Doctor Who - The Awakening by Eric Pringle

Published: June 1985

Edition read: Target first reprint, 1985

Coolest Cover: Classic Andrew Skilleter- take the one really good image and make the most of it.

The TARDIS materialises with..."violent quivering"

Childhood Recollections: Again, not sure whether I really read this or simply collected it and shelved it. But also see below.

Ramblings: After zooming back twenty years to one of Doctor Who’s earliest serials, what better than to return straight back to Peter Davison’s last season, and only the second attempt to adapt a story running to fewer than four episodes. ‘The Awakening’ has a reputation for being- as somebody once put it-small but perfectly formed, an interlude between more ambitious stories which nevertheless incorporates many of the trappings of traditional Who, not least the unearthly goings on in a picture postcard English village. The task of adapting a two-part story is however rather different from adapting four or six episodes; while it’s possible to make six episodes into something of the requisite length by adding a basic amount of description to the lines in the script, making 144 pages out of two episodes demands rather more description and elaboration while, with the production office keeping a close eye on the Target range, remaining essentially faithful to the story as transmitted. Fortunately Target were able to secure the services of scriptwriter Eric Pringle, before he hit on the idea of selling crisps in a tube and thus made his fortune.

When I was part of an informal group of Who fans at school, as far as this book was concerned the vogue was for mocking it on the grounds that Pringle’s style went into obsessive detail about anything and everything. Not having watched the televised story in a few years, it came as something of a surprise to find that the first scene of the story- up to and including our first meeting with Sir George Hutchinson- takes up the first ten pages of the book. What this does, however, is to give us a tremendous amount of detail and insight; Pringle starts by using Jane Hampden as his identification character, and she serves him well until the regulars arrive on the scene. It may seem strange that such a compact story should need a substitute companion figure, but it does enable the regulars to be split up so that there’s always something happening to somebody. The book is at its best when dealing with or describing the Malus itself; there’s a certain relish when Pringle describes either the face or the manifestation in the TARDIS as an obscene stone monkey, which gives an idea of the effect he was aiming to produce. Unsettling ideas pepper the book; it’s only on reflection that I realised that the Queen of the May would have been burned before the battle, and Pringle leaves it suitably unclear as to exactly how the Malus was awakened or whether it has been influencing Little Hodcombe for centuries.

In previous reviews I’ve mentioned how the twenty-first season of Doctor Who was something of a relaunch after the twentieth anniversary, and in this respect ‘The Awakening’ is an attempt to condense into two episodes much of what the best traditional Who is all about, treading the fine line between science fiction and the supernatural and giving us something with a feel not unlike the Ghost Stories for Christmas that the BBC used to do- the cruelty and butchery of 1643 are, by means of an unearthly force, revived in 1984 in a style which M.R.James would have recognised. It’s slightly frustrating that a book which does so well at giving us more character detail than would usually be the case doesn’t look into Sir George’s character sufficiently to tell us whether he’s insane, possessed or just plain evil, but Pringle is clearly much fonder of Jane and of the robust farmer Ben Wolsey and enjoys working on the motivation and state of mind of his characters. Given more space to play in, ‘The Awakening’ ultimately becomes something darker and genuinely unnerving in book form, as Eric Pringle has the opportunity to develop the atmosphere of his story and perhaps show us something of how the story could have been as a four-parter, with its dark oppressive atmosphere brought out to the full. Before he even started, Pringle deserved a certain amount of respect for taking on the challenge of making a 144-page novel out of his scripts, but it’s done so effectively- and more to the point, without feeling as if the action is dragging or the point being laboured- that the length feels exactly right for the story and the book itself is a pleasure.