Doctor Who and the Giant Robot by Terrance Dicks

First published on 13 March 1975, this book must have come as a surprise to the now well-established readership of these Doctor Who novelisations. For one thing, it had not been listed among titles “in preparation” in previous books — not even in Doctor Who and the Cybermen, published just 22 days before. 

From this and other evidence we can deduce that Doctor Who and the Giant Robot was commissioned relatively late, fast-tracked through production (with no internal illustrations, saving time) and then slipped into the existing schedule as swiftly as possible, the first of a relaunched range. 

That’s another thing that would have surprised readers: this book looked and felt very different.

First editions of the initial 12 Doctor Who novelisations, published between 2 May 1973 and 19 February 1975, are easily distinguished. The covers are all in a similar style and by one artist, Chris Achilleos. He later recalled that he was asked to emulate the work,

“that Frank Bellamy had done for the [listings magazine] Radio Times; in fact it turned out that they had already asked Frank if he would do them but he had turned them down, so they asked if I would do them in that style” (The Target Book, by David J Howe with Tim Neal, p. 22).

Bellamy produced a great deal of Doctor Who artwork for Radio Times — enough to fill a book. The Target team seem to have a favoured a particular piece: the striking cover art Bellamy produced to promote the 1972 series of Doctor Who and the return of the Daleks.

Frank Bellamy’s cover for
Radio Times, 1-7 January 1972

Compare that to the first of the cover art Achilleos completed for Target:

Chris Achilleos’s cover for
Doctor Who and the Crusaders, 1973

In both, there’s a prominent, stippled black-and-white portrait of the Doctor, surrounded by smaller illustrations of the antagonists in the given story, largely in bright colours, along with stars and cosmic phenomena. This dynamic montage is on a white background and takes up the lower part of the frame, so as not to obscure the title logo in black and other wording — which are all the more striking against white.

That is also true of the next 11 books. On these early novelisations, the Doctor Who logo dominates in big, thick, black letters, establishing the range. The rest of the title is in smaller lettering but still bold capitals, in a striking colour that compliments the artwork. 

The spine of each book is in the same colour as its title. That makes the books, together, distinctive even lined up on a shelf — iconic, in the true sense of the word.

Ten of the first 12 Target books, and four
of the relaunched titles with white spines

Picking up a first edition of one of these initial 12, they also have some heft. They all — with one exception — comprise 160 pages, or five sections of 32 pages, on relatively thick paper. (Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils is 144 pages but still feels substantial.)

The start of each new section is easy to spot: they are marked at the foot of the page with the initials of the title and then a letter indicating the sequence in which they should be bound. For example, Doctor Who and the Cybermen by Gerry Davis has “D.W.A.T.C.—B” at the foot of page 33, “D.W.A.T.C.—C” at the foot of page 65, “D.W.A.T.C.—D” on p. 97 and ‘D.W.A.T.C.—E” on p. 121.

(John Easson at the British Printing Society tells me that that the spines of sections were also often marked, usually in descending “steps”, to make the correct sequence obvious in binding — but I’m not unpicking the covers of my precious books to check! I’ve consulted John about the mechanics of producing subsequent editions of these books, more on which anon. Maybe. If you are good.)

Doctor Who and the Giant Robot begins a lengthy run of shorter novels, reduced by 20% to 128 pages and four sections — with some longer books on occasion. That this was as part of an overall relaunch of the range is evident from the cover, which boasts a bold new look.

First, there’s the distinctive new logo to better match the one used on TV and now in vibrant cover. The artwork by Peter Brookes is in a very different style to that by Chris Achilleos. While it still has a comic-strip flavour (Brookes says in The Target Book that he, too, was asked to emulate Frank Bellamy), this is full frame instead of a montage of selected items on white. The logo and wording are placed on top of the artwork — partially obscuring one of the planes as it blasts away at the Robot. 

The comic-strip feel is further conveyed by there being two different-sized panels on the cover, and two more on the back. On the cover, prominence is given to the titular monster, emphasising its giant size by showing it attacked by small planes and clutching a human. On the back, we see its huge foot kicking a truck, scattering tiny soldiers. This is perhaps overselling the contents of the book, in which the Robot is giant-sized for a mere four pages (pp. 116-120). 

That emphasis on the Robot is striking. The new incarnation of the Doctor and new companion Sarah Jane Smith, both making their debuts in the range of novelisations, appear only as small insets. Neither is a particularly good likeness. Compare that to the cover of Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils, published some six months before this, where immediately recognisable portraits of the Doctor and Jo Grant are bigger and more prominent than the monsters.

In fact, the relaunch doesn’t even feature the Doctor in the main cover artwork. Instead, his head is part of the new logo, in the “o” of “Who”. The plan was for the next books in the series to follow the same format, as we can see from Brookes’s original sketches for Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons and Doctor Who and the Green Death, as published in The Target Book (pp. 32-33). These both use the same illustration of the Third Doctor’s head. 

My guess is that this was to streamline the process of producing cover art, whether because each stipple-portrait took time or because every new likeness required approval from the BBC. I wonder, too, if this new format meant Brookes could produce covers more quickly and therefore at lower cost than whatever Achilleos was paid.

Brookes and Achilleos say in The Target Book that the changeover was to give the latter a break from the relentless schedule. But I think other factors were also in play. Businesses often look for ways to reduce internal costs and maximise profits. The Target Book also explains that while the Doctor Who books sold very well, Target’s parent company in the US was in trouble and draining money from the London office. 

Then there was the global shortage of newsprint — the paper on which newspapers and books are printed — which had delayed publication of Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters, according to Target editor Richard Henwood in a letter to fan Keith Miller on 1 February 1974 (see Miller’s The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol 1, p. 194). The shortage continued over subsequent months; in July 1974, Michael Meacher MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Industry, provided a Written Answer on newsprint manufacture in the UK, providing statistics that production had fallen from 789,400 tonnes in 1969 to 441,900 four years later.

These factors, between them, may explain why the relaunched range of Target books had a significantly reduced word count while selling for the same price. In fact, my second-edition reprint of Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, published in Autumn 1975, retailed at 40p, double the RRP of each of the first three Target novelisations when published just two years previously. Less book, twice the price, and selling so fast they went to reprint in months — the bosses must have been delighted.

I wondered if the reduced word count was part of the brief that incoming Target editor Mike Glover gave Terrance Dicks when they met for lunch on 30 April 1974, two days before Terrance began work writing Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons. Did he initially write that as a 160-page book, then get commissioned to write Doctor Who and the Giant Robot quickly at 128 pages and, once he’d completed that, go back to Terror of the Autons and cut it down to matching size?

The archive of Terrance’s papers includes several original typescripts for his Doctor Who novelisations, though sadly not for Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons. But the archive also includes the 1974 diary in which he recorded progress on writing the book, which says that chapter 1, written between 2 and 3 May 1974, comprised 10 pages. The published version runs from pages 7 to 16, so it’s roughly the same. 

That record of progress on writing ends with him reaching Chapter 10 at a total of 84 pages; it’s 96 pages in the book (up to page 103, with the story starting on page 7), but the book includes several internal illustrations by Alan Willow which take up space. The implication is that the full typescript, comprising 12 chapters, was about 100 pages. With Willow’s illustrations, front matter (title page, indicia, lists of other books in the range), that gives 128 pages of book. It’s certainly nowhere near enough to fill 160 pages. So Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons was always meant to be this length.

But I also don’t think this was a new direction for Terrance. Here is where things go a bit hardcore. There are even graphs.

The excellent, exhaustive Based on the Popular BBC Television Serial by Paul MC Smith provides word counts for the main text of each Target novelisation. Here is the data for the first 12 in order, with the titles of those written by Terrance:

The first six of these books are roughly between 45,000 and 50,000 words, except for Terrance’s one contribution which is more like 40,000. The second six books are roughly between 40,000 and 45,000 words, excerpt for Terrance’s two which are more like 35,000.

The relaunch saw a drastic reduction in word count by all authors compared to the first 12 books (in darker orange below) — but Terrance, now writing a greater proportion of the Doctor Who novelisations, still delivered fewer words in each one than his peers.

This isn’t always obvious from the physical books themselves. The wordiest of the first 12 novelisations, Doctor Who and the Daemons (49,699 words) contains the same number of pages as the least wordy title, Terrance’s Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen (34,723). That uniformity required some skill from the typesetter. Differences in leading and font size mean a full page of text in Doctor Who and the Dæmons contains 38 lines but in Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen there are 34. 

Some books were also padded out with adverts for other titles; the first advert at the back of Doctor Who and the Giant Robot is for, er, Doctor Who and the Giant Robot. (Paul MC Smith tells me he discounted this extra material from his word counts.)

But I don’t think Terrance was skimping on work by producing shorter books. His editors could always have asked him for additional material if they felt a book needed padding out. In fact, the work he delivered seems to have been cut. The surviving typescript of Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion includes a whole section in the prologue not included in the published book: following the Second Doctor’s trial, Time Lord Scanners cooly observe Earth and then, on the planet’s surface, UNIT’s Lance Corporal Walmsley detects the incoming meteor shower. (There’s no female UNIT Officer in charge, as played on screen by Tessa Shaw.)

As a result, I think the shorter books are evidence of Terrance’s dictum, as cited by his friend Barry Letts:

 “Anything can be cut, and cutting will always improve it.” (Letts, Who and Me, p. 154)

He wrote short, pithy novels because they were better. Incoming editor Mike Glover could see the sense of this, editorially and to save paper / reduce internal costs, and asked other authors to follow Terrance’s lead.

So what about the book itself?

Doctor Who and the Giant Robot was published just 54 days after the conclusion of the TV serial on which it was based. It’s a relatively faithful prose version of what we see on screen but with some notable differences. The TV serial begins where the previous story ends, continuing the scene in which the Doctor regenerates. (This was all the more seamless on TV because Planet of the Spiders was repeated, in omnibus form, the day before Part One of Robot went out.)

In the book, Terrance switches the first two scenes so that we now begin with the Robot — as with the cover, focused on the monster. When we return to the Doctor’s laboratory at UNIT, it’s been a several days since he regenerated.

We can deduce that Terrance wrote the novelisation from his own scripts, not the versions amended in rehearsal by the cast and director. Hence the Doctor doesn’t skip with Harry Sullivan, he doesn’t say “There’s no such word as can’t” or the Brigadier’s middle name, and he uses a pencil and paper rather than typing at super-speed. At the end, the Doctor vanquishes the Giant Robot from a UNIT Land Rover driven by Harry Sullivan not Benton. The Doctor's car Bessie does not feature in the book at all.

Terrance seems to have muddled up what he must have been told about the new Doctor’s costume, which he describes as,

“wide corduroy trousers, a sort of tweed hacking-jacket with a vaguely Edwardian look, and a loose flannel shirt” (p. 24)

It’s the other way round: in Robot, the new Doctor wears tweed trousers and a corduroy hacking jacket.

The book adds several lovely details. The Robot kills an unnamed sentry, then lays out the man’s body “almost tenderly” (p. 8). Terrance repeats the word “tenderly” when the Robot kills two further victims, on p. 22 and p. 55, making this a telling bit of character detail. Three times we’re told that the robot is a bit like a giant cat (p. 37, p. 67 and p. 117), again I think helping to build the reader’s sympathy for the machine. 

Another repeated word is the unfortunate sentry’s “ruddy” (used by other characters on p. 17, p. 18, p. 89 (twice) and p. 106). I wonder if Terrance was told that word was okay for child readers, and so used it wherever he could.

There’s more threat in the book than on TV. While the Doctor is recuperating at the start, the Brigadier refers to his friend’s comatose state as a “living death” (p.11), a disturbing idea that works here because more time has passed since the regeneration. When the Doctor recovers, he rifles through the pockets of his former self’s clothes — mirroring a scene in Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion (and in the script of Spearhead from Space but which never made it to the screen). When the Doctor battles the Robot, it throws him across the room (p. 83). It’s also nice that we get to share Harry’s first sight of the interior of the TARDIS; on TV that would have required an additional set.

Some additions are less about threat or scale but about better establishing character, such as why journalist Sarah Jane Smith wants access to Thinktank (one word):

“You see [a very Terrance phrase!], I’m very keen to get away from all this woman’s angle stuff, and if I could come up with a really good scientific story…” (p. 13)

Later, she’s worried about heading off in the TARDIS because she has “deadlines to meet” (p. 122), again helping to make her real (and riffing off Terrance’s own new freelance status). It’s from Sarah’s perspective that we first see Harry, who she likens to Biggles, Bulldog Drummond and the heroes of the Boy’s Own Paper (p. 15). We later learn that her journalistic instincts are dead right:

“Suddenly Harry spoke up. ‘What you need, sir, is an inside man.’ He produced the phrase with obvious pride. ‘Someone planted to keep tabs on them.’ Harry spent a good deal of his off-duty time reading lurid thrillers” (p. 49)

Of course, the italicised phrases are examples of Terrance’s love of specific vocabulary, despite his reputation for simple, straightforward prose. On p. 80, the Doctor is described as a “mountebank”, while on p. 119 he refers to the metal-eating virus as a “bucket of jollop”. (On the same page, he refers to Harry as “my boy”, perhaps a ghost of an early draft, before Tom Baker had been cast.)

I think the book reveals some of the influences on the original story. On p. 114, the Doctor muses that the Robot is suffering from an Oedipal complex, which is surely a reference to the robopsycology of Isaac Asimov’s famous sci-fi stories. (And also makes me wonder what plans the Robot had in mind for Sarah once the rest of humanity had been destroyed...)

The Giant Robot being attacked by planes, as seen on the cover, is obviously drawn from King Kong. But it’s notable that Terrance says the Robot grows to “fifty feet” tall — the specific figure surely suggesting he had in mind Attack of the 50 Ft Woman (1958).

But the reference that stopped me in my tracks was the one about the,

“peculiar business at the meditation centre.* ...

* Told in DOCTOR WHO AND THE PLANET OF THE SPIDERS” (p. 9)

This was the previous TV adventure — but the book that Terrance would write next, published seven months after this one. It is whetting the appetite of readers. But also, up to this point, his books had made reference to other, already published Target titles. This, just at the moment he greatly increased his output, is the first sign of him thinking in series, of books still to come. 

It is a footnote from the future.

• See my list of 236 books by Terrance Dicks 
• My biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be published by Ten Acre Books next year 

ETA: I hadn't intended this to be a series of posts on each of Terrance's books in turn, but the ones so far have gained quite a following and a few kind readers have even been in touch to suggest that they'd be willing to pay for more. That would certainly be useful in my efforts to source some of Terrance's more obscure book, whether I buy them second hand or hole up in libraries and archives.

I've had a look at options and have set up a Ko-fi account. All donations gratefully received. I'll keep going so long as there is sufficient demand...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forget glands or golf; it's the Skylon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

It's been fun to revisit this novel as part of my research into the BBC-1 Classic Serials of the 1980s worked on by Terrance Dicks. He was the producer of a TV dramatisation this broadcast in late 1986 which was nominated for a BAFTA. 

(Tedious nerd bit because this is how my brain works: the director was Barry Letts, Terrance's former boss on both Doctor Who and the Classic Serial, and the cast included Stephen Thorne (who I interviewed), Terence Lodge and Christopher Burgess from their time on Doctor Who. Then there was Sarah Crowden, whose father met with Letts in 1974 to discuss taking the role of the Fourth Doctor. 

I'm conscious, too, of Terrance and Barry Letts working on this stuff from their office in 509 Union House at the BBC, upstairs from the crises affecting Doctor Who (producer John Nathan Turner in room 304, his script editor in 312), with David Copperfield broadcast over the same weekends as The Trial of a Time Lord. Did they trade ideas for casting? Here we have Owen Teale, fresh from Doctor Who and the Vengeance on Varos. And there's a nod to future Doctor Who, too, with Simon Callow fresh from A Room With A View, the film that made his name, here as one of Dickens's best known characters, Wilkins Micawber, 20 years before taking the role of Dickens in Doctor Who...)

Anyhow. The novel is the autobiography of a fictional character who has a number of resemblances to the real-life Dickens. We follow David Copperfield - also known as "Master Davy", "Daisy" and "Trot" in different phases of his life - from birth through school and different jobs and two marriages, to established and successful writer. I'd have liked more on what he saw and felt in his time as a parliamentary reporter, not just how long it took to learn shorthand, because I've done the same job. But an impression can be gleaned from what David says when he moves on:

"One joyful night, therefore, I noted down the music of the parliamentary bagpipes for the last time, and I have never heard it since; though I still recognize the old drone in the newspapers, without any substantial variation (except, perhaps, that there is more of it), all the livelong session." (Chapter 48, Domestic)

As well as David, we follow the lives of a huge cast of characters around him, not least his school friend Thomas Traddles and early crush Emily, his nursemaid Clara Pegotty, aunt Betsey Trotwood and the feckless but well-meaning Micawber, always determined that something will turn up. In this version, engagingly narrated by Richard Armitage, Micawber is a broad Brummie, which produced some odd mental images as I listened to this in the wake of the death of Ozzy Osborne.

(More of how my brain works: early on, Clara takes young Master Davy to visit her brother, Daniel Peggoty, who lives in a converted old boat on the beach at Yarmouth. There's a long description of this cosy if eccentric home:

"Over the little mantelshelf, was a picture of the ‘Sarah Jane’ lugger, built at Sunderland, with a real little wooden stern stuck on to it; a work of art, combining composition with carpentry, which I considered to be one of the most enviable possessions that the world could afford." (Chapter 3, I Have a Change)

I said before that I think Terrance Dicks might have got the word "capacious" from Charles Dickens; could he also have swiped "Sarah Jane"? (Sarah Jane Smith was, of course, played on screen by Elisabeth Sladen. When she died in 2011, the new companion being devised for Doctor Who was renamed in her honour; Clara was Sladen's middle name.))

Anyhow again. The novel boasts some memorable villains. First, there's David's cruel, violent and manipulative stepfather Edward Murdstone and his sister Jane. Then there's schoolmate James Steerforth, who - brilliantly - Davy is taken in by but we and other characters see through. (In the TV version Terrance oversaw, Steerforth's mother is played by Nyrie Dawn Porter, surely as a kind of a clue to the viewer of moral corruption in the family, given Porter's association with The Forsyte Saga (1967)).

Then there's the ever 'umble Uriah Heep, in whom David spots wickedness long before Micawber lays out, at length, exactly what Heep has done. I don't think David gets better at recognising wrong 'uns - he is still drawn to Steerforth even after knowing the truth about him. I think in part Steerforth's posh, wealthy charm makes him more agreeable to David, so there's some snobbery in his distrust of Heep. But I also think, as others have observed, that Heep is in some ways a dark reflection of David himself: a young man of humble background trying to establishing himself and with an eye on his boss's daughter that might not be wholly appropriate...

If there's a failing here, it's how good and noble David is throughout; loving, patient, tolerant, hard-working, forgiving, blah blah blah. He speaks of his hatred for Heep, but I think that is intended as another signifier of virtue. It makes David rather insipid as a character but also, given how close much of this is to the real life of the author, it kept feeling like self-justification. 

The TV version swaps some stuff around, I think to tackle some of this beige. In the book, David and his former schoolmate Traddles are reunited with Micawber and, in chapter 28, they all have dinner at David's, the meal "mutton off the gridiron" plus "a bowl of punch, to be compounded by Mr Micawber". On screen, the bowl of punch is brought forward; it is David's first meal with Micawber, and they drink it instead of a solid meal. In both, the point is to show David and his friends making the best of things, and enjoying themselves, with only limited means. But I think the TV version has added tension because it's not right to be serving such a "meal" to children. That focus on "tension points" is, I think, very Terrance Dicks...

See also:

• Me on Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
• Me on Dickens, by Claire Tomalin

Who and Me, by Barry Letts

“Terrance once laughed at me when I told him that a fly was his cousin.” p. 74

I said in my post on Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons that I could see, in the sometimes sparky but close friendship between the Third Doctor and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, something of Doctor Who producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks. Reading Letts’s memoir of his first two years in that role has only bolstered that view.

It’s an engaging, insightful book, which ends with Letts about to tell us about the origins of Day of the Daleks (1972), promising a story involving him and Terrance drinking champagne at Pinewood Studios with Terry Nation. This is just after Letts has also told us that Terrance’s own memories of what happened are very different from his own. How intriguing!

Sadly, the promised second volume of memoir never materialised and the first volume was published after Letts’ death in 2009. This expanded edition published in 2021 includes a good overview of Letts’ career by Michael Seely and a long interview with Letts conducted in 2008, which help to fill in some of the gaps. Also, Letts skips about a bit in his recollections, so the main body of the book includes some insights into his work on the BBC Classic Serials years after his time on Doctor Who. Even so, there’s a feeling of a story only partially told.

Really, I wish this were an autobiography — covering Letts’ whole life — rather than a memoir of one particular job. I’d have loved much more in this evocative vein:

“I was born less than seven years after the end of the First World War.  I can remember, as a small boy, the lamplighter with his long pole, coming up the road in the evening to turn on the gas in the street lamps; I can remember feeding lumps of sugar to Jones, the horse who pulled the baker’s delivery van; I can remember Mr Glover, the milkman, pushing his little cart with its giant wheels at the back, dipping his ladle into the great milk churn suspended between them to fill the can which he brought to our back door, to ladle a pint or two into our jug…” (p. 152)

That golden age when tuberculosis was delivered to your front door! 

Yes, this stuff isn’t directly related to Doctor Who but often it can inform what a person brought to the programme. For example, in an interview for the BBC’s Doctor Who website in 2004, Letts shared some other details of his early life, such as his childhood favourites:

“Books? Wind in the Willows; Professor Branestawm; the Just William books; the Arthur Ransome books; every sci-fi book I could lay my hands on. Films? All the Fred Astaires; Snow White and Pinocchio; The Wizard of Oz; Things to Come.”

The Wizard of Oz was a sizeable influence on the plot of The Three Doctors (1972-3), and Letts later adapted Pinocchio for the BBC. We can also see in these different books and films a mix of fantasy and adventure with a strong moral core, the bedrock of his Doctor Who.

There are lots of Who-related tidbits in the memoir I didn’t know. In the interview from 2008, Letts says that,

“The Mutants, for example, was basically my idea. That wasn’t all that clever actually, because I had pinched it from a book by Olaf Stapledon.” (p. 197)

My guess is that he was referring to First and Last Men (1930) or its sequel Star Maker (1937), which chart the history of humanity over billions of years, including evolution into other forms. 

Letts tells us twice about acting with Roger Delgado on Queen’s Champion (1958), which included Delgado killing him in a sword fight. I wonder if that inspired the Doctor and Master’s sword fight in The Sea Devils. 

He tells us about “kenshō”, a Buddhist term meaning “seeing” or “perceiving”, saying that he worked this concept into his 1974 novelisation Doctor Who and the Daemons, where he has the Doctor — facing monsters, the end of the world etc — taking a moment to enjoy a bright blue sky. (p. 167 of the memoir, p. 96 of the novelisation).

This is, of course, very similar to the “daisiest daisy” speech made by the Doctor in TV story The Time Monster, co-written by Letts. There’s a common perception among fans that such “moments of charm” were put in at the request of Jon Pertwee* but the one in The Time Monster is, given what he says here about kenshō, clearly Letts putting his own philosophy into the series.

(On the documentary Genesis of a Classic, about the making of 1975 TV story Genesis of the Daleks, Terrance recalls something he was told by his successor as script editor, Robert Holmes, about being approached by Pertwee: “Now, listen, Bob, you know what I like … just want a few moments of charm, you know.” I wonder when that conversation took place; the obvious moment is when Holmes started working as script editor, shadowing Terrance on Death to the Daleks in 1973.)

There’s some good detail on Snowy Black, the 13-part serial Letts devised as a potential replacement for Doctor Who if it were cancelled in 1970. The original plan, he says on p. 82, was to finish recording Inferno, the last of that year’s Doctor Who, on 29 May and “plunge straight into rehearsals for the OB shoot” on the new serial.

He says Snowy Black was itself cancelled “in April, because of the great success of the new Who” (p. 83). Indeed, on 11 April, Episode 4 of The Ambassadors of Death was seen by an extraordinary 9.3 million viewers. This, says Letts, was a relief, because he’d not started on the first script of his new serial beyond a sample scene used in casting lead actor Mark Edwards. 

“I had no time to write during the day. I was far too busy with the current productions; planning the next season with Terrance; setting up the team that would be working on Snowy Black with me and so on” (p. 83)

Then something happened that surely clinched the decision. On 27 April, director Douglas Camfield collapsed due to a hitherto unknown heart condition and Letts had to take over as director of Inferno. And that surely meant he had no time to complete his script and couldn’t be expected to go straight into production on this ambitious new project anyway.

There are some details Letts seems to have muddled up. For example, he tells us on p. 41 that in 1965 he had lunch with Hugh David to seek his advice about becoming a director. David was, says Letts,“in the midst of editing” Doctor Who story The Highlanders, but the first episode was actually recorded in studio on 3 December 1966. That was after Letts — finally, after some persistence over a year — started the BBC directors’ course on 29 November 1966 (p. 46).

So there are some things I need to fact check and follow up on for my forthcoming biography of Terrance Dicks. I’d especially like to know more about Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton,

“appearing together at an American convention — in a playlet written by Terrance overnight in his hotel bedroom — which capitalised on their supposed antagonism, enjoying it so much that they insisted on two repeat performances” (pp. 18-19)

The Broadwcast list of Doctor Who conventions in the United States offers only one occasion where Terrance, Troughton and Pertwee were all at the same event: the TARDIS 21 (Spirit of Light) convention in Chicago, 23-25 November 1984. Were any of my readers there?

Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons by Terrance Dicks

An unexpected delight of blogging my notes on these early Target novelisations is that people have been in touch to say that a particular book was a favourite, to share a vivid memory of where they first acquired it, or to tell me how much these books meant to them generally. I’ve been toiling to make sense of what these books are as things but have been getting a sense, from other people, of what they mean.

I’m also grateful to those who’ve suggested further connections, with ideas feeding from the books into the TV series and vice versa. Nicholas Pegg points out that the term “Cyber Leader” is first used in the novelisation Doctor Who and the Cybermen and the TV story Revenge of the Cybermen, both written by Gerry Davis and probably commissioned around the same time. Michael Seely, meanwhile, prompted me to look for the use of “chameleon circuit” in Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons years before it was said on TV.

I think this term originated in Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon by Malcolm Hulke, first published on 18 March 1974. By chance, I bought a first edition on Saturday at the Whooverville convention — near mint for £8, bargain!

That book begins with two Time Lords, one the venerable Keeper of the Time Lords’ Files who is over 2,000 years-old, and the other his successor, “a mere 573 years of age”. They discuss the limitations of the first ever TARDIS which could carry three people, four at a squeeze (suggesting it was not bigger on the inside), and the two serious defects of the Doctor’s TARDIS. One issue is that the Doctor can’t direct where it takes him.

“‘The other defect,’ said the old Keeper, was that that particular TARDIS had lost its chameleon-like quality. It was in for repairs, you see—that’s how the Doctor got his hands on it.’” (Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon by Malcolm Hulke, p. 8.)

“Chameleon-like” means nothing to the extraterrestrial young Time Lord, so the old Keeper explains to him (and younger readers) on p. 9 that a chameleon is a creature on Earth that can change the colour of its skin; a working TARDIS can change its “colour, shape, everything”.

There is, as far as I can tell, no precedent for this. The Making of Doctor Who (1972) by Hulke and Dicks does not mention chameleon-like abilities, beyond mentioning Chameleons — the shape-changing villains of Hulke’s first TV Doctor Who story. Did his choice of analogy in the novelisation come from them?

Whatever the case, this innocuous moment in Hulke’s novelisation— perhaps not the most exciting opening ever — has gone on to become Doctor Who lore. This, I think, is where the idea is first introduced that the Doctor stole the TARDIS from his own people while it was in for repair. (Do please write in if I’m wrong!)

Here, it is in for repair because of the fault in the chameleonic function. But when Doctor Who began on TV, that system worked, with the TARDIS disguised as a police box to blend in with London of the early 1960s. It was only in the second episode, when the TARDIS materialises somewhere else, that the Doctor and Susan express concern that it has not changed to blend in with its new surroundings. The implication is that the system breaks as a result of the unusual take-off at the end of the first episode.

In The Name of the Doctor (2013), we see a cylindrical TARDIS in the repair shop on the Time Lords’ home planet Gallifrey as the Doctor steals it, the implication here that it’s in for repair for some other technical fault, prior to it taking the guise of a police box. But Fugitive of the Judoon (2020) introduces the idea that the TARDIS has been a police box before this. So maybe the old Keeper in Hulke’s novelisation is right after all — and the cylindrical TARDIS is only a temporary fix of the chameleonic system, like the ones seen in Attack of the Cybermen (1985).

Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons is, as I explained at Target Books Club, the fourth of 236 books written by Terrance Dicks, but the fifth to be published. He started writing it on 2 May 1974, less than two months after publication of Hulke’s Doomsday Weapon. And Terrance seems to have read that book:

“The Doctor knew that the Master’s TARDIS, unlike his own, still had its chameleon mechanism in working order. … This gave it the ability to change appearance, so that wherever it landed it could blend into the landscape. The Doctor’s TARDIS had once had this power but, unfortunately, on one of his visits to twentieth century London, the chameleon circuits had worn out, and he had been unable to replace them.” (Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons by Terrance Dicks, p. 61.)

That is taking its cue from Hulke, isn’t it?

Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon was the first novelisation to feature companion Jo Grant, and Hulke made it her debut story — in the book, she’s been at UNIT for a week and has never heard of the Master. But on TV she’d already had several adventures by this point, all of them battling the Master. Terror of the Autons was her first TV story and in novelising it Terrance makes no attempt to rationalise the account in Hulke’s novelisation; he simply introduces Jo again, as it happened on screen (but, I think, makes the Doctor more charming). 

If, as I suspect, Terrance had read Doomsday Weapon and borrowed the chameleon-like analogy, then this is a conscious choice: to make his book(s) a faithful record of the TV episodes and not concern himself about what other authors might have done in their own books.

Note that Terrance refers to “chameleon circuits” plural and not a proper noun. It’s only later that it becomes “chameleon circuit” singular: the proper name for a specific bit of technology. On TV, that’s first used in Part One of Logopolis (it’s the first thing the Doctor says in that episode).

Note also that Terrance corrects the record from what’s said in Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon: he says, as per the first two TV episodes of Doctor Who ever, that this chameleonic function broke down on a visit to late 20th century London, i.e. after the Doctor stole the TARDIS from his own people. (Terrance makes no mention of it having been in for repair.)

How familiar was Terrance with the first episodes of Doctor Who? In the TV version of Terror of the Autons, written by Robert Holmes, the Doctor is apprehended at the door of the Master’s TARDIS listening for “certain vibrations”. Perhaps extrapolated from that, in the novelisation Terrance describes, twice, a characteristic quality of the Master’s chameleon-like disguised ship.

“The horse-box tingled” (p. 8)

“He placed his hand flat against the glossy side [of the horse-box] and felt the tingling vibration” (p. 62). 

But this is very like a moment in the first TV episode, where school teacher Ian Chesterton is astonished when he touches what looks like an ordinary police box. There’s a faint vibration. “It’s alive!” he says.

That doesn’t happen in the novelisation Doctor Who and the Daleks, which also introduced Ian and Barbara to the TARDIS. If this and the correction about the faulty chameleon circuits are drawn from the first two TV episodes, when had Terrance seem them? The first episode was broadcast on 23 November 1963 and then repeated the following week but was not shown again on TV until well after Terrance wrote this book. It must have made quite the impression for him to recall such specific details more than a decade later.

Another option is that he watched the first story again while at the BBC, at some specially arranged screening. Maybe, conceivably, he did so in preparation for The Three Doctors (1972-3). But my sense from interviews with him is that he did not know the first story very well, and rather dismissed it, until tasked with novelising it in 1981.

The other option is that a fan responded to Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon with an, “I think you’ll find...” I’ve seen later examples of that in Terrance’s surviving correspondence.

Until The Three Doctors, the Doctor's laboratory at UNIT looked very different in each story in which it appeared. The version seen in The Three Doctors appears again in Planet of the Spiders (1974) and Robot (1974-75). I think the descriptions of the Doctor’s lab in the novelisations Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons match that version. Indeed, UNIT HQ in the TV Terror of the Autons is in central London, apparently right by the Thames into which the Doctor hurls the Master’s bomb. In the novelisation, to make the disparate locations all one place, Terrance invents a “little canal”, presumably running through the grounds of the estate seen in The Three Doctors.

There are other fun bits of retroactive continuity. On p. 67, the Master has a “Sontaran fragmentation grenade”, suggesting he’s met the war-like species introduced two stories after the Master’s final on-screen appearance at the time Terrance wrote this. The Doctor also uses the phrase “reverse the polarity” here, four stories earlier than its first on-screen use in The Daemons.

There are some neat fixes to elements of the TV story, such as setting up why the Master would switch sides at the end (here, before the switch, he bickers a few times with an Auton). On p. 15 we hear how a Nestene sphere survived when the Autons were otherwise all destroyed at the end of Spearhead from Space. On p. 114, there’s a chance for Jo to demonstrate her army training when she knows how to fall safely, rolling, bending her legs and protecting her face with her arms. There’s something similar, I think, in Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, when Sarah Jane Smith handles a gun.

We can even deduce that Terrance made these fixes as he went along. For example, on p. 96 he has the Master heading back to his own TARDIS meaning to confound the Doctor. However, when the Master then shows up in the Doctor’s laboratory, we’re told he entered on foot — hypnotising UNIT sentries to think they’ve seen and ushered in the Prime Minister (p. 105). Terrance had clearly realised that the Master couldn’t use his TARDIS to sneak into UNIT HQ because the Doctor had already stolen his dematerialisation circuit (singular, proper noun). Terrance seems to have spotted that error between writing pages 96 and 105. According to his diary, that was on Wednesday 15 May 1974.

There’s some fun word play, too, adding to the dry humour of the TV version. The Master makes a joke, describing the deadly plastic chair as made from “polynestene” (p. 46). The Master’s real name, we are told, is “a string of mellifluous syllables” (p. 25) — a lovely word, meaning to flow like honey. There’s another deftly employed word later, meaning circus workers: “roustabouts” (p. 70).

This may seem a simple, prosaic version of the TV scripts — like Terrance's last one, Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen. In fact, it’s full of deft structural work and detail. It is, I think, a very good novelisation of a very good set of scripts, though I may well be biased because this novelisation was such a favourite of my childhood.

Reading it again, in the context of other novelisations and all I’ve learned about Terrance in recent months, I think my favourite moment is a bit from the Brigadier’s perspective.

“The Doctor and the Brigadier were engaged in one of their not infrequent arguments. Good friends though they were, their temperaments were so utterly different that the occasional clash was inevitable. This time the subject of dispute was the missing Nestene energy unit. The Brigadier, aware that he should never have allowed it to go to the museum, knew that he was really in the wrong. As a result he was naturally insisting that he was completely in the right” (pp. 20-21).

The Third Doctor and Brigadier were like Holmes and Watson, Terrance told me, explaining why he and Barry Letts then created a Moriarty for them in the form of the Master. But this moment in the novelisation isn’t Holmes and Watson at all. I suspect it might be more Barry and Terrance. 

Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen, by Terrance Dicks

What follows is dedicated to the memory of my friend John J Johnston who died yesterday morning. The EES has an obituary. You can also see John in typically erudite form giving a talk on Sutekh’s sex life. A man with such an enormous heart that Anubis will need bigger scales. RIP.

The third of the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks was published on 21 November 1974. It was the first of Target’s Doctor Who novelisations to star the Second Doctor, though he’d appeared briefly in both Terrance’s previous novels (in the prologue of Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and in the Mind Analysis Machine sequence in Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks).

This wasn’t planned to be the Second Doctor’s debut in the range. My first edition of Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks, published on 18 March 1974, lists the books “in preparation” in this order:

• Doctor Who and the Dæmons
• Doctor Who and the Sea-Monsters
• Doctor Who and the Cybermen
• Doctor Who and the Yeti

The first two of those (each starring the Third Doctor) were published on 17 October that year,  though by then the second of them had been retitled Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils. According to this list, the Second Doctor was then due to make his debut pitted against the Cybermen, to be written by Gerry Davis and presumably published in time for Christmas. However, things got delayed; it’s probably no coincide that, on 9 May 1974, Davis was also commissioned to write a new Cyberman story for the TV series, which he may have given priority.

Terrance’s Yeti book must have been delivered in good time and required little editorial work if it could be brought forward in the schedule. By the time of publication, the title had changed to Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen to match the original broadcast.

Earlier this year, I looked through two separate appointments diaries Terrance had for 1974. One he used (sporadically) to list appointments. On Tuesday, 30 April 1974 he had a 10.30 meeting at 93 Piccadilly — a branch of Natwest bank, presumably to discuss his new status as a freelancer. He was then due to meet, presumably for lunch, Mike Glover, the new editor at Target.

The following day, Terrance attended the final studio recording on Planet of the Spiders, his last Doctor Who story as script editor. The day after, 2 May, according to his other diary, he started writing his fourth novelisation, Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons (which, as I’ve explained previously, was his fifth to be published).

So his first three novelisations were all written while he was on-staff at the BBC, QED.

The decision to novelise the first Yeti story is interesting, given that the Yeti had not appeared on screen since a brief cameo at the end of The War Games in the summer of 1969 and there were no plans to bring them back to the series. They’d certainly made a lasting impact: during production of the Doctor Who TV movie in 1996, Paul McGann was asked his memories of the series and recounted, vividly, details of the Yeti control-spheres.

As I’ve argued before, editor Richard Henwood was also very monster-focused. Books about Daleks, Cybermen and Silurians/Sea Devils had all been commissioned by Target, and the Ice Warriors would soon feature in Doctor Who and the Curse of Peladon, published on 16 January 1975. The Yeti were the only other monster to star in more than one TV story up to this point.

Another possibility is that this particular Yeti story resonated with Terrance, who must have been working on the novelisation at the same time as script editing TV story Planet of the Spiders which is also about Tibetan monks and nefarious psychic powers. An element of that  TV story ends up in this book, with the Doctor teaching companion Victoria to resist hypnosis by reciting the “jewel in the lotus prayer”: “Om, mane, padme, hum” (pp. 127-128).

That TV story was, of course, inspired by and an expression of the Buddhist faith of co-writer, director and producer Barry Letts. He was surely the source of the details about life in a Tibetan monastery in Terrance’s novelisation of The Abominable Snowmen which don’t feature in the TV version.

The monks, for example, wear “saffron-coloured robes” (p. 26) a detail that could not be conveyed in the black-and-white TV episodes. We also learn that these monks drink “unsweetened tea with Yak butter floating in it” (p. 49). When the villains are defeated and life returns to normal, the monks’ rituals include “banging an enormous gong” (p. 138). None of that is from the TV scripts; it must have come from Terrance’s friend and colleague.

I don’t think Terrance can have seen the sole surviving episode of the TV story before he wrote the book. Had he done so, he would surely have tried to convey something of the scale and ambition of the location filming, with Snowdonia doubling for Tibet. His descriptions are serviceable but curt. He also describes the Yeti control-spheres as the size of a “large pebble” (p. 70), fitting easily into a pocket. On screen, they had to be football-sized to accommodate motors.

We get our first description in a Target book by Terrance of the interior of the TARDIS, which has a “centre console” rather than “central” (p. 10). On the same page, the Second Doctor has a “shock of untidy black hair”, the “shock” borrowed from the description of the Third Doctor in Terrance’s previous book. He describes companions Jamie and Zoe pithily, and provides potted histories - I assume working from either the in-universe history of the whole series in The Making of Doctor Who (1972) or the story-by-story summaries in the Doctor Who 10th anniversary special published in 1973 by Radio Times. 

Though Terrance is credited as co-author of The Making of Doctor Who, my suspicion is that he was more of a consultant on the first edition than a writer. The recent biography of Malcolm Hulke also reveals that the in-universe history of the series given in that book was compiled by Hulke’s assistant and sometime girlfriend Lauraine Palmeri (Herbert, p. 46). So Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen is the first example of Terrance acting as not just the script editor of the current TV show but a historian of the whole series.

There’s one further historic first here. Terrance generally writes in an engaging plain style, the descriptions concise and straightforward. This novelisation is, I think, even more straightforward than Terrance’s previous ones. In those, he reworked some events and structure of the TV stories they were based on; here each episode is relayed breezily in two chapters each. There’s a sense of bosh, job done.

But on p. 106, the Doctor produces a piece of chalk from his “capacious” pockets. It’s a word Terrance will often use again in these novelisations, along with other occasional archaic, vivid gems: “roustabout”, “mountebank” and “jollop” feature in his next two novelisations. Each time, they make perfect sense in context so readers learn this new vocabulary. They are little bombs of knowledge.

Capacious is particularly effective. It’s a Dickensian word: for example, Old Fezziwig in A Christmas Carol (1843) wears a “capacious waistcoat”. The Second Doctor’s battered old coat doesn’t just have big pockets; that perfectly chosen adjective makes them, vividly, something a bit magical and from another time. 

Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks by Terrance Dicks

Just sixty days after the publication of novelisations of the Third Doctor’s first two screen adventures — Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion by Terrance Dicks and Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters by Malcolm Hulke — there was more. On 18 March 1974, Target Books presented two further Third Doctor books by the same pair of authors, skipping ahead to adventures that each star a major baddie.

Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, by Hulke, features the villainous Master and also introduces us to companion Jo Grant (even though this was not her debut story on TV). Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks, by Dicks, pits Jo and the Doctor against — well, guess.

I think you can see that these follow-up novelisations were written pretty quickly. The phrase, “You’re right, of course,” is used two-thirds of the way down page 11 of Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks and then again at the top of page 12, which is just the sort of thing a copy editor ought to catch if missed by the author. 

Later, we’re told three times within about a page of text (pp. 101-102) that the futuristic trikes are specially designed to race across a landscape strewn with rubble — for all that this is a neat explanation of why there happens to be a trike conveniently parked out in the wilderness. When the Doctor sees this vehicle,

“He jumped into the driver’s seat” (p. 102).

On to, surely, when it’s a trike. Or there’s the awkward alliteration and repeated “recent” here:

“I have been studying the recent reports of resistance activity. It has reached a peak in recent weeks.” (p. 14)

That’s a shame because Terrance, who spent five years in advertising before his time on Doctor Who, had a particular gift for the pithy, vivid phrase. There are plenty of those here, too. The Controller of Earth Sector One sums up the Third Doctor as the,

“tall lean man with the shock of white hair” (p. 99).

Or there’s the poetic moment in describing,

“the Time Vortex, that mysterious void where Time and Space are one” (p. 39).

Generally, this is a cracking prose version of a cracking TV story in which gorillas (p. 9) battle guerrillas (p. 17) at the behest of the Doctor’s arch-enemies. While the Daleks, on screen, don’t appear until the closing seconds of Episode One — that is, a quarter of the way into the story — Terrance brings them in after just seven pages, and there’s a big illustration, too. The book promises and delivers.

It also includes the ending excised from the TV version, in which the Doctor and Jo appear to their earlier selves, the first half of which otherwise doesn’t make much sense. The trike sequence is a great deal more thrilling than on screen, with Ogrons pursuing on their own trikes and the Doctor driving up the side of a house and doing cool skids and jumps, in the way you imagine a chase when you’re a child.

I’m amused by 22nd-century guerrilla Anat not having seen a telephone before but knowing how it works (p. 63) — I’m not sure my own children would — and Boaz having read “history books” (p. 73) so that he knows all about servants. The mechanics of future, Dalek-conquered Earth also include gruel for most humans but “real wine in a real china cup” for the Controller (p. 12). Who grows the grapes and presses wine in the Dalek Empire? Who makes fancy cups? (I have wanged on before about the economics of the Daleks.)

Other added details include the mechanics of changing future history. At the end of the novelisation, the Doctor explains that,

“I was able to intervene and put history back on its proper tracks.” 

And Jo responds:

“I know … because you’re a Time Lord.” (p.138) 

That, I think, is tying this up with what happens at the end of the TV story Invasion of the Dinosaurs, which had just finished broadcast when this book came out. 

Then there’s the way this novelisation ties in with one of Terrance’s later TV stories. We’re told that the Daleks’ Mind Analysis Machine — with capitals — has previously left its human subjects, 

“shambling idiots with all their intelligence drained from them” (p. 100). 

The Doctor is badly hurt by his experience, though recovers after,

“a little food and wine, and a chance to rest” (p. 109).

Terrance’s next book, Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen, also has stuff about the dangers of tampering with people’s minds, all almost a decade before his TV story The Five Doctors features the dreaded Mind Probe. The implication is that Terrance — who helped created the evil, hypnotic Master — found mind control rather disturbing.

I think this novelisation also helps reveal something that Terrance really liked about the Master’s debut TV story. In Episode Three of Terror of the Autons (up on iPlayer), Captain Yates bravely commandeers’ the Brigadier’s Austin Maxi and drives it straight into an Auton. The creature goes flying, somersaulting down a hill — and then, all in the same shot, gets back up and starts climbing.

It’s a brilliant stunt and Terrance has something like it happen in three of his first four books: on p. 139 of Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, again on p. 77 of Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks (in this case, the Brigadier driving into an Ogron) and then on p. 75 of the fourth book he wrote, Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons.

In each case, the vehicle being driven is referred to as a “jeep”. The word “jeep” is used a lot in TV Doctor Who overseen by Terrance as script editor, from Episode 7 of The Invasion (1968) — the first story on which he received a screen credit — to Part Four of Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974); Terrance’s successor, Robert Holmes, began shadowing him from the next story.

(“Jeep” is also used in Part Four of The Curse of Fenric (1989) and in Doomsday (2006); I wonder if there’s a correlation between script editors / show runners who don’t drive, just as Terrance didn’t.)

Of course, what’s seen on screen in these stories and what would be used by the British Army or its UNIT spin-off is not the distinctive US Army general purpose vehicle but instead the British Land-Rover, inspired by the American jeep but a notably different car. Someone must have pointed this out to Terrance or the Target editorial team at some point between the manuscript of Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons being delivered around the end of May 1974 and then typeset, and the publication of the next book Terrance wrote, Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, published the following March.

In the latter, the “Brigadier’s Land-Rover” first appears on p. 24 and then throughout. But it is “jeep” throughout the novelisation of Terror of the Autons. Terrance surely didn’t correct the error in one book and then return to the wrong name in his next, so this misidentification of the Brigadier’s make of car is further evidence to support my wheeze that Terrance wrote the novelisation of Terror first and then wrote Giant Robot, though they were published the other way round.

More of this stuff to come as I write up my forthcoming biography of Terrance Dicks, due for publication some time next year. In the meantime, you might like my biography of David Whitaker, the author of the very first Doctor Who novelisation.

Bookish, by Matthew Sweet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See also:

• Me on The New Forest Murders, by Matthew Sweet

Writers' Guild guide to working with factual material

The Writers' Guild of Great Britain has produced a new, free guide to working with factual material. 

I've been involved in helping put it together, in my role as chair of the guild's Books Committee. Earlier this week, I was quoted by trade paper the Bookseller in its coverage of the free guide. Later this week, on 27 August, I'll be hosting a free online event about it later this week (see below for details).

It's likely to be my last job as chair, as my three-year stint comes to an end next month at the guild's AGM. 

Full blurb for the guide and event details as follows:

The lives of real people and true stories have always provided inspiration for writers. But the practicalities of working with factual material – and the potential to upset an existing person (or their lawyer) – can leave writers feeling anxious.

Which is why WGGB has today (19 August 2025) launched a new free, online guide on working with factual material.

The guidelines cover how copyright law treats factual material and how writers can build relationships with their subjects. They also provide advice on how to avoid being accused of libel or defamation.

The guidelines have been produced by the WGGB Books Committee, but the advice and principles contained in them will also be useful for writers working in other craft areas such as film, TV, theatre or audio.

The guide includes answers to questions that the WGGB is regularly asked. For example:

• Do I need ‘life rights’ to write about a real, living person?
• What if I want to write about a real, deceased person?
• Do I need permission to include a reference to a brand or trademark in my work?
• Do I need a licence to quote an academic or journalistic article in my work?
• Do I need a licence to parody or pastiche something factual in my work?
• What if my sources are in the public domain?
• How do I protect my copyright when doing research/conducting interviews?
• Should my interview subjects sign an NDA?
• How do I work with historical consultants?
• What if my subject wants a cut of the profits from my project?
• I want to base a fictional character on a real person – can I do that?

When it comes to undertaking research and interviews, for example of subjects or specialists in the author’s chosen area, we have published an accompanying template ‘Right to release’ form (as a free download) which the writer can ask the interview subject to sign to confirm that they understand the purpose of the interview and which grants the writer the right to use their material.

Working with factual material guides writers through understanding the differences between libel and defamation, best practice to protect themselves against a legal case, and the implications of writer warranties and indemnities.

WGGB Books Chair Simon Guerrier said: “When it comes to working with factual material, there are clearly many areas in which writers want help and clarification — as WGGB has received numerous enquiries in the past few years.

“This clear, concise publication guides writers through what they need to know and includes some practical tips.

“I’m very grateful to everyone on the WGGB Books Committee and at the union for their hard work in putting these guidelines together.”

Working with factual material – come to our free event on 27 August

WGGB Books Chair Simon Guerrier will be offering some practical advice on this subject and discussing with guests (to be announced) the pitfalls of writing about real-life characters, events and issues, whether contemporary or historical.

Live captions will be available throughout. Please let us know when you register if you have any additional access needs.

5-6pm, 27 August

Online, via Zoom

Price: free

More information and bookings

Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion by Terrance Dicks

“In this, the first adventure of his third ‘incarnation’, DOCTOR WHO, Liz Shaw, and the Brigadier grapple with the nightmarish invasion of the AUTONS — living, giant-sized plastic-modelled ‘humans’ with no hair and sightless eyes; waxwork replicas and tailors’ dummies whose murderous behaviour is directed by the NESTENE CONSCIOUSNESS — a malignant, squid-like monster of cosmic proportions and indescribably hideous appearance.”

John Grindrod’s excellent talk at the Target Book Club event last month made me revisit the blurb on the back of this novelisation, the first* of more than 200 books by Terrance Dicks, originally published simultaneously in hardback and paperback on 17 January 1974. That blurb, a single, thrilling sentence chock full of adjectives, was probably written by commissioning editor Richard Henwood.

Heywood’s brilliant instincts for what would appeal directly to his readership of 11-14 year-olds also included changing the titles of stories to focus on the monsters. The TV story Spearhead from Space thus became Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion. 

Published on the same day was Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation of his own TV story, Doctor Who and the Silurians. This already had a monster-focused title but “Silurian” is a technical word referring to a specific period of geological time. Henwood went for something simpler and more vivid, a title to immediately conjure a mental image: Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters (with hyphen). The cover, by Chris Achilleos, promises monsters plural: a T-rex and a Silurian.

Of course, these new titles also fitted with those of the first three Target novelisations, published on 2 May 1973 and all reissued versions of books originally published in the 1960s. Two were originally published with snappy, simple titles focused on the antagonists: Doctor Who and the Zarbi and Doctor Who and the Crusaders. Henwood changed Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks to Doctor Who and the Daleks to match (though only on the front cover; it retains its original title inside).

As John Grindrod pointed out in his talk, these three Target reissues were published as part of the wider “Target Adventure Series”. The inside cover of each lists the other two Doctor Who books and also a non-Doctor Who adventure story called The Nightmare Rally. Written by Pierre Castex, this was again a reissue of a book originally published in the 1960s, which the new cover proclaimed was “Now an exciting Walt Disney film, Diamonds on Wheels”; the reissue was published ahead of the film being released in cinemas later that year.

Also listed as part of the Target Adventure Series in these first Doctor Who books was a non-fiction title, Wings of Glory — written by Graeme Cook and about the history of war in the air. Another non-fiction title, None but the Valiant, about war at sea, was,

“to be published in Target Books, September 1973”.

Note that there was no mention here of further Doctor Who books as “in preparation” — a feature of later Doctor Who novelisations. Henwood had written to the BBC on 3 November 1972 expressing a wish to novelise further Doctor Who stories beyond the three reissues but it seems he and the team at Target waited to see how those sold before formally committing to more.

They sold extremely well: The Target Book by David J Howe with Tim Neal, which is essential reading on this stuff, estimates an initial print run of 20,000 copies per title, a reprint within six months (October/November 1973), and again three months later (January/February 1974). One of the books, Doctor Who and the Daleks, reached no. 6 in the WH Smith top 10 on 20 July 1973. 

By this point, with the books clearly a success, six new Doctor Who titles had been commissioned. As well as Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters, there were to be novelisations of the following TV stories:

• Day of the Daleks (published as Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks by Terrance Dicks on 18 March 1974)
• Colony in Space (published as Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon by Malcolm Hulke the same day)
• The Daemons (published as Doctor Who and the Daemons by Barry Letts on 17 October 1974)
• The Sea Devils (published as Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils, with hyphen, by Malcolm Hulke the same day)

At this stage, Mac Hulke was the backbone of the Target range, writing half of the new books — all based on his own TV serials. To begin with, all his books were to be renamed with punchier titles: Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils was originally going to be put out as Doctor Who and the Sea-Monsters (as per the “in preparation” list in the first editions of Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon). The changed title and hyphen were surely to help indicate that this was a direct sequel to Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters. 

My guess is that the title was changed back to Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils following the last-minute decision to repeat the omnibus version of The Sea Devils on TV on 27 May 1974, a few months ahead of publication. Perhaps it was also to ensure the title matched the list of all Doctor Who TV serials given in the Radio Times special marking 10 years of Doctor Who, published in November 1973. Another title listed as “in preparation” in March 1974, Doctor Who and the Yeti, was also changed back to its TV title and published as Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen.

However, before Target abandoned this policy of changing titles to make them more simple, vivid and monster-focused, this approach seems to have had a profound effect on Hulke and others working on the TV show. On 2 July 1973 — around the same time that these first six new novelisations were confirmed — Hulke was also commissioned to write the scripts for a new six-part Doctor Who story on TV called Timescoop. By early August, that name had been changed to Invasion of the Dinosaurs. TV story Death to the Daleks, commissioned the same day, already had this kind of title but Return to Peladon, commissioned on 12 July from writer Brian Hayles, became The Monster of Peladon (Hayles was also soon commissioned by Target to novelise his first Peladon story). 

Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts had originally planned to end the 1974 TV series of Doctor Who by killing off the Master, as played by Roger Delgado, in a story to be called The Final Game. When Delgado died and then star Jon Pertwee decided to leave Doctor Who, the finale became a story to kill-off the Third Doctor, now with a monster-focused title: Planet of the Spiders. In the following season of TV adventures, the titles of all but one story — The Ark in Space — include the name of the monster.

The books introduced other stuff that found its way into the TV show, too. The Making of Doctor Who (1972) by Hulke and Dicks revealed that Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart’s first name is “Alastair”. This fact is given again in Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, published months before studio recording of the name’s first use on screen in Part One of Planet of the Spiders.

Then there’s this, from the climax of the Auton invasion book, as one of the monstrous shop-window dummies is caught in the blast of a grenade.

“An Auton arm blown clear from the body continued to lash wildly around the room, spitting energy bolts like a demented snake.” (p. 146)

It’s surely the inspiration for what happens in the TV episode Rose (2005).

(ETA clever Nicholas Pegg points out what goes through the mind of the policeman facing, in the novelisation, the Auton invasion of Oxford Street:

"Students, he thought vaguely. They'd gone too far this time. That thought was also his last." (p. 134)

Rose's response to encountering the Autons for the first time, in a department store in "central London", is that they must be students...)

I’ve much more to say about what Terrance does and doesn’t do in his first novelisation, but I’ll save it for my forthcoming biography of him...

* Terrance was credited as co-writer of The Making of Doctor Who (Piccolo, 1972), but Mac Hulke did the bulk - probably all - of the actual writing, and took 75% of the royalties. "The Auton Invasion was the first book of any kind I'd written," Terrance told the authors of the Target Book (p. 19). Years later, he alone carried out the rewrites on the updated edition of The Making of..., published by Target in 1976, but reused some of the material originally written by Hulke.

Further reading:

• Me on Terrance's next book, Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks
• Richard Benson, "Mark Gatiss, the boy that Dr Who books made", in the Bee - this new interview includes the influence on Mark of Spearhead from Space on TV and Terrance's novelisation of The Three Doctors
• Matthew Michael on Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion
• Jim Sangster on Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion
• More by me on Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who Magazine #620

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out today and includes After Image by me, in which I look again at recent TV episodes Lucky Day, The Story & the Engine, The Interstellar Song Contest, Wish World and The Reality War.

I, in turn, get reviewed, with Jamie Lenman casting his critical eye over Smith and Sullivan: Reunited, of which I wrote one episode. He says Blood Type is "complex and nuanced", which is nice.

There are lots of other goodies this issue, not least Gary Gillatt's lovely piece about the war service of the actors who played the first three Doctors Who. 

Anyway. I'm on deadlines so must dash. Will write up notes on some recent books read and post them here asap.

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?

Stone & Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch

This is the tenth full-length novel in the Rivers of London series about a London copper who is also a wizard, and it is a delight. I bought it for the Dr when she was feeling a bit low and it worked its magic.

Peter Grant and his extended family are in Scotland on holiday and to look into alleged sightings of a huge panther - or, melanistic leopard to be precise. As well as liaising with the local police to investigate this “weird bollocks”, Peter must also wrangle his parents, his toddler twins, his river goddess partner, and apprentice Abigail — who tells half of this story herself.

It’s smart and funny, and kept be guessing to the end. As always, I’m in awe of Ben’s ability to create such a vast range of rich characters, and how he grounds the fantastic elements in the mundane. The details — from the stone which built Aberdeen to the differences in police procedure and legislation once you cross the Border, are exemplary. I’ve been learning lots about scuba diving over the last year (as the Lord of Chaos is doing a course in it) and so found the threat at the end particularly tense. 

There are loads of nerdy references, the Doctor Who ones including Daleks (p. 26), Peter’s explanation of his job,

“I deal with the odd, the unexplained, anything on earth…” (p. 108).

and what might be a reference to one of Ben’s own Doctor Who stories, in using the word “obstreperous” (p. 153). I wonder, too, if there’s an echo of Doctor Who and the Sea Devils by Malcolm Hulke in some of what goes on here.

It’s fun to pick up on this stuff and the other nerdery (such as Abigail working out the physics of mermaids). And it’s fun following character’s personal lives — the impact on Peter of being a dad, the love lives of Abigail and of Indigo the fox, the hints we get about Dr Abdul Walid’s early, wild years.

So many detectives have terrible personal lives and rub people up the wrong way. Peter is a charmer (literally!) and peacemaker, and it makes him and his world very engaging company. 

Rivers of London novels I've also blogged about:

• Lies Sleeping
• False Value
• Amongst Our Weapons

Rivers of London novellas:

• What Abigail Did That Summer
• The October Man
• The Masquerades of Spring