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)
"They are specially made to suit my taste. I don’t think you’d like them"
DOCTOR WHO AND THE SEA-DEVILS
by Malcolm Hulke
First published 17 October 1974 (1), between Planet of the Spiders and Robot (2)
Height Attack
‘“Lizard,” said the man. “Tall as a man—taller!”’
Hulke really rattles through the plot points that made up almost all of Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters: the Chief Sea-Devil takes all of a minute (3) to agree that the Doctor ‘will negotiate a truce between my people and the humans’ (4); at that very moment, the humans start bombing the underwater base (5) and the yet-to-begin peace process is immediately off (6).
The increased pace lends an odd ease to the way the Doctor commits ‘mass murder’ (not his term but one he acknowledges is ‘true’ (7)) and contrasts unfortunately with the mercy he pleaded be shown the Master (8). His argument was based on the Master’s possession of ‘better qualities’, presumably evidence that he is not a complete monster, and that a belief in ‘the possibility of redemption’ is vital to civilised society. So what exactly is his problem with the Sea-Devils?
One explanation would be that the Doctor has learned a rather unpleasant lesson. On gaining his freedom, the Master, who was grateful to avoid execution whilst in prison, immediately seeks ‘revenge’ for his imprisonment (9). It seems the whole experience washes off him once, as he puts it, he ‘can think clearly’, as if redemption can last only as long as the punishment. However, the Doctor, far from petitioning for the Master’s execution come the end of the book, is portrayed failing to conceal a ‘wry smile’ at the Master’s escape (10), so there is clearly still a difference between his attitude to the Master and the Sea-Devils.
Another possible explanation would be that the Doctor only went against the ‘ordinary man in the street’ (11) regarding the Master because they’re both Time Lords. He simply prizes Gallifreyan lives higher than others in much the same way that humanity sees captured Sea-Devils as fit only for a ‘zoo’ (12) and refuses to acknowledge reptile casualties as ‘deaths’ (13). The Chief Sea-Devil betrays the same trait, insisting on ‘no pacts with apes’ (14) (though admittedly only after everything’s started going down the toilet) and happily proposing the destruction of ‘all Mankind, and all mammals’ (15).
I’m not suggesting Hulke, the man who will go on to provide interior monologues for a dinosaur (Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion) and a giant maggot (Doctor Who and the Green Death), views this failure of empathy between species as excusable – quite the opposite. This is the writer who, in Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, confronted David Whitaker’s view of what it meant to be human and here he’s taking on the way Daleks were presented in Doctor Who, and indeed how most aliens categorised monsters have been presented since (16). In Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils, the humans are the monsters, and a distressing rapacious one at that, ‘busily exterminating every other species on the planet’ (17). There’s even a roll call of the dead (18).
This is certainly an aspect of what was going on on TV – in About Time 3, Miles and Wood identify ‘The Sea Devils’ as taking Doctor Who’s typical monster aesthetic and turning it on its head (19). Difficult as it is to read a Target novelisation as a product of Sea-Devil civilisation, the humans definitely come off worse here. The Sea-Devils may share Man’s antipathy to other species, but only humanity seems to struggle with the presence of its own (20) – unsurprising if Crawley’s insight that people are all basically criminals (21), which if nothing else suggests there’s something fundamentally hypocritical in global society.
Where on TV humans were physically disgusting, in prose they’re ethically repugnant. Trenchard, the main human character in the book, manages to combine Hulke’s twin bug-bears of personal ambition (22) and patriotic fervour (23) on his way to getting all his staff killed and endangering all of humanity (24). His great inspiration in life appears to be his father, a man so determined in his efforts to suppress Indian self-governance that, faced with certain death, he heroically killed four people for no reason but to exact a price for his defeat (25) and the one thing that might be said in Trenchard’s favour is that he fails in his attempts to imitate him to the last (26).
And then there’s prime pig Walker. Childish, as when hoarding his sweets (27), outdated, hence his association with archaic weaponry (28), cowardly, shrieking and pleading the moment he sees a Sea-Devil (29), hypocritical, initially refusing the Doctor’s call for peace (30) and then insisting against action when his life is threatened (31), and so useless he can’t even engage in talks with the Sea-Devils because of his alleged sea-sickness (32), Walker is more concerned with shovelling food into his face than surveying the situation (33) or dealing with it (34). Like Trenchard, the only good thing to be said about him is that his ineptitude acts as a buffer against the appalling deeds he’d otherwise commit.
But the problem isn’t just the existence of the likes of Trenchard and Walker, it’s the fact that they’re in positions of power. This means Hulke isn’t just attacking Doctor Who’s monster fetish but also the Pertwee era earthbound format’s embrace of military and government organisations and their hierarchies. When trying to confess his conspiracy with the Master, Trenchard is met simply with the query ‘Does the Minister know you?’ as if that is more likely to get you his attention that being the governor of a massively expensive single-inmate prison who needs to speak ‘urgently’ (35). The fact that it’s a ‘matter of life and death’ concerning ‘the nation’ simply prompts the advice that he write to them (admittedly ‘by first-class post’) because ‘tomorrow morning’ is the earliest he can deal with any issue not involving a chum.
The idiocy, self-interest and social closed-shopness of those in power isn’t exactly new to Pertwee Who, but the substitution of the Navy for UNIT allows Hulke to highlight those qualities further down the chain of command than he usually could. Captain Hart, playing the role of the Brigadier for one story only, seems simply incapable of believing his ‘friend’ Trenchard (36) could be up to no good; he also sends his men into danger without fully informing them of what they may encounter, seemingly purely to satisfy his own scepticism (37).
To call attention to Hart’s ineptitude, Hulke has Jane Blythe undermine his decisions to the reader at each turn, incredulous that the Captain should believe Trenchard’s story of calling the Doctor and Jo a taxi (38) and clearly believing the submariners should have been made aware of what might await them (39). For her troubles, she’s labelled ‘suspicious’ and subject to her boss’s condescension (40). It’s difficult not to think the whole situation might have been resolved rather quicker were she in charge or at least not forced to hold her tongue (41) and pussyfoot around what Hart’s golf-buddy might be up to (42).
And, as I said at the top, the Doctor’s tarnished in all this. He treats the Master differently because he’s one of his own, just as Hart can’t believe Trenchard’s suspect or, inversely, the Minister won’t take Trenchard’s call. The one contribution his mates at UNIT make is to advise the Navy to bomb the reptiles to oblivion before they get a chance to even emerge (43), an interesting step up in their intolerance to their species’s predecessor since Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters, where they at least had the grace to encounter them first, which goes to show how much of an effect the Doctor’s had in all that time working for them.
The ultimate insult comes when, instead of the Doctor, who’s busy committing mass murder, it’s the Master who gets to pay a touching tribute to the slaughtered Chief Sea-Devil (44) while his fellow Time Lord’s typically military allies are busy demonstrating just how monstrous humanity is (45).
It’s so bleak, you’ve got to worry for Malcolm or for Doctor Who or for both. For Doctor Who, thankfully, Tom Baker’s taken over the role on telly and the next novelisation’s casting its eye back to Patrick Troughton. Hulke, though, has decided for his next trick to take on a script co-written by a co-architect of the set-up he so dislikes…
Hulkisms
You’ve got to love Hulke’s little touches: ‘The Jamaican, who really came from Trinidad and had never been to Jamaica in his life’
Revenge of the Educational Remit
‘“What’s May Day got to do with it?” Jo asked. “French for “aid me”,” replied the Doctor. “Look,” and he scribbled it down on a piece of paper so that Jo would understand. M’aidez. “It’s used internationally nowadays,” he added, “instead of SOS” – which inadvertently just sounds like the inspiration for that bit in the Red Dwarf episode ‘Marooned’.
‘Sonar, a form of underwater radar, sends out regular signals, and these can be heard as ‘pings’ over the operator’s earphones. If the beam of electronic signals hits anything metal, the signals echo back and the operator hears a ‘ping-ping’. The time span between the first and the second ‘ping’ gives the operator an idea of the distance to the metal object. By prodding with the beam in slightly different directions, the operator may be able to sketch out the outline of a sunken ship or the hull of another submarine’
1 http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Sea_Devils
2 http://epguides.com/DoctorWho/
3 ‘The lids of the Chief Sea-Devil’s eyes slowly closed, and for a full minute he seemed almost to be asleep’
4 ‘You will negotiate a truce between my people and the humans’
5 ‘more explosions rocked the shelter. He pointed at the Doctor. “Take him away and kill him!”’
6 I should be clear that this is hardly unique to the novelisation, as Elizabeth Sandifer points out in Tardis Eruditorum (www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/a-finely-tuned-response-the-sea-devils): ‘Where The Silurians spent the bulk of its time fretting with the possibility that peace could be negotiated between the Silurians and humans, The Sea Devils spends only 5-10 minutes on this before the Master manages to exploit a human attack on the base to foreclose all possibility of peace’ – However, that was 5-10 minutes; this is about a paragraph.
7 ‘“Very clever of you,” said the Master. “Do you realise you have just committed mass murder?” The Doctor looked down at the seething waters as the helicopter turned and flew them back to safety. He said nothing. What the Master had just said was true’
8 ‘many people had wanted to see the Master put to death. To the amazement of the Brigadier, however, the Doctor had made a personal plea to the Court for the Master’s life to be spared […] the Doctor talked of the Master’s better qualities—his intelligence, and his occasional wit and good humour. Jo well-remembered the Doctor’s final words to the Judges: “My Lords, I beg you to spare the prisoner’s life, for by so doing you will acknowledge that there is always the possibility of redemption, and that is an important principle for us all. If we do not believe that anyone, even the worst criminal, can be saved from wickedness, then in what can we ever believe?”’
9 ‘“They had good reason to execute you. Instead, they showed mercy.” “For that,” said the Master […] “I was truly grateful—while I was a prisoner. But now that I’m free, I can think clearly. And I want revenge!”’ – did they have good reason to execute him? Didn’t the Doctor earlier argue how there was no such thing? And then just the gloriousness of the Master’s childish pettiness
10 ‘The Doctor tried to conceal a wry smile. ”I don’t think it will do any good, Mr. Walker. Something tells me we are not going to see the Master again—at least, not until he wants us to”’
11 ‘“if you really wants my opinion, as an ordinary man in the street, as a taxpayer that’s got to pay for all the guards and everything, I’ll tell you what they should have done.” He drew a finger swiftly across his throat. “That’s what he deserved”’
12 Walker: ‘If we could catch some of these things alive and put them in a zoo, to that I could agree. But the rest must be destroyed’
13 ‘“Won’t be any deaths,” said Walker, sipping his white wine appreciatively, “except for them”' – he just can’t conceive of the Sea-Devils as people. I especially like the contrast between his so-very-civilised appreciative sipping of his white wine with the blank horror of his worldview.
14 ‘We make no pacts with apes’
15 ‘“We never forgive,” said the Chief Sea-Devil, levelling his raygun at the Doctor. “We are the rulers of this planet. It was ours millions of years before you apes developed and took it over from us. We shall destroy all Mankind, and all mammals. Only the reptiles shall survive—“’
16 And I do mean since, as this started to become the norm on TV with ‘Dalek Invasion of Earth’ more than in 1963/4, and that was broadcast soon after Doctor Who was published
17 ‘“Why not share the planet with Man?” The Master laughed. “Don’t listen to this person, I beg you. Man is busily exterminating every other species on the planet”’ – I can’t decide if this is late enough for the word ‘exterminating’ in Doctor Who to be a definite echo of the Daleks or not. Probably not.
18 ‘“The dodo,” cut in the Master, “the passenger pigeon, the great auk, the blue buck, marsupials in Australia”’ – when did we wipe out the marsupials?
19 ‘This story is set in a world where the Sea Devils are “normality”, and everything the humans do is alien. […] The extreme close-ups of Walker’s mouth as he eats […]; the odd camera angles […], unfamiliar music […]. We’re watching a drama set in a world where incidental music sounds just like this’
Tat Wood, About Time 3; pp.241-2
20 ‘“We hardly know how,” said Walker, prodding about in his mixed salad to find a slice of tomato, “to share the planet with each other, my dear fellow. Look at the Middle East, or Northern Ireland”' –the uncomfortable split of his sentence for the tomato makes clear that even he’s not particularly bothered by this bleak statement on his own species
21 ‘the way I look at it, the world’s divided into three groups of people—those who have been in prison, those who are in prison, and those who will be going to prison. Got it?’ – and he’s definitely not passing a dry comment on the problems of the justice system
22 ‘The Master’s plan was that he and Trenchard would work together to get to the root of the problem; then Trenchard would truly qualify for the recognition he so richly deserved, while the Master would remain quietly in the background. Already Trenchard could see himself receiving a knight-hood for his services to England in detecting and exposing its enemies’
23 ‘“why did George Trenchard help the Master?” “What would you say was Trenchard’s strongest characteristic?” the Doctor replied. Hart shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps patriotism, love of country.”’
24 ‘Trenchard knew that everything he feared was true. The Master had not only made a complete fool of him, but the Master’s ‘friends’ had murdered all his staff’ – which one’s the bigger deal?
25 ‘Knowing that there was no escape, and that the mob outside killed anyone who tried to be taken prisoner, the Major loaded his gun, went outside and shot dead four mutineers before he himself was cut to pieces’
26 ‘In his last moment of life he realised that he had forgotten to turn the safety catch of his revolver’
27 ‘Walker blustered, and tried to think of a reason. “They are specially made to suit my taste. I don’t think you’d like them”’
28 ‘bayoneting a slice of chicken’
29 ‘Walker shrieked, “We come in peace! Don’t kill us!”’
30 Doctor: ‘This is a time to make peace, not war’, Walker: ‘the rest must be destroyed’
31 ‘He was quivering with fear. “This is only going to annoy them,” he said. “Have you no thought for others? We should make peace, not war”’
32 ‘get terribly sea-sick. It’s just one of those little problems that one has to put up with in life’ - 1. It’s clearly bollocks and he’s just terrified. 2. He’s not putting up with it. He’s sending someone else to do the job instead
33 ‘All Captain Hart’s files and ink bottles and pencils had been removed from the desk top in order to turn it into a dining table for the man from the Government’
34 ‘As soon as I’ve finished my lunch, I shall order that atomic weapons be used against these monsters’
35 ‘“I need to speak to the Minister,” he said, “urgently?” “Who is that?” said the girl’s voice. “George Trenchard,” he said, “Prison Governor.” “Does the Minister know you?” queried the voice. Trenchard winced at the question […] “The prison that contains the Master. Now will you please put me through to the Minister. It’s a matter of life and death.” “Hold on,” said the girl’s voice. While he waited, his mind turned back to what might happen to him once he had confessed his intrigue with the Master... […] “The Master is very well,” said Trenchard. “The matter of life and death happens to concern the nation.” “Well, the Minister’s very busy,” said the girl. “Could you write to us about it?” “Yes,” said Trenchard, with a touch of heavy sarcasm, “I shall write to you about it.” “If you send it by first-class post,” the girl said, “we should get it tomorrow morning, and I’ll put it on the Minister’s desk straight away”’
36 ‘George Trenchard is a personal friend of mine. I simply cannot believe it’ – true, the line is apparently delivered ‘With little conviction’, but then later, when the Doctor and Jo don’t return from the prison, he still seemingly can’t believe Trenchard’s involved
37 ‘“I don’t think they can do any harm to a submarine—if they exist,” replied Captain Hart. “Do you feel I’ve sent him into danger unforewarned? […] if I’d told him what we have only heard, and have never seen for ourselves, is it possible he might imagine he was seeing Sea-Devils? You see, this way we shall get an objective report”’
38 ‘But sir, why would they take a taxi when they had a Jeep? And isn’t it odd that they haven’t called back here?’
39 ‘“Yes, sir,” said Jane, clearly not convinced that what Captain Hart had done was right’
40 ‘“You have a very suspicious mind,” he said, allowing himself a little smile’
41 ‘It’s not for me to say that, sir’
42 ‘“Exactly, sir,” said Jane, not wishing to say outright that Captain Hart’s friend must be a liar’
43 ‘I’ve checked with Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart of UNIT about the creatures that were in those caves in Derbyshire. If they all start to emerge from their underground shelters throughout the world, we won’t know what’s hit us!’
44 ‘The Master looked down at the Chief Sea-Devil’s body. “You have just killed one of the most intelligent creatures that ever walked on this earth,” he told Petty Officer Myers. “Really, sir?” said the petty officer. “They look like big frogs to me”'
45 ‘The Chief Sea-Devil’s sentence ended there because a bullet from a .44 service rifle, travelling at three times the speed of sound, and fired by one Petty Officer Myers, had just entered and destroyed its brain’ – this feels psychopathic thanks the very detailed but unemotive description of the killing, almost as if tools and actions like this are what really sum humanity up
Miscellania
‘It always astounded Jo how many things he could produce from those enormous pockets’ – it’s Tom Baker!
In fact, Hulke has a lovely, mischievous concept of the Doctor, really not based on Pertwee at all: ‘“Are you aware,” said Captain Hart severely, ‘that you have trespassed on Government property, and that that is a very serious offence?” “Actually,” said the Doctor, “no, because I had not the means to become aware.” Captain Hart tried to contain his patience. “There are signs, in very large letters, warning the public to keep out, and you ignored these!” “I didn’t see any signs,” pleaded the Doctor. Again Hart cut in. “Because you entered by way of the sea! Obviously, we can’t have signs bobbing up and down on the waves.” “There you are, then,” said the Doctor. “So the way I arrived, there were no signs to be seen.” “But you had no right to enter by way of the sea!” thundered Captain Hart. “Ah,” said the Doctor soothingly, “but I was not to know that I had no right unless I saw some sign to tell me”’
Two lovely, contrasting Master moments: ‘The Doctor asked, “What do you hope to gain by helping the Sea-Devils?” “Power,” said the Master. “I shall use them just as I’ve used the Ogrons”’ - leaving aside the continuity wrangle that opens up, just draws attention to the fact that the Master’s alliances always end in disaster; and ‘“Send to the surface one dead member of your species. That will convince the humans that their underwater bombs have been successful, and they will go away.” “None of my people have been killed,” said the Chief Sea-Devil. The Master looked round at the guards, finding it difficult not to smile. “Then you will have to arrange that, won’t you?”’ - an act that proves rather pointless but joyously arch
More Time Lord trivia: ‘I mean it seriously, my dear Trenchard. I have two hearts, a temperature of only sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and, if you care to observe closely, my breathing rate is four breaths to the minute compared with your twelve to sixteen’