Doctor Who And The Abominable Snowmen
First Broadcast: 30th September 1967 – 4th November 1967
First Published: 21st November 1974
The Abominable Snowmen saw the return of Terrance Dicks to the Target Range. This time around he was adapting the script for a story that the production team had loved working on so much that they commissioned a sequel for it almost immediately.
It’s an adventure the Doctor has with his young companions, Jamie and Victoria. Jamie was rescued from the Scottish Highlands by the Doctor around the time of the Battle of Culloden, while Victoria was a 19th-Century girl orphaned by a scheme hatched by the Daleks. At this point in time Jamie had been with the Doctor for about a season, while it was only Victoria’s third adventure. For readers, though, especially newcomers to the series, this was proper ancient lore: neither character had been seen on television for over five years at this point. These same new fans might have only learnt about the characters from their appearances in the BBC’s Tenth Anniversary Special, a magazine put out by the broadcaster in 1973 that celebrated and detailed the first ten years of the show.
Anyway, this time they had landed in Tibet, near a monastery that is being besieged from without and within by a group of robots masquerading as yeti, and their mysterious leader, a disembodied foe they would come to know as The Great Intelligence…
Dicks does a great job with this novelisation. The brief is to retell the original story but also to introduce the Second Doctor’s era for new readers. This was done through brief descriptions of the main characters: the Doctor, as played by Patrick Troughton, is described as
… a middle-aged, middle-sized man with a gentle, rather comical face, and a shock of untidy black hair.
Jamie, played by Fraser Hines, is
… a brawny youth in highland dress, complete with kilt…
… while Victoria (Deborah Watling) is
… a small dark girl dressed in the style of Earth’s Victorian age.
(“Earth” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.)
These are simple descriptions that readers would have to get used to with Terrance Dicks: he could take a complex thing like a person’s appearance and boil it down to a vague description and hope that the reader had enough of a passing familiarity with the series or the character to fill in the blanks.
But this doesn’t really matter because what we get afterwards is a riproaring adventure with monsters, exotic (but frozen) locations and suspicious and sinister locals and strangers, especially the other main character in the story, Edward Travers, a scientist hoping to make his fortune or reputation on an expedition to find the yeti. Interestingly, he was played in the series by Jack Watling, the father of Deborah Watling, who played series regular Victoria. Impressively, he is aged up about forty years for the sequel story, The Web Of Fear.
The script was written by two veteran writers for the screen, Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln. I’ll have more to say about them in The Web Of Fear, but it’s important to note that they continued their writing careers beyond Doctor Who, although they stopped writing together during the 1970s. Haisman had a reasonably successful career, but Henry Lincoln went on to write a series of bestsellers with Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh that started with The Holy Blood And the Holy Grail and created an incredibly detailed but, ultimately, rather ridiculous conspiracy history of the world
Anyway the book of The Abominable Snowman follows the script quite accurately, except in a few details in regard to the names of the characters. Haisman and Lincoln had given some characters names that were from Tibetan Buddhist history. Barry Letts, the producer of Doctor Who at the time of this novelisation and a practicing Buddhist, suggested that a couple of subtle name changes would be in order to not offend anyone so a few little changes were made by Dicks to smooth things over. This was the first time that Dicks used a little editorial tinkering in one of his Doctor Who books, but it wouldn’t be the last!
This was one of the first Doctor Who novels that I ever read. I was around 8 at the time and settling into a new school: a “primary” school, which was a step up from the “infant” school I had been at previously. This was in 1978 when there were around 40 or so books in the range. The school library had a couple of dozen of them, and I’m pretty sure I read most of them… up until the moment that I started collecting them myself – which we’ll also get to in due course.
But I remember really enjoying this one: Travers seemed like a villain at the start of the story, so I was relieved when they seemed to be more at ease and at peace with each other by the end of the story. I didn’t like it when the Doctor was around people he couldn’t trust or who didn’t trust him; one of the things I love about the show is how the Doctor manages to turn enemies into friends, or at least allies, united for a common goal. I had also never seen Patrick Troughton’s Doctor in anything except for The Three Doctors, so I was excited to be going down a new rabbit hole of lore for the show, something that would happen frequently as I made my way through the books.
For fans who had been following the book series, though, there was another bonus with this book: not only was it the first book for the Second Doctor, but it had been released just a month after the last one! There had previously been several months between releases, but the books would continue to be published on a more or less regular monthly or bi-monthly basis until the end of 1990!
Coming Up Next: Doctor Who And The Curse Of Peladon
