Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, by Terrance Dicks

Originally published on 19 August 1976, this is the first Doctor Who book issued from the new home of Wyndham Publications Ltd: 123 King Street in Hammersmith, London. The previous novelisations — and the three Mounties books — give the address of 14 Gloucester Road in South Kensington, the modest basement from which this whole industry started.

Beyond that one-line change in the indicia of this novelisation, which I doubt most readers noticed, there’s no evident sign of things being any different. The authoritative history on all this stuff, The Target Book, suggests that things were not happy at King Street, with a humber of staff leaving or losing their jobs, yet also quotes children’s editor Liz Godfray saying that,

“the Doctor Who schedule was largely unaffected by the behind the scenes changes” (David J Howe with Tim Neal, The Target Book (Telos, 2007) p. 34). 

As we’ve seen in previous posts, the early days of Target saw delays in publication and titles being switched about. But by this point the range had reached what we might call a time of peace and ordered calm. We can see this in a list of forthcoming novelisations published in the fanzine TARDIS, vol 1, no. 8 (July 1976) and supplied by one Angus Towler in Cookridge — presumably a fan who had written into Target:

This is pretty much what got published over the next 12 months, with only Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen pushed back to a later date. The range was now a well-oiled machine. Keep cranking the handle and out came novelisations — plop, plop, plop.

If we apply my estimated lead time of 7.5 months, Terrance wrote Doctor Who and the Web of Fear in January 1976, while the Doctor Who story The Brain of Morbius was on air — a serial he wrote but asked to have his name taken off. Though Terrance seems to have been quick to forgive script editor Robert Holmes for rewriting his story so drastically, it had not been a happy experience. If current Doctor Who was not a source of joy, I wonder how much he took solace in returning to the first Doctor Who story with which he had a connection.

He didn’t work on the TV version of The Web of Fear. “When I first arrived [at the BBC]”, he told the Doctor Who Appreciation Society’s local group in Surbiton on 28 March 1978,

“that show was being edited, and I remember seeing playbacks of episode six.” (reported in the fanzine Oracle and reproduced in Stephen James Walker (ed.), Talkback — The Unofficial and Unauthorised Doctor Who Interview Book, Volume One: The Sixties (Telos, 2006), p. 179).

Episode 6 of The Web of Fear was recorded on Saturday, 17 February 1968 and broadcast on 9 March. There’s no surviving paperwork to tell us the date of this playback — which was when the edited, completed episode was shown to cast and crew in Theatre D at BBC Television Centre (with star Patrick Troughton invited to watch it upstairs, in the office of head of serials Shaun Sutton). I’ve discussed this with David Brunt, author of the forthcoming The Doctor Who Production Diary: The Troughton Years, and we think — based on earlier episodes of The Web of Fear for which records survive — that it was probably the Thursday after recording, i.e. 22 February.

This is significant because Terrance later claimed that he’d not really watched Doctor Who until he started working on it. So the date of the playback suggests he became a regular viewer from Episode 4 of The Web of Fear, broadcast on 24 February — having already seen Episode 6 in playback. Or, perhaps, knowing he was joining this series and would attend a screening of cast and crew, he tuned in the previous week and his first regular viewing of Doctor Who was Episode 3.

I like to think so, because — by coincidence — that episode saw the debut of Nicholas Courtney as Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart. Nick, like Terrance, joined Doctor Who for what he thought would be a matter of weeks, and by the end of the year had become part of the establishment of the TV series. They each remained regulars on the series until 1974 and 1975 respectively, and close to it ever after.

In fact, this long association caused a problem for Terrance in novelising The Web of Fear. When that story first aired, viewers didn’t know Lethbridge-Stewart at all. That he “suddenly popped out from nowhere” (says the Doctor), one of just two survivors of an attack by Yeti at Holborn, means we’re invited not to trust him. He is one of the characters we’re effectively invited to view as suspects — a potential servant of the alien Great Intelligence. The others include cowardly Driver Evans (the only other survivor from Holborn), supercilious journalist Howard Chorley, and salt-of-the-earth Mancunian, Staff Sergeant Arnold. 

But most readers of the novelisation of Doctor Who and the Web of Fear would know the character of Lethbridge-Stewart from his subsequent adventures, in TV Doctor Who and in previously published novelisations. Terrance acknowledged this up front. In the TV version, little is made of the Doctor’s first meeting with Lethbridge-Stewart. In the book, we get this to open Chapter 5, putting this on a par with one of the most famous meetings of two men in British imperial history:

“Although neither of them realised it, this was in its way as historic an encounter as that between Stanley and Doctor Livingstone. Promoted to Brigadier, Lethbridge-Stewart would one day lead the British section of an organisation called UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce), set up to fight alien attacks on the planet Earth. The Doctor, changed in appearance and temporarily exiled to Earth, was to become UNIT’s Scientific Adviser.* But that was all in the future. For the moment, the two friends-to-be glared at each other in mutual suspicion.” (p. 42)

The asterisk links to a footnote, “See Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion”. It is Terrance linking the first Doctor Who story with which he had a connection to his first Doctor Who novelisation.

The reference in the above paragraph to the Doctor and Lethbridge-Stewart’s friendship being “all in the future” is also literally true. As per the scripts and broadcast version of The Web of Fear, we are told that the Doctor’s previous encounter with Yeti, in The Abominable Snowmen, took place in 1935 (p. 8 of this novelisation), which was “over forty years” (p. 8) before the events of this story; he includes a footnote, citing his novelisation.

The novelisation of The Web of Fear is therefore set, at the very earliest, in 1976 — the year it was published — meaning that all Lethbridge-Stewart’s subsequent adventures, as the Brigadier at UNIT, were still yet to take place. A young reader of this novelisation when it was published might have had dim memories of Lethbridge-Stewart’s second TV adventure, The Invasion, broadcast in 1968. For a 12 year-old, eight years ago is the ancient past. The young reader of this novelisation would have been presented with the boggling thought that it was also in the future.

Indeed, in Episode 2 of The Invasion, the Brigadier says the encounter with Yetis “in the Underground [ie in The Web of Fear] must be four years ago now”, meaning that The Invasion is set, at the earliest, in 1980. But just before Terrance started work on this novelisation, dialogue in the TV story Pyramids of Mars (broadcast 25 October — 15 November 1975) states — more than once — that Sarah Jane Smith is from “1980”, presumably meaning that the events in Terror of the Zygons take place in that year. That story was Lethbridge-Stewart’s last regular appearance on screen. 

So all the Brigadier’s adventures, from The Invasion (1968) to Terror of the Zygons (1975), occur in a single calendar year. No wonder he had a breakdown…

*

My first edition of this novelisation is in pretty good nick, the cover still smooth and shiny, only the spine a bit creased. The cover illustration is among Chris Achilleos’s best. Instead of the usual black-and-white stippled portrait of the Doctor’s staring dolefully back at us, the second Doctor is in colour, his face expressive, agonised, looking downwards — as if under terrible pressure. 

Behind him, radiating outwards to fill the frame, is a cobweb in black-on-white, which may explain the choice to put the Doctor in colour so he stands out. On some previous covers, Achilleos framed the central figure with radiating colours. The cobweb is much more effective, I think, because it is something tangible, not just a tone. Cobweb also has associations with horror, while the stark black and white is colder and less comforting that the colour fills.

The Doctor’s gaze directs our attention to the elements in the lower part of the frame: a Yeti with bright beams of energy blasting out from its eyes to ensnare a soldier. In fact, this is a bit of a spoiler because the ensnared soldier is Staff Sergeant Arnold, the character revealed at the climax of the story to be the servant of the baddies. Yet there’s nothing in the cover or the text of the book to identify that this is Arnold, beyond the stripes on his arm signifying his rank as sergeant. 

I wonder if Achilleos even knew that the soldier he put on the cover was the bad guy in the story. It may be that he simply worked from the most dynamic stock photo available, a soldier brandishing a rifle rather than just standing around.

Reference photo from The Web of Fear,
showing Jack Woolgar
as Staff Sergeant Arnold,
c/o the Black Archive

The beams of bright energy are edged with purple, which may have dictated — or been chosen so as to compliment — the purple Doctor Who logo. This is only the second purple logo featured in the range (following Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet), and the second time a Doctor Who novelisation featured a purple spine and back cover. 

In fact, the back covers of this book and Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (1974) look very similar. Both employ yellow text on purple. Using one of the three primary colours (blue, red or yellow) in juxtaposition with a colour mixed from the other two is a well-known technique, the clash of so-called “complimentary” colours meant to be striking and bright.

The difference between these two back covers is revealing about the way the range had changed in its first two years. Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon boasts a single paragraph in yellow teasing the plot of the book, the key characters and elements given capital letters. There’s then a quotation from a newspaper, underlining the universal appeal of Doctor Who — generally, not this particular story — to both children and adults. The slogan “A TARGET ADVENTURE”, places Doctor Who within a wider genre of exciting books (something John Grindrod first pointed out to me).

There’s no quotation or slogan on the back of Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, as though Doctor Who by now could stand on its own, with no need of introduction. The yellow-coloured text teasing the plot comprises fewer words than the earlier book (87 words compared to 97) but the point size is much bigger and the text presented in three paragraphs — the words less densely packed and so more digestible.

The novelisation is similarly digestible, six 25-minute episode condensed into just 128 pages, whereas Terrance’s previous novelisation needed 144. Last week, in response to my last post, Paul MC Smith from Wonderful Books produced this helpful graph of wordcounts:

Relative word counts of Doctor Who novelisations
Graph by Paul MC Smith

To keep Doctor Who and the Web of Fear breezily concise, Terrance cut anything inessential to the plot, including visually arresting moments from the TV serial that don’t really suit prose. For example, the opening scene of Episode 1 picks up from the end of the previous serial, with the doors of the TARDIS wide open while the ship is still in flight, the Doctor and his friends at risk of tumbling out. Likewise, episode 4 of the TV version features a thrilling battle between Lethbridge-Stewart’s soldiers and the Yeti in the streets of Covent Garden. Both are missing from the book.

Otherwise, it’s a pretty faithful record of the story seen on screen, with some deft amendments. For example, the unfortunate stereotype of rich, greedy Julius Silverstein in the TV version is here a “tall, elegant white-hair old man”, Emil Julius, much more childish than grasping.

Terrance also picks up on the attempt by Captain Knight to chat up Anne Travers in episode 1, where she cuts him dead.

KNIGHT: 

What’s a girl like you doing in a job like this? 

ANNE TRAVERS: 

Well, when I was a little girl I thought I’d like to be a scientist. So I became a scientist. 

To this, Terrance adds that Knight, “welcomed any opportunity to work with Anne Travers” (p. 28), offering to help her with a task rather than send for a technician. It makes a bit more of their relationship, suggesting something more along the lines of that between Captain Turner and Isobel Watkins in The Invasion — where the characters end up together. Here, the relationship seems to be one way; when, later, Knight is killed by Yeti, there’s no suggestion that Anne spares him even a thought.

This is an example of an addition Terrance makes at the start of the story that doesn’t pay off at the end. Another is — as I said above — his telling us on p. 42 that Lethbridge-Stewart is someone we can trust when, on screen, he’s one of the characters we’re invited to suspect is one of the Great Intelligence’s suspects. Terrance sets up that guess-who-the-baddie-is early on; on p. 31 he reminds us of the Doctor’s previous encounter with the Yeti, and the Intelligence’s ability to take over and control unwitting human servants. As the story continues, on p. 70 he makes the guess-who plot explicit, the Doctor thinking through the six suspects by name: Anne Travers and her father, then Chorley, Lethbridge-Stewart, Knight and Arnold.

We know to discount Lethbridge-Stewart — we’re reminded, on p. 77, that this man and the Doctor are at the start of a long friendship. But in listing the suspects on p. 70, Terrance surely lays a false lead by not including a name: he leaves out Evans. This is just after he’s reminded us that Evans is cowardly and selfish, with Jamie appalled that the man refuses to do anything dangerous and would rather run away.

“Jamie shook his head. ‘I’m not running out on my friends.’

Evans stood up. “Well, I’m sorry to leave you, boyo, but you got to take care of number one in this world.’” (p. 66)

Again, Terrance is keen to avoid stereotypes, and later shares a thought from Lethbridge-Stewart — who we know we can trust — that “the Welsh usually made such splendid soldiers” (p. 99). Terrance also ensures that at the end of the story, Evans finds “unexpected resources of courage” (p. 91) and redeems his earlier shortcomings. The cowardly red-herring character ends the story as a hero.

The Doctor here is also a compassionate, considerate hero. He’s introduced vividly, 

“a small man with untidy black hair and a gentle humorous face. He wore baggy check trousers and a disreputable frock coat” (p. 13).

(ETA: Oliver Wake points out that this is the first time in print the Doctor is described as wearing a “frock coat”, though this particular Doctor doesn’t wear one — his black jacket is something else, the bottom front flaps pinned back to make it resemble the shape of a tail coat. Piers Britton in his book Design for Doctor Who says the Doctor first wears a frock coat in Pyramids of Mars, which became,

“a mainstay of [Tom] Baker’s wardrobe for much of his long incumbency, ensuring that it became a Doctor Who fixture. Frock coats were retroactively ascribed to the Hartnell and Troughton Doctors in much of the expanding Doctor Who literature of the 1970s” (Britton, p. 177).

A second frock coat was introduced in The Android Invasion and worn again by the Doctor in The Brain of Morbius. Perhaps Terrance attended recording and herd the coat described as such, and the term worked its way into this novelisation as if meaning any kind of Doctor-type long coat.)

We get a good sense of this considerate hero later, when he is “looting” an electronics shop in Goodge Street for the components he desperately needs to thwart the Intelligence and save everyone on Earth, 

“At the back of his mind he hoped that the Government would remember to pay compensation [to the shop owner]” (p. 93).

At the end of the story, he wins the battle but not the war against the Intelligence because his friends have, with the best of intentions, tried to help. On screen, he is cross with them. Here, his anger is quickly curtailed by “seeing the happy faces all round him” (p. 124) and he asks for their forgiveness. It’s characteristic Terrance; it’s rare on screen for the Doctor to apologise. As in previous novelisations, Terrance makes the Doctor a bit kinder and more heroic. He also underlines that this is the same man as other incarnations, here using the Third Doctor’s catchphrase “reverse the polarity”.

Then there are the other regular characters. “Towering over” the Doctor, Jamie — no surname — is introduced to us as, “a brawny youth in Highland dress, complete with kilt”, who has been travelling in the TARDIS “since the Doctor’s visit to Earth at the time of the Jacobite rebellion” (p. 13). That background shapes Jamie’s character here in ways it doesn’t in the TV version, such as when he first encounters soldiers.

“Although their coats were khaki rather than red, Jamie found it hard to forget that English soldiers were his traditional enemies” (p. 45)

I wonder if that was informed by the complex relationships between redcoats and Indians in Terrance’s Mounties trilogy. But this kind of complex relationship between characters, each of whom thinks they are right, is characteristic of Terrance. Here, he adds that while the Doctor and Jamie are “the best of friends … occasional disputes were inevitable” (p. 13). 

Victoria — no surname — is introduced as a “small, dark girl” (p. 14); as with Sarah in Terrance’s previous novelisations, the darkness refers to her hair, not her complexion. Again, we get a concise history of this character, an orphan from 19th century London. Sadly, this then doesn’t inform her actions in the story. Even so, Terrance adds a couple of interesting character moments for her not in the TV version, First, there’s her perspective on the young man in her life:

“Jamie had rushed off with his usual impulsiveness, forgetting all about her” (p. 48).

There’s no suggestion of romantic feelings or emotional connection between them, as was seen in the next TV story. Rather, Jamie doesn’t consider Victoria. Terrance does not add anything to pre-empt the events of that next TV story, such as suggesting that Victoria is in any way unhappy aboard the TARDIS. In fact, he adds something I think informed by his own interest at the time in meditation and positive thinking, when Victoria makes an effort to say something positive:

“Travers was still very confused and Victoria felt she had to keep his spirits up. Strangely enough this had the effect of making her feel better herself” (p. 105).

Then there’s Lethbridge-Stewart, introduced here as having an,

“immaculate uniform and a neatly trimmed moustache” … ‘And who might you be?’ he asked [the Doctor], sounding more amused than alarmed.” (p. 40)

“Amused” is such an apposite word to describe Nicholas Courtney’s manner of playing the character.  Terrance also refers to the man’s “relaxed confidence” (p. 63), which is again very apt. Nicely, we glimpse how Lethbridge-Stewart sees the Doctor, as a “funny little chap” (p. 75), and then get the contrary view with the Doctor recognising a soldier who knows no surrender (p. 76). Indeed, that’s an issue for Lethbridge Stewart, trained for action yet in a situation where he is unable to act (p. 90). In spelling this out, Terrance makes action the consequence of character.

We’re told Lethbridge’Stewart’s name is Alastair (p. 41), the name first used in print in The Making of Doctor Who (1972), cowritten by Terrance, and on screen in Planet of the Spiders (1974), script-edited by Terrance. Terrance still doesn’t use the middle name “Gordon”, for all it was used on screen in Robot (1974-5), which he wrote. As I’ve said before, that suggests “Gordon” was an ad lib by Tom Baker in rehearsals on that story, to improve the rhythm of the character’s name. But it also suggests that the various fans in contact with the publisher and with Terrance by the time he was writing the novelisation hadn’t pointed out the missing part of the name.

That interaction with fans had a big impact on Terrance’s approach to these novelisations. We’re on the cusp of that change here. Between writing this book in January 1976 and it being published in August, Terrance received a letter from fan Richard Landen listing continuity errors in The Making of Doctor Who, and was a guest at a DWAS meeting at Westfield College, University of London. Reading up on this interactions, I’m struck by Terrance’s patience in dealing with fans in their late teens and 20s expressing the view that books written for 8 to 12 year-olds are perhaps a bit childish… 

This tiresome fan could point out odd things in Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, the stuff I might pick up if I were editing this book. Just as the Doctor makes an unwitting cameo in one of the Mounties books because Terrance wrote the word with a capital D, Captain Knight refers here to “some kind of Doctor” and “the Doctor who was in the tunnels” (both p. 36) before he knows it’s the character’s name. In the same vein, why does Lethbridge Stewart need to tell his men that they’re looking for a “blue Police Box” (p. 89) — if they know what a police box is at all, they’d surely know it was blue.

I would be tempted to excuse such pendantry by saying it’s a living. But it doesn’t really pay.

(ETA: Steven Flanagan on BlueSky suggests that Lethbridge-Stewart being a Scot means he would be more familiar with red police boxes.)

Still, this journeyman writer is enthralled by how deftly Terrance adapts the TV story. The scripts were brilliantly, vividly conveyed by director Douglas Camfield. It’s a hard task to relay anything of the same atmosphere in prose, but Terrance is brilliantly vivid. Mostly, he tells us directly what’s happening so we can easily visualise each scene. He doesn’t embellish or overly complicate the action, but makes things more palpable through his choice of words. 

For example, there’s the Yeti dragging the unconscious old Travers, “as a child drags a teddy bear by one arm” (p. 81) — perfectly, simply, conveying the gait of toddling creature, the prey hanging limp in its grasp, the relative power of these two bodies. He adds bits of army slang to convey the culture and feel of these soldiers — “bodge” (p. 86), “spit and polish” (p. 111), and “daftie” (p. 119). And then there’s another example of his sophisticated vocabulary in a book aimed at children, which makes perfect sense in context, when the Doctor responds to “Jamie’s woebegone face” (p. 99).

At the end of the novelisation, Terrance sets up what’s to come in the lore of Doctor Who, with Lethbridge Stewart telling Travers that this adventure has shown the need for some kind of intelligence Taskforce.

“I think I’ll send the Government a memorandum…” (p. 125)

This archivist of all-things Doctor Who is delighted to think that UNIT began with a memo. (What was the subject line? To whom was it CC’d? What were the initials in the bottom left, a clue to the name of Lethbridge Stewart’s secretary?)

With his memo, we know — not least because Terrance told us in opening Chapter 5 — that everything is about to change in the world of Doctor Who. And yet the book closes on what are by now stock phrases in Terrance’s books, Doctor Who the same as it ever was and will be. With a “wheezing, ground sound”, the TARDIS fades from view.

“The Doctor and his two companions were ready to begin their next adventure” (p. 126)

*

These long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks take time and effort. and involve expenses. I don’t currently have enough other paid work to justify going on with them without your support.

Throw some coins in the hat and next week you get Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks. And then we’re onto Christmas 1976 and the triple whammy of The Making of Doctor Who (and the origins of “never cruel or cowardly”), Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars (about which Terrance discussed his working methods), and The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book (I’ve been talking to palaeontologists)…

The Rose Field, by Philip Pullman

What bittersweet pleasure it has been to immerse myself in this last volume in The Book of Dust trilogy, and perhaps the last ever visit to the world(s) of His Dark Materials. 

As with La Belle Sauvage and The Secret Commonwealth before this, it’s a rich, compelling adventure story in which we follow various flawed heroes and villains through a world not quite like our own. These various factions are heading for the mysterious “red building”, located somewhere east of the Caspian Sea, which seems to the source of the precious, rare commodity rosewater, which is in turn linked somehow to the properties of Dust. 

Lyra and her daemon Pan, the protagonists of these stories, suspect the red building is a window to another world, like the ones in His Dark Materials. And, of course, they were told at the end of that trilogy that such windows imperilled the world and had to be sealed for ever. Is that really true?

Along the way, there are battles, explosions, a riot, murders, the loss of the alethiometer and some revelations about Malcolm Polstead’s sex life. It is an enthralling read, difficult to put down — as with the second volume, I rattled through all 600+ pages in just a few days. 

But it’s also much more than a rollicking adventure, with plenty to say — or at least worry at — about the nature of imagination, the importance of personal connection, and the destructive effect of capital on creative life. As before it’s good on the pernicious way authoritarianism takes hold. Interviewed In that sense, it’s an angry book, or despairing — a novel about another world or worlds, that is directly about our own as it is now.

Brilliantly for a book about the imagination, it doesn’t tie things up too neatly at the end, leaving some questions hanging and a sense of much more possible beyond the last page. In fact, with 100 pages to go I thought I was pretty much on top of the myriad characters, motives and plot threads. And then, on p. 532, a new character is introduced. Tamar Sharadze is a catalyst for change, leading innovations in the way trade is conducted — simply with the introduction of paper money. Pullman has deftly, without clunkiness, shared with us the mechanics of trade up to this point, so that we can see the enormous change coming as a result of this innovation. I hoped to learn more about her and the changes wrought — but that can all play out in my head, along with other thoughts about who gets together with whom, and what happens next.

And yet by the end of this novel the big plot threads are concluded, there’s a definite sense of an ending, at least of this particular story. We learn why Lyra and Pan had their split at the beginning of the previous book, and the forces — or ways of being — at play. We even gain a sense of what Dust is, and its interplay with the Secret Commonwealth and Rose Field.

It’s hard to say more without spoiling things, but my heart was in my mouth for the last few pages, fearful of some last, brutal act. But the closing moments are entirely fitting: despite everything that has gone on before, two people make a connection. It’s a satisfying conclusion; my only disappointment is that I yearn for more.

Kim, by Rudyard Kipling

I said a couple of years ago that the experience of reading A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles was a bit like a conversation with my late father, as it was the last novel he finished reading and the last book he recommended to me before he died. I’ve felt something similar reading Kim by Rudyard Kipling. 

As with Bellarion by Rafael Sabatini, this was a childhood favourite of Terrance Dicks, about whom I am writing a biography (in case I’ve not mentioned that fact). Kim was also a favourite of my late grandfather, who served in India in the 1930s. He enthused to me more than once that he’d been in Lahore and seen Kim’s gun.

First published in 1901, Kim is the classic tale of a streetwise young orphan boy who we first encounter, in the opening sentence and “in defiance of municipal orders”, sat astride the great gun Zam-Zammah, which is mounted on a brick platform outside the Lahore Museum. We’re then told that whoever holds the gun holds the Punjab, so that it is “always first of the conqueror’s loot”, and that 12 year-old Kim has taken his seat on it by dethroning another boy.

In just these first three sentences, we see Kim defy instructions in a region clearly subject to strict controls; this region is subject to conflict and changing regimes; there is some parallel implied between such conflict and Kim’s own spats with other children. Character, place, context, analogy, intrigue — deftly hooking our interest.

A big appeal of this book, I think, is the way it so simply and vividly conjures a sense of India. There are no long speeches or info-dumped bits of narration to explain what things are, how they work or what the author thinks of it all. Instead, it’s conveyed by a steady flow of small nuggets, almost like asides. These engage all the senses: colour, smell and texture, as well as the idiosyncrasies of the spoken word — the way one character says “thatt” with a closing double-T, or “veeree” and “effeecient”.

This immersive world we hear and smell and taste is lively and often comic. Yet Kim navigates the complex bustle of it all with pluck and skill, an Indian Artful Dodger. At first that seems to be because this is the world he grew up in as an orphan; his engaging cheekiness is a strategy to survive, “Friend of all the World” (the phrase used about him a lot) because he has no family to fall back on.

But then, a few chapters in, he learns his past: Kimball O’Hara is the white son of a dead Irish soldier and — to the Indians — a Sahib. Though he still lives among Indians, and often passes for one, even his closest Indian friends acknowledge this difference. On learning of Kim’s background, the old lama to whom he has been chela or assistant insists that the boy must now have an education, and of the highest quality. This is more than selfless piety; there is something magical in what happened next. Until now, the old man has has needed Kim to beg food and lodgings for them both; now the lama convinces Colonel Creighton of the British Army that he can pay for the best schooling money can buy — and the money duly arrives.

Creighton is another benevolent figure, though very different in background and attitude to the lama. Hetakes Kim under his wing, organises school and extracurricular lessons in spycraft, but also turns an indulgent eye when need be. This happens not least in school holidays and when Kim’s formal schooling ends, whereupon he slips off his restrictive English clothes, adopts his former attire as a native and heads off for more adventures with the lama. 

Such changes of outfit, referred to as disguises, are highly effective. Even the shrewd lama doesn’t recognise Kim when he is thus transformed. On another occasion, Kim helps an agent working for the British to escape from enemies in close pursuit by hurriedly whipping up some make-up from left-over ash and other oddments.

This kind of thing is a staple of adventure fiction. Sherlock Holmes is also a master of disguise — he can pass anywhere in the capital and is apparently a Friend to all of London. Or there is James Bond, who, in short story “For Your Eyes Only”, can pass fluently as an American so long as he doesn’t use the word “actually”. In the Bond film You Only Live Twice, screenplay by Roald Dahl, Bond is made-up in yellowface so he can live undercover on an island in Japan within plain sight of the baddies.

Admittedly, the bad guys don’t seem remotely fooled and there’s an attempt on Bond’s life on his first night on the island. Likewise, in his introduction to my Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition of Kim, Edward Said is not convinced by Kim’s own prowess at disguise, or by claims of real-life white protagonists doing this sort of thing.

“Was there ever a native fooled by the blue or green-eyed Kims or [TE] Lawrences who passed among the inferior races as agent adventurers? I doubt it” (p. 44)

This reminded me of real-life agent Colonel Bailey, undercover in Central Asia just after the First World War, with the Bolsheviks in hot pursuit:

“I decided to go to the house of an engineer named Andreyev whom I had met once or twice in the early days of my time in Tashkent and who, I thought, would be sympathetic. The house stood in a small garden. I walked up and rang the bell. The door was opened by a girl whom I had also met previously. I hoped she would not see through my disguise of beard and Austrian uniform. She gave no sign and said she would call Andreyev. I said to him in Russian: ‘Do you know who I am?’ He replied in English: ‘I suppose you are Colonel Bailey.’ ‘It is clever of you to recognize me,’ I said. He replied: ‘The girl who opened the door told me who you were.’ This was bad new as she was famous for being the most unrestrained chatterbox in the town.” (FM Bailey, Mission to Tashkent, p. 134)

That real-life memoir is packed with incidents in which things go badly wrong, or don’t work out as planned, or chance conspires against Bailey and his compatriots. He damages his leg; he is told what he needs is a massage, but the only masseuse is a terrible gossip who will surely blow his cover; he perseveres with a limp but it makes him distinctive. In a lot of this, Bailey scrapes through as much by luck as judgment.

In Kim, chance is at the service of our hero. By chance, he happens into the very regiment in which his late father served, which by chance includes officers who knew Kimball O’Hara Senior and feel an obligation to his son. On several adventures, he by chance bumps into people he already knows who can help him. A secret message is given to him just in time not to fall into the hands of an enemy; he delivers it just in time and to the right person. It has exactly the expected effect.

It is all a bit straightforward in a book so full of colour and incident, and so many richly drawn characters. Kim has two plot threads going on at once: he aids the old lama in looking for a river as seen in a dream, and he is educated as a British subject and potential spy. While Kim’s three years at school mean a pause in his travels with the lama, there’s little sense of the two threads, the two very different worlds Kim is part of, ever being in conflict. That’s partly because Kipling glosses over Kim’s schooling, more interested in what he gets up to during the holidays and afterwards. (My sense from Stalky & Co is that Kipling saw school as something to be endured rather than enjoyed.)

In fact, there’s no sense here of any innate conflict in the fact of the British being in India. When we met an Indian officer who was an eye-witness to the real-life uprising of 1857 (here, the “Mutiny”), he speaks of a “madness” that consumed his fellows so that they killed the Sahibs’ wives and children. It was an aberration, without cause. There’s no suggestion, no contrary voice, here or anywhere else in the novel that perhaps not everyone is happy with the British presence in India. Agents of other nations, such as the French and Russians, must be stopped, but the British are entitled.

Without that tension, there is nothing to stop Kim from achieving both his aims: the lama finds his river and Kim serves the mother country by foiling a Russian plot, providing evidence on paper of what the villains were about. The sense is that he will continue to flourish in both worlds. I wonder what became of him: aged 15 years and eight months when the novel was published in 1901, he would have been 63 at the time of Partition in 1947. What kind of eye-witness account would Kim have offered?

In his introduction, Edward Said compares Kim to contemporary novels such as Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, in which the protagonist has optimistic dreams and ideals to begin with but is crushed by grim reality. Kim undergoes no such disillusionment. Indeed, he goes to posh school, is trained and works as a spy, and yet remains largely unchanged. At the end of the novel, he is still the cheeky boy who sat astride the gun at the start; he’s just learned a few more tricks.

In opening, I said that the novel simply and vividly conjures its setting, but in being so uncritical it is highly simplistic. It badly lacks some voice of dissent, some challenge to the worldview. In stark contrast to the perils of real-life Mission to Tashkent, in Kim the Great Game of Imperialism in India is literally that — a game in a kind of playground version of India, with dressing up and puzzles as diversions from boring old school. 

I can also see why that proved so intoxicating to generations of readers, not least those directed into certain kinds of schools to be shaped into certain kinds of servants of Empire. The idea that they might escape for occasional larks, that they might endure the process unchanged, that the world awaiting them could be exciting and fun…

It’s not true. But it’s a very good trick.

(I’ve further thoughts on why this book appealed so much to Terrance Dicks in particular, and what he drew from it in his own writing and in editing other people’s work; I’ll save that for the biography…) 

See also:

• Me on The Jungle Book by Kipling

The Doctor Who Monster Book, by Terrance Dicks

I’ve loved this book since it was handed down to me by my elder brother when I was four. It continues to be a big influence: as I write for Doctor Who Magazine or other stuff as-yet unannounced, I endeavour to kindle something of the same thrill. 

But until recently, when I began to work my way through the 236 books by Terrance Dicks in the order he wrote them, I’d never put much thought into why this book proved so potent. 

Basically, how does it work?

To understand that, I think it helps to compare The Doctor Who Monster Book with its main competition. The Doctor Who Annual 1976, published by World Distributors in September 1975 is a fancy-looking hardback which originally retailed at £1. Following the format of previous Doctor Who annuals, the cover boasts a colour photograph of the lead character with the caption, “starring Tom Baker as Doctor Who”. 

This credit at the very start is markedly different from the TV series, where the lead actors didn't get credits in the opening titles until 1996. It also declares that everything to follow is fiction.

There’s also a colour photo of the Doctor on the back of the book and a couple of colour photos inside: Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (played by Nicholas Courtney) on p. 5 and the Doctor on p. 6. Otherwise, the book is illustrated with new artwork.

The likenesses of the Doctor are drawn from photographs of Tom Baker (not all of them when in the role of the Doctor). But the artwork depicting TV companions Sarah and Harry purposefully avoids the likenesses of actors Elisabeth Sladen and Ian Marter so as not to have to pay them a fee. For the same reason, the annual does not feature any monsters from the TV series, either in illustrations or text. 

The text and comic-strip stories feature the Doctor, Brigadier, Sarah, Harry and even Warrant Officer Benton (his rank taken from dialogue in TV story Robot, not the closing credits where he is still a sergeant — see right). Yet it doesn’t feel much like TV Doctor Who. That’s not just down to the likenesses. 

The artists working on this annual seem to have been encouraged to go all-out on wildly imaginative work. It’s expressive and often emotive, with plenty of screaming or agonised faces, and it’s all extremely strange. Largely in colour but muted, earthy tones, it is much more finely detailed art than anything you’d get in a comic from the same period. Quality was part of the sell of this annual as a festive treat, therefore it was published on good paper stock, perhaps using a specialist press. That mechanical process dictated a more lavish style of artwork. 

The result is the jaw-dropping, psychedelic-horror what-the-fuckness of a book aimed at children for Christmas.

 

At the same time, these outlandish, opulent stories go hand-in-hand with dry, worthy features on real space exploration such as the “short history of the pressurised spacesuit”. This stuff might be true to life but blimey it is turgid, lacking the thrill of, say, a space station that gets attacked by Cybermen and then by giant space-moths but which — just for extra boggle — we experience in reverse order. The annual’s wholesome non-fiction seems entirely at odds with the outlandish fiction except in one way: neither feels much like Doctor Who on TV.

In marked contrast, The Doctor Who Monster Book, published on 20 November 1975, is a concise, no-nonsense guide to the series as seen on screen. It is also more accessible, being half the price of the annual at just 50p. It also delivers on its title, providing page after page of monsters as featured in Doctor Who. This follows the monster-focused approach of the Target novelisations in cover art and titles, as detailed in my previous posts.

Readers who’d lapped up such adventures as Doctor Who and the Daleks, Doctor Who and the Cybermen and Doctor Who and the Giant Robot could now feast on a whole glut of nasties. There they are on the cover, around the beaming Doctor. The art is by Chris Achilleos, using the same format he employed for the first 12 novelisations: the face surrounded by monsters on a white background. But now the Doctor is in colour, too. He’s not sombre like on the annual; this book is something more fun.

ETA Cedric Whiting on Bluesky has kindly shared this photo of the Pull-out monster Dr Who poster included with the book, revealing that the cover cropped the original artwork. Also, is it my imagination, or are the Sontaran and Cyberman smiling?

The interior of the book does not feature any newly commissioned artwork, instead repurposing cover art from novelisations (all but one piece by Achilleos), now blown up to more than double size. This includes covers of books that were as-yet to be published — Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, Doctor and the Ice Warriors, Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet and Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, all published in 1976. 

The back cover of the Monster Book features a menu of 16 novelisations in colour, including three then-forthcoming ones. All the Doctors, two stories each for the Daleks and Cybermen, all big-event adventures. The good stuff, there for the taking. Where are you going to start?

It’s implicit from the interior of the book but explicit in this back page: the Monster Book is a launchpad to further reading and longer, more difficult books — some without illustrations. In that sense, it’s the first example of Terrance encouraging readers to wade a bit deeper as readers, to even take the plunge. He taught us to embrace reading and dare to try something more challenging.

As well as the artwork, the book features a wealth of photographs from the TV show. “I went in and looked up the files in the BBC production office to see what looked most interesting,” Terrance told Alistair McGown for DWM’s Referencing the Doctor special in 2017, “and then got the scripts out if I wanted to go further.” The implication is that he chose arresting images first, then wrote copy to fit. 

Many magazines take the same picture-led approach (after years of submitting stuff to Doctor Who Magazine, my first feature got commissioned when long-suffering editor Gary Gillatt explained this principle to me). That Terrance did it here may be an echo of his years as an advertising copywriter in the 1960s. They’re very well chosen — heroic portraits of the Doctors, the Daleks and Cybermen in front of London landmarks, the horror of whatever that is on p. 45.

(In fact, Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon reveals that this strange-looking Guardian is actually benign; the Monster Book tackles this by also showing the real culprit in the story — an IMC mining robot masquerading as a monster.)

Designer Brian Boyle, ARCA, well deserves his credit. He gives priority and space to these alluring images. Often, he places photographs adjacent to artwork, so we get both the stolid reality and the embellished wonder at once. He also employs simple effects really well, repeating a side-on photograph of a Dalek to produce an army for the title page, or adding energy lines that radiate from the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver. 

On pp. 58-59, there’s an arresting image of the Fourth Doctor at the mercy of the Zygons, who are turned towards him and away from us. Boyle adds a front-on Zygon as an inset, so we can really enjoy / be appalled by James Acheson’s brilliant monster design. 

Care of the Black Archive site, here’s the untouched photograph:

Doctor Who being menaced by Zygons
Black Archive: Terror of the Zygons

Over the page, Boyle adds Achilleos’s illustration of the Loch Ness Monster to a perhaps less arresting photograph of Sarah and the Doctor examining a folded piece of paper; the effect is to suggest they’ve picked up a vital clue on the trail of the Zygons.

In fact, that photograph of Sarah and the Doctor isn’t from the Zygon story; it’s from the later Planet of Evil, and was taken at a photocall in Studio 6, BBC Television Centre, on 1 July 1975. That means The Doctor Who Monster Book was designed by Boyle no earlier than that date (or, he completed work on the rest of the book and then slotted in this hot-off-the-press image at the last moment). 

Sarah and the Doctor examine a clue
Black Archive: Planet of Evil

The photograph of the Doctor being stung is interesting because this alarming moment, originally to have been seen at the start of Part Four, was cut from the story as broadcast.  Indeed, the broadcast version of the story doesn’t feature any reference to the Zygons’ ability to sting people — though it does survive in Terrance’s novelisation, which I’ll address in a subsequent post.

These photographs came at some cost. The licensing is detailed on the inside back page of the Monster Book, a long list of monsters and the writers who created them, and lists of various actors. Credits seem to be warranted for photographs of actors but not illustrations using their likeness: there’s no credit for Deborah Watling as Victoria or Katy Manning as Jo Grant.

But Jamie (played by Frazer Hines) appears in cover art and a photograph on pp. 30-31, and doesn’t get a credit either. That might be because his back is turned to us in the photo so we can’t see his face — which is what would warrant permission and a fee. However, directly below the photo of Jamie is a photo of Anne Travers (Tina Packer) being menaced by a Yeti. She’s facing us, clearly recognisable, but isn’t credited either. 

It can’t be that a character needed to be a series regular to qualify for credit as another one-story character, Eckersley (Donald Gee) gets a credit for his photograph on p. 29. More likely, the publishers couldn’t track down Tina Packer to seek her permission for use of the photo — but published it anyway. That, in turn, suggests that approvals might have been done in a bit of last-minute rush. If the book was in design no earlier than July, it would have been a bit pressured to get this all signed-off and the book to print in time for Christmas.

Actors playing monsters in photographs don’t get credited either. I can understand the reasoning here with Ogrons or Davros where the actor can barely be recognised under heavy prosthetics but it seems a bit harsh on Bernard Holley as an Axon on p. 44. (Though when I worked with him years ago, he told me how much he liked signing “his” page in the book when presented tattered, loved copies by fans.)

I can see that all being a thorny issue for actors and agents, not least when The Doctor Who Monster Book sold so successfully. Alistair McGown’s piece in DWM says that even though the print-run was an ambitious 100,000, it quickly sold out — prompting a sequel from Terrance. This was advertised in trade paper the Bookseller on 30 July 1977:

“TERRANCE DICKS

The 2nd Doctor Who Monster Book


150,000 sold of No 1” (p. 425)

That’s 150% of an ambitious print run in just 18 months.

The success of the book isn’t solely down to the images; the words are also important. Terrance writes in an engaging, concise, plain style, matter-of-factly telling us what these monsters are, what they did and how the Doctor stopped them — without giving too much away to spoil the novelisations.

In addition, Terrance tells us at the start that, 

“One of the purposes of this book is to piece together the Doctor’s history from what we have learned over the years” (p. 7)

Previous histories of the series, in The Making of Doctor Who (1972) and the Radio Times 10th anniversary special (1973), presented brief synopses of every TV story. Terrance instead focuses on the big moments, the tent poles of the series. How did the Doctor first meet the Daleks and Cybermen, and then what happened in their next encounters? How did each Doctor die? Which are the best and weirdest monsters?

There are some statements made here for the first time that went on to have lasting impact. For example, there’s the opening reference to the “mysterious traveller in Time and Space known only as ‘The Doctor’” (bold as printed), a phrase repeated word-for-word at the start of Terrance’s next novelisation, Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster. 

Another example of the stickiness of phrases is the entry for the Silurians. Terrance surely borrowed from his friend Mac Hulke, who opened Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters from the perspective of these dinosaur people, waking from long hibernation to the horrifying discovery that their planet has been overrun by what the Monster Book describes as, “That upstart ape called man” (p. 35). 

It’s a neat bit of sci-fi reversal — that “monster”? That’s you, that is. But Terrance gets the idea across concisely; you couldn’t express the same idea in fewer words. That brevity makes the phrase lodge in the memory, like an advertising slogan. I said previously that Terrance’s description of the Auton invasion seems to have influenced Russell T Davies in writing Rose (2005); did the upstart ape inspire the Doctor’s comments about “stupid apes” in that same year of the programme?

Sometimes, just a single word caught on. When the series began, says Terrance, the Doctor was, “a little stiff and crochety [sic], but still spry, vigorous and alert” (p. 7). “Crotchety” has often been applied to the First Doctor since, and I initially thought this was the source. In fact, the same word was used as a subheading on p. 2 of The Making of Doctor Who by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance, and on p. 3 they quote Sydney Newman saying, in developing the initial idea for the series, “Let’s make him a crotchety old man.” 

But Newman didn’t actually use the word himself. On 28 September 1971, writing to Hulke to answer his questions about the genesis of Doctor Who, the phrase Newman used was “senile old man”.  “Crotchety” is the invention of the authors of the book, a kinder term that is more accurate about the character on screen and that is a little more heroic. We seem something similar in the use of the term in the Monster Book, where Terrance follows it with more positive adjectives to underline the Doctor as hero. 

Having given us a description of his personality, we’re then told what he wears and a brief summary of his key adventures. That’s the model that follows for the next three Doctors — simple, vivid and consistent. That consistency is important because whatever their quirks of personality or style, these Doctors are all one person. Terrance doesn’t refer to them as the “First”, “Second”, “Third” and “Fourth” incarnations, capitalised or not; they are each “the Doctor”. The emphasis is on what they share not how they are different:

“But beneath this rather clownish exterior the Doctor’s brilliant mind and forceful personality were unchanged” (p. 9)

The new Doctor, he says, is a combination of traits from the first three, as if it’s all been building to this point. 

There’s a synthesis of lore gleaned from different stories. For example, there’s the account of the Second Doctor’s trial by the Times Lords (in TV story The War Games, which Terrance co-wrote, and then recounted in his novelisation Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion). In the short summary given in the Monster Book, Terrance adds to thisa small detail, that Times Lords can,  

“regenerate their own bodies when threatened by old age or illness” (p. 9)

It’s what we learn in a TV story from 1969 but with the word “regenerate” added from a story five years later.

We’re told the TARDIS is “dimensionally transcendental” (ie bigger on the inside), a phrase first used in Spearhead from Space (1970) and then in Colony in Space (1971) but not again until Pyramids of Mars (1975), broadcast just before this book was published. I wonder if Terrance took it from Spearhead (which he novelised), used it in the Monster Book and that got picked up by script editor Robert Holmes when he approved the text. Holmes wrote Spearhead so it could well have been his term, but perhaps seeing it in Terrance's book prompted him to reuse it.

If so, this only worked in one direction. The Doctor Who Monster Book does not mention the Doctor’s home planet, Gallifrey, first named in The Time Warrior (1973-4) by Holmes, and mentioned for the second time in Pyramids of Mars (largely rewritten by him), but not yet a staple piece of lore.

Some of the facts in the Monster Book aren’t quite right. The Wirrn are described as “ant-like” (p. 57) when they’re more like human-sized locusts or moths — flying creatures that develop from slug-like larvae.

We’re also told that the TARDIS’s “chameleon mechanism got stuck on the first visit to Earth” (p. 7), when it seems to break at the end of the first episode (and is a surprise to the Doctor and Susan in the next episode). It was presumably working properly in adventures we’re subsequently told about that took place before this first episode, such as when the Doctor tangled with Henry VIII or took a coat from Gilbert and Sullivan.

There are also facts of which Terrance doesn’t seem sure. In introducing the Doctor, we’re told that Susan “called him grandfather” (p. 7), as if that isn’t certain (again as per The Making of Doctor Who, p. 16). Also, this reference to Susan is the only mention of a companion in the text until we reach then-current companion Sarah, on p. 54. Yes, other companions feature in the illustrations but the absence from the text is striking. They’re not essential to the story being told.

I wonder if that’s to do with the perceived market for this book: the TV series was aimed at a mixed family audience but I suspect The Doctor Who Monster Book was aimed at young boys who, it was thought, wouldn’t be interested in girls. (Now I think about it, I’ve met some fans like that.) 

Perhaps it’s a consequence of the plot function of companions in stories, where — at the most reductive level — they serve a purpose in being relatable to the audience and asking questions on their behalf, such as “What does that mean?” and “What’s going on?” In The Doctor Who Monster Book, Terrance explains what went on in a given story and how that it is significant, making the companion redundant here. 

Or perhaps it is fairer to say that in this book Terrance takes the role of companion.

*

Thanks for reading. These posts don’t half go on a bit and they take a fair time to put together. There are also expenses in acquiring / accessing books I don’t already own. I can’t really justify continuing without support, so do please consider a donation to the noble cause. 

Next episode: Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster.

Bret Vyon Lives!

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

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

Bret Vyon Lives!

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

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

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

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

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

The three exciting interplanetary adventures are: 

The Man Inside by Simon Guerrier 

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

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

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

The Wages of Death by David Llewellyn 

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

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

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

The Sky is for Sale by James Kettle 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daumier, by Sarah Symmons

In the summer of 1993, me and my friend O. trekked up to London to work our way round various galleries, ticking off a longish list of paintings we’d been given as part of our A-level art course. It was mostly 19th century stuff, Turner and Constable through to the post-Impressionists. 

I scribbled basic pencil sketches of the ones I thought most interesting and bought postcards of anything on the list. Later, compiling this in an A4 folder to hand in to our teacher, I realised that while the postcards reproduced the paintings much more accurately than my sketches, they didn’t always convey their effect. On my sketch of Monet’s Water Lilies, I added little stick figures of people in the National Gallery, to get across that it took up a whole, enormous wall. I got extra marks for that.

It was also interesting to see which paintings I’d thought worth sketching had or hadn’t been selected for reproduction as postcards. Portraits of single individuals and landscapes of real places tended to get reproduced. Odder, more interesting stuff tended not to. In the Courtauld Institute, I bought two postcards of a painting that particularly spoke to me — one for my homework project and one for my bedroom wall. I couldn’t say at the time what it was about Don Quixote and Sancho Pancha (c. 1870-72) by Honoré Daumier that so held my attention. I’ve thought about it a lot since.

Honoré Victorin Daumier, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, c. 1868-72, The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust). Image courtesy of the Courtauld.

For one thing, it’s an unfinished painting, the work of an old artist in the process of going blind. That may account for the murky, dream-like quality and the half-formed figures — an impressionistically gaunt Quixote and his horse. Yet this crude, skeletal figure sits tall and proud, shoulders back, form in total contrast to the execution. If you know the story (I think I learned it after first seeing this painting), you’ll know Quixote is a fantasist, convinced he’s on an epic, noble quest. The posture here is his delusion.

Beside him, Sancho Panzo is a heftier silhouette, a little slumped upon the silhouette of a donkey. We get a sense of these two contrasting characters from this barest outline. They are dwarfed by the high, steep, dark terrain behind them, for all they are so prominent in the composition. But on they stride — Quixote proudly, Sancho with reservation — into the light.

I must have bought Sarah Symmons’ 2004 book on Daumier around the time it was published. Reading it again, I’m amazed by how prolific he was, producing some 4,000 lithographs, 1,000 woodcuts, 800 drawings and watercolours, 300 paintings and 50 pieces of sculpture. From this, Symmons calculates an extraordinary pace:

“Daumier completed a new work every two or three days of his adult life, except for the last three or four years when he was blind” (p. 22) 

Even so, we might query that word “completed”; he was notorious for not finishing work. Also extraordinary is Symmons tracing what Daumier was probably paid, not least for his lithograph work for Parisian magazines. He was, at least at times, on good money — and yet frequently poor and more than once bankrupt (p. 10). Sadly, there seems to be little surviving in the way of contemporary sources to explain this discrepancy. 

Again, I query the choice of words when Symmons says,

“His subject matter was limited to human activity,” (p. 16)

I think it would be better to say “focused on”. As she says, the vast majority of his work has striking figures in the foreground, no middle-ground and then a background at some distance. The effect is like a tableau, or portrait mode on a phone camera. 

Daumier was influenced by a range of other artists — his contemporaries, classical sculpture, Goya and Rembrandt. Symmons says Rembrandt had a particular effect on him from the late 1850s,

“after several new masterpieces by the Dutch artist were acquired by Napoleon III” (p. 99).

Presumably, these pieces were exhibited and Daumier went to see them. But I wonder how he — and other artists — accessed such works more generally. How much were they influenced by reproductions in print rather than the real thing? Basically, to what extend did Daumier learn and develop his craft through the equivalent of postcards?

Target Book Club, 19 July 2025

James Goss, the master brain behind Target Book Club, a celebration of the Doctor Who novelisations, has announced that I'm one of this year's speakers.

Target Book Club takes place from 10 am on Saturday 19 July 2025 at the Abbey Centre, 34 Great Smith Street, London.

• Buy tickets for Target Book Club 2025

My 15-minute talk, "The Unseen Terrance Dicks", will include some newly discovered facts about the most prolific of the Target authors. "Secrets from his files," says James. Yes, indeed.

I'm reading a lot of Terrance's work at the moment and blogged on his novelisation of The Wheel in Space just last week. You may also enjoy this 2015 interview I conducted with Terrance, in which he told me - very amiably - that I was talking nonsense.

Bowler Hats and Kinky Boots, by Michael Richardson

I’ve completed Part One of this enormous, comprehensive and highly readable volume, the 350 pages that cover production of the 1960s TV series The Avengers. The book goes on to cover the stage and radio versions, The New Avengers TV series, the 1998 movie and a whole load more besides — all beyond the scope of my latest research project. I hope to come back to this stuff another time.

In what I’ve read, Michael Richardson lays out an astonishing compendium of facts. If you want to know the make and registration of any vehicle in an episode, the make and calibre of any weapon or the identity of real-life locations, it’s all here. He’s clearly had access to production files and scripts, though it’s not always clear when the behind-the-scenes detail comes from contemporary paperwork or the later memories of cast and crew. As always with this kind of endeavour, I yearn for extensive footnotes spelling out the sources — which, admittedly, I’ve not always been able to include in the books I write myself.

In writing my own books, I’m acutely conscious of not simply listing a series of what took place on what date; the trick is to bring the material alive, to humanise it, teasing out the different personalities of those involved and the bigger story going on. There’s lots of that here and a lot that is suggestive. No one seems to have a bad word to say about gentlemanly Patrick Macnee, the actor in the leading role of not-always gentlemanly agent John Steed. His co-stars Honor Blackman (who played Cathy Gale) and Diana Rigg (Emma Peel) also meet with universal praise. With everyone else, I think Richardson frames things in the best of light but we can quite often read between the lines…

Again and again, I was astonished by the story being told here. There are often creative sparks and clashing egos. But even the hard numbers cited tell their own eye-popping tale.

I already knew that producers Sydney Newman and Leonard White at the ITV franchise ABC conceived The Avengers as a vehicle for actor Ian Hendry, keen to keep him under contract when another show, Police Surgeon, ended prematurely. What I didn’t know — what I can hardly get my head round — is that, from initial conception, it took just six weeks to get the first episode into production (p. 22). 

The idea you could have an idea for a series and get it made so quickly is unthinkable now. At the time, there were others working in television who would have found it unthinkable, too. No wonder there was a culture clash when Newman moved to the BBC and it took months to get Doctor Who started.

What was created so quickly remains compelling more than 60 years later. The first 15 minutes survive of Hot Snow, the first episode of The Avengers (1961). We see Ian Hendry established as a hard-working, cool young doctor with a nice fiancee — who is then shot and killed. It’s a cliche to kill a woman as an inciting incident like this but we at least get to know her first (it’s not simply her smiling at the camera while in bed), and her death is the pay-off to a very suspenseful sequence where she and Hendry chatter happily as they move round their home / office, oblivious to the villain who has broken in and keeps just out of sight (to them but not the viewer).

It’s slick and edgy and exciting, and then stops abruptly because the last two-thirds of the story are missing from the archive. The script included on the DVD box-set reveals what happens next: when the police seem unable to solve the crime, Hendry’s character investigates. In so doing, he meets the enigmatic John Steed (Macnee), who helps him uncover a plot to smuggle heroin, avenge the murder and bring the villains to book. Over subsequent weeks, Steed would call on him again…

Richardson is good on the logistics of production. At this stage, the actors would spend 10-14 days rehearsing each episode, with time out to film particular sequences that would lend a credible air or reality. They’d then spend a day at Teddington Studios, where after technical rehearsals they would perform the episode — “as live” if recorded in advance but often broadcast live. The episodes were made using electronic cameras and recorded on videotape, with its characteristic fluid and intimate feel. I’ve watched a lot of old telly, and The Avengers isn’t perfect — Richardson lists exactly when you can spot boom microphones in shot or actors fluff their lines — but it’s an ambitious, accomplished slick programme of its type.

That was recognised at the time. Made by and shown on the ITV franchise ABC, The Avengers did well in its first year. But, for reasons that Richardson explains, star Ian Hendry’s other commitments meant he wouldn’t be available for a second run. That could well have been the end of this series — a footnote in TV history rather than the icon it became.

Instead, the production team decided to make enigmatic Steed the lead character and introduce some new costars. For three episodes, scripts written for Hendry were given to Jon Rollason, playing an almost identical character. Richardson seems to suggest there was never any thought that they might extend Rollason’s contract — he was just a stopgap while they readied scripts for the two favoured candidates to take the supporting role. Honor Blackman was contracted for six episodes as Mrs Cathy Gale, the tough anthropologist widow of a white settler in Kenya killed by the Mau Mau. Julie Stevens was contracted for six episodes as singer Venus Smith, the scripts contriving means for her to perform numbers in each of her adventures. Blackman, of course, had her contract extended — and became sole costar to Macnee in Season 3 (1963-64).

Richardson explains why The Avengers proved such a hit, the way those involved made it something different and distinctive and fun. He tells us that the budget fro Season 3 was £5,100 per 50-minute episode (p. 79), still recorded basically “as live” on videotape at Teddington Studios. That budget is not too far from the £2,300 allocated to each 25-minute episode of Doctor Who being made by the BBC at the same time. But the team behind The Avengers had ambitions to sell their series to mainstream US networks, which required a higher resolution than could be achieved by videotape production in the UK at the time.

So, Season 4 of The Avengers (1965-66) was made on film. Each episode still took about a fortnight, but was now made bit by by, with about five minutes filmed per day. Instead of completing an “as live” production with a pretty much finished product, the film then needed editing and dubbing. It was all a much more time-consuming and expensive process — allocated £25,000 per episode and closer to £29,000 in practice (p. 132), more than five and a half times per episode compared to Season 3.

What astounds me is that they could find the investment to do this without a US sale agreed in advance, all on a gamble. They had made most of Season 4 before that the deal was agreed, with production taking place on The Danger Makers, the 20th of 26 episodes, when on 25 November 1967, the sale to the American ABC network was announced. (Yes, confusingly, a series made by the British ABC was sold to a US network with the same name.) The deal entailed making the next season in colour, with a corresponding rise in budget.

Seasons 5 and 6 cost £50,000 per episode (p. 191 and p. 264) — more than the combined budget of 12 episodes of Doctor Who, still being made in black-and-white and on videotape at the same time. All eight episodes of the Cybermen invading contemporary London in The Invasion, plus all four episodes on the alien world of The Krotons, and you pay for a single colour episode of The Avengers in late 1968. Which was still a year before ITV even began broadcasting in colour. It’s a gobsmacking amount of money. The gall of it! The chutzpah!

That money came with conditions: the US network had a say in casting the successor to Diana Rigg and in the style and tone of the series. This then led to problems.

When towards the end of production on the third episode of Season 6, the US network executives (and several people in the UK) thought the series had taken a wrong turn, there was an extraordinary about turn, carefully detailed by Richardson. The producer and script editor were fired and a new crew were brought in, led by Brian Clemens - who had left the series earlier that year under what may have been a bit of a cloud. With Clemens back in charge, all three episodes were reworked to a greater or lesser extent, the team changed the colour of lead actress Linda Thorson’s hair and introduced a new leading character in Steed's boss, Mother (Patrick Newall). According to Richardson, Clemens came in with carte blanche to do as he liked and he seems to have spared no one’s feelings where there were things he didn’t like. Basically: high drama.

By this point, says Richardson, The Avengers was being sold to 70 countries and ABC in the US moved it to a primetime slot at 7pm on Mondays. On 28 March 1968, the Stage called “it the most successful British television series ever to appear on the American network” (p. 293). But this high-profile position and dependence on American investment was also its downfall, which came swift and sure.

The success of The Avengers depended on how it fared against the competition on US TV. That competition, says Richardson, was Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and I Dream of Jeannie on NBC, and Gunsmoke on CBS. There’s a reason you’ve probably heard of them: they were the big guns of TV. Against them, The Avengers ranked 69th in ratings, respectable - even remarkable - for a UK-made series and yet not enough in its own right. Despite the extraordinary gamble and the work of all those involved, chasing the US market so doggedly also sealed the series’ fate.

News broke in the Daily Mail on on 24 January 1969 that the ABC network in the US had decided not to take any more episodes. Despite sales by now to 90 countries (!), the loss of the US network deal made the series no longer viable, given the enormous costs of production. The end came brutally fast: just a month later, on 28 February, Macnee and Thorson filmed their last scenes as Steed and Miss King. 

Steed, at least, would return a few years later. But the end of the initial run feels so abrupt, so frustrating, so wrong. Like the death of the fiancee in the very first episode, it’s utterly compelling. I want to dig in more. In fact, I’ve some threads to follow up now as part of ongoing research into something not yet announced. I hope to have more on the personalities involved, the crises and the drama...

Cue dramatic music by Johnny Dankworth and cut to the ads.