Doctor Who_ The Dying Days - Lance Parkin [143]
I just love the idea of some ordinary piece of television suddenly becoming Doctor Who, because... well, it’s either that or just plain, ordinary television.
C
hapter 7
Work, Rest and Play
Title
Another good chapter title, if a little lateral.
Homages
Original y, the scene with the President and his aide featured a flat-voiced FBI agent and his winsome ginger partner. Even though they weren’t named, this was dropped because the legal people got nervous. Bizarrely, I thought, given the number of ‘homages’ in the book. I have to note that this was the only book I ever got legal advice from Virgin on, and I got a lot. Perhaps, as it was the last Who book, the lawyers hadn’t got any other books to read that month.
Queen and country
I did wonder about the Queen evacuating the country. I suspect, in the unlikely event of alien invasion, that she’d want to stand her ground, in the same way the royal family stayed in the country during WW2. That would clash with what happens later in the book, though. This year, I’ve read a book called The Secret State, by Peter Hennessy, which says that in the event of nuclear war, the plan in the sixties was to get the Queen onto the royal yacht and off to Canada (‘if it still exists’ – not the yacht, Canada).
Keeping it real
I was also really nervous about involving ‘real people’ in the invasion section. You’l note that, after six chapters chock full of real people, from now on it’s just fictional characters. As wel as legal nervousness (not wanting to paint real people as collaborators or as accepting Martian rule) there would have been something irredeemably camp about having Gazza or Scary Spice joining the fight. Watching LA destroyed in Independence Day, though, I did find myself wondering how many movie stars survived.
The Ice Warriors
With the Ice Warrior, I wanted to get across that it wasn’t just some tal extra in a costume with a head that didn’t fit properly. This was a monster, and it looked like a monster. The idea was that it was an Ice Warrior done on a Hollywood budget. Another little touch – the reason the TV Movie people gave for not using monsters was that they were too expensive – Phil ip Segal said something like ‘the budget would run to about two monster costumes, and you can’t tell a story about the invasion of Earth with two monsters’. As a bifurcated handed salute to that sentiment, and sentiments like it, in The Dying Days there are never more than two Martians in the same scene.
You could make this story for television on about the same budget as a couple of episodes of Born and Bred.
Chapter 8
Death and Diplomacy
The plot thickens
Finally, someone explains the plot! All this exposition, of course, is just a way of getting all that ‘plot’ stuff out of the way so we can get down to having monsters chasing our heroes and going "grrrr" a lot.
The plan
Greyhaven’s plan, while basically undemocratic, isn’t actual y an evil one. He wants to reopen all the closed factories, shipyards and mines. I’m sure someone, somewhere could write an essay on how The Dying Days – the first Who story set in the Blair era, as Tim Col ins could tell you - was a metaphor for how New Labour courted big business and encouraged globalisation to get unemployment down.
Unanswered questions
Fans have often asked how The Dying Days ‘fits’, given that everyone on Earth should know about the Martians afterwards. Here, Benny asks the same question. The Doctor doesn’t answer.
I am he and he is me
Note that the eighth Doctor speaks of the seventh Doctor in the third person.
The Brigadier
The Brigadier knows that only the Doctor can get them out of this situation – he doesn’t know what’s about to happen to his old friend.
128
Chapter 9
Our Friends From Mars
So clichéd
New Adventures cliché piles on New Adventures cliché as a prostitute eats in a greasy café, smokes, quotes from Round the Horne, then makes a reference to a recent film. In my defence, she at no point drops a lyric from a pop song into