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.