“Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth”

…so the ironic thing is that it'll probably be a while before I watch the actual, televised version of this story, seeing how I've already watched two other takes on the same plot and am getting pretty sick of it. The first version, of course, was the excellent bit of fun that is the Peter Cushing movie, which, in its sole greatest flaw, bears the syntaxically-nightmarish title of Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.. (All the rights words are there, but it just doesn't………!) 

The second, and subject matter of the present review, is the Terrance Dicks novelization of the same book, from 1977 — well, no, not even that; what I actually got was the 2009 audiobook read by William Russell (Ian Chesterton in the TV series, way, way back) and Nicholas Briggs (the latest and greatest of Dalek voice artists). 

I could recite the plot by heart at this point, but for the benefit of those not currently suffering from Dalek Invasion of Earth overdose: after numerous travels through time and space with 1960's English schoolteachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, the two runaway Time Lords known as the Doctor and Susan English, respectively, finally manage to land the TARDIS in what appears to be London, where they have been trying to return Ian and Barbara since the second episode. Unfortunately, it soon turns out that this is 22nd century London, and in ruins at that, following many long years of Dalek occupation. 

For indeed, the Daleks, last seen being karmically exterminated by their ancestral enemies the Thals at the end of The Dead Planet, are back with a vengeance. After meeting up with the local resistance, the TARDIS travellers are soon separated and all sorts of things happen as they trudge about the devastated England trying to figure out what the Daleks want on this planet and how to stop them. 

Notable secondary figures in this plot are the laughably-named Robomen, a first draught of the Cybermen (being robotized, emotionless humans) who serve as the Daleks' henchmen; Tyler, a resistance leader who has lost the use of his legs, but not the will to think up a giant bomb with which to rid the planet of the Daleks' filth; and David, a handsome young fighter in the resistance, who develops into Susan's love interest. (In both the televised episode and the audiobook, his last name is Campbell, but I'm told that in the printed version of the novelization, his name was, rather hilariously, David Cameron.) 

So how does it fare? 

Well, for a start, four hours and ten minutes is way too long for this story, which was perfectly condensed as the hour-and-a-half Cushing feature. But that can't really be helped, and I know there is much, much worse (some Doctor Who audiobooks push on 10 hours! Ten blinking hours!). 

As an audio product it's otherwise quite good. William Russell was always a bit too deadpan for my taste as Ian, but he's perfect as a narrator; he doesn't sound much like himself anymore, it must be said, making the times he's reading out Ian's dialogue somewhat eerie; but on the plus side, he's very good at voicing the First Doctor. He's not limiting himself to an impression of his late co-star, not by far; he couldn't do that if he wanted to, because Terrance Dicks took many liberties with the original teleplay when turning it into a novel. 

If nothing else, the Doctor's farewell speech to Susan is very different, and Russell's delivery of it, accordingly, couldn't be further from Hartnell's serene “one day, yes… one day I shall come back”; the corresponding line in the Dicks script (simply “One day, I'll come back!”) is angrier here, as if he's scolding Susan for doubting that he would. 

Aside from the weirdness inherent in an old man voicing Barbara or Susan, there is one weird bit that doesn't quite work, though; the Robomen's voices are described by Dicks as “slurred”, and Russell took that, I think, a bit too much to heart. They don't sound like zombies, they sound drunk. 

Meanwhile, Nicholas Briggs is predictably awesome as the various Daleks, bringing his full range into it, bless him; it's not that the original voices were bad (1960's Dalek voices, whether on the small or big screen, are the best non-Briggs Dalek voices, in my opinion), but Briggs is an outright wizard. At the drop of a hat, he is the Daleks, and that is because he gets them; as he has explained, when he voices the Daleks, he's not voicing emotionless robots, he's voicing three-dimensional people — it's just that those people happen to be inordinately awful, perpatually-angry little people. Hence he is convincingly confused or vainglorious or angry, without ever forgetting the all encompassing irrational hatefulness lurking beneath their every dark throught. 

The sound design is great; the music, where there is some, is fitting, though a bit forgettable; it's certainly no patch on Bill McGuffie's fantastic score to the Peter Cushing film, which contains, among other things, a marvelously energetic theme song, and one of my favorite pieces of movie music ever, Fugue For Thought. 

What of the script? Well, it does what it can with the meandering plot; certainly it conveys the apocalyptic scope quite well, and while no character is particularly deep, they're all believable people. Dicks is inordinately good at setting up moods, better than he is at thinking up people; thus things are creepy when they need to be, or majestic, or tense, or thrilling. The opening line “Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man” is justifiedly famous. 

The story itself, for which, of course, we cannot blame Dicks, is as I said needlessly meandering and needlessly reliant on Susan twisting her ankle at convenient times of the plot, but the sheer fun of a premise like “the Daleks have taken over the Earth” usually makes up for it, and the worldbuilding of what life is like under the Daleks for the resistance forces and for the mining slaves is actually quite well-thought-out. 

Dicks is quite good at foreshadowing the Susan/David romance, but not so much the Doctor's decision to leave her to live with him. The way the televised story made a story arc out of the Doctor's slow realization that she wasn't his little girl any more may have been a bit ungraceful at times (“jolly good smack-bottom” indeed), but it was something; here there is no trace of it; we spend most of the story with no insight into the Doctor's view of Susan, nor any signs that he's getting on in years in a way that would justify her determination that she needs to stay with him to take care of him. Then suddenly, we're told (in quite a hamfisted fashion) by David that “he knew all along”. Well, okay, jolly good, why shouldn't he have? What have we discovered exactly? 

Oh, and another failing, simultaneously very small and quite major: Dicks made the very questionable decision to refer to the mining-cart in which Ian gets trapped for most of the climax as a “giant bucket”. It is much, much harder than anyone in the production expected to take seriously the travails of a man trapped in what an old British actor keeps calling a “giant bucket” with the utmost seriousness. 

All in all, I enjoyed Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, but if you're not a dedicated Who fan, there are probably much quicker, much funnier ways to experience the story, starting with the Cushing film. (Unless, of course, you are visually impaired, in which case, yes, I'm not an expert, but this seems like a pretty fun audiobook.)

Post-Scriptum:

• An oft-repeated bit of trivia that non-Whovians in the audience may not be aware of: the cover of the novelization, here reused for the CD jacket, was drawn with the Peter Cushing flick as a reference, rather than the TV episode; as a result, the Dalek spaceship is modeled on that in the film rather than the one in the episode itself. Though it's endlessly cut that the Daleks are the only A-list aliens in popular culture who genuinely, unironically use flying saucers as their primary mode of transportation, there's no denying that the hovership in question is a much more interesting bit of design-work. 

• Also about the CD jacket: that Roboman, from this angle, looks fainty like he's about to ask me if I'm his mummy.