First Broadcast: 28th December 1974 – 18th January 1975
First Published: 13th March 1975
This novelisation achieved a bit of a milestone for Target’s Doctor Who range: it was the first to be published while the season it came from was still broadcasting.
Of course, it was a fairly important book in the series as well: it was the debut story for a new Doctor.
Tom Baker had only recently taken over from the hugely successful Jon Pertwee in the role, so it didn’t hurt to have his first story being retold in book form.
Fortunately, it’s a cracker. Terrance Dicks is novelising his own script and he does an outstanding job on it. He had been the script editor of the show since 1968 until 1974, leaving the role when Pertwee left as well, but writing the introductory story as a “bridge” for the new production team.
The Giant Robot (as it was retitled) comes belting out of the gate and sets a dynamic pace. There are some slower moments near the beginning of it as we get to know this new incarnation of the Doctor a little. It was Dicks’s first writing credit for the show since The War Games, which had seen out Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor. He would also return for several other stories over the next decade but he would now become most famous in Who circles for the novelisations that he would churn out on a regular basis for the show to varying degrees of quality.
But back to Robot.
It follows the script quite faithfully, with only minor changes to what Dicks put on screen. It begins with a soldier on duty. In the screenplay, he’s mostly seen from the at-this-point-unknown Robots point-of-view, but here he’s given a brief glimpse of character. We get the impression of a soldier who feels hard done by for getting yet another night watch duty, the inkling that his CO might have it in for him. In modern literature and television we often bemoan the fact that we sometimes get clues that a walk-on character is about to meet their demise when they begin to let slip details of their inner lives; this novelisation, published in 1975, gives us that trick on the first page.
As the story progresses, though, the characters become deeper and more nuanced, or at least as much as they can be in a 120-page long retelling. Winters and Jellicoe, our two main villains are shown as shallow as they are nefarious, while Professor Kettlewell – the Robot’s creator – is shown to be misguidedly idealistic in his decisions and his part in the plot is unexpected but not out-of-character.
There’s also, as is common in Doctor Who, a host of references to other media: the conclusion to the story is a direct homage/ripoff of King Kong; while the Robot itself is guided by a mish-mash of rules that make the reader think of Star Trek or Isaac Asimov’s robot stories. But the obvious reference is very clearly Frankenstein, with an intelligent creation tormented by its lack of knowledge of the flawed human who created it and how it seeks it out for guidance and – eventually – some kind of vengeance.
But I want to circle back to the villains of the piece. With this story and the previous season’s Invasion Of The Dinosaurs, we had a fairly unique set of villains: a bunch of well-educated left-wing terrorists who were fed up with the status quo. In Dinosaurs they had managed to hijack some temporal machinery to send themselves back in time to create a “golden age” while here they are content to send the world into a nuclear holocaust and rule over the leftovers.
These two stories are often cited as reasons for Doctor Who becoming more “woke” in recent years, while ignoring the fact that acts left wing terrorism were in fact quite common during the Cold War, with the Weather Underground movement and the Symbionese Liberation Army being among the more famous groups active at the time. However, studies of terrorism have shown that these groups have largely disappeared in recent years, which is possibly the reason why they stand out so starkly in these stories.
Thinktank, the group run by Hilda Winters in this story, does not fade away like the other groups mentioned above, however: as we saw in the most recent incarnation of the show, they returned led by Ruby Sunday’s one-time boyfriend in an attempt to overthrow UNIT and have it disbanded in the episode Lucky Day.
But here they are only slightly more than just a bunch of cranks, as Sarah Jane Smith says:
“…somewhere between the flying saucer people and the flat earthers.”
But Dicks manages to build a sense of real menace from an organisation made up of people who are disgruntled with modern life. It’s not hard to imagine a future world where they manage to escape from the notoriety of their past history and become a major force for anarchy and disinformation in a world awash with far too many loudmouths with a platform.
Dicks portrays them quite effectively as people we have probably sniggered at in our own lives:
“(Jellicoe) was a nervous, fussy man in his late thirties, who combed his thinning fair hair carefully across a spreading bald patch, and made the mistake of dressing in clothes far too elaborately trendy for his age.”
It’s a lovely description of a fairly shabby villain; however, the real brains of the outfit is clearly Hilda Winters:
“an attractive dark-haired woman… looking cool and elegant in a formal business costume.”
We don’t get much of a description of our main characters, though: Sarah barely gets a look-in, while the Brigadier and Benton (newly promoted to RSM in this story) are hardly glanced at. Of our regulars, only Harry Sullivan – the newest member of the cast – gets a roll-call of his physical features. Presumably, the main players are well-known enough to the readership that they don’t need to be described. The Doctor, once he gets settled into his new outfit is largely described in terms of that, with an occasional mention of his curly hair, although he does get described in an early chapter by comparison to his previous incarnation:
“Still tall and thin, still with the same rather beaky nose. But a younger man, the face far less lined, a tangle of curly brown hair replacing the flowing white locks.”
His new personality is only fleetingly mentioned: we learn that he is still disrespectful of authority, still has a towering intellect and curiosity, but has a greater sense of whimsy as well, occasionally offering jelly babies to his enemies as a way of confusing them or getting them on side.
That small fault aside, though, this is a terrific introduction to the new era of the show.
Coming Up Next: Doctor Who And The Terror Of the Autons
