Backlisted - Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius by Terrance Dicks

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius (1977) by Terrance Dicks is the much-loved book featured in this episode of Backlisted. Joining John and Andy to discuss the life and career of a hugely influential and prolific author - and the history of the Target novelisations of Doctor Who stories, which between them are estimated to have sold over 13m copies - are two writers who are both enthusiastic fans and bona fide experts: broadcaster Matthew Sweet and returning guest Una McCormack. We also take a look at The Gifts of Reading, the recently-published anthology to which Andy has contributed a memoir (on Terrance Dicks), alongside new essays from Philip Pullman, Robert Macfarlane, Candice Carty-Williams, S.F. Said and more, proceeds from which go to the international literacy charity Room To Read.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 8'36 - The Gifts of Reading by Robert McFarlane 14'50 - Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius by Terrance Dicks* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. hello and welcome to backlisted the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us on the desolate wastes of the planet Karm, surrounded by the shattered remains of spaceships in a valley fringed by steep mountains. We're making our way to a grim building at the valley's end as a storm rages overhead and our path is illuminated by flashes of lightning.

I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today are two doctors, Dr Una McCormack and Dr Matthew Sweet. Matthew Sweet is a writer, broadcaster, cultural historian and presenter of the BBC radio programmes Sound of Cinema, Freethinking and The Philosopher's Arms. He has judged the Costa Book Award, edited Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White for Penguin Classics and was series consultant on the Showtime Sky Atlantic series Penny Dreadful. His books include Inventing the Victorians, Shepperton Babylon, and most recently,

Operation Chaos, the Vietnam deserters who fought the CIA, the brainwashers, and themselves, which was published by Picador in 2018. Pleasingly, last time I saw Matthew Sweet was when I bumped into him at a Matthew Sweet concert. True, isn't it? And he was in the company of Albert Di Petrillo, the commissioning editor at BBC Books, who commissions the Doctor Who range and who I spoke to just yesterday so he could bring

me up to date on a few key matters. So if you listen to this, Albert, hello. And was it Albert who persuaded you to go and see Matthew Sweet? It was his idea i've always thought that it would be a good a good idea uh to be in the presence of matthew sweet mainly because i assume that he gets as as many communications well he might i don't know he get i get occasionally get tweets saying really love that concert you gave um in the uh in the dew drop in in nebraska and i would say it's very charming of you to say so. But I assume he gets a bit of, you know,

odd remarks about things that happened in the 19th century. Was there any Blinovich limitation effect? I think we didn't get too close. So we didn't short out the time differential or the kind of the nominative differential, whatever it would have been. But I did think, should I go and talk to him? And I thought, well, what on earth would I say? Hello, I'm Matthew Sweet.

Are there as many Matthew Sweets as there are Andy Millers? No, there are far more Andy Millers. John Lloyd was going to do a talk show called The John Lloyd Show and he was just going to interview other people called John Lloyd. I mean, some of them are obviously famous, but some of them not famous. Quite a good idea. Dave Gorman did that, didn't he?

He did, yeah. Because he did write down Dave Gorman. Yeah. This Matthew Sweet, not the other... Well, we don't know about the other one, but this Matthew Sweet... You booked the wrong one. Come on, admit it.

You just booked the wrong one. Yeah. You're going to ask me to sing Evangeline and talk about dolls with big eyes aren't you yeah why don't you follow up girlfriend properly uh this matthew sweet is also a notable doctor who fan and has written several doctor who audio plays and short stories including one in the doctor who target story book which was published by bbc books last year the last volume of doctor who fiction to which terence dicks himself contributed a doctor who story as did our second guest today una mccormack welcome back una oh and can i just say albert has given us a world doctor who exclusive that we can announce on backlisted

towards the end of the show so keep listening who fans who may have joined us for the first time because we've got something special coming up near the end. Una McCormack is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling science fiction writer who specialises in TV tie-in fiction, particularly Star Trek and Doctor Who. How many different Doctors

have you written so far, Una? Oh, crumbs. I'm getting quite close to a full house, actually. I've done one, two, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. Crikey. No, I've not done ten. I've done nine. I've not done ten.

Yeah. So, yeah. Have you got a book coming out soon? You have, haven't you? I do, yeah. I've got a Star Trek book out, sort of now-ish, about Janeway, if you like Voyager. And I've got a Doctor Who book out in December,

which is the end of the Time Lords victorious saga called All Flesh is Grass, which is quite hard to say with my Lancashire accent. All Flesh is Grass. You're saying it the proper way. There's no other way of saying that. Yeah, Ass is Grass, as we were calling it and which doctor is that 30 no uh that's uh eight nine and ten yes so i ticked off another lot of them yeah with this book so and for civilians which doctors are those well if they're played by actors you know uh paul mcann, Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant are the human forms behind those.

Una has taught creative writing at university level and continues to mentor writers, particularly of genre fiction. She is chair of the editorial board for a new initiative with Goldsmiths Press to publish intersectional feminist science fiction. And of course, previously on Backlisted, she has talked about Deep Breath, Georgette Heyer, episode 30, Anita Bruckner, episode 49, J.R.R. Tolkien, episode 71, Russell Hoban, live on stage, episode 98, and a couple of months ago, William Golding, episode 114.

And a couple of months ago, William Golding, episode 114. Now, look at the range of that. Una needs to start referring to backlisted subjects by number only, because the real backlisted fans will love that. Oh, yes, I remember covering 98 and 114. Anyway, I think it would be fair to say that Una is a backlisted stalwart. It would. Now, in case you hadn't already guessed, the book we're planning to discuss is a Doctor Who book, specifically the 1977 Target novelisation

of the 1976 TV story Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius by Terence Dix. So to understand why we've chosen this among the hundreds of target books we need a bit of background to which i'm looking to you andy yes thanks john the first book that i ever read cover to cover was doctor who in the brain of morbius and i got it out of the library the week it was published in 1977 and we went to visit my auntie hilda and uh well after I've been in to say hello I was allowed to go back to the car and read my book and that's what I did all afternoon I read it in one go and so it holds a very sentimental place in my heart as do many other of the Doctor Who books published by Target books over 150 many of which were written by Terence Dix.

And I've written about the influence that my love of those particular books and Terence's writing in those books. I've written about what that gave me as a child reader. And also about, you know, I wasn't alone in that. Thousands of children, tens of thousands of children will have read those books in the 70s, 80s and right through to the present day. And Terence is a figure, as we'll talk about, of huge importance in the cultural literary life of this country since the 1970s. But he only rarely gets talked about in the round as a writer, as a writer of books. And I thought, well, we're a books podcast and we know people who can divide their time between both Doctor Who and books and other subjects. So why don't we convene to talk about Terrence? And my essay about Terrence Dix

has been published in a new book called The Gifts of Reading, which came out in September. Essays on the joys of reading, giving and receiving books, all the money from which goes to charity. So before we talk about Terence Dix and about The Brain of Morbius, John, what have you been reading this week? As it turns out, Andy, I've been reading a book called The Gifts of Reading. Oh, that's so kind of you. Which does indeed have the excellent essay, which I won't dwell on, that you've written,

called Andy Miller and the Brain of Terence Dix. It's a lovely collection, I have to say, for anybody who reads. I know a lot of backlisted listeners participated recently when we asked them about the kind of books that they'd like to give. You've basically got a lot of authors attacking that question, but also looking at the idea of the gift in that sort of Lewis Hyde way, the anthropologist way, of the gift economy. There's something wonderful about giving a person a story. I think it's old, I think it was Bertrand, maybe Bernard Shaw, who said, if I give you a story and you give, you know, we each give

other stories, we end up, we both end up with two stories. It's not like giving somebody an apple. And that's sort of the way the book proceeds. I think the book was inspired by Robert McFarlane's essay, The Gifts of Reading, where he wrote beautifully about being inspired by a friend of his who he was teaching with in China. And then he got given the gift of Patrick Lee Firmers, the time of gifts about his amazing walk through Europe. So it starts with a beautiful Macfarlane essay and then you work through writers from all over the world, Candice Carty-Williams writing a really lovely essay in a way that the nice thing about the book is it goes from people who are, it goes from writers writing about the books that turn them onto reading.

She does that beautifully. But there's also a brilliant scene. Basically, her sister, who doesn't read, is given all the Mallory Blackman books signed. Not only signed, she thinks, if they're signed, I can nick them and read them myself, but they're actually dedicated to her sister. And she said that the pain of that has lived with her through her life. So you've got that, you've got a wonderful essay by Roddy Doyle

on discovering Jeff Dyer's book, Braadsword, Calling Braadsword, which I've read is a lovely small book. And he talks about how that he gives that book to lots of people in his life, particularly people he thinks don't read because they do watch movies. So there's a lot of that, I suppose, in the way that you do in your essay in there, Andy, about it's not just about reading. There's a lot about reading. There's a lovely essay by Jackie Morris about the importance of libraries. There's a wonderful, I thought I might, there's a marvellous bit of Michael Ondaatje on Toni Morrison. There's a lovely Max Porter essay where he keeps you guessing until the very last line what the book is.

It is the small, important, powerful book that he gives to people to get them to think differently about the world. Yes, Max, who has been on Backlisted a couple of times. And there's also essays here by Philip Pullman, who we did the Anatomy of Melancholy with, and S.F. Saeed, who came on to talk about Alan Garner. with an SF Saeed who came on to talk about Alan Garner. I like, I just tell you, there's one little, I thought I might read just to give people a flavour, Andy, a little bit from the Iranian writer Dina Niari's work where she arrives in Oklahoma. And I just thought it captured the spirit of the book, but also I think the spirit of the liberation

that books represent for people. In Oklahoma, where we were granted asylum, my first and best gift from an American was a library card arranged for me by our sponsor, Mary Jean, who at nearly 60 wore tube tops and drank blue slushies and shopped for hairspray. Mary Jean told me that I could take home 30 books at a time and she let me loose with hours to spend among the stacks.

The gift, she thought, was time and access to words so that my English would improve. In fact, the English was easy. I was young. I learned it in no time. The real gift was the permission, the trust. In Iran, we weren't allowed to read just anything. Many books were banned, and my mother monitored everything we read. She was religious and strict. To be set free inside a library, to build a pile of books without having my choices checked, this was my first true taste of freedom. And because I was driven by all that was uncensored, my tastes became eclectic and strange. One week I liked Native American folklore, the kind with tortured ghosts and inexplicable skinnings. The next week, stories of cults and witchcraft,

witch trials, burnings. The next week, tales of troublesome puberty. The next, sexually charged kidnappings. All these things I had to hide from my mother. I had dark taste. She covered her own dark patches with treacle and religion and surface good deeds she cooked for everyone she only read the bible and medical books and i just like that idea that it's that little secret escaping thing that everybody does as a reader you've got doors open and you're free that sense of freedom it's it's a really beautiful anybody who loves books and reading ought to buy, read and support this book. Yeah, I should say a bit about

the proceeds from this book go to a charity called Room to Read, which was founded in 2000. It's a non-profit organisation which has transformed the lives of millions of children in low-income countries, mostly in Asia and Africa,

focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. And it's become an influential leader in the field of local language, the children's local language book development. So they've published more than a thousand titles in 40 languages around the world. And they think they've reached 20 million children across Bangladesh, Cambodia, Grenada, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Zambia and more. So if you want to read about reading and you want to give some money to charity that does brilliant work around the world with reading and you want to find some really good essays,

plus one with some jokes about Croydon in it, then this book is in the bookshops now. It's called The Gifts of Reading, and it's published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. It's great, and it's full of brilliant... I scribbled down about ten books that people talked about that I hadn't read and want to pursue. So for people who are looking for recommendations, it's full of them.

Let's pick this up again shortly. Would anyone like to describe to the listeners what's just happened? Well, we heard the deadly dulciber of Dudley Simpson there, I think. the deadly dulciber of Dudley Simpson there, I think, narrating something of the landscape of the planet Karn, a windswept planet, a planet with very practical streaks of lightning embedded somewhere into its ceiling. And we see, I suppose, a scene of carnage, really, don't we, Una? We see a very excellent bit of Doctor Who costume recycling as well. We do, yeah.

We see a fine creature about whom we learn a great deal in the book. And what did that squeak betoken that we heard there? His head is getting chopped off, which is proper good BBC decapitation there, proper squelch, the poor creature. Poor Chris has been for the chopper and that's what five seconds that we get there um terence in the in a manner known to many of us on a tight deadline with a high word count spins three pages of incredible prose i think in a bit you're gonna you're gonna read us something of that, aren't you?

Yes, I certainly am. So we're talking about the novelisation of the story from which that music comes. The Brain of Morbius, novelised as Doctor Who and The Brain of Morbius, and as is traditional on Batlisted. Let me ask Matthew first. I mean, can you remember watching The Brain of Morbius or can you remember reading The Brain of Morbius? I remember both very, very distinctly, really, because it's one of Doctor Who's strangest and

nastiest stories. So it had a strong effect and I think it was also repeated. So it's kind of embedded in my mind more firmly than most. But I do remember reading the novelisation as well, and it's very bright yellow cover. And I can remember reading it in bed in Hull in the year it came out. And I also, just as I say this, I can remember something of the circumstances I was reading in it, because I remember there is a reference to the Sargasso Sea in the story, because the planet Khan has this magnetic effect and through the strange influence of its inhabitants, it draws spaceships to it and makes them crash. And so it's described as the Sargasso Sea of spaceships. And I can remember calling my grandmother up, who must have been babysitting that night, and instead of being asked, can I have a glass of water?

She got asked what the Sargasso Sea was. And did that colour your reading of Jean Rees many years later? It totally did, yes. The Sargasso Sea of Cannes is much wider, in fact, than the one of Jean Rees. Jean Rees and the Sargasso Sea of Cannes. That's the adventure we all want to see. Una, when did you first...

We're going to say you're significantly younger than us. I'm slightly younger than you. Don't overstate it. I'm a little bit... Okay, you're significantly younger than us. I'm young enough not to remember Pertwee, which I think is a sort of distinguishing. And do you remember this story being on telly?

No, I must have been four, which I think is just, I mean, I almost certainly watched it. I had much older siblings, so I was practically feral and just watched what they watched. So it was definitely on, but I don't remember it. But what I do distinctly remember is sitting cross-legged in Eccleston Library, St. Helens, and the first shelf of the uh the kids section down at the bottom uh that bottom shelf was was D uh and in particular it was Dix and Dickinson and I distinctly remember sitting there reading pretty much from one end to the other and before I ask about the target novelizations in general I'd like to ask Mitchinson, how old were you when you first read Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius?

I was 57 years old. And can I just say, I feel I want my childhood back. I feel like I want to go back now to being sort of eight or nine. I don't know why I didn't read any of the novelizations. I was a keen fan of the show. I think maybe even had some annuals back in the 70s. But I remember Troughton. I remember, I think, the earliest ones. I remember the terrifying Cybermen, which I think was his last story. And I remember the Abominable Snowman as well. But you said a very poignant thing to me,

where you said you moved to New Zealand, didn't you, when you were 12 so yeah that was it that was bang there was no we just ended so it's it's been very it's very wrapped up for me in a sort of nostalgia for that that particular bit of my childhood and feeling that I'd sort of lost it and we have a running thing on that listed but you actually said to me and and with all due sincerity having never read any of these books and you've read like about half a dozen haven't you i have i'm i'm now officially addicted i mean i literally crack they are like crack the only thing is i wish they were a bit longer but what is terence dicks he is without a shadow of a doubt, Andy. And with no irony and no side eye, a master storyteller.

He just is. He just is. He exactly is, listeners. We finally found one. He can do in a page what it would take lesser storytellers, several chapters. I mean, he's extraordinary. Okay, so we're going to talk in a minute about what the Target books represented for children in the 70s and for Doctor Who fans since then. But I thought we ought to hear a bit of the storytelling mastery we've just been talking about. So this is an excerpt from the opening chapter of Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius. And we've got a special guest here to read it for us.

The Changing Face of Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius, and we've got a special guest here to read it for us. The Changing Face of Doctor Who. The cover illustration of this book portrays the fourth Doctor Who. Me. A wheezing, groaning sound filled the night air of Cannes, merging the occasional rumblings of thunder. A blue shape materialised out of the air. In outward form, it was a police box of the kind once used in a country named England, on a distant planet called Earth.

Inwardly, it was something very different, a space-time craft called the TARDIS. The door opened, and a very tall, very angry man sprang out. He was casually dressed in a loose, comfortable jacket and trousers, with a battered, broad-brimmed hat jammed on to a tangle of curly hair. An extraordinarily long scarf was wound round his neck. He shook his fist at the lowering night sky and shouted, All right, come on out, just show yourselves, I dare you. A slender, dark-haired girl followed him out of the TARDIS. She was carrying a big torch which she shone round the unfriendly-looking landscape.

She shuddered, not very favourably impressed by what she saw. Nodding towards the TARDIS, she interrupted the doctor's tirade. Why can't it just have gone wrong again?' The Doctor whirled round indignantly. "'What?' "'The TARDIS. After all,' added Sarah unkindly, "'it wouldn't exactly be the first time, would it?' Miracle of technology though it was, the TARDIS did have an undeniable tendency to be erratic. Take its present shape, for example. The TARDIS did have an undeniable tendency to be erratic. Take its present shape, for example. The TARDIS was supposed to change its appearance to blend in with the surroundings.

In a forest it should look like a tree. Here it should have taken on the appearance of one of the surrounding rocks. Unfortunately, this Chameleon mechanism had long ago jammed, and the TARDIS now arrived on alien worlds in the constant guise of a London police box. This was only a minor inconvenience. More serious were the undoubted faults in the TARDIS's guidance circuitry. Although it could travel in space and time, the TARDIS had an awkward habit of delivering its passengers to the wrong planet, or the wrong century. God, that's marvellous. We should just give over the rest of this hour to that, really. But anyway,

Chameleon is now canon. Well, it is, isn't it? Tom's commitment to pronouncing it that way goes back decades, because in one of Terence's scripts, The Horror of Fang Rock, he says it exactly that way to the bafflement of everybody but him, I think. So Terence died in 2019 and I saw you tweeting about it and very poignantly. And you were saying these books meant so much to me when I was growing up and I've carried them everywhere with me and I hope I never lose them. They're a big part of me could you sum up for people why those books are so important to uh let's say to Doctor Who fans in the first instance well I think to Doctor Who fans they were important because they were

Doctor Who for most of the time uh you saw these stories on television and of course if you were if you were late home, you missed them. And that was that. And they could seem, I think, sometimes like half-remembered dreams, the actual experience of watching them on television. But the novelization materialized them. And it made it possible to reenter those dreams through the wonderful, transparent constructions of Terence's prose uh and I can remember they were they were very very important to me and for a long time I think probably for stretches I might have gone I don't know like six months or more than or a year really

without reading anything other than the words of Terence Dick as a child and I can remember an exercise at school which I suppose we must have been I I don't know, I've been seven or eight, I think. And the teacher, Mr. Waterworth, a man whose name still poisons my mouth as I say it, who was probably only in his 30s and who was a terrible bully and who I'm now going to tell you pulled a chair out from under me because I couldn't say my three times table. pulled a chair out from under me because I couldn't say my three times table. And it's an event that marks me in a way that his other reaction to me marked me. And that was when we were asked what our favourite authors were. I said Terence Dix and he wouldn't write it down on the form because he said it wasn't a proper book.

And where are you now, Mr. Waterworth? Well, if he and his lawyers are listening, I've sat outside his house. Yes, exactly, Waterworth. But the thing is, you know, this is all part of my strong feeling about Terence, is that Terence's strengths as a writer, both as a television and film writer, and as a writer for children,

as a writer, both as a television and film writer, and as a writer for children, are obscured by the gigantic success of this range of books. They're estimated to have sold 13 million copies, 13 million copies of a range of books, of which Terence wrote approximately 60, slightly more than that, I think. And Una, let me ask you you so we're talking about the brain of morbius and we've talked to matthew about reading it as a child and what it meant to doctor who fans because they couldn't see the tv series and so the books were their their main way in is this a children's book um i i think it is but i think it's doing several things it's got its eye on the child who is reading it alone. And it also perhaps has an eye on where that child will be by the end of the book. And part of what he's doing in the course of that book, I think, is helping you become a slightly more sophisticated reader. So first of

all, they're really good reads. Yeah, you're kind of propelled through them. They're not souped up scripts. So, you know, I've the fastest I've written a Doctor Who book is 21 days. OK, so I don't know. I don't know how quickly he was turning these around, but he doesn't just dump the dialogue on the page. What he does is he writes prose narrative. He is translating these. He's adapting them. prose narrative he is translating these he's adapting them so and matthew terence's prose in these books what would you say are the hallmarks of the prose absolute clarity really i think absolute clarity and you're never really in doubt about about what's happening it takes you into the world of the story unflashy and humble i. I found an interview with Terence that he gave in the early 80s to a paper in Northern Ireland where he was there for a literary festival and he was setting out. And really what he says there is really exactly what Una was saying. He

said, what young people really hate is to be pushed aside. They don't like being told this is grownupsups' business. What I am talking about is a sort of kid's lib. A lot of people who write children's books have a tendency to preach or to moralise, which children spot and resent immediately. Like adults, children in the end want interesting, exciting and enjoyable stories with pace and movement. Never, never talk down to them. So when this story was commissioned for TV, Terence delivered the scripts. And I know you've got a thing to read us related to this. And then the scripts are rewritten by the script editor of Doctor Who at that time,

whose name was Robert Holmes, amidst some disagreements, which we'll talk about. And then Terence is given the task of novelising his own deeply, dramatically altered script. So here's a clip from 2009. First of all, we're going to hear the Doctor Who writer, Gareth Roberts, talking about the novelisation of the brain of Morbius, and then Terence saying what he was trying to achieve. With the novelisation of the brain of Morbius,

Terence had written the original script, then Robert Owens took it away and rewrote it, and it went out under a pseudonym. Terence presumably could have taken the opportunity to change it back or fiddle around with it again, but he didn't. I think this probably goes back again to the circumstance that in the 70s, we didn't have videos. So Terence wanted to give a faithful recreation of what had been on TV. When I came to novelise it I had no temptation at all to go back and novelise my original scripts, the script the way it had been. I was novelising the brain of Morbius that the viewer had seen on the screen and that's what I gave them. Una, I think you've got, haven't you, Terence's little note to Bob Holmes?

I do, yes, in the wonderful biography of Richard Millsworth's biography of Robert Holmes. So I think it's nice to read this cold and not know any context about it. So this is his letter, Terence's letter back to Bob. Thank you for the scripts, which I've now read through. Needless to say, you've done a grand job in the time available. However, I can't help feeling that the removal of the robot, the central pivot of the story, has left a more conventional story with the plot sometimes a bit thin on the ground, and you've moved a bit further towards horror than I'd care to myself. on the ground, and you've moved a bit further towards horror than I'd care to myself.

All that's debatable. What isn't debatable is that these scripts don't contain a line of my dialogue and just aren't written by me. So I'll have to ask you to take my name off them, if only to avoid breaking the Trades Description Act. Hope this doesn't add to your problems too much. I'll leave it to you to devise some bland pseudonym. Well, yes, Robert Holmes having a sense of humour and the relationship between these two men being very deep, I think. He put it out under a bland pseudonym, literally. The episode went out, written by Robin Bland, a robbed plot and bland according to the man who originally... Well, no, no, it's not the story that was bland at all, but it's a kind of self-effacement. And I think this is a really important aspect of Terence Dix's writing and his personality too, the humility of it, the humility of not choosing to restore anything to a story

that was rewritten in a way that, you know, that's a nice diplomatic letter. He was horrified, actually, when he discovered it had been taken out of his hands because he was on holiday and he wasn't around for the rewrites. And he thought he delivered it and it would all be fine. And it wasn't. So I think you see that here, the generosity of the man there, too, and the humour of the relationship between him and Robert Holmes. And if, Matthew, if one talked to Terence, you know, we've seen him interviewed. He was interviewed a lot towards the end of his life. What were the things that he prided himself on

in relation to what you were just talking about? You know, he would not see himself as an auteur, would he? That was not how he saw his strength. No, he didn't see himself as an ideas man either. He saw himself as a kind of craftsperson, really, I think. And that's absolutely what he was. And somebody who had fun and he wanted other people to have fun.

He wanted stories to be exciting. In some ways, I think he, I don't know how deep this was. And I would have loved the opportunity to probe it a bit. I do the interviews for the Doctor Who Blu-ray box sets. And we had Terrence in our sights and we're asking him for a proper sit down interview where we could really

actually go into the non-Doctor Who stuff as well. Because I think one of the burdens of being a big contributor to Doctor Who is that you get asked about it all the time and nothing else. But I would have loved to have known more about his his early life which is rather sketchy I've got some some sort of theories and thoughts about it that I would have really wanted to put to him and the culture that shaped him um both in his background and and academically that that gave him those those um abilities allowed that talent to come out and he saw himself as somebody if I can remember seeing him interviewed and him saying, you know, when they come to write my epitaph, I'd like to say it's something like, he fixed it. He always fixed it. Well, he did. And that's why he was there. That's why he was there. Doctor Who was in a parlour state, script-wise, when he arrived. He was brought in as a fixer. Things

were collapsing left, right and centre. He came in and he made it work. And he overcame what seemed like insurmountable problems. And actually, when he went away, it all happened again. Robert Holmes, who was his successor, he went to see him and found him in a state of total panic with half-written scripts all over the place. He actually was a brilliant man in a crisis. And Una, I know when we were talking about this, you were saying that you read some of Terence's other books when you were a child as well. Yeah, only a very little.

I read some of his science fiction. I read the Starquest books, which remind me a little bit of the frontier in space stories. There's a sort of big galactic civilisation. But the same hallmarks are kind of, you know, absolutely a story that propels through that you're engaged immediately engaged and excited about children as the as the gateway character which of course is the standard for children's literature but yes you're quite right

he likes to write about if you look at his other series i mean we're talking about a writer who who managed to produce approximately 220 books yeah and i think the hallmarks of his writing for me would be not just his doctor who but but this kind of publishing as well they were on time they were producible but also and not everyone hits this trifecta particularly with doctor who they're really rather good so it's a kind of sweet spot that you could do good and late and you could do bad and producible. But he does all three. I'm so interested in this idea, too, that in an age where there wasn't video, that this was how these stories lived in the imaginations of children. And one of the the things having watched the tv adaptation of the the tv original and what and reading the book just there's so much more in

the book you know that uh where sarah jane is is blinded and walking through the landscape i mean it's a it's a real it's a real sort of trek across the you know across the plain of gorgoroth like talking like whereas it's it's obviously's obviously a bit shit on the TV with Liz Sladen just bumping into a few polystyrene rocks. And I think he knows what a child's imagination can do, that he can actually, he can take, writing to a child, you can, you don't have to sort of lay it on his head because the child is gobbling this up

and doing most of that work for him, I think. Matthew, two questions. How did and how does a Terence Dix novelisation differ from other novelisations in the range? When you were a kid, did you know you were reading a Terence Dix one? And how do they differ when you read them now? I think I appreciate them more now than I did then because Terence did so many I think we were apt to

undervalue him rather and so when there was a policy to get authors the authors of the original script in to novelize their works even though this was work that was 20 years old at the time this was greeted by me. And I think most Doctor Who fans being a real step in the right direction. But actually a lot of those novels turned out to be kind of puddingy and slightly cranky and not really so readable as Terrence.

So I think in a way I appreciate him more now. And I can remember sort of feeling a bit disappointed sometimes that they had gone to him rather than to their original authors. But now that's not a feeling I have. I think that it's just so clean the way that he writes. Doctor Who books, or Doctor Who in general, and as part of that Doctor Who books, have played an enormous part in my career.

I mean, I have, in fact, done a lot of other things in which nobody ever takes the slightest interest. You know, you never get interviewed about them. You never get... I mean, I worked for a long time. I script-edited and later produced the classic serial. They never have any classic serial conventions, you know. We can't do novelisations because they're books to start with, as it were.

The big success and the one that always gets the fame and the glory and the autographs and the compliments, or of course the brickmats from time to time, they can be a touchy lot of fans, you know, is Doctor Who. So it has played an enormous part in my life. So this is a really important thing for me, the fact that when he leaves Doctor Who or writing for Doctor Who or the world of Doctor Who, first off he script edits

and then he produces the classic serial on BBC on Sunday, Tea Time, which we'll all remember because, you know, back in the 70s and 80s, these things were watched widely. I'll just read you his credits because, John, particularly, I think you'll be able to spot a pattern here. So he script edits the following adaptations. In 1981, Great Expectations,

and then in 1982, Storky & Co. The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Tom Baker as Sherlock Holmes. Bojest. Dombey and Son. Jane Eyre. Goodbye, Mr. Chips. The Invisible Man. The Prisoner of Zender and the Pickwick Papers.

And then when he takes over in production, he does Oliver Twist, Alice in wonderland david copperfield the diary of anne frank and vanity fair and to me that's totally fascinating you know here's somebody who has taken mass popular tv and novelized it for children and now it's working in the other direction where he's taking classic novels and he's adapting them and putting them out there for a family audience at tea time. This is his revenge on F.R. Leavis. Yes, this has just got to be right. It's got to be right.

It's absolutely got to be. I mean, that's my feeling. I can't prove it. But do you want to say about F.R. Leavis and about Terence studying? Yeah, well, F.R. Leavis was the constructor of the great tradition. He's the canon man. He's the man who, together with his wife, Queenie, got together and decided which English novels we ought to read and which we shouldn't really bother ourselves with. And for many years, Dickens was on that list. Although

just as Terence started working on Doctor Who, Leavis produced his kind of apologia where he admitted that Dickens should have been on that list. Those things coincide exactly. But Terence was propelled into that world, thanks, I think, to a very enlightened education that he received at East Ham Granite School, which had a good record of sending working class boys in that direction. And I think there's a real untold story about Terence Dix here, which I think I'd like to try and sketch out before we get into Cambridge and into Leavis's study. Terence came from a very working class background. His parents were publicans. They ran the Fox and Hounds pub in Forest Gate. But I think in a way more important

than that, and I would, you know, research needs to be done on this, the influence of the literature of the Jewish East End on Terence Dix. I'm not sure whether Terence's heritage was Jewish, but I've been looking, done a bit of kind of who do you think you are on this? And I think it does very, the spelling of the surname does flicker between Anglicized and Germanic versions as the century starts.

His family are all working in the tailoring trade in the East End in the early 19th century. His father was, in the obits, it said he was a tailor's salesman. But on the census, it actually says tailoress, interestingly. So he was a salesman with a female boss. But one bit of his output that's really fallen off the radar is his first ever broadcast work was a sitcom on the Light programme called Joey. And it's described as a comedy of East End cafe society. And it's about a man called Joey Green who tries out various jobs, but he hangs around this cafe in the East End. Joey is played by Harry Fowler. The cafe proprietor is called Jaime Rosen, and he's played

by Alfie Bass. This is kind of A-grade Jewish comic culture of the period. If Terence didn't have that in his background in some quite profound way, even if it's just that he's sort of steeped in it all, it's a rather odd act of appropriation, I think. Surely this must be something that's really in the heart of him. And also the boys who were being sent from East Ham Grammar School to Downing, well, his most illustrious predecessor was Wolf Mankiewicz, who was a kind of icon of that literature, wrote A Kid for Two Farthings, and also strayed into a popular territory that Leavis would have deeply disapproved of. And then at the end of his career, when he's

producer of the classic serials, who does he get in but Alexander Barron? Author of The Low Life, featured on Backlisted. Who is the other kind of great novelist? So I think that if Terence didn't have Jewish heritage himself, which is yet to be discovered as far as I know, the literature and the culture of that world, he existed in that as a child and as a teenager. In the East End, but the East End is still there throughout his career. Absolutely. Well, it's certainly, yes. Yeah. Mitch, why wouldn't Leavis have approved of something so improving as serialising these classic novels on television? He really hated the BBC, Leavis.

I mean, Leavis is complicated, okay, because he's a towering figure in the academic study of English in the 20th century with his wife, Queenie. And it's clear that in lots of ways he did a great deal to establish the seriousness. He was kind of influenced heavily by T.S. Eliot, although they fell out. He made Downing one of the great kind of centres of English studies in Britain. He's founded Scrutiny, the magazine. He had the highest possible standards. And he felt that the novel and the form of the novel, in a way,

whereas we're talking about storytelling, that was not really interesting to Leavis. Leavis was, there are people who argue, and I probably agree, that his best writing is on poetry. He's better on poetry than I think he is on fiction, because there's a thing about fiction that's called the plot, that's called the story. And one of the reasons, I mean, you know, the ones he loves, the writers he loves are Henry James, George Eliot, Conrad. I mean, Conrad is an interesting case. George Eliot, Conrad. I mean, Conrad is an interesting case. He famously decried Dickens as a mere entertainer and then sort of realised that later in life, he and Queenie came back and wrote a sort of book on Dickens, The Novelist, which has got some brilliant writing. I mean, the thing about Leavis, he's very, very good on all kinds of things, but he was a really,

really deeply unpleasant human being in lots of ways. very vindictive grudges were kept for years and and were acted on so of course i mean what terence seems to me to be he's a bright grammar school boy i mean you know feel a very strong connection who grew up being as interested in science as you were in stories and the idea that there was this thing called literature which was was sort of pure and untouched. And my tutor told me a great story about going. He said he took, he was John Jones. He was, again, would have fallen,

wrote some very, very influential books in the 60s and then fell away. But he was also the football correspondent for The Observer. And he took Leavis to the pub. And he remembered that levis while he was ordering a pint of bitter levis had a glass of soda water and a plate of scrambled eggs you know surrounded by men smoking and eating pork pies and drinking beer and you have this levis with his white shirt and his kind of he's you know and you know levis hated the dilettante, but he kind of, yeah, he's a sort of monstrous figure, as Edith Sitwell called him, a tiresome, whining, pettifogging little pipsqueak, which is really unfair because he was also a great and important and sensitive critic.

But, you know, what was Cambridge like when Terence from the East End, from the grammar school on the scholarship arrived? It's an interesting time. I sort of activated my networks and a former colleague of mine, she's a Professor Emerita Angioress in English, Nora Crook, and she's in Cambridge just a little bit later. But she sort of sent me this lovely sketch of what it must have been like. He probably went up in about 54, I think was probably when he must have gone up. So she says, he sounds a working class scholarship boy, the kind of person who made Cambridge seem in my time, accent on seem,

meritocratic powerhouse. I don't think that the tripos or Downing College would have fostered his love for science fiction, but perhaps National Service would have done. He might have felt he'd come at a nothing time too late for Wolf Mankiewicz, Tom Gunn and Ted Hughes, whose exploits he would have heard of, and too early for the spate of actors of the satire boom or Trevor Nunn and Ian McKellen, probably just too early for the best Cambridge prank ever, putting an Austin Seven on the Senate House roof. But he would have been a contemporary of Jonathan Miller, who made waves at the footlights in his first year in 1954, and who came up earlier than his fellow Fringers. He would have been around when Leslie Halliwell, manager of the Rex Cinema Cambridge, got around the censors and screened Marlon Brando in The Wild One.

And I can imagine, and I think it's very important about Cambridge, I can imagine that science and engineering and astronomy in Cambridge would have been very exciting things happening then too. things happening then too. So that's a kind of snapshot that maybe he fell between these two moments that we're used to thinking of, but that we see the bubbling of other things that are about to happen. And Matthew, that experience doesn't lead Terence towards academia, does it? I mean, he does his national service after he graduates. And then what does he do for the next 10 years? Well, he goes to work in advertising, which is, I think, he wasn't the only pupil of Leavis who did that. Possibly that was an act of rebellion too. But I think what's interesting is about,

is in a way how the influence of Cambridge seems to have been, in many ways, something to resist rather than offering a path to follow. Because, yes, we get to follow because yes we get the we get the national service we get that spell in advertising and that's how he falls into the orbit of his mentor malcolm hulk who is the person who kind of gets him into television writing because that's what his job is also a former member of the communist party malcolm hold what he and terence had in common politically, not much possibly.

But certainly, Holt was such an important influence on Terence in those days. So yes, I think in a way, he may be kicking against those things. I mean, his great strength for me, and this is the thing I write about in this piece in The Gifts of Reading, is that sense of him as what I call as a cultural democrat. You know, in my house, we didn't only read books. We listened to the radio and we watched telly and we went to the cinema and it was all part of the same cultural stew. And that is a thing we try and do here on Backlisted. And I think that way of looking at how these things work comes to me from Terence, actually, that, you know, clearly for lots of reluctant, what we

would call reluctant readers, Doctor Who books were their way into reading. Well, I wasn't a reluctant reader. I think the thing I got from Terence, and I don't know how you, Una, and Matthew would feel about this as well, is that sense that it was all there for the taking. is that sense that it was all there for the taking. These things all mixed together, you know, the literariness of Doctor Who and putting the classic books on television, they all speak to that idea that we can draw on whatever we want to get our cultural experiences,

and we don't have to, to use a very 21st century phrase, stay in our lane. You know, these things inform one another. When we think't have to, to use a very 21st century phrase, stay in our lane. You know, these things inform one another. When we think about a book, we don't only think of it in terms of other books. We think about it in terms of other forms of culture and our own lives. So for me, that is Terence's great gift to the culture i completely agree i i know that i mean just very simply that many of those uh john pertwee stories that he he was scripted his for i i i wouldn't have seen i would have experienced them first through the prose of terence dicks and then you know probably not

seen them till they got a video release in the 90s half of them so they were the only form that the story had for me and that made that shift between television and being able to i think it i think it taught me to be able to read television with the uh psychological depth that you would get from a narrative well listen it's backlisted and we have such excellent guests here so we're gonna have a little competition now so uh one of the spin-offs of the whole doctor who industry and the career of the various people involved with it is there's a whole substrand of memoirs and autobiographies of which by some margin the most extraordinary

is that by Tom Baker, which was published in 1997. It's called Who on Earth is Tom Baker? It also is one of the... You've not read Derek Sherwin's account of running a bar in Thailand then? Sorry, a bungee jumping business. I haven't. Come back. We'll talk about it. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Tom Baker's memoir spawned Tom Baker's audiobook,

which is one of the greatest audiobooks ever recorded. And it's not available in the shops it's never it never made it to cd it's not available on audible but it is available on the internet and we will play we will put a link to it on our website but i want to just uh play you a clip and ask John and our guests to be paying special attention towards the end when Tom starts talking about things he takes comfort from now. For more than six years, I left myself and floated about as a hero. Nobody was allowed to smoke or swear near me. I always sat down if I could, for the children were always a bit alarmed at my height. And so I was able to avoid my real self during all these activities, and pursue the fantasy life of the benevolent alien. And being able to escape the despised self kept me in good

spirits. The welcome and smiles came from all levels of the audience. There was no hostility anywhere. I think this was because the character I was didn't threaten anyone. It was all rather dotty, and I became used to being called doctor by real doctors and nurses, and the pleasure the children derived from all this was enough to make me happy. It was no great sacrifice, I can tell you. Nowadays, I escape into the world of Charles Dickens. What a pecksniff I might have been.

But any of the great hypocrites would do me. There is a serene quality in a fine hypocrite that I greatly admire. I don't think it's possible to be a frenzied hypocrite. That wouldn't do at all. There's nearly always a sublime self-assurance to a good hypocrite, don't you think? Hypocrites are not prone to self-doubt. I always imagine that great hypocrites have no interior life at all. What you see is what they are.

All good actors have a touch of the hypocrite. I think I was born to be a hypocrite, all exterior and hollow, but wanting to amuse. Hypocrites can be very generous, too, so long as the world is watching. I'd like to specialize in them. Boundaby, Sapsy, Fosco, and Chadband. Oh, and Turveydrop, that master of deportment. He'd be another good one. I'll get my agent onto it. Perhaps I could do a one-man show of hypocrites and we'll call it Hypocrites with Tom Baker. Let me tell you, I must say to listeners, before I open the quiz, you could stick a pin anywhere in that audiobook reading

and find an absolute masterful 30 seconds, minutes, two minutes like we just heard. It's absolutely wonderful. Okay, so Tom Baker there, masterful 30 seconds, minutes, two minutes like we just heard. It's absolutely wonderful. Okay. So Tom Baker there listed literary hypocrites. And I'm going to hold one back for a very specific reason. But he seems to be drawing from Dickens, doesn't he? So, John, let's start with you.

I'm going to name the hypocrite and I want you to name the source material. Right. And remember, it's Dickens, OK? Pecksniff. Old Curiosity Show. No, no, no, no, no, no. No, Martin Chuzzlewit. Sorry.

Martin Chuzzlewit, that's right. OK. We'll go to Una for the next one. Bounderby. I've no idea. I've not read enough Dickens. I'm hopeless. That's... Sydenham Sweet.

Bound to be... Is Bound to be in David... Yes, Hard Times. Hard Times. Absolutely, yes, Hard Times. Sean and Matt, no conferring. Hard Times is the right answer. To Matthew, Chad Band.

I know that's the Reverend Chad Band, isn't it? But which one is he in? That's what I'm asking you. Is he a friend of that horrible charitable lady in Bleak House? It is Bleak House. Very good. Matthew Sweet doing very well. Okay, so to Mitchinson again.

Turvey Drop. Mr. Turvey Drop is from which novel? All right, calm down, Matthew. Turvey Drop. It's not Pickwick. I can't. He's Bleak House as well. Is he?

They're all Bleak House again. Bleak House. You know what? You know why I know that? You know why I know that? At my interview at Oxford, I had an interview with the great Dickensian A.O.J. Cockshut. Cockshut.

The great chain of being. I went to the interview. I saw a lecture once i was waiting for the interview and uh he came out of the room and he he nodded to me it was incredibly cold the heating wasn't on in my memory he was wearing a russian hat a kind of russian hat indoors but surely that can't be right he came in he he went to the toilet about six feet away from me. And I heard every damn thing. And then he emerged.

And then he called me in for the interview. And his first question was, what is the significance of Mr. Turvey Drop? And all I could think of was the fact that I just listened to him produce a great curl of excrement. That's why I never went to Hartford College, Oxford. Well, under normal circumstances, I would feel nervous about being able to follow that anecdote, Matthew. But the next question is, which novel by Dickens does fosco appear dickens no that's that's that's a trick question he's not well tom says it's dickens but he's wrong isn't he tom doesn't

know everything tom is mixing up his wilkie collins and by an incredible coincidence i recognized that one yep i knew that one what matthew what's it from from the woman in white woman in white as edited by as edited by me fosco the name of the of the cat also the name of oscar wilde's cat that's very good so that leaves una what novel dickens or collins or somebody else that tom was referring to does sapsy come from? Oh, that's definitely Doctor Who and the Claws of Axel. What, pig bin sapsy? Pig bin sapsy, that's the one. Sapsy's near Nunton, isn't it, on that bit of the Essex coast?

Listeners, I don't know, because I can't find any mention of a character called Sapsy in the Victorian novel that Tom is referring to. Is he in Hard Times as well? No. It's Bleak House again. Bleak House.

It's Bleak House again. Well, do you think Tom possibly could have been, had just finished rereading Bleak House when he was... Well, perhaps he just had a very interesting holiday in Sapsy.

Is it spelt S-E-Y, Andy? I just hear what you hear. Hang on, hang on, hang on. Mr Sapsy's in Edwin Drood. Edwin Drood! Edwin Drood! He is the purest jackass in Cloisterham.

Matthew, congratulations. Let's just google that yeah you win you win the same prize that was offered to in 1984 to the target books bonanza competition uh in which the lucky winner could get their hands on a copy of a leather bound edition of Peter Haining's The Key to Time. You get to have lunch with Terence Dix. But in order to seal the deal, you have to let people know, you have to answer questions. And then the same, Una, I'll be looking to you for an answer as well. Which, you had to answer in not more than 20 words which of the

doctor's companions you would most like to be and why so i have to occupy the body of a of a you do of a of a relatively young british actor do i well instantly uh i'm Josephine Grant because I I would I would want to occupy the headspace of Katie Manning yeah I'm sorry that is the right answer that is the right that that needs more than 20 words and I'm not saying any of them on here okay that's perfectly acceptable that's uh that's Joe Grant who was the companion to the second companion to uh john pertwee's doctor the third doctor uh una same question to you please which companion i have no interest in being a companion i'm a doctor that's the end of the matter matthew you can you can travel in space and time with me if you like. All right. Excellent. It's a deal.

Now, let's give the last word. This is from a wonderful documentary that is sometimes on the iPlayer and is currently on YouTube as well, called On the Outside It Looked Like an Old Fashioned Police Box, which is about the Target novelisations. It was made in 2009 by Mark Gatiss. And this is Mark talking to Terence about the influence of these books.

It's not an exaggeration to say that for so many people it was their introduction to literature. It opened doors not only into Doctor Who's past and other things, but just to reading in general. And I think, honestly, everyone owes you a huge debt of thanks. No, I mean, I think if you can get a kid reading for pleasure, not because it's work, but actually reading for pleasure, you know, it's a great step forward.

He can start with me and start with dicks and work his way up to dickens, you know, but as long as you get them reading. Who could disagree with that? I promised an exclusive. Here is the exclusive. BBC Books next August will publish a compendium volume of 10 of the target novelizations written by Terence Dix with the title The Essential Terence Dix. So that's coming in August next year, the essential Terence Dix. Alas, the toiling of the cloister bell tells us we must close the door of the TARDIS and be off on our next adventure. Huge thank you to Matthew and Una

for sharing their deep knowledge and passion for this most loved of writers and story cycles. To Nicky for some deaf work with the sonic screwdriver and to Unbound for standing in as this podcast version of Unit. You can download all 123 previous episodes of backlisted plus follow links clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at backlisted.fm and we're always pleased if you contact us on twitter or facebook and now in sound and pictures on instagram too you can also show

your love directly by supporting our patreon at www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted we aim Thank you. in eSpace, where we three go to expand on movies, television, music, as well as books or anything else that pops up on our monitors. But the absolute pinnacle of support, our version of the Time Lords High Council, are our master storytellers. And we have five new ones to whom we'd like to publicly pledge our undying gratitude. Yes, thank you. Castellans, Sean Salter, Emma Hardy, Katerina Fake, Lorna Symes, and Frank Cottrell-Boyce, who really is a master storyteller. Not the master storyteller, though. That really wouldn't be good. And here is our latest list of lot listeners, those brave and loyal companions who make the whole Backlist adventure possible. So thank you very much to Susanna Reid, Christina, Oma Choudhury, Evan Lazarus, Bill Gales, Tom Hooser, Jill Laker, Deborah L. Pugh, Charlotte Denny, Henry Elliott, Mark My Words, Carmel Brennan,

Laura Sewell, Patrick McCarthy, and Alessandra Prentice. To Amanda Raleigh, Bill Gee, Debbie Baker, Emily Panizza, Justine Jones, Kathy Haas, Carla Garner, Dylan Smith, Katerina Kucharska, Jill Johnson, Adam Takamudi, Kristen Garlock, Jeff Chiskowski, Lee Rilvas, and Emis Filas. Thank you. I'd also like to say thanks to Adam Moody, who very publicly on Twitter has been keeping track of the fact that he listened to all 123 episodes of Batlisted in the space of about a fortnight. Why on earth do you want to give us any money and never want to hear our voices again? I don't know. But anyway, thank you very much. Brilliant. And that's it. We'll be back in a fortnight. Thank you for listening. Thanks, Matthew. Thanks, Una. There's only one way

we could possibly go out. KAMU MENGALA Bye. listed where you also get bonus content of two episodes of lot listed the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks