Doctor Who and the Daleks

by David Whitaker

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Authors

  Also available from BBC Books

  Title Page

  Introduction by Neil Gaiman

  The Changing Face of Doctor Who

  1. A Meeting on the Common

  2. Prisoners in Space

  3. The Dead Planet

  4. The Power of the Daleks

  5. Escape into Danger

  6. The Will to Survive

  7. The Lake of Mutations

  8. The Last Despairing Try

  9. The End of the Power

  10. A New Life

  Between the Lines

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘The voice was all on one level, without any expression at all, a dull monotone that still managed to convey a terrible sense of evil…’

  The mysterious Doctor and his granddaughter Susan are joined by unwilling adventurers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright in an epic struggle for survival on an alien planet.

  In a vast metal city they discover the survivors of a terrible nuclear war – the Daleks. Held captive in the deepest levels of the city, can the Doctor and his new companions stop the Daleks’ plan to totally exterminate their mortal enemies, the peace-loving Thals? More importantly, even if they can escape from the Daleks, will Ian and Barbara ever see their home planet Earth again?

  This novel is based on the second Doctor Who story, which was originally broadcast from 21 December 1963 – 1 February 1964. This was the first ever Doctor Who novel, originally published in 1964.

  Featuring the First Doctor as played by William Hartnell, and his companions Susan, Ian and Barbara.

  About the authors

  David Whitaker

  Born in April 1928, David Whitaker started his career in the theatre – writing, acting and directing – and was commissioned to adapt one of his plays for television. He was subsequently invited to join the Script Department at the BBC, writing scripts for plays, comedy, and series.

  Whitaker’s enthusiasm for Doctor Who was immense. As the first Story Editor (a position later called Script Editor) he was responsible for finding and commissioning writers then working with them to deliver final scripts. It was Whitaker as much as anyone who defined the narrative ‘shape’ of Doctor Who.

  In addition to this work, Whitaker wrote for the Doctor Who annuals, novelised the first Dalek story and his own script of The Crusade, and worked with Terry Nation on various Dalek-related material including the hugely successful comic strip The Daleks which appeared in the Gerry Anderson magazine TV Century 21.

  Whitaker’s own scripts for the programme, in particular his two Dalek stories for the Second Doctor – The Power of the Daleks and The Evil of the Daleks – are remembered as being amongst the very best of Doctor Who.

  David Whitaker died in February 1980.

  Terry Nation

  Terry Nation was born in August 1930 in Llandaff in South Wales. Nation started as a comedy writer and performer, although much of his later drama writing was influenced by his memories of growing up during the Second World War – as he pointed out, the Daleks are based very much on Nazis. He quickly realised that he was better at writing than performing, however, and went on to provide material for various comedians, including Frankie Howerd, during the 1950s.

  In 1962, Nation scripted three episodes of ABC’s Out of this World science fiction anthology series. Two were adapted from short stories, but the third was an original work called Botany Bay. From this he moved on to write an episode of the series No Hiding Place.

  While working with comedian Tony Hancock, Nation was approached with an offer to work on Doctor Who. He was not initially impressed with the format of the series, but after a falling out with Hancock found himself without work. So he quickly accepted the Doctor Who job, hurriedly providing the seven episodes of the first ever Dalek story before moving on to further work.

  After inventing the Daleks, Nation went on to work on several prestigious ITC television series including The Saint, The Baron (on which he was Script Supervisor), The Champions, The Avengers (where he became Script Editor), Department S, The Persuaders! (as Associate Producer and Story Consultant), and the Gerry Anderson-produced series The Protectors.

  In the 1970s, Nation was once again working for the BBC. He provided a play starring Robert Hardy as The Incredible Robert Baldick which was intended by Nation to be the pilot for a series. Following this he scripted four more Dalek series for Doctor Who – including ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, which has been voted the best ever story in the series.

  Also in the mid 1970s, Nation created the popular series Survivors which depicted the survivors of a Britain in a world all but wiped out by plague and struggling to cling on to civilisation. The series was revived and updated by the BBC in 2008. In the late 1970s, Nation also devised the hugely popular BBC science fiction series Blake’s 7.

  Terry Nation and his family moved to Los Angeles in 1980, where he continued to work in television providing scripts and ideas. It was in Los Angeles that Terry Nation died, in March 1997.

  Also available from BBC Books:

  DOCTOR WHO AND THE CRUSADERS

  David Whitaker

  DOCTOR WHO AND THE CYBERMEN

  Gerry Davis

  DOCTOR WHO AND THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN

  Terrance Dicks

  DOCTOR WHO AND THE AUTON INVASION

  Terrance Dicks

  DOCTOR WHO AND THE CAVE MONSTERS

  Malcolm Hulke

  Neil Gaiman

  IN AN EXCITING INTRODUCTION WITH THE DALEKS

  It was another world, in those days.

  Understand me, and try and picture it: we had no video cassettes, no DVDs, no on-demand anything, no YouTube, no iPlayer. There was no way of seeing an episode of a show you had missed. There was no way of re-experiencing a television show you had enjoyed.

  Well, almost no way. There were records you could listen to, big vinyl scratchable things, with the songs from films you’d liked, or even with old radio shows on them. These were not entirely satisfactory. There were also, and these were much better, books.

  Books let you go back through the story as many times as you wanted. They were always waiting for you, doors into worlds you wanted to revisit. They were 360-degree, full-sensory recreations, extrapolations or interpretations of television and film you had loved.

  There are still ‘novelisations’ of films and TV shows, but in the old days, back when this book was written, books really were the only way back to something you had loved, the only way to visit a story you had missed.

  And unless you were watching television in early 1964, you missed Doctor Who’s first encounter with the Daleks…

  I was three years old in 1964. I’d only just turned three. My birthday was in November. I was at Mrs Pepper’s Nursery School in Purbrook in Hampshire. John F. Kennedy had been shot a few months ago, but nobody told me about it. Back in those days children got free milk at school. It came in bottles that held a third of a pint. We drank our milk with a straw in our mid-morning break.

  One break-time, when they had finished their milk, a few of the other boys did something odd. They bent the straws over, when they had finished drinking their milk, so the ends of the straws resembled eye-stalks, and they moved the bottles around the table, making threatening noises and saying, ‘I-Am-A-Dalek!’ Which was how I discovered Doctor Who.

  My television-watching at home at that age was tightly controlled by my mother and limited to the amiable puppet vapidities of the BBC’s Children’s Hour: Andy Pandy and The Flowerpot Men and the like, in strange stories I expected I would understand when I was an adult, b
ecause they made no sense then. My grandparents, I am glad to say, were less concerned that television be used in a Positive and Educational way, so it was at their house in Southsea that I watched Doctor Who early on Saturday evenings, and when I got scared I watched it from behind the sofa, because the monsters couldn’t get you if you were behind the sofa.

  Each episode was precious. It could not be revisited.

  Which is why, by the time I was six and living in Sussex, and in control of the buttons on the TV, and when I watched Doctor Who from anywhere in the room I wanted to, and when the behinds of sofas were places I almost never watched television from any longer, my most precious possessions were a couple of Doctor Who annuals, a copy of another annual called Dalek World, and a paperback copy of the book that you are holding.

  I did not know who David Whitaker was, not then. I knew that he had novelised Terry Nation’s Dalek story, though. I knew that he had taken us into the TARDIS, and I made a point of searching for his name whenever I visited bookshops or libraries.

  That book was my talisman. It was where I learned how it started. The cover was a moody painting of the TARDIS with the First Doctor in front of it. It’s old and battered now, from so much reading, but I have it still.

  (The book I loved was almost, but not quite, this book. It was the Armada paperback, with different illustrations and a different cover. The human-armed dragon monster on the back cover looked sort of funny to me then and looks even funnier now, but you can’t see it, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.)

  I was surprised, years later, to learn that on the original TV series it didn’t begin in the fog, that Ian Chesterton wasn’t an unemployed job-hunting scientist but was a teacher. Surely this was how it began, on the heath, in a world that had faded to white.

  The book was also my way of getting further into the TARDIS than we seemed to be permitted to do on the TV. I loved the Food Machine that made things that looked like Mars Bars and tasted like bacon and eggs. (I tried to sneak that into the Doctor Who episode I wrote, and it was there for a couple of drafts.) I loved looking at this place through Ian’s eyes.

  Watching the DVDs of ‘An Unearthly Child’ and ‘The Daleks’ in later years was a wonderful thing, but still…

  I’m glad that there were books. The magic of pure fiction is this: that you are there. And I got to look through Ian’s eyes as he travelled in the TARDIS; I visited Skaro, and I met the gentle Thals; I was never as scared of the Daleks in the books as I was scared by them on the television, but in the book I got to see inside the Dalek casing to the creature within and it gave me the creeps in a way that fiction had never done before. The television never managed that, to show me the unimaginable, until Rob Shearman’s story ‘Dalek’ almost forty years later.

  I read the rest of the Doctor Who books, the ones that were available anyway, in hardback at my local library. One of them was even by David Whitaker.

  There are many joys in this book. I liked Susan and Ian and Barbara. I really liked the portrait of the conniving, brilliant, arrogant Doctor. I was not sure that I really liked him; I definitely didn’t trust him. A man who could break his own mercury fluid link might do anything.

  No, Susan’s grandfather was not ever quite my Doctor. I remember the initial shock of learning that Patrick Troughton had replaced William Hartnell, that there was now a new Doctor (but he was still the same Doctor – a ‘Phoenix in the Tardis’ as one of the articles in the Doctor Who Annual described him), and then the discovery that he was still the Doctor – and that, strangely, he was my Doctor. I knew I’d be safe with him. He was just as alien, but he was reassuring in a way that the prickly First Doctor had never been.

  But that never stopped me picking up this book, and it never stopped me loving it, looking for clues, wondering about the nature of the Doctor, of who he was, and where he and Susan came from, and why they had left…

  And although some of those questions have been answered, I love the fact that, almost fifty years later, so many of them remain mysteries and secrets.

  Now, read this book. Visit another world.

  The Changing Face of Doctor Who

  The First Doctor

  This Doctor Who novel features the very first incarnation of the Doctor. When the Doctor was younger, he was an older man. It seems strange now, but when television audiences were first introduced to the Doctor, nothing was revealed about his origins and background. We knew only that together with his granddaughter, Susan, he has fled from his own planet in the TARDIS – which he cannot control. Every trip is a mystery and a surprise as the TARDIS could take him anywhere and anywhen.

  Brilliant but crotchety, the First Doctor did not suffer fools gladly. He took his first companions – Barbara and Ian – with him out of necessity rather than choice. It was more of a kidnapping than a privilege. Over time, and perhaps because of his contact with human beings, the Doctor mellowed and became less irascible. But his brilliance and his passion for justice remained undiminished…

  Susan

  Susan is the Doctor’s granddaughter. Although she attends school under the name of Susan Foreman (she is renamed Susan English in this novelisation – see ‘A Note on the Text’), that is probably not her name any more than it is the Doctor’s.

  Susan looks and behaves like a typical 15-year-old girl. It is at her insistence that she attends Coal Hill School, and it is here that her strange breadth of knowledge in some areas, and total lack of it in others, is noticed by her teachers, who decide to investigate…

  Ian Chesterton

  In the television series, Ian Chesterton is a science teacher at Coal Hill School. While his occupation is altered in this novelisation, his character remains very much the same.

  As a science teacher, Ian Chesterton believes when he can see the proof. This makes him initially a sceptic when he finds himself inside the TARDIS, asked to believe that it can travel in time and space. But once he has proof, once he has seen and convinced himself, he proves to be the most practical of the travellers.

  Ian is not short of common sense, or of bravery and courage. He eventually wins the Doctor’s respect to the point where the old man treats him almost as an equal, almost as a friend. Before long he is revelling in his new-found life – and is even knighted by King Richard the Lionheart. But he never loses sight of the fact that he wants more than anything else to get home.

  Barbara Wright

  History teacher at Coal Hill School, Barbara Wright accepts the apparent impossibilities of travel through time and space more readily than Ian. She is practical, realistic, but also more instinctive, and once she realises the truth she accepts it entirely.

  This combination of intuition and practicality makes Barbara the ideal mediator in the TARDIS. From the start it is Barbara who manages to smooth the way between the Doctor and Ian. But when she is convinced of something, she is more than capable of standing up for it. She enjoys her adventures in space and time – especially those that take her back into Earth’s history, but like Ian she never loses her determination to get home.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Meeting on the Common

  I stopped the car at last and let the fog close in around me. I knew I was somewhere on Barnes Common and I had a suspicious idea it was the most deserted part as well. A warm fire and the supper my landlady would have waiting for me seemed as far away as New Zealand. I wondered how long it would take me to walk home to Paddington and the possible answer didn’t do anything to cheer me up. A fitting end to an impossible day, I thought savagely.

  For a start, before breakfast, I’d torn my best sports jacket on a loose screw on the door of my room. It didn’t help that I’d been putting off tightening it for weeks so I had nobody to blame but myself. Then later, after I’d driven all the way to Reigate for a job I was after as Assistant Research Scientist at Donneby’s, the big rocket component firm, I found that a nephew of one of the directors had got the post and I’d made the journey for nothing. Now the
fog and the prospects of a long, weary walk. I looked at my watch, delaying the decision as long as possible. Nearly nine o’clock.

  Just as the second hand completed its minute, I heard the sound of running footsteps. Probably somebody as lost as I was, I told myself, welcome for a delay from the final decision to begin walking. Suddenly, into the pallid glow of my head lights, a girl appeared. She stopped and I saw her hands moving slightly, and I could see her mouth opening to speak. I tore open the door and ran to her, catching her before she fell to the road.

  She hadn’t completely fainted and I could just make out the name she was saying – Susan – as I lifted her up and put her in the front seat, then her head rolled back on the seat-rest and she passed out altogether. She was in her early twenties, I guessed, and she had one of those deceptive sort of faces; attractive, yet with strong character. Her clothes were covered in mud and her stockings hung in ribbons about her legs. There was a big rip in the jacket of her suit on her shoulder and I could see the blood spreading over the material. I opened the bonnet and dipped my handkerchief in the radiator. This put an end to any idea of walking, I told myself. The cut on her shoulder didn’t look too good and might even need some stitches in it. I went back to her, wringing out the handkerchief, wondering why she didn’t have a handbag. Had somebody attacked her and stolen it? The obvious solution didn’t occur to me.

  She began to move her head a little as I bathed her forehead. Her lips quivered slightly.

  ‘Susan… Susan…’

  All I could think about was how strange it was that she should want to tell me her name and I suppose I was so preoccupied with this line of thought that it was almost startling when she opened her eyes and looked at me. There was a pause of a second or two and then I laid the handkerchief against her forehead.