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)
"nice, nippy little thing, a pleasure to drive"
DOCTOR WHO AND THE PLANET OF THE SPIDERS
by Terrance Dicks
First published 16 October 1975 (1), between Planet of Evil Parts Three and Four (2)
Height Attack
‘the most enormous Spider the Doctor had ever seen, larger by a hundred times than her sisters who ruled the planet’ - that's on top of the Queen Spider already being ‘a huge Spider’
About a third of the way in, the Doctor announces he’s ‘got a feeling I’m about to be faced with the worst threat, the greatest danger, of my entire life’ (3) and, lo and behold, by the end he’s dead.
Problem is, it’s not very clear why this adventure poses such terrible threat and danger. On TV, the answer was, if not exactly clear, at least clearer - ‘Planet of Spiders’ brings the Doctor face to face with the flaws of his own character: Paul Cornell seizes on the Doctor’s ‘greed for knowledge’ (a line absent from the book) to read the Doctor’s demise as a verdict on this incarnation’s ego (4); El Sandifer concurs, citing the same line (5) as evidence that his ego’s the problem (6), and adds an explanation of the ‘worst fear’ through the scene where the Great One makes the Doctor ‘march like a puppet on a string’ (7) (a sequence absent from the book). It appears the Doctor’s tragic flaw is his refusal to be dominated, and he must make himself submissive in order to fix the problem he created (by blithely nicking the Metebelis crystal in the first place).
Where does this leave the book-reader? When K’anpo asks ‘What is it that you most fear?’, the Doctor sighs, seemingly now understanding that he must return the blue crystal to the cave of the Great One (8). It’s never explained what the Doctor most fears nor why returning the crystal is the solution.
Jason Miller talks about how the novelisations were based on ‘pre-rehearsal scripts’ (9) and it might simply be that Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders is based on too early a draft. However, the themes Cornell and Sandifer identified are all here, they’re just not tied to the Doctor.
The dangers of greed, not exactly for knowledge but for mental capacity, are outlined right at the start when Clegg, appalled at the Brigadier’s suggestion he should use his powers in his show, bemoans that it would cause him to ‘lose [his] sanity’. He sees that as ‘a poor exchange’ (10). This trade-off is exactly the trap into which the Great One falls, her ‘powers’ and ‘towering intelligence’ leaving her mad (11). Further, as her greed to be ‘Ruler of the entire Universe’ (12) ultimately leads her to ‘explode [her] mind’ (13), so does her ego, unable to heed the Doctor’s warning because she can ‘do no wrong’ (14).
Lupton shares this arrogance. His ambition led him to ignore ‘the warnings’ around ‘the Rituals of Power’ (15) and his self-belief eventually leads him to lose ‘all sense of self-preservation’ (16), overestimating his position until he, like the Great One, is reduced to nothing but babble (17). His desire for power is rather more sympathetic than hers – discarded by his firm after 25 years and then flattened by his former employers when he sought to manage on his own – but this simply serves to emphasise how he will not accept another, better path, instead returning first to the job he’d lost and, when that failed, seeking revenge on the people who ‘broke’ him (18), spiralling in on his own eventual destruction, figuratively consumed by ‘hatred and bitterness’ (19).
In this, he’s contrasted by Tommy, reborn by the crystal and now with a mind ‘as new and fresh as a child’s’ (20), and Mike Yates, who is looking to rebuild himself after the personal and professional crisis of ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’. The theme of renewal through death is reflected more literally through K’anpo, for whom the ‘moment of death’, when he can fully transform into Cho-Je, is one he’s ‘been waiting for’ (21) and through the human population of Metebelis Three, where Sabor practically embraces death (22) in order to protect his son, the leader his people now need (23).
It seems unlikely that whatever scripts Dicks was working from were sufficiently developed to have all these parallels with the Doctor’s spiritual journey but too underdeveloped to actually feature a spiritual journey for the Doctor. That would almost suggest that, for Pertwee’s final tale, Robert Sloman and Barry Letts accidentally came up with a script all about the need to cast off the old and embrace the new and then, come the third or fourth draft, suddenly spied the opportunity to tie the dying Doctor into those themes. Instead then, Dicks must have chosen to discard the lines and scenes Cornell and Sandifer cite.
I rather like the idea that this is Dicks sticking the knife in (24). The novelisation keeps all the ways that the TV episodes stressed the need for rebirth save for the Doctor’s own appreciation of the fact. Understanding? That’s for the next guy. Instead, Pertwee resolutely remains himself to the end (25), deprived any moment of crescendo, stumbling off the stage barely noticed (26). That’s how a man who’s clung on too long and been left behind by his surroundings behaves.
Pertwee’s fatal flaw isn’t his greed for knowledge but in fact the exact opposite – he’s become intellectually lazy, too set in his ways. Come the end of Doctor Who and the Green Death, and all the use the crystal has been in that adventure, the Doctor utterly failed to engage meaningfully with the object he’d nabbed, ‘never really [investigating] it properly’ and then palming it off on Jo (27). Even when she sends it back with a warning (28), the Doctor’s too busy bemoaning her poor grammar and handwriting (29) to notice Clegg’s got hold of the crystal and is reacting badly to it (30). Clegg dies and it’s the Doctor’s fault – something even he acknowledges (31). Dicks’s Doctor doesn’t become ‘a new man’ (32) because he’s achieved self-realisation and bettered himself; Dicks’s Doctor becomes a new man because it’s the only solution to how fundamentally atrophied and inadequate to the challenges of the universe he’s become, to the extent that he’s actually become the cause of the problems himself.
Well, that or Terrance just thought reproducing the entire multi-vehicle chase in prose really was more important than signposting the protagonist’s spiritual journey.
Tory Who
‘A woman journalist!’
Dicksisms
‘The familiar groaning noise filled the air and the old blue police box shimmered and disappeared’
‘A wheezing, groaning sound filled the laboratory’
‘The Indian porters’ – can you use Indian to refer to indigenous South Americans?
‘almost child-like’ – one last dig at Jo
‘Perhaps it was something to do with being Welsh, she thought. After that, other languages must seem simple’ – and, in one fell swoop, all Hulke’s attempts to mend relations are defeated
‘The Doctor spared a moment from his pursuit of Lupton to appreciate the hovercraft: nice, nippy little thing, a pleasure to drive’ – Not my words, the words of Top Gear magazine
‘The Doctor swung the little hovercraft up the bank, across the road, over a field (and, quite without realising it, over a very astonished sleeping tramp)’ – Why??
1 tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Planet_of_the_Spiders_(novelisation)
2 http://epguides.com/DoctorWho/
3 ‘I’ve got a feeling I’m about to be faced with the worst threat, the greatest danger, of my entire life’
4 ‘'The Doctor's ego is... out of control,' observed Paul Cornell in DWB No. 88, dated April 1991, 'ignoring Sarah, getting Professor Clegg killed in his dilettante psychic experiments ("my greed for knowledge"), and basically displaying all the paternalistic traits that so annoy modern viewers. That he is to be criticised for this, and killed for it, is surely a huge testament to Letts' helmsmanship of the show. The Doctor's disquiet before K'anpo is a revealing moment that shows that even he has a monkey (or a spider) on his back. Even the Doctor must submit to his own principles.'’
www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/planetofspiders/detail.shtml
5 ‘in the sixth episode the Doctor accepts that his greed for knowledge caused all of this and thus that he must face his worst fear in resolving all of it’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/be-childish-sometimes-planet-of-the-spiders
6 ‘The Doctor doesn't just visit the cave of the Great One, he brings all of the trappings of who he is and who he has been for the past five years to the cave, laying down all of himself. In order to face Choronzon and have his ego forever shattered he must first recognize and pick up all of the parts of his ego’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/be-childish-sometimes-planet-of-the-spiders
7 ‘And so the Doctor faces his fear, and goes to confront the Great One - a terrible monster who can bend his will - who can finally mentally dominate him and make him cry in agony as she forces his broken body to march like a puppet on a string’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/be-childish-sometimes-planet-of-the-spiders
8 ‘“What is it that you most fear?” The Doctor looked at him despairingly. “There is no other way?” “None.” The Doctor heaved a sigh, seeming to accept some fate that was inevitable, but far from pleasant. “Very well. Give me the crystal.” Sarah looked from one to the other in anguish. “What is happening, Doctor? What are you planning to do?” The Doctor looked at her in surprise. “The only thing I can do. I started all this trouble by taking the crystal. Now I must set things right by returning it to the cave of the Great One”’
9 ‘books were often written from pre-rehearsal scripts, rather than from the final televised product or even shooting scripts. There are many books that contain more scenes, and more and better dialogue, than their TV counterparts. This is one of them’
Jason Miller, Doctor Who Novels, drwhonovels.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/planet-of-the-buddhists/#more-5130
10 ‘And lose my sanity? It would be a poor exchange’
11 ‘Whatever powers, whatever towering intelligence the Great One had attained, the price had been too high. The Great One was mad’
12 ‘You’re trying to increase your mental powers to infinity!” “Exactly. I shall be the Ruler of the entire Universe”’
13 ‘If you complete that circuit, the energy will build up and up until you can no longer contain it. You will literally destroy yourself. You will explode your mind!’
14 ‘“Why have you come?” she asked. “Why have you destroyed yourself?” “I want to make you see that what you plan to do is wrong.” “I am the Great One. I can do no wrong”’
15 ‘The forbidden books that he had stolen from Cho-Je’s library had warned that misuse of the Rituals of Power could summon up demons. In his eagerness for wealth and success, he had ignored the warnings’
16 ‘Lupton should have seen that his usefulness, never very great, was now over. His life hung by a thread as fine as a Spider’s web. Lost to all sense of self-preservation, he ranted on’
17 ‘Lupton babbled on, but his voice was drowned by the chanting of the Council’
18 ‘“Picture me: bright young salesman, sales manager, finally sales director. I gave them twenty-five years of my life. Then the take-over boys moved in. Golden handshake for poor old Lupton. So – I set up on my own. You know what happened? The big boys broke me. Very efficiently, too. I’m still looking for some of the bits” […] Barnes said, puzzled, “So you came here to seek peace of mind?” Lupton roared with laughter. “I came here for power! I want to see them grovelling to me. I want to see them eating dirt”’
19 ‘All the hatred and bitterness of their defeat was poured out upon him’ – alright, it’s not his own hatred and bitterness but the spiders are symbolic of spiritual corruption (‘We are all apt to surrender ourself to domination. Not all spiders are on the back’) and Lupton seems to work in perfect sync with his own spider of his own complete volition. The ‘hatred and bitterness’ they pour on him is a reflection of his own turmoil. And then they literally consume him: ‘it dropped to the ground, a shattered lump. The Queen spoke. “This two-legs can do us a last service, my sisters. Let us feast on our favourite food once more before the end”’
20 ‘“His courage and compassion protected him,” said the Abbot. “You too, my son,” he added, turning to Tommy. “Your mind was as new and fresh as a child’s! Innocence was your shield. That is why the evil of the Spiders’ minds could not destroy you”’
21 ‘“But now the moment approaches.” “What moment?” asked Sarah. “The moment of death,” said the old man placidly. “The moment I have been waiting for”’
22 Once captured by the spiders, for example, he just accepts his fate – ‘Sabor hung passively in his cocoon’
23 ‘“Because our people need you, my son,” said the old man gently. “They trust you and listen to you. You are our only hope.” Before anyone could stop him, the old man had slipped out of the door’
24 As I suggested at when looking at Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, there have been hints that Dicks might approach the demise of Pertwee’s Doctor with some glee
25 ‘Even in such an extreme situation, the Doctor’s scientific curiosity was still strong. It had been a dominant characteristic all his life and it did not abandon him at the end’
26 ‘He decided that he did not particularly want to spend whatever time was left to him in watching the Great One die. He turned and stumbled away’
27 ‘He’d taken the crystal from Metebelis to study it, having searched carefully for a jewel with exactly the right characteristics. But although he had sometimes made use of the crystal’s strange powers, he had never really investigated it properly. On a sudden impulse, he had given it to Jo Grant for her wedding present, she had taken it to South America, and then he’d forgotten all about it’
28 Jo’s letter: ‘the Indian porters are saying it’s bad medicine’
29 ‘The Doctor frowned, reflecting that neither Jo’s grammar nor her handwriting had improved since she left UNIT’
30 ‘All three had forgotten Clegg, who, during the reading of the long and rambling letter, […] had reached out and picked up the crystal, peering curiously into its blue depths./ Suddenly Clegg went rigid’
31 ‘A man’s dead, and I’m responsible. The least I can do is find out what happened, and why’
32 After regeneration ‘He will be a new man!’
Are You Sitting Comfortably..?
‘Even the Doctor didn’t realise that his interest in Professor Clegg was to be the prelude to the most dangerous adventure of his life’
‘If the Brigadier had any doubts about Clegg’s powers, they were finally disposed of in the next few minutes’
Miscellania
‘UNIT was a semi-secret organisation’ - is that an official designation or just a admission of reality?
‘“Land squids with great hairy tentacles,” the Doctor said. “Giant snakes, an eagle the size of a house... but no spiders. In fact, no really intelligent life at all”’ – I don’t think Terry’s read Doctor Who and the Green Death
‘He knew there was no gentle way of breaking the grip of the terror that had held Metebelis for so long. But, as always, the taking of life saddened and sickened him’
‘“The Great One is all seeing.” “The Great One is all knowing.” “The Great One is all powerful.”’ - That does surely basically make her God. And it’s a Christian God – they’re chanting in trinities
Time Lords: ‘K’anpo nodded. “But the discipline they imposed was not for me.” “Or me,” said the Doctor. “We both had to get away”’
FIRST PROSE REGENERATION?: ‘the body of K’anpo began to glow with a golden light. His features blurred and swam, and then seemed to settle into those of Cho-Je. The glow faded and now Cho-Je sat in the chair, beaming at them’
