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)
"Now, inside it, was flesh, and the sensation was wonderful"
DOCTOR WHO AND THE GREEN DEATH
by Malcolm Hulke
First published 21 August 1975 (1), between Revenge of the Cybermen and Terror of the Zygons (2)
Height Attack
‘Hinks was over six feet tall’
First off, this is clearly Hulke doing Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon again but better. Like the farmers of the space colony, the Wholeweal Community seek to escape becoming ‘slaves of machines and industry and finance’ (3) and feel ‘starved of [what] a man needs to live like a man—’ (4); like IMC, Panorama Chemicals wish to turn people into little more than units for work, with ‘no further right to exist’ (5) when ‘of no further use’ (6), or consumption, buying synthetic muck from which the company warns its own employees away (7).
And now it’s set in the present day, so when Boss outlines his future where people work ‘For a number of hours each day’ and then ‘eat, or sleep, or sing merry songs’ the rest of the time (8), it’s difficult to ignore that that’s basically a description of an average workday – the ‘rat race’ Professor Jones seeks to escape (9). Plus there’s a new faction. If the Wholeweal Community mirror the colonists and Panorama Chemicals the IMC, then the working class community of Llanfairfach’s coalmine represent something that had been erased from the corporate-ruined future dystopia. This is the story of how they come to be erased, and it looks a lot like what was happening to Britain’s coalmines between the 1950s and the 1990s (10).
If you have any memory of the TV story, it’s very obvious that Hulke has a particular interest in the miners here as, in a radical departure from the script, he doesn’t treat them as little more than chirpy yet quaint, regional-accented-and-bugger-any-further-character-traits slime-fodder (though Bert has a nasty habit of switching between being Pritchard and Williams, so Hulke’s not exactly ultra-attentive). These miners deserve respect, partly because of the dangerous nature of their work (11) but mostly because they demand it. The Brigadier, possibly standing in for Sloman here, is forcibly reminded that ‘We’re not all savages in Wales’ (12) and patronised for his comparative ‘simplicity’ (13); Professor Jones and his Nut Hatch crew are told to sod off back to Cardiff (14); Panorama Chemicals are told to sod off back to England (15); and everyone is left in no doubt that ‘Mines are for miners’ (16) and there’s no way anyone else is taking charge on their domain (17).
Whilst Bert’s reflection that ‘some people get born in Buckingham Palace [and others] get born in a place like Llanfairfach’ (18) might sound like a lament upon circumstance, he is in fact asserting coalmining to be a pillar of British society equal to the monarchy, another ‘big family’ (19) to be celebrated. These men aren’t simply miners because ‘Someone has to get the coal’ (20) but because it’s ‘a wonderful feeling’ to belong to a community so exclusive ‘you had to have three generations of dead behind you in the village graveyard; above all, both you and they had to be miners’ (21). Professor Jones whimpers that he wants ‘to live like a man’; Bert got to ‘show the world [he was] a man’ on entering the mine.
The working classes are threatened not just by the obvious corporate foe of Panorama Chemicals but by a whole political and economic structure that marginalises them. First, they suffered bosses to ‘live off [their] backs’ (22), risking workers’ lives for their ‘profit’ (23); then, in search of better pay and conditions in 1926, they were starved into submission by bosses and government (24); now the mines are being closed by distant, faceless strangers (a point hammered home by the repetition of ‘economists in London’ (25&26)) for reasons that are alien to the communities affected (25) – hence the gap between ‘proved’ in sceptical inverted commas and the observation that ‘There was still ample coal’ (26).
But multi-nationals are clearly the greatest threat. These are people who view ‘Wars’ and ‘people going on strike for higher wages’ as equal evils (27), who screwed ‘South American coffee bean producers’ despite their certainly far from ‘grasping demands’ (28) and who’ve happily settled in Ethiopia (despite civil war), Persia (despite the Shah) and Saudi Arabia (despite the oil embargo) (29). Marx and Engels told ‘Proletarians of all countries [to] unite’ (30) but the corporations have got there first and they’re not giving an inch. Not even ‘the hint of dispute’ is permitted (31). Even the Brigadier, a UN soldier, is reduced to being ‘told what to do by international business companies’ (32).
Boss’s great scheme to eradicate dissent is to make everyone ‘happy and well-fed’ (33). As Yates points out, this doesn’t sound so bad. However, this is a computer that’s terminated people for resistance to its programming and no longer being useful to Panorama Chemicals, so it’s not a surprise that ‘obedience’ is key to this offer (34). Looking at how those hypnotised by Boss are reduced to babbling strings of political and religious soundbytes (35), it’s hard not to be reminded, especially considering how Hulke was once a Communist party member (36), that ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature […] and the soul of soulless conditions’ (37) – Boss is offering ‘eternal slavery’ through hollowed-out passivity.
And then there’s all the Nazi phrases (38). Boss is Hitler, not only declaring ‘One world, one people, one Boss!’ (39) but also prompting Stevens to recall ‘Adolf Hitler screaming hysterically, “Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fuhrer!”’ (40). This might feel like Hulke reaching for the nuclear option when it comes to making your villains villainous but there is some substance to the parallel – Boss’s ‘prime directive’, presumably to maximise the profits of Panorama Chemicals, has led to his desire to take over the world and subjugate all its peoples to that purpose (41).
What’s more, were Hulke’s aim just to prod the reader to view Boss as bad, then Panorama’s employees would probably be portrayed as blank-faced followers. Instead, they’re a catalogue of the behaviours that allow something like Nazism to happen. Stevens is introduced as a knock-off Neville Chamberlain, holding up a piece of paper and declaring ‘Wealth in our time!’ (42), reminding the reader of the political appeasement that precedes conquest. Hinks is thug (43) who looks forward to ‘The prospect of any kind of violence’ (44), the type who signs up to the brownshirts to assert their status through intimidation. Elgin is more mundane, promoting tyranny for a nice salary and a big office (45). Dr Bell, meanwhile, is the amoral scientist who believes he’s noble, and acts nice enough on occasion, but is motivated by the quest for personal ‘achievement’, viewing matters such as the safe disposal of his own waste as a ‘problem’ to be left to those more menial (46), rather than the world’s improvement.
The miners aren’t just the canary warning against a future dystopia but an instruction manual on how to avoid one. Their ‘friendly world’, where people ‘live together, […] die together, and […] go on strike together’, is one which gives them the strength to resist, even if resistance is as futile as in 1926. By contrast, Bell, who has to be reminded ‘to go home to his wife and children’ (47), Elgin, who has shed his ‘working-class background’ because he considers himself ‘superior’ thanks to ‘being bright at examinations’ (48), and Stevens, ‘deserted’ by his family (49), whose only ‘friend’ is a computer (and even that friend is in inverted commas (50)), are adrift, able to be picked off by Boss for use in its schemes.
And now Hulke has made the people of Llanfairfach more prominent than their environment, Professor Jones doesn’t look quite such the catch he did on TV. He starts the story as ‘an impractical dreamer’ (51) living in his own little ivory tower ‘on the edge’ of the community (52). The villagers resent his attempts to ‘tell [them] what to do’ because of his ‘university education’ (53) and find his lifestyle choices (54), his spoken Welsh, learnt ‘out of a book’ and delivered with a ‘stupid Cardiff accent’ (55), and his financial means (56) utterly alien. And good on them frankly because the little shit’s decided the problem is that they’re ‘too ignorant to understand him’ (57) rather than that he’s failed to actually engage with them. On the other hand, Jones is practically welcomed by Stevens, who reflects on his ‘celebrated enemy’ with ‘pride’ (58) because it makes Panorama Chemicals a Nobel Prize-level organisation. That ‘Dr Stevens was always impressed with success because he was a snob’ (59) quietly establishes that this is the type of success he understands, appreciating it even in an adversary.
The moment Jones starts to come right, the moment the villagers start to accept him (60), follows a conversation with the Brigadier where the professor articulates the difference between the theoretical and the practical and comes down on the side of the latter (61). He demonstrates that, unlike Dr Bell or the economists in London, he’s concerned with what actually happens in the real world rather than what can be achieved in the laboratory or on a spreadsheet. That, and he finally engages with doing something about the miners’ deaths.
And Jones isn’t alone. In fact, he’s following in the wake of Jo Grant. Back when she was introduced in Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, she was also a character on the Stevens/Jones side of the social divide, walking into a job at a top-secret organisation thanks to her uncle’s string-pulling. Though competent enough to get ‘top marks’ at spy school, she also existed in a fantasy world, insisting on ‘an exciting job’ rather than the ‘dull, routine’ trappings of actually getting some work done in Bangkok. This is linked to her being pretty much one year out of school (‘the day she left school’ she interviews to be a spy and then spends ‘a year […] training’) when she joined UNIT, making her 17-ish, 19-ish or even 16-ish if she left school before 1973 (which is plausible as the book was published in 1974 and the character had debuted on TV in 1971). She was as close to a child role as you could get without the character being a child.
Doctor Who and the Green Death opens with her having grown up. Where Doctor Who and the Giant Robot ended with Sarah joining the Doctor in embracing that there’s ‘No point in being grown-up if you can’t be childish’ and buggering off to the stars, here Jo tells him off for not acting like an adult – failing to read the newspaper (62) , ignoring his responsibilities to UNIT (63) and not following workplace procedures (64) – and is entirely disinterested in Tardis travel (65), insisting her ‘place is here on Earth’ (66). The scene is pretty much lifted from TV, right down to Jo munching on an apple. Taking this a bit of Garden of Eden imagery, this can be taken as a hint at Jo’s sexual awakening, hence her sudden interest in a ‘younger’, shaggable Doctor (67), but it also symbolises knowledge. This is where Hulke’s adjustments to Professor Jones pay off. Where on TV, Jo’s departure looks rather like an excruciating passing from father-figure to lover, in the novelisation there’s a greater sense that her experience is something he needs – indeed, when Jones suggests she’s too young to help him, she points to her time with the Doctor as evidence that she can (68).
She’s the one who first wonders off to investigate the mines while Jones (69), who was actually present at the discovery of the first green corpse and seems to have a pretty good idea what caused it (70), is too busy fiddling with his fungus to bother. His engagement with the deaths and so his acceptance by the villagers follows her lead. She’s also responsible for directing him to the solution to the green death, albeit by the happy accident of tipping a load of fungus over his samples. This second detail might seem a stretch but the fact that it’s a slightly undignified accident is important. In a trick pulled from Dicks, the companion’s actions mirror those of the Doctor. Obviously, he can never resist sticking his nose in a mystery, so much so that the Brigadier feels the need to beg him not to ‘involve’ himself in anything (71) before leaving him unsupervised, and his solution to one of the other problems in the story, Boss’s influence over people, is the blue sapphire he serendipitously has (72) from his completely unconnected, ludicrous and rather undignified excursion to Metebelis Three (73).
It would have been easy to view Doctor Who and the Green Death as a bit of a hatchet job (74), what with sidelining the story’s environmental concerns, giving the miners a bit of dignity and juxtaposing Jo’s newfound maturity with the Doctor’s Metebelis Three runaround, but it’s not quite that. For a start, as said above, Jo’s newfound maturity is directly connected with her time with the Doctor. But Hulke also seems determined to signify Jo’s outgrowing her life with the Doctor with traits easily associated with Sarah – Jo makes a point of reading the news, Sarah is a journalist; Jo suddenly discovers ‘women’s liberation’ (75), a key cry of Season 11 (especially ‘The Time Warrior’ and ‘The Monster of Peladon’). Jo’s departure can’t really be read as a criticism of the series, a suggestion that the show can’t handle her no longer being a child, when her replacement’s starting point is noticeably at least as grown-up as she is becoming.
Furthermore, the Doctor’s childishness is not immaturity. Going back to that scene at the end of Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, the Doctor’s desire to be childish is very different to Stevens’s lament at ‘the responsibilities of a man’ and desire to retreat from adulthood (76). He and Sarah run away because of their shared sadness following the destruction of the robot, something the Doctor ‘had to do’ and so did despite his qualms. And theirs was a sadness no one else shared because no one else made the effort to understand the robot as anything other than a threat.
A similar situation is presented here, when the Doctor mourns killing a giant fly and Benton expresses confusion over how ‘He’s always so sorry in the end for the horrible creatures we come across’ (77). But this time, Hulke makes an effort to put the reader on the same page as the Doctor. A whole section is devoted to a maggot’s point of view, showing how they are just creatures that want to survive(78) and to sate the overwhelming hunger they suffer (79) in the same way and with the same ‘right to live’ (80) as other less fantastical creatures (if the mouse is anything to go by (81)). By the time the Doctor is driving ‘about the slag heap, slaughtering maggots with fungus’ (82), those readers are ready to accept that ‘slaughtering’ isn’t an entirely inappropriate word for what’s happening and can appreciate the sense that this is a ‘scene of carnage’ (83).
The point is that the Doctor doesn’t just solve problems, he engages with them. This contrasts with Stevens, trained by ‘his minor public school’ to just smile and wave and get on with things ‘when he couldn’t understand something’ (84), and Stevens, crucially, is the main villain of the piece, not Boss, who the Doctor completely ignores in the final confrontation. The chief danger isn’t the ‘megalomaniac’, it’s the social structures that promote and appease business at the expense of communities. And, in an echo of the TV episodes’ environmental concerns, the solution is to sweep the mind clean of corporate influence (85) just as the land must be cleared of their effluent, and to insist that those structures exert ‘control’ (86) rather than just going through the motions (87).
None of this is a huge change to ‘The Green Death’, and Tat Wood’s suggestion that the novelisation tackles the scripts difficulties (88) feels more accurate than Sandifer’s description of it fixing them (by which I suspect she means the same thing, but I need an artificial tension here). The extent of the ‘naivety’ Wood identifies Hulke as reacting against (89) is that the story focused on a symptom of society’s problems rather than their cause. It’s an odd effect. Where Target has started to resemble a proto-DVD range and been recreating old stories with increasing fidelity, Hulke has rounded up all the bits he knows people actually remember, basically Wales, maggots and Jo’s departure, and rewritten the story around them because he knows this is the version that will actually get revisited and remembered. He may have walked away from the TV series over two years before but he’s not finished with Doctor Who yet.
Tory Who
‘She felt rather sorry for the Doctor, and wondered why he had never married’
Hulkisms
No wheezing and groaning for Mac: ‘Jo heard the sound of the TARDIS dematerialising, like the trumpeting of a thousand wild elephants’
‘Using hyperdrive, passing through Time and space, the TARDIS had travelled the two million light years in nil-time’
‘The result could be universal pollution’ - ????
Just because it’s lovely: ‘the old sadness came over him. He looked up and down the section of gallery where he was sitting, thinking back on the old times when the mine had been worked and was full of his friends. There was no one to talk to now’
‘“It’s really like being a member of another nation,” she said. Bert got to his feet. “That’s exactly how it is, miss. There’s us down here, and there’s them up there”’ – workers of the world, unite!
Hinks, the overgrown school bully: ‘There was nothing much to do, so he had made himself a cup of tea and was now reading one of his comics. He had a big collection of comics, mainly American, most of them full of pictures that told stories. He preferred pictures to words because he could not read very fast, although he tried to keep this a secret. Hinks had looked through the picture story many times before, but it always fascinated him to go through it again’ - I suspect their being specified as ‘American’ is Hulke’s cementing this as a downmarket pastime alongside its description as a ‘picture story’
‘“Good grief,” said the Doctor. “Adolf Hitler said something on those lines. He lost the Second World War, you know?”’ – why do so many Who writers view Hitler as little more than a bounder?
1 tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Green_Death_(novelisation)
2 http://epguides.com/DoctorWho/
​
3 ‘We want to be human beings again—not slaves of machines and industry and finance’
4 ‘those of us who do have enough food are starved of everything else a man needs to live like a man—’
5 ‘“You are useless and have no further right to exist.” Like an automaton Dr Bell stood up from the chair. “I am useless, and have no further right to exist”’
6 ‘The harsh voice of Boss suddenly spoke from above. “The processing was a failure. This man is of no further use. I suggest self-destruct”’
7 ‘But it will make money for Panorama Chemicals. Sell it but don’t drink it’
8 ‘“You will become a slave,” said Dr Stevens. “You will have no mind or will of your own. But, like any well-cared-for animal, you will be very happy. For a number of hours each day you will work, and for the rest of the day you will eat, or sleep, or sing merry songs. And you will have no worries about anything.” “God gave Man the right of free will”’ – Hearing Yates blithely refer to God is quite odd and reminds me how religious Hulke appeared to be in Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon
9 ‘“I agree that we’ve escaped from the rat race coming here,” he went on, “the city pressures and the foul air. But we are trying to do things that may help the whole world”’
10 I hadn’t really been aware of the pre-Thatcher mine closures (and am barely more aware now, though I did check out some figures at www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historical-coal-data-coal-production-availability-and-consumption-1853-to-2011 thanks to a link I found at www.conservativehome.com/leftwatch/2013/04/wilson-closed-more-coal-mines-than-thatcher.html (I should point out that I get the impression Labour always closed mines through the NCB and in agreement with the NUM. This isn’t how it was done in the 80s)) nor that 1972 had been the first official miners’ strike since 1926 (according to www.agor.org.uk/cwm/themes/events/1972_1974_strikes.asp) though I had known about the Heath-toppling strike of 1974. However, even now I’m not too clear on why Wales was the obvious choice for this particular story. Though coalmining in Wales was seemingly ‘unrenumarative’, Gresford Colliery appears to have been the only mine in that area to have closed during the early 1970s and that was apparently ‘due to a combination of exhaustion of existing coal reserves and geological problems’ (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresford_Colliery#In_memoriam)
11 ‘“Eight years ago next November. I’d just finished my snap—lunch, as you would call it. Then a section of the roof came down. We didn’t see daylight again for the next two days.” “But you were all safe?” This time he shook his head, his helmet light playing horizontally to and fro across the mine wall. “Six of us never saw daylight again”’
12 ‘We’re not all savages in Wales, you know. We’ve got telephones, just like you English’
13 ‘Dave shook his head at the simplicity of this English non-miner’
14 ‘NUTTERS GO BACK TO CARDIFF’
15 ‘‘Free Wales’, ‘English Out!’, and ‘Jobs for Coal Miners’’
16 ‘Mines are for miners’
17 ‘where pit rescue is concerned, I’m in charge’
18 ‘There’s some people get born in Buckingham Palace, and they becomes kings and queens, because that’s the family occupation. Us, we get born in a place like Llanfairfach, where our fathers and uncles all go down the pit. When you’re old enough you go down too, to show the world you’re a man’ - and though the story does concede that coalmining’s time has probably passed, I suspect Hulke felt much the same about the royal family
19 ‘“When you’re a miner you are part of one big family, and that’s a wonderful feeling. Every man in the pits knows his life depends on the other men. We live together, we die together, and”—he grinned broadly—“by goodness if the people up top don’t treat us right, we go on strike together!”’
20 Jo: ‘Someone has to get the coal’
21 ‘you had to have three generations of dead behind you in the village graveyard; above all, both you and they had to be miners’
22 ‘“The workers have always had bosses,” said Dai Evans, “people who live off our backs”’
23 ‘“‘Uneconomic to have more than one shaft,” said Dave, waiting for Mr Owen to come to the telephone. “The old private owners were in coal for profit, weren’t they?”’
24 ‘The memory of the General Strike in 1926 was still with many of them. For seven bitter months the coal miners had remained on strike until finally they were defeated because they had no food’
25 ‘Economists in London had made a calculation, and the friendly world of Ted Hughes had been brought to an end’
26 ‘Llanfairfach Colliery, in a mountainous part of Wales, had been closed for some time. No one in the village saw the sense of this—particularly the miners who had spent their lives hewing coal from the pit. There was still ample coal down there, enough for another hundred years of mining. But government economists in London had ‘proved’ it was better business to buy oil overseas than to mine coal here in Britain’
27 ‘it causes so much trouble. Wars, people going on strike for higher wages, all sorts of social problems’ – I can’t decide whether this is just Hulke undermining the villain or if he’s juxtaposed the two to suggest the real war is the class war
28 ‘Panorama’s answer to the grasping demands of South American coffee bean producers’
29 ‘Panorama Chemicals always tries to be a good neighbour. Our plant in Ethiopia has distributed thousands of tons of grain to the starving. In Persia and Saudi Arabia all local employees have free classes to learn to read and write their own languages’ - Just to put that list of countries in context: Haile Salassie’s Ethiopia suffered famine in 1973 (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1753-4887.1977.tb06598.x/abstract) and erupted into civil war in 1974 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Civil_War); Iran was subject to the US-supported Shah at the time, whose opulence had been recently displayed through a fantastically over-ostentatious party in 1971 (www.alimentarium.org/en/magazine/history/most-expensive-party-ever); the only reason I can think of for the inclusion of Saudi Arabia is its membership, alongside Iran, of OPEC, responsible for the 1973-4 Oil Embargo (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis) – maybe a comment on using commodities as a tool to influence other countries’ policies..?
30 ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’
Marx and Engels. The Communist Manifesto (quoted from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers_of_the_world,_unite!)
31 ‘This country cannot afford to have an argument, or even the hint of a dispute, with Panorama or with any other multi-national company that’s good enough to have its plants here’ – though this turns out not to actually be the Minister of Ecology, just an imitation so I’m not sure how effective the attack is (‘Imitation of Minister’s voice on telephone first class’)
32 ‘“I recall a time, Dr Stevens, when Great Britain could regard itself as a sovereign state, answering to no one but its elected Parliament and its monarch,” the Brigadier said. “Now, it seems, we can be told what to do by international business companies”’ – Jason Miller suggests Hulke is attacking the Brigadier for patriotic sentiments similar to those lambasted in Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters (‘the Brigadier retains a touch of hard-right nationalism, in a way that most of us who read this book while growing up thought would just be a quaint memory in 2017’ - Jason Miller, Doctor Who Novels, drwhonovels.wordpress.com/2017/02/23/for-that-lean-mean-mean-green) but I’m not so sure. Having put kings and queens and coalminers on an equal par, Hulke is unlikely to think it preferable that both are now ‘told what to do by international business companies’. That way IMC lies
33 ‘“They’ve got a mad scheme to create an ordered world society with everyone happy and well-fed.” “What’s wrong with that?” asked Yates. “Their price of plenty is eternal slavery’”
34 ‘“People must have free will.” “Never,” shrieked Boss. “It makes them sad. They want order and obedience, Stevens. I shall order and they will be obedient”’
35 Elgin: ‘Peace in our time. Sheep shall safely graze’. Plus the Doctor mimicking Boss’s hypnotisees effectively: ‘“For increased efficiency,” said the Doctor. “For improved-balance-of-payments, let-my-people-go, strength-through-joy, peace-in-our-time”’
36 ‘Despite checking with a number of archives, I have been not able to establish exactly when, and for how long, he was in the Communist Party of Great Britain but it seems to have been in the 1950s. He may have left the party in 1956, as thousands did, when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and crushed the uprising with tanks. His politics remained on the left, though, unlike other former party members who moved to the right, and this view of the world was reflected in his writing’
37 ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people’
Marx, Karl, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie/Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people)
38 ‘Thou shalt not kill... exterminate... Jesus saves... final solution...’ – perhaps interestingly, I doubt the Daleks even crossed Hulke’s mind – AND ‘“God is love,” mumbled Dr Bell. “Today Europe, tomorrow the world”’ PLUS ‘“Every time I hear the word “culture” I reach for my gun,” Dr Bell babbled. “The meek shall inherit the Earth”’
39 ‘As from tomorrow the whole world will be united for the first time in history. One world, one people, one Boss!’
40 ‘Dr Stevens remembered as a little boy tuning his father’s radio into a Nazi station and hearing Adolf Hitler screaming hysterically, “Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fuhrer!”’
41 ‘“I am now self-controlling, self-sufficient. I am the greatest being this planet has ever seen. I am the Boss.” “I see you have a touch of human-like egotism,” remarked the Doctor, amused. “Of course! I am a megalomaniac. This uniquely fits me to carry out my prime directive.” “And what is that?” asked the Doctor. “Today Llanfairfach,” said Boss, demonstrating an excellent Welsh pronunciation, “tomorrow the world”’
42 ‘“I have here in my hand,” he said slowly and loudly, “a paper which will mean a great deal to all of you.” He paused for dramatic effect, then called out: “Wealth in our time!”’ – I don’t quite get the Neville Chamberlain thing here. Is Hulke having some fun at the locals’ expense? Is Stevens having fun at the locals’ expense? Or is Hulke having fun at Stevens’s expense? Is it a hint that, in accepting Panorama Chemicals’s terms, the locals are letting the enemy in? But that doesn’t work because it’s Stevens who has the Chamberlain-style piece of paper, not the locals. Actually, what might work, and I thought of this late in the day, is that it’s deliberately placing Stevens as the appeaser who lets the Hitlerian Boss in – except the paper’s not from Boss and Stevens is basically Boss’s subordinate and Chamberlain wasn’t in Hitler’s thrall. All of which aside, it’s still an odd echo unless Hulke is suggesting that Chamberlain was somehow seeking to con the public into war through his dedication to peace despite the traumatic experience of losing his brother to the First World War, though it might actually be a valorisation of Chamberlain’s pursuit of peace compared to the contemporary obsession with ‘Wealth’. What it does do, I guess, is reinforce the idea that government has nothing but appeasement to offer in the face of big business but it feels a bit oversignified for just that
43 ‘Dr Stevens reminded himself, the price he paid to keep Panorama Chemicals secure from hot-heads like Professor Jones was to employ thugs like Hinks’
44 ‘The prospect of any kind of violence always made Hinks grin’
45 ‘You ask too many questions. Don’t you earn enough money? Isn’t your office big enough?’
46 ‘What fascinated Dr Bell was the scientific achievement. The method resulted in tons of waste fluid, and this would have to be deposited somewhere. But Dr Bell did not regard that as his problem’
47 ‘“Dr Bell is our scientific and technical officer,” Dr Stevens explained. “Very meticulous worker, an idealist in his way. Many’s the time I’ve had to tell him not to work all night—to go home to his wife and children”’
48 ‘Elgin came from a working-class background himself, but through being bright at examinations had gone to university, and now considered himself superior to others less fortunate’ - and specifically not ‘being bright’
49 ‘Years ago he had enjoyed climbing mountains. But now his family had all deserted him, leaving a gap in his life that could only be filled by work’
50 ‘Perhaps it was kinder to leave Dr Stevens to die with the computer, the only ‘friend’ he had ever trusted’
51 The Brig on Dr Jones: ‘He’s an impractical dreamer’
52 ‘on the edge of the village of Llanfairfach’
53 Dai Evans: ‘It’s all right for you to tell us what to do, boyo, with your university education’
54 ‘You can afford to live the way you want to. We need jobs. We don’t want to live on nuts’
55 ‘stop talking Welsh with that stupid Cardiff accent. You only learnt it out of a book. You know half of us have forgotten how to speak it’
56 ‘none of us has got himself tens of thousands of pounds winning a Nobel Prize’
57 ‘He earnestly wanted to help the villagers—to help everybody—and it threw him off his stroke when they were too ignorant to understand him’ – Bloody hell, it’s the post-Brexit view of the people 40 years early
58 ‘“He won a Nobel Prize, you know?” He added this with some pride, as though it reflected on him personally to have such a celebrated enemy’
59 ‘Dr Stevens was always impressed with success because he was a snob’
60 ‘speaking in Welsh to show that he now accepted Professor Jones as one of the villagers’
61 ‘a direct relationship. But nothing you can prove in a laboratory. It’s the same with the green death and Panorama Chemicals. We know that no one in Llanfairfach, or anywhere else, went green and died before Panorama Chemicals arrived’
62 ‘Why don’t you read the newspaper sometimes?’
63 ‘What if you’re needed here?’
64 ‘Have you asked the Brigadier’s permission to take leave?’
65 ‘“I’m preparing the TARDIS to travel to Metebelis Three.” Jo asked, “Whatever for?”’
66 ‘My place is here on Earth, Doctor’
67 ‘In a way he reminds me of a... well, a younger you’
68 ‘“how do you propose to help Professor Jones? You’re not old enough.” Jo was outraged but tried not show it. “I’ve been assistant to an eminent scientist for some time, you know”’
69 ‘as soon as the meal was over they all went back to their various occupations. The Nut Hatch was a hive of activity, where these young people spent their time evolving alternative methods of production and living […] Everyone was far too busy to involve her, or even talk to her. Burning with curiosity about the man who died and went green, she decided to go and look at the mine’
70 “The process must be based on Bateson’s polymerisation. And that means thousands of gallons of waste. A thick sludge you can’t break down, like liquid plastic.” He paused. “I think it’s connected with the death of Ted Hughes”’
71 Brig: ‘Doctor, we’ll be back as quickly as possible. I trust you will not involve yourself in anything between now and then that might possibly upset the status quo’
72 ‘my trip to Metebelis Three wasn’t wasted after all’
73 And boy is it undignified. When the Doctor does go off on his ‘little holiday’ to Metebelis Three, Hulke throws everything at portraying it as an increasingly ludicrous side-jaunt. It starts off with the Doctor excited to have finally reached his exotic, magical destination, where even the flowers turn to greet him, and then quickly turns sour as first the flowers attack him and then the butterflies attack him and then the ground plants attack him (with tentacles!) and then the birds attack him and then, since none of that’s remotely farcical enough, heralded by the sound of hooves, ‘a herd of blue unicorns’ rampage up the valley to attack him. What’s more, throughout the whole business, the reader is constantly reminded that everything is ‘blue’ (no other adjectives required) just to emphasise how the Doctor is very much not getting on with dealing with the green death: ‘As the Doctor approached the flowers they turned their heads towards him, as though in greeting. Then their petals opened to the full, and from inside each flower came a venomous hissing sound. The butterfly rose up and flew straight at the Doctor’s face. Droplets of venom struck the Doctor’s hands and face, stinging him. Alarmed, the Doctor stepped back. A ground plant with straggling blue tentacles wrapped itself around his right ankle. As he dragged his foot away, three enormous blue birds swept down at him from the sky, squawking and trying to nip at his face with their blue beaks. The Doctor raised his hands to fight them off. One of the birds bit his finger. From further down the valley came the pounding of hooves. He turned to see a herd of blue unicorns bearing down upon him’ and ‘The Doctor ran for his life, pursued by blue birds, blue unicorns, and spat at with venom by blue flowers’ - I wish it were blue venom. AND just in case you’re still in any doubt about the intended comic tone of the Metebelis Three side-jaunt, it’s bookended by the Doctor’s pleasant anticipation of the visit based on the Time Lord brochure and his irate reflection on the inaccuracies of their write-up and features at its heart a pointed bit of comic understatement where he reflects that ‘His holiday was not turning out quite as he had hoped’ while running for his life: ‘No space traveller had landed there in three hundred thousand years since a lone Time Lord stayed for a few hours and wrote up the report that was later filed by the Time Lords’ and ‘“‘Wait till I tell the Time Lords about this,” he said to himself. “It’s the most unfriendly planet I’ve ever visited”’ – it’s like Thomas Cook sent him to a half-finished resort in Magaluf. Or, basically, Carry on Abroad
74 That potential hatchet job is well articulated by Elizabeth Sandifer at Tardis Eruditorum, who reads ‘The War Games’ as issuing a ‘challenge’ for Doctor Who to ‘face reality’ and the Pertwee era as completely not rising to that challenge: ‘It's time to break up the band. It's time to face the reality that the bad guys aren't external monsters, but the people who want to send riot police to crush the sex deviants planting flowers. It's time, in other words, to face reality […] The real test is how you can live as a mystic in the real world. The Doctor, like psychedelia, failed. Now it's time to come back down to Earth’ (www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/tied-to-one-planet-the-war-games) AND ‘Hulke was also one of the writers who laid down the basic challenge of the Pertwee era back in The War Games - involvement in more than just blowing up monsters. Instead he's been stuck writing for an era that prefers star turns, showboating, and visual spectacle to serious looks at society, even when it's doing earthbound stories. Even when the show does take on real political issues, it's generally been with ham-handed disastrousness, as with The Green Death, another story Hulke fixed in novelizing’ (www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/books-the-best-weapons-in-the-world-invasion-of-the-dinosaurs)
75 ‘People say “man-made” as though men are the only people who ever make anything. There are also women, and I’m one of them’ - and if ever there was a Doctor Who character who needed to develop a basic feminist awareness, it’s the Jo of the novelisations. PLUS ‘After that, you’ll never believe that I support women’s liberation, will you? But please try to pardon a slip of the tongue’
76 ‘Dr Stevens had enjoyed studying history when he was a boy at school. Sometimes he wished he was still there. But now he was a man and had the responsibilities of a man’
77 ‘I’ll never understand the Doctor. He’s always so sorry in the end for the horrible creatures we come across. It isn’t human’
78 ‘Now all the fluid was gone, and if the maggot was not to die it had to escape. Instinctively it arched its back, heaving against the walls of the egg’
79 ‘It also realised it was very hungry, and that it now had to find its own food’ AND ‘the desire for food made it forget all danger’ PLUS ‘The maggot watched, fascinated, and ravenously hungry. But instinct told it not to move. It remained absolutely still, despite the gnawing pangs of hunger in its digestive system’
80 ‘Whatever they were, they thought they had a right to live’
81 ‘It was, the mouse thought, some-thing that could be eaten, for it too was hungry’
82 ‘the Doctor continued to drive about the slag heap, slaughtering maggots with fungus’ – just pause and appreciate the majesty of that sentence. Out of context, ‘slaughtering maggots’ is an odd and melodramatic phrase but the weirdness of ‘with fungus’ is a whole other level. It’s so off-hand that it of course reads as comical but ‘slaughtering’ is just too weighty a word to completely dismiss. It jars beautifully
83 ‘He started Bessie’s engine, and slowly drove away from the scene of carnage’
84 ‘Dr Stevens smiled, as he had been taught to smile at his minor public school when he couldn’t understand something’
85 ‘your mind will be locked on to the crystalline pattern, the neural paths of your brain will be swept clean, and you will be free!’
86 ‘Don’t let the computer control you, man! It’s only a machine. You should be the one in control. Look at the stone!’
87 ‘“You do want everyone to be happy, don’t you?” […] Then he gave the reply he hoped would please Boss’
88 ‘tackling difficulties which the original script papered over’
Tat Wood, About Time 3 (expanded 2nd edition)
89 ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ was written while ‘The Green Death’ was being broadcast and Wood sees it as ‘almost […] a rejoinder to its [The Green Death’s] perceived naivety’
Tat Wood, About Time 3 (expanded 2nd edition)
Are You Sitting Comfortably..?
‘Unnoticed by either of them, the powdery brown fungus had started to envelop and destroy the traces of green maggot slime on to which it had fallen’
References I Didn’t Get
‘Using great thongs to lift the maggots, UNIT soldiers were putting the carcasses into sacks to clear the slag heap’ - genuinely, though I can work out what’s meant by the context and believe it would have been a common enough term at the time, the only result I can seemingly find online that doesn’t refer to underwear is a line from Solveig Rogstad Larsen’s Grandma's Secrets & Memories: ‘Arne asked how he could have known the mower thong was about to break’ and even that barely makes the first page of results when typing in ‘mower thong’
‘Every time I hear the word “culture” I reach for my gun’ - apparently a corruption of ‘Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meine Browning! ‘/‘When I hear the word culture ..., I release the safety on my Browning!’ from Hanns Johst’s play Schlageter and associated with Nazi leaders (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Johst)
Similarly, ‘Today Europe, tomorrow the world’ seems to be a quote sometimes associated with Hitler but not actually attributable, as does ‘Today Germany, tomorrow the world’. The closest I found was someone giving a rough translation of lines from a Hitler Youth songbook: ‘Denn heute gëhort uns Deutschland/ Und morgen die ganze Welt’ - ‘For today Germany belongs to us/ And tomorrow the whole world’ (forum.quoteland.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/99191541/m/6161012571)
Revenge of the Educational Remit
‘You know how many miners are killed a year in the pits? Fifty, on average. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’
Brig: ‘There’s a direct relationship between cigarette smoking and the incidence of lung cancer. I encourage all my men not to smoke’
‘Like any egg-born creature, the maggot inside had started as an embryonic speck floating in the fluid that was to be its pre-birth food. In a matter of days the embryo had absorbed the fluid, growing in the process. Now all the fluid was gone, and if the maggot was not to die it had to escape’
‘“Serendipity?” said the Doctor. He turned to Nancy. “Do you know what he meant?” “He’s rambling,” she answered. ‘It isn’t a word.” “Ah, but it is,” said the Doctor. “It was coined by a chap called Horace Walpole, after the fairy-tale called The Three Princes of Serendip. It means a happy accident”’
Miscellania
‘The Brigadier lowered his voice, even though no one could possibly be listening to their conversation’ – this could just be me but it makes me remember the cone of silence in Get Smart
‘a droplet of sludge landed on his left trouser leg. Without thinking, he tried to brush it of’ – I like how incidental the fatal detail is
‘“Of course we all regret that the National Coal Board closed down the mine,” he said, not regretting it at all himself but knowing this would please his listeners’ – politicians, eh?
‘“I have it here in black and white.” He waved the paper again. Actually it was the menu from the hotel where he had stopped off to have lunch, but he knew no one could get near enough to read it. He really did have a letter from the Government in his briefcase in the car but he couldn’t be bothered to fetch it’ – There’s laziness. There’s contempt for his audience. There’s luxurious lunches, presumably on expenses. Why’s he got their menu?
‘Sometimes he would hear a faint creaking sound—the mine talking, as he and his mates called it. If the sound was soft and gentle, like a woman murmuring in sleep, the mine was safe. But if the sound was ever harsh and sharp, it warned of danger, and the possibility of a gallery roof collapsing’ – there’s, I think, a sense here that the miners are in tune with the earth in the same way that the farmers in Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon sought to be
‘Care for some sherry? I’ve got something here made from reprocessed whale glue’ and ‘some very good Scotch whisky here made from re-cycled wood pulp’, plus the coffee is ‘Very good […] Best I’ve had since I arrived’ - so it’s not that synthetic products are inadequate substitutes but they are ‘slow poison’ (mind you, so’s real booze). It’s quite a nice comment on corporatism, that it’s all slick and desirable but ultimately eats away at you from inside, but it does just look like Hulke doesn’t like recycling
‘What the world wanted was more and more petrol and diesel, for industry, aeroplanes, and road vehicles. As for pollution caused through the continued use of oil, that was the price mankind had to pay. But in time, Dr Stevens believed, even this problem could be solved. Professor Jones and his followers lived in a world of make-believe. The clock of technological progress could not be turned back’ – theirs is the world of make-believe yet he’s the one relying on a solution that doesn’t yet exist
‘“Very clever, sir. But I’m not going to chase you because the whole heap is about to be bombed.” Once the professor was definitely out of hearing, the Sergeant added: “And you can get yourself blown to pieces, university degree and all!”’ – I mean, Professor Jones might well be a turd, but it’s still a bit cynical for everyone’s favourite Benton
‘Strange, isn’t it? He goes and obeys a ridiculous order because, as he explains, he’s a soldier. But he doesn’t really trust Stevens. So he’s got Mike rigged up in his best civilian clothes to pretend to be a Government official’ – Is that strange??
‘From him I learnt that the secret of human creativity is inefficiency. Humans make illogical guesses, that turn out to be more logical than logic itself’ – is he saying that promoting efficiency in the workplace kills the capacity for creativity?
Doctor age check: ‘his 725-year-old cheeks’
Series Target
Having declared that Target has stopped treating the novelisations as a book series, I couldn’t help notice how there’s now absolutely no introduction to Doctor Who. Come Chapter 2, the Doctor and UNIT are just present and going about their business. It’s especially noticeable because the Doctor and the Brigadier have a bit of banter about policemen before the Tardis is said to be a police box at the end of the scene. I might be overcompensating for my knowledge of the series but it feels like something that could confuse readers unfamiliar with the show.
Looking back, this isn’t as sudden a break with convention as it feels. The last book (re)introduced Jo and so established UNIT and the Doctor through her eyes; the one before had a new Doctor and Harry Sullivan to establish. Before them, though, Doctor Who and the Cybermen briefly introduced the companions but little else and Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils did little but mention that Jo has travelled through time and space (sorry, ‘Time and Space’) with the Doctor.
However, this is different in the way the format is introduced as if it’s utterly mundane, with the Doctor in his ‘laboratory at UNIT Headquarters’ and Jo ‘reading the morning newspaper [and] eating an apple’, even when this is no longer the show’s format on television. On top of that, the novelisation then casually refers back to the pre-‘Three Doctors’ set-up as well, when ‘the Time Lords decided where’ the Tardis went. This is firmly aimed at an audience who know the context in which ‘The Green Death’ took place – people who saw it or have read the guidebooks.
That’s not the whole story, though. First off, it’s lovely how they’ve tucked this one in just before Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, which features the return of Metebelis III, the blue sapphire and a prologue featuring Professor Jones and Jo, so the editor’s still thinking of the hypothetical reader-of-the-book-series-as-they’re-being-released to an extent. And then, of course, there’s the fact that this is by Malcolm Hulke and so, far from resembling the latest instalment of some sort of text-based proto-DVD collection, takes the nice eco-thriller with a touch of local colour that is ‘The Green Death’ and refashions it to within an inch of its life to make a story about the evils of capital.
