In fact, there’s a lot going on here.
For one thing, there’s why you’d reprint this particular novelisation. First published in hardback on 17 March 1988, in paperback on 18 August the same year, it wasn’t reprinted until 2021. Second-hand copies of the first edition were notoriously tricky to find. Over the years, I’ve cooed at rare specimens in specialist shops, well beyond my price range. It’s why, during lockdown, fans voted this one of 10, out of his 64 Doctor Who novelisations, to be republished as part of The Essential Terrance Dicks collection.
Except now I gather that the first edition wasn’t especially rare: print runs weren’t any different from other novelisations, and stocks of this book in particular weren’t decimated by a fire at the warehouse. Was it hyped? Was there a conspiracy? That would have involved quite a convoluted plot, but then that fits this particular story.
The Wheel in Space was the 61st of Terrance’s novelisations. In the Essential collection, ordered by broadcast dates of the TV stories they’re based on, it is followed by his very first (Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion (1974), based on Spearhead from Space). But the TV story The Wheel in Space was also Terrance’s first Doctor Who story — he seems to have joined the production team as assistant script editor just before the start of production on 18 March 1968.
The TV story was written by David Whitaker, the original story editor of Doctor Who — in effect, Terrance’s ancestor in the role. The closing episode led into a repeat of The Evil of the Daleks, also by Whitaker (the novelisation given away free by DWM last year). Wheel begins with our last sight of companion Victoria Waterfield and then introduces her successor Zoe Heriot, before segueing into the repeat — Victoria’s first story.
Round and round we go. Terrance seems to have been conscious of this muddling of chronology: on the last page of the novelisation, as Zoe is welcomed into the TARDIS, Jamie feels a pang.
“Jamie realised that the Doctor was telling Zoe the story of one of their recent adventures, the one in which they’d first met poor Victoria. … Jamie wondered if Victoria was happy in her new life. He hoped so. Curiously, he was finding it hard to remember her face — especially with Zoe’s vivid little face gazing enthralled at the screen.” (p. 136)
The novelisation of The Wheel in Space was also the first novelisation to feature the Second Doctor written by Terrance after the death of actor Patrick Troughton. He died on 28 March 1987 while a guest at the Magnum Opus II science-fiction convention in Georgia, USA; he’d been due to return to the UK for a costume fitting for his role as grotesque old letch Lord Steyne in the BBC’s epic 16-part TV serialisation of Vanity Fair — produced by Terrance.
Given what we know about Troughton’s, ahem, complicated love life, was there something pointed in assigning him that part?
When he died, John Shrapnel took the lecherous role. In the cliffhanger ending to episode 13 of Vanity Fair (tx 29 November 1987), Captain Rawdon Crawley (Jack Klaff) catches his wife Becky Sharp (Eve Matheson) in the arms of Lord Steyne and all hell breaks loose. The morning after broadcast of these shock events, Terrance and Eve Matheson appeared on the BBC’s live phone-in show, Open Air, to discuss the scandal — and attempt to boost flagging ratings.
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| Eamonn Holmes interviews Eve Matheson and Terrance Dicks Open Air, 30 November 1987 |
So much about this book is, well, odd.
From what I can gather, Terrance seems to have aimed for 100 pages of typescript per Doctor Who novelisation. He’d source videotapes of the surviving episodes and work from the scripts of the rest — largely supplied by the BBC but sometimes by acquaintances in fandom. There are 18 chapters in this novelisation and he clearly divided each of the six TV episodes into three.
Split evenly over 136 pages, that should mean 22.7 pages per episode. In fact, Episode 1 comprises 25 pages, Episode 2 is 22 plus a blank page, Episode 3 is 24 — so it’s slightly more dense in set-up and then accelerates in the second half.
Even the set-up is concisely done. He captures us from the first simple, vivid sentence — “Victoria was waving goodbye.” Then we rattle into the episode, now missing from the archive, as per the camera script. The Doctor and Jamie, at the console of the TARDIS, watch Victoria fade from the screen. On TV, there was then a fade out before the next scene, also set in the TARDIS control room, with Jamie now asleep on a chair to emphasise the passage of time.
Terrance follows that structure but feels the need to explain what’s happening, succinctly.
“Like the good fighting man he was, Jamie took every opportunity for a nap.” (p. 3)
It’s a quick, nimble fix for this particular transition — but is it really true of the character? By “took every opportunity for”, read “never takes”.
There’s then some attempt to explain sci-fi things from Jamie’s 18th-century perspective, such as their arrival on the spacecraft Silver Carrier:
“He was in a kind of metal cave, surrounded by massive metallic shapes.” (p. 7)
But Jamie doesn’t think of the TARDIS control room as a cave; he’s well used to travel in that particular space (and time) craft. He has also learned about other spacecraft — though he doesn’t go aboard — in The Moonbase and The Tomb of the Cybermen (both 1967), the two Cybermen stories that precede The Wheel in Space. It’s not how he was written on TV at the time, where they recognised that he developed while travelling with the Doctor. But writing him in retrospect, Jamie is defined by his origins. (I think something similar happens in the way he is written in 1985 TV story The Two Doctors.)
“A kind of metal cave,” is not especially specific or vivid, and we see similar vague, handwaving descriptions from Terrance later — “Somehow it was clear…” (p. 15), “Some kind of alien eggs…” (p. 18) etc. On page 20, he makes an ordinary item a bit more futuristic by referring to a “space blanket”. He also explains why Jamie picks up this item when he hears the injured Doctor cry out, so as to have it conveniently in his hand when confronted by a robot.
“Snatching up the blanket — he had a confused idea that the Doctor ought to be kept warm — Jamie shot out of the cabin and into the corridor…” (p. 20)
The same page includes a sudden shift in perspective: we follow events as seen by the Doctor and then, in a cliffhanger moment, shift to the robot’s perspective. I think it works rather nicely here but also know that it could throw readers. Not too long after this, the editorial team of Doctor Who books made a ruling that each section needed a single point-of-view.
Having glimpsed Zoe Heriot on a video screen on p. 37, we meet the Doctor’s new companion properly on the next page, from Jamie’s perspective — where he self-corrects his own first impression.
“Behind the desk sat a very small girl, or rather a young woman. She wore the same black and white coverall outfit as everyone else on the Wheel” (p. 38)
I think this is Terrance consciously making Zoe older than she was meant to be on screen — a woman, not a teen. He puts her in black-and-white, like the other, adult characters, not the more childish pink version actress Wendy Padbury actually wore (as seen in Dan Liles’s cover artwork for this new edition). I’ll come back to why I think Terrance did that…
On screen, there’s a moment in this first meeting where 18th century Jamie threatens to “larrup” Zoe, and she simply laughs. It’s a sign of her strength that she isn’t threatened in the slightest — we learn in later stories that she can defend herself with martial arts. I wonder how much this light-hearted threat inspired writer Dick Sharples, whose nearly-made Prison in Space ends with Jamie delivering on his promise. (No, being a call-back to this episode doesn’t excuse it.)
Twenty years after broadcast, Terrance didn’t think better of Jamie’s threat to larrup Zoe; it’s in the novelisation. I think the argument could be made that, again, it’s true to Jamie’s 18th-century character. It’s still odd to read in a book ostensibly written for children.
The colour — or lack of it — of Zoe’s outfit can be explained by the fact that the story was made in black and white. Terrance may have based the description on the two surviving episodes that he rewatched on video rather than what he remembered from production 20 years before. Where episodes weren’t available, he worked from surviving camera scripts, in this case working round some odd “ghosts” from earlier drafts.
Several characters were renamed in rehearsals to make the Wheel more multi-ethnic, but the original names still often appear frequently on the page. Gemma Corwyn was originally Nell (the name of writer David Whitaker’s mother-in-law); Tanya Lernov was originally Tanya Lerner; Enrico Casali was Harry Carby; Chang was Ken; Captain Leo Ryan was Tom Stone — perhaps a relation to the Stone family from The Dalek Book (1964), also written by Whitaker.
In writing the TV episodes, Whitaker worked from a storyline provided by Cyberman creator Kit Pedler, but there’s lots here I think is directly him. For example, the Venusian flowers are like the alien flora of his The Daleks comic strip. Then there’s something we’re sold as space-age psychology but I think is really the mentality of someone who grew up during the Second World War and wouldn’t dare waste food. Perhaps it’s an echo of something David heard from Nell:
“GEMMA: [Jamie] asked me for a drink of water and then he left it. He might have been on Earth. That boy's has no space travel training, Jarvis.” (Episode 2)
So I read this trying to sift what was Terrance, what Whitaker, what the ur-text of Kit Pedler. Pedler’s storyline must have had the Doctor and Jamie suspected of sabotage and kept confined; Whitaker also needed them out on the Wheel to uncover clues. That means, a bit awkwardly, Jamie is sometimes escorted to other parts of the Wheel, and then he and the Doctor are simply no longer kept under guard — “apparently restored to favour” as Terrance says in an aside (p. 90), with what I think might be a roll of the eyes.
He doesn’t comment on another aspect of the TV story, but my sense is that he didn’t approve of stuff about brainwashing children. This is the dialogue as broadcast in Episode 4:
ZOE: Leo said I was like a robot, a machine. I think he's right. My head’s been pumped full of facts and figures which I reel out automatically when needed. But, well, I want to feel things as well.
GEMMA: Good. Unfortunately the parapsychology unit at the city tends to ignore this aspect in its pupils. Some of them never fully develop their human emotions.
ZOE: You don't think I'll be like that, do you?
GEMMA: No, no: you seemed to have survived their brainwashing techniques remarkably well.
Though Zoe’s age wasn’t given on screen in Doctor Who, publicity material of the time said she was 15. She’s a schoolgirl, conditioned by her futuristic school to behave like a machine. Over the course of this story, we learn that such logical conditioning means she’s incapable of dealing with unexpected phenomena — such as the baroque plotting of Cybermen. As the Doctor says, logic “merely enables one to be wrong with authority.”
Jarvis Bennett, the Controller of the Wheel, is similarly afflicted, unable to believe what’s really happening. I wonder if Kit Pedler meant him to be have been schooled by the same system, as part of some broader point about the importance of critical thinking, of education needing to be more than the recitation of facts.
Terrance cuts the dialogue back so we learn that Zoe is brainwashed but are not told where. As I said before, Jamie corrects himself about Zoe: she is a “young woman”, not a girl, so there’s no suggestion that she was brainwashed at school. Perhaps Terrance thought the idea too unsettling for young readers; perhaps he thought it too pointed a comment about education policy. Whatever the case, there’s a tension here between the different authors of this story.
The latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine, which furnishes this new edition of the novelisation, reveals another author. Editor Steve Cole says:
“It felt to me as if the original manuscript was barely edited at all. Paragraphs and separate sections run into each other. At one point a Cyberman descends some steps although it is standing at the top of them, then descends them again. The phrase ‘his body went rigid’ appears twice in five lines. And poor Tanya Lernov! An astrogator on screen, in prose she is demoted to ‘Astrologer, second class’.”
He says Terrance once told him that he wished he’d been more robustly edited, which Steve has borne in mind in preparing this new edition. He indicates some differences from the version in The Essential Terrance Dicks, where the scan of the original copy produced a few small errors. I don’t have the first edition to check whether any of the things I note here are new inventions.
I’ve been chatting about some of this stuff with the very patient Steve — my editor, too — as part of something else I’m working on. That is, I’m in dialogue with my editor about him editing our late friend Terrance Dicks, who was in turn editing a story by his own predecessor, Doctor Who’s first story editor David Whitaker. This breezy novelisation is a direct conduit to the past: relive a lost TV story, commune with the people who made it.
That’s the electrifying sense I got as I flicked through the opening pages and then couldn’t stop.
Contact.
See also:
- My biography of David Whitaker
- On Doctor Who - The Time Warrior (1978) by Terrance Dicks
- On Doctor Who - The Five Doctors (1983) by Terrance Dicks
- On the making of the BBC's Vanity Fair (1987), produced by Terrance Dicks
- On Shakedown - Return of the Sontarans (1994) by Terrance Dicks
- On Doctor Who - Made of Steel (2007) by Terrance Dicks
- The Life and Times of a Doctor Who Dummy, by Robin Squire, one-time assistant to Terrance
- Cybermen - The Ultimate Guide (includes me on the design of Cybermen in The Wheel in Space)
1 comment:
I thought the Jamie takes a nap was referring to the habit Jamie has in 1968 of random snoozing. Mind Robber ep1, The Invasion ep6 I think. I blame Derrick Sherwin for all those naps.
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