Doctor Who: The Three Doctors

by Dicks, Terrance

  Hollis picked up his shot-gun, checked it was empty, tucked it under his arm and set off for his cottage. As he drew near, he saw his wife standing at the garden gate waiting for him, and he quickened his step.

  As soon as he was in earshot, Mrs Hollis began scolding him affectionately. ‘And where do you think you’ve been, Arthur Hollis? People here looking for you, scientists, soldiers and I don’t know what. Told ’em you’d be back in your own good time. Where’ve you been?’

  Arthur Hollis looked at his wife. She was one of the best, his Mary, but a terrible one to talk. Ran in the family; her mother and her sisters were just the same. Hollis himself had never been much of a talker. The thought of describing his adventures to his wife, and trying to answer her questions, filled him with horror.

  He put his arm round her waist and gave her an affectionate hug. ‘Wouldn’t believe me if I told you, woman. Now then, supper ready?’

  They went inside the cottage and the door closed behind them.

  DOCTOR WHO – THE THREE DOCTORS

  Between the Lines

  Target published Doctor Who – The Three Doctors on 20 November 1975, almost three years after ‘The Three Doctors’ had been shown on BBC One at the start of the show’s tenth season. A lot had happened in that three years: Doctor Who was now just three days short of its twelfth birthday, and it was almost a year since ‘Robot’, the first adventure of the Fourth Doctor, had been screened. Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor was no longer so new – having just seen off Sutekh in ‘Pyramids of Mars’, he was about to foil ‘The Android Invasion’, in the fourth story of his second season. For much of the TV audience, Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor was becoming a distant memory, and Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell’s even earlier Doctors were the stuff of legend. To a six-year-old viewer who’d caught only the very end of the Pertwee run, the idea that three long-gone Doctors might have come together, just once, seemed a magical impossibility.

  Terrance Dicks’s novelisation of ‘The Three Doctors’ was published alongside his Doctor Who Monster Book, which explored the adventures of all four Doctors, right up to the still-recent ‘Terror of the Zygons’.1 Both books featured the new logo that had debuted earlier in 1975 on Doctor Who and the Giant Robot; the logo was adapted from the one that had appeared in the TV show’s opening titles since December 1973. For the first time in the Target range, the title did not follow the usual Doctor Who and the… formula: Doctor Who – The Three Doctors was consciously new and special.

  Its cover was by Chris Achilleos. This new edition re-presents that original 1975 publication. A few minor errors or inconsistencies have been corrected, but no attempt has been made to update or modernise the text – this is Doctor Who – The Three Doctors as originally written and published.

  This means that the novel retains certain stylistic and editorial practices that were current in 1975 but which have since adapted or changed. Most obviously, measurements are mostly 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.

  Terrance Dicks’s adaptation is a largely faithful one but with many minor differences, occasionally reverting to scripted dialogue that was adapted by the actors in rehearsal, and often slightly tweaking or expanding on what was seen on screen. The game warden Arthur Ollis becomes Arthur Hollis. Dr Tyler no longer has a mysterious hotline direct to UNIT; in print, he’s not heard of UNIT but has been ‘whizzed off’ to see them by the police. (Tyler still, according to the Brigadier, finds himself at Liberty Hall – a phrase first used in Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 comedy She Stoops to Conquer: ‘… pray be under no constraint in this house. This is Liberty-hall, gentlemen. You may do just as you please here.’ By the time Bob Baker and Dave Martin wrote ‘The Three Doctors’, the expression had become John Grimes’s catchphrase in Arthur Bertram Chandler’s science fiction stories, which began in 1967. But a BBC adaptation of She Stoops to Conquer was broadcast in 1971, and is the more likely source.)

  When Bessie is despatched through the black hole on screen, the Doctor explains the ‘explosion in the garage’ as ‘a release of kinetic energy’; here, Jo gives ‘a rather incoherent account’ of the blob-from-the-drain (an account which bursts out of her). The Doctor no longer instructs Benton to put a guard on the drains, but Terrance Dicks gives readers a glimpse of something nasty stirring in UNIT’s drainage pipes.

  The Doctor, rather than the Brigadier, notes the blob-men’s ‘sound grasp of military tactics’. We are also told that he ‘picked Jo up bodily and carried her across to the window’ in Chapter 2, something not attempted by the actors. When they first take refuge in the TARDIS in Episode 1, the Doctor actually attempts to dematerialise, but Dicks revises this to allow a first mention of the force-field.

  The First Law of Time, frequently mentioned in ‘The Three Doctors’ and many subsequent stories, is initially referred to here as ‘the First Time Law’. Jo’s allusion to The Beatles’ ‘I Am The Walrus’ is omitted here, as is the Second Doctor’s line wondering whether there is a television set handy for confusing the organism-blob. Jo, rather than the Third Doctor, suggests that a bridge is for crossing, and the First Doctor gains a line pointing out that the ‘gel’ has more sense than either of his successors. The Brigadier no longer concludes that the TARDIS interior is the product of several years’ worth of UNIT funds.

  When the television episodes were completed and edited, some scenes intended for the third episode were shifted to the second for timing reasons. Dicks largely restores the original running order of these sequences. Arriving in the anti-matter world, the novel shows the Second Doctor, the Brigadier and Sergeant Benton recovering from a brief period of unconsciousness, rather than landing with a collective bounce as they do on screen. And the Brigadier’s conviction that the UNIT building has been transported to Cromer in Norfolk (actually an ad lib by actor Nicholas Courtney) is reworked as he tries ‘to persuade himself that UNIT H.Q. had merely transported to some lonely part of Norfolk on a very nasty day’. In Chapter 9, Jo and the Brigadier have a small discussion about UNIT rations (including ‘bully beef’, otherwise known as corned beef); both the rations and the exchange are absent on TV.

  All of the scenes set inside UNIT headquarters were recorded in the laboratory set, but the novelisation places a few of them in the Brigadier’s office. He receives a report of an explosion in the garage by telephone, rather than getting it first-hand from Benton (whose onscreen delivery is so unperturbed, it even begins with an ‘Oh’). On TV, the Brigadier mentions a video conference with the UN Security Council, but Dicks’s novel replaces this with a visit from a quickly disgruntled ‘chap from Whitehall’, who actually gets a very brief meeting with the Second Doctor. The introduction of this ‘chap from the Government’ – something of a staple of the Pertwee era – then requires the addition of a line instructing Corporal Palmer to make sure he gets away safely when the building is besieged.

  The initial attacks on UNIT see Benton and his troops being rather better equipped in the novel, with an Armourer dishing out sub-machine guns, rifles and grenades. On TV, Benton commends ‘Johnson’ for his good shot, but here Benton himself grabs an anti-tank rifle and takes the moment of glory of obliterating a Gel Guard.

  Omega’s extraordinary anti-matter organisms are unnamed in the episodes, though the closing credits labelled them ‘Gel Guards’. Here, though, Terrance Dicks prefers ‘blob-men’. He also makes them considerably less unwieldy and bouncy than their onscreen counterparts, even giving them ‘thick legs’. The legs in question are capable of continuing to run, even when separated from their bodies by gunfire, something far beyond the monster costumes created for television.

  Dicks also depicts Omega’s anti-matter world in notably more lurid detail than had been feasible when the serial was made. The threatening purple sky, the dull grey sea, and the hundreds of towers and sle
nder minarets, the ‘oriental opulence’ of the ‘Arabian Nights castle’ with its parabolic arches and ‘impossibly distant ceiling’ had all been rather beyond a 1972 TV production filmed in Springwell Quarry in Hertfordshire. Similarly, the Flame of Singularity, described by Dicks as an ‘enormous pillar of fire … like a colossal fountain, disappearing into the recesses of the roof’ had been realised for the cameras as a column of smoke. Perhaps as a result, Omega’s speech about the strain and ‘effort of will’ of maintaining so much ‘beauty and colour’ is entirely absent from the original episodes.

  When she first sees Omega in Chapter 6, Jo sees that ‘behind the eye-slits there was – nothing. Only blackness.’ This actually gives away a major plot twist that doesn’t happen until halfway through Chapter 9. Also in Chapter 6, the Doctor recognises the Veil Nebula (a genuine astronomical phenomenon in the Cygnus constellation), thus identifying the Time Lords’ power source, something that has never been confirmed on television.

  At the start of Chapter 10, Dicks presents ‘a full-scale battle’ between the Brigadier’s ad hoc forces and the blob-men: ‘the doors [were] flung open, and a strange looking force emerge[d]. It was led by the Brigadier…’ For the cameras, this was essentially rendered as Troughton and Pertwee knocking on the door and being let in.

  Perhaps the biggest difference – certainly the oddest given its key role here – between Dicks’s novelisation and the original episodes concerns the vital means of Omega’s defeat. Throughout the novel, the Second Doctor alternately irritates everybody with or frets about the loss of his ‘flute’; his huffy note in Chapter 3 that it’s not actually a flute is immediately ignored by everyone, including him, for the remainder of the book. The instrument was a regular element of Troughton’s performance between 1966 and 1969, perhaps as recognisable then as Tom Baker’s jelly babies and sonic screwdriver would become in the 1970s. It was therefore revived for ‘The Three Doctors’. But, as the Second Doctor points out almost as soon as he materialises in the TARDIS, it’s not a flute: ‘Properly speaking, it’s a recorder.’

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  Published in 2012 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

  A Random House Group Company

  First published in 1975 by Tandem Publishing Ltd.

  Novelisation copyright © Terrance Dicks 1975

  Original script © Bob Baker and Dave Martin 1972

  Introduction © Alastair Reynolds 2012

  The Changing Face of Doctor Who and About the Authors © Justin Richards 2012

  Between the Lines © Steve Tribe 2012

  BBC, DOCTOR WHO and TARDIS (word marks, logos and devices) are trademarks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

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  ISBN 978 1 849 90478 0

  Editorial director: Albert DePetrillo

  Editorial manager: Nicholas Payne

  Series consultant: Justin Richards

  Project editor: Steve Tribe

  Proofreader: Kari Speers

  Cover illustration: Chris Achilleos

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