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.

Bergcast #39 - The Blu-ray Xperiment

The latest episode of the Bergcast podcast, devoted to all things Nigel Kneale, features an interview with Steve Rogers at Hammer Films, responsible for the current run of deluxe Blu-ray releases including The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass 2.

I'm also interviewed about the two-part documentary about Kneale I worked on for these releases, with Jon Clarke and Robin Andrews at Eklectics, brother Tom and expert pundits Toby Hadoke, Andy Murray, Brontë Schiltz, Dr Tom Attah, Joel Morris, Jane Asher and Ted Childs.

Excitingly, Hammer are showing Quatermass 2 and the second-half of the documentary TONIGHT, 9pm on 31 October 2025, on YouTube. Quatermass! The rocket guy! Pew!

Both Quatermass films are also being shown at Derby QUAD on 6 December, with talks by Toby Hadoke, Andy Murray, Brontë Schiltz and Jon Dear.

The Quatermass Experiment, by Toby Hadoke

This comprehensive plunge into the sci-fi horror TV serial from 1953 has been a joy to read. I should declare right away that it’s written by my mate, with whom I’ve just made a documentary for the forthcoming deluxe Blu-ray of the film version of the same story, out next month. But then the reason Toby fronts the documentary is that he’s the go-to guy for this stuff.

The book is him sharing what he knows, the facts gleaned from decades of research and some shrewd deductions, plus his analysis based on long years of consideration. I especially like how good he is at probing sources: he says when he thinks an anecdote has been embellished; he also says when he isn’t sure what to conclude.

There’s lots of factual information here that I didn’t know and there are lots of fresh insights that open up this old TV show. It’s also very engaging — for example in Toby’s increasing exasperation with the Daily Mail’s TV journalist of the time, Peter Black. (By chance, I once gave Toby a copy of Black’s book, The Mirror in the Corner; I wonder what he made of it.) 

The serial was broadcast live in six episodes. The first two episodes were recorded and survive; the rest went out once and were then lost to the ether. What hadn’t occurred to me before I read Toby’s book is that at least some of episodes 3 to 6 were recorded — even if those recordings have now been lost. They each featured a small amount of pre-filmed material, detailed by Toby. It also seems that producer Rudolph Cartier filmed a little of each instalment up to episode 5 to act as a “trailer” or story-so-far at the start of the subsequent episode (pp. 168-9). 

The chances of this material having survived are next to zero, but sometimes — just sometimes — this kind of thing turns up. 

Indeed, Toby has turned up a load of archive material never seen before, including a roll of film from studio rehearsals on episodes 1 to 5, the images in very good condition and presented beautifully here. Reader, I have pored over these thrilling, vivid glimpses of what is otherwise lost to us. I should also like an illustrated version of the script - or even a whole comic strip - done by Robert Hack, whose artwork features here.

Toby has also gathered a wealth of sources to tell a detailed story. What we learn is set nicely in context — how this serial compared to other TV productions of the time, how people watched and engaged with it, and where it sits in the history of science-fiction and horror. Much is made of the fact that nothing like this had been seen on television preciously. That meant I was struck by the line at the end of Episode 1, when a reporter responds to the sight of astronaut Victor Caroon emerging from his rocket,

“That suit they wear, it is like the comic magazines after all,” (p. 70).

That is surely a reference to the Eagle and Dan Dare, pilot of the future, who dons a kind of diving gear in space. His comic strip adventures launched in 1950 but he perfectly exemplifies the kind of “New Elizabethan” hero referred to and then undercut in the serial. Quatermass is, I think, a kind of anti-Dan Dare.

Later, Toby notes that in L’esperimento Quatermass (Mondadori, 1978) — an Italian translation of the script book of the serial — a small change was made to the spoof, 3D sci-fi film playing in the cinema visited by Victor. 

“The Space Girl (Ragazza Spaziale) doesn’t call the Lieutenant ‘Chuck’ as in the UK version, but ‘Jim’,” (p. 269).

That’s a random change, I thought. Unless it’s a reference to the well-known Jim Kirk from Star Trek, updating the allusion to (what was seen as) a contemporary example of hokey sci-fi.

Toby is especially good at keeping the focus on the people involved, the contributions made by cast and crew to both the original production and recounting how it was made. A last section, detailing what they all went on to do after Quatermass, is compelling — like the serial itself, Toby gives them a last bow.

But what I was most taken by, I think, was what the leading man — the first Quatermass — brought to the role in particular.

Toby tells us that Reginald Tate made his TV debut in March 1937, which was less than six months after the start of the BBC’s regular TV service. He appeared in an exact from the stage version of Jane Eyre in which he was appearing at the time in London’s West End. Tate played Mr Rochester, a role he’d had since the stage production began in Malvern the previous year. Toby tells us he played Rochester again on stage in Leeds in 1946 (p. 65) and on TV in 1948 (p. 66). He then performed as Rochester once more, for BBC Radio, at the same time as he was in production on The Quatermass Experiment. He told the Evening Standard at the time that, 

“The transition [between the two roles] is not very great. The two seem to have characters in common” (p. 70).

Toby describes Quatermass as a troubled, guilt-ridden figure, trying to put right what he got terribly wrong — in this case, sending three men into space to devastating effect that now imperils the whole Earth. I don’t think writer Nigel Kneale had any thought of Mr Rochester when he wrote it; but that’s what Tate brought to his performance.

It’s another example of how the leading man of this new kind of TV drama — a pilot of the future, in his own way — is anchored in the past. The ideas are new but the emotional heft of the serial is an echo from the past…

• Buy The Quatermass Experiment, by Toby Hadoke, from Ten Acre Films

The Legend of Nigel Kneale: 1. The Creeping Unknown

An absolutely packed deluxe 4KUHD and Blu-ray edition of The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) is now available to preorder direct from Hammer. It will be released on 9 June. Order now to avoid disappointment.

Among the many, many treats listed on the Hammer site is this:

The Legend of Nigel Kneale: The Creeping Unknown. Who was Nigel Kneale? Toby Hadoke investigates the man and his influence in part one of a brand-new two-part documentary.

Produced by me and my brother Tom for Eklectics, and directed by Jon Clarke and edited by Robin Andrews, this authoritative new documentary includes expert analysis from Dr Tom Attah, Joel Morris, Andy Murray, Brontë Schiltz and some other people I won't mention just yet to add a bit of suspense.

Toby Hadoke, is of course, an authority on all things Nigel Kneale and Quatermass and I'm looking forward to his imminent book.

Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

"There's always another way, even for you."

The follow-up to Children of Time, first published in 2019, is another epic, mind-expanding treat. That first book ended with the sentient civilisation of giant spiders and the surviving remnants of humanity forging a last-minute peace after thousands and thousands of years. 

This sequel sees some of their descendants (and one surviving character) voyage to a star system with two roughly Earth-like worlds. Humans already reached this place some millennia before, and the new arrivals are faced with the extraordinary consequence of that early intervention. Whereas, in the first book, one ancient human scientist affected the development of spiders, here another human has a thing for the octopus. By the time the spider-human team turn up, the octopuses have their own spacecraft...

I thought this started a bit slowly, retreading what we'd seen before - and then if completely blindsided me. It really picks up as we come to learn that the octopus people are not the only antagonist in this system. The other, relentlessly predatory species - details of whom I'll not spoil here - is absolutely bloody terrifying and a brilliant threat. We jump back and forth a bit in time to understand how this species developed, which only makes it all the more appalling and implacable. 

We, as readers, come to understand the threat while the spiders and humans are still guessing at what it might be, so they plunge headlong into danger. I don't think I've ever read a book that achieves that thing of horror movies of making you want to shout "No!" about what a character is about to blunder into...

As before, a particular strength of all this is the way Tchaikovsky tells chunks from non-human perspectives, the physiology and biology of the observer defining their worldview. The octopus people are intelligent, curious and mercurial, in part because of the way an octopus's limbs can work independently of its central brain. They act, react and emote in a way that's separate from thinking. That presents challenges in communication: it's less a matter of finding a common language as expressing the right complexity of feels.

From the basis of this biology follows a whole load of logically reasoned but extraordinary stuff. I was wowed by descriptions of the octopus spacecraft that are effectively bubbles of water in space, and the practicalities this involves in such matters as docking and airlocks. There's an amazing, nightmare sequence near the end of the novel that reminded me a bit of Dead of Night, in which one character puts up a series of memory-based defences against an attack, each one at a personal cost. We understand the physics of what's happening in terms of computational power and yet the effect is an effective, unsettling noir.

Mel Hudson is again a brilliant reader for the audiobook version, nimbly personifying a large and diverse cast - humans, spiders, octopuses and the things I won't say more of. We're left at an intriguing point at the end and I'm very much looking forward to the third book, Children of Memory.

Nigel Kneale: A Centenary Celebration

What a thrill to be at the Picturehouse Cinema in Crouch End yesterday, in the shadow of Alexandra Palace, for the centenary celebration of writer Thomas Nigel Kneale, born 28 April 1922 - and not 18 April as some parts of the internet insist. This point was made by MC Toby Hadoke in his opening introduction to the day's festivities. And that, I think, was the theme of the day: to get this right. All credit to everyone involved.

The first panel, "Nigel Kneale, Quatermass and the BBC", was chaired by Kneale biographer Andy Murray and featured Dick Fiddy from the BFI, Toby Hadoke and comedian Johnny Mains - the latter daring to admit that he doesn't much like Doctor Who. Kneale famously hated that series, but many of us got into Kneale's work via Doctor Who. I've been trying to puzzle out why, and think a lot of fandom - of anything - is trying to recapture the strong feelings of our past. For those thrilled and terrified by Doctor Who as kids, Kneale offers a grown-up version of those feelings, and - since he was so often borrowed from - an understanding of how they were kindled.

The panel was a good, breezy introduction to Kneale and the impact of his work on television in the 1950s, though a lot of the ground here was familiar to me from Toby's recent Radio 4 Extra programme, Remembering Nigel Kneale, and Cambridge Festival's "Televising the future: Nineteen Eighty-Four and the imagination of Nigel Kneale". I'd also just read Andrew Pixley's 1986 interview with Kneale.

Next up, we watched the extraordinary opening episode of The Quatermass Experiment from 1953 (available on the Quatermass Collection DVD set). It's a while since I'd last seen this, and I'd forgotten how blurry, clunky and techbnobabble-heavy its early scenes are as we watch serious, posh scientists at their desks in a tracking control room. But that soon gives way to the extraordinary sight of a house half-demolished by the world's first crewed space rocket. We see before the characters on screen that there's an old woman trapped in the exposed upstairs; she's played by Katie Johnson who two years later was the similarly dotty Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers, only without her scene-stealing cat. It's just one of a number of well-observed comic characters enlivening the serious horror plot, adding a touch of realism - and fun - to the fantasy.

Having read The Intimate Screen by Jason Jacobs, I can understand why The Quatermass Experiment made such an impact: an original drama for television, rather than an adaptation of a stage play or book, that makes full use of the strengths of the medium to conjure an intimately creepy atmosphere. It's so busy, so populous, so nakedly ambitious - and all broadcast live. All these years later, it is thrilling. No wonder it stuck so powerfully with those who saw it at the time. As several panelists said, Quatermass was a thing that terrified our parents, that we first heard about from them decades afterwards - a folk memory of horror. (My mum says the girls at her school would make a lot of noise at the start of each episode, so the grown-ups in charge would not hear the warning of it not being suitable...)

Next up was Tom Baker in a bookish office to narrate Kneale's short story "The Photograph", in a 1978  episode of Late Night Story - a sort of grown-up Jackanory. It's an unsettling story about a sick child, but I was mostly struck by how little Baker blinked throughout what seemed to be a single take (and presumably involved him reading the story off an autocue). 

Then Douglas Weir discussed the the new restoration of Nineteen Eighty Four (1954). The audience gasped at a particular example showing Peter Cushing's Winston Smith walking through Hampstead. The version screened by BBC Four a few years ago had Cushing moving through what looked like silver fog; the restored version shows him moving between trees, individual leaves crisp and clear. (I'm on the new Blu-ray release, by the way, just about audible asking Toby Hadoke and Andy Murray the question about Kneale's never-made scripts.)

Next was the panel "From Taskerlands to Ringstone Round – Nigel Kneale in the 70s", chaired by Howard David Ingham with panelists William Fowler, Una McCormack and Andrew Screen. I've been guilty of overlooking Kneale's 1970s output - The Stone Tape (1972), which I'd at least seen, and the anthology series Beasts (1976), which I haven't yet. That led into a screening of Murrain, Kneale's contribution to a 1975 anthology, Against the Crowd (included on the DVD release of Beasts).

David Simeon - who sadly couldn't be at yesterday's event - plays a vet called to a small village by a farmer played by Bernard Lee from the James Bond films. The farmer has some sick pigs and his water supply has dried up, plus a young boy in the village has had something like flu for a month. The farmer and the villagers think this all the work of a local woman, played by Una Brandon-Jones (who I recognised at once as Mrs Parkin in Withnail & I). The villagers want the vet's help in dealing with her; he's determined to champion science over superstition, insisting that "We can't go back" to the old ways. It's a compelling piece: real, sometimes funny and increasingly sinister. With a start, I recognised some of the scenery: the Curious British Telly site says Murrain was recorded in Wildboarclough, not far from where I now live. A local film for this local person, indeed.

Then Matthew Sweet chaired a panel on "Kneale on Film" with panelists Jon Dear, Kim Newman and Vic Pratt. This covered a lot of stuff I didn't know about: Kneale's work on the movie version of stage plays Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (1960), and the mutiny-at-sea story HMS Defiant (1962) - all a long way from the weird-thriller stuff. Because of that, I'd not been much interested; the panel made me want to look them out and understand the weird stuff in context. I want, too, to see his last work, a 1997 episode of legal drama Kavanagh QC.

A clip from the movie version of The Quatermass Xperiment ((1955) showed infected astronaut Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth) stalk a Little Girl (Jane Asher), who offers it imaginary cake. Asher then joined us to discuss this early role and her later, more prominent part in The Stone Tape (1972) - which was then shown in full. I'd seen this before, but it was fascinating to see beside Nimbos, who didn't know what was coming, and in the context of the day's other offering. Again what struck me was how funny it was, especially the visual gag of Reginald Marsh's hands being outlandish colours as he experiments with dyes. Toby Hadoke pointed out that Neil Wilson appears as a salt-of-the-earth security guard having been seen as a salt-of-the-earth policeman in The Quatermass Experiment, so I wonder how much Kneale consciously used the same actors over the years.

This was followed by a live reading of Kneale's 1952 radio play, You Must Listen. Mark Gatiss played the lawyer who has a new telephone installed in his office, only to find he can hear a young woman talking sauce to an unheard lover. Again, it's very funny, the lawyer embarrassed and outraged but the telephone staff all keen to listen in on this rude stuff. And then, as before, it becomes ever more sinister as we realise this saucy woman is an echo from the past. In that sense, it dovetails with The Stone Tape from 20 years later, and with elements of the other stuff we'd seen. How well chosen all these examples were; we could see we were engaged in an experiment ourselves, to trace the resonant echoes of Kneale.

By this time Nimbos and I were flagging as the short breaks between screenings had not been long enough for us to eat any food, and I was getting a bit wobbly. So we sadly missed the panel on “'The inventor of modern television': Kneale’s influences and Legacy" chaired by Jennifer Wallis with panelists Stephen Gallagher, Mark Gatiss, Andy Murray and Adam Scovell. The day ended with a screening of the movie Quatermass & The Pit (1967), and then much natter in the bar.

It was all a bit overwhelming. There was the sheer amount of stuff covered and shown, but also the way the selection encouraged us to tease out shared themes, techniques, stylistics. Then there was the visceral thrill of being in company, catching up with so many friends. I had a long drive home today, passing close to Wildboarclough and its Murrain, brain abuzz from things learned and spotted and argued. That's the thing about Kneale, who died in 2006, and the stuff he wrote that was largely screened long before I was born... 

It is potent. It is alive.

Cinema Limbo: The Wicker Man (2006)

Jeremy Phillips and I discuss the merits - if there are any - of the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man on the latest episode of the Cinema Limbo podcast.

You can also hear me on past episodes:

• Cinema Limbo: Smoke (1995)
• Cinema Limbo: King Kong (1976)
• Cinema Limbo: Ryan's Daughter (1970)
• Cinema Limbo: Highlander II - The Quickening (1991)

Caligari in the Lancet Psychiatry

I've written about the 100 year-old movie Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari in the August 2020 issue of the Lancet Psychiatry. You need to pay to read the whole thing, but here's a preview:

Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) is now a century old. Even if you've never seen it, much will be hauntingly familiar. The plot is simple enough: wild-eyed showman Dr Caligari (Werner Krauss) has an unsettling stage act involving willowy Cesare (Conrad Veidt), who we're told has been asleep for almost all of his 23 years. Krauss has complete power over this somnambulist, waking him for brief intervals to foretell the future. One eager member of the audience is horrified to be told he'll die that very night—and then does. We soon learn that Caligari sends Cesare out at night to commit murder but, in a shock twist, “Caligari” is revealed to be the director of the nearby asylum. Then, in another shock twist, all of this turns out to be the gothic fantasy of another of the patients (Friedrich Fehér). The staff and other patients at the asylum have all been given roles in his delusion, and the exaggerated, Expressionist production design of the film is the world as seen by, in the language of the time, “a madman”.

Scratchman, by Tom Baker

I knocked through this delicious new Doctor Who novel very quickly, revelling in its fun and invention. It's based on a movie script Tom Baker - the fourth Doctor himself - worked out with co-star Ian Marter in the 1970s. Now Baker and my mate James Goss have turned it into a novel.

I knew the basic story from an old feature in Doctor Who Magazine (issue #379, cover date 28 February 2007, since you weren't asking.) But the novel is a revelation, full of wit and life that didn't quite come across in a dry synopsis. Partly, that's down to the first person narration - a Doctor Who story told by the Doctor, and in more than once sense, too.

After a prologue in which the Doctor is, yet again, put on trial by his peers - here is Tom Baker reading that prologue - we start with a picnic, the Doctor playing a ukulele to the despair of his friend Sarah, while Harry is keen to play cricket on the beach. But the three friends are watched by sinister scarecrows - including the brilliant mental image of a scarecrow policeman on a bike - and the scarecrows turn out to be linked to Scratchman or, as we better know him, the Devil himself.

In the late 1970s, the proposed film had a director attached: James Hill, who'd later oversee the TV series Worzel Gummidge. I tried to imagine the events of the novel in the same bleak pastoral style, all on film, the scarecrows beautifully realised. That series terrified me as a kid because it seemed so uncannily real. (Not helped by it being shot near where I grew up.)

Scratchman's scarecrows and its depiction of ordinary, village life with its squabbling egos, would suit that kind of production. But as I read the book, I imagined it more in the style of The Android Invasion - a 1975 Doctor Who story about weird goings on in a village, a mix of location recording and studio sets. That story, the last to feature Ian Marter as Harry, is the jolliest of the stories overseen by producer Philip Hinchcliffe, the one most unlike the rest of his tenure. It was directed by his predecessor, Barry Letts, which might account for some of that. But for all the scares and deaths in Scratchman, that's the tone I felt it had. This isn't to criticise the tone - I really like The Android Invasion - but it may explain why Hinchcliffe turned down the proposal to make this for TV.

A few small things also stood out to this tragic fan. On page 92, Sarah sees a picture of herself, "posing while happily hitting her android duplicate with a lump hammer." Surely, the implication is that Scratchman is set after the events of The Android Invasion - with Harry rejoining the TARDIS for more adventures we never saw on TV. Sarah herself was in only four more stories before leaving the TARDIS, so my head has been busy trying to sort out when these new adventures of Harry fit in.

On another occasion, the Doctor lights a cigar from a monster's burning head - a macabre joke, but one that seems out of character for this particular hero. Indeed, on the 1978 story The Stones of Blood, where the Doctor faces execution, Tom Baker changed a line asking for a "last cigarette" to a "last toffee apple." Today, the "rules" about these things are carefully watched over by benign guardians at the BBC, and I imagine they - in their infinite patience and wisdom - made a special exemption here.

Elements of the story also seem familiar from things that have come after it. An awful moment where we learn the life story of one of the scarecrows just before it's destroyed reminded me of things done with the Cybermen in a couple of stories. The Doctor and his friends caught up in a giant game of pinball that then gets mixed up with chess has echoes of the first Harry Potter. Of course, this story was devised first, but we're coming to it new.

The scarecrow with the sad life story is just one of many deaths, many of them involving characters we've come to like, even if we don't always know their names. In fact, a point is made of that when the Doctor claims to remember all those who have died - a scene I thought really powerful. But the emotional impact of the book is more personal and profound. Scratchman wants to know what scares the Doctor, and for all it is played for laughs that is a penetrating question. We get a sense of what it feels like to be the Doctor, to face so much danger and terror, and to carry so much loss. That loss includes himself - the "deaths" of his former selves, and his own impending replacement. There's some fun with this - Baker can't resist a pop at his immediate predecessor not tipping a cab driver, and there's a lovely cameo by one of his future selves where this Doctor tries to be brave about his future. The trial sequence concludes setting up stuff we've since seen on TV involving his successors. 

But the most powerful bit is a PS from the Doctor at the almost very end. Here, surely, is not only the Doctor ruminating on his fears, on what it's like to be him, but Tom Baker, too. He concludes with a beautiful blend of pathos and mischief, and it's hard not to think that Baker is 85. He's quite open in interviews that he's a little fragile now and might not be around too much longer. So this ending ties together the boggling ideas of the book but it also feels like goodbye. It's a perfectly judged sign-off and it completely got me. It made this broken old man cry.

Thank you, Doctor. Thanks for everything. Happy times and places to you, too.

Dark Tales, by Shirley Jackson

I've read loads since completing Space Odyssey - chapters of various mates' works in progress and all sorts of material for work, including a sizeable chunk of Amelia Edwards' 1878 travelogue, A Thousand Miles Up The Nile. Then there's Shirley Jackson.

Dark Tales is a collection of seventeen short stories by a writer who really ought to be a household name. One is a ghost story, one involves psychic abilities, one involves a painting that's like something out of MR James. But the rest are unsettling stories of very human monsters, the tyranny of ordinary snobbery, pettiness and meaness, of social conventions and small communities. They all take place in the modern day, in settings busy with people getting on with everyday life. The best of them are at their most disturbing because they're psychologically real. Women are usually central.

"The Good Wife" is about a jealous husband who incarcerates his wife. The twist ending reveals that the husband is more monstrous than first supposed, but what lingers is the awful detail of the wife's gradual acquiesence - having clearly tried to resist him to no effect, she now presents nothing but sweetness in the vain hope he will relent. In "The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith", a young bride accepts her imminent murder rather than make a fuss. In "Home", a woman learns better than to speak of the ghostly experience that almost killed her. The horror is not only of passivity, but of the ways these women are rendered passive.

In the brilliant "The Possibility of Evil", a respectable old lady notes the strains affecting her neighbours, before we discover that she's been sending them all anonymous, poisonous letters. Yet there's real tension when this malicious creature unwittingly risks being exposed. Jackson has deftly make us sympathise with the monster.

I'm keen to know more about Jackson and what shaped her extraordinary vision. It's surely no coincidence that her first story, "The Lottery" (not included in this anthology) was first published in 1948, in a post-war world lacking moral certainties - though some readers felt strongly otherwise, and she received death threats in response. I feel something noirish, something Hitchcock, in her stories, something haunted by the Holocaust and the Bomb, something deeply ill at ease with "ordinary" life.

It all feels so very contemporary, but not overtly political. In the final story in the collection, "The Summer People", there's mention of degeneration and inbreeding (p. 183), but the story is about the growing anxiety of an old couple when the local shops are out of groceries and oil. It's so relatable, the horror is horribly real.

I'm keen to see the new film version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle once I've reread Jackson's novel and adore the 1963 film The Haunting (based on The Haunting of Hill House), which first got me reading her stuff in my teens. I've also got a biography of Jackson - so more of this to come.

Unsung Live in London

Tomorrow night (Tuesday, 20 October), I'll be at Unsung Live, which promises to be an,

"evening of storytelling for fans of science fiction, fantasy, horror and all the bits in-between".

I'm reading an odd science-fiction story called "The Case of the Retiring Magnate". The line-up includes David Hartley, Cassandra Khaw and Robert Sharp, and the event is organised by the nice people at the publisher Unsung Stories.

(I'd meant to post something an age ago about a book of theirs, The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley, which tells of a world where all women have died out. It's not right to say I "loved" it - it's really unsettling, the relative passivity of the narrator adding to the feel of a nightmare.)

ETA: Unsung have posted photos from the event, and Andrew Wallace reviewed it.

Dead of Night

To mark 70 years (and 26 days) since its premiere, I've written about Dead of Night for the new issue of the Lancet Psychiatry.

Ealing's extraordinary psychological thriller - or horror film - has haunted audiences ever since, and led astronomer Fred Hoyle to come up with his "steady state" model of the universe. (He coined the phrase "Big Bang" to dismiss a rival theory, though it's the one we consider now to best fit the evidence.)

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

I really didn't like The Shining Girls at first. It's a thriller about a psychopath in Chicago who hunts down a series of women who, he tells us, "shine". The killings are described in graphic detail, with much of the story told from the killer's perspective - that is, Harper's brutal view of women and what he does to them. It's not that I'm particularly squeamish, but I don't like nasty things happening for the sake of it.

But I persevered through the first 20 pages, chiefly on the strength of how much I'd loved Beukes's Zoo City, and was soon swept up in an extraordinary piece of work. For one thing, Harper travels in time between the 1930s and 1990s, which makes the chances of his being caught all the more remote. More than that, it allows vivid glimpses of history: how these people lived as much as how they died.

Beukes' acknowledgements at the end spell out how much research into all kinds of areas has been necessary to make this world so rich and real - as she says herself,

"everything from illegal abortion groups to real-life radium dancing girls, the evolution of forensics, '30s restaurant reviews and the history of '80s toys."

Lauren Beukes, "Acknowledgements", The Shining Girls, p. 387.

What really makes the book special, though, is that the person on Harper's trail is also one of his victims - a girl who he thinks he killed. Kirby is funny, furious and liable to plunge headlong into trouble. She also feels very real, which makes it easier to accept the convenient, unexplained time travel stuff.

Kirby's story - her efforts to overcome to the trauma of what happened to her, to own it, to make something of the life she nearly didn't have - makes the horror more that titillation. We understand its long-lasting impact, and fear her facing it again. One sequence midway through the book skips ahead, showing Kirby in danger before we know how she's got there, and really builds the tension.

The last 50 pages or so are spectacularly exciting - I was rather glad the Dr had a night out in the pub last night so I could indulge in racing to the end.

Doctor Who: 2011

Episode 781: The God Complex
First broadcast: 7.10 pm on Saturday 17 September 2011
<< back to 2010

"Who else?"
Doctor Who: The God Complex (2011)

In The God Complex, the Doctor and his friends are trapped in a sinister hotel that isn’t what it seems. As well as the Minotaur stalking them, there’s the weird matter of the rooms. It seems (at first) that the hotel feeds on people’s fears. Somewhere, there’s a door for everyone, and beyond it the thing you’re most afraid of…

When the Doctor finds a door of his own he can’t resist taking a peek. But his response is quite unexpected. “Who else?” he says with a smile.

What did the Doctor see?

I’ve known a few people try to puzzle this out, assuming it would be the embodiment of his greatest fear. They suggest Daleks or Weeping Angels - or the Taran Wood Beast. There are some other options.

In The War Games (1969) the Doctor admits to his friends why he fled from his own people:

Well, I was bored.

Later, he’s horrified at the prospect of his travels being curtailed: he fears the loss of his freedom, of being forced to conform.

In The Mind of Evil (1971), he battles a machine that uses people’s fears to kill them. It torments him with visions of the Earth on fire and his failure to stop the calamity (events he witnessed in Inferno (1970), written by the same writer.)

In Planet of the Spiders (1974), he must face his greatest fear and return to the arachnid queen, even though it will kill him. But in doing so, he conquers that terror, doesn’t he?

At the end of Amy’s Choice (2010) it’s suggested that his greatest tormentor is actually the voice inside his own head. Perhaps he most fears his own capacity for evil: see his horror of the War Doctor and the Valeyard.

I also like the implied joke from the 2005 series, that Doctor Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf. Why would the Doctor fear Bad Wolf? Rose with golden eyes doesn’t just wield extraordinary powers, those powers threaten to destroy her – and him. But I think the thing the Doctor would find scary is that Bad Wolf suggests that events are pre-destined, that the Doctor is merely fulfilling a role someone else has contrived. His free will is an illusion.

(The trick, in both The Parting of the Ways (2005) and The Day of the Doctor (2013) is that he takes the initiative; but perhaps we could argue he’s been placed in just that position by the all-powerful being. How much is he free to choose?)

I’m not sure that, in The God Complex, the Doctor does confront his greatest fear. Soon after he’s seen what waits in his own room, he works out what the hotel wants from its victims:

It's not fear. It's faith. Not just religious faith, faith in something … Every time someone was confronted with their most primal fear, they fell back on their most fundamental faith.

What does Doctor believe in?

In The Day of the Doctor he explains that when he adopted his name, he also promised to adhere to a code of conduct.

TENNANT DOCTOR:
Never cruel or cowardly.

HURT DOCTOR:
Never give up, never give in.

The words are taken from Terrance Dicks’ description of the Doctor in The Making of Doctor Who (1972) - which I think would make a great title for an episode - and first cited in fiction as the Doctor’s personal code in Timewyrm: Revelation by Paul Cornell (1991).

But even if that's what he believes in, it doesn’t tell us what he sees in his own hotel room. Instead, I think the key words in The God Complex are how the Doctor defines the notion of faith:

Not just religious faith, faith in something …

That chimes with his explanation to Ace in The Curse of Fenric (1989):

ACE:
I thought vampires were scared of crucifixes.

DOCTOR:
No, no, it's not the crucifix that frightens them, it's the faith of the person carrying it. It creates a psychic barrier, just like I did.

"Susan, Barbara,
Ian, Vicki, Steven..."

That’s just after he scares off the vampires [or Haemovores] by reciting something under his breath. We can't hear what he says but its clear from reading his lips: the Doctor’s unshakeable, monster-beating faith is a list of his former companions.

(Go see for yourself: the Doctor's act of faith on YouTube.)

In recent years, River Song and others have said it’s a bad idea for the Doctor to travel alone: he’s a better man with his companions. But that's not a new idea - it goes right back to the beginnings of the series. I argued in my 2002 piece that original companions Ian and Barbara,

“serve the purpose of ‘educating the Doctor to maturity and responsibility’”.

When we first meet him, the Doctor can be cruel and cowardly - ready to kill a wounded caveman just to save his own skin. It's Ian and Barbara who change him. The first time the Doctor battles the Daleks it's because that's his only chance of recovering the missing piece of the TARDIS. A year later, because of Ian and Barbara's influence, he dares to battle the Daleks not out of personal gain but because it's the right thing to do.

In that first year of the show, Ian and Barbara make him realise his moral responsibilities in travelling through time and space: he has to get involved in events, to battle tyranny, to fight evil, yet to remain a man of peace… They’re the ones who make him change his behaviour, who hold him to a higher standard.

So who else would he see gazing back at him in his room in the hotel?

Jemma Powell and Jamie Glover
as Jacqueline Hill and William Russell
as Barbara and Ian in
An Adventure in Space and Time (2013)

Next episode: 2012

Two plays

I have two new plays out this month. Sorry.

First there's Dark Shadows - The Creeping Fog, Click the link for trailer, more details and to buy the damnable thing. The story, set in a London museum during the Second World War, stars David Selby (he's in The Social Network, you know) and Matthew Waterhouse. Thrillingly, it's Matthew's Big Finish debut (but he's not playing Adric. Or is he? Is he?!? No he isn't.)

Producers James Goss and Joseph Lidster commissioned me because I didn't know too much about Dark Shadows. They wanted a standalone, spooky story that would appeal to old-skool fans of Dark Shadows but also to a broader audience. So this is, clearly, the perfect thing to buy now so that you're all set for the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie next year. Yes it is. Quiet at the back.

Lots more about Dark Shadows at the Collinwood site, run by clever Stuart Manning who also did the cover for my story.

Then there's Doctor Who and the Cold Equations, starring Peter Purves and Tom Allen. Click the link for a trailer, more details and to buy yourself six copies. It's an exciting space adventure which has already earned 10/10 from the nice Doc Oho. Following on from The Adventure of the Perpetual Bond, the first Doctor Who and his friends Steven and Oliver find themselves on a spaceship... and things then go a bit wonky with aliens and stuff.

The lovely cover is by Simon Holub. Tom is interviewed in the new, free issue of Vortex magazine (issue 28). We recorded a third Steven and Oliver story last week.