The Time Team Unearthed - The Art of Adrian Salmon

I've had some late nights reading / poring over this beautiful new book collating the artwork that Adrian Salmon produced over more than 20 years for the "Time Team" feature that used to run in Doctor Who Magazine. The brief was simple: produce a single, sizzling image based on the TV episodes under discussion that particular issue. But original editor Gary Gillatt wanted Ade to use dramatic licence, to show us the things that aren't seen on screen but should be.

The result was that Ade produced a captivating image for almost ever TV Doctor Who story of the 20th century. For this book, he's gone back and filled in the gaps - and added a few extras.

The result is gorgeous, and gorgeously packaged, providing a thrilling, vivid, fast-moving history of last millennia's Doctor Who all from one artist's perspective. It is fascinating to see Ade's style develop, and the commentary explains how this was in part down to changing the tools he used (he names the specific makes of pens) and in part due to influences of other artists and an effort not to get bored.

There are loads of details I'd not noticed before - the Sandbeast in his image of The Rescue, the way the artwork for Resurrection of the Daleks mirrors what he did for Earthshock, or the tiny Doctors visible in what he did for The Power of Kroll and Time Flight. The new material is great, too, my favourite probably The Myth Makers with another tiny Doctor. But also, cor, The Evil of the Daleks. And also, woo, The Massacre... 

I'm delighted, too, that the book contains so many sketches, drafts and alternate takes. As the commentary says, some of this material has been a job to track down, and Ade has helped restore some artwork by hand painting new colours. The effort is well worth it. Kudos, too, to editor William Brooks for pulling the whole thing together.

Some of the stuff contained here is from the same period when I employed Ade for cover artwork for the Bernice Summerfield range of audio plays and books - I could tell exactly when just by looking at the style of art. In those days, it was a thrill to receive by email his thumbnail pencil sketches and discuss with him which of two or three options worked best for a particular new title. I've always been particularly, er, drawn, to his pencil sketches - and have failed more than once to convince my masters to employ him to illustrate a novel or novelisation just in pencils. One day...

But while we discussed the various options for any given cover, I don't think we ever talked about Ade's approach to his art, or how he put it together. So this book has been a revelation. How illuminating to learn his approach to colour, and what makes an image pop. The art of the art, as it were.

As Ade says, there's more of his artwork out there, as the "Time Team" was born anew to look at 21st century episodes. He also produced a wealth of other Doctor Who related artwork - I remember the unused cover he did for Short Trips: Zodiac in 2002 (not least because that book included my fiction debut). So I hope there's a second volume.

(A collected Cybermen strips next with new instalments, please and thank you.)

The Case of the Missing Masterpiece, by Terrance Dicks

This is the first of 10 novels to feature the “Baker Street Irregulars” — not the street gang who assisted Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four but four modern-day schoolchildren (and their dog) who solve mysteries by applying the methods of the (to them fictional) Holmes.  

Published in hardback in May 1978 and later reprinted in numerous editions, The Case of the Missing Masterpiece was the first original novel by Terrance Dicks since the last of the Mounties trilogy, War Drums of the Blackfoot, two years previously. The Mounties series had been conceived and commissioned by Richard Henwood at Target Books; when he moved to Blackie & Sons as group publishing director, he invited Terrance to Glasgow to meet with his team and come up with a new line of adventures.

The result was originally called “Robinson’s Irregulars”, as per the title page of the surviving manuscript in Terrance’s archive. By the time of publication, that had been changed to make the link to Sherlock Holmes more explicit.

In the book as published, the gang is referred to, once, as “Robinson’s Irregulars”, as well as “The Magnificent 3½” and “The Frightful Four” (p. 21), which may mean those were other working titles, too. One is clearly a reference to The Magnificent Seven (1960), Terrance a big fan of westerns; the other is clearly a reference to Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five, which is also a range of adventures involving four children and a dog. That gives us a sense of what Terrance was stirring into the mix: a mash-up of Holmes, westerns and Blyton.

The book begins with a prologue in which two villains we can’t see because of their stocking masks — but who in stature resemble Laurel and Hardy — steal a painting from a posh house, and brutally cosh the man who tries to stop them. They bind and gag the poor man but, notably, the Laurel-like burglar then goes back to remove the gag so the man doesn’t choke. It’s an intriguing bit of kindness.

The story proper then begins in what Terrance calls an ordinary London school, as if that’s something to which all readers will relate. It’s not a very racially mixed London school judging by the names and descriptions — something Terrance would be better on in his later books. But I love the description of the chaos of the school yard, the kids,

“all fizzing like shaken-up Coke bottles” (p. 11).

Amid this, Dan Robinson sits quietly reading The Hound of the Baskervilles. Tall, skinny, bookish and a loner, Dan is rather modelled on Terrance as a schoolboy. When the book is taken from him by a bully and ruined, Dan immediately fights back — and calls the bully a “moron” and “stupid cretinous spastic stinking twit” (p. 14). Later, Dan also pulls at his eyelids to affect being Japanese (p. 79). This is our hero!

When the fight is stopped by a teacher (“Potty Benton”), the bully challenges Dan to a wager: he can have a new copy of the tattered Hound of the Baskervilles if he can solve the real-life case of the stolen painting, in the week that they’re off school. Dan accepts.

He’s joined in his task by three friends. Best mate Jeff Webster is a stocky, sensible boy. Liz Spencer, we later learn, works on the school paper and is the daughter of a journalist. To begin with, we are told that,

“Liz was a keen supporter of Women’s Lib. She was a tough, wiry girl, who had dealt out many a thick ear as a practical demonstration of her principles.” (p. 17)

From this, I suspect Liz was named after Lis Sladen, who’d played plucky journalist and women’s libber Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who, a character Terrance helped to create. Finally, there’s Mickey Denning, younger than the others, dead keen to help and liable to get into trouble. When he goes to spy on the villains later on, he is quickly caught — fulfilling the kind of plot function of Jo Grant in Terror of the Autons.

The four friends start by visiting the house from which the painting was stolen — which is open to the public. As luck would have it, the eccentric Sir Jasper, who owns the place, is also an aficionado of Holmes and gamely recreates the burglary and his being coshed on the head for the benefit of the children. He also shares with them the words of a rude song involving his own name, “Oh Sir Jasper, Do Not Touch Me!”, which isn’t exactly suitable for children. Today, they’d be on to the police about him.

Then Terrance does something brilliant: on the basis of their conversation with Sir Jasper, Dan tells the others what is going on, as a cliffhanger. We have to read the next chapter to discover — always the best bit in a Holmes story — how he’s put this together from a series of logical deductions.

This is swiftly followed by another great moment, when Dan declares that instead of acting like characters in a mystery story, they’ll go straight to the police. Again, the details of routine police work seems a bit odd for a children’s story — we’re told it consists of dealing with flashers, knicker nicking and dog mess (p. 45). But then there’s another great twist: Mickey goes off on assignment to investigate a clue, and spies two men who turn out to be brothers. That doesn’t mean anything to him but it does to us, as readers, because we’ve already heard that the Hardy-like villain from the prologue is working in league with his brother.

Things move swiftly. At one point, Dan and Jeff are trapped on the roof of the villains’ headquarters, the villains climbing up to get them. Then, the villains get hold of Dan’s address and lay siege one evening when he’s home alone. It’s all brilliantly tense — and the solution is ingenious, even if the police arrive very quickly. Still, it seems nuts that the police then leave Dan in the house alone for the rest of the night, assuming the villains won’t return. Also, why don’t the police insist on speaking to Dan’s parents, who would surely come home when they heard what had happened?

Next morning, the nice detective Dan has met, Inspector Day, gives the boy a stern talking to.

“It’s not like in books. It isn’t suspecting, it isn’t even knowing whodunnit that counts. It’s proving it.” (p. 110)

He advises Dan and his friends to give up the case and lie low. Of course, they do no such thing and — by somehow identifying a splash of mud on the side of a van briefly glimpsed as it sped past — they head by train to the Essex marshes for a final showdown.

This is clearly based on the real-life village of Althorne, the battered old houseboat that the villains use as a hideout just like the one where Terrance and his family had regular holidays. Terrance may well have written this section of the book there, his own children fizzing like Coke bottles around him. (I think the nature reserve as described in Doctor Who and the Three Doctors is the same spot.)

There’s other stuff of this sort: Dan’s room at the top of his old, terraced house, complete with office and sloping ceilings, is very much like the top floor of Terrance’s house in London, including the office where he worked. Mickey’s large Cockney family is very much like Terrance’s family, on his mother’s side. 

By peppering the book with such real details and observations, the more outlandish bits of adventure are kept grounded. It’s obviously a much more relatable story than the Mounties novels, and more real than Doctor Who. It is of its time but a cracking adventure, and leaves us wanting more. 

Art by John Bolton

The back cover promises two further titles: The Fagin Foundation and The Blackmail Boys, which were published in November 1978 and sometime in 1979, the suggestion being that, like the Mounties, this was commissioned as a trilogy. 

But the idea for the Mounties came from Richard Henwood. I think this is something different; it’s very much Terrance’s book: what he wanted to write, rather than what people wanted from him, for the first time since he became a novelist.

For more, see my list of the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to posts on them. You might also like my 2015 article “My Immortal Holmes” for the Lancet Psychiatry on the appeal of Sherlock.

Doctor Who Magazine #628

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out today, featuring an exclusive extra comic and a  preview of the two episodes of The Daleks' Masterplan thought lost since 1965 which will be up on iPlayer from tomorrow. Exciting.

I've also contributed the first of a new series, "Who Connections" (pp. 30-33), this initial one inspired by a the chance discovery of an extraordinary connection between Stooky Bill - the puppet seen in The Giggle (2023) - and a character from a Doctor Who story more than 40 years before. There is also mention of Star Trek and EastEnders.

Spock Must Die!, by James Blish

A matter transporter in Star Trek works like a fax machine that destroys the original. That, effectively, is the case put by Dr Leonard McCoy at the start of this original Star Trek novel:

“Every time we put a man through the transporter for the first time, we commit murder” (p. 6).

The adventure that follows seems to suggest he is right. The crew of Enterprise is alerted to an emergency on the planet Organia (previously seen in the TV episode Errand of Mercy, the first to feature Klingons). Our heroes are keen to investigate but even when travelling at a breathless Warp 6, Organia is six months’ flight time away. 

Scotty and Spock plan to get round this by extending the range of the transporter using tachyons and hand-waving. If things go to plan, the person who steps into the transporter will remain on Enterprise but a perfect duplicate will be created on Organia, able to carry out reconnaissance and report back. They will then remerge with the tachyon universe for reasons of plot convenience — we wouldn’t want two versions of the same person, would we?

However, something goes wrong and there ends up being two identical Spocks on Enterprise. Captain Kirk names them “Spock One” and “Spock Two” and determines that one must be destroyed. That decision is made before we realise that one of the Spocks is evil and working with the Klingons, but we don’t know which. Both Spocks behave in ways that seem out of character, so how can Kirk deduce who to kill?

This is a fun, fast-moving and exciting adventure. For all it is told on an epic scale over a six-month period (from star date 4011.9 to 4205.5), it feels like a TV episode of Star Trek from the original series. The high-concept idea at the heart of it, the high-emotion stakes and the, ahem, questionable science and ethics all feel authentic. It presumes we are familiar with the TV show, too, as there are no descriptions of characters — not even mentioning Spock’s ears.

This may have been in response to the first original Star Trek novel, Mission to Horatius by Mack Reynolds (1968), which was written expressly for children and is generally considered to be not very good. More than that, the then producers of Star Trek complained about the racially coded ways in which Sulu and Uhura were described. I wonder if in writing Spock Must Die!, the second original novel, James Blish was instructed not to describe them at all.

Referring to Uhura as “the Bantu girl” (p. 9) conveys something of her ethnic background, though it’s not very specific — Bantu languages are spoken over a very wide area. It’s not a connection gleaned from TV episodes, either, but lore surely added by Blish based on “uhura” being a Bantu word (for “freedom”). Yet the same reasoning would make Kirk and McCoy both Scottish. Even so, other writers seem to have picked up on this and referred to Uhura as Bantu in later novels etc. 

That’s also true of another bit of lore here. On p. 2, Kirk recalls McCoy’s reasons for joining Star Fleet (a divorce) and the name of his daughter, Joanna. This isn’t from a TV episode; the character Joanna McCoy was devised for TV and then not used, yet she was added to the series “bible” issued to writers and is mentioned on p. 124 of The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry (1968). Blish must have drawn from one of these sources and decided to make Joanna canonical. She has since appeared or been referenced in various novels and other media. Spock Must Die! might not be the first original novel of Star Trek but it is the first that other writers then built on. 

Then there’s stuff where Blish applies fixes to things seen and heard on screen. For example, he tells us that Montgomery Scott’s Scottish accent, “came out only under stress” (p. 3). On another occasion we’re told that Scotty’s,

“English [accent] was as high, white and cold as his terminology” (p. 71).

I’m not sure Scotty ever sounded English on TV. Besides, Blish pointing out the inconsistency made me spot when he is inconsistent himself, such as when Scotty starts all Brigadoon and then trails off:

“An’ it’s oft before lang an’ lang that I’ve cursed the designer who thought it’d be cute to put no pockets in these uniforms” (p. 99).

The plot of Spock Must Die! is woven from the established lore of the TV series, so that there are frequent footnotes telling us to refer to specific novelisations (also written by Blish). He shares a number of facts about the operations of Star Fleet, such as that there are 17 Federation starbases (p. 8), the Enterprise has a crew of more than 430 (p. 22) and that more than a third of them are female (p. 109).

We learn that Uhura is fluent in Eurish, the language of James Joyce (pp. 48-49), that Kirk practices his quick draw in the mirror (p. 61) and that, according to McCoy,

“The retraining of left-handed children to become right-handed — in complete contradiction to the orders the poor kids’ brains are issuing to their muscles — badly bollixes up their central nervous systems, and, among other bad outcome, is the direct and only cause of habitual stuttering” (p. 64).

Scotty also uses the term “bollixed”, on p. 99 and p. 103, a term never used on screen (until Miles O'Brien says “bollocks” in an episode of Deep Space Nine). Spock has a a gift for “telempathy” (p. 115), i.e. picking up on someone else’s feelings from a distance, predating Counsellor Troi’s own similar gifts in Star Trek: The Next Generation. At the end of the book, the Klingons and their worlds are banned from spaceflight for a thousand years (p. 112), and Uhura learns that a lieutenant at Star Fleet wants her to teach him Eurish. Her response is:

“I hope he’s cute” (p. 117).

It’s a cheery note on which to close this perilous adventure, and we leave the Enterprise to continue its voyages. The irony is that on screen these had already ended; the last episode of Star Trek was filmed in January 1969 and the series was formally cancelled the following month. The indicia of this battered paperback says it was first published in the USA and Canada in February 1970, and that this is a second printing. Mine is a US edition, with the price of 60¢ printed on the spine. Yet I think it may be a UK-issued edition.

I’ve seen some accounts say that this novel and Blish’s novelisations of multiple TV scripts of Star Trek were not available in the UK until the Corgi editions first published in 1972. So I was a bit surprised by the author’s note at the start of Spock Must Die! First, he suggests that this original novel,

“might make a television episode, or several, some day. Although the American network (bemused, as usual, by a rating service of highly dubious statistical validity) has canceled the series, it began to run in Great Britain in mid-June 1969 [actually, 12 July], and the first set of adaptations was published concurrently in London by Corgi Books. If the show is given a new lead on [sic] life through the popularity of British reruns, it would not be the first such instance in television history.” (p. -1)

I don’t think Corgi published new versions of the book at this stage; instead, they seem to have distributed Bantam-published US stock with a sticker added giving a price in shillings and pence. I’ve got a copy of the first novelisation, with 50¢ printed on the cover and a sticker for 3/6 to one side (see image, right). 

So, when were Star Trek books available in the UK, exactly? I looked up the details in trade magazine the Bookseller:

Star Trek (aka Star Trek 1) by James Blish, comprising 7 TV stories

• Published in the US by Bantam tab 50¢, January 1967
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 3 shillings and sixpence, 21 April 1967 (source: Bookseller, 15 April 1967, p. 1,938).
• Issued again in the UK by Bantam at 3/6, 18 July 1969 (source: Bookseller, 12 July 1969, p. 134), to coincide with Star Trek first being aired in the UK for the first time, from Saturday 12 July.

Star Trek 2 by James Blish, comprising 8 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 50¢, February 1968
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 3/6, August 1969 (source: Bookseller, 16 August 1969, p. 1,384), alongside Star Trek 3.

Star Trek 3 by James Blish, comprising 7 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 50¢, April 1969
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 3/6, August 1969 (source: Bookseller, 16 August 1969, p. 1,384), alongside Star Trek 2.

Spock Must Die! by James Blish, an original novel

• Published in the UK by Bantam at 60¢, February 1970
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 4 shillings, April 1970 (source: Bookseller, 25 April 1970, p. 2,174).

Star Trek 4 by James Blish, comprising 6 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 75¢, July 1971
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 25p, October 1971 (source: Bookseller, 23 October 1971, p. 2,076).

Star Trek 5 by James Blish, comprising 7 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 75¢, February 1972
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 25p, June 1972 (source: Bookseller, 24 June 1972, p. 2,696).

New, Corgi-editions of these books were then published in the UK 1972, with Corgi editions of Star Trek 6-11 to follow.

We know Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks — about whom I'm writing a biography — had a collection of Star Trek books which he loaned to his writers. For example, on 8 March 1972, he wrote to Bob Baker and Dave Martin with notes on a storyline and added, “Where are my Star Trek books?” (source: p. 102 of the “09-04 The Mutants Production Documentation” PDF included on the Doctor Who Season 9 Blu-ray box-set).

Now I know what books those were, I can better trace the influence of Star Trek on Doctor Who in the early 1970s. More on this to follow.

• See also: me on Doctor Mirabilis by James Blish (1964)

Doctor Who missing episodes found - in the Telegraph

I've written a piece for the Telegraph about the thrilling discovery, announced today, of two episodes of Doctor Who that have been lost for the past 61 years. They are, as I'm sure you're aware, The Nightmare Begins and Devil's Planet, aka episodes 1 and 3 of The Daleks' Master Plan, which will be up on iPlayer for us all to watch from 4 April.

In December, I wrote a piece for the Telegraph on episode 7 of the same story on its 60th anniversary. An age ago, when the last discoveries of lost Doctor Who were made, I wrote a blog post about why finding missing episodes is such a thing.

See the Film is Fabulous website for more details about the new discovery, and to donate to their valiant work. They have also posted an interview with Peter Purves about the find. It is rather moving to see Peter's delight. 

I also enjoyed the special episode of the Doctor Who Missing Episodes Podcast about these finds. You might also like the special episodes from Dalek 63•88, one on The Nightmare Returns and one on Devil's Planet.

Oh, and these newly discovered episodes include the first appearance of Bret Vyon as played by Nicholas Courtney. Later this year, thanks to Big Finish, Bret Vyon lives.

The Heartless Sea - out now

My latest Doctor Who audio adventure, The Heartless Sea, is now available to download. It's paired with another story, The Kraken of Hagwell written by Barbara Hambly, as part of a set called The Companion Chronicles: The Legacy of Time.

My story involves Harry Sullivan (Christopher Naylor) and Eleanor Crooks (Naomi Cross) meeting the Second Doctor (Michael Troughton) just in time to take arms against a troublesome sea.

It was lovely to return to the Companion Chronicles range, having written a whole bunch of them back in the day, and to be reunited - though I didn't know until I downloaded the story just now - with sound designer Richard Fox, who has always performed such wonders. As I say in the interview at the end, what a thrill to be support act to the brilliant Barbara Hambly.

The striking cover art, above, is by Oliver Chenery.

Doctor Who Chronicles: 1984

From the makers of Doctor Who Magazine, Doctor Who Chronicles: 1984 is now on sale. My two pieces are:

Frontios Row Seat (pp. 48-49)

Today, Jenny Colgan is a best-selling author - but as a child, she won a competition to see Doctor Who being made.

Windy City Showdown (pp. 98-101)

In November 1984, writer Terrance Dicks and producer John Nathan-Turner has a "blazing row" at a Doctor Who convention in Chicago. Why had their relationship soured?

For the latter, I spoke to Stephen Dicks, Gary Russell, Steven Warren Hill, Emma Abraham, John Lavalie, Kathryn Sullivan, Rob Warnock and Richard Marson. The feature boasts some amazing images from the convention taken by Mary Loye.

A Criminal Practice, by Terrance Dicks

A Criminal Practice, a comic play by Terrance Dicks first broadcast on 5 July 1967, has been repeated on Radio 4 Extra today at 3pm and 9pm and will be available for a while on BBC Sounds, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002r4tl  

Excitingly, when I checked the archives last year this play was thought lost. It’s been recovered and returned by those heroes at Radio Circle — why not make a small donation to say ta?

By this point, Terrance Dicks had already co-written three TV episodes of The Avengers (1963-64), a seven-episode radio sitcom called Joey starring Alfie Bass (1965-66) and a one-off comic radio drama, Set A Thief, starring Nicholas Parsons (1966).

He tried selling Joey to TV, but Richard Waring — script editor of comedy at BBC Television — thought the “lower class milieu” of an East End cafe culture lacked sufficient “gloss and sophistication” (source: Waring to TD, 1 June 1966).

Perhaps it's no coincidence, then, that Terrance’s next pitch to the BBC, received on 8 July, was a drama set in the near future about a well-to-do young solicitor dealing with a gang who steal his car and takeover his house. The BBC declined The Day of the Yob but Terrance seems to have reworked some elements as a comic radio play. A Criminal Practice was commissioned by the BBC Drama Department (Radio) on 16 November. 

Note that for all it’s funny, and Terrance had been working in sitcom, this and the earlier Set a Thief were produced by the radio drama department. He’d not made further headway in comedy, either on TV or radio. 

For inspiration, I suspect Terrance spoke to his lifelong friend Simon Goldstein. They’d met at grammar school in East Ham, then gone to university at Cambridge together. Simon was by 1967 a solicitor and later a circuit judge.

The script for A Criminal Practice was delivered on 11 April 1967 and a week later authority was given to pay Terrance the second half of the fee. Rehearsals began on Thursday 15 June, and two days later it was recorded in Studio 2 at 201 Piccadilly, between 4.30 and 6.30 pm.

The producer was John Gibson, based in room 6082 at BBC Broadcasting House, supported by secretaries Christine Young and Peggy Dowdall-Brown, and stage managers John Farrell, Chris Pallet and Martin Penrose. “John Farrell” is a name used in a 1971 Doctor Who story on which Terrance was script editor, Terror of the Autons. Perhaps that is a coincidence.

A Criminal Practice was first broadcast on 5 July 1967 at 8.15pm on the BBC’s Light Programme as part of “Midweek Theatre”. It got a fair bit of press coverage, though mostly just explaining the wheeze. The audience appreciation index (AI) was 61 out of 100 and a hand-written note on the script now held at the BBC says “good”.

The play was repeated on 1 June 68 (Light Programme) and 14 July 72 (Radio 4). That all suggests it did well, but Terrance never wrote a full play for radio again. He had better-paying work.

First, he went back to The Avengers, co-writing The Great Great Britain Crime, which began principal photography on 20 November. I have discovered that he was commissioned for a solo-written episode, too. But his return to The Avengers was short-lived. I’ll say more about all of that in my forthcoming biography of Terrance. Stay tuned.

By the end of 1967, he’d taken a job on soap opera Crossroads, where he worked as both writer and storyliner. In February 1968, he was offered a job as assistant script editor on Doctor Who by Derrick Sherwin, who he’d met on Crossroads. He remained attached to Doctor Who for the rest of his life.

So, when A Criminal Practice was repeated on 1 June 1968, Terrance was well into that job; it was down to him that the prolific Robert Holmes was commissioned for his first Doctor Who story the day before, on 31 May.

That day, 31 May 1968, also saw recording of episode 3 of the Doctor Who story The Dominators. The cast included Walter Fitzgerald as Sennex. Fitzgerald had also played The Judge in A Criminal Practice, so surely he and Terrance remarked on the repeat the next day — for which they both received a fee.

Other members of the radio cast Terrance worked with again: Elizabeth Proud, as Penelope, was later Mrs Sowerberry in the BBC One dramatisation of Oliver Twist (1985), Terrance’s first credited work as producer. (To me, she’ll always be Mrs Phoeble in Simon and the Witch).

Bartlett Mullins (who’d been Second Elder in 1964 Doctor Who story The Sensorites) was later in Gulliver in Lilliput (1982), directed by Barry Letts and script edited by Terrance. Alexander John was later in The Franchise Affair (1988), the last TV produced by Terrance. 

Then, more tangentially, Preston Lockwood, as George Larrabie, later played Dojjen in the 1982 Doctor Who story Snakedance, which Terrance novelised. Victor Lucas was Andor in 1977 Doctor Who story The Face of Evil, novelised by Terrance in 1978.

(Nigel Clayton was one of the Fish People in 1967 Doctor Who story The Underwater Menace. But Nigel Robinson novelised that one.)

Anthony Jackson, who plays young protagonist Mathew Laramie in A Criminal Practice, was cast of the voice of Azal in 1971 Doctor Who story The Daemons. The production team then decided that Stephen Thorne would play both voice and body. David Brunt tells me that there is no indication that Jackson's contract was cancelled, so the decision may have been made after he recorded the voice.

(When I interviewed Stephen Thorne, he remembered things a little differently.)

Jackson had a wide-ranging career. He’d already filmed his role as an ape in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but went on to play Dai Station in the colour version of Ivor the Engine, and did loads of sitcoms and kids shows.

A Criminal Practice was repeated, a second time, on Friday 14 July 1972. Terrance seems to have been on holiday at the time, returning to the Doctor Who office in 24 July to find waiting for him a storyline for The Three Doctors and the script for the first episode of what was then called Destination: Daleks.

I’ve read the script but haven’t heard the play so am very excited about this afternoon’s broadcast. It’s very him, I think: good-natured, warm and funny, with a few bits of unexpected grit to make us sit up and take notice. Enjoy.

Hamster Book Club podcast interview

The Hamster Book Club podcast, devoted to Doctor Who books, has posted a big long interview with me, covering my books The Time Travellers, The Pirate Loop and the short-story anthologies I edited for Big Finish. 

We also cover my non-fiction work including Bernice Summerfield - The Inside Story, and biographies David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television and the forthcoming Written by Terrance Dicks.

Doctor Who Magazine #626

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out now. I've a couple of pieces in it.

pp. 12-15 "I name you, Sea Devils"

Palaeontologist Dr Dave Hone, who was scientific advisor on The War Between the Land and the Sea, tells me how he came up with Latin names for three distinct classes of Sea-Silurian. 

(I previously interviewed Dave about what he thought of Invasion of the Dinosaurs for The Essential Doctor Who: Invasions of Earth (2016).)

pp. 32-37 "Doctor Where [2025]"

Exactly where and when do the Doctor's adventures take place? I look for clues we can use to set the TARDIS co-ordinates...

Steering the Craft, by Ursula le Guin

Dr Una McCormack recommended me this brilliant book on the craft of writing. The title is a pun, the idea being that a piece of writing — a story, a novel, a work of non-fiction — is like a boat on the water, making for a destination. What can be done to guide it?

Other guides to writing, such as Screenplay by Syd Field, approach this kind of thing like we’re building a house. You work out the frame of your story, put up the scaffolding and then fill in the gaps. 

The danger of that, I think, is that it often becomes a kind of prescribed blueprint, the way screenplays must be constructed. You end up with vast estates of near-identical houses, all achingly by-the-numbers. Sometimes, I watch the first few minutes of a movie, or even the trailer, and know exactly how the thing will play out. 

Le Guin is on to this:

“Plot is so much discussed in literature and writing courses, and action is so highly valued, that I want to put in a counterweight opinion. A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither. To my mind, plot is merely one way of telling a story, by connecting the happenings tightly, usually through causal chains. Plot is a marvellous device.

But it’s not superior to story, and not even necessary to it. As for action, indeed a story must move, something must happen: but the action can be nothing more than a letter sent that doesn’t arrive, a thought unspoken, the passage of a summer day. Unceasing violent action is usually a sign that in fact no story is being told.” (p. 83)

She comes at things from the opposite direction. Rather than start with the structure then fill in the gaps, her focus is on what you put in each sentence. Start with ensuring you have the right tools and know how to use them. To switch analogies, the effect of the book is like sharpening one’s knives before starting to cook.

The chapters cover the sound of your writing spoken aloud, punctuation and grammar, sentence length, the use of repetition, adjectives and adverbs, using verbs to express person and tense, point of view, indirect narration and what she calls “crowding and leaping” — when to provide lots of detail and where to skip through it. 

Each chapter contains examples, either from works of classic (ie out-of-copyright) literature or stuff specially written by le Guin. This stuff is illuminating and fun. 

For example, le Guin quotes the opening paragraphs of the first three chapters of Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1852). The first two are in what she calls the “involved authorial voice” — she objects to the term “omniscient” narrator as judgmental (p. 57) — and then it switches to first person, past tense, from the POV of Esther Summerson. Le Guin comments afterwards:

“Bleak House is a powerful novel, and some of its dramatic power may come from this highly artificial alternation and contrast of voices. But the transition from Dickens to Esther is always a jolt. And the twenty-year-old girl sometimes begins to sound awfully like the middle-aged novelist, which is implausible (though rather a relief, because Esther is given to tiresome fits of self-depreciation, and Dickens isn’t). Dickens was well aware of the dangers of his narrative strategy; the narrating author never overlaps with the observer-narrator, never enters Esther’s mind, never even sees her. The two narratives remain separate. The plot unites them but they never touch. It is an odd device.” (p. 75)

This stuff about different kinds of narrator has been really useful in clarifying my thoughts about what Terrance Dicks was doing as he novelised Doctor Who stories. Le Guin details several different kinds of narrator, with the same scene related in each different mode so we can see the effect. She differentiates between first person, limited third person (ie in the head of one character), involved author, detached author, and observer-narrator (both first and third person).

For example:

“Detached Author (‘Fly on the Wall’, ‘Camera Eye’, Objective Narrator’)

There is no viewpoint character. The narrator is not one of the characters and can say of the characters only what a totally neutral observer (an intelligent fly on the wall) might infer of them from behaviour and speech. The author never enters a character’s mind. People and places may be exactly described, but values and judgements can only be implied indirectly. A popular voice around 1900 and in ‘minimalist’ and ‘brand-name’ fiction, it is the least overtly, most covertly manipulative of the points of view.” (pp. 58-59).

I can see why this mode would suit “brand-name” fiction. If you’re writing a novelisation of a TV show or film, the source takes that point of view anyway — because the viewer is effectively the fly on the wall, and all pertinent information must be relayed by what we see or characters say. Even if you write an original Doctor Who novel — or Star Trek or Star Wars — you’re still often in that mode. Make it read like something we’re watching, and it will feel more authentic.

If you want a novel to feel more novelistic, you do something else. In the very first Doctor Who novelisation, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (1964), writer David Whitaker used first person, relaying events originally seen on screen through the perspective of one of the lead characters. On screen, a lot of the mood is created by visual design, effects and music. On the page, the tone is set by a narrator sharing his feelings.

In 1990, when editor Peter Darvill Evans established a range of original Doctor Who novels aimed at adult readers, he wanted “stories too broad and deep for the small screen” — a claim printed on the backs of the books. One way he achieved this richness was to insist that books were written from multiple points of view, strictly marshalled.

As per the guidelines sent out to prospective authors, each distinct section of a chapter was to be told in limited third person, the events as seen and understood by one character. If the writer wanted to change perspective, they needed to start a new section. They were also not to relay information from the perspective of the Doctor, so that he’d remain alien and mysterious.

I’ve seen some correspondence from editor Peter Darvill-Evans to Terrance Dicks, insisting on this approach for the novel that became Timewyrm: Exodus (1991). After 64 novelisations of TV Doctor Who stories, Terrance had developed a very different method for writing Doctor Who — but not as detached author.

He’ll tell us, for example, that the Doctor brooding at the start of Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars (1976) is not his usual, cheery disposition. That’s not the Doctor’s point of view, or that of companion Sarah; it is Terrance as author. He tells us where Sarah picked up her knowledge of ancient Egypt, or what the letters in TARDIS stand for. He’s an involved author, putting out sign-posts to guide the reader.

Within the same section, Terrance might change POV or jump in space and time, but it’s never confusing — we know exactly where we are. Le Guin gives an example of another writer doing the same thing. In To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927), we move back and forth between the perspectives of Mrs Ramsay and her husband. Le Guins provides a long example, then says:

“Notice how Woolf makes the transitions effortlessly but perfectly clearly. … The paragraph indent is the signal for the switch back to Mrs Ramsay. What are the next switches and how are they signalled?” (p. 80)

That’s not to suggest that Terrance Dicks was consciously following the example of Virginia Woolf; it’s just that she, via le Guin, opened up for me what he was doing. Note also that le Guin doesn’t simply tell us what’s being done. She prompts us to read the example again and puzzle out its workings for ourselves.

Each chapter includes writing exercises aimed at writing groups of at least six people to prompt discussion and reflection. The point is not to prescribe a method of writing but to suggest things to think about and try.

In that sense, this book reminded me of “Politics and the English language”, the essay by George Orwell about conveying meaning in a plain style to maximise the chances of being understood, which I found so useful when I worked in the press office of a government department, and which I think still influences a lot of what I write. Orwell lays out a series of rules, then tells us to break them if needed.

In the same way, Steering the Craft is a practical and pragmatic guide for writers, and has really helped me this week on something I’m writing as yet unannounced. It meant a switch of perspective, too. Oh, I realised, as the problem I’d been wrestling with suddenly resolved, I’m the one being steered.

See also:

• Me on The Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore by Ursula le Guin

DWM The Yearbook 2026

The latest Doctor Who Magazine special edition is out today, The Yearbook 2026. Among its wonders is something by me:

How You Watch Who (pp. 46-50)

Simulcasts on iPlayer and spoilers on social media have changed the way we watch and engage with Doctor Who - but how? Simon Guerrier investigates...

For this, I spoke to several different fans: 26 year-old Erica Tucker (watching since Rose in 2005); Sam Ripley, Luc Fawcett, Alfie Giffen and Charlie Gaskin from Warwick University's Who Soc; his great eminence Jeremy Bentham; and 9 year-old Olivia who has been watching since The Church on Ruby Road in 2023.

Jeremy boggled my mind by telling me that there are only four episodes of Doctor Who he's not seen - ones he missed on original transmission that are now among the 97 episodes currently missing from the archive. I list what those four are in the article. 

But since then I've spoken to someone who has seen every episode of Doctor Who. Yes, I am arranging for the preservation / scanning of their brain...

Vortex #203 — The Heartless Sea

The new issue of Big Finish’s free magazine Vortex includes a feature on an audio Doctor Who story I’ve worked on, out next month.

The Heartless Sea involves UNIT’s Harry Sullivan (Chris Naylor) and Naomi Cross (Eleanor Crooks) meeting the Second Doctor (Michael Troughton). Blurb as follows:

“As Harry and Naomi investigate the apparently haunted Warehouse 9, they come across someone who they didn’t expect to meet – the Doctor! But one who hasn’t met them yet… and soon after they find themselves dealing with the wrath of the most furious sea there has ever been.”

In the piece for Vortex (“The Good Companions”, pp. 18-19), I explain a bit of the background to the story and how it came about. There are also interviews with producer Dominic G Martin and my fellow writer Barbara Hambly, whose story The Kraken of Hagwell features on the same release (bargain!). 

Next month, Big Finish is also releasing Bret Vyon Lives!, the second set of three stories involving the Space Security Service. I produced the series and wrote one of the stories in this second set.

Oh, and p. 76 of Doctor Who Magazine #625, which I’ve just received, mentions that I’ve written the third of three new stories for David Bradley’s First Doctor, following Knights of the Round TARDIS by LR Hay (out now) and Return to Marinus by Jonathan Morris (out this month). My one is out in May 2027, says the Big Finish website.

Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, by Terrance Dicks

The four-part Doctor Who story Pyramids of Mars was originally broadcast in October and November 1975. It was then repeated, in a one-hour omnibus version, on Saturday, 27 November 1976, where it was watched by 13.7 million people — the largest audience ever achieved by Doctor Who to that point. 

(Since then, just five episodes have beaten that record, all in autumn 1979 when ITV was affected by industrial action.)

The novelisation was published simultaneously in paperback and hardback three weeks later on 16 December, so the repeat would have been fresh in the minds of readers who received this book for Christmas. They would have been conscious of quite how much Terrance added to the version on TV — much more than in his previous novelisations. I’ll dig into what he adds and why presently.

The cover is, I think, one of the best by Chris Achilleos. The focus is the monster — or robot Mummy — standing impassively upright, its legs breaking out of the lower edge of the frame. The closest reference photograph I’ve been able to find crops the lower half of the Mummy, so Achilleos may have worked from a separate photograph to provide more of the body.

Photo care of the Black Archive

ETA, Paul MC Smith sourced this, care of the tragicalhistorytour.com:

In the photo, it’s framed by a pyramid; it’s notable, I think, that Achilleos didn’t keep that pyramid, but perhaps it inspired the composition of this artwork, as I’ll try to explain.  

The Mummy is flanked by portraits of the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, their expressions suggesting a deadly serious book.

The slightly stippled portrait of the Doctor is similar in composition to Achilleos’ previous illustrations of this incarnation, the hat on his head with brim angled upwards to the right, one loop of scarf under his chin. But the glowering countenance is unlike the beaming, even laughing, versions we’ve seen before. Whereas in the reference photograph the Doctor is staring away into space, here he glowers at the Mummy.

Photo care of the Black Archive

Sarah also looks in towards the Mummy, but points her rifle over its shoulder, pointing away to something out of frame. 

Photo care of the Black Archive

She is slightly angled compared to the reference photograph; this, the rifle and overlap all add dynamism to the whole composition, so the cover is at once serious and exciting. A white oblong arranged vertically behind these three characters helps connect them — separate photographs made into one entwined image, a cruciform with the vertical Mummy. 

But without that oblong, I think there’s a triangular structure to the arrangement of the three characters, fitting for a story about pyramids. Was that the original plan, perhaps inspired by the pyramid in the reference photograph of the mummy, and then Achilleos thought it looked wrong within the wider rectangular frame? If so, did he add the oblong to square the whole thing off?

The sepia tinge suggests an old-fashioned photograph and helps to convey a story set in the past (in 1911). The radiating orange background is suggestive of the heat of Egypt, or perhaps the landscape of Mars, though at best the connection is subtle. The bright, white heart of this energy is slightly off centre, to the right of the Mummy’s head, again creating a more dynamic, three-dimensional effect. The Doctor Who logo and border are deep purple, the text in black, adding to the sombre tone. 

Inside the book, there’s the usual list of titles “Also available in the Target series”, which for the first time includes Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, published 18 months previously. As discussed before, I think the late addition of that book to the schedule meant it got missed from these lists. But here it is at last, alongside The Making of Doctor Who, which was published the same day as this novelisation. 

A third book by Terrance also published on this day, The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, isn’t listed. I think this and some other things suggest that the book was a late commission, written after this novelisation. I shall dig into that in a subsequent post.

By now, there were so many Doctor Who titles from Target that some were left out to fit the list on one page. I wonder how decisions were made as to what to omit. Among those missing are Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders by Terrance, and Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon and Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion both by Malcolm Hulke, who I’m sure would have taken the omission gracefully.

Then we get into the book itself. As usual for Terrance, the novel comprises 12 chapters but here there are also a prologue and epilogue, both of them additions to what is seen on TV. The prologue draws from a single line of dialogue in Part Two:

DOCTOR WHO:

He destroyed his own planet, Phaester Osiris, and left a trail of havoc across half the galaxy. Horus and the rest of the Osirans must have finally cornered him on Earth. 

From this, we get three pages of epic legend, the kind of big mythic stuff more commonly seen in and around 21st century Doctor Who. As we get into Chapter 1, Terrance continues to embellish what we see on screen.

Marcus Scarman, for example, wears a suit and public school tie despite the heat in Egypt. This, we’re told, is because,

“The year was 1911, and Englishmen abroad were expected to maintain certain standards.” (p. 10)

In fact, stage directions in the camera script for Part One tell us Scarman wears a “Wykehamist tie” — that is, in the brown, navy and red of Winchester College. But Terrance makes it a point of character and context, and refers to the tie again on p. 45, where it help us to recognise Professor Scarman when he reappears in the story. 

In the TV version, Scarman is the first person for millennia to enter a particular “blind pyramid” somewhere in the region of the real-life Saqqara. Indeed, Part One begins with stock footage of the distinctively shaped stepped pyramid there, which my late friend John J Johnston identified in his comprehensive article on the story:

“Establishing shots of the Fifth Dynasty pyramids of Abusir and archaeological excavations at Saqqara … hailing from the documentary The Catacombs of Sakkara, first transmitted under BBC2’s Chronicle strand on 11 April 1970, which focused on the work at this most ancient of sites by W B Emery, then Edwards Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology at University College London.” John J Johnston, “Excavating a Television Classic: Pyramids of Mars (1975)”, Mummy Stories 

In the book, it’s a “Black Pyramid” (p. 10) and in “Sekkara” (p. 57), the spelling as per the camera script — where the smaller typeface suggests that the place name was a late addition, perhaps after the production team had secured the stock footage.

We learn from Terrance of the “long years” Scarman has spent tracking down clues to the location of this hidden pyramid, “many” fellow archaeologists having scoffed at him. We’re also told how Scarman bribed his local guide Ahmad,

“whose love of gold had finally overcome his fear” (p. 10).

This, we’re then told, is Ahmad’s,

“fear that he was blaspheming the ancient gods of his people” (p. 11).

There’s some local colour, with “half-naked Egyptian labourers squatted patiently by the tethered camels” (p. 10), a pen portrait akin to the stock footage to establish setting. I don’t think this is any worse than, say, in The Daemons (1971), when the stock archetypes of an English village know the pagan legends related to the local barrow and are variously frightened or scornful.

We get a bit more detail in Chapter 2, where Terrance provides a potted history of another Egyptian, Ibrahim Namin, “High Priest of the Cult of the Black Pyramid” (p. 19). Namin has served the cult his whole life, the latest in a line of ancestors in the same role, stretching back millennia. Having heard of Scarman’s expedition to the Black Pyramid, Namin and his fellow priests descend on the site and kill Ahmad and all the labourers — a detail not shared on screen.

At this point, Namin and his cult are loyal to the other “Great Ones” and keen to keep Sutekh securely imprisoned in the pyramid for all time. They know the consequences of failure:

“In the Secret Writings of his cult it was laid down that the Pyramid must never be broken into or the most terrible disaster would overwhelm the world” (p. 20).

It is only on entering the desecrated pyramid that Namin is taken over by Sutekh, who softly explains that there has been a misunderstanding and promises that Namin and his priests will be “exalted” for loyal service — to Sutekh. Terrance tells this from Namin’s perspective, where this all seems very reasonable. Namin therefore switches sides.

We then learn how Namin has loyally followed Sutekh’s instructions, packing up artefacts from the pyramid and shipping them in crates first to Cairo and then England. He also posed as Scarman’s servant to obtain the professor’s luggage from a hotel in Cairo.

This extra detail makes for an unusually long chapter for a novelisation by Terrance, comprising 15 pages. With the lore-filled prologue, there’s a lot of added material in this first section of the book. We don’t reach the moment that marks the end of Part One on TV until p. 44 — more than a third of the way through the book. Based on his previous novelisations, it’s unusual for Terrance to embellish what happened on screen to such an extent. Why did he feel the need here?

Well, Terrance addressed this very issue when he was the guest of the newly formed Doctor Who Appreciation Society at an event held on 29 April 1976 — when he was surely still writing this book:

“Mr Dicks explained that in books more explanations are necessary and any loose ends, which would pass by on television, must be tied up for the printed page. He quoted the forthcoming adaptation of Pyramids of Mars — which he himself is penning — as an example. In it the whole [backstory] about the character of the Egyptian Namin and his relevance to the plot will be explained. Explanations are taboo for television drama.” (JJ Bentham, “Terrance Dicks report — part one”, TARDIS vol. 1 no. 8 (July 1976), p. 17.)

Pyramids of Mars is a great, atmospheric story on TV, propelled by forward momentum. It works on visuals and feel. But in adapting it for the page, Terrance found — I think more than with most other Doctor Who stories — that its shortcomings in logic were rather exposed.

Why, when people have got into his prison in Egypt, does Sutekh send them and a whole load of artefacts back to England? It’s not explained on screen or in the book. 

(I can suggest an explanation: Sutekh needs them to set up various technical means to free him, but doesn’t want to do that in Egypt where local people know his name; better to do it well out of sight, and he’s just possessed a man who owns a private estate where such operations can be carried out in secret.)

Why does Sutekh appear in the TARDIS at the beginning of the story, not least given that — according to the Doctor — “nothing can enter” the ship? Is Sutekh even aware he has done so, given he doesn’t speak of it later? 

(A few people have been in touch to suggest this is the TARDIS overlapping with Sutekh trapped in the Vortex at the end of the story. That would make a neat bootstrap paradox but is, I think, complicated by the trip to 1980 midway through the story; it is a closed loop then, then it isn’t, then it is. Yes, we can marry up that idea of trapped Sutekh invading the TARDIS with his return to the series in 2024, but my focus here is on what Terrance did and didn’t address in his novelisation.)

Why do both the Doctor and Sarah Jane don outfits suitable for 1911 before they know that’s where they’re headed? Even the on-screen explanation makes little sense: Sarah is wearing an Edwardian dress but the Doctor says it belonged to his companion Victoria, who was from 1866. It looks great — and the Doctor’s first ever frock coat became a signature look for this and later Doctors. But the logic is at fault.

Something similar is going on when Sutekh sends the possessed Marcus Scarman to the house in England and he arrives as a “black-robed figure” with a “shining globe” for a head (p. 43); a “burnished globe” in the script. On screen, I think the idea was to up the stakes at the end Part One by having the nominal villain, Ibrahim Namin, killed off by an even worse, alien monster. It wouldn’t be quite so scary, or linger in the minds of viewers for a week, if this were Marcus Scarman from the off. On the page, without the cliffhanger, it is odd.

Then there are the remarkable coincidences all through the story. Why do events take place on the site of the future UNIT HQ — last seen in Robot almost two years previously? Or there’s Laurence Scarman having conveniently “invented the radio telescope about forty years too early” (p. 39). In fact, it’s more like 20 years early, with Karl Guthe Janke’s array dating from 1932. (Presumably, out of shot behind Laurence’s cottage, there’s a large set up of dipoles and other technical gubbins for this contraption to work.)

How convenient that the Osirans broadcast a warning in a cipher of English, enabling the Doctor to translate it by assuming that the most commonly occurring letter is “E” (p. 41). (It’s the most commonly occurring letter in other languages, too, such as French, German, Italian and Spanish, too, but “A” is more common in Icelandic, Polish, Portuguese and Turkish. In Finnish, the most frequently occurring letters are “A”, “I”, “N” and “T” and then “E”. My point is that no thought has been given to the Osirans writing in, say, Egyptian hieratic or demotic, let alone hieroglyphs. The logistics of translation are very different to decoding a cipher. 

The production team seem to have been aware of some of the contrivances here, as we can see from the Doctor’s response to a convenient hiding place in the Scarman house:

Again, the smaller typeface suggests a late addition, the nonsense perhaps picked up in rehearsal.

These are all issues of the TV story. The issue in a novelisation is how much to fix this stuff. The more you tinker, the more you alter the on-screen story or hold up the action — and it is then a less faithful translation of what occurred on screen. I think Terrance’s approach is the right one, adding some backstory to the beginning to give the whole thing some weight and history, and then breezing through the rest with relatively small fixes that don’t disturb the flow.

So, for example, we learn how Sarah happens to know, very conveniently, about the 740 gods listed on the walls of the tomb of Thutmose III (that is, the real-life KV34) — a relatively obscure bit of information with which I used to impress Egyptologists when the Dr (my wife, for those coming to this blog new) worked at the Petrie Museum. Terrance tells us, twice, that Sarah knows this because she once researched Egyptology for an article in an educational magazine (p. 41 and p. 83). He also has the Doctor chuckle at this display of one-upmanship from Sarah — so it’s not just a fix, but reveals a fun side of their relationship, too.

Then there’s what Terrance does with the Doctor and Sarah being chased by slow, lumbering Mummies, which they could surely outrun. With Sarah, he simply hangs a lantern on the problem:

“Somehow it had got ahead of her” (p. 33).

With the Doctor, he increases the burden of carrying wounded Dr Warlock. On screen, Warlock is played by the relatively slight Peter Copley. Here,

“Warlock was a big heavy man, and with such a burden even the Doctor couldn’t move very fast” (p. 33).

Terrance sets this up earlier on, introducing Warlock as “a burly figure in country tweeds” who “shouldered his way” rudely into a room:

“Namin looked thoughtfully at the ruddy-faced balding figure in front of him. A typical English country gentleman, with all the unthinking arrogance of his kind.” (p. 22)

Making Warlock more physically powerful ups the tension, and makes it more difficult for the Doctor to carry him, but also Namin’s perspective of Warlock is revealing of character.

When the possessed Marcus Scarman confronts Warlock and asks him about the Doctor, Terrance adds a bit of explanation as to why Warlock doesn’t simply share what he knows with his old friend:

“I’d just been shot when I met him, so my memory’s a bit hazy” (p. 53).

Terrance is especially good at adding connections between these various characters. On screen, Warlock lives in the nearby village and “Professor Scarman is my oldest friend”. Here, Warlock is also a “good friend” to poacher Ernie Clements (p. 53), occasionally buying a rabbit or partridge from him. Ernie also lives in a cottage in the village (p. 82).

Clements’s first name isn’t used on screen but does appear in the script. Here, he’s got some pride, preferring to think of himself as a kind of unofficial gamekeeper rather than poacher (p. 49). He’s intelligent, too, working out the contours of the invisible barrier round the estate (p. 50). Like Harry Sullivan before him, he’s allowed to swear, with a single “ruddy” (p. 55).

Clements also knows “old Collins”, the servant at the house. We’re told Collins wears “the formal black clothes of an upper servant” (p. 21) — my italics — and has been in service all his life. Just before Collins is killed, we’re told he’s known Marcus Scarman since childhood (p. 26), a bit of human connection that makes us feel more of his death.

Terrance also explains Clements shooting a man in cold blood: initially feeling a “sudden surge of furious rage” at the murder he has witnessed, then,

“He was suddenly appalled by what he had done” (p. 58-59).

Our understanding of Clements adds to the effect of the poacher then being hunted — an irony Terrance doesn’t spell out but I think is implicit in the script. On screen, his predicament is played a little for laughs; here, he gets more respect.

Laurence Scarman doesn’t get these added biographical details, but doesn’t need them; he is perfectly written and played on TV. We learn a bit more about his family: his father was a big game hunter (p. 68), explaining why there are “several” guns on the property (p. 42). But Terrance makes Laurence’s death distinctly more horrible:

“With horror Laurence saw that his brother’s hands were black and charred. Their touch seemed to burn, he felt smoke rising from his jacket. ‘Marcus’, he choked, ‘your hands…’”

On screen, Laurence clearly says “Your hands” because they are hurting him; here, there’s maybe a sense that he’s concerned for his brother’s hands being in such a state. Then, on screen, we cut away while Marcus is holding Laurence’s shoulders. Terrance adds an extra gruesome touch, as Marcus,

“shifted his grip to Laurence’s throat” (p. 86).

There are several examples of this kind of addition to the horror. When Sutekh is seen in the TARDIS and the controls spark, Sarah wonders, “Was the TARDIS on fire?” (p. 16). When a Mummy traps its foot in one of Clements’s snares, it snarls (p. 49) — an odd response for a robot. Unlike on TV, there is a ferret in the cage in Clements’ hut (p. 83). Whereas events on TV take place in the daytime on a single day, night falls on p. 42 and events continue the day after. And when the Doctor enters the time-tunnel to Sutekh’s pyramid, he loses consciousness (p. 95), suggesting a more taxing, less instantaneous trip. 

When, possessed, the Doctor returns up the tunnel sitting “cross-legged like a Buddhist in meditation” (p. 103), whereas on TV he is standing, his eyes staring blindly upwards. On the next page, Terrance describes the Doctor as a “mindless puppet”, but he doesn’t go into further detail, whereas in previous novelisations he’d shown disquiet at stuff about mind control. Perhaps through over-use it had lost its horror.

The depiction of the Doctor is doing something new. The TV story begins with the Doctor brooding in the TARDIS; here, Terrance conveys this but notes how at odds it is with the Doctor’s “usually cheerful features” (p. 13). On TV, Laurence asks if his hunting rifle could be of use and the Doctor responds, “I never carry firearms.” Terrance extends that and makes it more emphatic:

“Certainly not… I never carry fire arms” (p. 41)

But he also has the Doctor ready to defend himself with a fallen branch as a club (p. 35), and has him speaking “practically” (ibid) and “impatiently” (p. 36), so he’s more brusque and potentially violent than normal. Perhaps that’s to be consistent with, as on screen, the Doctor’s cool response to the murder of Laurence Scarman. But it’s not the only odd thing. On screen, the Doctor knows about “sweaty gelignite”; here he explains how it's used in fishing (p. 83) — an odd thing for him to know. When Sarah makes a reference to the events of Death to the Daleks (1974), his response is terse:

“The Doctor was in no mood to discuss his past adventures, particularly those which had taken place in earlier incarnations” (p. 110).

Yet there are signs that this is the same, jolly character as before. He chuckles at Sarah while searching for explosive, he calls Laurence “old chap” more than once (p. 67 and p. 69), and there’s an odd, repeated gag where, despite the crisis, he rushes off to recover his hat and scarf (p. 36 and p. 93). It’s oddly goofy behaviour, more like Terrance’s Robot than TV Pyramids of Mars.

More than anything, Terrance underlines that this is the same Doctor from previous other adventures when introducing him. First, there’s a variation on familiar words:

“Through the swirling chaos of the Space/Time Vortex, the strange continuum where Space and Time are one, there sped the incongruous shape of a square blue police box, light flashing on the top”. (p. 13)

I’d query the use of “square”, but the “swirling chaos” is interesting. On screen, the police box spins through a simple starfield. Did Terrance imagine swirling chaos would be more dramatic, or more in keeping with earlier depictions of the TARDIS in flight? Could he have meant to link this to Sutekh, god of chaos, as the TARDIS spins into his grasp?

The opening TARDIS scene on TV references UNIT, the Brigadier and Victoria, and Terrance concisely explains all this stuff, as well as what the TARDIS is (p. 14). He also includes a footnote to another of his own novelisations, Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster (p. 16).

Some continuity he cuts. There’s no mention of Sarah being from 1980, as on screen. At the end, the Doctor doesn’t mention having once been blamed for starting a fire in 1666. But notably, there’s a historic moment here. On p. 97, for the first time, Terrance refers in print to Gallifrey, planet of the Time Lords, giving — as per the TV story — its galactic coordinates and location in the “constellation of Kasterborous”. 

Terrance would go on to novelise all the 20th century TV stories set on Gallifrey — The Deadly Assassin (20 October 1977), The Invasion of Time (21 February 1980), Arc of Infinity (21 July 1983) and The Five Doctors (24 November 1983, and based on his own script). His later, original Doctor Who novels dig ever more into Time Lord mythology. For all he co-wrote The War Games and script edited The Three Doctors, this is where that starts, with him grappling with history and the Proper Nouns.

As on screen, Sutekh refers to the Time Lords as a “perfidious species” (p. 104) but Terrance adds a slight qualification from the Doctor:

“I come of the Time Lord race, but I renounced their society” (p. 97).

Technically, race isn’t the same thing as species; it’s a more cultural than biological distinction, and now an outmoded term. This, I think, plays into ideas later suggested in both The Deadly Assassin and The Invasion of Time, that there are many different peoples on Gallifrey, of which the Time Lords are just one social order.

Sarah, meanwhile, is, “a slender, dark-haired girl” (p. 14) — not, as in earlier novelisations by Terrance, simply “dark”. As well as drawing on the magazine piece she wrote about Egyptology, she also recalls “childhood visits to the Science Museum” (p. 37) in London; there’s an analogy later,

“like a child on its first visit to the Science Museum” (p. 62),

as if this is a universal rite of passage. The Doctor doesn’t know how good a shot Sarah is (p. 88), but she seems highly competent, knowing to “cuddle” the rifle butt into her shoulder (p. 91) when readying her aim. She dismisses the Doctor’s mention of Madame Antoinette as “cheerful nonsense”, as if she doesn’t take his name-dropping too seriously. But there’s a touching moment, as he goes to face Sutekh, where they both acknowledge that he might not come back (p. 94).

Sadly, this is followed by the distracted, careless Sarah getting captured — explaining a detail that is missed from the TV serial, but not the most heroic moment. Likewise, when Sutekh appears in the TARDIS at the start, Sarah screams (p. 16).

Terrance describes this vision of Sutekh as “half human, half wolf or jackal” (p. 16), and later refers to,

“Sutekh’s true visage, the snarling, bestial jackal” (p. 115).

This isn’t quite right: the production team on the TV story seem to have made a point not to make Sutekh’s exposed head like that of an animal on Earth. While other Egyptian gods had heads like recognisable animals — jackal-headed Anubis, hippo-headed Tarawet, falcon-headed Horus — the strange, square-eared “Tythonian beast” of Sutekh/Set has not been matched to a real creature.

As on TV, Sutekh refers to the “main pyramid” on Mars (p. 105), suggesting a community of pyramids, plural — thus giving the story its title, even though we see only one. It’s a shame there’s no description here of what exactly is sitting up there on Mars: is it a relay station, or was it once a whole populated town?

Again, Terrance is good on small detail: he explains why the possessed Marcus thinks nothing of the police box in his house (p. 62), and when the Doctor reaches the tomb in Saqqara we’re told the tapestry is still smouldering (p. 95). But it’s odd that Terrance has the paralysed Sutekh able to turn his head and then swing back (p. 96), as if the only part of him fixed in place for eternity is his bum.

The TV scripts are peppered with rich vocabulary, but “stertorously” (p. 34) and “vitreous (p. 84) are both Terrance’s. Even so, some of the descriptions aren’t quite right. He speaks in one instance of the “machine-like persistence” of the Mummies (p. 67), which is hardly surprising given that we know they are robots. 

There’s something odd, too, when the Doctor races back to the TARDIS on Mars and Sarah has to shout “Wait for me!” and leap through the closing doors behind him (p. 117). Would he really leave her behind? On the same page, we’re told they “journey back to the Earth of nineteen eleven”. But the vital plot point of there being a distance of eight light minutes between Earth and Mars hinges on this all happening in the same relative time: the TARDIS can make the trip in an instant, so gets ahead of Sutekh. It suggests Terrance hadn’t understood the physics of the story. 

Likewise, on TV Sarah refers to “tribophysics”, the real science of friction. Terrance renders it “triobyphyics” (p. 107), which I think translates roughly as the physics of 3 and 2. Again, the suggestion is that he thought this was something invented for the TV story.

There’s some handwaving over the physics of the organ on which Namin plays in Marcus Scarman’s house, which we’re told is performed as a “kind of prayer, a tribute to his gods” (p. 16). On TV, the organ in the script means an organ in Dudley Simpson’s incidental music, giving a particular flavour to the extradiegetic sound. Here, the organ is clearly diegetic — heard by characters in the story. Sarah even hears it inside the TARDIS (p. 17), and it serves a purpose in masking the Doctor’s footsteps (p. 42). 

So is the organ used in summoning Sutekh, or making a link to the time-tunnel? Is it an ordinary organ, and particular kinds of music have this effect on the Vortex? Or has Ibrahim Namin specially built an organ with some kind of technical, physicsy qualities? Is that why he had to come to England? We are not told.

The significance of this organ is also uncertain. As usual, Terrance capitalises words of import: Mummy (p. 34), Casket (p. 65), Warhead and Phase One (both p. 89). But the room of the house with the organ in is both organ room (p. 118) and Organ room (p. 121).

Then we get to the end. As on TV, the Doctor traps Sutekh in the time tunnel, effectively weaponising time to age a god to death. A fire duly breaks out in the house, and history seems back on course. On TV, the Doctor cracks jokes and he and Sarah hurry back to the TARDIS. Here, we get a scene inside the TARDIS with Sarah mourning the loss of the people who have died and wondering if word will get out to the wider community. It’s a brilliant idea, continuing the themes of the TV story, as to whether she and the Doctor have left a footprint in history.

There’s then an epilogue, set “Later, much later” (p. 122) in which Sarah visits the offices of the local paper in the village near UNIT HQ to look up reports from the time. That qualification “much later” suggests this is not around the time of the next TV adventure, ie The Android Invasion, but some way beyond that. When this book was published, Sarah had just left the TARDIS for the last time on TV, so I imagine her dealing with her grief after being abandoned by following up on loose ends.

There are some lovely touches here. We learn Collins’s first name, Josiah, and get a sense of Sarah acknowledging what she accomplished in helping to save the world. We’re told she emerges into “summer sunshine”, so different from that fearful night back in 1911. It’s the opposite of the poem “Ozymandias”, which connects Ancient Egypt to the present day and suggests despair. Sarah gains peace and perspective.

And no doubt she looked in on her friends at UNIT. Perhaps they went for a nice meal.

*

Next time: the last of these long posts (for the time being), and the last of the three books by Terrance published on the same day in December 1976: The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book.

In the meantime, you might like my piece for the Doctor Who Figurine Collection on Sutkeh’s costume on the TV story Pyramids of Mars.  

Here’s a bit more by me on the TV story,  and an introduction I wrote for a screening. And here is the list of 236 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to long posts on many titles.