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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Waltz 1815

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

The School for Scandal and Other Plays, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I bought this Penguin Classics edition second-hand an age ago because David Whitaker (about whom I wrote a book, which I never mention) had played Sir Oliver Surface to great acclaim in a 1957 production of A School for Scandal at the Theatre Royal in York, the cast including John Barrie, Derek Martinus and Titus Oates, who later changed his professional name to Simon and was in Doomwatch. 

Skimming through the script of that particular play, I got a sense of the farcical comedy, and the kindly, authoritative role. The book comprises three plays by Sheridan: The Rivals (1775), The Critic (1779) and The School for Scandal (1777). Reading them all now, at a more leisuredly rate and without an agenda, I've been delighted by the modern-feeling pace and the quality of gags. In The Rivals, for example, Lydia races to tidy up her salacious novels before posh visitors walk in, and asks her servant to help:

LYDIA: Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books - quick, quick - fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilet - throw Roderick Random into the closet - put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man - thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa - cram Ovid behind the bolster - there - put The Man of Feeling into your pocket... (p. 48).

Sat in a quiet library last week, "Put The Man of Feeling into your pocket" made me snort out loud.

Likewise, The Critic has an amazing sequence in which abominable playwright Sir Fretful Plagiary insists he never reads reviews in papers. The mischievous Mr Dangle says this is just as well, as the reviews are particularly awful. Plagiary can't resist asking what is said, so Dangle provides a whole page of different example, ripping into every aspect of Plagiary's work, and Plagiary must pretend not to be offended.

We then visit rehearsals for a play, The Spanish Armada, into which the author has inserted a romance between the daughter of the head of the English fort at Tilbury and one of the Spanish sailors, no matter how improbable this might be. This sailor has the most amazing, authentically Spanish name: Don Ferolo Whiskerandos. Scenes of this terrible play out with critics commenting on further outlandish devices: characters telling each other things they already know, or the overuse of research (one character, known to have been a good dancer, duly enters a supposedly tense scene with his toes turned out). You could make a checklist of this stuff and use it to teach creative writing.

The School for Scandal is very Bridgerton, involving society gossips who then get caught up in their own scandals, and various people donning different person to find out what people are really like. The morality is all a bit twisted, which makes it surprising and fun. There is a ridiculous scene involving two people both hiding, separately, in the same room which often seems to have been performed as a standalone scene, such as in the 

The plays are peppered with references to contemporary people and things, which need a bit of explaining in footnotes. I'm not sure how funny these would have been, even at the time - it's a lazy kind of placeholder comedy, where you trick a laugh from the audience by naming something they recognise. Sometimes, Sheridan does something a bit more witty than that, such as in The Critics where it seems the famous actors being praised or critiqued in a scene are the very men who'd have been on stage in it.

For all the wit and zip feel up to date, the plays are oddly unstructured and they each just sort of stop. I was prompted to read up more on Sheridan, and discovered his private life was even more scandalous than the intrigues staged here. What a binfire - and knowing this, you can feel the chaos in his writing.

The Moonlandings, by Reginald Turnill

I greatly enjoyed this exhaustive memoir of the US space programme written by BBC aviation correspondent Reg Turnill — a familiar face from my childhood, reporting on space stuff for children’s shows Newsround and Blue Peter. The book covers what Turnill calls the “first era of manned spaceflight” (p. 393), from Alan Shepard becoming the first American in space in 1961 to Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz in the mid-1970s.

By working from his archive of paperwork and scripts, which I suspect may include programmes no longer held in the BBC archive, Turnill provides a lot of detail about the flights themselves, and what did and didn’t go right. He tells us he couldn’t, at first, shake the hand of Wernher von Braun because of the man’s involvement in the wartime bombing of London — Turnill and his family lived in Sydenham. Over time, their relationship mellows and Turnill quotes from this own lengthy, revealing interviews with von Braun, yet remains unsure about his legacy. 

We learn, too, of the celebs at the launch of Apollo 11 on 16 July 1969: former President Lyndon Johnson, Vice President Spiro Agnew, air pioneer Charles Lindbergh, rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth and science-fiction writer Arthur C Clarke — the latter stopping by Turnill’s news desk to rehearse what he was going to say on screen to Walter Cronkite at CBS. 

We’re also told who wasn’t there — Nixon attended the launch of Apollo 12, in the cold and rain, but no others. John Freeman, former presenter of the BBC programmes Panorama and Face to Face, was now US ambassador and had been to the launch of Apollo 10. To explain why he turned down the invitation to the next one, his spokesperson responded, “When you’ve seen one Apollo launch, you’ve seen them all” (p. 231). Turnill clearly finds that indifference amazing.

I’m especially, nerdily, thrilled by all the mechanics of the TV and radio coverage, the way improvements in satellite and camera technology shaped what could be shown, and the gossip about “the BBC’s never-ending internecine warfare” (p. 389) between three of its own departments: News and Current Affairs, which Turnill worked for, and Outside Broadcasts were both based in Lime Grove, while Science and Features, led by Richard Francis and Aubrey Singer, was at Kensington House.

The different teams were instructed by the BBC’s director-general to collaborate on the Mercury 9 launch in 1963, but Turnill explains that this, “was really a victory for Science and Features, who could not now be excluded” (p. 82). Francis quickly set about organising a big TV special.

“Robin Day, newly recruited from Independent Television News to Paul Fox’s Current Affairs team, who were the principal customers for Outside Broadcasts facilities, happened to be in New York working on a political contribution to Panorama. He was told to drop everything and stand by to ‘anchor’ live TV coverage via satellite.” (p. 82)

But Day declined, knowing nothing about spaceflight, so Turnill got the gig. 

He and Francis seem to have got on well enough until October 1968 and the launch of Apollo 7. Turnill describes Francis arriving at Cape Kennedy with a “posse” of assistants and secretaries to mastermind the TV coverage, and maddening the team back in London by adopting “space-speak”: “affirmative” and “negative” instead of yes or no, “go” and “no-go” when something was or wasn’t possible. Then, on 20 December, Turnill felt it his duty to share a weather report that suggested there would be little to see of the launch of Apollo 8. Francis felt this cost them a million TV viewers on the BBC at lunchtime on Saturday 21 December (a few hours before the broadcast of Episode 8 of Doctor Who story The Invasion). Decades later, Turnill was unapologetic about what he had done:

“I had no guilty conscience even when the launch weather and the view of lift-off were spectacularly perfect!” (p. 156)

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he was squeezed out of the TV coverage of Apollo 11 the following summer.

“The reason I was unemployed at this supreme journalistic highlight of my career was that the BBC’s ‘Apollo Studio’, at Shepherds Bush for TV, and at Broadcasting House for radio, had insisted on taking over the launch coverage. The studios were packed with ‘experts’ who had to be given something to do, and once again it had been a case of ‘leave the facts to us, Reg. We’ll just come to you with the question: What’s the atmosphere at the Cape?’ Since most of the experts had never been near America’s space programme, I was well aware that they would call upon me for tougher explanations than that if anything went wrong.” (p. 234)

Turnill was clearly hurt and frustrated at being squeezed out, and annoyed by TV executives wanting him to emphasise drama — he tells us there was no real risk to the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts (!) so is withering about Burke crossing his fingers on TV. He also says a key problem was the focus on live pictures, with better-quality colour or film images of no interest to the editors because they arrived half-an-hour later than the less good live images. The sense is that the public appeal of the spaceflights — or, in some cases, the lack of it — was shaped by the coverage on TV, which was in turn led by the prejudices of the execs. Turnill says he was “baffled” by such decisions, then adds,

“TV executives tend to have literary rather than scientific backgrounds” (p. 189).

He refers to the “experts”, in quotes, as “superfluous” (p. 261), and claims they had no or little knowledge of spaceflight, not least because they’d not been to the Cape. That’s not true of James Burke, who Turnill mentions just twice in the whole book, who pre-filmed a series of reports at different NASA facilities and was very good on technical detail. I would like to cross-check the account here with Burke’s own memoir from 2019, James Burke: Our Man on the Moon.

Turnill does not name at all the other members of the TV crew covering Apollo 11, such as Patrick Moore, Cliff Michelmore and Michael Charlton. Charlton reported from Houston, and Moore was hardly inexpert in matters of space — the Apollo astronauts made use of his maps of the Moon. So it’s a rich text, full of fascinating detail and stuff that isn’t quite as straightforward as the author makes out. I found it utterly compelling.

More of this sort of thing:

• Carrying the Fire by Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
• Apollo 11 graphic novel by Fitch, Baker and Collins 
• Moonglow by Michael Chabon

Bookish Volume II, by Matthew Sweet

Harold Terence Sneed is found in his parlour in Borough, stabbed through the ribs. The irony is that he’d just conducted a seance; one of those present at that attempt to reach the spirit world is the cause of Sneed now passing on.

Maxie Kleinmann is an elderly tailor on Jermyn Street who claims to have killed the man found dead on his shop floor, with a single punch to the throat. And when Gabriel Book takes Jack Blunt to Germany to trace the death of a man very close to them both, there are soon more murders…

I’ve not yet seen the second series of Bookish, of which this is a novelisation, but the book is a delight. I noted of the first volume that it provides some clues to when Book’s adventures are set which we don’t glean from the TV episodes. Here, the three cases all take place in the autumn of 1946, the second story — Dead Man’s Whistle — between 23 October (p. 125) and 8 November (p. 201), and the last one, Killer Nacht, on and around 6 December. Indeed, the first case, Memento Mori, takes place soon after the end of the last series (in September), as there are newspaper headlines about it.

As before, the book is bookended by a brief glimpse of the future, two years on from last time, with a letter from Book in Los Angeles to Nora dated 13 February 1964 and her reply from the following day — meaning that, away from the fog and cold of London, he missed The Edge of Destruction go out.

There are a number of Doctor Who references in the book — Sneed is named after the undertaker in Gatiss’s first Doctor Who episode, and there’s an appearance by Luigi Rossini (Lew Russell) and his circus from Terror of the Autons, and a Chinese fowling piece.

In fact, the book is chock full of references — to books, to real crimes and odd bits of history such as the sad death of Eleanor Marx (the doctor who attended her, and lived just round the corner, was the dad of Ernest Shackleton). I should dearly love footnotes, and a reading list.

I’ve seen the series described as cosy crime, and can see it being just the thing for Sunday evenings in the Call the Midwife slot. There’s a steely edge to some of this stuff, and a pathos which Mark Gatiss has always been so good at. The last episode, in particular, ends with some real tension on the heartstrings — and leaves me baying to know more.

But I note that one of the regular characters is not mentioned in correspondence from 1964. Is that a clue about what’s to come?

Magic Rays of Light, by John Wyver

Rekindling the spirits of lost television

An absorbing new history of the interwar period, gleaned from the echoes left by early, experimental TV

by Simon Guerrier

This history of pre-war television is a strange, compelling treasury of ghosts. For one thing, the interwar period has largely slipped from living memory. Few people remain who can share first-hand the wonders and weirdness of the new technological medium described in these pages. The voices quoted, sharing by turns their delight and exasperation, have passed on. What was seen and felt by television’s first audiences must instead by gleaned from old paperwork and stiffly posed photographs, from which we piece together a tantalising sense of the extraordinary range, innovation and visual richness. Sadly, very little pre-war television survives for us to experience for ourselves. It was broadcast live, released into the air and then gone — literally ethereal.

I’ve been haunted by the ghosts of television since, as a child, I learned that lots of old Doctor Who got wiped. Now, I pine for all kinds of lost treasures — I’d love to see Sean Connery’s first leading role, as a washed-up boxer in Requiem for a Heavyweight (1957), or Peter Cushing in sci-fi detective story The Caves of Steel (1964). I’m fascinated by ITV’s coverage of the Moon landing (1969), as David Frost’s live chat show kept being extended through the night and ultimately ran for 10 hours. The guests included Sammy Davis Jnr, Lulu, Dame Sybil Thorndike and Peter Cook. Ray Bradbury walked out in disgust at the shambles of it all, while others passed out from exhaustion and/or drinking. Meanwhile, on the BBC, Pink Floyd played live in the studio, Judi Dench and Ian McKellen recited moon-themed poetry, and Dudley Moore played ‘Moonlight Sonata’. That’s all missing from the archives, too, but the strangeness of it lingers. This major moment in history, this apotheosis of engineering, and TV met it with music hall.

Whatever my personal wish-list, any discoveries of old TV are revealing. Each year, the BFI hosts ‘Missing Believed Wiped’ to show off the latest finds, and it’s always a thrillingly eclectic mix. The 2025 Missing Believed Wiped included a trailer for Cliff Richard in panto, an episode of a sitcom in which a man tries to pay a bill by writing a cheque on the side of a cow, and brief, glitching footage of Tony Hancock enthusing about pilchards. Television is an immediate, intimate medium, so even random, disjointed scraps provide vivid windows on history. What people wore, or drove, or thought suitable to say out loud at prime-time, are all bracingly alive.

Yet it’s rare for material to be recovered from the earliest days of the medium. The last big discovery was in 1996, when a means was found to decode recordings made in the 1920s and 1930s on standard 78 rpm gramophone records — John Logie Baird, the pioneer of TV, having developed a technique to record but not to play back. The peculiar results of the decoding can be seen in an episode of Tomorrow’s World (tx 28 October 1996) reporting this technical feat at the time, now up on YouTube.

In portrait format, like on a modern smartphone, we see in scarlet and black a flickering, distorted moving image, as if though fluted glass. It’s the face of Baird’s temporary secretary, Mabel Pounsford, captured on 28 March 1928. The report then shows, in the same distorted red-and-black, some of a dance routine broadcast by the BBC on 21 April 1933, with the Paramount Astoria Girls all in a row, their pale legs distinct from dark leotards. In both cases, the 30-line resolution is so poor I’m not sure I would have made sense of what I was seeing if I hadn’t just been told.

We can gain further sense of the limited technology and extraordinary ambition of the early TV pioneers from a 4 April 1970 edition of the BBC programme Review, which reassembled the surviving cast and crew to recreate some of the BBC’s very first TV drama, an adaptation of Pirandello’s The Man with the Flower in his Mouth broadcast live on 14 July 1930. The play was chosen because it involved only three characters in a single set, and ran for just half an hour. But it’s an unsettling, moving drama: the titular man is dying of cancer — the ‘flower’ growing in his mouth — but strikes up conversation with a customer who has an excess of time, in that he’s just missed the last train of the night and now has to wait for the first one of the morning. The TV version wasn’t recorded — it’s one of the many TV ghosts —  but the reconstruction lets us see how it would have looked, how it was put together in the studio and how the technology worked.

The ‘pink’ and black picture — to me, it looks red — was the result of the neon light used on the single camera, which could not move or zoom. Even where a second camera was available, there was no ability to ‘cut’; it took eight seconds to mix between shots, so this was done sparingly. In that sense, I think a lot of television of this period must have been like looking through a hole in the wall, and through fluted glass, at a performance taking place next door.

That makes what the early pioneers managed to achieve all the more amazing. The reconstruction shows how the crew of The Man with the Flower in his Mouth evoked the dramatic grammar of cinema, using differently framed shots without cutting. The sequence begins with a hand-drawn picture of the cafe, and some narration setting the scene. That drawing is then slid out of shot, revealing a close-up of the titular man (Earle Gray), seated and speaking to the customer (Lionel Millard), who is visible in frame. A chequered board then slides in front of the camera, blocking our view briefly while the actors reposition themselves. Then the board slides back to reveal the customer now in shot, further upstage so smaller in frame. After more dialogue, the chequered board slides back into view, the actors quickly change position, and the board slides back to reveal both men in frame. Technologically, it’s very basic; aesthetically, it’s how TV drama is framed today.

John Wyver tells us that this first televised drama by the BBC followed and perhaps drew from the one-act The Queen’s Messenger, broadcast in Washington DC on 11 September 1928. This employed three cameras, cutting between shots of each of the two actors and the feed from a third camera that provided close-ups of relevant props. The BBC, then, were trying to emulate this technical marvel with just a single camera — just as BBC drama now, on relatively modest means, tries to hold its own against the big-budget US networks and streamers.

That ambition and competitiveness meant television developed extraordinarily quickly. Wyver charts efforts to televise the Derby, the coronation of George VI and various ballets, in each case explaining how these individual productions helped to progress the medium more generally. By late 1936, when the BBC launched its regular, daily television service, Baird had developed what he called ‘high definition’, 240-line television, which the BBC alternated week in, week out with the rival EMI-Marconi electronic 405-line system. The latter soon won out and remained the standard for TV until the late 1960s (when it was succeeded by a 625-line system as part of the groundwork for colour TV). We can see how radically different, how much clearer and engaging, television had become by the latter half of the 1930s from brief examples, such as in a home cine recording of the coronation on TV, or newsreel reports and documentaries. Film lacks electronic television’s intimacy and immediacy, but Television Comes to London (1936) conjures the excitement of the opening night of the regular service, and lets us see and hear Adele Dixon sing the specially composed song ‘Television’ — with its reference to ‘magic rays of light’ — while also showing a TV camera on wheels tracking her, so we get a sense of how it would have been framed for viewers at home.

The BBC’s demonstration film (1937), used in shops and exhibitions to entice sales of TV sets, gives a sense of the range and breadth of programmes otherwise lost. 

We can sense, too, how appealing this all was from the rapid growth of the audience. It’s thought the first night of the regular service was viewed on 400 TV sets; by September 1939, less than two years later, 20,000 sets had been sold.

Wyver provides a wealth of contemporary accounts to conjure more of what we’re missing. Along the way, there’s loads of fascinating social history: why ballet was so popular in Britain with working-class audiences — the result of Russian emigres putting on relatively inexpensive shows — or why boxing worked so well on TV. The size of the boxing ring suited television’s limited depth of field, while two people with a clear issue to be decided made for good small-screen drama; also, there was a frisson from seeing muscular, bare-chested men in your own living room. That, I think, explains why drama about boxing became such a feature of post-war television — one reason Sean Connery was cast in Requiem for a Heavyweight was that the former Mr Universe contestant looked good in the shorts. But Wyver underlines that this early period contains more than just the origins of later, familiar forms of TV. Lots here is strange and unfamiliar because it didn’t last, such as efforts to establish ‘cinema television’ for large crowds, as a rival to the BBC’s domestic service.

Pioneers made assumptions about the audience watching, given the high price of TV sets. In fact, the relative wealth of different parts of London and so the potential for investing in sets dictated the decision to broadcast from Alexandra Palace rather than Crystal Palace (where John Logie Baird was already based). Though Wyver quotes some working-class viewers, they seem to have been the exception — and were reported in the newspapers for being so. The implication is that programming was designed to entertain and inform middle-class viewers, and aimed less to educate or uplift them as it would post-war.

The audience was also assumed to be white, which informs any sense of the diversity seen on screen. Wyver thinks that Avril Coleridge-Taylor was the first person of colour to perform on TV, in June 1931, and later programming included speakers such as the Jamaican activist and feminist Una Marson. The half-hour variety show broadcast on the first night of the regular service boasted Adele Dixon (as above), then Buck and Bubbles, a Black dance and comedy act, followed by Chinese dancers the Lai Founs — a diverse line-up, as if to get as much of the world into the small frame — but Wyver asks how much these acts would have played to racial stereotypes. Blackface and minstrelling were common and thought uncontroversial, and programming reflected colonial and racial assumptions of the time.

Output also reflected established ideas of cultural value. The classic texts chosen for dramatisation — Shakespeare, Chaucer and Austen — were, says Wyver, from a ‘literary canon [that] had taken form in the later nineteenth century in the complex processes of remaking English identity and the national culture.’ He goes further, arguing that the BBC played an active part in cementing this idea of a national theatre, with texts thought important independent of their box office appeal. He adds television of this period to commercial cinema and nationally distributed newspapers and magazines, the factors that DH LeMahieu, in his interwar history A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (1998), identified as creating a common national culture.

This cutting-edge technology promised ever more innovation and technical wonder — a medium of the future — and yet there’s a sense that much of the broadcast output was reassuring, even nostalgic. There’s no contradiction in this: Wyver links the idea to the ‘dominant mood’ of ‘conservative modernity’ identified by Alison Light in her Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (1991): modern in form but conservative in effect. I can see that going hand in hand with the popularity of HV Morton’s travelogues of the late 1920s and 1930s, using his modern, affordable motorcar — and encouraging readers to do the same — to take trips into the countryside steeped in nostalgia and whimsy.

In that context, it’s fascinating to see what changed in the lead-up to war. Among the programmes Wyver describes, there are increasing notes of disquiet. A version of Julius Caesar is presented with characters in modern, military uniforms, making a connection to fascism in Europe. There’s a demonstration of anti-aircraft precautions, and an interview with refugees. A photograph on p. 317 shows Neville Chamberlain met by a crowd on the tarmac at Heston Aerodrome on 18 September 1938. In the upper-left of the picture, we can see a television camera, ready to relay the promise of ‘peace in our time’ live to viewers in London, making them part of the moment. 

Today, every beat of a war plays out in real time on TV. As I write this, the BBC boasts live coverage of Iranian strikes on Qatari and Saudi energy sites, and video of a US F-15 fighter jet crashing in Kuwait. The BBC News website offers a wealth of short videos: footage of explosions, vox pops with people on the ground, expert commentary to provide perspective — all in sound and vision. We can pick what to view of this, and in what order, making a story for ourselves.

Things were very different in 1939, when the BBC decided to halt all TV transmissions before any official declaration of war against Germany. Just after noon on Friday, 1 September, the scheduled broadcast of the eight-minute Disney cartoon Mickey’s Gala Premier was followed by closedown. War was declared two days later and the TV service only resumed on 7 June 1946 (when the same cartoon was repeated). This is where Wyver ends his story. He explains the reasons for halting the TV service: it was expensive, still in very experimental form and had a limited audience. Management felt that, with war looming, resources could be better deployed: some 50 TV engineers soon went to work on radar, and electronics companies who’d been manufacturing TV sets moved into such work as military radios and radar screens.

I’d previously read that TV was halted because of the fear of air raids: the TV signals broadcast from Alexandra Palace might guide the Luftwaffe to densely populated north London. Wyver confirms this and then, in the closing pages of his book, shares something extraordinary. The German radio navigation system, Wotan, worked on an operating frequency of 45 MHz. By chance, that was also the frequency of the vision transmitter at Alexandra Palace, which could be used to disrupt the German system. As a result, some broadcasting continued during the war and proved so effective that the Luftwaffe abandoned Wotan. 

It’s left me haunted by one last thought: How many lives did television save?

More of this sort of thing by me:

• My book, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television
• ‘Where the strange, secret world of Mr Benn came from’, for the Telegraph
• ‘The secret Coronation Street pilot episode lost for 66 years’, also for the Telegraph
• On The Intimate Screen — Early British Television Drama by Jason Jacobs
• On Writing for Television, by Sir Basil Bartlett
• On Starlight Days, by Cecil Madden

Talk on David McKee, Mr Benn and Elmer

You can now watch my talk, "The David McKee Sketchbook - The Origins of Mr Benn and Elmer", on YouTube:

The talk was given on Friday evening for the friends of the St Barbe Museum + Art Gallery in Lymington, which is home to the exhibition "Elmer and Mr Benn: the magic of David McKee" until 6 September. It's a lovely exhibition, full of amazing original artwork - so bright and colourful in real life, and full of detail and interest. I would like to stand at the back and watch the expressions on people's faces as they enter.

I helped write some of the panels for the exhibition, as well as a piece for the Sunday Telegraph, "Where the strange, secret world of Mr Benn came from".

NB in the Q&A at the end of the talk, I mention Ralph Steadman when I of course mean Gerald Scarfe! But another example of how people working on these different things kept an eye on each other's work: Cliver Juster (film editor and producer on Mr Benn and the King Rollo Films output) told me that Oliver Postgate was a big fan of Towser.

The Great When, by Alan Moore

“So it’s all true then. I suppose I’ve always had a feeling in my stomach telling me it was, but if you’ve been there, then I can’t deny it, can I? Birmingham is real.” (p. 224)

Eighteen year-old Dennis Knuckleyard works in a grubby little London bookshop, where proprietor Coffin Ada — she is always coughin’ but her nickname relates to a murder — would rather tear up a book than haggle over the price. One day in 1949, she sends Dennis across town to buy a set of books by Arthur Machen from another dealer; if Dennis can negotiate a lower price, Ada says he can keep the proceeds. So, he haggles, pays just a fiver, and finds himself the owner of one particular book that doesn’t, that shouldn’t, exist.

This book turns out to be an artefact from the Great When, a London-of-the-imagination, a place of vivid dreams and nightmares, that lies beneath the London we know. Dennis must return the book to this place, following appropriate procedures, of face an awful fate. Then he must organise a meeting between a nefarious real-London criminal and a criminal from the Great When. And then he discovers that one of his trusted friends cannot be trusted at all…

Meanwhile, he falls for sex worker Grace Shilling, goes to an art show and learns various things about the people with whom he knocks about.

It’s a typically rich, strange adventure story from Alan Moore, chock full of bits of real history and literature, sometimes warped and twisted. In his acknowledgements, Moore speaks of the book’s “balance of coarseness and refinement” (p. 313), and much of the fun comes from juxtaposition: the comic and horrific, the mundane and the fantastic, the clash of people from very different worlds.

A lot hangs on made-up elements in the (real) short story “N” by Machen, and the ways that the past lives on in the present. But I was also really struck by the premonitions of the future, with a new world as yet to be forged after the horrors of war. For all the magic and fantasy stuff going on here, that put me in mind of Bookish — set in a bookshop not too long a walk from Ada’s, and at around the same time.

This is the first of a new series: the “Long London” novels, according to the cover. A prologue, involving elderly wizards, doesn’t seem related to the main story, but presumably lays clues for these subsequent adventures. But the Great When — the place, rather than the novel — is a domain of headache-inducing nightmares and not exactly fun. Scenes there, often lasting pages, are relayed all in italics, which this reader found a bit hard-going. I wonder how Moore will entice us back.

I also felt a bit disappointed by his handling of the two main women in the book, one a cross old lady who — big twist — used to be younger and more beautiful — and the other a young sex worker with a heart of gold. There’s a repeated joke in the penultimate chapter where Dennis learns something new about each of them, where what they share is that Dennis made assumptions based on how they both appear. In one case, he decides to end the relationship having learned the truth, and I thought less of him for it.

Having finished the book this morning, I poked about online to find discussion of male-skewed “mantasy” (clever Juliet E McKenna previously referred to “blokes in cloaks” and its counterpart “guy-fi”). Yes, that’s an issue for The Great When: a new, original and often thrilling story, but still too embedded in the cliches of the past.

See also:

• Me on the Backlisted podcast discussing The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore and Ian Gibson
• Me on V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
• Me on Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie discussing Lost Girls with Stewart Lee

Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, by Terrance Dicks

Originally published on 19 August 1976, this is the first Doctor Who book issued from the new home of Wyndham Publications Ltd: 123 King Street in Hammersmith, London. The previous novelisations — and the three Mounties books — give the address of 14 Gloucester Road in South Kensington, the modest basement from which this whole industry started.

Beyond that one-line change in the indicia of this novelisation, which I doubt most readers noticed, there’s no evident sign of things being any different. The authoritative history on all this stuff, The Target Book, suggests that things were not happy at King Street, with a humber of staff leaving or losing their jobs, yet also quotes children’s editor Liz Godfray saying that,

“the Doctor Who schedule was largely unaffected by the behind the scenes changes” (David J Howe with Tim Neal, The Target Book (Telos, 2007) p. 34). 

As we’ve seen in previous posts, the early days of Target saw delays in publication and titles being switched about. But by this point the range had reached what we might call a time of peace and ordered calm. We can see this in a list of forthcoming novelisations published in the fanzine TARDIS, vol 1, no. 8 (July 1976) and supplied by one Angus Towler in Cookridge — presumably a fan who had written into Target:

This is pretty much what got published over the next 12 months, with only Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen pushed back to a later date. The range was now a well-oiled machine. Keep cranking the handle and out came novelisations — plop, plop, plop.

If we apply my estimated lead time of 7.5 months, Terrance wrote Doctor Who and the Web of Fear in January 1976, while the Doctor Who story The Brain of Morbius was on air — a serial he wrote but asked to have his name taken off. Though Terrance seems to have been quick to forgive script editor Robert Holmes for rewriting his story so drastically, it had not been a happy experience. If current Doctor Who was not a source of joy, I wonder how much he took solace in returning to the first Doctor Who story with which he had a connection.

He didn’t work on the TV version of The Web of Fear. “When I first arrived [at the BBC]”, he told the Doctor Who Appreciation Society’s local group in Surbiton on 28 March 1978,

“that show was being edited, and I remember seeing playbacks of episode six.” (reported in the fanzine Oracle and reproduced in Stephen James Walker (ed.), Talkback — The Unofficial and Unauthorised Doctor Who Interview Book, Volume One: The Sixties (Telos, 2006), p. 179).

Episode 6 of The Web of Fear was recorded on Saturday, 17 February 1968 and broadcast on 9 March. There’s no surviving paperwork to tell us the date of this playback — which was when the edited, completed episode was shown to cast and crew in Theatre D at BBC Television Centre (with star Patrick Troughton invited to watch it upstairs, in the office of head of serials Shaun Sutton). I’ve discussed this with David Brunt, author of the forthcoming The Doctor Who Production Diary: The Troughton Years, and we think — based on earlier episodes of The Web of Fear for which records survive — that it was probably the Thursday after recording, i.e. 22 February.

This is significant because Terrance later claimed that he’d not really watched Doctor Who until he started working on it. So the date of the playback suggests he became a regular viewer from Episode 4 of The Web of Fear, broadcast on 24 February — having already seen Episode 6 in playback. Or, perhaps, knowing he was joining this series and would attend a screening of cast and crew, he tuned in the previous week and his first regular viewing of Doctor Who was Episode 3.

I like to think so, because — by coincidence — that episode saw the debut of Nicholas Courtney as Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart. Nick, like Terrance, joined Doctor Who for what he thought would be a matter of weeks, and by the end of the year had become part of the establishment of the TV series. They each remained regulars on the series until 1974 and 1975 respectively, and close to it ever after.

In fact, this long association caused a problem for Terrance in novelising The Web of Fear. When that story first aired, viewers didn’t know Lethbridge-Stewart at all. That he “suddenly popped out from nowhere” (says the Doctor), one of just two survivors of an attack by Yeti at Holborn, means we’re invited not to trust him. He is one of the characters we’re effectively invited to view as suspects — a potential servant of the alien Great Intelligence. The others include cowardly Driver Evans (the only other survivor from Holborn), supercilious journalist Howard Chorley, and salt-of-the-earth Mancunian, Staff Sergeant Arnold. 

But most readers of the novelisation of Doctor Who and the Web of Fear would know the character of Lethbridge-Stewart from his subsequent adventures, in TV Doctor Who and in previously published novelisations. Terrance acknowledged this up front. In the TV version, little is made of the Doctor’s first meeting with Lethbridge-Stewart. In the book, we get this to open Chapter 5, putting this on a par with one of the most famous meetings of two men in British imperial history:

“Although neither of them realised it, this was in its way as historic an encounter as that between Stanley and Doctor Livingstone. Promoted to Brigadier, Lethbridge-Stewart would one day lead the British section of an organisation called UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce), set up to fight alien attacks on the planet Earth. The Doctor, changed in appearance and temporarily exiled to Earth, was to become UNIT’s Scientific Adviser.* But that was all in the future. For the moment, the two friends-to-be glared at each other in mutual suspicion.” (p. 42)

The asterisk links to a footnote, “See Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion”. It is Terrance linking the first Doctor Who story with which he had a connection to his first Doctor Who novelisation.

The reference in the above paragraph to the Doctor and Lethbridge-Stewart’s friendship being “all in the future” is also literally true. As per the scripts and broadcast version of The Web of Fear, we are told that the Doctor’s previous encounter with Yeti, in The Abominable Snowmen, took place in 1935 (p. 8 of this novelisation), which was “over forty years” (p. 8) before the events of this story; he includes a footnote, citing his novelisation.

The novelisation of The Web of Fear is therefore set, at the very earliest, in 1976 — the year it was published — meaning that all Lethbridge-Stewart’s subsequent adventures, as the Brigadier at UNIT, were still yet to take place. A young reader of this novelisation when it was published might have had dim memories of Lethbridge-Stewart’s second TV adventure, The Invasion, broadcast in 1968. For a 12 year-old, eight years ago is the ancient past. The young reader of this novelisation would have been presented with the boggling thought that it was also in the future.

Indeed, in Episode 2 of The Invasion, the Brigadier says the encounter with Yetis “in the Underground [ie in The Web of Fear] must be four years ago now”, meaning that The Invasion is set, at the earliest, in 1980. But just before Terrance started work on this novelisation, dialogue in the TV story Pyramids of Mars (broadcast 25 October — 15 November 1975) states — more than once — that Sarah Jane Smith is from “1980”, presumably meaning that the events in Terror of the Zygons take place in that year. That story was Lethbridge-Stewart’s last regular appearance on screen. 

So all the Brigadier’s adventures, from The Invasion (1968) to Terror of the Zygons (1975), occur in a single calendar year. No wonder he had a breakdown…

*

My first edition of this novelisation is in pretty good nick, the cover still smooth and shiny, only the spine a bit creased. The cover illustration is among Chris Achilleos’s best. Instead of the usual black-and-white stippled portrait of the Doctor’s staring dolefully back at us, the second Doctor is in colour, his face expressive, agonised, looking downwards — as if under terrible pressure. 

Behind him, radiating outwards to fill the frame, is a cobweb in black-on-white, which may explain the choice to put the Doctor in colour so he stands out. On some previous covers, Achilleos framed the central figure with radiating colours. The cobweb is much more effective, I think, because it is something tangible, not just a tone. Cobweb also has associations with horror, while the stark black and white is colder and less comforting that the colour fills.

The Doctor’s gaze directs our attention to the elements in the lower part of the frame: a Yeti with bright beams of energy blasting out from its eyes to ensnare a soldier. In fact, this is a bit of a spoiler because the ensnared soldier is Staff Sergeant Arnold, the character revealed at the climax of the story to be the servant of the baddies. Yet there’s nothing in the cover or the text of the book to identify that this is Arnold, beyond the stripes on his arm signifying his rank as sergeant. 

I wonder if Achilleos even knew that the soldier he put on the cover was the bad guy in the story. It may be that he simply worked from the most dynamic stock photo available, a soldier brandishing a rifle rather than just standing around.

Reference photo from The Web of Fear,
showing Jack Woolgar
as Staff Sergeant Arnold,
c/o the Black Archive

The beams of bright energy are edged with purple, which may have dictated — or been chosen so as to compliment — the purple Doctor Who logo. This is only the second purple logo featured in the range (following Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet), and the second time a Doctor Who novelisation featured a purple spine and back cover. 

In fact, the back covers of this book and Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (1974) look very similar. Both employ yellow text on purple. Using one of the three primary colours (blue, red or yellow) in juxtaposition with a colour mixed from the other two is a well-known technique, the clash of so-called “complimentary” colours meant to be striking and bright.

The difference between these two back covers is revealing about the way the range had changed in its first two years. Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon boasts a single paragraph in yellow teasing the plot of the book, the key characters and elements given capital letters. There’s then a quotation from a newspaper, underlining the universal appeal of Doctor Who — generally, not this particular story — to both children and adults. The slogan “A TARGET ADVENTURE”, places Doctor Who within a wider genre of exciting books (something John Grindrod first pointed out to me).

There’s no quotation or slogan on the back of Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, as though Doctor Who by now could stand on its own, with no need of introduction. The yellow-coloured text teasing the plot comprises fewer words than the earlier book (87 words compared to 97) but the point size is much bigger and the text presented in three paragraphs — the words less densely packed and so more digestible.

The novelisation is similarly digestible, six 25-minute episode condensed into just 128 pages, whereas Terrance’s previous novelisation needed 144. Last week, in response to my last post, Paul MC Smith from Wonderful Books produced this helpful graph of wordcounts:

Relative word counts of Doctor Who novelisations
Graph by Paul MC Smith

To keep Doctor Who and the Web of Fear breezily concise, Terrance cut anything inessential to the plot, including visually arresting moments from the TV serial that don’t really suit prose. For example, the opening scene of Episode 1 picks up from the end of the previous serial, with the doors of the TARDIS wide open while the ship is still in flight, the Doctor and his friends at risk of tumbling out. Likewise, episode 4 of the TV version features a thrilling battle between Lethbridge-Stewart’s soldiers and the Yeti in the streets of Covent Garden. Both are missing from the book.

Otherwise, it’s a pretty faithful record of the story seen on screen, with some deft amendments. For example, the unfortunate stereotype of rich, greedy Julius Silverstein in the TV version is here a “tall, elegant white-hair old man”, Emil Julius, much more childish than grasping.

Terrance also picks up on the attempt by Captain Knight to chat up Anne Travers in episode 1, where she cuts him dead.

KNIGHT: 

What’s a girl like you doing in a job like this? 

ANNE TRAVERS: 

Well, when I was a little girl I thought I’d like to be a scientist. So I became a scientist. 

To this, Terrance adds that Knight, “welcomed any opportunity to work with Anne Travers” (p. 28), offering to help her with a task rather than send for a technician. It makes a bit more of their relationship, suggesting something more along the lines of that between Captain Turner and Isobel Watkins in The Invasion — where the characters end up together. Here, the relationship seems to be one way; when, later, Knight is killed by Yeti, there’s no suggestion that Anne spares him even a thought.

This is an example of an addition Terrance makes at the start of the story that doesn’t pay off at the end. Another is — as I said above — his telling us on p. 42 that Lethbridge-Stewart is someone we can trust when, on screen, he’s one of the characters we’re invited to suspect is one of the Great Intelligence’s suspects. Terrance sets up that guess-who-the-baddie-is early on; on p. 31 he reminds us of the Doctor’s previous encounter with the Yeti, and the Intelligence’s ability to take over and control unwitting human servants. As the story continues, on p. 70 he makes the guess-who plot explicit, the Doctor thinking through the six suspects by name: Anne Travers and her father, then Chorley, Lethbridge-Stewart, Knight and Arnold.

We know to discount Lethbridge-Stewart — we’re reminded, on p. 77, that this man and the Doctor are at the start of a long friendship. But in listing the suspects on p. 70, Terrance surely lays a false lead by not including a name: he leaves out Evans. This is just after he’s reminded us that Evans is cowardly and selfish, with Jamie appalled that the man refuses to do anything dangerous and would rather run away.

“Jamie shook his head. ‘I’m not running out on my friends.’

Evans stood up. “Well, I’m sorry to leave you, boyo, but you got to take care of number one in this world.’” (p. 66)

Again, Terrance is keen to avoid stereotypes, and later shares a thought from Lethbridge-Stewart — who we know we can trust — that “the Welsh usually made such splendid soldiers” (p. 99). Terrance also ensures that at the end of the story, Evans finds “unexpected resources of courage” (p. 91) and redeems his earlier shortcomings. The cowardly red-herring character ends the story as a hero.

The Doctor here is also a compassionate, considerate hero. He’s introduced vividly, 

“a small man with untidy black hair and a gentle humorous face. He wore baggy check trousers and a disreputable frock coat” (p. 13).

(ETA: Oliver Wake points out that this is the first time in print the Doctor is described as wearing a “frock coat”, though this particular Doctor doesn’t wear one — his black jacket is something else, the bottom front flaps pinned back to make it resemble the shape of a tail coat. Piers Britton in his book Design for Doctor Who says the Doctor first wears a frock coat in Pyramids of Mars, which became,

“a mainstay of [Tom] Baker’s wardrobe for much of his long incumbency, ensuring that it became a Doctor Who fixture. Frock coats were retroactively ascribed to the Hartnell and Troughton Doctors in much of the expanding Doctor Who literature of the 1970s” (Britton, p. 177).

A second frock coat was introduced in The Android Invasion and worn again by the Doctor in The Brain of Morbius. Perhaps Terrance attended recording and herd the coat described as such, and the term worked its way into this novelisation as if meaning any kind of Doctor-type long coat.)

We get a good sense of this considerate hero later, when he is “looting” an electronics shop in Goodge Street for the components he desperately needs to thwart the Intelligence and save everyone on Earth, 

“At the back of his mind he hoped that the Government would remember to pay compensation [to the shop owner]” (p. 93).

At the end of the story, he wins the battle but not the war against the Intelligence because his friends have, with the best of intentions, tried to help. On screen, he is cross with them. Here, his anger is quickly curtailed by “seeing the happy faces all round him” (p. 124) and he asks for their forgiveness. It’s characteristic Terrance; it’s rare on screen for the Doctor to apologise. As in previous novelisations, Terrance makes the Doctor a bit kinder and more heroic. He also underlines that this is the same man as other incarnations, here using the Third Doctor’s catchphrase “reverse the polarity”.

Then there are the other regular characters. “Towering over” the Doctor, Jamie — no surname — is introduced to us as, “a brawny youth in Highland dress, complete with kilt”, who has been travelling in the TARDIS “since the Doctor’s visit to Earth at the time of the Jacobite rebellion” (p. 13). That background shapes Jamie’s character here in ways it doesn’t in the TV version, such as when he first encounters soldiers.

“Although their coats were khaki rather than red, Jamie found it hard to forget that English soldiers were his traditional enemies” (p. 45)

I wonder if that was informed by the complex relationships between redcoats and Indians in Terrance’s Mounties trilogy. But this kind of complex relationship between characters, each of whom thinks they are right, is characteristic of Terrance. Here, he adds that while the Doctor and Jamie are “the best of friends … occasional disputes were inevitable” (p. 13). 

Victoria — no surname — is introduced as a “small, dark girl” (p. 14); as with Sarah in Terrance’s previous novelisations, the darkness refers to her hair, not her complexion. Again, we get a concise history of this character, an orphan from 19th century London. Sadly, this then doesn’t inform her actions in the story. Even so, Terrance adds a couple of interesting character moments for her not in the TV version, First, there’s her perspective on the young man in her life:

“Jamie had rushed off with his usual impulsiveness, forgetting all about her” (p. 48).

There’s no suggestion of romantic feelings or emotional connection between them, as was seen in the next TV story. Rather, Jamie doesn’t consider Victoria. Terrance does not add anything to pre-empt the events of that next TV story, such as suggesting that Victoria is in any way unhappy aboard the TARDIS. In fact, he adds something I think informed by his own interest at the time in meditation and positive thinking, when Victoria makes an effort to say something positive:

“Travers was still very confused and Victoria felt she had to keep his spirits up. Strangely enough this had the effect of making her feel better herself” (p. 105).

Then there’s Lethbridge-Stewart, introduced here as having an,

“immaculate uniform and a neatly trimmed moustache” … ‘And who might you be?’ he asked [the Doctor], sounding more amused than alarmed.” (p. 40)

“Amused” is such an apposite word to describe Nicholas Courtney’s manner of playing the character.  Terrance also refers to the man’s “relaxed confidence” (p. 63), which is again very apt. Nicely, we glimpse how Lethbridge-Stewart sees the Doctor, as a “funny little chap” (p. 75), and then get the contrary view with the Doctor recognising a soldier who knows no surrender (p. 76). Indeed, that’s an issue for Lethbridge Stewart, trained for action yet in a situation where he is unable to act (p. 90). In spelling this out, Terrance makes action the consequence of character.

We’re told Lethbridge’Stewart’s name is Alastair (p. 41), the name first used in print in The Making of Doctor Who (1972), cowritten by Terrance, and on screen in Planet of the Spiders (1974), script-edited by Terrance. Terrance still doesn’t use the middle name “Gordon”, for all it was used on screen in Robot (1974-5), which he wrote. As I’ve said before, that suggests “Gordon” was an ad lib by Tom Baker in rehearsals on that story, to improve the rhythm of the character’s name. But it also suggests that the various fans in contact with the publisher and with Terrance by the time he was writing the novelisation hadn’t pointed out the missing part of the name.

That interaction with fans had a big impact on Terrance’s approach to these novelisations. We’re on the cusp of that change here. Between writing this book in January 1976 and it being published in August, Terrance received a letter from fan Richard Landen listing continuity errors in The Making of Doctor Who, and was a guest at a DWAS meeting at Westfield College, University of London. Reading up on this interactions, I’m struck by Terrance’s patience in dealing with fans in their late teens and 20s expressing the view that books written for 8 to 12 year-olds are perhaps a bit childish… 

This tiresome fan could point out odd things in Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, the stuff I might pick up if I were editing this book. Just as the Doctor makes an unwitting cameo in one of the Mounties books because Terrance wrote the word with a capital D, Captain Knight refers here to “some kind of Doctor” and “the Doctor who was in the tunnels” (both p. 36) before he knows it’s the character’s name. In the same vein, why does Lethbridge Stewart need to tell his men that they’re looking for a “blue Police Box” (p. 89) — if they know what a police box is at all, they’d surely know it was blue.

I would be tempted to excuse such pendantry by saying it’s a living. But it doesn’t really pay.

(ETA: Steven Flanagan on BlueSky suggests that Lethbridge-Stewart being a Scot means he would be more familiar with red police boxes.)

Still, this journeyman writer is enthralled by how deftly Terrance adapts the TV story. The scripts were brilliantly, vividly conveyed by director Douglas Camfield. It’s a hard task to relay anything of the same atmosphere in prose, but Terrance is brilliantly vivid. Mostly, he tells us directly what’s happening so we can easily visualise each scene. He doesn’t embellish or overly complicate the action, but makes things more palpable through his choice of words. 

For example, there’s the Yeti dragging the unconscious old Travers, “as a child drags a teddy bear by one arm” (p. 81) — perfectly, simply, conveying the gait of toddling creature, the prey hanging limp in its grasp, the relative power of these two bodies. He adds bits of army slang to convey the culture and feel of these soldiers — “bodge” (p. 86), “spit and polish” (p. 111), and “daftie” (p. 119). And then there’s another example of his sophisticated vocabulary in a book aimed at children, which makes perfect sense in context, when the Doctor responds to “Jamie’s woebegone face” (p. 99).

At the end of the novelisation, Terrance sets up what’s to come in the lore of Doctor Who, with Lethbridge Stewart telling Travers that this adventure has shown the need for some kind of intelligence Taskforce.

“I think I’ll send the Government a memorandum…” (p. 125)

This archivist of all-things Doctor Who is delighted to think that UNIT began with a memo. (What was the subject line? To whom was it CC’d? What were the initials in the bottom left, a clue to the name of Lethbridge Stewart’s secretary?)

With his memo, we know — not least because Terrance told us in opening Chapter 5 — that everything is about to change in the world of Doctor Who. And yet the book closes on what are by now stock phrases in Terrance’s books, Doctor Who the same as it ever was and will be. With a “wheezing, ground sound”, the TARDIS fades from view.

“The Doctor and his two companions were ready to begin their next adventure” (p. 126)

*

These long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks take time and effort. and involve expenses. I don’t currently have enough other paid work to justify going on with them without your support.

Throw some coins in the hat and next week you get Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks. And then we’re onto Christmas 1976 and the triple whammy of The Making of Doctor Who (and the origins of “never cruel or cowardly”), Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars (about which Terrance discussed his working methods), and The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book (I’ve been talking to palaeontologists)…