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)
“I felt happier with something in my hands. Puny though it was, it was better than nothing”
DOCTOR WHO
by David Whitaker
First published 12 November 1964 (1), between Dangerous Journey and Crisis (2) (or parts 2 and 3 of Planet of Giants, if you’ve not got your Programme Guide to hand)
Height Attack
‘The Dalek machine was about four feet six inches in height’
‘The average height of the female Thal was about five foot six, but Dyoni was just under six foot’
‘Kristas [is] a huge man of nearly seven feet’
With Whitaker’s choosing to write in the first person, the Graham Greene prose style immediately establishes Ian as a more brooding protagonist than the matinee adventure hero William Russell portrayed. This is backed up with his cigarette habit (3), his need to work his frustration out through physical aggression (4) and his obsession with weapons – confused by the Doctor’s lack of arsenal (5). This is a far less content and settled character than on TV (6), with ‘a line of […] tries and failures to find the answer, not just to [his] future but to [his] own personality’ behind him (7), including, presumably, his current job, since he doesn’t ‘like being a teacher much’ (8).
Instead, he’s a man unusually ready to star in his own thriller, not just because he is quick-thinking in an emergency and willing to do unpleasant but necessary tasks (9) (traits shared by TV Ian), but because the ‘excitement and adventure’ satisfy a hollowness at the centre of his character. This Ian needs to travel with the Doctor before he will be able to ‘settle down to some ordinary work with no regrets’, whereas TV Ian was rather more homely, ready for a return to the pint and the pub of home since before he ever entered the Tardis
Balancing film-noir Ian is a Doctor who veers toward the sinister, described as ‘the least trustworthy factor’ in Ian’s ‘new and unreliable world’ (that’s a world that includes the Daleks). He is introduced using the motifs of a Victorian serial killer (10), his caped figure slipping in and out of the fog surrounding Ian and Barbara (11), threateningly ‘snarling’ at the pair (12), and there’s a hint of a more aggressive rage than ever seen on screen (13).
He does soften after Barnes Common, revealing impish glee (14), genuine remorse (15), great charm (16) and emotional perception, easily identifying Barbara’s feelings for Ian (17), but even then something stays a bit off. His attitude to Barbara, for example, morphs from ‘the most insincere’ gesture in response to her injuries to immediate and genuine concern on learning she is ill later on (18), but he still struggles to identify her as anything more specific than ‘the other one’ (19).
Where on TV the Doctor became less threatening as his character became better known, Whitaker’s Doctor shows flashes of Hartnell’s portrayal from the start but fails to prove any more comforting for it. He is, for example, at his most evil-sounding when also betraying his childishness - ‘malevolent’ when worried he’s been ‘caught out’ and ‘malicious’ when cheekily telling the truth (20) - and it’s a petulant tantrum on his part that endangers everyone (21). Perhaps that childishness is also why he finds it difficult to really care about others, as with Barbara above despite his concern, easily dismissing ‘sentimentality’ (22) and coldly plotting to use the Thals as a distraction (23).
Having given the two central characters a harder edge, Whitaker introduces explicit conflict between them, the Doctor insisting there can be only ‘one Captain of the ship’. In practical terms, that means he gets to make everyone go and explore the Dalek city (ostensibly through trickery but also, as Ian is not fooled by his play-acting (24), by pushing his indispensability as pilot) despite Ian’s protests that it’s too risky (25). But this isn’t just a matter of fine-tuning the relationships aboard the Tardis; it feeds into the story on Skaro. When Ian and the Doctor decide the Thals must be made to battle the Daleks, the novelisation has them begin their entreaties before they realise they no longer have the fluid link (26). While this fixes the difficult ethics of their sole motivation being their own desire to escape the planet, it also makes their rejection of the Thals’ refusal to fight philosophical rather than expedient.
Alongside this, the Thals’ pacifism is articulated as thoroughly unnatural, something which involves them ‘shutting their eyes to reality’ (27) – in fact, ‘everything’ in life should properly be seen ‘in terms of a struggle’, even a hot day (28). The desire to fight is so natural it is ‘a purpose […] as old as time itself’, something that has ‘lain dormant’ in the Thals rather than been expelled (29), and its awakening is portrayed as exclusively positive, transforming them from mere ‘survivors’ to ‘true heirs’ of the planet.
What’s odd is that the novelisation offers no balance against these attitudes. Even at the end, when the Doctor concedes that ‘If you say to me, “Why should we ever make war again?” then now I not only agree with you, I insist that you follow your principles’, Ian is busy articulating the Dalek-free future as a mere continuation of their battle: ‘you must go on fighting. You must battle with the soil and the sun, fight the creatures in the lake and struggle to keep life itself an ever-increasing thing of beauty’. It starts to look less like a worldview just held by Ian and more like one being supported by the whole story.
A similar problem arises with the portrayal of the Daleks. They’re less of a nihilistic monolith of horror than they were on TV, with a life that involves making art (30), tending farms (31) and tackling thirst (32), and their little beating hearts (33) lend them a touching air of vulnerability. None-the-less, the mutants within the cases look ‘evil’ (34) and that’s enough for the Doctor to know they were right to side with the Thals (35), just as the Thals’ eradication of physical ‘ugliness’ is enough for him to deduce they’re good people (36).
There are two options for how to read this, neither comfortable. Either Whitaker is launching a book series that by now he knows will revolve around conflict and alien cultures by openly declaring how the male leads are innately prejudiced against the alien, constantly spoiling for a fight and ideologically invested in the idea that one race must always be preeminent wherever they go for stability to reign, just as there can only be ‘one Captain’ in their ersatz home, or he’s launching a book series that by now he knows will revolve around conflict and alien cultures by openly declaring that anything non-humanoid is objectively ugly and evil, conflict is an essential truism of life and one race must always be preeminent on any planet for stability to reign - tweak the word non-humanoid and the Daleks could happily sign up to this. None of this really detracts from the strength of Doctor Who as a book, and it remains one of the strongest novelisations, but it is an unfortunate message with which to launch the series.
Billy Fluffs
Ian: ‘”An atomic explosion of some sort.”’
Doctor: ‘”Precisely. A gigantic one, too, and yet not an atomic or a hydrogen one as being experimented with on your planet.”’
So a non-atomic atomic explosion?
Tory Who
Ian on Susan: ‘I wondered briefly what would happen when she met a man she wanted to marry and decided not to travel in the Tardis with her grandfather any longer’ - though, to be fair, Whitaker’s probably just been handling ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ scripts
It’s clearly inconceivable to Whitaker that even another planet might have different coupling norms: ‘a young woman whose name was Dyoni. Susan told me she was to be married to Alydon’
When Kristas suggests Barbara tell Ian how she feels, she explains that ‘the man asks the woman if she is willing
References I Didn’t Get
‘we moved in this Indian file fashion’ - the same as moving single file. Apparently Native Americans used to pass through woods on foot in columns of one
‘I call them buildings for want of a better description but really the whole design was as if someone had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build a city’ - perhaps the most famous example is the New York Guggenheim Museum
images from Wikimedia
1 http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_in_an_Exciting_Adventure_with_the_Daleks
2 http://epguides.com/DoctorWho/
3 ‘I offered her a cigarette. She refused and I lit one for myself’
‘I leant against the wall for a moment, wishing I had a cigarette’
‘I didn’t have a cigarette and I was on my own’ - he seems unsure which is the worse predicament
4 ‘I spent a little of my fury against one of the white trees and I hit it so hard my fist went deep into the trunk’ - disconcerting that only a ‘little’ anger results in ‘so hard’ a punch
5 ‘the Doctor carried no armaments of any kind whatsoever on board. When Susan had mentioned this earlier [...] I had dismissed this as a lack of knowledge on her part. Obviously, I had thought then, the Doctor wouldn’t want her meddling with guns or explosives’. And he’s very happy when he finally gets his hands on a Dalek rod: ‘I felt happier with something in my hands. Puny though it was, it was better than nothing’
6 The Doctor on Ian: ‘a certain lack of early purpose’
7 Ian on Ian: ‘Secretly, I knew that I was beginning to enjoy what was happening to me. It was a fantastic wrench [...] yet already a part of me welcomed it. I’d enjoyed teaching but I knew it wasn’t right. The job I’d failed to get at Donneby’s was only one instance of a line of similar tries and failures to find the answer, not just to my future but to my own personality. That was all over and now I could work out the restless itch that had made me scratch my way through a dozen jobs. I could fill myself with excitement and adventure with the Doctor and then, when the day came for it to end and he returned me back again to Earth [...] I’d be happy to settle down to some ordinary work with no regrets’
8 Susan on Ian: ‘You’re a schoolmaster with a degree in science. You don’t like being a teacher much, I gather’
9 ‘It was an unpleasant business. I had to engineer the dead body back into the cabin before I could wrench open the door and then scramble over to reach the light switch’
10 ‘This sort of walking was deliberately quiet’
11 ‘I spoke the last three words into the fog for the old man turned quickly and was swallowed up. I could hear his running footsteps’
12 ‘I could hear him snarling at me’
13 ‘The old man sobbed with anger and tore himself away’
When Ian says they shouldn’t go to the city: ‘I really thought he was going to hit me for a moment, his anger was so great’
14 When Ian stays to warn the Thals: ‘the Doctor, who was shaking his head from side to side. “Sentimentality, Chesterton. That’s all it is. Still, I won’t stop you”’
15 ‘Susan has told us the Thals are coming to the city. The Daleks will be occupied with them. With care, we ought to be able to slip through to the forest’
16 ‘”But we haven’t checked everything properly yet, Grandfather.” “I don’t care about that. I simply won’t stand here and be subjected to insult from a young man whose intellect can’t even stretch out to accept known and proved scientific fact. Open the doors!”’
17 ‘The Doctor rubbed his hands with glee and actually gave a little dance’
18 ‘You must forgive me, Chesterton; all of you must! What have I done with my stupid subterfuge?’
19 ‘he smiled at me in the most engaging fashion’
20 ‘I hadn’t any idea what was the matter with Barbara and the Doctor hadn’t helped me one bit, although he was obviously driving at something’
21 When Ian points out that Barbara is hurt, the Doctor ‘clicked his tongue in sympathy. It was the most insincere sound I’ve ever heard in my life’
‘To give him his due, he was immediately and genuinely concerned’
22 ‘it’s the other one I’m worried about. We must find her and get back to the Tardis’
23 ‘a look of malevolent cunning and triumph suddenly mixed with concern that he had been caught out’
‘his eyes glinting with malicious amusement. “Perhaps one of her family found her and took her home.”’
24 ‘I just had to accept the situation he’d contrived. For all I knew he had pounds of mercury all over the Tardis but there were too many places he could hide it and far too many other things he could interfere with and use as excuses to make a journey down to the city’
25 ‘You control the Ship. You’ve uprooted us from our own world and brought us to this one, but we have some say in our safety. And yours, too’
26 Ian starts trying to get the Thals to fight back before he realises he needs their help: ‘before you go, have a talk with my friend the Doctor. We’ve already immobilized one of the Daleks. They aren’t invincible, you know. We can work out some sort of plan to defeat them’ and the Doctor talks to the Thals about the necessity of fighting – also before any mention of the fluid link: ‘”I’m no advocate of human conflict. I have seen splendid races destroyed; brilliant cultures lost beyond recall; marvellous cities in dust and rubble, where beauty and grace flourished. But terrible though it may be, one must sometimes commit an offence in order to stamp out the greater evil. I say to you, fight! Struggle to hold on to life. Protect the weakest of you and honour the eldest. Provide for the girls and the mothers. Teach the children.” Alydon said, “All these things we mean to do.” “That is precisely what you will fail to do,” replied the Doctor, ‘if you give in to the Daleks”’
27 ‘It was a look of strange excitement and I recognized it instantly and was glad. They knew they were fighting now, that it was possible to stand against what seemed to be the invincible and defeat it. For the fast time I felt that they were not simply the survivors of the planet Skaro, ekeing out a miserable half-existence and shutting their eyes to reality . They were the true heirs ready to earn their inheritance’
28 ‘It’s curious how everything we do I now see in terms of a struggle. I did not realize it before. The sun will be a worthy opponent’
29 ‘something new was being born here, some new purpose in the Thals—yet it was a purpose that was as old as time itself’
‘There was a part of him that had lain dormant, as with all the Thals, that part that knows adversity and battles against it’
30 ‘we came across what I can only describe as an example of Dalek sculpture. It was little more than a series of metal squares welded together, without any particular design or pattern, and since it had no attachments to the flooring or showed that it possessed any internal engines or served any purpose at all, we concluded it must be some form of bizarre decoration’
31 ‘The light in it hurt my eyes and I screwed them up and saw that the entire area of the floor, except for two feet all round was taken up by a glass case under which I could see thousands of little green shoots. The heat in the room was terrific “Artificial sunlight,” breathed Barbara. ‘Don’t you see, Ian that’s how they grow things”’
32 ‘They must drink some of the water’
33 ‘My guess is that electricity wasn’t just used to power the casing they wore or fire their guns. I think they needed power to help their hearts beat’
34 Just in case you think I’m being unfair and selectively quoting: ‘It was an evil, monstrous shape. There was one eye in the centre of a head without ears and with a nose so flattened and shapeless it was merely a bump on the face. The mouth was a short slit above the chin, more of a flap really, and on either side of the temples there were two more bumps with little slits in them and I heard the Doctor mutter that they must be the hearing parts. The skin was dark green and covered with a particularly repellent slime. I felt my stomach heaving and I bit the inside of my mouth until I tasted blood. The Doctor viewed the thing with repugnance and wiped a hand over his brow’
35 ‘Chesterton, if I had any doubt at all about what we were contemplating, the sight of that disgusting thing has totally dispelled them. And they call the Thals mutations!’ - yes they do! As, in fact, do the Thals. They do so because they use the word ‘mutations’ to refer to things that have mutated, which the Thals have, rather than just things that are ugly
36 ‘“now they have eradicated ugliness and awkwardness from their bodies altogether.” He paused significantly. “And from their minds as well”’
Whitakerisms
‘A warm fire and the supper my landlady would have waiting for me seemed as far away as New Zealand’ Why New Zealand? Is this something from Ian’s past or just Whitaker’s choice for the furthest away imaginable place?
‘The first real shock was the immense size of the room [...] I was in a room about twenty feet in height and with the breadth and width of a middle-sized restaurant’ Seems an oddly low-key analogy for the ‘immense’ room that caused such ‘shock’, especially the specification of its being ‘middle-sized’ – that’s almost deliberately underwhelming
‘Concern and curiosity are valid feelings, but scepticism, my dear Chesterton [...] is a failing in your world.’ Does that mean that his race has become so advanced through simply believing everything indiscriminately?
Miscellania
That glass Dalek in full: ‘He was resting on a kind of dais and his casing was totally made of glass. Inside, I could see the same sort of repulsive creature that the Doctor and I had taken out of the machine and wrapped in the cloak. The Dalek looked totally evil, sitting on a tiny seat with two squat legs not quite reaching the floor. The head was large, and I shuddered at the inhuman bumps where the ears and nose would normally be and the ghastly slit for a mouth. One shrivelled little arm moved about restlessly and the dark-green skin glistened with the same oily substance that had revolted me before. [...] it spoke with a different kind of voice altogether, not like the dull, lifeless monotone of its fellows but more of a dreadful squeaking sound that only just made the words intelligible. [...] I saw the glass Dalek jump to its feet and give a little dance of rage, its one arm waving furiously and banging the inside of the glass. “Silence!” it squeaked’
The Doctor describes himself as ‘from the next Universe but one’ and ‘Cut off from our own planet and separated from it by a million, million years of your time’, as well as hinting at why he travels: ‘A life of drifting from place to place, searching perhaps for the ideal and never finding it’
Susan’s errors seem less purposeful than on TV: ‘She thought Australia was in the Atlantic Ocean’, ‘She thought the Spanish Armada was a castle’ and ‘she had written that Japan was a county in Scotland’
The Doctor and Susan have travelled before: ‘I shall have some of that Venusian Night Fish we discovered. I’m very glad I laid in a supply of that’
The death of Antodus is a little less than the climax of his accumulating doubts than it was on TV: ‘Antodus stumbled over his feet’
