Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, by Terrance Dicks

On Wednesday, 7 October 1998, Peter Griffiths from Doctor Who Magazine took Terrance Dicks to the bar at BAFTA in London’s Piccadilly to conduct an extensive interview about his work on Doctor Who. When they got onto the subject of novelisations, Terrance said he had enjoyed bringing scripts to life in vivid prose. “I still remember one of my favourite opening lines,” he continued:

“Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man” (cited in DWM #273, p. 48).

This, the opening sentence of Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, remained a personal favourite for the rest of Terrance’s life. His family even quoted it at Terrance’s memorial service in 2019 as an example of how, said the celebrant,

“He crafted the brilliant phrasing that remained emblazoned in the minds of the many young readers who devoured his books.”

It was one of three examples of such indelible phrases, along with “sonic screwdriver” (not actually Terrance’s coinage) and the TARDIS’s “wheezing, groaning sound.”

But “crafted” was exactly right. A draft manuscript of Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth survives in the archive of Terrance Dicks’s papers now held at the Borthwick Institute in York, enabling us to see his efforts to perfect that brilliant opening sentence and the ones that immediately followed:

My friend Gary Gillatt once observed that the 1977 Doctor Who story Horror of Fang Rock, which Terrance wrote a few months after completing this novelisation, has a perfect title; you couldn’t replace any single word and improve it. There’s something similar going on with the opening page of this book. The prose is simple, vivid and arresting. Terrance crams the 25 lines of text on the opening page full of potent adjectives: tattered, grimy, blotched, diseased, wasted, gleaming, stiff, jerky, shattered, nightmare, sluggish, debris-choked, polluted, great, stiffly, grimy, inhuman, rubble-littered, strange, wheezing, groaning.

I have seen examples of this simple, rich kind of writing before, in my days writing advertising copy. Terrance also spent five years as a copywriter, and I think it informed his prose style. Compare the opening of this novelisation to the following ad for Imperial Leather soap from 1958 — not written by Terrance, but the sort of thing he’d have been taught to emulate when he worked in ads, including on TV campaigns for the same brand of soap, c. 1959-66: 

The Waltz 1815

The waltz came in a whirl of naughtiness. Daring, dizzying, it didn’t take the beauties of the day long to find out how it made eyes shines and pale cheeks bloom with roses. This day’s generation of dancers has the sparkle of clear, rose-petal skin not on dance nights only—but for keeps. The reason is more and more women are switching to IMPERIAL LEATHER SOAP—the superfatted soap that’s so gentle, so rich, so sure in the way it deep-cleanses and softens.

(Queen magazine, 18 October 1958, p. 2.)

See how quickly and concisely the judicious use of adjectives conjures distinct feelings and images. It is rather like a dance itself: in a quick box step, we move forward into an impression of a party in 1815, then sidestep to the present, then close with the science, all of it tactile and sensuous. The language is simple to ensnare us, then drops in something more substantial, like grit — “superfatted” isn’t a real word. 

I’ve spoken before about Terrance dropping the word “capacious” into Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen, and other examples of this kind of judicious use of vocabulary, but capacious doesn’t appear until p. 106 of that novel, by which point we’re already under the spell woven by his “plain style”, as Orwell would have called it. So, I think Terrance took the methods learned in copywriting to make soap alluring and, in Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, applied them to the end of the world.

Speaking of which, the title page of this novelisation tells us that it is,

“Based on the BBC television serial Doctor Who and the World’s End by Terry Nation” (p. 3).

Now, the production team of Doctor Who never knew the TV serial by that name, but we can use this disparity between what the team at Target thought the story was called and the name they applied to the front cover to deduce the sources from which Terrance and the team worked. 

As broadcast, World’s End was the title of the first episode of the six-part story that the Doctor Who production team in 1964 referred to internally by several different names. Surviving paperwork shows that it was initially “The Daleks”, then “Return of the Daleks”, “The Invaders” (the title Nation used on his draft scripts) and finally The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Producer Verity Lambert used the latter in an internal memo dated 8 October 1964, just over six weeks before the broadcast of its first episode,  ie World’s End. Perhaps because the title kept changing, on camera scripts used in production the story was simply “Serial K” — that is, the 11th Doctor Who serial. No overall title was used on screen or in listings. 

The 1966 movie version seems to have taken the BBC’s internal title, ie The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and slightly amended it to Daleks — Invasion Earth 2150 AD (sometimes rendered as Daleks! Invasion Earth 2150 AD or Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 AD, but not how it appears on screen). I think the change was made to emphasise the future setting, not least to an overseas audience who might not have heard of Daleks or the TV series. It also comprises fewer words and characters than the BBC version, so can be rendered in a larger point size in the same space on posters etc.

In 1973, the Radio Times special published to mark 10 years of Doctor Who provided summaries of all Doctor Who stories to date. For early stories — those broadcast with titles for individual episodes rather than the serial as a whole — it tended to use the name of the first episode, so this entire six-part story was called World’s End (p. 9).

Terrance clearly had a copy of the Radio Times special to hand, because he repurposed material from it in his 1976 version of The Making of Doctor Who, published three months before this novelisation. Surviving paperwork shows that Target paid the BBC a fee to reuse the Radio Times synopses, and Terrance largely did so word for word. That special also seems to have been a key source of reference photographs for artwork on the early Target books, too.

I think that Radio Times special was also used by Terrance and the team at Target when working out which TV stories to novelise. That’s why this serial was added to the schedule as Doctor Who and the World’s End, the form in which it was listed as “in preparation” in the first edition of Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, published in May 1975. 

To write the novelisation, Terrance would have worked from copies of the six camera scripts held by the BBC. As we have seen, these were headed “Serial K”, so would not in themselves have prompted a change of title.

Yet one of the relatively small number of changes Terrance made to the Radio Times synopses when he incorporated them into The Making of Doctor Who was to the title of this story: he renamed it “Dalek Invasion of Earth (6 episodes)” (p. 58). I can see why he preferred that title: it more accurately describes the story, not least in including the word “Dalek” — which would also help sell the novelisation that was already on his schedule to write. 

He could have chosen something more concise, such as “Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion”, which would have been more in keeping with the style of a previous novelisation, Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion (itself a more concise version of the TV story Invasion of the Dinosaurs). But Terrance employed a longer version that matches the wording used internally by the Doctor Who production team in 1964. I think it very unlikely that he looked through the production files and found the title there. So where did he get this precise wording from?

In the schedule of forthcoming novelisations that fan Graham Wellfare sent Keith Miller of the Official Doctor Who Fan Club circa August 1975 — reproduced on p. 92 of The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol 2 — this book was listed as “The World’s End (Dalek Invasion of Earth)” for publication in July 1976. Note the “of”: this is the title used by the 1964 production team, not the amended version from the movie. So, fans at the time knew the story as The Dalek Invasion of Earth, despite what the Radio Times special said.

My understanding is that they did so because this was the title used on BBC Television Play Synopses produced at the time of broadcast by the Royal National Institute for the Deaf, with information provided by the production team, including the late-agreed title. By the mid-1970s, these RNID documents had become a key source for fans diligently compiling summaries of old episodes, in the days when there seemed little prospect of ever watching old episodes again. (I have seen RNID synopses for some other early Doctor Who stories, but not for The Dalek Invasion of Earth.)

Terrance’s revised The Making of Doctor Who acknowledges the help of members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society including Jan Vincent-Rudzki and Stephen Payne, so my guess is that they advised him on the “proper” title for this story, based on this unimpeachable source, and he agreed that it worked better as an overall title than World’s End. In July 1976, “Daleks Invasion Earth”, and not “World’s End”, was listed in a schedule of Target books published in the DWAS fanzine TARDIS (vol 1, no. 8, p. 2), the list supplied by fan Angus Towler. Without the “of”, that is closer to the movie title, but I suspect it is just an abbreviated version of the “correct” title for the TV serial, as DWAS continued to use The Dalek Invasion of Earth as the proper name of the serial — see for example p. 14 of the society’s Cybermen Daleks Autumn Extra (Autumn 1976) and p. 10 of fanzine Celestial Toyroom #4 (October 1976), both helpfully provided on the DWAS website.

[Jonathan Morris points out that, as I said in my post on the novelisation Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, that Terrance used the phrase “the Dalek invasion of Earth” on p. 103 of that book, when the Fourth Doctor recalls events of that earlier story, and that in the script it is “the Dalek invasion of the Earth”. That novel was published in July 1976, so written towards the end of 1975, after the Wellfare list. My guess is that this rephrasing, too, was informed by the fan advisers.]

Given publication on 19 May 1977 and the lead times we’ve talked about before, I reckon Terrance began work on Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth after completing work on The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book c. July 1976, and must have delivered the manuscript for this new novelisation by the end of August.

It’s a longer novelisation than usual for Terrance, my first-edition paperback comprising 144 pages rather than the by-then usual 128. Yet Paul MC Smith, author of Screen Printed — The Definitive Guide to the Exciting Adventures Based on the Popular BBC Television Serial provides word counts for the novelisations and, compared to the books Terrance wrote immediately before and after this one, Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth is a more concise adaptation:

• Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters: 27,691 words / 4 episodes = 6,923 words per ep
• Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth: 34,616 words / 6 episodes = 5,769 words per ep
• Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos: 31,486 words / 4 episodes = 7,872 words per ep

Terrance must have had access to the RNID synopsis or a similar document detailing the plot of the story because the camera script only provides a three-word summary of the pre-filmed opening sequence:

“MIX TELECINE (2) TK 23 (ROBOMAN COMMITS SUICIDE)”

It’s possible he arranged a screening of the episode to see what happened in this scene, but later discrepancies between events on screen and how Terrance describes them suggest he didn’t (re)watch the story. For example, he says the 2164 calendar found by the Doctor has a “familiar pattern of numbered squares” (p. 21), suggesting a relatively large monthly planner type of calendar rather than the small, squat ring-bound day-by-day version seen in World’s End. Likewise, he describes the character of Jenny as a “small dark girl” (p. 34), whereas actress Ann Davies had her hair dyed blonde especially for the part.

As I said above, Terrance crams the opening page of the novelisation with evocative adjectives. There’s something haunting in the idea of the great, wide Thames reduced to a “debris-choked, polluted stream” (p. 7) — a dystopian image from a life-long Londoner. He adds some cruel irony, too: the Roboman’s head gear is what makes him want to kill himself, and the weight of it is what drowns him. The result is an opening page that is indelibly brutal.

We’re then back in familiar territory, with the bigger-on-the-inside TARDIS and its “many-sided” console (did no one advise Terrance that it has six sides?), and a pithy description of the First Doctor:

“He had flowing white hair and a proud, imperious face, with more than a touch of ruthless cunning” (p. 8)

This is not Terrance’s first description of the First Doctor — there’s one in Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks when the incarnation is seen on a screen, and in the novelisation of The Three Doctors, in which the First Doctor plays a (slightly) more active part. But this is Terrance’s first full novelisation of a First Doctor adventure (rather than a Third Doctor adventure in which the First Doctor cameos). I’ll get on to the significance of that in a moment…

Terrance takes the opportunity to provide a précis of the story of Doctor Who so far — how school teachers Barbara and Ian followed their unearthly student Susan home, discovered “home” was a time machine and were then kidnapped by Susan’s grandfather, beginning a series of adventures in time and space. This is the first occasion in which those events from the very first TV episode are imparted in a novelisation, and I think Terrance drew from the brief account of events given in the revised The Making of Doctor Who (p. 53), which itself drew from the Radio Times special. It’s a further example of what he’d done in previous novelisations: outlining the essential lore of Doctor Who for fans old and new. (Another time, I’ll compare this to his similar précis of the story-so-far that opens his much later novelisation of Planet of Giants…)

In setting out this early lore, he tells us — as did that first TV episode — that TARDIS is an acronym, which Terrance says stands for Time And Relative Dimensions (plural) In Space (p. 9), not the singular dimension of the TV episode. If fans at DWAS read over the manuscript of this novelisation, they did not correct him.

This groundwork done, the Doctor and his friends exit the TARDIS and explore the eerily quiet riverbank outside, trying to deduce what has happened here. In the TV version, the Doctor notes dilapidation and Ian floats the idea that they’re in the midst of a construction site:

DOCTOR WHO: Well, you take this bridge now. It isn't an easy task, is it? Look at all this neglect all over the place. It's been abandoned, all of it. 

IAN: There's always a mess with construction work, Doctor. 

It seems William Hartnell slightly mangled the words and meaning in the camera script, which makes clear that it definitely is a construction site — for a new bridge across the river. The sense is that work on this ambitious project must have been halted abruptly:

DOCTOR: Well, look at this bridge. Not a small undertaking. Yet all around is this air of neglect. This place has been abandoned.

(HE RUNS HIS HAND ALONG A GIRDER AND DISTURBS A PILE OF DUST.)

IAN: But there’s always a mess in construction work, Doctor.

Terrance embellishes that idea, describing a taller, more massive structure of building works than is seen on screen. Susan climbs this and is afforded a panoramic view of the “deserted, half-ruined city” (p. 13) — which Terrance sadly doesn’t describe in more detail, as I’d love to know what is and isn’t still standing. The scale of the structure then serves the plot: when it collapses, the sense is of the TARDIS entirely buried under rubble and not, as on screen, that the door is partially blocked.

The novelisation omits the line of dialogue where the Doctor says Susan needs “a jolly good smacked bottom” for causing this collapse, which is not in the script — further evidence that the script was Terrance’s primary source, not a screening. Stage directions in the script then refer to a “flying saucer drifting over rooftops”, which Terrance develops into the following:

“They watched the saucer drift slowly downwards. It looked exactly like the classic flying saucer of science-fiction films and drawings, silvery-coloured, oval in shape, and with rows of windows round the exterior.” (p. 24)

This is not the flying saucer seen on the cover of the novelisation — about which more in due course.

Among other additions are a reference to the European Emergency Committee (p. 28), which I think is a gag by Terrance, the UK having joined the EEC on 1 January 1973; he is surely positing that the connection lasts almost 200 years and is only broken by the actions of a foreign state. If he doesn’t explain this reference, he feels the need to explain the term “heliport” (p. 37).

He also explains that the secret room used by Tyler and his friends in the London Underground was originally a staff room for London Transport personnel — though doesn’t say why they would want to conceal the entrance with a secret button. He gives Tyler a first name, Jim (p. 29), which suggests that he and the DWAS experts had not seen Terry Nation’s draft script (from when the story was called The Invaders), where Tyler’s first name is Carl. Terrance doesn’t give Dortmunn a first name but later tells us Craddock’s first name is Bill (not Jack as in the draft script) and Thomson’s name is Mick (p. 38). I’m not sure why the Daleks are interested in knowing their captives’ names, but it serves to help the reader empathise with these men before they are ruthlessly dispatched.

When Ian recalls his first encounter with the Daleks, there’s a footnote: “* See ‘Doctor Who and the Daleks’” (p. 31) — the first such footnote in one of Terrance’s novelisations to cite a book written by someone other than him. Note, too, that that book boasts a wholly different account of Ian’s first meeting with the Doctor to the one included here, so actually following up on this reference would be a bit jarring. Terrance simplifies some of the continuity stuff here, removing the Doctor’s guesswork that his and Ian’s prior encounter with the Daleks took place in the distant future. Instead, he muses that the Daleks survived that previous encounter because they may have had other colonies on other parts of Skaro (p. 37). 

There is no mention of the saucers on the Daleks’ backs that allow them to roam beyond their city, as seen in the TV story (again, they are not in the script). Here, the Doctor muses that the Daleks have adapted themselves “on the hover-craft principle” (p. 38).

For all Terrance tries to make sense of the logic of events here and wider Doctor Who continuity, I’m puzzled by the mechanics of the Dalek invasion, which began “about ten years ago” with a space-borne plague which weakened humanity while the Daleks patiently waited. We are told that, “whole continents were wiped out [such as] Asia, Africa, America” (p. 43). But then one human, Baker, says there are not many Daleks on the Cornish coast (p. 68) — so what have the Daleks got against, or in favour of, Cornwall? 

We’re told the sewers of London are smelly (p. 93), but would they be when, given 10 years of devastation, so few people are left to use the facilities? Would there really still be tins of edible food to be looted from department stores (p. 35) or tins of milk fresh enough for using in tea (p. 71)? Likewise, Barbara suggests that the ancient vehicles in the transport museum still work because, “I imagine they used to drive them out occasionally, for parades and exhibitions” (p. 82) — but that was a decade previously. 

My favourite addition is the passage, pp. 95-96, told from the perspective of the monstrous Slyther — Terrance surely inspired by his friend Mac Hulke, who did something similar at the start of his 1974 novelisation Doctor Who and the Silurians. It doesn’t last long, and abruptly switches back, in the same section, to Ian’s point of view. But Terrance does something similar in the opening paragraph of his next novelisation, Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos, and in the opening shot of the TV script he wrote soon after, Part One of Horror of Fang Rock, in both cases with the POV of a creature as it closes in on new hunting ground...

The spiv Ashton is, here, plump, wears a soft hat and good coat (p. 97), which may draw from Terrance’s own memories of black marketeers in the war. Similar childhood memories may have influenced the visceral moment Ian and his friends eat from tins of spam and of peaches with their fingers (p. 99) — yuck! But Terrance is also keen on adding heroics: though Ashton acts for selfish reasons to shoot at the Slyther, concerned only to protect himself, Terrance notes that this unwittingly saves Ian and so is Ashton’s last good deed (p. 101). Having let us see things from the Slyther’s point of view, Terrance also ensures the creature survives the fall that surely kills it in the TV version (p. 102).

The Daleks aren’t so nearly developed: they are straightforwardly villainous, as they are in the story. Even so, there’s a mention of “bemused” Daleks (p. 127), and one Dalek refers to a waxwork of a milkman in a museum as a “subcultural effigy”, which makes me wonder if it took classes in anthropology. Later, when the Daleks’ plan is helpfully stated out loud by one Dalek to another, when they both already know it, the Doctor notes the “sheer audacity”, as though the Daleks are giddily reckless. It’s a long way from the cultural richness of the Daleks in their first story, where they had philosophers and scientists, a detailed history, what seems to be art on the walls of their city, and even experimented with drugs.

I wonder how much Terrance was aware of this TV sequel making the Daleks more simplistic. He seems to have consciously moulded events here to make the Doctor more heroic. The TV story lays the groundwork when the Doctor first confronts the Daleks and mocks their claims to have conquered Earth. Terrance adds various bits to what follows. Outside the Dalek saucer, the Doctor stops Craddock helping the doomed Thompson, assuring him “but our time will come.” Terrance then adds that Craddock is persuaded, “such was the confidence and authority in the Doctor’s voice” (p. 39).

Later, the Doctor is “very much in command” (p. 105) of the small rebel party. When he gives an order, no one questions it — “once again, the Doctor had taken charge” (p. 117). The weary, cynical Tyler admits “reluctant admiration” for the Doctor (p. 129) and “was quite prepared to believe the Doctor could do anything” (p. 134). Terrance does more than add this kind of commentary; he adds action, too. As though to explain that the Doctor and his friends didn’t just walk freely into the Dalek base, there is a reference to the Doctor having outwitted a photoelectric alarm (p. 130). He’s witty, too: when the Doctors observes David kissing Susan while they’re supposed to be preparing a meal, he drily notes that, “Something is cooking” (p. 116).

Unlike some other TV stories where the First Doctor can behave erratically, foolishly or even immorally, in this particular battle with the Daleks he’s a straightforward hero, defiantly standing up to the Daleks and refusing to be cowed, and making a noble self-sacrifice on behalf of his beloved granddaughter. He is not always like this, but novelising this particular story supported a theory Terrance had already expounded in The Doctor Who Monster Book, that the Doctor is the same character — the same hero — in each incarnation. Indeed, the First Doctor here can sound very like Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor:

“Science, my dear chap, not chance” (p. 133).

In his later novelisations featuring this Doctor, and in the TV story The Five Doctors (1983), I think it’s this sometimes crotchety but straightforwardly heroic First Doctor that Terrance always writes. So this book, and the TV serial it is based on, are foundational.

Here, the Doctor’s example inspires others to act bravely, such as the moment where Barbara decides a course of action when things otherwise seem so hopeless:

“We can try to find their [the Daleks’] main control room. That’s what the Doctor would do.” (p. 118)

Terrance adds a few details to what we know about the Doctor’s companions here, too. There’s extra tension when Susan doesn’t tell Barbara that Ian and the Doctor are on board the Dalek ship — and then Barbara discovers the truth and is angry (p. 53). There’s also a rare glimpse of Barbara’s life before she joined the TARDIS:

“She’d run her own little car in her teaching days, and had learned the basics of car maintenance just to save on garage bills” (p. 82)

We learn less about Ian, though he’s able to use a “judo throw” (p. 62) on Craddock the Roboman, and we get some insight into his motives: an admittedly vague plan to either find the Doctor or, as if following his example, to gather useful information  (p. 89). His actions in the opening moments of what, on TV, was Episode 6 are also different: he kicks at the capsule and makes it oscillate rather than pulling out random wires, and he diverts rather than wedges the bomb — more like what he does in the movie version of this story. I think the book gives him more skilful, considered action that random interference.

There’s little added for Susan, but then the TV scripts already had her talk about her past, her future, her hopes and fears — a bit more depth than she often got on screen. (It still feels a bit daring to do anything else, like when I have Susan mention her mum in my recently released audio novel, The Missing Hour, which you might like to purchase, hem hem.)

There is a fifth leading character in the story: Terrance’s depiction of London. Take, for example, his description of the Daleks on Westminster Bridge, an image he knew well having selected a publicity shot of it for a double-page spread in The Doctor Who Monster Book. There, he pithily described the events of the story; here he describe the effect of the image. It is, he says, an,

“Unforgettably symbolic picture of Daleks framed in front of the ornately decorated façade of the Houses of Parliament [which] represented so many centuries of human progress and tradition” (p. 69).

On TV, the geography of the chase through the real streets of London is a bit confused. Barbara and Jenny race the wheelchair-bound Dortmunn over Westminster Bridge, down Whitehall and into Trafalgar Square, which is just a few streets from Covent Garden — and the real-life Transport Museum with its collection of antiquated vehicles (staff there once kindly helped me with a query about the bus seen in 1965 TV story The Chase, when I was working on my 2005 novel The Time Travellers). 

But on TV, before they get to the transport museum, they set off into Knightsbridge and duck down beside the Albert Hall. The sense, I think, is that what looks like a transport museum is actually a wing of the Science Museum on Exhibition Road. Terrance, though, has the motley band of heroes cross Westminster Bridge and then head into Belgravia to a “Civic Transport Museum” on a “quite side street” (p. 70).

[ETA: Richard Long tells me that the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden only opened in 1980, so the production team on Doctor Who may well have envisaged a museum in Knightsbridge.]

Here Terrance has Barbara ask, “Had Londoners ever solved their traffic problem?” At the end of the novel, he has Londoners already in boats and cars again, as if the bustle of transport is the lifeblood of the capital. (What would he have made of the recent pedestrianisation of Oxford Street?!)

Terrance keeps the stuff about the Women in the Wood near the mine at Bedford asking for news of London:

“What’s it like now, dearie, still as wonderful? … When I went it was all so pretty. The shops and the moving pavements… and I went to the Astronauts’ Fair.” (p. 108)

This is not quite as delivered on screen, but I wonder how much it resonated with Terrance, who as a schoolboy visited the Festival of Britain and later had the Doctor retread the same steps in Timewyrm: Exodus (1991). The old woman also hasn’t had oranges in years, just as Terrance would later recall his own wartime privations in Prisoners of War (1990). But I find myself puzzling once again over the economics of the Daleks: have they cultivated oranges themselves? Is that because they use them to bribe humans, or know citrus is a cheap, efficient means to prevent their slave workers developing scurvy? Perhaps Daleks like marmalade.

On TV, the Dalek plot is thwarted quite quickly into Episode 6, allowing time for the emotional, character stuff as Doctor Who loses a regular character for the first time. Terrance cuts this all back, yet while on TV the return from Bedford to London is done by a fade from one scene to another, conveying some undefined interval, Terrance underlines that it took “a very long time time.” On arriving back at the London riverside, he adds some lines from Tyler:

“There’s your police box, Doctor, and I won’t ask questions. As far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to every police box in London.” (p. 138)

When this book was written, most London police boxes had already been demolished. How many, exactly, did Terrance envisage would still be standing in 2164?

If people driving boats and cars signify the resurrection of London here, Terrance adds something else:

“A sound familiar to every Londoner, one that had been missing for a very long time — the chimes of Big Ben” (pp. 138-9).

Again, it’s a very TV idea to use a sound effect to help convey a world going on beyond the small studio set, but this is a novelisation by a Londoner who spent part of the war in the city. It is more than an effect; it’s a memory transposed to the future.

Of course, the TV serial was drawn from writer Terry Nation’s own childhood experience of the war. Nation always had a plain, engaging style and the novelisation is in a similar vein. That explains, I think, why there are fewer examples here of Terrance dropping in more complicated words, though there’s an “autocratic” (p. 76) and a wooden “derrick” (p. 95).

After that thrilling, brilliant opening page, perhaps there is a sense that Terrance didn't work quite so hard on the words here. Sometimes the characters speak a little too like him. The Doctor says at one point that, “You’re a good lad, Chesterton” (p. 45); that doesn’t sound entirely like William Hartnell but might do for Peter Cushing’s movie Doctor. On the same page, Tyler refers to “that Doctor chap”, and on p. 95 young David Campbell refers to the frustrated alligator as a “poor chap” — it is usually the Doctor that Terrance has employ “chap”, a Third Doctor word that Terrance puts in the mouths of other incarnations. 

In trying to underline a Roboman’s connections to ordinary human existence, we hear the names of people supposedly close to him — but “Phil” and “Angela” (p. 114) are so majestically un-sci-fi that it seems almost like parody. So, too, does the whole paragraph given over to a delicious meal (p. 116), the kind of thing I’ve had to be wary of in trying to emulate but not pastiche Terrance for my forthcoming novelisation of his The Six Doctors.

Perhaps the thing that most surprised me reading this again is how much Terrance crops the Doctor’s final, moving speech of farewell to Susan. Hartnell delivered it so beautifully that the sequence has been used in various later programmes to convey his mastery of the role. Indeed, one reason I feel its absence is because I know it so well from the beginning of The Five Doctors (1983), written by Terrance.

In fact, the TV story ends with Susan dropping the TARDIS key that Terrance says, “she’ll no longer need”. But he decides not to end the book on a note of such perfect, searing pathos. Instead, we cut back to the interior of the TARDIS where the Doctor does not brood for long:

“‘I’ll get over it,’ he said briskly. ‘Bound to happen one day. Now then, I really must get you two home again…’” (p. 141) 

Off he goes to new adventures. That’s especially extraordinary, given that Terrance as script editor allowed the pathos at the end of The Green Death (1973), in which there’s a similar kind of parting with a companion who is off to get hitched. Had he perhaps not been happy with the ending of that TV serial, or the response it garnered? If so, was he in this novelisation sort of correcting his own work on screen? He may just thought this mushy stuff would be unpalatable to his young (intended) readers.

That isn’t quite the end. My first edition paperback includes adverts for many more books from Target, primarily ANIMAL STORIES  involving dogs, badgers, skunks, ponies, calves, etc. It then devotes a little space to a list of six Doctor Who novelisations, all of them illustrated, and two written by Terrance — the implication being that these were thought of lesser interest to readers of a Dalek book than stories about animals. Perhaps that was the publisher simply being optimistic about flagging its other titles.

All in all, this is a good novelisation of a good TV story, and one with an important historic role in helping to helped establish the character of the Doctor as Terrance inherited him and as we know them today — as defiant, monster-battling hero. With that in mind, it’s striking how the book was packaged, because the cover doesn't show the TV story.

All right, the pink Dalek is referenced from a black and white photo from location filming of the TV production, but the spaceships and Roboman are (as Paul MC Smith demonstrated at Target Book Club recently) from posters for the movie version. Terrance refers to the Robomen carrying whips and truncheons; artist Chris Achilleos has one sporting a machine gun. This is, I think, an Achilleos version of a poster for the movie, not a depiction of the book contained within.

(Not always visible on later editions but clear at the foot of my first edition is Achilleos’s new signature — an A in a circle, introduced on his previous book for the range, the cover of Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom by Philip Hinchcliffe. The 1982 reprint loaned to me by my friend Ed Salt crops this, and I treated myself to a first edition to find out what else might be missing. Er, nothing, as it turns out. Still, I think the orange version of the Doctor Who logo used on the first edition conveys the heat and fire of invasion better than the later pale blue version.)

Of course, Achilleos often had limited reference photos to work from. We can also understand why he and the team at Target may have favoured something redolent of the movie: it was the more readily accessible form of this story when the book was published, having been shown on TV by this point, and there were still sometimes screenings, while the TV version was in effect ancient history unlikely to be seen again. So the image is exciting in itself but also, to many potential readers, familiar. 

That was certainly true in my case. I remember the thrill, aged maybe eight or nine, of finding in the library a book that promised the movie I loved, having seen it once on Saturday-morning TV, and the excitement of then discovering it was something else: what I thought of as the authentic version of the story.

*

You might like to know that my exhaustive biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be published on 30 November 2026 and is now available to pre-order from Ten Acre Books. Pre-order it now.

The launch event, at the Portico Library in Manchester on 25 November, has now sold out. I will be signing copies of the book at the Who Shop in London on 28 November. The Who Shop also has an exclusive hard-back edition for sale.

See more of my posts on the 235 books written by Terrance Dicks.

In addition, Jonathan Morris’s excellent book for the Black Archive series explores the different versions of The Dalek Invasion of Earth. 

My pal Jim wrote about this novelisation on Escape to Danger. There is also my pal Matt Michael’s view. 

The Doctor Who Production Diary - 2. The Troughton Years, by David Brunt

This engrossing, 774-page brick of a volume details the day-by-day production of Doctor Who in the late 1960s, when Patrick Troughton was the Doctor. It follows the magnificent first volume in perhaps even more exhaustive detail, covering the period Monday 18 April 1966 (when ‘significant’ changes to Doctor Who were mooted, which surely included the recasting of the lead character) to Monday 4 August 1969 (and the issuing of an audience research report on reactions to the final episode of The War Games). I have delighted in every page.

A lot of histories of Doctor Who tend to focus on one given story at a time. Brunt’s approach coveys the dizzying chaos of multiple stories being in different stages of development all at once. Seeing things presented in this way sparks a lot of new thoughts and connections.

For example, The Evil of the Daleks was broadcast as the final story of Season 4, the last episode airing on 1 July 1967. After a summer break, Season 5 began with The Tomb of the Cybermen, the first episode broadcast on 2 September. That gap, I think, helped to hide the fact that these two consecutive serials, recorded back to back, have a number of similar features. The Doctor visits the planet of his enemies and meets a larger-headed leader version whose plan is to brainwash humans. The Doctor defeats the villains but, in the closing seconds of the final episode, we see that something survives… 

That surely can’t be a coincidence, so I suspect story editor and co-writer Gerry Davis consciously sought to mirror the Dalek story in what he wrote for the Cybermen. Something similar then happened in a subsequent Cybermen story, The Invasion (1968), in which the villains are seen stalking around landmarks of London, mirrors something similar in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964).

Another connection I’d not made before is that the first approval to wipe an original videotape recording of Doctor Who (boo, hiss) was issued on Thursday 9 March 1967 (p. 198), two days ahead of the broadcast of Episode 1 of The Macra Terror, which debuted a new title sequence. It’s boggling — to me — to think that the videotape archive of Doctor Who remained complete for the entire span that the original title sequence was in use. The wiping of episodes and the commissioning of new titles are also both, I think, signs of a production team looking forwards, not back — at a time when they were also jettisoning what had once been a fundamental part of the series format, stories set in the past. It is all part of a consistent mindset.

As with the first volume, I must declare an interest in that I liaised a bit with David Brunt as he assembled this extraordinary compendium. Especially with the later bits, we scrutinised many of the same sources as I worked on my imminent biography, Written by Terrance Dicks. We discussed and debated various points where the sources aren’t entirely clear, and he read over my draft chapters and caught some of my more glaring errors.

As he explains in the introduction here, his approach has been to work chiefly from the BBC paperwork held at the Written Archives Centre in Caversham — his list of the files there that he looked through takes up two whole pages (pp. 771-2). From this, he lays out, as objectively as possible, what happened on what date. Along the way, he makes a number of shrewd deductions to tackle discrepancies in the primary sources or to plug gaps in the record. 

Even so, his emphasis is on evidence from documentation. Where no documents survive, he is warier than me of using things said in later interviews by cast and crew. For example, there are several accounts that script editor / associate producer / producer Derrick Sherwin organised a screening or screenings of the Quatermass serials from the 1950s for himself and his team (Terrance Dicks and Trevor Ray) ahead of commissioning the first Doctor Who stories involving the new Earthbound format. In discussing that with Brunt, we think this must have taken place in late December 1968 — but, unable to be surer than that, he leaves it out of his production diary.

There are a few instances where I disagree with his conclusions — not that he’s wrong, but I interpret things another way. For example, in his entry for Tuesday 18 October 1966, he provides a summary of an early version of Part One of The Power of the Daleks, detailing how it varies from the episode as broadcast. That surviving early script is not dated, but Brunt suggests it’s the version issued to the cast for the start of rehearsals, which began on this particular Tuesday. I think the very different and much wordier version of the Doctor in this script suggests that this is the script written by David Whitaker, before — on Friday 7 October, as detailed by Brunt — Dennis Spooner was engaged to rewrite it. I think a now-lost Spooner rewrite was used in rehearsals, prior to a final (surviving) camera script being drafted.  

Likewise, Brunt thinks “on or around” Tuesday 20 February 1968 that Terrance Dicks was interviewed for the job as assistant story editor on Doctor Who, and at the same attended the video playback of the most recently recorded instalment of Doctor Who, Episode 6 of The Web of Fear. My sense from Terrance’s own (brief, not entirely clear) accounts of what happened is that this playback was among the first things to happen once he’d been appointed.

This isn’t meant to quibble — it’s a delight to engage with this stuff and puzzle out the nuances as best we can. Brunt’s different perspective has made me look again at what I’ve come up with and in a couple of places I’ve been able to correct small details in my own book, just in time. What’s more, something here prompted a new line of thought and on Monday I’m off on a research trip to dig out what I hope will be new information for an article in DWM...

I look forward eagerly to the next volume.

Black Archive: The Daleks, by Oliver Wake

I greatly enjoyed this shrewd, wide-ranging exploration of the seven-part Doctor Who serial variously known as Serial B, The Mutants or The Daleks. First broadcast over the winter of 1963-64, it introduced us to the outer-space robot people of the planet Skaro.

Wake covers a lot of ground, detailing how the story evolved from Terry Nation’s initial wheeze through storyline, draft scripts and production, and what this process of revision by multiple people did to the resulting drama and its meanings. As he says, in this first serial the Daleks are not and never were Nazi analogues; that came later. He makes an argument that they’re something more like ants in an anthill, and provides good evidence.

A lot of what’s here is his analysis of paperwork from the time and old interviews, sources with which I’m very familiar — I wrote the Black Archive book about The Edge of Destruction, the Doctor Who serial that followed this one, and a biography of the story editor on both stories. What strikes me most is how deftly Wake has taken a great wealth of material and written something so concise and pacy. There are lots of big ideas and we rattle through them. Nation would approve.

Wake is excellent on the serial’s debt to Nation’s 1962 dramatisation of “Imposter”, the short story by Philip K Dick, and what we can glean from the RNID summary of the story — a document I’d not been aware of before — that was clearly based on early versions of scripts. He’s also good on citing his sources, so we can check his claims — though it’s a bit jarring to be caught up in some smart, insightful bit of reasoning and then hit my own name. “Oh no, him.”

I particularly liked the analysis of the direction of two key moments: the cliffhanger at the end of episode 1 where Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) is menaced by a sink plunger and then the sequence in episode 2 where we get a first proper look at the Daleks. Wake is also brilliant in his deductions about the real-world item used for the Daleks’ domed heads, using that to explore the specific aesthetic style of this first iteration of Daleks. I’ll not name the specific style here; that’s worth you paying for the book.

My only quibble, really, is where he says Nation muddled his science, eliding two distinct ideas — that radiation can mutate DNA, and that a species evolves over time through mutations in DNA — so that the neutron bomb makes the Daleks and Thals evolve into very different creatures from what they once were. He also says that real petrified jungles aren’t like the one seen here. I don’t think that’s Nation being wrong, as such. He just didn’t think Earth science applied to his story, where he could set the rules. He said as such in an interview included on the video Daleks: The Early Years (1992):

“You land their ship, the TARDIS, on a planet and from that moment on everything on that planet is your creation. If the rocks talk, fine, that’s my planet. If the creatures have 12 eyes, that’s what happens on my planet. So you have this wonderful freedom to do almost anything you want.”

Nation revelled in things being different and strange, and not as our scientists would think possible. So it was not a mistake but conscious choice. And that meant he could sometimes be ahead of the boffins: as I’ve said before, his Planet of the Daleks (1973) features an “ice volcano” in that “instead of white hot lava … erupts with molten ice” — daft fantasy until, 16 years later, scientists spotted cryovulcanism for the first time in space, and it became science fact.

Wake’s book also prompted what may be a new thought. The appendix discusses a short-lived title for the serial: Beyond the Sun. Wake argues that this suggests a setting far beyond our Solar System, but I wonder if that’s right. “Beyond” means “on the farther side of”; departing from Earth, we’d need to head towards the Sun and keep going past it — to the area of space on Earth’s own orbital path but diametrically opposite. In that sense, Skaro would be a hidden, twin planet of Earth.

We can date the moment this changed: on 23 September 1963, Doctor Who story editor David Whitaker commissioned writer Malcolm Hulke for a story called The Hidden Planet, set on planet in the Solar System previously undetected because it shares Earth’s orbit but is on the far side of the Sun. Unlike Skaro, this would have been a world almost like our own but with a number of notable differences the Doctor and his friends would explore; the setting sparked the story.

The Hidden Planet didn’t make it to the screen, but Whitaker seems to have hung on to the idea: his 1966 story The Power of the Daleks is set on a planet called Vulcan, the name used in (discredited) theories about Earth having a twin.

The Feast of Steven on YouTube

Another YouTube video, this time by my excellent friend Gav Rymill and based on a piece he, Rhys Williams and I put together for Doctor Who Magazine #559 in 2020. We tracked down clues to reproduce the studio sets of the missing Christmas Day 1965 episode The Feast of Steven.

That piece for DWM got a mention on Countdown. I also wrote about The Feast of Steven earlier this week for the Daily Telegraph.

The Feast of Steven in the Telegraph

I have a piece in today's edition of the Daily Telegraph, "Exterminated! The daft Dr Who festive special lost in time" (Arts, pp. 10-11). It's about the episode The Feast of Steven, broadcast 60 years ago on Thursday, and digs into why it was so odd.

The online version went live on Sunday under the title "The story of Doctor Who’s first-ever, and profoundly daft, Christmas special" (£).

Nine days ago, I had another piece in the same paper on writer Malcolm Hulke and the Sea Devils.

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

In Part I of this two-part epic, we looked at the way that this novelisation does — and doesn’t — follow on smoothly from the preceding adventure, Doctor Who and the Space War by Malcolm Hulke. I concluded that Terrance did not confer with Hulke as they wrote their books, despite them being friends and neighbours. The result is a mismatch between the end of Hulke’s book and the start of this one.

Yet there is evidence that in writing Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks Terrance swapped notes with another writer, and as a result ensured continuity with a book from a completely different publisher.

As I reread this book, I was also conscious of Terrance in dialogue with himself, in that it is a novelisation of a TV story on which he had been script editor. He fixes some things here that he didn’t fix then, but he also avoids the temptation to tinker too much.

More than anything, I was conscious of pace. On TV, Planet of the Daleks is a fast-moving action adventure, full of incident and forward momentum — what a delight it was to watch some years ago with my young son. But in that haste, some elements of the plot that we rattle past don’t hold up if we stop for a proper look. The novelisation addresses some of this, but I think we can also see a similar fast-paced, forward momentum at the typewriter. There are things here I would fix...

As usual in this period, Terrance worked from the camera scripts rather than rewatching episodes as broadcast. We can see this from the opening page of the novelisation, where Jo helps the wounded Doctor. In the script, she presses a button in the TARDIS, a,

COUCH SLIDES OUT FROM THE WALL & HE FALLS ONTO IT.

It’s a “couch” in the novelisation, too (p. 7). But on TV, it’s a pull-out bed, part of a unit of cupboards and drawers. Once on it, the Doctor directs Jo to a “locker” above the bed, in which he stores the audio log for the TARDIS.

But in the script, the Doctor says the log is, “In a locker under … here”. Stage directions say he points to it, but don’t specify where this locker is or what it is under. Terrance rationalises this by placing the,

“locker in the base of the [TARDIS] control console” (p. 7).

A little later, the script specifies that Jo “goes to a locker”, presumably a different one, from which she “pulls out a suitcase” containing a change of clothes suitable for the conditions on the planet Spiridon, where they have just landed. Terrance makes this a,

“clothing locker in the wall” (p. 10).

On screen, we don’t see from where she gets her change of clothes. (Lockers are clearly de rigueur in a spaceship, as the Thal ship also has a wardrobe-like locker (p. 17), named as such in the script.)

The audio log recorder is more than a simple Dictaphone; we’re told here that it has eternal batteries and unlimited capacity (p. 7), making it a bit more sci-fi than ordinary secretarial equipment. 

As per the TV story, the vegetation on Spiridon spits liquid at the TARDIS and at people. This is meant to be horridly visceral, and Terrance makes them “spongy, fleshy plants” (p. 10), with the results of this “rubbery spitting” (p. 20) at once “viscous” (p. 11), meaning thick and sticky, and readily familiar: 

“The plant spat milky liquid at her” (p. 14).

I suspect a modern editor would cut either “fleshy” or “milky”; both is a little suggestive.

When the TARDIS is covered in rubbery plant spit, no air can get in from outside, leaving the Doctor at risk of suffocation. It is nuts that the TARDIS relies on external air, not least because the ship travels through the Space/Time Vortex where there isn’t any. But this jeopardy is all as per the TV story, the fault of writer Terry Nation and, er, his script editor at the time. Terrance at least has the Doctor here acknowledge that he shouldn’t have let his emergency air supply run low (p. 13). Bad captain of the ship!

The Doctor then tries the TARDIS doors which, because of the rubbery spit outside, 

“yielded but would not give way” (p. 18).

This is a rare example of Terrance employing the wrong word, as “yielded” means to stop resisting. (Writer Jonathan Morris suggests “yielded a little” would work better.) There’s something similar when the Thals first see the TARDIS:

“they realised that the tall, oblong shape was the ‘Space-Craft’ they were seeking” (p. 19).

Why would a space-faring crew capitalise and hyphenate “spacecraft” as if it were some exotic new concept? ETA: My pal Dave Owen suggests that the quotation marks are there to emphasise how unlike a spaceship the TARDIS seems to these Thals. Hmm, maybe.

I love the word “oblong”, too, but it means a two-dimensional shape. The TARDIS is, roughly, cuboid or a rectangular prism. A more apposite word is “box”, which would also convey limited size.

We’re told early on that,

“Jo had often heard the Doctor say that the TARDIS was invulnerable to outside attack” (p. 10). 

This invulnerability is restated on p. 124, this time not as something Jo has heard but as fact care of the author. Terrance should have known better from TV stories on which he was script editor. For example, the TARDIS is destroyed in The Mind Robber (1968). It has only just reassembled itself when, in the opening moments of The Invasion, missiles are launched at it. The Doctor desperately works the controls to move his ship out of the way, surely because he doesn’t expect the TARDIS to survive the encounter. 

In Death to the Daleks (1974), again written by Nation and script edited by Terrance, the TARDIS is subject to eternal attack by a sentient city, which drains away the ship’s energy — the Doctor then struggling to open the door of the TARDIS is a direct echo of what happens here. In the very next story Terrance was to novelise, Pyramids of Mars (1975), a psychic projection of Sutekh is able to enter the TARDIS. In novelising that, he didn’t — or wasn’t able to — amend the lines here. He moved forward, not back.

I’m not the only person to nitpick such stuff. Based on my estimated lead time of 7.5 months, Terrance wrote this novelisation in March 1976. The following month, he received a letter from fan Richard Landen listing errors in the original version of The Making of Doctor Who (1972), in the hope that these could be corrected for the revised edition — Terrance’s next writing assignment. On 29 April, he was the guest of the newly formed Doctor Who Appreciation Society at Westfield College in London. As Jeremy Bentham reported in the fanzine TARDIS in July,

“The evening commenced with a slightly nervous former script-editor explaining that he was often dubious about talking to dedicated Dr Who fans, since they tended to know more about the show than he did.” (Vol. 1, no. 8, p. 8.)

Soon, this scrutiny would change the way Terrance approached his novelisations.

For the time being, we can see other influences on the novelisation of Planet of the Daleks. Terrance describes the jungle of Spiridon, with its varied flora and fauna, as “one gigantic beast” (p. 9). That idea of a whole ecosystem being a single, complex lifeform was relatively new; Robert Poole suggests in his book Earthrise that it’s a consequence of the space age, and people — starting with the crew of Apollo 8 in 1968 — seeing the disc of the Earth for the first time.

Real space travel seems to inform Terrance’s description of the Thal spaceship, too. In the script for Episode One, stage directions say it is has a “HULL AND FINS” but is,

SHAPED RATHER MORE LIKE A GUIDED MISSILE THAN ANYTHING WE HAVE SEEN IN U.S. SPACE MISSIONS … A DESIGN THAT SHOULD APPEAR STRANGE AND ALIEN TO EARTH.

Terrance doesn’t use the analogy of a missile:

“The ship was small and stubby, vaguely cigar-shaped. Hull and fins were badly damaged” (p. 14).

The hull is, he says, “picked out in blue and gold” (ibid). The script describes, simply, an “interior”. But Terrance has Jo explore the “nose-cone” and “flight deck” (p. 15). Nation wanted the ship to be alien and unfamiliar; Terrance made it seem a more like a real, contemporary rocket — something readers could easily visualise.

The book is peppered with analogies that do something similar, likening the strange, sci-fi elements to things readers would know. The prone Doctor at the start of the story is like an effigy on a Crusader’s tomb (p. 10) — not just any stone effigy, but a heroic knight. Jo likens the alien temple she finds to something from Brazil (p. 11). The exposure of an invisible Dalek is like something from a children’s “magic” drawing book (p. 25). 

Jo later hides from a Dalek behind an instrumental panel, where there is a,

“gap, rather like that between a sofa and a wall” (p. 52).

That is, of course, exactly how many readers would respond to seeing Daleks when watching Doctor Who. The enormous ventilation shaft in the Dalek base is like a “chimney” — a word used several times — from which the Doctor emerges like a cork out of a bottle (p. 76). The Thals behave, at one point, like children in a playground (p. 84), while the Doctor’s efforts to recover a bomb from between massed ranks of Daleks is,

“like a ghastly slow-motion football game” (p. 116).

This is a simple, quick means to convey meaning to younger readers — the intended audience of these books. But I think it also serves to make the events seen on screen a bit less strange and scary. 

That’s not to say this is a wholly bowlderised version. On screen we’re told twice in dialogue that the Thals are on a “suicide mission”. The word “suicide” appears much more frequently in the novelisation, and not only in reference to the Thals. At the end of the story, Terrance gives Jo a moment to acknowledge the earlier “self-sacrifice” of brave Wester (p. 123), whereas on TV his death is a relatively quick, sudden shock and then we move on, without a backward thought.

Wester and the other Spiridons are invisible, which on screen makes for some fun visuals as stuff floats about via the magic of roughly fringed yellow-screen. Terrance makes the scenes — the un-scenes — with these invisible people suspenseful and involving; Jo’s first encounter with them (p. 17) is deftly, atmospherically told, and more tense than the TV version.

The Daleks insist that the Spiridons wear big furry coats to make them visible. Terrance, working from the script, doesn’t mention the colour (p. 46); on screen, they are a distinctive shade of purple. Wester abandons his coat to go unseen when he attacks the Daleks (p. 104). The implication, surely, is that he attacks them naked — but Terrance doesn’t spell this out.

Well, no, that might not be appropriate. Yet we’re told that the Doctor “cursed fluently in a Martian” (p. 109), and when our heroes succeed in one part of their mission,”,

“Jo and the Doctor joined the jubilant Thals in an orgy” (p. 100)

All right, it’s an “orgy of hand-shaking and back-slapping”. But is that really the appropriate word?

Many of the more technical words used here — “allotrope” (p. 47), “hermetically” (p. 86), the frequent use of “catwalk” and “arsenal” in the final part of the story — are as per the script. But Terrance adds some of his own: “flush” (p. 52), meaning to be fitted perfectly, or the way confused Daleks “milled about” (p. 66 and p. 104).

The young Thal called Latep, a potential romantic interest for Jo, is introduced as a,

“tall muscular man with a fresh open face” (p. 45). 

That word is used again — on p. 81 it’s a “cheerful open face”. Terrance later employed “open” to describe the Doctor, again as a synonym for young.

Then there’s Terrance’s idiosyncratic approach to capitalisation, which we have seen before. Here, that includes Space/Time Vortex (p. 7), the study of Space Medicine and the threat of Patrol (both p. 16), “Space-Craft” (in quotation marks, p. 19), Time (p. 21), Command Centre (p. 35), Thal Communications (p. 44), and Galaxy (p. 78). 

The Daleks on Spiridon are led variously by a Dalek Commander (p. 42), Dalek Expedition Commander (p. 84) and Expedition Commander (p. 108) — all the same single Dalek. His subordinate is the Dalek Scientist (p. 84), aka the Dalek Chief Scientist (pp. 93-4). But there’s no capital letter for the Dalek scientific section (p. 42).

The Expedition Commander answers to the Dalek Supreme (p. 108) from Dalek Supreme Command (p. 44), who we’re told here — but not in the TV version — is second only to the Emperor (p. 109). That’s surely Terrance recalling something of the Doctor’s encounter with the Dalek Emperor in The Evil of the Daleks (1967), a story repeated on TV just as he joined the production team of Doctor Who. But I think it is also doing something with the lore of the Daleks, to which I will return in a moment.

Taron is a Thal doctor, lower case (p. 19), for all that Space Medicine is up. The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver is also lower case, as is the “some kind of pterodactyl” identified by Taron (p. 83), who seems to know a lot about the history of life on Earth, given that the Thals think it is a legend, not a real place (p. 16). Terrance also hyphenates “wild-life” (p. 86).

The Thals are equipped with the latest futuristic kit: plastic beaker, plastic notebook and plastic carton (p. 17), plastic cape (p. 19), plastic box of food concentrates (p. 22), plastic wrapping for bombs (p. 42), and plastic rope (p. 75). On Earth, most plastic is derived from fossil fuels, whether gas or petroleum. The implication, then, is that oil is abundant on Skaro. Why, then, do the Daleks employ static electricity?

Terrance also tells us a bit more about Thal culture; they prepare their “rubbery cubes” of food (p. 22) on “tiny atomic-powered stoves”.

“Soon they were all washing down the tough, chewy food-concentrates with delicious hot soup” (p. 78).

It’s characteristic, I think, that what Terrance adds to this suspenseful, thrilling story, is a bit where they have a nice meal.

The Thals aren’t exactly the most liberated bunch. Rebec, the sole Girl One, adds little to the story beyond aggravating Taron, because being in love with her means he can’t think straight. That’s in the TV version, but Terrance doesn’t exactly improve things by having Rebec “sobbing with fear” (p. 67) as they all escape from the Daleks, and then again on p. 79, when the Doctor dispatches Jo to console her. 

That said, the male Thals are also under pressure here. Terrance uses these moments to underline that the Doctor is a kind and canny hero: he makes allowances for Vaber’s rudeness because he knows the man is tired and lashing out (p. 21); when he sees that Codal needs cheering up, he thanks him for earlier bravery (p. 38). The Doctor is shrewd, but also takes time to form an opinion — such as when he acknowledges to himself that he,

“knew too little of the situation on Spiridon to form a proper judgment” (pp. 28-9)

There’s a fair bit added here about positive thinking. The Doctor is “cheerful and confident” (p. 107) as he heads into danger, and “as always, making the best of things” (p. 28). He tells the Thals, in a sequence not in the TV version, that they must guard against self-doubt — the “enemy within” (p. 84).

Terrance underlines other heroic aspects of the Doctor. For example, when running away from the Daleks at one point, we are told his route is not “completely at random” (p. 55), but purposefully leading him and his friends back to the lift so they can escape. We’re told that there is nothing the Doctor can do to save a Thal called Marat; even so, the Doctor is compassionate, with an “anguished look” (p. 60). When the bomb they need falls into a pit of 10,000 Daleks, the Doctor hurries after it “without hesitation” (p. 115) and emerges, triumphant, by climbing up the side of a Dalek then performing a “flying leap” (p. 116). 

Sadly, Jo isn’t similarly bolstered in the prose version of the story. She’s described simply as “very small and very pretty” (p. 7), and her smallness comes in useful several times. She’s loyal and brave, as in the TV story, but all the novelisation really adds is that she has a dream about a holiday on the French Riviera (p. 85).

This is a rare hint of Jo’s life outside the events seen on screen. We learn all sorts of incidental details about the Doctor, too. For example, while he is down among the 10,000 Daleks,

“Talk about Daniel in the lions’ den, he thought” (p. 115).

So he’s familiar with the Old Testament. At this point in his lives, the Doctor has not been hot-air ballooning (p. 66). He cups his hands over his ears because of the changing pressure in the lift (p. 37), a rare example of this incarnation of the Doctor not having superhuman powers. 

Yet it is uncharacteristic of this Doctor to be clumsy, stepping on and breaking the modified audio log recorder that proved so useful a weapon against the Daleks (p. 51). That weapon is possible because the Daleks imprison the Doctor and the Thal called Codal without “really” searching them. As well as the recorder, the Doctor has his sonic screwdriver and Codal an atomic-powered motor (p. 41). It is as per the TV version, but not typical of Daleks, and Terrance makes no attempt to explain it away.

By contrast, when a Dalek doesn’t immediately blast the Doctor, we’re told that it was “astonished” (p. 55) by his sudden appearance. That makes the moment more credible. There is more in this vein when the Doctor and his friends escape from a locked room (by floating up the chimney) and,

“The astonishment of the Daleks was almost ludicrous” (p. 66).

I think Terrance meant that their astonishment was funny, with the Daleks in “utter confusion”. But “ludicrous” suggests foolish, unbelievable. “Hilarious” or “surreal” might be better; “ludicrous” is not quite on the mark.

When the Doctor returns to this locked room later in the story, he notes the ruins of the Dalek anti-gravitational disc, but there’s no reference to the Dalek that tumbled down the chimney with it, or the other Daleks it crashed into. Did those Daleks survive — or is there a rank of Dalek that does the tidying up, and prioritised clearing the bodies before tackling the wreckage?

We glean other bits of Dalek lore here. The Doctor, for example, knows they build,

“bases underground wherever possible [as] daylight and open air meant nothing to them, and they flourished best in a controlled underground environment” (p. 37), 

This is new information, but consistent with the bunker from Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, which (as we saw) Terrance linked to the city seen in the Daleks’ first TV story. The Doctor also refers here to the“first Dalek war” (p. 20), ie the events of that story, but there is no asterisk to “See Doctor Who and the Daleks”. On TV, that was simply “the Dalek war.”

In adding an ordinal, perhaps Terrance simply meant to differentiate the events of that story from the conflict going on around this book — ie the “space war” against Earth and Draconia. But I think adding “first” implies a series of wars, the Daleks a recurring menace in considerable force. It’s not what we’ve seen in TV adventures, which tends to involve small numbers of Dalek in small-scale machinations. 

It’s much more like the kind of thing we see in media other than TV — the comic strips and annuals in which the Daleks conquer whole star systems. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

In the TV version of Planet of the Daleks, the Daleks are on the planet Spiridon to exploit a rare geological feature: what dialogue refers to as “ice volcanoes”. In the novelisation, Terrance uses a shortened term, “icecano”. But I don’t think that’s his coinage. The word was first used on p. 21 of Terry Nation’s Dalek Annual 1977, published by World Distributors in September 1976 — a month before this novelisation. Here it is as per that book, describing a feature on the Dalek planet Skaro:

My sense is that these lavishly illustrated annuals, printed on good quality paper to a high standard, had much longer lead times than prose-only novelisations on regular newsprint. That surely means that “icecano” was coined for the annual, before Terrance even started on this novelisation. 

Somehow, the term was then shared with him. My guess is that Terry Nation, working on the annual and knowing that Terrance was going to novelise this story, suggested he use the word. It was Nation, then, who encouraged Terrance to join up terms and lore, building an expanded universe of the Daleks far more rich and spectacular than we could ever see on screen.

The irony is that, in Planet of the Daleks, Terrance made his own massive contribution to Dalek lore. His amended ending to Frontier in Space, in which the Doctor is shot by the Master, leaves our hero in no state to set the controls of the TARDIS in pursuit of the Dalek army. Instead, in Terrance’s version, he uses the telepathic circuits to ask his own people for help.

For the first time in their long history — to the best of our knowledge — the Time Lords intervene against the Daleks. In doing so, they help prevent a space war but spark a wholly different conflict. This is the start of the Time War…

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Thanks for reading, sharing and responding to these huge long posts about the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks. I am glad they are still popular, though they take a fair bit of time to research and write, and incur various expenses. With other pressures and commitments, and the freelance world a bit sparse, I can only justifying continuing with your kind support. So do please show your appreciation…

Next time, more Mac collaboration (or not) with The Making of Doctor Who, a book that is very largely about anything but the making of Doctor Who… 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, perhaps we shall.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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