The Making of Doctor Who, by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke — I

The Making of Doctor Who by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks — their names in that order — was published in paperback by Piccolo on 20 April 1972. It was the first book with Terrance’s name on the cover, but I decided not to begin this series of posts on his 236 books with it because it’s not really his “first book”. 

Terrance certainly didn’t think so:

“The Auton Invasion [published in January 1974] was the first book of any kind I’d written, and I worked very hard on it.” TD interviewed by Peter Griffiths, “Author! Author!”, Doctor Who Magazine #273, cover date 12 January 1999, p. 46.

In April 1976, Terrance mentioned in a letter to Harvey Unna — the agent he shared with Hulke — that royalties on The Making of Doctor Who had always been split 3:1 in Hulke’s favour. But that doesn’t mean Terrance did 25% of the writing. So what did he do on this book?

Hulke mentioned in a letter while working on The Making of Doctor Who in September 1971, that Terrance was due to interview the show’s original producer, Verity Lambert, about the early days of the series. Hulke, meanwhile, interviewed Donald Wilson and corresponded with Sydney Newman and David Whitaker. (The correspondence with Newman survives, and includes a transcript of the interview with Wilson.) 

That suggests that the bulk but not all of the material here on the origins of Doctor Who was researched and compiled by Hulke. In the process, Newman’s account of first conceiving the Doctor as, “a senile old man 745 years old from an un-named planet” (Newman to Hulke, 28 September 1971) was changed to the kinder, more heroic, “Let’s make him a crotchety old man … at least 745 years old” (p. 3). We don’t know if it was Hulke or Terrance who made the substitution, but Terrance used “crotchety” again in both The Doctor Who Monster Book (1975) and the revised version of The Making of Doctor Who (1976).

I suspect that Terrance also conducted the interviews with then-current cast members Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning, Roger Delgado, Nicholas Courtney, Richard Franklin and John Levene, as well as with former Doctors Who William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, and with Jack Kine of BBC Visual Effects. Their contact details would have been kept on file by the Doctor Who production office, where Terrance worked as script editor, so it would have been relatively quick and easy for him to ring round — perhaps a morning’s work.

(Hulke interviewed Donald Wilson and made contact with Newman in September 1971, so Terrance probably rang Hartnell and Troughton around this time, too. One of them, surely, mooted the idea that perhaps the actors might like to reappear in the series. Then, at the end of February 1972, writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin attended studio recording of their Doctor Who story The Mutants and Terrance must have raised with them the prospect of a new adventure involving all three Doctors. On 3 March, they duly sent Terrance an outline for Deathworld, eventually made as The Three Doctors.)

As well as conducting a share of the interviews, Terrance facilitated some of Hulke’s research, such as loaning him the production office’s scripts of all previous Doctor Who stories — Terrance wrote to ask for them back on 23 November 1971, in a letter included among the PDFs on the Season 9 box-set (10-03 — Frontier in Space production documentation, p. 2). Hulke’s sometime partner Lauraine Palmeri worked through these scripts, making summaries of plots from which Hulke then wrote his in-universe narrative of all of Doctor Who so far, as recounted by the Time Lords and by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart in the 24-page chapter “The Travels of Doctor Who”. 

This is by far the biggest chapter in the book, accounting for just over 20% of the 115 pages. Add to that the in-universe chapters on everything we’ve learned about the Doctor (13pp), an account of his trial (4pp) and a doctor’s report on his physiology (3pp), and just over 38% of this non-fiction guide to the making of Doctor Who is, er, fiction. 

What’s more, this stuff is riddled with small errors. The first chapter quotes a line of dialogue written by David Whitaker that was never used in a broadcast episode (p. 8). The book claims that the Cybermen originate from Telos and “first appeared on television on February 11th, 1967 in a Doctor Who story set on the moon” (p. 14), entirely ignoring the existence of and events depicted in The Tenth Planet (1986). The “Travels of the TARDIS” section correctly says Cybermen feature in The Tenth Planet, but adds that events take place in the year 2000, not 1986 (p. 49). 

On 30 May 1972, fan Richard Landen wrote to Hulke and Dicks listing such errors over two pages, in the hope they could be corrected in the next edition. Terrance kept a copy of this letter and, indeed, corrections were made to the manuscript of the 1976 version. This is the first example I’ve found of fans advising Terrance on Doctor Who history and lore.

Hulke was on steadier ground writing the 19-page chapter “Diary of a Production”, since its about the making of his own story, The Sea Devils, which was in production at the time he wrote this book. He provides information not found in other sources — exactly what he was briefed to write by Terrance and producer Barry Letts, the changes made at different stages of commissioning, details of elements that were lost such as the Doctor waterskiing. He also shares passages from otherwise now-lost original storyline and scene breakdown for the story. 

It’s a shame there isn’t more of this — longer excerpts from paperwork, more detail on exactly what happened and when, with dates. There’s an interview with Jack Kine about making monsters (4pp), but it might have been nice to hear, directly, from director Michael E Briant and other members of the cast and crew about what was involved day-to-day, in the thick of production.

Instead, we get a chapter exploring some real science and philosophy suggested by Doctor Who, entitled “Could It All Be True?” (9pp), in which Hulke — an atheist — cites the books of Joshua and Ezekiel. This is followed by what’s basically a sermon, contributed by the Rev John D Beckwith AKC, Chaplain to the Bishop of Edmonton. This has caused me a bit of a headache.

The see of Edmonton was new, having been created in 1970, with Alan Rogers appointed as first bishop. Prior to his appointment as chaplain, the Rev Beckwith, born c. 1933, had been senior tutor of Ijebu-Igbo Great School and Molusi College in Nigeria (1960-62), assistant curate of Bedale (1962-63), Mottingham (1965-69), house tutor at Eltham College (1964-69), and chaplain of St Andrew’s Gothenburg, with Halmstad and Jönköping, Sweden (1969-70) — source. 

He had worked in schools, so had some qualification for contributing to a book aimed at children. But he doesn’t seem to have made a habit of this sort of thing, such as writing for other publications or appearing in the media. Sadly, the current Bishop of Edmonton doesn’t hold records going back to 1971 (I did ask!), so I’m a bit stumped as to how Hulke might have known the Rev Beckwith. Do please write in if you know.

(I’d also be grateful for any information about Charles Bowman and Catherine Dale, who are named at the top of the page of Thanks.)

While I don’t know the connected between Hulke and Beckwith, I can guess why Hulke might have wanted a closing word from such a figure. In early 1971, Doctor Who had been widely criticised for being too scary and unsuitable for children. Then, as Barry Letts detailed in his memoir, his boss Ronnie Marsh, Head of Serials at the BBC, objected to the “blasphemous” use of a church in The Daemons, requiring last-minute rewrites to a story already in production. I think Hulke effectively tried to head off this kind of criticism by obtaining the church’s blessing for Doctor Who.

I also think he was keen to show the scientific and social value of the series because The Making of Doctor Who had originally been conceived by science-fiction writer George Hay in light of the success of two books published in the US: The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry (1968), and The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 by Jerome Agel (1970). These were both aimed at adults. Subsequent editions of the Star Trek book sought to reach more widely than fans of science-fiction by claiming to be,  

“The book on how to write for TV! … The only book of its kind! The complete history of a top TV series — how a television show is conceived, written, sold and produced.”

The book on 2001 also took a broad view, digging into the ideas in and related to the film — at once making-of and quest for meaning. Jerome Agel had form in this, having previously worked with Marshall McLuhan on both The Medium is the Message and War and Peace in the Global Village, as well as cowriting I Seem to Be a Verb with Buckminster Fuller. 

Hulke, I think, fancied some of this chin-stroking stuff. His final, short chapter, “The Shape of Things to Come”, shares some hints about that might be coming up in future stories, hinting that the Doctor might recover the use of his TARDIS. But the title of the chapter is from HG Wells, a 1933 novel — then a film — that laid out a future history spanning hundreds of years, in some ways a kind of fictional sequel to his non-fiction A Short History of the World. 

There’s something of this long view of history in Hulke’s approach to “The Travels of Doctor Who”, which is largely related by the Time Lords — who are very like the super-elites favoured by Wells.

George Hay was, like Wells, interested in the idea of using fiction as a kind of blueprint for the future. I recently wrote about the book he edited, The Disappearing Future (1970).

So all of this stuff went into the mix, and I think helps explain the structure. But the result is not very much about the actual making-of Doctor Who. The cover, showing a photo of Jon Pertwee and a Sea Devil, is from a TV story that had only finished being shown on TV on 1 April 1972; the book was published just over two weeks later. It promises Doctor Who of the immediate now but that isn’t what this book is.

It also isn’t exactly a how-to guide for wannabe writers or crew. There’s no tacit encouragement to readers to try and get into the industry, no tips for young readers who might write their own adventures. That’s notable given Hulke ran a course for writers, had edited two editions of the Writers’ Guide for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and would go on to write the hugely influential guide Writing for Television in the Seventies. 

But I’ve spoken to a whole load of people who now work in TV and publishing for whom this book lit a spark. For them, it was a blueprint for the future. Job done.

And then Terrance rewrote it, without Hulke, for Target. We’ll get into that in Part II — but maybe not for a few days as I’m off doing things this weekend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, perhaps we shall.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

The Disappearing Future, edited by George Hay

“A thirteen-course brain banquet” boasts the back cover of this 160-page anthology from 1970, comprising six short stories and seven essays — four of the latter republished from elsewhere. 

It is, promises the cover, a “symposium of speculation.” That’s in line with editor George Hay’s firmly held view of the valae of science-fiction as a kind of blueprint for tomorrow — or, as the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia puts it, 

“that sf provides an armamentarium of mostly technological tools for coping with the future, and that a – or even the – main role of sf was to educate us for that future”.

This was the basis on which Hay helped to establish the Science Fiction Foundation, originally at North East London Polytechnic, and the journal Foundation. (The Encyclopaedia says that this was in 1972, but on 10 June 1971 Hay sent a letter on SFF-headed paper to Barry Letts, producer of Doctor Who…)

A second blurb on the inside first page here suggests that this is exactly what the book will contain: “versions of the future we are now storing up for ourselves” sourced from “practising scientists and well-known sf authors”. Hay — I’m sure he wrote this, for all he refers to himself in the third person — goes on that,

“we have recently begun to to criminally destroy our ancient life-giving relationship with external nature … The Disappearing Future insists that Mother Earth is urgently giving us, her children, the red alert, and that we have very little time left in which to take even evasion action. The decision is ours.” (p. 1)

That sense of urgency, that sense of the whole Earth as environment and as nurturing mother, is surely an example of the impact of the “Earthrise” photograph taken in December 1968 by the crew of Apollo 8, seeing the world as a whole, single organism, as explored in Robert Poole’s book Earthrise. So it’s odd that, having brought up Mother Earth and imminent environmental catastrophe on p. 1 of this anthology, pretty much nothing further is said on the subject.

In his foreword, Hay tells us that the theme on which he submissions was, “the future, as the writer saw it, as derived from present events and trends”. He wanted a mixture of fiction and non-fiction to allow ideas to be explored in detail without holding up the action (or requiring clunky exposition). But he also says that this book is a response to the “paucity” of so many other tired and cliched anthologies of SF, not least in the shadow of the Moon landing,

“Now that space has finally cracked open, now that we know we can make it” (p. 9)

If not the whole-Earth environment, then, the promise is of a practical, useful ideas about what happens next, how we prepare for and embrace the future. Something to build on and with — or, if you will, a foundation…

But what follows is nothing of the sort. 

The anthology opens with “The First Forecast of the Future” by Professor IF Clarke, Head of the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde — and, er, not a scientist. It’s a short history of predictions, mostly focused on the anonymously written The Reign of George VII, 1900-1925 (1763), with references to Ini by Julian von Voss (1810) and the work of Jane Webb (he doesn’t mention the title but he means The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827)).

Well, yes all right, it’s not really about what the future might hold, but gives us some context for how long we’ve been thinking this way. Fine.

Next up is “The Show Must Go On” by David I Masson, in which a character called Piitasan — his name taken, I think, from the marxist Karl Peterson — wanders through urban streets full of squalor and violence. He shares his views on the economics of labour as he steps over a “meths drinker”, ignores a rape in progress, refers to “spastics” and “mongols” and things then don’t end well for him. There’s some sort of analogy in this nasty mess, something a bit Clockwork Orange but not as fedt or insightful. It just left me feeling grubby.

Ophthalmologist and media boffin Kit Pedler’s “Deux Ex Machina?” was apparently first published in the Listener. It’s a bit dry and technical, positing some ideas about the future of robots, or “biological mimics” / “biomims” as he calls them, because why use the perfectly good and understood “android”? He doesn’t use “Cyberman” either; his biography mentions his work on Doomwatch with “Jerry” Davis, but not that they met on Doctor Who. 

Then we get “Political Science — Mark II” by John W Campbell, which Hay’s foreword suggests has been published elsewhere but doesn’t say where. This is more editorial than essay. Campbell starts by laying out his own scientific credentials:

“I have over the east few years brought up the subject of psi, and the facts of dowsing, and protested that scientists refused to apply the scientific method of open-minded experiments — and have been lectured by many kindly people on the subject of how little I understood” (p. 32). 

Yes, the “facts” of dowsing. But this is just the preliminary to his main point, which is to object to the vote taken by members of the National Academy of Sciences, decided 200 to 10, against making “scientific studies of genetic differences of intelligence among racial groups” (p. 33). Campbell thinks people voted out of fear of embarrassing results — which suggests he already felt he knew what those results would be. As with psi and dowsing, he seems to see the value of science as validating what he thinks or would like to be true. And it’s not really about the future at all.

“The Thorns of Barevi” by Anne McCaffrey is the sole contribution from a woman. It is told from the perspective of Cristen Bjornsen, a young woman from Denver who was abducted by alien Catteni and spent some time as a slave on the planet Barevi. In the nine months she has been there, it has been warm like summer on Earth, but the story begins with her worried that this will change as she only has the one outfit.

“Her sleeveless, single piece tunic was made of an indestructible material but it would not be very warm in cold weather. The scooped neckline was indecently low and the skirt ended mid-way on her long thighs.” (p. 35)

She then eats a red-coloured pear, with,

“its succulent juices dribbling down her chin on to her tanned breasts” (p. 36)

This is especially odd as the story is told in the third person from Cristen’s own perspective; this is how she sees herself.

Then she meets an alien Catteni who is humanoid, and “almost good looking” as he has an aristocratic nose and not the “thick, blubbery lips” of others of his kind. “She’d heard rumours…” she begins to tell us while admiring this handsome specimen, but we’re not told what part of his anatomy she has heard rumours about (p. 38). It’s not exactly subtle in the racial coding.

They run away from some other Catteni, taking refuge in a “flitter”. The handsome alien then says he hasn’t had a Terran before and, as if out of curiosity, rapes her — Cristen attempting but failing to resist his advances. 

“Her struggles only seemed to aid his efforts and just as she was certain she would be split apart, a surging emotion far more powerful and overwhelming replaced fear and pain” (p. 43).

Afterwards, they talk a bit and then, on more friendly terms, have sex again. End of story. I’m not really sure what this has to say about the future; I don’t really want to think what it says about the author.

Next up is “Sleep, Dreams and Computers" by Dr Christopher Evans, originally published in the Sunday Times Colour Magazine. He dismisses three theories about why we dream — to rest, to enter some realm of the fantastic, to be free of societal pressures and rules (the reason dreams are of use in psychoanalysis). Then he puts his own theory, based on a computer going offline from the exterior world to back up and sort data. It’s a compelling idea but not really about what the future holds.

Christopher Priest’s short story “Double Consummation” is based on a fun reversal where, in the Britain of the future, the social norm is not to have lasting or monogamous relationships. A man who works in politics is surprised to be dumped by one of his girlfriends, then finds out his other girlfriend has not taken her pills, is now pregnant and wants to get married — which he fears will end his career. It’s neatly set up and the ending works well, but it’s yet another story about sex without consent (in this case, concerning contraception). 

“The Temple Scientists” by Edward J Mishan — LSE staff member and author of The Cost of Economic Growth — muses on the differences between SF and FS, the latter his term for “future society” stories. I didn’t feel there was much of an argument here, really, more technicality than thesis. But it’s the only contribution, apart from George Hay’s foreword, to address other contributions: Pedler’s essay is “stimulating and thoughtful (and occasionally cynical)”, Masson’s short story “barely qualifies as SF” and Chapdelaln’s — which we’ve not got to yet! — is “perhaps too clever”.

“The Sunset Perspective” by Michael Moorcock is another outing for his achingly trendy / sexy time agent Jerry Cornelius, a character introduced in 1965 novel The Final Programme. Here Jerry struts around in “brown velvet bellbottoms” (p. 79) and “black car coat” (p. 80), while tackling an incursion in time that makes people revert to old, superstitious ways. For example, at one point he finds Miss Brunner — also from that first novel — busy burying a goat.

“He watched as she mumbled to herself, hitching her Biba miniskirt up to her thighs and urinating on the new mound of each” (p. 81)

I do not claim to be an expert on the logistics of miniskirts, but wouldn’t it already be around her thighs? Jerry then tries to help this victim of the time incursion in a manner thematically consist with other stories in this collection:

“He flung himself on top of Miss Brunner and began to molest her” (p. 87)

The story, set in the future, is peppered with headlines and fragments of news from the New York Times of 16 October 1969 and the November 1969 edition of Flying Review International, which I think was meant to convey a connection between the then-now and the future. Some 55 years later, it does not have quite the same effect, but gives an indication of exactly when this was written.

“Future Recall” by James Blish is an essay that largely refutes Hay’s whole thesis that science-fiction can and does prepare us for the future. I liked this a lot: it is engagingly argued and full of top facts — that the term “gas giant” is Blish’s own coinage (p. 102). Blish, whose novels I have long enjoyed, is full of shrewd insight. For example, he speaks of a vogue for mysticism in science at the time he was writing.

“When astronomers only a few years ago discovered the strange celestial objects called pulsars, the first explanation they suggested and published was that they might be navigation beacons for an interstellar civilisation. Had pulsars been discovered in 1935, a scientist here and there might have hoped that that was what they’d turn out to be (they didn’t), but he’d never dare to say so aloud.” (p. 103)

This is followed by “Someday You’ll Be Rich!” by Perry A Chapdelaine, about a PhD cyberneurologist who tries various different schemes to make money, and comes up with a means of rapidly churning out long strings of text using up every combination of keys on a typewriter, so that he can claim copyright on all stories as yet to be written. It’s a bit over-cooked and over-long, but striking to read now in the age of interminable techbro lifehacks and AI.

In “About Five Thousand One Hundred and Seventy Five Words” by Samuel R Delaney, originally published in Extrapolation (ed. Thomas D Clareson), the author presents a brilliant, original view of science-fiction based on the way meaning emerges incrementally as we read each word at a time. Every new word conditions what has come before, he says. If we’re introduced to a science-fiction object or idea — a thing that we know is invented — that shapes our sense of everything else in the story, even if it is part of our recognised world. It’s a really compelling idea, engagingly argued and great fun; that perfect mix of clever and funny and boggling. Hay admits in his foreword that it is “somewhat off-course” from the remit of the book; I rather wish more of the book was like this one.

Finally, “Welcome to Wesbloc/Wesbloc” by Anthony Haden-Guest is a report by the teaching machine Merlin:Merlin in the future city of Ecumenopolis, the gag largely being that many things in the future are named after things from the past — one computer called Orwell, another Lenny Bruce. But it ends with the teaching machine looking backward to “now”, so we get more contemporary headlines and fragments of real news, at the time a connection to the present, but in retrospect a weird snapshot of a historical moment. 

All in all, it’s a very odd collection that doesn’t really deliver on what Hay says in his blurb and foreword that he set out to do. It’s too open, too lacking in discipline, and far too often too nasty. Nerds, get over yourselves. 

Yet it has provided a blueprint for the future. Samuel R Delaney’s piece has got me thinking hard about the way meaning is constructed by the precise deployment of words. That has already changed the way I am reading Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks. I think it will shape how I read and how I write from now.

Doctor Who The Revenge of the Cybermen, by Terrance Dicks

The eagle-eyed reader might spot the odd, occasional typo in this series of long, long posts about the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks. I blame the growing cyber-menace that is autocorrect and not my own fleshy human weakness. However, there is not a word missing from the title of this post. The absence of “and” is deliberate.

This is, after Doctor Who — The Three Doctors, the second Doctor Who novelisation not to employ an “and the” title. At least, the “and” is missing from the front cover of my first edition of this book. On the spine and title pages, and in most references to this novelisation, it is Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen. It is only from the front cover that the word has been deleted.

This was clearly done to make a long title fit the established cover template. On Terrance’s next novelisation, the long title Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks was made to fit by reducing the vertical height of the letters, still set in Futura Condensed ExtraBold, from 6mm to 5mm, or from 40pt to 35pt (based on the typeface I have for reference). 

The team at Wyndhams — who published Doctor Who The Revenge of the Cybermen simultaneously in hardback and paperback on 20 May 1976 — initially intended to shorten the title still further, presumably to make it better fit the template. “[Doctor Who and] The Cybermen’s Revenge” is the title given on a list of “Advance information on Doctor Who novelisations in preparation” sourced from Wyndhams, handwritten by Graham Wellfare and reproduced on p. 92 of Keith Miller’s The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol 2. 

As I said in my post on that book, this list sadly isn’t dated but the first title given is [Doctor Who and] The Green Death by Malcolm Hulke, to be published “Aug 75” at 35p [in paperback]. That implies that this list was written before publication of that book on 21 August 1975 but after publication of the previous Target novelisation, Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, on 15 May.

The title was also “Cybermen Revenge” in Terrance’s handwritten notes for Chapter 10 of the in-progress novelisation. The three pages of notes are undated but were written between dated entries on other projects on 6 September and 6 October 1975. 

Therefore, I think Terrance wrote and delivered the manuscript for Doctor Who and the Cybermen’s Revenge in September 1975, under that title. My guess is that the production team then wanted to retain the title used on screen, as would be the case for all Doctor Who books from pretty much this point on (Doctor Who and the Space War, published 23 September 1976, was the last novelisation to rename a story). The awkward step of deleting “and” from the front cover of this book but not from the spine or title pages suggests that the change was made late in the process.

That original title for the book would have made this a closer match to Doctor Who and the Cybermen by Gerry Davis (published 19 February 1975), adapted from the TV story The Moonbase (1967), which Davis co-wrote with Kit Pedler. I think that may be part of a wider, conscious effort to link these two novelisations.

For the cover of Doctor Who and the Cybermen, Chris Achilleos produced a stippled, black-and-white portrait of the Second Doctor, including his collar and bowtie, framed by an image of the Moon (the setting of the story) with a flaming and dappled black border suggesting outer space. 

A Cyberman in the lower left of the frame stares impassively back at us. It’s the wrong Cyberman for the TV story, based on a photograph of the redesigned Cybermen from 1968 story The Invasion. But perhaps that was on purpose, to align more closely with the versions seen on TV in Revenge of the Cybermen, broadcast just weeks after this book was first published.

When producing cover artwork for Doctor Who The Revenge of the Cybermen, Achilleos seems to have had this earlier artwork in mind. Again, there’s a stippled-black-and-white portrait, this time of the Fourth Doctor, including the top-most part of his scarf. He is framed by an image of fiery space bordered by nebulous black. It’s not space station Nerva or the rocky asteroid of Voga that are the settings in the story; I think that makes it closer in style to the cover of Doctor Who and the Cybermen. Again, there’s a Cyberman in the lower left of frame. This time he faces another alien creature, a Vogan.

The big difference between the two covers, I think, is that the Second Doctor looks serious, suggesting a serious story, while the Fourth Doctor is beaming. The portrait is based on a photograph of Tom Baker on location for The Sontaran Experiment (1975), but in that photograph Baker’s expression is a bit more determined and grim, teeth gritted rather than smiling. Achilleos has also made the Doctor's hair fluffier and more bouffant. It’s a gleeful Doctor, not one fighting for his life.

Tom Baker filming
The Sontaran Experiment
c/o The Black Archive

There's something similar going on in the depiction of the monsters. On TV, the Cybermen tower over their victims — Terrance refers to them more than once in this novelisation as “silver giants”. But the Cyberman and Vogan here are the same height; indeed, the relative positions of eyes, mouth, chin and shoulders suggest that the Vogan is actually taller. 

There’s little sense that these two figures are deadly enemies; they seem to be smiling at each other. It doesn’t help that there’s something about this particular Vogan that’s a bit Private Godfrey from Dad’s Army…

As a whole, the composition lacks the dynamism and excitement of other work by Achilleos, such as Omega’s hands burning into the foreheads of the Three Doctors, or the kklaking pterodactyl of Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion. By placing the Cyberman on the left, as per Doctor Who and the Cybermen, and the Vogan on the right, the latter’s arm and body obscure much of the two-handed sci-fi raygun he is holding. For ages, I thought he was proffering some kind of ornate gift or bit of technical apparatus: a friendly gesture, not a threat to kill. Again, there’s no sense of him fighting for his life.

All in all, it’s a rather jolly-looking cover, at odds with the grim tone of the novel inside.

Before we get into the contents of the book, there’s one more thing to address about the cover which has a bearing on the words inside. The name given under the title is Terrance Dicks, not Gerry Davis.

Davis seems to have written the novelisation Doctor Who and the Cybermen around the same time as he wrote the scripts for what became Revenge of the Cybermen on TV. The two stories share a number of elements. For example, both feature what was then a new class of Cyberman — a “Cyberleader” (sometimes, in the novel, also a “Cyber-leader”). Both stories involve a “virus” that the Doctor is able to show is not a virus at all, but a toxin spread by the Cybermen as a prelude to taking control of a remote, human-crewed outpost in space. 

In both stories, the human crew are sceptical of the Doctor’s claims, believing that the Cybermen died out long ago. In Doctor Who and the Cybermen, the silver giants exploit human weakness for sugar and are themselves vulnerable to nail-varnish remover; in Revenge of the Cybermen, they exploit human greed and are vulnerable to gold. The implication, surely, is that in revisiting the older TV story for his novelisation, Davis found some of the structure and plot elements for the new TV adventure.

At that stage, it would also have been logical to assume that Davis would novelise his new TV story in due course. For one thing, of the various Doctor Who stories that Davis worked on over the years, this is the only one on which he received sole credit as writer.

Soon after publication of Doctor Who and the Cybermen and broadcast of Revenge of the Cybermen, Davis tackled the very first Cyberman adventure, Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet, published on 19 February 1976. In previous posts, I’ve estimated a lead-time on these books of 7.5 months; if that applies here, then Davis delivered Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet at the end of July 1975. Just as he finished that book and needed a new assignment, we see that, as per the list of books in preparation cited above, The Cybermen’s Revenge was added to the schedule. 

He retained copyright on the scripts of the TV story, so his permission must have been sought and given for this novelisation. But he didn’t write the book. Instead, he went on to novelise other TV stories he had worked on as co-writer and/or story editor, with his next one, Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen, published on 18 May 1978. 

The reason, of course, is that the version of Revenge of the Cybermen that made it to the screen is very different from what Davis wrote — as we can hear in the audio version of the original scripts. The production team felt there were numerous problems with this version and the scripts were extensively rewritten by Robert Holmes in his capacity as script editor, on staff at the BBC. Davis was not happy with the revised version; the upshot was that he retained sole credit and copyright on a story he largely hadn’t written and really didn’t like. Understandably, he didn’t want to novelise this version of “his” story.

That is significant because it means that Terrance Dicks was commissioned on the specific understanding that he would novelise Revenge of the Cybermen as broadcast. This in turn presented him with a challenge I don’t think he’d faced before. 

Up until now, he’d novelised Big Event Doctor Who stories: the Third Doctor’s debut, his first encounter with the Daleks and the Master, and his death; the Fourth Doctor’s debut, the Second Doctor’s first encounter with the Great Intelligence, the Three Doctors all meeting up. Even Doctor Who’s encounter with the Loch Ness Monster is a big, iconic moment. These are all good, strong stories, too.

With Revenge of the Cybermen, Terrance was presented for the first time with a TV story that, for all I enjoy it, is fundamentally flawed. When he had been script editor, it was his job to fix problems in storylines and scripts. Here, the brief was to not fix the story but match what went out on screen. At times, I don’t think he could help himself, whether in trying to correct faults or in offering wry comment on illogical proceedings.

The three pages from his notebook relating to this novelisation give some sense of his approach. They cover events in Chapter 10, which is the end of Part Three and start of Part Four of the TV story, with a line break for the cliffhanger.

“Kellman killed

Harry sees K dead

Doc knocked out —

Harry sees Doc — goes to unstrap b[omb]

Commander — stop! Explain [that undoing the strap will set off the bomb]

Doc survives — Harry idiot

Doc says Commander keep on — rest of u will get grd + attack”

There’s no reference here or in the other pages of notes to what we see on screen, such as what people are wearing or what things looks like. That suggests Terrance worked from the words in the camera script — stage directions and dialogue — rather than from a screening of the episodes, which would have provided visual details. The notes are a summary of plot, Terrance establishing for himself the overall thrust of the action before translating each scene into prose.

(ETA: Nicholas Pegg told me on Bluesky me that “A further indication that Terrance was working from the scripts rather than from the TV broadcast is his retention of ‘cobalt bombs’. On screen they became ‘Cyber-bombs’, which [director] Michael Briant told me was part of a general decision ‘to make everything Cyber’.” Thanks to Nick, who knows a surprising amount about Cybermen given that he is Dalek.) 

But there is more than that going on here, too. This page of notes includes the word “gyroscope”, which isn’t used in the scripts or the story as broadcast. I think the word was prompted by something else in the script at this point: the machine that the Cybermen use to track the progress of the Doctor as he carries their bomb is a “radarscope”. The word is used in dialogue at other points of the story but it’s also in the stage directions of the script just after the Doctor insults Harry. And I think that word prompted Terrance to use “gyroscope” in a completely different moment in the novelisation, as an apposite word for the very opening sentence:

“In the silent blackness of deep space, the gleaming metal shape of Space Beacon Nerva hung like a giant gyroscope” (p. 7).

The model used in the TV story (and in The Ark in Space) looks a little like the kind of gyroscope that children have as toys, but that single word also conveys a spinning, moving, mesmerising instrument. We do more than visualise the shape; we can feel its intricate, automated workings. It is tangible and a wonder — all from a single word.

There are plenty of other well-chosen words: p. 49, for example, boasts “imperious”, “melodious” and “ostentation”.  The explanation of the “transmat beam” vital to one part of the plot is told from Harry’s perspective, so it is at once conversational, easy-going and fun:

“His travels with the Doctor had familiarised him with this latest triumph of man’s technology, an apparatus that could break down a living human body into a stream of molecules, sent it to a predetermined destination by a locked transmitter beam, and reassemble it unharmed at the other end. With transmat you could send a person as easily as a telephone message” (p. 38).

That page of notes above has another well-chosen word, when the Doctor calls “Harry [an] idiot”. He uses a more offensive term on screen and then falls back unconscious. In the book, he follows the rude comment with something kinder:

“Nevertheless I’m very glad to see you again” (p. 102).

The Doctor is nicer than on TV, Harry is not so undermined; both are more heroic.

In opening the novel, Terrance describes Sarah as a “slim, dark pretty girl” (p. 7), by which he means white but brunette. Her “exceptionally good peripheral vision” (p. 17) explains how, on TV, she alone dodges a Cybermat that has killed more than 40 other people. But when she screams, we’re told it’s in “true feminine style”. That’s the view of the omniscient narrator because Harry, from whose perspective this is sometimes told, knows better. For example, he knows that Sarah “always refused to accept the role of the helpless heroine” (p. 90).

Harry is the same “broad-shouldered, square-jawed young man” (p. 7) as in Doctor Who and the Giant Robot and Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster. He has the same vocabulary as in the former, referring here to all the “ruddy gold” (p. 47) on Voga. But there’s a steely side to Harry that we don’t really see on screen, such as when the villainous Kellman is killed in a rockfall that’s partly Harry’s fault.

“Harry felt no sympathy. As far as he was concerned, Kellman had been luckier than he deserved.” (p. 100).

The Doctor, meanwhile, is a “very tall, thin man whose motley collection of vaguely bohemian garments included an incredibly long scarf, and a battered soft hat jammed on top of a mop of wildly-curling brown hair” (p. 7). It’s the first time in print, I think, that this incarnation is described as “bohemian” — though note in this case that it is only “vaguely”.

(For all his love of specific, well-chosen words, Terrance can also often be vague. On p. 64, two things in quick succession are described as “some kind of”…)

That opening page of the novel also introduces the lead character as “that mysterious traveller in Time and Space known as ‘the Doctor’”, repeating the phrase from The Doctor Who Monster Book and Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster; less description now as slogan. 

There’s also a reference to the Doctor’s “habitual cheery optimism”, which seems more Terrance than the TV story, and at odds with the lofty, “Olympian detachment” Tom Baker was told to convey by producer Philip Hinchcliffe. It is, I think, a sense of the Fourth Doctor had Terrance stayed on as script editor beyond Robot.

Speaking of which, we’re told it’s been a “few weeks” (p. 8) since that adventure. On TV, the first episode of Revenge of the Cybermen aired 13 weeks after the last part of Robot. Working solely from on-screen evidence, has such a lengthy period really elapsed for our heroes? I would have said it was days.

Page 8 has two footnotes, each referring the reader to other novelisations by Terrance: Doctor Who and the Giant Robot and Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks. The latter was the next of his Doctor Who books to be written and published, so had clearly been scheduled at the time he wrote this — begging the question: why didn’t he write that one first? It’s as if these books were purposefully published in reverse of the order of broadcast so that readers had to puzzle out the correct sequence, encouraging them to be active collectors.

On TV, Revenge of the Cybermen begins with the Doctor, Harry and Sarah finding themselves back on space station Nerva and referring to the previous time they were there, in The Ark in Space. A novelisation of that story had not yet been scheduled, so Terrance omitted these lines and instead makes reference, in his narration, to the adventure they have just concluded, and their efforts to “prevent the growing menace of the Daleks” (p. 8). The continuity references are to Terrance’s other Doctor Who books.

There are a couple of further examples of that: the Doctor uses an eye glass (p. 40 and p. 59) as per Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, and there is a reference to Harry Houdini (p. 121) as per Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. In Terrance’s most recently completed novelisation, Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, there’s reference to the Brigadier’s “recall device”. Here, it’s the “Space-Time telegraph” (p. 127) as per dialogue in the script — where it is “space-time telegraph”, lower case. The book ends with a scene inside the TARDIS, the Doctor tracing the signal to Loch Ness, nicely cueing up the next / previous novelisation.

The continuity of the Cybermen is interesting. Terrance knew the history of the silver giants, having detailed it in The Doctor Who Monster Book, but there’s no reference to their previous encounters with the Doctor here. Humans, on Nerva, have only vague recollections of the Cybermen (p. 30), just one of several species to attack Earth in its early space-faring years. Again, that is as per The Moonbase.

These Cybermen wear “clothes” (p. 64). We’re told several times that they’re emotionless and without feelings, which is a fundamental characteristic, sort of Cybermen 101. But on TV, the Doctor taunts them:

“You've no home planet, no influence, nothing. You’re just a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers skulking about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship.” (Part Three)

What is that all about?

In the novelisation, we’re told that when the Doctor says this, he “seemed to be determined to be as tactless as possible” (p. 76) and “seemed to be set on provoking their captors”, after which “it seemed almost possible to detect the overtones of hate in the Cyberman’s voice”, as the Doctor continues in the same way, “infuriatingly”. It is not clear if this narration is from the perspective of one of the human observers, but the repeated use of “seemed” is Terrance suggesting an explanation for what happens in the script, without imposing his view.

Responding to the Doctor, the Cyberleader’s voice rises in volume and intensity. The Doctor continues being annoying and,

“For some reason this childish insult finally broke through the Cyberleader’s control” (p. 77).

It lashes out, exactly as the Doctor has planned; he uses rage against the machine.

I don’t think a Cyberman losing its temper is inconsistent with it being emotionless. It’s sometimes said of the Cybermen that they’ve had their emotions deleted or surgically removed — but what bit of the brain would that be, exactly? 

The academic paper that first coined the term “cyborg” and which I think is key to the original conception of the Cybermen, “Cyborgs and Space” by Manfred E Clynes and Nathan S Kline (1960), suggests the use of “an emergency osmotic pump containing one of the high-potency phenothiazines together with reserpine” to automatically respond to abnormal “thought processes, emotions, or behaviour” in the human test-subjects surgically altered for work out in space. The idea was to chemically suppress the emotions.

If the same thing is happening with the Cybermen, they can be emotionless and yet capable of emotion. The Doctor just has to find the right means to trigger them. Note to anti-Cybermen forces: being infuriating and childish works, as here; but don’t waste your time wanging on about sunsets and nice meals, as in Earthshock (1982).

Less fathomable is the sequence in which the Cybermen strap bombs to the Doctor and two humans, then insist that they carry these into the depths of the asteroid Voga. The Cybermen say that, once in the right position, the bombs will begin a 14-minute countdown, allowing the Doctor and the others time to escape with their lives. The Doctor thinks but does not say,

“Pull the other one, it’s got bells on” (p. 82). 

So why does he then do as instructed? Well, with the Cybermen using a radioscope to monitor the humans’ progress, and able to detonate the bombs remotely if they veer off course, the Doctor feels he has no other option to escape than to do as bidden, then use the 14-minute countdown to defuse the bombs (p. 83). But we are then told that the Cyberman have anticipated exactly this response; in fact, there is no 14-minute countdown and the bombs will simply explode when they reach the right position. The Cybermen have lied to the Doctor so that he unwittingly does what they want (p. 85).

It’s a clever bit of psychology. But then, almost immediately, one of the other humans asks the Doctor if he really thinks there will be a 14-minute countdown. “I doubt it,” says the Doctor (p. 85). He doesn’t believe the Cybermen’s story, and the humans are at least suspicious. The Cybermen’s clever bit of psychology hasn’t fooled anyone.

So, er, why then is the Doctor willing to carry the bombs into the depths of the asteroid? Well, he says Micawberishly, that he is hoping for something to turn up (p. 86). It’s all a bit woolly and confused, the Doctor relying on luck. We can see that Terrance tried to make sense of it as he wrote this section, but not entirely successfully — because, I think, he couldn’t veer too far from what had been broadcast.

As on screen, Voga is both an asteroid (p. 18) and planet (p. 30), the idea being that the new asteroid is the last-surviving fragment of the planet. On screen, it is also described as a satellite  — ie moon  — of Jupiter, to which the Doctor responds:

 “What, do you mean there are now thirteen?” (Part One)

Terrance cut this line, perhaps because he knew that a 13th moon of Jupiter had already been found by the time of publication: Leda, discovered on 14 September 1974. A 14th moon, Themisto, was spotted in 1975 but not confirmed until years later. But Terrance also refers to Voga as a meteorite (p. 43), suggesting his knowledge of space science was on a par with his knowledge of cars. 

The plot hinges on Voga being an asteroid/planet/satellite/meteorite comprised largely of gold, which is immediately lethal to Cybermen. We see the evidence of this on screen: throw a bit of gold in their general direction and they choke and die. Yet Cybermen can also teleport into the caverns of Voga, stomping around and battling Vogans there with no perceived adverse effects. I suppose Terrance could have fixed this by suggesting that the gold must be forced into their breathing systems, and in sufficient quantities, to be deadly. Perhaps that would only have served to highlight this basic flaw in the story.

But I think the fundamental problems of Revenge of the Cybermen are the structure and the tone. Let’s start with the structure.

The blurb lays out the stakes:

“A mysterious plague strikes Space Beacon Nerva, killing its victims within minutes. When DOCTOR WHO lands, only four humans remain alive. One of these seems to be in league with the nearby planet of gold, Voga… Or is he in fact working for the dreaded CYBERMEN, who are now determined to finally destroy their old enemies, the VOGANS? The Doctor, Sarah and Harry find themselves caught in the midst of a terrifyingly struggle to death—between the ruthless, power-hungry Cybermen and the desperate determined Vogans.”

A central part of the story, then, is who Kellman really works for. Yet I think, ironically for a story about Cybermen, that it is difficult for us to care.

The trouble is that Kellman is, when we meet him, a sardonic, mean-spirited character. There is no great mystery about him being involved in the “plague” that has killed more than 40 people. This horrible fact is not mitigated by the discovery that he is really working for the Vogans, not least because it seems he does so because they will pay him in gold.

Villains in other stories, such as Broton or Davros, present articulate reasons for the evil they do, challenging the Doctor. Kellman offers no such challenge. In fact, he speaks in cliches — at one point using what Terrance calls, “one of science fiction’s immortal cliches” (p. 65). There is no redemption: he proves to be a bit cowardly and is then killed in a rockfall. The usually kind-hearted Harry has no sympathy at all. Kellman deserves only scorn.

That is unusual for Terrance, who so often in a conflict endeavours to see the other point of view. And I think that is the fundamental problem here: there is no depth to or interesting aspect of Kellman. I find myself wondering what Terrance would have done had he been allowed to fix this.

My sense, from the notes he gave as script editor to writers on other stories (available in the production paperwork included on the Blu-ray boxsets), is that he would have wanted to simplify unfolding events and concentrate on revelations of character. So, with that in mind…

At the start of the story, Kellman should be the last person we’d suspect of controlling the Cybermats or working with the Cyberman. A kindly, warm-humoured character, to whom our heroes — and we — take a shine. Only later, when he’s exposed, should we see his colder, more ruthless side, as when James Bond shifts from charmer to hitman. That, in turn, would give the actor a bit more to work with.

Then, over time, we come to learn his vital but morally difficult mission: sacrificing the crew of Nerva to gain the trust of the Cybermen so that he can destroy them and in doing so save countless more lives. Just as Harry learns that he’s got Kellman completely wrong, that the man is a hero, they are both caught in a rockfall. Kellman dies. And Harry realises that he will have to complete the mission, no matter the cost…

Something along those lines. But I think if you can fix Kellman, you fix much of what’s wrong in this story.

Then there’s the tone. The story begins with the Doctor and his friends returning to Nerva to find, instead of Vira and their other friends from The Ark in Space, something out of a horror film for grown-ups. Terrance acknowledges the effect:

“For the rest of her life Sarah Jane Smith was to be haunted by the memory of that nightmarish stumble down the long curved corridor filled with corpses” (p. 14).

It is not a moment of peril in a science-fiction adventure, where our heroes are at risk. It is them stalking their way through the carnage of something brutally realistic that has already taken place and so they are powerless to stop. It is horrific because it is hopeless.

Later, Harry witnesses the brutal death of someone at first hand, and we’re told “it remained for ever photographed on his memory” (p. 107). Then, the Cybermen are defeated and Nerva and Voga are saved, but on screen there's barely time to draw breath or acknowledge what our heroes have been through before they head off to their next adventure.

Terrance adds a brief moment of reflection, addressing the oddness of this, with Sarah,

“surprised to find herself as calm as she was. She supposed so much had happened recently that they’d both lost the capacity to be surprised” (p. 127).

It’s a damning diagnosis. The implication is that Sarah and Harry are both suffering from PTSD… Either that, or from bad writing.

*

These great long posts take time to put together and incur expenses. I’ll keep doing them while I can afford to, so do please support the cause if you are able.

Next time: the last of the Mounties books, War Drums of the Blackfoot, which borrows some of the plot of one of the Doctor Who stories on which Terrance was script editor. And then it’s Genesis of the Daleks…

The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol 2, by Keith Miller

This second volume of correspondence and fanzines covers the period 1974 to 1978, and most but not all of the era of Tom Baker as the Doctor. It also charts the burning out of the author's passion for Doctor Who, increasingly frustrated with the direction of the series, the more strained and/or “business-like” attitude of the production team towards him, and the activities of other fans.

As with the first volume, it is absolutely fascinating, sometimes very funny and sometimes cringe-inducing. The best thing about it is how honest and raw it all is, the source documents reproduced in full.

There are reports from the set of three Doctor Who stories - Genesis of the Daleks, Terror of the Zygons and The Masque of Mandragora - as well as various bits of interview with cast and crew, alongside letters they sent Keith. We hear what he thinks of episodes and novelisations as they came out, and follow the exhausting business of running an officially sanctioned fan club that the BBC continued to support but at ever more of a remove.

For my purposes in researching the life and work of Terrance Dicks, a number of things are really striking. First, there's Keith's description of the Doctor Who production office in Room 505 of Union House, Shepherd's Bush Green, on 16 February 1975. Keith had been there several times before (as detailed in the first volume, the last occasion in April 1974), when it was the domain of producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance. 

The scene he describes here gives a vivid sense of the dramatic change brought in under new producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes:

“The whole place looked totally different. Gone were the piles and piles of paper. Where walls had once been covered in newspaper-clippings, notes, white-boards etc, now there was barely anything covering them. All the props had been removed. The office reflected the new occupant — very business-like. Ordered.” (p. 18)

What paperwork I wonder, what treasure, got chucked in the bin? 

Miller then shares a transcript of the conversation over lunch at the BBC restaurant, where he spoke to Hinchcliffe, his secretary Ann Burnett and actors Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen and Ian Marter. In among the gems here, Hinchcliffe claims that Target books were at the time printing, “25,000 [copies of each Doctor Who novelisation], then a reprint of 50,000”, but that the publishing company had not been aware until he told them of the two Doctor Who exhibitions - at Blackpool and Longleat. This was missing a big opportunity to sell books as, according to Hinchcliffe, 

“Something like a quarter of a million boys and girls went through the exhibition [singular] last year!” (p. 22)

Miller responded to this by saying that Jon Pertwee had hired the London Planetarium a couple of years previously, for a well-organised event involving him answering questions posed by attendees. Hinchcliffe thought this was worth putting to Tom Baker (who Keith tells us was absent for this bit of the conversation, having gone to the loo).

But it seems that by this point Miller already had plans for an in-person event at the Planetarium, because he reproduces a letter sent to him that same year from Juliet Simpkins, Press Officer at Madame Tussaud's (of which the Planetarium was part), responding to “your letters [plural] of 12th February”. That is, four days before he raised the matter with Hinchcliffe (p. 45).

Simpkins had spoken to Hinchcliffe, who wrote to Miller on 22 May 1975, saying that both the Doctor Who production team and the Planetarium were too booked up through the summer to organise an event, but that he would consider the idea again either later in the year or perhaps in early 1976. Note the word Hinchcliffe used for any such event:

“I have heard that you have been in touch with the Planetarium about the idea of a Doctor Who Convention as we discussed when you came down earlier this year” (p. 46).

There had been science-fiction conventions for decades. But the idea of a Doctor Who event being called such a thing was surely inspired by the success of the UK's first Star Trek convention, held at Abbey Motor Hotel in Leicester over the weekend of 28-29 September 1974, with guests George Takei and James Doohan (source). 

In fact, that event directly inspired a group of other Doctor Who fans to organise something similar: the Doctor Who Appreciation Society '77 Convention was held on 6 August 1977, with both Pertwee and Baker in attendance (but not at the same time). It's interesting to see the idea for this first ever Doctor Who convention in the ether so early, and being considered by the production team.

I'll note two more things of particular interest to me. On p. 92, Miller reproduces a handwritten list of Doctor Who novelisations in preparation, supplied to him by Graham Wellfare. The first title listed is [Doctor Who and] The Green Death by Malcolm Hulke, to be published August 1975 at 35p [in paperback]. That implies that this list was written before publication of that book on 21 August but after publication of the previous Target novelisation, Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons by Terrance Dicks, on 15 May.

At this point, 15 books were in preparation, with a schedule of monthly publication up to October 1976. (No book was listed for December 1975 but two were listed for February 1976, and no publication date was given for the last book in the list.) In fact, the books were published at a slightly less rapid rate, and not in the order given here. The suggestion is of issues with particular titles, and perhaps authors. I'll address some of this in my forthcoming post on Doctor Who [and the] Revenge of the Cybermen.

Lastly, thrillingly, Miller shares a letter from Liz Godfray, Children's Editor at Wyndham Publications, with responsibility for the Doctor Who novelisations. On 24 August 1976, she responded to a letter from Miller, answering his questions. That included a query about the author of the very first Doctor Who novelisation. She replied:

“David Whitaker has been in Australia for the last two or three years - in fact he was back on a visit to this country only two months ago, and he called in to the offices here” (p. 91).

Whitaker had been living in Australia for a little longer than that, since early 1971. But the mention of a visit to London matches another source. On 28 July 1976, the Daily Mail reported that Whitaker had been seen dining with his ex-wife, actress June Barry, and asked what his new wife might think. 

June lived in a large house on the Barnes side of Hammersmith Bridge. I'm struck by the thought of David seeing - perhaps even staying with - her, then ambling over the bridge to pop in and see the Target team at 123 King Street, on the off-chance of some work. 

On the way, he'd pass Riverside Studios, where lots of his BBC work had been made, including several Doctor Who stories. Among them were The Dalek Invasion of Earth, David's final production as story editor, and which he helped adapt for the big screen. Indeed, the TARDIS materialised under his feet, in the shadow of the bridge.

According to the “in preparation” list mentioned above, the novelisation of this story was due for publication in July 1976, the month David was in London. In fact, the book wasn't published until March 1977. 

So I like to imagine David turning up at Target, unannounced, and politely asking how the team were getting on. 

“Oh, fine, but we're having a spot of bother with one particular story...”

Backlisted #244: The Ballad of Halo Jones

I'm the guest on the latest episode of books podcast Backlisted. Keen to choose a book that was a formative influence and by an author they'd not previously covered, I chose The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore and Ian Gibson. Thanks to Dr Una McCormack, Andy Miller and Nicky Birch for inviting me. What fun.

• Backlisted #244: The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore

In our natter, we mention other works by Alan Moore. You might like to read the big essay I wrote for my MA on V for Vendetta. 

The episode also mentions something that was announced on Saturday at the excellent Target Books Day: I am currently at work on a biography of Terrance Dicks, to be published by Ten Acre Films (who published by previous biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television). More of all that anon.

Space Security Service title sequence

The first volume of Space Security Service is out today from Big Finish. This new audio series, which I produced, comprises three adventures of space cops Anya Kingdom (Jane Slavin) and Mark Seven (Joe Sim), who used to travel with Doctors Who and are now on missions of their own.

To accompany the release, Rob Ritchie has produced a title sequence to match Jon Ewen's amazing theme tune for the series:

Full blurb as follows:

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

Anya Kingdom (Jane Slavin) and the android Mark Seven (Joe Sims) are the top agents of the Space Security Service, fighting alien threats and sinister villains across the galaxy. 

Last encountered in the Dalek Universe story arc, in which they teamed up with the Tenth Doctor, these popular characters now star in their own spin-off series of full-cast audio dramas, inspired by the 1960s Doctor Who serials of Terry Nation. 

The thrilling retro-styled adventures of the Space Security Service begin today with a box set of three brand-new stories, which take Anya and Mark to London in the 1980s, a Thal planet where a scientist conducts dangerous experiments, and a world on the brink of war. 

The Worlds of Doctor Who – Space Security Service: The Voord in London is now available to purchase for just £19.99 (as a digital download to own), exclusively from Big Finish. 

The SSS’s three latest missions are: 

The Voord in London by LR Hay 

1980s London. WDC Ann Kelso is assigned to CID, helping to clean up the streets. But “Ann” is really SSS Agent Anya Kingdom from the 41st century, on a top-secret mission to track down aliens hiding in the past. But then she finds a different group of aliens hiding in the Thames – with very deadly intentions… 

The Thal from G.R.A.C.E. by Felicia Barker 

As their investigations continue, SSS agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven journey to a planet colonised by Thals. They’re in pursuit of a Thal scientist who has perfected an experimental new weapon… But soon they are the targets… 

Allegiance by Angus Dunican 

The lush planet Othrys is on the cusp of civil war. SSS agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven are meant to keep a low profile while on a diplomatic mission there… But when a pregnant surrogate for the Othryn royal family desperately asks for their help, they’re unable to refuse…

Joining Jane Slavin and Joe Sims in Space Security Service: The Voord in London are Sean Gilder (Slow Horses), Madeline Appiah (Jungle), and Lara Lemon (Insomnia). The guest cast also includes Rodney Gooden, David Holt, Nicholas Briggs, Camille Burnett, Peter Bankolé, Jez Fielder, and Barnaby Kay. 

Cover art by Grant Kempster. Script editor John Dorney, director Barnaby Kay and executive producers Jason Haigh-Ellery and Nicholas Briggs.