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)
"It was a colourful, barbaric scene"
DOCTOR WHO AND THE FACE OF EVIL
by Terrance Dicks
First published 19 January 1978 (1), between Underworld Parts Two and Three (2)
To be overdramatic for a moment, Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang seems to have unleashed something in Dicks. Actually, since Talons, this and Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock are, as well as being consecutive Dicks novelisations, all pretty close to each other in terms of TV broadcast and production, it’s difficult to say whether this is really something in Dicks or just something in the air around Doctor Who in 1977/8 that managed to transcend two producers and three writers. Anyway, where Talons broadly sought to manage the problems of the broadcast episodes, Doctor Who and the Face of Evil storms in and accentuates its story's problems.
The Sevateem are an odd bunch in the novelisation, even odder than on TV. It doesn’t help that Dicks on page one immediately labels them ‘colourful, barbaric’ (4) and ‘savage’ (5), not exactly inspiring confidence in how he’s going to handle the tribe. Swinging in completely the opposite direction to how Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang did just enough to gain the benefit of the doubt, this early onslaught of adjectives draws attention to the way Dicks’s Sevateem are animalistic, especially when Andor is introduced in terms that would equally suit a silverback or alpha chimpanzee, winning his throne by ‘strength and ruthless cunning’ and keeping it by the same means (6). Worse (maybe), Dicks doesn’t even follow through on the gorilla/chimp parallel. For example, though Leela is described in superlative terms (7) as a prospective mate, Andor reflects how ‘Many warriors had looked with favour’ on her (8), suggesting he’s not getting exclusive or even prioritised breeding rights. Okay, that would definitely actually be worse than what the book does offer, but the absence of any purpose to this detailing of the tribe's structure means that it sits as nothing but a poor descriptive choice (9).
This feels a far cry from the anti-imperialism that’s run through so many of Dicks’s Target contributions, but it’s not the whole story. As El Sandifer observes, the TV episodes mark ‘the first real step since Planet of the Spiders to present the Doctor as thoroughly fallible’ (10), and Dicks turns this into a critique of the Doctor as imperial explorer, the very model Hinchcliffe had suggested he was moving towards had he done a fourth season (11) and, frankly, something that had long, if not always, been an aspect of the Doctor’s character (12).
Doctor Who and the Face of Evil specifies that the Doctor’s first encounter with Xoanon took place during Doctor Who and the Giant Robot (13). At first glance, that might seem to absolve rather than hold to account the Doctor for his actions, suggesting his errors stemmed from ‘his new personality still not [being] fully established’ (14), his ‘hazy’ (15) memory of events framing them as if it was all the work of another man (16). However, such a distancing of himself from his earlier actions doesn’t quite wash. For a start, unlike on TV, this is no random landing, the novelisation strongly implying the Doctor himself subconsciously steered his ship here (17). Not only that, he has a niggling sense from the start that there’s some ‘purpose’ (18) to his landing; despite his poor memory of events and having left before Xoanon went rogue, he seems to know this is a situation that’ll need fixing (19).
On top of that, it’s a bit suspicious that this should be his first trip without Sarah, barring the Gallifreyan diversion that caused him to dump her. It's as if he knows he’s going to be confronted with a disaster of his own making and couldn't face the idea of her witnessing it. Indeed, more emphasis is placed on Sarah’s recent departure than onscreen (20), and the novelisation creates a furtive air around the way the Doctor kept his side-trip from his friends (21). This all feels more like a guilty secret than a barely recalled misadventure.
What’s significant in all this is that the Doctor’s actions on his first encounter with Xoanon, despite all the post-regenerative backstory and talk of fuzzy memory, sound very true to character; his presence was simply down to his ‘overwhelming urge to go off into the TARDIS and just disappear’ (22) and his error the result of the ‘careless expertise’ (23) he brought to the problem. That sounds a lot like the ‘colonial explorer’ Hinchcliffe envisaged, arriving in new places simply because he has the means and desire to do so and taking charge of a local situation he’s only just encountered and knows little about.
With the first Mordee adventure more clearly described, the Doctor’s off-hand comment that the problems might well result from this ‘own egotism’ feels rather less off-hand here than on TV (24), even with his suggestion that he ‘wasn’t quite [him]self’ at the time. Dicks reinforces this less flattering version of the Doctor's interventions, the Doctor having to concede the monument to his initial interference stares ‘arrogantly’ across the land he inadvertently created (25), as well as blithely noting of himself ‘He had never been particularly modest’ (26). On top of that, the prose lays bare the Doctor’s need for the attention of others, noticing Leela’s possession only because he’s ‘Hurt by her lack of response to his rather neat turn of phrase’ (27), and exposes a rather overbearing attitude to what’s ‘for the best’ for his friends (28). This is a Time Lord who swans about the universe simply to sate his own desire for thrills and to become the focus of events.
One of the things that’s interesting about all this is that Dicks is writing after the making of ‘Horror of Fang Rock’, when Tom Baker’s onset behaviour seems to have become very difficult (29). It’s tempting to read his tweaks, in that light, as a bit of Tom-bashing akin to his earlier Pertwee-bashing, but both are undermined by the detail that Dicks’s approach remains more-or-less consistent for both despite the differences between their onscreen Doctors.
El Sandifer gets to the nub of the point when she observes how the Target novelisations, and especially Dicks’s contributions, are more significant in forming ‘the Doctor’s default characterization’ than the TV series (30), revealing a lot ‘about the Doctor’s thought processes’ (31). While Tom Baker’s and, I’ll grudgingly admit, Jon Pertwee’s raw charisma often masked it onscreen, the show has never assumed the audience and the Doctor to share the same perspective. Often this is articulated as the Doctor being mysterious and unknowable, hence the need for the companion as an audience-identification figure (32), but it can also extend to the Doctor being wrong, needing the companion to keep him on the straight and narrow, most obviously in Hartnell’s early adventures with Ian and Barbara and again during the Russell T Davies era, explicitly so in the teaming of Tennant and Tate (33).
The issue in the mid-70s, as revealed by Dicks’s treatment of the Sevateem and his failure to completely erase the racism in ‘Talons’, was that the writers were seemingly more comfortable with the Doctor’s perspective than that of the worlds on which he landed or the people he met, which does rather blur matters.
1 Based on the Popular Television Series, ed. Paul Smith
2 epguides.com/DoctorWho
​
4 ‘It was a colourful, barbaric scene’
5 ‘the savage skin-clad warriors and the strange regalia of the elders’
6 ‘Andor tugged thoughtfully at his grizzled beard. He was a stocky man in his fifties, a grim experienced warrior. He had fought his way to the throne by strength and ruthless cunning. There was no succession by right in the Tribe of Sevateem. The shining throne, handed down from the Old Time, belonged to the man who could take it—and keep it’
7 ‘She was a fine strong girl, one of the bravest and fiercest of his warriors. Soon she would have married and had fine sons and daughters to serve the Tribe’ – what’s the benefit of her bravery and fierceness then? Just genes? Are bravery and ferocity predominantly genetic traits?
8 ‘Many warriors had looked with favour on Leela. But life was precious, and after all, there were other women’
9 Talking of breeding, I’m also curious about the statement that ‘The Sevateem were dwindling year by year’. Even accounting for a high infant mortality rate, which wouldn’t be an unreasonable assumption, that means ‘Hunting accidents, famine, disease, and above all the endless futile attacks upon the Wall’ consistently cost more lives than they’re able to produce. Maybe fair enough. But the tribe must be significantly larger than the original Mordee survey team, which means, though ‘the Tribe has been trying to get through the Barrier for generations’, they must, at some point, have not been trying to get through the barrier. Why did they start? Presumably because the voice of Xoanon at some point told an earlier Neeva-equivalent to do so, but does that mean that they hadn’t heard from Xoanon before that point? Were they particularly receptive to that voice on first contact because of half-forgotten stories of Xoanon that had been passed down since the original survey team? All of this can be sort of made to make sense, but it does unnecessarily draw attention to the artificiality of the Sevateem’s situation, especially the transitions from survey team to jungle tribe and from jungle tribe to fanatical followers of a mysterious voice.
10 ‘it marks the first real step since Planet of the Spiders to present the Doctor as thoroughly fallible, and the first time his fallibility has been defined in terms of its consequences for the people around him since The Massacre’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, eruditorumpress.com/blog/and-he-is-me-the-face-of-evil
11 See blog post for Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, specifically Hinchcliffe’s talk of ‘the Doctor being like a colonial explorer, with a pith helmet out in the jungles' in Morgan Jeffery, 'Doctor Who's former producer Philip Hinchcliffe reveals his plans for 'lost' season of Tom Baker stories', digitalspy.com/tv/cult/a860236/doctor-who-lost-stories-tom-baker-season-15 [25/06/2018]
12 To be honest, Dicks had always been keyed into this. El Sandifer’s citing of ‘Planet of the Spiders’ is significant here in that it was Dicks’s last story as script editor. You could argue that Dicks always saw the Doctor as an establishment, imperialist figure and ripe for criticism, which would certainly explain a lot of the apparent Pertwee-bashing in his third Doctor novelisations
13 ‘The Doctor stood staring into space, remembering. It had been somewhere near the beginning of that business with the Giant Robot’
14 ‘The Doctor had just undergone his latest regeneration. The early days of a new incarnation are always a tricky period for a Time Lord, and in this case the process had been hurriedly accelerated in order to save his life. He had been in a confused, irresponsible state, his new personality still not fully established’ – now that would be true Pertwee-bashing, suggesting the Doctor’s first encounter with Xoanon was his last act before Tom Baker came properly to the fore…
15 ‘Even now his memories of those first days were hazy’
16 ‘“Unfortunately I forgot to wipe my personality prints from the data core... or did I really forget? I forget if I forgot or not...” “You're not making yourself very clear, Doctor.” “Well, I wasn't quite myself at the time. It may just have been my own egotism”’
17 ‘Then he'd set course for Earth. Or had he? Had his fingers sent the TARDIS to some other destination, guided by some impulse deep in his unconscious mind’
18 ‘If he had brought himself back here for some purpose there was only one way to find out’ AND ‘he couldn't rid himself of the feeling that there was some purpose in his coming to this place. He strode on through the silent forest, hoping that this purpose, if there was one, would soon be revealed’
19 ‘Indeed, he himself had almost forgotten the strange dream-like interlude. But somehow his unconscious mind knew—and it had brought him back to this planet to undo the harm he had done’
20 ‘an obscure feeling of something missing. Of course! Sarah Jane Smith’
21 ‘Since the TARDIS had returned him to Earth within minutes of his departure, no one ever knew that he'd been away’
22 ‘There had been Sarah, and the Brigadier, and the problem of the Robot to grapple with... And all the time there had been this overwhelming urge to go off into the TARDIS and just disappear. One night the urge had been too strong and the Doctor had given way. He had sped off alone in the TARDIS to another time and another planet—this planet’
23 ‘He had found the colonists in trouble, repaired their computer with careless expertise and gone on his way—leaving, he now realised, a terrible legacy behind him’
24 DOCTOR: […] Unfortunately I forgot to wipe my personality print from the data core. Or did I really forget? I forget if I forgot.
LEELA: You're not making yourself very clear, Doctor.
DOCTOR: It may have been my own egotism
chakoteya.net/DoctorWho/14-4.htm
25 The carving of the Doctor’s face ‘stared arrogantly across the valley at him’
26 ‘He had never been particularly modest, but there was something rather embarrassing at seeing one's own colossally magnified features carved onto a mountain’
27 ‘Hurt by her lack of response to his rather neat turn of phrase, the Doctor looked up’
28 On Sarah’s departure: ‘it was more than time that she took up her own ordinary human life again. Yes, the Doctor decided, he'd acted for the best’
29 Lawrence Miles & Tat Wood, About Time 4; p.164 – especially ‘Baker and Jameson went head-to-head and director Paddy Russell removed all breakable objects’ and, as the director tried to ensure the story got filmed on time, ‘the star complained that his “Auntie Wyn” wouldn’t be able to see him […] Baker backed down, but he bitchily called Russell ‘sir’ from that point on’. In-Vision, Issue 24; p.4 – Paddy Russell: ‘Tom Baker was going through on [sic] of his phases where he was being difficult with everybody, including his fellow actors’ and ‘The first one I did with him [PYRAMIDS OF MARS], he listened. He wasn’t listening on HORROR OF FANG ROCK’; In-Vision, Issue 24; p.7 – still Paddy Russell: ‘He was desperately difficult to work with. His input got totally out of hand. His attitude to his fellow actors was extremely difficult, his attitude to his director was extremely difficult, and his attitude to the crew was extremely difficult […] Tom’s idea was to have that show to himself’
30 ‘so much of what we assume to be the Doctor's default characterization comes from the novels’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, eruditorumpress.com/blog/and-he-is-me-the-face-of-evil
31 ‘Dicks fills in reams of details about the Doctor's thought processes, talking about how "he'd set a course for Earth. Or had he? Had his fingers sent the TARDIS to some other destination, guided by some impulse deep in his unconscious mind" or reflecting openly on how the Doctor is lonely without Sarah there’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, eruditorumpress.com/blog/and-he-is-me-the-face-of-evil
32 Though I’m sure I’ve heard and read people specifically talking about the Doctor Who companion as the audience-identification figure of the series, the best I can find for the moment is a paraphrasing of Letts and Dicks’s thinking when replacing Liz Shaw with Jo Grant: ‘Liz Shaw […] had little need to rely on the Doctor for explanations and so, in their eyes, failed to fulfil the basic dramatic functions of aiding plot exposition and acting as a point of audience identification’
bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/season7.shtml
33 You could argue that the biggest problem with the Colin Baker era is the failure of the programme to lean on Peri as the means to guide the Doctor from ‘The Twin Dilemma’ back towards something more sympathetic, instead insisting that it should organically occur from somewhere entirely within himself, a lesson the Capaldi era perhaps learnt, with the Doctor and Clara both learning how to better be the Doctor from each other
Dicksisms
‘a strange, wheezing groaning sound broke the silence and a square blue shape materialised beneath the mighty trees’ AND ‘a wheezing, groaning noise shattered the calm of the forest as the square blue shape of the TARDIS faded away’
‘“I really must remember to overhaul that Tracer. I'll put a knot in my hanky...” He groped in his pockets and produced a red-spotted handkerchief—with a knot in one corner. “I wonder what that was for?”’
Height Attack
Leela is ‘tall, with brown hair’, the Doctor’s ‘a tall curly-haired man’ and Jabel is ‘tall and thin, white-haired with a thin, lined face’
Are You Sitting Comfortably..?
‘The Doctor was off on a new adventure—with a new companion!’
References I Didn’t Get
‘The Sidelian memory transfer’ – Oh, it’s nonsense…
Miscellania
‘Even his love was not strong enough to face almost-certain death’ – Is it just me or is there more than a little similarity between the names Andor and Andred? It’s hard not to notice, what with ‘The Invasion of Time’ coming up on telly soon. And does Andred risk almost certain death for Leela in that story? Is that why he’s able to get Leela to stick around when Andor’s son Tomas couldn’t?
‘Leela could face the prospect of her own death unafraid, but the thought that her rashness would destroy her father was more than she could bear’ – I’d forgotten all about that! It’s never really mentioned again
Needy Doctor: ‘he couldn't help feeling a little lonely...’
Tesh: ‘Despite the quiet voice and the friendly smile, he had the fierce, burning eyes of a fanatic’ – is it just me or does this really not come across on TV?
Just some nice Doctor/Leela bits: ‘The Doctor turned, saw the fallen body, and Leela's exultant grin […] The Doctor glared at her and Leela realised with some surprise that he was angry about the death of the guard’ AND ‘“Who gave you licence to slaughter? No more Janis thorns, you understand—ever.” Leela gave him a puzzled look, and they set off at a run’
‘When Xoanon's concentration wandered, his personality split into its divergent parts. It was like holding a conversation with an unruly crowd—a crowd of madmen’ – which sounds a lot like the inside of the Doctor’s mind as revealed in ‘The Invasion of Time’
A lovely line that I don’t think comes up on TV: ‘I will think you no longer, Doctor […] I will not think you’
And a sure sign that the Doctor is starting to view the universe through the prism of his own personality: ‘Now he knew Xoanon was cured. A sense of humour is the finest proof of sanity’