First Broadcast: 13th February 1965 – 20th March 1965
First Published: September 1965
Following the success of the first novel, it was only fitting that there was a second. This novelisation was based on the story The Web Planet which had enjoyed the highest ratings that Doctor Who had yet attained in its short history.
The Web Planet was praised on first broadcast for its unusual setting and actor choreography: it was set on a properly alien planet populated by human-sized insects familiar to most viewers but with the power of speech… well, most of them, anyway. Even looking at it from the perspective of more than 60 years after broadcast, it still displays itsaelf as being a properly ambitious story, pushing production values in directions that hadn’t been seen on the show – or in much of television in general – before.
The insects were engaged in a power struggle for the control of the planet Vortis, which has been usurped by the all-powerful animus. The various insect races vie for control, aided by the Doctor and his friends Ian, Barbara and Vicki, a recent addition to the crew following the departure of the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan in an earlier adventure.
It’s a fairly mixed story, featuring some great ideas and production values but which suffers from being filmed in a tiny studio, with some ludicrous costumes and with Vaseline smeared over the camera lenses which equally serves to heighten the alienness of the environment and to annoy the viewer who can’t quite see everything clearly.
It was novelised by the story’s original writer, Bill Strutton (1918 – 2003) who wrote it in three weeks.
The benefits of this are many: he is able to explain the motivations of the characters a lot more thoroughly than someone who was a little distant from the production, and describes the settings as he originally envisioned them.
Unfortunately, his close proximity to the story means that sometimes he overeggs his own pudding a little: the Doctor (or Doctor Who as he is constantly referred to as here) frequently follows stage directions in the prose – we are told that he pauses several times, the word “chirruping” is used a lot to describe the noises the various insect races make – and there’s a rather ridiculous amount of plotting and counterplotting for a story of this length, especially when a big chunk of the beginning is devoted to getting our characters used to the world and inhabitants.
It also doesn’t dwell as much as I would like on the story, turning it into a standard Doctor Who adventure with hints of fascinating ideas in the background. It’s an okay retelling, like I said above, but it’s not my favourite. However, it is decently-written and it does move the story along at a speedy pace. Where it differs from David Whitaker’s novelisation of The Daleks (and The Crusaders, but more on that next time) is that we don’t learn much about the characters, especially our heroes. Whitaker’s version of the characters have inner lives and hopes and dreams; Strutton’s are going through the actions of the plot without making us learn terribly much that is new about them. Now, Strutton isn’t the only writer in this series who is guilty of this – he’s just the first, because this is a sin that I can lay at the feet of so many other people who adapt the stories.
So I’m not really a fan of The Zarbi. There are loads of people who are and who rate it quite highly as a retelling of the rather glacially-paced television original. For me, though, the lack of characterisation of our regulars is the biggest issue – there is more attention paid to Ian’s tie than there is to the fact that Vicki is a recent addition to the crew, having replaced Susan, who was left behind in 22nd-Century London.
But one benefit this novel has over the original is that it isn’t as slow-paced or difficult to view (as opposed to difficult to watch) as the original; the insects move much more gracefully and speedily in your imagination than they did on the screen and the illustrations (by John Woods, not Wood as the books say) add to the text rather than being a reminder of the show, like some pictures did in The Daleks.
I realise that I sound like I’m being mean to the television version, but I’m trying not to be; it conveyed, for one of the first times on screen, a truly alien life-form that looked, moved and thought differently to how human beings did. In a show that was originally touted as educational family fare, this was a real triumph for Science Fiction since it was an effort to apply the sorts of values and ideas that authors had been writing about seriously for several decades to a venue – the screen – that had also been sneered at by those same authors for many years.
And because of that, I think this is a really important story.
Coming up next: Doctor Who And The Crusaders
