Doctor Who - Documentary s06e23 Episode Script

In American thrillers, there's an expression for a policeman, a New York detective, you have to have a "rabbi".
A rabbi is an older man in the police force, who looks after you, and keeps an eye on your career, and tries to keep you out of trouble, and gives you a helpful push every now and again.
And Mac Hulke was my rabbi.
He was passionate about writing, you know, passionate about Doctor Who and about what he'd done.
That, that genius, that little spark of making people come alive on the page is what made me want to be a writer.
It's solely down to Malcolm Hulke's writing of people's characters and that viewpoint.
He sort of ran his life on a system of quite deliberately networking, getting to know people, you know, helping people and feeling, you know, quite appropriately, that they would in time help him, you know.
So he got kind of a network of favours and obligations, you see.
He actually saw himself as being very cold and calculating and cunning, and he was actually a very sort of kind and generous man, you know.
So, he had this side to his nature, which he tried to keep concealed, I think.
Malcolm Hulke is responsible for me and, I suspect, an entire generation of Doctor Who fans, for writing the most important piece of work in the history of Doctor Who publishing.
He was always looking for a way Looking for a scheme or project and he loved doing things like guides and directories and that kind of thing.
DICKS: He said to me, "Why don't we do a book, a sort of guide to Doctor Who?" RUSSELL: In 1972, he and Terrance Dicks teamed up to write The Making of Doctor Who, which was published by Piccolo books and was a bible.
It just became a Doctor Who fan's bible.
We based the book around the making of Doctor Who, and what the production progress of a script is.
The whole process, from getting in the script, from going in production, to doing filming, to doing studio work.
There was a list in the book of all of the monsters that the Doctor had met, sort of listed out story by story.
And this was the first time ever that a list of the Doctor Who stories had actually been published.
But written in such an imaginative way.
Rather than just being a "this story was this, this story was that", it tells a story of people investigating the Doctor.
The Time Lords going back and exploring all the Doctor's past adventures while he's on trial.
So all the stories you had seen on TV over the previous nearly 10 years were all there, but all turned into a fiction.
Target Books began in 1973, which was when the first three titles in the range were published.
The editor at Target went to Terrance Dicks at the BBC and said, "Would you like to come and write some novels for us?" And Terrance said, "Yes, I'll do them, "but can I also bring in one of the other script writers, "Malcolm Hulke," who was a good friend of Terrance's.
Malcolm started by novelising one of his scripts for the programme, Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, which was a story called Silurians, on television.
And, of course, that was, again, very well received and Malcolm went on to do several more stories for the range.
And between the two of them, in those early days of Target, they just stormed, they just wrote, sort of alternate books.
And just wrote some of the best Doctor Who fiction that's ever been written.
Although it was obviously adapted from TV episodes, they stretched it and took their stuff in amazing directions.
Malcolm Hulke, particularly, just took the general idea of a story and ran with it, and made it something completely new.
Malcolm was a very meticulous writer.
He would take care over smallest character to the biggest character and made sure that all of them were real on the page, and came alive for the reader, as they would read the books, even if that meant creating characters that hadn't been on the television show, or changing them around, or cutting some.
Rather than just state it, rather than just say, here is this world and A-B-C this happened, he always does it through the viewpoint of one of the characters.
And they're very rarely is it a major character.
I think that was Malcolm's great talent, was being able, whatever he was writing, to make you care about the people that were in it and to really make it all come alive for you.
I think when you view the TV serials and read the novelisations it's quite easy to discern a political subtext to almost everything he wrote.
Almost all the villains are reactionaries of some kind or capitalists, you know, traditional bogeymen of the Left.
DICKS: I mean what we never did was, you know, commission a Doctor Who with a political message.
But, nonetheless, if you look at it, there is, you know, a streak of anti-authoritarianism in nearly all Mac's work.
He doesn't trust the establishment.
Malcolm Hulke had this really good tendency to create fantastic prologues for all his books.
The Cave Monsters, for instance, starts magnificently with a scene back in sort of prehistoric Earth with the Silurians out in their cities, certainly outside of their caves, realising that this thing is coming towards them that's going to create this planetary disaster and they don't know what it is.
They don't know it's, as we now know, that it's the moon.
They've never seen it before.
And it's just that lovely little touch of giving you the background to the story.
NARRATOR: "Okdel tuned to follow the others.
"Then he heard a familiar sound and paused to look back into the valley.
"About 20 of the furry animals were racing across open ground, "babies clinging to the backs of some of the females.
"As always they were calling out to each other, grunting and chattering.
"Sometimes Okdel imagined they were trying to form words.
"He was certain that his own pet furry animal "understood many of the things said to it, "even though it only chattered and grunted in reply.
"He had released the pet two days ago, so that for what remained of its life "it would enjoy freedom to climb trees and race across open spaces.
"'Okdel!' Morka was calling from the lift doors.
"'We must go into the shelter!' "Okdel slowly walked towards where Morka and K'to were waiting.
"Just before stepping into the lift, he looked again across the valley "to see the tip of the sun as it sunk below the horizon.
"It was the last time he was to see the sun "for 100 million years.
" Hulke's first book is The Cave Monsters and it's very interesting because you've got a more sophisticated idea of the monsters.
It's particularly fascinating the way he humanised the alien reptiles in the actual story, and gave them all names and characters.
He made them rise above the ciphers that they were on the screen, of men in rubber suits, into being fully-rounded alien creatures that you could really believe in.
There's a brilliant moment in that book where he has Miss Dawson asking of herself.
She's frightened of the fact that people will stop saying, "Why don't you get married?" and turn it into, "Why didn't you get married?" And it's that little moment, that little beat of character that you'd never have on television, for such an incidental character.
One of the best things that Malcolm Hulke did was in his novelisation of Colony in Space, which he called The Doomsday Weapon.
And in that, he just shows us a little peek of the Earth of the future, through the character of Captain Dent.
Where you just learn about things like marriages and weddings in this future Earth is just a couple of documents being stapled together.
Jo Grant was introduced.
Now, obviously, on television she had actually been introduced a few stories earlier.
But this was the first book to come out featuring Jo.
So, Malcolm Hulke clearly thought the best thing he could do was actually introduce the character again to the readers.
NARRATOR: "'I'm sorry, but I don't remember your name.
' "Jo heard the Doctor's voice coming to her "as though from a far distance.
"Slowly she opened her eyes.
"She was on the floor of the TARDIS, "her arms still locked firmly round the base of the pillar.
"The Doctor was kneeling over her.
"'Jo Grant, ' she said automatically.
"'Call me'Jo.
' "'Well, let me help you up,'Jo, ' said the Doctor.
"He put his hands under her arms to lift her.
"For a moment,'Jo let him, "then, with returning strength, she got herself up.
"'Open the doors, please.
' "Jo tried to sound very cold, "like one of the teachers she had known and hated at school.
"'The joke's over now, Doctor.
' "'First, ' the Doctor said, crossing back to the central control, "'We must check if it's safe.
' "'It's perfectly safe to open these doors, "Jo said, "keeping well away from him.
"'I intend to go straight into the Brigadier and offer my resignation.
' "Within a week, she had decided, she would be on a plane to Bangkok, "or wherever jobs were going for embassy filing clerks.
" Again the book has got this sort of self-containedness that tended to disappear as the range became more established.
You never felt, "Oh, I need to read something else, "I need to know something else to understand what he was talking about.
" He made sure that reading one of his novelisations was a unique experience all of its own.
RUSSELL: In Malcolm Hulke's novelisation ofThe Sea Devils, one of the great characters I think in that is the politician who comes in at the end, who everybody hates.
You cannot help but hate this politician.
And, in the book, it's all about his sweets.
He has a tin of sweets.
Something as simple as that.
And his refusal to pass his sweets around to everybody else in the room and everything.
And you see what's going on and his belief that he is right.
And that he's a very selfish, very arrogant character is all contained in the fact that all these other characters you know and like he refuses to just give a boiled sweet to.
And it's just a brilliant way of making you see what on television could have been a fairly two-dimensional character, but in a book, is given this whole third dimension, this enormous richness.
It's revealing that when Hulke came to adapt a television story that wasn't one of his own, he adapted The Green Death, which, as a story, surely is most in tune with Hulke's own political leanings than pretty much anything else he could have chosen.
As a kid, reading it, it opened my eyes so much to sort of green politics and ecology and things like that, which when you look at the TV show, yes, they're there, but they're sort of underneath everything.
Whereas, in the book, he really made that come to life.
It was a very important book to read.
And I think to be able to take your own work and transform it into something new is brilliant, in itself.
But to take somebody else's and really go to town, and make you believe after a while, maybe Malcolm Hulke wrote The Green Death.
I think for years there's a whole load of people brought up on the Target novelisations, who actually thought he wrote the TV version.
The Green Death is a story that'swhere its sympathies lie with a commune of counter-cultural hippies.
And, you know, he goes to town on, you know, on Professor'Jones and whatever and the Nuthatch encampment because these are his people.
You can see Hulke's left-wing politics reflected in pretty much everything he wrote.
Invasion of the Dinosaurs is the clearest case in that it's about a bunch of political reactionaries seeking to take the whole of planet Earth back to a sort of mythical Golden Age.
The interesting thing about Hulke's novelisation, The Dinosaur Invasion, is that he actually takes the time to water that down slightly, or muddy the waters, certainly, with the character of Butler being given a little speech about, you know, his scar wasn't wasn't won fighting in Guernica or something.
It was He got his scars when he was a fireman saving a small child.
So, immediately, you're sympathetic.
You think, fireman's a great character.
And he was rescuing someone and he fell through a glass roof.
And he has this big gash down the side of his face.
And that's all you need, because then, for the rest of the book all you have is, the man walks into the room and one or the other characters says, "That's an unfortunate scar on his face.
" And you as the reader go, "Oh, my God! It's the bad guy," but none of them can possibly know that.
And that's a brilliant technique for helping you through a story and helping you understand where all these characters are and what they're reacting to.
Just by adding a scar.
NARRATOR: "Over the years, Butler had learnt to live with his disfigurement.
"He'd got used to people looking away, pretending not to see it.
"'I can't help the way I look.
' "'Oh yes, you can.
Plastic surgery would fix that.
"'But there won't be any medicine or operating theatres "'back in this stupid Golden Age you people dream about.
"'Still, maybe you like being ugly.
"'It makes you look more sinister and criminal.
"'How did you get it? In a fight?' "'Not exactly.
I was a London fireman.
"'I tried to save a child that had crawled out of an open window "'and was stranded on a high ledge.
"'I managed to pass it to safety all right, but I fell 30 feet "'through a glass roof.
"' For The Dinosaur Invasion, I decided to go a little bit whacko.
(LAUGHS) So, I stuck on this large lettering, like in comic form and said, "Kklak!" on it.
I could have put "wham", or anything, but I just put "Kklak!" I thought it looked great with the Ks.
Beautiful colours and everything over London.
Big Ben.
A dinosaur coming up.
Jon Pertwee going, "Ugh!" And the bird going "Kklak!" And drew it up, painted it and then delivered it.
I knew that they'll say something about it, but went home and then the telephone rang and then they said, "What have you done, Chris?" you know, "You have to get rid of that lettering, it's just not on.
" And I said, "Well, you get rid of it, 'cause I'm not doing it again.
" It was done, it was printed, and, as I thought, the kids loved it.
Well, the young people used to buy those books mostly, they loved it.
And I used to get a lot of fan letters, so I knew they liked it.
BARNES: The Space War, which is based on Frontier In Space, is another perfect vehicle for, you know, Hulke's political obsessions.
In that you have two great empires whose conflict is being fomented by a mysterious third party.
And it's quite interesting that the point in time that he's writing Frontier In Space and The Space War is the early '70s, where you definitely have a sort of You have these terribly polarised conflicts over frontiers going on in the world.
North Korea, South Korea, you know, over in Vietnam.
And a sense of great empires trying to hold each other back.
You've got the Cold War as the obvious vehicle.
So Hulke is saying something there.
You know, he's looking at the newspapers and he's saying, "What can I make of this in a Doctor Who story?" We're left with The legacy of Malcolm Hulke was left with The War Games.
And you feel sorry for Malcolm, because the great thing about all his early books is you got the sense nobody put a restriction on him.
By the time he came to do The War Games, which is a ten-part story, massive thing, and yet had to make it fit 126 pages of a book.
But the charm is still there and the characters are still there.
Lady Jane and the Captain and people like that, still are fully three-dimensional, rounded characters in that book.
Which really and truly you would have totally forgiven him for, if he'd not done that because of those constraints.
Malcolm Hulke, unfortunately, passed away in'July, 1979, shortly before the novelisation of The War Games came out.
So he never saw that published, which is good, because it's a nice tribute to him.
It's a good book.
But it did mean that, sadly, we were denied the pleasure, and I think it would have been a pleasure, of him novelising his other two Doctor Who stories.
He wrote, or he co-wrote, Doctor Who and The Faceless Ones, which I think he would have turned into a lovely novelisation.
And my favourite would have been Ambassadors of Death, which although on TV was credited to David Whitaker, it was actually rewritten totally by Malcolm Hulke and is a Malcolm Hulke story.
And epitomises everything that Malcolm Hulke believed in about characters, that thing of no black and white characters, everyone being shades of grey.
And I think he would have turned in a magnificent novelisation of that.
And, sadly, we don't have it.
Malcolm, you know, he was nice that way.
He always had time for you.
He was always very friendly.
He would always have a kind word.
He was a lovely guy.
He really was a lovely guy.
I was very, very sad when I heard that he died.
The best legacy, I think, you could say that Malcolm Hulke has left us, apart from obviously a canon of fantastic Doctor Who stories, both on TV and in book form, is his inspiration.
I know from talking to other authors of Doctor Who books that he is a huge inspiration on everybody's style of writing.
Everybody sees that thing in Malcolm Hulke's books and goes, "That's why I want to be a writer.
" It was for me, and I think If you're looking for a legacy of someone, it is the continuing publishing that goes in Doctor Who, and how many of those writers are writing Doctor Who books because they grew up reading Malcolm Hulke, Terrance Dicks, people like that.
DICKS: I went to his funeral and Mac was Mac was a convinced atheist and he had left orders that at his funeral, there would be no hymns, no priests, no singing, no nothing, you see.
Now, the trouble with this is, it doesn't give you a lot to do when you attend the funeral.
And a little group of us, Mac's friends, sat round the coffin not knowing what to do, you know, when to get up and go, or whatever.
And eventually Eric Pace, who again was an old friend of Mac's, who worked with him and collaborated with him long before I knew him.
Eric Pace, who was a tall, thin, bald chap.
And he got up, slapped the coffin and said, "Well, cheerio, Mac.
" And wandered out and we all followed him.
So, that was my farewell to Mac.