There’s a lovely logic, I hope intended, in following up the Key to Time novelisations with a look back to a previous multi-location quest for keys. At the same time, Doctor Who and the Keys of Marinus, offers up the intriguing prospect of Philip Hinchcliffe adapting one of the earliest Hartnell stories. Though I’ve not exactly been Hinchcliffe’s greatest fan, the marriage of his visceral physicality with the Lambert years promised something very odd and special. That’s not quite how things pan out. There are a few brief glimpses of the style you might expect, Vasor dying as a result of an oddly specific strike to the kidneys (3) and Yartek’s death seeing his ‘flesh was seared to the bone’ (4), but Hinchcliffe mostly subsumes himself to the era.

    Where Hinchcliffe’s voice does seem to come through more strongly is a sequence of bizarre similes towards the end of the novelisation: the Conscience, as the fake key causes it to malfunction, is said to ‘quiver like a glass bell’ (5), a description which makes literal sense but ignores the organic connotations of quivering; it then blows up ‘with the force of an exploding sun’ (6), which makes sense of Yartek’s death but not of the way nothing beyond the pyramid is effected; as the pyramid collapses, cracks spread across its walls ‘like scurrying lizards’ (7), capturing perhaps the zigzag motion but not the permanence of the damage being forged. That these lines all occur late in the book might reflect the writer getting fed up with the work at hand – according to Based on the Popular BBC Television Serial, at least, ‘Hinchcliffe didn’t find the story […] enjoyable to write’ (8) and maybe this realisation only came as he slogged his way through it. The only problem with that is the very early, highly hexagon-reliant description of the Tardis (9), a passage which suggests his motivation was already draining away.

    Of most concern are the bits of the novelisation which just leave you scratching your head. To pick a particularly obtuse example, I have no idea what’s supposed to be going on when the Tardis crew bid farewell to their fellow adventurers at the end of the tale (10). More fundamentally, what is Marinus? The start of the novel strongly suggests it’s a ‘Great City’ (11), but the ‘Voord invasion of Marinus’ begins when they emerge from their submarines (12), so it might be the island. According to Arbitan, it’s ‘the name of [the] planet’ (13) but, by the end, Altos seems to view it as his ‘country’ (14). Not all these contradictions are merely carried over from Terry Nation.

    Even less on Nation’s hands is the confusion around the Voords. They are the ‘ancient and dreaded enemies of Marinus’ (15), which, depending on how you define Marinus, might make them aliens to this world. The new detail that ‘Yartek invented an immuniser’ (16), slightly more specific and deliberate- sounding than on TV (17), sort of supports this – Yartek would have had to escape the sphere of the Conscience in order to desire to develop the immuniser in the first place, which would either involve his somehow having found himself beyond its influence or his coming from another place and, upon hearing of the docile people of Marinus, considering them an easy mark and developing an immuniser so that he could exploit them without falling prey to the Conscience himself. To back this up, Arbitan refers to a Voord as a ‘creature’ (18), suggesting they’re physiologically different, and the prose describes them as ‘reptilian’ (19) with ‘dark and rubbery’ skin (20). All of this would actually paint quite a clear picture, one in which the Doctor’s supposition, the same as on TV, that under the wetsuit a Voord is ‘something similar to a human’ (21), is simply wrong, were it not for the fact that the novelisation persists in rubber appearance of the Voords being a ‘protective suit’ (22). And the Hinchcliffe throws in the detail that these people or creatures are ‘programmed to kill’ (23), like some sort of computerised James Bond. They’ve certainly got the gadgetry (24).

    Now, I would agree it’s rather tawdry to have a go at Hinchcliffe’s writing – taking cheap shots at the work of a few days back in 1980 is easy fare. All told, Doctor Who and the Keys of Marinus is actually quite fun. When the novelisation opens reeling off ‘Inter Galactic Time’, ‘BXV sub-oceanic assault craft’ and ‘anti-metradar devices’, it doesn’t matter whether Hinchcliffe is rushed or fed up or whatever – this, despite my opening paragraph, is definitely a meeting between two very different visions of the series, with a result that’s definitely nothing like I would have anticipated.

    On a very simple level, the almost incidental yet more intricate stuntwork that the likes of Havoc brought to the series gets telegraphed backwards when Vasor strands our heroes in the ice caves. On TV, he simply unties the bridge while the others are all on the other side; in the novelisation, it’s cut while Ian is attempting to race back across it (25). More intricately, you can almost feel Hinchcliffe trying to make sense of the world of Marinus, inserting an explanation for the strange laws of Millenium – a response to having relied for order on the Conscience for so long (26) – hinting, perhaps because the city is so strangely unpopulated onscreen, at a curfew (27) and making explicit the toll rediscovering a balance between law and freedom has taken on its people (28).

    It also sometimes feels like Hinchcliffe is seizing on some of the tools that had slipped away from the series since 1964. When Altos, for example, becomes aware of ‘the warmth of Sabetha’s body’ when tied up with her (29), it’s a reminder of how readily David Whitaker directly related the attraction between Ian and Barbara in Doctor Who as well the sensuality of some of the descriptions in Doctor Who and the Crusaders. On a less positive note, Altos’s ‘protective instincts’ also summon up the extent to which Barbara’s freedom in that latter novelisation was so dependent on Ian, plus another of Whitaker’s less admirable quirks, the instinctive disgust with which everyone reacted to the mere sight of the Daleks, also gets resurrected here. Yartek, through Altos’s eyes, is ‘sly’ and ‘sub-human’ (30), a ‘sub-species’ and a ‘frog-like abomination’ who can’t possibly have any understanding of ‘human affections’ (31). It makes you wonder if Hinchcliffe is trying to introduce a little disquiet into the reader’s feelings towards Altos, to hint he may be a little too Aryan (32) to be sympathetic. Maybe Yartek’s distaste of the Conscience, his ‘lifetime adversary’ (33), a machine the Doctor himself is far from sad to see the back of (34), has a touch of the noble quest about it? But no, Yartek just seeks ‘absolute power’ (35), to become an ‘untouchable god-head!’ (36), and the Tardis crew, just as Altos, view the Voords as ‘repulsive’ (37).

    The greatest asset that Hinchcliffe finds in the series’ past, however, is the original Tardis crew. There’s a lovely passage about how she still hasn’t adjusted to ‘Space-Time travel’ (38) which not only sets up her tearing off her travel bracelet the first time she uses it (39), but also establishes how different Ian and Barbara’s experience was to later Tardis travellers – this is a truly alien experience for which ‘Human bodies were not built’. Similarly, there’s a reminder that all they ever really wanted in the early days was to get the Doctor back in the Tardis and trying again to return them home (40). Hinchcliffe also echoes Whitaker’s characterisation of Ian and Barbara in less off-putting ways than just the repulsion at everything alien with Barbara’s little ‘prayer for Ian’s safe return’ (41) and Ian’s clinging to an unconscious Barbara in what he thinks might be their final moments (42).

    Pleasingly, Hinchcliffe also sees fit to slightly strengthen Barbara and Susan’s involvement in the adventure. In her struggle with Vasor, Barbara now kicks his shins and topples him while he’s off balance (43), which feels a little more capable and deliberate than the bite she delivers on TV. She also gets to use the Voord knife that she makes such a point of picking up (44), using it to free Sabetha and Altos (45), where on TV the Doctor is shown releasing them (46). Susan’s involvement in escaping the ice-cave, meanwhile, is much more deliberate, deciding for herself that their rickety construction of an icicle bridge ‘would never support them all’ and deciding, independently, to go across first and reattach the rope bridge (47). On TV, this is far less clearly Susan’s idea or even a plan, and she certainly doesn’t cap it off with a death-defying leap (48).

    Most intriguing is the handling of the Doctor, summed up perfectly near the beginning (49). Understandably, this isn’t a million miles from Tom Baker – ‘mischievous’ and ‘eccentric’ and with a list of clothes that just needs the addition of a scarf – but Hinchcliffe really brings out the differences: the ‘mischievous blue eyes’ are a contrast with the ‘dignified’, ‘upright’ ‘old man’; he may be dressed ‘like an eccentric’ but it’s specifically ‘an eccentric Victorian professor’. Everything about Hartnell plays with the balance between the elderly, the youthful and the childish. The final sentence of his introduction builds this wonderfully: it starts by highlighting the ‘wooden walking stick’, then hints at his surprisingly youthful vigour, returns to the image of a cantankerous old man with ‘when arguing’ and then throws in some childishness with the weary aside ‘which was often’. This is a Doctor who, ‘like a child with a new toy’ (50), can become oblivious to the threat around him, a Doctor who gets carried away play-acting (51), who gets ‘bossy’ when ‘excited’ because he can’t quite control himself (52) and pursues the object of his enthusiasm with an impatient and inelegant-sounding ‘gallop’ (53). Unlike the more imposing figures of Pertwee and Baker, this Doctor is ‘almost comical’ (54), but he’s also more approachable (55), bringing ‘comfort’ as well as ‘hope’ (56). Meanwhile, he seems to carry a deeper wisdom than those later incarnations, acting not just from a position of more technologically advanced knowledge but a sense of ‘what the future held’, like he’s seen history repeat over and over.

    Tony Whitt, on the Doctor Who Target Book Club, hypothesises that Philip Hinchcliffe would have adapted this book from a video of the broadcast episodes rather than a set of scripts (57), which would certainly tally with Terrance Dicks’s memory getting tapes (58). Whilst it does sounds like Terry Nation’s notes could have fuelled some great passages for the novelisation, I can’t imagine Nation’s scripts would have sparked the same warm glow Hinchcliffe found in Hartnell’s performance and so the one positive he seems to have clung on to when adapting this story.