The Making of Doctor Who, by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke — II

The first edition of The Making of Doctor Who, published by Piccolo in 1972, was credited — on the front cover — to Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks. The title page then reversed the names, suggesting an equity of credit. Yet, as we saw last time, I think Hulke did most if not all of the writing and took 75% of the royalties.

Four years later, Terrance produced a revised edition of the book for Target, published on 16 December 1976 alongside two wholly new books also by Terrance: the novelisation Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars and the largely non-fiction “magazine format” The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, illustrated by George Underwood. I’m going to conclude this series of long posts by looking at these three books in turn.

Of the three titles published on the same day, I think Terrance worked on The Making of Doctor Who first, and entirely without Hulke’s involvement. In early 1976, when keen young fans Paul Simpson and David J Howe visited Hulke at home to interview him, they knew more about the revised edition than he did:

“According to Mac at the time, he knew nothing of the Target Making of and was going to ask Terrance about it after we left!” — Paul Simpson to me, 8 December 2025.

There are two good reasons why the team at Target might not have wanted Hulke involved. First, he’d fallen out with them. On 15 September 1975, Hulke wrote to his friend Jean Tate to say he’d had to get his agent Harvey Unna to “bludgeon” the publisher over the copyedit on Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion. “Much of it no longer makes sense”, he said, while also admitting, 

“I don’t have a degree in grammar [and] what if the rewrite is better?” (Cited in Michael Herbert, Things Are Not Always What They Seem, p. 397)

Despite this admission that the copyedit might have improved the manuscript, and that it would take him an estimated 70 hours to re-edit it into something more like its original form, Hulke set out to do exactly that — doggedly sticking to a point of principle that I suspect didn’t win him many friends. He didn’t write for Target again until Doctor Who and the War Games in 1978 (published posthumously in 1979).

Secondly, in commissioning Terrance to revise The Making of Doctor Who, I think the team at Target — and perhaps Terrance himself — wanted to excise some of Hulke’s more, ahem, fanciful notions from the first edition. Out went the philosophy and the sermon. Out went the long “in-universe” entries on past adventures, which were more fiction than fact. The new version keeps the non-fiction history of the television series Doctor Who, summarising the plots of old stories in much more straightforward form, and retains the analysis of how one story was made. Everything else got cut. 

Excitingly, we know exactly what Terrance did on the book because he detailed it in a letter to Harvey Unna (his agent as well as Hulke’s) on 22 April 1976. He told Unna that the manuscript of the revised edition had been accepted by the publisher — meaning he’d completed the main bulk of the work on it, bar approving a copyedit. Then, “as requested”, he listed how it differed from the original: 

Chapter One — How it all began — Based on original, revised and updated with additional material from Radio Times [10th anniversary Doctor Who] Special (hereinafter RT) 

Chapter Two — The Daleks — Based on original, revised with additional RT material. 

Chapter Three — Who is Doctor Who — Partly based on original but mostly on my own Doctor Who Monster Book. 

Chapter Four — Tom Baker is Doctor Who — New chapter. 

Chapter Five — The First Three Doctors — As original, revised and updated. 

Chapter Six — Monsters Galore — new chapter. 

Chapter Seven — The men from UNIT — New chapter. 

Chapter Eight — The Good Companions — new chapter, based on RT. 

Chapter Nine — Some Regulars Old and New — new chapter, based on RT. 

Chapter Ten — The Adventures of Doctor Who — new chapter, RT material with additional material by me. 

Chapter Eleven — Inside a TV studio — as original, slightly revised. 

Chapter Twelve — Diary of a Production — new chapter. 

Chapter Thirteen — How to make a Monster — as original. 

Chapter Fourteen — A New Life for the Doctor — new chapter. 

Glossary of terms — as original. 

This breaks down into: Chapters from original book 3, Chapters wholly or partly based on original 4, Entirely new chapters 8. Total 15. (The original book’s royalties were divided 75% to Mac Hulke and 25% to myself.) We await the judgment of Solomon! Best wishes, Terrance

Unna seems to have been left to arbitrate the division of royalties from this new edition between his two clients. He decided to reverse the earlier split, so Terrance now got 75%. That was good news for Terrance as this version seems to have sold well, and was reprinted in 1980, 1984 and 1986. I have worked from my 1986 reprint, but Paul Simpson kindly shared photos of his first edition so that I could verify how little changed in the decade between them. 

On the front cover of mine, the Target logo on the top right is a black-on-white outline; on the original edition, the logo was in colour: concentric red, yellow and blue circles. Artist Chris Achilleos incorporated that version of the logo into his cover art, framing a portrait of Tom Baker’s head, hat and part of his scarf. On the first edition it’s clearly the Doctor’s head within the established Target logo; by 1986, that link between Doctor and publisher is perhaps not quite so explicit.

The artwork doesn’t convey, in any sense, the “making of” Doctor Who; the Doctor is not surrounded by cameras, lights or a PA with clipboard. I suspect the idea was to commission a piece of artwork that Target could also use to promote the Doctor Who titles more generally. They would have been able to do so because Achilleos was paid a flat fee for each commission, rather than royalties:

“It was £95 per cover artwork, you had to sign a job acceptance form which basically said, ‘you surrender the original artwork and whole copyright over to the publisher’” — Achilleos to a “shocked” Terrance Dicks, interviewed by Russell Cook for his piece, “Doctor Who — The Neverending Stories”, Geeky Monkey (July 2016), pp. 41-42.

The portrait of the Doctor is similar to but not the same as Achilleos’s work on both The Doctor Who Monster Book and Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, the hat at the same angle, the same single ring of scarf around the neck, suggesting he worked from the same reference photographs, or ones from the same shoot. Of the three, I think this is the most accurate likeness of Tom Baker, the face better illuminated than the rather shadowy Monster Book version. It feels like his definitive portrait.

ETA Paul MC Smith has shared the reference photos, which do seem to be from the same shoot; look at the tones of the stripes on the scarf, in the same position relative to his chin. The photo used for the cover of The Doctor Who Monster Book is also reproduced inside the book; the shoot may have been done especially.

The illustration for The Making of Doctor Who sits under a bright green version of the logo, the colour in contrast to rather than complementing the logo, as if to make the effect brighter.  Above the Doctor Who logo, the words “The Making of” are presented in — well, what exactly is that typeface? ETA: Paul MC Smith thinks it is Balloon Extra Bold. 

It gives the impression of having been written in marker pen by hand, the sort of typeface you’d use on a book about how to draw comics or caricatures. I suppose that’s the closest match to how-to-make-TV, but it’s not very Doctor Who of this era. Why not employ the usual, perfect Futura Condensed ExtraBold? 

The back-cover blurb is a good indicator of the different approaches taken by the Piccolo and Target editions. The 1972 Making of boasts 116 words:

What happened when Doctor Who was put on trial by the Time Lords? 

Why did he agree to help UNIT? 

This fascinating book tells you everything about the Doctor and his adventures, the points in Space and Time he has visited, the aliens and monsters he has defeated. 

One of the most famous and longest running BBC serials of all time, Doctor Who depends for its success on the enthusiasm of everyone working on the show. 

Come inside the TV studio and meet them, learn how the Daleks and the Cybermen came into being and how the special effects work. 

What happens in Doctor Who often seems impossible. But is it? Could it all be true?

Quiz questions about old continuity, interesting bits of in-universe history and then, only in the fourth paragraph, a reference to the behind-the-scenes business you’d expect in a making-of. It’s all a bit woolly about the remit of the book.

In the 1976 edition, the blurb was condensed to 81 words and is a lot more direct and focused:

Here it is... the story behind one of television's most successful, longest-running shows. Come with DOCTOR WHO on a trip through time... to the early days of the programme when it all began... meet actors, authors and television staff... see inside a TV studio and watch a production take shape... learn the secrets of the monsters... relive every ‘Doctor Who’ story since the beginning... follow the Doctor through four incarnations and — perhaps — begin to discover just WHO is DOCTOR WHO?

“Here it is,” is a brilliant gambit: this is the book you’ve been longing for. While the first edition offers to answer “fascinating” questions, the revised version is more immersive, promising to take the reader “on a trip through time” where “perhaps” we’ll get answers. Perhaps! It’s at once more direct and focused, and more thrilling and intriguing.

Opening the pages, the first thing to note is the indicia. In his letter to Harvey Unna, cited above, Terrance happily acknowledged the debt he owed to the Doctor Who special published by Radio Times in 1973. Here, there’s no mention of that publication but we’re told:

“Parts of the material in this new edition appeared in The Doctor Who Monster Book by Terrance Dicks, Target Books 1975”

It’s odd that the debt is acknowledged to Terrance’s own work for Target but not to stuff written by someone else for another publisher. Was that material used under licence, and paid for?

Then there’s the “Thanks” page. Jack Kine, Barry Letts, Sydney Newman and David Whitaker are listed in both versions of the Making of, though I think they were consulted solely for the first edition. But they were not the only people consulted for that first edition — Donald Wilson, Verity Lambert, Shaun Sutton and various cast members also contributed. In revising the book, Terrance didn’t take the opportunity to add names left out of the acknowledgements in that first version.

Charles Bowman, Catherine Dale and Lauraine Palmeri are credited only in the first edition. We know Palmeri worked through old scripts to produce the plot summaries from which Hulke wrote his in-universe synopses for the first edition. These were cut from the revised version — hence her acknowledgement was cut, too. That may suggest that whatever Bowman and Dale’s contributions might have been to the book, they were also cut from this new edition. If so, my best guess is that they helped Hulke with the philosophical chapter, “Could It All Be True?”

For the new edition, Terrance thanks then-current producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, who presumably provided the outlines of Doctor Who stories broadcast since the Radio Times special, as well as offering other such assistance. Terrance doesn’t seem to have interviewed them for this book.

Lastly, Terrance credits Jan Vincent-Rudzki and Stephen Payne. We’re not told in what capacity they assisted, but they were fans and founder members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, established just as Terrance wrote this book. Exactly one week after writing his letter to Harvey Unna about completing work on it, Terrance was the guest of DWAS at an event held at Westfield College in London. 

This is, I think, the first evidence of fans contributing to what Terrance was writing. In years to come, he borrowed VHS tapes of stories he was going to novelise, and he recommended particular fans to his publisher and other authors, as expertise to draw on. The corollary of that, I think, is that he couldn’t avoid hearing the views of some of these older fans, who objected to Terrance writing books aimed at 8-12 year-olds at the level of, er, 8-12 year-olds. 

(In that context, I once made Terrance laugh by quoting a favourite gag from The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4, in which he complains that this year’s Beano annual is a bit childish.)

Then, at last, we’re into the body of the book itself.

Terrance begins the revised edition of The Making of Doctor Who with the boggling fact that the series is 12 years old (p. 7), though it was 13 by the time the book was published. In mulling over Doctor Who’s “incredibly long life”, he notes that there are now schoolchildren “unable to remember a time when there wasn’t Doctor Who.” Today, some of those schoolchildren are drawing pensions.

He then recounts the creation of Doctor Who by Sydney Newman and Donald Wilson, who handed the project to producer Verity Lambert and “script editor” (sic) David Whitaker, who cast William Hartnell in the title role, commissioned Anthony Coburn to write the first story and Terry Nation to write the second — which featured things called Daleks and made the series a hit.

It’s pretty much as per Hulke’s version but Terrance corrected a few details. Hulke says Newman and Wilson devised Doctor Who in 1962; Terrance says, more accurately, that Newman was appointed Head of Drama at the BBC in 1962 (he didn’t start work there officially until 14 January 1963, and the first documented evidence of him thinking about a new teatime serial for children is from March that year).

Terrance also corrects a claim about where the word Dalek came from, quoting Terry Nation directly: 

“In a desperate attempt to satisfy [journalists], I told them I was inspired by the letters on a volume of an encyclopaedia. But the fact is that no encyclopaedia in print covers those letters, DAL-LEK. Anyone checking the facts could have found me out.” (p. 16)

There’s more from Nation on what makes the Daleks successful: “The Daleks must always be totally evil.” This isn’t in the original; Terrance interviewed Nation for the revised book.

Terrance is keen to note that,

“It would be a mistake to attribute all the success of Doctor Who to the Daleks” (p. 17).

Yet he acknowledges that they are inextricably linked to the Doctor, 

“Like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, like Chauvelin and the Scarlet Pimpernel” (ibid).

I wonder how many 8-12 year-olds understood the latter reference. Older readers might have recalled the BBC’s 10-part version of The Elusive Pimpernel shown on Sundays at teatime in 1969, or there was the Powell and Pressburger movie starring David Niven (1950) — or even the Carry on spoof, Don’t Lose Your Head (1967). But I think this is Terrance assuming his young readers had an interest in and knowledge of adventure fiction. Or it was a prompt for more assiduous readers to go and investigate.

Chapter 4, “Tom Baker is Doctor Who”, boasts all-new information. The biographical details must have come from Baker himself, though he’s not directly quoted. Of particular interest to me are the details Terrance reveals about himself, such as why he left the job of script editor on Doctor Who, reported in the third person:

“Terrance Dicks wanted to return to writing his own scripts rather than editing other people’s, and was now increasingly involved with Target’s Doctor Who paperback series” (p. 24).

So the novelisations were part of the reason he left. He also tells us about the “lengthy and intense” (p. 25) search that he and producer Barry Letts undertook to find a successor for Jon Pertwee. I knew that having been recommended Tom Baker and met with him, they assessed his acting by going to see The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (if memory serves, at the Odeon on Tottenham Court Road). But here we get what they saw in that film:

“Tom Baker played the wicked magician [Prince Koura], a man worn out by the exercise of his own evil powers. Each spell left him a little older and more exhausted, and he was searching desperately for the Fountain of Youth to renew his failing strength. The character was sympathetic as well as villainous, and it was impossible not to feel saddened at his eventual defeat.” (p. 26)

Terrance doesn’t make the connection himself, but this account chimes with what he later tells us about the origins of Robot, the story he wrote for Baker’s debut in the role of the Doctor. Having been commissioned for a story about a robot,

“The writer [ie Terrance himself] remembers a remark by a famous film critic, to the effect that in most monster films one ends up on the side of the monster. Like in King Kong—one of the earliest and best monsters of all. … So—a sympathetic robot then, not so much evil in itself, as misguided, or misused.” (p. 104)

Annoyingly for my purposes, Terrance doesn’t provide dates for when this story was conceived and developed, and there’s not much in the way of surviving paperwork to narrow it down. That means we don’t know if Terrance already had this sympathetic robot in mind when he went to see The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, where his thoughts about the story may have informed what he saw in Baker’s performance on the big screen. But perhaps he saw the film and then had the idea of a sympathetic villain, in which case in Robot Tom Baker battles a version of himself.

Another fun thing revealed here is mention of changes made by director Christopher Barry to make the location shoot more manageable:

“An extended sequence in which Sarah, in her car, is attacked by the Robot, is reluctantly dropped altogether” (p. 106)

I wonder if this chase sequence explains why, in the story, Sarah drives a gold-coloured Midget MG sports car (registration RMF 654L) — quite a fancy motor for a freelance magazine journalist.

There’s a further sense of roads not taken, too. The original version of The Making of Doctor Who covered the making of a story that was in production as the book was written, and which aired just before the book was published. This new edition covers a story that aired almost two years prior to publication. 

Terrance explains that Robot is of interest as Baker’s debut story. But surely the original plan had been to base the revised version of the Making of on a more recent production, also written by Terrance. The Brain of Morbius was in production in October 1975 and broadcast in January 1976 — but credited to the pseudonym “Robin Bland”. Terrance asked for his name to be taken off the story after it was extensively rewritten by script editor Robert Holmes. 

There’s no mention of this in the book, written in March / April; the chapter summarising all TV stories to date includes the broadcast version of Morbius, credited to Bland, with no sense of Terrance being involved. I can understand why Terrance wouldn’t cover what happened in a book like this — it’s not as fun and positive as the making of Robot, for all its a more interesting behind-the-scenes story. 

While Terrance cribs from the earlier edition, the Radio Times special and his own Monster Book, plenty here is new. For example, he tells us that there are three distinct types of Autons: basic Autons who resemble shop-window dummies, more sophisticated Replicas of real people and the spider-crab-octopus Nestene consciousness that is their true form (p. 37). He also recounts the career of UNIT’s Captain Mike Yates from Mike’s own perspective (pp. 42-43), and makes him a hero who gains full redemption following his wobble in Invasion of the Dinosaurs. 

Many of the details are consistent with Terrance’s novelisations: Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart (no middle name) has a “neatly trimmed moustache” (p. 40), as per Doctor Who and the Web of Fear. Terrance cuts the reference to the Brigadier’s ancestor who fought at Waterloo — a detail not gleaned from the TV series. Benton is a Warrant Officer (p. 43) as per Robot and Terrance’s novelisations but not Terror of the Zygons. Though the summary of stories tells us, definitively, that Susan “is the Doctor’s granddaughter” (p. 55), Terrance says earlier that,

“It is possible that this was simply a title of affection” (p. 45).

That doubt is as per the Monster Book.

What’s really striking here are the numerous small errors. Of course, when Terrance wrote this there weren’t the wealth of websites, reference books and magazines with which to check such details. But the result is that this is not the authoritative source it first appears, and the story being told isn’t quite right.

For example, Donald Wilson is credited as the BBC’s “Head of Series and Serials” (p. 8) and David Whitaker as “Script Editor” (p. 10), when they were Head of Serials and Story Editor respectively, in both cases, less powerful positions. Terrance used the job titles of their successors in 1976, who each wielded a bit more authority. [ETA: Paul Hayes points out that the post of Head of Series and Serials was created in 1981, with David Reid the first incumbent; I will check how Wilson is credited in the first edition.]

Both posts — Head of Serials and story editor — were introduced by Newman when he joined the BBC, so the two men were new in post in new ways of working, assigned to a new series. The sense from Terrance is rather of business as usual in the way telly is made.

He says the audience of the first episode of Doctor Who was a modest “two or three million” (p. 11), but that things changed with the start of the second serial “on 28 December 1963” (p. 12). Again, this isn’t quite right and presents a story that isn’t quite true. The second serial started a week earlier; on 28 December, in the second episode of the story, viewers got their first full sight of the Daleks, only glimpsed in the previous instalment — which was part of the draw.

The leap in viewing figures wasn’t quite as Terrance makes out. The first episode of Doctor Who was watched by twice what he suggests, 4.4 million viewers, and the numbers rose over the course of the first serial to 5.9, 6.9 and 6.4 million. Terrance doesn’t mention that the first episode’s figures were affected by events in the news that fateful weekend; the wider socio-political context isn’t really covered here.

In fact, the first two episodes of the Dalek story got the same figures as the end of the previous serial — 6.9 and 6.4 million. Then the numbers rose, reaching 10.4 million by the end of that first Dalek story. The series started more robustly than he suggests and there was a steady rise in figures, which continued after the Dalek serial. Terrance’s version is more legend than reality.

Other details aren’t quite right. Terrance recounts, as per the Radio Times special, Deborah Watling’s anecdote about acting with her father in Doctor Who, which conflates the two stories in which Jack appeared — one in which they filmed on location on a mountainside, another in which he was made up in “grey bread and white hair” (p. 51). Terrance also misquotes a line of dialogue on which he himself was script editor, adding an extra last word: 

“Chap with wings. Five rounds rapid, fire!” (p. 40).

Some of this stuff could have been picked up in the copy edit, such as where the recently published Doctor Who and the Space War being is missed from the list of adventures featuring the Master (p. 39), the mis-spelling of Carole Ann Ford’s name as “Carol Ann” (p. 45) or the unfortunate split of a word over two consecutive lines:

“Other travellers in the TARDIS included Vicki, survivor of a crashed spaceship, Steven, a spaceship pilot, Ben, a cock-

ney sailor, and Polly, a scientist’s secretary” (p. 45)

Likewise, there’s an unfortunate choice of word when describing the Sea Devils as being, “Aroused from their long hibernation” (p. 38). 

Less rudely suggestive but still the wrong use of a word is where Terrance describes the space station Nerva Beacon in Revenge of the Cybermen as “a kind of galactic lighthouse” (p. 92), as if its light or signals can be detected well beyond the Solar System, when its in orbit round Jupiter.

Even so, “lighthouse” is a good way of conveying what the space station does. He’s keen on straightforward analogies like this. We’re told a TV studio is as big as a football pitch, a director has “homework” and that TV cameras are Dalek-like, all on p. 98. In the glossary, he has a rather grand definition of a TV producer:

“He is as a general is to an army” (p. 127).

Is that how Terrance saw it, a decade later, when he became a producer himself? And what rank did he think was the equivalent of script editor?

My nitpicking went into overdrive in the long chapter of plot summaries from old adventures. The 1972 edition includes a list of credits per broadcast story, citing writer, director, producer and script editor. Here, Terrance only credits writers, effectively making them the primary creative input. In other chapters he mentions the roles of directors, producers and script editors, as well as heads of department and people in make-up and special effects, but the sense is that they’re all in service to the real authority. What a delightful fantasy, the writer as king.

Then there’s the detail of what these writers wrote. On p. 71 we’re told of The Evil of the Daleks that “ancient Edward Waterfield” has to “travel through time as Maxtible”, which isn’t what happens in the story at all, and of The Tomb of the Cybermen that people are “Evacuating the last remains of the now-extinct Cybermen” — the first word should be “excavating”.

It’s not just the facts; the varying levels of attention paid to different stories is odd, too. The synopsis for the four-episode The Underwater Menace is far longer and more detailed than the four sentences allotted to 12-episode epic The Daleks’ Master Plan, where Terrance doesn’t even mention villainous Mavic Chen. 

His summary of The Curse of Peladon likewise fails to mention that the Ice Warriors are in it, when he makes a point of mentioning returning monsters elsewhere — and lists the novelisations in which they appear. He makes no mention of Lethbridge-Stewart in the summary of The Web of Fear, whereas he had underlined the significance of that first encounter with the Doctor in his recent novelisation.

He’d also just novelised Planet of the Daleks, so its odd that the summary here is basically the version as per Radio Times, Terrance simply changing the reference to “Doctor Who” to “the Doctor” and adding that Jo is saved from the fungal disease by a friendly native. The summary here and in Radio Times refers to an “ice volcano”, not “icecano” as in the novelisation and Terry Nation’s Dalek Annual 1977. How odd, to synchronise novelisation and annual, then not be consistent in your very next book.

As per Radio Times, the summary here also suggests that the Doctor “falls gravely ill” after arriving on the planet Spiridon (p. 86). I wonder if that was how the story originally played out, perhaps with the Doctor spat on by the planet’s deadly vegetation before Terrance revised the ending of Frontier in Space and had the the Doctor gravely wounded there. Even so, it’s odd he didn’t amend the details here to fit the story as broadcast.

There are other indications of early drafts of TV stories. Here, the villain of The Hand of Fear does not die at the end but is left “to his solitary fate” (p. 96). His name is also given here as not Eldrad but “Eldred” — the name of a character in The Seeds of Death, on which Terrance was script editor (and uncredited writer). This is the last story summarised in the book; it had not entered production when Terrance delivered his manuscript.

That means he he doesn’t summarise the events of the next TV story, The Deadly Assassin, which was set on the Doctor’s home planet. The story had been broadcast by the time this book was published, so readers may have been surprised to find that The Making of Doctor Who does not mention “Gallifrey” by name. That name features in Terrance’s novelisation Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, published on the same day as this book. It’s the first time Terrance used “Gallifrey” in print, which I think is evidence that he wrote the novelisation after completing work on The Making of…

I know that picking over this stuff is pedantic, but today the writers of magazine articles, books and documentaries sweat over this stuff, knowing people will write in if we get it wrong (also, sometimes if we get it right). So I raise these small errors as indicative of another age, when the history of Doctor Who was more folk memory than documented history.

That goes hand in hand with the myth-making here. The chapter “Who is the Doctor?” repeats much of Terrance’s pithy account from The Doctor Who Monster Book, though he corrects the spelling of “crotchety” in reference to the First Doctor. But he also adds something to this lore.

First, perhaps by accident, he establishes what I think may be the first example of how we tend to refer to the Doctor’s different incarnations. It’s in marked contrast to previous forms of address. In The Doctor Who Monster Book, he speaks of “the Doctor”, the same person in each incarnation, just with a different face. In his novelisation Doctor Who — The Three Doctors, he refers to “Doctor One”, “Doctor Two” and “Doctor Three”, though sometimes the latter term is used for the Hartnell incarnation, and sometimes it means Pertwee.“The Changing Face of Doctor Who” on the first page of the early novelisations speak of, for example, “the fourth DOCTOR WHO”, the ordinal in lower case.

The original version of The Making of Doctor Who is almost the same, with chapters titled “THE FIRST DOCTOR WHO WAS WILLIAM HARTNELL” (p. 34) and “THE SECOND DOCTOR WHO WAS PATRICK TROUGHTON” (p. 36). On the contents page, these titles are given in title case rather than all caps: “The First Doctor Who Was William Hartnell”.

In the revised version, these two chapters and a piece on Jon Pertwee are all contained in one chapter, “The Three Doctors” (pp. 28-33), with subheadings in italicsed title case: “The First Doctor Who was William Hartnell”, etc. Terrance is consistent with the earlier version of the book, referring to the character in subheadings and the text as “Doctor Who” rather than “the Doctor”, though this was a point he picked up with other writers while script editor on the series. 

Correct that small detail, and this is the earliest example I’m aware of where the different incarnations are referred to as the First Doctor, Second Doctor, etc, the ordinal capitalised as part of a proper noun. It originates in the first edition of the Making of, but it’s the revised version that puts “First Doctor Who”, “Second Doctor Who” and “Third Doctor Who” into the same chapter, one after the other — and so makes a point of that being their proper names.

Then there’s what Terrance adds to the end of the chapter on “Who is the Doctor?”. I said of The Doctor Who Monster Book that he describes each incarnation in a way that makes them heroic and consistent — the same person just with a different face (even though they are different heights etc). Here, he underlines that idea.

Again, what Terrance says is following the lead set by Hulke, in this case in response to a quote from Shaun Sutton, the BBC’s then Head of Drama, referring to Doctor Who’s “quality of moral indignation”:

“Put in simpler terms, the Doctor always cares about people: he believes in good and fights evil. He is never cruel, and he never carries a gun or other weapon. He is often in battles, but he hates war” (p. 8).

Terrance takes this, adds it to his point about the character being consistent throughout his different incarnations, and produces magic:

“He is still [in his new incarnation] impulsive, idealistic, ready to risk his life for a worthy cause. He still hates tyranny and oppression, and anything that is anti-life. He never gives in, and he never gives up, however overwhelming the odds against him.

“The Doctor believes in good and fights evil. Though often caught up in violent situations, he is a man of peace. He is never cruel or cowardly.

“In fact, to put it simply, the Doctor is a hero. These days there aren’t so many of them around…” (p. 23).

Benjamin Cook dug into this a bit when he interviewed Terrance for Doctor Who Magazine #508, with Terrance’s friend Paul Cornell noting the similarity to Raymond Chandler’s description of a hero in his 1944 essay “The Simple Art of Murder”; go read it in full if you haven’t but I will quote the best-known line:

“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

Terrance certainly saw the link between his view of the Doctor and the idealised hero in that essay, quoting from Chandler directly to open his 1994 Doctor Who novel Blood Harvest and naming a 1997 novel Mean Streets. But did he know he was riffing on Chandler back in 1976?

I think back then he drew on something else, and the clue is in the words, “He never gives in, and he never gives up.”

That’s in line with something in Terrance’s second Mounties novel, Massacre in the Hills: “the soldier’s motto [of] Never explain, never complain” (p. 25), which he later echoed in his semi-autobiographical novel:

“Never explain, never complain, as Dad always said” (Prisoners of War (1990), p. 67).

The suggestion is that this is something Terrance heard while his father was a quartermaster-sergeant during the war. I have a piece in DWM’s new Unit Declassified special about how this and Terrance’s own time in National Service influenced his approach to the Doctor Who stories he worked on.

“Never complain, never explain” is a pretty well known phrase, with its own entry on Wikipedia detailing how it was used and then rejected as the public relations strategy of the royal family. It was originally attributed to the 19th century Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who in turn seems to have fashioned it from one of 11 “Maxims for a Statesman” (1873-76) written by Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College:

“Never quarrel, never explain, never hate, never fret, never fail.”

That’s the sentiment Terrance is expressing, isn’t it? So it’s a late Victorian idea of heroism, the kind he knew from the adventure stories he’d grown up on, such as Kim by Rudyard Kipling. There’s something, too, of Kipling’s poem “If—” (1895), which Terrance had a copy of on the door of the office where he wrote these books.

“If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…”

All of that, I think, Terrance made into “Never cruel or cowardly”, which has now become part of the fiction of the character, quoted by the Doctor on screen — the hero s/he wants to be, if not always attaining this ideal. 

The irony is that that’s in stark contrast to the way this book concludes. Whereas the first edition promised “The Shape of Things to Come”, as if setting out a blueprint of the future in the manner of HG Wells, here the final chapter is “A New Life for the Doctor”.

“At the time this book is being written, the Doctor seems to be loosening his connections with Earth, returning to his earlier role of the mysterious wanderer through the strange world of Space and Time” (p. 124).

The suggestion is that the Doctor will be less knowable and more of a mystery; yet this book sets out exactly who the Doctor is, the promise at the core of the character. Indeed, by detailing what we know about the Doctor in a book like this, and by setting a TV story on his home planet, the Doctor became much more known and less mysterious. 

Terrance concludes this book by saying that the ever-growing list of novelisations — as many as 27 so far! — are preserving Doctor Who for posterity, allowing readers to relive adventures or catch up on ones shown before they were born. This comes in the same heart-stopping paragraph that he reveals that the BBC wiped tapes of old programmes and many Doctor Who episodes “are gone for good” (p. 124), which I think adds a sense of urgency — read the books or lose Doctor Who.

This underlines something implicit in this version of the book. Much more than the original edition, it continually prompts readers to get more involved. In the summaries of stories, Terrance tells us where novelisations are available so we can search them out and read up on these adventures in more detail, tick them off, collect them. He mentions the “hundreds of children” who meet Tom Baker at “Target book-signing sessions” (p. 27), the implication being that we could do the same — if we haven’t already.

In his chapter on how monsters are made, Terrance recommends the book The Techniques of Special Effects in Television by Bernard Wilkie, suggesting we borrow it from the library. It’s a book for grown-ups, largely aimed at those already working within the industry, but Terrance challenges readers aged 8-12 to give it a go. 

In that context, The Making of Doctor Who as a whole is more than a book; it’s a challenge. Explore the fictional lore of Doctor Who. Explore the way the programme is made. Go out, be an active participant.

I know a load of people — me included — who did just that. In doing so, they made careers, forged friendships, met life partners, even had children. Terrance began this book by boggling that there were children who’d never known life without Doctor Who. Even more boggling is that, thanks to this book and what it started, there are children who would never have been born without Doctor Who…

Not bad going for a book.

*

Thanks so much to everyone for your support for these long posts about the books written by Terrance Dicks, whether by reading them, sharing them, responding and/or contributing to costs. But I’m afraid I have some exciting news for all readers.

I’m going to write two more long entries in this series, one on Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars and one on The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book. After that, I need to focus attention on some other biggish projects, not least the biography of Terrance. But I hope to be back for some longer posts again in future.

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.