by Gerry Davis
‘You’ve got a job to do,’ Hobson said, ‘or have you forgotten! Get the probe back into position.’ He pointed to Franz and another of the technicians.
‘Sam, take a party outside and re-assemble the aerial. We must establish radio contact with Earth as soon as possible. Then, Nils, call up space control. Tell Rinberg we’ll be operational in,’ he looked at his watch, ‘about two hours. He won’t like it, but it’s the best we can do.’
‘Jules,’ he looked over at Benoit, ‘I want you to make a survey of the damage done to the base by the low deflection of the Gravitron. We may have damaged something irreparably.’
The Doctor and his companions, almost forgotten by the technicians as they wearily went back to their jobs, were standing over by the door. The Doctor looked at Ben, Polly and Jamie. He raised his eyebrows. ‘I think we’d better get out of here,’ he murmured, ‘before he starts charging us for having damaged their Gravitron. It was my suggestion!’
Ben nodded and smiled. ‘Let’s scarper while we can,’ he said.
Quietly, without disturbing the base crew, the Doctor’s party left the room.
Inside the Weather Control Room, Hobson had finished organising his men. ‘Now,’ he said heavily, ‘Doctor.’ He turned around, swivelling in his chair. But the Doctor and his companions had gone. ‘What the…?’
Only Benoit had noticed their departure. He looked over to his chief. ‘I think they decided it was a good moment to depart.’
For a moment, Hobson seemed about to say something. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Just as well, perhaps,’ he said. ‘We’ve got enough lunatics here already. Liked to have thanked them though… and found out where they came from!’ He turned back to his crew.
‘Right, men, start calibrating the Gravitron control unit. Come on now, I want to see a first weather plot in five minutes time. Remember… I’m the one who’s got to report back to Mr Rinberg…’
Outside the moon base, the Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie, clad in their space suits, toiled up the slope towards the TARDIS.
Polly looked up in the night sky. Far above them they could just make out a couple of shooting stars, flashing across the black immensity.
‘Could that be the Cybermen?’ questioned Polly.
‘It’s possible.’ The Doctor’s voice filtered into the other three’s space helmets. ‘I hope that’s the last we ever see of them.’
Ben turned to him, but the Doctor’s face could not be made out clearly through the sun visor.
‘You said “possibly”, Doctor. Can’t you be sure?’
‘No,’ said the Doctor, ‘I wish I could. The trouble with the Cybermen is that one can never be entirely sure…’
DOCTOR WHO AND THE CYBERMEN
Between the Lines
On 28 December 1974, Tom Baker’s reign as the Fourth Doctor began on BBC One. During his first season of adventures, the new Doctor dissolved a giant robot with a metal-eating virus, saw off a swarm of Wirrn, outwitted a Sontaran and witnessed Davros’s creation of the Daleks. And then he met the Cybermen.
By April 1975, it had been over six years since the Cybermen’s previous television appearance, in ‘The Invasion’, so ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ by Gerry Davis was many viewers’ first experience of the silver giants with the strength of ten men. But Target Books’ Doctor Who novelisations had now been running for a year, so some viewers had just recently been introduced to them…
Doctor Who and the Cybermen, also written by Gerry Davis, was first published in paperback by Target Books on 20 February 1975. It was adapted from ‘The Moonbase’, originally written by Kit Pedler and script-edited by Davis. The interior illustrations (used in this edition) were by Alan Willow, and the cover was by Chris Achilleos. This new edition re-presents that 1975 publication. 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 Cybermen as originally written and published.
This means that the novel retains certain stylistic and editorial practices that were current in 1974 (when the book was written and prepared for publication) but which have since adapted or changed.
Most obviously, 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. Unusually, however, the characters’ dialogue uses metric measurements, presumably intended to reflect the story’s multinational flavour and future setting.
Like ‘The Moonbase’ and a number of other Doctor Who serials at that time, Doctor Who and the Cybermen presents a future in which the nations of the world – or of Europe, at least – have cooperated in a great endeavour to improve life for all humanity. The staff of the moon’s weather control station include a Dane, Nils, a Frenchman, Jules Benoit, and the – presumbly – Welsh character Evans. The novelisation adds a German called Franz, a Dutchman called Peter, and an American, Chuck, plus at least one unnamed Italian. The book does not, though, incorporate the smattering of French heard in Episode 2 on television:
BENOIT
Eh là, qu’est-ce que vous fabriquez, imbécile d’idiot!
Vous n’avez rien d’autre à faire? Vous croyez que nous
sommes en train de nous amuser? … Get out of the way!
DOCTOR
Enchanté, monsieur.
Benoit’s outburst (‘Hey, what are you doing, you stupid idiot? Haven’t you got anything better to do? Do you think we’re having fun?’) is replaced, in Chapter 6, by the more prosaic ‘Hey! Careful!’
The station chief Hobson, meanwhile, becomes ‘a large, thick-set Yorkshireman of forty-five’; his onscreen counterpart’s background is unspecified, and actor Patrick Barr played him with the standard ‘BBC English’ tones of the time. Foreign accents were acceptable in the broadcasts of 1967, but regional English was still extremely rare.
Cockney companion Ben Jackson is a notable exception to this – Doctor Who’s first consistent and successful attempt to include a series regular who didn’t speak the Queen’s English. Davis’s novel steps this up a little, as lines like ‘You lot aren’t half edgy’ become ‘You lot ain’t ’alf edgy.’ Davis does something similar with his rendering of Jamie’s Highland speech, giving him a rather stronger Scottish accent than he has on TV.
‘The Moonbase’ is only the third story to feature Jamie, who joined the TARDIS crew at short notice at the end of ‘The Highlanders’. As a result, the character has only a limited role to play in his earliest adventures, with scripts being hurriedly edited to give him a share of the dialogue. The Pedler/Davis solution was to give him concussion, keeping him largely out of the way for the first couple of episodes, and thus for the first seven chapters here. Jamie rejoins the action properly in the third episode (Chapter 8), though his main contribution comes later, and amounts to moving a bench to block off the Medical Unit exit. Strangely, this is one of the few times that the novel diverges from the TV story, having Polly – not Ben – help Jamie shift the furniture.
Doctor Who and the Cybermen was the second novelisation to feature Jamie, after Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen three months earlier. That novel avoids mentioning Jamie’s surname, but ‘The Moonbase’ makes a virtue of his heritage when he believes a Cyberman to be the phantom Piper. The scripts for Jamie’s earliest stories, including ‘The Moonbase’, spelled his name ‘Macrimmon’; subsequent scripts from 1967 to 1969 featured variants such as ‘McCrimmon’ and ‘McCrimmond’. Here, Gerry Davis (or, perhaps, Target’s editor, Mike Glover) settles on ‘McCrimmon’.
The novelisation is rather dismissive of Jamie, describing him early on as ‘a little thick, even by 1745 standards’. This is a quite different approach from that seen on television, where Frazer Hines portrayed Jamie as quick and eager to learn from his strange new experiences – a scan of his brain in a later story found ‘signs of recent rapid learning’.
&n
bsp; The third companion, too, suffers a little in this novel. A scene in ‘The Moonbase’ where the Doctor asks Polly (the only woman in the base) to make coffee to keep everyone happy might be taken as proof that she has only a stereotypical ‘female assistant’ role: scream, ask silly questions, look pretty, put the kettle on… In fact, like most Doctor Who companions, Polly is generally bright, compassionate and resourceful – it’s Polly, after all, who comes up with the idea of attacking the Cybermen with a nail varnish solution (‘Cocktail Polly’). Despite this, the novel nudges her back towards the stereotype, adding several rounds of stupid questions (‘“Their what?” Polly looked confused.’) and being decorative (‘While the men’s attention was diverted by Polly’s mini-skirt’). Gerry Davis is clearly aware of this (‘“Clever girl,” said the Doctor patronisingly.’).
Another change made by Davis’s novelisation is to identify Ben and Polly as coming from the 1970s; they’re therefore familiar with the real-life moon landings of July 1969 onwards. On television, they joined and, through the magic of time travel, also left the Doctor on 20 July 1966.
‘The Moonbase’ was broadcast in four episodes beginning on 11 February 1967, little more than three months after the Cybermen’s first appearance, in First Doctor William Hartnell’s last story. ‘The Tenth Planet’ reveals that the people of Mondas had begun to experiment with cybernetics, so creating the Cybermen; they perish in that story during an attempt to drain Earth’s energy into Mondas. Doctor Who and the Cybermen offers a different version of Cyber-history in its opening prologue, stating that the Cybermen originated on Telos. (Telos is named as the Cybermen’s ‘home’ planet in ‘The Tomb of the Cybermen’.) The rest of the novelisation is more circumspect, referring to Telos as ‘the other Cyberman planet’ during a conversation about Mondas in Chapter 8 that was adapted from a scene cut from a draft script.
Neither the TV serial nor the novelisation explicitly mentions that the Cybermen of ‘The Moonbase’ look very different from those seen in ‘The Tenth Planet’. The cloth faces of the originals are now replaced by metal and plastic, giving them a more robotic look, and their hands are now three-fingered and metal, not human. The cumbersome headlamp and chest units are smaller and have been more fully incorporated into the overall design. The novel’s illustrations give a fairly faithful representation of this new design, although the cover uses a later evolution from ‘The Invasion’ (1968) that’s rather closer to what viewers would soon see on television in ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’.
‘The Moonbase’ also dispenses with the notion of individual Cybermen having names, as they had in ‘The Tenth Planet’. Draft scripts had, however, allocated a couple of names, and Davis retains these (Tarn and Krang) in the novel. He also gives the Cybermen the beginnings of a hierarchy; on television, the black-helmeted rank of Cyberleader does not appear until ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’. Davis retrospectively introduces one, Tarn, here, complete with distinctive black headpiece.
Right from their first appearance, the Cybermen have been described as emotionless: ‘they had no heart, no emotions, no feelings. They lived by the inexorable laws of pure logic’ says the prologue. Often, however, the Cybermen have actually seemed quite emotional – the 1980s breed are given to triumphant exclamations of ‘Excellent!’ and the Fourth Doctor comments on a Cyberleader’s ‘nice sense of irony.’ The ‘Moonbase’ Cybermen have a tendency to gloat: explaining how they penetrated the base’s protective dome, one says, ‘Only stupid Earth brains like yours would have been fooled … A simple hole that’s all … Clever! Clever! Clever!’ In Chapter 8, Gerry Davis tones this down:
‘It was very simple,’ said the Cyberman. ‘Only rudimentary Earth brains like yours would have been fooled.’
… ‘That explains those air pressure drops we’ve been recording.’
… ‘You should have acted upon them. No Cyberman would have neglected such a vital fact.’
A little less passion, perhaps, but still a hint of pride…
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Published in 2011 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
A Random House Group Company
First published in 1974 by Universal-Tandem Publishing Co., Ltd.
Novelisation copyright © Gerry Davis 1974
Original script © Kit Pedler 1967
Illustrations © Alan Willow 1974
Introduction © Gareth Roberts 2011
The Changing Face of Doctor Who and About the Authors © Justin Richards 2011
Between the Lines © Steve Tribe 2011
BBC, DOCTOR WHO, TARDIS and CYBERMEN (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.
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 849 90191 8
Commissioning editor: Albert DePetrillo
Editorial manager: Nicholas Payne
Series consultant: Justin Richards
Project editor: Steve Tribe
Cover design: Lee Binding © Woodlands Books Ltd, 2011
Cover illustration: Chris Achilleos
Production: Rebecca Jones
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