The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, by Terrance Dicks and George Underwood

For the time being, this will be the last of my long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks. I need to focus on some other projects, not least my forthcoming biography of Terrance, which is due for publication later this year. Thanks for your ongoing interest and support.

The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book was the third of three books by Terrance published by Target on 16 December 1976. I’ve addressed them in the order I think they were written: the manuscript of the revised version of The Making of Doctor Who had been approved by 22 April that year; Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars must have been delivered by the end of May, given my estimated 7.5-month lead time for novelisations; then there was this relatively late commission.

The evidence for that lateness includes the fact that Target did not feature The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book in lists of forthcoming publications such as the one published in fanzine TARDIS, vol 1, no. 8 (July 1976), which cites every other title planned for 12 months:

The Dinosaur Book is also missing from the list of other Doctor Who books available featured in Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars; this is not a list solely of novelisations because The Making of Doctor Who is included. 

The suggestion is that when this novelisation was in lay out, Target still weren’t sure whether the Dinosaur Book would be ready in time for publication on the same day.

This is also the first, and only, Doctor Who book written by Terrance that does not have his name on the cover: he is credited on the title page inside. Given his renown by this point, as script editor and writer on the series, and author of 13 novelisations as well as other Doctor Who titles, my suspicion is that this is evidence of rush.

Then there’s what George Underwood, illustrator of The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, told me when I interviewed him last month:

“I looked it up in my job book. It was [done] in August [1976].” 

In that single month, George produced all 32 illustrations: 28 double-page spreads and three single-page images in monochrome pencil, plus the cover art in acrylic colour (the pale blue background done with an airbrush). 

“Man, the hours I must have put into it!”

The limited time in which he completed this colossal undertaking suggests a late commission for the book as a whole. For comparison, I’ve worked on some books where we talked to the illustrator more than a year before publication.

The tight turnaround surely explains why the book wasn’t illustrated by Chris Achilleos, already busy producing book covers for Target. I put that to George:

“Yeah, Chris did a lot of Doctor Who stuff. I’m sure they’d have gone to him first. Then they needed someone else, so they’d have asked around and my agent at the time must have sold me to them. They decided to use me."

George had some history with dinosaurs, having previously provided the mind-bending artwork for My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair... But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows (1968), the debut album of Marc Bolan’s band, Tyrannosaurus Rex.

“That had creatures in it but there I used Gustave Dore’s engravings as inspiration. So this was different.”

He’d also produced artwork for his friend David Bowie, such as the rear sleeve painting for the album David Bowie (1969, now better known as Space Oddity), and colour hand-tinting Brian Ward’s black-and-white photography for the covers of albums Hunky Dory (1971) and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972). He also produced gatefold artwork for a planned Ziggy-related live album that ultimately wasn’t realised.

In the summer of 1976, George was a jobbing freelance illustrator and took work as it came.

“I was doing a lot of commercial work just to pay the rent, so I was happy when this came in. Book covers and illustrations were much more enjoyable to work on than advertising, where often an agency came up with awful ideas you then had to solve. I can come up with my own ideas! I didn’t have much to do with the negotiations. The money was probably okay.”

Having been taken on by Target,

“I’d have gone into the office [at 123 King Street in Hammersmith] at least once. I worked for [art directors] Brian Boyle and Dom Rodi on other things as well, but I don’t remember which of them was on this.” 

No designer is credited in the book itself, but some sources credit Frank Ainscough, who later oversaw the Doctor Who Discovers series of books; George didn’t recognise that name. This suggests that Rodi oversaw the Dinosaur Book but followed the style Boyle established in The Doctor Who Monster Book (where he is credited).

George told me that he “may have met” Target’s children’s books editor Elizabeth Godfray but had no direct dealings with writer Terrance Dicks. 

“The BBC sent me some great [photographic] shots of the Doctor in various poses as reference. I had to find ways to manipulate those and fit them into the backgrounds with the monsters, to make it look as if the Doctor was there. That was important, to give the right sense of scale.”

When Terrance worked on The Doctor Who Monster Book, he sourced photographs from the BBC himself and wrote his copy to fit them. He seems not to have been involved in commissioning artwork, such as the cover. Indeed, in several interviews Terrance said he’d sometimes be asked by editors what he wanted on the covers of his books, and never knew what to say.

I asked George if he’d been given much of a brief for the illustrations in the Dinosaur Book; I wondered if he was told something like, for example with the spread pp. 38-39, “We see a Polacanthus, like the one on p. 32 of the Ladybird Dinosaurs.” But George said:

“Not that I remember. And I remember doing quite a lot of research myself, checking out other illustrators’ versions of dinosaurs. I already had some reference books at home, encyclopaedias and didn’t the Reader’s Digest do stuff as well? For that particular job, I might have gone out and bought a book on dinosaurs but I’m sure I had some at home which had been given to my children."

On the Love in the Time of Chasmosaurus site, Marc Vincent identified the two key sources for George’s artwork in The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book: Album of Dinosaurs written by Tom McGowen and illustrated by Rod Ruth (Rand McNally, 1972) and Dinosaurs written by Colin Douglas and illustrated by BH Robinson (Ladybird Books, 1974). There is a full LITC post on The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book. 

As that post says, some of the images in the Dinosaur Book are very like the sources they’re drawn from:

Cover of Album of Dinosaurs (1974)
art by Rod Ruth
 

“Tyrannosaurs rex”, in
The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book,
art by George Underwood
after Rod Ruth

Or, see the Stegosaurus here:

Stegosaurus and Antrodemus
by BH Robinson from
Dinosaurs (Ladybird, 1974)

“Allosaurus v Stegosaurus” in
The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book
Art by George Underwood
after BH Robinson

George openly acknowledged this in a 2016 interview:

“That was the only way I could do it. It’s not like there were any walking around my back garden at that time. Any artist who does a dinosaur book has to look at what’s been done before. It’s impossible to make anything up.” (George Underwood, interviewed by Graham Kibble-White, “Scary Monsters”, The Essential Doctor Who — Adventures in History (June 2016), p. 91.

Of course, he was under extraordinary pressure to deliver a lot of work in a short amount of time. And he wasn’t alone in this; as we’ve seen in previous posts, Chris Achilleos appropriated material from other artists in his cover art for Target Books, such as Daleks from the comic TV Century 21 and Omega’s hands from an issue of The Fantastic Four. I’ve spoken to a few artists who say this sort of thing was quite common in commercial illustration.

But look at this example:

Tyrannosaurus rex
by Rod Ruth
Album of Dinosaurs (1972)

“Fighting Tyrannosaurus”
The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book
Art by George Underwood
in part after Rod Ruth

See what George also adds: another Tyrannosaurus of matching type, but from the opposite angle, and a curled up Anatosaurus — consistent with his standing Anatosaurus on pp. 26-27. If he uses the same posture, he changes skin texture, tone and other details. Elsewhere, he changes posture to a greater or lesser extent, or provides wholly new compositions.

George also supplied his own characteristic features, such as the “pie-crust” spines seen on these Anatosaurus and other dinosaurs in the book (and noted by Mark Vincent as distinctive). Then there are his unique creatures:

“Compsognathus”
The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book
Art by George Underwood

This portrait of Compsognathus seems to be entirely George’s own creation, as he explained to me:

“It’s not very different from a modern lizard. They’d sent me that photograph of the Doctor in kneeling position, and that led what I could do. Sometimes you just had to make it up. Especially the colouring.” 

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

*

George wasn't the only one who had to work quickly: Terrance had lots of other work on at the time. As well as the two books published on the same day as this one, he wrote an episode of the TV series Space: 1999. The treatment for this, then called Brainstorm, is dated 4 March 1976 and the final shooting script — renamed The Lambda Factor — is dated 6 August, with a series of amendments made during September and October as it entered production.

His next novelisation, Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters, was published on 20 January 1977 so, based on my estimated lead time of 7.5 months, was delivered around the end of June 1976. He followed this with Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, presumably delivered at the end of August as it was published on 24 March 1977.

What’s more, on 22 July 1976, Terrance sent an extensive pitch for a non Doctor Who project to Carola Edmonds at Tandem Books. In his covering letter, he said that he would be away on holiday until mid-August. In summary:

4 March — Treatment for Space:1999 episode Brainstorm

22 April — MS of The Making of Doctor Who approved by the publisher

≅ end of May — delivers Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars

≅ end of June — delivers Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters

22 July — synopses and sample chapters for original book project for Tandem; heads off on holiday

6 August — “Final” shooting script for Space: 1999 episode The Lambda Factor (presumably delivered before 22 July but now approved by production team) 

≅ end of August — delivers Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth (presumably written on holiday)

Somewhere into this we must fit The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, a non-fiction title entailing research as well as writing. I’ve plenty of experience in typing multiple projects at once and the prospect of squeezing a whole extra book into the above schedule doesn’t half make my head swim.

Can we narrow down any further when Terrance wrote this book? Given that it’s missing from the list published in TARDIS, I think it must have been commissioned no earlier than June 1976 and was written June-July, perhaps overlapping with Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters. 

That novelisation may have been written first, and perhaps even inspired this new book. This is all highly speculative, but my current line of thought is as follows:

A number of things may have inspired The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book. First, The Doctor Who Monster Book, published just before Christmas 1975, sold extremely well, Target boasting 150,000 sales by summer 1977 (Bookseller, 30 July 1977, p. 425). By the summer of 1976, Terrance and his publishers would have known it had been a success. If they could produce a new book in a similar format in time for Christmas 1976, they might replicate that success.

What would this new book entail? Well, The Doctor Who Monster Book focused on the fictional monsters of the TV series. The follow-up would focus on real-life monsters. Dinosaurs are popular with children anyway, so a Doctor Who dinosaur book would surely have wide appeal. A book children might buy for themselves, and a book an adult would buy for a child they knew (or suspected) liked Doctor Who, dinosaurs or both.

Terrance already understood the crossover appeal of dinosaurs. It was the basis on which, as script editor, he commissioned the TV story Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974). His eldest son Stephen remembers being taken by his dad to see the dinosaurs at London’s Natural History Museum, as well as to see the film One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975) — one of the first projects on which actor Jon Pertwee worked after leaving Doctor Who. 

Perhaps the response of his children to these trips inspired Terrance to suggest a Doctor Who dinosaur book. Perhaps someone else came up with the idea, to which he was receptive.

Then there was the format. The Doctor Who Monster Book was a 64-page “magazine format” title, the colour cover artwork reproduced in a pull-out poster, and the rest of the book comprising black and white text and illustrations. That’s the format of the Dinosaur Book as published, too.

But The Doctor Who Monster Book comprised photographs from TV stories alongside repurposed artwork by Chris Achilleos from the covers of novelisations (and one piece by Peter Brooke). This included cover artwork from four books not yet published when the Monster Book came out. 

It occurs to me that the initial idea may have been to do something similar with the Dinosaur Book. That’s because, around the time that this new book was devised, Achilleos was commissioned for his third cover to feature prehistoric creatures: the plesiosaur on Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters follows a Tyrannosaurus rex on Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters and the kklaking pterodactylus on Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion.

What’s more, the novelisation Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils is about (fictional) creatures from the same time as the dinosaurs, and Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster has a dinosaur-like antagonist (a fact referenced in the Dinosaur Book as published). Did Achilleos or someone at Target realise they had five pieces of artwork that would suit a dinosaur-themed Doctor Who book?

Dinosaurs had appeal in their own right. But also, as with the Monster Book, each piece of reused artwork would, effectively, advertise an existing novelisation, increasing sales all round. Ker-ching.

I think that makes sense as the starting point for this project. But, given the late commission and the problems experienced the previous year on The Doctor Who Monster Book, it would have soon become evident that there wasn’t time to clear the rights for a wealth of photographs from the TV series. Instead, they would need to increase the proportion of or entirely use new artwork.

Achilleos was the obvious choice to provide this additional work, alongside his existing dinosaur-related covers. That would be consistent, Target clearly had a good, long-standing relationship with him, and his work seems to have been in favour with the production team on Doctor Who and other parts of the BBC (where I’m aware of complaints about artwork, it involved the work of other artists). 

At the same time, I can see why Achilleos, offered the chance to produce almost a whole book’s worth of new illustrations in a single month, politely declined. Having met Chris a few times, I can well imagine his pained expression.

In that case, the decision was made to find another artist to turn round this project quickly. And that fits with what George Underwood told me, above.

*

Whatever the case, Terrance had to research and write this new book pretty quickly. We don’t know the sources he worked from, but I wonder if taking his son to the Natural History Museum was part of the legwork on this book. 

The 52-page Ladybird Dinosaurs book keeps us waiting: after spreads on early life in the sea, amphibians and early reptiles, life in the sea and the air, and then modern humans discovering footprints and “bones” (not fossils) from which we can piece together the forms of ancient animals, the first dinosaurs appear on pp. 26-27, exactly halfway through. 

Terrance gets down to business much more quickly. The introduction (pp. 6-7) begins with a breezy, 

“Hello! I’m the Doctor. If you’ve been following my adventures, you’ll know I’ve met some pretty fearsome monsters in my travels around the Universe.”

This direct address to the reader — implying that the Doctor knows we are watching him on TV — immediately makes us part of the adventure to follow. The Doctor mentions some of these monsters he’s encountered — Daleks, Cybermen, Ice Warriors and the Loch Ness Monster — then says,

“You once had more than your share of monsters right here on Earth.”

A pedant (hello) might point out that the Doctor had, at the time this was written, encountered Daleks, Cybermen, Ice Warriors and the Loch Ness Monster on Earth. But he’s talking native species, conjuring a lost world quickly and vividly. 

“Huge, terrifying creatures with savage fangs and claws. Monsters of all shapes and sizes, on land, in the seas, and even in the air.”

This “Age of the Monsters” ended before the arrival of human beings — “Perhaps it’s just as well!” — but, he says, left traces:

“fossils, bones, even footprints, and your scientists have done a pretty good job of reconstructing what they looked like.”

That “pretty good job” nicely gets across the idea that all knowledge is provisional, and that the way we imagine the dinosaurs has developed over time — and may yet still change. A nice bit of hedge-betting, too. And then, after just this single page of set-up and what I think is the Doctor’s signature in Tom Baker’s handwriting, we go meet the dinosaurs.

“The Age of the Dinosaurs” boasts the heading of pp. 8-9 in big capital letters. The Doctor stands, hands in pockets, just in front of the TARDIS, beaming at the wondrous sight of two great Apatosauruses in a lake. 

“Here we are in the Age of the Dinosaurs,” says the Doctor as tour guide, landing us right in their midst. There’s then some further hedge-betting:

“We’ve travelled back one hundred and eighty million years in Time — give or take a million of two!” (p. 8).

The Doctor explains that we’ll need to hop back and forward in time a bit on this tour to “see a good selection.” The language he uses is interesting; while some dinosaurs are ferocious, these first ones on our tour are “very peaceful, placid”, that last word as per Part Two of Invasion of the Dinosaurs:

DOCTOR WHO:

Apatosaurus, commonly known as the Brontosaurus. Large, placid and stupid. That's exactly what we need. 

The newly regenerated Fourth Doctor repeated the phrase “large, placid and stupid” in the first episode of Robot, written by Terrance, so I don’t think the use of the word here is a coincidence.

But is the joke at the end of this first spread also a coincidence? The Doctor tells us that many dinosaurs’ names are “fine old tongue twisters” (but, unlike the Ladybird Dinosaurs and most modern dinosaur books, there’s no guide to pronunciation). Then he adds:

“Still, I suppose such impressive creatures deserve impressive names. It wouldn’t seem right to call a Dinosaur Fred, or Bert…” (p. 9).

As with all licensed material, the text of this book must have been approved by the production team on TV Doctor Who, including script editor Robert Holmes. A couple of years later, he made use of the same joke in the TV series, delivered by the same Doctor:

DOCTOR WHO: What's your name?

ROMANA: Romanadvoratrelundar.

DOCTOR WHO: By the time I’ve called that out, you could be dead. I'll call you ‘Romana’.

ROMANA: I don’t like ‘Romana’.

DOCTOR WHO: It's either ‘Romana’ or ‘Fred’.

ROMANA: All right, call me ‘Fred’.

DOCTOR WHO: Good. Come on, Romana.

Robert Holmes, The Ribos Operation Part One, tx 2 September 1978

The tour continues: Coelophysis is a “little chap” who,

“Nips along on those two back legs with tail stretched out, like a kind of giant bird. His bones are hollow too, just as a bird’s are” (p. 11).

This is on the cusp of something most children now take as read: that birds evolved from the dinosaurs. Later, we’re told that while Pterodactylus “looks and acts like a bird, it’s a reptile right through” and “really isn’t a bird”, but Archaeopteryx is “a reptile that’s actually managed to grow some feathers” but will “take quite a few million years to evolve into the birds you know today” (p. 21).

In fact, the choice of dinosaurs depicted here is very of the time in which it was written. There are obviously the big names — Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus rex, Stegosaurus — and he doesn’t mention Brontosaurus, covering Apatosaurus instead as the then more accurate term. But there’s no Velociraptor of Spinosaurus, which I think are now de rigeur in dinosaur books. There are few specimens found outside the US and UK. I wonder how much the choices of specimen matched the displays at the Natural History Museum at the time.

Having introduced us to Apatosaurus, Terrance gets some narrative going: p. 13 ends with the Doctor noting that one Apatosaurus has seen something of concern. We turn the page and there’s an Allosaurus charging into view. Turn the page again, and the Apatosaurus is feasting on the neck of the poor Allosaurus. 

Next page, and we jump in time and space, to see an Allosaurus more evenly matched against a Stegosaurus. Terrance seems keen on even matches — on fair fights — and later we see Tyrannosaurus rex versus Tyrannosaurus rex, and Triceratops versus Triceratops. 

Once we get beyond “Allosaurus v Stegosaurus”, the tour jumps about quite a bit, with diversions for creatures in the air and sea. The latter includes Plesiosaurus, though notably without any mention of the Doctor meeting one of these animals in Carnival of Monsters. Indeed, beyond the introduction there is no mention of events from TV adventures; the fiction and fact are kept entirely separate.

The Doctor notes that Polacanthus has “special claim to your [ie the reader’s] interest” (p. 39) as it it is from what is now England and Northern Europe. It’s an odd bit of flag-waving, not least because the Doctor / Terrance doesn’t make the same point in the entry on Iguanodon (p. 22); he tells us that this was one of the first dinosaurs that humans knew about, but doesn’t mention that remains of it, Megalosaurus and Hylaeosaurus — the three animals for which the word “dinosaur” was originally coined — were all found in the UK.

As with his novelisations, Terrance uses everyday analogies to convey ideas simply. Apatosaurus is “as big as a train, but it’s a very slow train” (p. 12) and also as big as a herd of elephants (p. 13); Ankylosaurus is “the armoured tank of the Dinosaur world” (p. 25); Anatosaurus is the dinosaur equivalent of modern-day platypus (p. 26); Compsognathus is “hardly as big as a chicken” (p. 49). When the Doctor examines a Protoceratops egg, he asks us:

“How about one of these, lightly boiled for your breakfast?” (p. 29).

There are some odd things, too. We’re told Tyrannosaurus rex “stands a good six metres high” — metric — and “weighs nearly eight tons” — imperial (p. 42). I suspect a modern edit would get Terrance to look again at the sentence,

“One good bonk from an Ankylosaurus could send the hungry carnivore limping away” (p. 25).

But on the whole, the book gets across a lot of information — and wonder — in a concise and engaging way. It really does feel as if we’re in the company of the Doctor, and I love the idea that, just once, we get to be his companion. And then the book does something brilliant, a proper Doctor Who twist…

I said that the Ladybird Dinosaurs book doesn’t show any dinosaurs until we’re halfway through. We get just seven spreads of dinosaurs, with pp. 42-43 devoted to Archaeopteryx, and the next spread “The first mammals”, including a Megatherium shown — as per the display at the Natural History Museum and the sculpture in Crystal Palace Park — on its hind legs, reaching up to eat the branches from a tree. 

The Ladybird book then covers “More mammals”, “The first horses”, “The woolly rhinoceros” and “The wooly mammoth” — the latter shown hunted by humans. Finally, there’s a sabre-toothed-tiger.

This, I think, influenced the end section of The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, but Terrance makes it all more dramatic. First, there’s the spread “The End of the Dinosaurs”, where the Doctor — shown sat brooding beside a huge dinosaur skeleton, not entirely unlike the one in One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing — shares some theories about how dinosaurs died out. Cold temperatures, lack of appropriate food, not protecting their eggs, and some mysterious disease are all mooted. Of course, this book was published long before the Alvarez hypothesis, the scientific idea that inspired the Doctor Who story Earthshock (1982), though a line in that story echoes what the Doctor says here:

“Perhaps one day I’ll come back in the TARDIS and find out what really did happen…” (p. 53).

The next spread is devoted to Megatherium, and here the Doctor is part of the classic way of depicting this animal: he is holding the tree branch from which the great creature is feeding, while up on its hind legs. The Doctor tells us some facts, such as that this is an ancestor of the sloth, then warns us about the next specimen on the tour:

“Now it’s time to move on again. Around half a million years ago an entirely new creature was on the scene. It was the fiercest and most dangerous killer ever to walk the Earth…” (p. 55).

That’s quite a claim after Tyrannosaurus rex. We turn the page, to “An Animal Called Man”. The same gag was done later by David Attenborough in the series Life on Earth (1979): after 12 episodes observing different animals in the wild to tell the story of evolution, the 13th episode applies the same observational techniques and objective style of narration to humans in everyday, modern life. 

The next spread in the Dinosaur Book is a naked man, bare bum to the fore, spearing a Smilodon, “a giant sabre-toothed cat” which now “won’t have much to smile about” (p. 58). The next spread shows humans hunting a Mastodon clearly based on the image in the Ladybird book. The use of Megatherium, Mastodon and Smilodon suggests Terrance himself drew from the Ladybird book for this last section of the (text of the) book, but while that book is setting out chronological context, Terrance makes it a story with a twist.

Terrance used a version of this twist again in his short story, Doctor Who and the Hell Planet, published in the Daily Mirror on 31 December 1976, a fortnight after publication of this book. You can read the whole story at the Cuttings Archive. My suspicion is that this story was written to tie into and promote The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, given the connection in setting and twist, though there’s no plug for the book in the paper. 

Nerd that I am, I find myself wondering if the events of the short story occur during the tour the Doctor gives us in the Dinosaur Book, which would mean we — the reader — are there, too, a bona fide companion.

It’s a beguiling idea. In fact, Terrance ends the Dinosaur Book with the prospect that we might enjoy further adventures with the Doctor.

“Perhaps we could take another trip some time? Just keep an eye out for an old blue police box. I gather your police aren’t using them any more. So if you do see one, it’ll probably be my TARDIS… Goodbye!” (p. 64).

How brilliant, how tantalising. What an extraordinary and odd book, and how much I’ve enjoyed digging into its past. 

*

Thanks to George Underwood, to Nicholas Pegg (author of The Complete David Bowie) and to palaeontologist Dr David Hone for answering my questions in preparing this post. All errors by me. Brush your teeth.

Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks, by Terrance Dicks — I

First published in hardback and paperback on 21 October 1976, this novelisation opens with an attention-grabbing first paragraph:

“The tall white-haired man lay still as death. The girl leaning over him could find no pulse, no beat from either of his hearts. His skin was icy cold to the touch.” (p. 7)

This is the Doctor, near-dead on a couch in the TARDIS following the events of his previous, thrilling adventure. The girl — his friend Jo Grant — helpfully recounts for our benefit what’s been going on. Sometime “far into the future”, she and the Doctor had stumbled on,

“a plot to cause a space war. The Doctor discovered his old enemy the Master involved in the plot — and behind the Master were the Daleks. Although the Doctor managed to defeat the Master and prevent the war, he was seriously wounded in a Dalek ambush. I managed to get him into the TARDIS.” (p. 8)

There is no asterisk and footnote to “See Doctor Who and the Space War” by Malcolm Hulke, which was the Doctor Who novelisation published directly before this one — on 23 September. And that’s probably just as well, because Jo’s summary is not at all what happens at the end of that book. There is no Dalek ambush; the Doctor is in perfect health when he leaves in the TARDIS.

In part, I think the mismatch is because Mac and Terrance both worked from scripts, not the stories as broadcast. But working through this discrepancy is revealing of other things, too.

Doctor Who and the Space War is based on a 1973 TV story called Frontier in Space, which was written by Malcolm Hulke and script edited by Terrance. The Daleks appear in the final episode but depart long before the end. They are not even on the same planet when the last few scenes take place so there is not even a chance of an ambush. Instead, in the closing moments, the Master confronts and tries to shoot the Doctor. The Doctor switches on a machine that makes nearby Ogrons think that a monster is attacking. In the confusion, the Master’s hand is knocked just as he fires his gun.

In Hulke’s script for the episode, this meant that the Master entirely missed the Doctor. The Master then ran off, pursued by other characters. The Doctor, in perfect health, decided not to follow, telling Jo that they needed to prioritise going after the Daleks. We were to see them both enter the TARDIS, it would dematerialise and the credits would roll.

This was how the scene was recorded on 31 October 1972. But then producer Barry Letts decided that the end of the story needed reworking, not least because the monster had not been realised well. Terrance, as script editor, was tasked with reworking the sequence. He was able to add new material so long as it involved solely the Doctor and Jo. Actors Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning recorded this new material on 22 January 1973, on the same day as recording Episode One of the next story to be broadcast, Planet of the Daleks.

In the revised and broadcast version, when the Doctor switches on his machine and the Ogrons react, we don’t see to what. They bump into the Master but his shot now hits the Doctor, who falls to the ground. As the others rush off, Jo leans over the prone Doctor, amazed to discover that he is still alive; jogging the Master’s arm meant it was only a glancing blow. Jo helps the Doctor to his feet and into the TARDIS. We see the interior, with the gravely wounded Doctor on his feet at the console, sending a telepathic message to the Time Lords to ask for help in pursuing the Daleks.

In novelising his own TV story, Hulke worked from the camera scripts — ie the last versions used in recording of the episode in October 1972. But these, obviously, included the monster, and the Doctor not being hit. What’s more, Hulke further amended the closing moments of the story to address something else. 

Due to the untimely death of actor Roger Delgado in June 1973, Frontier in Space had been his final onscreen appearance as the Master. On screen, he is rather lost in the confusion of the amended scene, but it wasn’t much of an exit for such a significant character, played by such a well-liked man. In the novelisation, Hulke gives Delgado a proper send off.

As per the script, the Doctor working the machine makes the Ogrons see a monster — Mac describes it as a “giant, Ogron-eating lizard, rearing up its great head”, not the pink fabric bag featured in recording. The Ogrons rush off, bumping into the Master so that he drops his gun — which the Doctor now picks up. The Master, his “face contorted with fear”, asks if the Doctor will shoot him. Jo says he can’t, not in cold blood, but the Doctor ushers her into the TARDIS. He has to tell her twice before she complies.

The two Time Lords are now alone, one at the mercy of the other. The Master thinks the Doctor will shoot. It’s a tense moment as we turn to the very last page of the book, where the Doctor says that he won’t kill his old enemy. He should really take him prisoner but has to get after the Daleks. So he throws the gun harmlessly to one side.

“The Master grinned. ‘Perhaps we shall meet again, Doctor.’

‘Yes, perhaps we shall.’

The Doctor closed the door of the TARDIS. The Master watched as it dematerialised. Then he went back to his big table and started to collect his star charts and other papers. ‘Oh well,’ he said to himself, ‘there’s always tomorrow.’” (Doctor Who and the Space War, by Malcolm Hulke, p. 142).

It’s a lovely send-off, perfectly capturing Delgado’s Master and the relationship with Pertwee’s Doctor. That last line is funny yet bittersweet if we know that there wasn’t a tomorrow, and the two never met again. What a deft bit of writing. 

Of course, it doesn’t match what happens at the start of Planet of the Daleks — on screen or in the book. As broadcast, the first episode begins by reprising the closing moments of Frontier in Space, ie the revised ending that Terrance wrote. Our first sight is of the Doctor lying on the floor outside the TARDIS having just been shot, with Jo leaning over him. Amazed he is still alive, she helps him to his feet and through the door. Inside, he sends his telepathic message, then collapses across the console. Jo finds him somewhere to lie down: a pull-out bed rather than a couch. 

Terrance keeps that opening shot — the Doctor lying prone, Jo leaning over him — but simplifies the action by having this happen inside the TARDIS, the telepathic message already sent. This means he doesn’t have to explain where the TARDIS is when the Doctor is lying outside it. He can quickly bring us up to speed on what’s happened and concentrate on what happens next.

This simplification of action may explain why he has the Doctor wounded by an ambush of Daleks — the antagonists in the story to follow — and not being shot by the Master, who doesn’t feature in what’s to come.

The alternative is that Terrance didn’t recall his own rewrite of the closing scene of Frontier in Space. Hulke — his friend and sometime neighbour — might have reminded him, if they’d consulted one another in writing their novelisations. But it doesn’t look as though they compared notes. Other examples include the fact that Terrance is vague about the setting of his novelisation beyond it being, “far into the future”  (pp. 7-8), while Mac’s opening sentence is definitive: “The year 2540.”

But then why wasn’t the discrepancy between the end of Hulke’s novelisation and the start of Terrance’s picked up by the editorial team at Target? 

I wonder if, in fact, the brief from the publisher was not to collaborate, to ensure that each book could stand on its own. Neither book features a plug for the other, either in a footnote or among back-page ads. 

On p. 2 of my first edition of Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks, the preceding Doctor Who and the Space War is cited last in the long list of other novelisations available, but with no indication that it has any particular link with this book. (Poor Doctor Who and the Giant Robot is still absent from the list.)

Nor is there anything in the cover art of these two books to suggest a link between them, though they are by the same artist and presumably completed one after the other.

1982 reprint of Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks;
1984 reprint of Doctor Who and the Space War

Doctor Who and the Space War is the first novelisation to feature the Third Doctor where he doesn’t appear on the cover. The focus is an Ogron, all the more imposing for being seen from below and dramatically lit, and more detailed than the photograph on which it is based:

Reference photo used for the cover of
Doctor Who and the Space War
c/o Black Archive

Behind the Ogron is a vista of planets and twinkling stars. The planets are lit from one side, the crescent of the light making them three dimensional. We can see the traces of craters and other surface detail.

Below this are two inset images: the head of a Draconian and a spacecraft in a cloud of steam. The Draconian is pale green — matching the logo of the first edition. The rest of the image is in tones pink and purple-brown. The muted colours, the fine linework and airbrushed colour are, I think, in the style of grown-up science-fiction titles of the time. Not quite Chris Foss, but in that direction.

By contrast, the cover for Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks is in a much more comic-strip style, with the blasts of energy, thunderbolts and stippled effects characteristic of Achilleos’s early work for the series. Instead of looking up at a single central figure, we look straight on at a Dalek framed on either side by the Doctor and the Thal called Taron. The Doctor is leant forward, face in profile; we see more of Taron’s agonised face. It’s a much more dynamic composition, the Doctor’s posture leaning into the Dalek, as well as the direction of the sucker arm and gun stick, giving a sense of movement from left to right.

ETA Richard Long on Bluesky suggests the photograph that Achilleos worked from, as below. We can see how Achilleos has reworked elements of the composition, notably the eyestalk. Also, compared to what we see on TV, where this moment happens in a beige-coloured quarry in winter, it’s all much richer and brighter. 

The bright red logo is in contrast to the blue background (for some reason, we can’t see the blue through the middle of the “O” in “Who”). The illustration is otherwise variously brown, green, orange, purple, red, yellow, as well as grey, black and white. It’s full of colour and there are details to pick over — such as the orange sparks dripping vertically from the Dalek gunstick as it fires a blast of energy off the right of frame. Yet above Taron’s head, a planet is depicted as a simple red spot.

The difference in styles between the two covers is, I think, comparable to the difference between the work Achilleos did on the first 12 novelisations for Target and the new look brought in my Peter Brookes. It has to be conscious, doesn’t it? Why would the artist — and publishers — want to keep these two books separate?

I think we can understand why. It’s one thing to say at the end of Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen, when the Cybermen have been entirely defeated and the story wrapped up, that the Doctor’s next adventure will take place in Scotland, with a footnote “See Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster” — a wholly new adventure. Likewise, the first edition of Doctor Who and the Giant Robot contains a footnote referencing the as-yet unpublished Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. This directly precedes the events of the Robot story, but each book is its own, self-contained adventure. You don’t miss anything by reading just one of the books.

The TV stories Frontier in Space and Planet of the Spiders are something different: two halves of a an epic single story. In commissioning them in the first place, Terrance partly had in mind the example of the 12-episode The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965-66), also written by two writers taking half the episodes each.

That was fine on TV, where no further payment was required. But I can see why the publishers might have been nervous about conveying any sense that a book, or two books, contained just 50% of a story. These were novelisations that children bought for themselves, often from their own pocket money. It would not do to be seen to exploit that. 

One other thing to note about Doctor Who and the Space War before we dig into the book that Terrance wrote: it is the last novelisation to change the title of the story as used on screen.

Now, Frontier in Space is perhaps not the most thrilling title, and a frontier is steeped in old-fashioned ideas of empire. But the story, notably, doesn’t feature a space war — it is threatened but avoided. As we’ve seen, previous changes to the titles used on TV emphasised the names of the monsters in the story. So why not call this “The Ogron Plot” or something similar?

In the handwritten list of forthcoming novelisations included on p. 92 of Keith Miller’s The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol. 2, and written a little before August 1975, the story is listed as “The Frontier in Space” — apart from the “the”, as on screen. It had changed by the following year, when it was listed as “The Space War” in the July 1976 issue of fanzine TARDIS.

By then, there was news of a big-budget science-fiction movie being filmed in the UK for release the following year. For example, the London Evening News reported on 24 March 1976 that,

“one of the most expensive films ever to be made in Britain begins shooting this week — at a cost of more than £7 million. … The title: Star Wars. The theme: a war between three worlds [sic].” (p. 5.)

The same paper had another story on the film on 19 April (p. 15), and I’ve found accounts in other papers. There was, to some degree, hype. 

And note that detail in the new report about the war between three worlds. That’s also the plot of Frontier in Space, with a conflict between planets Earth and Draconia being plotted from the planet of the Ogrons. Did the publishers, or the canny Malcolm Hulke, make that connection? If so, was the title and style of cover art used on Doctor Who and the Space War an attempt to cash in on Star Wars — more than a year before its UK release?

It would be very Doctor Who to pinch ideas from the future...

*

In Part II, I dig deeper into what Terrance wrote in Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks. There is swearing, fleshy parts that spit milky liquids, and also an orgy…

Pretty ugly - piece on Daumier for Art UK

Art UK has posted a new piece by me, "Pretty ugly: Honoré Daumier drawing for print".

If that sort of thing is of interest, here are 10 posts with me rabbiting on about pictures:

• Daumier, by Sarah Symmons
• Don Quixote by Cervantes and Rob Davis
• Van Gogh's paintings in Doctor Who
• Augustus John by Michael Holroyd
• Seurat and the Science of Painting, by William Innes Homer
• Mr Lear – A Life of Art and Nonsense, by Jenny Uglow
• Manet to Picasso at the National Gallery
• Sickert in Venice at Dulwich Picture Gallery
• Mrs King, my 2011 talk for the National Portrait Gallery
• Doctor Who: Portraits in Time and Space, my 2010 talk for the National Portrait Gallery

Daumier, by Sarah Symmons

In the summer of 1993, me and my friend O. trekked up to London to work our way round various galleries, ticking off a longish list of paintings we’d been given as part of our A-level art course. It was mostly 19th century stuff, Turner and Constable through to the post-Impressionists. 

I scribbled basic pencil sketches of the ones I thought most interesting and bought postcards of anything on the list. Later, compiling this in an A4 folder to hand in to our teacher, I realised that while the postcards reproduced the paintings much more accurately than my sketches, they didn’t always convey their effect. On my sketch of Monet’s Water Lilies, I added little stick figures of people in the National Gallery, to get across that it took up a whole, enormous wall. I got extra marks for that.

It was also interesting to see which paintings I’d thought worth sketching had or hadn’t been selected for reproduction as postcards. Portraits of single individuals and landscapes of real places tended to get reproduced. Odder, more interesting stuff tended not to. In the Courtauld Institute, I bought two postcards of a painting that particularly spoke to me — one for my homework project and one for my bedroom wall. I couldn’t say at the time what it was about Don Quixote and Sancho Pancha (c. 1870-72) by Honoré Daumier that so held my attention. I’ve thought about it a lot since.

Honoré Victorin Daumier, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, c. 1868-72, The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust). Image courtesy of the Courtauld.

For one thing, it’s an unfinished painting, the work of an old artist in the process of going blind. That may account for the murky, dream-like quality and the half-formed figures — an impressionistically gaunt Quixote and his horse. Yet this crude, skeletal figure sits tall and proud, shoulders back, form in total contrast to the execution. If you know the story (I think I learned it after first seeing this painting), you’ll know Quixote is a fantasist, convinced he’s on an epic, noble quest. The posture here is his delusion.

Beside him, Sancho Panzo is a heftier silhouette, a little slumped upon the silhouette of a donkey. We get a sense of these two contrasting characters from this barest outline. They are dwarfed by the high, steep, dark terrain behind them, for all they are so prominent in the composition. But on they stride — Quixote proudly, Sancho with reservation — into the light.

I must have bought Sarah Symmons’ 2004 book on Daumier around the time it was published. Reading it again, I’m amazed by how prolific he was, producing some 4,000 lithographs, 1,000 woodcuts, 800 drawings and watercolours, 300 paintings and 50 pieces of sculpture. From this, Symmons calculates an extraordinary pace:

“Daumier completed a new work every two or three days of his adult life, except for the last three or four years when he was blind” (p. 22) 

Even so, we might query that word “completed”; he was notorious for not finishing work. Also extraordinary is Symmons tracing what Daumier was probably paid, not least for his lithograph work for Parisian magazines. He was, at least at times, on good money — and yet frequently poor and more than once bankrupt (p. 10). Sadly, there seems to be little surviving in the way of contemporary sources to explain this discrepancy. 

Again, I query the choice of words when Symmons says,

“His subject matter was limited to human activity,” (p. 16)

I think it would be better to say “focused on”. As she says, the vast majority of his work has striking figures in the foreground, no middle-ground and then a background at some distance. The effect is like a tableau, or portrait mode on a phone camera. 

Daumier was influenced by a range of other artists — his contemporaries, classical sculpture, Goya and Rembrandt. Symmons says Rembrandt had a particular effect on him from the late 1850s,

“after several new masterpieces by the Dutch artist were acquired by Napoleon III” (p. 99).

Presumably, these pieces were exhibited and Daumier went to see them. But I wonder how he — and other artists — accessed such works more generally. How much were they influenced by reproductions in print rather than the real thing? Basically, to what extend did Daumier learn and develop his craft through the equivalent of postcards?

Holiday Sketches exhibition at Senate House

Exciting news! The clever Dr has curated an exhibition which opens this Saturday, 1 February, and runs until 14 March, at Senate House in London.

Holiday Sketches: Two Female Artists and an Archaeologist Husband go on Holiday, 1863, is about the trip made to Rhodes (as well as Athens, Ephesos and Istanbul) by artist Ann Mary Severn Newton and the teenaged Gertrude Jekyll, in the company of Mary's husband Charles. He was an archaeologist, the trip related to his work for the British Museum. 

You can find the exhibition on the 3rd floor of Senate House, University of London - just as you come out of the lifts, by the library of the Institute of Classical Studies. If you can't make it (and even if you can), the Dr has also produced an accompanying fanzine. 

For more of this sort of thing, she previously wrote the book, From the Harpy Tomb to the Wonders of Ephesus - British Archaeologists in the Ottoman Empire 1840-1880 (Bloomsbury, 2008) and continues to dig into all this, especially the life of Mary. You can keep up with her researches on her blog.

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

“Six of them in a great H of metal hanging above the earth. They turn head on heel, four astronauts (American, Japanese, British, Italian) and two cosmonauts (Russian, Russian); two women, four men, one space station made up of seventeen connecting modules, seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. They are the latest six of many, nothing unusual about this any more, routine astronauts in earth’s backyard. Earth’s fabulous and improbable backyard.” (p. 2)

When this short, 136-page novel won the Booker Prize on 12 November 2024, I saw some commentary that it was clearly a work of science-fiction just not marketed as such — the implication being out of shame. Sci-fi, after all, is genre and lowbrow while this book aspires to art.

Having read it, I don’t think that’s true. Yes, it is set in the future — just — given that it includes the launch of the first crewed mission to the Moon in more than 50 years. In real life, Artemis III is currently scheduled to land the first woman and next man on the Moon in mid 2027 (I suspect it may be delayed). The typhoon that here devastates Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines is also a thing still-to-come — but given recent news of extreme weather in the UK and abroad doesn’t seem very distant.

More than that, I’d argue that the technology here, the apparatus of the world depicted, is as it currently exists. There is no “novum” or new wossname to differentiate this world from our own, a novelty whose consequence we then explore. Instead, the launch of the Moon mission, the typhoon and other things — such as the death of one astronaut’s mother down on Earth — help to clarify the sense of scale, distance, remoteness and connection of these six people aboard the small, creaky H. It shapes how we observe them and what they, in turn, observe.

The unnamed H space station here is not, explicitly, the International Space Station — which, in real life, has been permanently occupied by humans since 2 November 2000. But the tech and practicalities are the same. The novel details 24 hours on board, in which the H makes 16 orbits of Earth. We cover the crew’s schedule: scientific experiments, exercise regime, sleeping and toilet arrangements, a shared movie. We dig into their thoughts and fears and dreams. There’s a thing about exactly who and what is being observed in Las Meninas, the painting by Velázquez, as seen in a postcard on board the H. We skip occasionally back to Earth to get a contrasting viewpoint: the dying mother thinking of her daughter in space, the people sheltering from the devastating typhoon that, from orbit, looks serene.

In all this, I’m struck more than anything by a profound sense of fragility: the six people in their slowly eroding H; the people on Earth under threat from the elements; our relationships and loved ones and inevitable loss. So much meaning, all gained by taking a vantage point that provides perspective.

My copy of the book, published (very quickly!) after it won the Booker Prize, includes an afterword from the author which is just as insightful as the novel itself. It’s largely on the subject of what words can do and add and illuminate, as the poorer relation of music, but she also addresses the issues of sci-fi:

“Perversely, perhaps, though Orbital is a book about space, its blueprint wasn’t 2001 or Dune, but A Month in the Country. I thought to myself: I want to write A Month in the Country in space.” (p. 143)

This seems to have been inspired by online videos of the Earth seen from the ISS:

“There’s never a bad view. You never think: oh, this is the boring bit, more ocean, more desert, blah blah; never, no — every view begs for your fresh attention.” (p. 141).

How brilliant and how true, putting in words what I realise I’ve long felt but never consciously articulated. In fact, how extraordinary to look from an orbiting space station — at an altitude of between 413 and 422 km above mean Earth sea level — yet gaze right into my head and explain to me what it is I can see.

Some other books I've read recently:

• Truth & Dare, by So Mayer
• Last Chance to See..., by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
• Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Hackenfeller’s Ape, by Brigid Brophy
• Farewell Crown and Good-bye King, by Margot Bennett

Adventures in Type and Space

My clever colleagues Graham and Jack Kibble-White and Stuart Manning have produced a lovely supplement to last year's Adventures in Type and Space. The new addition is The Sid Sutton Collection, devoted to the late graphic designer perhaps best known for the Doctor Who opening titles used between 1980 and 1986.

In February, I posted on Twitter/X some thoughts about Adventures in Type and Space, slightly revised here for clarity:

I’ve been utterly spellbound by this beautiful, brilliant book. It goes in big on a very small subject — the 30 seconds or so of opening titles at the start of each episode of old Doctor Who. But it’s just as thrilling and rich as those sequences, and so much more than simply a history of who made them and how. It’s funny and profound about the process of creating art and what’s going on in the artist’s head. Along the way, we learn the role of God and Fra Angelico in the whizzy opening titles for Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor, and what a CGI artist “sees” in their head as they tap out the code. There are connections to Alien, Bladerunner and Points of View, and everything you could want to know about the typeface Futura. Like the titles themselves, this is an extraordinary visual treat, all the more wondrous the closer you look.

My contribution to that original book was to supply a photograph of Sid Sutton from when I interviewed him at home on 2 May 2017 for Doctor Who Magazine's special The Essential Doctor Who: Adventures in Space. Another of my photographs and some previously unpublished bits of the interview feature in this new supplement.

There is also a long interview with Sid culled from multiple sources, plus an interview with his two sons - who both work in design - and with Sid's collaborator Terry Handley. Again, there's a wealth of detail here: how exactly things were done, using what bespoke equipment and in what premises, and what to look for in the familiar titles that reveal this painstaking process. (Clue: keep you eye on the question marks.)

There's also a revealing interview with Colin Baker as he's shown the myriad different elements Sid employed to create his Doctor Who opening titles. A video of this conversation is also available:

There's some revealing stuff here and not just about the way the titles were made. Baker compares his Doctor, and his plan for revealing this incarnation's true persona, to Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.

"[We] don't want him anywhere near our heroine. But it turns out he's the only truly decent person in the story. Everything he's done, which others have found objectionable, has been for the benefit of third parties, not himself." (p. 37)

There's a sense that these opening titles are invested with great meaning by interviewer Graham Kibble-White, who was 11 when Colin Baker became the Doctor. The conversation is an attempt to explore what meaning they hold for Baker - very different as an actor on the other side of the screen and yet no less significant.

The separate versions of Aventures in Type and Space and The Sid Sutton Collection are now sold out but compendium edition Adventures in Type and Space: The Complete Collection is available to buy from the Ten Acre Films site.

Still Life, by Sarah Winman

Ulysses Temper is a British soldier in Italy during the Second World War. There he befriends art historian Evelyn Skinner, and helps her rescue paintings from the conflict. We follow Ulysses home to austere, post-war London, to discover that his wife Peg has had a baby with someone else and now wants to divorce him. Ulysses bonds with his ex-wife's daughter in a way Peg never has, and when he returns to Italy the girl goes with him. Around them flit and linger other lives, a cast of misfits variously longing and grieving and muddling things out. Along the way there are musings on fate and art and love, and a sense of the muddle slowly being worked out...

I loved this strange, big-hearted ramble of a book, its vivid characters, its love of life and the echoing horror of loss. The death of one kindly character late on hits extremely hard. How fitting, too, to fall into a novel all about passion for the art of Urbino and Florence as I drove to the memorial for my old A-level Art History teacher, who on Friday afternoons more than 30 years ago shared his joy at Giotto, Uccello and Massaccio.

Doctor Who Chronicles: 1965

I've just received my copy of Doctor Who Chronicles: 1965 from the splendid lot that make Doctor Who Magazine. Among the delights to be found within its 114 pages is "Rembrandt of the Daleks", my feature on artist Richard E Jennings who produced 49 instalments of the Daleks comic strip in TV Century 21 and also worked on the three Dalek annuals of the 1960s.

I spoke to Jennings' daughter Celia, while Bob Corn of the Eagle Society was extremely generous in helping to dig out details of Jennings' life and work more generally. Thanks also to Colin Brockhurst of the fanzine Vworp Vworp! for sharing his research.

The sumptuous new collected edition of the TV Century 21 Daleks strip is still available. In DWM issues 558 and 559 last year, I argued that Jennings was an integral part of the sprawling, multimedia Dalek empire - his opulent artwork feeding into the movies, merchandise and back into the TV show.

DWM special on production design

The latest special edition of Doctor Who Magazine is devoted to production design. Among the delights are some things by me:

Dr Who and the Daleks (1965)

Bill Constable was responsible for the look of the original Peter Cushing movie. I spoke to Bill's daughter Dee - who shared some previously unseen artwork from the film - and biographer Olga Sedneva, as well as Dr Fiona Subotsky, whose late husband Milton produced the movie. (Fiona also wrote Dracula for Doctors, which I read last year.)

The Evil of the Daleks (1967)

With the help of original production designer Chris Thompson, Gav Rymill and I have attempted to recreate the sets from the missing first episode of this classic Dalek story.

Michael Pickwoad (2010-2017)

To accompany a "new" interview with the late, great Michael Pickwoad, Sophie Iles and I interviewed his daughter Amy, who worked with him in the art department on Doctor Who.

Beautiful and Beloved, by Roderic Owen and Tristan de Vere Cole

On twitter a few weeks ago, a friend mentioned that Tristan de Vere Cole, director of 1968 Doctor Who story The Wheel in Space, was not only the son of Mavis Mortimer Wheeler but also co-wrote a biography of her. I sought out the book.

Back in 2011 I was much struck by a sketch of Mavis in the National Museum of Wales by Augustus John - believed to be Tristan's father. At the time I saw the portrait, I was reading Michael Holroyd's exhaustive, 600-page biography of John, and followed that up with Mortimer Wheeler's autobiography Still Digging - though in that Wheeler makes no mention of his second wife at all - though it was over Mavis that John famously challenged Wheeler to a duel; Wheeler consented, suggesting they fight it out with field guns.

Things never got that far, the quarrel was settled, and John was best man to Wheeler when he married Mavis - a newsworthy event given that Mavis was sister-in-law to the Prime Minister (her late husband's sister was Mrs Neville Chamberlain):


Beautiful and Beloved certainly doesn't shy away from that mix of celebrity, sex and wild goings on. Much of the later part of the book details the events of 1954 when Mavis shot her lover, Lord Vivian. A range of sources are used to piece together the night of drinking that led up to the shooting, the shooting itself - as best it can be understood - and the subsequent trial. The authors are in no doubt of Mavis' innocence - yes, she shot Lord Vivian, but they're sure she didn't mean to hurt or kill him. Despite this, the four different versions of events given by Mavis that suggest she wasn't entirely honest about what happened. They seem surprised that she went to prison for it but I didn't think there was much reasonable doubt.

In fact, Mavis' different accounts of herself were nothing new. Born Mabel Winifred Mary Wright on 29 December 1908, Mavis kept reinventing herself, changing her name to Mavis and then Maris, with other names such as Faith and Xara along the way. She was also horrified that news reports of her trial gave her real age. That constant reinvention helped her escape her modest background - she was the daughter of a grocer's assistant, and worked as a scullery maid and waitress before she met and married society prankster Horace de Vere Cole. He was much older than her and had already lived quite a life: the book includes a photograph of a blacked-up Virginia Woolf alongside Horace as part of the notorious Dreadnought hoax in 1910 (when Mavis was aged just one). By the 1960s, Mavis has risen so high through the social ranks that she could accuse her daughter-in-law of being bourgeois - for not being classy enough.

The book shares details of Horace's other pranks, but doesn't tell us exactly which rude word he contrived to spell out in the audience of a theatre by buying tickets for a bald-headed men. That's not from prurience. For one thing, details are sparse for this particular legend: Wikipedia says it was either BOLLOCKS or SHIT but can't name the performance, either. For another, the book isn't shy of f-words and c-words when it quotes the endless, bad poetry Mavis inspired from her various lovers. Or there's this, about John in 1957:

"To Mavis he wrote about an exhibition of drawings he was thinking of having, drawings of what a convention of the day would have had him refer to , in print, as c--s; but such evasions were not for him. He warned her that he would shortly be calling on her to provide the crowning feature of the lot, and he sent love from himself and [his partner] Dodo for good measure.
He wasn't just being shocking, in the time-honoured, intimate manner. John was known to have made a number of studies of private parts. And since Mavis came so easily to hand he was bound to have used as a model, even after a lapse of so many years, the girl who'd won the competition at the old 'Eiffel Tower' [restaurant] for the finest concealed charms." (p. 257)

The book is strikingly candid, and includes one of the nude photographs she sent to John in the 1930s. In fact, she sent such photographs to at least one other of her lovers - and each time the photographs were returned with a horrified response. John wanted to know who had taken the pictures and how she'd got them developed, and the authors add a footnote about practicalities here:

"It wasn't until August 1972 that the Boots chain consented to develop and print snapshots showing full frontal nudity. 'The interpretation of what is obscene has changed in the minds of juries and public opinion,' stated their spokesman, quoted in the Daily Telegraph. 'A normal naked woman is not obscene." (p. 78n)

The obvious candidate for photographer is Bet, the "local and very Cornish woman" who looked after Doll Keiller's cottage at Woodstock St Hilary near Marazion in Cornwall, where Mavis stayed while pregnant with Tristan in December 1934. We know Bet was taken by Mavis on first sight:

"But rushed round to spread the news [of the arrival] to her neighbour, Mrs Allan. 'You wait 'til you see what's in my cottage,' she boasted. 'Six foot of beauty, that's what I've got.'
But even Bet was taken aback when Mrs de Vere Cole opened the door to her next morning, completely naked. 'Look here, Bet, you'll have to get used to this,' said Mavis. 'You'd better begin now.' Even in December, if she could remove her clothes, she would." (p. 72)

She's back in Cornwall with Bet in 1958, though Doll had died three years before:

"They took photographs. On returning to London she [Mavis] prevailed upon a manager to co-operate. She wrote to Bet, 'I told him that some were taken unawares, when I was getting out of my bikini. "Oh," says he, "I'll attend to the matter myself and will get them through by Saturday morning." So--Bet--what fun!" (p. 260)

For all the detail of the letter, the dates and the brazenness, for all the honesty of the book, I find myself wondering what her relationship was with Bet.

Yet given her vivacity, the image of Mavis that really struck is the one from the opening chapter: in the last year of her life, in 1970, venturing out each day into the streets around Sloane Square with her Yorkshire terrier in her shopping basket, to buy tins of cheap food and a half-bottle of either whisky or brandy (or, sometimes both). This daily intake procured, we follow her back to her home in Cadogan Estates, dirty and full of junk as well as a stack of valuable pictures by John, the plumbing not always working, a huge mirror by the bed. It's tragic but honest, and this version of herself is entirely her own creation.