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)…

Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, by Terrance Dicks — II

PART TWO

Following part one, this post concludes a great plunge into the novelisation Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster by Terrance Dicks, first published on 15 January 1976. Here, I’ll focus on what Terrance added to the TV story Terror of the Zygons written by Robert Banks Stewart and script edited by Robert Holmes.

The opening scene of the TV story is set on an oil rig at sea. Munro speaks by radio to an unseen, unheard person called Willie — pronounced “Wullie” — asking him to send over some haggis as the chef “doesnae ken” about it. This subtly conveys to the viewer that we are off the coast of Scotland. 

There’s then a disturbing, electronic sound and the oil rig is destroyed by something unseen — though the title of the novelisation is a bit of a giveaway. 

(Nine year-old Lady Vader helpfully summarised the story for me this morning: “The Loch Ness Monster isn’t good or bad, it’s just a big puppy and they’ve hidden it’s treat.”)

So, what does Terrance do with this? He tells us in his first sentence that this is the oil rig Bonnie Prince Charlie, though it’s not named on screen until much later in the story, where it’s just “Prince Charlie”. In his first draft, Terrance called it the Ben Nevis, which is another rig destroyed in the story, suggesting that the simple effort to underline exactly where we are at the start of the story took more effort than we might expect. 

Jock Munro, his first name Terrance’s coinage, is drinking “rum-laced cocoa” and his internal monologue is a little spicy:

“Grinning to himself, he waited for Willie to demand how the blankety-blank he was supposed to find haggis for twenty-odd men at a few hours’ notice.” (p. 7)

Strong liquor and swearing in a book for children, and we’re only on the first page! (Reading this as a child, I thought blankety-blank was a reference to the TV game show, but Blankety-Blank didn’t air until 1979).

Terrance gives Munro — and the reader — a glimpse of the titular monster, “something huge, incredible” at this early point. But he doesn’t explain the term “RT”, used several times here and later. Perhaps these were more common in the mid-1970s, or it was felt that given the setting is the radio room of an oil rig we’d know that RT means “radio transmitter”. Still, it’s unusual for Terrance not to spell it out.

We cut from this monstrous attack to the arrival of “the blue police box” — definite article — with its “strange, wheezing, groaning sound”, the phrase Terrance coined in his first novelisation (where it’s “a strange wheezing and groaning”) and would reuse many times after this. 

In fact, several phrases here are repeated from other books. “That mysterious traveller in Time and Space known only as ‘the Doctor’” (p. 9) is word-for-word the opening sentence of The Doctor Who Monster Book (although there “the Doctor” is in bold). Here, as there, Terrance explains the acronym TARDIS (“dimensions” plural). This stuff is the essential lore of Doctor Who and Terrance repeating it in different books etched it into readers’s brains.

Harry Sullivan, a companion Terrance created, is — as per his Doctor Who and the Giant Robot — “handsome” with a “square jaw, frank blue eyes and curly hair.” We’re told Harry is “conventionally dressed in blazer and flannels” and is “like the hero of an old-fashioned adventure story”. It’s the same method Terrance used in the Monster Book to pithily describe the four Doctors: facial appearance, clothes, the kind of heroics in evidence. 

By contrast, Sarah here is simply a “slim, attractive girl” (p. 9). Still, when Harry’s medical skills and Sarah’s journalistic prowess are useful to the plot, Terrance tells us about the mechanics of doorstepping local people as Sarah gathers her “harvest of gossip” (p. 20). He had first-hand experience of this kind of thing, having once had a job going door-to-door to ask people their habits in shampoo and dog food. 

Reference is made briefly to the “many strange things” Sarah and Harry have seen in their adventures in Time and Space (with capitals), but Terrance doesn’t cite examples. When we’re told the Doctor has been summoned urgently back to Earth, there’s no asterisk and footnote saying “See Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen”, the adventure immediately preceding this one and the novelisation that Terrance wrote next. As we’ve seen, Doctor Who and the Giant Robot includes a footnote citing the then not-yet published Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. The fact that the same thing doesn’t happen here may mean a novelisation of Revenge of the Cyberman hadn’t been scheduled when Terrance wrote this.

Terrance also says that the Doctor gave the Brigadier the “recall device” — not “space-time telegraph” as in Revenge of the Cybermen — “just before this latest trip” in the TARDIS. That implies that the gift was given not long prior to the end of TV story Robot, ie during the events of that story. In Terrance’s later novelisation Doctor Who and the Face of Evil (1978), we learn that during the events of Robot the newly regenerated Doctor takes a quick jaunt in the TARDIS to a planet in the far future where he attempts to fix the broken computer of a survey team from Earth. I’m rather taken by the idea of the TARDIS landing back in the laboratory at UNIT HQ late one night, only for the Doctor to be caught by the Brigadier who takes him to task for sneaking off in the midst of a crisis.

But I can’t see the Fourth Doctor conceding, or giving the Brigadier this kind of electronic leash. It’s surely more likely that the recall device was a gift from the Third Doctor, prior to the events of Planet of the Spiders. We saw in the novelisation of The Three Doctors that, despite being granted his freedom to travel in time and space again, the Third Doctor felt tied to his “home” at UNIT. Maybe he and the Brigadier swapped gifts just before heading out for the night together to watch a magic show and erotic dancer.

I didn’t mention it in my post on Doctor Who and the Planet of Spiders, but that novelisation suggests its own scene not included on TV. We’re told at the end that the Brigadier has been to the meditation centre to help with the mopping-up, alongside Sarah and former UNIT captain Mike Yates. The Brig and Yates don’t share a scene in the TV story, but I like the idea that they had a chance to clear the air, Mike earning some redemption because he helped to thwart the spiders. Perhaps they shared one last pint. 

The loss of Captain Yates from UNIT led, in the next TV story, to the promotion of Sergeant Benton. As he explains to Sarah in Part Two of Robot:

“That’s promotion, Miss, to WO1. … Warrant Officer. You see, technically speaking the Brig should have a major and a captain under him. The UNIT budget won’t run to it so they settled on promoting me.”

This may have been a late addition as it was missed in the closing credits, where he’s still credited as “Sergeant Benton”. But the promotion was picked up in Doctor Who books, and he’s “Warrant Officer Benton” in The Doctor Who Annual 1976 (published September 1975) and again here, on p. 47 of Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster.

But he’s not “Warrant Officer Benton” in the TV version of this story: he’s “Mr Benton” in dialogue, and “RSM Benton” in the credits — that is, a regimental sergeant major. This isn’t wrong; “RSM is the most senior rank held by a Warrant Officer,” clever Paul Scoones explained to me on Bluesky. I suspect the hand of director Douglas Camfield in this maximised promotion; a stickler for military matters, he also cast his friend John Levene in the role of Corporal Benton way back in The Invasion.

There’s an unnamed corporal played by Bernard G High in Terror of the Zygons who, in Part Two, features in a fun scene where he responds “Sir” to everything the Brigadier says. Terrance gives this “super-efficient” and “invaluable” corporal a name — and its one we’ve seen before. In Terrance’s previous book, Doctor Who — The Three Doctors, Corporal Palmer is the first to respond to the attack on UNIT HQ by antimatter jelly.

Palmer is also named on screen in the TV version of The Three Doctors, where (unlike the book) his first sight of the jellies is met with the words “Holy Moses!” He was played by Denys Palmer, who surely gave the character his name. But this character was at least in part the creation of Terrance Dicks. 

We can deduce this from surviving paperwork included on the Blu-ray release of the story. On 9 November 1972, just after production began on The Three Doctors, Terrance sent writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin copies of the scripts, which he had had to revise at the last minute. He explained the various changes he’d made.

“Firstly because of a contractual mixup Frazer Hines became suddenly unavailable and we had to substitute Benton for the Jamie role.”

It seems that as originally written, the Second Doctor and companion Jamie McCrimmon turned up in the TARDIS in Part One, to the surprise of the Third Doctor and Jo. In the rewrite and as broadcast, the Third Doctor and Jo are accompanied by Benton, who has entered the TARDIS for the very first time. This change meant that Benton couldn’t also be, as I think originally written, outside UNIT HQ when it vanishes at the end of Part Two. His astonished reaction was duly assigned to a subordinate, ie the corporal whose more-prominent role in the story meant he now deserved a name. 

I think Terrance must have recalled this as he novelised The Three Doctors and then reused Palmer here, in his very next novelisation. Palmer’s reappearance is, then, a result of the order in which Terrance happened to write these books — and I’ve only spotted the connection by reading them in the same sequence. 

The efficient, kindly Palmer later offers to fetch Sarah some tea, even if he has to make it himself (p. 58); observing that she’s now alone, the Zygons choose that moment to attack. That neatly explains why there aren’t any soldiers closer at hand when Sarah calls for help, an example of Terrance script editing a story a good year after he had left that job on Doctor Who.

A cup of tea being a plot point is also very Terrance Dicks. An innocuous moment in which Benton offers to share a bar of chocolate with Sarah while they’re waiting for news is as per the TV version but Terrance adds three whole meals to the story. Chapter 1 ends with the Doctor informed of suspicious deaths and “briskly” asking “where do we start” with the investigation — as if eager to get moving. On the next page, we’re told that he and his friends enjoy “a large and filling lunch first” (p. 18). 

They also enjoy a proper Scottish breakfast, with Terrance telling us how our heroes take their porridge.

“The Doctor, in true Highland fashion, ate his with just a sprinkle of salt, saying something about having acquired a taste for it during the Jacobite rebellion” (p. 79).

With Terrance taking ever more professional interest in the history of Doctor Who, that may well be a conscious reference to the events of 1966 TV story The Highlanders. But there is also something a bit Ian Fleming / James Bond (of which Terrance was a fan) about telling us that our hero eats the local delicacy in the most authentic manner.

Then, having told us about lunch and breakfast, we get a reference to dinner. After his near-death ordeal with the Skarasen, the Doctor says he wants “a hot bath … then a very large meal, and a nice long sleep” (p. 75).

It’s odd to think of the Doctor soaking in the bath — when he takes a shower in Spearhead from Space, it’s part of a daring escape. Dinner, bath and sleep are all so... ordinary, especially for this particular Doctor. However, we soon learn that a long sleep to the Doctor is just three or four hours and next morning he bangs on doors early to rouse his friends. We’re told that,

“Sarah groaned as she struggled into her clothes” (p. 79). 

Again, it’s an odd mental image. Is she — like the bathing Doctor — naked? Perhaps, at some point between doorstepping villagers and being locked in a decompression chamber, she popped back to the TARDIS for a nightie. Perhaps that always-useful Corporal Palmer was dispatched to source a toothbrush and clean knickers.

There are other odd things of this sort that result from Terrance filling gaps between scenes or explaining details. We’re told twice — on p. 24 and p. 90 — where the Caber got his name. On p. 40, we’re blithely informed mid-paragraph that Sister Lamont is really a Zygon rather than it being a big revelation, and in the next paragraph reference is made to Broton, a page before we’re introduced to him as leader of the Zygons.

The sense is of a book written and revised in some haste, and a light-touch editorial process. Yet many additions are skilful and great fun. Terrance makes Broton a much richer, more memorable character than we see on screen. On TV, John Woodnutt gives the human-form Duke of Forgill a delicious, withering disdain, but the Zygon-form Broton is a more generic monster, saved by amazing costume design and the choice to speak in a whisper. Terrance, brilliantly, makes Broton a vain show-off, bothered when Harry doesn’t “show the proper terrified reaction” (p. 53), and explaining a lengthy bit of exposition as his “need to tell someone of his cleverness” (p. 105).

The other Zygons don’t fare quite so well. On screen, the design makes each Zygon visually distinctive and the dialogue gives them individual names. Terrance uses one of these, “Madra” (p. 61) but omits “Odda” — the Zygon who takes the form of Sister Lamont, named by the Duke-form Broton towards the end of Part Three. Otherwise, little in the way of character is revealed among these Zygon underlings. It’s not in the TV story either, but Terrance often takes care to ensure that groups of people (or aliens) are not uniform, adding bespoke desires, feelings and fears.

See, for example, what he does with the Doctor, with a pause to acknowledge that our hero “hated” having to blow up the Zygon spaceship and its crew for all he understood the need (p. 117). There’s a nice character moment for the Brigadier when he explains the best means of searching for the Doctor out on Tulloch Moor, which sums up his whole outlook: “System and method, Miss Smith” (p. 74). The fastidious, old-fashioned Brigadier also expresses distaste for the slang term “bug” (p. 63).

Even peripheral characters benefit from this kind of thing. We get a vivid sense of the Fourth International Energy Conference in London — whose delegates we don’t see on screen — when Terrance tells us they “muttered and grumbled over their Government champagne” (p. 120).

(“Government” is more usually lower case when employed as an adjective. “Champagne” is a proper noun so should have a capital letter. For some reason, this novelisation also puts “land-rover” in lower case when it’s a brand name. I wonder who subbed this. Can it have been the same person who oversaw “Land-Rover”, capitals, in both Doctor Who and the Giant Robot and Doctor Who — The Three Doctors?)

There are further examples of well-chosen, evocative vocabulary. On screen, the Duke of Forgill drives a Range Rover. Here, it’s a “muddy shooting brake” (p. 11), conjuring something more old-fashioned and characterful. The interior of the Zygon spaceship is all “fibrous” with “protuberances”, “nodules” and “tangles … of roots and vines”, vividly conveying the impression before Terrance puts it more plainly: 

“Somehow the place looked as if it had been grown rather than made” (p. 41).

The terms he feels need explanation are also interesting. Broton says on screen that the Zygons live off the lactic fluid produced by the Skarasen, as per on-screen dialogue, to which Terrance adds, “so the monster was also a kind of milk cow” (p. 43). But a page before this, Broton uses the term “regenerated” and it isn’t explained — because Doctor Who readers could by now be expected to know.

Some additions add to the horror and suspense. The Zygon signalling device doesn’t just stick to the Doctor’s hand as on TV, put attaches itself with tentacles that “made weals in the flesh of his wrist” (p. 71), so the bathing, naked Doctor is also badly wounded. By explaining the workings of a decompression chamber and how long a human can survive without air, Terrance underlines the threat facing the Doctor and Sarah (pp. 39-40). Angus McRanald spends his last moments alive “emptying ashtrays” in the pub, a mundane detail that I think makes his sudden death all the more unexpected and brutal. (It also means that this novelisation for children features smoking as well as boozing and nakedness.)

Terrance further dials ups the suspense when the Doctor and his friends visit Forgill Castle for the first time by describing it in gothic terms as, 

“like that place in Transylvania where Frankenstein carried out his dreadful experiments and Count Dracula flitted around the battlements at sunset” (p. 79).

A pedant might object that the novel Frankenstein is not set in Transylvania, but Terrance is surely evoking the horror films made by Universal which gleefully teamed up Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula. He clearly knows the source material well enough to use “Frankenstein” here as the name of the one conducting the experiments — ie the doctor, not his creation. This reference may also be an echo of conversations with Doctor Who script editor Robert Holmes around the time Terrance was writing this novelisation, about a new TV story drawing from Frankenstein, which became The Brain of Morbius.

Our hypothetical pedant (not me, guv) might also object to the moment here in which Sarah spots the fake Harry Sullivan — really a Zygon — because his forehead is not grazed (p. 59), which isn’t in the TV version and doesn’t make sense if the form of fake-Harry is drawn live from real-Harry’s body-print. Much more logical is what happens next, when Sarah knows that this Harry is a wrong ‘un because his manners are lacking (p. 60). The effect of these additions is positive, giving Sarah some agency while being attacked, though Terrance underlines that for all she defends herself, she doesn’t mean “Harry” to fall to his doom. As with the Doctor, she takes no pleasure in her deadly enemy’s death.

In the TV version, the Zygon is killed by this fall. Terrance adds a touch of irony: the would-be killer is skewered on its own pitchfork. When the dead Zygon is then teleported away, the pitchfork protruding from it doesn’t go too and clatters to the ground. It’s such a vivid image, I thought I’d really seen it and was a bit surprised to find, on watching the new Blu-ray the other night, that this doesn’t happen on screen.

Likewise, I love Terrance’s vivid description of the Zygon spaceship concealed in the nook under a cliff-face “like a crab under rock” (p. 103), a suitably aquatic analogy, for all it’s nothing like the TV version where the ship lands in the midst of an open quarry. In fact, it’s so different to what we see on screen, it suggests that Terrance didn’t get to see footage from or a rough cut of these TV episodes, even after completing his first draft of the book. If so, he’d have surely corrected the description to align with what we see on screen — not least because the explosion of the spaceship was so effectively achieved. 

Likewise, Terrance would surely have delighted in the joke ad-libbed by Nicholas Courtney when the Brigadier addresses the Prime Minister as “madam”. In the novelisation, it is “Sir” (p. 110), as per the script. Part of that joke is that this “present-day” Doctor Who was set a little in the future and Courtney thought Shirley Williams might have a chance in the coming election. 

But Terrance has his own eye on the near future. Almost as an aside, we’re told of,

“The development of Man’s technology to the point where the moon [lower case] had already been reached, with interplanetary travel an inevitable next step” (p. 10).

That’s surely foreshadowing UNIT’s next TV adventure, The Android Invasion, broadcast a month before this book was published, which involves a crewed mission to Jupiter. Given this effort to tie up UNIT continuity, I note that Terrance could not acknowledge in this novelisation something that became clear only in retrospect. 

Due to other commitments, Nicholas Courtney was unable to appear as the Brigadier in The Android Invasion as planned. The story features Benton and Harry Sullivan, but it was the last on-screen appearance of both. The Brigadier wouldn’t be back on screen until 1983, by which time we would learn he had left UNIT long behind him. If Terrance hadn’t novelised Terror of the Zygons quite so close to production, he’d have known that this turned out to be the Brigadier’s last story for years, and the end of an era Terrance had helped usher in.

With that in mind, there’s something poignant about the ending of this book. As on TV, the Brigadier and Harry each decline another trip in the TARDIS. Here, the Brigadier recalls his own previous trip — and we get the only footnote in the book directing us to another novelisation, which is the one Terrance wrote most recently. Sarah takes up the Doctor’s offer and off they both go. No one says goodbye or notes the fateful moment.

Terrance adds a little to what we see on screen. The TV version gives the last word to the Duke of Forgill, to which the Brigadier responds with a quizzical look. In the novelisation, that is followed by him wryly wondering where the Doctor and Sarah will end up next. They’re off to their next adventure and all the ones beyond that — but without him.

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These long, long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks take time and effort, so I am busking. Throw some coins in the hat and I can keep going.

Next time: the first of the Mounties books, The Great March West, and Terrance’s first original novel — which features an unexpected appearance by the Doctor...

Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, by Terrance Dicks — I

PART ONE

This novelisation was first published on 15 January 1976, simultaneously in hardback by Allan Wingate and in paperback by Target — both imprints of Tandem Publishing Ltd. It’s the second Doctor Who novelisation to feature the Fourth Doctor, his face featured on the cover. 

On the day of publication, the Fourth Doctor was halfway through his tenth adventure on TV: The Brain of Morbius, credited to writer “Robin Bland.” This, of course, was a pseudonym for Terrance Dicks, who asked for his name to be taken off a story that script editor Robert Holmes had extensively revised.

Terrance had another book out later the same month — the first of his Mounties trilogy, The Great March West, also published by Tandem in both hardback and paperback on 28 January. As we’ve seen, the company had only just issued two other books written by Terrance: Doctor Who — The Three Doctors and The Doctor Who Monster Book, both published on 20 November 1975. 

Four books and four TV episodes, all out within a matter of weeks. When did Terrance write these things, and in which order?

Production paperwork survives relating to The Brain of Morbius, providing dates on which scripts were commissioned and delivered. You can browse these papers for yourself, as they’re included among the wealth of PDFs on the new Doctor Who — Season 13 Blu-ray box-set (thanks to the efforts of living saint Richard Bignell).

Sadly, little paperwork survives relating to these four books. Yet Terrance’s archive includes a spiral-bound shorthand notebook in which he jotted thoughts on subsequent writing projects. Some of those notes are dated, from which we can make deductions.

On Saturday, 6 September 1975, Terrance made notes on an idea for a putative TV series that never made it to the screen. At some point after this, he used the same notebook to jot notes on “Cyberman Revenge” — ie his novelisation of Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen, published the following year. This was followed by three more entires, dated 6, 9 and 14 October, related to his third Mounties novel, War Drums of the Blackfoot. A full manuscript for that novel also survives, labelled in Terrance’s handwriting “uncorrected” and “November 17th 1975”.

My sense from other paperwork is that Terrance tended to work on one book at a time, completing a manuscript and crossing it off his list before proceeding to the next assignment in line. On that basis, I think he wrote his novelisation of Revenge of the Cybermen at some point between 6 September and 6 October 1975; it was published seven months and 14 days later, on 20 May 1976.

His next book, War Drums of the Blackfoot was written in draft form (requiring another read and corrections) by 17 November 1975, and my guess is that he delivered it to the publisher at the end of that month. The novel was published seven months and 12 days later on 12 July 1976. Terrance — and Tandem — were working to lead-times of 7.5 months.

We can apply this lead-time retrospectively to his previous books. Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, published 15 January 1976, must therefore have been delivered around the end of May 1975. Doctor Who — The Three Doctors, published on 20 November, must have been delivered around the end of March. Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, published on 16 October, must have been delivered around the end of February.

So: the end of February, the end of March and then the end of May. A book a month, but with a gap in April. I said before that the use of the name “Gellguards” in The Doctor Who Monster Book but not in Doctor Who — The Three Doctors suggests that the latter was written first. My guess, therefore, is that Terrance wrote the Monster Book in that gap in April; the different format of that book meant it had a different lead time. 

Let’s put all this guesswork — marked “≅” — together with some dates we can be sure of:

≅ end of Feb 1975: Terrance delivers manuscript of Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders

≅ end of Mar: delivers Doctor Who — The Three Doctors

≅ end of Apr: delivers The Doctor Who Monster Book

01 May: commissioned to write storyline for The Brain of Morbius, target delivery 14 May and delivered by 19 May

≅ end of May: delivers Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster

06 Jun: commissioned to write 4x scripts for The Brain of Morbius, target delivery 30 Jul

25 Jun: BBC acknowledge delivery of Morbius Part One, accepted by script editor Robert Holmes on 01 Jul

01 Jul: Photocall on set of Planet of Evil; photograph of Elisabeth Sladen and Tom Baker from this shoot used in The Doctor Who Monster Book, suggesting design layout undertaken in July

04 Aug: BBC acknowledge delivery of Morbius Parts Two to Four; undated cover note suggests that Terrance actually delivered revised Parts One and Two in line with notes from Holmes and first-drafts of Parts Three and Four. So he’d had notes from and perhaps a meeting with Holmes in July.

04-18 Aug: Terrance on holiday, according to his cover note to Holmes; he returned from holiday to learn Holmes had extensively rewritten Morbius; on 23 Sep, Terrance’s agent formally asked for his name to be taken off the story.

06 Sep: makes notes on an idea for a putative new TV series.

≅ end of Sep (ie after 06 Sep but before 06 Oct): delivers Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen

06 Oct: working on his third Mounties novel, War Drums of the Blackfoot

17 Nov: completes a rough version of War Drums, probably delivered end of Nov

≅ end of Dec: delivers Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, published some 7.5 months later on 22 Jul 1976.

The first two Mounties books — published in January and April 1976 — don’t fit easily into this sequence but I’ll address what I think happened there in a subsequent post.

This rough timeline helps to explain one of the most striking features of the novelisation Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster: the number of things in it that aren’t in the story as broadcast. As we’ve seen in previous entries, Terrance was generally faithful to the source material, for all he might add brief explanations or soup-up the special effects.

In fact, I think he was faithful here, too. It’s just that his source wasn’t the broadcast version of the story.

We know he worked from scripts because his surviving archive includes a rehearsal script for Part One of what was then called The Secret of Loch Ness, issued ahead of the start of production. That script, which Terrance labelled “DRAFT”, is included among the PDFs on the Season 13 Blu-ray set — you are welcome. On a recent episode of the Power of 3 podcast, Richard Bignell details how the rehearsal script differs from the TV version.

Let’s take one example. In the rehearsal script, the TARDIS materialises “at a precarious angle” amid “jagged rock and dark peat pools”, and causes a few startled sheep to scatter. The Doctor emerges from the TARDIS and identifies the flora all around as heather, giving its Latin name.

Between this rehearsal script being issued and the filming of this scene on Monday, 17 March 1975, this sequence had been rewritten. Stage directions still called for “Jagged rock and dark peat pools” but the sheep were written out. What’s more, no sooner has the TARDIS materialised than it briefly turns invisible — a bit of added jeopardy and interest apparently added by director Douglas Camfield (something similar happens in the last full Doctor Who story he’d directed, The Invasion, in 1968). 

This pre-filmed material was cut together ahead of studio recording of Part One on 7 April. The camera script for that recording, with the story now entitled Terror of the Zygons, includes the scene in full, and the duration of the edited sequence: 3’ 19”. The camera script is included on the Blu-ray, and a copy of this version of the script is held in Terrance’s archive, too.

Scenes filmed on the same day as the arrival of the TARDIS were also reworked between the rehearsal script being issued and the start of filming. For example, there’s the sequence where Harry is on the shore of Loch Ness when he spots a body in the water — Munro, the radio operator of a doomed oil rig. In the rehearsal script, Harry’s arrival is observed by a tall, strong man called the Caber. Despite Harry’s efforts to help, Munro dies as a result of his ordeal and then Harry is pursued by a Zygon, described in stage directions as having a head like an octopus and a body like a manta ray. We later learn this Zygon had, until moments earlier, been disguised in human form as the Caber. 

In the version filmed and broadcast, the human-form Caber uses a rifle to shoot both Munro and Harry, killing one and wounding the other. We don’t see the Caber in Zygon form. When we see a Zygon for the first time at the end of this episode, the design was inspired by a human foetus, though with suckers like an octopus. 

The fetal Zygons, rifle-totting Caber and disappearing TARDIS are all in Terrance’s novelisation, indicating that he worked from the later camera scripts even though he was provided with the earlier drafts. At some point, he also had access to on-set photographs from the production taken on 23 April, because two images are included in The Doctor Who Monster Book.

In post-production, director Douglas Camfield decided to cut the sequence he’d filmed of the TARDIS arriving then turning invisible. Another cut was made to Part Four of the story, which begins with the Zygon spaceship taking to the air, the Doctor a prisoner inside. Originally, the Doctor called the ship an “old banger” then mocked Zygon leader Broton — who responded by stinging him.

The camera script for Part Four says this was to play out in a medium two-shot of a Zygon and the Doctor, panning right to include Broton in a medium three-shot around the control console of the Zygon ship. Once stung, the camera would tilt down, following the sinking Doctor as he succumbed to the venom. This is what’s happening in the evocative photograph in the Monster Book (and two other photographs taken on the same day) and it’s faithfully recounted on p. 99 of the novelisation, though Terrance slightly tweaked the dialogue in the camera script. 

He seems to have felt the need to foreshadow this thrilling moment, as his novelisation adds several earlier references to the Zygons’ stings, not least the detail that they can’t sting while disguised as humans (p. 77). The TV version makes no mention of stinging at all.

There are two surviving, undated versions of Terrance’s typed manuscript for the novelisation. The first is titled Doctor Who and the Secret of Loch Ness, the name on the rehearsal scripts. My guess is that Terrance was contracted to novelise the story while it was under this title — that is, ahead of the start of production. A subsequent manuscript, this time with corrections made in Terrance’s handwriting, is still titled Doctor Who and the Secret of Loch Ness but adds that the novelisation is based on the serial “Doctor Who and the Terror of the Zygons.” (The “and the” doesn’t appear in the title as broadcast.)

The title of the TV story was apparently changed to focus on the Zygons because of perceived shortcomings in the realisation of the huge cyborg Skarasen, which is revealed to be the Loch Ness monster of legend. These shortcomings weren’t an issue for the book, which retained the focus on the well-known legend. Indeed, the title of the book was changed to emphasise the Loch Ness monster rather than the secret.

Chris Achilleos’ artwork reflects this sense of what did and didn’t work in the TV production. The Zygon is a good likeness of the creature seen on screen, based on the photograph used in the Monster Book as Broton stings the Doctor. But Achilleos modified the TV version of the Skarasen, making it more animal-like, fierce and convincing.

Achilleos also returned to the format of the first 12 Target novelisations with a likeness of the Doctor’s head in stippled black and white. The Doctor’s scarf and the Skarasen’s neck break the bottom of the frame, adding a three-dimensional effect which makes the whole thing a bit more dynamic. 

The early covers (and that of The Doctor Who Monster Book) were on white backgrounds but here, as with Achilleos’s cover for Doctor Who — The Three Doctors — a radiating colour gradient fills the frame. On that earlier book, the radiating colour scheme adds to the sense of Omega’s power. Here, the concentric circles and colour scheme make this look like a Looney Toons cartoon, which rather undercuts the Doctor’s serious expression and any terror evoked by these monsters. The colour effect is so simple, I wonder if Achilleos delivered black-and-white artwork with colour applied by someone else, in an effort to save time.

(ETA: A couple of correspondents think I am wrong and that Achilleos produced the colour artwork all himself. I have been given a lead on a source to corroborate this and will investigate. More to follow...)

I bought what I thought was a first edition of the paperback which turned out, on arrival, to be a third impression reprint from 1980, with a green logo that doesn’t match the other colours of the artwork. Thanks to the generosity of donors to my Ko-fi, I then bought a first edition so I could compare the two.

This first edition has a pale blue logo, brighter than the blue at the top of the artwork but in sympathy with it, while clashing with the orange that frames the Doctor. Clashing “complimentary colours” (primary blue with secondary orange, yellow with purple, red with green) make an image seem brighter — it’s an effect used by the Impressionists. So the original, blue title is brighter and more arresting, the later green version more muted.

The cover art on the latter edition is an nth-generation reproduction, darker and with less fine detail than the original. It’s the same artwork and design and yet overall less pop.

Both editions comprise 128 pages but the first edition is notably thicker, being printed on better quality paper, and is 2mm taller. I need to read up again on the mechanics of reissuing titles but the height discrepancy suggests that the later edition is a reissue rather than reprint, with the cover and spine removed from unsold, pristine stock and a new cover applied to create what was considered to be a whole new book. If I remember rightly, the process involved trimming the pages to remove any scuffed or bent edges, hence the slightly smaller book.

If so, that affects any reckoning of numbers of copies produced. The dead useful Doctor Who Toybox says (if you put “Loch Ness” in the search box) that the 1978 second impression of Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, i.e. the first version with the green logo, was published in two print runs, first of 3,000 then of 10,000 copies. A print run of 12,000 copies followed in 1979 and one of 15,000 in 1980 (one of the latter my copy). There were then print runs of 15,000 in 1982, 20,000 in 1983 and 10,000 in 1986. But the missing 2mm suggests that at least some of these were not wholly new books but reissued stock. That would mean we can’t simply add up these different figures to get total copies printed (which would be 30,000 1977-80 and a further 45,000 1982-86). 

Besides, books printed isn’t the same thing as books sold. I’ll have more to say on numbers sold in due course…

The back-cover blurb is the same on both these editions. “DOCTOR WHO” and “ZYGONS” both feature twice, both times all in capitals, but “the monster” is lower case despite the emphasis given to it in the book’s title. “The Doctor, Sarah and UNIT” are mentioned, but not poor Harry Sullivan — a bona fide companion though this is his final trip in the TARDIS. He made his final onscreen appearance on 13 December 1975, just a month before this book was published and long after this blurb was approved.

Both books cite the Writers’ Guild Award won by the Doctor Who script-writers on 12 March 1975, a long time ago by the time of the 1980 reprint. (I wonder if any young readers thought it applied to the most recent run of episodes on TV…)

Inside, the first edition explains “THE CHANGING FACE OF DOCTOR WHO” but the 1980 reprint does not. The first edition lists all the Target novelisations to that point except for Doctor Who and the Giant Robot — once again, the late addition of that book to the schedule seems to mean it got missed from subsequent lists. It’s also missing from the much longer list of available titles in the 1980 reprint, but that skips a load of others titles, too, including Terrance’s Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders and Doctor Who — The Three Doctors. 

The title page in both editions gives the name of the book (well, d’uh) and tells us it is “Based on the BBC serial “Doctor Who and the Terror of the Zygons by Robert Banks Stewart by arrangement with the British Broadcasting Corporation”. This is followed by Terrance’s name in capital letters. In the first edition, the Target logo appears at the foot of the page. In the later edition, there’s a smaller logo with a caption saying that Target is the paperback division of WH Allen and Co. I bet there was a long, involved meeting to decide that change.

Over the page, the indicia is different, the later version acknowledging that it is a “third reprint” but the blue-logo one not saying that it is a first edition — which doesn’t half cause some bother when tracking down first editions. The details given of the publisher are also different. Target, originally an imprint of Tandem, had been born at 14 Gloucester Road, London SW7 and was still there when this book was first published. By 1980, Target was at 44 Hill Street, W1. But the printer remained the same on both editions: Richard Clay (the Chaucer Press)  in Bungay, Suffolk.

The only other difference between these two editions is the interior back page: readers are invited to write in for a free badge and to be entered into a draw to win free books, but with Target having moved offices there’s a different address in each edition. In all, eight of the 128 internal pages are different in to the two editions, but everything else — the contents page, the chapters — are identical. My guess is that the printers simply pulled out lithographic or photographic plates from storage and set the presses running, but were able to make amendments to the first and last pages to update postal addresses and credits.

The books changed with new editions — the look and feel of them, the technicalities of head office. Yet what Terrance wrote in May 1975 remained unchanged, a constant through the years.

At last we come to what Terrance actually wrote. That incldues the return of a character created for The Three Doctors. There’s booze, cigs and swearing, and two lead characters get naked.

But that is still to come in part two.

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These long, detailed posts as I work my way through the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks take a bit of time and effort, not least to get hold of the books under scrutiny. You can support the cause by making a small donation.

The Doctor Who Monster Book, by Terrance Dicks

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

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

Basically, how does it work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“TERRANCE DICKS

The 2nd Doctor Who Monster Book


150,000 sold of No 1” (p. 425)

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

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

In addition, Terrance tells us at the start that, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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Next episode: Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster.