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. 

Arise to Conquer, by Wing Commander Ian Gleed, DFC

A friend recommended this extraordinary first-hand account of the Battle of Britain by one of the Hurricane pilots, written soon after the events of the summer of 1940 and published in 1942. That was just as well, as Wing Commander “Widge” Gleed was killed in action the following year. I got hold of a first edition, yet knowing his fate casts a shadow as I read it. His friends are shot down, he’s in a serious accident, he wonders about his odds, and won’t make long-term plans... 

The book begins on the morning of 3 September 1939, with Gleed woken by his batman, going for breakfast with other pilots, then to check his plane out on the ’drome before listening to the Prime Minister’s announcement on the radio. Yet war doesn’t kick off immediately — the expected Blitz doesn’t come, at least not at first.

“For days there had been no action” except instructions on what to do in an air raid, the business of blacking out building and vehicles, and ominous warnings of fuel rationing that is bad news for one friend, Micky, who owns a rather fuel-thirsty Buick.

The commanding officer knows Gleed as “Leeds” (p. 14), his fellow pilots called him “Widget” or “Widge”; of the latter, he claims “I don’t know why” (p. 15), but Wikipedia suggests it was because he wasn’t very tall. He must have known that but chose not to say, the first of several examples of him not being entirely honest with the reader.

Given a forty-eighter, or 48 hours’ leave, he heads to Herne Bay with his girlfriend Pam, where they sail his boat to Broadstairs — where she lives — without formal permission to be in the water, running the risk of being apprehended or hitting mines. They chance their luck anyhow and, “It was a wizard day,” he says (p. 19) — an adjective he uses a lot. So here he is, cheerful, optimistic, a bit gleefully mischievous. 

Yet this scene and several that follow read very differently when we know Pamela didn’t exist. Gleed later claimed he invented a girlfriend for the book because reader’s like a romance. But in later years, some people who knew Gleed claimed he was gay. So I found myself reading the frequent references to Pam wondering if she was entirely invented, and how much she might stand in for someone else, a man Gleed was close to but did not dare put in print.

For example, Gleed has a last weekend with his parents in Finchley before being posted to France. His mum has amassed a great wealth of supplies for him to take, including two rolls of loo paper; his father — a veteran of the First World War — knows he’ll want to travel light. Meanwhile,

“Daphne, my sister, ‘phoned up Pam for me, and asked her to come and stay the night with us—rather a tall order for her, as she was at home at Broadstairs. She said that she would be arriving at Victoria at ten that evening, and would I meet her?” (p. 24)

He and Pam stay up until the early hours talking, and in the morning Mum can barely keep the tears back, Daphne has to blow her nose a lot, “and Pam and Dad smiled.” If Pam never existed, did something like this still play out, with Daphne — perhaps knowing more than Mum and Dad about the nature of the relationship — inviting someone else?

Then there are some other encounters. In France, Gleed arrives in Merville to find the place crowded with troops and refugees, but he finds a house with a huge double bed going spare, and offers to share it with another pilot, John Banks:

“He was a young boy, who was looking very tired … After asking the lady of the house to wake us at four-thirty, we retired to our room with a couple of candles, stripped and leapt into bed naked. … In two minutes I was asleep.” (p. 40).

In Lille, Gleed and another pilot are the only ones not to befriend the local sex workers and find a double room together (p. 26). It’s at least suggestive.

These infrequent moments aside, the bulk of the book is vivid descriptions of battle in the air. He gives a really good sense of the nerves before a flight and the eagerness to get airborne and have a crack at the enemy. Then, when specks of black appear in the sky, we’re suddenly “Tally-ho” and into the frantic business, the breathless style often passing into internal dialogue and the present tense. Brrrrrrrrm! he tells us, and rat tat tat, rat tat tat.

There’s a lot of slang — Gleed feels the need of footnotes to explain “bull” (red tape),  “flap” (a fuss), “a bind” (a chore), “bumf” (paper), “duffs up” (conditions becoming hazy or cloudy; by extension “duff” means anything going wrong), “force-lob” (forced landing), “piece of cake” (easy), “gong” (medal). I wonder how much war films are to blame for much of this passing into common use. He uses “wizard” a lot, and also “old boy” — the latter still a favourite of my paternal grandfather, who was also in the RAF in the war; it's how he addressed me in my teens and twenties. 

Gleed uses “damned” and “bastard” but there are several instances of a censored “b——s”, not least in referring to the enemy. There are also footnotes for the technical terms used by the RAF: “gen” (genuine information, to be relied on), “black-out” (rendered unconscious by by pulling too quickly out of a dive or turning too quickly), “perspex” and “glasshouse” (the hood of the cockpit), and “super-readiness” (pilots sitting in their planes so they can be airborne in 15 seconds). Pilots shout “Contact” to ground crews when their planes are starting up, and wish one another “Good hunting”. A system for producing a little extra speed is known as a “tit”, which results in an extraordinary sentence in the midst of one scrap:

“I was balls out with the tit pulled” (p. 79).

He’s good on other details: the role of batmen in running round after their pilots, getting them washed and packed and fed; the different types of Hurricane screw; the physical impact of flying (lots of sweating, plus sore arms); and the nature of tests conducted on pilots — a naked examination where Gleed is worried about having dirty feet, then a sight test involving being able to discern tiny letters or figures on a colour background, then blowing a bubble of mercury up a tube and holding it there, as seen in The Right Stuff. 

There’s also good detail on what pilots do in their time off. There’s a lot of drinking — one evening involves, “sherry, champagne and port; then, after that, beer” (p. 15). Once promoted to Wing Commander, Gleed is a bit more careful:

“We all drank orange squash, much to Robbie’s disgust. I was strict about that, as we had a long time to wait, and it’s so damned easy to drink quietly away, not noticing how many beers you have; by the time midnight came we would have been in no condition for a ground-straff. So orange squash it was.” (p. 93)

We learn the pilots share a copy of the book Gone With the Wind (p. 55), read detective novels and magazines, and go to the flicks or the theatre — after getting his gong from the King at Buckingham Palace, Gleed has lunch at the Savoy and then sees Cottage to Let. Pilots lark about, build model aircraft, eat lots of bacon and eggs and worry about getting their tea. It’s a convivial fraternity with Cock, Robbie, Dusty, Watty, Dinky, Beaver, Dickie, Rubber, etc — and so all the more shocking when some of these chaps don’t come home. There’s a poignant chapter in which a few men attend the funeral of one man, Squadron-Leader “Shuvvel” Forbes, killed in the big blitz on 14 August 1940. He’s from New Zealand so has no relatives nearby; his colleagues fly in for the ceremony, place their wreaths and then fly back to HQ ready for the next scrap, trying not to think too much about their own mortality.

All in all, this is an invaluable primary source. For all that bits may be invented, it conjures the sounds and atmosphere. The tone of it, the I-say-you-chaps, is very like the other books I’ve read on the subject and the films of the time, though I think anyone writing about the Battle of Britain or the pilots of the time — my forthcoming Doctor Who — The Missing Hour involves Hurricane pilots on Malta around this same period — may find it too easy to fall into pastiche. That would be a pity given that this book, this record of a man on borrowed time, is so bracingly alive.

I have also been recommended Flying to the Limit (1996) by Roland Beaumont, who flew with Gleed. More on that to come...

Black Archive: The Daleks, by Oliver Wake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Croquet Player, by HG Wells

This short, 82-page novella first published in 1936 was recommended to me after I posted about the 1934 and 1941 editions of A Short History of the World and Wells’s anxieties about where things were headed. I tracked down a first-edition copy, and read it in a single sitting earlier this week. It has haunted my imagination ever since.

The blurb is as follows:

“In a cafe at Les Noupets, as he comfortably sips his vermouth before lunching with his aunt, the narrator is accosted by a voluble stranger who tells him a strange and terrible story of the haunted countryside of Cainsmarsh, and of how he was finally driven to leave it and put himself in the hands of nerve-specialist. The narrator, already disturbed and frightened by the tale, meets the nerve-specialist next day and the mystery, instead of being solved, broadens and deepens until it embraces the whole world.

This is Mr Wells at his very best, and he could have hardly have chosen a more appropriate moment at which to give us this intriguing story.” (Back-cover blurb of first UK edition, Chatto & Windus, 1936)

The story comprises four chapters. In the first, “The Croquet Player”, the unnamed narrator tells us of two strange people he’s encountered, and that he’ll share what they have each told him in an effort to get it straight.

“It was a sort of ghost story they unfolded” (p. 1).

Having promised us something unsettling, he then sets a scene rather out of PG Wodehouse. The narrator and his aunt, Miss Frobisher, are at Les Noupets to play croquet because they don’t care to be seen playing tennis as it is too popular, while golf.

“we find mixes us up with all sorts of people” (p. 7). 

This snob was educated at Harton and Keble, now lives with his aunt at Upper Beamish Street in an unnamed part of Hampshire, and is, he tells us himself,

“just a little inclined to be what the Americans call a sissy [ … with … ] soft hands and an ineffective will” (p. 5).

He is, in short, an unlikely figure to get caught up in a ghost story or strange adventure. He is a comic character, a recognisable type to ground the story in something real before the horror strikes. My first thought was that Wells was doing a kind of fish-out-of-genre story, putting the least likely or least equipped sort of character into an established kind of set-up. That can be very effective, like doing a Chandler-esque thriller but making the protagonist a baffled stoner, as in The Big Lebowski.

In chapter 2, “The Haunting Fear in Cainsmarsh”, the narrator is out on the terrace when he meets nervous young Dr Finchatton, who tells him about his practice in Cainsmarsh where everyone is beset with a strange, low-level sickness that leaves them perturbed, with visions of ghosts from under the ground etc. It is brilliantly unsettling for being so underplayed, reminiscent of MR James, Lovecraft or The Woman in Black.

In chapter 3, “The Skull in the Museum” Finchatton traces the pestilence to the local museum in Cainsmarsh, which holds the newly found skull of some early version of man — I suspect inspired by the contentious real-life “discovery” of Piltdown man. The implication here is that in unearthing the skull they have unleashed an ancient curse, or rather an ancient perspective — a savage, violent, early version of humanity.

Things then step up: heading home, Finchatton finds the body of a dog that has been beaten to death, then learns that the kindly old vicar Rawdon who advised him earlier in the story has attempted to murder his own wife. Finchatton shares with the narrator his theories about the influence of “primordial Adamite” (p. 55) on everyone in the region, including himself.

“And then Finchatton said a queer thing. ‘Little children killed by air-raids in the street.’” (p. 56)

This incongruous reference brings a tale of ancient horror suddenly into the present. Air-raids weren’t a new idea in 1936; London was bombed in the First World War, and Wells had explored the idea in science-fiction novels including The War in the Air (1908), The World Set Free (1914) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), the latter made into the influential film Things to Come (1936). 

But the haunting image here of children killed in the street is apparently a response to contemporary events and the civil war in Spain, a year before the bombing of Guernica. The sense is, then, that the curse has already spread far and wide from Cainsmarsh.

I’ve seen this kind of thing done elsewhere, not least in Quatermass and the Pit (1958-59), where the discovery of an ancient skull produces nightmare visions and we learn our deep-seated violence is an ancient inheritance. I’d understood that to be a direct response to the Second World War and the Holocaust, not least given that writer Nigel Kneale was married to Judith Kerr, a Jewish refugee from Berlin, and his mother-in-law was a translator during the Nuremberg trials. So, for me, it’s extraordinary to see the same kind of idea being articulated before the outbreak of war. 

Wells then goes in a different direction. Chapter 4, “The Intolerable Psychiatrist”, flips the whole tale. The narrator meets with Finchatton’s nerve specialist, Norbert, who tells him that Finchatton’s story isn’t true. There is no such place as Cainsmarsh, and the young doctor was practising in Ely.

Yet, says Norbert, the sickness is real: he’s seen loads of people having similar delusions and nightmares, which he thinks is a response to the mounting tensions in the world, implicitly the rise of fascism and the threat of another world war. People are gripped by a nightmare of things to come.

I put this to my friend Niall Boyce, who shared with me an even earlier version of something similar — the vivid, precognitive nightmare experienced by Carl Jung in 1913:

“In October, while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realised that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilisation, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision lasted about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness. Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasised. An inner voice spoke. ‘Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.’ 

That winter someone asked me what I thought were the political prospects of the world in the near future. I replied that I had no thoughts on the matter, but that I saw rivers of blood.” (CG Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Flamingo, 1961) p. 199.)

Three years after these dreams, with the First World War in progress, Jung first used the term “collective unconsciousness”, in part drawn from Freud’s idea of the “primal horde”, where part of us, deep in the consciousness, will always be archaic, primitive, wild. I think that’s exactly what Wells is drawing on here, initially as a kind of ghost story.

In the story, Norbert argues that the mounting sense of disquiet, the shared nightmares, are a response to looming threat, implicitly of a new war, but originate in the primitive parts of our consciousness. He  appeals to the narrator:

“‘In a little while,’ he said, ‘there will be no ease, no security, no comfort any more.’ (Thank Heaven! he did not say I was ‘living on the brink of a volcano’.) ‘There will be no choice before a human being but to be either a driven animal or a stern devotee to that true civilisation, that disciplined civilisation, that has never yet been achieved. Victim or vigilante. And that, my friend, means you!” (p. 78) 

The narrator has, he admits, been “hypnotised” by all this. Yet when challenged by the psychiatrist, he shakes him off, because he has and appointment to keep with his aunt, playing croquet. He does not succumb to primitive consciousness; he simply ignores the threat.

I said at the outset that the narrator is like something from PG Wodehouse and to a post-war reader the ending reinforces that idea, given Wodehouse’s behaviour in the early part of the war. Of course, Wells could not have known that at the time of writing, but it is another example of his eerie prescience. 

There’s also something more profound in all this: that idea of people unable to face up to challenges and threats, determined to deny them, avoid them or conjure nightmares of something else. That’s coloured my sense of the news this week, with politicians of various hues determined to ignore or underplay climate change. How strange to read a book published 90 years ago and find it is pointedly now. 

The Croquet Player is dedicated “To Moura”, ie Russian translator and double-agent Countess Moura Budberg, with whom Wells had a long-standing on-off relationship. She’s a fascinating character, and given her experience in the Russian revolution, I can well understand why she might sympathise with a story / view of human psychology like this. 

I wonder how much of this strange, haunting story is the ghost of a conversation between Wells and Moura, horrified by a future they could so plainly see coming.  

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe

I read this compelling account of the early days of the American space programme — and the egos involved — an age ago, before my 2009 trip to Cape Canaveral, and have seen the film version a few times. But I looked up a detail the other week and got caught up again. 

Wolfe tells us in his foreword that the book was inspired by a simple question:

“What is it, I wondered, that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan, or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse? I decided on the simplest approach possible. I would ask a few astronauts and find out. So I asked a few in December of 1972 when they gathered at Cape Canaveral to watch then last mission to the moon, Apollo 17. I discovered quickly enough that none of them, no matter how talkative otherwise, was about to answer the question or even linger for more than a few seconds on the subject at the heart of it, which is to say, courage.” (P -4)

He persists in his investigation all the same, and the promise is of stuff about Tough Men Who Don’t Talk Emotions, alongside lots of Detail About Engineering. Yes, there is a lot of that stuff in what follows, but not to begin with. Chapter 1 opens, instead, on a domestic scene, wives ringing one another to find out what people might have heard. It’s ordinary, relatable, with a growing tension as we realise that a plane has crashed and the wives are trying to work out who has lost their husband.

Having explored the social networks and the psychology of all this, we then follow the efforts to recover the crashed plane and what little remains of the pilot, the state of the body described in horrific, visceral detail. It’s emotive and arresting, and I lacked the velocity to escape it. So I’ve read the whole book again.

There are effectively two stories here: first, the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager on 14 October 1947; then the Mercury space programme (1958-63), from the recruitment of the seven pilots, the first American chimps and humans in space, through to the appointment of a second wave of pilots (including Neil Armstrong) for the subsequent Gemini and Apollo programmes that would take astronauts to the Moon.

There’s some amazing stuff, like Yeager being invited to the US premiere of David Lean’s film The Sound Barrier (1952, released in the US the following year). The film claims the British broke the sound barrier first and did so by “reversing the controls”. Yeager found this outrageous, and was then horrified to discover that people thought he was only the first American to break the sound barrier, have copied this manoeuvre from the British.

“The last straw comes when he gets a call from the Secretary of the Air Force.

‘Chuck,’ he says, ‘do you mind if I ask you something? Is is true that you broke the sound barrier by reversing the controls?’

Yeager is stunned by this. The Secretary—the Secretary—of the US Air Force!

‘No, sir,’ he says, ‘that is… not correct. Anyone who reversed the controls going transonic would be dead.’” (p. 62)

Wolfe reports everything in a hard-boiled journalistic style, with an eye for human foibles — ego, hubris, jealousy, anger, lust and foolishness. It’s a little as though Dashiell Hammett had written a history of rockets. He’s good on the culture — the hard drinking, hard driving astronauts, the way they were wooed by sponsors and politicians, the conflict between perceived glamour and the reality. We get to know these different people and what makes them tick. Mission accomplished on that score.

There are also some notable absences. Frustratingly, there are no footnotes or index so we must take Wolfe’s claims on trust. But there are also some big things missing from the story here that I’ve seen picked up elsewhere. For example, there’s this reference to the partying going on at Cape Canaveral in 1960.

“There were NASA people and the contractors and their people, and there were the Germans. Although they scrupulously advised publicity, many of Wernher von Braun’s team of V-2 experts had important jobs at the Cape and were happy to find a fraternal atmosphere in which they could take off their official long faces and let the funny bone out for a tap dance or two. And many were the midsummer nights in Cocoa Beach, nights so hot and salty that the No See’um bugs were sluggish, when sizzling glüwein materialized as if from out of a time warp and drunken Germans could be heard pummelling the piano in the cocktail lounge and singing the ‘Horst Wessel Song’!” (p. 167)

This is a rare mention by Wolfe of von Braun and the Germans working on the space programme, with little to suggest any moral objection to the involvement of former Nazis. I’ve seen that addressed in, for example, the non-fiction Moondust by Andrew Smith, the novel Moonglow by Michael Chabon and the TV series For All Mankind. This is an example, I think, of Wolfe being like the journalists he decries more than once as behaving like “Victorian gents” in the way they reported the space programme, discreetly skipping unpalatable details to present a romantic story.

At the end of the book, he discusses the political pressures involved in recruiting Ed Dwight to the Mercury programme, as the first black astronaut. With other astronauts, Wolfe shares their perspective on events, their frustrations at being pawns in political games; we don’t get that with Dwight. Wolfe also doesn’t say that Dwight’s career was then halted by the end of the Mercury programme — though Dwight finally made it into orbit in 2024. 

The book ends, instead, at the end of 1963 with the Mercury astronauts receiving an award from the Society of Experimental Test Pilots that makes them feel as though they have, finally, been accepted by their peers as proper pilots. There’s the sense of things changing gear as Mercury is superseded by the next stages of the space programme. But I’m struck by Wolfe also closing the curtain on another key moment in history:

“When Kennedy was assassinated on November 22 by a man with Russian and Cuban ties, there was no anti-Soviet or anti-Cuban clamor in the Congress or in the press. The Cold War, as anyone could plainly see, was over.” (p. 435).

That seems a remarkable claim to make in 1979, the time of the coup in Afghanistan. For a book all about the importance of precision, it’s not quite correct — not quite the right stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo reference for Davros
c/o the Black Archive

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

The place: Skaro

Time: The Birth of the Daleks

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

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

But even the Doctor cannot always win…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terrance amends this slightly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carnival of Monsters Jun 76

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

The Web of Fear Aug 76

Planet of the Daleks Sep 76

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s more on similar lines a bit later:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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