If Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars saw Dicks applying a little correction to Robert Holmes’s wonky judgement around outdated stereotypes, Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters gives us a chance to see what Dicks does when Holmes is actually paying attention. The answer, largely, is to leave well alone, with a phenomenal amount of the script simply getting transposed straight to the novelisation. He liked this one. Even so, he does tweak it here and there, and the overall effect is to give Holmes’s satire a bit more focus and bite.

    First up, the SS Bernice. As Tat Wood says, the point of the interwar crew is to demonstrate how ‘imperialist, racist attitudes and snobbery belong in a museum’ (3). Dicks makes what seems an incidental change, making it ‘possible for minor variations to occur within the programmed pattern of events’ as seen when Major Daly turns ‘a fraction earlier—and caught sight of Jo and the Doctor’ (4), but this has a profound effect. On TV, the commentary simply lies in the way these museum-pieces are going round in circles, literalising its critique by sticking them in a rut, but the book seeks to show that they will actually just go round in circles if left to their own devices. Old-fashioned British imperialists aren’t just museum-pieces perpetually stuck in the past, they are, without any outside force, perfectly capable of ensuring that there’s never any progress at all.

    More little changes can be seen in the parallel set-up on Inter Minor. Dicks specifies that the ‘different social classes’ have ‘evolved into two different species’ (5). This could run the danger of reinforcing the falsehood of an innate difference between colonial officers and those on whose labour they depend, but this is shut down with the narratorial interjection that ‘it was not the rebellious Functionaries who were abnormal, but the conditions under which they had to live and work’ (6). Indeed, these differences are a sign of how long the planet has stagnated – long enough for natural selection to have adapted its people according to their working environment. It’s also clear that the joke is on the likes of Kalik, Orum and the Officials’ scientists, who cannot begin to perceive something the text makes appear so obvious but instead suspect ‘some disease or mutation’.

    The purpose of the ‘two different species’ statement, then, is to draw attention to the homogeneity of the Officials, ‘rulers by right and custom’ (7), and the fact that Zarb is very much one of them. The President’s desire for ‘a gradual improvement in the lot of the Functionaries’ (8) is not motivated by their poor living and working conditions but by a wish to ‘save [the Officials] from revolution’ (9). This is described as a programme of ‘liberal policies’ (10). At a time when the Functionaries’ uncomplaining acceptance of their lot is ‘beginning to change’ (11), liberalism is a tool for managing and restricting that change, preserving the status quo as much as possible by means of the mildest programme of reforms tolerable. It is a means by which ruling elites seek to preserve their position.

    And then, just as on TV, nothing changes. This isn’t some call to revolution. That tale might not have required the Doctor to shatter the status quo exactly but it probably would have required some sort of call-back to the Functionary who was shot and experimented on for climbing on a ramp and ‘daring to make some kind of speech’ (12). That’s not a criticism of the story – it’s still a satire that pokes fun at the bureaucracy and power-politics of the ruling classes and establishes that all progress requires constant pressure from the workers – but it is a criticism of the Doctor. He leaves Inter Minor’s bureaucracy standing in favour of dealing with the scope and then just clearing off.

    Dicks makes this into more transparently Time Lordly behaviour than it was on TV. Holmes has the Doctor make a ‘nuisance’ of himself until his people ‘banned’ miniscopes (13), pushing them to interfere despite their general resistance to doing so; the novelisation makes this all sound a bit more proper – ‘I refused to shut up’ suggests more of a campaign than just being troublesome and having the ‘Scopes outlawed by Intergalactic Convention’ is a bit more official-sounding, and indeed suggests a somewhat more bureaucratic process, than a simple ban (14). The Doctor may be personally responsible for the Time Lord position on miniscopes but he still turns up on Inter Minor, does no more than his duty by Intergalactic Convention and then goes away again.

    That’s not the only change Dicks makes to place the Doctor on the wrong side of this satire. Unlike on TV, the Doctor falls prey to the aggrometer, getting ‘caught up in the prevailing madness’, declaring an enthusiasm ‘to teach this insolent young puppy a much needed lesson’ (15) and throwing himself into a ‘short and savage’ fight (16). He may well be ‘appalled at what he had done’ shortly after (17), but he is clearly receptive to the same ‘bloodthirsty eagerness’ as the passengers of the SS Bernice (18). Jo, as on TV, isn’t, and so the reason can hardly boil down to ‘intelligence centres’ (19), certainly not when Dicks is writing. The Doctor belongs among these outdated stereotypes a bit too well. He might not quite be full-on Time Lord, but, like Zarb, he prefers his change to come ‘in a few very small details’ (20).

    The novelisation does actually seek to explain some of the Doctor’s more pompous behaviour. From the moment he exits the scope, it’s ‘calculated’ to ‘dominate [the] Minorans’ (21), who he ‘summed up […] very quickly’ and decided would respond ‘favourably to a display of force and bluster’ (22), and encourage them to ‘help him’ and, by extension, Jo, who ‘was still in great danger’. For all that, though, the Doctor’s ‘act’ achieves nothing. It’s actually Kalik’s scheming that lets him get away with it – Pletrac, who seeks only to follow the rules, ‘was for eradicating the Doctor at once’ but is talked out of it by Kalik simply because his plan means the eradicator must not yet be used (23). The Doctor may play at being a disreputable type – ‘look at his clothes’ (24) – but, when it comes to the crunch, he’s both an overbearing ponce and ineffective.

    Vorg, on the other hand, though brought in to offer the circuses bit of bread and circuses on behalf of Zarb (25), ends up turning his gift for entertainment on the establishment itself. The Functionaries only ever show a cursory interest in what he has to offer (26), but the Officials are both quickly obsessed with the scope (27) and end the novelisation in thrall to his tricks (28).

    This is quite instructive considering how Vorg and Shirna are set up as a parallel to the Doctor and Jo: Vorg is a man in possession of a wondrous machine, by illicit means (29), which he doesn’t quite know how to operate (30); and Shirna fulfils the roles of tool-passer (31), voice of common sense (32) and agent of compassion (33). She even gets Dicks’s three companion traits: she’s ‘attractive’ (34), obedient when given an order (35) and ‘terrified’ to paralysis (36).

    It’s Vorg rather than the Doctor who leaps into action to defeat the Drashigs, even taking a moment to grab ‘Shirna by the hand’ and shove her out of trouble first (37), and Vorg who’s clearly going to bring change to Inter Minor (38). Even the jokey suggestion that ‘He'll probably end up President!’ is something the audience has seen Tom Baker (sort of) pull off with his own bureaucratic people in ‘The Deadly Assassin’. It seems, once again, Pertwee is found wanting in relation to his successor.