Ahead of time…
It is Saturday November 19th 1983. “Doctor Who’ isn’t on TV, it isn’t the 20th anniversary yet, Longleat has long been and gone, all should be quiet. So, why is a 14 year old me standing excited beyond belief in a bookshop in Liverpool? To answer that question, I’ll ask you a couple of questions in return:
Imagine that if the weekend before ‘The Day of the Doctor’ aired, the Steven Moffat novelisation was accidentally on the shelves of your local bookshop – appropriately falling through a window in time or maybe via a 3-D Time Lord painting. What would you have done – would you have walked away calmly and remained blissfully unaware of what was going to happen until the evening of the 23rd? You are grown-ups – or at least a very rough approximation of one – what would you have done?
What about when the first Peter Capaldi stories were put out on the internet before they were even completed – did you download and watch them? As an adult are you able to avoid being spoilered, do you have the willpower, the self-control? We are fans after all.
Well imagine instead you are 14 years old and it’s 1983. It is the 20th anniversary of your favourite programme and you are really and I mean really looking forward to ‘The Five Doctors’. You have the Radio Times Anniversary special, you’ve seen some of the sets at the Longleat Anniversary convention, you’ve got this weeks Radio Times, but apart from the Doctor’s involved, you don’t really know too much about it.
I think what happened was that the screening in the UK was moved from the anniversary to allow it to be shown as part of ‘Children in Need’. So, the USA got the story first, which wouldn’t work at all these days, we’d be spoilered in seconds, back then it would have taken weeks! I don’t know the thinking behind the move, but it was all a bit strange and doesn’t seem to have especially worked, the ratings being pretty standard for Davison era stories.
Anyway, whatever the reason, someone forgot to tell W.H. Allen or W.H. Smiths. And so, the Saturday before (which would have been too early even if it had aired on the 23rd), there it was – sitting on a shelf in Smiths on Church St, Liverpool – ‘Doctor Who and the Five Doctors’ by Terrance Dicks. This was back in the days when that store was a thing of wonder – solely because on its shelves it stocked lots of Target books and Doctor Who Monthly and it was the scene of some of my happiest purchases of later childhood – ‘The Making of Doctor Who, ‘The Doctor Who Programme Guide’ and ‘Twenty Years of Doctor who: A Celebration’. Now ‘The Five Doctors’ is a bit of a rush job from Terrance, a quick turnaround, I doubt it is the favourite Target book of too many people. I mean, it has a beautiful cover – all rendered in silver and it is typical lean, sparse Terrance Dicks prose (more on that later). However, amongst its’ pages, at that precise moment in time it held forbidden fruit. It was the story of a TV show that hadn’t yet been aired. A Target book that should have come with its own illicit brown paper bag (ask an older gentleman if you don’t get the reference!).
So, what to do? Walk away, pretend you never saw it? Have a quick glimpse, just enough to get excited, but not enough to spoil anything and then walk away? Or buy it and tell yourself that you won’t read any of it until after the story airs, but at least you will be able to read it straight after? Buy it and just the read the thing? Or just read it in W.H. Smith in one long go for free? I can still remember that moral dilemma, I was the Doctor on Skaro with two strands of wire in his hands, agonising over whether to commit genocide or like Stein ‘I can’t stand the confusion in my mind’ (oh sorry that was still in the future!).
So, what did I do? If you were in the same situation what did you do?
Spoiler
I read the whole thing of course! I was a fan after all!
Whilst you can re-create similar contemporary examples (the leaks of episodes online, the early shipping of DVD’s etc.), this dilemma is very much of that time – a low-fi version of those other ¤¤¤¤-ups. It allowed you (if you chose to) to read the story, without having experienced the TV show. It was at the time, very similar to the way that Target books allowed you to experience old ‘Doctor Who’ that you hadn’t seen – just with a story that had never been shown before and wasn’t old – in fact it wasn’t even ‘new’ yet! A missing episode that wasn’t missing, in fact one that didn’t yet exist in the public realm – at least not in the UK. For a brief period of time, ‘The Five Doctors’ was Schrodinger’s story – it existed in book form and on TV in the USA, but not in the UK. I’ve heard Steven Moffat talking about facing this exact same dilemma – he went through the exact same experience as me. Given all of this, is it any wonder that his plots are all out of sequence and involve temporal paradoxes and things falling through time? That’s right Target books are entirely to blame for all of his output – whether you like it or not. It isn’t just ‘Never Cruel or cowardly‘ in ‘Day of the Doctor‘ that comes from Uncle Terrance – but the entire plot (especially the Fez!) was inspired by a publishing distribution ¤¤¤¤-up and a lovely little silver book from the great man!
So., there we have it – ‘The Five Doctors’ Target book and why it still gives me an illicit thrill. Probably shouldn’t have admitted that!
Five-ish Doctors
So, for the first time in possibly 38 or so years, I had a quick read of the Target book of ‘The Five Doctors’. What did I think? Well, what struck me as interesting, is that it is like a nugget of pure compressed Terrance. It is his story of course, but if you took all of his Target books and distilled them into pure essence of Uncle Terrance, then out of the distillation process would come something like ‘The Five Doctors’. Have quick read – a skim if you don’t believe me. I’ll save you a bit of time – he gets to describe all five of his Doctor’s and all the familiar descriptions are there. Here they are for your enjoyment:
“The commanding beak of the nose gave the old man a haughty, imperious air. The old man in the garden was known as the Doctor – a Doctor nearing the end of his first incarnation. The Doctor sensed that the end was near. He had come to this place to prepare himself, to say farewell to a body and a personality almost worn out by now, to prepare himself for the birth of a new self. Here in this peaceful garden he could prune his roses, and care for his bees. He could enjoy a time of peace, of semi-retirement, before returning to the mainstream of his life and preparing to face the coming change.”
“He saw an odd-looking little fellow in a shabby old frock coat and rather baggy check trousers. Untidy black hair hung in a fringe over his forehead, and his dark brown eyes seemed humorous and sad at the same time.”
“Elsewhere in space and time, on the planet Earth, the Doctor’s third incarnation was driving very fast along a long straight road. This particular Doctor was a tall figure with a young-old face and a mane of prematurely white hair. He wore a velvet smoking jacket and an open-necked shirt. The outfit was completed by a rather flamboyant checkered cloak. Doctor Three was something of a dandy. The car he was driving was a vintage Edwardian roadster nicknamed ‘Bessie’. It was moving at an impossible speed for so ancient a vehicle.”
“The tall curly-haired man with the wide staring eyes propelled the punt along the backwaters of the river Cam with steady thrusts of the long pole. He wore comfortable Bohemian-looking clothes, a loose coat with an open-necked shirt. A broad-brimmed soft hat was jammed on the back of his head, and an incredibly long scarf looped about his neck. This was the Doctor in his fourth incarnation. As might have been expected, he had something of all his previous selves about him: the intellectual arrogance of the first, the humour of the second, and something of the elegance of the third, though in a more relaxed and informal style.”
“Now in his fifth incarnation, he was a slender fair-haired young man, with a pleasant open face. As usual, he wore the costume of an Edwardian cricketer: striped trousers, fawn blazer with red piping, white cricketing sweater and an open-necked shirt. There was a fresh sprig of celery in his buttonhole.”
Oh and there is much more what that lot came from – descriptions of Sarah, K9, the Brigadier, Romana. In fact, Terrance even has a bit of fun at Nicholas Courtney’s expense – he mentions his size a number of times, including:
‘“Moving very silently for such a big man, the Brigadier crept up behind the Master. ”
Tidying up a bit
And of course, the book is better than the TV story – as Terrance tidies up a bit:
“The fog pressed in on her threateningly. Somehow Sarah was convinced that there was something waiting in ambush, out there in the fog. She tripped over a chunk of broken branch and snatched it up, thinking it might serve as a weapon. Clutching her club, she took a cautious step forwards – and suddenly the ground vanished from beneath her feet. She had stepped clean over the edge of a ravine.
Sarah screamed, dropping the stick, and flailed out desperately in an attempt to regain her balance, but it was too late. She hurtled over the edge, scrabbling desperately for some kind of handhold. She managed to arrest her fall by clutching at a shrub growing from the cliff edge. But it was too slight to bear her weight. She felt it beginning to pull away. Sarah looked below. The ravine appeared to be bottomless, a deep fissure in the earth. If she fell she would probably be killed. Even if she survived, she would never get out again. The roots began to tear…”
That’s a bit more exciting than rolling down a gentle slope in Snowdonia. It also makes Sarah look much braver – she is reaching for a weapon to defend herself.
He also gives Susan a nice introduction, set after ‘Dalek Invasion of Earth:
“The woman called Susan Campbell, who had once been known as Susan Foreman, walked through the streets of New London on the way to market. Looking about her, she marvelled at how swiftly the city had recovered from the devastation of the Dalek attack.
Gleaming new buildings were everywhere, the old bombed sites had all been cleared. Those which hadn’t been used as sites for new buildings had been turned into parks and gardens. It was a smaller London – it would be many years before population rose anywhere near its old levels – but it was a greener, far more attractive one.
Life had been hard at first. For many years she had seen very little of her husband David, who was a prominent figure in the Reconstruction Government. But gradually life had returned to normal. Now Susan and David and their three children could look forward to a more peaceful life. These days it seldom occurred to Susan that this wasn’t really her world at all, that she had originally come here almost by chance in the company of the old man she sometimes called Grandfather, and everyone else called the Doctor.”
It is a shame that while adding in little scenes like this, Terrance didn’t re-instate his cut scenes of the Autons in abandoned, derelict shopping street.
He nicely handles the scenes where the Doctor’s meet and a parallel scene where Tegan, Sarah and the Brigadier catch-up. At one point, addressing the issue of Tom failing to turn up:
“Sarah asked, ‘What’s happened to the other one. The one after him,’ she pointed to Doctor Three, ‘and before your one?’ ‘The one with the hair and the scarf and the funny hat?’
That would be Doctor Four, thought Tegan. ‘He doesn’t seem to be here. They were saying something about one of them not making it, getting trapped in the time-vortex.’
‘Trust him to get himself in trouble,’ said Sarah. ‘Pity, I’d have liked to see him again.”
Yes, so would we. And I suspect so would Terrance, would have saved him some re-writing!
The Quest to find a story
As for the story, well I feel slightly sorry for people who don’t enjoy ‘The Five Doctors’. I mean you don’t have to think it is good – but it is at least enjoyable – surely? You’re a fan, let your hair down, enjoy it, forget about any hipster pretensions you might have for a bit and just revel in your fannishness. We sometimes seem to have almost a self-loathing about that aspect of our fandom – but if you can’t indulge in a bit of nostalgia for the past, meet some old friends, have a few drinks when you reach a milestone birthday, when can you? This sets the Doctor off on a course to run away from Gallifrey and responsibility – which consciously re-iterates the original premise of the show, ‘Day of the Doctor‘ does the opposite – he ends up running towards it and the Presidency. One ends up with “Trial of a Time Lord‘ and other ends up with ‘Hell Bent’ – I struggle to endorse either approach!
Some complain that there isn’t really a story – well there is. It’s one of the oldest stories there is – a quest. The reluctant Greek heroes, wandering Vikings or Knights on a quest to a specific place (The Dark Tower taken from Browning), rescuing fair maidens, fighting and defeating monsters of legend, a villain that may or not be the brother of our hero – or at least is an old friend and rival, sirens calling, a maze, we have the grail legend of immortality and a god-like figure of myth at the end of all of this. It is Greek or Roman myth, Norse saga and British Arthurian or Saxon mythology all rolled into one – Terrance throws the lot at this. That is a story – it isn’t hugely sophisticated, but of course it is a story.
The reason of course is that it needs a simple framework that people will easily understand and get straight away to hang off so many characters and elements. Getting the framework right and balancing the elements is the thing that broke Robert Holmes’s attempt to write this – Terrance just makes the plot as simple and as identifiable as possible, rolls his sleeves up and gets on with the job. This is the man who managed to build a similar framework to hang 10 episodes of ‘The War Games’ off after all.
All of this is wrapped neatly up in the mythos of the first 20 years of Who – Time Lords, the Master, Daleks, Cybermen, UNIT, Susan, the Brigadier, Sarah, Jamie, Romana – that’s most of the big hitters – we are only missing Ian and Barbara and Jo really. It has the internal script logic of Terrance, but combined with the big set pieces of Bob Holmes and ‘journey’ and jeopardy of Terry Nation. I would argue that in many ways it is Terrance’s finest moment (if not his finest script – ‘Fang Rock’ is perfection) – to manage to create a working script that actually got made and was approved by JNT and Eric Saward. I think only Terrance could have managed it, it is the ultimate tribute to his professionalism and his ability to craft a script precision engineered for its purpose with all the complex moving parts ticking away harmoniously.
Dead Ringers
After reading the novelisation, I also listened to the BBC audio book. The narrator is John Culshaw and he makes an excellent reader. He also plays most of the roles – his Pertwee is uncanny, as is his Brigadier and his Troughton and Hurndall are very creditable. Culshaw has been an excellent addition to this range – I am currently very much enjoying his reading of ‘Genesis of the Daleks’. It is funny that we still pigeon hole people – you’d think we would learn our lesson. He is very much more than an impressionist or impersonator – he makes a very skilled narrator and proves himself a fine voice actor.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this, it rattled along and was a joyful thing in its own right. I have bought the Target audio range on and off over the years, whenever they were cheap really, but only recently have I really started listening to them – for the most part they are highly recommended and made with love.
A Journal of Impossible Things 