Doctor Who and the Daleks

by David Whitaker

  Barbara said ‘Yes,’ very softly and added, ‘Besides, the man asks the woman if she is willing.’

  Then she got to her feet.

  ‘I’m going back to find the Doctor and Susan now. Otherwise, they’ll come looking for me.’

  I thought she would see me. I could have put out a hand and touched her shoulder but her eyes were busy on the ground and she walked by without noticing. Kristas threw down his stick and rubbed his hands together, then he bent down and started to pick up the five-box. I waited until Barbara was out of earshot then moved from the shadow of the bush. Kristas gave a muffled exclamation but smiled when he saw who it was.

  ‘Then you know?’

  I held out my hand to him. He put down the fire-box, and grasped it.

  ‘We’re going with the Doctor now. He’s asked me not to say any good-byes, but I couldn’t leave without a word to you. You’ve been my friend, Kristas, and I’ll never forget you.’

  Whatever sadness I saw in his eyes must have been in mine as well. Our hands gripped together and I had the greatest difficulty in not wincing with pain.

  ‘Good-bye, Ian. I wish you wouldn’t go but I see your way is set.’

  I felt a ridiculous prickling in my eyes so I turned quickly and walked away from him, through that dead forest for the last time, my footsteps hurrying to take me away and leading me faster and faster towards the Ship. Just as I reached the glade, I saw Alydon and Dyoni in the distance. His arm was around her shoulders and her face was turned up towards his. There was a look on it of such intense happiness that I strangled the few words I wanted to say and walked quietly through the doors of the Ship, content with the memories I took with me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A New Life

  I saw Susan press a switch and the doors closed behind me. The Doctor turned and leaned his hands behind him on the control panel. Barbara had her back half turned to me.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said the Doctor, in a business-like way, ‘we’ve been waiting for you, young man.’

  I crossed the control room and sat down in the arm-chair.

  ‘Chesterton,’ he muttered, ‘and Miss Wright.’ She turned and faced him and then sat down on a low stool near the Ormulu clock. Susan folded her arms and looked from one to the other of us.

  ‘I can’t promise either of you to return you to your planet Earth. I have said that before and I repeat it now. The Tardis, although excellent in many respects, does have one or two faults in it. I can never, for example, plan a journey with any accuracy. Both of you, if I may say so, have carried yourselves very well. Intruders you started out but it has been as friends and companions that I recognize your values.’

  He left his place by the control column and walked over to the double doors.

  ‘Now, outside these doors,’ he said, turning, ‘we know there is a world and a very interesting one. The people are delightful and there is much to do. It would be a very full life and a very satisfying one. To build a planet, Chesterton, now there’s a challenge for you.’

  I inclined my head in agreement.

  ‘Less than a hundred people to populate it and tame it. You would be assured of good positions in such a society.’

  Barbara said, ‘You make it sound very attractive.’

  ‘I mean to,’ he said. ‘For what can I offer you? Constant danger. No permanence. A life of drifting from place to place, searching perhaps for the ideal and never finding it. Mind you, if you wish to stay with us, Susan and I agree we would be glad of your company. If, on the other hand, one or both of you prefer to stay…’

  ‘Then we shall be dreadfully sorry,’ finished Susan for him and he nodded agreement with a sharp move of the head.

  There was a short silence while Barbara and I looked at each other. I thought there was a tiny smile on her lips. I know there was one on mine.

  ‘I’ll let Barbara decide for both of us,’ I said. The Doctor frowned.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the man,’ I murmured, ‘always asks the woman if she is willing.’

  I saw something move in her eyes and a faint blush tinged her cheeks. The light made her eyes glisten and I knew she was remembering everything she’d told Kristas in the wood and knowing I must have overheard it. The Doctor looked at her briefly then directed his gaze at me. It was not at all unkindly.

  ‘It seems to me,’ he said gently, ‘that the young lady hasn’t made up her mind.’

  I waited.

  Barbara said, ‘Can we stay with the Doctor, Ian?’

  I saw Susan and her grandfather smile at each other. I got up and walked over to Barbara and took her hand lightly. I felt her fingers pressing into mine. Asking for comfort? Affection? I still didn’t dare hope it might be love. Only time could tell. I turned and faced the Doctor with a smile.

  ‘We stay with you,’ I said.

  DOCTOR WHO AND THE DALEKS

  Between the Lines

  Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks by David Whitaker was first published in hardback by Frederick Muller Ltd on 12 November 1964. Doctor Who’s second season had begun transmission on BBC television almost three weeks earlier, and it was just nine days before the Daleks’ second television adventure – ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ – was broadcast. The novelisation featured internal illustrations (used in this edition) and a cover by Arnold Schwartzman; almost a year later, on 4 October 1965, it was reprinted by Armada Paperbacks with a new cover and inside illustrations by Peter Archer. It would later be one of the three reprinted titles that launched Universal-Tandem’s range of Doctor Who books under the Target imprint on 2 May 1973, this time as Doctor Who and the Daleks, and with Arnold Schwartzman’s illustrations reinstated.

  This new edition re-presents that 1973 version. While a few minor errors or inconsistencies have been corrected, no attempt has been made to update or modernise the text – this is Doctor Who and the Daleks as originally written and published.

  This means that the novel retains certain stylistic and editorial practices that were current in 1964 but which have since adapted or changed, including paragraphing conventions that are quite different from current usage.

  Most obviously, all measurements are given in the then-standard imperial system of weights and measures: a yard is equivalent to 0.9144 metres; three feet make a yard, and a foot is 30 centimetres; twelve inches make a foot, and an inch is 25.4 millimetres. The Thal Alydon is described as ‘six foot four’, meaning six feet and four inches (1.93 metres).

  In common with the television scripts at the time, the name of the Doctor’s time machine is given here as ‘Tardis’ or ‘the Tardis’; only in the 1970s did the series’ ‘house style’ establish ‘TARDIS’ as the standard usage, still used in 2011. (Susan, on television and in print, credits herself with making up the name from the initials of ‘Time And Relative Dimension In Space’, though this novel actually features the first appearance of the plural ‘Dimensions’ that was subsequently used on TV for many years.) As on television, and in almost every novel, the Doctor himself is ‘the Doctor’ and never ‘Doctor Who’ or ‘Dr Who’; 1963’s TV dialogue ‘Eh? Doctor who? What’s he talking about?’ and ‘Who is he? Doctor who? Perhaps if we knew his name we might have a clue to all this’ become, in this print version, Ian’s suggestion: ‘Perhaps that’s what we ought to call him – “Doctor Who”?’ Susan, meanwhile – known as ‘Susan Foreman’ on television, after the name painted on the junkyard gates – is here given the surname ‘English’, presumably chosen to be nicely inconspicuous.

  The Doctor is said to be ‘very rich’, paying Barbara £20 per week for Susan’s tuition (more than £300 at 2011 prices). Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor stated in 1970 that he had ‘no use for the stuff’, an attitude that has remained part of the Doctor’s character ever since, but money was rarely mentioned in 1960s Doctor Who. Whitaker does, though, use a couple of pre-decimal coins for comparisons, first to the size of a half-crown (a 32-millimetre coin, valued at two shillings
and sixpence – a little under £2 in today’s money); the second to the size of shillings (24-millimetre coins, replaced in the early 1970s with the 5p denomination, and now equivalent to about 77p). The Doctor is also depicted as having a ‘gold hunter on a thick chain’, a vintage pocket watch.

  The Dalek city is described as resembling the work of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who had died in 1959 and was famous for his ‘organic architecture’, designed to integrate buildings with their surroundings. In Chapter Six, Ian feels he knows ‘how men in the Tank Corps suffered when an enemy bazooka suddenly appeared’, a reference to a unit of the British Army established during the First World War that was officially replaced by the Royal Tank Regiment in 1939. He also refers to the four travellers proceeding in ‘Indian file fashion’, a reference to Native Americans that simply means ‘single file’.

  While Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks would eventually spearhead a range of more than 150 novelisations (and, later, inspire more than 300 original novels), in 1964 it was effectively a one-off. It was adapted from Doctor Who’s second television adventure, ‘The Daleks’, which prompted David Whitaker to devise the entirely new introduction to the four main characters seen in the first couple of chapters. The after-school encounter in a London junkyard and a three-part ordeal in Earth’s Stone Age are exchanged for a car crash and a meeting on Barnes Common. The tone of the novel at this point is also rather different from the television series, with Ian Chesterton’s first-person narration giving us fairly graphic descriptions of a fatal road accident, making the Doctor an even more mysterious and untrustworthy character than he’d seemed on TV, and showing Ian himself smoking cigarettes. (That’s a sign of the times – smoking was a much more widespread habit in the 1960s than it is now, and the Doctor himself had lit up a pipe, for the first and last time, in the second television episode. Ian’s novelised experiences on Skaro seem to have kicked the habit for him, too. Nowadays, Alydon’s cloak would probably be compared to tracing rather than cigarette paper.)

  The structure of this new first encounter with the Doctor is quite similar to the events of the first television episode, ‘An Unearthly Child’, keeping all the main story ‘beats’ in place and reprising or echoing some of that episode’s dialogue. Ian’s criticism of Barbara for letting things out ‘a bit at a time’ recalls his observation in ‘An Unearthly Child’ that Susan ‘lets her knowledge out a bit at a time so as not to embarrass me’, and the Doctor is here given the same first line as he’d had on television in that junkyard – ‘What are you doing here?’ Barbara, too, has dialogue in the novel derived from televised exchanges, like her determination ‘to have a chat with this grandfather of hers’.

  The conclusion of this account is the same: Ian and Barbara force their way into the TARDIS, and the Doctor impulsively spirits them away to a life of adventure in time and space. The TARDIS control room is, as on TV, dotted with antique chairs and bric-a-brac, some identified in this novel as a Chippendale, a Sheraton and an Ormulu clock – these examples of eighteenth-century furniture, together with the bust of Napoleon, tie in with Susan’s televised observation that the French Revolution (1789–1799) is the Doctor’s favourite period of Earth history. So, too, does Susan’s thirty-page essay on Robespierre, itself a development from a scene in ‘An Unearthly Child’ where she leafs through a thick volume on the French Revolution and comments, ‘That’s not right.’ The list of the gaps and errors in her knowledge is wholly new, but again fits in with her not understanding the details of contemporary British currency in the first episode.

  The Doctor’s description of the delights of exploring time and space is also reminiscent of dialogue from the earliest television episodes: ‘It’s … a privilege to step out on to new soil and see an alien sun wheeling above you in another sky’ recalls his transmitted line ‘If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cries of strange birds, and watch them wheel in another sky… would that satisfy you?’

  The first-person narrative is from Ian Chesterton’s viewpoint, but Whitaker strengthens the characterisation of the Doctor considerably, emphasising his keen intelligence over the more obvious signs of ageing portrayed by William Hartnell. The Doctor even takes some of Ian’s televised lines, such as when he quickly deduces that Susan may have placed the Thals in danger (‘This Alydon of yours seems to have kept his wits about him’).

  Whitaker also took the opportunity to expand our knowledge of the Doctor’s time machine. In addition to the food machine seen on screen, the TARDIS is now equipped with a highly advanced shower and shaver that Ian uses, though they’re never seen on screen. (Ian says the haircut he gets in the TARDIS is as good as one from Simpson’s of Piccadilly, a Central London department store that traded between 1936 and 1999.) Ian is also assigned a bedroom – on television, the question was slightly fudged, but there seemed to be a communal sleeping area. The circular indentations adorning the TARDIS walls – much later identified as ‘roundels’ – can be opened and used as storage space, something that would not be true on television for twenty years. There’s still a ‘yearometer’ which ‘was damaged on a previous expedition’; on TV, it stopped working as soon as the TARDIS left 1963 London. Missing from the novel is the faulty radiation meter that fails to warn them of Skaro’s dangers in ‘The Daleks’; instead, the Doctor is provoked into leading them from the ship prematurely, despite Susan’s warnings that they’ve not checked everything properly. When they exit the ship on Skaro, it is still disguised as a police box, and there’s no explanation here of the TARDIS’s theoretical ability to disguise itself.

  Ian’s initial disbelief and Barbara’s more open-minded response to what the Doctor and Susan tell them mirrors their attitudes on screen. The Doctor remains supercilious, although Whitaker here has him deciding that Susan needs a twentieth-century education, rather than ‘that ridiculous school’ being Susan’s choice in ‘An Unearthly Child’. His uncertainty over how far human science has progressed (‘you’ve discovered television, haven’t you?’) is echoed here when Susan breaks in to correct ‘aeronautical machine’ to ‘aeroplane’. He and Susan are ‘cut off from our own planet’, the same phrase as used in the first episode, though Whitaker adds here that they are ‘separated from it by a million, million years of your time’. Doctor Who’s writers have always liked big numbers. And, like a lot of the television scripts of the time, the word ‘universe’ tends to be used interchangeably with ‘solar system’ and ‘galaxy’ (‘Forget about your planet. We’re already in the next Universe but one’).

  Once the TARDIS arrives on Skaro, the novel’s plot follows that of the television original very closely, although a number of televised scenes that don’t involve Ian directly are omitted. The putative romance between Ian and Barbara means that Barbara’s onscreen closeness with the Thal Ganatus is entirely dispensed with. Other variations include Ian easily escaping his Dalek casing disguise, where the third episode of ‘The Daleks’ gains several minutes of tension from him being trapped inside it with hostile Daleks just moments away. The neutron war is said to have taken place 200 years before the events of the novel; this was ‘over 500 years ago’ on screen. Whitaker’s novel originally described the Dalek machines as about three feet tall and then as about four foot six inches; this has been corrected to five feet (about 1.52 metres). The Doctor theorises that the Dalek creatures’ mutation is not complete, and the TV episodes suggest that the Thals have fully mutated to become more or less perfect; in 1975, however, ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ informs us that the Dalek’s creator, Davros, has conducted experiments to discover his people’s final mutated form and then invented travel machines for them – the Daleks.

  Whitaker also devises an extra element to Ian’s efforts to convince the Thals to fight, the boxing match described in Chapter Seven, and the death of Antodus is revised to have him stumble on a creeper after successfully jumping the chasm, rather than the failed jump seen on TV. And the final chapter features an
entirely new sequence in which the Doctor offers Ian and Barbara a place aboard the TARDIS, which they accept. On the small screen, Doctor Who’s first two seasons centred on the Doctor’s continuing attempt to pilot the TARDIS to return the pair home to 1960s Earth.

  On publication in 1964, the novel also provided a few glimpses of Doctor Who’s future. Susan’s observation that she’d have worried about her grandfather had she stayed the night at Barbara’s flat quietly foreshadows her exchange with the Doctor when she leaves the TARDIS to settle on Earth after the Dalek invasion, in an episode broadcast a few weeks after this novel’s publication. So does Ian’s musing on whether the Doctor and Susan ‘understand such Earth-like customs as marriage’ and what will happen when the granddaughter decides to leave her grandfather. The title of the fourth chapter, ‘The Power of the Daleks’, was later used by Whitaker when he scripted Patrick Troughton’s first adventure as the Second Doctor. Chapter Nine introduces the Daleks’ leader, another Dalek mutant, which sits inside a glass casing. In 1960s comic strips featuring the Daleks, their leader was the Emperor, who subsequently appeared in ‘The Evil of the Daleks’ in 1967, though not in a glass casing and with a deep and resonant voice rather than ‘a dreadful squeaking sound’. But a glass Dalek did eventually appear on television, in 1985’s ‘Revelation of the Daleks’.

  Most significant, perhaps, is the frequent appearance of a certain word. In their first few television stories, the Daleks ‘fire’, ‘destroy’ and ‘annihilate’; it’s not until David Whitaker’s pair of Dalek scripts for Patrick Troughton’s Doctor in 1966/7 that the Daleks really develop their famous catchphrase. Doctor Who and the Daleks can lay claim to the first regular use of the Daleks’ battle-cry: ‘Exterminate!’