A strange girl who knows far more than she should about the past – and the future… Two worried teachers whose curiosity leads them to a deserted junk yard, an extraordinary police box and a mysterious traveller known only as the Doctor… A fantastic journey through Space and Time ending in a terrifying adventure at the dawn of history… DOCTOR WHO AND AN UNEARTHLY CHILD
THE BEGINNING OF A LEGEND
Like many of our readers I first encountered Hartnell, Troughton and the early Pertwee stories through the medium of the Target Novelisations. Memories of musty libraries, trawling second hand bookshops, and reading with a torch under the pillow come flooding back.
An Unearthly Child was a particularly exciting release to my twelve year old self. It was after all the very first Doctor Who story and I knew so very little about it, save from the briefest of synopsis in Piccolo’s The Making Of Doctor Who book. It was also written by my then favourite Who author, Terrance Dicks whose books were so readable I could complete them in a night or two (as long as the batteries on my torch held out). And to top it all it even had a foil logo on the cover, the first of its kind (it would be followed by The Five Doctors).
Published in October 1981, it was a sparse year for the novels due to the Writers Guild strike. However, I for one didn’t really notice due to the need to catch up on previous releases. John Nathan-Turner pushed for this one in order to tie in with November’s Five Faces Of Doctor Who repeat run (the first of its kind) and I distinctly recall feeling a sense of privilege at having read the novel before the repeat transmission, and even attempting to read it along with the broadcast.
Priced £1.25 I purchased this one from WHSmith’s in Rhyl, North Wales on our regular family holiday using summer spending money, sacrificing a couple of rides at the fair for a journey of a lifetime at least in my imagination. Not able to wait to get back to the caravan that night, I started chapter one whilst my brother rode the ghost train and whizzed around on the waltzer. At 128 pages with reasonably large print, it isn’t a long read and fitted the standard format of the books as the time. Terrance Dicks was by then almost too good at writing them, churning each book out at an alarming speed. He recalls that this one along with the novelisation of his own The Five Doctors were the easiest to write. However, it is a more satisfying read than say The Robots Of Death.
I used to rate the targets when I first read them and my rather battered copy has my scribbled three stars on the back (out of a possible five). Thirty three years later and I’d probably give it a similar score.
The chapter headings are always good fun and range from chapter one’s story specific “The Girl Who Was Different” to the final chapter’s corny and generic “Escape Into Danger.” Reading the targets, I enjoyed guessing at what point in the narrative the television cliffhangers kicked in. An Unearthly Child is structured around the same four part roughly equal division, with each episode divided into three chapters so that the cliffhangers are at the end of chapters three, six and nine respectively.
In this novelisation Dicks sticks fairly faithfully to the scripts as broadcast but there are plenty of extra or altered lines. At times he consciously makes Ian out to be ungrammatical in his speech patterns, perhaps reacting against the all too proper English of the original scripts. He keeps true to the 60s setting of the first episode, adding an explanatory line to younger readers about pre-decimalisation currency and even the individual old coinage values.
But it is Dicks’ character descriptions that are the most fun. Poor Barbara is described as having “a face that would have been even prettier without its habitual expression of rather mild disapproval.” (p12). William Hartnell’s doctor is described as being like a “family solicitor from some nineteenth century novel”. (p33). Susan’s alien qualities receive the most apt of descriptions through the eyes of Chesterton “Her speech was almost too pure, too precise and she had a way of observing you cautiously all the time, as if you were a member of some interesting but potentially dangerous alien species. There was a distant, almost unearthly quality about her…” (p18)
The heavy morality tale element of Coburn’s original script, with its focus on leadership styles and how best to build a community, is somewhat downplayed in the novelisation. Dicks stresses instead the horrific elements, something he had first noticed when researching for the book. The culture of the cavemen is narrated with a focus on their brutality and Dicks storytelling is evocative enough to make his younger readers recoil at some of the barbarism displayed. Old Mother is brilliantly characterised as a person to be as equally feared as Za. But it is all told in a very safe manner, with the focus on adventure. Chapter 9s opening account of the attack of Za’s fight with the sabre toothed tiger is suitably action packed and impossible to convey so well in a 60s TV studio.
“As the tiger hurtled through the air towards him, Za seized his only possible chance. He ran, not back but forwards, under the attacking beast, and swung his great stone axe with all his strength at the creature’s side.
He felt the axe-head thud home. The tiger screamed in rage and pain. Its while weight dropped full upon him, bearing to the ground.
Za tried to wrench back his axe for a killing blow at the skull, but only the handle came free. The axe was broken….
To the Doctor and the others, everything seemed to happen in a blinding flurry of speed. They saw the great beast spring, bearing the caveman to the ground.. They heard the tiger scream…
In a flash of yellow fur, it broke free and disappeared into the forest, leaving the blood-covered form of the caveman stretched out in the moonlit clearing.”
Dicks trademark lines feature in abundance including the tried and tested TARDIS description - “there was a wheezing, groaning sound, quite unlike the roar of any beast” But this repetitive familiarity is a reassuring hook to the young readers familiar with his work.
The quintessential Dicks novelisation, Doctor Who And An Unearthly Child is a fun though undemanding read, dialogue based with the briefest of exposition and almost no insight into the motivations and thoughts of the characters. It is worlds apart from Whitaker’s earlier novelisation of the next story The Daleks.
This article is the fifth in our new “Story by Story” series running all this week celebrating An Unearthly Child. DWW welcomes all submissions and pitches on the theme throughout the week at [email protected]
In future weeks we shall be celebrating The Daleks (Oct 27 – Nov 2), Inside the Spaceship (Nov 3 – 9), Marco Polo (Nov 10 – 16), The Keys of Marinus (Nov 17 – 23), The Aztecs (Nov 24 – 30), The Sensorites (Dec 1 – 7) and The Reign of Terror (Dec 8 – 14).
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