The Questions

See, for example, Reynolds, “H. G. Wells and Doctor Who”. Also see Cartwright, “Roots Part 4,” 22.

Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists, 93–94.

Quoted in Hearn, “Donald Wilson,” 35.

Hartnell made this comments in an interview with the Daily Express; “William Hartnell.”

Rutherford, When Television Was Young, 279.

Coburn, “An Unearthly Child.”

Ibid.

Lowe, “‘Stages of Performance,’” 99.

Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, 114.

Newman, “Return to Zenda,” 46–50.

Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, 114.

Sweet, “Doctor Who Missing Episodes.”

22.

Hearn, “Donald Wilson,” 35.

What Gets Adapted?

The Doctor (in his second incarnation) and his companions Jamie and Victoria stumble upon an archaeological investigation into mysterious and long-abandoned underground tombs. Opening the tombs has dire consequences for the team of archaeologists, as the long-buried inhabitants revive from a long sleep and begin to kill the intruders one by one. In his fourth incarnation the Doctor and his companion Sarah battle man-eating plants that are stalking people and killing them in the English countryside. Terrifyingly, the plants move of their own volition, consume humans, and can even communicate. The tenth incarnation of the Doctor hunts down a deranged and mutating scientist through the streets of London. He eventually corners the scientist, now unrecognizable as a human at all, in a cathedral. Finally the hideous mutant is killed within this ecclesiastical setting.

These are précis of Doctor Who serials, respectively “The Tomb of the Cybermen” (1967), “The Seeds of Doom” (1976), and “The Lazarus Experiment” (2007). They are all adaptations. The Second Doctor’s archaeological adventure not only has its roots in generic horror films about the excavations of Egyptian mummies’ tombs, but is more specifically inscribed within the vernacular of the mummy horrors made by Universal in 1931 and Hammer Films from 1959 onward.^[1] For good measure, the actor George Pastell plays the untrustworthy and unscrupulous foreigner in “Tomb of the Cybermen,” the same role he essayed in Hammer’s The Mummy (1959).^[2] Wild plants killing people in the countryside bring to mind the 1951 science fiction novel Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. The scenes in “The Seeds of Doom” of plant life moving and hunting prey are immediately reminiscent of both the novel and its 1962 film and 1982 television adaptations, with their emphasis on themes of ecological horror.^[3] However, Day of the Triffids is an example of “postapocalyptic” writing; besides the killer plants, the novel also includes global catastrophe (the blinding of 99 percent of the world’s population). “Seeds of Doom” pulls back from plunging the world into an apocalypse as the Doctor saves the day, but the resonances between the 1951 novel and the Doctor Who serial are clear. But whereas “Tomb of the Cybermen” mostly took inspiration from the Hammer mummy films, “Seeds of Doom” incorporates a multiplicity of influences into its plot. The mutating plants and the infected scientists are ideas taken directly from Nigel Kneale’s first Quatermass television serial from 1953, which was later filmed by Hammer in 1955, ideas that had since repeated through other science fiction works including The Trollenberg Terror, a 1956 television serial adapted into a film in 1958, and the 1974 horror film The Mutations (aka The Freak Maker). An astronaut who returns to Earth from a space mission only to turn into a mutating monster also appears in The Incredible Melting Man, a 1978 horror film and yet another iteration of Kneale’s plotting.

Kneale’s influence over science fiction in Britain and Doctor Who especially is compelling. His signature creation, Professor Bernard Quatermass of the British Rocket Group, was name-checked in the 1988 serial “Remembrance of the Daleks,” and his works are influential over Doctor Who as a whole, even though Kneale actually turned down the invitation as a BBC writer to create a script for the program and claimed to dislike the show.^[4] If “Seeds of Doom” borrows one aspect from The Quatermass Experiment in the mutation of men into vegetative monsters, the conclusion to “The Lazarus Experiment,” when the mutating scientist is chased into a cathedral, replicates in tone and content the conclusion to Kneale’s 1953 serial (and the film adaptation), where the mutating astronaut Victor Carroon is chased into Westminster Abbey and killed.

These three serials are not isolated examples of adaptation but are rather suggestive of a general trend that unites both the original 1963–1989 serials and the episodes made since the 2005 revival: that trend is to adapt from single and sometimes multiple sources. It is obvious that Doctor Who’s writers and producers resorted to established ideas or sometimes entire plots in creating serials and stand-alone episodes. As we have seen in the introduction, the impulse to adapt is widespread through a multiplicity of genres and discourses. Doctor Who stories provide an exceptionally rich resource for not only comparing sources and adapted works through many decades of television production and the changing techniques and vernaculars of that production, but also for studying the range and extent of the adaptation taking place. What Hutcheon calls the “moment” of adaptation, or the point of transformation from a source into an adapted work, repeats again and again in Doctor Who in a variety of ways and with many different results.

In this chapter we consider types of works adapted into Doctor Who serials, but do so in pursuit of what these texts reveal of the moment of adaptation and the transition of a variety of texts into medium-specific works. In chapter 1 we saw that the first episode in 1963, “An Unearthly Child,” encapsulates many of the adaptive characteristics that would appear over the next decades. From this first episode we can move through a range of examples up to the recent “The Angels Take Manhattan” (2012), applying insights from adaptation theory to explain what we see in these stories. In this chapter, we are in pursuit of the types of sources that we find turning up in various guises in Doctor Who. It is also necessary to consider how we can use ideas on the theory and practice of adaptation to make sense of what we see happening on screen and to understand the importance of thinking about Doctor Who in terms of adaptation. I particularly consider the notion of “transgressive adaptations,” where the types of sources selected for adaptation can provide a foundation for later deviation from the originals. While we will see that adaptation involved announcing a prior relationship with the original source, Doctor Who’s adaptations are often likely to adapt from a diversity of sources.

Genres and Sources

To begin, it will be useful to lay out the chief types of sources adapted into Doctor Who serials in both the classic and the revived series. I do not intend in this chapter to exhaustively tick off each and every source that has ever been adapted into a Doctor Who serial. Rather I intend to offer some broader thoughts on the choices made by Doctor Who’s creative personnel about the types of stories they drew on, and to see how these intersect and can be interpreted by thinking about them in the light of adaptation theory. Fifty years is a long time in terms of television production, but we shall find that within Doctor Who several thousand years of literature has been either purloined or adapted.

Books

Novels are an important point to start with in adaptation. They are the most frequently resorted to source for adaptation in either film or television. As Walter C. Metz points out, landmark films in cinema by leading auteur directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk, Max Ophuls, and Fritz Lang are all adaptations of novels, and the proliferation of films that are based on a source novel continues unabated in contemporary cinema.^[5] I have already discussed at length the impact of the Victorian adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda on the serial “The Androids of Tara.” While the extent of this influence is notable in “Tara,” this serial is not the only instance where a novel has provided adaptive inspiration for Doctor Who. Later I will consider the influence of Agatha Christie’s detective novels, but writers as otherwise diverse as Jonathan Swift, Evelyn Waugh, and the American science fiction writer Harry Harrison have written works that have been adapted by Doctor Who scriptwriters. The Bulldog Drummond novels by “Sapper” (H. C. McNeile) provided the basic plotting of the 1979 serial “City of Death”—just one example of how popular literature has informed the writing and production of Doctor Who. Later we shall see the use scriptwriter Terrance Dicks made of She, a Victorian adventure novel by H. Rider Haggard in the 1975 serial “The Brain of Morbius,” but the novel was also a source of ideas for Peter Grimwade’s scripts for the 1984 story “Planet of Fire.” Elsewhere I have written about the influence of other books on Doctor Who, including John Wyndham’s catastrophist fiction and the metaphysical novels of the Anglo-Irish philosopher Iris Murdoch, which inspired Steven Moffat’s 2010 story “Time of Angels”/“Flesh and Stone,” which are diverse illustrations of the types of books that could influence Doctor Who.^[6]

Both novels and short stories are among the most frequently adapted of works into television programs and films.^[7] They are the basis of the majority of Hollywood screenplays, provide the source of many television miniseries, and are influential over the narratives of Doctor Who as well.^[8] One of the most striking and much discussed components of the revived series has been the relationship between the Doctor and Professor River Song. Their curiously distorted relationship, in that they are traveling in different directions down each other’s time lines, so that the Doctor’s future is River’s past, is an evocative and intriguing idea. It is also reminiscent of an earlier work, the science fiction novel The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. River and the Doctor first met in a library, as did the time traveler and his wife, and the traveler was given a diary, as River later gave one to the Doctor. The time traveler and his wife are also moving in different directions in time, so that his first meeting with his wife is not her first meeting with him. Understanding this relationship is quite mind bending. Clearer, however, is the debt to Niffenegger’s ideas for the way River and the Doctor’s relationship has been formulated.

Films

Cinema of different national schools, but especially British and Hollywood cinema, has been a potent influence on Doctor Who. Science fiction films (themselves often adaptations of literary science fiction) have left significant traces, as have horror films. For instance, Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise has provided ideas that a number of Doctor Who scriptwriters have adapted. The tense hunt for an alien and the dissipation of tension on the discovery of an innocuous cat appear in Eric Saward’s 1984 serial “Resurrection of the Daleks,” a scene lifted from Alien. More recently, the chilling realization in “Cold War” (2013) that the alien is lurking “in the walls” is again a moment adapted directly from the Alien franchise. Throughout the last fifty years flying saucers, zombies, vampires, haunted houses, and other staples of cinema have routinely made up the constituent elements of Doctor Who stories. Classic horrors that sit prominently in popular consciousness recur as elements of Doctor Who serials. The well-remembered scenes of an aquatic monster emerging from under water in Creature from the Black Lagoon inspire similar scenes in “The Sea Devils” (1972) and “Full Circle” (1980). While adaptation can often be thought of in terms of plotting, these are instances of the adaptation of the appearance of films. Doctor Who stories borrow striking imagery and designs. “The Daleks” (1963–1964) is one of many creative works to have been influenced by the Expressionist set design of the celebrated 1920 horror film Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari.^[9] The set design of the Dalek city consciously evokes the twisted and uneven scenography of the German film.^[10] Another classic image from film—a giant monster holding a screaming woman tenderly in its hand—was adapted from King Kong (1933) into the climax of “Robot” (1974). The adaptation of not only plot and themes but also visuals continues in the revived series. Recent serial “Nightmare in Silver” included a visit by children to a “World of Wonders”; they gained entrance with a Golden Ticket and were greeted by an eccentric man wearing a top hat and holding a cane, images that hark back to 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Some writers, producers, and directors proved particularly susceptible to cinematic influence. In chapters 6 and 7 particularly, there is analysis of the impact that the gory Hammer horror films had over Robert Holmes, one of the classic series’ most prolific writers (in all he penned eighteen stories) and a major creative figure, as he was script editor from 1974 to 1977 and contributed scripts from 1968 to 1986. Holmes was susceptible to other influences beyond the Hammer stable, however. His 1976 story “The Deadly Assassin” adapted deeply from the book and film The Manchurian Candidate (book 1959, film 1962) in its portrayal of brainwashing, political assassination, and conspiracy. As script editor, Holmes rewrote the beginning of Terry Nation’s scripts for “Genesis of the Daleks” in 1975 to create a scene emulating the imagery of the famous portrayal of the figure of Death in The Seventh Seal (1957). Here the adaptation is more a visual quotation than a more penetrating borrowing, but it is one of the many ways films recur in Doctor Who stories.

Television Series

Other television programs influenced the themes, tone, style, and plots of individual series and even entire eras or production regimes. As we will see throughout this book, a range of programs from Nigel Kneale’s seminal BBC science fiction series Quatermass to Associated Television (ATV) adventure series have contributed ideas to Doctor Who’s creative personnel. Some of the most recent stories (at time of writing) have continued to reveal the adaptive influence of television programs. Indeed, recent stories seem to have provided writers with the opportunity to emulate some of their favorite scriptwriters. An example is the 2013 story “Hide.” As many critics and reviewers have noted since its transmission, the story is clearly indebted to Nigel Kneale’s deft blend of science fiction and horror, especially his celebrated 1972 drama The Stone Tape. Kneale’s story was a tale of paranormal activity in a Victorian building, where scientists discover that a violent death from long ago has become implanted in the walls of the building (the “stone tape” of the title). Neil Cross’s script for “Hide” has identical plotting, including finding a spooky message from the past hidden in an old house. As reviewer Graham Kibble-White points out, “Hide” “is possessed by the spirit of Kneale’s work.”^[11] But this is merely the latest example. As we saw, Kneale’s influence extends over work from “The Seeds of Doom” to “The Lazarus Experiment,” taking in serials such as the 1970 adventure “The Ambassadors of Death,” in which murderous astronauts return to Earth from a doomed space mission, a scenario from the original Quatermass serial. The emergence of terrifying race memories from Kneale’s 1958–1959 serial Quatermass and the Pit was memorably used in “Doctor Who and the Silurians” (1970). Reviewer Vanessa Bishop labels almost the entirety of season 5 from 1967 to 1968 as a set of “Nigel Kneale knock-offs,” suggesting the extent to which his teleplays influenced Doctor Who’s production.^[12] Prominent and successful instances of telefantasy and science fiction have continued to influence Doctor Who. When the BBC revived the program in 2005 the most significant change between the new and the old program was the format change from serials comprising normally four twenty-five-minute episodes linked by cliffhangers to stand-alone stories of forty-five minutes each. The thinking behind this major change was an adaptive one, in that it borrowed from the formatting of then highly successful fantasy programs including Smallville and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The influence is deeper than just formatting, however, as these series also provided inspiration for the tone and style of the revived program and for the type of audience the BBC hoped it would capture.^[13] An early episode of the revived series, “Boom Town,” was heavily reminiscent of Buffy, including a city mayor who turns out to be a monster and the emphasis on personal relationships.^[14]

Poems

Even poems can be adapted into nonpoetic television drama, including the epic poetry of ancient Greece as well as more modern works. Long-standing Doctor Who contributor Terrance Dicks, script editor for the Pertwee era, has actually written two serials inspired by poems. His twentieth-anniversary story “The Five Doctors” (1983) evokes T. S. Eliot’s modernist poem The Waste Land as it shows the various incarnations of the Doctor, their companions, and their enemies trekking through the wild and desolate wastelands of Gallifrey’s Death Zone. A few years earlier in 1977, Dicks scripted “The Horror of Fang Rock,” a story of a lighthouse in 1910 under attack from an alien creature, the Rutan. Again the inspiration is poetic, this time from the ballad “Flannan Isle,” written in 1923 by Wilfrid Gibson. This spooky poem is based on real events, namely the mysterious disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from the lighthouse on Flannan Isle near the Hebrides. The poem provides both the atmosphere and the plot for Dicks’s serial, which narrates the mysterious killing of lighthouse keepers on Fang Rock. In his novelization of his scripts for Target Books, Dicks made the link even more obvious. The Doctor’s companion Leela asks the Doctor, “What will the people of this time say about all this? What will they think happened here?” and the Doctor answers that someone “will probably write a poem about it.”^[15]

But we must be mindful that different genres could intermingle within single serials. Films, books, or television programs could all feed into the one story. The scale and nature of the adaptation can differ significantly. Sometimes the traces are allusive; the “Sisterhood” guarding the Elixir of Life in Terrance Dicks’s serial “The Brain of Morbius” suggests the vestigial influence of the nineteenth-century novel She by H. Rider Haggard, while the name Morbius is from the movie The Forbidden Planet. These are instances more of brief inspiration than of comprehensive or extensive adaptation. By contrast, a serial such as “Dragonfire” (1987) reveals influences operating at a more profound level in terms of characterizations and action set pieces. The sympathetic but grotesque monster hunted in this story evoked the creature portrayed by Boris Karloff in James Whale’s 1930s Universal horror films. The “ANT” hunt in the same story is a close adaptation of the “bug hunt” in James Cameron’s Aliens (1986).

What Is an Adaptation?

Having just looked at the sources, the question of what then comprises an adaptation is a useful prelude to asking what gets adapted. However, both questions are fraught with points of contention and with some element of value judgment and even snobbery. An adaptation is a work derived from another source. Implicit in this simple definition, however, are the causes of contention. The process of adaptation has generated a significant body of scholarly literature and theoretical speculation, not all of which is helpful in interpreting the process or the result of adaptation. Robert Stam, a scholar who has written extensively and authoritatively on adaptation studies, criticizes a degree of theoretical thought on adaptation as “hamstrung” by the “inadequate trope” of fidelity, or measuring the value or success of an adaptation based on how closely and faithfully it parallels the original work.^[16] Robert Ray shares this disapproval, criticizing many writers in the field of adaptation studies for producing little except for comparative case studies of books and films.^[17] The fidelity paradigm is limiting in two particular ways. First, it limits discussion of adaptation to a binary position of a book becoming a film. Second, it introduces value judgments that assess a film purely as faithful to a book or not, rather than considering what interest or significance may lie in the transgressions from the original work or works. Anthony Davies reinforces this point, suggesting that traditional analysis of adaptations of a play to a film has raised questions such as, “How far can the film maker be a creator? To what extent is he obliged to confine himself to being an interpreter?”^[18] In other words, adaptation has not always been viewed as a process imbued with creative potential.

Despite these limitations, adaptation studies themselves have proved capable of change; furthermore, adaptation studies remain a body of thought crucial to understanding what Simone Murray refers to as “the structural logic of contemporary media and cultural industries.”^[19] This observation moves beyond comparisons of the differences in structure or aesthetics between a novel and a film based on a novel, and instead stakes a claim for adaptation studies as central to understanding both the vernacular and the priorities of contemporary popular culture. It moves beyond the comparison of literary adaptations in another important respect, one salient to understanding the types of works adapted into Doctor Who’s serials. As Murray suggests building on her observation about contemporary culture, adaptation studies have also moved beyond their “long preoccupation with the nineteenth-century Anglo-American literary canon.”^[20] Less charitable comments on earlier adaptation theorists suggest this preoccupation arose from a desire to make the field of adaptation studies seem academically respectable, by asserting its intersection with traditional English literary studies on the nineteenth-century novel, as Hollywood moguls had desired artistic respectability by making adaptations of what they regarded as “great literature.”^[21]

Regardless of the reason for an original focus on literature, adaptation studies now cast wider nets, a point again salient to Doctor Who, where the serials not only take inspiration from sources beyond the novel, but also bring diverse works into dialogue with each other, as multiple sources provide material for individual stories. Adaptation in Doctor Who is far removed from the supposed linear progression of a book into a screen adaptation that is privileged in works such as Brian McFarlane’s Novel to Film.^[22] The idea of linear progression in fact has been left behind by more recent intertextual relationships, including those in Doctor Who. Far from conforming to a process of novel into film, in Doctor Who there is the process of television serial into novelization, as most of the 1963–1989 serials were written up as novelizations, essentially throwing into reverse the process MacFarlane discusses.

More recent theoretical insights into adaptation have accordingly suggested alternative frameworks to the linear progression from book to film and offer broader assessments of the types of works adapted. However, a consistent idea in adaptation theory is, as Hutcheon says, that “adaptations have an overt and defining relationship to prior texts.”^[23] Further, adapted works “usually openly announce this relationship.”^[24] This point relates clearly to Doctor Who, where writers, producers, and directors can be entirely open and almost flagrant in spelling out their adaptation from other sources. An element of the focus of this analysis is that adaptation can be understood as a medium-specific process and outcome, meaning that the medium of the adapting work can define the relationship with the source and the type of work that is created. Doctor Who’s medium is the small screen: television. Accordingly, its creators can adapt from plots, ideas, or characters, but can also adapt visually. Adaptations of the visual realization of ideas announce their relationship explicitly to the prior text, because the relationship can be seen.

A number of Doctor Who stories make clear this capacity to announce relationships. The cliffhanger of “Spearhead from Space,” episode 3 (1970), shows a military officer opening his front door to be confronted by a murderous doppelganger of himself; the scene borrows from an identical sequence in the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball. Scenes from multiple season 7 and 8 serials (1970 and 1971) of the hijacking of military hardware mimic similar scenarios from many Bond films.^[25] A sequence in “Inferno” (1970) showing the Doctor infiltrating a scientific establishment by donning a radiation suit and mingling with a crowd of similarly suited people lifts its imagery from the climax of Dr. No, the 1962 Bond film.^[26] These visual consonances announce the relationship to a prior text as much as does the Doctor’s ironically reflexive comment that they were walking through a clichéd recreation of the Wild West in “The Gunfighters.”

But the exploration of this relationship between the adapted work and its prior text is now considerably more nuanced than just evaluating the fidelity of the adapted work to the source. Adaptation studies are now open to the idea of the transgressive relationship, where the adapted work departs from the source in ways that produce a product of cultural interest and where the process of adaptation is significant in the ways the adapted work is arrived at. Importantly, moving past and beyond the once dominant binary model of examining a book made into a film and judging how faithful the resulting film was to the book has also given us the critical apparatus to evaluate the adapting works and to account for and understand the points of difference as much as the points of similarity between an original work and the adapted work. For example, the James Bond films, a popular cultural phenomenon of enduring appeal and major importance in cinema history, were themselves originally adaptations. The first Bond film, 1962’s Dr. No, was adapted closely from Ian Fleming’s novel of the same name, published in 1958. Only some of the more ambitious sequences that Fleming described at the climax of the novel were omitted from the adaptation. But quite swiftly the adaptations became more transgressive. If we remained simply in the fidelity paradigm, we would have nothing else to say about these films except that they were unfaithful adaptations of Fleming’s books. Moving beyond this stance, however, gives us the means to evaluate how the transgressive adaptation process created original works of enduring appeal that often improved on the dramatic potential of the novels.

A telling instance is Goldfinger. This 1964 film adapts from a Fleming novel and mostly follows the novel’s plot that has Bond battling against Auric Goldfinger, a covetous SMERSH agent. But Fleming’s book had Goldfinger attempting to steal all the gold from Fort Knox. The plot is nonsense and quite dramatically unsatisfying; simply lifting that weight in gold would in reality be impossible. The film addresses this issue by transgressing from the novel and having Goldfinger (no longer a SMERSH agent, but a megalomaniacal, privately wealthy supervillain) plotting to leave the gold where it is, but to contaminate it, thus ruining the stockpile in Fort Knox and increasing the value of his own gold hoard. Here there is transgression, but it creates more elegant and logical drama. The transgression is also important to understanding the survival of the Bond franchise. Quite simply, Fleming’s output was finite and the number of Bond novels that could be adapted has run out. For the film franchise to survive, it had to outgrow its prior relationship to the books, suggesting that while adaptations do have these prior relationships, it can be just as important to understand how adaptations depart from, as much as follow, the source text.

These points must be borne in mind when pursuing adaptation within the diegesis of Doctor Who, where we will see some instances of a book being adapted into a serial, but where we are more likely to encounter transgression than fidelity, and where we will be concerned with what the transgressions or even the infidelities are revealing of the moment of adaptation and the creation of a media-specific work.

A Period of Originality?

The process of adaptation in Doctor Who thus presents itself as being of capital significance to the program’s impact and to the types of stories it tells, as its impact relies on a mixture of familiarity and the unexpected. Partly this may be familiarity of setting. Most famously the actor Jon Pertwee (1919–1996), who played the Third Doctor, commented that the appeal of Doctor Who for television viewers lay in the possibility of finding a “Yeti on a loo in Tooting Bec.”^[27] Of course there never was (nor yet has been) a Doctor Who story where a Yeti was found in such a location. However, there have been stories where Yetis have been found down the London underground or rampaging through a monastery, and the alien menace they pose is sharply heightened by the contrast of the more familiar setting with the strange and preternatural (a tactic earlier pursued by Nigel Kneale in his Quatermass serials, such as locating an alien invasion against the drab backdrop of an oil refinery).^[28] However, familiarity may not just be related to setting but to familiar types and patterns of storytelling. The reassuring figure of a London policeman doing his rounds outside the junkyard in “An Unearthly Child” would have been instantly recognizable from Dixon of Dock Green, but here the borrowed trope from the police series serves to reinforce the alien mystery of the TARDIS, which is humming as if it is alive rather than a dormant object and is in an inexplicable location for a public utility. So, too, does the contrast between not only the setting of the school, but the type of mundane “kitchen sink” drama that the episode resembled before the abrupt jump into the TARDIS. Accordingly, it is important to think in more detail about the types of sources that were absorbed into Doctor Who’s narratives and to think about the different types of stories that were brought into dialogue with each other.

What Gets Adapted? Onward from 1963

From its beginnings, Doctor Who was made by creative personnel who were adapting from different sources, or in some instances were under orders to avoid adapting from sources, such as Newman’s orders regarding BEMs. Newman especially wanted to avoid the taint (as he saw it) of pulp American science fiction. While Newman himself was not British (he was Canadian), the way Doctor Who developed was with a distinctively British emphasis in the originals, adapted from Dixon of Dock Green and Quatermass and later on the Bond films. With this sense of the origins of Doctor Who clear, as well as a sense of the diverse sources that fed into its first twenty-five minutes, it is now important to consider broader questions about the nature of adaptation. What gets adapted was once a straightforward question with an equally straightforward answer. Adaptation studies, their methodological frameworks and overarching questions, began as an offshoot of both cultural and literary studies, and consequently they were intended to explain the implications of adapting a novel into a film (or television miniseries). Films themselves proclaimed their indebtedness to source novels and invited critical exploration of the fruits of adaptation. David Lean’s celebrated 1946 adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations begins with title cards that show the pages of the novel being opened to reveal the credits that lead into the opening of the film. The film thus proclaims that it is not original but is taken from the novel. Not all films that are adaptations from a novel are quite so visually explicit as Lean’s film, nor so anxious to suggest the clear trajectory from novel to film that Lean’s title sequence—of the novel being a segue to the film—suggests. For example, the introduction to this book mentions the 1993 comedy Dave, which is an allusive rather than a direct adaptation of The Prisoner of Zenda.

Adaptation theorist Thomas Leitch suggests that “adapted films are by definition irradiated with the traces of other texts they acknowledge in a mind-boggling variety of ways.”^[29] His point is a salutary reminder that there is more to adaptation studies than a linear progression from a book to a film or television series. Other theorists propose similarly complex visions of the processes of adaptation. Hutcheon proposes that there are three principal “modes of engagement” between a story and its audience: “to tell, show or interact with stories.”^[30] In other words, a written text “tells” its story; a visual medium, chiefly film and television (although Hutcheon has also written extensively on opera), “shows” its story; and it is possible to “interact” with multidimensional adaptations such as theme park rides, or else to engage as a participant in narrative in role-playing games.^[31]

But the types of texts that Doctor Who adapts blur these distinctions. As a television program and therefore as a visual medium, Doctor Who does “show” its stories, but precisely because it is an adaptive program and draws ideas, themes, and sometimes entire plots into its narrative, it also tells its stories, sometimes textually, and its characters do interact knowingly with other stories. As indicated in the introduction, in “The Gunfighters” the Doctor and his companions find themselves wandering through a Wild West setting that seems highly clichéd. Crucially, the characters actually realize this and comment that the environment they find themselves in is a collection of tropes. In the preceding story, “The Celestial Toymaker,” the Doctor’s companions battled a number of adversaries that had come to life from children’s literature. They were challenged to a series of deadly games by “Cyril,” a sly, fat schoolboy who was clearly a copyright-careful adaptation of Billy Bunter, the schoolboy from Grayfriars School created by Charles Hamilton. They also stumble upon a disorderly kitchen with a cook and maids who seem to have stepped out of the Duchess’s kitchen in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In “The Androids of Tara” the Doctor essentially finds himself interacting with the (renamed) characters from Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda, but the most extended and most playful if frightening example of the program telling, showing, and interacting with its sources is the 1968 story “The Mind Robber.”

This story is also the most acutely reflexive story among Doctor Who serials in showing, in its narrative, the way that Doctor Who adapts from other sources and in suggesting the types of texts likely to be adapted into Doctor Who stories. Overall it is a playful reflection on how Doctor Who tells stories that it has adapted from other sources. In “The Mind Robber” the Second Doctor and his companions Jamie and Zoe are stranded in the Land of Fiction after the TARDIS explodes. They eventually discover that the mysterious realm is the product of the imagination of the “Master of the Land of Fiction,” actually a writer of adventure stories from England who has been kidnapped in 1926 by unseen alien creatures and forced to create fictional scenarios and characters. The Master himself is an adapter. Among the literary characters he has brought to life in the Land of Fiction are Lemuel Gulliver from Jonathan Swift’s 1726 philosophical romance Gulliver’s Travels, Rapunzel from numerous fairy story tellings, and d’Artagnan from Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, published in serial form in 1844. Other sources are fictitious—including a comic strip about the superhero the Karkus—but the Master also uses mythological sources about the gorgon Medusa and Grimm’s fairy tales. Parts of the story are told via words, including scenes of the Doctor moving through a forest of books, which is literally a series of giant classic novels, and in other scenes the Doctor reads the next stages of the narrative out loud from ticker tape spewing out of a computer. The ticker tape machine is in a room containing titles of works such as Vanity Fair, Don Quixote, and Legends of Ancient Greece. The serial also shows the story through conventional televisual means, but of course the Doctor and his companions also interact with characters from other stories, including Gulliver and other figures from classical literature and mythology.

By turns playful (including an appearance by Cyrano de Bergerac with a ridiculously oversized nose) and sinister (such as when the Doctor is menaced by robots or by a troupe of sword-wielding and distinctly diabolical Victorian children), “The Mind Robber’s” script plays games with the process of adaptation.^[32] The Master of the Land of Fiction complains that as a writer of adventure serials for a boys’ magazine, he was under enormous pressure to create new stories by deadlines (he claims to have written five thousand words a week for twenty-five years), and now as a prisoner of the unseen aliens he is under the same pressure, which is why he has brought the Doctor to the Land of Fiction to take his place and give him a rest.^[33] Small wonder, the story suggests, that the Master has resorted to ripping off from Swift, Dumas, fairy tales, comic strips, and other sources in order to meet his deadlines. But significantly, the serial shows the characters and plots the Master has lifted effortlessly incorporated into the Doctor’s own adventure. Throughout “The Mind Robber,” the Doctor easily segues from making conversation with Lemuel Gulliver (who can, however, only talk in words that his creator Swift gave him), to witnessing sword fights by the musketeers, to climbing up to Rapunzel’s tower, and ultimately to defeating Medusa. Overall “The Mind Robber” makes important if playful points about the types of sources adapted into Doctor Who; the Master’s choices are eclectic in the extreme, and the Doctor confronts and deals with a range of characters and threats from a wide range of textual sources, which he reads and interacts with. Some of these might be considered the sort of texts with which schoolchildren might once have been familiar, such as Swift, but the Master is a very well-read man.

Very recently Doctor Who returned to this approach to bringing the process of adaptation onto the screen and building allusion to the process of adaptation itself into the story. The 2012 story “The Angels Take Manhattan” showed the Doctor and his companion Amy gradually realizing that their actions in twenty-first-century Manhattan have been prefigured in a potboiler detective novel that Amy happens to be reading, about a 1930s female gumshoe called Melody Malone. When they discover a reference in the book to their missing companion Rory, the Doctor realizes that the book is narrating adventures that are currently happening and will happen in the near future. Meanwhile, in 1930s Manhattan, Rory has met up with the actual Melody Malone (who is the Doctor’s wife, River Song, in disguise), been kidnapped by a pair of henchmen, and been locked up by Mr. Grayle, a mafioso. If all this sounds confusing, it is because the narrative of the novel converges with the narrative of the Doctor and Amy’s adventure, and the characters find themselves interacting in a literal way with the characters and events from the potboiler detective novel. In this way, Steven Moffat’s script suggests that the Doctor and his companions are moving through an adaptation of the 1930s detective genre, but furthermore, they themselves realize this point.

Conclusion

What can we conclude about the types of sources adapted? One point is that we certainly will look in vain for consistency in choice of selection across the last fifty years, even if particular epochs were making choices based on necessity or popularity, such as the more didactic and literary scripts of the 1960s or the stories of the late 1970s and 1980s that were conscious of the impact of Alien. This should not surprise us, as the choices made reflect fifty years of television making, and as we will see in forthcoming chapters, choices were made by a wide variety of creative personnel, including producers and scriptwriters, as well as script editors. From the program’s first twenty-five minutes of monochrome adventure, a team of producers, writers, and other executives pooled their mental resources, interests, and ideas on what made good television to produce a patchwork of a script. From “The Mind Robber” to “The Angels Take Manhattan,” the makers of Doctor Who have even brought the fact that the Doctor’s adventures are adaptations onto the screen and into the fabric of the adventure. In this chapter we gave particular attention to some of the earliest people to work on Doctor Who, but in the next chapter we will see that the impulse to adapt carries through multiple production regimes up to the present. It is now time to turn to look more closely at the people responsible for creating Doctor Who.

Notes

Egyptologist Jasmine Day’s text The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-speaking World (London: Routledge, 2006) explains the core elements of many “classic” mummy films, including many that have parallels with the plot of “Tomb of the Cybermen.” For example, the scene where the Doctor works out some complicated symbolic logic that opens the tombs is similar to deciphering ancient curses in hieroglyphs.

Pixley, “The Tomb of the Cybermen,” 38.

Jørgensen, “Blueprint for Destruction,” 18–20.

“Bernard Quatermass.”

Metz, “‘Who Am I in This Story?,’” 285.

See my papers “The Church Militant?” and “Martians, Demons, Vampires and Vicars.”

Edwards, “Brand Name Literature,” 32–58.

Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, 4.

Nor was this the last time that Caligari influenced Doctor Who; when he landed in Tombstone, Arizona, the Doctor assumed the alias “Dr. Caligari.”

On the influence of Caligari, see Robinson, Das Cabinet, 53–59.

Kibble-White, “Hide,” 67.

Bishop, “Curious: You Expect-a Me to Talk-a, Eh?,” 46.

Rixon, American Television, 102.

Burk and Smith?, Who Is the Doctor, 60.

Dicks, Fang Rock, 126.

Robert Stam, “Beyond Fidelity,” 76.

Ray, “The Field of ‘Literature and Film,’” 38–53.

Davies, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays, 3.

Murray, “Materializing Adaptation Theory,” 4.

Ibid., 7.

Sconce, “Dickens,” 178.

22.

McFarlane, Novel to Film.

23.

Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, 3.

24.

Ibid.

25.

A sustained comparison of the Bond films and Doctor Who is Christinidis, “Britishness and Popularity,” 81–91.

26.

Cartwright, “Roots Part 2,” 19.

27.

Smurthwaite, “Jon Pertwee.”

28.

Johnson, “Quatermass Serials,” 151.

29.

Thomas Leitch, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know,” 233.

30.

Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, 22.

31.

Ibid.

32.

On the adaptation of the Cyrano de Bergerac story, see Brereton, Short History, 330.

33.

The real-life model for the “Master” may be Frank Richards, the prolific children’s story writer and creator of Billy Bunter; see Barnes, “The Mind Robber,” 55.

Who Was Adapting?

Behind the scenes, and doubtless like any other program, Doctor Who’s production was plagued by clashes between personalities and ideas. This chapter assesses the personnel responsible for selecting and adapting sources, predominantly the scriptwriters and script editors, from Terry Nation and David Whitaker in the 1960s through to Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat of the twenty-first century. But this chapter also points out that Doctor Who’s creators were its consumers too. By the 1980s, writers adapted earlier serials into stories and produced narratives that were continuity heavy and likely to satisfy fans but alienate a more general audience. It has not generally been considered before how adaptation theory can be used and applied to understand the creative intentions of program makers, but in the case of Doctor Who, adaptation studies also are central to understanding the controversial implications of their actions. This chapter assesses production teams, especially those of the 1980s, whose impact on the program was to have created entire seasons of stories that adapted from the program’s past. But in doing so, they alienated audiences and the BBC’s own hierarchy.

The chapter will gain additional depth by considering occasions in the program’s history when production personnel have consciously eschewed adaptation, attempting to encourage writers to produce stories that “only Doctor Who” could tell and avoiding derivation. This chapter will give focused attention to particular production regimes, especially the team of John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward and the pairing of Nathan-Turner with Christopher H. Bidmead. Although the producer (and Nathan-Turner was the program’s longest-serving producer) is a constant factor, the script editors have shown markedly different approaches to adapting. Questions arise in studying them: To what extent did borrowing from other sources or self-consciously striving for originality impact the program’s success with audiences? Has Doctor Who ever adapted from or consumed itself?

Adaptation in Groups

Thinking about the people who were responsible for the adaptation brings to prominence two major ideas about the adaptive process. One is that adaptation is often a collaborative exercise. The second and associated point is one already alluded to: that multiple, not single, sources are the basis of Doctor Who serials. These points emerge from the widened theoretical perspectives that now inform adaptation theory. It is possible to apply insights from adaptation theory to understand the process and the results of adapting a work simultaneously from different sources that are all brought into dialogue with each other within the adapted work. This point is central to understanding the circumstances of narrative creation in Doctor Who and the people responsible for it. It would, for example, be unhelpful to think of the diegesis of this program as the result of an auteur’s vision. Auteur theory supposes that a single dominating creative vision—normally the director’s—gives life and shape to a creative output.^[1] Doctor Who has, by contrast, continued through its fifty years of production to be the result of the same type of group-based collaboration and pooling of intellectual and imaginative resources that defined its creation in 1963. There have admittedly been times when one voice has been far more dominant in Doctor Who’s production than others (Russell T. Davies being the arch-autocrat during 2005–2010 and John Nathan-
Turner’s influence in the early to mid-1980s being dominant before falling off somewhat toward the end of his tenure). These influences do not, however, lead toward acceptance of auteurism but rather suggest the relative power relationships in different phases of the program’s life.

The Program Makers

It will help to have a sense of the different types of roles that informed Doctor Who’s production and the types of people who fulfilled that role. The “classic stories” from 1963 to 1989 were made in a production format that changed remarkably little over those twenty-six years, even if the people who filled the different positions did change; changes which in turn altered the relationships between director and producer, script editor and scriptwriters, and actors and writers. For example, Tom Baker’s power to determine the direction of the program between about 1976 and 1979 was quite remarkable; aided and abetted by Douglas Adams in 1979, Baker pushed for a more deliberately humorous tone, but Baker was challenged by John Nathan-
Turner. He had been unable to have such influence earlier in his tenure owing to “finding his feet,” and was then again disempowered through declining health, apathy, and the rising power of Nathan-Turner in 1980–1981.

Tom Baker’s influence is, however, a remarkable instance of unusual creative involvement that distorted the usual pattern of the production. At the apex of the creative team was the producer, who worked closely in collaboration with the script editor. Both the producer’s and script editor’s roles were permanent positions and spanned multiple stories and seasons. By contrast the incumbent of the other major creative role in Doctor Who’s production—the director—changed with each serial. Many directors were hired more than once, and some, including Christopher Barry, Douglas Camfield, Lennie Mayne, Peter Grimwade, and Paddy Russell, worked on multiple stories across several eras of the program.^[2] Others, however, were only ever hired the once. As such, a great deal of writing on Doctor Who, either by fans, journalists, or television critics and historians, tends to break the production history down into regimes according to the combination of producer and script editor. There is much validity in this approach, as there are clearly entire eras in the program that are the creative fruits of close collaboration between the incumbents of these roles. Verity Lambert and David Whitaker worked in close collaboration across Doctor Who’s first year of production. Barry Letts produced and Terrance Dicks script-edited almost the entire Pertwee era, and Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes oversaw the gothic “golden age” of Tom Baker’s first three years in the role. Later there was long-standing collaboration (from 1982 to 1986) between producer John
Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward, while Nathan-Turner worked with the same script editor, Andrew Cartmel, for all of Sylvester McCoy’s time as the Seventh Doctor (1987–1989), although the tone and preoccupations of these last two years do seem to owe more to Cartmel, while Nathan-Turner’s interest in the program declined.

This list is not exhaustive, and not every era of Doctor Who presents such coherence in the production team. For some of Patrick Troughton’s era as the Second Doctor, the incumbent of the script editor’s role actually changed with every serial, and sometimes the producer and script editor swapped roles.^[3] Some figures remained in their posts for such short periods of time as to have had only a negligible impact. John Wiles, Lambert’s successor, only produced four stories before departing for another series.^[4] Neither should the simple fact of parallel incumbency necessarily be taken to imply constructive creative collaboration, as Nathan-Turner and Saward in particular ended their collaboration amid great acrimony.^[5]

Nonetheless, periodizing the program in this way is a useful way to step into its production history and its creative processes. Casual viewers of the show may not particularly have noticed the impact of the changing production regimes across the years, nor been able to pinpoint any changes they did notice to the names listed in the closing credits. However, closer study of the program does indicate the impact of particular creative personnel on the tone, style, and content of stories made under their aegis. Thus stories script-edited by Eric Saward are notably accented by heavy violence, high levels of on-screen gore, and an overall style and tone indebted to the Alien series of science fiction/horror films, especially his 1982 serial “Earthshock,” set on a space freighter. Earlier, practicing Buddhist Barry Letts produced stories laden with Buddhist parables, especially 1974’s “Planet of the Spiders,” which led the Third Doctor toward a regeneration through a narrative that saw him reach a form of enlightenment about his own fears and insecurities. Robert Holmes was an appreciative viewer of the repeated Hammer horror films on British television and brought this viewing experience onto the screen in the gothic stories he script-edited between 1974 and 1977.

One other person merits attention at these early stages: Christopher H. Bidmead, the script editor in 1980–1981, and thus of season 18. Although only script editor for a year, his impact was significant, and the stories made under his supervision are notable for his ambition as script editor to steer both new and established writers away from the adaptation of other texts, traditions, and ideas and to eschew other people’s ideas. In a series of interviews he has given in the years since he was script editor, Bidmead has outlined his philosophy of writing for Doctor Who, which was to avoid telling stories that could be or even already had been told by other programs. However, the limits of his success register on screen, and the year of stories he edited are particularly valuable for this study of adaptation in Doctor Who, as they reveal an ongoing tension between writers’ impulses to adapt and Bidmead’s to avoid derivative stories.

The “new series” of Doctor Who has been made under a very different set of production circumstances. The apex of its creative team is not the producer but the executive producer and chief writer: from 2005 to 2010 this was Russell T. Davies, and since 2010 it has been Steven Moffat. A major shift in the way the “new” is made as opposed to the “classic” is that the executive producer is also the chief writer for the series. By contrast the producers of the “classic” serials did not also write them, although their script editors frequently did.^[6] This factor influences the revived series significantly. Although the executive producers have not written every serial, they have written a large number of them, including landmark stories such as those featuring regenerations of the Doctor, the introduction of new characters, or the introduction, continuation, and resolution of story arcs. Accordingly, both Davies and Moffat have set contrasting but equally emphatic tones for the serials on which they have been executive producers. What is common to both classic and revived Doctor Who is the collaborative nature of its creation, a practice actually formalized under Russell T. Davies’s era by the “tone meetings” he held for each story to bring a group together to work on production development, although these meetings were also an opportunity to imprint his vision on each story.^[7]

Continuity in Doctor Who

The people making Doctor Who have at times been fans of their own program, or at least likely to draw off the program’s history in making their stories. This impulse transcends any particular production regime and manifests across the last fifty years. Every Dalek story since the first has been an attempt to recreate the impact and success of the first. The success of a “multiple doctor” story with 1972’s “The Three Doctors” made it obvious to bring back past doctors in “The Five Doctors” (1983) and “The Two Doctors” (1985). After the success of 1972’s “The Curse of Peladon,” a sequel seemed an obvious move, and “The Monster of Peladon” appeared in 1974. The desire to adapt from Doctor Who itself also appears as a narrative strategy in the revived series. For example, the 2010 story “Victory of the Daleks” self-consciously borrows from the two stories that brought together Patrick Troughton’s Doctor with the Daleks, 1966’s “Power of the Daleks,” and 1967’s “Evil of the Daleks.” “Victory” features the same duplicitous and devious Daleks that appeared with such impact in the earlier stories. More generally, the appearance of Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor, including his braces, bow tie, and boots, has suggested to more than one observer a direct homage to the appearance and characterization of the Second Doctor.

The teams making 1980s Doctor Who repay particular analysis as a group of production personnel who had a definite impact on the program in their choice to make continuity-heavy stories. This period was when many of the children who had been fans in earlier years became more critical adult viewers. The producer for the entire decade, John Nathan-Turner, has had some defenders but has mostly been vilified over the years. This was in part because his was the first “era” in which longtime fans of the show were now in adulthood and capable of voicing their concerns over what Nathan-Turner had done to “their” program. During his tenure the program moved through a number of difficult periods. After being put on hiatus in 1985–1986—by an unsympathetic controller in Michael Grade—its viewing figures dwindled, and finally it was pulled from the air in 1989. Although this point has not been made in depth before, adaptation is important to understanding some of the controversies of the period. The program as produced by Nathan-Turner, when working in collaboration with Eric Saward, was heavily accented toward its own history.

There are several reasons for this emphasis. One is that this history became more readily available to committed fans—and writers—of the program because of developments in recording technology. The reason a large number of the original tapes of 1960s and 1970s episodes were not kept by the BBC after their broadcast was because it was not envisaged that home VHS players would become common, or even exist, and be readily available. The development of this technology in the early 1980s created demand for stories to release on video. In 1983, the commercial arm of the BBC released 1975’s “Revenge of the Cybermen” on home video, and thus launched the ongoing release of a back catalogue of surviving Doctor Who serials. A second reason is that in 1983 Doctor Who reached its twentieth anniversary of ongoing transmission on the BBC. The timing of this anniversary coincided with developments in home recording and playback technology.

People willing to buy VHS copies were able to watch some old stories that had survived the archival purging of earlier decades, but viewers of Doctor Who in the 1980s were able to watch variations on older stories in different ways as well. Particularly for the twentieth season of 1983, producer John Nathan-Turner mandated that every story would feature a returning monster, villain, or character from earlier years of the program’s history. Some of the returning characters were still current. “Snakedance,” the second story of the season, featured the Mara, an alien entity returning from “Kinda,” a story in season 19 the year before and which had been a success with audiences. The final story, “The King’s Demons,” featured the Master, a character who first appeared in 1971 but who, played by various actors, was a recurring one across the 1970s and 1980s. Other returning monsters would have required viewers to have fairly lengthy long-term memories of the program. The Black and White Guardians from stories in season 16 of 1978 reappeared in a trilogy of 1983 stories, “Mawdryn Undead,” “Terminus,” and “Enlightenment,” although the White Guardian appeared in only the last of these. Going back even further, the season opener “Arc of Infinity” was set on the Doctor’s home planet of Gallifrey, but also featured Omega, a renegade Time Lord last seen in the 1973 story “The Three Doctors” (not coincidentally the program’s tenth-anniversary story).

There was nothing inherently new in Doctor Who producers deciding to bring back old monsters, villains, or even story lines. The immediate success of the Daleks from their debut story in 1963 was apparent to Verity Lambert, who would produce two further Dalek stories, and her successors as producers brought them back routinely (Hartnell’s next producer, John Wiles, produced an epic twelve-part Dalek story, Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor fought them twice, Pertwee’s Doctor three times, and Tom Baker’s Doctor twice). The Daleks had been intended to appear in a story in season 20, but unforeseen production problems delayed the serial to 1984 (as a consolation, a lone Dalek appeared in “The Five Doctors”). Similarly other creatures and characters were used across multiple production regimes, including the Master, the Cybermen, and others such as the Sontarans.

But there are clear distinctions between bringing back monsters or alien creatures on a semi-routine basis, which had been an approach taken by all producers from Verity Lambert onward, and the way that Nathan-Turner reintroduced aspects of the program’s history into 1980s stories. It is one thing to bring back an old monster and write a new story around it, but another to bring back an old monster and the old monster’s older story. For example, the character of Omega returned in “Arc of Infinity,” and he brought with him a complex backstory that was only fully comprehensible if viewers had seen “The Three Doctors.” In “Arc of Infinity” the plot was driven by Omega’s quest for revenge against the Doctor, but not realizing what had happened in “The Three Doctors” may have dissipated the impact of this quest for more casual viewers. The plot dynamics of “Mawdryn Undead,” “Terminus,” and “Enlightenment” are driven by the Black Guardian’s quest for revenge against the Doctor. However, that desire is only fully comprehensible for viewers who could also recall the conclusion of the 1979 serial “The Armageddon Factor,” where the Doctor defeated the Black Guardian in the quest for the Key to Time and left the Guardian vowing revenge (itself dependent upon the entire story arc of season 16). The dramatic intentions of these season 20 serials differ significantly from earlier rematches of the Doctor against old monsters.

The focus in season 20 on old monsters set a trend which continued through the next years of Nathan-Turner’s producership. The next season, season 21 of 1984, opened with “Warriors of the Deep.” This story brought back not one but two monsters from the 1970s, the Silurians from the 1970 serial “Doctor Who and the Silurians,” and the Sea Devils from the eponymous 1972 serial. In “The Sea Devils” it was explained that the two races were related to each other, which seemed a good reason for Nathan-Turner to bring them back in the one serial. But the old story returns as well. “Doctor Who and the Silurians” ended on a downbeat note, with the Doctor’s attempts to mediate between the humans and the Silurians ending with the latter’s destruction by Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, a move the Doctor bitterly regretted. Throughout “Warriors of the Deep,” the Fifth Doctor seems determined to fix his mistakes from “The Silurians,” and not just an old monster but an old story comes back. Later in season 21 the Daleks return, as does the Master. The Doctor’s regeneration in the final story is also a returning plot device.

In season 22 (1985) the emphasis on returning monsters continued and the season opened with “Attack of the Cybermen.” The complex plot reiterated narratives from two 1960s stories, “The Tenth Planet” (1966) and “Tomb of the Cybermen” (1967). To fully understand the narrative of “Attack of the Cybermen” requires a working knowledge of the plots of both earlier serials. The dramatic high point of the final episode is reached when a member of the Cryon race, a friendly alien species, informs the Doctor that the Cybermen are plotting to change the course of history (as established in Doctor Who’s own internal history) and prevent the destruction of their home planet Mondas by destroying the Earth instead. They are acting on this plot from their underground tombs on the planet Telos, an aspect of the narrative taken from “The Tomb of the Cybermen.” By 1985 it would have been verging on the unrealistic to expect viewers to recall with detail the events of both the 1966 and 1967 serials. Neither had ever been repeated on British television since their original transmissions. In 1985 “Tomb of the Cybermen” was missing from the BBC’s archives, and “The Tenth Planet” was only partly complete.^[8] To complicate matters further, other aspects from earlier stories are included. The TARDIS sets down at number 76 Totter’s Lane, where it had last rested in the very first episode in 1963; it had not been mentioned on screen since. The principal protagonist, Lytton, returns from an earlier story, and the scenes of the Cybermen stalking through the sewers of London emulate earlier sequences in “The Invasion” of 1968. It is, therefore, not surprising that the critical review of the serial in Doctor Who: The Television Companion declared, “Attack of the Cybermen is one of the most derivative stories that Doctor Who ever turned out.”^[9] The evaluation of the serial in the BBC’s Classic Episode Guide is more succinct and more brutal, calling it “pointless.”^[10]

There is, however, a point to assessing this story as an adaptation of multiple sources. Some of the sources are simply the black-and-white serials that were plundered to provide the plot for “Attack of the Cybermen.” There is a yet more diffuse but potent source that Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward adapted: what they perceived to be the nostalgia of fans for the earlier episodes of the program and the same fans’ desire to see earlier monsters return and for their backstories to be revisited. Contemporary negative reactions from so-called fanzines, or periodicals containing reviews by fan viewers, suggest that the adaptation of the past stories alienated rather than appealed, and audience viewing figures began to fall.^[11]

Here the adaptation actually tried very hard to be faithful and not to transgress, and the result was critical derision. Nathan-Turner’s intention as a producer was to create stories that appealed to fans by incorporating what is called “continuity.” Continuity means not only the return of past monsters or characters, but also revisiting earlier narratives and making full understanding of current stories contingent on knowing the narratives of earlier stories. This approach typifies the stories produced by Nathan-Turner and script-edited by Eric Saward. Following “Attack of the Cybermen,” subsequent stories brought back members of the Doctor’s own race the Time Lords, the Daleks, the Master, and even the Second Doctor, again played by Patrick Troughton, as well as his companion Jamie. The references to continuity came to weigh heavily in the program. In the season 22 story “Timelash,” it was suggested that the Doctor’s current companion Peri was able to recognize an image of the Third Doctor’s companion Jo Grant, suggesting rather oddly that the Doctor kept photograph albums on board the TARDIS and made his companions memorize the faces and names of their predecessors. By this point the continuity had even become invented continuity: the Third Doctor and Jo were never seen to visit Karfel during their televised adventures.

People adapting Doctor Who into later Doctor Who serials took two different approaches: uncritical and even slavish attempts to recreate what were seen as past glories, or ironic updating of earlier themes and ideas. It is significant that the same producer could be capable of both approaches. The stories Nathan-Turner produced in collaboration with Saward’s successor, Andrew Cartmel, have an anarchic and antiestablishment tone missing from the serials made earlier in the 1980s. Continuity references continued to proliferate, and so too did appearances from old monsters and characters. Once more the Master, Daleks, and Cybermen all appeared, but in stories that expressed more a complicated than slavish relationship with the program’s history.

The return to 76 Totter’s Lane in “Attack of the Cybermen” was an act of nostalgia intended to satisfy fans who knew that this was the same setting used in “An Unearthly Child.” In 1988’s “Remembrance of the Daleks,” another setting from the first-ever episode reappeared, the Coal Hill School where Susan had studied and Ian and Barbara taught. But here there is no nostalgia. The 1963 visited by the Seventh Doctor and Ace appears as a racist, bigoted society. Ace finds herself staying in a suburban London guesthouse, but in a controversial and much-discussed moment in the serial, she turns over a sign hanging in the front window to discover it reads “No Coloureds.” Here the Daleks, creatures who instinctively hate those different from themselves, appear to be a mirror of this period of British history, rather than being juxtaposed against it. This serial is iconoclastic. Part of the iconoclasm is about Britain’s past, suggesting the ugly aspects of that past at a time when British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was calling for a return to traditional values. More directly, the serial adapts from Doctor Who’s past—the setting of Coal Hill School is from the foundation serial—but tellingly it transgresses. In one scene the intersection between the historical period in all its failings and Doctor Who itself is made especially clear. The Doctor’s companion turns on a television in an evening in November 1963 to hear a BBC continuity announcer introducing a new science fiction serial, clearly intended to be an extradiegetic reference to Doctor Who. This serial thus places Doctor Who’s origins in a period with ugly undercurrents. The boom in fan interest in the program during the 1980s led to the holding of many conventions, at which former 1960s companions including Anneke Wills (who played Polly from 1966 to 1967) went on record to claim that First Doctor actor William Hartnell had held racist attitudes.^[12] There was an insistence in late 1980s Doctor Who on undercutting the nostalgia for the past that informed earlier adaptations from the program’s own history. This fed off of and into these surrounding developments. The effect of the scene moves past what could have been an in-joke and instead asserts the connection between the period and the program in a way that makes nostalgia about 1963 impossible.

The makers of the revived series have also drawn heavily on the program’s heritage but in ways likely to generate interest because of deviation rather than imitation. The Daleks, Cybermen, Silurians, Sontarans, the Master, UNIT, and other characters, races, and institutions from the “classic” series have all appeared since the 2005 revival, despite—or because of—an initial reluctance to rely on the series’ established continuity for its marketability. Indeed, the first episode of the revived series, “Rose,” pitted the Doctor against the Autons, returning for the first time since “Terror of the Autons” (1971). Yet the episode title conveys an important insight about the place of the Autons and their history within the episode. The story served to reintroduce the Doctor and to introduce his companion Rose. We see Rose at her home and place of work and gain a sense of her daily life some time before the Doctor appears. “Rose” is not “about” the Autons, and the history of their encounters with the Third Doctor and the Master in serials from 1970 and 1971 does not inform the plot of this episode. While the Autons appear, they have not brought their backstory with them, and the episode can be understood without knowing of the earlier serials. The center of interest in “Rose” was the Doctor and his new companion, and the Autons are mostly a generic contribution to the episode. However, in subsequent instances, the people who make the program have demonstrated an iconoclastic approach to adapting Doctor Who’s own heritage, and the stories recreate many aspects of the mythologies of these characters and frequently transgress, rather than recreate, the past. While there are references to the program’s past, the clarity of the plotting is not contingent on them.^[13]

The reintroduction of the Cybermen into the program is a salient example of this transgression. The narrative of 1985’s “Attack of the Cybermen” had a plot where the twists and revelations required viewers to have remembered stories broadcast twenty years earlier. The reintroduction of the Cybermen in the new series followed a different narrative strategy and actively jettisoned the existing continuity. In its place the two-part serial “Rise of the Cybermen”/“Age of Steel” (2006) introduced a new backstory for the monsters, doing so by setting the story on an alternative Earth. Since then the creatures’ continuity has been revived again. The influence of “The Tomb of the Cybermen” has resurfaced in 2013’s “Nightmare in Silver.” On this occasion the influence was iconographic, and the story featured an updated version of the Cybermen breaking out of their tombs that first appeared in “Tomb.” To long-term viewers, the visual quotation was obvious, but understanding the plot of “Nightmare” did not depend on having seen “Tomb.”

Other recurring monsters have had their continuity disrupted. The 2010 serial “Victory of the Daleks” wreaked similar havoc on the established history of the titular monsters. The story introduced an entirely new race of Daleks, the “New Dalek Paradigm,” a story development that moved far from the history of the Daleks established from 1963 onward.

Avoiding Adaptation

Neither the appeal of adaptation, nor its ability to a be a productive rather than a derivative process, struck all of Doctor Who’s creative personnel; analysis of the impact of the people making the program is not complete without addressing this complicating factor. A late story from Tom Baker’s era, again involving stresses and frustrations for Terrance Dicks, brings to light the occasions when creative personnel have attempted to avoid adaptation. It may seem peculiar in a book about adaptation, and in a chapter in particular about the people responsible for adapting texts, to discuss occasions when Doctor Who’s creators consciously avoided adaptation; however, the occasions when writers and producers have consciously striven to avoid relying on other sources do themselves present particular insights about adaptation within the diegesis of Doctor Who.

From 1980 to 1981 the tone and style of Doctor Who’s scripts was set by Christopher H. Bidmead, script editor of season 18. As was noted at the time and has since been often remarked, Bidmead came into the position with a number of definite aims. One was to restrain what was then perceived to be a dominant strain of “undergraduate humor” that had proliferated in the previous season with encouragement from script editor Douglas Adams (soon to achieve fame for the comedy radio series The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy) and the show’s exuberant star Tom Baker. In place of humor, Bidmead wished to inject what he viewed as “hard science” (he had been a science journalist and viewed scientifically plausible ideas to be a possible foundation for drama). Most of all, Bidmead wished to oversee stories that paid no creative debt to any other sources. His point of view has been expressed in a number of interviews he has given in the years since he was script editor: “Has it been done before, shall we not bother then,” he stated rhetorically as a summary of his attitude on adapting other texts and his goal of achieving originality.

Since his tenure as script editor came to an end, aspects of his period have been extensively evaluated, and some of Bidmead’s creative intentions have been questioned in terms of their actual achievement, especially his goal to introduce “hard science” into the program. In this regard he signally failed, and the “science” in season 18 is as inventive or inaccurate as in any other period of the program’s history. For example, in “Logopolis” (1981), which Bidmead actually wrote and did not just edit, the Doctor states that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is that “entropy increases,” which is inaccurate.^[14] The same story also takes an extremely liberal attitude to the speed of light and shows the Doctor’s archenemy, the Master, broadcasting a message via radio telescope that is somehow transmitted to the entire universe.

Neither was Bidmead’s goal of creating entirely original stories realized on screen; instead this goal came into creative tension with the writers he employed, who provided scripts that heavily drew off other sources, much to Bidmead’s frustration. This creative tension is most visible in the 1980 story “State of Decay.” The story is in fact an object lesson in the limitations of Bidmead’s vision to be wholly original and the enduring potency of the influence of other sources over Doctor Who. “State of Decay” is by Terrance Dicks, who had been writing for Doctor Who since 1969 and was also one of Bidmead’s predecessors as script editor (serving as assistant script editor in 1969 and as the main editor from 1969 to 1974).

Dicks’s script for this 1980 story had actually been sitting on the shelf since the mid-1970s awaiting production, and the delay is suggestive of the script’s character and influences; the story is a pastiche of numerous gothic horror influences that Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes were mining in the mid-1970s.^[15] It is replete with swarms of vampire bats, a trio of vampires, a castle, a village full of peasants, and a dark and frightening forest. In the story, the Doctor confronts and defeats an ancient evil, and in Dicks’s initial draft, the Doctor was to unearth crucial information in a collection of dusty and ancient scrolls. Dicks, Bidmead, and the serial’s director Peter Moffatt have all placed their thoughts on the serial on record, and it is possible to reconstruct the battle that raged behind the scenes over the script, a battle based on Bidmead’s quest for originality, which came up against Dicks’s tendency to adapt and modify. When he read the script, Bidmead was reportedly dismayed, finding it derivative and certainly viewing it as exemplifying his criterion “not to bother,” as it was sharply reminiscent of other texts and traditions, especially Hammer horror. Bidmead commented that on reading the scripts he decided, “The whole thing was conceived on the basis of the earlier Doctor Who premise of, ‘Let’s do such and such a story, only make it a Doctor Who script.’ That frankly bored me to tears.”^[16] Moffatt by contrast was entranced by the gothic elements and insisted on toning down Bidmead’s revisions to the script, which had removed most of the horror film ideas and replaced them with putatively scientific elements.^[17]

In this instance a number of influences fed into Dicks’s scripts. One clue to his inspiration is the name of the female vampire, Camilla, which immediately associates the story with the writings of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, the nineteenth-century horror writer who originated the character of the vampiric Carmilla Karnstein.^[18] But even here the process of adaptation runs more deeply and in a more complex manner, for Dicks is not adapting Le Fanu directly but rather the distillation of his plots and characters in a trio of popular Hammer horror films about the Karnsteins, Vampire Lovers and Lust for a Vampire (both 1970) and Twins of Evil (1971). These films had performed well at the box office, perhaps helped by their (for the period) highly charged and provocative lesbian narratives and copious amounts of on-screen female nudity.^[19] These elements are not in Dicks’s script. What he has borrowed, however, is the general Central European ambience, the social structure based on the oppression of peasantry by a social elite who are dependent on their vampirism for their social status, and a great deal of the style and atmosphere of these films.

It was only through Moffatt’s intervention that some of these visual cues and trappings made it onto the screen at all. The final result that appears on screen is accordingly the result of these creative conflicts. Moffatt and Dicks had their way in some instances; the vampires, forest, bats, and peasants are all still there. However, the ancient scrolls the Doctor was meant to have read became a magnetic card system, and the vampires’ spooky castle became a spaceship.

In their critical review of the series, Mark Clapham, Eddie Robson, and Jim Smith point out the visible creative tension between Dicks’s adaptive Gothicizing and Bidmead’s push for originality. They point out that the creative clash which evidently occurred may in fact have created an arresting and original work: “There’s an argument that Doctor Who works best when it’s juxtaposing inappropriate things (call it the ‘police box in a junkyard’ factor) and State of Decay has this element in spades thanks to Terrance Dicks and Christopher Bidmead’s very different approaches.”^[20] Hutcheon’s suggestion that “the appeal of adaptations for audiences lies in their mixture of repetition and difference, of familiarity and novelty,” is salient here.^[21] In the case of “An Unearthly Child” it was the very same “police box in a junkyard” factor which Clapham, Robson, and Smith invoke, although that could be expanded to the “time space craft inside a police box factor,” which is the truly jarring juxtaposition in Doctor Who’s very first episode. In the case of “State of Decay,” it is clear that Bidmead’s desire for total originality did not come off and instead was compromised by Dicks’s adaptive tendencies in the first instance and Moffatt’s sympathy for Dicks’s vision in the second, and Moffatt’s insistence on bringing it onto the screen.

What emerges from this clash of intentions is a story which exemplifies the appeal of adaptation and which explains the motivating force that leads creative personnel to adapt, as the story is a striking juxtaposition of the scientific and the folkloric. Viewed today it is oddly but perhaps inevitably the scientific elements that now actually seem the more novel, and the TARDIS’s magnetic computer cards are very quaint. The elements lifted from Le Fanu via Hammer, however, seem the more familiar, not least because of the enduring popularity of those particular Hammer films and the niche the vampire narrative occupies in popular culture (post–Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight). If nothing else, adaptation, while clearly a practice much resorted to by storytellers, is also a lively and unpredictable process.

Conclusion

If we assess the people doing the adaptation, a point that emerges strongly is that there was a recurring impulse to adapt Doctor Who itself, even if during the Bidmead era there was a conscious effort to avoid adaptation. We began part I of this book with a discussion of Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert, so let us return to them. Keen and perceptive viewers of the 2007 story “Family of Blood,” during which the Doctor hid his Time Lord DNA and assumed a human identity, will have noticed that the “human” Doctor said his parents were called Sydney and Verity. This is a brief and heavily submerged in-joke, as well as a tribute to Newman and Lambert as the progenitors of the character and the program that would be appreciated by those in the know. It is also one of the instances where the program brought its history onto the screen but did so fairly subtly.

Other instances were not so discreet. The twentieth anniversary of Doctor Who’s original transmission coincided with the launch of old serials onto VHS, and the anniversary celebrations brought with them a tendency by the incumbent production regime to fixate on the program’s history. During the 1980s, viewers could not only watch old stories if they were willing to buy the gradually expanding VHS catalogue but could see old monsters and old stories brought back as the basis of the current productions. Reviewing these stories in the light of what adaptation theory suggests about the impulse to either emulate or transgress, the limitations of some serials of this era reveal themselves. Fully understanding a 1980s serial could involve requiring knowledge of much earlier and never-repeated serials from the 1960s. Later rematches between the Doctor and his old enemies are by contrast likely to be transgressive. The people who adapted, or those responsible for bringing the program’s own history into dialogue with its present, were not necessarily going to follow the one approach. Serials produced by Nathan-Turner could be unimaginative retreads of serials from the 1960s or 1970s, or else they could offer ironic and sometimes savage criticism of the contextualizing time periods of these earlier serials. The capacity to adapt from the program’s own history recurs in the revived series, but so too does the capacity for iconoclastic and transgressive adaptation by the people making the program.

Notes

Thompson and Bordwell, Film History, 381–383.

Barry directed ten serials, Camfield directed nine serials, Mayne four serials, Grimwade four, and Russell four.

Barnes, “Tomb of the Cybermen,” 53.

“John Wiles.”

Cook, “In at the Deep End,” 14.

Although as an emergency, producer Graham Williams (1977–1980) co-wrote scripts when other stories fell through, notably “The Invasion of Time” (1978) and “City of Death” (1979).

Hills, Triumph of a Time Lord, 74.

“Tomb of the Cybermen” was returned to the archives from Hong Kong in 1992; “The Tenth Planet” remains incomplete and is missing its final episode.

Cited in “Attack of the Cybermen.”

“Attack of the Cybermen.”

Booy, “Doctor Who (BBC, 1963–1989, 2005– ),” 189.

Sweet, “JN-T.”

Although it is too much to suggest, as have Chris Howarth and Steve Lyons, that references to the program’s past have become “taboo.” Rather the way the past is presented in the program is substantially different to the way this was done in the 1980s; Howarth and Lyons, Doctor Who: The Completely Unofficial Encyclopedia, 13.

“Logopolis: Original Airdate: Feb. 28, 1981,” http://www.chakoteya.net/doctorwho/18-7.htm (accessed May 1, 2013). A better statement of the Second Law would be “an engine can never be 100% efficient, that is, all the heat supplied can never be transferred or converted into mechanical energy during a complete cycle”; Nelkon and Parker, Advanced Level Physics, 231.

BBC executives were certainly alert to the borrowings from gothic literature that Holmes and Hinchcliffe were commissioning, as the script that was eventually made as “State of Decay” had been vetoed for production three years earlier in case it clashed with an adaptation of Dracula that the BBC was producing.

Griffiths, “Coming of Age,” 10.

Pixley, “State of Decay,” 22.

The character originated in Le Fanu’s Carmilla, published in 1872.

Mosley, “Hammer’s Sexy Vampires.”

Clapham, Robson, and Smith, Who’s Next, 260.

Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, 114.

Motives for Adapting

Adaptation is a recurring practice and impulse in storytelling. In many instances the motives are obvious. Adaptation is “safe,” as a popular book or comic will likely come with a prior audience. In earlier years, adapting classic literature was a means for Hollywood producers and studio heads to claim identities as purveyors of culture. Adaptation can also be a selling point. As Sarah Cardwell points out, most works (especially films and television programs) that are adaptations are marketed as such.^[1] Viewers can be gained by promoting a work based on the adapted source’s reputation. But we must adjust these insights for adaptation in Doctor Who. No Doctor Who story, even those that are flagrantly close adaptations of another source, have ever been marketed as such. Adaptations may be recognizable to observant or well-informed viewers, or they may provide convenient storytelling codes or conventions. They may even have just provided rushed scriptwriters with inspiration in times when the rate of television production was unreasonably rapid. Adaptations in Doctor Who may also provide moments of comforting familiarity for viewers as well as the chance to create dramatically effective jumps from the familiar to the unknown. However, adaptation is not a marketing tool for Doctor Who. We look to other reasons to explain why stories were based on particular sources.

This chapter will consider the imperatives—commercial and artistic—that encouraged scriptwriters to adapt Doctor Who’s plots from diverse source texts. To bring focus to the discussion, a clear source of inspiration from cinema will be the basis of the discussion, after some initial comments on the basis of choice and selection in adapting texts. This is the recognizably distinct cinematic form of the “space opera.” A compelling motive to adapt was to place Doctor Who’s more outlandish narratives within more familiar or established types of storytelling, including popular forms of science fiction. We begin by situating the adaptive motive within a much broader tradition of storytelling before narrowing the focus onto Doctor Who and the forces that led its writers and producers to seek ideas, characters, and even whole plots in other sources. The “fidelity” paradigm of adaptation discussed in earlier chapters had several limitations, and one of these was its inability to account for why a writer, producer, or director would actually want to adapt anything. The fidelity paradigm inevitably made the adapted work seem the inferior product and most often a betrayal of the original. Broader theoretical horizons are now open, allowing consideration of the creative potential of adaptation and the reasons for adaptations. Overall, the goal of this chapter is to interpret one particular suggested motive for adaptation: that the program’s makers borrowed from texts and sources that were currently in vogue. It will then study space opera as a recurring source of inspiration to evaluate possible reasons the program’s makers had for adapting sources. Finally, the chapter broadens out the issue of adaptation beyond particular texts to suggest how broader cultural parameters and preoccupations can provide sources of inspiration, even if sometimes this meant that particular Doctor Who stories ended up having an uncomfortable relationship with contemporary sources of controversy.

The Basis of Decision Making

“Adaptation” means borrowing stories from earlier sources. In the televisual and cinematic age, this definition shifts and grows more nuanced. Both of these media are adapters, mostly from novels, plays, and sometimes short stories and poems.^[2] As a creative output of the BBC, Doctor Who’s own production context was one shaped by the adaptation of texts, especially from the literary canon. Almost from the beginning of its transmissions in 1938, the BBC has made a simply endless parade of so-called classics series (not to be confused with the “classic series” of the 1963–1989 production run of Doctor Who). The Corporation has televised Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice at least seven times, including a landmark production of 1995. But the BBC is not alone; there have also been versions in Italian (Orgoglio e pregiudizio) and Dutch (De vier dochters Bennet). Other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelists, especially Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, and Robert Louis Stevenson, have been staples of television adaptations and often cinema as well. At the time of writing, another version of Dickens’s Great Expectations has been released.^[3] In the 1980s, Merchant Ivory’s glossy period productions could not have existed without E. M. Forster or Virginia Woolf’s early-twentieth-century novels.^[4] Theorists and commentators on adaptation have made the clear point that many books chosen for adaptation are either established favorites or recent successes, such as winners of major prizes like the Man Booker. Simone Murray points to a recent example: Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, a prize-winning book chosen for adaptation.^[5] Margaret Montalbano suggests a similar point, classifying the relationship between books and visual media as essentially an exploitative one, where books are plundered for good plots and characters by filmmakers.^[6]

In these cases of a written text becoming a film or television production, a number of controversies raise themselves. Adaptation clearly involves choice; once a source novel has been selected for adaptation, writers, producers, directors, and other creative personnel must make choices about how to adapt the work. Most Victorian novels are of a length that renders them unfilmable in their entirety, and cuts must be made to story lines, characters, or scenes.^[7] For instance, Jane Campion’s 1996 adaption of Henry James’s 1881 novel Portrait of a Lady skipped the first hundred pages of the book.^[8] Many adaptations of Dickens’s novels have made major excisions or alterations to novels that have plots that are, so Marguerite G. Ortman points out, “so diffuse and scattering” that to be filmed they need major reordering.^[9]

But even if we step back further—from even before a novel or some other work has been selected for adaptation—some other motives are at play. As even the most cursory survey of the BBC and commercial channels’ output would indicate, authors such as Dickens and Austen are clear staples of television making, and film as well. Why are some of their contemporaries not so lucky? There have been far fewer adaptations of the works of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) or Wilkie Collins (1824–1889), for example, than their contemporary writer Dickens. While there is strong motivation to adapt Dickens, no such impulse is felt for other nineteenth-century writers. Further, why have some of Dickens’s novels, such as Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, or Great Expectations, been so frequently adapted, above others such as the rarely seen Hard Times?^[10] If television and filmmakers cannot do without Dickens or Austen, they seem to run miles from other novelists. There has so far been only one attempt to film Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (a novel published in volumes between 1759 and 1767), but there is a clear reason. This eighteenth-century text features a range of bizarre literary features (including at one point the insertion of a blank page in place of ongoing narrative) that supposedly rendered it unfilmable. As one scholar describes the book, it is “a novel with no clear beginning, middle and end; its narrative content is distributed across a bafflingly idiosyncratic time-scheme interrupted by numerous digressions, authorial comments and interferences with the printed fabric of the book.”^[11] Small wonder no one attempted adaptation until the comedian Rob Brydon in 2005. Indeed, some critics regarded the 2005 film version as an eccentric artistic failure, judgments reflecting the impossibility of adapting some texts.^[12] The film version actually combined some scenes from the original novel within an entirely new narrative structure set in the present day about attempts to film the novel, and in essence this linking narrative was about the difficulty of adapting Sterne’s book. Nonetheless, even the fact that an adaptation of this most difficult and uncinematic of novels was attempted testifies to an emerging trend in adaptation studies to be less faithful and more what theorist Peter Brooker calls part of a “more intensively palimpsestic, ironic, and self-reflexive film culture,” one likely to make transgressive adaptations.^[13]

Choice then is central to adaptation, choice in the source and how to adapt the source. For example, what happens to the novel during the process of adaptation: do excisions have to be made or characters lost? Is the integrity of the source text lost? Is the adapted version on screen simply a copy, or a creative work in its own right? Is it likely to be unsatisfying to see an adaptation after reading the book? These are hardly questions confined to nineteenth-century novels, as the many millions of readers of the Harry Potter novels have thought of similar points as each of the books has been adapted, and fans of contemporary fiction such as the Hunger Games often apprehensively wait to see if the film would “do justice” to the novel. Not to mention the expectations placed on Peter Jackson by many fans of J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels when he set about adapting the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.^[14]

I referred a moment ago to the landmark 1995 adaptation by the BBC of Pride and Prejudice. This adaptation was wildly popular, made stars of its lead actors, and furthermore established an iconic scene—Mr. Darcy, as played by the broodingly handsome Colin Firth, emerging from the lake on his estate with a wet shirt clinging to his muscular chest. The scene has entered popular culture as a pivotal moment in the development of the romance between Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett; but it is not in the original novel, and readers who encounter the book after first seeing the adaptation have been disappointed to discover its absence.^[15] In this instance, the adaptation has taken on a life of its own beyond the source text, which is why many regard the 1995 Pride and Prejudice as “definitive.” But does this status mean definitively the best of the other television adaptations, or as a definitive version of the story perhaps originally created by Austen in written form but now taking on new life in a different medium? There are also the series of adaptations of Austen’s novels such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, versions of her novels that leave the basic plots, characters, and narratives intact, but augment the stories with additions of sequences of comedy-horror. Yet the works remain recognizably in the mold of a characteristic Austen story.^[16] Choice remains central in the motivation to adapt particular works and avoid others.

These thoughts on adaptation return attention to Doctor Who and the different motivations of its writers and producers to adapt sources into stories. Some writers on Doctor Who have interpreted the program’s first three years as perhaps the only period when Doctor Who was not made with a particular template setting the tone and style of entire seasons, and where stories were not adapting other sources. Mark Clapham, Eddie Robson, and Jim Smith, authors of Who’s Next: An Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who, make this point. In particular, they pinpoint the 1966 serial “The War Machines” as a turning point in the types of stories the program made.^[17] “The War Machines,” by Ian Stuart Black, tells of the attempted invasion of London from a sentient computer housed in the Post Office Tower. The computer, WOTAN, uses the eponymous war machines as its front line of attack against the government and military forces. Certainly “The War Machines” contains elements that make it strikingly different from most of the serials that had come before it: it is set in the present day, which no serial had been until that point, and the character of the Doctor, hitherto seen interacting with famous historical figures or else in futuristic and speculative settings, was seen in situations of everyday life such as hailing cabs, visiting a night club, and being out and about in central London. Doctor Who had not been like this before.^[18]

Clapham, Robson, and Smith are alert to the significance of this shift, and according to them, “The War Machines” “bears more resemblance to contemporary Independent Television (ITV) adventure series and the teleplays of Nigel Kneale than it does to most previous Doctor Who stories.”^[19] They go further, seeing “The War Machines” as marking the end of an era for a particular type of storytelling in Doctor Who, and suggest that the serial “established a new status for the series as a vehicle for whatever style was in vogue at the time. Before this Doctor Who was principally like itself; afterwards, it was frequently defined by the sources it drew from.”^[20] Their point is not entirely original. One of the earliest serious critical analyses of Doctor Who, John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado’s Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, argued that the program drew on “a variety of stars and codes of performance, as well as a range of genres.”^[21] These points are crucial to understanding adaptation within the diegesis of Doctor Who, and there are a number of issues here that merit exploration. Are their assertions true? What do we see if we look at stories before and then after “The War Machines”?

Certainly “The War Machines” is very different from previous Doctor Who serials, but what does it mean for the program to have been “principally like itself” and then to have resembled whatever was in vogue? It is certainly questionable to say that Doctor Who had been chiefly like itself until “The War Machines” came along and disrupted that paradigm. As we have already seen in chapter 1, the very first episode contained a number of resonances with other texts. After that came stories that, at the least, alluded to themes and imagery from other sources. Most suggestive of all are the stories featuring the Daleks. Originally these stories were written by Terry Nation (1930–1997), and the concept of the Daleks as creatures mutated by neutronic war and confined within mobile traveling machines is one that speaks to a number of sources. One is simply the Cold War context of Doctor Who’s 1960s production. The very first episode of Doctor Who made its debut on British television the day after President Kennedy’s assassination and not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Accordingly, the themes of nuclear destruction and mutation are not allegories in Nation’s “The Daleks” (1963–1964); they simply represent themselves and contemporary fears of nuclear war. Other aspects of the story, including the dangerous trek through an alien-infested swamp and jungle, are derivative of quest storytelling, including the Dan Dare serials and the Journey into Space radio series.

Nation’s second Dalek story, “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (1964), looks to another war before the Cold War. While it is set in the twenty-second century, the story’s portrayal of the attempted invasion of London by an external menace, its backdrop of familiar but threatened London landmarks including the Houses of Parliament and Trafalgar Square, and scenes of prison camps, attempted escapes, and the sweeping arcs of search lamps are all richly suggestive of a diet of World War II cinema at work on Nation’s imagination.^[22] The depiction of southern England devastated by alien invasion has suggested to some reviewers of the story resonances with H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which narrates the ruination of the Home Counties by Martian attack, but it is just as reminiscent of the blitzkrieg of World War II. Indeed, the story owes aspects of its imagery and its portrayal of an England overtaken and suppressed by invasion to near-contemporary cinema works including 1964’s It Happened Here, which is set in an alternative future where the Nazis won the war and conquered England.

William Hartnell’s serials offer up other instances of allusive influences. Take 1964’s “The Reign of Terror,” set in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution; its story of the rescuing and smuggling of aristocrats out of revolutionary France is clearly filtering elements of Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel stories. The Anglo-Saxons of “The Time Meddler” (1965) owe their look to the BBC’s popular 1965 historical series Hereward the Wake. “The Space Museum” (1965), with its scenes of bored and corrupt colonial overlords, is more than a little reminiscent of Graham Greene’s colonial fiction. More broadly, the 1964 serial “The Keys of Marinus,” again by Terry Nation, is a story of the Doctor and his companion set on a dangerous quest during which they must complete a series of tasks, and it is a science fiction–accented variation on the Labors of Hercules. However, these are quite generalized influences, and we should not forget the other point that Clapham, Robson, and Smith made in their analysis, not simply suggesting that from about 1966 onward Doctor Who began to borrow heavily from other sources, but that it did so from sources that were in vogue at the time. In asking what were the motives for adapting and the choices made, one issue to focus the answer will be topicality and that texts and ideas popular at the time were picked up on by the program’s makers.

This answer is not universal; by the twentieth century, sources including Homer, the Jacobean dramatists, or the Victorian novelists were far from being in vogue, at least in terms of publication date, yet all found their way into Doctor Who. Even the very next serial after “The War Machines,” while a derivative work, was not a topical one. “The Smugglers” (1966) is a synthesis, or rather pastiche, of Russell Thorndyke’s Dr. Syn stories of the smuggling pirate disguised as a vicar, as well as J. Meade Faulkner’s Moonfleet (1898), with traces of Daphne du Maurier’s 1936 novel Jamaica Inn. The plot of “The Smugglers” involves pirates, an ancient curse, hidden treasure, a riddle, and a village full of seventeenth-century smugglers who are led by their corrupt squire. With quaint dialogue such as, “Are ye truly a sawbones?” the story positively creaks under the weight of the venerable sources from which it borrows. But it is striking that so soon after the mold-breaking “War Machines” came another serial that proclaims very clearly its adaptation of other sources, and soon after would come “The Highlanders” (1966–1967), an equally derivative and unambitious serial looking to Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) for inspiration.

After 1966

But it is certainly reasonable to see “The War Machines” as a watershed serial. Its special emphasis on placing alien menace among recognizable London landmarks, or more broadly in everyday British settings, has proved enduring. “Rose” (2005), the first episode of the revived series, saw the Doctor locate the aliens threatening the world near the London Eye, and between these stories, other parts of London such as St. Paul’s Cathedral (in “The Invasion,” 1968); the Houses of Parliament again (“The Invasion of the Dinosaurs,” 1974; “Terror of the Zygons,” 1975); and other clearly identifiable locations have been the backdrop to narrative. In the revived series, major landmarks including 10 Downing Street (home of the British prime minister), Buckingham Palace, and the Tower of London have all appeared in stories, in “Aliens of London”/“World War Three” and “The Sound of Drums” for Downing Street, “Voyage of the Damned” for Buckingham Palace, and “The Christmas Invasion” and “The Power of Three” for the Tower. The Houses of Parliament have recurred often as a landmark in the new series, including in “Rise of the Cybermen” and “Victory of the Daleks.”

But these are settings, not sources. If “The War Machines” was indebted as well to what Clapham, Robson, and Smith say were contemporary ITV serials, what does this mean? Again, the figure of Sydney Newman comes into view. Before coming to the BBC in 1962, Newman had become known for initiating a number of fairly slick thriller series with contemporary settings, most famously The Avengers (1961–1969, revived as The New Avengers, 1976–1977), but other examples including The Baron (1966–1967), The Champions (1969–1971), and The Persuaders! (1971–1972) followed in its wake. “The War Machines” is like these series in placing its menace in contemporary London. Stories that came after this 1966 series followed its cue. Hartnell’s replacement as the Doctor, Patrick Troughton, featured in stories that took him to everyday locations such as Gatwick Airport (“The Faceless Ones,” 1967), down into the London Underground (“The Web of Fear,” 1968), and among milieus in contemporary swinging London, such as milk bars (“The Evil of the Daleks,” 1967), or to scenes of modern industrial London (“The Invasion”).

Contemporary Science Fiction

After Hartnell left the series because of ill health, Patrick Troughton played the role from 1966 to 1969, and then (in color) Jon Pertwee played the Doctor from 1970 to 1974. In this time Doctor Who’s audience and audience appreciation figures (the data collected by the BBC showing how many were watching the program and how many were actually enjoying the program, respectively) waxed and waned to a degree, but the program was mostly highly popular and scored audience figures of many millions of viewers, including sometimes as high as 12 or 13 million people. It is perhaps ironic that the many millions watching were by no means commensurate to the amount of money the BBC spent on the making of Doctor Who. In popular consciousness Doctor Who is a “cheap” program, with imaginative but “dodgy” special effects and backdrops and sets so poorly made that they wobbled. Some of this is urban myth; why, after all, would sets wobble unless there were unreported earth tremors under the BBC? Nonetheless, the BBC expended very little on Doctor Who, and each episode cost the trifling sum of only several thousand pounds.^[23]

But in the early years none of this seemed to register or to matter. Undoubtedly the production limitations of the program’s sets and effects and other production deficiencies were matched and even disguised by the flickering 405-line transmissions that sent Doctor Who out to British television viewers. Many shortcomings could be hidden that more precise picture quality would pitilessly expose, such as the Sellotape that held together the Cybermen’s heads in 1966’s “The Tenth Planet,” which is visible in color photographs taken on set but thankfully less obvious in the black-and-white transmission.^[24] But there were also limited benchmarks against which viewers could measure the production shortcomings that were inevitably engendered not only by a small budget but also by the quite remarkable haste with which each early episode was made (as each twenty-five-minute episode was normally rehearsed and recorded within a week).

In terms of benchmarks, there had of course been science fiction shown on the BBC and (from its launch in 1955) on the different companies that comprised ITV. There had been Nigel Kneale’s three Quatermass serials of the 1950s, but as Derek Johnston discovered in the course of his research into the earliest history of the BBC’s television transmissions, the Corporation had been showing science fiction since the 1930s.^[25] As early as 1938, the BBC dramatized Karel Čapek’s R.U.R., the play that introduced the word “robot” to general parlance.^[26] But these shows were made in the same style and within the same parameters of the Corporation’s production methods, including live or almost live recording and the realization of special effects directly in the studio and not as electronic effects added later.

There was also the science fiction of the cinema, but much of this was the pulpier form about which Sydney Newman was so apprehensive. Major films including the Godzilla series, Attack of the Giant Woman, Attack of the Giant Ants, Invaders from Mars, and others have titles that eloquently testify to their themes but also to their B-movie status and the limitations in their special effects. None of these works would especially have shown up Doctor Who’s own particular limitations, but across 1968 and 1969 British audiences were exposed to new science fiction works on the big and small screens, works that were quantifiably in vogue and which exerted strong influence over the style, tone, and content of Doctor Who. Which are they?

It is not widely known that in 1965 the Doctor Who production office was contacted by Stanley Kubrick’s team at MGM’s Borehamwood studios. At the time Kubrick was making a science fiction film and wanted to know how a particular effect of corpses floating in space had been achieved in a recent story, “The Daleks’ Master Plan” (1965–1966).^[27] It, therefore, seems more than ironic that when Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey came out in cinemas in 1968, it set a benchmark for the portrayal of science fiction special effects and storytelling that reviewers were immediately alert to and which showed Doctor Who’s own effects to be inadequate.

2001: A Space Odyssey has been called many things, one of which is “space opera.”^[28] More broadly, it is a manifestation of futurist cinema. A space opera implies not simply the science fiction setting of outer space, but a level of scale and grandeur in the presentation of outer space, including vistas of wide galaxies, interplanetary travel, and many spaceships. All of this is hard to achieve in a television studio, especially the cramped and aging studios at Limegrove where the 1960s Doctor Who was made. Yet the program’s makers clearly noted what Kubrick had achieved in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and change registers almost immediately in what viewers saw on the screen. As mentioned above, Doctor Who’s production was remarkably rapid; new episodes were made each week and often only a few weeks ahead of their transmission, and the program’s writers, script editors, producers, and directors could be responsive to popular culture. We should not forget this as a major aspect of how Doctor Who was made in its earliest years of production, and it is immediately salient to this study of how the program’s makers adapted texts. Precisely because the program was made so close to transmission, it was possible to take note of what was topical, or as Robson, Clapham, and Smith say, what was in vogue.

Already in 1968 the then production team showcased Patrick Troughton in “The Wheel in Space.” 2001 was released in Britain on May 10, 1968, during the transmission of “Wheel” (which aired from April 27 to June 1, 1968), immediately coloring the reception of this story, if not actually influencing its production. This story’s emphasis on its futuristic setting, its uncannily intelligent machines and humans, and even its wheel-shaped spaceship and danger from artificial intelligence cohered with some of Kubrick’s ideas. In 1969 the interest in rockets and moon shots continued in “The Seeds of Death,” which was in part an ironic comment on the contemporary obsession with rockets and moon shots, while also having its cake and eating it by featuring heavily these same rockets.^[29] Also in 1969 came “The Space Pirates,” a story indebted in terms of its ambition if not its final execution to Kubrick’s example. “The Space Pirates” tries very hard to be a space opera, with many shots of rockets and outer space, and a plot involving privateers and intrepid space agents attempting to stop them. Kubrick’s influence was keenly felt into the era of the next lead actor to play the Doctor, Jon Pertwee (1919–1996). The 1970 serial “The Ambassadors of Death” had a central premise of what Doctor Who historian Stephen Cartwright summarizes as “doomed astronauts lost aboard a drifting spacecraft at the mercy of a mysterious alien power,” one that Cartwright suggests with good reason is “particularly evocative of 2001.” There is of course also the parallel of this story of March 21 to May 2, 1970, with the later Apollo 13 mission (April 11 to 17, 1970).^[30] Pertwee’s Doctor featured in “Frontier in Space” (1973), another futuristic space epic involving much to-ing and fro-ing between ships in outer space, outlandish alien creatures, and an adventure narrative.

1968 was not the last time that space opera in the cinema would influence Doctor Who. Less than a decade after Kubrick’s epic appeared in cinema, George Lucas released Star Wars in 1977. Its influence was immediate and compelling on film and program makers of all kinds. In the years immediately after 1977 a number of space sagas appeared in cinema, from Starcrash and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (both 1979) to Flash Gordon (1980). By the late 1970s Doctor Who’s production was no longer quite so frantic as it had been a decade earlier, and stories were no longer made in such a very short time, mostly a matter of weeks and sometimes just days ahead of transmission. Nonetheless the cultural impact of a landmark science fiction film such as Star Wars registers on the screen in the sort of stories that Doctor Who’s producers and writers started to make. Many of the intervening stories between 1968’s “The Space Pirates” and the serials made in the wake of Star Wars’ release in 1977 had been set in present-day Earth. A particular set of prevailing circumstances—the fact that the BBC is itself based in southern England and alien menace to the Home Counties is more easily and believably created through location filming than visits to alien worlds—dictated Doctor Who’s production and meant that serials tended to be set in twentieth-century Britain.

With the arrival of Jon Pertwee’s Doctor in 1970, the then production team including producers Derrick Sherwin and Barry Letts made a virtue of the necessity of this production limitation and made it a part of the program’s own narrative. Pertwee’s Third Doctor was exiled to Earth by his own people, the Time Lords, and thereafter many of the stories were set on Earth for this reason. Although the exile was later lifted (in the 1972–1973 story “The Three Doctors”), the financial exigencies of production meant that many subsequent stories starring Pertwee and then his successor Tom Baker (who played the Doctor from 1974 to 1981) continued to be set not just on Earth but in London and the Home Counties. Many of Pertwee’s stories are set around a distinctive mise-en-scène of an industrial landscape of gasometers, factories, and scientific establishments. Baker’s stories took him to a different part of the English landscape, to the picturesque countryside and to investigate mysterious goings-on in country houses and mansions. Either way, these Earth settings gave way in the late 1970s to outer space as a frequently seen setting. Tom Baker’s Doctor was seen in space again in adventures including “The Invisible Enemy,” set on one of the moons of Jupiter, and in most of the serials from seasons 16, 17, and 18 (or those covering the years 1977 to 1981). In the case of “The Invisible Enemy,” the influence of Star Wars must be understood in precise terms; the film was not seen in Britain until after “Invisible Enemy” had already been transmitted. It was, however, filmed in Britain and had a British-dominated cast and production team. In these years, the Doctor and his companions made only occasional visits to Earth, and settings of spaceships and alien planets proliferate. Outer space and exotic worlds were the setting for “The Sun Makers,” “Underworld,” “The Invasion of Time,” “The Ribos Operation,” “The Pirate Planet,” aspects of “The Stones of Blood” and “The Androids of Tara,” “The Power of Kroll,” “The Armageddon Factor,” and “Destiny of the Daleks,” taking viewers all the way to September 1979 before there was a real return to present-day Earth in “City of Death” (which, even then, was actually about a time-traveling alien from the distant past), and then the Doctor was off into space again with “Nightmare of Eden” and “Horns of Nimon.”

Inadvertent Adaptation

It is obvious that producers, writers, and script editors drew inspiration from popular and prominent sources, as the compelling impact of Kubrick and Lucas indicates. But what of the possibility of inadvertent adaptation? By this I mean that there was the possibility that some Doctor Who serials reflect issues or themes that were prominent in popular culture or public discourse but engaged with these almost unwittingly and with unfortunate outcomes. A case in point is the 1985 serial “Vengeance on Varos.” This serial recounts the visit of the Doctor (in his sixth incarnation) and his companion Peri to the planet Varos, a former prison colony. The planet is now run by members of a sadistic elite, and the economy is dependent on the production of a macabre version of reality television. Prisoners in the “Punishment Dome” are filmed undergoing a variety of torments, from being tortured by lasers, attacked by cannibals, having their DNA transmogrified so they turn into hideous monsters, and dying from thirst or starvation. These torments are captured on video cameras, edited, and sold as an entertainment commodity.

When broadcast, “Vengeance on Varos” was highly topical but also much criticized. It was made only one year on from 1984, the year that brought back into public discourse the dystopian themes of Orwell’s novel of the same title, and in particular the preoccupation in that book with surveillance and observation. A film adaptation of Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was released on October 10, 1984, while “Vengeance on Varos” was transmitted between January 19 and 26, 1985. The scenes in “Varos” of the Varosian citizens watching party political broadcasts on large screens emulate similar scenes in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The serial was topical in other ways, and while if anything it was intended to offer critical commentary on a society with mores so perverted as to enjoy torture as a form of entertainment, it was also highly criticized for its violence, reactions that began immediately after its broadcast when concerns about its torture scenes were raised in letters to Radio Times, the television magazine, and on the BBC’s viewer feedback program Points of View.^[31] Certainly “Varos” is an immensely violent serial. Among its best-remembered but also most controversial sequences are ones including mortuary attendants falling into an acid bath, Peri being turned into a hideous birdlike creature, and the Doctor’s party encountering a tribe of cannibals. It is therefore ironic that while the serial was aiming to criticize televisual violence (and it ends with the Doctor having defeated the planet’s elite and ending the broadcasts), the serial was condemned as part of a wider moral panic over “video nasties” that was taking place in Britain at the time.

The “video nasties” debate in 1980s Britain was led by and exploited by the then Conservative government. Moral campaigners raised concern about the importation of unclassified but clearly excessively violent horror films into the country, and campaigns led to much stricter legislative control of video content.^[32] More pertinently for Doctor Who and the contexts from which it took material to adapt, the campaigns against “video nasties” focused attention on perceived violence in the media. Doctor Who had long been criticized for its violence, especially by the “clean up television” campaigner Mrs. Mary Whitehouse in the 1970s, but the contemporary debate over “video nasties” focused what had been diffuse criticism, providing a terminology to attack violent Doctor Who serials and to associate them with a wider moral panic. “Vengeance on Varos” is one of the serials of season 22; this season overall was much criticized for its high levels of violence. Although as we shall later see in chapter 8, the violence was arguably nothing worse than, for example, a Shakespearean tragedy, the season’s tone contributed to the cancellation of the program in 1985 (which was also driven by economic rationalism, declining viewership, and the dislike of BBC channel controller Michael Grade for the show) and ineluctably linked the program to the “video nasties” debate, not as commentary on it but as an example of excessive violence in popular culture. The serials of season 22 reflect a current popular concern with violence, and other serials besides “Varos” are preoccupied with characters watching scenes of violence or with surveillance. In this sense the aim of the program makers was to adapt the themes of current debate into the program, but popular perception instead found that they had simply adapted the violent content. “Varos” was not the last time that Doctor Who adapted from contemporary media discourse and trends. The final story of the 2005 season, “Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways,” set the Doctor in a television station in the far future that was still broadcasting reality television shows such as Big Brother, The Weakest Link, and What Not to Wear, and the story adapted not only from the look and style of these shows but could engage in trenchant criticism of current media trends.^[33] “Varos” had attempted to do the same, but on that occasion people seemed to miss the point.

Conclusion

Motivations for adaptation can be understood a number of ways. As Hutcheon has pointed out, adaptation allows for the incorporation of the familiar against the unexpected, a point that clarified many of the most striking and dramatically successful aspects of Doctor Who. The program’s makers have long understood the impact to be had from placing Daleks in Westminster or Autons at the London Eye. Similarly, the attraction of basing Doctor Who serials on works that were obviously successful for other programs is clear. Adapting from works that are currently popular or in vogue has provided inspiration to earlier program makers but continues to inform choices made by the creators of the revived series. In recent years the Doctor has fought witches in Elizabethan London in a 2007 story titled “The Shakespeare Code.” The title itself is an obvious allusion back to the best-selling Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, but in a story about witchcraft, the allusions to Harry Potter come thick and fast. Characters shout out, “Expelliarmus,” invoking one of the spells from J. K. Rowling’s books, and at one point the Doctor even makes reference to having read the final book in the series. In that same year the production team made “42,” a story where the narrative unfolded in real time over the forty-two minutes of the story’s length, an obvious storytelling debt to the then popular series 24 with Kiefer Sutherland. More recently the Doctor and his companions became embroiled with “The Curse of the Black Spot” (2011), set on a seventeenth-century pirate ship. The link between pirates and a “black spot” goes back to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, but the wording of the title, the battle between the Doctor’s companion Amy and a number of pirates, and the appearance of the black spot itself on the palm of the hand suggest the influence of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). In stories such as these, the production team borrowed from and cashed in on ideas from popular contemporary works.

But neither does the idea that influences derived from texts or sources that were currently in vogue necessarily provide us with a clear impression of what was selected and then adapted. Texts millennia old reemerged in Doctor Who and not simply works or ideas from works that were currently fashionable. We should realize the eclecticism of the choices, people, and motives involved in adapting sources into Doctor Who serials. Next we turn to works far removed from science fiction and to the literature of the classical world, which underwent strange metamorphoses in order to become Doctor Who stories.

Notes

Cardwell, “Literature on the Small Screen,” 181.

Including Doctor Who; the 1983 serial “The Five Doctors” was partly inspired by T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland.

Mike Newell’s 2012 adaptation starring Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes.

Novels adapted by the team of Ismail Merchant (producer), James Ivory (director), and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (writer) included James’s The Europeans (1979), Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1985), and Forster’s Maurice (1987). See Caughie, Television Drama, 210.

Murray, Adaptation Industry, 111.

Montalbano, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” 385–398.

Edwards, “Brand Name Literature,” 32–58.

Primorac, “Corsets,” 43.

Ortman, Fiction and the Screen, 115.

Hard Times has been adapted twice, in 1977 and 1994.

Ousby, ed., Cambridge Guide, 1004.

Travers, “Tristram Shandy”; Urban, “Tristram Shandy.”

Brooker, “Postmodern Adaptation,” 110.

The so-called Ringers are enthusiastic fans of Tolkien’s stories and are active bloggers and reviewers; Patches, “Fandom of Tolkien.”

Campbell, “Object of Interest,” 153.

Reviewer Donna Bowman, for example, suggested that “what begins as a gimmick ends with renewed appreciation of the indomitable appeal of Austen’s language, characters, and situations, and unbridled enjoyment in the faithfulness with which they have been transformed into the last, best hope of English civilization”; Bowman, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” A.V. Club, http://www.avclub.com/articles/jane-austen-and-seth-grahamesmith-pride-and-prejud,26559 (accessed April 23, 2013).

Clapham, Robson, and Smith, Who’s Next, 74.

One earlier serial, 1964’s “Planet of Giants,” had technically been set in the present day, but the regular companions were all shrunk by “space pressure” and at a tiny size were menaced by a cat, insects, and so on. This situation is unlike “The War Machines,” where the characters interact with daily reality.

Clapham, Robson, and Smith, Who’s Next, 74.

Ibid.