Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, by Terrance Dicks

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

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

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

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

Photo care of the Black Archive

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

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

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

Photo care of the Black Archive

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

Photo care of the Black Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DOCTOR WHO:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This, we’re then told, is Ahmad’s,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

Athens

View from our hotel

Back from a nice week in hot, sunny Athens. As the Dr said, it's been fascinating to see what the kids made of the place and how different it is when seen through their eyes. They were wowed by the Acropolis and the Acropolis Museum. A morning on a nice beach or somewhere shady to run around was as big a win as the culture. Trying a new fizzy drink - Loux Sour Cherry - or the delighted response from waiters when, unbidden, they said "thank you" in Greek, was all part of the adventure.

Highlights of the trip for me were the things that engaged them. That includes staff at Manchester Airport spotting my son's sunflower lanyard and quietly, conscientiously making things a little easier for us all. Aegean Airlines were incredibly accommodating with families, such as ensuring that children on the flights got fed first and providing colouring books and card games. 

Really, there was only one sour note to the trip. The Acropolis was very crowded and the narrow path up to it a bit of an ordeal, with many other tourists not behaving well - shoving past my daughter, standing on my feet so often I had to wash blood from my sandals, and ignoring ropes and signs closing off various bits of the site. It may just be that our pre-booked, mid-morning slot coincided with all the coach trips.

Other sites - the Temple of Olympian Zeus, Hadrian's library, the Greek Agora and its Roman counterpart - were bustling but less of a scrum. In contrast, we ducked into the Museum of Modern Greek Culture to escape from the sun and had the place pretty much to ourselves. It was a revelation, the various themed exhibits holding the children's attention for two hours.

I was wowed by the Acropolis Museum, where me and Lady Vader completed a treasure hunt of different representations of Athena and then had various games and activities. For the latter, we found a quiet corner on the second floor, where there's the awe-inspiring recreation of the Parthenon frieze and other ornamentation made up from original stonework and casts of the purloined pieces. 

As we sat there, passing tourists kept voicing the same thought: once you see this incredible display, with the windows looking out on the Acropolis itself, it's hard to fathom how the British Museum can possibly object to sending its own bits of the Parthenon home.

(The Lord of Chaos was much taken by the Lego version of the Acropolis on display on the floor below, where a pith-helmeted Lord Elgin can be seen nicking some of the sculptures - boo, hiss). 

For all we explored the ancient past, we were also tracing more recent history - the corner of Syntagma Square where, in 2000, I first met the Dr's aunt and uncle (then residents of Athens, now sadly deceased), the bit of Monastiraki where in 2007 we whiled away an afternoon with my parents in a bar overlooking the Agora. I first went to Athens on a fancy school trip in 1989, when I was the same age as my son is now. Our trip to the Museum of Modern Greek Culture made me especially sensitive, I think, to that idea of interwoven, personal history.

At the same time, the coach-loads of tourists from America, Australia, Japan and wherever else make a different case. The Acropolis Museum focuses on the Greek history and the birthplace of democracy but there's little on why so many modern states trace a line back to this city, and how the ideas originated in Athens have been adapted. Uncivilised by Subhadra Das points out that ancient Athenians wouldn't recognise our modern political systems as "democratic"; I'd have liked to have seen more of the present in reading the past.

House of Simon

But the future was also on my mind. As we wandered the Agora looking for the House of Simon, in the shelter of the gnarled olive trees stood individual staff members on duty. Several had fire extinguishers with them. At the end of May, it was a knackering 30℃ and the full heat of the summer is still to come. 

A history at once personal, universal and so very fragile.

In conversation with Fatima Manji

On Saturday 11 March, I'll be in conversation with award-winning author and broadcaster Fatima Manji about her book Hidden Heritage: Rediscovering Britain's relationship with the Orient, as part of Macfest. 

This free event takes place online from 2 to 3.30 pm. For more details and to book tickets, see the Eventbrite listing for Hidden Heritage: A Fresh Persective. Blurb as follows: 

Fatima Manji will be exploring and answering some of the following questions: Why was there a Turkish mosque adorning Britain’s most famous botanic garden in the eighteenth century? How did a pair of Persian-inscribed cannons end up in rural Wales? And who is the Moroccan man depicted in a long-forgotten portrait hanging in a west London stately home?

Throughout Britain’s museums, civic buildings and stately homes, relics can be found that reveal the diversity of pre-twentieth-century Britain and expose the misconceptions around modern immigration narratives.

In her journey across Britain exploring cultural landmarks, Fatima Manji searches for a richer and more honest story of a nation struggling with identity and the legacy of the empire.

‘A timely, brilliant and very brave book’ Jerry Brotton, author of This Orient Isle.

 

CERN: Science Fiction and the Future of Detection and Imaging

I've had the most amazing few days in Geneva as a guest of Ideas Square at CERN. It's the first time I've been out of the UK in three years, and I was jangly with nerves for a good week before setting off; I'll be jangly with excitement about it all for some time to come.

During lockdown, my friend Dr Una McCormack roped me into some online sessions where sci-fi writers (hello!) were brought in to help / hinder the work being done by students from round the world in attempting to imagine the future impact of technology. This week, a bunch of us assembled in person, got a tour of the Large Hadron Collider and other CERN bits and bobs, and had lots of really interesting chat about, well, everything really. There was high-end physics, and high-end gossip, and high-end physics gossip.

I've returned home with pages and pages of notes in my notebook - bits of new ideas, lists of things to read or look into, random bits of detail. For example, one thing that boggled my brain was that work on constructing the CMS detector (one of a number of detection instruments located round the Large Hadron Collider) was delayed by the discovery of Roman ruins on site which then had to be painstakingly excavated. I'm taken by the Nigel Kneale-ish thought of ancient ghosts being picked up by the sensitive detectors...

Then there was the fact that when building this underground facility the team had to dig through a subterranean river. To do so, they dug down to the level of the river, then froze it and dug through the ice, constructing a concrete-lined shaft through the middle before letting the ice thaw. Ingenious!

And how extraordinary, how liberating, to discover that in visiting the CMS we had crossed the border into France without a moment's thought, let alone all that mucky business with passports. Coming home, there weren't enough ground crew to let us off the plane so we sat stewing for 45 minutes. There must be a better way of doing things, I thought. Which was exactly the sort of thing these few days have been about.

Here are a few pictures...

View of mountains from CERN hostel

Geneva tram, for my father-in-law

More mountains, plus v hot writer

Tour of the CMS facility;
photo of detector like a gothic rose window

Going underground

Warning signs to give one pause

The LHC creates a magnetic field;
look at its effect on these paperclips!

Doctor U and her plucky assistant

New hat / cool museum

Hot, hot evening, and yet snow on the mountains

Marie Curie clearly delighted to meet me

Very heavy lead,
so dense it would shatter to dust if dropped

Arty reconstruction of CMS, using mirrors
 (cf Maxtible in The Evil of the Daleks)

Old-skool, pretty wiring in old device

Where the web,
and so much of my life, began

Cool retro tech in a garden

More cool, retro tech

The Champions
(ie me, Una McCormack and Matthew De Abaitua)

Van Gogh's paintings in Doctor Who

Vincent Van Gogh was born on this day in 1853, and this evening my clever friend Emily Cook at Doctor Who Magazine has organised a special online watch of 2010 Doctor Who episode Vincent and the Doctor, with tweeting along by writer Richard Curtis, script editor Emma Freud and stars Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Tony Curran.

The Lord of Chaos has greatly enjoyed the last two tweet-alongs, but I suspect tonight he'll want to know more about the paintings featured in the episode. So I have made a list.

1. Wheat Field with Crows, July 1890

The episode begins with Van Gogh painting what some have said is his last work, a wheat field with crows. We then cut to the Musee D'Orsay in Paris, in the present day, where the picture is part of a special exhibition of Van Gogh's work - and presumably on loan from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

2. Self-portrait with straw hat, summer 1887

As Bill Nighty's unnamed art expert expounds, we see more pictures in the exhibition. This self-portrait is now in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

3. Olive Trees, 1888

The art expert passes a screen on which can be seen this sketch of olive trees, now held by the Musée des Beaux-Arts Tournai in Tournai, Belgium.

4. Road with Men Walking etc. 17 June 1890

The screen changes, to show this sketch contained in a letter Van Gogh wrote on 17 June 1890, listed as "Road with Men Walking, Carriage, Cypress, Star, and Crescent Moon" in the collections of the Van Gogh Museum.

5. The Starry Night, June 1889

Now the Doctor and Amy breeze into shot, and we get glances at a range of paintings on display - which we'll get clearer views of later. The Starry Night, which will be a pivotal one later in the episode, is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

6. Still Life: Vase with 12 Sunflowers, c. 1888-89

Across the gallery, we get a glimpse of this, one of numerous paintings of sunflowers by Van Gogh. This one is now in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich.

7. Wheat Field with Cypresses, late June 1889

Back in the main part of the gallery, there's this wheat field which is now owned by the Met in New York.

8. La Berceuse, December 1888 to early 1889

Next to it is one of the five portraits Van Gogh produced of Augustine-Alix Pellicot Roulin, wife of the postmaster at Arles. I'm not sure I've got the right one of the five - this one is from the Met collection.

9. Road with Cypress and Star, May 1890

Then there's this, one of a number of paintings of the same scene - as sketched in the letter (image 4, above). This seems to be the right one, with the distinctive curves of the tree and green patch of grass in the road at the bottom centre. This one is from the Kröller-Müller Museum, in the Netherlands.

10. Siesta, or Noon: Rest from Work (after Millet),January 1890

Next, there's this famous one of a sleeping couple, today in the Musee D'Orsay.

11. Wheat Field with Thunderclouds, mid to late July 1890

This one is next is thought to be the first of the sequence that culminated in Wheat Field with Crows (image 1). I wasn't sure at first as the version on screen seems to be a different shape and the clouds more grey, but the triangle of green in the middle seems to match exactly. It's now in the Van Gogh Museum.

12. Portrait of Dr Gachet (second version), 1890

This is one of two portraits of Dr Paul Gachet,  both painted in June 1890. This one is in the Musee D'Orsay collection.

13. The Yellow House, September 1888

Showing 2 Place Lamartine in Arles, this is the house Van Gogh rented - and shared for nine weeks with Paul Gaugin. The painting is now in the Van Gogh Museum.

14. Church at Auvers, June 1890

We focus on Church at Auvers because - in the episode - there's a monster in the window. The painting is now in the Musee D'Orsay. The art expert tells the Doctor it was painted between 1 and 3 June 1890.

15. Bedroom in Arles, 1888

Next the painting of the church hangs Bedroom in Arles, which the episode later recreates as a set - a joke surely lifted from the 1991 Guinness ad. The painting is now in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum.

16. Blossoming Almond Tree, February 1890

Shocked by the monster in the church window, the Doctor dashes past three paintings hanging together. We see them in a blur, but get a better look later on. This one of a blossoming almond tree is in the Van Gogh Museum.

17. Portrait of Marguerite Gachet at the Piano, June 1890

This is a portrait of Marguerite, daughter of Dr Paul Gachet (see in image 12).  It's in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland.

18. Irises, May 1889

This is now in the collection of the Getty, Los Angeles. This is the last of the paintings shown in the pre-titles sequence.

19. Cafe at Night, 1888

On arriving in 1890, the Doctor and Amy look for Van Gogh and Amy matches this painting, seen in her book of postcards from the exhibition, to the exterior set.  This is the cafe terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, and the painting is now in the collections of the Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands.

When we meet Van Gogh in the episode, he is arguing over the merits of his self-portrait with straw hat (image 2). When he talks to the Doctor and Amy, he also unrolls some of the canvas for Siesta (image 10).

Amy and the Doctor follow Vincent home, and Amy looks at her postcard of the Bedroom (image 15) before entering Vincent's house. The house contains many of the pictures we've also seen - the Yellow House, both Gachet portraits, the apple blossom - as well a still life of flowers in a vase with a red background that Van Gogh will later paint over in the episode. There is one we've not seen before:

20. Prisoners' Round, after Doré, 1890.

This was inspired by an 1872 engraving by Gustave Doré of the exercise yard at Newgate Prison in London. Van Gogh's painting is now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow.

There are also various sketches pinned around Van Gogh's home which I've not yet identified.

21. Still Life with Basket and 6 Oranges, March 1888

The Doctor chides Van Gogh for using the above as a tea tray. It's now held in a private collection.

22. Self-portrait as Painter, Dec 1887-Feb 1888

Finally, when the Doctor goes to see Van Gogh in his bedroom (the set designed to match image 15), this self-portrait is on one wall. It's now in the Van Gogh Museum.

After this, Amy fills Van Gogh's garden with sunflowers, as per his famous still lives. We then see him paint the Church at Auvers (image 14), and he shares with Amy and the Doctor his view of the night sky (an animated version of image 5). We return to the exhibition in the present day, giving us a better look at paintings glimpsed in the pre-titles sequence.