First Broadcast: 19th May 1973 – 23rd June 1973
First Published: 21st August 1975
I know what you’re thinking: we just met Katy Manning’s Jo Grant for the first time (again!) last time – why are we doing her departure story for the very next book?
Honestly, who knows?
But it doesn’t really matter because this novelisation is one of the best, most relevant and prescient books published in the entirety of the Doctor Who range.
Big claim?
Well, I’ve got some receipts…
First up, it’s a companion departure story and it’s the first one we’ve had in the book range so far. Characters have joined the show (Jo’s done it twice!) but none of them have left in the books yet, so it’s sort of a big deal that we get it done as wonderfully as it is here.
It’s also one of the last big UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) stories: on television the broadcast date of Terror Of The Zygons is just nine days away from the publication date of The Green Death, so it’s nice to be reminded of a really good story that UNIT had just before we get what will eventually become their last hurrah.
It also contains a plot point that is going to be important to the next story published in the book range (Planet Of The Spiders), as well as a villain who played by the actor who plays a villain in the next book (John Dearth), so it ties everything together quite nicely.
But what’s so great about The Green Death?
Malcolm Hulke adapts Robert Sloman’s script for this book. He’s done one of these already in this range (The Daemons) so he’s familiar with his work, which is advantageous, and he knows the characters inside-out as well, which is a bonus.
And he manages to put together a ridiculously well-crafted and tense retelling of an already superb script, which really only falters as we approach the ending and the pacing sometimes slips up.
Let’s look at what makes it brilliant, though.
First up, it’s got a superb leading antagonist in Dr Thomas Stevens. Stevens is the rather bland director of Panorama Chemicals (renamed from Global Chemicals in the script since it was discovered that this was the name of an actual company in the real world). He comes across as the type of character who normally makes a good villain in these stories – like the Controller in Day Of The Daleks, he appears to toe the company line before betraying his master and sacrificing himself in the end, but his journey to that is quite fascinating.
What makes it fascinating is that he is presented as having a “friend” who he admires and wants to spend a lot of time with. Stevens is presented as a workaholic with no interests outside of his work. It’s mentioned that he used to have some interests like mountaineering and history, but also that his work has completely divorced him from these as well as other, more humanising influences.
This makes his slow reveal as a pawn in the long game of “Boss” – his friend who is also the computer that runs the company – even more heartbreaking.
Boss is the central intelligence behind the entire story. It has been slowly hypnotising the staff of Panorama into enacting its plans for world domination. On the screen it is portrayed by an oscillating arc of light voiced by the wonderful tones of John Dearth; on the page it is an even more seductive force, promising Stevens a joined life – there are blatant references to a wedding of their intellects, a true marriage of the soul.
At any rate, what begins as a routine investigation into pollution and waste being disposed of illegally becomes a breakneck race against time.
But let’s get back to our regular characters for a bit.
The Doctor (Jon Pertwee) is still on a bit of a high at having been released from his exile by the Time Lords (in The Three Doctors, which is still two books in the future from where we are now) and is planning a trip to Metebelis Three. Jo (Katy Manning) and the Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney) are heading off to Wales to investigate a poison leak in a mine, but while the Brig is working with the company that appears to be responsible, Jo intends to work with a young scientist that she admires, Dr Clifford Jones (played by Manning’s then-fiancé Stewart Bevan).
As this was going to be Manning’s final story she was given the option of being written out more graciously and logically than many other companions had been in the past. Jo meets the fiery scientist, hits it off badly with him then comes to love him over the course of the six-episode story before agreeing to travel down the Amazon River with him in search of alternative food sources. Theirs is a thin story with only a few scenes devoted to it in the script but the two actors commit to it, convincing the audience that they have indeed fallen for each other just as much as they had in real life. It plays out just the same on the page, which has the disadvantage of competing with several other storylines in a limited page count.
But love and pollution aren’t all that’s going on here: Hulke manages to include some incredibly incisive and clever thoughts about the story and what the wider implications could be.
The story about waste disposal touches on two issues that were growing in importance in contemporary Britain. The first was the mining dilemma. The mine is presented here as the lifeblood of the once thriving village. But it’s also a demon, a Moloch that “eats” the inhabitants, killing the very people who depend upon it for their livelihood. As Bert, a miner who is trapped down the shaft with Jo puts it:
‘There’s some people get born in Buckingham Palace, and they becomes kings and queens, because that’s the family occupation. Us, we get born in a place like Llanfairfach, where our fathers and uncles all go down the pit.”
The resignation of the miners – represented by Bert and others, including the first victim of the Green Death, a miner named Ted Hughes (I don’t know if Hulke or Sloman were Sylvia Plath fans) – to their lot is presented with dignity here.
The waste disposal issue is presented succinctly by Dr Bell, another employee at Global/Panorama Chemicals:
The method resulted in tons of waste fluid, and this would have to be deposited somewhere. But Dr Bell did not regard that as his problem.
This cavalier attitude by the company towards the problems they have created is carried through to a logical conclusion wherein Boss impersonates the Prime Minister, castigating the Brigadier for getting in the way:
“This country cannot afford to have an argument, or even the hint of a dispute, with Panorama or any other multi-national company that’s good enough to have its plants here.”
It’s frustrating and more than a little chilling to see that attitude becoming a reality in this world, the future that this program was reaching towards. Almost as though the viewers may have taken the wrong message from it.
The symbolism is hammered home even further throughout the novel with allusions made towards Stevens and Boss representing the face of an evil foe that is just capitulated to: Stevens at the start of the book engages in a scene that many viewers of the time would have found hauntingly relevant, where he mimics Neville Chamberlain having returned from his meeting with Hitler – Boss even misquotes the dictator at one point:
“One world, one people, one Boss!”
Boss is, frankly, one of the great villains of this era of the show. Very clearly based upon 2001: A Space odyssey’s HAL 9000, it is far more eloquent and maniacal, but that single round screen through which it projects its voice does reinforce the connection.
And the fact that there’s an artificial intelligence that brainwashes and radicalises its followers with glib nonsense that doesn’t bear the slightest scrutiny into doing its bidding at the expense of their souls requires no real comment from me at all.
However, for all that I am praising this novelisation, it is not perfect. As is sometimes the case in a long-running series, we get very little in the way of physical description of the characters, despite being granted so much of their motivation and background, and several events near the climax are truncated or only alluded to, no doubt due to Hulk being aware of the encroaching page count he was working under.
The Doctor’s trip to Metebelis Three is presented as a comedic adventure, too, with the only real pay-off being that he gains the crystal that he uses to deprogram Boss’s minions, including his colleague Mike Yates, who has fallen under the spell of the computer. While it’s a great sequence, the trip should have had more consequence to this story.
On the other hand, the fact that it’s used as a lead-in to the next season’s climax, with a sidestep during that season to see the consequences of this story, is absolute genius, and one of my favourite storylines across the entirety of Doctor Who.
And while the final scene, wherein the Doctor bids farewell to Jo, is quite touching on the page, it has nothing of the impact that the footage of Jo glancing over her shoulder as the Doctor leaves her engagement party, then cutting to the Doctor driving home in the half-light across the hills does.
This post has wound up quite a bit longer than most of my usual posts in this series have been so far. The Green Death, as I alluded to in the introduction to this series, is a fairly important story to me personally, but it’s also one of the best examples of the book range, using the existent story to frame this retelling and adding so much depth and substance to a story that is already quite excellent.
Coming Up Next: Doctor Who And The Planet Of The Spiders
