Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, by Terrance Dicks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KNIGHT: 

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

ANNE TRAVERS: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

Barry Cryer Same Time Tomorrow, by Bob Cryer

This is a lovely, funny and often moving biography of the comedian Barry Cryer (1935-2022) written by his youngest son. Each chapter is preceded by one of Cryer’s well-worn jokes, which I could easily hear in his distinctive, warm gravel tones. There are more great jokes peppered through the text, as well of bits of showbiz history and gossip. 

There are, too, some shocking moments such as the time Cryer tried to end his own life and was saved by his neighbour Douglas Camfield — then assistant floor manager on TV shows such as Garry Halliday and later a celebrated director on Doctor Who and other drama. But really this is a history of a hardworking, professional writer and performer plugging away at his trade as the entertainment world changed around him.

In early 1961, while still relatively green, Cryer and his friend Ted Dicks (no relation to Terrance, though their credits sometimes get muddled up) began writing for revue show This is Your Night Life. The show was headed by Danny La Rue, who we’re told described himself as a “female impersonator” rather than “drag artist”, and it was performed at Winston’s nightclub in London where La Rue had been in residence for some years. 

“Shows usually started at 12.45 am, meaning they often finished around 3 am. Almost all the performers, including Danny, had jobs in other West End shows and came to Winston’s afterwards” (p. 108)

The cast of This is Your Night Life included Terry Donovan, who Cryer married in 1962. Their son describes them cycling from their home in Maida Vale to rehearsals for Danny La Rue during the day. Terry would then cycle to her evening show in the West End and her husband would be off to a stand-up gig at the Players’ Theatre. They’d then head to Winston’s for 11 pm for their next performance, get home in the not-so-small hours and then do it all again, night after night after night. It’s exhausting and thrilling and mad. You can smell the cigarette smoke and tiredness.

Cryer Jnr says his dad was an almost perfect match for revue shows of this kind, given the OED’s definition of revue as “a light theatrical entertainment consisting of a series of short sketches, songs, and dances, typically dealing satirically with topical issues.” The fit was almost perfect because, “to my knowledge Strictly Come Dancing never called” (p. 78). 

To Cryer Jnr, that’s because revue matched his father’s love of “professional amateurism”, that mix of spontaneity and chaos where it seems as if the wheels might come off at any moment. I know exactly what he means, having grown up on Cryer Snr’s work with Kenny Everett on TV and hearing him on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue on the radio. In fact, Cryer Jnr is good on why the late-night revue show on stage morphed into the panel show on radio and TV.

“The Theatres Act of 1968 meant that the Lord Chamberlain no longer had the power to censor the West End and a new kind of liberated and more confrontational voice was now being heard. Innuendo, that great staple of cabaret and Danny’s nightclub shows, not to mention one of Dad’s great weapons (if you pardon the, ahem, innuendo), was now seen as quite quaint.” (p. 174) 

The panel show, and Kenny Everett, allowed the informal, wheels-coming-off to continue in new guise.

Given Cryer Snr’s prolific career, of the many shows in different media mentioned in the book there’s a single, brief reference on p. 182 to Better Late…, a revue show broadcast over nine weeks on BBC Radio 4 in the summer of 1970, filling the gap while Any Answers? was on holiday. 

By Cryer Jnr’s reckoning of revue shows as given above, that mean it was a bit quaint, though BBC audience research reports from the time suggests that listeners were still uncomfortable — even outraged — to hear politicians being very lightly mocked.

Cryer didn’t write for the series; he was one of the performers led by Peter Reeves. Reeves also co-wrote the scripts with his friend Terrance Dicks — NB not, this time, Ted.

So, here’s some of what I can add about this long-forgotten revue show:

Better Late… was a kind of summer holiday for Terrance, who’d just completed work as script editor on Jon Pertwee’s first series as Doctor Who — the final episode of closing story Inferno, directed by Douglas Camfield (and, uncredited, by Barry Letts) was recorded on 29 May and went out on 20 June. Terrance duly commissioned scripts for the next series of Doctor Who and must have co-written this revue show while waiting for those scripts to come in. 

On Tuesday 7 July, Robert Holmes delivered his scripts for what was then called The Spray of Death, the debut story of Doctor Who’s 1971 series. The following day, Reeves, Cryer, Elizabeth Morgan and Bill Wallis, with producer John Dyas and I assume co-writer Terrance, rehearsed the first episode of Better Late… ahead of recording in the Paris studio at BBC Broadcasting House that evening, accompanied by the Max Harris Group and announcer David Dunhill. The show went out at 7.30 pm the following evening.

The pattern was basically the same for the next eight weeks.

Sadly, Better Late… no longer survives in audio form but the scripts are (mostly) held by the BBC’s Written Archives Centre. Since the revue show was topical, a lot of the material must have been written the week of recording and transmission, and skips in page numbering on surviving script pages suggests that a lot more material was written than used. The scripts also include many handwritten rewrites — refinements and rephrasings, whole jokes added or cut, the swapping of roles between performers. The sense is of a lot of work, right up to the last possible moment.

Terrance formally accepted draft scripts from Don Houghton for what was then called The Pandora Machine — the second story of the 1971 run of Doctor Who — on 2 September, the same day he was in rehearsals on the ninth and final episode of Better Late… The following week, finished on Better Late..., he completed edits on the scripts for The Spray of Death so it could go into production, received a storyline from Malcolm Hulke for the third story in the run, and commissioned Bob Baker and Dave Martin to write scripts for the fourth story.

So, he finished work on the 1970 series of Doctor Who, which had been something of an ordeal, plunged into this demanding radio series and then went straight back to Doctor Who. Exhausting, thrilling, mad! 

Some Men in London vol 1, Queer Life 1945-1959, ed. Peter Parker

Reading Bookish and its brief, telling reference to a man who walks into the sea because someone has his letters prompted me to try this, the first of two volumes collecting primary sources on what the blurb calls "the rich reality of life for queer men in London, from the end of the Second World War to decriminalization in 1967."

It's a fascinating, insightful and often disturbing read, presenting contemporary accounts by gay men alongside the things said about them such as in the press and Parliament. Editor Peter Parker largely lets these things speak for themselves, providing context rather than judgement, though one or two contributors get short thrift and you feel his anger in the Introduction when citing archives that would not allow publication of relevant material.

Some of what is presented here I knew, such as Noel Coward's outward support for and inward impatience with Sir John Gielgud following his arrest. I also knew some of the history of the Fitzroy Tavern. But it's very different to see all this stuff in context. There is a lot of buttoned-up, barely contained emotion, as much from those apoplectic about gayness as the gay men themselves.

A number of pieces here are particularly haunting. There's an extraordinary account by Brian Epstein, describing his arrest on 24 April 1957.

Having been to see a play that evening in London, Epstein stopped to use the public lavatory at Swiss Cottage tube station and, on leaving, made eye contact with a man staring at him, who then followed Epstein down the street. When Epstein looked back, the man, "nodded again and raised his eyebrows". Epstein walked on but then decided to go back to this man, who asked if Epstein knew anywhere they could go. Epstein suggested a nearby field, but as they headed off together another man joined them - both men were policemen and arrested Epstein for "persistently importuning".

At the police station, the arresting officers told the sergeant that they'd caught Epstein importuning four men. The next day, at Marylebone Magistrates' Court, he was advised to plead guilty as it would, said the detective, result in a simple fine rather than his history being looked into. The same detective then proceeded to give evidence that Epstein had been caught importuning seven men.

"I am not sorry for myself. My worst times and punishments are over. Now, through the wreckage of my life by society, my being will stain and bring the deepest distress to all my devoted family and few friends. The damage, the lying criminal methods of all the police in importuning me and consequently capturing me leaves me cold, stunned and finished" (pp. 277-78)

It's one of a number of examples here of similar methods and false claims by police. I've looked up the details and Epstein was sentenced to two years' probation. Given his experience, it's extraordinary to learn that in 1958, while still on probation, he went back to the police to report being assaulted and extorted by a man he'd had sex with, which ended up in him having to testify in court and to come out to his family. The press were not allowed to name him; if they had, I suspect Epstein would never have gone on to be manager of the Beatles.

Among the examples of disgust and fury from the press, Parker quotes in their entirety three notorious pieces by Douglas Warth, published over consecutive weeks in the Sunday Pictorial in the summer of 1952. The first, from 25 May, is headlined "Evil Men" and feels the need to explain slang terms "slap", "dragging up", "send up", "camp" and "rough" (p. 134). That suggests readers had little knowledge of the subject, but the piece goes on to counter misconceptions and address claims made in defence of gay men. 

It quotes London psychiatrist Dr Carl Lambert, who admits that gay men can include those in what he calls the "virile professions" such as,

"generals, admirals [and] fighter pilots ... The brilliant war records of many homosexuals is explained by the fact that, as the Spartans, they fought in the company of those whose opinions they valued most highly" (p. 133).

The implication is that heterosexuals who display courage under fire do so for reasons other than peer pressure and being easily led. 

The following week, 1 June, Warth was trying to unpick the causes of gayness and cited an unnamed "celebrated psychiatrist":

"We all have some homosexual tendencies. Sex is a delicate balance and there is something womanly about the toughest man. So we must all alert ourselves to the danger" (p. 139)

There was more of this attempt to explain causes the following week. The extraordinary subheading "Why not a Broadmoor for such people" refers to the infamous high-security psychiatric hospital, but the piece that follows then suggests a physical cause: 

"There is a great deal to be learned about the delicately balanced endocrine glands which determine whether or not a man could take to these unpleasant activities" (p. 141).

Having suggested a hormonal cause, effectively something a person is born with, the article then switches back to psychiatry, quoting Harley Street psychiatrist Dr Clifford Allen:

"Homosexuality is caused by identification with (or moulding oneself on) the mother ... In such cases, the mother, by being alternately cold and affectionate, has made the child seek an affection it has never enjoyed."

Allen goes on to say it's not all the fault of mothers. 

"With a son often the father is too busy, or too interested in golf" (p. 143).

Parker, usually impartial about sources, describes Allen as "unhelpful" (p. 381). But the muddle here is all Warth. The cause of gayness is glands, it's Mum, it's Dad, it's golf. It's something in some of us and it's something in us all. It's secret, nefarious and evil; even when gay mean are "brilliant" and heroic, it must be for wrong reasons.

There are other dubious explanations given by those horrified by gayness. For example, Sir John Nott-Bowes, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, gave evidence to the Wolfenden Committee on 22 November 1954 that the recent rise in arrests for importuning was due to, of all things, the Festival of Britain: 

"This is borne out by the fact that the increase took place during the exact months when the South Bank Exhibition was open" (p. 204).

Forget glands or golf; it's the Skylon.

Speaking of Wolfenden, Some Men in London, ends with biographies of the leading figures cited, presented in alphabetical order. That means we finish with Sir John Wolfenden and his son. We're told that on being appointed as chair of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Sir John wrote to Jeremy:

"I have only two requests to make of you at the moment: 1) That we stay out of each other's way for the time being. 2) That you wear rather less make-up" (p. 431) 

That we're also told that this is something Jeremy Wolfenden "claimed" suggests editor Peter Parker is not convinced it is true. How fascinating, even so. Jeremy was born in 1934 and,

"did a Russian interpreter's course during his National Service" (p. 430).

That means he was probably at the Joint Services School for Linguistics at RNAS Crail in Scotland, one of the 5,000-7,000 students there between 1956 and 1960. Given his age, Wolfenden could well have been there alongside Alan Bennett (also born 1934), Terrance Dicks and Dennis Potter (both born 1935), Jack Rosenthal (1931) and Michael Frayn (1933) - all but Terrance mentioned here. 

Terrance's widow Elsa tells me that Terrance didn't exactly apply himself to the Russian course and spent most of his time in Scotland playing golf. Jeremy Woldenden seems to have stuck at his lessons, given that he was recruited by the Secret Service and later become Moscow correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. While in Moscow, he,

"befriended Guy Burgess, whose habits of drunkenness and promiscuity he shared. Caught in flagrante, he was asked by the KGB to report on his press colleagues, while the British wanted him to to report back to them" (pp. 430-31).

He died in mysterious circumstances in 1965. In looking into this, I find that the Wolfendens, father and son, were the subject of a film shown on BBC Four, Consenting Adults (2007). The role of Police Constable Butcher was played by Mark Gatiss - years before he conceived Bookish.

Bookish, by Matthew Sweet

This is a novelisation of the first series of the TV drama of the same name, created by Mark Gatiss and co-written by Matthew Sweet (both of whom I know). The titular Gabriel Book runs a bookshop, Book's, at 158 Archangel Lane, WC2, his wife Trottie running a wallpaper shop next door. Book has an encyclopaedic memory of the thing he's read and a great interest in the strange and macabre, consulting for the police when they have unusual cases. He also seems to have done some kind of intelligence work in the war and has his own secrets...

Sometime around February 1946, a young man called Jack Blunt is released from prison and finds himself offered a job assisting Book. Jack's an orphan, left with only a photograph of his father and not even his name. Soon he's caught up in the Books' lives and their investigations of murder.

The novelisation largely follows the events of the three two-part TV stories but its peppered with additional details. For example, it is bookended by letters from 1962, 14 years after the events seen on screen and giving some hints about what is still to come. We also glimpse a bit more of Trottie in the war and Book takes a haunting journey on a train. 

When books are mentioned, we often learn their publisher and bindings - and so gain something of the way Book classifies his world. We're told the second adventure takes place in August 1946 six months after the first (p. 129), and that the third story occurs "weeks" later, so in September.

It's also peppered with bits of real history, such as the other roles taken by film extras Linda and Barbara:

"The David Lean Great Expectations condemns them to the cutting-room floor." (p. 160)

As with the TV series, it's all good fun but the cosy crimes are given an edge by the real social history. In that sense, it's got something, I think, of the feel of Call the Midwife: just the thing for a Sunday evening in front of the box. A second series is now in production and I hope it can be seen more widely than on the relatively limited channel U&Alibi because it is a delight.

See also:

• Me on The New Forest Murders, by Matthew Sweet

Chapters of Accidents, by Alexander Baron

As expected, Alexander Baron’s autobiography confirms that various elements of his novel The Lowlife (1963) are based on real life: his own, his relatives’, his neighbours’. That image that so struck me of the continually rechalked squares for hopscotch, is mentioned here on p. 350. In fact, the autobiography — written in the 1990s — draws from his novels to recall events otherwise since forgotten, quoting From the City, From the Plough (1948) to recount Baron’s direct and harrowing experience of the D-Day landings.

The autobiography covers his early life as a working class boy from a non-practising Jewish immigrant family in Hackney up to the sale of his first novel. One note describes the sounds of East London between the wars:

“‘Won’t you buy my pretty flowers?’, ‘I’ve been 7 years in prison…’. Other ballads — Victorian London, Dickens’ London — continued until the war scattered a way of life in 1939.” (p. 344)

It’s not the only reference to Dickens. For example, while his father read science books by such authors as James Jeans, Baron and his mum would visit the library on Northwold Road each week “with oilskin shopping bags”, where Baron read huge, bound volumes of adventure stories by GA Henty and Percy Westerman before progressing to PG Wodehouse’s PSmith.

“about one of the vast army of clerks which still existed, now swelled by women typists, who were the cleverer children of working-class families which were proud of their status (escaped!) Although almost all worked for wretched wages, often in Dickensian offices.” (p. 349)

Baron read some Dickens at this point, citing Barnaby Rudge and,

“its effect on me as a small boy — lurid, a phantasmagoria, those Gordon Riots — the unspeakable ecstasy of reading books you cannot understand when you are small” (p. 347),

He also speaks of the “effect on me” of The Pickwick Papers, while David Copperfield was a formative read later, while he was stationed in Southampton as a soldier during the war. I’m fascinated by all this because he later dramatised Oliver Twist for the BBC, broadcast in 12 episodes in 1985. The novel was first published in 1838 but I wonder how much Baron and producer Terrance Dicks (born in East Ham, 1935) were conjuring the London of a hundred years later; the one they’d both known as children.

As with Terrance, cinema was another key influence on Baron — he explains, pp. p. 347-48, how it shaped the structure of his writing. But his literary interests had another powerful consequence: it was on a trip to a library while still at school that he was first enthralled by the communists. Though he didn’t join the Community Party officially at that point— they thought it better he didn’t so he could infiltrate the Labour youth movement instead — he was a keen adherent. They even sent this schoolboy revolutionary on an errand to France.

“It was of all days Yom Kippur, the supreme Jewish fast. My parents had taken my sister to the East End to visit my grandparents. I left a note on the kitchen table, ‘Gone to Paris. Back Monday.’ The reader would have to understand the nature of the times, the moeurs of a working-class Jewish family and the particular character of my parents to appreciate what a bombshell that was going to be for them, how incredulous they would be.” (p. 168).

When he returned, all that his parents asked of him was whether he had a nice time (p. 170).

There’s something a bit Boy’s Own adventure about much of this stuff, with brassneck and dodges and pluck — such as his role in the Labour League of Youth’s weekly street-corner meetings.

“I was too shy to speak at these, but I was given the job of heckling our own speakers to draw a crowd, which I enjoyed.” (p. 147)

It’s in the mode too, I think, of Kipling’s schoolboy stories, Stalky & Co, which Baron dramatised for the BBC, the first time he worked with Terrance Dicks. 

On another occasion, Baron explains how one night he escaped a gang of young Fascists keen to beat him up by running on to Hampstead Heath then lying down with his arms around himself, so that he resembled one of the other copulating couples (p. 156). It’s another funny dodge — but a bit less heroic than what happens in The Lowlife, where the main character evades his pursuers thanks to a native grasp of London buses and trains, then beats them up single-handed.

Things become more serious as the war approaches. Baron speaks of his own horror at having to recruit men to fight in the Spanish Civil War — and his relief that he never succeeded. At the same time, he says how easily he might have done in Spain what a contemporary did, working for the Republican Army’s secret police (Servicio de Informaction Militar), befriending young soldiers and then reporting those who criticised the party. He cites another case, another friend, who was accused of writing “calumnious letters” home and seems to have been shot.

“I am an old man now but I am ridden by the memory of these distant events, of him and of Monty, the one murdered by the secret police, the other in their ranks, both brave, honourable in intent and so alike; and I am all the more fervently relieved that I did not send Bill Featherstone or anyone else to fight where I did not go myself.” (p. 181)

In all this and what follows, Baron doesn’t mention Malcolm Hulke, who must have been in and out of the King Street HQ of the Communist Party around the same time, and who he might just have bumped into after the war when they both worked in management at the Unity Theatre. Baron says that while he was at Unity,

“we wiped out a large and chronic debt, which must have been a feat unique both among fringe theatres and organisations of the left.” (p. 332)

In part, this organisation was because Baron avoided the “tantrums and cliques” of the actors; as with his reticence at public speaking cited before, he seems to have been a bit quiet and shy.

“My own nature kept me apart from a crowd who were serious in their intentions but involved with all the scattiness and temperamental quirks that are to be found in theatricals.” (Ibid.)

There’s also the suggestion that he’d not been well after the war, suffering from some kind of PTSD. The war certainly had a profound effect on him, not least in undermining his communist zeal. There was no single cause but that loss of faith went in tandem with his new-found interest in writing. Soon after the war, he had a chance meeting with his old friend Ted Willis — who had also left the party to become a writer. Baron tells us that,

“This was a drastic step for a member of the inner core [of the party], since writing was regarded at King Street as a trifling and contemptible occupation.” (p. 331).

They referred to Ted as a “deserter”. Later, Baron explains why it was thought so contemptible, quoting what he was told by his former mentor John Gollan:

“What does a writer do, even a good writer, even one of ours? He describes the world. You are one of the people who have to change it. And one day to run it.” (p. 336)

I wonder how convincing Baron found this? Earlier, he speaks of the,

“Communist ability to show a fair face in any company, display charm, patience, reasonableness and willingness to listen and a persuasiveness that provide irresistible to many.” (p. 208)

If his first novel had not been a success, how easily might he have been drawn back into the fold?

For all he was compelled to write a novel based on his own wartime experience, Baron put it away in a drawer and says he later showed it to Ted Willis unwillingly. It was Willis and his wife who submitted it to Jonathan Cape, and Cape’s wife who came up with the title under which it was published. 

Baron tells us that he thinks much of history is accidental like this — hence the title of this autobiography. But I think something else is going on: this is a bildungsroman, showing the development of a man’s character through his experience and choices. When he bumps into Ted Willis after the war, its because Baron has chosen to buy a typewriter — that choice surely compelled the conversation that followed. Willis, facing the opprobrium of his former comrades, must have been glad to find in Baron a fellow scribe. And what Baron went on to write was infused with all the things he’d soaked up in Dickens and cinema and the life he’d lived.

His escape was no accident at all.

The Lowlife, by Alexander Baron

Harryboy Boas is a working-class gambler in Hackney. While his sister has married well and moved to Finchley, Harryboy still haunts the streets he knew as a kid, where hopscotch  is still played in the same place, for all that the squares have been rechalked, sometimes on new tarmac. We feel the thrill of his addiction to gambling, and the shame of it, too. But he presents a good front to the woman he pays for sex, and to the uptight family that have just taken rooms in the shabby house he’s renting.

Then, almost 100 pages in, we learn something else about Harry that helps explain what makes him tick. Before the war, he lived in Paris with a girl there. He thought about marrying her but when war broke out he went home to London. Only later, much too late, did he receive a letter saying she was pregnant. He and she are Jewish — and we never learn her fate.

So, he stalks the streets of London haunted by the Holocaust. He takes each day, each bet, as it comes, and tries not to get involved in anything more complex. But the little boy in the room downstairs has taken a shine to him…

The foreword to this edition is by Iain Sinclair, who — with filmmaker Chris Petit — visited Baron at home in Golders Green in 1992:

“The elderly author, unpublished since 1979, when his Spanish novel, Franco is Dying, met with the indifference that seems to be the lot of any awkward cuss who refuses to step aside when his humber’s up” (p. vi).

Characters in the novel might well speak of protagonist Harryboy as an “awkward cuss”, but we’re privy to his rich inner life, his passions for gambling, books and women, his strong survival instinct paired with a self-sacrificing moral core. He’s a loner in many ways, and one reason is because he is bookish.

“Among the uneducated (which frankly is what you would call the general population where I live) the serious reader is a lonely person. He goes about among the crowds with his thoughts stuffed inside him. He probably dare not even mention them to his nearest pals for fear of being thought a schmo. There’s a hunger in his eyes for someone to talk to.” (pp. 63-64)

Harryboy reads a great range of books. “Chandler and Hammett are my favourites,” he tells us (p. 63), at a time he’s working through everything by Zola. He holds forth on Upton Sinclair, HG Wells and George Simenon, and later on Nat Gould, Edgar Wallace and Damon Runyon. On p. 148, he’s reading Theodore Dreiser, on p. 211 he cites a poem by John Masefield. There are women writers, too:

“We were both at that time searching out psychological thrillers at the library, the kind the Americans do well, Vera Caspary, Patrica Highsmith and so on.” (p. 134).

It’s a diverse list of names but I wonder if they’re united by a naturalistic style, a focus on — or unwillingness to avoid — the grit and dirt of life.

That’s the kind of view we get of post-war London, particularly in all the stuff about the short-term investment in renting squalid building, which the council will surely soon condemn, to the new waves of immigrants. Sinclair says in his introduction that “Baron foresees Peter Rachman”, who died in 1962 — the year before The Lowlife was published — but became notorious as a slumlord after his death as the Profumo scandal broke. That makes the book exactly of its moment.

But I’m not sure this is a social realist or kitchen sink novel. It’s more of a thriller, the stakes every building against Harryboy, caught against his will in different, conflicting loyalties. There’s a theft, a chase and a violent punch-up, We really think at one point he is going to lose an eye.

And yet for all its an adventure, it feels very real — and is full of shrewdly observed detail. Many Londoners, Harryboy included, take the changing demographics of London in their stride, but Baron is good on the prejudice, too. It’s most directly seen in snobby neighbour Evelyn Deaner. At one point, we catch her horrified by the hats on women in the Daily Mirror.

“Can you imagine me wearing one? I think they must design these hats for exhibitionists.”

Then, from nowhere, she is “fighting for breath” in fury that their landlord let a room to a black couple.

“‘You know’ — she turned to me — ‘there’s only one water-closet in this house.’” (p. 125)

Later, she’s sure, on no grounds at all, that this couple eat “tinned cats’ mean” (p. 147) and mean to serve it to her son.

When Evelyn’s husband Vic tries to quell what Baron calls these “spasms of hate”, Evelyn tells him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about because he’s out of work all day.

“Suppose that man cam home early. Eh? Have you thought of that?” 

And then, almost immediately:

“Please don’t tell me now that I’m prejudiced. I know there are good and bad. … What do you think I am — one of those colour-bar people? [But] this man is a labourer.” (p. 126)

It’s all unfounded and in her head; she’s conscious of it being unfair; it’s about class as much as ethnicity. There’s a lot bubbling up here, and Harryboy then makes his own connection:

“Sure, I nearly added, and these haters of life, they can even murder babies. Because that moment brought back to me like a twitch of pain in the head my fear that a little son of mine might have been packed into a dark, suffocating, sealed trunk for five days and nights and sent to the furnaces.” (p. 133).

It’s the mechanics of prejudice observed and relayed by a Jewish veteran of the war. The connection haunts him, and it haunt us, too.

I'm now reading Baron's autobiography, more of which anon...

Prisoners of War, by Terrance Dicks

This is an unusual book by Terrance Dicks. Alongside his wealth of Doctor Who novelisations and novels — more of which in due course — he tended to write books in series: there are multiple volumes about T.R. Bear (a bear), Sally Ann (a rag doll) or Goliath (a dog); for slightly older readers, the Baker Street Irregulars and The Unexplained ran to more than 10 books each. Even his non-fiction books tended to be in runs.

Prisoners of War, first published by Methuen in 1990, is not only a standalone novel, I think it’s also more autobiographical than any of Terrance’s other books. It’s set in the spring of 1944, with young Tony Dent — ie Terry Dicks — starting a new school at “Grendon Moor” in the north of England, where his dad, a sergeant, has been posted to the local prisoner-of-war camp.

Tony’s mum and dad, Bill and Nell, have the names of Terrance's parents, and also their temperaments and backgrounds. The following, for example, matches a description Terrance gave elsewhere about the real-life William Henry Dicks:

“Dad … was what you might call unpolitical. Back in London, he belonged to the Liberal Club, the Labour Club and the Conservative Club, all at the same time. He said the company was better at the Labour Club, the beer was better at the Liberal Club, and the Conservative Club had the best billiard table. Dad could get on with anyone, anywhere, any time.” (p. 56)

Bill is a bit of a wheeler-dealer, able — in the midst of rationing — to acquire champagne for a party, or bacon and eggs for his wife. When posh Lady Carrington screams at him because his army truck has upset the gravel on her drive, Bill easily charms her, and lies to her too, so as not to land her husband in trouble for not passing on “her orders” about where they should park (p. 24). He’s a loveable rogue, good in a crisis and, when needed, in a fight.

While there’s lots on the “happily incompatible” relationship of Bill and Nell, and Tony’s issues fitting in at a new school, the main story involves his burgeoning friendship with a German prisoner, about which both feel conflicted, and the machinations of a Nazi officer in the same camp. There’s also a romantic subplot for Tony — we’re told in the closing chapter that he goes on to marry Lucy Carrington.

Tony shares traits with young Terrance:

“What with being an only child, and our being shunted about so much, I was a keen picturegoer and what my family called a big reader.” (p. 48)

But Terrance turned 9 in April 1944 and though we’re not told Tony’s age, he’s surely older than this given what happens here and that he is taller than his dad (p. 100). There's some other fudging of real-life, in that the imposing headmaster Dr White is surely based on the real-life Dr Whiteley, headmaster of East Ham Grammar School for Boys, where Terrance was a pupil after the war. This is a fictional adventure story grounded in various odd bits of real life — and that’s what makes it so effective. The suspense and moral complexity feel real.

In fact, it’s not quite a standalone novel as it surely follows Terrance’s short story “London’s Burning”, first published in the anthology Streets Ahead — Tales of City Life, also published by Methuen and a year before this novel came out. (Around this time, Methuen published new editions of Terrance’s Baker Street Irregulars books, too). 

Streets Ahead was edited by Valerie Bierman, who Terrance had known since 1980 when she invited him to be a guest at the Edinburgh Book Fair and later Edinburgh Book Festival. She says in the introduction that she approached 10 well-known novelists and asked them to write “a story on any theme that interested them — provided it had a city as a background” (p. 7); the results were almost all based on personal experience and connections to the cities they describe. So, the brief inspired something more personal than usual from Terrance. In fact, I think we get some of his best and most vivid writing: 

“Most mornings we’d make ourselves late for school by hunting for shrapnel, chunks of ragged metal fragments, all that was left of the exploded bombs. Stamp collecting was nowhere that year.

I thought it was all wonderful. But my mum and dad didn’t and now I can see why.

One morning I woke up to find a gaping, smoking hole where the end house in the street used to be. A nice family called the Strettons, cheerful dad, pleasant mum and two little girls. They’d just moved into the house and done it up and they were pleased as anything with it. Now there was no more house and no more Strettons.” (“London’s Burning”, Streets Ahead, pp. 77-78)

Given the danger, the unnamed narrator is taken by his mother — Nelly (p. 78) — to stay with her cousin on a farm some 50 miles outside London. Homesick, he runs away and arrives back in London as the bombs are falling. It’s a thrilling, concisely told story, running just 11 and a half pages. At the end we're told that the narrator’s dad “finished up Quartermaster-Sergeant in an army camp in the North, and after a time Mum and I moved up to join him” (p. 85).

That matches Tony Dent’s experience in the novel:

“Mum had tried a sort of private-enterprise evacuation on me when the bombing first started, packing me off to relations in the country. I’d hated it so much I’d run away after a couple of weeks.” (Prisoners of War, p. 22.)

They’re surely the same character, but how much of this was based on Terrance's own real experience?

Sadly, Prisoners of War doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact. I’ve found little in the way of press coverage about it, and Terrance didn’t write another book for Methuen after this, though he did contribute a short story to another Bierman anthology, No More School? (1992).

But I think this novel may have influenced something else. It was published in June 1990, and that same month Terrance received a letter from Peter Darvill-Evans, editor at Virgin Publishing, to confirm a new range of original Doctor Who novels. Terrance was invited to come up with a story involving a villain created for the range, the Timewyrm, but was otherwise free as to plot and setting. His synopsis, delivered in August, began with a compelling image:

“The Doctor in erratic pursuit of the Timewyrm finds himself attending the 1950 [sic] Festival of Britain. He realises when and where he is when they emerge from the TARDIS to the South Bank and see the Skylon, the tapering tower that is the symbol of the Festival. It’s there all right — but there’s a swastika on top!” (“Doctor Who: The New Adventures — Exodus of Evil by Terrance Dicks”, storyline received by Virgin Publishing, 23 August 1990).

Just as with Prisoners of War, this was an adventure story based on his own experience, grounding things in the real:

“I actually remembered going to the Festival of Britain with a school party in 1951, so it was fun to bring that in. I remember it rained all the time.” (Andrew Martin, “Terrance Dicks — Writing the Past, Present and Future”, TV Zone Special #5, p. 23.

That’s exactly what we see in what he wrote:

“Beside a broad and sluggish river, a group of concrete pavilions huddled under a fine drizzling rain. A tall slender tower soared gracefully into the mists towards a grey and cloudy sky.” (Terrance Dicks, Timewyrm: Exodus, 1991).

As in the synopsis, this London has fallen to the Nazis and the Doctor and Ace are soon arrested. The Doctor not only escapes but convinces the Nazis that he's a senior officer, commandeering a car and swanning about like he owns the place. It’s deftly both great fun and also tense and suspenseful.

When I first read Timewrym: Exodus in the summer of 1991, I knew this was also riffing on what the Second Doctor does in pretending to be a German office in TV story The War Games (1969) — co-written by Terrance and his friend Malcolm Hulke.

But now, reading Prisoners of War, I can see he was drawing on an older source. In this wheeler-dealer Doctor, there's something of Terrance’s dad.

• I’ll be giving a short talk on Terrance Dicks at the Target Book Club event on 19 July

See also

• Doctor Who and the Wheel in Space by Terrance Dicks
• Doctor Who and the Time Warrior by Terrance Dicks

Target Book Club, 19 July 2025

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

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

• Buy tickets for Target Book Club 2025

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

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

Space Security Service title sequence

The first volume of Space Security Service is out today from Big Finish. This new audio series, which I produced, comprises three adventures of space cops Anya Kingdom (Jane Slavin) and Mark Seven (Joe Sim), who used to travel with Doctors Who and are now on missions of their own.

To accompany the release, Rob Ritchie has produced a title sequence to match Jon Ewen's amazing theme tune for the series:

Full blurb as follows:

They’re the guardians of the Solar System and Earth’s first line of defence. But now the agents of the Space Security Service face their greatest ever threat… 

Anya Kingdom (Jane Slavin) and the android Mark Seven (Joe Sims) are the top agents of the Space Security Service, fighting alien threats and sinister villains across the galaxy. 

Last encountered in the Dalek Universe story arc, in which they teamed up with the Tenth Doctor, these popular characters now star in their own spin-off series of full-cast audio dramas, inspired by the 1960s Doctor Who serials of Terry Nation. 

The thrilling retro-styled adventures of the Space Security Service begin today with a box set of three brand-new stories, which take Anya and Mark to London in the 1980s, a Thal planet where a scientist conducts dangerous experiments, and a world on the brink of war. 

The Worlds of Doctor Who – Space Security Service: The Voord in London is now available to purchase for just £19.99 (as a digital download to own), exclusively from Big Finish. 

The SSS’s three latest missions are: 

The Voord in London by LR Hay 

1980s London. WDC Ann Kelso is assigned to CID, helping to clean up the streets. But “Ann” is really SSS Agent Anya Kingdom from the 41st century, on a top-secret mission to track down aliens hiding in the past. But then she finds a different group of aliens hiding in the Thames – with very deadly intentions… 

The Thal from G.R.A.C.E. by Felicia Barker 

As their investigations continue, SSS agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven journey to a planet colonised by Thals. They’re in pursuit of a Thal scientist who has perfected an experimental new weapon… But soon they are the targets… 

Allegiance by Angus Dunican 

The lush planet Othrys is on the cusp of civil war. SSS agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven are meant to keep a low profile while on a diplomatic mission there… But when a pregnant surrogate for the Othryn royal family desperately asks for their help, they’re unable to refuse…

Joining Jane Slavin and Joe Sims in Space Security Service: The Voord in London are Sean Gilder (Slow Horses), Madeline Appiah (Jungle), and Lara Lemon (Insomnia). The guest cast also includes Rodney Gooden, David Holt, Nicholas Briggs, Camille Burnett, Peter Bankolé, Jez Fielder, and Barnaby Kay. 

Cover art by Grant Kempster. Script editor John Dorney, director Barnaby Kay and executive producers Jason Haigh-Ellery and Nicholas Briggs.

Space Security Service

Big Finish have announced that June 2025 will see the release of Space Security Service, a series of audio adventures produced by me and starring Jane Slavin and Joe Sims. Press release as follows:

The Space Security Service return!

Jane Slavin and Joe Sims star as Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven in two brand-new box sets of full cast audio drama from The Worlds of Doctor Who, coming soon from Big Finish Productions. 

They’re the guardians of the Solar System and Earth’s first line of defence. But now the agents of the Space Security Service face their greatest ever threat… 

Having joined David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor in the popular Dalek Universe series, the heroes of the Space Security Service will soon defend the universe once again in their own exciting adventures. Jane Slavin will return as Anya Kingdom, a special agent from the 41st century, alongside Joe Sims as her android colleague Mark Seven. 

These star-spanning escapades will take inspiration from the imaginative creations of Terry Nation. Nation devised the Space Security Service for the 1960s Doctor Who TV serials Mission to the Unknown and The Daleks’ Master Plan, and expanded upon them in the Dalek annuals and comics, as well as a never-made TV spin-off series, The Daleks. 

The fast-paced new adventures will see Anya and Mark encounter monsters from across the universe, from Voord in the Thames to a rogue Thal scientist. 

There are two box sets of The Worlds of Doctor Who – Space Security Service to look forward to, each comprising three thrilling episodes of full-cast audio drama. The first volume, The Voord in London, is due for release in June 2025; details of the second volume, due out in January 2026, will be announced at a later date.

Space Security Service: The Voord in London is now available to pre-order for just £19.99 (as a digital download to own), exclusively from Big Finish. But see the bargain offer below for both sets.

The three episodes in this first box set are: 

• The Voord in London by LR Hay 
• The Thal from G.R.A.C.E. by Felicia Barker 
• Allegiance by Angus Dunican 

Producer Simon Guerrier said: “This series has long been in the works – arguably since Terry Nation tried to launch his Daleks TV show back in the 1960s. We've taken that as our cue and come up with a fast-moving, fun series of adventures for Space Security Service agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven, who were such a hit in the Dalek Universe range. 

“We start with Anya back in London in the 20th century, working undercover as a police officer on the trail of one group of aliens - and then getting caught up with another. Soon the action moves to... well, just wait and see!” 

Big Finish listeners can save money by pre-ordering both volumes of Space Security Service in an exclusive multibuy bundle for just £38 (download to own). 

All the above prices (including pre-order and multibuy bundle discounts) are fixed for a limited time only and guaranteed no later than August 2025. 

The director of Space Security Service is Barnaby Kay, the script editor is John Dorney and the cover art is by Grant Kempster. 

Terror of the Suburbs, with Matthew Sweet

The Blu-ray set Doctor Who: The Collection Season 7 has been out for a few weeks. It includes the documentary I co-produced, Terror of the Suburbs, a clip from which has just been posted on the official Doctor Who YouTube channel:

Now that people have had a chance to see Terror of the Suburbs in full, I have permission to share some photos from the shoot.

Terror of the Suburbs was directed by Jon Clarke and edited by Robin Andrews at Eklectics. Presenter Matthew Sweet spoke to Alex Moore (assistant location manager on Doctor Who 2022-24), Dr Adam Scovell (writer and historian), Subhadra Das (also a writer and historian) and Dr Rupa Huq, MP. It's produced by me and Thomas Guerrier for executive producer Russell Minton at BBC Studios.

Director Jon Clarke and camera op Lewis Hobson on Ealing High Street
where Autons once invaded

,

Presenter Matthew Sweet on the corner of Ealing Broadway and Ealing High Street,
outside the Autons' favourite branch of M&S

Jon and Lewis line up a shot with Matthew

Lewis, Jon, expert guest Alex Moore, Matthew Sweet and me
(Photo by Kitty Dunning)

Me looming in the foreground while the team interview Dr Adam Scovell
outside Ealing Film Studios

Dr Adam Scovell and Matthew Sweet at Ealing Film Studios

Nice Vibez, Lime Grove

Jon records Subhadra Das and Matthew Sweet in Chiswick

Subhadra and Matthew in Chiswick

Jon records Matthew's reaction shot in front of a brick wall

Matthew and Jon in front of the Palace of Westminster,
the south side of the river popular with alien invasions 

Matthew and Dr Rupa Huq, MP at Portcullis House

Jon and Matthew in front of Elizabeth Tower