Friday, 28 August 2015
This adventure was going to require a serious frock.
Paul Cornell, Human Nature, Chapter 1
It’s 18 February 1995. My friends and I are attending Tri©on, a Doctor Who convention which is being held at the Parramatta Travelodge in a suburb of Sydney called Rosehill. Mark Strickson is the special guest: he has made the 500-kilometre journey from Armidale, where he is currently studying at the University of New England. He has hilarious things to say about how stunts were performed in the studios at the BBC Television Centre.
One of the items on the programme has already been cancelled. It was called Companion Makeover, presumably in honour of Strickson, but no one is really sure who is running it or what it is supposed to be about. So the organisers have decided to replace it with an interactive panel called DonaWho, in honour of The Phil Donahue Show, which will end its 26-year run some time later in the year. Like its near namesake, this panel will feature a compere with a radio mic who will wander around the room, soliciting bracing contributions from the audience and creating entertaining conflicts among its members.
Twenty years later, I can’t remember why I was the one given that microphone.
I have already planned what I want to do. I may have worked it out on the train on the way up, if I caught the train, or perhaps the night before if I was driving there in my sprightly yellow roadster known as Carol. In any case, I have a plan. “Ladies and gentlemen”, I probably say, “today I intend to create to set fan against fan, to create a rift in Doctor Who fandom that will echo throughout the ages.”
And I mean it. Today, I will split the audience into two irreconcilable warring factions — not Rills and Drahvins, not Savants and Deons, not Daleks and Thals. This time the factions will be called Guns and Frocks.
The ‘Guns and Frocks’ thing dates back a few years now. I think it’s [Doctor Who novelist] Gareth Roberts who said that Doctor Who needs less guns and more frocks. And it became a very quick shorthand for two rough schools of writing in the Doctor Who novels: one of which was militaristic space opera books that were very serious, and took themselves very seriously; and then at completely the other end of the spectrum, very camp ones that did not take themselves seriously….
Interview with Kate Orman, 2005.
By the begining of February 1995, Virgin Publishing had released 22 original novels in its New Adventures range. The range had started in June 1991, two years after the soft cancellation of the TV series, and one month before the publication of the long-delayed novelisation of the last available Doctor Who story, Battlefield.
The New Adventures were explicitly intended to be the official continuation of the Doctor Who story. They starred Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor, reconceived as the dark and mysterious arch-manipulator we barely glimpsed in Remembrance of the Daleks, along with his companion Ace, whose soft-left politics and fascination with chemistry was inexplicably transformed into a hard-right obsession with military hardware and a fascination with killing things.
I remember being disappointed by the New Adventures at the time. Reading a New Adventure took many times longer than watching a Doctor Who story. And it wasn’t something you could enjoy drunkenly with friends. More than that, though: the New Adventures were grim and dark. They introduced uninteresting plot elements early on that demanded the reader’s memory and attention until they were unimpressively slotted into place towards the end of the novel. And they were heavy with continuity. Not fun Hand-of-Sutekh continuity: dull, leaden continuity involving Arc of Infinity or the history of the Earth Empire as established in the Pertwee Era.
There were a few exceptions. My friend Kate Orman had written a book called The Left-Handed Hummingbird, an immensely clever and well-written piece of science fiction. Paul Cornell had written two novels: Timewyrm: Revelation, which had featured a sentient church and a weird mindscape redolent of nostalgia and love for the television programme we had lost, and Love and War, which had introduced the incomparably clever, knowing and hilarious Professor Bernice Summerfield. And Gareth Roberts — who had loved Tom Baker’s Doctor and Lalla Ward’s Romana nearly as much as I had — whose novel The Highest Science had featured hilarious turtle-shaped aliens, and which would, a million years later, form the basis of the brilliantly entertaining 2009 Easter Special, Planet of the Dead.
Benny grinned at her. ‘My dear Roslyn, frocks are the purpose of life.’ She twirled, her skirt flying out around her, grabbing at her hat. ‘Frocks are what it is all about. Do try to remember that.’
Kate Orman, SLEEPY, Chapter 22
“I’m going to ask you five yes/no questions, and I want you keep count of how many questions where your answer is yes. Ready?”
They are ready, and so I ask them these questions:
- Has your enjoyment of a Doctor Who story ever been spoiled by what one of the major characters was wearing?
- Have you ever as an adult had to stop yourself from crying while watching a companion’s departure scene?
- Do you prefer a companion wearing high heels to one wearing combat boots?
- Do you think Delta and the Bannermen is seriously underrated?
- Have you ever, in public, in a mixed gathering, impersonated one of the following: Lady Adrasta, Helen A, Count Scarlioni, Harrison Chase, Lady Peinforte or President and Supreme Commander of the Terran Federation Servalan?
“Now I want you to get up and change seats. If you answered yes to zero, one or two of these questions, I want you to sit on this side of the room. You guys are the Guns. But you answered yes to three or more questions, I want you to sit over here. You are the Frocks.”
Fortunately, the audience splits into roughly two equal groups. Here they are, sitting in rows, staring uncomprehendingly at each other across the aisle.
[Nathan] then asked a whole bunch of Who-related questions, trying to determine if there were any real dividing factors. Most factors had people on both sides both agreeing and disagreeing, but some were dividing (opinion on Mel was amazing — the Frocks loved her and the Guns hated her).
The debate was really, really fun and there was no animosity on either side, due to the fun approach.
Stacey Smith?, The Frock Homepage, with Gun
Doctor Who is over fifty years old now. And I love it to death. As my friend and fellow-podcaster Richard once said, it can be anything, any story. An elegiac history lesson about sectarian murder. A ludicrous space opera featuring robot monsters and a megalomaniacal Bond villain. A love story across dimensions. An allegory about racism, a rollicking adventure story featuring racism, a story — many stories — in which the Doctor fights against exploitation, oppression, and villains without any sense of humour.
But there are things about Doctor Who that leave me cold. The history of the Time Lords. Harmonising the ridiculously inconsistent stories of the various Dalek factions. Explaining why the Cybermen in Attack look so much like the centuries-later Cybermen of Earthshock. And believing that watching people with guns attacking other people with guns is adult, serious and entertaining.
Here’s what I love. Billy’s sadness when he remembers how little his friends loved and understood him. Tobias Vaughn’s laughter as Zoë destroys his receptionist computer by talking to it in ALGOL. Pertwee’s time flow analogue, made of forks and corks and tea leaves. The Hand of Sutekh. Tom and Lalla effortlessly outshining the dull, unimaginative forces of evil. Beryl Reid’s tango hairdo. Melanie Bush trapped under a crocheted throw-rug, screaming at an advancing toasting fork. Sylv dancing awkwardly with Ray in Wales in 1959. And a Doctor who would “make the villains fall into their own traps, and trick the monsters, and outwit the men with guns. He’d save everybody’s life and find a way to win.”
Those are things, I hope, that both Guns and Frocks can agree on.
Wednesday, 26 January 2022
This essay was originally published in You on Target, an anthology of essays about the Doctor Who Target novelisations, released in 2020. In it, I talk about (among other things) Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation of the Doctor Who story Invasion of the Dinosaurs.
Thank you to Christopher Bryant for commissioning it.
66 million years ago
Somehow, the pterodactyl was glad to be back. It had been a very difficult day.
Just this morning, it had been sunning itself in this sandy clearing. It must have fallen asleep, for the next thing it knew was that it was somewhere else, in a giant underground cavern. There was some kind of mammal there, a mammal with a head covered with a shock of white fur. The mammal was holding a searing bright light, which had sent the pterodactyl off screeching to the roof of the cavern. But then mammal had gone away, and the pterodactyl had settled down to wait for sunrise.
Still, that’s all over now, it thought.
But this very thought was interrupted by a loud, high-pitched buzz. The pterodactyl looked up to see two more of the brown-coloured mammals, appearing out of nowhere in a swirling eddy of light.
It couldn’t understand the ugly noises coming from the mammals’ mouths, of course, and it couldn’t admire the highly polished fingernails of one or the expensively cut lounge suit of the other. But it knew that they would attract the attention of the Monster, who would soon be along to enjoy them as a between-meals snack.
So it flew off, the tip of one leathery wing grazing the cheek of one of the mammals as it went. The Monster was coming.
Silence. A sound of thunder.
12 January 1974
At teatime today, Part 1 of Invasion of the Dinosaurs is broadcast for the first time.
(I will turn five in three months, but I don’t appear in this chapter of the story.)
Part 1 is a pretty good episode. The Doctor and his new assistant Sarah Jane Smith are exploring a mysteriously bleak and deserted London. They are mistaken for looters, and are quickly arrested. No one will even listen to their story: they are apparently powerless to escape from a rigid and tiresome military bureaucracy.
And then, at the cliffhanger, they are menaced by a roaring puppet Tyrannosaurus.
Invasion of the Dinosaurs will not become an instant classic. Last year’s finale, The Green Death, featured simple rod-and-string puppet maggots, and psychologically scarred an entire generation of children. But no one will be scarred by Invasion’s puppet dinosaurs, because they are plangently, lamentably bad. They float in mid-air, amateurishly CSO’d onto poorly-directed location footage. They burst suddenly through cardboard walls. Instead of roaring, they actually seem to be saying the English word ROAR. One dinosaur retreats out of shot, pulled by the tail by an off-screen hand. Another two dinosaurs fight, menacing each other with bendy rubber teeth. (Or are they snogging? It’s honestly hard to tell.)
Six weeks later, a man with polished fingernails and a man in an expensively cut lounge suit will vanish completely from a secret government base underneath an evacuated London.
19 February 1976
Malcolm Hulke’s fifth Doctor Who novelisation is published: a version of Invasion of the Dinosaurs called Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion.
Unlike the televised story, it’s a triumph. And not just because it doesn’t include a single puppet dinosaur.
Consider how it reveals the backstory — the evacuation of London and the mysterious appearance of the dinosaurs. In Part 1 of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, the Doctor and Sarah hear about these events in some fairly unremarkable expository dialogue. But in Chapter 1 of the novelisation (London Alert!), we see the same events through the eyes of Shughie McPherson. Shughie is a young unemployed man from Glasgow, who has come down (up?) to London with some mates to see the Cup Final. He misses the evacuation because he is too tired and hungover to leave with them.
He wakes up in a London that has been completely abandoned. There’s no electricty, so he decides to leave the house, only to discover that the entire street is deserted. Terrified by the sight of the broken body of a young milkman, he falls to his knees and recites the Lord’s Prayer. And then he is attacked and killed by an unseen dinosaur.
In the televised version of the story, there is no one as interesting and skilfully characterised as Shughie McPherson. And no one like him has ever appeared in Doctor Who before.
Malcolm Hulke is brilliant at backstory and characterisation. There’s an entire chapter in Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters devoted to the odd, one-sided relationship between Dr Quinn and Miss Dawson. In Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, we learn all about Jane Leeson — a character who gets a couple of minutes of screen time on television — what her life was like on a miserable, overcrowded earth, how she met her husband, and why she left to colonise the planet in whose soil she will finally be buried. And in Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils, we learn how Captain Trenchard aspires to be a hero, and how he is tragically killed by his own buffoonish incompetence.
21 June 1978
Here I am, appearing in the story at last. I’m ten years old, and tonight I will watch my first episode of Doctor Who.
A couple of weeks ago, my best friend at school showed me my first ever Target book. It was called The Doctor Who Monster Book. Somehow, Luke and I managed to spend hours of class time looking through it, when, presumably, we were meant to be doing mental arithmetic, or reading English books, or doing whatever the hell you do in Fourth Grade in primary school.
The Doctor Who Monster Book had a picture of Tom Baker on the front cover, apparently drawn by someone who had never actually seen him, even in photographs. There were sections on each of the Doctors, double-page spreads for all of the top-tier returning monsters, and even pages covering the the Zarbi, the Sensorites, and the Uxariean mining robot.
Because it was a Target book, many of the pages reproduced Chris Achilleos’s cover art for the novelisations. On pages 52 and 53, you could even see the classic cover of Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, depicting Pertwee’s Doctor, his hand protecting his face, as a Tyrannosaurus rex advances on him from behind, and a pterodactyl snaps at him with an almighty Roy-Lichtenstein-inspired KKLAK!
But the star of the books was the Daleks. Five pages were devoted to them, chronicling their exploits in every Doctor Who story of the sixties and seventies, culminating in the Doctor’s attempt to avert their creation in Genesis of the Daleks.
Tonight’s episode, Luke tells me, is called Death to the Daleks. And so I will go home after school, and announce to my family that at half past six, on Channel 2, we will be watching Part 1 of my first ever Doctor Who story.
It will change my life.
Later in 1978
At ten years old, I am already a voracious reader. Summer is hot in Sydney, and we are lucky enough to have a swimming pool in the backyard. Sometimes I come home from school and sit on the top step of the pool and read. I’m often reading a Target novelisation.
By now, I’ve got quite a collection going. I get a couple of dollars a week in pocket money, in exchange for simple chores like wiping up the plates after dinner and not coming downstairs to annoy my parents after bedtime. I use that money to buy novelisations. David Jones at Warringah Mall has a bookshop, just near the butcher. We go there every week to buy meat, and after that I choose five or six novelisations and put them on lay-by until I can save up enough money to take them home with me. I write my name and phone number on the first page of each book.
Soon I have dozens of them. They’re almost always Pertwee or Baker stories, although I do have Doctor Who and the Cybermen, starring a strange old Doctor who I have never even seen. Some of them, like Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear, Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom, I have seen on television. Others, Doctor Who and the Mutants, Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils, Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion have not been on television since I started watching Doctor Who.
April 1979
I’m in an airport, in the United States somewhere. My family are here on holiday: perhaps we’re travelling across the country, from LA to New York, I think. In my bag, there is an exercise book in which I use a biro to write an account of the trip; there are also a few Target novelisations from my collection.
My edition of Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion doesn’t have the cover with the pterodactyl saying KKLAK! It’s a later edition with a T. rex on the cover, based on a painting by Charles R. Knight, standing in front of a building I will later learn to identify as St Paul’s cathedral.
This is my first vivid memory of reading a Target novelisation: Sir Charles Grover, with his expensively cut lounge suit and delusions of grandeur, tells the Doctor that he is “in time to be present at the most important moment in the world’s history.” The Doctor, unimpressed as ever by the most important moments in the world’s history, replies, "On the contrary. I am in time to prevent a crime.”
I think I might be in love.
Interlude: Nathan meets Tom Baker
It’s March 1980, the last year of primary school. I’m still friends with Luke. He has told me that Tom Baker is visiting Australia, that he’s coming to Warringah Mall, and he’s making an appearance in the Grace Brothers car park.
My father has agreed to let me go. The night before, in preparation, I watch a new Doctor Who episode, Part Something of The Creature From The Pit. I also go through my collection to find a novelisation for Tom to sign. I settle on Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng Chiang: it has the best likeness of Tom on the cover. He is dressed like Sherlock Holmes, staring grimly out of the picture with his piercing brown eyes.
My mother is in hospital for the first time. Over the next ten years, she will often be in hospital. Now, in the distant future, I still remember going to see her years later, reading Doctor Who Magazine on the bus, clutching it in my hand as I go to visit her in the room where she will eventually succumb to the cancer that kills her.
That’s still ten years in the future. Right now, I’m in a long queue at the rooftop car park. Luke and his sister Rachel are with me. Immediately behind me in the queue is a boy who I will actually meet and befriend many years later: one of my co-hosts from the podcast Flight Through Entirety — Richard Stone. He has just about forgiven me for what happens next.
Many more people have turned up than the organisers expected. But we’re not very far from the front. Behind us, the queue snakes off into the distance. Ahead, I can seen Tom in the distance, wearing his costume from last night’s episode.
While we wait, I talk to Luke about my mother’s trip to hospital. I am overheard by a kindly old lady who is walking up and down the queue to keep everything running smoothly.
It takes an hour, I guess, but now we’re just about standing in front of Tom himself. An announcement is made. Tom needs to leave now, and so the people in front of us will be the last people to get to speak to him.
But the kindly lady intervenes. “This boy’s mother is in hospital,” she says, and I’m allowed to go up and speak to Tom. No one behind me in the queue will get that opportunity.
I can’t remember what I said. But I do remember Tom signing my Target novelisation and saying, “Your mother’s in hospital? Well, you know, if you ever need help, let me know. I’m a Doctor.”
His eyes are piercing and blue.
5 November 1984
In Sydney, in the late seventies, Channel 2 shows repeat after repeat of Doctor Who, four or five nights a week, at 6:30 PM, just before the news. They start at Spearhead from Space, and go up to the most recent episode with Tom Baker, and then back to Spearhead from Space again. Weirdly, they leave out anything scary, anything only available in black and white, and anything with the Master.
But tonight, they’re showing Invasion of the Dinosaurs for the first time. Part 1 is still only available in black and white — the colour version was deliberately incinerated — and so they’re renumbering the episodes to make it a five-part story. Watching Part 2, now re-branded as Part 1, is the first time I ever see the televised story, and it opens with the Doctor and Sarah inexplicably menaced by an unconvincing puppet Tyrannosaurus.
26 June 2010
I’m all grown up now. Crazily, I got rid of my whole collection of Target novelisations years ago. There were dozens and dozens of them, but I only kept one. Now the books are available in a completely new format — audiobooks. And so I start my collection up again, buying a copy of Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion.
Unlike my previous copy, this has the orange cover with the pterodactyl going KKLAK! It’s read by Martin Jarvis, who played Butler in the episode.
Martin Jarvis is, of course, superb. He does great accents for poor old Shughie McPherson and his mates, and great voices for the Doctor, Sarah and the Brigadier. More impressive, of course, is his note-perfect Martin Jarvis impersonation. Butler is much kinder and more working class here than the posh and distant character he was in the televised version. Hulke has given him a livid facial scar, to help us to recognise him when other characters don’t know who he is. When Sarah taunts him about that scar, she is embarrassed to learn that he got it saving a terrified child trapped on the ledge of a high building.
Hulke has a genius for backstory and characterisation.
January 2016
And now, in the distant future, my iPhone contains dozens of audio versions of Target novelisations, even ones that I have never owned before, like Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, tantalisingly referred to in a footnote in Chapter 3 of Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion.
My favourites are always the novelisations by Malcolm Hulke. I have all of them now, except for Doctor Who and the War Games. (Why don’t I have that? Wait here a second while I go and put it on my Audible wishlist.)
And my favourite audiobook is still the first one I ever bought.
5 billion years from now
The sun expands, and the Earth is destroyed, but nobody watches it happen. The Doctor is there, with his new best friend Rose. Later, or earlier, they will go out to get chips.
Saturday, 28 June 2025
This essay was first published in Outside In Regenerates, a collection of essays published by ATB Publishing in 2023 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who and the 10th anniversary of the Outside In book series.
For this collection, each author contributed an essay on a single story. My essay is based on Death to the Daleks, the first Doctor Who story I ever saw.
Many thanks — again — to Stacey Smith? for the commission, and for her patience.
Wednesday, 23 June 1978
I’m about to watch Doctor Who for the very first time tonight. I’ve known of it for years, I think, but I’ve only started to get interested in the last few weeks. My friend Luke and I have been reading his copy of The Doctor Who Monster Book in class instead of solving maths problems, and although I’ve never even seen the show, I know all four Doctors by name, and I can already identify his most formidable enemies — the Zarbi, the Wirrn, someone called Steyr, the Exxilons, the Sensorites and Bellal.
But I’m watching tonight because Luke has told me that there will be Daleks.
We skip the first scene of Terry Walsh staggering through a misty greenish landscape, being shot by an arrow and tumbling into a puddle full of dry ice — it’s a scene apparently too horrific for the nine–year–olds in the [Australian] audience. Instead, we open with a spinning beach umbrella — the Doctor and Sarah are talking about the beach holiday that he has promised her on the planet Florana. “You can’t sink on Florana,” says the Doctor. “The water’s effervescent.”
I won’t get to see the Doctor luring Sarah into the TARDIS with this promised holiday until many years later: Channel 2 in Sydney won’t screen Invasion of the Dinosaurs until 1984, and Malcolm Hulke doesn’t include the scene in his 1976 novelisation. But it’s one of the best final scenes of any Classic Doctor Who story. The Doctor is describing Florana to a reluctant Sarah, who is determined not to board the TARDIS again because of the dangers she’s faced in this story and the previous one. But the Doctor perseveres. “The streams flow with waters that are clearer than the clearest crystal,” he says lyrically, as she laughs and covers her ears, convinced already of her own defeat.
Sarah is the first companion we see lured onto the TARDIS by the promise of wonders, and she’s also the last companion in the classic series to hear the Doctor’s Florana speech. (The Doctor has promised Jo that the air of Metebelis is like a fine wine, but we never get to see that conversation; all of the later companions are dropping out of their lives in some way, except for Harry, who is tricked aboard by the Doctor, and Romana, who is there on a special assignment. Oh, and Mel, whose first trip in the TARDIS occurs offscreen.) But when the show returns in 2005 as the New Series, the Florana Speech is back too — again and again we hear that the companions travel with the Doctor in order to experience wonders. The Florana Speech looms so large in our memories of the Classic Series that we assume that its underlying idea was always a part of the show.
– Why do you do it? Why do you fly off in the box with him? The truth. Please, just this once.
– Because it’s amazing. Because I see wonders.
Of course, Sarah never gets the Florana holiday that the Doctor has promised. (The Doctor also fails to get Amy and Rory there many years later, in a different medium.) Instead, she is captured, drugged and nearly sacrificed by the Exxilons. She is frightened by Bellal, pursued by the Daleks and set to work mining parrinium. Promised wonders, she is confronted by horrors.
It’s obvious why this is. Watching Donna sunning herself by the pool on the planet Midnight is fun for one scene, but we’d much rather watch the Doctor under attack by a group of terrified humans. For us, the sightseeing tour of Argolis only really kicks off once Earth Visitor Loman has been dismembered. And way back in 1965, or AD 64, it’s the arrival of the slave traders that piques our interest, however enjoyable it has been watching Barbara and Ian relaxing post–coitally in Flavius Giscard’s villa. We watch Doctor Who for the monsters, the dangers, the cliffhangers. Maybe Jo is right in Carnival of Monsters. Maybe we are evil and horrible people.
– You know, the thing about a time machine, you can run away all you like and still be home in time for tea. So what do you say? Anywhere. All of time and space, right outside those doors.
So why does Sarah stay with the Doctor? It’s still early days for her, but next year’s adventures will be full of monstrosities: corpses and Nazis; torture, peril and venom. And yet, when Harry, the Brigadier and the Duke of Forgill refuse the Doctor’s offer of a trip home in the TARDIS, Sarah joins him. “Providing we go straight back to London,” she says.
My friend Brendan says it’s because she loves the Doctor. “I worry about you,” she tells him in her second last episode. But can that possibly be enough? Is her character just distorted by the demands of the format, by our desire to watch her undergoing horrors?
– Someone’s got to be the Doctor.
– They’ll kill you.
– Never stopped him.
The New Series answers this question by creating a life for the companions that isn’t just peopled by horrors. It alludes to unseen adventures in which the companion sees wonders — Rose travels to Woman Wept, Martha visits the moon landing three times, Clara gets to snog her favourite Regency novelist. And it can now afford to put wonders on screen — the fish over Sardicktown, the creation of the earth in The Runaway Bride.
But there’s more to it than that. The horrors of Doctor Who are an occasion for heroism, and by confronting them the companions themselves become heroes. “The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life,” says Rose. “You don’t just give up. You don’t just let things happen. You make a stand.”
And perhaps the Classic Series provides this answer as well. Death to the Daleks isn’t much interested in the heroism of its female characters: in the last moments of the story, our eyes are on Galloway, whose cold pragmatism requires him to sacrifice his own life to destroy the Daleks. But perhaps the real hero here is Sarah, whose courage and ingenuity have provided the Space Marines with enough parrinium to save the lives of ten million people. Some things, even fictional things, are more important than a holiday at the beach.
Nathan Bottomley is a Latin teacher living in Sydney with his husband and three small fluffy dogs. He podcasts about Doctor Who on Flight Through Entirety.