The Chase
Doctor Who - The Chase
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The Chase |
Target novelisation Doctor Who - The Chase |
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| Author | John Peel |  |
| Published | 1989 | |
| ISBN | 0 426 20336 4 | |
| First Edition Cover | David MacAllister |
| Back cover blurb: Through a Space-Time Visualiser the First Doctor and his companions are horrified to see an execution squad of Daleks about to leave Skaro on a mission to find the TARDIS and exterminate the time travellers. Eluding the Daleks on the barren planet Aridius the Doctor and his friends escape in the TARDIS. But this is only the beginning of an epic journey. As they travel through space and time, they try to shake off their pursuers by making a series of random landings-but the Daleks don't give up easily. This is a chase to the death... |
Why. So. Serious. by Jason A. Miller 25/12/18
Every decade or so -- every 10 years, 15 years -- fandom decides to re-evaluate The Chase. It's a brilliant fast-paced adventure with great character moments! No, it's a painfully unfunny comedy! No, it's an atrocious turkey with bad production values and worse acting! No, it's a brilliant post-modern take on the limitations of the televisual medium in 1965!
And then came Twitch. Twitch, which is evidently a haven for teenage live-stream gamers (the only word I understand in that sentence is "evidently"), has been streaming almost every extant Doctor Who adventure from the classic series, starting with An Unearthly Child in May 2018 and running a promo for that era's Doctor after every 25-minute installment. Within a few hours, catch-phrases from the Hartnell promo were trending on Twitter. "LONDON 1965!" "I KNOW!". Heck, The Web Planet was trending higher than Theresa May in the UK on the day that it was live-streamed.
I finally jumped into the live stream in order to catch episodes 3 and 6 of The Chase. If young fans were gonna be there to experience Morton Dill and Ian and Barbara's departure for the first time (the Twitch kids evidently loved Ian and Barbara), I wanted to be a part.
What most impressed me is how much the kids appeared to love this story. There was a good-natured call and response to almost every line of dialogue in the Empire State Building sequence. Earlier, when a line of Daleks paced the desert sands of Aridius chanting four-syllable words all meaning "EX-TER-MIN-ATE", the Twitch kids kept the echo going for a good half hour. Impersonate. Elucidate. Defenestrate. By the time the Mechanoids showed up at the Episode 5 cliffhanger, the new fans were over the moon.
In this light, The Chase is funny again. Terry Nation or Dennis Spooner or whoever was most responsible for the final camera scripts packs in the jokes and quips fast and furious. After the Mire Beast of Aridius eats a Dalek, the Doctor wryly observes that it was "pate de Dalek a la Mire Beast". Vicki actually trolls a Mechanoid by imitating its speech patterns in Episode 6, in a way that I'm quite embarrassed to admit I've never noticed before. Here's a bunch of younger kids seeing this episode for the first time, totally ignoring the bad production values and just grooving on the main cast chemistry and the funny lines. In fact, picking up on funny lines that even I'd managed to miss.
Thank you, Twitch. Thank you, The Chase.
Which brings us to John Peel's novelization of The Chase, a now almost 30-year-old book which, shockingly, I'm the first person in the 20-plus years of the Ratings Guide to actually review. If The Chase on TV can now be enjoyed as a good-natured, funny story with endless quotable lines.... well, you'd never know from the novelization just how much fun the thing is to watch on live-stream.
Peel, in his introduction, tells us that he's novelizing Terry Nation's original scripts, rather than the camera scripts. His stated motivation for so doing is to show us what the story looked like in Terry's head -- before the budget and Richard Martin's direction turned the story into unintentional comedy. This is a noble motivation. Of course, that's what almost every other novelization did before Peel joined the Target line 17 years late, but Peel was the first person to say, directly in the book, "This is what I'm doing," so it made him look original.
On the other hand, though, novelizing Terry's scripts makes you realize just how much value was added to the story by Dennis Spooner as script editor and what else came to the table during rehearsal, after Terry had moved off to America trying to get Daleks and MacGyver off the ground. Some very funny lines remain in the book, but some of the funniest bits that were on TV simply disappear from the book.
The sequence of Vicki annoying everybody in the TARDIS? Not here. "You've squashed my favorite Beatles!"? Not here. Vicki's story about the castle in the field? Not here. "Pate de Dalek a la Mire Beast"? Not here. The Empire State Building tour guide, aka my Uncle Eddie [1], who tells us, uh, that, uh, de elevatah will get you down in about, uh, seven minutes, but, uh, if you go d'other way, it'll take youse, uh, about toity seckints [2]? Not here. The "Grey Lady" in the haunted house who walks through Ian? Not here. (Evidently she was an unscripted character stuck in by Richard Martin, in gratitude for her having choreographed The Web Planet, which, as thank-yous go, is kind of like giving that special someone in your life salmonella on their birthday.) In fact, the whole Festival of Ghana 1996/Canceled by Peking (an amazing bit of world-building)? Not here. Hi-Fi the Panda? Not even here.
[1] I don't have an Uncle Eddie.
[2] I was born in Brooklyn, I still l live in Brooklyn, I've taken Robert Smith? on a tour of Manhattan, and, yes, we really do sound like that [3].
[3] Robert can confirm.
Granted, the spectacle does look a little better in the mind's eye. The mire beast attack on the Aridian city - and, in fact, the underwater Aridian city - look great in the book. The jungle battle on Mechanus also looks great without BBC Camera 5 in shot, and the Doctor's robot double actually looks like the Doctor, in the way that he didn't on TV. The Mechanoid city has actual computers in it. Stephen Taylor is blond in the book. He plays a more central part in the escape from the rooftop and, minus the panda, is given a much more logical explanation for falling behind the TARDIS crew during the escape. Historical detail and tragedy are added to the Mary Celeste chapter. So, all those are plusses.
But, on the whole, the book takes itself very, very seriously. The Chase on TV is very funny, a laugh a minute, for two reasons: one, the atrocious production values, and, two, the fact that it's just a funny script, peppered with all sorts of clever asides. The book has a little bit of humor, yeah, but otherwise it's a straightforward big-budget action blockbuster that takes itself seriously. You can see why an author who takes the Daleks so, so seriously will eventually, a decade later, give us War of the Daleks.
It's a decent book, Peel really does deserve a lot of credit for that, but, honestly, it's just not the same The Chase that the kids are still loving today.
Cringe Through Eternity No More! by Matthew Kresal 8/10/23
The Chase is an odd duck in its TV incarnation. A story even grander in scope than the previous two Dalek serials, Terry Nation's scripts got a sprucing up in the humor department from script editor Dennis Spooner on their way to the screen. The result was a tonal mess across much of its six episodes -- and worse, it gradually turned the Daleks from less of a threat than a minor nuisance tolerated to get to this week's cliffhanger. Thankfully, in keeping with several serials in the later years of the Target novelizations, The Chase got a second look-in thanks to John Peel in 1989. And rarely have I been glad for such a thing to occur.
Because Peel, having established a rapport with Nation while writing The Official Doctor Who and the Daleks Book, got ahold of Nation's original scripts for The Chase. Those scripts (rather than the Spooner rewrites) became the basis for Peel's novelization, something that's apparent from practically the opening page. Gone are many cringe-inducing moments, from Vicki's story about the glass castle to the excesses of Morton Dill and the haunted house sequence. Elsewhere, the scene of the Mary Celeste crew ambushed by the Daleks (played unwisely for laughs on-screen) is far more darkly portrayed here and with more reflection by Ian and Barbara when they recognize what's happened. Tonally, The Chase novelization is a different beast than its TV predecessor and far better for it.
Not that those aforementioned scenes are gone for good. There remain flashes of humor in what remains, and this version of Morton Dill is still here for laughs. But here, it's less cringe and actually funny because it doesn't overplay its hand (and, frankly, the accent isn't over the top on the page or even in the audiobook version read superbly by Maureen O'Brien). What changes is the emphasis as Peel -- like Marc Platt would when he novelized Ghost Light the following year -- finds a better way of pacing the story. Wisely, he affords more page count to the opening and closing installments of the TV serial, trimming down the flabby middle episodes. The focus shifts from comedy to suspense, something that Nation (as a writer of thrillers outside of his Doctor Who work) excelled in and which Peel nicely realizes on the page. The Daleks, too, feel more threatening, and their demises in sequences such as the haunted house feel more like actual threats to them rather than played for laughs.
The choice to focus on the bookending portions of the narrative also suits their locations. Free from the constraints of a 1960s BBC TV studio, Aridius and Mechanus are far grander worlds than they could ever have been on-screen. The once-underwater cities of Aridius have a faded grandeur to them, the jungles of Mechanus feel far more threatening, and the Mechanoid's city can be the utopia in waiting it was so clearly meant to be. Even the Doctor's robot (well, android) double can be more convincing on the page. The ideas, rather than the execution and misplaced humor, shine through.
The concluding chapters also offer surprises in the companion department. Ian and Barbara still leave, and Steven Taylor's introduced as the incoming companion. The handling of both are different here, with Steven receiving a far more central role in the escape and a fleshing out of just how on Earth (or, rather, Mechanus) he ended up at the TARDIS in time for The Time Meddler. Ian and Barbara's farewell plays out slightly differently, the Doctor less confrontational and abrasive (and minus the "time and Spain" slip of Hartnell's), but with no less poignancy. It's a shame that the now-iconic "London 1965!" moment is missing, though the literary equivalent of that joyous final montage remains present even here.
The Chase novelization, like The Space War's take on Frontier in Space or Platt's aforementioned Ghost Light, offers a vision of the serial that might have been. A version that would prove more in keeping with Nation's original intentions, rather than copying and pasting what viewers would have seen in 1965 (and later on home video and streaming). For anyone who cringed their way through the TV serial and wondered what it might otherwise have been, Peel's prose offers an alternative, one that's far more enjoyable.