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)
"How do you think Man first made out on Earth?"
DOCTOR WHO AND THE DOOMSDAY WEAPON
by Malcolm Hulke
First published 27 March 1974 (1), between The Monster of Peladon Parts One and Two (2)
Height Attack
‘“This monster,” said the Doctor to Winton, “was it about twenty feet high?”’
I definitely read this one as a kid but the sheer brazen bonkersness of the opening chapters must have very much passed me by back then. First, Hulke follows Dicks’s lead in introducing the Doctor (and now the Master) through the Time Lords (3), then we get confirmation that the lead is indeed called Doctor Who (4) (I guess Strutton did try and tell us) and finally there’s a quickfire introduction to Jo that simultaneously establishes her as hyper-competent (5) and unbelievably stupid (6).
What my child-self also failed to notice but which almost certainly seeped into my very soul exactly as Hulke no doubt intended was his despair at the corporatism he could see clambering towards supremacy in the 1970s. Never is this clearer than during a brief insight into Dent’s thoughts:
As Dent sat there, touching the controls of the IMC spaceship, he felt happy and secure in the fact that he was an IMC man, with an IMC wife, IMC children, with a beautiful four room IMC home. His present and his future were as secure as IMC, and IMC would go on for ever.
That’s seven IMCs. They’ve got their fingers in everything, including your wife – ‘an IMC wife’ is much the same as an ‘IMC spaceship’(7), they’re both company property. As, in all but name, are their employees, shackled to the company through debt (8). What’s really worrying is how Dent’s father’s sermon that ‘big corporations […] look after you’ (9) is precisely the sort of sentiment a child might have heard in 70s Britain but it ends with employees who fervently believe the ‘IMC would go on for ever’ like some sort of Third Reich.
What IMC create with their debt-laden buck is a distorted parody of society, in which the ‘ambitious and totally unscrupulous’ are the ones ‘you could always trust’ (10) and those on which to focus your ire are the ‘people who could think and reason’ (11); where untruths are trotted out by rote (12) and there’s no hint of irony in a utterance like ‘There can’t be anything wrong in obeying orders’ (13) while ‘hate’ for others is a necessary attribute in doing your job ‘properly’ (14). It’s not surprising how easily they’re able to do it either since they’re picking staff who’ve already willingly sacrificed their lives to be taken in by IMC’s warm bosom, whether shunning such things as the Sun, walking or human contact, like Dent during his training (15), or who’ve given up on their dreams, like Norton turning his back on acting (16). Indeed, Norton provides a wonderful microcosm for the warped symmetry between what it means to be human and IMC’s use for humanity, viewing his undercover operation through the filter of his frustrated art – his murder weapon his ‘prop’ and his victim his ‘audience’ (17).
Jane Leeson affords a short glimpse of the Earth IMC have built, where ‘Every square kilometre of land had been built over’ (18) and the only activities provided for are to ‘go shopping and get to work’, which conveniently makes plain Hulke’s elision of the corporate world with capitalism. You have to pay for the ‘special treat’ of getting outdoors or engaging in movement and even these recreations are made abject, partly thanks to the reader taking them for granted but also in Hulke’s descriptions of ‘a few hours sitting on concrete’ and going into a ‘cubicle’, something which only really carries connotations of an open-plan office or a public toilet (did they have open-plan offices in the 70s?). Everything becomes depersonalised to the extent that you’re married by ‘a friendly computer’ and the ceremony seems to consist simply of your files getting stapled together in the ‘Automatic State Personnel File’(19).
Against this, the colonists, ‘drop-outs from society’, are ‘eccentric’ people (20) who don’t ‘conform to the society’ and sometimes ‘smelt of sweat’ (21). That small mundane detail, so distasteful to IMC employees, makes clear how very normal the colonists are and how inhuman Dent and his crew have become. It also makes more understandable their excitement at the prospect of physical labour (22), with all that lovely sweat. Considering the world in which they’ve been nurtured, it’s perhaps not surprising that Hulke portrays them as embarked on the course to reclaiming their humanity rather than as quite the finished article. More surprising is that their teachers are the Doctor and the Bible in, oddly, quite interconnected ways.
‘Colony in Space’ is the story that saw El Sandifer dub the Doctor a ‘science vicar’ (23), an especially apt description of his role in the novelisation. It does mean the Doctor is slightly peripheral to the story (a vicar’s not exactly starring role in the Gospels) but it also means that we start to see him have an effect that stretches beyond the end of the book – he doesn’t just help the colonists win but is formative in their view of what life after victory will be. Oddly, for a book that introduces him as a Time Lord, he does this not as an alien with a broader view of the universe or a greater technology but as an emissary from the past, reminding the colonists of a humanity that IMC’s Earth has erased from their memory.
Confronted with Ashe’s uncertainty at the Leesons’ burial, the Doctor encourages him to ‘say some nice things’ and ‘say that they did not die for nothing’ (24). This is to help them cope with death, which they have never experienced on their ‘computerised, sanitised Earth’ but also to ensure that, as well as grief, they look forward to ‘the continuation of life’ (25). This ties in with his reflections on how ‘Man first made out on Earth’ and brings Whitaker’s ideology on the state of life back into the Doctor Who book range: ‘He had to fight sabre-toothed tigers, rampaging mammoths, diseases of all sorts. He survived’ (26).
What made it striking in Whitaker’s Doctor Who is that you seemingly can’t be truly human until you embrace a burning desire for struggle rather than a simple acceptance of its necessity. Hulke, however, goes a stage further when he links this to faith. At the burial, the Doctor began the lesson by asking ‘What religion were they?’ (Ashe reveals a complete inability to even understand the question and future-humanity’s loss of religion is further emphasised when Ashe talks mystically of the Bible (27)) before passing on the very specific ceremony of scattering soil into the graves (28). The colonists’ salvation then comes as Ashe, who found the manner in which Jesus ‘sacrificed his own life for the sake of others’ so alien (29), imitates that act, relayed by Winton with Biblical echoes of He gave His son and he laid down his life for us (30), and is labelled ‘a saint’ by the Doctor for the act.
This might seem incidental were it not for the clear parallel drawn with the natives of the planet. The Primitives are set up as a degenerate mob (31) of heathens, pursuing ‘a lunatic religion’ (32) and idolatrously collecting dolls which resemble their god (33), who are saved by an act of self-sacrifice. Just as Ashe is Messianic because ‘He died so that we could live’ (34), the Guardian dies for the sins of others – ‘it creates evil […]. It must be destroyed. And therefore I must die’ (35) – and even sort of conquers death through his self-sacrifice: ‘The weapon has only brought death […] you must give up your own life so that others may survive’ (36).
Hulke is getting all New Testament on Whitaker’s Old Testament legacy. This can be seen in the colonists’ arrival, when ‘Some of the younger men, who had never possessed a gun before, wanted to shoot the Primitives’ at first sight (37). Here are the echoes of Doctor Who’s first novelisation, men with the weaponry so craved by Ian and actively eager to use it when confronted with the unknown. But Hulke presents another way: ‘Ashe had restrained them, and explained that they could and must live in peace with these strange people’. Life might be a struggle but victory comes not in winning the fight but in enduring and transcending it. Winton observes that ‘To get anything worth having, like freedom, sometimes you have to fight, and sometimes you have to die’(38) and it is the final clause that is Hulke’s addition to Whitaker’s worldview. Where Doctor Who in the 60s was concerned with survival, the 1970s brings a belief in something bigger, a struggle for ideals. IMC can win every battle but it fights simply to preserve itself, as its employees fight simply to manage their debt to IMC. It cannot win against a group whose members are willing to die in the pursuit of final victory.
Hulkisms
‘All the Earth animals had been systematically exterminated by Mankind by the year 2500’ – Systematically?? Is he saying people made a deliberate decision to wipe out all other animal life?
Making slash fic not just easy but basically canon since 1974
Oh, and this was apparently judged one of the ten most visual moments in the book
1 http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Doomsday_Weapon
2 http://epguides.com/DoctorWho/
3 ‘There have been two stolen, you know […] One of them nowadays calls himself “the Doctor”. The other says he is “the Master”’
4 ‘“even if he cannot control it, others sometimes can.” […] “what others? Who?” “Who? No, Who can’t control it... not always.” The old Keeper dropped his voice, and there was a faint smile on his 2,000-years-old lips’
5 ‘at the Security Training Establishment […] learning how to code and decode, how to speak two foreign languages, and how to read economic reports on wheat and oil production […] she was given top marks’
6 Specifically, in an odd child-like way: ‘“There really are spies,” she insisted earnestly' and ‘“I don’t call that being a spy,” she complained […] “You should have explained that a year ago,” she said. “I want an exciting job”’
7 There’s also more obvious evidence how much control they feel it’s right for them to have over people: ‘He had always remembered his father’s advice that the big corporations much preferred to choose the wives and husbands for their employees, so he hadn’t tried to find a wife’
8 ‘Finally he asked, “Do you know how much all this is going to cost me?” “I worked it out,” said the girl. “Even if they make you up to Captain in a year, with your earnings you’ll pay off IMC for all this in about twenty years’ time. But, of course, by then we’ll have moved to somewhere bigger, and there’ll be children, so I imagine you’ll be paying back IMC for just about the rest of your life!” She laughed’- was this already a preferred method for people smugglers back in the 70s?
9 ‘When he was a child his father had told him, “You’ve got to work hard at school and at university, and then you must get into one of the big corporations and stay there, and they’ll look after you.” He had listened to his father’s advice. He had never wanted to be like his uncle, a man who had changed jobs many times in his life and still had no real position in the world’
10 ‘Dent liked Morgan. Morgan was ambitious and totally unscrupulous. Dent felt you could always trust people like that’
11 ‘If there was one thing Dent hated it was people who could think and reason. It was that kind of person who always caused trouble. He dearly wanted to put a bullet through the Doctor as he stood there’
12 ‘“IMC always keeps to the law!” He knew this was totally untrue, but it was what he had been taught to say’
13 ‘“You’re nothing more than criminals,” Jo shouted. “We obey our orders,” said Allen. “There can’t be anything wrong in obeying orders”’
14 ‘Morgan knew that to do his job properly he had to hate the colonists’
15 ‘He was given six months’ training on spaceship maintenance; he studied day and night and never took the elevator up to the sunshine or went for Walks or attended parties’
16 ‘In his heart he had wanted to become an actor, but his father and mother told him that he ought to get work with one of the big corporations’
17 ‘Suddenly Norton realised how much it compared with an actor waiting to go on stage. There he was, standing in the wings, waiting for his cue. He could see the other actors already on stage, but he had to wait till exactly the right moment to make his entrance. He could see his most important ‘prop’, the big spanner that he most remember to pick up on entering. The only thing was an audience; but in the circumstances that was perhaps as well […] Holden whirled round. “What the—?” Then he saw the Primitive lying dead on the floor. “You must be crazy!” he yelled at Norton. “What do you think you’re doing?” Norton had found his audience—an audience of one startled man’
18 Earth in the 30th century: ‘Every square kilometre of land had been built over, with roads and monorails over-running the great sprawling built-up areas. This area, which extended everywhere, was twenty to thirty storeys deep, with linking corridors and escalatorways so that people could go shopping and get to work—all under cover, with fresh air sucked in by huge ventilators from above. As a special treat, on non-work days, you could pay to go up to the surface in an elevator and spend a few hours sitting on concrete in the sunshine. Another treat was to go for a Walk. This meant you paid to go into a special cubicle with a floor that rolled from one end of the cubicle to another. To stay in one place you had to keep walking. Meanwhile, all around you, there was a moving picture on the walls of passing grass and trees, and sometimes wild animals, films that came from the State Archives. To further the illusion they blew gusts of fresh air at you, sometimes with funny smells that were supposed to resemble those of animals and grass’ – first of all, the ‘Walk’ does basically sound like a gym. But more importantly the whole description leaves me wondering which of Charlie Brooker or Konnie Huq read this as a kid (see Black Mirror: ‘Fifteen Million Merits’, ideally on All4 if they’re still allowed to home it)
19 ‘By getting married they qualified for a room of their own. Previously she had had to share a room with her parents and three sisters. The marriage was conducted by a friendly computer that played music to them as well as announcing that their State records had been stapled together in the great Automatic State Personnel File, which meant they were then married. Then the computer gave them the key to their room, a cubicle just big enough for a double-bed, a shower, and a lavatory. They took one look at the room and decided they had to escape’
20 ‘“All colonists are eccentric,” said Dent, which was something he had once read in an IMC handbook on interplanetary sociology. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be colonists. They’re drop-outs from society”’
21 ‘they pressed on as best they could because they all had IMC living units back on Earth that they didn’t want to lose, and IMC wives, and their children were in IMC schools that were very exclusive, and if they got the duralinium from this planet they would all get good IMC bonuses. Above all, they hated all colonists because they were eccentric and didn’t conform to the society on Earth, and sometimes they smelt of sweat’
22 ‘The first days of sowing seeds brought great excitement because none of them had ever done physical work before’
23 ‘the Doctor is perfectly suited to the role of science vicar’ - a description so in keeping with the motifs of the novelisation I can’t help but wonder if memories of the novelisation were its inspiration (or if I’ve repeatedly missed a sentence which cites the novelisation as inspiration)
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/people-in-charge-of-those-laws-colony-in-space/
24 ‘“Now we have a service,” said the Doctor. “What religion were they?” “Religion?” said Ashe, not understanding. “You must stand here and say some nice things about them both,” said the Doctor, still in no more than a whisper. “You must say that they did not die for nothing.” “Why?” asked Ashe. “Because,” said the Doctor, “all these people standing here expect it. They don’t know that they expect it, because they’ve never met death before, not on your computerised, sanitised Earth”’
25 ‘you’ve got to learn more than how to sow seed and use a plough. With death, there has to be a time for tears, and then a time to rejoice in the continuation of life’
26 ‘“How do you think Man first made out on Earth?” asked the Doctor. “He had to fight sabre-toothed tigers, rampaging mammoths, diseases of all sorts. He survived”’
27 ‘something written thousands of years ago, and was largely about someone called God’
28 ‘The Doctor nodded, picked up some of the dug out soil in his hand and dropped it into first one grave then the other. Then the Doctor walked off quietly towards the main dome. Almost involuntarily Ashe did the same, picking up a few grammes of the powdery soil, and scattering them onto the corpses within the graves. Then he, too, walked away. One by one the other colonists did the same, scattering the soil of their planet onto their dead friends’
29 ‘a man who sacrificed his own life for the sake of others. It was this part of the book that most interested Ashe, because it was so difficult to understand. Why, he asked himself, should anyone willingly give his own life for other people?’
30 ‘“He gave his life for the sake of the rest of us. […] Maybe he was a bit crazy.” “Perhaps,” said the Doctor, “or a saint”’
31 ‘some degeneration set in in the life strain, and they never used it’
32 ‘the super-race have become the priests of a lunatic religion that serves machines which they think of as gods’
33 ‘“when one of them saw a doll of yours.” Mary had to think back. “Oh, that was ages ago. Yes, he got very excited and wanted to take it from use. I let him. That seemed to make him happy.” “What did he do with it?” the Doctor asked. “Held it to himself,” Mary said, “as if to protect it from of all people. Then he ran away with it”’
34 ‘John Ashe. We can’t bury him, but we can always remember him. He died so that we could live’
35 ‘It turned to the Doctor. “This man proves you are right. The Doomsday Weapon is not only evil, but it creates evil in others. It must be destroyed. And therefore I must die”’ – I would question whether the Doomsday Weapon was responsible for creating evil in others, especially considering our past experience of the Master
36 ‘“This invention,” said the Guardian slowly, “has destroyed us. Once the weapon had been built our race began to decay. The radiation from its power source poisoned the soil and even the upper atmosphere.” “Exactly,” said the Doctor. “The weapon has only brought death.” He pointed at the Master. “This man wants to spread that death throughout the Universe. Only you can stop him. You must destroy the weapon.” “I am the Guardian of the weapon, and its radiation gives me life.” “Then I am afraid,” said the Doctor, “you must give up your own life so that others may survive”'
37 ‘Then they saw the Primitives, and some of the women were terrified. Some of the younger men, who had never possessed a gun before, wanted to shoot the Primitives. Ashe had restrained them, and explained that they could and must live in peace with these strange people’
38 ‘To get anything worth having, like freedom, sometimes you have to fight, and sometimes you have to die’
Miscellania
‘Jane had heard of some of the terrifying creatures spaces travellers had found over the centuries—Monoids, Drahvins, some small metallic creatures called Daleks, and even from the bowels of Earth there had emerged once a race of reptile men .*’ – There Hulke goes, promoting his own work. Especially as the reptile men feel like such a tenuous addition to a list of ‘space’ threats.
He’s a world away from Whitaker’s Doctor now: ‘“it’s got a horrible face, like an animal.” “It might have a horrible face to you,” said the Doctor, “but to itself it might be rather good-looking”’