Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters, by Terrance Dicks

Where were we? Back in January, I posted at length about The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, which was the third of three Doctor Who books written by Terrance Dicks all published on 16 December 1976. He didn’t stop to rest: a month after that, Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters was published simultaneously in hardback and paperback on 20 January 1977. It was Terrance’s 14th Doctor Who novelisation and 20th published book since his debut, Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, three years previously.

• See my list of all 235 books written by Terrance Dicks
• Pre-order my biography Written by Terrance Dicks, due for publication on 30 November

A novelisation of the TV story Carnival of Monsters (1973), adapted from scripts written by Robert Holmes, had been on the Target schedule since at least August 1975, when it was planned for publication in June 1976 — as per the “Advance information on Doctor Who books in preparation” reproduced on p. 92 of The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol 2 by Keith Miller. That list doesn’t name the authors assigned to each book, but Terrance had novelised Holmes’s two previous TV stories, Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, so I suspect he was always attached to this one, as a matter of course.

So why was publication delayed by six months? My guess is that Gerry Davis was originally assigned to novelise his own TV story Revenge of the Cybermen (1975) but when the scripts were largely rewritten by Holmes — now script editor on the TV series — Davis declined to adapt them in that form and Terrance duly took over the book version, which had originally been scheduled for publication in April 1976 and was published on 20 May. Terrance then returned to the book I suspect he had always been assigned, Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks; this had been scheduled for May 1976 and was published on 22 July. The early schedule then listed Carnival of Monsters (Jun 76) and World’s End (Dalek Invasion of Earth) (Jul 76), but these were pushed back down the list. Instead, Terrance skipped ahead to Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, originally scheduled for Aug 76 and published on 19 August, and Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks, scheduled for Sep 76 and published 21 October.

I think we can explain this swappage on the basis that Target had decided to capitalise on the Christmas market by publishing three books on the same day in December: Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars (a novelisation of a recent TV story featuring the (then) current Doctor;  a revised The Making of Doctor Who; and The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book. To accommodate this, they could have pushed the whole schedule of novelisations back, but I think they prioritised titles. They must have thought The Web of Fear, featuring the popular Yeti as well as the first appearance of regular character Lethbridge-Stewart, would sell better than Carnival of Monsters, and that the linked novelisations of Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks together would sell more copies than the solo World’s End, for all it also featured Daleks.

Given my estimated 7.5-month lead time, Terrance must have delivered a manuscript for Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters by the end of May 1976 for publication in January, so I think he wrote it after delivering his first draft of what was originally called Brainstorm and then became The Lambda Factor — his episode of the TV series Space: 1999. 

He may well have completed work on it before beginning the late-commissioned The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book. That book surely explains the cover artwork on this novelisation: the TV story Carnival of Monsters briefly features a plesiosaurus but it is this real-life monster rather than the story’s original creation, the Drashigs, that is depicted by Chris Achilleos. That choice is odd given that the back-cover blurb describes it simply as a “prehistoric monster”, suggesting that the name plesiosaurus was not considered a sufficient draw for punters. So, was the cover commissioned with the idea that this illustration could also be used in the Dinosaur Book, along with the dinosaurs that had already featured on the covers of Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters and Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, in the same way that the successful The Doctor Who Monster Book had repurposed cover art?  

The cover illustration is a more convincing, dynamic creature than the one seen in the TV story. In producing his striking artwork for the covers of these books, Achilleos had previously made use of reference material such as photographs and old comics. I suspect the same was true of the plesiosaurus and the SS Bernice seen here — though I’ve not been able to identify sources. He did not use reference from the TV story, or from the dinosaur books that George Underwood cribbed from for The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book (namely Album of Dinosaurs illustrated by Rod Ruth and the Ladybird book Dinosaurs illustrated by BH Robinson). 

Digging around, I thought the films King Kong (1932) and Son of Kong (1933) may have been a source — either the “sea monster” battling Kong by a cave in the former, or the one that attacks a boat 1:04:19 into the latter on YouTube.

Screengrab from Son of Kong (1933)

Achilleos certainly had form in borrowing from King Kong, as he provided cover artwork for the copyright-dodging Amok: King of Legend, a 1976 novel by Bernard L Ross (a pseudonym for Ken Follett, who was at the time working with Terrance’s friend Malcolm Hulke on Crossroads novelisations and Hulke’s never-published original novel Airship). Perhaps Achilleos had stills from King Kong or related artwork for that book and reappropriated something from them here…

Yet when I put this frankly brilliant theory to Paul MC Smith, author of new book Screen Printed — The Definitive Guide to the Exciting Adventures Based on the Popular TV Serial and a skilled detective in tracing Achilleos’s sources, he was unconvinced. He shared with me a close-up of the creature from Son of Kong, which seems much frillier and bobblier than what Achilleos drew. 

Production still from Son of Kong

Paul thinks that, like with other covers for Doctor Who novelisations, Achilleos probably drew inspiration from old comics he had at hand, but we’ve not yet been able to identify which. Do get in touch if you have suggestions…

We don’t know the source Achilleos used for the SS Bernice either, but his stippled portrait of the Third Doctor is taken from a BBC photograph of Jon Pertwee stood back-to-back with Patrick Troughton in front of the police box prop on the set of the Doctor’s laboratory at UNIT HQ from The Three Doctors. We even know that this picture was taken in Studio 1 at TV Centre on Tuesday, 28 November 1972. I think Achilleos makes Pertwee look a bit darker-haired and younger than the photograph. It’s not quite the “shock” of white hair described in Terrance’s prose.

The lads

The yellow border is a new innovation, and makes the whole cover a lot brighter and more striking. Achilleos used the same trick with a later novelisation, Doctor Who and the Ark in Space by Ian Marter, published in May the same year, and Mike Little seems to have appropriated the idea for his cover of Terrance’s Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius, published the following month. Perhaps yellow borders were a short-lived way of maintaining visual continuity in the range despite a change in cover artists, prompted by Achilleos leaving the range.

Let’s get into the book itself. Until now, I’ve largely worked from first-edition paperbacks but this time I reread a 1984 reprint I’ve owned since it was published. It begins by telling us that the Doctor has just recovered his ability to travel in “Time and space”, only the former capitalised, with a footnote referring to the events of the previous TV story, The Three Doctors, as already novelised by Terrance. The Doctor is now attempting to visit the planet Metebelis 3 — a name than meant little when the TV story was first broadcast but by the time of publication had new meaning because it had been seen in two further TV stories. The mention of it on the first page here foreshadows significant events to come for the Doctor in Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, also by Terrance, and Doctor Who and the Green Death by Malcolm Hulke — both already published.

As per the TV story, the Doctor tells us that on Metebelis 3, “the air was like wine”, which makes me wonder if the atmosphere there has narcotic properties and provides a natural high. Terrance adds some practical detail about the Doctor’s new-found abilities to pilot his spaceship:

“I don’t drive the TARDIS, I programme it” (p. 8).

The house style today would be “program” for a computer, and the TARDIS would probably be “she”; indeed, in Terrance’s next-but-one novelisation, Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos, he has the same incarnation of the Doctor refer to the TARDIS as “the old girl” (p. 139), not a phrase used in the script.

When the action moves to the planet Inter Minor, Terrance draws from a line of dialogue by Pletrac to explain the division between the two types of indigenous being. On screen, Pletrac refers to himself and his colleagues, “as members of the Official species”, distinct from the Functionaries. Strictly speaking, that word “species” suggests that while Officials and Functionaries are both grey-skinned humanoid creatures that look rather like one another, a pairing of one with the other cannot produce any offspring. On p. 10, Terrance reiterates that idea, telling us that the two groups, “had gradually evolved into two different [ie distinct] species”. Yet on the same page he also speaks of a more cultural kind of division, differentiating  the minority “Official caste” from the “larger class” of Functionaries. This is muddling up  kinds of categorisation, biological with ideological (see also Doctor Who’s tangled history of using the word “race”).

There’s an in-joke in the description of the Functionaries as looking “coarse, lumpy, unfinished”,

“As if they’d been slapped together out of rough clay by a rather poor sculptor” (p. 11).

On screen, the Officials are played by guest actors in close-up, while the Functionaries grunting about in the background are supporting artists / extras. The make-up and costume budget seem to have been applied accordingly.

As is typical with a script by Holmes, the dialogue sparkles, and a character’s manner of speaking and the vocabulary they use demonstrate their personality and worldview. Terrance largely keeps the best lines, but peppers the prose with telling details. For example, there’s this about Official Kalik:

“Like all officials, he had no inhibitions about stating the obvious” (p. 12).

He spells out some of the class-conscious stuff in the dialogue for younger readers who might miss the point:

"It did not occur to Kalik that it was not the rebellious Functionaries who were abnormal, but the conditions under which they had to live and work” (p. 15).

Or there’s what a closer look at the glamorous outfits worn by performers Vorg and Shirna reveals about their existence:

“Many neat darns and patches showed a desperate attempt to keep up appearances” (p. 12)

The analogies are simple and relatable: at the climax of Chapter 3, a giant hand picks up the TARDIS as though it were a box of matches (p. 35), and I particularly like the ravenous Drashigs crashing through the walls of the miniscope as easily as “opening a sardine can” (p. 73). That works especially well because it’s Jo who observes this — so it’s revealing of her perspective. But sometimes Terrance veers into a kind of authorial analogy. For example, when the TARDIS expands back to normal size, we’re told it reaches “the size of a Police Box — which is what it was, at least on the outside” (p. 62). Yet none of the characters who witness this moment would recognise a police box, let alone suspect it wasn’t what it appeared.

Stage directions in the script describe Vorg’s Miniscope device as “a large gaudy cylinder, a cross between a juke box and a samovar”. We come to learn it’s like a TV set, only one with miniaturised people inside performing live entertainments without realising they are on show. Terrance describes it as like a What the Butler Saw machine (p 13), and I wonder how many young readers when this was first published knew what that meant, let alone readers now. “The scope was a kind of peepshow,” he continues. I know Peepshow was the working title for the story, but that name suggests something risqué if not outright pornographic, and not really suitable for a family audience or young readers. That was surely why the title of the story was changed for broadcast. Indeed, Terrance also quotes the line of dialogue that inspired the title used on TV — “a whole Carnival of Monsters” (p. 22).  

When the Doctor and Jo are apprehended on the SS Bernice, the Doctor explains himself away by making up a pulpy adventure story of the kind Terrance loved to read — and which no one believes (p. 26). It’s a rare example of Terrance adding to the source material. Largely, he transposes each 25-minute episode into three chapters, each chapter comprising about nine or 10 pages, so there’s a little over a minute of screen time per page.

That’s fine because the source is so rich. The characters from 1926 drop references to real-life musicals Lady Be Good and Chu Chin Chow, and there are self-reflexive in-jokes about the TV series Doctor Who, such as Jo’s observation that “[I] suppose we’re due for [another] monster bit any minute now.” There’s an extra joke of that kind in the book, when Vorg tries to justify the lurid entertainments in his peepshow by saying they’re, “not only amusing but educational too” (p. 42). 

Terrance makes the analogy plain: once inside the workings of the miniscope,

“Jo felt like an ant that had wandered inside the back of a television set” (p. 51).

But this is a special kind of TV set, with an especially powerful effect on its audience: Terrance tells us that the miniscope produces something like a hypnotic effect, putting the viewer right in the midst of the action (p. 43).

There is, though a limit to the in-jokes. When the Doctor is all set to box with Lieutenant John Andrews (Ian Marter), there’s a reference on screen to real-life boxer John L Sullivan (1858-1918) — but Terrance resisted the urge to play on the fact that Marter had gone on to play a companion with the same surname, Harry Sullivan. Other writers of Doctor Who books would not have been so restrained!

Terrance’s additions are much more about character. When, in the script, Jo complains about her lot to the Doctor, Terrance gives her an extra sentence to underline that she’s generally more fun: “Sorry to be such a misery” (p. 60). As he’s done before, he shares practical tips he may have learned in National Service, like the need when landing from a height to bend the knees and roll like a parachutist (p. 89). Likewise, he adds the detail that Major Daly had, 10 years before the events here, “seen action on the Western Front” (p. 79), thus explaining his prowess using what Terrance specifies as a Thompson sub-machine gun with a magazine of .45 calibre bullets.

There are some other additions: we learn that the Miniscope includes Tellurians (humans), Ogrons, Drashigs and Cybermen — all as per the TV story — but also Ice Warriors. Still, it’s odd Ice Warriors and Cybermen would collapse when exposes to airless cold (p. 117). 

He also modifies the way in which the Doctor survives his first encounter with the Drashigs. On TV, he uses his sonic screwdriver to ignite the marsh gas around the creatures. Here, on p. 66, he draws a flare pistol from his pocket instead. This has been mentioned only briefly before, on p. 48 and p. 50, when the Doctor takes it from a wall rack on the Bernice. Presumably, this was to avoid any suggestion of the Doctor using the sonic as a weapon, but was that imposed by someone else on Terrance or, since script editing the TV story, had he devised that rule for himself?

Terrance provides us with some insights into the Doctor’s scheming mind as he works to rescue Jo:

“The Doctor’s own behaviour had been calculated from the very first. As long as Jo Grant was inside the Scope, she was still in great danger [so] he had to dominate these Minorans from the start, force them to help him.” (p. 95)

In this,

“He was gambling, that like all authorisations, they would harass and bully anyone who seemed weaker than themselves, while responding favourably to a display of force and bluster” (p. 97).

Notably, Terrance does not embellish what I think is a key moment in the TV story, and Doctor Who more generally, when the Doctor tells Jo that he “had a great deal to do” with persuading the Time Lords to ban the use of miniscopes. As I argued in my article “Who Connections — Star Trek”, for Doctor Who Magazine #632 (August 2026), pp. 44-49, this is news to Jo, so it must have happened sometime before the Doctor met her, and the sense is surely that it happened before his exile to Earth, so in a previous incarnation. It is changing the role of the Doctor, from itinerant traveller to intergalactic diplomat and campaigner in the same vein as Captain Kirk, and suggesting that, despite the lack of evidence in TV episodes from the 1960s, that the Doctor has always been like that.  The lack of embellishment to this scene in the novelisation suggests that Terrance didn’t recognise it as a big change in the lore of the series. 

Other small changes make the Doctor more dynamic, powerful and in charge. He carries Jo on his shoulders (p. 116) and they later materialise back beside the TARDIS, “just as the Doctor had planned” (p. 121), though it seems to have been down to luck. Terrance also acknowledges a plot hole in the story: Jo realises that the Doctor recalled the name of the SS Bernice in the first place because it famously disappeared; by sending it and the crew back to their own time, haven’t she and the Doctor changed history? “Only in a few very small details,” handwaves the Doctor.

The book concludes with Vorg — who, like Daly, fought bravely when occasion demanded — “surrounded by an admiring audience of Officials and Functionaries … telling the story of his valour for the hundredth time” (p. 123). In his review of this novelisation for Escape to Danger, my friend Jim Sangster sees this as meaning that the different classes/caste/species of Inter Minorans now live on equal terms, with “no sign of the lower caste being ushered away.” I’m not sure I’m convinced that there really has been a redistribution of power. The (unseen) president is still in charge, the Officials still command. As with the Doctor sending the SS Bernice home, I don’t think there’s much evidence that a lot has really changed.

All in all, it’s a great TV story, full of wit and excitement, and it’s a good novelisation. But I think it’s perhaps a more run-of-the-mill entry than Terrance’s previous novelisations, which up to this point tended to fix on big-event stories — the first adventures of particular Doctors or companions, battles with Daleks and other big-name monsters, and major events affecting series lore. This book was the last novelisation of the five stories from the 1972-73 series on TV, and perhaps marks the beginning of something that will become a lot more prevalent with Terrance’s books for the range: a novelisation that is less a top-notch, must-have story, and more just filling a gap. 

But there were still plenty of classics to come. Terrance’s very next book is a corker and among his own favourites. Next episode: Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth.

Other pals writing about this novelisation:

• Matt Michael read a first-edition hardback, coo posh
• Nicholas Whyte thinks it only an average novelisation  

Written by Terrance Dicks - pre-orders open

You can now pre-order my new biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, which will be published by Ten Acre Books on Monday, 30 November.

We'll be launching the book at the Portico Library on Wednesday 25 November and I will be signing copies at the Who Shop in London on Saturday 28 November.

Here is the cover of the exclusive hardback edition available from the Who Shop, with cover art by Andy Walker:

Blurb for Written by Terrance Dicks as follows:

“Through the ruin of a city stalked a little boy…”

Terrance Dicks was the bestselling author of 235 books for young readers, and is widely credited for teaching generations of children to read, instilling in them a life-long love of reading.

That would have been achievement enough, but he was also writer, storyliner, script editor and producer of some of the most popular TV shows — best known for his work on Doctor Who, but with credits ranging from The Avengers to Crossroads, and Space: 1999 to the BBC’s ‘Classic Serials’ of the 1980s, including Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist and Vanity Fair.

With access to Terrance’s treasure trove of papers, and new interviews with those who knew and worked with him, Written by Terrance Dicks is the authoritative biography of his life and work. This is Terrance’s own story.

Simon Guerrier has written countless Doctor Who books, comics and audio plays, including the new novelisation The Six Doctors, based on Terrance Dicks's draft script. He's also the author of Sherlock Holmes: The Great War and has produced a number of documentaries for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4.

Cover photograph by Chris Ridley (c) Radio Times Archive. Cover design by Stuart Manning.

For more, see my list of the 235 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to detailed posts on individual titles.

Also available, my previous biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television.

War With the Robots, by Harry Harrison

This anthology of eight science-fiction stories was first published in the US in 1962 by Pyramid Publications and the UK in 1967 by Dobson Books. I read a paperback published by Panther, an imprint of Granada Publishing, in 1976. The indicia says it was “made and printed” by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) in Bungay, and that it is set in Linotype Times. It doesn’t credit the cover artist — though that looks, to my untrained eye, like Chris Foss.

My guess is that these stories were collected in an effort to emulate the success of Isaac Asimov’s anthologies, not least the interlinked robot stories collected in I, Robot (1950), The Rest of the Robots (1964) and The Complete Robot (1982). In revisiting the stories originally published individually in various sci-fi magazines, Asimov revised them and added bridging material to make a more cohesive whole.

The opening “A word from the (human) author” rather suggests this will be something similar, Harrison explaining the history of fictional “robots”, as coined by Karel Capek in his play RUR (1920), then arguing that robots are already with us in the sensing and deciding gadgets we take for granted in our lives, from the automatic alarm clock on. He then, separately, introduces the first story by telling us,

“The first creature from earth to set foot — or treads — on the moon will be robot” (p. 11). 

Indeed, he says, that robot was in the planning stage at the time of writing. So the reader would surely expect the story to follow to address some aspect of this. But “Simulated Trainer” (originally published as “Trainee for Mars” in Fantastic Universe in 1958) is about humans in training to be the first to land on Mars. There’s a fun idea at the heart of it about the psychological impact of knowing, or not, that you’re in a simulation. And there is a robot, in the manufactured Martian creature encountered early on. But it’s not quite what I expected from the author’s note.

“The Velvet Glove” involves robot Jon Venex applying for a job and getting caught up in a drug-smuggling operation. The rather crude analogy being drawn is that robots are not the first demographic group to be treated as slaves. It’s kind of fun, but ends before we get into what I think would be more interesting territory, with a robot working for the intelligence services while also undergoing a political awakening about the lot of its kind…

“Arm of the Law” is much better: a robot worth $120,000 credits is delivered to a police department, and rather than turning a blind eye to the local protection racket, sets out to arrest all the villains. It’s sort of dumping a dorky, literal robot of the Asimov kind into the cynical, morally grey world of Hammett or Chandler. It’s not so vividly, richly told — but good fun.

My favourite, “The Robot Who Wanted to Know”, is about the places reading can take you. One robot, we’re told, has followed a thread of enquiry through available books, and is now an expert of languages. But the robot protagonist follows a different line, into romantic fiction, and then wants to participate so fakes an invitation to a masked ball. The resolution is neat, producing a mechanical fault that also works an analogy.

“I See You” (originally published as “Robot Justice”) is set in a Big Brother-type world of mass surveillance, where no crime goes unobserved and is swiftly punished. The hero-villain who attempted to steal money is sentenced to 20 years of dismal menial labour, objects and gets more penalties added. How can he escape from the all-seeing machine? Again, the resolution works well — what doesn’t a camera look at? — and ends on an arresting cliffhanger, which helps it linger.

‘The Repairman” involves a technician sent to repair a bit of kit on a remote and primitive planet. The kit is vital to interplanetary travel, but the unsophisticated locals have developed a religion around the artefact. So the repairman of the title must dress up as an indigenous creature, complete with spiky teeth and tail, and pretend to be an emissary from their ancestors / gods. It’s all a bit Star Trek, I think, in High Colonial mode. Ho ho, this salt-of-the-earth hero is so much smarter than the silly natives…

One thing of note is that the repairman surveys the area by sending down a “Flying Eye”, effectively a drone camera. In 2022, I got Samira Ahmed to interview Philip Hinchcliffe, former producer of Doctor Who (1974-77), at length, for the release Daleks! Genesis of Terror. He said that on getting the gig in 1974, “I gave myself a crash course in sci-fi I hadn’t read. Most of it was basic stuff: Asimov, Brian Aldiss and other people. And I thought ‘Wow, this is a really interesting story area’.”

As I argued in my essay for The DNA of Doctor Who — The Philip Hinchcliffe Years in 2024,

“Planet of Evil was the direct beneficiary of this: on the DVD, Hinchcliffe says the ‘occuloid tracker’ – what we’d now recognise as a surveillance drone – was his idea, drawn from one of the science fiction stories he’d read. There are, for example: automated flying ‘eyes’ in ‘This Moment of the Storm’ by Roger Zelazny; golden, basketball-like ‘copseyes’ in ‘Cloak of Anarchy’ by Larry Niven and ‘flying eye’ probes in ‘The Repairman’ by Harry Harrison.”

I read the story when researching that piece, but then completely forgot it. “Oh yeah,” I thought when I got to the reference to the Flying Eye this time, but couldn’t remember what happened next. That is not the greatest endorsement of a story.

In fact, there’s a Flying Eye in the next story in this collection, too, “Survival Planet”. This is another High Colonial story, this time about Good Space People visiting a world once ravaged by Bad Space People called Slavers. The primitive-seeming natives have taken steps to protect themselves from the Slavers, and treat the Good Lot as if they’re no different. But the implication, of two adjacent stories with the same kit, is that both occur in the same shared universe. It is the only evidence apart from Harrison’s introductions to each story that these are all connected.

The final story, “The War of the Robots” is not included in the acknowledgments as having been previously published, so seems to be new to this collection — and provided the overall title. It involves the last survivors on one side of a longstanding war, battling to continue in the rising heat of their underground base. Robots don’t suffer the same effects, so the humans withdraw, allowing them robots to pursue their war for them. Only things aren’t quite what they appear and at least some characters discover they have been duped…

There’s something fascinating here, and perhaps more relevant now than when it was first written, about artificial intelligence replacing human workers, with their enthusiastic consent. But Harrison’s introduction to the story is guilty, I think, of the same naive zeal:

“Homo sapiens is a born improver. Everything keeps getting bigger and bigger and better and better … This applies to war too” (p. 149)

The problem, then, is that he’s not at war with the robots.

Target Book Club 2026

Art by 
Gürkan Özer

On Saturday, I was in London to speak at Target Book Club, reading Chapter 4 of my forthcoming Doctor Who novelisation The Six Doctors, which I have adapted from scripts and surviving paperwork from the archive of Terrance Dicks.

You can now listen to that and all the other speakers, care of the Hamster Book Club podcast: Target Book Day 2026. List of speakers and their speakings below.

As well as reading from my book, I also announced that my biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be published on 30 November. You can pre-order it now.

00:01:40 “Chapter One” by Bruce Nicholson, read by Una McCormack (a woman!)

00:07:25 “Father in the Mirror” by Julian Richards, about his late father Justin

00:21:54 “Zarbi-Ye-Ye!” by Robert Crighton, on the oddness of Doctor Who and the Zarbi

00:38:24 “And the Mysterious Imagery” by Jason Thompson

00:54:19 “Lyle and a Time Lord” by Matthew Sweet

01:14:21 “Exterminations in the Library” by Gary Brannan, on the archive of Terrance Dicks held at the Borthwick Institute for Archives in York

01:29:17 “The Revolting Rutan Will Not Be Television” by Paul Kirkley

01:43:07 “Literal Targets” by Jonathan Morris, who has posted a transcript and missing bits

01:49:29 “The Stallslady is BBC Enterprises” by Stephen Wyatt on how fans interpret his work

02:02:01 Reading from The Power of Kroll novelisation by Robert Shearman

02: 08:37 “Young Men Are Dying For It” by James Goss, on his novelisation of The Armageddon Factor

02:22:30 “Bargain Hunt / On Target” a game with Steve Cole and 02:32:52 a few words from Albert dePetrillo off of BBC Books

02:36:01 Reading from An Unearthly Child novelisation by Nigel Robinson

02:47:38 Reading from The Six Doctors novelisation by Simon Guerrier

02:59:00 “Drawing Inspiration” by Paul MC Smith

03:14:25 “Et zut! Ca recommence!” by Phil Pascoe

03:28:21 “The Changing Face of Doctor Who” by Andrew Orton

03:43:15 “The Timeless Pieces” by James Cooray Smith

03:53:34 “Revenge of the Blurboids” by John Grindrod

04:11:34 “A New Target At Last” and a reading from The Vampire Mutation novelisation by Steve Cole

[Not included] “The Five-Fingered Bookmark” by Professor Esther MacCallum-Stewart (she was a woman, too!)

Hideous Kinky, by Esther Freud

I can see why this strange, disturbing novel had such an impact when first published in 1992. It’s the semi-autobiographical account of a childhood trip to Morocco in the early 1970s, at once exotic adventure and horror story.

In the opening pages, the young narrator is in a van driving from the UK to Marrakech with her elder sister Bea, unnamed Mum, Mum’s boyfriend John and a silent, sullen woman called Maretta who we then learn is John’s wife. The implication, unrecognised by the narrator, is that Maretta is unhappy with the relationship between her husband and the unnamed Mum. There’s something odd and uncomfortable going on, to be teased out by the reader from the narrator’s account. 

The only words the girls have heard Maretta ever say are “hideous” and “kinky”, which they work into the rules of their game of tag, I think unwittingly taunting her. Then Maretta is seriously ill, and covered in lice, and suddenly we learn that John has taken her back to London. Much later, we briefly hear news that Maretta previously suffered the loss of a child but is now pregnant by John again… We don’t hear of them again.

The point is that the narrator shares with us events as they happen — the chaos and feelings and textures of this adventure with her Mum — but doesn’t quite grasp what they mean. As readers, we must deduce the things not said or understood: connections, desires, what characters are escaping. Bit by bit, we piece together that the narrator’s Mum is as much escaping the “rules” laid down by her strict mother in Tunbridge Wells as searching for some kind of freedom or meaning. Yet she depends — desperately — on the connections she’s escaped, reliant on regular payments sent out by the girls’ father.

The effect, I think, is to invite us to pass judgment. Some of what’s described here is very funny, such as the local women who regularly steal clothes from a washing line, including nappies, and then flaunt them whether or not they fit. The children briefly had a pet chicken while living in a hotel; the chicken stalks the other rooms and shits on people's stuff.

But much of what is described made this hapless parent jittery with apprehension. At one point, Bea is seriously ill and fears all her teeth will fall out, and the adults acknowledge that yes, her lips have gone blue — and don’t do much else about it. On another occasion, Mum gives away the previous talcum powder that prevents the narrator’s rash. The narrator can’t read, is prevented from going to school, and is conscious of missing out.

Then Bea refuses to go with Mum and younger sister on yet another jaunt, so stays behind with a neighbour. When Mum and narrator eventually return, days and days later, Bea is no longer where they left her, has spent time living with a man Mum doesn’t even know, and is now somewhere else, ultimately tracked down to the home of a woman who refers to her as an orphan. 

Part of what makes this all so affecting is that the book offers few clues to the ages of the two children, beyond them being very young. In the film version, Bea is eight — younger than my own daughter now — and her sister Lucy (the unnamed narrator of the book) just six. The book is compelling because I found myself worried for their welfare. 

I couldn’t resist the signed copy of this spied in my local Oxfam bookshop, not least because Esther Freud played Threst, one of the Cryons, in Attack of the Cybermen. As a kid, I used to be terrified of that period of Doctor Who; as an adult, a story about a wayward parent with young children in potential peril is way, way more disturbing…

The School for Scandal and Other Plays, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I bought this Penguin Classics edition second-hand an age ago because David Whitaker (about whom I wrote a book, which I never mention) had played Sir Oliver Surface to great acclaim in a 1957 production of A School for Scandal at the Theatre Royal in York, the cast including John Barrie, Derek Martinus and Titus Oates, who later changed his professional name to Simon and was in Doomwatch. 

Skimming through the script of that particular play, I got a sense of the farcical comedy, and the kindly, authoritative role. The book comprises three plays by Sheridan: The Rivals (1775), The Critic (1779) and The School for Scandal (1777). Reading them all now, at a more leisuredly rate and without an agenda, I've been delighted by the modern-feeling pace and the quality of gags. In The Rivals, for example, Lydia races to tidy up her salacious novels before posh visitors walk in, and asks her servant to help:

LYDIA: Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books - quick, quick - fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilet - throw Roderick Random into the closet - put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man - thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa - cram Ovid behind the bolster - there - put The Man of Feeling into your pocket... (p. 48).

Sat in a quiet library last week, "Put The Man of Feeling into your pocket" made me snort out loud.

Likewise, The Critic has an amazing sequence in which abominable playwright Sir Fretful Plagiary insists he never reads reviews in papers. The mischievous Mr Dangle says this is just as well, as the reviews are particularly awful. Plagiary can't resist asking what is said, so Dangle provides a whole page of different example, ripping into every aspect of Plagiary's work, and Plagiary must pretend not to be offended.

We then visit rehearsals for a play, The Spanish Armada, into which the author has inserted a romance between the daughter of the head of the English fort at Tilbury and one of the Spanish sailors, no matter how improbable this might be. This sailor has the most amazing, authentically Spanish name: Don Ferolo Whiskerandos. Scenes of this terrible play out with critics commenting on further outlandish devices: characters telling each other things they already know, or the overuse of research (one character, known to have been a good dancer, duly enters a supposedly tense scene with his toes turned out). You could make a checklist of this stuff and use it to teach creative writing.

The School for Scandal is very Bridgerton, involving society gossips who then get caught up in their own scandals, and various people donning different person to find out what people are really like. The morality is all a bit twisted, which makes it surprising and fun. There is a ridiculous scene involving two people both hiding, separately, in the same room which often seems to have been performed as a standalone scene, such as in the 

The plays are peppered with references to contemporary people and things, which need a bit of explaining in footnotes. I'm not sure how funny these would have been, even at the time - it's a lazy kind of placeholder comedy, where you trick a laugh from the audience by naming something they recognise. Sometimes, Sheridan does something a bit more witty than that, such as in The Critics where it seems the famous actors being praised or critiqued in a scene are the very men who'd have been on stage in it.

For all the wit and zip feel up to date, the plays are oddly unstructured and they each just sort of stop. I was prompted to read up more on Sheridan, and discovered his private life was even more scandalous than the intrigues staged here. What a binfire - and knowing this, you can feel the chaos in his writing.

If We Tolerate This, by Daniel Trilling

On Monday, the Dr and I had a day trip to Oxford. She went to the new Aphrodite exhibition at the Ashmoleon, and I spent an afternoon in a university library reading a 60 year-old pamphlet for a thing I am writing. On the way there and back, we listened to Rory Kinnear reading this short book which seems to have two subtitles: "How the British establishment made the far right respectable" and, "The rise of the far right and what we can do to stop it."

As Trilling argues, what were at the time of the 2010 general election considered rather fringe, extreme views, on immigration especially, have since shifted into the mainstream. He charts why and how, threading together austerity, neoliberalism, unregulated social media and political opportunism more generally. 

Along the way, he asks key questions, such as why there was a sudden surge in the numbers of immigrants attempting to reach the UK by small boats after January 2021, aka the "Boriswave." But he does more than just ask questions; he does his best to provide the answers, too. In answering this question, for example, he explains why efforts by governments both blue and red have struggled to meet their own targets to reduce such numbers (and why such targets were a hostage to fortune anyway). 

It's at once a depressing read and yet also empowering, in part by making sense of the apparent chaos and in part because he identifies a number of positive ways forward. Concise, cogent and pragmatically optimistic, it's a good primer on what the heck is going on, and what we can and should do next.

I'd been keen to read this since meeting author Daniel Trilling at the Festival of Ideas in York earlier this year, where we were both speaking - on YouTube, you can watch him on the panel "Democracy on trial: the promise of democracy" and my talk on writers David Whitaker and Terrance Dicks. But I knew Daniel's work already, not least his brilliant piece on Alexander Baron for the LRB (in case of interest, I've previously written here on Baron's memoir Chapters of Accidents and novel The Lowlife.)