Doctor Who's Putrid Ham
A quest through the Dr Who novelisations
"The excellent ham of Doctor Who is more than a little off"
1974 Times Literary Supplement review of Doctor Who and the Crusaders (quoted from David J Howe's The Target Book)
"Worse than a midsummer night it was. Seeley blamed it on those atom-bombs"
DOCTOR WHO AND THE AUTON INVASION
by Terrance Dicks
First published 17 January 1974 (1), between Invasion of the Dinosaurs Parts One and Two (2) (or Invasion and Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part Two, if you prefer (or is it Invasion Part One and Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part Two?))
Height Attack
The Doctor is a ‘tall thin man’, the Brigadier is a ‘tall army officer’ and there’s ‘the tall figure of the Auton’
Doctor Who’s changed a bit in the eight years since Doctor Who and the Crusaders – that much is clear just from comparing the blurbs. Where the 1966 book promotes itself on the characters’ juxtaposition with their location (3), Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion focuses on the titular ‘invasion of the AUTONS’ (4). Dicks follows suit, turning to Ian Fleming for his model where Whitaker had served up children’s versions of Greene and Boccaccio. This is pacy, punchy and action-packed (remember Ian’s last minute escape from inside a Dalek in Doctor Who? Never happened).
That doesn’t mean Dicks has shunned the advantages prose brings, though. ‘Spearhead from Space’ was a story about factory automation and the fear that modernity might make people obsolete, and Dicks uses internal monologue to tease out how technology can leave even figures of authority befuddled: the Brigadier interprets the words of the scientists of whom he’s ‘in command’ as little more than ‘mumbo-jumbo’ (5); Dr Henderson, confronted by the Doctor’s medical data, is unsure whether he’s ‘a doctor, a vet or a raving lunatic’ (6); and Liz Shaw can only dismiss the Brigadier’s job offer as ‘science-fiction’ (7). Meanwhile, Seeley, the only non-expert with any significant role in the story, is reduced to simply accepting everything as a result of whatever modern inventions he happens to think of, attributing the Nestene spheres, seemingly randomly, to ‘atom-bombs’ (8). There’s also the lovely way the ‘too immaculate’ Auton at the hospital, repeatedly described as ‘a waxwork come to life’ (9), attracts nothing beyond general unease – it’s almost an attack on the idea that the modern professional is already pretty plastic, but it doesn’t really build to anything.
Anyway, the modern world isn’t just confusing, it’s also brutal: a hospital cares so little for those entrusted to its care that the likes of Beavis slice up ‘healthy’ patients for no reason other than the ‘challenge’ and ‘adventure’ (10), passing students commenting as if it’s a common occurrence (11); soldiers shoot unarmed men for being confused in the woods !2) , with even a glimpse of the start of a cover-up (‘Came straight at me!’) before the incredulity in his superior’s response makes clear how thin an excuse this is (13); and Seeley’s desire for a profit endangers his wife as he hides the Nestene sphere in his shed (14) and then the whole world as his obtuseness nearly allows the Autons to get it before the soldiers (15).
Dicks adjusts his hero and monsters for this harsher world. Pertwee, in ‘Spearhead from Space’, played the newly regenerated Doctor as crafty but, in the book, he’s rawer, genuinely panicked and confused, ‘Like a hunted animal making instinctively for its lair’ (16). Meanwhile, the Autons are more predatory, described as ‘hunting’, able to track and corner their prey, and with an ‘over-riding function […] to kill’ (17). This all threatens to come together beautifully at the end, the book hinting that the Doctor is the perfect balance the modern world and more old-fashioned personability when the Brigadier recognises him thanks to both his ‘scientific results’ and his ‘uniquely, aggravating temperament’ (18) and so suggesting that the modernity the Autons so threatening represent is actually fine if coupled with a good dose of humanity, but this, like the immaculate Auton earlier, doesn’t really go anywhere.
All that said, however, there’s a good reason for Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion not quite coming together like the 60s books and the key is how the Doctor muses on ‘looking forward to his stay on Earth’ (19) , promising at another story. The Muller novelisations may have felt more literary than this, but they were firmly a collection of one-offs, cherry-picking the Doctor Whos they wanted and rewriting the stories so they could stand alone; Dicks firmly signposts the Target range firmly as a continuing series. That means that the novelisations might now suffer some of the same drawbacks of serialised storytelling that the TV series does but the constant promise of more stories is probably one the reasons why every available television story ended up getting novelised.
In this, he’s helped by the eight years that have passed since Doctor Who and the Crusaders. Following Doctor Who’s first Wood/Miles-sanctioned ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (20) and, according to David J Howe’s The Target Book, the 1973 rereleases of the first three titles having just sold out 20 000 copies, with Doctor Who hitting No 6 in at WH Smith on 20 July that year (21), the series and its concepts can be taken for granted in a way that’s more akin to now than the 1960s.
That familiarity is most obvious in the Prologue, which opens with ‘In the High Court of the Time Lords’ and introduces the Doctor as one of their renegades (22). This is their first appearance in the books and a flashback to their first TV appearance, yet they receive absolutely no build-up at all. Dicks can assume his readers have heard the Doctor’s people talked about endlessly and even seen them in ‘The Three Doctors’ and so that they’re about to get a scene involving the Time Lords is a bigger hook than any mysterious hints towards what or who this powerful race might be. In this way, the novelisation goes beyond the ‘in-print video’ Dicks has talked about aiming to create (23) (and which Strutton did) and in fact reinterprets the script as a look back at how the third Doctor used to be rather than a tentative introduction to what he will be like, something the readers know better than Robert Holmes could possibly have done, hence the book is promoted as ‘the first adventure of [the Doctor’s] third ‘incarnation'’ (24). Similarly, opening with the soon-to-be-dead second Doctor (25), launching a new series (this is technically the first Target book) in exactly the way the TV Movie failed to two decades later, makes sense if you assume that it is the glimpses into the otherwise unreachable past that is the appeal of the range. The success of the Target range rather proves Dicks right.
Are You Sitting Comfortably..?
The odd Doctor Who novelisation narrative voice raises its head once more: ‘As yet, the Doctor had no idea of the significance of the meteorite shower that had accompanied his arrival on the planet Earth’ - it’s the hint forwards inherent in ‘as yet’
And, in a whole new twist, Terry has a go at providing the blurb in the book: ‘Soon a normal, bustling London day would be in full swing. But this day, in London, and in cities all over the country, was to be like no other. This was the morning of the Auton invasion’
Tory Who
The Brigadier ‘deciding not for the first time that he would never understand the ways of women’. REALLY??
Dicksisms
We even get a glimpse inside the Time Lords’ minds and it’s fiercely banal: ‘The President of the Court sighed. They were letting the fellow off lightly. He ought to be humble and grateful, not kick up all this fuss’ - so you can hardly collar The Deadly Assassin as the moment they were hauled down from Godhood
Now you know Uncle Tel’s in town: ‘a strange wheezing and groaning filled the air’
A nurse considers the Third Doctor’s appearance: ‘It was a strange face. Sometimes it seemed handsome and dignified, sometimes quizzical, almost comic. The seams and wrinkles, the shock of almost white hair should have made it an old face, yet somehow there was a strong impression of energy and youth’ - the double ‘sometimes’ does make you wonder how long the nurse actually spends studying the Doctor’s face despite being mid-conversation with Dr Henderson
Terry appears to believe the Doctor lives in an episode of The Avengers: ‘General Scobie heaved an exasperated sigh. He’d been looking forward to a quiet evening with his collection of regimental memoirs’
Even in the books, villains can’t shoot where the script says.
1 http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Auton_Invasion
2 http://epguides.com/DoctorWho/
3 ‘From unknown Space, the Tardis returns to Earth, but not to the world Ian and Barbara know [but] to the struggle between Richard the Lionheart and Saladin’. Even the ‘dramatic climax’ is advertised as Ian’s struggle against ‘the harsh, cruel world of the twelfth century’ rather than his struggle with the bloke with the whip. Blurb for Doctor Who and the Crusaders (http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Crusaders)
4 ‘DOCTOR WHO, Liz Shaw, and the Brigadier grapple with the nightmarish invasion of the AUTONS’. Blurb for Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion (http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Auton_Invasion)
5 ‘The Brigadier looked at Liz and the Doctor as they bent over their instruments. He sighed, recognising that he hadn’t a hope of understanding what they were up to. No doubt they’d tell him when it suited them. And he was supposed to be the one in command! Not for the first time the Brigadier considered applying for a transfer back to normal regimental duties. Life had been so simple then. Parades, inspections, manoeuvres, more parades... He’d been offered the UNIT job not long after that Yeti business in the Underground. Presumably because he was the only senior British officer with experience in dealing with alien life-forms. At the time it had seemed like a rather cushy number, carrying as it did the welcome promotion from Colonel to Brigadier. If only he’d known! First that nasty affair with the Cybermen, and now this. The trouble with the scientific approach, thought the Brigadier, was that it left you at the mercy of your scientists.
‘Then he brightened. For all their scientific mumbo-jumbo it was direct military action that was going to solve the problem. The Brigadier’s eyes sparkled with anticipation at the thought of tomorrow’s attack on the plastics factory’
‘Then he shrugged his shoulders. Let them go to the waxworks. Let them go to the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace and the London Zoo while they were at it! And much good might it do them. As usual all the real work was left to him. Like children, these scientists!’
Let’s just look at that in detail: the Brigadier, who is very much his 1974 persona here rather than his 1970 one, bemoans ‘the scientific approach’ because ‘it left you at the mercy of your scientists’, considering things beyond his field simply ‘mumbo-jumbo’ and consoling himself that ‘it was direct military action that was going to solve the problem’. He resents Liz and the Doctor’s help so much (‘No doubt they’d tell him when it suited them’) that ‘Not for the first time the Brigadier considered applying for a transfer back to normal regimental duties’ which, in his head, consists purely of different ways to about – ‘Parades, inspections, manoeuvres, more parades’ (an insult to the actual military as well as to the character). Apparently, he accepted the role at UNIT because ‘it had seemed like a rather cushy number, carrying as it did the welcome promotion from Colonel to Brigadier’ rather than his being actively involved in the formation of the unit, as I always thought ‘The Invasion’ implied, because he was atypically broad-minded enough to see the need for such an organisation and clever enough to persuade others. In fact, in Dicks’s head, he’s a complete idiot, even completely missing the connection when the Doctor and Liz race to the waxworks on finding the plastics factory makes replicas for them: ‘As usual all the real work was left to him. Like children, these scientists!
6 Dr Henderson accepts the nature of his patient quite easily in the end – it just requires two pieces of evidence even though each is clearly questionable as they’re only solitary samples: ‘Now I don't know whether that makes me a doctor, a vet or a raving lunatic, but as far as I'm concerned those are the facts’
7 ‘He's cracking up, she thought wildly. Over-work probably. Been reading too much science-fiction […] She wondered if she ought to start heading towards the door, before the Brigadier suddenly decided she was a Martian spy’ - the Brigadier is head of a successfully secret (allegedly) military unit commissioned by the UN and Liz knows this so how dangerously mad exactly does she think it’s likely he can be?
8 I have no idea on Earth what this is supposed to suggest: ‘Worse than a midsummer night it was. Seeley blamed it on those atom-bombs’. Does he think the Nestene baubles are atom bombs? If so, does he have absolutely no concept of what an atom bomb is beyond that they’re rare and usually delivered from the sky? And why is he not worried and attempting to put as many miles as possible between himself and multiple (MULTIPLE!) atom bombs he believes are landing? I suppose the first question might answer the second. Does Terry have no idea what an atom bomb is or is he trying to suggest that Seeley's an idiot?
9 ‘middle-aged, immaculately dressed, with regular, handsome features […] The clothes were too immaculate, the handsome features too calm and regular. He looks like a wax dummy, thought the reporter uneasily. Like a waxwork come to life’
10 'a brief exploratory operation. Open him up, take a poke around, see what's what'
‘he seems to be a very healthy one. I don't see that an operation...’
'“Where's your sense of adventure?' asked Beavis. 'Haven't had a really interesting operation for years. It'd be a challenge”'
11 ‘He's probably finished off poor old Henderson's patient for him already’
12 The Doctor gets shot by a soldier: ‘As he burst from the bushes surrounding the clearing, he saw to his horror the soldier with his rifle aimed straight at him. The Doctor tried to shout but the tape was still over his mouth. There was the crack of the rifle shot, a searing pain in his head and then blackness. The Doctor spun round and crumpled to the ground’
13 ‘“I had to shoot, Corp,” babbled the sentry. “He attacked me. Came straight at me!” Forbes looked at the still figure of the Doctor. “Attacked you, did he? An unarmed man, in a hospital nightshirt?”’
14 ‘The wonderful find that was going to bring him fame and fortune —once those idiots of soldiers realised that it took a man like Sam Seeley to find things in the woods’
'Worth a pound or two, you are, me beauty. I'll just hang on to you till they all get a bit keener'
15 'I reckon it'd be worth a fair bit of money—if anyone did happen to know where he could put his hand on one?'
16 ‘Totally confused by the sudden flurry of events, there was only one thought in his mind. Like a hunted animal making instinctively for its lair, he wanted desperately to reach the safety of the TARDIS’
17 Autons are not just dumb plastic grunts: ‘Channing said softly: "I have some control over them. But they also have a life of their own. Their over-riding function is to kill"'. And Ransome observes that they show tactical awareness: ‘the hunting Auton. He realised that the creature must have some kind of intelligence. It consistently managed to block his way to the exit. All the time it was edging closer and closer, confining him to one corner of the factory’
18 ‘“Two things combined to convince me, actually.” “Oh, yes?” said the Doctor curiously. “The brilliance of your scientific results was one,” said the Brigadier. “And the other?” said the Doctor, with a modest smile. “Your uniquely, aggravating temperament,” the Brigadier said crisply. “There couldn't be two like you anywhere, Doctor. Your face may have changed, but not your character!”’ - Interesting that that’s still the view of regeneration
19 ‘All in all he was quite looking forward to his stay on Earth’
20 Tat Wood: About Time 3 (expanded 2nd edition)
21 'All three titles quickly sold out of their initial printings - estimated to have been around 20,000 copies each [...] The crowning glory was the appearance of The Daleks at sixth place in W H Smith's top ten books on 20 July 1973'
David J Howe: The Target Book; p.24
22 ‘In the High Court of the Time Lords a trial was coming to its end. The accused, a renegade Time Lord known as the Doctor, had already been found guilty’
23 ‘Dicks also points out that when he started writing the books, there was virtually no commercial video and few repeats […] ‘My intention was to do an in-print video’’
David J Howe: The Target Book; p.49
24 ‘the first adventure of his third `incarnation'’ – setting up the idea of ‘incarnations’ and so ‘regeneration’ ahead of 'Planet of the Spiders'. Blurb for Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion (http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Auton_Invasion)
25 ‘he was quite a small man. He wore an ancient black coat and a pair of check trousers. He had a gentle, rather comical face and a shock of untidy black hair. But there was strength in that face, too, and keen intelligence in the blue eyes’
Miscellania
Welcome to the double entendre: ‘The nurse trembled. Like all the other nurses in the hospital, she was terrified of Henderson and his sharp tongue’
Bit of history: ‘a sheet of the wife’s new-fangled kitchen foil’
Even the Brigadier thinks UNIT’s cover’s rubbish: ‘As the leader of a supposedly secret organisation’
Hibbert made Channing: ‘He remembered finding the green pulsating globe in the woods, the night of the first meteor shower. He remembered taking the globe back to the factory. He remembered staring as if hypnotised into its flashing green depths’
Um…: ‘No question of telling them his real name, of course. Time Lord names have an almost mystic importance, and are usually kept closely guarded secrets. Anyway, they’d never be able to pronounce it’