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…

* 

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...

*

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…

Vortex #202 - Bret Vyon Lives!

The new issue of Big Finish's free magazine Vortex includes a feature on the forthcoming audio boxset Space Security Service - Bret Vyon Lives!, on which I was producer and wrote one instalment: The Man Inside.

The feature by Kenny Smith includes an interview with me and fellow writers David Llewellyn and James Kettle.

Space Security Service - Bret Vyon Lives! is released in February 2026 but available to pre-order now.

Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, by Terrance Dicks

My first edition paperback of this novelisation, published on 22 July 1976, has clearly been well loved. The pages are dog-eared, the front and back covers are creased and the spine has faded to white, so you can no longer read the title. The effect of this love is that, on my shelf of Terrance’s books, it matches the white spine of Terrance’s previous novelisation, Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen. 

But a pristine copy looks very different. As this image from eBay shows, the spine of the first edition was bright red, the title in white. 

This is very different to Doctor Who novelisations of the time. In fact, it matches the red spines of Terrance’s three Mounties novels; putting his books in order of publication you would see two red spines, then white Revenge on its own, then two more red spines (followed by the purple-spined Doctor Who and the Web of Fear). 

But surely the reason for giving the Mounties novels bright red spines and back covers was to match the distinctive red coats worn by Mounties — so distinctive that they’re key to the plot of the third book. That’s obviously not the case with Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks. Something else is going on.

Here, the spine and back cover match the red logo and title on the front cover, which were unusual for the time: Genesis is the 23rd Doctor Who novelisation published by Target and only the second to feature a red version of the logo. On Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, I think the red logo is there to add some zing to the otherwise muted grey-green colour scheme of the illustration, helping to make the Fourth Doctor’s debut in print stand out as something special. The same does not apply to Genesis.

This is also only the second of 23 Doctor Who novelisations to feature a red spine. On Doctor Who and the Crusaders, that and the colour used for the title match bits of red in the cover illustration showing the clash or armies. Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks was the first novelisation since that book to be set in the midst of a war. In both cases, then, I think the red signifies blood.

Artist Chris Achilleos seems to have known the logo would be red because his cover art is sympathetic: the tunic worn by Davros has a reddish tinge, the inset portrait of the Doctor is sepia tinted rather than the usual black-and-white, and the background of the main image within the border is a brownish-red. 

The illustration is also much simpler and more muted than Achilleos’s previous work for the Doctor Who range: there are no laser blasts, cosmic phenomena or radiating energy. Perhaps he felt the red logo would provide sufficient zing. Or perhaps he took his cue from the dour-looking production stills from the TV story that he used for reference.

Photo reference for the Doctor
image c/o the Black Archive

Photo reference for Davros
c/o the Black Archive

Then again, other evidence suggests that the team producing this book knew it was something different from and more grown-up than the usual fare. The back-cover blurb takes an unusual format:

The place: Skaro

Time: The Birth of the Daleks

After a thousand years of futile war against the Thals, DAVROS has perfected the physical form that will carry his race into eternity – the dreaded DALEK. Without feeling, conscience or pity, the Dalek is programmed to EXTERMINATE. 

At the command of the Time Lords, DOCTOR WHO travels back through time in an effort to totally destroy this terrible menace of the future.

But even the Doctor cannot always win…

The blunt statement of fact at the start of this, giving the location in time and space, underlines that this is a big moment in history. That use of “Skaro” is surely meant to resonate with the reader — a name they would recognise, having been steeped in the lore of Doctor Who by previous books. And how extraordinary to tell us, up front, that this is an adventure in which the Doctor doesn’t win.

This is also the first book Terrance had published since Doctor Who and the Giant Robot to have more than 128 pages; this comprises 144. The very handy Based on the Popular BBC TV Serial by Paul MC Smith gives a wordcount of 33,549 words — some 3,500 more than the novelisations Terrance wrote either side of this. Yet look at the graph I produced before, of the wordcounts of the first 12 Doctor Who novelisations (in dark orange) compared to the second 12 (in light orange). 

The 144pp Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks comprises fewer words than the 128pp Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons and 128pp Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. It is also noticeably shorter than the novelisations shown above by authors other than Terrance. These aren’t labelled in the graph but are, from left to right, Doctor Who and the Green Death by Malcolm Hulke, then — after the three books by Terrance — Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion by Hulke, Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet by Gerry Davis and Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors by Brian Hayles. They are all 144pp.

I suspect the publishers wanted this book, the third Target novelisation to feature the Daleks, to be just as long — and so more of an event. If not, Terrance could easily have cut this six-part serial down to 128pp, as he did with his next book, Doctor Who and the Web of Fear. Here, the Doctor standing on a land mine, him and Harry escaping the Kaled base only to be immediately recaptured, the two sequences with bitey giant clams, the scene (pp. 94-96) in which Nyder cosies up to Gharman before the scene in which Nyder betrays him... They could all be deleted without harming the plot or structure. In fact, I’m used to versions of this story that excise this stuff — I think I had the condensed, audio cassette version before I saw the condensed, omnibus TV version in 1982, a decade before getting to see the full thing on VHS.

Terrance may well have watched a condensed version of this story as he completed the novelisation. I’ve previously estimated a lead-time to publication of 7.5 months; supporting this, on 28 March 1978, Terrance told the DWAS local group in Surbiton that,

“From when I deliver a manuscript, it takes six to eight months to get the book into the shops.” — David J Howe, “Terrance Dicks Speaks”, Oracle vol 2, no. 2 (November 1978), p. 6.

That means that Terrance probably delivered the manuscript for Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks at the end of December 1975. On the afternoon of Saturday, 27 December, an 85-minute omnibus version of the story was shown on BBC One. 

Perhaps this enabled him to add some visual detail to the manuscript. Even so, it seems he largely worked from the scripts. As scripted, Part One opens with “fog-shrouded desolation”, from which soldiers wearing gas-marks emerge before disappearing back into it. This is how Terrance opens his novelisation, too. But in filming this sequence, director David Maloney decided to start things more arrestingly: the soldiers emerge from the fog and are mown down by machine guns.

Likewise, there’s this stage direction on p. 21 of the camera script for Part One:

“THE KALED TROOPS PULL OFF THEIR GAS MASKS. WE NOW SEE THAT THEY ARE ALL VERY YOUNG, FIFTEEN OR SIXTEEN YEARS OLD.”

Terrance tells us, on p. 21 of the novelisation, that when the Kaled soldiers remove their gas masks, they look “little more than boys”; on screen, the actors are young men. We can also see Terrance embellishing details in stage directions. For example, on p. 25 of the camera script for Part One, the Doctor is taken to a headquarters, some distance from the front lines, where he meets Ravon,

“A YOUNG OFFICER OF EIGHTEEN, SLIGHTLY BETTER DRESSED THAN THE TROOPS WE HAVE THUS FAR SEEN”

In the novelisation, Terrance underlines this: Ravon is “a tall, very young officer, elegant in his gold-braided uniform”, and we get a wry comment from the Doctor’s point of view:

“He noticed that the guards were smartly uniformed here, their weapons modern and well cared for. Strange how all wars were the same, thought the Doctor. The staff back at HQ always had better conditions than the men actually out fighting…” (p. 23)

There are other examples of Terrance working from the script. Chapter 10 ends as per the script of Part Five, with the Doctor asking his friends if he has the moral right to destroy the Daleks, and not — as per broadcast — with him being throttled by some slime; again, a last-minute change made by the director. 

But Terrance doesn’t simply copy out what’s in the scripts. For example, on p. 1 of the camera script for Part Five, the Doctor tells Davros that,

“The Dalek invasion of the planet Earth in it’s [sic] year two thousand was foiled because of the attempt by the Daleks to mine the core of the planet…. The magnetic properties of the Earth were too powerful.”

Terrance amends this slightly:

“The Dalek invasion of Earth in the year Two Thousand was foiled because of an over-ambitious attempt to mine the core of the planet. The magnetic core of the planet was too strong, the human resistance too determined” (p. 103)”.

The repetition of “of the planet” is a bit awkward, but look what else he’s done. In the script and TV version, the Daleks were defeated by natural, intangible forces. In just a few words, Terrance has made that defeat the result of two other things: the Daleks’ over-reaching themselves and human agency. In his version, the bombast of the Daleks was thwarted by heroic action.

Note that Terrance keeps the year in words, as per the script — for all he puts it in capitals — and does not amend the date. The date given in the script surely came from writer Terry Nation, perhaps having checked his own story outline for 1964 TV story The Dalek Invasion of Earth, which was originally to be set in the year 2000. That date features in some other production paperwork and was used in the TV trailer to promote the serial ahead of broadcast. 

But at some point the production team pushed the story further into the future: in Nation’s draft script for the first episode, the Doctor’s friend Ian finds a calendar dated 2049; in the camera script and episode as broadcast, the calendar is dated 2164. The late 22nd century is therefore the date more usually ascribed to the serial. For example, the Radio Times special published to mark 10 years of Doctor Who says the story takes place in “London in 2164” (p. 9), but see my post on the economics of the Daleks for more on invasion dating.

Intriguingly, no date is given for the events of the Dalek invasion in the summaries included in The Making of Doctor Who (1972) and The Doctor Who Monster Book (1975). But when Terrance wrote his novelisation, Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977), he included the calendar and date of 2164 (p. 21), as per p. 16 of the camera script. The implication is surely that he’d not read that script prior to this, as he would otherwise have included this detail in his previous books, such as the novelisation of Genesis.

That’s interesting (to me) because Terrance was scheduled to novelise The Dalek Invasion of Earth before he even began work on novelising Genesis of the Daleks. The list of “Advance information on Doctor Who books in preparation” reproduced on p. 92 of The Official Doctor Who Club vol. 2 by Keith Miller, begins with The Green Death by Malcolm Hulke, due for publication in “Aug 75”; though the list itself is undated, it was surely written before that date. It includes the following:

The Cybermens [sic] Revenge [ie Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen] Apr 76

Genesis of Terror [ie Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks] May 76

Carnival of Monsters Jun 76

The World’s End (Dalek Invasion of Earth) Jul 76

The Web of Fear Aug 76

Planet of the Daleks Sep 76

No authors are ascribed to these but they were all ultimately written by Terrance. The schedule changed, with the novelisations of Carnival of Monsters and The Dalek Invasion of Earth pushed back to 1977, and other books added before them. But by the time Terrance started work on the novelisation of Genesis of the Daleks, around December 1975, The Dalek Invasion of Earth had been on the schedule for months.

This all rather implies that the story had been selected and presumably cleared with Nation’s agent without Terrance having read the scripts. The selection of stories to novelise was therefore done on the basis of what Terrance and the editorial team remembered as being good and/or key stories, rather than by reading the scripts to be sure. 

Anyway, back to what Terrance wrote in this ‘ere novelisation…

As we’ve seen, by working from the camera scripts rather than the episodes as broadcast, Terrance omitted some of the more violent moments seen on screen — such as the machine-gunned soldiers in the opening moments. But that doesn’t mean he presents a bowdlerised version of the TV story. We could certainly understand why Terrance or his publishers might have wanted to do so in books aimed at readers aged 8-12, not least given the concerns raised when this serial was first broadcast. For example, Mary Whitehouse gave her view between broadcast of Parts Three and Four:

“Cruelty, corpses, poison gas, Nazi-type stormtroopers and revolting experiments in human genetics are served up as teatime brutality for the tots.” (The Mirror, 27 March 1975, c/o Cuttings Archive) 

But Terrance didn’t censor Genesis of the Daleks. In some places, he makes things more harrowing than on screen, such as when a shell of poison gas is fired at the Doctor and his friends, and there’s only one place for them to get gas masks:

“It wasn’t particularly pleasant grappling with the stiff, cold corpses, but things were too desperate for any fastidiousness” (p. 20)

There’s more on similar lines a bit later:

“Sarah had one of the most horrifying awakenings of her life. Buried beneath a pile of rapidly stiffening corpses, she could feel her face wet with blood. At first she felt confusedly that she must be dead too, or at least badly wounded.” (p. 33)

This, I think, is similar to what we saw in Terrance’s novelisation of Revenge of the Cybermen, where by describing events from the perspective of Sarah (or Harry), they become more horrible and haunting.

Yet Terrance also makes things more palatable by making the Doctor less brusque than on screen. On p. 17, he has the Doctor apologise to Harry and Sarah for the predicament they find themselves in. He then explains the situation and “seemed so genuinely distressed” that his friends assure him it is all right and that they will gladly help.

During the gas attack, our heroes are set upon by soldiers. Terrance tells us that,

“The Doctor and Harry closed ranks to defend Sarah. They put up a splendid fight. Harry had boxed for the Navy in his time and he dealt out straight rights, lefts and uppercuts in the best traditions of the boxing ring. The Doctor fought in a whirl of long arms and legs, using the techniques of Venusian Aikido to drop one opponent after another” (p. 21)

The word “splendid” makes this all sound quite fun, not the confused, brutal scramble on screen. In this version, Harry is more competent and heroic than seen on screen, and the Doctor is more Jon Pertwee than Tom Baker. It’s a moment of Genesis of the Daleks as if script edited by Terrance, not by Robert Holmes. While the Fourth Doctor on-screen in this period can be sombre and brooding, we’re told here that, “Characteristically, the Doctor wasted no time in regrets” (p. 104). He is a man of action.

There’s another example later, when the Doctor tells Harry to go first into the ventilation shaft of the Kaled bunker — even though there might be dangers lurking. On screen, this is played rather at Harry’s expense. Here, we have Harry’s perspective that if the Doctor really suspected any danger, he would of course go first himself. As with the change in Doctor Who and Revenge of the Cybermen where Terrance has the Doctor call Harry an “idiot” rather than the more unpleasant word used on screen, the change makes both the Doctor and Harry more heroic. 

Sadly, I don’t think the same is quite true with Sarah. She’s brave and resourceful as on TV, and yet there’s an odd moment in the novelisation when she asks the Doctor if he really needs to go back to the Kaled bunker to complete his mission, given the evident dangers. He says he must, not least to recover the Time Ring with which they can get back to the TARDIS.

“That was reason enough to convince even Sarah” (p. 93).

It’s an oddly uncharacteristic bit of self-interest. Until this moment, Sarah had been heading to the Kaled bunker anyway, and later she is the one who insists the Doctor completes his mission while he dithers over morality. 

There’s another bit of sexism earlier on, when the Doctor is told that “Davros is never wrong — about anything”, and responds, “Then he must be an exceptional man” (p. 31), assuming a gender. Terrance should have know better, having previously made a joke of this sort of assumption in  his own TV story Robot. 

Better, I think, is Terrance’s handling of the Thal woman Bettan, and the way in which she is persuaded by the Doctor to fight back against the Daleks. When they meet, the Doctor is a prisoner — and enemy — of her people, but we’re told she finds him “curiously compelling” (p. 86) and pauses to speak with him about the friends he has lost in the war. We’re then told Bettan is “an efficient and hard-working young woman, with an important official position” (p. 87) and plenty of work to do, yet she can’t help thinking of this strange, charming man and what he told her. It all helps to explain how, when they meet again, the Doctor is able to persuade her to join him (p. 90).

While the Doctor charms Bettan, he is more withering about other characters, for example diagnosing Ravon’s “basic insecurity” (p. 24) in needing to boast to his prisoners. That’s similar to what Terrance did with Broton in Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, covering the slightly clunky exposition by making it a point of character.

That said, there aren’t many examples of particularly well-chosen words here, as there are in Terrance’s previous novelisations. The Doctor attempting to befriend the Kaleds by speaking in German, “Kamerade” (p. 30) is as per the camera script. Terrance refers to the sucker arm of a Dalek as a “tactile organ” (p. 43), which makes it sound more like a tentacle than a stick with a sink plunger. Sometimes his descriptions are vague, such as when “some kind of field communications equipment” (p. 23) is swiftly followed by “some kind of central command post” (p. 24). Or there’s this:

“Harry and Sarah ran to the doors [of the bunker] and held them back by force. The Doctor came tearing along the tunnel, a patrol of Daleks close behind him. Just as their strength failed, the Doctor reached the fast-narrowing gap and squeezed through.” (p. 137) 

He mentions a patrol of Daleks then refers to “their strength”, but means the strength of Harry and Sarah from the previous sentence. This lack of clarity is very rare for Terrance and may mean the book was written and edited more hurriedly than usual.

More typical of Terrance is the eating. The TV story has a fun scene in which the Doctor is horrified, during an interrogation, not to be offered tea. That is retained here. But Harry also wants “a bite to eat” (p. 73) before he and the Doctor go in search of the missing Sarah. Priorities, man! She’s more important than a sandwich! 

When the Thals destroy the Kaled dome, they celebrate with “wine” (p. 85). I should like to know more about the viticulture of Skaro. In fact, some of the most interesting additions here are to the lore of Skaro and the Daleks. Here, we learn what happened to disfigure Davros:

“An atomic shell struck his laboratory during a Thal bombardment … His body was shattered but he refused to die. He clung to life, and himself designed the mobile life-support system in which you see him” (p. 42)

This makes explicit what is implicit in the design seen on screen, that the Daleks are an extension of Davros’s own life-support system, but there’s also the suggestion, I think, that the conception of the Daleks is Davros imposing what happened to him on everybody else. The atomic shell was presumably radioactive, which may mean Davros has — or had — cancer, so the conception of the Daleks was born out of a sense of his own body wasting away. They are an embodiment of his own desperation to survive.

As on screen, we’re told that Davros has been researching for 50 years (p. 70). Even if he began in his teens, he must be pushing 70. Did the atomic shell strike when he was a young man, so he’s spent 50 years developing Daleks, or did the strike happen some way into his career and diverted the course of research?

There’s a clue in the broadcast Part Two, in which Davros says he has been working “for some time” on the “Mark III project”, which Ronson confirms is a “Mark III travel machine” — later named a Dalek. Three stages of the project does not suggest it has been going on for very long.

But it seems that before working on travel machines, Davros looked at organic methods of getting about. That, at least, is the conclusion of the Doctor, Sarah and Harry when they encounter giant clams. On screen, Harry says Davros “obviously” rejected these for being too slow-moving. 

In the novelisation, it’s the Doctor who ventures this theory, but says “maybe” rather than “obviously”. Terrance also omits the references to the “Mark III” project and machine. That suggests a conscious decision to keep the genesis of the Daleks a bit vague. 

In other places, he adds to the lore. While the Kaleds understand and favour democracy (as on screen, but pp. 116-117), Terrance adds a suggestion of the way power is organised among the Daleks:

“One of the Daleks seemed to be speaking for the others, as if they had already evolved their own leaders” (p. 137)

That word “evolved” is interesting; it suggests leadership developed by nature not vote. In this Dalek’s final speech, vowing to emerge from the buried bunker stronger than ever, Terrance adds under promise / threat:

“We shall build our own city” (p. 139).

That’s surely joining up this story to the first TV appearance of the Daleks, when they are trapped within the confines of their own city. Yet there is no helpful footnote here, telling us to “See Doctor Who and the Daleks” — perhaps because Terrance only put in such references to his own books. Even so, I wonder if the conscious effort to be more vague about Dalek origins was a way of better joining up these two books.

Thinking about this sort of thing makes me realise something odd about Genesis of the Daleks — on TV and in the book. The war between Thals and Kaleds has been fought for thousands of years, but their domed cities are within walking distance of one another. There’s no suggestion that a night passes while the Doctor and co make this journey. The Doctor and his friends are not not trained walkers, so their maximum range in a day — not counting mountain-climbing, attacks by Mutos or giant clams — is probably a maximum 40 km / 25 miles, or about the north-south diameter of London, between Enfield and Croydon.

Another thing I noticed by studying TV version versus book is the irony of poor Ronson, who saves the Doctor and Harry from being the first victims of a Dalek — and then, later in the story, is the first person ever to be exterminated. Terrance didn’t pick on this irony, but he did add a nicely menacing touch not in the TV version: here, Davros claims that it was Ronson who gave the Thals the chemical formula they needed to destroy the Kaled dome (p. 85). It’s a classic technique of the tyrant, accusing someone else of the crime you yourself committed.

At the start of the story, the Doctor is given three ways in which to complete his mission successfully: avert the creation of the Daleks altogether, affect their genetic development so that they become less aggressive, or discover some inherent weakness that can be used against them. He fails on all counts. At the end of the story on TV, Sarah acknowledges this: “We failed, didn’t we?” The Doctor’s response comprises the last words of the story:

“Failed? No, not really. You see, I know that although the Daleks will create havoc and destruction for millions of years, I know also that out of their evil must come something good.”

This is, of course, great comfort to everyone who has ever suffered under the Daleks. It’s also… well, a bit of an anti-climax.

The novelisation tackles this head on, not least by warning us in the blurb, before we’ve even started reading the book, that “even the Doctor cannot always win”. But Terrance also works to make those closing sentiments of the TV serial work a little more effectively. In recruiting Bettan, in getting her to team up with the Muto Sevrin, there’s a sense of him galvanising people to stand up up to the Daleks. 

He underlines this in what the Doctor says when dithering over his right to destroy the Daleks. 

“the evil of the Daleks produced counter-reactions of good” (p. 120)

Terrance also adjusts those closing words from the Doctor. His response to Sarah’s question is that they’ve “not entirely” failed, as they’ve given the Daleks “a nasty setback” (p. 139). This is a “kind of victory”, which is also the name of this closing chapter, and surely an echo of “A Kind of Justice”, the epilogue to the second Mounties novel with its shock last twist. 

The closing words of the novelisation modify the last words of the serial:

“Disappointed, Sarah? No, not really. You see, although I know that Daleks will create havoc and destruction for untold thousands of years… I also know that out of their great evil… some… great… good… must come” (p. 140)

Again, a well-chosen word can make a significant difference to the stakes. The Daleks’ evil and the potential good have both become greater than on screen. It doesn’t entirely fix the anti-climax, but it’s a much more satisfying end. 

One of the best ever Doctor Who stories on TV and Terrance simply, subtly improves it.

*

I’m very grateful to those who have kindly chipped in to support these long, long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks. Writing them takes time and incurs some expenses, but I’ll press on while that support continues. 

Next time: counting the cuts when a six-part serial is squeezed into 128 pages, with Doctor Who and the Web of Fear… 

Oh, and also announced today: the family of Terrance Dicks have donated his archive of papers to the Borthwick Institute. 

Bret Vyon Lives!

Big Finish have announced the details of Bret Vyons Lives!, the second volume of adventures for the Space Security Service. This time, as well as being producer, I've written one of the three stories. 

The set is out in January. Blurb and puff as follows:

Bret Vyon Lives!

Jane Slavin and Joe Sims encounter some familiar faces in the second volume of full-cast Space Security Service audio adventures, due for release January 2026. 

The guardians of the Solar System – agents Anya Kingdom (Jane Slavin), Mark Seven (Joe Sims), and Sola Akinyemi (Madeline Appiah) – return for three thrilling original adventures. 

Their most dangerous enemies, the Daleks (Nicholas Briggs), are back, in greater numbers than ever, exterminating their way across the cosmos. And when she becomes their prisoner, Anya encounters a man she used to know and love – her uncle Bret Vyon. 

This Space Security Service agent was originally played by Nicholas Courtney in 1965-66 Doctor Who TV serial The Daleks’ Master Plan, and here is voiced by Jon Culshaw. Anya knows her uncle is dead, so who is this living, breathing Bret Vyon? 

The Worlds of Doctor Who – Space Security Service: Bret Vyon Lives! is now available to pre-order for just £19.99 (as a digital download to own). 

The three exciting interplanetary adventures are: 

The Man Inside by Simon Guerrier 

Anya Kingdom is a prisoner of the Daleks on a very peculiar space station orbiting a very peculiar star. The Daleks don’t want to kill Anya; they want to break her down psychologically.  

One way to do that is to lock her in a cell with someone Anya knows is a fake. Whoever, whatever, this man really is, he cannot be her beloved uncle. Bret Vyon is dead, end of story. 

But if Anya is to survive, she will need his help… 

The Wages of Death by David Llewellyn 

Furiosa 237 is a remote world in the hinterlands of the galaxy. Anya and Mark teleport in and quickly take jobs on a cargo shop. They’re undercover – on an urgent, secret mission. 

Their task is to locate a device called a Progenitor, then drop it into the nearest black hole — and quickly, before it can hatch. 

But at least one person on board is determined to save the Progenitor and unleash its deadly contents: a whole army of Daleks. 

The Sky is for Sale by James Kettle 

A huge satellite mines the atmosphere of Saturn. Following a number of threats, agent Sola Akinyemi of the Space Security Service is on board, tasked with keeping the workers and their families safe. 

Meanwhile, Anya Kingdom is at Triple-S headquarters, working to expose and eradicate corruption in the service. But just as she’s making progress, HQ is attacked. And then the mining satellite is invaded – by a different hostile force! 

In the desperate battle that follows, Anya and Sola will have to make impossible choices. Who can they really trust? And what horrors are they willing to sanction if it means defeating the Daleks? 

The guest cast of Space Security Service: Bret Vyon Lives! includes Shobu Kapoor (We Are Lady Parts), Forbes Masson (The High Life), and Louiza Patikas (The Archers), plus further names yet to be announced. 

Producer and writer Simon Guerrier said: “Anya Kingdom faces her greatest challenge yet as a prisoner of the Daleks. But help is at hand from the least expected person – Bret Vyon, traitor of the SSS and Anya's long-dead uncle! With this second batch of adventures, we really wanted to raise the stakes. With the Daleks on the warpath, Earth's future depends on alliances – but who can Anya really trust? 

“What a delight it’s been working on this set of three thrilling adventures steeped in the rich lore that Terry Nation created all those years ago. I’ve loved every stage of collaboration with John Dorney and Barnaby Kay on this compelling, fast-paced series. 

“The one I've written is a particular treat. An age ago, I worked on stories featuring SSS agent Sara Kingdom as played by the brilliant Jean Marsh. So it's been a particular pleasure to revisit Sara’s brother Bret and tell something of his side of their fateful story. And then there's what David and James have written to follow... Oh, just you wait!” 

Big Finish listeners can save money by pre-ordering Bret Vyon Lives! in a multibuy bundle with the previous volume of Space Security Service (June 2025’s The Voord in London) for just £38 (download to own). 

All the above prices (including pre-order and multibuy bundle discounts) are fixed for a limited time only and guaranteed no later than 28 February 2026.

Space Security Service

Big Finish have announced that June 2025 will see the release of Space Security Service, a series of audio adventures produced by me and starring Jane Slavin and Joe Sims. Press release as follows:

The Space Security Service return!

Jane Slavin and Joe Sims star as Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven in two brand-new box sets of full cast audio drama from The Worlds of Doctor Who, coming soon from Big Finish Productions. 

They’re the guardians of the Solar System and Earth’s first line of defence. But now the agents of the Space Security Service face their greatest ever threat… 

Having joined David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor in the popular Dalek Universe series, the heroes of the Space Security Service will soon defend the universe once again in their own exciting adventures. Jane Slavin will return as Anya Kingdom, a special agent from the 41st century, alongside Joe Sims as her android colleague Mark Seven. 

These star-spanning escapades will take inspiration from the imaginative creations of Terry Nation. Nation devised the Space Security Service for the 1960s Doctor Who TV serials Mission to the Unknown and The Daleks’ Master Plan, and expanded upon them in the Dalek annuals and comics, as well as a never-made TV spin-off series, The Daleks. 

The fast-paced new adventures will see Anya and Mark encounter monsters from across the universe, from Voord in the Thames to a rogue Thal scientist. 

There are two box sets of The Worlds of Doctor Who – Space Security Service to look forward to, each comprising three thrilling episodes of full-cast audio drama. The first volume, The Voord in London, is due for release in June 2025; details of the second volume, due out in January 2026, will be announced at a later date.

Space Security Service: The Voord in London is now available to pre-order for just £19.99 (as a digital download to own), exclusively from Big Finish. But see the bargain offer below for both sets.

The three episodes in this first box set are: 

• The Voord in London by LR Hay 
• The Thal from G.R.A.C.E. by Felicia Barker 
• Allegiance by Angus Dunican 

Producer Simon Guerrier said: “This series has long been in the works – arguably since Terry Nation tried to launch his Daleks TV show back in the 1960s. We've taken that as our cue and come up with a fast-moving, fun series of adventures for Space Security Service agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven, who were such a hit in the Dalek Universe range. 

“We start with Anya back in London in the 20th century, working undercover as a police officer on the trail of one group of aliens - and then getting caught up with another. Soon the action moves to... well, just wait and see!” 

Big Finish listeners can save money by pre-ordering both volumes of Space Security Service in an exclusive multibuy bundle for just £38 (download to own). 

All the above prices (including pre-order and multibuy bundle discounts) are fixed for a limited time only and guaranteed no later than August 2025. 

The director of Space Security Service is Barnaby Kay, the script editor is John Dorney and the cover art is by Grant Kempster. 

Daleks: The Ultimate Guide

Out today, this massive and comprehensive 224-page bookazine from the makers of Doctor Who Magazine is full of everything you could possibly want to know about Daleks.

With Dalek expert Gav Rymill, I’ve written 28 entries on different models of Dalek, charting their evolution from the very first Dalek story in 1963-64 to their more recent full episode, 2022’s Eve of the Daleks. There are some new facts and insights included, such as my outlandish theory about when and why writer Terry Nation decided to make them look the way they do.

Each entry is illustrated with a CG rendering of the particular model by Chris Thompson.

The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation, by Margot Bennett

“Informed public opinion is infectious, even to governments.” (p. 149)

Thursday, 30 July 1964 saw publication of two paperback “Penguin Specials” from Penguin Books both looking at the same subject. At four shillings, Nuclear Disaster by Tom Stonier,

“was based on his 1961 report to the New York Academy of Sciences which dealt with the biological and environmental effects of dropping a 20-megaton bomb on Manhattan”. Geoffrey Goodman, “Obituary — Tom Stonier”, Guardian, 28 June 1999.

Alongside this, at a slightly cheaper three shillings and sixpence, Margot Bennett’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation is, according to the back-cover blurb, a “first reader in the most uncomfortable subject in the world”. 

The title is surely a riff on The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism by George Bernard Shaw, first published by Constable & Co in 1928 and republished in 1937 as an inexpensive two-volume paperback — the first Pelican Book — under the revised title The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Fascism. 

Of course, that was timely given the ongoing civil war between Republicans and Fascists in Spain, and the growing power of the Nazis in Germany. I’d be surprised if Margot Bennett wasn’t aware of the book, given that in 1937 she was in Spain. It was the year that Margot Mitchell (sometimes known as Margot Miller) married English journalist Richard Bennett while both were working for the Government — that is, Republican — radio station. Bennett, who also worked as a nurse, had been machine-gunned in the legs the previous year and at the time of her engagement had recently broken her arm when the ambulance she was in crashed under shellfire.

There’s nothing very militant in her book on atomic radiation, written 27 years later. “Politics is not the concern of this book,” she tells us in her introduction (p. 10). The focus is instead on the cause and effects fallout,

“addressed more to women than to men [because] the mother is far more intimately concerned with the health of the family than the father. It is the mother who sees that the children have green vegetables and milk, and who nurses then when they have measles.” (p. 11)

This still holds, she says, even if the mother has a career; a woman with no family, “still has a tenderness to children that is different in quality from the feelings of a man.”

It’s not exactly the most feminist stance but this is a politically active woman writing in the mid-1960s for a small-C conservative readership, the emphasis on presenting just the facts rather than on what we should think. The book concludes on a broad political note:

“Science affects us all; so far, overwhelmingly to our advantage. If there are times when we feel this is not so, as members of a democracy we have some kind of duty to find out what is happening.” (p. 154)

But there’s no sense of a particular party or ideology being favoured. We’re left to make up our own minds.

The domestic perspective — the way radiation affects milk and green vegetables, and our children — might imply this is rather lightweight or condescending to the ordinary housewife. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed one contemporary review thought it was, 

“little more than another text book, and heavy going at that.” (Robin Turner, “Nuclear penguins and others”, Birmingham Post, 8 August 1964, p. 5.)

A more generous review found it,

“Thought provoking … easily read but thorough” (John Berrie, “Woman’s angle”, Nottingham Evening Post and News, 7 August 1964, p. 10.)

It’s certainly thorough, covering the ground in detail in just 154 pages (not including appendices, glossary and index). After the introduction, the first three chapters give us a grounding in the physics involved in atomic radiation — “Inside the Atom”, “Neutrons and Nuclear Energy" and “Fission, Fusion, and Fallout”. We then switch to biology for “The Message in Our Cells”.

Chapter 5, “The Subtle Enemy”, then applies the physics to the biology to explain the damage atomic radiation can do to us and to future generations. The next chapter, “The Influential Friend”, puts a counter case, outlining all the beneficial ways atomic radiation can be applied. “Pollution and Protection” addresses what can be done to mitigate potential fallout. Bennett then provides a conclusion, making the case that even statistically “negligible” numbers of people wounded or killed would still be tragic for those concerned.

A lot of this is very technical. Promotion for the book at the time said that Bennett wrote in “plain English” (for example, “For Your Bookshelf”, Halifax Daily Courier and Guardian, 31 July 1964, p. 4). Even so, I found it quite hard going and made slow progress. 

Two things really bring it alive. First, Bennett peppers her book with vivid real-world examples of the way radiation can affect people’s lives. Hauntingly, she details the stages of radiation sickness suffered by early pioneers, from skin rashes and hair loss through anaemia, sterility and useless, deformed fingers to the fatal cancers (pp. 96-97). Or there’s the awful story of the Radium Girls (pp. 100-101). 

I’d be interested to know more about the Russian scientist who claimed to be able to cure the effects of radiation on DNA via a simple pill (p. 114), or about the Scottish boy discovered playing in a “pile of radioactive dust” and the factory making luminous dials that proved so radioactive that the Radiological Protection Service had the whole site buried (both stories p. 146). Frustratingly, there are no notes or bibliography to guide us to more information.

Secondly, throughout the book Bennett uses relatable, often domestic analogies to explain the complex ideas. She likens electrical charges — the way positive and negative attract one another but two positives or two negatives repel — to attraction between people, where a talker will fall for a listener (p. 17). She describes atoms of different elements as being like different breeds of dog (p. 22). Compounds and molecules are likened to marriages (p. 24).

Sometimes those analogies show how far we have come. On page 83, she refers to the cumulative effect of exposure to radiation over “the long days of our lives — 20,000 days if we live to be about sixty”, which doesn’t seem very long at all. (Bennett lived to 68).

But on the whole the effect is to make a complex, technical subject more tangible. The central, political idea here is the responsibility to be better informed: nuclear weapons are devastatingly powerful, but knowledge is also power — one to hold the arms race at bay.

*

Obligatory Doctor Who bit

Since the book was published at the end of July 1964, Bennett must have delivered the manuscript no later than, I’d guess, the end of May. Given the technical detail, it can’t have been a quick book to write. As well as the time taken to research it, a note just ahead of the introduction tells us that, 

“Everything factual has been checked by scientists whose knowledge is far more than equal to the task” (p. 7).

We’re not told who these scientists were or what the editorial process involved, but writing and editing surely took some months, which means work on the book overlapped with Bennett’s conversation(s) with BBC story editor David Whitaker about potentially writing for Doctor Who. As detailed in my post on Bennett’s novel The Furious Masters, that seems to have happened in late February 1964. She was being considered to write a story comprising four 25-minute episodes as a potential replacement for what became Planet of Giants — but nothing further is known about what her story might have entailed, or whether she even submitted an idea.

I partly read this book in the faint hope of finding some clue as to what she might have discussed with or submitted to Whitaker. The short biography of Bennett on the opening page is suggestive:

“She likes variety in writing and is now doing something in Science Fiction,” (p. 1) 

That “something” may have been The Furious Masters, published four years later. Or Bennett may have completed work on her study of atomic radiation and then turned to Doctor Who, only to discover that she was now too late and Planet of Giants was going ahead after all…

Then there’s one of the allusions she uses. At the end of her introduction, Bennett says that there’s no point wishing that the atom had never been cracked open.

“Man can’t afford to retreat; it is by discovery and invention, from fire and flint axe onwards, that he has survived. The axe is dangerously sharp, and the fire has grown as hot as the sun.” (p. 13)

Unlike most of the analogies she uses, this isn’t contemporary or domestic — it’s making a link between modern technology and the ancient past. 

The first ever Doctor Who story, broadcast 23 November to 14 December 1963, involves a tribe of cave people where authority is dependent on the ability to make fire (I think this owes a debt to The Inheritors by William Golding). “Fire will kill us all in the end,” opines the Old Mother of the tribe.

In the next story, we see something of this prophecy come to pass when the TARDIS materialises in a petrified forest that Barbara initially thinks is the result of a “forest fire”. It turns out that the devastation is the result of a neutron bomb, leaving the ground and atmosphere “polluted with a very high level of fallout”. Beings called Daleks are among the survivors.

I’m not the first to suggest that the Doctor Who production team deliberately juxtaposed the role of fire in the prehistoric tribe and the role of nuclear weapons on this futuristic world as part of a wider ambition to have the time travellers witness key moments of societal change. And it’s exactly the same connection made by Margot Bennett.

Did she and David Whitaker discuss it? And who exactly informed whom?