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)
"his neck twisted at a strange angle, obviously broken in the fall. Harry felt no sympathy"
THE REVENGE OF THE CYBERMEN
by Terrance Dicks
First published 20 May 1976 (1), between The Seeds of Doom and The Masque of Mandragora (2)
Height Attack
‘Towering in the doorway stood the giant silver figure of a Cyberman’ AND ‘The creature was at least seven feet tall’
Obviously, I’m going to start by picking a fight with Keith Miller’s 41-year-old review which describes The Revenge of the Cybermen as possessing a ‘script-to-book-and-never-mind-the-detail style’ (3). This is a perverse criticism of a novelisation that changes so many little details.
First up, the Vogans are actually quite good here and, considering, according to Shannon Sullivan, how late in the day they were added to the scripts (4), I suspect a lot of this is down to Dicks instinctively fleshing out the characters. There is a clear contrast between Vorus and Tyrum, the latter preferring a ‘smaller’ and ‘simpler’ office than his inferior (5), suggesting he’s more dedicated to public service than the man with ‘a mad thirst for power’ (6). Other selfless acts include his reluctance to risk ‘the lives of many of our people’ in his personal power battle with Vorus (7) and his seeming willingness to lead the final assault on the Cyberattack himself (8).
Tyrum, however, is clearly not above politicking, adding theatrics to his accusation of murder against Vorus’s guards (9), and, by the end, he looks the more cynical of the two, reflecting that Vorus’s rocket ‘had come in useful after all’ and taking his rival’s death easily in his stride: ‘A martyr was so much more satisfactory than a political rival’ (10). Meanwhile, Vorus’s thoughts reveal there is some sincerity behind his manoeuvres – he does, for example, truly believe the Vogans have become too timid (11). Alongside this, Dicks introduces an odd parallel with the Cybermen, Tyrums’s objection against Vorus’s plea that by remaining hidden the Vogans ‘survive’ (12) now echoing the Doctor’s description of the Cybermen’s motivation as ‘a great determination to survive’ (13). Vorus is rebelling against a living death akin to cybernisation, pursuing a desire to truly be alive, and that, in any Cyberstory, must at least put him somewhere near the right side of the debate.
It’s not just the Vogans Dicks fiddles with. Voga is now slightly less baffling, a ‘meteorite’ rather than a planet (14) that wonders between solar systems unnoticed. The detail that it’s the ‘last fragment’ of the seemingly forgotten ‘Planet of Gold’ that was ‘broken up by the Cybermen’ also lends it a mythic weight, a relic of a seemingly lost race. No wonder the Vogans are so timid if they’ve even lost most of their home.
The plot makes more sense than on TV too. For example, it’s now clear why the Doctor goes along with the Cyberplan as far as he does, seizing on the ‘one possible loophole’ he spies that causes no harm to himself, the Nerva crewmembers and Voga (15). Wonderfully, that loophole is revealed as a deliberate Cyberstrategy, a little glimmer of ‘hope of escape’ designed ‘to be sure that [the Doctor] would follow the plan’ (16). It’s a tiny touch but it gives the Cybermen a nice moment to appear something other than totally cretinous.
Then there’s all the stuff Dicks just improves with his prose. The early sequence when the Doctor, Harry and Sarah navigate a corridor of corpses, for example, is far more memorable in the novelisation than on screen thanks to adopting Sarah’s POV for the ‘nightmarish stumble’ and adding in a bit where one ‘fell suddenly toward her’ (17). As is the later sequence when a scene burns itself onto Harry’ memory, allowing Dick’s to provide a snappy freezeframe of the action (18).
And there are lots of little gems of phrases enlivening the story too, like the Doctor introducing all the characters to each other ‘with all the aplomb of a vicar at a garden party’ (19), the description of transmatting someone as like sending ‘a telephone message’ (20) or Harry attacking Sarah’s manacles ‘with rather more enthusiasm than care’ (21), plus nice little comic juxtapositions, like the Doctor considering that ‘Maybe Harry and Sarah were safer where they were’ before a cut to Harry and Sarah running frantically through corridors to the sound of gunfire’ (22) or the Cyberleader’s deadpan response to the Doctor asking Kellman if he’s betrayed Nerva for the gold: ‘There will be no gold’ (23). Dicks even rewrites the whole Cyberarrival to give it much more momentum, the Doctor frantically charging around in a doomed attempt to deny them entry (24), and offers a fleeting insight into the primal fear the Cybermen represent to the Vogans: they are ‘ancient nightmares’ (25).
The only things Dicks hasn’t actually done much with are Kellman and the Cybermen and, I suspect, that’s because they’re both so incomprehensible as characters. The former is immediately hateful, refusing ‘to even attempt to help’ the overwhelmed remnants of Nerva’s crew (26) and then luxuriating around (27) all ‘plump and rested’ (28) while taunting them with ‘his habitual sneer’ (29). Added to that, he’s utterly lacking in remorse about the deaths he’s brought to the beacon, calmly looking down at Warner, a man he’s presumably programmed the Cybermat specifically to kill (30), ‘With a smile of quiet satisfaction’, not even giving the corpse ‘a second glance’ as he leaves (31). His sole motivation for this carnage is explicitly simple greed, ‘the gold he hungered for’ (32), rather than any desire to eradicate the Cybermen or help the meteorite’s inhabitants.
Dicks compounds the problem by making both Vorus (33), who enlisted his help, and Harry, who barely knows him, treat him with utter contempt. Harry’s attitude, seeing as he’s a regular character and unquestionably a good guy, is the more interesting case here. When he and Kellman are trying to get to the Cyberbombs, Harry is portrayed ‘ruthlessly’ shoving the professor to the front so that, should there be any danger, he will encounter it first (34). When that then happens and Kellman dies, he feels ‘no sympathy’, judging that having ‘his neck twisted’ in a rockfall was ‘luckier than he deserved’ (35). Even when he then relates the events to the Doctor, he betrays a strange ease regarding Kellman’s fate, offhandedly explaining that ‘he copped it’ (36). Frankly, awful as Kellman was, it seems disproportionate that he’s so completely unworthy of basic human sympathy, even if he was himself incapable of feeling it for others.
The Cybermen, as always in prose, have the exact opposite problem. One minute, they definitively ‘do not have feelings’ (37), the next they’re speaking with ‘overtones of hate’ (38) or ‘eager anticipation’ (39) or taking a moment to ‘savour the horror’ on their victim’s face (40). When the Doctor decides to wind up the Cyberleader, its voice increasingly rises ‘in volume and intensity’ (41) before one ‘childish insult’ riles the unfeeling giant so much he snaps and takes a swing at the long-scarfed bastard (42). If writing for the Cybermen on TV is a pretty thankless task, trying to make them both exciting and consistent in prose seems to be an impossible task. Maybe the problem is that the concept of the Cybermen is just unworkable in the context of action-adventure derring-do where your villains have to actually be entertainingly villainous and have exploitable flaws, which disturbingly suggests none of the writers see an emotionless adherence to logic as a flaw.
Admittedly, the main problem seems to simply be the need to avoid using the phrase ‘he said’ too much, but that doesn’t explain why they speak in a ‘sibilant, whispering voice’ in to each other (44) but a purely ‘mechanical voice’ in front of humans (45), perhaps just putting on the steely demeanour for public show, and it certainly doesn’t explain Cyberclothes (46). I mean, I’d never really thought of the Cybermen as wearing clothes. Why would they? They can feel neither cold nor self-conscious. Clearly, they wear clothes on TV but I’d always just accepted that as an essential concession given that they’re, you know, men in costumes rather than it being a deliberate design decision. It’s like Dicks has accidentally swapped Kellman and the Cybermen around, which, if nothing else, is definitely not a ‘script-to-book’ mistake.
Dicksisms
‘a very tall, thin man whose motley collection of vaguely Bohemian garments included an incredibly long scarf and a battered soft hat jammed on top of a mop of wildly curling brown hair’
‘that mysterious traveller in Time and Space known only as the Doctor’ – it’s not the Davison era that launches this abomination of phrase, it’s the Target books
‘The familiar groaning noise filled the TARDIS as she took off’
‘there's a constant danger of space collision...’ - ?
‘green fluid oozing from its joints...’ and ‘Sarah shuddered at the sight of the green hydraulic fluid oozing from its joints’ – well, it is the colour of monsters
Look how smooth his transition to the word Vogan is!: ‘Although he didn't know it, Warner had been right about the transmission. It had come from Voga. In a control room deep inside that planet, the alien operator who had made it was slumped dead over his instruments. Blaster in hand, another alien creature, obviously some kind of security guard, stood watching over the body of the fellow-Vogan he had just killed. Two more Vogans strode into the room’
Of course, Dicks’s prose isn’t always a force for good. He’s still pushing ‘old chap’ as something the Doctor says, for example, and the description of the Cybermat is a nice try but baffling to untangle: ‘It scurried between the corpses, triangular in shape, metallic body scaled like a silverfish, large red electronic eyes glowing on top of its head. It was like a giant metal rat’. Other odd missteps include:
‘Commander Stevenson had been hammering away at Kellman for what seemed ages now, but the prisoner showed no signs of breaking down’ – I mean, Jesus. Actually, it’s just badly phrased but it’s the opener to that scene so the effect is the same in context
‘Unaware that he was using one of science-fiction's immortal cliches, Kellman said, “Take me to your leader”’ – is Dicks making the best of a bad line that didn’t make it to broadcast or is he wholly responsible for this?
‘The Militia Captain sighed. These wretched humans were popping up all over the place nowadays’ – it’s just so casual
‘A glancing rock grazed the Doctor's head and he took a sudden and unexpected nap’ –it feels like Dicks thinks the word ‘nap’ carries much more weight than it does
1 tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Revenge_of_the_Cybermen_(novelisation)
​
3 ‘Mr Dicks’ traditional script-to-book-and-never-mind-the-detail style’
Keith Miller in Doctor Who Digest in 1976 on The Revenge of the Cybermen; quoted from David J Howe, The Target Book
4 In October: ‘it became clear that more money was available for “The Revenge Of The Cybermen” than had previously been anticipated. Hinchcliffe and Holmes decided that additional material should therefore take place on the asteroid, which could now been filmed on location. Deciding to tackle this overhaul of Davis' scripts himself, Holmes replaced the miners with an alien race’. It filmed in November
Shannon Patrick Sullivan, A Brief History of Time (Travel);
shannonsullivan.com/drwho/serials/4d.html
5 ‘The picture on the wall showed a room, smaller and far simpler than the one in which Vorus stood. It was bare and functional, completely without ostentation. In it another Vogan sat working at a simple table. He was small and slender, dressed in plain dark robes’
6 ‘you are a gambler with a mad thirst for power’
7 ‘And lose the lives of many of our people? No—we shall wait’
8 ‘Tyrum put his hand on Sheprah's arm. “Come, old friend, I will speak to them. I am no longer young... but if I lead the last attack, perhaps they will be shamed into following me”’
9 ‘“Now your guards have resorted to murder— and that I can prove!” Tyrum ripped aside the curtain. Behind it, in the alcove, lay the body of the dead radio operator, killed by Vorus's guard for attempting to send a warning message to Nerva Beacon’
COMPARED WITH
VORUS: You have no proof of this absurd allegation.
TYRAM: Nonetheless, I believe it.
(Tyram goes over to a curtain and pulls it aside to reveal a body on a slab.)
TYRAM: Whatever is happening in the gold mines, Vorus, and strange stories have reached my ears, your guards have never before resorted to murder.
chakoteya.net/DoctorWho/12-5.htm
The theatrical ‘ripped’ rather than ‘pulls it aside’ might just be a side effect of Dicks rendering the scene in prose, but Tyram now uses the revelation as an exclamation mark for his accusation rather than simply ambling over to the curtain mid-conversation and is the one to positively assert that he has proof, where on TV it was Vorus who insisted on his lack of it
10 ‘To himself he thought that Vorus and his rocket had come in useful after all. He would see that Vorus received full posthumous credit. A martyr was so much more satisfactory than a political rival’ – it’s the way it’s so off-hand that makes Tyrum look bad. ‘useful after all’ seems pretty derogatory when the rocket did precisely what Vorus always intended it to do and ‘satisfactory’ is such an inappropriate yet very mild term to use about someone’s death
11 Watch a whole race get stereotyped in one fell swoop: ‘Magrik was a timid fool, even for a Vogan’ AND ‘Vorus's voice was unexpectedly kind. “You feel fear because you have lived too long in darkness. When I lead our people into the light, all these ancient fears will drop away”’ – yes, he’s still obsessed with being the one to lead them to it but the ‘unexpectedly kind’ reveals that he really does think he is helping
12 Tyrum: ‘Because this way we survive!’
13 ‘They're totally ruthless, with a great determination to survive, and to conquer’
14 ‘That meteorite is all that's left of Voga, once known as the Planet of Gold. The planet was broken up by the Cybermen, just before their defeat in the Cyberwar. They can't rest till this last fragment is shattered too’ – I’m sure on telly it was the whole planet orbiting Jupiter
15 ‘The Doctor could see only one possible loophole. He could take the bombs to the detonation zone, take off the packs once the countdown clock was in the final red sector, then use his fifteen minutes not to escape, but to attempt to defuse the three cobalt bombs. It was the slimmest of chances but it was the only one he could see’
16 ‘How transparent and emotional these animal organisms were. It had been easy to follow the thoughts in the Doctor's mind. That single loophole had been left deliberately, left to give him a hope of escape, to be sure that he would follow the plan to the last. What the Doctor did not know was that his fifteen minutes' grace after removing the packs did not exist’
17 ‘For the rest of her life Sarah Jane Smith was to be haunted by the memory of that nightmarish stumble down the long curved corridor filled with corpses. She closed her eyes for most of it, clutching the Doctor's sleeve and trying not to think about the stiff, pathetic figures as she edged blindly past them. Once a corpse, disturbed by the Doctor's passing, fell suddenly toward her with claw-like hands that seemed to be reaching out. Sarah choked off her scream and moved grimly on’ – that said, ‘stiff, pathetic figures’ with ‘claw-like hands’ does feel like a dig at the mannequins they used on TV.
18 ‘Harry turned from dealing with his Cyberman just in time to take in the scene. It remained forever photographed on his memory: the Doctor slumped against the far wall, blood trickling from his temple; Lester and the Cyberman collapsed across the relay apparatus. Lester's fingers undoing his pack buckle...’ – unfortunately ‘It remained forever photographed on his memory’ is sufficiently similar to ‘For the rest of her life Sarah Jane Smith was to be haunted by the memory’ to make it feel like Dicks is just repeating a trick
19 ‘The Doctor performed introductions, with all the aplomb of a vicar at a garden party’
20 ‘With transmat you could send a person as easily as a telephone message’
21 ‘Harry managed to get his hands on a piece of rock about the size of a grapefruit. Using it as a crude hammer, he started bashing away at Sarah's leg chains with rather more enthusiasm than care’
22 ‘Maybe Harry and Sarah were safer where they were. At that particular moment, Harry and Sarah were running along an endless succession of seemingly identical mine galleries, trying to find their way back to the transmat terminal’
23 ‘Bored with his role of mere audience, he suddenly chimed in. “One thing intrigues me, Kellman, what do you get out of this—Voga's gold?” The Cyberleader swung around. “There will be no gold, human”’ – there’s a lot of boredom in Dicks’s books. I guess it’s a feeling he’s confident kids’ll know
24 ‘He lifted it off to reveal a maze of heavy hydraulic piping. Taking a heavy monkey wrench from Lester, the Doctor started to unscrew the main power feed. Or rather he tried to unscrew it. But with the long quarantine period on the Beacon, the docking bay hadn't been used for some time. There had been no proper maintenance since all the engineers were dead. The big locking nut was jammed tight, and nothing the Doctor could do would shift it’
25 ‘The ancient nightmares had come to life. Cybermen had returned to Voga’
26 ‘Kellman had refused to even attempt to help, claiming that he lacked the necessary skills ‘
27 ‘Kellman yawned and stretched luxuriously’
28 ‘he had no duties, nothing to do but eat and sleep, he looked plump and rested’ compared to the crew
29 ‘his habitual sneer’
30 ‘I had to set the controls to home in on his brainwaves’
31 ‘Kellman appeared in the doorway. He looked down at Warner's body but made no attempt to help him. With a smile of quiet satisfaction, he crossed to the control console, opened a panel, took out the day's log tape cassette and dropped it into his pocket. Without giving Warner a second glance, he walked quickly from the room’
32 ‘Kellman felt a wave of panic. If he didn't get down to Voga in time to warn them of the Cybermen's plan, the gold he hungered for would be blown to smithereens’
33 ‘The alliance is over. You failed. What do I care what becomes of you?’
34 ‘Harry ignored the protests, shoving him ahead ruthlessly. If there was danger at the end of the passage, Harry was quite prepared for Kellman to run into it first’
35 ‘The nearest was Kellman, his neck twisted at a strange angle, obviously broken in the fall. Harry felt no sympathy. As far as he was concerned, Kellman had been luckier than he deserved’
36 ‘the late Professor Kellman—he copped it back in that rockfall’
37 ‘There was no emotion in the mechanical voice. Cybermen do not have feelings’
38 ‘It seemed almost possible to detect the overtones of hate in the Cyberman's voice’
39 ‘Even in the flat, toneless voice, Sarah could detect his eager anticipation’
40 ‘The Cyberleader paused to savour the horror on Sarah's face’
41 ‘The Cyberleader's voice rose in volume and intensity’
42 ‘For some reason this childish insult finally broke through the Cyberleader's control. It took a final step forward, the silver arm sweeping upward for a blow’
43 ‘This time failure was impossible, since no human element was involved’
44 ‘the leader was listening to a report from his engineer. In his sibilant, whispering voice the engineer said’
45 ‘“The Doctor's beaten you.” The toneless mechanical voice showed no disappointment’
46 ‘There was no real difference between the Cyberman's face and body, its clothes and the many strange-shaped accessories attached to its chest’
Tory Who
‘Sarah caught a flash of movement in the corner of her eye, spun round and reacted in true feminine style; she let out a loud, hearty scream’
‘He knew that Sarah had always refused to accept the role of the helpless heroine’ – I know it’s saying she isn’t one but it’s still implying that’s her natural role
Miscellania
‘They had just escaped, barely, from the most recent, an attempt by the Doctor to go back in Time and prevent the growing menace of the Daleks.*’ – little teaser for the very next book
‘“How early are we?” “Oh, about a thousand years or so”’ – is this only set 1000 years before ‘The Ark in Space’ or have I got the wrong end of the stick?
‘Sarah's life was saved by her exceptionally good peripheral vision’ – a rarity in Who
‘There had been so many enemies when Man first ventured out among the stars’ – you’ve got to wonder how many aggressors one race can encounter before realising it might be the problem
‘Very hard to get a laugh out of a Cyberman, thought the Doctor ruefully’ – it’s quite revealing that he still tries though
‘The Doctor, meanwhile, was struggling and choking in the steely hug of the Cyberman’ – I don’t know how Dicks would have described this if he’d seen the aggressive massage it became onscreen
‘One Cyberwarrior is still searching for the Doctor’ – there are Cyberwarriors?