Doctor Who And The Daemons
First Broadcast: 22ndMay 1971 – 19th June 1971
First Published: 17th October 1974
Doctor Who And The Sea Devils
First Broadcast: 26th February 1972 – 1st April 1972
First Published: 17th October 1974
Just under six months after the last pair of Target novelisations were published, readers were given another glimpse into the written life of television’s Doctor Who with the publication of The Daemons and The Sea-Devils.
Like the last two books, these came from different seasons (The Daemons was the fifth and final story of the show’s eighth season, while The Sea-Devils was the third story of the ninth).
As usual, let’s look at them in publication order.
Barry Letts was the producer of Doctor Who from Jon Pertwee’s second story right through until his last, Planet Of The Spiders. He oversaw many significant changes to the show, not the least of which were the new actors, transitioning from black-and-white to colour, and the reduction of episodes from 40 a year to just 26. He also co-wrote four stories from this era with Robert Sloman (they credited this one to a pseudonymous “Guy Leopold”), as well as two radio plays featuring the Third Doctor in the 1990s and some original novels and plays for Big finish. You can find his name as Director on several stories, as well. He also acted as a supervising producer in 1980 when John Nathan-Turner took over as producer.
He was a Buddhist and fairly liberal-minded in his politics which led him to commission several stories that concerned themselves with some of the pressing political themes of the day – Letts’s time on the show is what I point to when I find alleged fans complaining about how the later renditions of the show have “gone woke” because it has people they personally find revolting (women, gay men, people of colour) playing the lead characters.
Anyway, back to The Daemons.
Letts gives us a fascinating and lively look at the lives of the inhabitants of Devil’s End, the small village that the Master has decided to hatch his latest plan in. This involves summoning and enslaving an ancient race of aliens who resemble certain mythological figures from the legends of Earth, or who at least inspired them. We also find out a little more about the inhabitants of the village than we do in the television version which adds to the tension of the story. To facilitate his plot, the Master is impersonating a priest and infiltrating the nooks and crannies of the village in order to cajole and blackmail people into helping him succeed. And the glimpses we get of the folks of Devil’s End’s transgressions and petty sins make this feel far more realistic than it needs to. Then there’s the portrayal of fan favourite Miss Hawthorn, the local white witch, who alone of the village seems immune to the inveigling ways of the Master. She comes across as brave and outspoken here – just as she does on the screen – but we get more of a sense of the frustration of being more intelligent and observant than her fellow villagers during this time of spiritual and material crisis.
Like the television serial, this is a wonderful mix of folklore, science fiction, fantasy and gentle comedy. And like most of the stories adapted by their original writers, we get the chance of seeing the story as it possibly “should have” happened, rather than with all the problems of translating an ambitious idea to the screen.
It’s the same story with Malcolm Hulke’s own adaptation of The Sea-Devils. He takes a script already packed with action and story and improves it, making it feel like an epic in spite of its modest length.
It’s another story that features the Master. After the events of The Daemons, he was incarcerated in a secure prison. The only inmate there, in fact. And after five stories in a row featuring him as a guest character/villain (that was the gimmick for the eighth season) viewers had a break of precisely three stories before he turned up again (it had been nine months since he had last appeared on screen). It’s explained in the second chapter that he was going to be executed but some rather passionate and persuasive talking by the Doctor had the sentence commuted to “life-long imprisonment.”
Another of my pet theories is that it’s this section of the book that has shaped the portrayal of the Master the most in the Revived era of the show. The implication that the Doctor cares so much for his “old friend” the Master (“Believe it or not, we were at the Academy together,” a later incarnation of the Master tells an earlier incarnation of the Doctor in The Five Doctors) that he would plea for his life while still working hard to defeat his plans on their next meeting suggests a more complicated relationship that modern television writers find tediously hard to ignore. That the Doctor frequently tries to avert or avoid violence just doesn’t come into it.
At any rate, the Master is still plotting behind prison walls and has managed to turn the situation to his advantage; far from being a prisoner, he has the run of the place, having convinced the governor that he is working at defeating an unknown threat that faces the Earth. And the early scenes where we see the Master playing at being contrite and regretful of his sins plays out far more brilliantly on page than it does on screen.
But where this novel excels is in the portrayal of the guest character George Trenchard. Described as a retired military officer, he is introduced to us as someone who believes himself to be more intelligent than he really is. But he is just the latest pawn in the Master’s plans. However, when he realises that he has been fooled and tries to redeem himself he comes up against the reality that nobody takes him seriously and thus ignore his warnings about the threat they really face. His death before battle starts – brought on by his own incompetence – is blackly comic and haunting at the same time.
It’s also probably the best treatment of the titular villains in the series as well. They would return to television in 1984’s Warriors Of The Deep, playing second fiddle to the returning Silurians, with whom a familial link is suggested here. Then we wouldn’t see them again until 2023’s Legend Of The Sea Devils (sic). Neither story covered the creatures in any glory and their most recent appearance, the spin-off The Battle Between The Land And The Sea, has received a mixed, though generally favourable response. Like most Who monsters they have made appearances in other media, but they are beyond the focus of this blog series (and my own personal discretionary income).
But this book, superior (in my own humble opinion) to the television story that spawned it, is my favourite representation of them.
In terms of the Target series, Sea-Devils represents a rather important milestone for the range: it meant that there had been twice as many books published in the “modern” range than there had been in the original (you might say) set of books. And all these books had ranged through the era of the incumbent Doctor, Jon Pertwee. However, Pertwee had regenerated into Tom Baker about four months before these two most recent books had been published. The show was entering a new phase of its life. What better thing to do than…
… go back seven years and novelise a story from a Doctor who hadn’t appeared in print yet…?
Coming Up Next: Doctor Who And The Abominable Snowmen
