Doctor Who And The Auton Invasion/Spearhead From Space
First Broadcast: 3rd January 1970 – 24th January 1970
First Published: 17th January 1974
Doctor Who And The Cave Monsters/The Silurians
First Broadcast: 31st January 1970 – 14th March 1970
First Published: 17th January 1974
So after the initial success of the first three novelisations, the status of the book series was in a bit of a no-man’s-land. The initial buzz around Doctor Who had run its course, although the Daleks remained immensely popular whenever they cropped up on television or in popular media.
When Jon Pertwee was cast in the role of the Doctor, the show was in the doldrums. The ratings had gone down, some folks viewed the show as being a bit repetitive and samey (the fact that it was being screened around 40 weeks of the year possibly didn’t help, either), and it was being viewed as increasingly expensive to make (a bit ironic given the show’s apparent bad reputation for the quality of its special effects and costumes).
So at the end of Patrick Troughton’s run as the Second Doctor, he was exiled to Earth by his Time Lord superiors, who were fed up with him interfering. His companions were sent home with their memories wiped, he was forcibly regenerated into a new form, and his knowledge of time travel and how to correctly operate his TARDIS were wiped from his own memory.
His new body, the addition of a regular and semi-regular cast of characters (notably the Brigadier, Liz Shaw, and Sergeant Benton, as played by Nicholas Courtney, Caroline John and John Levene respectively), as well as the fact that the series was now being produced in glorious COLOUR gave the show a new lease of life.
The new production team, headed by Barry Letts as producer, with Terrance Dicks as his script editor, managed to revitalise the show, making it a staple of British – and, increasingly, worldwide – viewing. Pertwee’s amazing performance as a Doctor who took no crap from anyone but was steadfast and loyal to his friends built a faithful and dedicated audience.
So much so that after the success of the show’s tenth season there was talk of relaunching the book range. Target Books, a subsidiary of Universal-Tandem Publications, had been formed in 1972 as a children’s range and they were interested in producing a range of Doctor Who books. They had obtained the rights for the first three books and had reached out to the BBC to produce more.
The production team jumped at the opportunity. Malcolm Hulke was keen to adapt his own story, The Silurians, into a novel, while the author of Spearhead From Space, Robert holmes, was unavailable to adapt his script – which introduced the Third Doctor and his exile on Earth. Terrance Dicks stepped into the breach and penned the first of nearly 70 novelisations of what is now known as the Classic Series. The two books were simultaneously published on February 17, 1974.
Lets look at them in broadcast order.
The Auton Invasion – as Spearhead From Space was now known (it was a punchier title, apparently) – begins with a prologue that explains why the Doctor is on Earth at this time (it had been four years since it was broadcast, after all). It recaps his trial and regeneration, all things that had been covered in the final Troughton episode, the tenth of an epic story called The War Games.
(I will be developing my “Terrance Dicks Prologue Theory” over the course of this series. This is the first prologue he writes, but it is, unfortunately, the outlier of my theory and, thusly, not a good example to begin with)
It’s a relatively slim volume compared to the other books (for now, at any rate) but it does do a lot of work. The first thing it does is retell the story faithfully and with a little extra depth for the characters and settings.
But what it also does is open up a lot of new lore of the series. This is the first story that mentions the Doctor has two hearts. It also talks about the condition of his blood and his body temperature. This is straight from the pen of Robert Holmes who would go on to contribute an immense amount of information about the history of the Doctor and his people.
Something else that Holmes gave us was the alias used by the Doctor for his time on Earth:
Something simple, dignified and modest. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself. The Doctor’s eyes brightened. He’d got it – the very thing! He turned to the waiting Brigadier.
‘Smith,’ said the Doctor decisively. ‘Doctor John Smith!’
It’s a name that we first encountered in The Wheel In Space, a story from the show’s fifth season, and one that he briefly uses as an alias in that story. It’s a minor but important facet of the Doctor’s personality and one that has a fairly important part to play in a couple of stories – most famously in Paul Cornell’s Seventh Doctor novel Human Nature, later adapted to television for the Tenth Doctor – so it’s good to see it starting in print here.
The other is a fairly quirky and decidedly fannish piece of trivia.
Jon Pertwee suffered from a mild lisp. As a result, he found some words tricky to pronounce. In a series that is riddled with “technobabble” like Doctor Who, that can produce a unique acting challenge. Terrance Dicks recalled at one point that he had included a line of dialogue in The Sea Devils (an eighth season story) to explain something the Doctor did. Pertwee came up to him afterwards and thanked him, noting that he found it quite easy to say, asking if he could have more like that, please?
The line was
“Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow”
Pertwee says that line exactly twice in his portrayal of the Doctor (The Sea Devils and The Five Doctors) but he does “reverse the polarity” of several things during other stories and it’s become an in-joke for fans and the production crew alike. In The Auton Invasion, it’s placed near the end of the story, where the Doctor is musing about how to repair the TARDIS:
For instance, he could try reversing the polarity of the neutron flow in the dematerialisation circuit…
It’s a confident beginning to the revitalised series, which it needed to have. However, I would argue that The Cave Monsters/The Silurians (for it has been published under both of those titles) has the tougher job because it has to show that the range has legs; that it can adequately transfer the Doctor’s adventures from the screen to the page.
Spoiler alert: it’s excellent. Malcolm Hulke’s prose puts us in the story so that we get the maximum exposure to everything that is happening in the story, ably accompanied by Chris Achilleos’s illustrations.
Achilleos, who became a famed artist in his own right, was quite a coup for the fledgling series. His unique style of art had graced magazines and novels for about five years at this point, but he had already been snaffled up by Target to do a number of their covers, including their reissues of the original three books.
Hulke manages to compress his seven-episode story into a lean 150 pages, without making the reader feel as though they are missing out on anything. The only thing that I found was truly lacking was an adequate description of a lot of characters, particularly our regulars: we don’t get an idea of what Liz Shaw looks like, for instance, despite her not having been on the screen for three years as of the first printing of this story. Likewise, the Doctor only gets descriptive passages when his appearances differs from normal, to alert the reader that something has happened. Several books into a series, I can get that descriptions of characters can be tricky, but by the second volume, and by a different author than the first? There’s no excuse really. Admittedly, Terrance Dicks does help out the reader in later books, but we’ll deal with that when we get to them, because they need their own space.
However, it’s the description of the supporting characters where Hulke excels himself. Early on in the piece we are introduced – in a chapter entitled “The Traitor” – to Miss Dawson. She is described in a rather exquisite paragraph that talks about how her mother’s “illnesses” have prevented her from being successful in her career or in any aspect of her life. She is set up as someone we are sympathetic towards and a physical description hardly feels necessary because we know what a person like that looks like, don’t we? And Major Barker, who has been imprisoned by the Silurians of the title, portrays a frustrated and paranoid officer beautifully; you don’t at any point feel like he doesn’t make sense because of what he experiences, even when you know he’s wrong.
But it’s the Silurians themselves that come across the best. From the prologue where we meet them first, packing themselves into their bunker to escape the ravages of a rogue planet that is threatening prehistoric Earth (which later becomes our Moon), they are never presenting as wholly villainous, merely as creatures with factions and opinions just like the humans they are opposing in this story. Which makes the conclusion to the story all the more tragic and heartbreaking.
But it’s an excellent introduction to the book range. Hulke brings a high literary standard and sensibility to his work, while Dicks writes smoothly, making his story accessible and easy to follow for his readers. Neither writer speaks down to their audience (ostensibly kids but including 56-year-old me half-a-century into the future) but nor are they really stretching themselves here either, novelising scripts that they have worked on in the recent past. However, I think I have a preference for the Hulke; I’m way more familiar with Dicks and his strengths and – alas – weaknesses after he had written so many stories, while Hulke, who wrote less frequently, felt like he was giving more of himself to the page and the story in terms of how deep into the story we could get.
Coming Up next: Doctor Who And The Doomsday Weapon and The Day Of The Daleks
