Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, by Terrance Dicks

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

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

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

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

Photo care of the Black Archive

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

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

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

Photo care of the Black Archive

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

Photo care of the Black Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DOCTOR WHO:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This, we’re then told, is Ahmad’s,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

The Feast of Steven on YouTube

Another YouTube video, this time by my excellent friend Gav Rymill and based on a piece he, Rhys Williams and I put together for Doctor Who Magazine #559 in 2020. We tracked down clues to reproduce the studio sets of the missing Christmas Day 1965 episode The Feast of Steven.

That piece for DWM got a mention on Countdown. I also wrote about The Feast of Steven earlier this week for the Daily Telegraph.

The Feast of Steven in the Telegraph

I have a piece in today's edition of the Daily Telegraph, "Exterminated! The daft Dr Who festive special lost in time" (Arts, pp. 10-11). It's about the episode The Feast of Steven, broadcast 60 years ago on Thursday, and digs into why it was so odd.

The online version went live on Sunday under the title "The story of Doctor Who’s first-ever, and profoundly daft, Christmas special" (£).

Nine days ago, I had another piece in the same paper on writer Malcolm Hulke and the Sea Devils.

The Games of Kings, by Dorothy Dunnett

First published in 1961, this enormous historical novel - volume 1 in a whole enormous series - is set in the late 1540s and concerns the roguish but charismatic Francis Crawford of Lymond, the younger son of a landed Scottish family who may also be a cad, murderer and English spy. Or perhaps he is none of these things and is, in fact, a hero.

Among the friends he makes, and potentially compromises, is kindly blind girl Christian Stewart. But many of the characters here are real figures from history, and part of the fun is that we know much of what is coming, such as the plot to marry off Mary of Guise's young daughter - i.e. the later Mary Queen of Scots.

It is a long, long book and takes a while to kick into gear, much of the early part involving long, long scenes with characters going about their business with little - I felt - at stake. Yet as we get to know the characters and their world, we pick on up interconnections, misconceptions, and that things are not quite as straightforward as first presented. 

There are some thrilling moments - late on, Dunnett abruptly kills off one leading character, which completely took me by surprise. This is swiftly followed by Lymond being blamed for the death, when we know he is innocent, and making a break for it to pursue a fiendish spy. He ends up leading a single-handed assault on an English castle. Things get especially thrilling when, in the midst of the ensuing chaos, Lymond trains his last arrow on where the spy is hiding, hoping to catch a glimpse of and kill him, while someone else lines up a shot at Lymond. It is incredibly tense and exciting. But that only serves to underline how slow the book is in other places.

The ending involves a long, long trial. We have, by this time, made our own minds up about Lymond, so have to hang around waiting for characters to catch up. The vital piece of evidence is somewhere tantalisingly just out of reach, which adds some suspense. It's all good, just a bit long, long.

The audiobook is ably narrated by David Monteath - not, as I thought when I downloaded it without having my glasses on, my mate David Monteith. It's been very good company on some long drives recently. And this was a favourite book of Terrance Dicks - he even wrote Dorothy Dunnett a fan letter. I shall have more to say on how he first discovered this book and Dunnett, and what he saw in her writing.

Missing Believed Wiped 2025

I had a happy time on Saturday at the BFI’s annual Missing Believed Wiped, where we get to see clips and full episodes of old TV recently returned to the archives by teams of ruddy heroes. Last year, I wrote a post on what was shown and a pal asked if I could do the same this time for those who couldn’t attend. So…

The first session began with a trailer, originally shown on BBC One on Thursday 15 December 1966 between the end of The Illustrated Weekly Hudd (of which we saw a closing bit of credits) and Sports Review of 1966. The trailer was for a thriller series called Vendetta, but Presentation clearly had no footage from the series, or wanted a generic trail for the whole series not just a given episode. Instead, specially shot material shows a hand with a syringe, a hand with a knife, a letter in which “Vendetta” is written in cut-out letters from newsprint. How amazing to advertise a series with, “This is roughly the gist…”

That was followed by a full episode of Vendetta, The Running Man, originally broadcast on 30 December 1966. It wasn’t at all what I’d expected from doing some reading in advance. The Radio Times of 27 October previewed the first episode of Vendetta with a profile of the series’ star, Italian actor Stello Candelli. His character, Danny Scipio, is a Sicilian who,

“fights the Mafia with his own methods … In the course of his unending vendetta Scipio will be confronting the Mafia in places all over the world: in the American south, in France, in Sicily, and in metropolitan Italy. But for tonight’s opening episode, written by the originators of the series, Brian Degas and Tudor Gates and called The Sugar Man, he travels to London.”

Scipio is not in or even mentioned in The Running Man, which is largely set on the Devonshire moors, with a bit of action in Cornwall. Agent Angelo James (played by Australian actor Neil McCallum) goes to Dartmoor Prison to bully prisoner Johnny Barbiere (Sebastian Breaks) into testifying against one of the notorious Pulito brothers. But Johnny is in prison with the other Pulito brother, who then tries to kill him. Johnny escapes and goes on the run — there’s quite a lot of location filming as he runs about the scenery and scrambles over stone walls, while stock footage shows groups of policemen on what are clearly different hills.

Johnny then breaks into the house of Patricia Rattan (Janet Munro), just as she’s leaving a note for the husband she is walking out on. Against her will, she must now drive Johnny out of the area and through the police checks, pretending to be his loving wife. Things don’t go to plan, and they end up having to spend the night together…

Janet Munro — who I knew from playing opposite Sean Connery in the Disney musical Darby O’Gill and the Little People — is amazing in this, with a lot of wide-eyed close-ups as she is variously terrified, brave or intrigued. There are some nice visual touches, such as the way the runaway sequence involves handheld shooting to give Johnny’s point of view. 

Sometimes the writing is deft. Johnny tells Patricia that he wants to get to the Isles of Scilly, where he can sit and watch the few boats coming in and — if he sees anyone that concerns him — lie low for a bit. Later, agent Angelo says pretty much the same thing, independently: he had effectively deduced Johnny’s motives and movements.

Yet we’re led to believe that the story will hang not on whether Johnny can escape but who will catch up with him first — the ruthless but good-guy Angelo or the ruthless, deadly Pulitos. The latter get largely forgotten. Johnny shares with Patricia how he got mixed up with the Pulitos — the vital evidence agent Angelo needs — but this isn’t picked up at the end, either. It’s as if a chunk of plot got left out. I wonder how much the logistics of filming on a ferry for the climax determined what featured in the resolution.

After Vendetta, Chris Perry from Kaleidoscope shared some fun stuff. First, a cinema trailer for a 1964 stage pantomime starring Cliff Richard as Aladdin, with the Shadows, Arthur Askey and Vanessa Howard.

Then there was a reconstruction of the dramatic final moments from the first season of Doomwatch, with material from the otherwise missing episode Survival Code (11 May 1970) recovered from the recap at the start of the next episode and from an edition of Blue Peter (where it could be seen on a screen in the background of an item about the band, the Scaffold). The editing was done by Jon Coley and gives a good sense of the mounting tension — and the shock twist ending, decades before similar stuff in Spooks and Line of Duty. It’s good, too, to see something of Hugh David’s tense, enthralling work as director (all 10 Doctor Who episodes that he directed are missing). 

Then there was a full episode of legal sitcom AP Herbert’s Misleading Cases, this one The Negotiable Cow (20 June 1967). Roy Dotrice was — as ever — aged up, in this case to play Albert Haddock, an old pedant who objects to a bill from the Inland Revenue for £68, 1s and 3d. Reading up on obscure bits of old law, he decides to deliver a cheque in person to the bureaucrat in question. But he does not write the cheque on paper: he daubs it on the side of a cow.

The case as to whether he can pay by cow, and whether he can tie up said cow at a parking meter, goes to court, with Alastair Sim presiding. This was quite a coup, and Radio Times credited Sim first and ran a photo of him not Dotrice. On screen, Sim seems delighted by the daft, witty script, such as when he asks of this particular, unusual cheque, “Were you afraid it might bounce?” It’s all good fun. Plus, for Doctor Who fans there was the bonus sight of John Levene — just prior to playing a Yeti in The Web of Fear — as one of the jurors, seen clearly in one shot. 

Next up was a compilation of clips from Ed Stradling at the TV Museum, which included an unused take from Attack of the Cybermen (1985), a Top of the Pops performance of “Ships in the Night” by Be Bop Deluxe and a song from Play School (30 March 1983). You can see more from the TV Museum, and support its work, at https://www.patreon.com/TheTVMuseum

The second session began with The Best in TV, Michael Aspel presenting coverage of the Guild of Television Producers and Directors Awards held earlier the same day — 14 February 1969 — at the Dorchester Hotel in London. This forerunner of the BAFTAs had a chequered history. The bigwigs of the BBC were all at the event in November 1963 when news came in from Dallas that President Kennedy had been shot. This meant there was no one senior enough on duty to authorise changing the pre-agreed TV schedule. I’ve read about the fallout from this in Competition by Asa Briggs and A Survey of Television by Stuart Hood.

At the awards in 1969, host Kenneth Horne suffered a heart attack midway through the show and died. The show continued without him, and the TV version still went out that evening, but the footage of the ceremony was kept noticeably brief. Instead, the programme showed extended clips from the winning TV shows — many of them otherwise missing. We got to see Marty Feldman as a policeman using his cloak to “bullfight” with cars, Max Adrian and Christopher Gable at the piano in a (surviving!) film about Delius by Ken Russell, and an aged-up Roy Dotrice — him again — tell bawdy stories about Sir Walter Raleigh in Brief Lives. The show ended with a standing ovation for the Czechoslovakian TV Service, awarded in absence. 

Afterwards, in the bar, I think this was the material shown to us that was mostly hotly debated. The strangeness of it, the ethics of carrying on with the broadcast after the death of the host, how posh it all was… I realised that just a month after this, the same venue hosted the Writers’ Guild Awards, which honoured many of the same shows and recipients. (You can see, in the opening moments of Marty Feldman: No, But Seriously… Feldman receiving his guild award from David Whitaker and Marius Goring.)

Next up, my pal Gary Brannan from the University of York presented footage from a videotape found within the archives of writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. This comprised brief fragments of programmes, some silent and in poor quality, including some of the fourth episode of Hancock’s, broadcast on 1 July 1967 with Vicky Carr singing “Here’s That Rainy Day” on the nightclub set. The tape was intercut with brief moments from an episode of Hancock called The Bowmans, originally broadcast in 1960 but — thinks Gary — taped from the repeat on 16 March 1966, with glimpses of Tony Hancock fronting a campaign of (fake) adverts for Grimsby Pilchards, which young women seem unable to resist. By chance, there was also more from Christopher Gable, this time giving a ballet performance with Maryon Lane to Debussy’s “Petite Suite” as part of an episode of Melodies for You. (Thanks to Gary for correcting what I originally posted here!)

The date in question is curious. 1 July 1967 was the day BBC Two starting broadcasting in colour — some two years ahead of BBC One and ITV. It was also the day on which BBC Two broadcast the final episode of The Forsyste Saga in its original run. I know this because June Barry, who starred in Forsyte, hosted a party the same night at the home she shared with her husband David Whitaker, whose serial The Evil of the Daleks concluded that evening, too. Stars from both series attended, filling up their small mews home that looked out on to railway tracks and was illuminated by the lights from passing trains. So, as Hancock advertised Grimsby Pilchards, the Second Doctor and Soames Forsyte may have been out on the balcony, smoking.

The fragments on this tape also included some tantalising glimpses of Alan Bennett’s otherwise missing series On the Margin (1966), with Bennett as vicar giving a sermon, then breaking the fourth wall by removing his dog collar to one side of the set, as the studio lights went out. The sound held long enough for one good gag about the BBC closing down for the night— the make-up woman has put away her lipstick, the wardrobe man has just put on his. What a shame, though, not to have sight of one of his costars in the series, Prunella Scales.

Oh, and this stuff was introduced by a clip from some 30 years of Bennett saying there wasn’t much to miss.

Next was Hank Rides Again, a mix of puppetry and animation for children made by Francis Coudrill for Associated-Rediffusion. It concerns the adventures of a cowboy and his horse, and their battles with the villainous Pete. From what I’d read in advance — Hank features quite a lot in Paul Hayes’ forthcoming book, When Saturday Came (Telos, 2026) — I thought this was some kind of Western. But the setting is contemporary, the villain driving a modern car, so I think it owes more to Roadrunner cartoons, with the same kind of stylised backdrops of Monument Valley. We also got to see a documentary about the series, with Christopher Frayling as appreciative fan and Coudrill’s son demonstrating how he provided the sound effects for different vehicles on his trumpet.

I wrote quite a lot of notes about all this but, in the darkness of the screening, they ended up on top of each other so whatever insights I had have been lost. You are rarely so fortunate. Besides, episodes of Hank Rides Again are now being shown on Rewind TV so you can watch and judge for yourselves.

Lastly, those heroes at Film is Fabulous shared one of the 53 episodes of Emergency Ward 10 they’ve recovered, which includes all six episodes from 1964 in which Annete Andre plays an actress who is severely sunburned. We got to see the first of these (tx 7 July 1964), in which there was a lot going on. One big element was the aftermath of surgeon Louise Mahler (Joan Hooley) walking out on dinner with Dr Giles Farmer (John White) and his father, after the latter said something inappropriate — presumably about her ethnicity. I’m not sure if this was just before or just after the couple were seen to kiss, which was only the second time a white actor and black actor had been seen to kiss on British television.

Then there’s the doctor who doesn't think the lamb chops served on the wards are good enough, the excitement of the imminent hospital fete, and the prospect of new uniforms for staff. But most of the episode is about old faithful Albert (Howard Douglas) having been electrocuted by touching a plug socket with wet hands. There’s a fun scene where the poor bloke struggles to tell the nurses that he wants something, and we realise he’s missing his ‘choppers’. One of the doctors is asked about this, acts surprised and then, er, remembers that he’s put the man’s teeth in a drawer. It’s an odd thing to forget!

Another plot involves a new locum with an eye for the nurses — though they seem excited by the attention, rather than warning each other about him. And then there’s Annette Andre, wheeled in face down wearing only her underwear and a smearing of dark make-up. Later, she’s topless. Although she’s always seen lying on her front, her bare back is a bit risqué for an early evening soap of the time — and pre-empts the notorious sunbathing scene in Triangle by almost 20 years.

The episode ends on a cliffhanger: Annette’s character has second-degree burns and has been told that she might be permanently scarred. In the closing moments, she has some kind of blob on her face. But what kind of blob? The credits roll…

Afterwards, Annette Andre was on stage to answer questions. She remembered one of her episodes of Emergency Ward 10 being broadcast live because something had gone wrong — implying that pre-recording was done very close to broadcast anyway. She also recalled a night playing poker with other cast members where she won £20.

And then out we tumbled into the bar, to compare notes and gossip.

Malcolm Hulke in the Telegraph

I've written a short piece for the Telegraph about writer Malcolm Hulke, "The communist who turned Doctor Who into an eco-warrior". It's behind a paywall but the opening line is,

"Last Sunday, as the whole world watched on tenterhooks, an ordinary man made an impassioned speech to a fish..."

(Yes, I then go on to explain that Salt is not actually a fish.) 

ETA: The piece was also published in the print version of the Sunday Telegraph under the title "The Left-wing writer who radicalised Doctor Who", 14 December 2025, pp. 14-15.

War Drums of the Blackfoot, by Terrance Dicks

This is the first of Terrance’s books to be published in my lifetime, on 12 July 1976. The indicia says it was published simultaneously in Great Britain by Allan Wingate (Publishers) Ltd and Tandem Publishing Ltd, in hardback and paperback respectively.

I suspect the print runs were not huge. While first editions of Target’s Doctor Who paperbacks are relatively easy to come by and it is the hardbacks that are rare, I’ve only been able to find a hardback edition of War Drums of the Blackfoot. I’ve also spoken to collectors who’ve been at this for longer than me, and they haven’t traced a paperback either.

Perhaps there’s more going on in this than simply the number of copies printed. Readers may have tended to keep hold of their Doctor Who paperbacks, building up a collection, whereas the Mounties books were more readily discarded. Even if readers grew out of Doctor Who, those books could be passed on to school fetes, bring-and-buy sales and second-hand book stalls and shops, where a subsequent generation of fans — including me — eagerly gathered them up. Thus these books survived. 

It may even be that discarded Mounties paperbacks ended up on those stalls, and I didn’t notice — or care, because they weren’t Doctor Who. I don’t remember seeing them but might have barely spared them a glance as I looked for the good stuff. If so, I played a part in unsold, second-hand Mounties getting binned. Sorry, everyone.

Hardback editions survive, I think, because they were largely published for and bought by libraries, which tended to hold on to their books. My copy of War Drums of the Blackfoot was, says a stamp on the title page, “Discarded by Havering Library Service”. It’s in pretty good condition, the dust jacket largely intact except for what look like chew marks in one corner. It’s not well thumbed and dog eared like some of my well-loved Doctor Who books.

The brick red spine as on the other Mounties books — still evident here on the back and on a stripe on the spine once covered by a library sticker — has faded to pallid orange. The front and back covers haven’t faded. This is a book that spent considerable time on a bookshelf, not being opened and read.

While the Doctor Who books went through multiple reprints and new impressions, sometimes within months of first publication, the Mounties books have never been republished. Several people have responded to these posts of mine saying that, though they know Terrance’s Doctor Who books very well, they had no idea these existed.

Yet, as Terrance worked out the plot of War Drums of the Blackfoot, three months ahead of publication of the first book in the series, he was optimistic that the Mounties would do well, as we can see from his earliest surviving notes. Thrillingly, these notes also tell us a lot about his creative process.

Monday Oct 6th 1975

Mounties III Preliminary notes

1) Fake Mountie murders Indians

2) Missing uniforms

3) Yankee coats incident. Mounting hostility and hysteria

Climax — ‘The Treaty’

(Later Books about — (1) Denbow and (2) Dubois) More role in this.

Fred Denbow and Henri Dubois were introduced in the first Mounties book, The Great March West, as colleagues and friends of hero Rob MacGregor. At this earliest stage of plotting the third book, Terrance wanted to build up their involvement so that they could each be the focus of further novels in the series.

His next notes are dated Thursday, 9 October, by which time Terrance had a title, “Wardrums [one word] of the Blackfoot”, and a basic structure, with a sentence summarising each of 10 chapters plus an epilogue to feature a final twist — much the same structure as the second novel, Massacre in the Hills. He also specified that the novel was to take place prior to 25 June 1876, the date of Custer’s notorious “last stand” — which surely meant he intended to include that key historical moment in a later book.

Over the next few days, Terrance developed each one-line summary into a paragraph per chapter, up to and including Chapter 7, each given a separate page of his spiral-bound notebook. On Tuesday, 14 October he added the note to himself that there should be, “Continuous conflict, tension, excitement, action. Hold back plot as much as possible.” 

He also calculated an approximate wordcount, based on an average 10 words per line, with 32 lines per page over 144 pages equalling 46,080 words. This is considerably more than the roughly 30,000 words Terrance produced for each Doctor Who novelisation at this time. But I don't think this greater wordcount meant he intended the Mounties books to be for older readers, not least because Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen and Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, written either side of this novel, are so grim and violent. 

Besides, the published version of War Drums of the Blackfoot isn’t as long as Terrance initially predicted. It comprises the usual 128 pages of an Allan Wingate / Target book of the time, whereas Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, at a slightly longer than usual 33,549 words, warranted 144 pages. (I’ll have more to say on wordcounts when I post about that novelisation, with data care of the dead useful Based on the Popular BBC Television Serial by Paul MC Smith.)

Anyway, having estimated wordcount, Terrance then stopped making notes and got on with bashing out a first, uncorrected draft. This was completed by 17 November, which means he was writing roughly 1,000 words a day. The book as published comprises 12 chapters and no epilogue, so he didn’t stick too rigidly to that first outline.

Once again, he seems to have drawn from the non-fiction history of the real-life Mounties, Maintain the Right by Ronald Atkin (1973). One crucial element, first detailed on p. 27 of the novel, is the poor state of the Mounties’ uniforms, which comes right out of Atkin:

“In fact, the quality of the uniforms was a continuing disgrace during the Force’s early years. In 1876, in an attempt to cut costs, the Canadian government had the police clothing and boots made of inferior materials by inferior craftsmen — the inmates of Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario. One constable reported that when he got his prison-made boots wet he was unable to remove them when they dried, so he had to soak them again before being able to get them off.” (Maintain the Right, p. 126).

Atkin also tells us about 25 year-old Ephraim Brisebois, in charge of the Mounties’ F Division, who was, in August 1875, tasked with the construction of a new fort.

“Inspector Brisebois made persistent attempts to have the new fort named after himself, even writing ‘Fort Brisebois’ at the head of all outgoing correspondence and on bills and invoices.” (MtR, p. 98).

Terrance refers to the real-life Brisebois in his notes but in the novel it’s a fictional Inspector Bellamy who wants the new fort named in his own honour (p. 13). In Atkin, we’re told work to build the fort was contracted out to the firm of one IG Baker (p. 98). In the novel, Bellamy has the Mounties doing the construction — as further sign of his self-serving nature.

In reality and in fiction, Commissioner Macleod over-ruled the inspector and named the new fort “Calgarry” — two Rs — giving the modern city of Calgary its name. In the novel, that’s because Macleod was born in a place of the same name on the Isle of Skye (p. 125); in reality, the gothic mansion known as Calgary Castle is on the Isle of Mull and Macleod had been a guest there. Terrance either misread what Atkin said or chose to simplify reality for the benefit of his readers.

Unlike the first two novels, there’s no “author’s note” here to tell us that the story is based in real history, which suggests that Terrance was conscious of being freer here with the sources. He took the problem of the poor uniforms and the problem of the vain inspector and imagined what happened next.

On meeting the “pompous and unpopular” Bellamy, Rob is amazed to find the inspector wearing a “handsome blue cloak” — part of the uniform of the US cavalry. Bellamy says, “complacently”, that his own cloak is “threadbare” and American uniforms have been delivered to him by mistake, so “I saw no harm in wearing this” (p. 14). Rob replies crossly that if the Indians see him in US Cavalry uniform, they are liable to attack…

Rob is, as usual, correct. What’s more, the Indians have been attacked by Mounties so turn on Rob and his friends. That’s what we see in the cover artwork, once again by Jack Hayes. It is not a hundred miles from the cover of the second Mounties novel: Rob on horseback in the centre of frame, staring coolly back at the advancing, aggressive Indian(s). 

The Mounties trilogy by Terrance Dicks
Cover art by Jack Hayes

Being closer in on the action this time, we see Rob’s face more clearly, which I think makes the cover more effective. It might have helped if the Indian’s arrow and the line made by his arms pointed at Rob’s face, to direct our focus — but perhaps that was thought too violent for young readers. Otherwise, it has the dynamism Hayes could convey so well, Rob’s horse rising up on its rear legs while he remains calm in the saddle. The whole composition is full of strained muscles and dramatic tension.

But am I imagining that Rob’s hat was added later, and doesn’t quite sit right on his head? The hat anyway makes Rob less relatable than the bare-headed young man of the first book. I’m not sure how well it would connect to the boys this was aimed at. It lacks what is achieved in the cover of the first book, a kind of “Who’s this cool guy I’d like to be?”

The text, though, works hard to ensnare us. First there’s the injustice of bad guys dressed as good guys as they carry out a crime. Then Rob, our hero, has to put up with a dangerous, vain idiot in command. Soon the plot kicks in, Rob setting out to find the needed evidence that some third party is stirring up trouble between Mounties and Indians. 

This plot seems to have been borrowed from the 1973 Doctor Who story Frontier in Space (script editor T Dicks), in which a third party is fomenting war between humans and Draconians. That, in turn, was surely borrowed from the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967), in which the Americans and Soviets teeter on the brink of war. In each case, the third party playing off the two sides turns out to be an old foe of the hero — Running Fox (from the first Mounties novel), the Master and Ernest Stravro Blofeld.

“See how it works? Fake Mounties killing Indians, fake Blackfoot attacking white men. Much more of this and we’ll all be at each other’s throats, They’ll just be able to stand back and watch us kill each other.” (p. 70)

Villains dressing up as, variously, Indians and Mounties, is also a reversal of what happens in one of Terrance’s favourite childhood books, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, where the young hero moves fluidly between British soldiers and native Indians (in India this time) by changing clothes and make-up. I think Terrance’s version of the Mounties’ Commissioner Macleod may even owe something to Colonel Creighton in Kim, a four-square British officer who knows when to turn “a discreet blind eye” to the natives, such as when the Indians here share some illegal firewater when celebrating their victory (p. 122).

Rob is, like Kim, a Friend of all the World, good at getting on with people from any background or culture. His valiant actions lead to Chief Crowfoot agreeing to a treaty with the white authorities (here, very much a Good Thing). Before that, Rob’s mission depends on the help of a villainous character from the first novel, the whisky trader Dempsey, with the plot hingeing on whether he can really be trusted. Effectively, it’s a test of Rob’s optimism and instincts, the very kind of hero he is.

The sub-plot, in which Rob’s friend and colleague Fred Denbow goes undercover as a posh, rich English idiot but gets caught by villains who aren’t funny at all, is a little like what Harry Sullivan gets up to in Terrance’s Doctor Who story Robot, though it’s also fairly standard stuff for this kind of adventure. For example, see John Steed going undercover as a man called Goodchild and then having to submit to the dentist’s chair in Terrance’s first work for TV, The Avengers episode The Mauritius Penny (1963).

The point is that this third Mounties novel is a mash-up of stuff from other adventure fiction peppered with details from real history. I don’t think the details all come from Atkin; Terrance must have been reading more widely. Fred’s quest, for example, means travelling the country.

“He ate so many free meals he hardly needed supplies. At every line camp, every round-up chuck wagon, every isolated ranch-house, he was invited to ‘Light down and set’, the traditional greeting invitation to the hungry stranger.” (p. 82)

This tradition and “Light down and set” aren’t in Atkin; they must be from some other historical source. One of the people Fred speaks to refers to the villains as “some mighty mean looking jaspers” (p. 83). I know that last word as a term for wasps, from growing up in Hampshire (it’s also used in Fingers in the Sparkle Jar by Chris Packham, who grew up not far from where I did). Whether or not Terrance meant it in that sense, where did he get it from?

Then there are the words and phrases that he doesn’t use here. Terrance makes no play on the real-life towns that feature in the plot, Lethbridge and Benton — the names of regular characters from Terrance’s time overseeing Doctor Who, who feature in several of his novelisations. In some later original novels, Terrance couldn’t resist the odd in-joke. Here, I think he was careful not to break the illusion, and to make the setting of the Mounties novels real. 

That meant avoiding cliches. The workers on cattle ranches Fred encounters are “cow-hands” (p. 86), never — in any of these books — cowboys. In places, Terrance even spells out the cliches he’s avoiding:

“You’ve been reading too many dime novels. Most Western gunfights happen over a bar-room table — and if you can get your man in the back, so much the better.” (pp. 60-61)

I think perhaps he also, here, corrects a cliche from the previous two books, in which he sometimes referred to the Indians as childish or child-like. Yes, the Indians here can be simplistic:

“To them the red coat was the Mounted Police. The possibility of trickery hadn’t even occurred to them.” (p. 33)

But in this novel it’s the villains who have “an almost childish sense of the importance of fair play” (p. 110) and are “like kids” as they dress up as Mounties and Indians (p. 113). Then, at the end, the villains’ plot is exposed and they are made to strip off their disguises.

“The Indians, always appreciative of a good joke, began to guffaw among themselves, and even women and children appeared from nowhere to see the fun. Soon the mercenaries were standing shame-facedly before their captors in an assorted of patched and filthy underwear.” (p. 121)

This is fun but lacks the punch of the second novel, which ended with what we feel is a gross miscarriage of justice and then a final twist. At the end of that book, I was left eager to find out what happened next in Rob’s relationship with the half-Indian Jerry Potts. Potts hardly features in this one. There is no consequence to the shock ending of that previous book and no twist at the end of this one to anticipate the next.

I don’t think Terrance could have ended on a cliffhanger as these books are meant to stand on their own. It is just all a bit neat and easy. What makes us want to read on is rough edges and things not being quite right. It may be that Terrance ended things on this happy note because he knew the Mounties were not going to have more adventures. 

In April 1976, he sent the first two Mounties books to Ronnie Marsh, Head of Serials at the BBC, suggesting a TV version co-produced with Canada. But he included the books and made the suggestion in a letter about something else entirely and I am not sure he meant it too seriously. There is no record of a reply. 

Then, in July — the same month this third novel was published — Terrance pitched an entirely different Wild West series to Carola Edwards at the same publisher. This would have ventured into much more adult territory, written under a pseudonym to distance them from the books that Terrance wrote for children. Again, there’s no record of a reply and nothing came of the pitch.

Instead, Allan Wingate / Target commissioned Terrance for ever more Doctor Who titles. Among them, I think, are some of his best work. Yet he still hankered after his own original series; his biography in the backflap of this book speaks of his developing interests in mysticism and meditation, which relate to a project he worked on that never materialised; I will detail that in the biography.

Then, in September 1976, Richard Henwood got back in touch. Henwood had, of course, set up the Target range, commissioned Terrance to write his first novelisations and come up with the idea for the Mounties series. Now, as group publishing manager at Blackie & Son in Glasgow, Henwood wanted to discuss new ventures.

But woah there, those ventures are a long way off for Terrance yet. First, there are a whole slew of Doctor Who books, starting with one of the best… 

*

These long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks take time and incur expenses, and I can’t afford to press on without help. Last week’s detailed post on Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen has had hundreds of views but resulted in zero contributions.  

Throw some cash in the hat and next week you get Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, Terrance’s tenth novelisation. The Doctor speaks German, Harry wants a meal before he’ll try to save Sarah’s life, and Sarah is buried under stiffening corpses.

Oh, and Terrance explains what’s up with Davros and makes the continuity fit with the Daleks’ first  TV adventure… Is that not worth a few quid?

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