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)
"Sarah's head nodded on her chest as Bellal's voice droned on and on"
DEATH TO THE DALEKS
by Terrance Dicks
First published 20 July 1978 (1), between The Invasion of Time and The Ribos Operation (2)
According to Tat Wood, Dicks had very little to do with ‘Death to the Daleks’, concentrating on new series Moonbase 3 and rewrites to ‘The Monster of Peladon’ (3). He even recounts a legend that the little exposure Dicks did have to the script led him to commiserate Robert Holmes as he handed his duties over (4). The novelisation suggests this might not be quite the myth Wood suggests.
Early on, Dicks makes an admirable attempt to give this story a bit of energy. The prologue is visceral and action-packed, echoing the Hinchcliffe era for which some see ‘Death to the Daleks’ as something of an opening salvo (5). Adjectives tumble over each other (6), suggesting frenziedness and injecting pace, actions flow into each other (7), emphasising Jack’s desperation, background is filled in in flashes (8), giving the exposition a sense of urgency, and then his death comes with an arresting numbness (9), much like Ian Marter conveyed the body horror of Doctor Who and the Ark in Space as an out-of-body experience. Dicks even manages, in the way Jack prepares to use his blaster, made ‘useless on this planet’, as ‘a club’ (10), to sum up the entire story of what the city has done to the people of Exxilon before either are even introduced. To cap it all, chapter one then has the wonderfully evocative title ‘Death of a TARDIS’.
Things then quickly start to slip away, Dicks’s efforts to lift the events of the story plainly exhausted. By chapter two, the book as firmly drifted into offering little more than a list of stuff happening. With two-and-a-bit pages, Sarah changes clothes (11), exits the Tardis (12), gets spooked (13), runs into a bush (14), finds the Doctor’s lamp (15), notices blood (16), goes back to the Tardis (17), closes the door (18), gets attacked (19), hits her attacker (20), opens the door (21), gets attacked (22), hits her attacker (23), exits the Tardis (24) and runs (25). By the time the Daleks turn up, even that’s too exciting and Dicks is dragging events out (26) and delivering dreary lines like ‘One of the Daleks in the ship's doorway spoke in the metallic grating voice that the Doctor had known and hated for so long’.
Dicks seems to have reached the same verdict on this story as Tat Wood (27) and, rather than attempting a salvage job, decides to rub salt in the wound. Such thrilling set pieces as the Exxilon sacrifice leave Sarah ‘rather bored with it all’ (28) while Galloway and Hamilton’s ‘nightmarish’ ascent of the city’s tower is described as ‘repetitive’, involving ‘the same set of actions over and over again’ (29). And then there’s all the exposition. The Doctor at least feels simply ‘overwhelmed with all this new information’ when he’s the focus of a massive infodump (30), but Sarah’s a lot less charitable, almost immediately tiring of Bellal (31), eventually struggling to even stay awake as he ‘droned on and on’ (32), and tiring even of the Doctor’s attempts to engage with the adventure towards the end (33).
Despite all the exposition, a lot is simply left up in the air by the end. It’s never clear what the rock that first caught the Doctor’s attention on Exxilon is despite all the time devoted to his theories of sand erosion, statues and petrified lifeforms (34). More crucially, we never find out if the destruction of the city is a result of the Doctor’s efforts, the Daleks’ bombs or the city’s own scorched-earth approach to self-defence (35). Dicks doesn’t suspect we’ll care so long as it’s all over.
Even the opportunity to pick up on Dalek characterisation from right where he left it in Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks doesn’t seem to inspire Dicks very much. There’s the treat of a Dalek ‘Baffled’ by a pile of rocks in an underground cave (36), the ‘ludicrous surprise’ a group suffer when the Doctor and Bellal decide to use a door (37) and the Dalek with ‘a curiously drunken air’ thanks to having its gun bent (38), but that’s about it. He doesn’t even take the opportunity of expounding on the Daleks possessing ‘a miniature TARDIS’ to use as target practice (39).
Worst of all, despite all the lack of effort elsewhere, Dicks still takes the time to make the presentation of the Exxilons more uncomfortable than it was onscreen. Sarah immediately identifies them as ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’ (40), the narrative describes them as physically ‘brutal, misshapen [and] degenerate’ (41), their speech, in a second language, mind, is labelled ‘debased’ (42) and they ‘swarm’ (43). Not content with just sticking the knife in regarding alien cultures, Dicks also takes the opportunity to make a link between Dan Galloway’s ‘poverty-stricken’ childhood and his view of ‘Morals and ideals’ as ‘luxuries’ (44).
And that really is it. There’s nothing more to milk from this book, bar the trepidation appropriate to the realisation that the next novelisation is going to see Dicks doing Terry Nation all over again…
Dicksisms
No wheezing or groaning this time, but the Doctor having ‘a deeply-lined, young-old face’ makes an immediate return, plus returns for the stock phrase ‘The police box, which was not a police box at all, sped through that mysterious void where space and time are one’ and, for the first time in a long time, the generic and irritating companion-description ‘an attractive, dark haired girl’
Height Attack
The Doctor is ‘thin, […] tall and broad shouldered’, at least one of the savage Exxilons is a ‘tall black shape’ and even a rock resembles ‘a tall figure’
References I Didn’t Get
Sarah wears ‘an abbreviated beach robe’ – it’s clear what this means, but it does suggest she’s been busy shortening it
Tory Who
‘The Doctor nodded like some teacher whose pupil has finally come up with the answer’ – patronising git
‘I'm afraid Sarah's inclined to be headstrong. By now she's probably out looking for me’
Proto-L’Officier
‘During her relatively brief acquaintance with the Doctor, the TARDIS had taken her to a particularly violent era of England's medieval past, and to a London mysteriously infested with dinosaurs’
1 Based on the Popular Television Series, ed. Paul Smith
2 epguides.com/DoctorWho
3 ‘Dicks concentrated on Moonbase 3 and the drastic revisions to 11.4, “The Monster of Peladon”, leaving Holmes in charge of this one’
Tat Wood, About Time 3 [expanded 2nd edition]; p.445
4 ‘A few myths have grown up around this script’s next stage. According to legend Dicks handed over to Robert Holmes with the words,| “good luck – the Aspirins are in the bottom drawer”’
Tat Wood, About Time 3 [expanded 2nd edition]; pp.444-5
5 R: ‘This is Robert Holmes’ first story wher he takes on script-editing duties […] he puts all his attention into little themes and moments he’ll turn to with greater effect over the next few seasons’
Toby Hadoke and Robert Shearman, Running through Corridors 2; p.162
‘this oddly prefigures the dark science fantasy tone of the looming Hinchcliffe years, doubly so because Robert Holmes is the uncredited script editor on this story. This story isn't usually pointed to as a prototype of the Hinchcliffe era, but it absolutely is’
Elizabeth Sandifer, Tardis Eruditorum, eruditorumpress.com/blog/poor-pathetic-creatures-death-to-the-daleks
6 I’m in danger of quoting the whole prologue but there are two examples just in ‘He ran blindly, desperately through the swirling green fog, deep, sobbing breaths rasping into his tortured lungs’
7 ‘His foot slipped on a loose rock and he pitched forward on to his face. He rolled over, scrambled to his feet and ran on, snatching another quick look behind him’
8 ‘As he ran, confused memories flashed through his mind. Selection for this all-important mission, farewells to family and friends on Earth, the landing on this isolated hell-planet. And then—disaster’
9 ‘he felt a blow over the heart. It felt no worse than a heavy punch, but when he looked down there was an arrow jutting from his chest’
10 ‘He snatched the blaster from his belt and glared defiantly around him. The weapon was useless on this planet, but if one of them came close enough, he could use it as a club’ – an opening hint of what the city has done to all civilisation on the planet
11 ‘Hurriedly she started to change’
12 ‘Outside the TARDIS Sarah looked fearfully around’
13 ‘In sudden panic Sarah started to run’
14 ‘blundered straight into something that grabbed at her […] but it was only a scrubby thorn-bush’
15 ‘The oil lamp was perched on a stone spur’
16 ‘she looked closely at her fingers. They were smeared with blood’
17 ‘she reached the TARDIS safely enough’
18 ‘Slowly the door started to close’
19 ‘a bat-like figure swooping down on her’
20 ‘Her hand was still on the crank-handle […] she swung it in terror at the approaching shape’
21 ‘Soon the door was open wide enough to get through’
22 ‘the creature came suddenly to life. Lunging towards her’
23 ‘Sarah pulled the handle free, and smashed it down’
24 ‘she slipped through the gap and out’
25 ‘she ran desperately on’
26 ‘Slowly, very slowly, a landing ramp slid out of the ship and a door above it opened’
27 ‘very little of what’s actually on screen warrants praise or interest of any kind’
Tat Wood, About Time 3 [expanded 2nd edition]; p.444
28 ‘It was a funny thing to say about your own sacrifice, thought Sarah, but she was beginning to get rather bored with it all’
29 ‘It had been a nightmarish business, all the worse because it had been so repetitive. They had repeated the same set of actions over and over again’
30 ‘The Doctor felt somewhat overwhelmed with all this new information’
31 ‘“I am called Bellal. I am an Exxilon, a native of this planet. But my people do not share the beliefs of those others, the ones who tried to sacrifice you. They consider us their enemies.” Sarah thought it was bad enough being on this planet, without having to listen to a lecture on its politics’ – God, she’s got a short attention span
32 ‘Sarah's head nodded on her chest as Bellal's voice droned on and on’
33 ‘Sarah found it difficult to share the Doctor's enthusiasm. “This is all very fascinating, but it isn't going to help us get off this planet”’
34 ‘The monolith could be of natural origin. It was perfectly possible that swirling sand storms had gradually carved the rock pillar into its present fantastic shape. Or was it a statue of some kind, worn away by the passage of time? Then there was the other theory he'd mentioned to Sarah. Perhaps it was some creature of the planet, dead for untold thousands of years, petrified into its present form’
35 ‘Perhaps because of the Doctor's work on the computer, perhaps because of the Dalek assault on the beacon, perhaps even because of its own rampaging antibodies, the City was dying’
36 ‘Baffled by the rock-pile, the Dalek halted—Daleks cannot climb’
37 ‘The Daleks swung round into the alcove, machine-guns blazing. They sprayed every inch of the confined space with bullets—and suddenly stopped firing. Their eye-stalks swivelled round in almost ludicrous surprise. The alcove was empty’
38 ‘The Doctor noticed with wry amusement that the second Dalek's gunstick was bent into an upward-pointing U, giving the Dalek a curiously drunken air’
39 ‘On a bench at the other end of the laboratory was a target—a miniature TARDIS’ – why has he kept that??
40 ‘Perhaps the creature that had attacked her was merely one of the barbarians of this world, one of the savages who skulked outside the City without daring to approach’
41 ‘Although they were more or less humanoid, the faces were brutal, misshapen, degenerate, with loose mouths, flat noses and small close-set eyes glinting evilly’ – what are loose mouths?
42 ‘They speak a kind of pigeon galactic, though it's so debased you can hardly follow them’
43 ‘A swarm of Exxilons descended upon the disabled Dalek, bashing at it with clubs, axes and heavy rocks, hammering it into a shapeless lump of metal. The tremendous battering triggered the Dalek's self-destruct unit’ – but at least he sorts out that exploding Dalek, eh?
44 ‘Dan Galloway was essentially a simple man. He had lost all his family in one of the early Dalek wars, grown up as a ragged poverty-stricken refugee, joined the Marine Space Corps at the first opportunity, and clawed his way up from the ranks. Morals and ideals were the kind of luxuries he had never been able to afford. He had only one standard of behaviour—whatever helped Dan Galloway to succeed was justified’
Miscellania
Bellal ‘was very small, not much bigger than a child. It wore a tattered greenish garment that covered arms and legs and body so closely
that at first sight it looked like the creature's skin. The head was small and round, completely hairless, with small ears and enormous staring
eyes. The face was a dull, fish-belly white, and seemed to be faintly luminous’. He also seems to be slightly gelatinous: ‘As soon as he had
moved past, a hand and a long thin arm appeared out of the crack. The hand was totally white, like that of some creature that never sees
the light. The rest of the creature's body was grey and it oozed out of the crack like toothpaste from a tube’
Double entendre: ‘She had been sprinkled with strange fluids, menaced with various weapons, endlessly harangued by the priests’
‘With three choices you couldn't even spin a coin’ – what good would spinning a coin do anyone?
‘the knife that was stabbing towards his chest was made from a single piece of metal —a spaceman's knife’ – isn’t that standard for a knife?
It’s certainly true of all my knives
