First broadcast: 21st December 1963 – 1st February 1964
First published: 12th November 1964
Doctor Who had been screening for just over a year when this first novelisation was published. In a sensible but interesting choice, the second story was chosen for novelising. This would ordinarily be seen as a bit of a stupid decision: after all, why wouldn’t you pick the story that explains the premise and the characters rather than jumping in midstream, as it were, hoping that the audience were able to catch up with you?
Well, there’s a really good reason why.
Dalekmania.
The second story in the first season of Doctor Who managed to secure some kind of pop culture immortality for the crew of the time ship TARDIS – or Tardis, as it is styled here.
At the end of the fifth episode of the first season (the season unfolded with stories leading into one another rather than episodically as it would later do), the Doctor and his crew – his granddaughter Susan, and her two teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright – have escaped a tribe of murderous cavemen in Earth’s distant past, and managed to land on some forbidding planet elsewhere in the universe. After the Doctor decides that he wants to explore the spooky landscape seen on the scanner, viewers were left with an astonishing cliffhanger: Barbara was being menaced by an appendage of some sort that looked like a plunger. And just as our favourite history teacher might have become history herself, the end credits rolled…
Terry Nation (1930 – 1997), author of this episode and the six that followed it, recalled in a much later interview that he had a phone call from a friend shortly after the episode finished that opened with “What the hell was that?”
The next few weeks established Doctor Who – initially planned as a series that would a) educate as well as entertain, and b) fill in a blank space in television scheduling for a few months – as one of the most popular adventure shows on television. The Daleks – the be-plungered creatures that were monstering Barbara – became the most popular monster that would ever be created for the show and ensured its immediate success, becoming immensely successful in their own right, dwarfing anything else that Terry Nation would create over the rest of his very successful career. They appeared as villains in the show another thirteen times, as well as making several guest appearances in other stories.
Nation had captured the nation.
The Daleks became known through a wide range of products – wallpaper, soap, bedsheets, costumes, toys, comic strips – and also inspired two movies based on serials from the parent show.
And this novel.
Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks was written by David Whitaker (1928 – 1980), based on Nation’s script. Whitaker was the script editor of the show for the first season and a bit. He also wrote several stories for the series across its first seven seasons, after he left, possibly realising belatedly that he had been on to a good thing.
It’s not a completely faithful retelling of the script, but it does a great job. Whitaker makes the bold decision to retell the story in the first-person, using Ian Chesterton as the narrator.
He also avoids the narrative problem of explaining what happened in the first story (An Unearthly Child) by making this adventure the first time the characters meet.
It makes perfect sense in the context of the novelisation, although it does slow down the first third of the book. However, Whitaker makes it more exciting by having our heroes meet at the scene of a car accident, rather than having the two teachers follow their student home (although to be honest, the car accident storyline has aged a lot better over the ensuing years). So in this version, Barbara is Susan’s tutor while Ian has just been for a job interview at a laboratory.
We get a quick precis of the first part of An Unearthly Child with Barbara and Ian being introduced to the time machine known as Tardis and the miracles within it; the fact of it being dimensionally transcendental (bigger on the inside than the outside) being the most obvious. Once we arrive on Skaro (the Dalek’s home planet), though, the story picks up from Nation’s version more faithfully, although with minor differences, possibly to abbreviate seven 25-minute episodes into something more manageable, including an interminable sequence involving crossing an apparently uncrossable chasm being abridged to something far more like the minor obstacle it really is.
It’s a great retelling. It captures the main beats of the story, and the characters behave like the characters we know from television. The addition of a possible romance between Ian and Barbara is something that was not explicitly stated on-screen – but go and watch the second season story The Romans and tell me that it isn’t there. There are also some deviations from the text that may have been in Nation’s original script but didn’t survive to the filming stages.
And it features some illustrations by Arnold Schwartzman, several of which are based on photos taken from the filming but which still add to the story.
I’ve got to say that when I first read it I weas totally swept away by the adventures of this crew, and it was with quite a bit of surprise that I eventually discovered some years later that it was actually their second adventure together. I was still a new fan at this point: I had only experienced Doctor Who on television for a couple of years, although – given the repeat-laden nature of Australian television of the day – I was incredibly familiar with the two or three seasons that I had seen. I was also aware that there had been Doctors prior to Jon Pertwee (he was my first Doctor, but the third to play the role) so to find novels about one of them in my school library was amazing. Learning that this was the very first novel and reading about these arcane characters and story from several years before I was even born felt amazing! I was soon hooked by the entire range, knowing that there were adventures I could read that I had never seen before. My imagination was piqued and I really wanted to know more about this mysterious traveler in time and space and his friends and companions.
Thankfully, because of the success of this book and its sequels, I was able to: it was a mild bestseller and secured the publication of two other stories based on tales from the series not long afterwards, which sadly did not sell as well, though each have their merits. And when the novelisations were relaunched by Target Books nearly ten years later, these three novels provided a secure launch pad to establish a new range of books, which is a story for another day…
