Doctor Who and the Daemons

 

Barry Letts Doctor Who and the Daemons (1974)
Just to get the cloying stench of nostalgia out of the way, specifically the increasingly widespread notion of the quality of a work being equivalent to whether one is able to remember it from childhood, I was nuts for Who when I was a kid and The Daemons, first broadcast in 1971, constitutes my absolute earliest memory of the show. I would have been five. My memory is specifically of being terrified as I watched Jon Pertwee menaced by Bok, a living stone gargoyle, in a subterranean burial chamber. Somehow attendant to this memory is that of me informing my mother that it would be okay for me to watch Doctor Who from that point on because it no longer scared me as it had once done - which I vaguely recall as having been a cause for concern.

I became a regular and obsessive viewer from that point on. I bought the Radio Times special in 1973 and what little mind I had then developed was blown by the realisation of there having been both doctors and stories prior to Jon Pertwee. It never occurred to me that I might ever get to see, or at least experience, any of them because television was an ephemeral medium and I'd missed the boat. Naturally I went wild for the Target novelisations when they started to show up on the shelves of my local WHSmith. There were just five of them - three from the Hartnell era and two Pertwees. I wasn't much of a reader but I bought and read them all, assuming that would probably be the lot.

Then another five came out, and because I'd sent my stamped addressed envelope and coupon off to Target Books, I was forewarned and excited almost to the point of exploding. If they could just keep novelising the stories I'd missed due to either being too young or not actually having been born, I could die happy.

I expect persons of similar vintage will have recognised at least some of this, and a few of them give Doctor Who and the Daemons five stars on Goodreads. Five stars is the rating you give a book on Goodreads if your reaction is that it was amazing. I assume five stars also covers reactions as diverse as I can remember this from my childhood and I see it has a Doctor Who logo on the cover, thus illustrating the general worthlessness of the system.

The Daemons, which is also one of the first Who serials I ever saw on VHS, was inspired by Barry Letts reading Dennis Wheatley and Robert Sloman concluding that Erich von Däniken had proved that there were spacemen on Earth before we arrived, which he really hadn't. The thing we saw on the telly additionally betrays significant influences from John Wyndham's Midwich Cuckoos, Quatermass, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End at a bit of a stretch, and all that folk horror which was doing the rounds in the early seventies. It was a lot of fun and nearly caused me to shit myself when I was five.

The novelisation was great when I was a kid who hadn't actually read much of anything, but is underwhelming now that I'm in my fifties - which I state as a fully grown man who is nevertheless still able to take pleasure from seventies Defenders comics. It's not badly written. Letts makes some efforts to flesh things out a little, presenting more than we actually saw on the screen, but the bottom line is that it remains a two-hundred page blow by blow account of what we would have seen had we been sat in front of the telly back in June, 1971. There's a lot of running around while people get tied up and held captive in wooden trunks, which simply fails to hold the attention as prose, meaning the infodumps are more interesting than anything done with that info in the course of the story. It's readable, even now that I'm old and fat, but it really isn't amazing. Sorry.