Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, by Terrance Dicks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KNIGHT: 

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

ANNE TRAVERS: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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…

Doctor Who — The Three Doctors, by Terrance Dicks

I said of Terrance’s previous book, Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, that there was loads of Doctor Who in 1975, with 35 new episodes on TV as well as in-character appearances by Tom Baker in other TV shows and real life. There was also the ongoing picture strip in TV Comic and a novelisation of his first TV story. Then, in time for Christmas, there were three special books.

The first, published in September, was the Doctor Who Annual 1976 (or, as per the cover, THE DR WHO annual 1976). This, the tenth Doctor Who annual from Manchester-based World Distributors, is a rather nice-looking 64-page hardback with a lot of colour inside, which originally retailed for £1. The cover boasts a photograph of a glowering, serious Doctor, with the words “Starring TOM BAKER as DR WHO”. No monsters are mentioned or seen; the focus is all on the titular character — in fact, on the leading actor.

On 20 November, Target published two special titles of its own. The Doctor Who Monster Book is a 64-page paperback, the interior all black-and-white, retailing at 50p, ie half the price of the annual. While it also boasts Tom Baker’s face on the cover, here he’s got a huge grin and is surrounded by monsters. I’ll dig into this wondrous book in a future post.

The same day saw publication of the 17th in Target’s range of Doctor Who novelisations: Doctor Who — The Three Doctors. This wasn’t just more of the same; it was something a bit extra.

That’s evident when you compare a first edition to the novelisations released immediately before and after this. Doctor Who — The Three Doctors comprises 128 pages, as do Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders and Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster. But the paper stock here is thicker and of better quality, so this book has more heft. It feels more like, and is almost as wide as, one of Target’s first 12 novelisations.

Another thing linking it to that first run of books is the return of cover artist Chris Achilleos after four novelisations with cover art by Peter Brookes. Once again, there are good-quality, stippled portraits of the Doctor (x3) in black and white, with the monstrous Omega and sparkling-energy in colour. But Omega also radiates energy all around him— white hot near the top of his bronze-green mask, cooling to yellow and then orange as it fills the frame.

In that sense, this cover is an amalgamation of the montage-on-white covers that Achilleos produced for the first 12 novelisations and the subsequent full-frame comic-strip panels favoured by Brookes. Achilleos had previously used comic-strip art as reference for particular elements in his covers artwork, such as borrowing individual Daleks from the old TV Century 21 comic strips. But now he used comics to inform the whole composition: as is well known, for this one he drew inspiration from Jack Kirby’s cover for Fantastic Four #49 (April 1966).

I think the logo on the cover is also an amalgamation of the two styles of Target book to date: it’s the new logo with curving “Doctor”, as per the TV show’s opening titles and used on the books since Doctor Who and the Giant Robot. Yet, for the first time, it’s in black rather than a bright colour, recalling those first 12 books.

The back cover blurb sets out that this story is something special:

“Jo glanced up at the Doctor.

‘Things must be pretty serious then’.

‘They are, Jo. Very serious indeed. The whole of the Universe is in danger.’

The most amazing WHO adventure yet, in which Doctors One, Two and Three cross time and space and come together to fight a ruthlessly dangerous enemy — OMEGA. Once a Time Lord, now exiled to a black hole in space, Omega is seeking a bitter and deadly revenge against the whole Universe…

DOCTOR WHO scripts — awarded the 1974 Writers’ Guild Award for the best British children’s original drama script.”

As with the previous book, the bit of this blurb apparently quoted from the text inside doesn’t quite match what’s there (on page 28), but is a punchier, more concise version. 

Again, I don’t think Terrance wrote this blurb. The clue, I think, is the reference to Omega as “once a Time Lord.” On TV, Omega says that because of the supernova he created, he was “blown out of existence into this black hole of antimatter [while] my brothers became Time Lords”. That is, Time Lords were created after Omega was lost, so he was never one himself. 

(Yes, he refers to the Doctor as a “brother Time Lord” and speaks of “our fellow Time Lords”, but that’s in his efforts to reclaim his place in the society they created without him.)

The award mentioned is also worth noting. At the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain’s 14th Awards Presentation Dinner, held at the Cafe Royal on Wednesday 12 March 1975, “Best British Children’s Drama Script” was awarded to Doctor Who writers Robert Holmes, Malcolm Hulke, Terry Nation, Brian Hayles and Robert Sloman for all 26 episodes and five stories comprising Season 11 (1973-74). 

The award therefore did not include The Three Doctors or its writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin, as that story was from the previous year’s run (1972-73). It would have made more sense to mention the award in the blurb for Target's previous book, Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, as it was adapted from a story in the award-winning season. The fact that it wasn’t added to that blurb suggests that by 13 March, the morning after the awards do, the back cover for Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders had already been set and couldn’t be changed, with a seven-month lead time ahead of publication on 16 October.

ETA Paul MC Smith points out that the award was included in the blurb for the hardback edition of Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, published a month after the paperback (and on the same day as Doctor Who — The Three Doctors and The Doctor Who Monster Book):

Dustjack from Doctor Who
and the Planet of the Spiders

Speaking of which, I think Terrace must have written and signed off on Doctor Who — The Three Doctors before he wrote The Doctor Who Monster Book. My sleuthing is as follows:

The latter provides short, pithy biographies for a range of monsters, each headed by the monster’s name. That includes, on page 48, the “Gellguards” (one word) from The Three Doctors. These creatures weren’t named on screen; instead, to meet the format of the Monster Book, Terrance drew from stage directions of the script for Episode One, which initially speak of animated “jelly” and “gel” before we encounter large, mobile actors-in-suits referred to variously as “Gellguards” and “Gell Guards”.

(That surely means they’re pronounced with a soft G, an abbreviation of Jelly Guards, and not — as I always thought as a kid reading the Monster Book entry — with an alliteratively hard G as in "Girl", or the more colloquial “Gel”, the term both the First Doctor and Arthur Ollis use in the novelisation to describe Jo Grant — see p. 36 and p. 75.)

In the novelisation, these monsters are simply “jelly-like creatures” and “blobs”. If Terrance had written the Monster Book first and then moved on to the novelisation, he would surely have used “Gellguards” again for consistency. He didn’t, so the novelisation came first.

Had he also written Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, published 15 January 1976, before he wrote the Monster Book? We’ll look for clues when we reach that novelisation…

As usual with Terrance, the novelisation generally follows the story as seen on screen, though with improved effects — whether because Terrance thought the TV version looked a bit lacking or to make this book extra special. For example, he details the way the alien jelly separates and then assumes humanoid shape (p. 22), how bullets slice through these creatures without causing harm (p. 23) and how one is destroyed by an explosive shell but the scattered bits reform (p. 24). The latter is, I think, lifted from what happens to the grotesque Bok in The Daemons.

There’s an extra fight with the jellies later in the book that doesn’t happen in the TV version, the Brigadier wielding a Sterling submachine gun, Benton with a Bren and Jo Grant being knocked over by the recoil of her rifle (pp. 111-112). The latter is odd given Jo’s UNIT training (as detailed in Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, where she knows how to jump safely from a moving vehicle), and in contrast to her successor Sarah Jane Smith, who coolly points a gun at Hilda Winters in Doctor Who and the Giant Robot.

Omega’s world has a dull grey sea (p. 48), purple sky (p. 74) and a storm (p. 108). Omega himself lives in a castle (p. 65) with enormous brass gates (p. 76) and polished brass floor (p. 89), matching his brazen mask. This fantastical realm is, I think, more in line with what Bob Baker and Dave Martin had in mind in their initial idea for this multi-Doctor story, originally called Deathworld (available now from Big Finish, script edited by me, yadda yadda).

Terrance seems to have worked from the scripts of The Three Doctors rather than rewatching the story, which would have required the faff of a special screening at the BBC. For example, 1m 20s into Episode One on iPlayer, a (prop) sign informs us that the tree-lined lake — really a reservoir in Rickmansworth — is “Minsbridge Wild Life [sic] Sanctuary”. The place isn’t named in the script, it’s just “Ext. Bird Sanctuary. Day” with a later reference to “marshes”. Mrs Ollis, wife of the warden there, is described as having a “Norfolk accent”, which is our only clue as to where Minsbridge might be.

In the novelisation, the setting is “the flat marshy ground of an Essex bird sanctuary” (p. 7), matching the words in the script and not what’s seen on screen. Why Essex of all places? Well, between his work on novelisations, Terrance spent time mucking about on a boat he kept at Althorne in Essex, opposite Bridgemarsh Island which is a great haven for birds. Just as his novelisation of Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion relocated the sequence of dummies breaking out of shop windows from the unnamed Ealing High Street on TV to the named Oxford Street, this is Terrance grounding events in real places that he knew well.

Terrance is also specific about another setting. While the TV story doesn’t tell us where in space the black hole is located, in the novelisation we learn that the Veil Nebula, “an enormous mass of gases and cosmic dust” (p. 69), is all that remains of the star Omega destroyed. The Veil Nebula is a real place, in the constellation Cygnus. As observed from Earth, it’s in the same part of the sky as Cygnus X-1 which in 1971 was the first object in space to be identified as a black hole — a key inspiration for this Doctor Who story. My guess is that Terrance consulted a map.

Space and physics stuff generally is considered of sufficient importance to be given a capital letter: “Galaxy” (p. 11), “Universe” (p. 28), “Time Streams” (p. 29), “Force” and “Anti-matter” (p. 30), “Time Travel”, “Nebula”, “Solar Engineers” and “Time" (p. 69). As in Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, “University” also warrants a capital (p. 8). In contrast, when Omega exclaims that, “I should have been a god!” (p. 70), it’s a lower-case apotheosis.

Yet given this enthusiasm for specific places and proper names, it’s notable that Terrance doesn’t give the name of another key setting in the story — the planet of the Time Lords.

Gallifrey was first mentioned on screen in Part Two of The Time Warrior (tx 22 December 1973), written by Robert Holmes and script edited by Terrance. By that point, it had also been used in an issue of TV Action, but we think drawn from The Time Warrior script. The name wasn’t used on screen again until Part Four of Pyramids of Mars, script edited (and largely written) by Holmes and broadcast 15 November 1975, five days before this novelisation was published. That Holmes remembered the name and Terrance didn’t — he doesn’t mention Gallifrey in the Monster Book either — suggests it was coined by Holmes. 

(In contrast, Doctor Who — The Three Doctors includes a reference to the Doctor’s car, Bessie, being fitted with a “Superdrive” (p. 97). This was seen in action in Episode One of The Time Monster (1972), script edited by Terrance. The car’s “minimum inertia superdrive” was also mentioned in the preceding adventure, Episode One of The Mutants; I wonder if, in novelising The Three Doctors by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, Terrance recalled adding that bit of continuity to their previous TV story.)

Even though the name Gallifrey was used in Pyramids of Mars, it doesn't feature two stories later in The Brain of Morbius, despite that delving into Time Lord lore. That story was initially written by Terrance in July and August 1975, then rewritten by Holmes and broadcast in January 1976. “Gallifrey” wasn’t used again on screen until Part One of The Hand of Fear (tx 2 October 1976), where it foreshadows the next TV story — which is set there. It’s only then, I think, that the name becomes a key part of Doctor Who. As I work my way through Terrance’s books, I’ll keep an eye out for the first time he cites it.

Despite this absence, we get quite a lot on Time Lord life in Doctor Who — The Three Doctors. The huge “Temporal Control Room”, containing “hundreds of monitor screens”, is where Time Lords are employed in, “keeping a benevolent and watchful eye on innumerable planets and times” ie as couch potatoes throughout eternity. “It was many years since the Doctor had stood in that room,” we’re told, implying that he used to have a job here before deciding to experience this stuff in real life. The Time Lords are also Olympian figures, powerful and virile:

“Despite their age and wisdom, the Senior Time Lords had always been lively, vigorous figures, burning with energy and authority.” (p. 29)

One younger Time Lord is described as a “boy” of 200 (p. 31). We’re also told that,

“Time Lords had immense strength and endurance but they are not superhuman or immortal. They can tire, they can be hurt, and they can die. Doctor Two wondered what would happen to him is his other self [ie the Third Doctor] were to be killed. Presumably he too would wink out of existence, and cease to be.” (p. 92)

Note the shift from past to present tense in that first sentence, as if changing gear from an old story being recounted to a statement of current fact. Note also the odd idea that if the Third Doctor should die, his former selves might wink out of existence. It would surely be the other way round: if the Second Doctor died while battling Omega instead of as the result of his trial (as in the TV story The War Games), there could be no Third Doctor.

(The odd repetition that Doctor Two thinks he might “wink out of existence” and “cease to be”, makes me think he’s been watching Monty Python's Parrot sketch. Next he’ll be gone to meet ’is maker, ie Tecteun.) 

In fact, the mechanics of multiple Doctors is a bit confusing here. A caption on p. 1 tells us that, “The cover illustration portrays the first, second and third Doctors”, the ordinals uncapitalised and the order wrong: in fact, the cover illustration portrays the first, third and second Doctors. 

The back cover blurb speaks of “Doctors One, Two and Three”, with capitals, but that does not mean the first, second and third Doctors. In the book itself, Jo thinks of her Doctor — the incumbent, as played by Jon Pertwee — as “Doctor One” (p. 53), matching stage directions in the script where script editor Terrance was keen to denote that Pertwee remained the first among equals. 

However, the Time Lords in the book number the Doctors in the opposite order, referring to his “earliest” incarnation and then the successive “second” and “third” Doctors (p. 51). The two systems get a bit muddled: the “third Doctor” referred to on p. 114 in a scene set within the TARDIS is Jo’s Doctor Three and the Time Lords’ first Doctor, ie the one played by William Hartnell. 

Keeping up?

Now, obviously, as Terrance wrote this novelisation, Tom Baker was establishing himself as the Fourth Doctor on TV. If we were to continue the numbering system used in The Three Doctors where the incumbent is Doctor One or the first Doctor, Jon Pertwee would have been duly relegated to Doctor Two / second Doctor, Patrick Troughton to Doctor Three / third Doctor, and Hartnell to Doctor Four / fourth Doctor. A new actor taking over the role from Baker would mean they all had to change again. It was evidently much simpler to fix a proper name to each incarnation, with capitals — Hartnell is and will always be the First Doctor we encountered on screen, even if The Brain of Morbius subsequently introduced the idea of prior incarnations.

As I said, calling the Third Doctor “Doctor One” was a means to placate Jon Pertwee while making The Three Doctors, and that was obviated by him leaving the role. That the novelisation contains the last vestige of this outmoded naming system is because Terrance wrote it by working from the scripts.

There are some other odd ways of describing things. When we first encounter the Second Doctor in the novelisation, he’s “a rather small man in eccentric and colourful clothing” (p. 31). “Colourful” is surely Terrance remembering the way costume designer James Acheson recreated Patrick Troughton’s original costume to suit colour TV, with a blue shirt and colour-flecked tweed for his trousers. But the mental image now conjured is of something else; I thought of Troughton in the Sixth Doctor’s clothes.

In raising the stakes of this story, Terrance also seems to have forgotten other adventures he worked on. Jo feels at one point that, 

“It was the first time she had ever seen the Doctor afraid.” (p. 68)

But, as just one example, in The Mind of Evil (1971) she rescues the Doctor from a machine that makes him experience nightmares. Later, we’re told that the Doctors’ battle with Omega is something special because,

“With the exception of the Master, this was the first time he had found himself opposed by a fellow Time Lord.” (p. 82)

That’s forgetting the War Chief and the presiding judges in The War Games, cowritten by Terrance. (Let alone the Meddling Monk, or Susan Foreman arguing back.)

Then there’s the Second Doctor’s recorder. Terrance makes a point of mentioning this more often than it featured in the TV story, nicely seeding the important role it plays in the denouement. He repeatedly refers to it as a “flute”; while technically a recorder is a duct or fipple flute, to me the mental image conjured is of a different musical instrument — a longer, metal one. It’s important to the end of the story that the Doctor’s recorder can roll, hence the initial description of it being a “round wooden object” (p. 32). But “round” surely suggests spherical; “cylindrical” is the word.

That might seem pedantic but, as we’ve observed before, Terrance is often very good on concise, vivid description using well-chosen words. There are plenty of striking examples of that here. Early on, he throws in “iridescent” then immediately explains that it means like oil on water (p. 17), helping to advance the vocabulary of younger readers. There are “paradiddles” and “cacophony” (p. 36), “parabolic” arches (p. 66) and “reconnaissance” (p. 81). He also uses “brazen” (p. 67) in the technical sense of being made of bronze, and Arthur Ollis refers to Jo as “tidgy”, meaning small (p. 75).

In surviving production paperwork included on the Blu-ray sets of this era of Doctor Who (thank you, Richard Bignell), Terrance refers to his meetings with writers to discuss the mechanics of storylines and scripts as “conferences”, a rather serious word for a long natter in the office followed by drinks in the bar. I wonder if that’s why the quick-fire sharing of exposition between the three Doctors here is referred to as a “telepathic conference” (p. 35). 

(I now imagine Terrance at his usual table by the main door in Albertine’s on the corner of Wood Lane, raising a big glass of red wine to Bob and Dave, to the toast of “Contact”.)

So, all in all this is a bigger, more opulent version of the TV story, in part because Terrance worked from the scripts and thus the imaginations of the two writers, rather than from a screening of the story as realised on a modest budget. Even so, he makes a lot of the special nature of the story, the whole Universe at stake from a foe unlike any the Doctor has previously encountered (whether or not that’s quite true). But some of the details aren’t right, with words and phrasing that are not always as precise as in Terrance’s previous books. We get our first sense, I think, of the production line process behind his increased output. And yet it’s only a quick polish off being perfect.

At the end of the adventure, Omega is destroyed (for now), the Universe saved and the past Doctors sent back to their time streams. The First Doctor’s closing words are, sadly, as per the script and not the last-minute rewrite done while filming with William Hartnell on 6 November 1972. On p. 124 of The Three Doctors production documentation included on the Blu-ray, we can see that the brilliant last words he delivered as Doctor Who, “I shudder to think what you'll do without me”, are an amendment in Terrance’s distinctive handwriting on the shooting script for that day. 

It’s especially sad to lose such fitting final words given that Hartnell died on 23 April 1975, around the time Terrance was writing this novelisation. My guess is that they’d have been in the book if Terrance had been able to rewatch the story. Instead, the First Doctor is cut off mid-sentence while complaining: a rare example of a novelisation failing to improve the TV version.

The Second Doctor fares a little better, consoled for the loss of his recorder with the gift of a mouth organ, on which he immediately picks out “Oh Susannah”. And the Third Doctor is granted his greatest wish, as the suitably grateful Time Lords end his exile to Earth in the late 20th century. On TV, he’s keen to get going and a new era of Doctor Who begins. Here, Terrance makes the moment bitter-sweet. Jo protests about his eagerness to leave and the Doctor muses on the family he has found among his pals at UNIT. 

“For the first time, in many years of wandering, he’d found somewhere that could be called home, and he didn’t want to give it up. Not completely, that is. One or two little trips from time to time, of course…” (p. 126)

It’s a nice character moment but I read it with a pang. As viewers would have seen by the time this novelisation was published, the Fourth Doctor soon abandoned UNIT. That means that the Third Doctor’s sense of home died with him. In the closing moments of this special novelisation, Terrance spares a moment to mourn.

*

These long, involved posts take time and involve expenses, such as buying the first edition copy of this novelisation which so helped me tease out meanings. If you’d like to show your appreciation and support the ongoing endeavour to explore the work of Terrance Dicks, please make a donation:

Huge thanks to the kind people who responded to my last rattling of the tin; I’ve received just under £50 to date. This has been spent on what I thought was a first edition of Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster but is a later reprint (with some interesting quirks I’ll address when we get there) as well as the next two books Terrance published and a work of non-fiction he drew from. Posts on all those goodies to follow the next instalment, which will be on The Doctor Who Monster Book.

How long I continue beyond that depends on contributions to the cause.