I’ve repeatedly used other critics suggestion that Dicks plainly converts scripts to books as a straw man to argue in Dicks’s favour, largely because the particular straw man I chose fully describes it as a ‘script-to-book-and-never-mind-the-detail style’ (3), where it feels the implication is that Dicks just dumps what he finds in the scripts onto the page and then hands it in. I’d still resist that verdict but the early pages of Doctor Who and an Unearthly Child make it very clear why that accusation might get levelled, reading like little more than a procession of stage directions, culminating in the Chapter Two title ‘Enter the Doctor’ (4).

    ‘A foggy winter’s night’ (5) it opens, in a manner that hints at the Jackanory style of the ‘Are You Sitting Comfortably..?’ box. The description of the ‘tall figure loom[ing] up out of the fog’, though devoid of any clear perspective and formatted, image first followed by clarification ‘- the helmeted, caped figure of a policeman’, so as to make clear to the director the desired effect, can be imagined as an omniscient storyteller recreating the effect of a silhouette emerging from the peasouper. The end of the first scene, however, tips the balance as the gate to the Totter’s Lane junkyard ‘creaked slowly open again’ (6). In the broadcast episode, this is the cue for the camera to enter, have a little wander around and come to rest on the mysteriously place police box; in the novelisation, that business has already all been done, and flatly commented upon (7), by the policeman himself. As a result, the opening gate isn’t followed, as on TV, by a look inside the junkyard but by a cut to the policeman’s discovery the next night that the police box has gone (8). Why does the gate creak open unseen? I can’t think of any reason other than because it does in the script.

    This is still no ‘never-mind-the-detail style’ though – Dicks specifically adds the, admittedly banal, detail that the catch on the gate ‘must have been faulty’ and, more extensively, a role and briefly sketched character for the policeman. It’s worth bearing in mind that Dicks, according to Based on the Popular BBC Television Series, had a mere fortnight to complete to complete this novelisation (9). He’d have had to rely on instinct to power him through a lot of the writing and that instinct, understandably considering his career and the source material, is that of a screenwriter. Even stripped of its mystery (the faulty catch) and purpose (the policeman’s already shown us round the yard), the gate creaking open is a little audiovisual moment on TV – it makes the set feel more 3-dimensional and serves as a precursor to the opening of the Tardis door – and so it stays in, even though it doesn’t really function in its new medium.

    All of this makes it sound like Dicks has steadfastly resisted any development that might have come with writing at least 52 books before this one (10), but his handling of the tribe later in the novelisation demonstrates how very far he is from the script-to-page merchant of repute once he gets some characters and motivation to work with. Take Old Mother, Za’s mum in Dicks’s telling.

She despises her son for keeping her alive, a weak act she implies she and his father would never have allowed and which guarantees Za will never make chief (11). Za’s father Gor ‘died hunting’ (12) but Old Mother is convinced he was too good a hunter for such a fate (13), believing instead that his ability to make fire had ‘angered the gods’ (14), leading them to kill him (15) and rain ‘misfortunes […] upon the Tribe’ (16). This addition gives her stronger motivation in her campaign against fire (17), but it also changes the tribe’s relationship with fire. On TV, it seems Za’s father was killed by the tribe (18); they may well have bowed before him (19), but it seems they also feared his ability or resented his power, actively ending his reign and eradicating his knowledge. In the novelisation, Gor is simply the latest is a line of chief-firemakers (20), with fire nothing more than a ‘jealously guarded’ secret which he is careful to keep from his mate (21) and his son (22), and his failure to pass that knowledge on represents his prioritising his position over the survival of the tribe.

    Gor’s reason for keeping his secret too long was he feared his son as ‘a rival’, one who, at least according to Old Mother’s view of the world, would have driven Gor ‘out of the cave to die’ (23). That Za has allowed Old Mother to remain, much to her disgust, shows he is, by the start of the story, already moving beyond the mistakes of the past. Ian may bemoan how ‘These people just don't understand kindness’ (24) but Za’s ‘softness’, plus his seeming comprehension of the Tardis crew’s actions in contrast with Hur’s bafflement, suggests he’s already more open to new ways. His recognition, for example, that the role of a leader is to organise hunts and ensure all are fed (25), makes him more receptive to Ian’s  lesson that ‘Kal is not stronger than the whole Tribe’ (26). Dicks even strengthens Za’s resistance to superstition, repeating his assertion that the Tardis crew must ‘come from a tribe across the mountains’ when the rest of the tribe decide they must ‘come from Orb’ (27). In this way, Za represents the first steps toward humanity, at least as it’s reflected in Ian and Barbara, keen for ‘new thoughts’ (28), and those steps are being taken even before the Tardis crew blunder in.

    The greater insight into Za’s thoughts makes the contrast between him and Kal, who is ‘greedy and ruthless’, an animalistic alpha male who, not unlike Gor, wants ‘everything for himself’ (29), stronger than on TV. Oddly, Dicks also puts emphasis on the fact that Kal’s appeal is based not on his hunting prowess (30) but on his ability to ‘use words cunningly’ (31); Kal is, as the Doctor observes with dismay, a politician (32). This has the effect of steering the story towards an anti-articulacy message – it’s better to speak plainly and the art of manipulating language is at least the thin edge of a treacherous edge. To be fair, though, Dicks’s issue seems to be specific to the use of words for ‘clouding the minds of the Tribe’ and being ‘a quick thinker’ like Kal is clearly not the same as being open to new thoughts like Za. There’s also clearly limits to what a smooth tongue can achieve – when Kal boasts the seemingly ‘impossible’, Za is certain he must be speaking the truth for ‘he would not have risked making such a claim before all the Tribe unless he was confident that he could back it up’ (33) and Kal’s one outright lie, that Za killed Old Mother, is the move that brings his own downfall. It’s not articulacy Dicks is criticising but liberality with the truth.

    But, as so often with discussions of ‘An Unearthly Child’, enough with the actual meat of the story. If we’re talking about characters, it’s the original Tardis crew most readers are going to be interested in. Susan gets a nice introduction, Ian viewing her as ‘too pure, too precise’, as if imperfectly mimicking humanity thanks to her constant observation of those around her (34). Though ‘unearthly’, her interest in fitting in is motivated, not because she’s a dangerous alien, but because she’s the humans that surround here are a ‘potentially dangerous alien species’ (35), foreshadowing the Doctor’s fears when Ian and Barbara force their way into the Tardis and his decision to kidnap them rather than let them go. That’s about it, though. As the story progresses, Susan, as on TV, fades quickly from prominence, performing little beyond the generic ‘kid’ role (36).

    Perhaps surprisingly, Ian doesn’t fare much better. His own verdict on himself, that he ‘take[s] things as they come’ (37), is preserved from TV, as is his complete inability to do so the moment he enters the Tardis (38). Quite where Dicks feels he falls on this spectrum is unclear however. I can’t help but feel that his ‘traditional sports jacket and flannels’ (39) is meant to suggest a laid-back nature, though my inability to get my head round quite what this means makes that a shaky reading to say the least. It’s also possible that his speaking ‘ungrammatically’ (40) is Dicks seeking to convey a lack of formality, though it could just as easily be a comment on Barbara’s inability not to notice, to her mind, such a slip. That his friendship with Barbara results from his appreciating ‘the kindness beneath [her] rather severe exterior’ (41) suggests a greater willingness to accept people’s good nature than others rather than get hung up on their demeanour, which would most solidly fit Ian’s self-view. On the other hand, he’s quick to lay all the blame for their later travails on the Doctor (42) and Dicks is quick to paint him as something of a buffoon, not simply confused by Susan’s belief that the UK’s gone decimal, but seeming to insist it could never happen (43). In combination with Dicks’s snark at the ‘uniquely complicated monetary system’ (44), and the fact the novelisation was published ten years after the UK had made the switch, this establishes Ian as resistant to change. Dicks also describes him a speaking ‘stupidly’ (45).

    Barbara gets worse treatment. Dicks becomes fixated on her being ‘a typical schoolmistress’, with it made clear this is meant ‘unkindly’ (46), twice (47), and there’s the jarring comment that she ‘would have been even prettier’ were it not for her ‘habitual expression of rather mild disapproval’ (48), which sounds like she’s being criticised for not optimising her prettiness. Similarly, her ‘conviction that she knew what was best’ and her willingness ‘to be in charge’, seemingly evidently useful qualities for a schoolmistress, are specifically distinct from her ‘good qualities’ (49). Though the focus on her prettiness suggests sexism by Dicks, it might be, considering the novelisation also turns on the more relaxed Ian, that the writer has it in for teachers. Only problem with that is the way her ‘unthinking bossiness’ (50) collapses when faced with the cavemen and gives way to hysteria. Indeed, Barbara gets half the incidents of hysteria related in the book and all but one of them are given to women (51), hinting that Dicks does view the reaction as specifically female.

    Whenever Dicks and sexism raises its head, however, it’s difficult not to be reminded of his views regarding the role of ‘the heroine’ (52), much like Sydney Newman’s view of the ‘kid’. Perhaps Ian’s laid-back buffoonery is similar, drawing a thread between him, Jamie, Harry, even the Brigadier. Supporting this is Dicks’s approach to the Doctor. Whilst there are some concessions to his just being a mysterious old man, ‘coughing as old people do’ (53) and resembling ‘a family solicitor from some nineteenth-century novel’ (54), whose ‘ruthless grasp of priorities’ (55) is focused on little more than survival and escape, the hints of Hartnell’s later increasingly ‘spry’, ‘alert and vital’ (57) performance can’t help but creep in. That there are two characterisations fighting here is perhaps best illustrated by the insertion of a moment where the Doctor, aware of his assumption of the surname Foreman, introduces himself ‘simply as Doctor’ (58) alongside the retention from the broadcast episodes of his confusion around the teachers addressing him as ‘Doctor Foreman’ (59).

    By the novelisation’s end, Dicks embraces looking forward, deciding not only to include the final episode’s cliffhanger into ‘The Dead Planet’, not only to tease to tease the Doctor’s first meeting with ‘his greatest enemies’ (60), but to frame radiation-soaked Skaro as the product of ‘years of warfare between […] the Kaleds and the Thals’ (61). This is probably the sensible choice. Doctor Who and an Unearthly Child came at John Nathan-Turner’s suggestion (62) and was purposely published a month before the serial was repeated as part of The Five Faces of Doctor Who (63). Not only was this novelisation, in a manner which recast the Target books away from how Dicks had so far approached them (64),  at least partly envisaged as a companion to watching the TV episodes, the story was now being envisaged as the opening stage in a journey to current Doctor Who.  For the first time, viewers’ interest would lie not only in the story itself but in how it related to what came later (65) and the novelisation was as much a way of reliving that experience as of recreating the experience of the original broadcast. It really would have been, as it’s often presented, the perfect first book to adorn with the new 1980s logo, the launch of a new era…