Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Target Book Club - Recordings from the Day - Part One: Gary Gillat, Simon Guerrier, Jenny T. Colgan & Mags L. Halliday

Transcript

Target Book Club - Recordings from the Day - Part One: Gary Gillat, Simon Guerrier, Jenny T. Colgan & Mags L. Halliday · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:39
  The. I could introduce Gary Diller at
• 1:08
  enormous length, but everyone in this room knows who Gary Diller
• 1:13
  is. And of course, the inventor of
• 1:17
  the phrase squabbling rubber. So what is about to happen will
• 1:25
  be a thing for you to tell your grandchildren, your grand pets,
• 1:32
  this is it's going to be incredible.
• 1:36
  So. Would you care to come and take
• 1:39
  the stage, Gary? For what I'm going to say is
• 1:55
  indescribable, but Oh my God. Lock the doors.
• 2:08
  I stopped the car at last and let the fog close in around me.
• 2:14
  It was almost quiet inside TARDIS, as swiftly and silently
• 2:18
  as a shadow Doctor Who's space and time ship.
• 2:20
  TARDIS appeared on a succession of planets, each as different as
• 2:24
  the pebbles on a beach, stayed a while and then vanished as
• 2:28
  mysteriously as it had come. In the High Court of the Time
• 2:32
  Lords, a trial was coming to an end.
• 2:34
  Ochdale stood watching as the last of the young reptile men
• 2:37
  and women took their turn to go down to safety in the lift.
• 2:41
  The young Time Lord sat at the side of the old Keeper of the
• 2:43
  Time Lords files. At the control console.
• 2:46
  Moany sat up and looked around cautiously.
• 2:49
  You can cheer your favourites. Thunder rumbled ominously.
• 2:55
  Fitful lightning much mocked the darkness of the green.
• 2:58
  With a sudden day, a few threatening drops of rain
• 3:01
  splashed heavily on the cobbled Rd. abandoned ship.
• 3:03
  Abandoned ship high on the Himalayan mountain side.
• 3:07
  The little campfire was burning low.
• 3:09
  The electric storm clawed and tore its way across the night
• 3:11
  sky like a wild animal, flaring suddenly into ripples of
• 3:15
  lightning more eerie and majestic than the three moons of
• 3:18
  Peladon centuries ago. By our Earth time, a race of men
• 3:22
  on the far distant planet of Telos sought immortality.
• 3:25
  It moved through the darkness, swift and silent despite its
• 3:29
  enormous bulk. Luigi Rossini came down the
• 3:31
  steps of his caravan and looked around him with satisfaction.
• 3:34
  In his 40 years as a coal miner, Ted Hughes had never seen
• 3:37
  anything like this. Night falls suddenly in the
• 3:42
  rainforests of the Upper Amazon. For an adventure that was to be
• 3:46
  one of the most astonishing of the Doctor's very long life, it
• 3:49
  all began very quietly. The oil rig called Bonnie Prince
• 3:52
  Charlie towered high above the moonlit sea.
• 3:54
  Shugi McPherson woke up that morning with a pounding
• 3:56
  headache. Centuries ago by our Earth time,
• 3:59
  a race of men on the far distant planet of Telos sorting
• 4:02
  mortality. Stand by all personnel base
• 4:05
  evacuation procedure Phase One section leaders report
• 4:07
  immediately. Centuries ago by our Earth time,
• 4:10
  a race of men on the far distant planet of Telos sort
• 4:13
  immortality. It was a battlefield.
• 4:17
  The huge fairy monster reared up as if to strike the year 2540,
• 4:22
  The tall white haired man layer still as death.
• 4:24
  In a Galaxy unimaginably distant from ours, on a planet called
• 4:28
  Face to Osiris, there was a race so powerful that they became
• 4:31
  like gods. With a strange groaning sound
• 4:33
  the blue police box appeared from nowhere.
• 4:36
  Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, was a gleaming
• 4:38
  expanse of white. Through the ruin of a city
• 4:44
  stalked the ruin of a man. It moved through the silent
• 4:49
  blackness of deep space like a giant jellyfish through the
• 4:52
  depths of the sea, out among the remotest planets in faithful
• 4:57
  orbit through the solar system. The great satellite revolves
• 5:00
  slowly in the glimmer of a billion distant Suns, reflecting
• 5:02
  their faint light from its cold and silent surfaces.
• 5:05
  Look out for Ian Martyr once. Chris was dying.
• 5:13
  Chris was dying, Chris was dying.
• 5:17
  The planet was alive. It was a planet of jungles.
• 5:19
  The telescopic site moved slowly across the crowded hall.
• 5:22
  They were having a good night at the palace.
• 5:24
  The year was 1492. The place a remote principality
• 5:27
  in northern Italy. The 17 was holding a trial.
• 5:31
  Fang Rock Lighthouse, centre of a series and mysterious and
• 5:34
  terrifying events at the turn of the century, is built on a rocky
• 5:38
  island a few miles off the Channel coast.
• 5:41
  Centuries ago by our Earth time, a race of men and the farthest
• 5:43
  of clients of Telos sought immortality.
• 5:46
  Lynx was his name. He was a microsecond from
• 5:49
  obliteration. He was a dead man running.
• 5:52
  A soldier was marching through the forest.
• 5:54
  A huge red sun was hung in a sulfurous yellow sky, its angry
• 5:58
  light filtered by the thin clouds of whitish mist that
• 6:01
  swirled over the deserted, wasted landscape.
• 6:04
  The planet was dying. Something was waiting out in
• 6:08
  space, like a city on the moon. The sand liner glided through
• 6:12
  the desert sands. A man was hurrying through the
• 6:14
  woods. What a sad, terrible place.
• 6:16
  Through the vortex, that mysterious region where time and
• 6:19
  space are 1 speed. A police box.
• 6:21
  There was not a police box at all.
• 6:23
  The tall, loose limbed figure cladding, voluminous
• 6:26
  shirtsleeves and baggy tweed trousers tucked into creaking
• 6:29
  leather boots strode through the faintly humming chamber.
• 6:33
  Once there were the minions. Oh, banana.
• 6:40
  The spaceship was enormous, terrifying, a sleek killer whale
• 6:43
  of space. It might have been Stonehenge in
• 6:46
  the days of the Druids. The doctor was playing chess
• 6:48
  with canine. Deep beneath the waters of the
• 6:50
  immense lagoon. Crawl slept Atrios, said the
• 6:53
  doctor. Do you know I've never been to
• 6:55
  Atrios? The day, like every day on
• 6:58
  Marinus, started clear and bright.
• 7:02
  It should have been impossible, but it happened.
• 7:06
  Next to the crumbling palace of the Emperor, on the edge of the
• 7:09
  sprawling ruins that were the capital of Skonos, there rose
• 7:12
  the power contracts. On the remote edges of the
• 7:15
  Galaxy was a planet called Pelodon.
• 7:17
  It was a beautiful day, thought the Lady Adrasta.
• 7:22
  The hot January sun beat out of the cloudless blue sky and a
• 7:25
  warm NE wind blew the Coral Sea into a roaring froth over the
• 7:28
  Great Barrier Reef. A foggy winter's night in a
• 7:34
  London backstreet. The little Rd. was empty and
• 7:36
  silent. Looming above the village was
• 7:38
  the Dark Tower. It was a mess of a planet too
• 7:42
  big and too far out from its sun.
• 7:44
  The Doctor had escaped. The deck chair attendant
• 7:48
  shivered in the cold wind off the sea and cursed for the
• 7:50
  thousandth time yet another chilly English June.
• 7:53
  It was a warm summer evening, right?
• 7:58
  Twisting, burning metal screamed at a pitch which challenged the
• 8:01
  death yells of the passengers and crew members throughout the
• 8:03
  massive structure of the starliner.
• 8:04
  As the great vessel hurtled out of control towards the shifting
• 8:07
  grey mist that enshrouded the surface of the terror planet
• 8:10
  Alzarius, events cast shadows before them.
• 8:15
  But the Huger event, The Huger shadows creep over us unseen in
• 8:19
  a drab and featureless corridor. A drab and featureless man stood
• 8:23
  waiting before a shuttered hatch at 57,000 feet.
• 8:26
  The air over the Atlantic was cold and clear.
• 8:28
  People disappear. He's changing, said Adric.
• 8:32
  The doctors regenerating the ship was like a city.
• 8:35
  The towering cliffside resembled A gigantic human skull, with
• 8:38
  dark openings of caves gaping like empty eye sockets and
• 8:41
  nostrils. Tegan was sure there was
• 8:44
  something to like about Turlo. Which you couldn't think.
• 8:47
  What they met in a hidden chamber deep, deep beneath the
• 8:54
  capital. The being from another dimension
• 8:56
  and the Time Lord who was betrayed not only his people,
• 8:59
  but the universe. Love is blind, Gallifrey.
• 9:03
  It was a place of ancient evil. Tolo hated it all.
• 9:06
  The routine, the discipline, the invented traditions and petty
• 9:09
  snobbery of a minor English public school.
• 9:11
  Diva Loca was a paradise. On a rocky hillside between two
• 9:14
  jagged stones sat dodging the snake dancer check.
• 9:17
  A huge Crescent of brilliant pinpoints of light sliced
• 9:21
  through the unimaginable emptiness of space near the edge
• 9:23
  of a remote spiral Galaxy that was the dominace.
• 9:28
  The base might have been in space.
• 9:31
  The TARDIS has materialised, the Doctor announced
• 9:33
  authoritatively. It was the greatest scientific
• 9:36
  project that England had ever known.
• 9:38
  The tortoise was slowly materializing in the middle of a
• 9:40
  plump of brambles and ferns at aside from Captain Revere, the
• 9:43
  diggers put up their picks and stood as still as shadows on the
• 9:46
  Cliff rock walls. The full fury of the storm hit
• 9:50
  the ship as it rounded the headland.
• 9:53
  Twin planets orbiting each other in space, one large, one
• 9:57
  relatively small. Andrazoni Major and Andrazoni
• 9:59
  Major Minor were two of the five planets that made-up the serious
• 10:03
  system. It's freezing cold outside.
• 10:06
  Susan said, looking at the external temperature thermometer
• 10:09
  in the tardis -20 somewhere horses hooves were drumming the
• 10:14
  ground. The prisoners always knew when
• 10:17
  sentence was to be carried out. Look over here, here under the
• 10:21
  olive trees, that's right, by the pile of broken stones and
• 10:24
  cracked statues of old gods. Who do you see?
• 10:28
  The doctor sat hunched in his rickety chair, biting his nails
• 10:30
  anxiously and staring grimly around him in in the crackling
• 10:33
  air as everything swam sickeningly back into focus in
• 10:37
  the gloomy, cavernous underground hall of Learning.
• 10:39
  The assembled Gons were waiting. Space Station J7 defied all
• 10:43
  sense of what was structurally possible.
• 10:47
  It sounded Sanatori Mcglennver Springs, Colorado was never a
• 10:51
  place you'd visit for your health, but at least the
• 10:53
  management would usually arrange for you to die there in some
• 10:55
  sort of comfort. Which is better, to my way of
• 10:57
  thinking, than meeting your maker in some gun loud back
• 11:00
  alley. Without the benefit of boots,
• 11:06
  I've nothing to put. The tall, thin man with a young,
• 11:10
  old face and the mane of prematurely white hair was
• 11:13
  sleeping uneasily. The house stood on Lydell St.
• 11:16
  The Doctor was puzzled. A purple haze glistened upon the
• 11:18
  conglomeration of pyramids that made-up the planet Karfel's
• 11:22
  principal city. Evil cannot be tasted, seen, or
• 11:27
  touched. The King tore the meat from the
• 11:29
  bone with his teeth and grunted his way through a mouthful of
• 11:31
  food and satisfaction. Long before the estimated time
• 11:34
  of arrival of the TARDIS. The Doctor was looking
• 11:36
  particularly pleased with himself.
• 11:37
  The sky had never looked more menacing.
• 11:39
  Doctrine, you vanished. There were voices in the air.
• 11:42
  The young man in the white jacket was professional, and he
• 11:45
  knew he had very little time left.
• 11:47
  Jungle. It began with a bang.
• 11:54
  The jet airliner screamed down out of the sky. 3 pairs of eyes
• 11:59
  gazed at the scanner screen. Eyes like those of a sad and
• 12:02
  lonely person in a strange town, desperately seeking the smile of
• 12:05
  a friendly face. Now it feels out in the still,
• 12:11
  in infinite blackness of uncharted space, hundreds of
• 12:13
  light years from its planet of origin.
• 12:15
  The spacecraft hung like a family in a gigantic spider's
• 12:18
  web. The twilight forest was hot and
• 12:21
  muggy. Dear Sir, I am in reluctant
• 12:24
  receipt of your insufferable scroll written.
• 12:26
  I must remark I'm papyrus of so inferior quality that I can only
• 12:29
  suppose it to have been selected especially to suit the style of
• 12:32
  your grammatical construction and the insolence of your tone.
• 12:37
  Far above the earth, in the infinite blackness of space, 2
• 12:40
  metal capsules were converging. The Doctor sat in the garden
• 12:43
  which always reminded him of the Garden of Peace, where Stephen?
• 12:45
  No, not Stephen, his granddaughter Susan and that
• 12:47
  nice young couple Barbara and Ian had their adventure with the
• 12:49
  Aztecs a on to go. The Doctor had complete and
• 12:54
  utter faith in the TARDIS, accepting it as almost an
• 12:56
  extension of his own nervous system.
• 13:00
  The huge curved navigation console hummed and its multi
• 13:03
  coloured displays flashed their tireless sequences of vectors
• 13:06
  and coordinates endlessly mottling with garish lights the
• 13:08
  failed faces which hung disembodied in the semi darkness
• 13:12
  of the smooth metal. At the apex of the cosmic
• 13:16
  evolutionary scale is the ultimate refinement of creation,
• 13:20
  a society comprised of Time Lords, beings whose intellectual
• 13:23
  powers and agility surpasses that of every other preacher in
• 13:26
  the universe. The young man in the astronauts
• 13:29
  uniform fell to the ground, the jungle floor with a sickening
• 13:32
  thud. It was a graveyard in space
• 13:36
  525350. The random laser beam emitter
• 13:39
  turned ominously on its axis, clicked as if an irritation,
• 13:42
  then spat A searing beam of force at the lean young man
• 13:46
  changed the wall in a corridor deep within the main punishment
• 13:48
  Dome of the former prism planets of Faros.
• 13:52
  It was magic, decided James Robert Mccrimmon.
• 13:56
  Victoria was waving goodbye. The charge must now be genocide.
• 14:01
  It all started, they would say, later, in a forgotten London
• 14:04
  junkyard on a foggy November night in 1963.
• 14:06
  A police box stood up, stood in a London square, up against the
• 14:10
  railings that surrounded the garden in the centre.
• 14:13
  It was Mel who, first of all, wanted to visit Paradise Towers.
• 14:16
  The time traveller known as the Doctor chuckled to himself.
• 14:19
  Right on time, called the Doctor.
• 14:21
  Sergeant Krakauer's words hung mockingly in the frosty air of
• 14:23
  the cryogenics chamber. Outside, the rain rained in.
• 14:30
  The softly lit Oval courtroom was in The softly lit Oval
• 14:33
  courtroom was in recess, empty except for the doctor and a
• 14:36
  guard. The room had a background pulse,
• 14:39
  like an electronic heart. Slowly beating.
• 14:42
  Smoke filled the city as the invading Greeks torched every
• 14:44
  building they could set alight. Sarah Kingdom awoke with a cry,
• 14:48
  sitting upright in bed. The closer one travels towards
• 14:52
  it, from the cold, silent black darkness of infinite space, the
• 14:55
  more the planet Earth appears as a backcloth to some small
• 14:58
  theatrical performance taking place on a limited budget.
• 15:02
  So you weren't the first with a meta textual James Goss.
• 15:08
  It had an atmosphere all of its own.
• 15:11
  It was a beautiful summer's day. The woman wanted to die.
• 15:16
  The beacon A1 hung silently in the blackness of space, it's
• 15:19
  complex shape recalling the technology of distant Earth.
• 15:22
  The old man had a shock of white hair pulled back from the broad
• 15:24
  forehead. Startling eyes glittered in a
• 15:27
  severe high cheekbone face. It was hot.
• 15:31
  The dog days of August. It was an ordinary Sunday in
• 15:34
  Perivale. Every story must have a
• 15:36
  beginning, a middle, and an end. Three sisters bore him to the
• 15:39
  boat. The Antarctic winds howled
• 15:41
  mournfully across the battlefield.
• 15:43
  It was almost beyond belief. Bernie Wilson was a guilty man.
• 15:57
  It was Tuesday and life didn't happen.
• 16:00
  There is a moment, a terrible moment, when you wake up and you
• 16:03
  suddenly realise to your panic that you've missed something.
• 16:07
  Feed connecting. Once Upon a time, 709 episodes
• 16:13
  ago, there was an old man who lived in a police box with his
• 16:15
  friends Ben and Polly. The TARDIS rolled and tumbled
• 16:18
  helplessly in the blackness of space.
• 16:20
  It was Wednesday morning. There are so many reasons why I
• 16:23
  shouldn't be here, writing this as it begins, as it so often
• 16:27
  does, with a boy standing on a hill to my heirs.
• 16:31
  I'm all too conscious as I assemble this rambling narrative
• 16:34
  that it may prove altogether too fantastical for the reader to
• 16:37
  believe. They were already calling for
• 16:40
  Mr. Fibuli. The Doctor was lonely.
• 16:43
  They had slept for thousands of years, deep under the ground,
• 16:46
  unaware that they were even still alive.
• 16:49
  It's all about the sun. It was a choice made by someone
• 16:53
  else. They waited.
• 17:01
  It was a sliver of light that woke her, the brilliant white
• 17:04
  crack in her bedroom curtains that gradually teased her eyes.
• 17:08
  Her eyes open, D50 exited the lift on the top floor of OOD
• 17:13
  Operations and made his way along the corridor towards the
• 17:16
  centre of his world. Master Bartlett's Executive
• 17:19
  Sales office. Stu Ferguson pulled the collar
• 17:22
  of his coat up round his neck and shivered as he walked
• 17:24
  through the night on his way to his overnight cleaning job at
• 17:26
  the Steel Works. Isaac's head was buzzing with
• 17:29
  ideas. This is the end.
• 17:33
  Once Upon a time, late on Christmas Eve, a stranger came
• 17:36
  to the church on Ruby Rd. Here is a story.
• 17:41
  It was another brisk autumnal morning on the West Coast of
• 17:44
  Wales. Gurgle in some corners of the
• 17:47
  universe was considered a drink for unimaginative beings.
• 17:51
  The end began on a sunny day in a park in Pennsylvania.
• 17:56
  Do you believe in destiny? Do you believe in fate?
• 18:00
  Saturdays at Lizzie's Place was a ritual.
• 18:04
  The presents had been alone for 400,000 years, haunting the
• 18:08
  caverns and rock fissures beneath the blasted service
• 18:11
  surface of its ruined world. The end for now.
• 18:38
  So I've got Simon Gerrier next with the unseen Terence Dix.
• 18:52
  That will give you your next slide like that.
• 18:55
  Down, one down. OK, great.
• 18:57
  Also. If you want to be fancy.
• 19:00
  You can do that. OK, well.
• 19:03
  Thank you for coming to our conference.
• 19:06
  Sales brochures will be available later.
• 19:12
  Hello everybody, I'm a bit nervous about this.
• 19:14
  This is a bit of a window into my head for the last few months.
• 19:20
  If you have seen the documentary Terence and Me, Frank Skinner
• 19:25
  ends that documentary by going up to Terence Sticks office and
• 19:29
  the top floor of his house in Hampstead and it is a cave of
• 19:32
  videos and books and paperwork and stuff.
• 19:37
  When I was there earlier this month, earlier this year in
• 19:40
  April, the family had been going through that stuff and boxing it
• 19:45
  up and putting it in order and things in one room.
• 19:49
  They removed so many books that they found a sofa that they
• 19:53
  didn't know was there. A lot of paperwork and things
• 19:59
  are arranged but there's about 33 boxes of papers and books and
• 20:03
  things they've they've been working their way through.
• 20:07
  Some of them are are his books. So those that I couldn't breathe
• 20:11
  when I opened books and it was just full of hardback Doctor Who
• 20:13
  books, paperback Doctor Who books.
• 20:16
  There are translations of his Doctor Who books.
• 20:18
  There are his other non Doctor Who books.
• 20:20
  He wrote more than 100 of them. He the translations, the Baker
• 20:25
  St. Irregulars in Japanese was a bit
• 20:27
  of a surprise. And that's all very interesting,
• 20:32
  but I kind of knew he'd written a lot of books.
• 20:35
  What I was interested in was the paperwork, and what the
• 20:38
  paperwork might tell us that we didn't already know.
• 20:43
  And an awful lot of the paperwork is typescripts of his
• 20:48
  books of one sort or another. This is his first novel.
• 20:52
  It's a TypeScript of the Author and Invasion From published in
• 20:56
  January 1974. I was hoping that the manuscript
• 21:01
  might be dated so we would know how far in advance he wrote it.
• 21:05
  And then you could work out what else he was going on.
• 21:08
  Because the paperwork for the TV show, as I'm sure you all know,
• 21:11
  is very well documented. So we could work out what you
• 21:14
  know what between which episodes was he writing which book.
• 21:17
  Unfortunately, the typescripts are not dated.
• 21:22
  They are basically you can see one small correction he's made
• 21:26
  by in by hand, but basically they are what was published.
• 21:29
  He was not edited a great deal. Steve Cole says in his Doctor
• 21:34
  Magazine piece from a couple of months ago that Terrence
• 21:36
  actually complained to him that he wasn't edited very much in
• 21:40
  the sixth books that he wrote. That is also a reason why he got
• 21:44
  so much work, because he would hand it in and it was fine and
• 21:47
  it could go to print. Other authors not the same.
• 21:50
  Malcolm Hulk. This is a slightly more
• 21:58
  interesting one. This is his second novel.
• 21:59
  This is Day of the Daleks. You can see that he's corrected
• 22:04
  it a bit more so you can begin to see a bit of his working
• 22:07
  process. It's not a great deal that can
• 22:10
  tell you. Again, it's not dated.
• 22:12
  I think the most interesting thing for me is that Terence
• 22:15
  didn't type this because I've been able to check it against
• 22:17
  other things he typed. There's no space after a full
• 22:21
  stop, and it's not Terence's typewriter.
• 22:25
  Terence's widow, Elsa, told me that she had typed some of the
• 22:29
  early manuscripts, so this might be her.
• 22:31
  But he also used a typing pool, an office in Hampstead that
• 22:35
  would would type up neat versions of his books for for
• 22:39
  delivery. What Terence was doing, sort of
• 22:42
  three or four books in, was to hammer out on his own typewriter
• 22:48
  a rough version of the book, and he'd go back over it and you can
• 22:53
  see him rewriting bits as he's going.
• 22:56
  This, excitingly enough, is him working out his best opening
• 23:01
  line. You can see it's not quite the
• 23:03
  version of the Dalek Invasion of Earth that was published.
• 23:08
  Once he'd done this, he would tend to go through it with in
• 23:11
  pen and correct that. That would then go to a number
• 23:16
  of different typing offices that he used around Hampstead.
• 23:19
  He would then get a neat version of the manuscript and he would
• 23:23
  deliver it in person to the offices in in Hammersmith at
• 23:27
  Target. And basically he delivered them
• 23:30
  on in person because then they would go for a boozy lunch.
• 23:34
  I found a letter from Terence to Justin Richards complaining that
• 23:40
  when Steve Cole left Doctor Who books and Justin took over, the
• 23:44
  boozy lunches stopped. And Terry suggested this might
• 23:49
  be a good idea to to rekindle so that that that those manuscripts
• 23:54
  are interesting, but they don't tell us a great deal.
• 23:57
  What I found as well was Diaries and Terence, in a very Terence
• 24:04
  way, would start a diary, use it for about a week or two, then
• 24:09
  stop, then get another diary for the same year, fill in a bit of
• 24:15
  that and stop. And so it's all a bit piece
• 24:18
  meal. But this is from the week of the
• 24:20
  28th of April 1974 and you can see a few things in here.
• 24:25
  On Tuesday he is meeting Mike Glover, the editor at Target
• 24:30
  Books on a Wednesday. He's in studio.
• 24:34
  Now this week is quite interesting because it's the
• 24:38
  week that they were off on location shooting Robot written
• 24:41
  by Terence, but his diary shows he wasn't there so he didn't go
• 24:45
  to the filming. So what was he there on the
• 24:47
  Wednesday doing in studio? Well, at the same time, it was
• 24:50
  the last day on Planet the Spiders.
• 24:53
  And that explains what the thing at the bottom is. 8:00 PM Barry
• 24:57
  Party. Basically Terence is turning up
• 24:59
  at 8:00 PM at TV Centre on that Wednesday because it's the last
• 25:03
  day of Barry Letts being producer on Doctor Who and they
• 25:06
  go for a few drinks afterwards. He then on the Thursday what
• 25:11
  we've got is the 6th floor viewing room, a screening which
• 25:14
  is probably they're watching Planet of the Spiders and he's
• 25:17
  making notes. And then on the Friday he's got
• 25:20
  a script editor meeting with Robert Holmes, his successor.
• 25:22
  So you can begin to see the way these things work.
• 25:26
  But also, just to completely confuse me, he had another diary
• 25:31
  for 1974 and the same week shows something else.
• 25:36
  This is a tiny little. This is a tiny little diary in
• 25:40
  and Terence was left-handed in his, his handwriting was was
• 25:43
  dreadful as he said himself. But this shows that in between
• 25:48
  these meetings, he's also working on a on a book.
• 25:52
  And you can see he does 3 pages on the first day, three pages on
• 25:56
  the next page. And what he's counting is the
• 25:58
  full scap, slightly longer than a four typed pages that he's
• 26:01
  working out that we saw before. And he knew by this point that a
• 26:07
  four part story of Doctor Who would translate to 100 pages of
• 26:13
  full SCAP, which would work out at about 128 pages of a target
• 26:16
  book. And what's great about that is
• 26:18
  there are that you can see earlier he was counting every
• 26:21
  line and how many words there were on each line to work out
• 26:24
  his word count. Once he got into the system of
• 26:26
  four parts is 100 pages. He didn't need to do that.
• 26:29
  He could just see it. He knew he'd written 3 pages, so
• 26:33
  he had 22 pages to write of that episode left.
• 26:35
  So it just made everything much easier.
• 26:41
  This is how he carried on the the diary.
• 26:44
  So you can see that as he goes on with the writing over the
• 26:48
  next 10 days, he's accelerating. It's 3 pages to begin with.
• 26:51
  It's 20 pages a day towards the end.
• 26:54
  Now you may be able to see from his handwriting what it is he's
• 26:57
  writing. Does anyone want to shout it
• 26:59
  out? It is Terror of the Autos and
• 27:03
  you can see he's given up filling in his diary of writing
• 27:06
  this by the time he gets to chapter 10.
• 27:09
  The last two chapters I had written listed what the chapters
• 27:15
  were, but the last he's up to chapter 10 on the Wednesday.
• 27:19
  He's got two more chapters to write.
• 27:20
  He's probably written them by the Friday at the rate he's
• 27:23
  going. So having written it out then
• 27:26
  gone through it by hand, he will have handed it in to Hammersmith
• 27:30
  and gone for a boozy lunch. And then his original diary says
• 27:33
  he went on holiday on the 30th of May.
• 27:35
  So we know that he had written Terror of the Autons in about a
• 27:38
  two week period and delivered it and off it went by the end of
• 27:43
  May 1974, which is odd because the book comes out a year later,
• 27:49
  which is quite a long lead time for a book.
• 27:52
  So I wondered why that was. So I had a look again at the
• 27:55
  first diary, the one that says that he's in TV Centre.
• 27:58
  And this says that at the end of June, so he comes back from his
• 28:01
  holiday where he's about out mucking about on his boat.
• 28:04
  He maybe has lunch with Terry Nation about what we don't know.
• 28:09
  And then on the 20th of June, he goes to see Mike Glover at
• 28:13
  Target again. And he says take Who list.
• 28:17
  So what he's gone to have a meeting about is the run of
• 28:20
  Doctor Who books, because they're not commissioning Doctor
• 28:23
  Who books one at a time or pairs at a time.
• 28:26
  Mike Glover is commissioning 18 Doctor Who books at a time.
• 28:30
  They want them to run one a month from this point.
• 28:34
  And Terence is advising as a sort of unpaid editor on the
• 28:39
  books or consultants, what those books should be.
• 28:42
  And something happens at this stage, which is that they decide
• 28:47
  to do The Giant Robot. Now, it's possible that Terence
• 28:52
  wrote the novelization of The Giant Robot first before Terence
• 28:56
  Autons, but that would have meant, because of what we've
• 28:57
  seen already, that he had written The Giant Robot while or
• 29:01
  before the Giant Robot, the robot story was in production.
• 29:04
  And I don't think that's likely. So I think what this means is
• 29:08
  that he wrote and delivered Terror of the Autons and they
• 29:10
  decided that robots should come out first and introduce the new
• 29:13
  Doctor. So Terror of the Autons got
• 29:14
  bumped and Robot came out first. QBD.
• 29:18
  I think I said this to James Goss and he said I don't care
• 29:28
  what I'm interested in. Is gossip.
• 29:31
  So if you've seen Looking for Mack, the documentary on the
• 29:36
  Season 7 set, Toby Hader goes to Terrence's house, meets at
• 29:40
  Terrence's widow Elsa, and she hands him a letter written to
• 29:44
  Terrence by Mack Hulk that is a kind of a letter about how to
• 29:50
  behave, how to comport himself, make sure his hands are clean,
• 29:54
  make sure he's polite, but he doesn't slag people off.
• 29:58
  I was hoping there'd be loads of this stuff, that there'd be
• 30:01
  loads of correspondents. Alas, there isn't.
• 30:03
  Terence had periodic clear outs and and and you can see him
• 30:08
  listing in his things to do tidy office on a periodic basis.
• 30:11
  His filing cabinets still had the cardboard sheets for the
• 30:16
  folders with his handwritten labels, a bulging folder,
• 30:20
  handwritten. David Whitaker had nothing in it
• 30:23
  and I haven't slept since, but he did write.
• 30:29
  He did keep another letter from Mack from 1973, covering a lot
• 30:33
  of the same ground as the letter that's in the documentary.
• 30:36
  Again, how to deport yourself, How to be.
• 30:39
  Now reading that letter, I thought Mack's telling Terrence
• 30:43
  that he's scruffy and disorganised and whatever.
• 30:45
  I would be really upset if I received a letter like that.
• 30:48
  Other correspondence shows that Mack was working on a book,
• 30:51
  probably called another You that he was still working on right up
• 30:54
  until he died, which was a guide for working class and lower
• 30:59
  middle class people. All the things that nobody tells
• 31:03
  you when you work at the BBC or in the civil service or
• 31:06
  whatever, all the things that that people look down on you
• 31:08
  for. That was the idea.
• 31:10
  And he's comparing notes with Terence as a working class guy
• 31:13
  from the East End on. Have I missed this?
• 31:16
  Have I missed that? What?
• 31:17
  What are the other things that people need to know?
• 31:20
  But there's some gold in this letter, Max says.
• 31:27
  Always speak of people, speak well of people.
• 31:30
  Try to train yourself to Loudoun reflexes, for example, Dee
• 31:34
  Sherwin. Oh yes, a most efficient reason,
• 31:52
  I think you can't watch the episodes of season 7 now without
• 31:56
  thinking, oh, they're, they're like Hitler.
• 32:00
  And there's an amazing, it's on YouTube.
• 32:01
  There's an amazing interview on stage, which is Derek Sherwin
• 32:05
  and Terence Dix, where once you know this, Terence's acidly
• 32:12
  polite responses to everything Derek says.
• 32:14
  It's just amazing, absolutely amazing.
• 32:17
  There are some other bits and pieces.
• 32:23
  This is of course Roger Hancock, the agent for Terry Nation.
• 32:26
  At this point, what is being negotiated are two books Target
• 32:31
  wants to do. The dialects are coming back to
• 32:33
  TV decimally. The dialect is about to go into
• 32:35
  production and Target want to get the novelization out as soon
• 32:38
  as possible after that. They also want to do another
• 32:41
  dialect book, Terry Nation's Dialect Special.
• 32:44
  And Roger Hancock as agent is not negotiating for a higher
• 32:48
  fee, he is negotiating for a higher proportion of the fee.
• 32:53
  So he wants more money for Terry Nation at the expense of
• 32:57
  Terrence. And Terrence is really hurt by
• 32:59
  this. But the relationship between
• 33:03
  Hancock, Terry, Terrence Dicks and Terrence's agent, Harvey
• 33:08
  Anna, is quite complicated. Because just a few months
• 33:10
  before, Roger Hancock had sent Harvey and Terence a page from
• 33:16
  Private Eye which was talking about all those shenanigans
• 33:19
  going on at Wyndham's, the parent company of Target Books.
• 33:22
  And that Nephanta very kindly looked up the archives in
• 33:26
  Private Eye to tell me which issue of the Private Eye this
• 33:28
  is. But what is going on here is
• 33:30
  that Terence is that money is being siphoned off to the to the
• 33:35
  new owners of the company at the expense of its authors.
• 33:37
  And Terrence and Terrence and Terry Nation, effectively
• 33:41
  through their agents, put up a united front to make sure
• 33:44
  they're not getting ripped off. So that sometimes this
• 33:48
  relationship around money does serve Terrence very well.
• 33:51
  And at this point, they are earning a lot of money from
• 33:54
  Target Books. And then there's what he thinks
• 33:57
  of us. Terrence says that when he was
• 34:04
  script editor of Doctor Who, he would go out to second hand book
• 34:10
  shops and find things and he found a book that he loved and
• 34:13
  then he discovered it had a loony fandom.
• 34:14
  And he was just like, this is great because it explains lots
• 34:16
  of Who fandom. But I'm very quickly just going
• 34:19
  to give you a loony obsessive theory.
• 34:22
  Torrance gave a speech in 2012 to down in college where he'd
• 34:27
  been a student Here he is very smart student.
• 34:31
  That student, that picture, his wife said, is a complete lie
• 34:35
  because actually he spent most of his time, that's him at the
• 34:37
  top, punting with his friends, having parties, mucking about.
• 34:42
  He told Toby Haydock in 2013 that what would happen is that
• 34:46
  you had to, you were left alone for the year and then you had to
• 34:48
  pass an exam at the end of the year.
• 34:50
  If you failed, you got kicked out.
• 34:51
  So he just crammed one week a year, basically had a great
• 34:55
  time. And I thought this is is how he
• 35:01
  summed it up. But I thought this reminded me
• 35:07
  of something when I interviewed Terence in 2014 about the
• 35:10
  casting of Roger Delgado as the master.
• 35:13
  Terence said that the name the the, the casting was down to
• 35:18
  Barry Letts, who'd worked with Roger Delgado before, and they
• 35:20
  had this idea that he'd be a Moriarty figure.
• 35:22
  But Terence said it was my idea to come up with a master because
• 35:26
  it would be like the master of a college at Cambridge, which had
• 35:31
  the right overtones of dominance, villain and conceit.
• 35:35
  The thing is, if Terence was not was a bit of a wayward student,
• 35:39
  he would have got into trouble with the master at down in
• 35:43
  college when he was there. So who was that?
• 35:47
  Well, there were two masters when Terence was there.
• 35:50
  This is WKC. Guthrie, a leading authority on
• 35:54
  Greek philosophy at the time, very involved in Downing College
• 35:59
  stuff at the time, very active. Lots of people said he was very
• 36:01
  charming. But he became master in April
• 36:04
  1957, two months before Terence left, so I don't think they had
• 36:08
  a lot to deal with. Guthrie was the successor of a
• 36:11
  guy who died in late 1956. He's this guy.
• 36:15
  And Lionel Whitby, again, very involved in Downing College.
• 36:19
  He was very charming, very organised, very disciplined.
• 36:23
  He was also a hematologist who made his name at the time that
• 36:28
  the blood groups, A&B and whatever was a new thing.
• 36:32
  Blood transfusions was a new science and he saved hundreds of
• 36:36
  thousands of lives as a result of working that out.
• 36:40
  But people were a bit creeped out by it.
• 36:42
  One of Lionel Whitby's most famous patients, somebody that
• 36:45
  Terence was a fan of, was a guy called Winston Churchill.
• 36:48
  You may have heard of him. Churchill referred to his doctor
• 36:52
  as the vampire. So this charming but sinister
• 36:59
  authoritarian guy who told the wayward Terence Dicks, you've
• 37:03
  got to behave and do your exams, who's known as the vampire?
• 37:07
  Is he where where Terence's head was when he was thinking of
• 37:11
  coming up with the name of the master?
• 37:13
  Now I know what Terence would say, because when I did that
• 37:16
  interview in 2014, Missy had just been introduced in Doctor
• 37:20
  Who and had been a bit flirty with Peter Capaldi's doctor.
• 37:23
  And I said to Terence, do you not see that as true to the kind
• 37:27
  of traditions of things? Is there not something a bit
• 37:29
  flirtatious between John Pertwee and Roger Delgado when they're
• 37:33
  having the sword fight in the Sea Devils?
• 37:36
  And Terence said, And so I hope to do him proud with this coming
• 37:49
  soon. Thank you very much.
• 38:16
  All of bras. Hi everyone, my name is Jenny T
• 38:22
  Colgan. We put the T in to separate it
• 38:25
  from my other publishing and in a quick moment of levity I said
• 38:30
  it stood for TARDIS, which has now led to 9 years.
• 38:34
  I've been asked if I am bigger on the inside.
• 38:37
  I regret it and I am adapting A Time of the Angels and Flesh and
• 38:42
  Stone. This has proved the most
• 38:45
  incredibly difficult job because there is quite a lot going on in
• 38:51
  the Trio, River, the Doctor and Amy, which perhaps was not
• 38:56
  apparent the first time out. It is very difficult to rewrite
• 39:00
  that jaunty opening in the sure and certain knowledge that this
• 39:04
  is the last time River will ever see her mother.
• 39:08
  I'm doing quite a lot of reverse engineering.
• 39:12
  We also have here, of course, much nastier, more aggressive
• 39:15
  versions of the Angels. I think people realise pretty
• 39:19
  fast that if all they did was fling you back in time, we would
• 39:24
  all request to go back to 1994, buy a property in London, visit
• 39:33
  our dead relatives and continue to live, work and roam freely in
• 39:38
  the European Union. Also, it took me, and in fact if
• 39:49
  anyone can help, please see me after it took me an
• 39:51
  embarrassingly long time to work out what the actual original
• 39:55
  plan is to get River on that shit.
• 39:58
  I have added an explanatory Father Octavian prologue about
• 40:03
  his early days in the military novitiate.
• 40:06
  Trying not to think too much about the cat nuns.
• 40:12
  I'm going to do a very short reading.
• 40:14
  I need some help, which is that I am not a performer and I can't
• 40:20
  do the warp noise very well. But we have one.
• 40:26
  So when you see me clearly indicating, could you do your
• 40:30
  best for thank you. Right, We are going to pick up
• 40:38
  at River, arriving in the TARDIS.
• 40:41
  Here we go. River hurtled across the stars,
• 40:46
  tumbling in her cocktail dress, hair wild.
• 40:49
  His hand caught hers, and they crashed through the doors
• 40:53
  together, collapsing onto the floor of the TARDIS in a heap,
• 40:57
  River gasping for breath, clinging to consciousness.
• 41:01
  Amy stared, absolutely astounded.
• 41:05
  Dr. But the Doctor wasn't listening to her.
• 41:09
  He was staring at the new arrival in utter consternation.
• 41:15
  River. River was already scrambling
• 41:18
  upright, turning to the still open doors.
• 41:21
  The great Byzantium was drifting away, damaged and trailing
• 41:25
  smoke. She pointed urgently.
• 41:27
  Follow that ship. Then She kicked off her shoes.
• 41:31
  Better for flying, she'd always found, and they'd already served
• 41:35
  their purpose. She'd never needed heels to
• 41:38
  distract the Doctor. She'd never needed anything at
• 41:41
  all. They've gone into work, right?
• 41:44
  We're losing them. Stay close.
• 41:46
  I'm trying, said the Doctor. He had the slightly silky tone
• 41:50
  he got when something was happening that he hadn't already
• 41:54
  anticipated in a million different ways.
• 41:56
  You didn't get to see that look very often.
• 41:59
  River liked it. Use the stabilisers.
• 42:03
  There aren't any stabilisers. The blue switches, Said River
• 42:07
  exasperated. The blue ones don't do anything.
• 42:10
  They're just blue. Yes, the blue.
• 42:13
  They're the blue stabilizers. She flicked the switch and the
• 42:17
  TARDIS immediately quieted and started flying smoothly.
• 42:21
  You might have expected the Doctor would have been pleased,
• 42:24
  but you would have been incorrect.
• 42:26
  Yes, well, it's just boring now, isn't it?
• 42:28
  They're boringers. They're blue boringers.
• 42:32
  Dr. How come she can fly the TARDIS?
• 42:34
  Asked Amy, regarding the glamorous newcomer with some
• 42:37
  awe, which didn't necessarily add to the Doctor's mood.
• 42:43
  River, on the other hand, could hardly glance at Amy once she
• 42:47
  had taken in the terrifying, incredible fact of her.
• 42:51
  She couldn't. She had to focus.
• 42:53
  This job was everything. You call that flying the TARDIS
• 42:58
  hat? Said the Doctor, very fussily.
• 43:02
  He sat down on one of the jump seats to have a good sulk.
• 43:06
  River filed away the realisation that she was once again dealing
• 43:11
  with a very young regeneration. OK, I've mapped the probability
• 43:15
  vectors, done a fold back on the temporal isometry, charted the
• 43:18
  ship to its destination and parked us right alongside.
• 43:22
  Parked us. We haven't landed, Said the
• 43:23
  Doctor, leaping up. Of course we've landed.
• 43:26
  I've just landed her. But it didn't make the noise.
• 43:32
  What noise 123 Excellent, thank. You.
• 43:46
  Thank you. It's not supposed to make that
• 43:51
  noise. You've left the brakes on.
• 43:55
  Yes. Well, it's a brilliant noise.
• 43:57
  I love that noise. I quite love that.
• 44:07
  Come along Pond, let's have a look.
• 44:09
  No, wait, said River. Environment checks.
• 44:12
  Oh yes, sorry, you're quite right.
• 44:13
  Environment checks. He stuck his head outside the
• 44:16
  door. Nice out, he said, with a that's
• 44:19
  you told expression. River was still staring at the
• 44:23
  screens. We're somewhere in the Garn
• 44:25
  belt. There's an atmosphere.
• 44:27
  Early indications suggest the Doctor interrupted on happier
• 44:31
  ground when Alfalfa Metraxis, the 7th planet of the Dundra
• 44:35
  system. Oxygen rich atmosphere, toxins
• 44:37
  in the soft band. 11 hour day and he stuck his head out again.
• 44:42
  Chance of rain. Later, River addressed Amy for
• 44:46
  the first time, looking for something, anything to say that
• 44:51
  would not make the situation weirder than it already was.
• 44:54
  How unbelievably young she was, how beautiful, how much she had
• 45:00
  to come. Good, bad, terrible, beyond
• 45:04
  imagining. He thinks he's so hot when he
• 45:08
  does that. She settled on lamely.
• 45:13
  How come you can fly the TARDIS? Asked Amy, fascinated by the
• 45:17
  first person she'd ever met who spoke to the Doctor like that.
• 45:20
  Fascinated by her in general, for reasons she could not have
• 45:23
  explained. Oh, I had lessons from the very
• 45:26
  best. Well, yeah, said the doctor,
• 45:29
  trying to sound modest and failing as usual.
• 45:31
  It's a shame you were busy that day, continued River, picking up
• 45:35
  her beautiful shoes and heading for the door.
• 45:38
  Right then why did they land here?
• 45:41
  Oh, they didn't land, said the doctor smugly.
• 45:44
  Sorry, you should have checked the home box.
• 45:46
  It crashed. The Doctor followed River to the
• 45:51
  door as she left the TARDIS, as if he too were leaving.
• 45:54
  As soon as she was safely outside, he slammed the door
• 45:57
  behind her and headed back to the console.
• 45:59
  Amy was having absolutely none of it.
• 46:02
  Explain. Who is that and how did she do
• 46:06
  the museum thing? The Doctor bent his head to the
• 46:09
  controls. It's a long story and I don't
• 46:13
  know most of it. Thank you.
• 46:21
  So romance has two definitions in fiction.
• 46:25
  First, there's the Regency and Victorian romance novel, which
• 46:29
  focus on adventure and love, and secondly, the modern romance,
• 46:33
  which focuses primarily on love, your lovely Barbara Cartlands
• 46:37
  that we saw earlier. Both tend to end happily, but
• 46:41
  there's also the unhappy ending, the unrequited love or death in
• 46:46
  John Peel's Evil of the Daleks, A novelisation that leans
• 46:50
  heavily into the gothic romance trope.
• 46:53
  The Doctor even calls this out. Don't be so melodramatic, The
• 46:57
  Doctor replied to Jamie curtly. You don't even know the young
• 47:00
  lady. You've been reading too much
• 47:03
  Walter Scott. Unresolved Sexual tension or
• 47:08
  unresolved romantic Tension is a phrase currently thought to be
• 47:11
  coined in about 1984 in early X-Files fandom.
• 47:16
  But as a narrative tension, as a device for engaging people with
• 47:19
  story, it's been around forever. In Pride and Prejudice in 1813,
• 47:25
  William Darcy loves Elizabeth Bennett against his will and his
• 47:29
  reason, which he tells her, and the Merry war betwixt Benedict,
• 47:34
  Beatrice And Much Ado About Nothing, which is around 1599,
• 47:38
  is Shakespeare using the device. It rests on the audience seeing
• 47:43
  something in the relationship which the characters themselves
• 47:46
  don't, resulting in shipping them again.
• 47:49
  A term that emerged in fandoms to define an existing audience
• 47:53
  response to a storytelling device.
• 47:57
  Henry Jenkins in 1992's Textual Poachers.
• 48:00
  I may be the only person that's going to quote that today raises
• 48:04
  the idea of a resistant reader, someone who steals fleeting
• 48:08
  pleasure from the territory of the producer.
• 48:12
  In 1980s fandom, any romantic or sexual reading of Doctor Who
• 48:17
  went against the very explicit statement of J&T that there is
• 48:21
  no hanky panky in the TARDIS. So in the 1980s and 1990s,
• 48:27
  reading the target novelisations in search of codified illicit
• 48:31
  romance is both radical and not an entirely surprising response.
• 48:38
  The romantic reader is looking to create a consistent, ongoing
• 48:42
  narrative in a series which didn't appear to have them.
• 48:46
  It takes a latent idea that companions will bond through
• 48:50
  their experience with the Doctor and adds a romantic frisson that
• 48:54
  means the reader is invested in the story.
• 48:58
  I suggest there are three approaches to romance in the
• 49:01
  classic novelisations. There's the simple romantic
• 49:04
  adventures, typically written in the 1960s.
• 49:08
  There's the aromantic adventures, which are typically
• 49:11
  contemporary novelisations of the 1970s and 80s.
• 49:15
  And then there's my favorite, the retroactively romantic
• 49:18
  adventures, which were written in the 1980s and 1990s, but
• 49:22
  about earlier stories. So let's look at the romantic
• 49:30
  adventures. I think we know where we're
• 49:32
  going. There's a subset of Targets that
• 49:37
  read as a traditional romantic novel, a story of adventure and
• 49:41
  love. This is most apparent in
• 49:43
  Whitaker's novelisations that make the implicit on screen
• 49:47
  story in Barbara explicit. The first novelisation goes as
• 49:52
  far as to suggest a happy ending.
• 49:56
  I got up and walked over to Barbara and took her hand
• 49:59
  lightly. I felt her fingers pressing into
• 50:02
  mine, asking for comfort, affection.
• 50:06
  I still didn't dare hope. It might be love.
• 50:09
  Only time could tell. It's even stronger in The
• 50:14
  Crusaders, which I will come back to.
• 50:17
  And Bill Strutton, who had worked on adapting to Walter
• 50:20
  Scott's Ivan Hope, a big romantic novel for ITV, wasn't
• 50:25
  immune to this. His novelisation for the Zabi in
• 50:28
  1985 opens with a scene suggesting the romantic tension
• 50:32
  between Ian and Barbara has been spotted.
• 50:35
  Barbara absently pushed the bracelet up her arm.
• 50:39
  It caught Vicky's eye. How lovely.
• 50:43
  I haven't seen you wear it before.
• 50:45
  The bracelet. I haven't had it all that.
• 50:49
  Was it a present? Vicky asked.
• 50:51
  She turned the bracelet on Barbara's arm to look at the
• 50:53
  pattern. Yes, Said Barbara from Ian.
• 50:58
  Vicky asked, faintly Sly. These first novelisations are as
• 51:04
  much romantic adventures as science fiction.
• 51:08
  In the case of Crusaders, I think it's even more so.
• 51:12
  So this is Whittaker starting the Crusades as he means to go
• 51:15
  on. Where her face and form had
• 51:19
  conjured up beauty in the eye of any beholder, now beauty
• 51:23
  radiated from within her and trebled her physical
• 51:26
  attractions, making her the admiration and desire of all who
• 51:30
  met her. But always her eyes turned to
• 51:33
  Ian and their hands were ready to hold out, to reach out and
• 51:37
  touch for whatever world of the future enmeshed them.
• 51:40
  They knew their destinies were bound up in each other, the one
• 51:43
  sure thing fixed and unalterable in the ever changing life with
• 51:47
  the Doctor. So I've, I've missed a slide.
• 51:52
  I've got carried away. There we are.
• 51:56
  There aren't any good pictures from that so far.
• 51:58
  The Crusade. So we've jumped to the end.
• 52:02
  So these first novelisations are rebranded as targets as we go
• 52:06
  into the 1970s reprinted. We've probably all got a copy
• 52:10
  well thumbed probably. And the 1970s is where we meet
• 52:14
  our second type of romantic novelisation.
• 52:17
  But it's not romantic. I've coined them the aromantic
• 52:20
  adventures. These are less overtly romantic
• 52:24
  in any sentence, and they're also more resistant to that
• 52:27
  counter reading than they're harder to subvert.
• 52:32
  These novelisations of very recent stories written and
• 52:35
  published very close to transmission.
• 52:38
  For example, there are 15 novelisations featuring Jo Grant
• 52:43
  and only a few intermittent suggestions of any romantic
• 52:46
  relationships. It's mentioned she's been on a
• 52:49
  few dates with Mike Yates in The Green Death, written by Malcolm
• 52:52
  Hulk in 1975. That's the only type of UNIT
• 52:55
  dating I'm willing to talk about.
• 52:59
  She does consider Bill Feiley attractive in an ugly way in
• 53:03
  Claws of Accents, written by Terrence Dicks.
• 53:07
  So Malcolm Hughes Gates name 1975 Green Death is only one of
• 53:12
  the 15 to come close to suggesting regulars might have
• 53:16
  romantic feelings as Joe transfers her affections from
• 53:20
  the doctor to Cliff Jones. He knows I've fallen in love,
• 53:25
  Joe thought to herself. She felt rather sorry for the
• 53:28
  Doctor and wondered why he had never married.
• 53:32
  Were there, she wondered, Lady, Time, Ladies, Time, Time Lords?
• 53:38
  Did Time Lords get married and have babies?
• 53:42
  How old was the Doctor? So two of those questions have
• 53:47
  since been answered. Maybe, but this novelisation
• 53:51
  isn't adding anything to what was on screen or creating room
• 53:54
  for resistant counter reading. Doesn't You don't pick it up and
• 53:58
  say I can read this in a different way than was intended.
• 54:05
  And this carries on through into the 1980 books.
• 54:15
  Often the 1980s books describe Africans as children, which
• 54:19
  makes the whole idea of reading of a manse with either or both
• 54:22
  of them unacceptable when you watch it on screen.
• 54:25
  Whole different affair. But in the books, all above
• 54:29
  board. And instead you're shipping an
• 54:31
  adult like Tegan with the doctor because that's easier and and
• 54:36
  less quickie. Such as this brief line in The
• 54:39
  Awakening by Eric Pringle in 1985.
• 54:42
  That's the story really, heavy with kind of unspoken sexual
• 54:46
  violence. The Doctor marched straight to
• 54:50
  Tegan's side, his eyes dilated a little at the sight of the dress
• 54:53
  she was wearing. With the new novelisation every
• 54:58
  month or even more, these 70s and 80s fast turn around books
• 55:03
  are peak churn. They lack the over excitable
• 55:06
  melodrama of Whitaker's novelisations and the thoughtful
• 55:10
  expansion of what comes later when we start to get to the
• 55:14
  retroactively romantic adventures.
• 55:18
  These are the completionist novelisations, the ones written
• 55:21
  to plug the gaps and create a single run of every story, which
• 55:26
  takes up a lot of space on my bookshelves.
• 55:29
  These novelisations seem much happier to play with over
• 55:33
  romance tropes in both senses of the word.
• 55:36
  For example, Ian Martyrs novelisation of Reign of Terror
• 55:39
  in 1987 is practically signposting Georgette Heyer's
• 55:43
  Regency romances as a source. Leon looked at Barbara and for a
• 55:49
  moment she thought he was about to seize her and kiss her
• 55:52
  passionately, for the moment passed.
• 55:56
  Colbert paused in the doorway again.
• 55:58
  He seemed on the brink of rushing across to embrace her,
• 56:01
  like a young blood out of an adventure story.
• 56:05
  You like that, Leon, don't you? Susan murmured, a hint of
• 56:09
  mischief in her voice. And these retroactive
• 56:13
  novelisations reveal a pattern. As part of preparing this, I
• 56:18
  reread various sets of novelisations.
• 56:22
  So you read all the run of E and the Barbra.
• 56:24
  You read all of the Joe Grant or However, and I identified one
• 56:30
  other element which which strengthens the subtextual
• 56:32
  reading of some couples and is why I'm not covering Ben Polley.
• 56:39
  Often the densest stories for romantic subtexts or subplots is
• 56:44
  a companion's final story. This parting story casts a more
• 56:48
  romantic light on all the preceding ones.
• 56:52
  So, as an example, there are only 7 Jamie and Victorian
• 56:55
  novelisations, and of those, only three carry any text that
• 57:00
  could suggest a romance. Yet the final scenes in Victor
• 57:03
  Pemberton's 1986 Fear from the Deep create such a strong sense
• 57:08
  of unresolved romantic tension that it colours the rest of the
• 57:11
  run. Jamie lowered his eyes and made
• 57:15
  aimless patterns with his foot in the frost.
• 57:18
  I'm not doing the Scottish acts. You'll be happy here.
• 57:22
  They talk about her decision to stay and Jamie starts to leave.
• 57:25
  Jamie. Victoria quickly stopped him.
• 57:28
  You wouldn't go without, well, saying goodbye, would you?
• 57:34
  Oh, no, of course not. Victoria sighed with relief.
• 57:37
  Good, Vic. Jamie turned back, as though
• 57:42
  there was something he just had to say to her.
• 57:45
  Yes. I, I, he stammered.
• 57:48
  Yes, Jamie. Jamie's courage failed.
• 57:53
  Oh, nothing. See you later.
• 57:59
  John Peel's Gothic Evil of the Daleks was written after this in
• 58:02
  1993. It introduces Victoria and it
• 58:06
  suggests Jamie's instantly smitten by her from seeing just
• 58:09
  a portrait of her mother. Whole weird.
• 58:14
  I I genuinely I really enjoyed rereading it these whole Blimey.
• 58:23
  So these two bookends, a series of stories and you you pick up
• 58:28
  tiny fragments from the rest. And this is the normal fanish
• 58:32
  desire for pattern and meaning. We tie things together and
• 58:37
  sometimes it only exists in retrospect.
• 58:40
  I've spent decades reading Harry and Sullivan Harry and Sarah
• 58:43
  novelisations as a tragic tale of unrequited love.
• 58:47
  There are only 7 novelisations, including Harry and Sarah +2
• 58:51
  companion stories. So the reason I read this was
• 58:55
  this from Harry Sullivan's war? Harry took her hand, but this
• 59:01
  time more gently. Believe me old girl, it could be
• 59:04
  vital. He murmured.
• 59:05
  Just ask Missus Willigoski in the flat next door to give you
• 59:08
  my spare key. Sarah looked doubtful.
• 59:11
  But will she give it to a complete stranger?
• 59:14
  Harry smiled tenderly at her. Oh yes, she's heard an awful lot
• 59:18
  about you, I used to tell her. He blushed and fell silent.
• 59:23
  Sarah. Sarah was touched at this shy
• 59:25
  confession. She needed no further
• 59:27
  persuasion. She kissed Harry goodbye and
• 59:29
  hurried away. And straight away.
• 59:33
  You've got a world where Harry has been in love with her the
• 59:36
  whole time. Sarah never even thinks about
• 59:39
  Harry Sullivan once in canine and company.
• 59:46
  Can I do the last reading? So in conclusion, I'd argue that
• 59:54
  despite 1 producer's injunction against it, there was always
• 59:57
  romance in the targets and I am going to do the last thing.
• 1:00:02
  So this is from David Whitaker's 1965 crusades.
• 1:00:07
  Barbara looked across at Ian, stretched out her hands and held
• 1:00:10
  his. A dozen unsaid words hung
• 1:00:12
  between them. In the understanding of that
• 1:00:14
  moment, modern people though they were, they'd stepped into a
• 1:00:18
  world of chivalry and barbarism. And Ian had not failed her.
• 1:00:22
  She had needed him and he had come for her.
• 1:00:25
  She knew whatever the age, whatever the place, whatever the
• 1:00:29
  circumstances, he would measure up to her every expectation.
• 1:00:34
  She leant across from her horse, put her arm around his neck and
• 1:00:38
  kissed him softly on the lips. Thank.
• 1:00:44
  You.