, as we can see from the Doctor’s response to a convenient hiding place in the Scarman house:

Again, the smaller typeface suggests a late addition, the nonsense perhaps picked up in rehearsal.

These are all issues of the TV story. The issue in a novelisation is how much to fix this stuff. The more you tinker, the more you alter the on-screen story or hold up the action — and it is then a less faithful translation of what occurred on screen. I think Terrance’s approach is the right one, adding some backstory to the beginning to give the whole thing some weight and history, and then breezing through the rest with relatively small fixes that don’t disturb the flow.

So, for example, we learn how Sarah happens to know, very conveniently, about the 740 gods listed on the walls of the tomb of Thutmose III (that is, the real-life KV34) — a relatively obscure bit of information with which I used to impress Egyptologists when the Dr worked at the Petrie Museum. Terrance tells us, twice, that Sarah knows this because she once researched Egyptology for an article in an educational magazine (p. 41 and p. 83). He also has the Doctor chuckle at this display of one-upmanship from Sarah — so it’s not just a fix, but reveals a fun side of their relationship, too.

Then there’s what Terrance does with the Doctor and Sarah being chased by slow, lumbering Mummies, which they could surely outrun. With Sarah, he simply hangs a lantern on the problem:

“Somehow it had got ahead of her” (p. 33).

With the Doctor, he increases the burden of carrying wounded Dr Warlock. On screen, Warlock is played by the relatively slight Peter Copley. Here,

“Warlock was a big heavy man, and with such a burden even the Doctor couldn’t move very fast” (p. 33).

Terrance sets this up earlier on, introducing Warlock as “a burly figure in country tweeds” who “shouldered his way” rudely into a room:

“Namin looked thoughtfully at the ruddy-faced balding figure in front of him. A typical English country gentleman, with all the unthinking arrogance of his kind.” (p. 22)

Making Warlock more physically powerful ups the tension, and makes it more difficult for the Doctor to carry him, but also Namin’s perspective of Warlock is revealing of character.

When the possessed Marcus Scarman confronts Warlock and asks him about the Doctor, Terrance adds a bit of explanation as to why Warlock doesn’t simply share what he knows with his old friend:

“I’d just been shot when I met him, so my memory’s a bit hazy” (p. 53).

Terrance is especially good at adding connections between these various characters. On screen, Warlock lives in the nearby village and “Professor Scarman is my oldest friend”. Here, Warlock is also a “good friend” to poacher Ernie Clements (p. 53), occasionally buying a rabbit or partridge from him. Ernie also lives in a cottage in the village (p. 82).

Clements’s first name isn’t used on screen but does appear in the script. Here, he’s got some pride, preferring to think of himself as a kind of unofficial gamekeeper rather than poacher (p. 49). He’s intelligent, too, working out the contours of the invisible barrier round the estate (p. 50). Like Harry Sullivan before him, he’s allowed to swear, with a single “ruddy” (p. 55).

Clements also knows “old Collins”, the servant at the house. We’re told Collins wears “the formal black clothes of an upper servant” (p. 21) — my italics — and has been in service all his life. Just before Collins is killed, we’re told he’s known Marcus Scarman since childhood (p. 26), a bit of human connection that makes us feel more of his death.

Terrance also explains Clements shooting a man in cold blood: initially feeling a “sudden surge of furious rage” at the murder he has witnessed, then,

“He was suddenly appalled by what he had done” (p. 58-59).

Our understanding of Clements adds to the effect of the poacher then being hunted — an irony Terrance doesn’t spell out but I think is implicit in the script. On screen, his predicament is played a little for laughs; here, he gets more respect.

Laurence Scarman doesn’t get these added biographical details, but doesn’t need them; he is perfectly written and played on TV. We learn a bit more about his family: his father was a big game hunter (p. 68), explaining why there are “several” guns on the property (p. 42). But Terrance makes Laurence’s death distinctly more horrible:

“With horror Laurence saw that his brother’s hands were black and charred. Their touch seemed to burn, he felt smoke rising from his jacket. ‘Marcus’, he choked, ‘your hands…’”

On screen, Laurence clearly says “Your hands” because they are hurting him; here, there’s maybe a sense that he’s concerned for his brother’s hands being in such a state. Then, on screen, we cut away while Marcus is holding Laurence’s shoulders. Terrance adds an extra gruesome touch, as Marcus,

“shifted his grip to Laurence’s throat” (p. 86).

There are several examples of this kind of addition to the horror. When Sutekh is seen in the TARDIS and the controls spark, Sarah wonders, “Was the TARDIS on fire?” (p. 16). When a Mummy traps its foot in one of Clements’s snares, it snarls (p. 49) — an odd response for a robot. Unlike on TV, there is a ferret in the cage in Clements’ hut (p. 83). Whereas events on TV take place in the daytime, night falls on p. 42. And when the Doctor enters the time-tunnel to Sutekh’s pyramid, he loses consciousness (p. 95), suggesting a more taxing, less instantaneous trip. 

When, possessed, the Doctor returns up the tunnel sitting “cross-legged like a Buddhist in meditation” (p. 103), whereas on TV he is standing, his eyes staring blindly upwards. On the next page, Terrance describes the Doctor as a “mindless puppet”, but he doesn’t go into further detail, whereas in previous novelisations he’d shown disquiet at stuff about mind control. Perhaps through over-use it had lost its horror.

The depiction of the Doctor is doing something new. The TV story begins with the Doctor brooding in the TARDIS; here, Terrance conveys this but notes how at odds it is with the Doctor’s “usually cheerful features” (p. 13). On TV, Laurence asks if his hunting rifle could be of use and the Doctor responds, “I never carry firearms.” Terrance extends that and makes it more emphatic:

“Certainly not… I never carry fire arms” (p. 41)

But he also has the Doctor ready to defend himself with a fallen branch as a club (p. 35), and has him speaking “practically” (ibid) and “impatiently” (p. 36), so he’s more brusque and potentially violent than normal. Perhaps that’s to be consistent with, as on screen, the Doctor’s cool response to the murder of Laurence Scarman. But it’s not the only odd thing. On screen, the Doctor knows about “sweaty gelignite”; here he explains how it's used in fishing (p. 83) — an odd thing for him to know. When Sarah makes a reference to the events of Death to the Daleks (1974), his response is terse:

“The Doctor was in no mood to discuss his adventures, particularly those which had taken place in other incarnations” (p. 110).

Yet there are signs that this is the same, jolly character as before. He chuckles at Sarah while searching for explosive, he calls Laurence “old chap” more than once (p. 67 and p. 69), and there’s an odd, repeated gag where, despite the crisis, he rushes off to recover his hat and scarf (p. 36 and p. 93). It’s oddly goofy behaviour, more like Terrance’s Robot than TV Pyramids of Mars.

More than anything, Terrance underlines that this is the same Doctor from previous other adventures when introducing him. First, there’s a variation on familiar words:

“Through the swirling chaos of the Space/Time Vortex, the strange continuum where Space and Time are one, there sped the incongruous shape of a square blue police box, light flashing on the top”. (p. 13)

I’d query the use of “square”, but the “swirling chaos” is interesting. On screen, the police box spins through a simple starfield. Did Terrance imagine swirling chaos would be more dramatic, or more in keeping with earlier depictions of the TARDIS in flight? Could he have meant to link this to Sutekh, god of chaos, as the TARDIS spins into his grasp?

The opening TARDIS scene on TV references UNIT, the Brigadier and Victoria, and Terrance concisely explains all this stuff, as well as what the TARDIS is (p. 14). He also includes a footnote to another of his own novelisations, Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster (p. 16).

Some continuity he cuts. There’s no mention of Sarah being from 1980, as on screen. At the end, the Doctor doesn’t mention having once been blamed for starting a fire in 1666. But notably, there’s a historic moment here. On p. 97, for the first time, Terrance refers in print to Gallifrey, planet of the Time Lords, giving — as per the TV story — its galactic coordinates and location in the “constellation of Kasterborous”. 

Terrance would go on to novelise all the 20th century TV stories set on Gallifrey — The Deadly Assassin (20 October 1977), The Invasion of Time (21 February 1980), Arc of Infinity (21 July 1983) and The Five Doctors (24 November 1983, and based on his own script). His later, original Doctor Who novels dig ever more into Time Lord mythology. For all he co-wrote The War Games and script edited The Three Doctors, this is where that starts, with him grappling with history and the Proper Nouns.

As on screen, Sutekh refers to the Time Lords as a “perfidious species” (p. 104) but Terrance adds a slight qualification from the Doctor:

“I come of the Time Lord race, but I renounced their society” (p. 97).

Technically, race isn’t the same thing as species; it’s a more cultural than biological distinction, and now an outmoded term. This, I think, plays into ideas later suggested in both The Deadly Assassin and The Invasion of Time, that there are many different peoples on Gallifrey, the Time Lords just one social order.

Sarah, meanwhile, is, “a slender, dark-haired girl” (p. 14) — not, as in earlier novelisations by Terrance, simply “dark”. As well as drawing on the magazine piece she wrote about Egyptology, she also recalls “childhood visits to the Science Museum” (p. 37) in London; there’s an analogy later,

“like a child on its first visit to the Science Museum” (p. 62),

as if this is a universal rite of passage. The Doctor doesn’t know how good a shot Sarah is (p. 88), but she seems highly competent, knowing to “cuddle” the rifle butt into her shoulder (p. 91) when readying her aim. She dismisses the Doctor’s mention of Madame Antoinette as “cheerful nonsense”, as if she doesn’t take his name-dropping too seriously. But there’s a touching moment, as he goes to face Sutekh, where they both acknowledge that he might not come back (p. 94).

Sadly, this is followed by the distracted, careless Sarah getting captured — explaining a detail that is missed from the TV serial, but not the most heroic moment. Likewise, when Sutekh appears in the TARDIS at the start, Sarah screams (p. 16).

Terrance describes this vision of Sutekh as “half human, half wolf or jackal” (p. 16), and later refers to,

“Sutekh’s true visage, the snarling, bestial jackal” (p. 115).

This isn’t quite right: the production team on the TV story seem to have made a point not to make Sutekh’s exposed head like that of an animal on Earth. While other Egyptian gods had heads like recognisable animals — jackal-headed Anubis, hippo-headed Tarawet, falcon-headed Horus — the strange, square-eared “Tythonian beast” of Sutekh/Set has not been matched to a real creature.

As on TV, Sutekh refers to the “main pyramid” on Mars (p. 105), suggesting a community of pyramids, plural — thus giving the story its title, even though we see only one. It’s a shame there’s no description here of what exactly is sitting up there on Mars: is it a relay station, or was it once a whole populated town?

Again, Terrance is good on small detail: he explains why the possessed Marcus thinks nothing of the police box in his house (p. 62), and when the Doctor reaches the tomb in Saqqara we’re told the tapestry is still smouldering (p. 95). But it’s odd that Terrance has the paralysed Sutekh able to turn his head and then swing back (p. 96), as if the only part of him fixed in place for eternity is his bum.

The TV scripts are peppered with rich vocabulary, but “stertorously” (p. 34) and “vitreous (p. 84) are both Terrance’s. Even so, some of the descriptions aren’t quite right. He speaks in one instance of the “machine-like persistence” of the Mummies (p. 67), which is hardly surprising given that we know they are robots. 

There’s something odd, too, when the Doctor races back to the TARDIS on Mars and Sarah has to shout “Wait for me!” and leap through the closing doors behind him (p. 117). Would he really leave her behind? On the same page, we’re told they “journey back to the Earth of nineteen eleven”. But the vital plot point of there being a distance of eight light minutes between Earth and Mars hinges on this all happening in the same relative time: the TARDIS can make the trip in an instant, so gets ahead of Sutekh. It suggests Terrance hadn’t understood the physics of the story. 

Likewise, on TV Sarah refers to “tribophysics”, the real science of friction. Terrance renders it “triobyphyics” (p. 107), which I think translates roughly as the physics of 3 and 2. Again, the suggestion is that he thought this was something invented for the TV story.

There’s some handwaving over the physics of the organ on which Namin plays in Marcus Scarman’s house, which we’re told is performed as a “kind of prayer, a tribute to his gods” (p. 16). On TV, the organ in the script means an organ in Dudley Simpson’s incidental music, giving a particular flavour to the extradiegetic sound. Here, the organ is clearly diegetic — heard by characters in the story. Sarah even hears it inside the TARDIS (p. 17), and it serves a purpose in masking the Doctor’s footsteps (p. 42). 

So is the organ used in summoning Sutekh, or making a link to the time-tunnel? Is it an ordinary organ, and particular kinds of music have this effect on the Vortex? Or has Ibrahim Namin specially built an organ with some kind of technical, physicsy qualities? Is that why he had to come to England? We are not told.

The significance of this organ is also uncertain. As usual, Terrance capitalises words of import: Mummy (p. 34), Casket (p. 65), Warhead and Phase One (both p. 89). But the room of the house with the organ in is both organ room (p. 118) and Organ room (p. 121).

Then we get to the end. As on TV, the Doctor traps Sutekh in the time tunnel, effectively weaponising time to age a god to death. A fire duly breaks out in the house, and history seems back on course. On TV, the Doctor cracks jokes and he and Sarah hurry back to the TARDIS. Here, we get a scene inside the TARDIS with Sarah mourning the loss of the people who have died and wondering if word will get out to the wider community. It’s a brilliant idea, continuing the themes of the TV story, as to whether she and the Doctor have left a footprint in history.

There’s then an epilogue, set “Later, much later” (p. 122) in which Sarah visits the offices of the local paper in the village near UNIT HQ to look up reports from the time. That qualification “much later” suggests this is not around the time of the next TV adventure, ie The Android Invasion, but some way beyond that. When this book was published, Sarah had just left the TARDIS for the last time on TV, so I imagine her dealing with her grief after being abandoned by following up on loose ends.

There are some lovely touches here. We learn Collins’s first name, Josiah, and get a sense of Sarah acknowledging what she accomplished in helping to save the world. We’re told she emerges into “summer sunshine”, so different from that fearful night back in 1911. It’s the opposite of the poem “Ozymandias”, which connects Ancient Egypt to the present day and suggests despair. Sarah gains peace and perspective.

And no doubt she looked in on her friends at UNIT. Perhaps they went for a nice meal.

*

Next time: the last of these long posts (for the time being), and the last of the three books by Terrance published on the same day in December 1976: The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book.

In the meantime, you might like my piece for the Doctor Who Figurine Collection on Sutkeh’s costume on the TV story Pyramids of Mars.  

Here’s a bit more by me on the TV story,  and an introduction I wrote for a screening. And here is the list of 236 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to long posts on many titles.

My Baby Box, by Dr Debbie Challis

The Dr has made available online the full text of her memoir, My Baby Box, which deals with her (our) experience of infertility, the death of our eldest daughter and a whole loads of things besides.  

• Full text of My Baby Box, by Dr Debbie Challis

Blurb as follows:

A portrait of Queen Victoria’s baby. Statistics on the fertility of educated women. Tokens left at the Foundling Hospital. Sunken headstones in a suburban cemetery. Tiny 4,000 year-old beads. A hippo amulet. The bones of a newly born child… 

These are some of the things in My Baby Box, a memoir about my double loss. The loss after a diagnosis of infertility and the loss after the death of my unexpected baby.

It is also about my double love. The love found through adopting a child and then having a second baby who lived. It is about trying to become a mother through fertility treatment, approval from committees, getting to full-term pregnancy and giving birth safely, as well as what I have learnt about the historical context of what I went through. It is my account of trying to become a mother in early twenty-first century Britain and how I came to understand what happened to me through the things belonging to those who had been there before me, whether in Victorian Wigan or Ancient Egypt.

I've previously posted here about infertility and the loss of Emily. 

Trowelblazers' TrowelTakeover

Today, Samira Ahmed and I took over the twitter feed of the Trowelblazers, which celebrates pioneering women in archaeology, palaentology and geology, past and present.

We shared the story of how we made our Radio 3 documentary, Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt in an 80-tweet thread.

• Listen to Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt

Pick of the Week in Radio Times

Excitingly, listings magazine Radio Times has chosen our documentary, Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt (this Sunday, 6.45pm, Radio 3), as its pick of the week.

Bolton Council also has a piece on the documentary: "BBC to highlight Bolton's museum benefactor."

ETA: Samira's also written "The women who love mummies" for the BBC News site.

And, on her website, "How we made Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt".

Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt

Marianne Brocklehurst's diary

Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt, my fourth documentary for Radio 3's Sunday Feature will be broadcast on 3 February. This morning, presenter Samira Ahmed is in the Guardian about it:

• Guardian: "The lure of ancient Egypt is a way to revitalise faded industrial towns"

There are details for the programme on the BBC website:

Samira Ahmed explores the profound connection between ancient Egypt and the Victorian heyday of Britain’s industrial north – in a legacy of museums and northern pride.

Being taken to see the mummies has become a rite of passage, captivating generations of children since the late 19th century. Ancient Egypt is now embedded in early years education. At more than a hundred museums across the UK, that culture helps shape the British imagination. Where did that affinity come from?

To find out, Samira follows in the footsteps of three extraordinary women: Amelia Oldroyd, Annie Barlow and Marianne Brocklehurst. Each came from a northern, mill-owning family, and each felt compelled not only to visit Egypt and to collect antiquities, but to share their treasures with those at home. Each established local museums that survive today, inspiring new generations.

Today, such museums face an uncertain future. By returning to these women’s stories, can lessons be learned from the past?

Contributors:
Katina Bill, Kirklees Museums and Galleries
Matthew Watson and Rizwana Khalique, Bolton Library and Museum Services
Danielle Wootton
Emma Anderson and Kathryn Warburton, Macclesfield Museums
Rebecca Holt, MPhil student at Oxford University
Heba abd al-Gawad, Egyptian Egyptologist
Alice Stevenson, Institute of Archaeology, UCL
Dr Chris Naunton

Producers: Simon and Thomas Guerrier
A Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 4

Edward Lear - Egyptian Sketches, by Jenny Gaschke

Edward Lear - Egyptian Sketches
by Jenny Gaschke

Having finished the biography of Lear, I had another look at this collection published by the National Maritime Museum in 2009, collating sketches from two trips Lear made down the Nile in 1853-4 and 1866-7.

It's a beautiful book, full of beautiful images, presented in sequence according to Lear's own numbering system so we can follow him on his journeys.

As Gaschke tells us, Lear - like many of his contemporaries - was interested in the picturesque and historical, and ignored signs of modernisation such as the new steam-powered boats. Instead, there are lots of sailed boats sitting quietly on the water, serene and bewitching. (I'm glad to see sketches of the dahabeeh he travelled on - the same kind of vessel hired by Marianne Brocklehurst in the 1870s, about which I'm making a documentary.)

Nor does he  depict his travelling companions, and few of the pictures presented here show the famous monuments. Gaschke is good at underlining what makes his images different from those of others, such as the well known lithographs of David Roberts (1796-1864).

"While closely documenting architectural and natural detail, these (published) drawings were also highly appreciated at the time as aesthetic expressions of the sublime, beautiful and picturesque. Roberts laid emphasis on the exotic, the 'oriental' aspects of everyday life in Egypt, with warm lighting and adoption of dramatic viewpoints, for example from far below, to stylise the monumental remains of ancient temples." (p. 20). 

Lear's images, by contrast, often place ruins at a distance, in outline, even partly obscured by foreground "rox" or trees. Without the low viewpoint, they are smaller, part of wider, sand-swept landscape.

Mr Lear – A Life of Art and Nonsense, by Jenny Uglow

“Lear’s great poems and songs are not about his life – they float free. But their gaiety and sadness feel even keener when set against the tensions he saw, and suffered” (Uglow, p. 380).

This exhaustive account of the life of Edward Lear (1812-88) is a great delight. I’ve been a fan of Lear since seeing his sketches on the walls of the Benaki Museum in Athens in my earliest travels with the Dr. They’re beautiful, briskly drawn things, conjuring a view, a feeling, in just a few lines and annotated with detail for when he came to paint his (to my mind less interesting) full versions in oil. When the Dr and I married in 2004 we chose “The Owl and the Pussycat” as a reading.

The most famous of Lear’s nonsense poems, was – Uglow tells us – written on 18 December 1867, for a troubled young girl called Janet Symonds whose father seemed less interested in Janet’s mother than in publishing his Problems of Greek Ethics, in which he sought to show that,

“what the Greeks called paiderastia or boy-love, was a phenomenon of one of the most brilliant periods of human culture” (quoted in Uglow, p. 377).

Lear was also gay, Uglow tells us, shrewdly sifting the evidence when nothing could quite be admitted to. It was part of his reason for constant restlessness and travel; perhaps it informed the gender of the pussycat and owl. His 30-year relationship with his servant, Giorgio, is rather moving - and ends with quite twist.

Uglow tells Lear's story through impeccable research, from his early days at Knowsley illustrating exotic animals and birds to his last, quiet days in Villa Tennyson, the house he had built in San Remo. He is a funny, kind and rather sad man and its a pleasure to accompany him throughout the world - just as his friends enjoyed his company. Despite my better judgment, I laughed at many of his old jokes, such as this one included in at letter to his friend Chichester Fortescue on 16 August 1863:

“What would Neptune say if they deprived him of the sea? I haven’t a n/otion.” (p. 265).

Lear wrote a lot - letters, diaries, even on his sketches. But where direct sources are missing Uglow quotes from others who were in the same place at around the same time, or whose comments can inform. In fact, the book is full of other people. I was drawn to Lear's friendship with Frances Waldegrave (1821-79), the "dazzling hostess" of Strawberry Hill whose various husbands Uglow dashes through on page 229, adding,

"Trollope allegedly used her as the model for Madame Max Goesler in his Palliser novels."

We learn to love her as Lear did, and her death - in a book where everyone is long dead - comes as a terrible shock.

Another extraordinary character is Charlotte Cushman (1816-76), a stage actress and contralto living in Rome "with her current lover, the sculptor Harriet 'Harry' Hosmer". Lear attended an evening she hosted on 28 January 1859, and Uglow quotes a letter from another attendee, US sculptor William Wetmore Story, to reconjure the "harem" and these "emancipated ladies":

“The Cushman sings savage ballads in a hoarsey, many voice, and requests people recitatively to forget her not. I’m sure I shall not.” (in Uglow, p. 276.)

If Lear's diary doesn't provide insight on that particular night, Uglow quotes his entry of 9 May the same year:

"Lear was astounded when the Prince of Wales commissioned one of her sculptures: ‘& one from Hosmer!!!!!!!!!!!!’” 

For all the exclamation marks, Lear returned to Cushman's for dinner in March 1860, where,

“the other guests were her new partner the sculptor Emma Stebbins, the diplomat Odo Russell … the archaeologist Charles Newton [the subject of the Dr's PhD]… and Robert Browning" (p. 281).

Or there's Gussie - Augusta Bethell Parker - the young, sweet girl who Lear kept thinking he'd marry and then thinking he would not. She might be the passive victim of his indecision and insecurities, had we not been told the first time we met her (on page 343) that Gussie was also author of Maud Latimer (1863), a novel about a naughty, adventurous heroine that suggests a more thrilling inner life.

There is plenty of name-dropping, not all of it because Lear was himself famous. On page 105, Uglow tells us that the young Lear had lodgings at 36 Great Malborough Street in London at the same time as Charles Darwin, who'd just completed his trip on the Beagle, and asks, "did they pass on the stairs?" But nor is it all celebrity encounters. Uglow notes, in brackets, a fun detail about protestant tourists attending mass at the Vatican.

"a few years later English ladies gained a reputation for whispering and eating biscuits, and the Vatican sent round a notice asking for decorum in Holy Week" (p. 114).

She is brilliant at following a thread. In noting, on page 253, Lear's horror at bigotry, she guides us through the religious debates of the day - in response only partly to Darwin. David Friedrich Strauss’s three volume The Life of Jesus, first published in the mid-1830s, set aside the supernatural to see Jesus as a historical figure, while Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841) stressed sympathy and love over vengeful justice. Both were translated into English by Mary Ann Evans (later George Elliot) - in 1846 and 1854 respectively.

She returns to this thread sometime later, in chapter 25 - titled "'Overconstrained to Folly': Nonsense, 1861". I wasn’t sure about Uglow’s earlier close reading of the first edition of Lear's book of nonsense, for all it helps explain the enduring appeal.

“The rhymes, ‘Hairy! Beary! Taky cary!’ or ‘mousey, bousey, sousey’, were the kind of nonsense words that parents speak to babies, often the first words they hear, and all the more alluring – and important – for that reason” (p. 264).

But when she returns to this close analysis for the second, revised edition of his book, the differences suggest Lear's changing character and mindset. It is brilliantly done. Then she moves straight into religion, and Darwin and the more pertinent Essays and Reviews, which caused a furore by seeing Jesus historically and doubting the truth of the miracles. It seemed a bit crass to link this to Lear's nonsense - but that's exactly what Lear does himself, addressing the debates in a letter to Lady Waldegrave on 15 March 1863:

"I begin to be vastly weary of hearing people talk nonsense, - unanswered – not because they are unanswerable but because they talk from pulpits” (p. 309). 

Who better than Lear to spot nonsense?

That's what so brilliant about this book: it doesn't bridge the nonsense books with Lear's career as a painter; there is no separation between these parts of him. Insecurties - his sexuality, his epilepsy - fed his travels and his nonsense; his travel informed his nonsense; especially in his later life, his travels were aided by the fame of and delight in his nonsense.

Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt, by Chris Naunton

I first met Egyptologist Chris Naunton around the time he was working on his BBC Four documentary, The Man Who Discovered Egypt, which included the Dr as a shrewd talking head. Chris then advised me on the Egypt bits in the first chapter of The Science of Doctor Who and a timeline in Whographica - he wrote his own account of working out when exactly the Daleks invaded Egypt.

When the esteemed published Thames & Hudson approached Chris about writing a book on Tutankhamun, he argued instead for a book answering the question he and fellow egyptologists get asked all the time - what is there still to find?

The result is a fascinating, comprehensive and carefully weighed assessment of the chances of tracking down some of the most coveted tombs in history, those of: the great architect Imhotep (the one whose name was co-opted by the horror movies); Amenhotep I; Nefertiti and the other Amarna royals related to Tutankhamun; Herihor whose tomb, it has been claimed, would make "Tutankhamun look like Woolworths"; the pharaohs of the much disputed Third Intermediate Period; Alexander the Great; and Cleopatra.

It's a little like Richard Molesworth's book, Wiped!, which details the loss and recovery of episodes of Doctor Who - at times tantalising, fascinating and utterly frustrating. Along the way, Chris supplies plenty of fascinating history - of ancient Egypt and of modern archaeologists, not all of whom come out of it very well. He is good at putting the claims of some enthusiasts and attempting to weight them against evidence fairly. 

There's plenty that I didn't know - Alexander the Great had a sister called Cleopatra - and I particularly like a quotation from Howard Carter's 1917 report, "A tomb prepared for Queen Hatshepsut and other recent discoveries in Thebes", in which he feels the need to accent and italicise the exotic, foreign word "débris".

Journey up the Nile, the Egyptian Diary of Marianne Brocklehurst

Last week, I visited the West Park Museum in Macclesfield as research for my forthcoming Radio 3 documentary, “Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt”, to be broadcast early next year.

The museum was the idea of Marianne Brocklehurst (1832-98), the well-off daughter of silk manufacturer, banker and Liberal MP John Brocklehurst (1788-1870), and I’m investigating Marianne’s own politics and why she, and the industrial north more generally, might have felt an affinity for the Pharaohs.

Marianne apparently made five trips to Egypt, and the museum has many of the artefacts she acquired along with her drawings and paintings. In 2017, the museum published “Journey Up the Nile”, a transcript of Marianne’s diary from her first trip. It’s a nice, hardback edition on glossy paper, including many illustrations and photographs, and an introduction by honorary curator Alan Hayward that helps set the scene. (The only thing lacking is a map, so I referred to the one in Alan’s 2013 pamphlet, “The Story of the Collection – How West Park Museum Got Its Ancient Egyptian Objects.”)

The diary begins on 11 November 1873, as Marianne sets off from Macclesfield with her travelling companion Mary Booth (1830-1912), Marianne’s young nephew Alfred and manservant George Lewis. The entries are mostly short, single paragraphs, the detail in the accompanying sketches. But there’s a sense of fun and adventure, Marianne seeming to relish the small hardships.

They pass through France and Italy, losing some of Alfred’s luggage along the way, recovering it, then losing track of time – presumably because of so much travelling by night - to arrive at Brindisi a day early for their boat across the Mediterranean. There are comic sketches of people falling over themselves during the very rough crossing, which leads to their boat ending up a hundred miles off course.

Although they reach Alexandria on 28 November, it’s another day before they’re cleared to land – 18 days after setting off from home. Stuck on board for that last evening, Marianne and Mary – the MBs, as they were known – meet other tourists, including novelist Amelia Edwards (1831-92), who will follow much of their course down and up the Nile on another, grander boat.

Edwards would later establish the Egyptian Exploration Fund (now Society) and provide a legacy for the first professorship of Egyptian Archaeology – awarded to Flinders Petrie – so she’s a significant figure in the discipline. This is from before all that, but she’s hardly a young girl. She’s a well-established professional writer, and in her early 40s – as are the two MBs.

In 2016, Historic England Grade II listed the grave Edwards shares with her long-term companion Ellen Drew Brayshaw, noting its importance in LGBT history. The MBs were also long-term companions who would be buried together. What can we read into that?

“We should not take a modern attitude to two women living together,” says Alan Hayward in his 2013 pamphlet, “for in those days, when a woman’s role was to raise a family and run the home, it was the only way for independently minded wealthy women to ‘do their own thing’.”

I scoured the diary looking for anything that might hint at something more. At no point does she tell us what their relationship is – but then she also doesn’t spell out her relationship to Alfred (her nephew) or George (her servant). The assumption is that her readers will know, because this diary was likely passed between friends and not intended for publication.

She is candid about certain things, describing at some length and with much excitement how she and Mary smuggled a mummy case out of the country, bribing officials along the way, and noting the very serious punishments those involved risked by helping her. Yet she is coy about exactly how much she paid – something less than a £100 but a “good round number in sovereigns” (p. 91).

So we’re left to interpret what is left unsaid. Can we read anything into the moment that Mary “smokes a pipe over the oil can” (p. 36) with the sailors, which seems rather unladylike, or the delight the MBs take in “paying our baksheesh like a man” (p. 69)?

Other details are more sure. The four-month trek down and up the Nile is a well-established journey, the river busy with other tourists, some of them friendly and respectable, others – such as Cooks’ excursionists and some American Christians – behaving badly, carving their names in the monuments and leaving their rubbish behind them. Some things have not changed in a century and a half - just like the MBs, the Dr and I struggled to find the carving of Cleopatra on the wall of the temple at Dandara.

In other ways it's another world. There's the pith helmets and formal wear of the tourists in the pictures. There’s the risk of crocodiles, and thieves, and Marianne’s compassionate response when a trusted sailor turns out to have stolen from them.

“Let us not be hard on his memory considering that, like the rest of the sailors, his pay was only thirty shillings a month for three or four months at the most and then nothing to do or to get until the next season began.” (pp. 86-7)

There is a great deal more, but I won’t share all my notes here as they’re for the documentary...

Dr on Today yesterday

Yesterday, the Dr was up early to get to BBC Broadcasting House, where she was a guest on Today and talked to John Humphrys about Different Perspectives: Archaeology and the Middle East in WWI - a Heritage Lottery Fund project looking into the lives and stories of great archaeologists who became spies during the war.

The Dr was there representing the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, and was interviewed alongside Dr Roderick Bailey, a historian specialising in unconventional warfare in the world wars.

You can hear the segment 2:41:15 into the Today programme of 14 November 2016.

Whographica

I have a new book out in September. According to the press release, Whographica is "a journey through the Doctor Who universe by Steve O'Brien and Simon Guerrier, with infographics and visualisations from Ben Morris."

As part of the research, I got Dr Christopher Naunton, director of the Egypt Exploration Society, identifying the year in which the Daleks visit the pyramids, as seen in The Daleks' Master Plan (1965-6).

In other news, out in December is The Sontarans, an audio adventure I've written in which the First Doctor meets... well, guess.

"It was established in 1974's The Time Warrior that the Doctor had encountered the Sontarans before," says producer David Richardson in the announcement. "That line of dialogue fired up our imaginations, and Simon's thrilling script is the result - a full-blooded war story set in deep space."

Peter Purves plays Steven and the Doctor, Jean Marsh is back as Space Security Agent Sara Kingdom while Dan Starkey plays the Sontarans.

Events for The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who

I'll be at some events to publicise my new book, The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who.

• 4 June, 6 pm
  I'll be signing the book at Forbidden Planet in London, alongside by co-author Marek Kukula and short story writers Jenny Colgan, Jonathan Morris and Andrew Smith.
• 5 June, 7 pm
  Marek and I will be giving a talk at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, accompanied by a Dalek.
• 6 June, 7.30 pm
  I and the Dr will speak at the Northwich Lit Fest on "Doctor Who and the Egyptians".

There'll be more events to come, which I'll post here as they're confirmed. And I've done some interviewed too. I was a guest on the Handsome Timmy D Express last week. 

Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell

"Foreigners nearly always wish to simplify the Middle East, Agnes. They cannot tolerate to feel ignorant long enough to understand it."

Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day (2008), pp. 197-8.

When all her family die in the 1918 flu pandemic, middle-aged American schoolteacher Agnes Shanklin finds herself suddenly free. Without her overbearing mother to tell her otherwise, she goes shopping for the latest styles and has her hair cut. She also books passage to Cairo, where she just so happens to stumble into Lawrence of Arabia, Winston Churchill and Gertrude Bell as they struggle to carve up the Middle East...

Dreamers of the Day is an odd but engrossing book. It's partly a late romance adventure, with the dowdy, timid heroine learning to take what she wants - and then paying the price. But it's also a history lesson, or several strung together.

Its first section covers the flu pandemic, the way it cut down the apparently fit and healthy in their prime, and the effects it had on society. The middle and longest section explores Egypt, Gaza and Jerusalem and has plenty to say on their history and peoples, as well as on the diplomats sowing "black seeds" for the future in the aftermath of World War One and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. The last, short section sees Agnes return home and takes us up to her death and beyond - as it turns out she's narrating this from a special kind of afterlife on the banks of the Nile, in the company of Napoleon and St Francis.

That last section isn't any less odd for having been signposted: Agnes tells us several times throughout the novel that she is long dead and that what she saw will help us understand our world today. It's true, the schoolteacher is concise and lucid in pulling together the threads that explain the sorry mess in the Middle East now.

Agnes is so horrified by the English toffs dictating the fate of these nations (it reminds her too much of being forced to eat oatmeal as a child - whether it was good for her is not the point). So perhaps it's ironic that she often lectures us on the history of the region. But it's hard to object because it's so deftly done. It's a beautifully told story - full of wryly observed character and humour, and joy in the adventure. I just felt that the final conceit rather trivialises what has gone before.

Other reviewers don't share my dissatisfaction with the end. Niall Harrison, for example, says:

"The effect of [Agnes being dead], which I take to be deliberate, is to break the immersion associated with historical fiction. Agnes's times are not for us to live in—they are for us to watch."

Niall Harrison, review of Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell, Strange Horizons, 9 July 2008.

Perhaps that's my objection: as a narrative device, it stops us losing ourselves in the story and the rich, tangible world that's created. That's a shame because the book otherwise feels very credible: the characters - both real and invented - feel like flesh and blood. That's quite a feat, to paint Churchill and Lawrence not as myths but as men.

The book is peppered with sharp observations, too. I especially liked Agnes guiltily justifying a trip to a medium after all her family died.

"And remember, please, all the other invisible forces that had so recently become a part of our lives in these days. Madame Curie's radiation, and Signore Marconi's radio, and Dr Freud's unconscious. Even before I died, it seemed possible that there might be some scientific basis for communication with the unseen soul. There might be a sort of telephone of the spirit, or maybe radio waves, which were there to be heard if only one were tuned to the right frequency."

Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day, pp. 70-1.

I was intrigued by mention of Lady Churchill, Winston's mother:

"Jennie Churchill was, according to Winston, one-quarter Iroquois".

Ibid., p. 155.

But that turns out to be a myth. There's a nice bit of history when one woman suspects Karl of being homosexual because he wears a "bracelet watch". Agnes snaps back a reply:

"They're called wristwatches... All the soldiers wore them in the war."

Ibid., p. 199.

Karl, the unreliable spy who Agnes falls for, is a fascinating character. Russell tells us in her acknowledgements that,

"As often as possible, I let historical figures write their own dialogue".

Ibid., p. 375.

But Karl is not a historical figure, and his job here is to question the statements by Lawrence, Churchill et al. According to Niall Harrison, this creates a game of "knowingness", where we question and interrogate what these people say. I think it's simpler than that: Karl makes us more suspicious of what Agnes takes on face value. Plus, his status as a Jewish German (not a German Jew, as he says himself) makes us less trusting of the claims made by westerners about nations, religions and race in the Middle East.

The book rather concludes that, despite the best efforts of the peacemakers, there will always be war. Napoleon and Churchill both seem to relish the prospect. For a book so preoccupied with faith, it ends feeling rather hopeless.

And yet earlier, when Agnes visits Jerusalem and is furious by the lies told by those guiding the tourists around, Lawrence comes to her rescue. He explains that no, the current city, is not the one in which Jesus lived:

"When they started excavations at the northeast wall of the Temple, archaeologists had to dig through something like a hundred and twenty-five feet of debris before they got to the level of Herod's city. My field was Hittite, but I think this Jerusalem is probably the eighth ... The city of David sat on an even earlier settlement. Then there's Solomon's Jerusalem, which last about four hundred years. Nehemiah's - three hundred for that one, I believe. Herod's Jerusalem was magnificent, by all accounts. That's what everyone expects to see when they come here, but Titus destroyed it. Later on, a small Roman city was built on the ruins. Since then, Muslims and Christians traded this place repeatedly, and burned it down occasionally. And yet... the pilgrims come."

Ibid., p. 281.

Agnes protests that it's a nineteen-hundred-year-old scam (and is most upset by the thought that her late sister devoted so much of her short life to it). But Lawrence counters with a surprising argument:

"'Jerusalem has always been important strategically. It's been one war after another for millennia. But if you can convince enough people that this place is sacred ...?'
He let me consider this until I could admit I'd understood his point: 'Then maybe the next army won't destroy it.'
The corners of his long mouth turned up, but the real smile was in those tired eyes, already lined at thirty-two. 'The present city has survived six hundred years,' he said. 'That's the longest stretch on record.'"

Ibid., pp. 282-3.

Doctor Who: 1975

Episode 408: Pyramids of Mars, part 3
First broadcast: 5.45 pm, Saturday 8 November 1975
<< back to 1974

Sarah Jane takes aim
Pyramids of Mars, part 3

This blog thing of choosing one moment from each calendar year of Doctor Who has taught me a new fact! Until I started thinking about what I'd do for 1975, I'd never noticed that that year boasted a whopping 35 new episodes - from Robot part 2 (4 January) to The Android Invasion part 4 (13 December). I wonder how much showing a season and a half in one year helped cement new Doctor Tom Baker in the public mind? We can but dream of such riches today. Anyway, this plethora of episodes made choosing one moment quite tricky.

I've chosen something from Pyramids of Mars - a story I'm especially in love with. It's a very good story to show people who don't know old Doctor Who (see an introduction I wrote to it for some students). That's why it, of all Sarah Jane's 18 adventures with the Third and Fourth Doctors, was included on the DVD of The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Complete Fourth Series to thrill a new generation of viewers. In 1998, readers of Doctor Who Magazine voted it the 4th best Doctor Who story ever; in 2009 they voted it seventh best of the then 200 stories.

It was also the first old Doctor Who story I - or rather my brother Tom - owned. My elder brother and sister bought the video as a Christmas present for him in, I think, 1990. We watched it endlessly and it's the Doctor Who story I know best of all. Yet I still spot new things each time. Watching it again recently I was struck by how often our heroes depend on the most extraordinary good fortune.

In her first scene, Sarah just happens to have rummaged through a wardrobe in the TARDIS and put on a period dress before the TARDIS crash lands in the year 1911 - where the dress fits in just right. This coincidence isn't helped when the Doctor says the dress was worn by his former companion Victoria: she was from 1866, nearly 50 years earlier.

In part 3, when the Doctor explains the history of villainous Sutekh and the ancient Egyptian gods, Sarah already knows some of it, referring to,

The seven hundred and forty gods whose names were recorded in the tomb of Thutmoses the Third.

That's quite a precise bit of egyptological knowledge. As I discovered when I visited the Valley of Kings in early 2012, the tomb of Thutmoses III is not one tourists usually see. It's an earlier tomb than the rest, the wall decorations (which do indeed name 740 gods) simpler, less striking, so tourists are often disappointed. It's conceivable that Sarah has been to the tomb or had read about it somewhere, but it's still quite a thing to be able to recall when needed. (Presumably, it's from whatever reference book the writer used as a basis for the story.)

Later in the same episode, Sarah also just happens to be a brilliant shot - though she and the Doctor never mention or use this skill again in any other episode she appears in. There's something striking and cool about Sarah Jane in an Edwardian frock pointing a rifle at an alien spaceship but it's completely out of place for the character. (I'll talk about companions wielding weapons another time.)

It's not just Sarah. In part 1, the Doctor congratulates Laurence Scarman on conveniently,

Inventing the radio telescope forty years early.

In part 2, Laurence shows Sarah a good hiding place in the house - a priest hole he and his brother found when they were boys. The Doctor isn't impressed when Sarah mentions this priest hole.

In a Victorian gothic folly? Nonsense.

But pointing it out as nonsense doesn't excuse it being there. In part 4, two things that help the Doctor outwit Sutekh - the TARDIS controls being isomorphic so only the Doctor can work them and the Doctor's respiratory bypass - have never been mentioned before.

These things suggest a script rewritten in some haste, and it's a mark of the quality of the setting, characters and dialogue - as well as the design and performances - that I'd never spotted them before. Brother Tom reckons that we only notice continuity errors or poor design and performances when we're not caught up in the story. This period of Doctor Who, under producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, is often brilliant at ensnaring us, the stories so shocking and thrilling, the characters so lively, that we rarely notice the joins.

See also: my friend John J Johnston, vice-chair of the Egypt Exploration Society explains a bit about Sutekh's love life.

Next episode: 1976

Doctor Who: The Library Of Alexandria

Out next month is a new Doctor Who adventure by me, The Library of Alexandria, performed by William Russell as Ian Chesterton and Susan Franklyn as Hypatia.

"The port of Alexandria, 5th Century AD. The Doctor, Ian, Susan and Barbara have taken a break from their travels, and are enjoying a few weeks in the sunshine – and the chance to appreciate the magnificent Library of Alexandria. They know that the library will soon be lost to history. What they are about to discover is the terrifying reason why…"

To whet your appetite, here's Carl Sagan wandering the Library of Alexandria in 1980 for his history of science series Cosmos:

On finishing a notebook

Last night I finished a notebook I've kept since 29 December 2011 (when I was in Egypt). I've kept notebooks since I was in my teens, and find them very useful to refer back to – pinching ideas from my past to pitch anew to unsuspecting bosses. It's not a diary, but flicking through this latest volume reminds me what I was working on and having ideas about, and what preoccupied the insides of my head.

There are the day-to-day notes as I wrote one novel, 10 plays and three short films, marking down new clever wheezes or things I'd need to go back and fix. There are pitches for yet more plays, films and comics, notes on what I was reading or watching (much of it later blogged here), fragments of conversation – real and imagined – and turns of phrase or interesting words or ideas.

As an insight into the terrible mess of my brain, here is a selection:

21/1/12

Lord Wallace of Tankerness is asked if he knows of a case of suicide in a young offenders' institution and responds, “I associate myself with expressions of regret” - [House of Lords, 24/1/12; col. 987.]

12/5

Page 21 of A Bullet in the Ballet (1937) refers to “con. men” - NB the full stop.

Undated

Do we know what we vote for? Have we read the manifestos, interrogated the data and understood the arguments? Generally, no; we are lazy. We buy newspapers and follow Twitter accounts that confirm our opinions. We avoid complex or counterintuitive issues and the testament of evidence in favour of the glib and easy. We elect a smile, a soundbite, a cipher, not a problematic and uncertain truth. Rule so we don't have to think about it – that is your mandate, nothing more.

10/6

Doctor Who - The City in the Clouds ([Rough idea for a Companion Chronicle set in Season 1, but beaten to it by clever Jonny and his Voyage to Venus)

In space, maybe on zeppelins linked together to create a city in the temperate zone on Venus – a city in the clouds.

All a bit Dan Dare (which Ian has read, confiscated from his pupils), and they realise that this futuristic world is in the early 17th Century, the same time as Galileo is on Earth recording the phases of Venus for the first time.

Barbara falls in love and Ian has to take her back to the TARDIS (he uses her mum Joan to convince her to leave). Her lover will think she died.

They have to get down to the planet's surface – the hottest place in the Solar System – to recover the TARDIS. Need local people's help. They don't use money there, it's all about reputation and respect – like crowdsourcing, or your number of followers on Twitter. So the Doctor and Susan etc. have to be storytellers, scientists, busking their way in the society, getting themselves known – and only for the right reasons. Loss of face can ruin everything. That's where we meet them at the start of part one, the Doctor as a Punch and Judy man.

[Before I knew about Jonny's story, I realised that was too much like Patrick Troughton's role in The Box of Delights before I knew Matt Smith would do some Punch and Judy business in The Snowmen.]

21/8

Video going round of a guy mocking iPhone users for taking photos of their food. We're often fooled into thinking we're part of something because we consume it. There are all the tweets and fan activity involved in watching a TV show (a passive experience), or the adverts that sell the idea that by eating a burger or drinking a fizzy drink we're part of the Olympics.

21/10

After the accident, people would say to him, 'Do you dream you'll walk again?'

And he would consider – as if it were the first time he'd been asked – then say, 'No, only of being able to fly.'

14/11

We used to tease her

That in the freezer

Below the croquettes and fish fingers and peas

She kept the bodies of one or two geezers

Who thought they'd got lucky

When she invited them home.

But we were very wrong -

It wasn't one or two.

Something inside her

Moved like a spider

Spinning them in and dispatching them

Then cooking them up for her guests

Despite her reservations that these men

Could be counted as fair trade.

She liked the big-boned ones

Who made lewd remarks

And promised not to treat her respectably.

Their steaks were good for marbleising

And she saw putting them on the menu

As a service to women her age.

27/12

Rewatching The Snowmen. Why does Madame Vastra look a bit different from how she did in A Good Man Goes To War? She's a lizard and sheds her skin, so looks a little different after each shedding. (Also, it's considered rude to point that out.)

4/1/13

Billy Connolly, interviewed by Mark Lawson, describes “middle class” as “the kind of people who had dressing gowns as children”.

7/1

Michael Rosen on Radio 4's Word ofMouth investigating stenography and Hansard (in the Commons). Stenography machines are phonetic and you press keys simultaneously. Need 200+ words a minute to be accurate and keep up with speech. Some stenographers are certified to 250 words. The quality is “down to a price, not up to a standard”.