Are the books being used to get the audience ready for things on telly? First, we get the first non-current Doctor novelisation following Pertwee’s final story, then Doctor Who and the Curse of Peladon removes what few UNIT trappings there were in its TV progenitor on the eve of the Doctor finally breaking his links with them in Robot and now we get an introduction to the Cybermen (who haven’t appeared on TV since The Wheel in Space) shortly before Revenge of the Cybermen is broadcast. Would people have watched those in the context of reading these? I suppose they must have done.

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It’s unfortunate then that what they’d have got was far more a reflection of Davis’s drafts before Robert Holmes completely transformed them, Davis actually describing his scripts as ‘‘The Moonbase’ with the Cybermats’. At first, aspects of this seem understandable. According to Shannon Patrick Sullivan, it was in response to Letts’s budget-concerned request that  ‘most of Davis' action took place on board the Nerva beacon’ in the manner of the one-big-set base-under-siege stories that The Moonbase was formative in bringing in. Thing is, he’s then clearly disappointed when they get the money to expand the action, feeling this makes it less effective: ‘they got more money and decided to write in a sub-plot, which I thought diffused the interest a bit’. Similarly, it’s fair enough that, with no idea of how Baker would play the Doctor, Davis wrote the role ‘in the vein of Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor’. Only problem is, with the latter, that he apparently did this by ‘including the use of such signature elements as his 500-year diary’, a bit of business that had barely ever appeared in the show in the first place, been dropped before Troughton left the role and never appeared during five years of Pertwee. It was at the very least quite idiosyncratic that he should expect it to suddenly roar back to life under Baker, however much it had just falsely been set up as a show perennial in a recently released novelisation (possibly, if he’d written this yet).

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There were other signs that Davis was simply unconcerned it wasn’t 1967 anymore. Sullivan says he still ‘gave each episode its own title’ and that Holmes and Hinchcliffe felt he was ‘pitching his scripts at an audience younger than’ that they were targeting, had little interest in the female companion and gave all the action to the male sidekick. None of this of course is a problem for a novelisation of serial from 1967 and it’s understandable how loved this one seems to have been.

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If nothing else, Davis does a wonderful job of putting Troughton on the page. One of the nicest examples comes when the Doctor reflects that, though he has no idea what’s infecting the crew, ‘we’ll have a lot of fun tracking it down’. It’s the sort of line Pertwee also got, most noticeably when looking forwards to the Master’s reappearance, but Troughton would infuse it with a sense of warmth where Pertwee would seem detached and even a little dangerous, anticipating a new threat rather than a solution and leaving his companion looking at him as if he were unhinged. Davis can’t easily communicate this warmth but achieves it though making it an attempt by the Doctor to be reassuring – he says it as a response to seeing his companions’ ‘faces fall’.

 

Davis is also good at the way Troughton combined his Doctor’s anarchic and childish aspects, as when, in his investigations, he enters the control room, a ‘scene of concentrated activity’, and immediately ‘began to disrupt’ it ‘With a mad gleam in his eye’. Once he becomes ‘obsessed by something he saw on Nils’ boots’, the sequence effectively involves his crawling along the floor and secretly unlacing Nils’s boot much like in a children’s game. It even ends with the Doctor seemingly joyous at having won as he’s seen ‘triumphantly holding the boot’ thanks to the unnatural detail that ‘Nils went flying forward’ making the moment feel more playful than inconsiderate. The idea is clearly that this Doctor is prone to tunnel vision, his obsession with a detail leading him to forget all else, including already shakily observed social norms.

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Davis suggests this is all a ‘pose’, the real him slipping through in glimpses of his ‘‘far-horizons’ look’, but that isn’t the whole story or else he would be ‘gratified’ when he hears a note of ‘respect’ in Hobson’s attitude to him. The Doctor may be ‘steely’ but he’s still a genuine contrast to the Cybermen rather than simply an opposing force with a nicer façade. The Doctor really is invested in having fun, in losing himself in ‘what he enjoyed best’ and finding triumph in tiny, childish moments and Davis even invents new bits of business to reinforce this trait, such as the already noted eccentric overuse of his diary which slowly winds up those around him or his habit of ‘doing a series of intricate calculations […] as a way of thinking out problems’ because the pursuit of logic is just a sideshow whilst his mind intuits solutions to real problems.

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Actually, that doesn’t quite work. For a man who got so worked up about the title Revenge of the Cybermen, presumably because of its strong pointer toward the metal men having emotions, he pays little more than lip service to the idea that the villains have expunged all feelings. Yes, they’re said to live only by ‘the inexorable laws of pure logic’ and, yes, they’re baffled by the use of the word ‘revenge’ (which might well be Davis’s little dig at Holmes and Hinchcliffe) but they’re also shown to get bored, to goad their prisoners about their inadequate mental faculties and to get flummoxed by seemingly faulty equipment. What’s more, Davis actually suggest that their sole motivation in pursuing ‘power’ is a desperate desire to compensate for ‘the lack of love and feeling in their lives’, the very lack they are supposed to either be unaware of or view as an advantage. These are exactly the sort of creatures who would seek revenge and they pretty much say as much, what with ‘the Earth people needed to be taught a lesson’ being almost the exact expression of a desire for revenge and it effectively being the ‘but’ clause following the assertion that ‘revenge was not part of their mental make-up’.

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All of this makes it sound like Davis has made a complete mess of the Cybermen but the opposite is true. They’re brilliant. Delusional they may be, but there’s something wonderfully evocative about them here, as in the way they’re introduced: ‘By the year 2070, they had become as known and feared in the galaxies as the Viking raiders of the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries’. They have made space their habitat in the way Viking raiders made the sea, which I guess means they basically skulk about the galaxy like those in Revenge of the Cybermen but here the focus in on the constant fear that those living settled lives live under. The Cybermen may not be a big threat but they are an omnipresent one.

 

What’s effective about the Cybermen then is not that they are logical but that they stand opposed to less ruthless ways of life. Their inhumanity is Davis’s sales pitch and so we get details on their failure to eat or sleep, instead recharging themselves through ‘powerful Cyberman batteries’, or even betray basic consciousness – ‘except when they were moving, the two Cybermen were as still as two suits of armour in a museum’. Yes, it might be less silly if they really were unfeeling rather than moustache-twirlers, didn’t have names like Tarn, didn’t use devices ‘which resembled the control used to guide model boats and aeroplanes’ and weren’t irrationally (and Davis’s strongly implies an irrational fear) ‘afraid of gravity’ but it doesn’t really diminish their effect because they might still just sweep out of space and turn everyone’s lives upside-down anyway.

 

And that, oddly, tallies nicely with how the TV series is busy taking the Doctor from the stable, cosy environment of the Pertwee years and making the universe a sinister land of horrors once again. Despite so many of Davis’s own efforts, and on top of simply being a very effective read, it’s clear how this became one of the most well-remembered novelisations. Everything about it pretty much is perfectly suited to when it came out.