Revelation of the Daleks

Eric Saward Revelation of the Daleks (2019)
As you may recall, Doctor Who was a children's science-fiction serial on the telly back before the advent of the video recorder, meaning that if you wanted to catch up on older episodes, you had to buy the novelisation published by Target. Happily, at least for persons such as myself who require everything to exist within the context of a neatly ordered set, Target eventually novelised everything seen on the box, even a few which would have been on the box but weren't due to the lazy, work-shy BBC sponge-monkeys being on strike that year because the tea served in the staff canteen was the wrong colour.

Anyone still reading?

Never mind.

Anyway, by the time Target went tits up, they had published all but five of the Who serials seen on the television, notably two by Eric Saward who supposedly didn't want anyone else adapting his work - although I may have remembered that wrong. It could have been something to do with the estate of Terry Nation, but really - who gives a fuck? Revelation of the Daleks was unofficially novelised by Jon Preddle back in 1992 as part of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club's campaign to fill in those five terrifying gaps in our collections. I didn't know of this until many years later, by which point, copies of Preddle's version were impossible to find unless you count eBooks, which I don't.

Well, I'm nearly fifty-fucking-seven, older, probably wiser in some poorly defined capacity, and with a general suspicion* regarding almost everything sprung forth from Who since he came back on the telly played by an Easter Island statue in 2005; and yet my devotion was once so deeply ingrained that, even now, I still feel the need to fill those five gaps in a collection of books I may never read again because I'm no longer thirteen.

Revelation of the Daleks was an odd story, although one for which I recall some affection. I think I may have watched a VHS copy at some point back in the nineties, but I'm otherwise so unfamilar with whatever it did as for this to be an almost new thing, now that Eric has finally found time to write it.

Saward seems to be regarded as one of those problematic Who writers, probably meaning he wasn't afraid to point out when some sacred fan cow was actually a pile of shite, or at least that's how it usually works. For my money, he wrote some decent stories and did a good job of keeping things interesting during his time as script editor on the show. I've seen him criticised as a Douglas Adams knock off, which I don't quite see given the lesser level of annoying self-conscious whimsy.

Converted to prose, Revelation of the Daleks serves as a strong reminder of Who having been developed back when television was still pretty much theatre with cameras pointed at the actors. Everything here occurs within what may as well be a couple of rooms with a cast of eight or nine chasing each other from one set to the next; and if it's not exactly Shakespearean, it's closer to being a twentieth century Billy than it is to either Star Wars or Asimov's Foundation. Revelation reads very much as a telly script novelised for the benefit of thirteen-year olds or younger, which doesn't mean that it's bad so much as that certain narrative weaknesses seem amplified and they're difficult to overlook.

The strengths of the original story were arguably its big ideas regarding what's really going on at Tranquil Repose, but here - even without the Dalek connection already spunked away by the title - everything is signposted from almost the very beginning with clues so fucking obvious as to what's coming that the eventual revelation of what's really going on feels redundant. All the running around therefore seems designed to keep us busy as we wait for certain discoveries to be made - even though we've already guessed what they're going to be - and accordingly lacks drama. This leaves us with just the humour, which I assume would be the DJ, played on the box by Alexei Sayle, and which could have worked as a linking device in the vein of Lynne Thigpen's DJ in The Warriors, but didn't because the whole thing may as well have been an episode of fucking Rentaghost; and Dave Lee Travis in space is not an inherently funny idea if you've actually mistaken Dave Lee Travis for anything genuinely cool; and in case you've forgotten and were wondering, the DJ's weapon by which he blasts his foes with - sigh - concentrated rock'n'roll is also corny as fuck on the printed page, and not even in an entertainingly ironic sense, as it might have been had Saward specified that, for example, such and such a Dalek had been obliterated by the mighty force of that fucking terrible I Like It song by Gerry & the Pacemakers.

So, I'd say I'm too old to get much from this adaptation, except I routinely read all sorts of juvenile shite, most of which works just fine for me; and it's really, really difficult to work out just who it's aimed at, given that I found it in the science-fiction section at Barnes & Noble, as distinct from the children's section. It's a shame because some of it works, and a quick peak at other Sawards suggests he may simply have rushed this one to get it over and done with. An even greater shame is that a quick peak at Jon Preddle's unofficial online version leads me to suspect that he probably did a better job.

*: I say general suspicion but I actually mean uncompromising hatred.