With Dicks revealing himself perhaps a bit less radical than the recent run of novelisations was starting to suggest, here comes the ultimate test. If any story’s going to reveal what he’s actually up to, if indeed he’s up to anything at all, ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ is it.

    To anyone who doesn’t immediately get why this might be, here’s El Sandifer: ‘this is the infamously racist anti-Chinese story’ (3). And here's Rob Shearman: ‘Is the treatment of the Chinese in The Talons of Weng-Chiang racist? Of course it is’ (4). And here’s Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood: ‘“The Talons of Weng-Chiang” went unshown in America for many, many years, for fear of offending the Chinese community, and it’s not hard to see why’ (5). And here, God help us, is Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers’ and Listener’s Association: ‘‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ (1977) came in for special abuse for its racism’ (6).

   I’m going to lean quite heavily here on El Sandifer’s take because her critique of the story ties its presentation of race in with a wider verdict that Holmes is carelessly adopting the very ‘Victorian colonial attitudes’ (7) he’s supposed to be satirising, which are also the attitudes Dicks seems to have untangling in the novelisations. Before looking at what Dicks does though, let’s unpack Sandifer’s problems with ‘Talons’ as broadcast.

    First up, there’s the issue that every Chinese villain seems to be ‘a villain purely [because] they’re Chinese’, thus ‘playing off […] yellow peril stereotypes’, while any attempt at sending up European British attitudes can never be more than ‘a loving poke’ (8). Then there’s the fact that the Doctor and Leela ‘display the same attitudes about the Chinese as everyone else’ (9), despite the fact that their neither Brits of European heritage nor Victorian. On top of all this, Leela becomes ‘subservient to the Victoriana in [the] story’ (10), set apart from the likes of Litefoot by ‘her failure to use plates and glasses, not in her ability to savvily deconstruct Victorian excess’ (11), while the Doctor is explicitly engaged in an attempt at ‘civilising’ her and views Victorian London as a perfect place to do so (12). Taken together, this isn’t simply an unfortunate example of thoughtlessly peddling outdated racist stereotypes but a valorisation of specifically European-heritage British middle-class Victorian attitudes, allying the Doctor with that worldview and demeaning anyone from a different background.

    So, what does Terrance do with all this? Well, thankfully Litefoot no longer refers to ‘inscrutable Chinks’ (13) and the Doctor now talks only of being attacked by ‘this man—and several others’ (14), the only ‘little’ characters being Mr Sin (15) and Casey (16). The Doctor’s later comment to Greel about ‘Life’s little surprises’ survives (17) but, without the Doctor’s earlier remark creating the link between diminutive stature and Chinese assailants earlier (18), it appears innocuous enough (19). Leela’s talk of the ‘yellow one’ (20) is excised too, though this is rather undermined by that narration itself later giving Chang a ‘yellow hand’ (21). I suppose the fact that it’s a ‘grimy yellow hand’, Chang having just climbed from the sewer, might allow the suggestion that the colour is caked on Victorian effluent, but it doesn’t exactly convince (22).

    On sharpening the ‘loving poke’, Dicks does better. He establishes Victorian London as ‘a tough, savage place’ (23). It may not be much, but it is a definite attempt to paint Victorian London using the vocabulary with which it might dismiss other cultures. What’s more, there’s an easiness to the way the city can be interpreted through outsiders’ eyes, Leela recognising in the audience at the music hall an ambience familiar from ‘tribal festivities’ (24) and Chang viewing the workers of the early mornings as the same as the ‘peasants’ from his native land (25).

    That allows Dicks to also do slightly better when it comes to Victorian attitudes to the Chinese in London too. He keeps the lovely exchange where Jago confuses the Chinese with druids (26), but he also uses the theatrical setting to delve slightly into one possible reason for such confusion. When Jago stops to think about Chang, he reflects on how the performer ‘really was Chinese’ (27), unlike, as Kate Orman points out (28), most of the ‘Chinese’ acts of the age. No wonder his ideas of Chinese culture are muddled when they’re mostly coming off yellowface entertainers, with such acts clearly so prevalent that a genuine Chinese performer then finds himself reinforcing such stereotypes, imitating their patter when onstage (29) and peppering his performance with jokes about Chinese ‘opium smoking’ (30).

    None of this makes Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang unproblematic, indeed I wouldn’t even argue that Dicks is concerned with the broadcast story’s presentation of race at all. However, had that opium-smoking joke, for example, come up in the TV episodes, it would have read as a dig at the Chinese diaspora in Limehouse, just as ‘life’s little surprises’ managed to.

    There are a few reasons the novelisation avoids such a fate. First, it makes an effort to actually point out how China is home to ‘a far older culture’ than the UK (31), one that can’t be lightly dismissed. Secondly, it portrays even the Londoners who should be most familiar with Chinese populations, Litefoot, who actually ‘grew up in China’ (32), and the police, who, being near Limehouse, encounter the local Chinese often (33), as staggering unknowledgeable: Litefoot merrily professes he ‘never came anywhere near understanding them’ and brands them wholly ‘Odd’ (34); a constable shown pondering the Chinese ‘affinity with laundries’ does so ‘vaguely’ (35), clarifying how little knowledge or even thought lies behind his speculation; and Sergeant Kyle’s extraordinary attempt to communicate with a Chinese suspect (36) now acts as a set-up for Alf Buller’s later clearly mistaken belief that ‘An English policeman would know how to deal with [a] foreigner’ (37), especially as ’that smooth-talking’ Chang is who he turns to when his own attempts fail. As a result, when Chang’s audience ‘undoubtedly’ know opium-smoking is widespread among the Limehouse Chinese, it reads as a dig at the audience’s supposed certainty in the face of their assumed ignorance and not as a statement on the Limehouse Chinese.

    By avoiding the careless cynicism which, as El Sandifer argues, Robert Holmes allowed to overwhelm the TV episodes (38), the novelisation buys itself a bit of goodwill. This might only lead to minor and inadvertent improvements around the story’s treatment of the Chinese, but it has a more interesting effect on how Leela comes across.

    She doesn’t ‘savvily deconstruct Victorian excess’ but then, to be fair, that would be trickier now Victorian London’s a ‘savage place’ with rituals not dissimilar to her own tribe’s. What she does get, in a more defined way than onscreen, is a running commentary on the Doctor. This is clearest around his disdain for weapons, where she’s seemingly right at every turn: she brands his ban ‘ridiculous’ (39) while hampered in a fight by not having any; she describes his initial recce of the sewers with no weapons as ‘foolishness’ (40) and, though he may be right that very little weaponry would be of much use (41), he does later arm himself up and is only able to save Leela from the giant rat thanks to Litefoot’s Chinese fowling piece; she saves the Doctor’s life thanks to secretly carrying the Janis thorns he’s forbidden her from using, something he only acknowledges ‘ungraciously’ (42) and quietly lets drop; and finally she only manages to stop Mr Sin blasting everyone at the end because she gets her hands on a revolver. There’s also the detail that the Doctor’s solution to Magnus Greel, though it doesn’t involve weapons, seems to boil down to a quick wrestle (43), precisely the means you’d imagine Leela might employ.

    This doesn’t mean the Eliza Doolittle aspect of her character is completely gone – the novelisation adds a particularly vexing moment where Leela feels ‘pleased in spite of herself’ because she finds her new Victorian dress ‘rather becoming’ (44) – but it does at least make Leela a version whose skills and attitude from before she met the Doctor are inarguably valuable. In this way, Dicks is hewing closer than Homes to what John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado explain as Hinchcliffe’s reasoning behind the introduction of the character: by ‘constructing an Eliza Doolittle character’, he hoped to balance the series’ need for a ‘strong woman’ and one who had to ‘defer to the Doctor’ and ‘ask questions’ a lot of the time (45).

    Rather than make Leela ‘subservient to the Victoriana’ of ‘Talons’ and the Doctor, the aim had been to create, successfully according to a 1981 interview of Sydney mothers, ‘the only female companion that […] little girls identified with while playing’ (46) – in other words, as Tulloch and Alvarado put it, ‘the only female companion who ever challenged the Doctor for heroic identification’ (47).

    Dicks doubles down on this by allying the Doctor even more strongly with the Victorian attitudes of the story’s setting than on TV, explicitly aiming to ‘re-educate’ Leela (48) rather than more plainly ‘teach’ her (49), and then have Leela consistently undermine his starchy demeanour, recognising that his ‘lessons’ are more for his benefit than hers (50), blithely ignoring his instructions without even a moment’s thought (51) and ‘joyfully’ throwing herself into the very scraps the Doctor tries to keep her away from (52) while he lies ‘semi-conscious’ beneath the melee of fighting (53). Eliza Doolittle she may be, but she’s also the ‘female Tarzan’ (54) Dicks picks as an analogy – a protagonist in her own right – and she negotiates the gap between the absorption into middle-class society of the former, at least in the more popular versions of Pygmalion, and its complete rejection by the latter.

    On race and the role of the companion, then, this shows Dicks doing exactly what he’s been doing since at least Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowman, avoiding needless insensitivity, as when he tweaked Haisman and Lincoln’s overenthusiastic approach to naming Tibetan characters, and cementing the female lead as a protagonist, giving Victoria actual motivation for her plot-generating behaviour.

    That leaves El Sandifer’s linking Holmes’s treatment of Leela in ‘Talons’ with a casual indifference to ‘demeaning the working class’, which conveniently ties in with Dicks’s recent trend of sharpening the commentary in the stories he adapts on the imperialist attitudes of the ruling classes. Leela’s relationship with the Doctor offers some critique but, as in Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, Dicks is showing himself rather less radical than he’d previously hinted at.

    What he does do though is ensure the people on whom the wealth of the ruling classes is built are not erased. On the very first page, he introduces imperial London as ‘powerful and prosperous’ but emphasises how only some ‘shared in their country’s prosperity’ whilst others are ‘servants’ or ‘short of money to pay for their next meal, or even a roof over their heads’ with ‘troubles’ they can’t solve but only ‘forget’ (55). Like so much in Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang, it’s pretty minor but it trims off the worst excesses. Maybe that’s all Dicks is seeking to do with Target novelisations? Where the broadcast episodes have a nice idea struggling to pierce through, he brings it through more clearly, but where the scripts have teetered off the straight and narrow, he can only strive to make the ride less bumpy.