Doctor Who - The Wheel in Space by Terrance Dicks

Published: August 1988

The book, though, is in the interesting position of being the product of three particularly important talents in the development of Doctor Who. It’s a Terrance Dicks adaptation of David Whitaker’s scripts, based on an idea by Kit Pedler- three people who each had important influences on the series’ first decade- and it’s interesting to pick the adaptation apart a little to try working out who came up with what. We don’t really learn that much more about the Cybermen (apart from the story being the Cyber Planner’s first appearance), so I suspect Pedler’s influence is much more along the lines of showing how an isolated group of people might function together in space, and particularly the way in which Jarvis Bennett cracks up when faced with a situation outside his experience. The first episode is surely all Whitaker- the Doctor and companion having to deduce things about the place where they’ve landed from the clues around them, and being faced with a minor threat (in this case the servo-robot) which forces them to take part in the action of the story. You can also practically guarantee that any part of the script which involves faffing around with mercury is Whitaker to the core. Dicks’s job (and quite frankly there’s nobody like Terrance Dicks for being able to reconcile different visions of a story) is to marry all this up. Being a six-part story, there’s necessarily some compression, but here Dicks is slightly fortunate in that the second episode was constructed around one of Patrick Troughton’s holidays and is therefore Doctor-light; all that really happens is that Jamie meets the crew of the Wheel and is introduced to Zoe, so the pace balances itself out after the slower pace of the first few chapters.

Although one of the things the original script does well is to show an international crew manning a space station without resorting to caricatures (pretty much all the nationalities could be swapped around and it’d make no difference), it does mean that the supporting characters tend to come across without much personality, although some characters (Duggan, Tanya, Gemma Corwyn) are more sympathetic than others. The exception is Zoe, and again I think you can see Kit Pedler at work here- I’m not sure that the original conception of Zoe wasn’t as something more distant than the character Wendy Padbury eventually played. It’s strongly suggested, both by the original scripts and Dicks’s adaptation, that Zoe has had some kind of special conditioning to make her into the brilliant astrophysicist and librarian that she is, and at times the character comes across as slightly freakish, both in her unnatural responses and the way that people around respond to her. It’s a shame that this aspect of the character wasn’t really developed, as the idea of the human race in the future improving itself through mental and psychological conditioning is perhaps an element in Pedler’s original ideas which became diffused as the story passed through several hands, when the point could have been made that Zoe is as much an end product of the misuse of science as the Cybermen themselves.

As with the vast majority of Terrance Dicks’s adaptations, it’s a straightforward and entertaining read, which makes palatable a story which probably did drag over six weeks on television. It also, for anybody who’s seen the censor clips and wondered what on earth Flanagan is saying in the fight sequence, provides a pointer- in the book (and presumably the scripted line) he says "You need a few lessons in the Noble and Manly Art, my friend", rather than the "unmanly arse me bottle" which some have suggested. It’s a good, solid adaptation of a story made according to the rules in force in 1968- so suspense and monsters over character development- but also one which feels fresh and keeps the story going.