Love and Liberty

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… The Doctor’s finished on the telly again, and who most wants him finished? With Doctor Who – The Mind of Evil released this week to complete a rival Time Lord’s adventures on DVD, it’s about time to follow Number 40’s “I’m the Doctor” with a hostile takeover:

“I am the Master.”

And while sometimes I add a second Bonus Quotation here, something’s got into my head (a sort of drumming) and now there are rather more. More spoilers, as well. So, peoples of the Blogosphere: please attend carefully…

“I am many things.”

Springtime for the Master! If he ruled the world, every first day of Spring would be the blizzard (possibly of flying killer heads) that this year’s started out with. After not being at all well and getting out of the habit of writing this Fifty, it’s now the end of Spring, but cast your mind back to the beginning of the season and perhaps it’s just as well that I didn’t post this on the frozen 20th of March – despite it appropriately being a broadcast anniversary of the Axons. Even the alternative date for the start of Spring was still frosty, despite the 1st of April appropriately being a broadcast anniversary of some Sea Devils. And yet the Master’s been very much on my mind, not just nagging me to write but with his own two very special bank holidays – first Beltane, then the Master for one night only from in 1996 (or 1999). The Master, if you didn’t know, is almost the Doctor’s other half – an old friend who also left the Time Lords, but to rule the Universe, not just to see it, longing to make everyone else feel small. He became a jealous enemy across many of his and the Doctor’s lives, and a jack-in-the-box of irresistibly nasty fun across many of years of our television. I may have missed the daffodils, but his blooms last, so here’s something of the first plastic flowering of each Master, most of all the original. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Have a chair…

“This plastic has got unique properties, Mr McDermott. Allow me to demonstrate.”

The Master (Roger Delgado) is a suave, powerful presence with dark, hypnotic eyes and a deep, hypnotic voice. Usually wearing a dark, pointed beard and a dark, elegant suit – most often a round-collared black Nehru suit – he’s also to be found disguised in everything from self-aggrandising pseudonyms to flamboyant robes to the grubby overalls and rubbery face of a phone engineer. The personification of charm when he needs to be; smiling and playful, albeit with his own murderous sense of humour; given to savage flashes of anger. His ambition is to rule the Earth, or occasionally the galaxy, though with an underlying need for the Doctor’s attention – before he kills him in an amusing way. To overcome his status as a one-man band, he forms alliances with a variety of alien races to do is legwork… Always (over-)confident that he can dispose of them when they’re no longer of use, rather than the other way round.

Terror of the Autons is the Master’s first appearance, materialising in the first scene of Doctor Who’s Eighth Season and immediately dominating the show – and the petty ‘big man’ to whom he introduces himself. By the time the Doctor gets a look in, still less when a Time Lord belatedly turns up to warn him of the Master’s arrival, the new villain has already stolen the show (and much more besides). Aiming to create a new spearhead for the Nestene Consciousness and their power over plastic, he’s found Rex Farrel, a young plastics factory manager in a rather nasty fashionable suit eager to make his mark after years following his father’s orders. Unfortunately for him, his new big customer in a much more impressively cut dark suit and gold tie is “Colonel Masters”: meet the new boss; very much not the same as the old boss. But Mr Farrel Senior’s left James McDermott, his own bluff, practical production manager in a sober suit, to report back to him in case his son mucks about too much, and McDermott patronisingly tells Rex the company’s not going to dump all its old customers for a mystery man with no paperwork. McDermott calls up the old man; Rex calls in “Colonel Masters”…

Not liking a new face, McDermott begins with a tirade about changing the plastics mix and ruining a day’s production. The Master is polite, urbane, amused, and shows off a shiny black fat square cushion of material that isn’t to McDermott’s taste at all. But he doesn’t appreciate its unique properties – or the Master’s. At a click of his fingers, the square begins to expand and, to off-key synthesiser music, slithers into the form of a shiny black fat square armchair. Rex seems curiously blasé, but an unsettled McDermott licks dry lips and weakly asks if the new customer is a magician as well as a Colonel. The Master answers quietly, staying still, ominous, powerful, while McDermott fidgets and flails about, trying to assert himself and the company as he knows it. The Master moves to stand behind the inflated chair, arms astride it proprietorially, and strikes a warm, friendly tone:

“Look, why don’t you try it?”
“Well, you’ll never sell that, I’ll tell you that for nothing. Sure, it looks like – like a black pudding.”
“Try sitting in it.”
“It’s got a cold clammy feel to it. Now plastic should be warm and dry to the touch—”
“Sit down, man!”

McDermott’s been eyeing the chair uneasily and prodding it like a first-time swimmer at the water’s edge – but the Master’s sudden whiplash of will is that of a villain who’s suddenly tired of the shaggy dog and wants to skip to the punchline. McDermott can’t help but sit. The moment he does, the chair starts to writhe again, wrapping itself around him and, rearing over his head, suffocating his screams within its thick, blobby synthetic mass and the thick, blobby synthesiser music.

The Master has instant presence, and you can’t tear your eyes from McDermott in the chair. But the third person in the room is in his own way just as fascinating – Rex has come entirely under the Master’s spell, but is shocked for a moment by the horrible death. The Master raises a hand to stop him stepping forward… And, everything over, Farrel is nonchalant again. More even than the Doctor’s companion, Rex is the personification of the viewer here, finding the thrilling new villain utterly compelling, briefly shocked by horror daring you to reject him, then back to watercooler-chat complicity as he steps to the intercom for a killingly funny businessman’s response:

“Sylvia? Will you check Mr McDermott’s entitlement on termination of employment, please?”

Rex Farrel – and the rest of us – are already so far back in the Master’s thrall after all this showing off that when he hilariously affects humility at the waste of so much material for one simple death we’re with Rex in saying, no, no, that was an impressive one, honestly. And like Rex, we want to know what the Master means when he gives a playful smile and promises efficient death with just a few inches of plastic:

“The human body has a basic weakness. One which I shall exploit – to assist in the destruction of humanity.”

I’ve written about the death at the plastics factory before – I didn’t see the Master’s showpiece scene on screen until more than twenty years after it was broadcast, but I saw it in my mind’s eye as a thrilled little boy reading one of the first books I ever bought, Terrance Dicks’ novelisation Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, and not only does it grip you (and Mr McDermott) on TV, it’s just as gripping on the page. Though it makes Rex more sympathetic by taking away his punchline, permitting him more struggling shock and generally removing the impression that his appreciation of the patronising right-hand-man’s death is an eagerness to murder his father by proxy, it gives the Master a terrible gag that I’ve always loved. You can read what in my in-depth review of the novel here, complete with that very scene as my selection of choice (and a terrifying picture of little me). And if you keep watching the DVD, the Master gets another deft little punchline later along the way…

In both forms, this is the Master’s crucial establishing moment – it’s such an outrageously exaggerated swagger of a scene that you just know he’s going to be fun to watch if he’s prepared to put on such a show for an audience of two one (give or take eight million). I don’t know if the phrase ‘hiding behind the sofa’ was in common currency yet back in 1971 or if the Master has always had the power to serendipitously subvert both the show and its viewers even before the clichés have formed to be subverted, but he reaches out to the audience’s safe place and deliciously makes it something to hide from. Similarly, the whole confrontation comes across like a scene from ’60s industrial power-play drama The Plane Makers being warped out of recognition by a devil from another genre stepping into it for a laugh. Perversely, of course, it also made me long for a blow-up plastic chair.

Each time the Master’s been reintroduced to the TV series – The Deadly Assassin, Logopolis, Last of the Time Lords, all below – Terror of the Autons has been the source text that the writers have looked to for inspiration, most of all Russell T Davies as John Simm takes over and, heretically, delivers for me the best interpretation of that original concept’s viciously playful streak. Roger Delgado is fantastic in this scene, but in other points of his first story he doesn’t yet seem as at ease, as in control, to simply be enjoying himself so much as he does growing into the part. So if you’re inspired by this selection to mount your own ‘The Seven Faces of the Master’ retrospective, while Robert Holmes’ Terror of the Autons is the definitive Master script, you might consider for slightly more compelling stories on screen and with Mr Delgado’s definitive Master performances either The Dæmons, in which he puts on a robe so resplendent it makes vaunting a blow-up chair seem almost introverted and then summons the Devil, or The Mind of Evil, out at last this week and making the whole of the Master’s adventures now available on DVD, in which he gets a big cigar, a big car and a big coat to play the part as a fabulously louche Bond villain.

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 1 – The Deadly Assassin

The Master (Peter Pratt) is a daring reinvention of the character, his charm, his humour, his looks, even his skin stripped away, though still boasting a deep, powerful voice. Rather than take the obvious option of simply making him a new regeneration like a new Doctor, Robert Holmes introduces the Master for the second time no longer as the Doctor’s ‘naughty brother’ but his dark side, all his narrow escapes having cost him every life and stretched him to the end of his thirteenth body – after which even a Time Lord must die. A rotting, ravaged ghoul wrapped in a tattered cowl, he’s still walking because he simply refuses to die… And because hate for the Doctor and the other Time Lords keeps him alive. This is The Master Unplugged, stripped to his essence, smouldering with pain and hatred and more impatient than any of his other lives. There’s no time for amusing banter, but only to renew himself at any cost (in fact, preferably at a terrible cost – not merely a killer for fun but a fiend who glories in chaos and destruction). He’s lost his vanity – though the hypnotic power that once seemed like seduction now blazes forth as sheer mental domination. He’s given up his delusions of grandeur – and ironically forms an utterly selfish plan that promises death on his grandest scale yet. He doesn’t hide behind pseudonyms – instead presenting his hideous face almost with pride and bellowing his name as if that is all that he has left. It’s almost as influential an introduction as his first, with the idea of the Master as walking corpse such a powerful one that he’s never quite whole again.

The Master has lured the Doctor back to their home planet of Gallifrey and framed him for the killing of the President – in part as a complex attempt to get his hands on the ancient relics of the Presidency and unlock the secrets of the Time Lords, though mostly to gloat. He will rip their power source away to bring himself new life, destroying their world and perhaps destabilising the Universe itself, making the story – for my money, Doctor Who’s best – a uniquely apocalyptic film noir. In the crypt where the Head of the Presidency and all its regalia lie in state, the Master rises from apparent death to seize them, only to be interrupted by the Doctor and two old Time Lords (the local police chief and the local librarian). As with Terror of the Autons, the confrontation of these equal and opposites is all the more effective for being held back until the finale, and the Master steps from the shadows, pissed off beyond endurance, to answer the Doctor back:

“The Master’s consumed with hatred. It’s his one great weakness.”
“Weakness, Doctor? Hate is strength.”
“Not in your case. You’d delay an execution to pull the wings off a fly.”

Even as the camera lingers on the Master’s gun – and he’s never more brutally trigger-happy than here – even as he’s twisted with physical agony, even he’s as kept alive by his absolute focus on the most important person in his life, the subject of all his rage and envy and vengeance, the one who he’s crafted all this to get his attention before he dies in disgrace, the Doctor still just dismisses him. That hurts.

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 2 – The Keeper of Traken

I did warn you there were spoilers, didn’t I?


The Master (Geoffrey Beevers) remains a twisted, skeletal wreck of himself, but has had to learn patience. He’s found another astronomically powerful Source to steal a new life from, but at the price of sitting it out on a planet that might make him regret calling the Doctor “insufferably good”; on Traken, evil simply gives up and calcifies. But he’s safe inside his TARDIS – disguised as a gorgeously twisted statue, a Melkur of local legend – and uses his time well to plot not just how to gain control but how to twist and corrupt a people kept without real knowledge of good and evil by the Keeper of the world exerting moral sense on everyone’s behalf. The Master here is an outstanding corruptor, blatantly the serpent in this Eden and with a marvellously silky, persuasive voice, pan-fried in evil with extra goose fat. As Richard says, this isn’t just evil. This is rich, gloating M&Ster evil. From the mildness of a wise advisor to the high, gloating glee of triumph at last, the Master’s greatest weapon is his voice. Though blazing energy beams from Melkur’s eyes come in handy, too.

The Master has waited until the old Keeper’s thousand-year reign is faltering, and turns a bride’s love into his instrument for removing the chosen successor. Again, the confrontation between the Doctor and the hidden Master is reserved for the finale – with one stunning scene in particular as the Master taunts him, and demonstrates that surrendering all your decisions to absolute godhood is a dangerous thing – but there are some marvellous exchanges between the Doctor and the Melkur as it slowly evolves from the ivy-covered feature in the background to a creepy walking statue at the centre of events. And it places itself most literally at the centre as the old Keeper dies: with the benign controlling intelligence of centuries suddenly gone, chaos breaks across the world in a storm of unchecked nature, and through the howling gale Melkur gloatingly offers a merciful death, its shrivelled, secret occupant looking down at the Doctor through great eye-like screens. The Doctor defies “Melkor” – appropriately recalling a famous fallen angel, and of what great order was the Doctor a member, and who fell the furthest? – but it’s too late. The Master’s catspaw is on the Keeper’s Throne. In the spellbinding last minutes of Part Three, all seems dark: the Keeper who called to the Doctor for help dead; the Master’s Machiavellian machinations turned almost the entire Court against our hero; the true nature of Melkur about to be revealed when it doesn’t merely walk but, with a wheezing, groaning sound, dematerialises to take the Throne – and, heralding that cliffhanger, long-term viewers feel the hairs rise on the backs of their necks as we see inside Melkur a room roundelled in black with a cowled plotter at the controls… Who turns to us with a great swell of music and with the ravaged face of the Master and, as all the years of insufferable imprisonment come to an end, with a tone of wonder and exultation:

“Now, this Traken web of harmony is broken. I am free…!”

Although Geoffrey Beevers’ time as the Master was a short one on television – though I do love The Keeper of Traken – the Master of voice has appropriately become the definitive audio Master, with many delicious readings of Doctor Who novels (not least Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons) and a splendid new array of adventures for Big Finish. Perhaps the most remarkable of these is Joseph Lidster’s Master, which has more than a passing influence on TV Master stories to come…

If you find yourself in the mood for audio-play Masters, two others are available, with actors you’re highly likely to recognise and enjoy in the part. But both of them are big twists! So I’ll mention Doctor Who Unbound – Sympathy For the Devil, which was released ten years ago and so you’ll probably have heard of it if you were ever going to, but not the one from last year, which is also terrific fun (email me if you want to know). You’ll certainly remember it if you’ve heard it, and I will say that bears a remarkable resemblance to the much earlier Master story The Claws of Axos – done rather better, and very much bigger…

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 3 – Logopolis

The Master (Anthony Ainley) still carries the mark of having used up his lives, a synthesis of his predecessors – and of the poor schmuck whose body he stole as a consolation prize for failing to hold onto the renewing power of the Source. Dark-haired, dark-bearded, sometimes charming, he has something of the look of one prior Master, but the rotten dead heart of the other. Usually dressed in the embossed black velvet of the Traken Court – a reminder of the victim in whose dead body he scampers, father of one of the Doctor’s companions and taunting her with it horribly, while still ever more wounded in his cadaverous existence and needing help with further degradations from or for the Cheetah People, the Tzun or his own carelessness – he’s another Master with a taste for increasingly ambitious disguises, sometimes less for function’s sake than on the edge of sanity. That’s the key to this Master, whose old, confident desire for domination is mostly displaced into being more than ever a one-man band with one man on his mind, obsessed with the Doctor in as bizarre revenges as possible. Laughing all the while. And laughing. And laughing (yet I’ve not picked “Heh heh heh heh!” as his signature quote).

The Master seized a new body as the twist in the tail on Traken, but it’s by insinuating himself throughout Logopolis that he really makes his mark. Glorying in vicious deaths, stalking fear and, as ever, cutting the Doctor down to size, he’s initially little-seen but a palpable presence throughout his first full story. He may laugh a lot, but he’s got a cold, dispassionate air that’s very sinister. A cold, high, echoing music, too. This time, he’s dangerous. But even he doesn’t realise how dangerous, as his greed to find out what secret the planet Logopolis is hiding sparks the greatest catastrophe in all of Doctor Who and the Universe itself begins to unravel. He loses his nerve like a typical bully and bolts, then teams up with the Doctor not to undo the damage – nothing can do that – but to save what’s left by transmitting a new lifeline into another universe to give ours breathing space… And, recovering his composure, he finds again an eye for the main chance. Again borrowing from the iconography of Terror of the Autons, Christopher H Bidmead’s script crafts a far more powerful climax up in the dizzyingly high control room of a radio telescope. But this time they do not get on: the Doctor is revolted by everything the Master’s done, and all the Master’s overtures are ostentatiously mocking of a man he clearly thinks is past it. It’s the final episode of the story, the final episode of this Doctor, and the Master sees himself as the coming man, a lithe, Thatcherite go-getter contemptuous of self-sacrifice and concern for others. But before he finds to his shock that the real coming man is yet to come, he patronises the Doctor’s old, comfy ways and mockingly praises him for a technological deliverance that he clearly thinks he could have delivered himself – but was instead keeping the Doctor busy while he worked out how to turn it to his advantage. The Doctor knocks the Master’s congratulatory hand away as if stung – and, even as he tries to bundle the Doctor out, he can’t resist giving the game away with a good taunt. The gloves are off…

“So it works. Congratulations, Doctor. I always knew you’d do it.”
“You did most of this.”
“Oh, no. I was little more than a humble assistant – but I have learned a great deal. And now I think it’s time for you to go and explain the presence of your friends. There’s quite a hubbub outside.”
“You’re quite right. One mistake now could ruin everything.”
“I know that, Doctor – and it could happen so easily.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Universe is hanging on a thread. A single recursive pulse down that cable and the CVE would close forever. Even a humble assistant could do it.”

Logopolis is probably Mr Ainley’s most dangerous performance – and certainly his Master’s most deadly effect – but, if you want a wider variety of Doctor in your ‘The Seven Faces of the Master’, like Mr Delgado he has other stories worth a look. I’d recommend Planet of Fire for a different and rather glorious interpretation of the Master in which he has a great deal of fun and is pitted for the last time against the ‘new’ Doctor who becomes his arch-enemy as they were in the early ’70s. Then there’s a more different still portrayal in Survival, Mr Ainley’s last TV appearance but, as with his first, not quite managing to finish off the Doctor (here one who shares Mr Ainley’s birthday, and his companion’s, too).

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 4 – The TV Movie: Time Waits For No Man

The Master (Eric Roberts) comes back from being executed first as a wriggling morphant monstrosity and then to possess yet another body, this time an unlucky paramedic. A mere human body begins to rot immediately, though his inner wriggling thing does at least give him the ability to spit sticky and occasionally hypnotic bile at those who get in his way. First underplayed, charismatic and rather sexy, his chiselled, clean-shaven features looking cool in shades, when bits start falling off his rapid deterioration leads to a waspish temper and a desperation to get the Doctor’s body – no, not like that. Oh, I dunno though. He also puts on his grandest frock yet for that big occasion. And yet he’s still not ‘the camp one’.

The Master has charmed a street gangster to his side with hard-luck tales of how – well, he’s no saint, but that awful, awful Doctor! A substantial quantity of gold helps. And the Doctor has made the mistake of choosing his companion rather less well: she’s already killed him once, she doesn’t believe him, and she’s more concerned with her sofa than his TARDIS. Never mind poor Mr McDermott: this is the sofa to really fear. And to top it all, she’s gooily hypnotised by the Master into abetting his S&M torture-possession plans, in a story that does millennialism considerably more stupidly than the one two above. And yet this Master is great fun and more of a mirror to the Doctor than he’s been in years, full of black humour when the Doctor plays it straight and, yes, I’m afraid heavily coded as the Hollywood Homosexual of Evil against a suddenly straight Doctor. I can’t help but enjoy both one-night-only Time Lords taking the piss immensely, and most of all as the Doctor wakes and expresses sheer incredulity as the Master’s companion swallows everything, his own slaps him because she’s evil now rather than merely banal, then the Master interrupts him, flouncing down the stairs with a flourish like Blanche turning up to the end of the world, which only the Doctor seems to notice:

“You! You took my things – where are they?”
“They’re not your things any more. Pretty soon, everything around here’s going to belong to the Master again.”
“Again? What’s he been telling you?
“When he gets his body back from you, I’m going to be rich.”
“And you believe him?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“I suppose he neglected to mention that there won’t be any place to spend your money?”
“Which is why we have no time to waste.”
“But time to change!”
“I always dress for the occasion.”

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 5 – Utopia

I really, really did warn you there were spoilers, didn’t I?


Professor Yana (Derek Jacobi) is a brilliant, eccentric scientist, perhaps the last – the savant at the end of the Universe (no longer delayed). An old man with a young companion, dressed in old-fashioned clothes, selflessly helping everyone (though it would be nice, just once, to get a little credit), with strange twinges of memory about time travel, the Doctor’s companion accidentally alerts him to the significance of the Gallifreyan symbols on his pocket watch. Not long before, the Doctor had used such a watch to hide his true self while living a normal life in a body and person made suddenly human. So with this dear old man so obviously Doctorish, surely there couldn’t be any doubt who’d be inside when he opened the watch…

The Master (Derek Jacobi) is older than some, with grey hair and an old body… But he finds new vigour and purpose – and newly compelling, dark eyes – when his whispering inner self takes over again (and you’ll recognise some of those voices). If you remember him sitting waiting inside a statue, an even better disguise was sitting inside a nice man (sweet? Effete!). If you think he was in drag last time, this was a performance so great that he was lost in it. And if the Doctor’s deepest wish when he had to make himself a new person to hide in was to become an ordinary man, the Master’s deepest wish was to be the Doctor… But just a little bit better. Fleeing service in the Time War, tormented by the drums in his head, in recovering himself the Master’s a real live wire, suddenly turning with contempt on his other life and his friend, sneering at and scorning everything about her – unwisely – and leaping back into murder and sabotage for spite. That came very easily.

This really shouldn’t be here at all. I may not be breaking the laws of my Fifty, but I am— no, hang it, I am breaking them, because here’s a moment, quite a bit of a moment, that’s going to turn up again later. I won’t tell if you won’t. This is only a part of it where, let’s say, the Master has seized control of the Moment. That sounds ominous, and it is. To simply fantastic music, the greatest outing for the 2007 theme we know as ‘Dance of the Macra’, Professor Yana has gazed into the abyss, the abyss has gazed greedily back and, with his most disturbing and brilliantly portrayed possession so far, the Master now takes possession again of – himself. Locked outside, humanity’s twisted, cannibal offshoots the Futurekind bay in hungry frustration as, above, humanity’s more hopeful survivors soar off in search of Utopia; below, the Doctor is confronted with the appalling realisation that You Are Not Alone. And, at the heart of the otherwise abandoned outpost, Professor Yana’s friend Chantho is being confronted with evidence that her friend may no longer be in residence. Black-eyed and delighting in life again, the man in his place is about to rediscover a taste for murder, but first can’t resist some playful, vicious fun as he operates the master controls first to lock the Doctor away from his TARDIS, then to let the Futurekind into the silo to greet (and eat) the Doctor and his friends. Chantho is appalled; the Doctor panics as a massive door slams in his face; and the Master – oh, the Master makes me laugh.

“Chan—but you’ve locked them in—tho…?”

[“Get it open! Get it open!”]

“Not to worry, my dear. As one door closes, another must open.”

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 6 – Last of the Time Lords

The Master (John Simm) is young, and strong, and we see that he’s at last won that new lease of life – he explodes from his previous self’s mortally wounded body with a new voice and new hyperactivity. Or is it simply that, taunted by the Doctor’s survival and rejuvenation, he regenerates by sheer force of will? He bounds away from the end of the Universe and lays a long plan, taking the Earth, a wife and leadership of his most insanely loyal allies yet. He spends months building himself up as Harold Saxon, charismatic Prime Minister and saviour. Urbane, excitable, with just a hint of madness, he’s more spectacularly hypnotic than ever before, and more than any other Master a mirror of and match for the Doctor. And that viciously playful streak is given full reign – over all the Earth, the Universe to follow – with not just taunts, and pranks, and killing again and again, but now dance. Handsome in an untrustworthy way, dark-haired but clean-shaven, he tends to wear sharply tailored black suits and ties, but with just a flash of purple inner lining to mock a Doctor’s cape of old (though after things go a little wrong even with his back-up plan, he turns up again rather the worse for wear and rather more on the side of madness than urbanity, less cheeky than feral). And if the Master really were the Doctor’s equal, what would that mean? He’d win. He does.

The Master takes over the world and the lead – it’s only a shame that Russell T Davies didn’t also remake the title sequence starring John Simm in THE MASTER. The reborn Master can hardly contain himself when at last he gets to speak to the Doctor; he tells him to run, taking command of the whole narrative; he rejoices in teasing him as a public menace; he proclaims the fall of the human race. Well, one of them, anyway. Topping every other writer’s conception of him as fallen angel, he stages the Rapture with terrible pedantry and glories in his legions of the Damned fleeing the ultimate judgement day. And, for a fan who loves The Deadly Assassin more than any other story and grew up intoxicated by novelisations of Roger Delgado’s stories, this tour-de-force follows through on the Master’s original promise and reaches through the screen to take control of me, too: he’s never better than in this story, and it’s an amazing performance, taking everything that Robert Holmes gave the character to set sail and flying away with it. It’s the most fun he’s had since the Chair – this time with the Cabinet. And he’s both very, very funny and utterly horrible. This is perfectly encapsulated a year into his reign, riding high above the Earth, tormenting a Doctor he’s long made a captive audience and aged to infirmity, always ready to make him feel small. He sees the Doctor making a grab for his laser screwdriver and revels in his failure, helping him back to his wheelchair, staring into his face, derisively ‘commiserating’ with him – then laughing in sheer delight.

“There you go, Gramps. Oh, do you know? I remember the days when the Doctor – oh, that famous Doctor – was waging a Time War, battling Sea Devils and Axons. He sealed the rift at the Medusa Cascade, single-handed. Phew. And look at him now. Stealing screwdrivers. How did he ever come to this? Oh yeah – me!”

Here’s to many more Masters – future and past.


Next Time… Who could follow that?


[Number 38 has already been published, but its “Next Time…” would simply have been “Happy Easter!”]

Labels: Big Finish, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Jon Pertwee, Made-up DVD Sets, New Beginnings, Paul McGann, Terror of the Autons, The Master, The Plane Makers, Tom Baker

Happy birthday, today, to Doctor Who novelist supreme Terrance Dicks. BBC Books are celebrating with the release of new editions of another six Target Doctor Who novels (after last year’s successful relaunch). I’ve turned to one of Terrance Dicks’ earliest and best-loved books, possibly the first of his that I read, Doctor Who and the Terrance of the Autons: in which the Doctor discovers that the most everyday objects can be the source of a murderous attack; faces a more unearthly attacker that’s part crab, part spider, part octopus; and, for the first time, his rival Time Lord, the Master. And daffodils. What could be better for a wet Spring day?

Like many others, I learned to read – was inspired to learn – on Target Doctor Who books. While the very first I read wasn’t one of Terrance’s, the first Doctor Who I saw on television was (its own novelisation broadcast again on Radio 4Extra just yesterday), and the next three books I can dimly remember saving up my 5p tokens to buy from the three little racks that made up the St Simon’s School Bookshop all were: The Abominable Snowmen, The Web of Fear and, of course, Terror of the Autons. All may have been my second Doctor Who book, and certainly the three together were read and re-read so much that I knew that was the way I’d carry on. So it’s fair to say that Terrance Dicks had a huge impact on literacy as well as on Doctor Who, where he went from lead writer during Jon Pertwee’s time as the Doctor to then write many more Who novels than anyone else, sometimes – perhaps ironically, particularly for those Pertwee stories – making them far more exciting than they were on screen.

Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons is one of those so packed with ideas (and script fixes that he may have missed at the time but thought of later) that it’s been hugely influential on later Doctor Who in its own right, as well as becoming a prime example of the notorious ‘Pertwee Gap’ between the fabulous novels I grew up reading and the patchier TV versions I only saw much later. Like many of Terrance’s best books, it’s based on an original screenplay by Robert Holmes, who Terrance himself says made him rise to his best because Bob’s were simply the best scripts. Pyramids of Mars; Carnival of Monsters; The Auton Invasion; its first sequel, here; all these books showcased that ideal relationship between a scriptwriter with a flair for brilliant dialogue, strong stories and a dab of horror, and a novelist with a tautly readable style, a sense for structure and an understated, laconic wit. Like many of Terrance’s earlier novels, too, not just his enthusiasm but the time he had to write it gives a novel with much more inventive detail and nearly half as many words again (crammed into the same page count!) as when he later became the sole author on the production line.


Unusually for a 1975 Target Doctor Who book, the cover isn’t by Chris Achilleos but Peter Brookes, later to become a top political cartoonist, and it’s by far my favourite of his handful of Who paintings, with its fabulous pop-art spark and the huge, tentacled Nestene monster looming above a tiny radio telescope. It’s one of the covers that’s most startlingly appropriate to the novelisation range – while most took images from the TV serials as their starting points, Brookes read the book and let his imagination soar into a Cthulhoid horror fit for Terrance’s prose, rather than the rather disappointing smudge of light that appears in the climax of the TV serial (and it’s not the only way in which the novel improves that climax; spoilers below at the end of “The Master Takes Over”). Peter Brookes isn’t the only artist for the book, either, with some pretty good internal illustrations from Alan Willow, the most memorable of which are, again, those never shown on TV: the Master haunting Goodge from a skylight (though the artist has plainly paid no attention at all to Goodge’s description); the Master, again, creating an Auton from a coffin of seething plastic (well, never seen on TV until it was borrowed for The Sontaran Stratagem); and Willow’s own take on the giant Nestene, no competition for Brookes’ comic-book fabulousness but again showing that Terrance’s vivid description of the ultimate monster inspired artists as much as it did readers, and that even for such an incredibly cartoony and colourful story as this is on TV, the most memorable mental images remain the ones you imagine. A third artist arrived for a new edition in 1979, and Alun Hood, too, choose to feature that hideous creature only brought to life in the book, building on Brookes’ design to create the most horribly photo-realistic cover painting of the whole Target range, disturbing readers with its glaring eye, writhing tentacle and, above all, its ickily teeth-like suckers [above, clockwise: the original edition; shiny CD audiobook; Alun Hood’s hideous Nestene; back cover of the original, and my oldest battered original copy].

Death at the Plastics Factory

Here’s the passage in the book that most gripped me as a child. It’s the horror of Bob Holmes’ original scene, turned by Terrance Dicks into a crucial establishing moment for the Master, with most of the jokes taken out but one, intriguingly, put in. You can find it on page 45, or in track 4 of the second CD…

“McDermot, a tough, stocky Northcountryman in his fifties, was on the phone in Rex Farrel’s office. A brief tour of the factory had convinced him that Rex’s father should be informed at once. He was talking to him now in a low, urgent voice. ‘It’s true I tell you… aye, that’s right. All the staff’s been dismissed. Regular customers told we can’t supply them. New machinery brought in, a secret research lab. I’m sorry, Mr. Farrel, but I think young Rex has gone right round the bend. Keeps on about this fellow, Colonel Masters. Right, sir, I’ll tell them to hold everything, and that you’re on your way. I’ll wait for you here.’

Rex entered with the Master who was carrying a black plastic bundle.

McDermot slammed down the phone and swung round angrily. ‘You’ll be Rex’s precious Colonel Masters, I take it? Just the man I wanted to see!’

The Master smiled. ‘You are seeing me, Mr. McDermot.’ The angry engineer wasn’t listening. ‘Just what right do you think you’ve got to come marching in here and ruin a decent little family business? Me and Rex’s dad built this place up from nothing. I’ll not stand by and see it all thrown away by a daft kid and some foreign jackanapes with big ideas.’

The Master’s eyes blazed with sudden anger, but he kept his voice quiet and pleasant. ‘You’re being less than fair, Mr. McDermot. The new processes and products I have introduced are truly revolutionary.’ The Master held out the bundle of plastic sheeting over his arm.

McDermot snatched it from him and snorted in disgust. ‘That—revolutionary? It’s the wrong colour, the wrong texture. It’s got a cold, clammy feel...’

He threw the plastic bundle back at the Master in disgust.

The Master caught it. ‘I assure you, you don’t realise its full potential... Allow me to demonstrate.’ He threw the bundle of plastic into a corner, then snapped his fingers. The plastic sheeting began to move and swell, as if alive. McDermot looked on, shaken, as the plastic writhed and grew. Slowly but surely it was taking on the shape of a chair. A squashy, bulgy, black armchair, made of plastic. McDermot snorted. ‘You think you’ll sell that? It’s one of the ugliest things I’ve seen in my life.’

‘It’s very comfortable,’ said the Master smoothly. ‘Try it.’

Somehow McDermot didn’t fancy the idea. There was something very sinister about that squat black shape. ‘No thanks,’ he said, backing away.

With a sudden fierce authority the Master snapped, ‘Sit down, man!’

Without quite knowing why, McDermot lowered himself uneasily into the chair. Its arms felt cold and slithery to the touch. ‘Disgusting stuff, this,’ he muttered. ‘What do you call it?’

The Master smiled coldly. ‘Polynestene!’ he said, and began to laugh. The armchair billowed and surged, and McDermot felt himself sinking lower and lower. He struggled to get up but the plastic seemed to cling to him. His arms and legs were trapped. A tide of cold clammy black plastic rose over his head and swallowed him up, choking off his attempt to scream... The last thing McDermot heard was the Master’s mocking laughter.

Rex looked on appalled as the heaving black shape in the corner swallowed McDermot, completely. He made an instinctive move as if to help the doomed engineer, but the Master held him back. ‘No! I will not tolerate the insolence of primitives.’

The Master snapped his fingers. An Auton appeared in the doorway, gathered up the shapeless black bundle and carried it from the room.

Regretfully, the Master watched the armchair disappear. ‘An amusing little conceit—but rather laborious!’

White and shaking, Rex sank into his chair. ‘It seemed very effective,’ he said.

The Master smiled. ‘But so extravagant, my dear Rex. All very well for my little joke—but for the mass attack, we have better means. Why use yards and yards of precious plastic for a task that can be accomplished by a mere few inches?’

Rex stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘Inches?’

‘The human body has one central weakness,’ said the Master savagely. ‘One which I shall exploit to bring about the destruction of mankind.’”

Yes; the Master is behind penis enlargement spam.

Perversely, of course, this made me long for a blow-up plastic chair. My parents were less impressed, so I had to be content just with pulling the slabs* of our black leather sofa on top of myself and uttering choked cries. It also made me adore the Master as a villain all the more, having been introduced to him in a later incarnation on telly months before I started reading. Still today, some of the Master’s most memorable moments for me aren’t to be found on the telly, but where in the novels he makes a nasty joke at some patsy’s expense and begins to laugh (“Polynestene” here, “Enemy agents” in The Sea Devils). It’s more appropriate, too, for it to be McDermot and not the Doctor who’s given the word “jackanapes” against the Master, with the book’s engineer more plausibly seeing him as an upstart than the TV’s rival Time Lord thinking of him as a naughty monkey.

Some of the jokes that Terrance removes for the book are just bad to start with – a whole sequence of the Doctor bullying a civil servant by being a Tory on TV is one I don’t miss, and is part of making the Doctor less childish and arrogant on the page (most notably by no longer having the Doctor, at the start, singing how a world destroyed was a laugh, nor, at the end, saying how several hundred deaths and nearly half a million more was a big laugh), just as his Master seems more dangerous – while other lost jokes are funnier ones that he clearly thought were in too bad taste for children, sadly. Ironically, without the bad taste jokes and with some lines reinterpreted as anger and given added brutality, he makes the book a far grimmer work than the TV serial, which others might suggest is just as unsuitable for kids (not bowdlerisation but swapping one approach to death for another). I loved it, of course, and while I also now love the outrageous punchline to the version of that scene above found in Episode Two on TV, I think Terrance was probably right to have Rex shocked by the violence in his book, even as the Master (and the reader, and for all his protestations plainly the writer) revels in it. What most shocked me when I at last saw this on screen wasn’t the camp comeback, which is funny, nor the special effect – which, unlike many, is almost as convincing as in the book – but that the Master’s joke plastic name was only in the book. I don’t know why that had always tickled me, yet for some reason it had. Perhaps it’s that it makes the Master laugh, and so has to be funny, but on top of Terrance writing a Master here whose sudden lashing anger scares us and whose outrageous, ludicrously inventive deathtrap amuses appals us, he also gives him a joke that’s funnier than Bob Holmes’. Now, that’s an achievement.

The Terror Begins

Death by armchair wasn’t even one of the most controversial scenes in a story attacked by anti-TV busybodies, the police and even Labour Lords when it was broadcast. A scene with police officers is one of the few that has even more punch on TV; a killer ‘devil doll’ is far more striking when the book’s special effects beam straight into your head; and while penitent, responsible BBC Script Editor Terrance Dicks always says in public that perhaps Bob went a bit far and shouldn’t do it again, children’s novelist Terrance Dicks (no relation) simply wasn’t going to retitle this story ‘Doctor Who and the Slight Goosebumps of the Autons’, so in making the book much better-done he also makes it more frightening from the start.

Though not to the same degree as Malcolm Hulke’s novels, Terrance fleshes out characters and settings with flashes of backstory and internal dialogue here, opening with bullying circus owner Luigi Rossini (née Lew Ross from Hoxton), a greedy, crooked, vain hard man with a shabby circus full of deadbeats, incompetents and “Some, like Tony the strong man, were on the run from the police” (notably, we don’t get ‘illegal immigrants’, so thank you, Terrance for not reading the Daily Mail, and I’ll try to gloss over the doll’s “slitted eyes”), all of whom he exploits in a way that prefigures the story’s wider critique of mass-market consumerism, whose luck seems on the turn thanks to ’flu in a big circus but is actually turning a different way when a gleaming new horse box suddenly appears by the one holding Madame Mariella’s Prancing ponies (“three worn out old nags who could hardly manage a gallop, let alone a prance”)…

New companion Jo Grant, too, gets a good page of introduction, though it’s a shame that, along with softening the Doctor’s character for this story (on screen, as much a git as in The Dæmons), Terrance drops the Brigadier’s put-downs of him. Terrance’s characterisation of Jo is a mix, having more initiative but also made even dimmer (at one unfortunate point internally agreeing with someone who hideously patronises her then still going off against orders after accepting it’s wrong), though at least he greatly expands both the general search of the plastics factories by UNIT agents when it looks like the Nestenes – who can animate any form of plastic – are back, and Jo’s own search of the factories allotted to her, right down to her “tiny, nagging feeling of unease” about the too-helpful Rex Farrel. The Doctor, on the other hand, rubs his chin a lot, thoughtfully, a barbed in-joke for Pertwee’s mannerism when looking about for his lines. And says an awful lot of things “grimly”, giving the feeling Terrance is sternly telling gleeful Bob that, all right, he’ll put in all his grisly deaths, but he draws the line at laughing at them:

“‘You’ve just got to be joking.’
The Doctor said grimly, ‘There’s precious little to joke about, I assure you. That thing’s appallingly dangerous.’”

“‘I think it was someone’s idea of a joke,’ said the Doctor. But there was no amusement in his voice.”

Despite his cuts and his occasionally disapproving tone, though, Terrance does put in some of his own black humour; something that’s much more understated, and which I didn’t find funny as a child but now can’t help smiling at, is the start of Chapter 2, Terrance’s extended shaggy egg story:

“Albert Goodge, a melancholy, balding, bespectacled scientist, drove slowly and cautiously as always along the narrow country lane, plunged in his usual gloom and lost to the beauty of the scene around him. It was a fine day in early summer. Fields and hedges lay bathed in sunshine, birds sang, lambs gambolled; and Albert Goodge worried about the quality of his packed lunch.”

The list of bucolic bliss cracks me up. And it’s actually all a harbinger of death. Goodge, with an egg-like head of his own, is gloomy about everything except the threat that’s going to kill him…

“Goodge sighed and opened his lunch box. His worst fears were confirmed. Eggs again!”

And, again, the bathos is brilliant – he’s in a horror story, and his worst fears are eggs.

“‘I told her only last night,’ he said indignantly. Phillips went on taking readings. ‘Mmm?’

‘“Cut out the boiled eggs, Elsie,” I said. “Quite apart from the effect on my digestion they’re boring to look at.”’
‘Aha!’ said Professor Phillips, who hadn’t heard a word of all this. Goodge was always grumbling about something, and most of his colleagues had stopped listening long ago.”

And at this stage you realise that Phillips is going to be doomed in exactly the same way – what’s he going to criticise Goodge for in a moment? Yet he’s in a listening station, and he’s stopped listening. He loves people bringing it on themselves, does Terrance.

“Philips paused by the door and looked back at his colleague. All around them instruments whirred and clicked. Radio pulses and emissions from the depths of deep space were being monitored and recorded by the giant radio telescope, checked on the computer in an attempt to detect a pattern, a meaning, some clue to the biggest question of all. Was there, somewhere in the galaxy, an intelligence other than man? Here in this tiny cabin they were listening to the voices of the stars. And old Goodge was grumbling about boiled eggs! Phillips shook his head and left the cabin. Closing the door behind him, he started clattering down the metal steps on his way to the main control area.

Albert Goodge, still obsessed with boiled eggs, continued the routine duties that marked the beginning of his shift on the scanner. Above his head, a sort of skylight was set into the roof of the cabin. Had Goodge looked up, he might have caught a glimpse of a dark shape peering down at him. He might even have been able to sound the alarm in time to save his own life. But he didn’t look up.”

And that blood-curdling last line, all foreshadowed by the jokes of him never looking up, always just looking into his lunch box and never to the stars. So the stars stick him there (but you’ll have to read the book or watch the DVD to find out how bad taste Bob Holmes does it).

Another impressively improved sequence is at the circus (despite only a fleeting mention of elephants); on TV, the Doctor’s trip there meanders a little and it becomes easy to spot that he’s pretty much only gone there because Bob wanted to do a circus with paper-thin relevance to the plot. In the book, there’s more compelling characterisation and a more palpable sense of threat. I enjoy the Doctor smugly thinking that if the Master had materialised as something shabby to fit in with the rest of the circus, he’d have taken much longer to find his ‘horse box’, while displaying a glorious lack of self-awareness that it’s his own flamboyant outfit that means he’s easily spotted and followed as he goes around asking frightened circus people if they’ve seen the unfortunate Phillips, who’s since gone missing. Phillips himself is doing the following, as part of if anything a more queasily undignified fate than Goodge – he’s now the sinister clown that’s so shockingly lacking from the TV version. After the Doctor, taken prisoner, manages both to out-butch the strongman and name-drop even in the narration (gee, thanks, Terrance), the Master famously orders Phillips to blow him up with a “Sontaran fragmentation grenade” – bringing them into the series before their first appearance, as well as the TARDIS’ “chameleon circuits” long before they were called that on TV – which Terrance turns into a vividly exciting action sequence with a turn of phrase that’s much-copied, not least by Terrance himself. Among the book’s few flaws, though, is while that a lot of time seems to have been spent on rewriting the script (largely to its benefit), it might have been read through with a fresh eye itself: often, the same word or phrase recurs in very close proximity, as if stuck in Terrance’s head. The most memorable, a sort of Goodge’s revenge, is in this particular murder attempt:

“‘Listen carefully. In a locker just beside you is a small egg-shaped sphere, with a contact button inset into the top. Here is what you must do...’”

“They both stopped talking as the rear doors of the horse-box opened. Still wearing his clown costume, Professor Phillips came down the steps and started walking towards them. His eyes were blank and glassy, and there was an egg-shaped silvery sphere in his right hand. He raised the hand above his head in a throwing gesture. The Doctor put every ounce of authority and power he could into his voice. ‘Professor Phillips! Don’t!’”

At least not until you’ve become a Professor of Spherology and learnt the greatest secret of all spheres – that eggs are a different shape!

Your personal Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons drinking game (remember to steal your wine from a prominent politician, sneering at him for having it while you neck it down) might also include each instant re-use of the words “tremendous” or “grotesque”, or when every explosive device in the galaxy, whatever its provenance, blasts its target into “white ash”. You should probably restrain yourself from tippling to “exultant”, which occurs so often you’ll rapidly find yourself as exultant as a Sea Devil.

The Master Takes Over

Terror of the Autons, both on TV and even more on the page, is so packed with little character moments, japes and flashes of fury for the Master that this story does far more to establish him than you’d expect even from it being his first appearance. There’s even a narrator, in the form of a Time Lord in civil service drag, to tell the Doctor and the audience that he’s a bad ’un and dangerous with it; the book’s narrative voice is at pains to stress the difference between the two renegades, the Doctor’s interference always “on the side of good” and the Master enjoying “death, chaos and destruction for its own sake”.

On screen, Roger Delgado grabs the role and establishes it very effectively, but Terrance makes much more of the book point directly to the Master. He sets up Luigi Rossini as a tough guy to be reckoned with on the very first page, telling us he enjoys being “the Boss”. The repeated self-identification as “the Boss” is entirely to set up what a real Boss or synonym would be. Someone who likes snapping his fingers, once, like a pistol shot, and who Rossini “With a sudden flash of superstitious fear” thinks “looked like the Devil.” After that, when the much weaker Rex Farrel gets his own introduction, trying to carve out his own identity at his father’s plastics factory once his father’s at last retired, you already know he’s not going to be up to it before his internal monologue, too, rings your alarm bells: “At last… he was the boss.” The Master, like the Doctor, doesn’t have such a simple internal monologue that we can be privy to it, and rather than hiding his ego inside his head, introduces himself outright with “I am usually referred to as the Master”, smiling “as if at a private joke”. The joke being that, like you and me as we look at the page, he can read the others’ internal monologues.

Right from the Master’s first scene, when his eyes blaze with anger at Rossini – “You insolent primitive!” – he’s much less playful than on screen, or rather, on a much shorter fuse when his playfulness isn’t instantly humoured or his little attempts on the Doctor fail. On screen, he lightly dismisses these little bungles as small gallantries, but while the book doesn’t take us directly inside his thoughts, it often observes what they must be, usually when he’s covering up. “He was unable to resist boasting, even to such a pitiful audience” (as Rex), and “having twice failed to kill the Doctor, the Master was salving his enormous vanity by pretending he’d planned things that way all along.” Given more bad news, the Master is initially as light as on screen but then, in “bitter anger,” “slammed his fist onto the desk, cracking the heavy mahogany top.” It’s both the playfulness and the savage temper that I remember, and that makes him seem more dangerous on the page (there’s a single moment in Episode Four of the TV serial when his urbanity deserts him and he suddenly, savagely kills someone in his way, which has always been the more powerful for illustrating exactly how I’ve always read him to be). That gives him space to be more urbane when planning the flower tour with a cringing, and flattering Rex, which turns into a rather marvellous travelogue that gives him much more to do in the book’s equivalent of ‘Episode Three’ than the TV’s couple of cameos on a poky set and on bluescreen that week. In the book, it feels like he’s still driving the plot (even if he gets Rex to chauffeur the coach).

Each time the Master’s been reintroduced to the TV series – The Deadly Assassin, Logopolis, Last of the Time Lords – Terror of the Autons has been the source text that the writers have looked to for inspiration. Bob Holmes, to strip him down to his essentials and bring back his meanest and most distinctive weapon; Chris Bidmead, to make him murderously dangerous again, and make use of a radio telescope; Russell T Davies, to add many little references (including to the last two) but crucially, for me, to capture with John Simm’s Master better than any other the same viciously playful streak of that original concept, going from “Ooh, you public menace” to deadly threat. I realise it’s shocking to see Simm’s first appearance as probably the Master’s greatest flowering, compounded by the way that for me Last of the Time Lords is a much stronger script, though I love both writers, with Terror of the Autons seeming weirdly much more in Russell’s style than Bob’s: a selection of vivid pop-culture set-pieces rather than much of a story, and that’s something Russell does better than Bob. This book, especially, is one Russell has certainly read, with elements specific to the novelisation informing the TV series more than thirty years later: Farrel, dismissed and overlooked, attacking the Master and crashing the coach is echoed in Chan’tho; he subverts, of course, the Doctor’s confidence that “He knew the Master would be unable to resist the opportunity to explain his own cleverness”; the Cabinet nearly die en masse because there’s a bowl of the Master’s deadly daffodils on their table; replacing the TV’s “Don’t be trivial” in reply to wondering how the Master gets into UNIT HQ, the book has him proclaim:

“A number of UNIT sentries firmly believe that they have just admitted the Prime Minister!”

Perhaps the most influential idea in the novel, however, through many off-TV stories in between and now to the Mister Moffster, is Terrance’s brilliant time-travel interpretation of the Roman concept of damnatio memoriae. It’s announced by the unhelpful Time Lord at the start’s promise that, were they ever to catch the Master, he would face the severest punishment:

“The Master’s life-stream would be thrown into reverse. Not only would he no longer exist, he would never have existed.”

It’s a more mundane but still striking existential threat that Terrance uses – and here is that spoiler – to greatly improve the story’s climax. Obviously, all three artists for the novel have jumped on one crucial way that Terrance improves that, the creature I mentioned above which is impossible to avoid; but he also significantly rewrites the Master. Ready? Having judiciously prefigured the key moment with a peppering of early scenes in which the Nestene High Command (how do you have that in a group intelligence? Moving swiftly on) start to mistrust and threaten their ally for wasting time and failing in doing it, causing the Master “A spurt of ungovernable rage”, once he goes to open a channel for the full Nestene energy to come through, first they nearly electrocute him to add to his doubts, then the Doctor comes in and warns him that they’ll only turn on him once they’ve won and he’s of no more use to them, and then the Brigadier calmly orders him to go along with the Doctor in shutting down the Nestene gateway or he’ll pump bullets into both his hearts. On TV, the only part of that we get is the Doctor’s warning, which makes the Master seem both a chump and a bit flighty when, after four episodes, it’s enough to make him switch sides on the spot. It’s a shame that Terrance has Jo run and hide here, as otherwise the book wins hands down, right through to the twin codas of the Master’s chilling last encounter with Rex (followed by Terrance’s sardonic eulogy) and the Doctor then expressing only a grudging feeling for his rival before going back to brooding on his exile.

In the Hands of the Autons

Perhaps it’s the climax above all else that makes me see this as perhaps the story Terrance rewrote most significantly for the novel, and that makes me think of its second half as where it really gets going, despite so many memorable moments early on (the chair, the circus, Goodge…). He shifts the structure around rather more, changing one ‘cliffhanger’ to what he clearly thought was a more effective scene to close a chapter on, and makes two big fight sequences exciting – not always easy on paper – with the last one particularly strong in both its telling and its aftermath.

Terrance always writes a good thriller – the crispness of his action scenes is exciting, complete with those Auton guns that fall away at the wrist rather than near the knuckle (as it were). The start of Chapter 7 / Episode Three is vibrant, the UNIT jeep (not a nasty blue saloon) driving up to precipitate a far more exciting battle in the forest than on TV, with both UNIT and Auton casualties, albeit lacking one superb stunt fall. And poor Katy running into a tree, or a rock, or whatever it was. Similarly, the desperate final battle seems for much higher stakes and with far higher casualties. And while the Autons here have a much smaller role in the plot than in The Auton Invasion, much less being made of them as shop window dummies come to life and making them consequently less sinister, the explosion of deadly plastic consumer goods bads that Bob gleefully thinks up mostly make up for them, with Terrance deftly sketching in a much bigger promotional campaign than we could ever see on TV.

“Only the Master, and the Autons, knew that this particular something-for-nothing was the deadly prelude to the second Auton invasion.”

Perhaps the most striking Auton appearance here, though, is only part of one, in a scene that builds terrifically on just a moment from the TV version. Searching the Farrel Factory for clues as to where the Master and the Autons might have gone, the Doctor shows off by opening the safe… Only for the Auton inside it to open fire. The Brigadier chucks in a grenade, the Doctor slams the door closed again… And its severed arm starts thrashing like a snake, “spitting out energy bolts” at them, a shock borrowed since by both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat for the screen, though not yet bettered.

The more tautly directed book also makes it amusingly clear that this is not a road safety lesson – never mind giving a bad example with the police, it features the Doctor and Jo leaping from moving vehicles in two ‘episodes’ running. The best is their escape from the coach, depicted far more excitingly and in far greater detail than some rather confused and limited scenes on screen.

One of the less fêted elements of this novel is that the victims, too, get a quiet look-in. Rex’s bullying father is easier to empathise with here thanks to Terrance softening the news (albeit deliciously broken on screen by the Master) of McDermot’s death into just a cover story about a sudden business trip. You’d think it would be the death of his friend that would make him more sympathetic, but on screen all that means is that Rex, seemingly in shock and cracking up, is just the target of his father having a go at him without the empathy to see it; in the book, Mr Farrel Snr worries that his son’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Mrs Farrel, too, is more successful on the page (rather than in front of her fitted kitchen). Terrance is both straight to the point and understated in deftly sketching in her feelings after bereavement, a rare moment in one of his books that I can instantly feel for, while the Doctor solemnly telling her that her husband was one of the first victims of a kind of war resonates with the return of the Autons three decades later.

The Deadly Daffodils

You thought the picture of me grown up and retouched was scary? Here’s a very early model me, aged 7: “Alexander” still shortened to “Sandy” rather than “Alex”; pre-glasses; hair in mid-shift between curly blond and straight brown; but already a Doctor Who fan, and when everyone else in my class at St Simon’s R.C. Primary School, Hazel Grove, was just getting on with drawing the daffodil, I was wondering if it was going to kill me. And who could blame it, in that outfit?

Doctor Who had obviously made all too great an impact on me very early in life. But, fortunately, pretty much all of that impact was marvellous. Except for the bow tie (no, Matt, I hate to break it to you…). From reading to Richard, life is just better. And unlike my love for Richard, I did eventually learn to love not just daffodils but Doctor Who with a critical eye. So, yes, as I give Terrance his birthday bouquet, he has some reason to be wary, too…

While mostly Terrance’s novel beats TV’s Terror of the Autons hands down, one element that’s definitely inferior in the book is that the Master switches from having a Mark Two dematerialisation circuit to the suggestion that the Time Lords have only had two marginally different TARDISes in their millions of years watching all of time and space. Terrance is clearly making it about the TARDISes themselves as a character point, so that the Doctor in effect sides with the ‘vintage roadster’ against the ‘flashy new model’, but what it gains in ‘moment of charm’ it loses in ‘moment of brain’:

“‘You see my TARDIS is one of the original Mark One’s. Splendid old machine, mind you. Don’t build ’em like that any more. But the Master’s is one of these flashy Mark Two jobs. The two circuits just aren’t interchangeable.’”

Shame about the uncharacteristic Grocer’s Apostrophe, too, but it didn’t harm me as a boy. Terrance’s other books taught me well.

Terrance’s tendency in his Pertwee books most of all is to smooth out any character development, so that the reader can comfortably drop in at any point in the book range and have, say, the Doctor always feeling the same about his exile, always wearing a velvet jacket and always patrician but kind. This occasionally leads to slip-ups such as that on page 79, where Terrance is so familiar with the set-up that he forgets to make it new when it needs to be – Jo has only just met the Doctor and has yet even to see inside the TARDIS, much less believe it works, but when the Doctor plans to slope off:

“She was always a little hurt when the Doctor talked about going away again.”

Both the “always” and “again” being for the first time, as far as she’s concerned.

Terrance’s – and the sub-editor’s – biggest cropper comes on page 104, after a deadly daffodil attacks Jo and a whole chapter after the doll has, empirically observed to have been activated by heat, as the Doctor exclaims on page 92…

“‘What about that poor Mr. Farrel?’ asked Jo.
“‘The doll probably works in the same way as the flowers. I expect he was murdered because he was threatening to cause trouble.’”

A page which might continue:

‘“But, surely, Doctor, you’ve already told me that the doll works in a completely different way to the flowers?”
‘The Doctor rubbed his chin thoughtfully and looked around for his prompt card.’

The book as originally pressed occasionally looks a little cramped in its layout to fit 34,000 words into space for 25,000, crashing in new chapters on the same pages as others end and often lacking even a blank line between scenes, though that does add to the feel of breathless excitement. Even the novel’s closing lines get an ad for other books stuffed in underneath them, which is a bit much! And yet who cares, when the words are so much fun and they have those pictures wrapped round them?

Prisoners of the Master

Although Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons isn’t yet one of the new reprints, an unabridged reading by Geoffrey Beevers was released on CD in 2010, and as with his Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, this later Master has rather a fabulous voice. Though he has a fair range for the characters, he’s usually most effective as the engaging and very slightly creepy narrator – except, of course, that it’s again marvellous to hear more of his silky Master, who at last gets to say “Polynestene”.

There’s more than the reading to these CDs, though. As ever, the audiobook misses the Doctor Who Theme, despite a jolly little tune at the end which, charmingly if inappropriately, segues into the TARDIS dematerialisation noise, a BBC sound that they can afford. There’s considerable development from the early audiobooks, now with far more of their own added music, mostly quite effective though occasionally overwhelming the lines, and sound effects that vary in effectiveness from an echo on the Master’s hypnotism to some rather overdone paper-shuffling and over-literal “pistol shots”.

Another happy development is that they’ve added a ‘third page’ to this one’s folded booklet, thankfully, which means its reproductions of Alan Willow’s interior illustrations (while not large) are no longer postage-stamp-sized as they were in earlier releases. It makes it all the more of a shame that their picture of Alun Hood’s horrific Nestene second edition is still tiny, and hidden within the jewel case.

The End of Round One

Most novelisations of stories from this Doctor Who season (the Eighth, in 1971) are highly praised, and I’m solidly with that – most, too, are for me some way ahead of their TV versions. In both the books – where both The Doomsday Weapon and The Dæmons are among the best they ever did – and the TV series – where I’d plump for The Dæmons and The Mind of Evil – I sometimes overlook Terror of the Autons slightly now, yet each time I come to it, in either version, I tend to enjoy it enormously, if not faultlessly. And when I first started reading Doctor Who books, aged five, the crisp pace, inventive plot and the fantastic Master throughout were all exactly that. It was a long time before I starting thinking maybe other writers gave more character than Terrance, or that the plot of this one goes all over the shop, or that the Master was mightily overused that year – the last, certainly, fair in criticism of some stories but never for this, still the benchmark for his character. This story was still brilliant when, a few years later, Doctor Who Magazine started up and showed those fabulous photos of the Pertwee era, still for me unbeatable for, ah, stills, and the best of the lot surely the four main characters posing dramatically with the TARDIS out at the circus. I loved the picture of one of them so much that I drew them myself from it, several times. I bet you can guess which.

When I was a boy, Terror of the Autons was without a doubt the best story of Season 8 and one of my favourites of my early books. And sometimes it’s just a pleasure to revisit this story, and that feeling. Thank you, Terrance.




*Apparently the proper term for the big soft square bits that you put over the frame of your sofa or armchair and form the back or seat that you sit on is just “cushion”. But that sounds like the smaller ‘throw’ or ‘scatter’ cushion that’s more of a decoration or a back support. Yes, it took me a lot more online work to try and find the word for a ‘boxed cushion’ than it did to check any of the Doctor Who bits, both because I’m far more of an expert on Who than upholstery, and because it turns out that the vocabulary of upholstery sites is a bit cruddy. They needed to read more Terrance Dicks as children.

Labels: Books, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Jon Pertwee, Matt Smith, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Personal, Pictures, Reviews, Terror of the Autons, The Brigadier, The Master