Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to 500 Year Diary.
The only Doctor Who podcast with plans to nip back in time to 1945
to lace Fred and Mary Ann's highballs with radium.
I'm Nathan.
I'm Adam.
I'm Kate.
I'm pizza.
It's the 15th of August, 1991.
Just over 2 months ago, Virgin Publishing launched a new series of
original novels to broad, deep, wide and thick for the small
screen.
The Virgin New Adventures. which would serve as our only source of
new Doctor Who for nearly 10 years, you know, apart from that one
night in 1996.
And who else should they tap to contribute to the range, but
Terrence Dix, the man who has written more Doctor Who novels than
anyone else ever, and whose association with the show stretches
back more than 20 years.
Can Terence create original Doctor Who for a new decade, a new era
and a new medium?
Let's find out as we head back to Nazi occupied London in 1951 for
Timeworm Exodus.
So, this is the second of Virgin's new adventures in the second in
the timeworm series.
Maybe we could just talk briefly about what the Virgin New
Adventures meant to us, perhaps.
Well, I know for Kate, it was a living for a little while.
At that point, it was certainly my ambition.
As soon as I saw those guidelines, that's what I'm going to have a
go at.
Yeah.
I submitted one.
I was 19.
I got told there was too much running around getting caught in
escaping.
I'm like, yes, that's Doctor Who.
Someone brought up on season 22.
It's literally what it was it was a Colin Baker one.
Kate, I remember back in those days.
I remember that virtually as soon as they published the guidelines
on it, you were like, I'm going to make my 1st submission and your
1st novel comes around very quickly.
Yeah.
My 1st attempt was refused for similar reasons.
It was too linear.
It was too preachy.
Yeah, was it?
The sequel to the arc with the refusion.
Rubbish.
I did a 2nd one and that was sort of, yes, maybe. and I thought
God, that's encouraging.
Yeah.
And then the 3rd one, it was like, that's the left-handed
hummingbird.
So yeah, but I mean, I was just going to keep shooting off
attempts until they had to publish a manuscript just so that they
could actually leave the office.
Get all paper out of the way.
That was the old days when it was actual paper.
Like you had to send in physical, like now you're just far off an
email and go, can you publish my thing?
They're like, nah.
I think I remember seeing like manuscripts of yours, you know
double spaced and all of that sort of thing, pieces of paper.
Yeah.
So this is before your published, obviously, and this is the 1st
Tet trilogy of stories, and we've had John Peel, is it?
Yes, they did the 1st one.
The weirdly rapey Gilgamesh one.
Yeah.
Like the dawn of civilisation business.
And so it's called Genesis with a Y. like the Terminator movie.
All things where you spell Genesis with a Y of questionable
quality.
That's true.
This is Exodus without a Y.
It doesn't seem to have anything to do with an actual exodus.
Apart from the fact that it's set during the war and they
mentioned Jews twice and they're, you know.
And they all eventually moved to Israel.
Like, other than that, yeah, it's weird, isn't it?
And then we have 2 that are both called like Revelation and
Apocalypse, which are the same book.
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, nobody's going to do Timeworm Kings 2 or something.
Yeah, yeah, Timeworm Matthew.
Time worm Leviticus.
Oh, Lord, you thought Genesis was raping?
And of course you get Terrence to do one.
Yes.
I mean, the great mystery is that Terence wasn't asked to go
thirst.
Yeah.
And he will next time, won't he?
Yeah, let's see how that goes.
But he was the obvious choice too, if not go first, to be very
early on, because what I think Terence gives in the product and
with his reputation is he brings fans board.
It's like, don't be scared.
Terrence is involved.
It's like a halfway house between the novelisations and sort of
the 2 broad, 2 deep stories that are to come in the novel range
and I think it was a very canny idea having him.
Yeah, it kind of legitimises it in a way.
It's like, 0 no, this is the guy you know from the show.
And that you've read all his 4000 books as a 12 year old.
That's right.
And, you know, if you're not sure if the novels are going to be
like the TV show, read this because this is going to read exactly
like a novelisation of the TV show.
Yes.
And I think he does a very good job.
I have to say that I didn't really enjoy it very much.
But he certainly does what we expect Terrence to do.
You know, it's a plot where things happen.
There's a range of different villains.
It's a sequel to something that we've covered already, which I had
forgotten.
Did you forget about that?
Yeah, yeah, it's really funny.
I actually think.
Because I collected all of the new adventures all the way up till
Falls the Shadow and Falls the Shadow defeated me.
It's just like, I...
And they're still all upstairs somewhere under a 100 different
unopened Lego kits that will be getting rid of at Calvin's wake.
And so I will never see them again.
So I definitely had a copy of it, but I actually don't think I
ever read it.
And obviously at the time, I don't think I had seen, had we seen
the War Games by 1991.
The war games, I believe, was released in 1990 or 1991.
Okay, okay.
So maybe we had seen it.
Oh, yeah, I think it was on telly, wasn't it?
before then?
1969, yes. repeat just.
Because I remember seeing the war games before and, you know, had
read the book, obviously.
But yeah, I was living in the UK when these came out, and it was
exciting and fun and because I'd moved over there in 91, waiting
for Doctor Who to come back on, as we all were.
I thought you'd be 1st in the queue.
Well, I'm going to see it before it gets to Australia 6 months or
4 years later. as was the style at the time.
And yeah, so these came out and I was like almost, like on one
hand, it was like a great big fat sign saying, you know, it's not
coming back.
And I'd enjoyed reading some of those Star Trek books.
Like some of those were great.
You know, you had great writers like Greg Bear and Vonder McIntyre
writing those kind of things.
So I was like, oh, maybe this is the, you know, this will be
Doctor Who's version.
And it wasn't.
On the whole, no.
But there are some spectacular ones, including ones written by
people in the room.
Yeah.
On the call with us now.
Well, you know, there's only a handful of new adventures that I've
read twice.
Wow.
And that's not any indictment of them.
You know, there's something you got.
I got every single one of them.
I enjoyed most of them.
I read them all.
The ones I returned to twice.
Obviously, Kate's because she's a friend and because they're all
exceptionally good.
And also, Timeline Exodus, because when you want that little
charge of Terenceism, and you want something which is so aligned
with the series as it was and reads like the Doctor Who of your
childhood.
It's a go-to book.
So I think I've read Exodus maybe 3 or 4 times.
Okay.
One thing I do love about Terrence's writing is it's like Agatha
Christie.
It is unmistakeable.
It is straightforward.
It's easy to read.
And he has a turn of phrase that you go, oh, we're using that now
aren't we?
I mean, sometimes he does some really genuinely clever things with
language.
And of course, I think if we all thought hard enough, we would be
able to come up with words that we learned from reading
novelisations by Terrence, words that he introduced us to.
I didn't know what a tunic was for most of my life, but I knew
that it was a thing.
Voluminous.
Capacious.
Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, that's a huge deal.
And it was super readable.
Like I did find myself going through it.
And I think a lot of the younger writers wanted to be
challenging.
And so you would have the sort of every 2nd chapter would be in
italics and seem to have nothing to do with what was going on.
I mean, even Exodus false victim.
Oh yeah.
You know, that sort of thing where it's just like, really, this is
much, much more work than I want to do to read a TV tie in book at
this point, where Terrence writes very straightforwardly and
breezily and interestingly, and he makes things happen.
He outlines pretty clear characters and stuff.
Like, I think there's a lot of virtue to it.
I do think, though, Terrence wrote the novelisations for
children.
The TV show was for adults, but the novelisations were for
children.
And here he is writing for adults.
And I think what he's decided is that what adults like is things
that are mostly boring.
So, um, so with children, you know, you've got to throw a monster
in or something thrilling, but this is just going to be like
people talking quite a lot.
And I used to say when we did the 60s stories in flights through
entirety, that a story would be vastly improved by flinging a
terraleptyl in, uh, uh, and the Aztecs with a pteroreptyl.
Do you know what I mean?
The Romans with the pter leptol.
Oh my god, the massacre with a whole bunch of pteroactic.
Or is the deep.
It would actually be much better.
And clearly as well.
So Terrence is born in 1935.
So when he's a little boy, the war is going on and he's of sort of
Doctor Who age when it finishes and clearly he's super interested
in the war, you've heard his opinion about the Nazis, Peter, what
did he say?
What an incredible bunch of cooks.
And it shows very much in this novel.
Yeah, in fact, one of the things that's really striking about
reading the novel in 2025.
Oh my god.
Yeah, yeah.
He's just Hitler's not a great orator.
He's an idiot.
He's sort of basically incompetent.
His speech is are all about nothing.
They're long rambling rallies where he just doesn't talk about
it.
And just starts screaming.
Yeah, yeah.
And people get riled up by the screaming and the yelling.
And then everyone's making money.
Like everyone's a crook.
Everyone's on the take and so they're making money for themselves
describes more physically and such grotesque time.
Oh, yeah, ratty and corpulent.
Not together.
And so, you know, this is his thing.
This is the thing that he's been longing to ride, I think.
And so he does go to the alternative earth where the Nazis won, and
it's his 2nd Doctor Who novelisation where he's done that, because
of course he did Dalek Invasion of Earth.
And it's a little bit of a kind of, it's played, I think, by
1991.
We've had a lot of those. over the years.
Philip K. Dix, but spectacular work, the man in the high castle
where you're just like, oh yeah, this is what happens.
Right.
Well, remember the story which Terrence Scripted is at Inferno.
Yeah, where they're living in that Britain, where fascism won.
This almost feels like an upside down version of Inferno where it
like it starts in the alternate world and then goes back. instead
of starting in our world and then going to the fascist world.
I can just see Terrence getting those instructions from Virgin
publishing.
These books are for adults.
You can do adult things in them.
These are not novelisations. children that have to be safe.
John Peel, I think perhaps interpreted that as you can be sexy.
So...
Inverted colours.
You know, he did not shy away from such topics.
No, I'm Genesis.
And Charice's thought, if this is not for kids, I can actually go
in amongst Nazis.
Yeah.
I can have the doctor help Hitler.
I mean, it's part of our plan.
But this is kind of a taboo area where, you know, you're not
really supposed to see these, especially these high ranking
Nazis.
There's anything human at all.
And they are in his version.
They are very flawed, very corrupt human beings.
And we kind of, we will take their point of view for a page and
just sort of see what makes them tick and then go to somewhere
else.
You make certain among them quite likeable way.
Like, I'm thinking general stressor in the Britain timeline early
on and Goring actually come across quite well and you catch
yourself double thinking.
Hang on.
Wait, wait.
Yeah, even Borman seems like a fairly decent guy.
It's like, oh, yeah, he's just good at doing his paperwork.
I think a clever thing that Terrence has done is because the
doctor's got ace, essentially a child figure or an adolescent
figure with him.
She can do the appropriate moral reactions to everything.
As soon as Hitler says something about the Jews, she's furious, but
the doctor stops her from doing anything that would get them
killed.
Then the doctor can be the one who goes in and manipulates the
Nazis, interacts with them, pretends to be their pal, because we
have this moral centre by his side.
And I think that's actually quite a clever use of them.
Although I object to having a faint, a scream and faint.
No, that's that's just a mischaracterize.
And even she points that out.
There's a hilarious line later on where she says, honest professor
me screaming and fainting, but she's embarrassed and he responds
you've got to stop clinging to this macho image, which I thought
was hilarious.
He says he would be screaming the place down if he was in the same
situation.
What you were saying about the fact that Terence takes his
instructions as being more adult.
I like what that allows him to do with characterising the doctor
because there's a very striking moment early on where the doctor
physically attacks the 2 thugs who are harassing the guy at the
festival of Britain.
And that's quite a striking moment.
And you wouldn't imagine that happening on television, but I think
Terrence has gone, the stakes here are high.
There's Nazi thugs in charge of the world at this point.
There's these 2 small-time villains hassling this guy.
When the doctor assumes his role as kind of the Nazi who they're
going to defer to.
The fact that he physically beats them around the head is quite
shocking.
I have to say that I didn't like that at all.
And there is something where part of the thing about hanging
around with the Nazis is that they put you in moral peril because
you know, in a way, it's okay and perhaps even in some
circumstances morally obligatory to punch them in the face.
But the doctor sometimes comments on that feeling of wanting to do
that, both in AC and in himself, that the Nazis are corrupting
morally.
But for me, the problem that I have is that it's a
misunderstanding of Sylvester McCoy's doctor, that he is never
physically violent, that he never, ever shoots someone.
Remember when Terrence was script editing.
You had Pertwe shooting Ogons with guns and killing them. for
that.
But Sylvester McCoy's doctor would never, ever do that.
You have ace shooting people dead.
You have ace blowing people up.
That's something that would never, ever have happened in the McCoy
era.
And all of the kind of moral peril and stuff that the doctor is in
is things like blowing up Scaro or blowing up the cyberfleet or
whatever, which is done from a distance, but he himself is never
violent and he prevents people in his presence from using guns if
he can.
And so I thought that that was a misreading of the character.
I mean, Terence has a handle on the doctor, of course, because he
creates the character of the doctor in all kinds of ways.
But I don't think he gets McCoy's doctor.
Well, that's because this is a 3rd doctor novel.
Yes, yeah.
Yeah, essentially.
It's hard to imagine the 7th doctor saying, good grief.
I don't find it difficult to envisage to Wester's doctor doing a
lot of the things that he does in this book and that hearing him
say the things that he says in this book.
But it does strike me as the 3rd doctor a lot.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, when the doctor punches a Nazi or punches a racist on
television in thin ice.
The thing about that that's so great is, firstly, the guy
absolutely richly deserves it and so it's fun to watch.
But secondly, it's him losing.
You know, he's he's lectured Bill on retaining her composure and
behaving and stuff and then he punches the guy in the face the
moment he says anything.
And so it's him being an idiot.
You know what I mean?
Whereas I actually found the scenes of the doctor being violent
and the doctor hanging out with the Nazis actually really quite
unenjoyable because yeah.
Just because that's, I mean, this version of Doctor Who doesn't
have to be the version that I see on TV or anything like that, but
it's Sylvester McCoy's doctor that's being portrayed here.
And I just don't think, I think he doesn't capture him.
He's still doing a 1970s.
I think you're right, Kate, that it feels like a 3rd doctor story
because the 3rd doctor is like in the firmament with, you know
hanging out of the club with Squidge or whatever his name is and
being part of that whole sort of, you know, Boney, I said.
Yeah.
Like all of that kind of thing.
And you can see the 3rd doctor just like settling down with a
bunch of Nazis and going, yeah, this is this is who's in charge.
I will suck up to them and get what I need out of them and then
shut them down.
That's why those scenes really do work well for me.
They're probably my favourite part of the book because while
Sylvester's doctor is very good at insinuating himself into a
situation, which is what he does there.
The book does a good job of making you realise that the doctor
kind of is dripping with contempt at the same time for these
people.
I think that's part of Terrence moving it towards more of an adult
reader, but I think it's also partly a symptom of the fact that
Terrence never novelized a 7th doctor story.
And so when people, and I suspect when he said people, he meant
Paul Cornell, told him what to watch, they directed him to the
curse of Fenrick to get a handle on Sylvester and Sophie's
characters, and he watched it several times over.
And Kursa Frederick is a certain kind of heightened drama for both
of those characters.
And I think that's what he latches onto.
Another aspect that would be considered more adult than your
average target novelisation would be the existence of torture in
this universe.
Yeah.
And I think Terrence has been extremely clever because he's not
thinking, I'll run up this for an hour, like 60 year old man who's
seen the world and it's not going to be bothered by anything that
I tell him.
I've still got to keep the younger readers in mind.
And also, sometimes the person who might get tortured is ace, you
know, this is a young woman, so that would be a bit, you know, not
on.
So what he does is he keeps torture off screen.
He positions us before torture.
So the doctor and I are sitting in their cell and they can hear
these terrible noises off and the doctors explain, look, this is
just a psychological softening up.
So he actually takes a scare away for the reader as well as for
ace.
And then later, uh, Hemmings tells Ace all the lovely things he
would like to do with her, but he never gets the chat.
So it's there, that threat, that Nazi threat is there.
But it's not played out on screen.
I mean, the Holocaust has not played out in the novel either, if
that's, that has to be kept off screen.
Otherwise, it's completely incompatible to have, even now these
days we have, what are they called now where there's a historical
event that cannot be changed?
Fixed point in time.
We have those now so that we can all relax about that.
But we don't have them in 1991.
So if the doctor turns up and there's Nazis around.
He has to defeat them and prevent World War II and prevent the
whole.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He just starts.
And this is simply not an option to change history like that.
And also, comic book versions of Nazis are as old as the hills.
I mean, look at, say, the Indiana Jones trilogy, where, you know
Indiana Jones comes up and has Hitler sign the book that will show
him where the Holy Grail is.
I think you'll find that was kneebore from the planet.
Absolutely was.
Michael Shed doing his best Hitler for the 4th time.
So good.
Whereas you can't include something like the Holocaust in a Doctor
Who story because there's just no entertainment value, you know, at
all.
You can't infantilize the audience by turning that into an
adventure story in any way.
I think that's why we meet Mr. Gold at the beginning, that we're
going to gesture in that direction, but we're not going to go any
further.
Yeah.
There's some anti-Semitic rhetoric, which is described or
mentioned in the description of the big rally in Nuremberg, but we
don't hear it so much.
And everything else kind of happens off screen.
And also there's Dr. Krieg's Lightest library, which Ace gets
drugged in where you've got all of the Aryan, the pro-Aryan
writing, and Terence takes great pains to talk about how dirty and
awful Ace feel surrounded by something they've been committed to
literature like that.
Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting, isn't it?
Because now it's the manosphere.
I mean, the thing is that Ace, you know, has encountered racism
and we had that speech in Ghostlight...
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that even gets alluded to.
So she's aware of it, but it's here where it's actually committed
to writing as if people are kind of proud of it.
And people, you know, who think and read are committed to these
ideas.
Given some kind of serious consideration.
Yeah, yeah.
That's interesting, actually, that it's booked in particular that
come in for this sort of execration. in a book.
It's almost like Terrence is saying, there are things.
I'm not going to talk about because they are too disgusting.
Yeah, but they are in other books and I know about it.
It's by Malcolm Hulk.
One thing I found interesting, like when I read this as a kid, like
19, I think, 20, um, was there there had been no real
investigation of the history of Hitler and Nazis, which, if you
watch certain channels, like SBS, for instance, people of my age
seem to be obsessed with, like the rise of the Nazis, how it
happened.
Like, it's a constant thing.
But this was the 1st time I think I'd ever read all of it put in
that order.
Like, and for a lot of this book is Terrence Dick's writing
historical fiction about the rise of Hitler, how it happened, like
you know, the various points at which the war started, you know
going to Dunkirk, all that kind of thing.
And, yeah, I think that's his main concern and trying to jam in
the other bits of the Doctor Whoisms, I feel like a last minute
thing.
He's like, oh, yeah, I've got to have the doctor there, an ace
turn up, but mainly he seems to be concerned about writing the
history of Hitler.
It's really funny too because there's 2 levels of Doctor Whoness
involved in this story.
And one is that it's a sequel to the war games.
And we observed a few weeks ago that the War Games wasn't really
allowed to do World War II.
No, it was yeah, too soon and kind of too serious.
And so the latest war that it can do is World War one.
And so he makes it a sequel to the war games.
And he even comments on the premise of the war games and has the
war chiefs say, actually, that was a ridiculously overcomplicated
plot.
And I could have just got the Nazis to take over the galaxy and it
would have been fine.
And this is the 4 episode version, not the 10th.
I don't know. the bit in alternate universe. feels like a couple
of episodes.
And then, of course, there's the timeworm.
And so the timeworm is trapped in Hitler's mind and unable to do
anything.
Yeah. and the people in the other Doctor Who plot in the war chief
plot are aware of it but don't know what it is.
And so I think it's his way of containing the timeworm so he
doesn't have to do a timeworm story.
He wants to do a sequel to the war games, but even more than that
he wants to write about World War II.
And so he does a great job of making it a sequel to the war
games.
That seems like the obvious thing to do.
And then he gets to put the timeworm to one side.
So it can be dealt with in the italics chapter at the beginning.
And then in the coder at the end.
That's clever if you're going to have the timeworm change history
and make the Nazis win.
You are sort of thinking like, do we have scenes with Hitler and
the time where I'm shaking hands?
But the idea, I liked the fact that the timeworm is present in
Hitler's mind, that this is, she's trapped in the mind of a
madman.
She gives him a little bit of extra power and he's a little bit
more charismatic and convincing and what have you, but she isn't
the one going, I will now make the Nazis win.
Yes.
So, you know, it eventually does end up in Britain getting
conquered in the alternative timeline.
It's enough to cause that.
But it's not simple cause and the fact that the timeworm says now
now the Nazis will win.
I actually had a similar problem with wheat Zealand and the left
handed hummingbird because somebody pointed this out to me when I
was 2 thirds of the way through writing it, I think.
It looked like New Zealand was responsible for violence in human
history.
The way that I was portraying it.
I thought, oh my god, that's not what I'm trying to get at.
I'm not trying to you know, give history an excuse like that.
So I had to make certain things more clear.
But I think that's what Terrence has done here.
I mean, the funny thing is that, of course, the defeat of Britain
is caused by the war chief rather than the timeworm.
And the doctor says this doesn't smell like the time worm.
You know, this is an intervention in history that doesn't feel
like what the time worm would do.
And there is a huge problem with kind of putting aliens in, um
it's a problem that we managed to avoid, for instance, in Rosa, by
having the villain be a human being for a start, just a racist
white guy.
And by keeping Rosa away from any sort of ridiculous science
fiction nonsense in the episode.
And here, I think, making Hitler a little bit more charismatic
because clearly everyone imagines what Terrence is doing, one of
the things that he wants to make clear is that Hitler was actually
hopeless and incompetent, and that that was a good thing.
And, you know, coming after Trump's 1st presidency, again, where
he was just an he's just an idiot and surrounded by people who are
also idiots.
And so he's an incompetent dictator.
We don't need the timeworm to explain why Hitler was such a
convincing orator despite being so bad at it because we've been
living through it for the last 10 years.
It struck me a little bit that there was conflicting instructions
here.
You know, we've always talked about sort of the one more draft
kind of theory of things.
I think the plot of this could have had another draft because
they're a bit conflicting, the timeworm, and the warlords, one of
them should have created the situation whereby Hitler's oratory is
a little bit more powerful, and then he doesn't make stupid
decisions, so the invasion of Britain happens.
To have 2 of them, and one of them sidelined seems a bit muddled
to me.
Yeah, I think it is just because he's got a brief, you know, he's
had to shoehorn in the arc staff and he's done it as ungraciously
as possible, I think.
I want to ask Kate.
Was the timeline on submitting, once you'd been accepted, was that
really tight?
Was that a tight turnaround to get a draft in?
Almost always, yes.
Lie-handed Hummingbird was written over 9 months and you can tell
the difference between that book and later books that I wrote
because they would be more like 3 or 4 months.
Yeah.
So yeah, it's pretty quick.
Yeah, and knowing Terrence.
They probably could produce.
Yeah, yes.
Publishable material.
Yeah, without needing a 2nd draft, but wouldn't it be great if he
did take one?
I mean, I actually don't mind...
It's a little bit like the way that the Reebus operation makes fun
of its arc story.
It's just like there's been over the heretic being told that there
aren't godlike forces warring over the planet in a story that's
entirely part of an arc that is about godlike forces warrior in
the universe.
And so Terrence is kind of going, yes, there is going to be a
change in history, but psych, it's not the time where I'm doing it
at all.
It's my made-up guy.
I think what Adam was saying about the fact that Terrence really
just wants to talk about the 2nd world.
I think that's right because I think maybe the 1st half of the
book is the more successful part and all of that alternate history
stuff in Britain.
It feels like Terrence is really enjoying that.
So going from the Festival of Britain to the Savoy Hotel occupied
by, you know, the Nazi hierarchy to like the resistance calf.
And by the way, oddly for Terence.
He gets the directions wrong.
When he says you go from the Festival of Britain, over Waterloo
Bridge, left onto the Strand, and right into the Savoy.
It's not.
It over Waterloo Bridge, left on the strand and left.
Very unusual for Terrence. alternative universe.
Alternative map topography.
Maybe the Nazis moved the door.
Move to the Savoy, yeah.
The tunnel now.
Those rotters. put it past them.
How dare they?
But I think you can tell because those early chapters are far and
away the best.
They're very evocative.
So those scenes traipsing around the dismal festival of Britain
with like only old people there and children. paints a really
bleak picture and Terence, I think, revels in it.
Once the Doctor Who stuff gets in the way and you're off to a
castle in Germany somewhere with kind of zombies running around
and the war chief has suddenly turned up and now he's being
tereptilized.
Yeah, I think maybe the sheen comes off a little bit.
There's wonderful descriptions of food in that book.
Oh yeah.
Everybody's starving and occupied Britain, but they keep getting
bread and cheese and cold meats and these incredible descriptions
of the menu.
Even though they're prisoners.
That stuff talking about tea.
Oh yeah, the her set's tea tastes awful.
And then you get the real tea at the end when you get to the real
festival of Britain. you're like, oh, that's right.
The tea's good again.
Even though there was rationing and it probably was like 4
leaves.
They do mention it, though.
They do mention the rationing.
Yeah, there is that sort of Terrence thing.
We've talked about, there's a kind of vague sort of liberalism and
a sort of soft leftness to his writing.
And so there's that moment where he says, everywhere in the world
wherever you are, the people on top are doing very nicely.
Thank you.
And he makes that sort of very clear.
Yeah.
I have a problem with, with, we can't change history, and the
whole thing is that we have to make World War 2 happen.
And it is on a bigger scale. what happens in Rosa, you know, our
job in Rosa is to ensure that a racism happens.
And I think part of the problem with it is that it makes the
doctor seem powerless.
And it also makes up a rule that the doctor has to adhere to that
doesn't resemble any actual kind of moral rule.
So the idea that we can't change history seems to me to be
ridiculous.
There are certain things that if you go back in time you're not
allowed to do those things, but you can do them normally.
I mean, it would have taken just a line.
Like, you know how there's, obviously this is about World War 2
but it's said about the Daleks, like, you know, out of such horror
some good will come.
And, you know, it just could have been bringing up penicillin.
That wouldn't have happened without the war.
Like, or, you know, radar or any of the 100s of things that were
invented cryptography, like all of that stuff that came out of the
war because of the necessity of fighting the Nazis and the
Japanese and trying to innovate and the innovations that came from
it.
But yeah, because necessity being the mother of invention, you
could easily just drop a line in.
Then the doctor's like, we can't do this because then we won't
have X, Y, Z. To be fair, the one thing that he does do is he says
it's the war that wipes the Nazis out.
And that's why I don't think we necessarily need qualification
about it.
I agree with you to an extent in some circumstances.
But I think in this one and especially from a very British point
of view.
World War 2 and stopping the Nazis. is kind of the shining gem in
British history.
It's the one moment where they actually protected the world from
something dreadful and really were the last 4 standing in their
way for possibly years until Americans came aboard.
And I think just the fact that you can point to World War 2 as a
just war.
It was stopping a terrible evil is really all you need in this
situation.
Yeah.
It's why it's better than World War one.
And, you know, the war game shows a fairly healthy suspicion of
what's going on in World War one, I think.
It's why Waters of Mars is so ridiculous.
It's kind of like, I mustn't save these people because someone
will have to re-edit their Wikipedia pages.
I was killed on Mars.
Now I shot myself in my home.
I'm sure history will just go on. rails after that.
But you see, that's the counterexample, which proves the point, I
think, because in the waters of Mars, they have to go to a great
extent to tell you why it's so important that history doesn't get
changed.
Whereas we all know that the Nazis had to be stopped.
Yes, yeah.
And again, you know, why Ace can't kill Hitler in 1926 is the fear
that someone competent might take over and would win the war
spells that out.
Yeah, yeah. really enjoyed that.
I really enjoyed the idea that Hitler was completely useless and
you know, they wouldn't have tried to fight a war on 2 fronts if
he wasn't so megalomaniacal.
Yeah.
And he was also an anglophile.
And so the fact that he halted his troops pushing the Allied
forces into the sea at Dunkirk out of this kind of bizarre
preoccupation with the fact that Britain might become friends with
him might go, oh, okay, it's fine.
That was always going to be madness, but that was him, and that
was probably the key turning point where the Brits were able to
save their forces and then fight on.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, who knows how close he was at that point to
thinking, oh, I will be able to install a different king and
they'll just do what I tell them.
Like, yeah, I love time travel story set in World War II.
Like one of my favourites is the Connie Willis books blackout and
all clear, which take place throughout the whole of the blitz
basically.
Is it people going back in time?
Yeah, they have to do a history practice at Oxford.
I've heard of those.
They're so great.
But they get trapped there and they can't kind of get out and they
meet Agatha Christie.
She's dispensing pills at the hospital and, you know, they make
these ridiculous ragamuffins in the East End and it's just lots of
hiding in tube stations, but yeah, there's this constant idea of
like you can't change anything because so much of what happens
afterwards is because of this war. as awful as it is.
It's just a constant thing.
But I mean, you're not allowed when someone collapses on the
street, you're not allowed to withhold 1st aid from them in case
they grow up to become a dictator in the future.
You know what I mean?
Like we don't make moral decisions like that in practice.
Maybe you don't.
One thing I'll tell you one thing I really hate is the fact that
I'm now living through history.
I know.
I always tell myself, Kate, you had 50 years of living through not
history.
Just peace, prosperity, lots of terrible things happening overseas
but nothing happening to you and your family personally.
And now I'm living through history, so I had only 50 years.
Well, there's a reason that people talk about the post World War 2
order, which held firm for 50 or 60 years, and made sure that
there wasn't another worldwide conflict in that time.
Of course, there was, you know, there was wars and there was
skirmishers and there was terrible things which happened.
But basically the order insured, a generally peaceful world.
The way that Chris Eggleston's doctor talks about post-war Britain
in the empty child, the doctor dances is just tremendous.
I don't think Doctor Who's ever expressed it in quite that way
before.
Yeah.
It's really sweet.
It's, it's kind of weird.
It feels weird going back to World War 2 because it was so banned
for so long.
Like, like when Cursor Fenwick came on.
I was like, what, why have they been to World War 2 before?
Yeah.
And you go, oh, that's right.
Because it was 20 years earlier when the show started.
It even meant it takes great pains to avoid Germans as the enemies
like Germany doesn't really play a pass in the story.
No, but they're in the silver nemesis.
They're modern Nazis.
That sober addressing of the issue.
Love a neo-Nazi in the 90s.
They seem so deluded.
We have them in government.
I think the whole book is drafted with such economy and wit that
it's impossible not to like it.
I think as it goes on, there's possibly too much economy.
I think Terrence is racing through his pleasures a little bit.
And so you get an awful lot of touing and throwing and going from
like escaping from places and going to new places and the doctor
following Ace and all of that.
And so it reads a little bit like an episode 3 of a TV story, you
know, capture escape, capture escape.
And there's certain scenes which I wanted there to be more of, like
some confrontation scenes, those climactic scenes with the doctor
and Hitler in the same room where the doctor is called a
manipulating Hitler, but also is in the presence of this
historical evil.
I wanted more focus to be on that.
And I think it's a slight case of diminishing returns as you go on
ending up in a big battle with sort of, you know, a hunchback
monster and his zombies at the castle.
And so I think the 2nd half of the novel doesn't quite do justice
to the first.
But it's told with such panache and such easy reading that I think
it's invaluable that we have it.
Yeah.
The other thing I find is that he's written it like it's a TV
episode, like, oh, we'll just hang around outside this one cafe
and look across there, and that can be some footage that was
filmed earlier, and then we'll go and be in the Savoy Hotel, and
we'll just be in one room, all 2 rooms, and that's it.
And then they go to the castle and they're there for the rest of
the time and that's in one or 2 rooms and it's like, you could
have left.
Like you could have had a chat in a car.
But it all feels very state and stuff.
I mean, to be fair, there are plenty of chats in cars.
They're smoking it easy for the director.
Exactly.
But it's like...
The director's me.
That's right.
Unlimited budget.
And all I'm seeing is some hastily painted studio flat.
We've been saying about the way Terrence tells a story and we've
got this from way back in the War Games, but also in Robot and in
Horror Fang Rock, that he's able to make new things happen.
What we don't get is the doctor locked up in episode 3 like we do
in the 80s in both robot and Horror Fang Rock.
We have an enemy that has plans and that is doing different things
and the doctor is kind of tracking that and responding to that.
So new things happen, new elements, get introduced, and the story
never feels like it's artificially keeping us away from the
climax.
But here, I got the impression that because he has a kind of
didactic purpose, that the storytelling isn't as strong, and I do
think that, for instance, going back to 1926 and having the doctor
meet Hitler, is largely there so that the doctor can tell Ace, all
of this staff.
And I think Terence is aware that Ace is a companion is not like
Sarah Jane or Joe, who grew up in a kind of, you know, after the
Second World War, in the middle of the 20th century.
And so he has the opportunity to tell the story of the 2nd World
War to her.
And so it seemed to me that there was a lot more exposition.
Normally Terence sets things up that are straightforward and
comprehensible and don't require a great deal of scaffolding, but
here because he really wants to inform us about a thing, he does
spend a lot of time just telling Ace the background.
The narrative pauses a fair bit.
Yeah.
Well, just even that even that structure where it's 1951 and then
we go to 1926 and then we go to 1939 and all of that sort of
thing.
That is the sort of whistle stop tour of the 2nd World War, which
is entirely because Terrence wants to tell us about the things.
If he sets it in 1943 or something like that, then he doesn't get
to do all of the other things that he wants to include.
Yeah.
And and a McCoy era story really should be all in 1943.
And then you find out.
He's popped back.
He like, I'm just going down the shops.
And then he goes to 26 and it goes to 39 and comes back and you
find out he's sewn all these things in.
And, you know, maybe that is the freedom that he has now that he's
writing a book rather than doing a television story that he's not
going to go for that dramatic unity of place or unity of time.
He can be free of that in a way that you can't be, I guess, in a
four-part story or a six-part story.
I mean, it does remind me slightly of Silver Nemesis, where the
doctrinates just pop around all over the place, back in time
forwards in time to London, to Windsor.
Like, and so it does ape that.
But yeah, I think Terence is using the structure so that he
doesn't just have to sit down with Ace on some stairs, like in
remembrance of the Daleks part 3 and explain what's going on.
They actually go there, which is what you can do in a book.
Yeah, I mean, that's the Moffat style thing, isn't it?
Like, why would I have a flashback in this story that has a time
machine in it?
where you would just go back in time and do it.
And so he's definitely doing that here.
I also have like this, I don't know, I had this thing in my head
of like, he's gone, I've written this normal sized Doctor Who
book.
My novelisations are usually quite slim.
And then he's gone, oh, how do I fill up the rest of it?
It's like writing a thesis.
It's like you've gone, I've got I've got this much.
I'm going to do 4 chapters of explaining all of my terms.
Terrence, that is, let's explain Hitler.
For 80% of the book and then like 20% can just be some Doctor
Hoopizo at the end.
Well, I mean, maybe the 1951 stuff is the least essential part of
it, isn't it?
But he's having fun riding fun, though.
Yeah, yeah.
He's showing us the stakes.
That's fair.
Yeah, yes, yeah.
That's true.
And then we go back to a proper 1951.
Yeah, this is this is the brief opening of the door in Pyramids of
Mars.
He's just fleshed it out a bit.
You know, I think we can overlook the importance of this book to
the new adventures.
Because, obviously, I think it should have been first, but
Timeworm Genesis first, he did not receive a good...
No, it was not well received.
I popped onto the timescales review site, and I sampled the
reactions timeworm Genesis, and there's some samples.
Infamous and divisive.
Reeks of self-importance, yet feels like fan fiction.
The worst soft reboot this franchise ever spawned.
Ouch.
Oh my god.
Now, none of those criticisms could be applied to Exodus.
And I think if this book hadn't done what it does so well.
If it hadn't kind of swooped in and rescued or put the train back
on the rails, I think the new adventures could have been
permanently tarred in fandom's eyes as something that was too
different.
What this book is is permission.
It's permission for the new adventures to then go off and do
different things.
It's permission for Revelation 2 books later or transit half a
dozen books later to do their thing because what it's saying is
that's a choice.
It's saying to a certain section of fandom, we give you permission
to come aboard because we can do this kind of story and this kind
of story that you love will still be part of the fiction.
But also we can do these other things.
So come and sample these.
I think it's incredibly important to the new adventures that this
book exists.
Also, they're not all going to be sexy. don't panic Even though
they tried to do that with the cover and you're like, why does Ace
look like she's about to be sacrificed as a virgin?
It's the virgin new adventure.
Can I circle back one more time to Terrence's writing and what it
meant to me as a child?
Yeah.
I particularly want to talk about the Pyramids of Mars
novelisation.
Because Terrence told me it was one of his favourite stories to
novelize, and you can just see it when you read it.
You know, it's dripping with all of the quality Terenceisms that
we know.
The hotel is so evocative and beautifully committed to page.
But the thing which meant a lot to me is this incredible prologue
which tells the story between Sutek and Horus and the science, it
goes on for page after page.
It's Terrence's original work rather than someone else's script
being novelized, and it's majestic.
It's almost lyrical.
It's like the story from mythology.
It had such an impact on me that when we came at school to study
Percy B. Shelley's sonnet Aussie Mandius.
It really captured my imagination, that poem. because it reminded
me so heavily of that prologue from the Pyramids Mars.
That sort of took me back there.
So I learnt the words to Ozzymandis by heart and I can still
recite them.
From memory. you like me to?
Yes, please.
I met a traveller from an antique land who said, to vast and
trunkless legs of stone, stand in the desert, near them on the
sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled
lip, and sneer of cold command tell that its sculpture well those
passions read, which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless
things.
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal, these words appear.
My name is Ossimandius, king of kings.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The
lone and level sands stretch far away.
It's so good isn't it?
It's so good.
And the fact that that was inextricably linked with the pyramids
of Mars, in my mind, and that was down to Terence, and it was the
fact that I went off and learnt something that was beautiful and
literary because of his words.
And I think I'm not alone in that.
I think our generation, he opened the door to so many things.
Oh, yeah. through his book.
So many, you know, so much world building and world learning and
sort of going off into different topics, things that you would
have known nothing about.
We owe him this debt of gratitude for kind of expanding our
horizons a little bit.
Same for me.
Like, I learned that being a writer was a job you could do, like
and I said that as a five-year-old to my parents who said, why
don't you get a real job?
Anyway, here I am, professional writer. that owns a house and
still feel that horrible thing.
The core of me.
But just because it was a name, like you could attach a name to
the things that you loved. like, and that someone was responsible
for them and you're like, oh, I want to be that guy.
I want to be the guy that comes up with fun things to do.
And it was, yeah, I think you're right, Peter.
It just makes you feel like you have this entry into a world that
you previously didn't know existed and he's responsible for that
for so many people.
I always tell the story of reading the novelisation of Planet of
the Spiders when I was quite small.
And there's Sarah goes to Metabulous 3.
She's teleported there in an instant.
And I think it's at the beginning of the next chapter.
She's got her eyes shut and she can feel the heat of the desert on
her face.
And I remember distinctly thinking, he's telling it from her point
of view.
That's what she's experiencing.
It's not what I saw on the television because I would have seen
that quite recently and realising that that was a thing you could
do and it was my very 1st ever insight into writing.
I must have learned a lot without even realising it.
Yeah.
He was really, really quite incredible.
I have a friend at work who is maybe one of the most voracious
readers that I have ever met and people at work and, you know, at
Sydney grammar school.
It's an academic school.
People at work go to her and ask her opinion or, you know, what
should I read next or what did you think of this?
Does she say underworld?
It's really good book.
But the 1st chapter book that she ever read was the Auton Invasion
by Terence Diggs.
And when she went to the Doctor Who experienced years ago, she
came back with a copy of the Cave Monsters for me and I had never
owned that as a child.
I know that's Malcolm Hulk, but that novelisation of the Orson
Invasion, which was the 1st time I ever experienced that story.
I think I read it before I ever saw Spearhead from space, even
though that was kind of regularly repeated, is so extraordinary.
Like, and it is the clarity and simplicity, the fact that he
doesn't talk down to you.
We've talked about the opening lines, you know, through the ruins
of a city, stalk the ruins of a man.
He was a dead man running or whatever.
Like just those wonderful beginnings there.
There's some funny jokes in here.
There are some clever turns of phrase that are almost poetic but
not pretentious and it is just something that reads itself in
front of you, I think.
It's so, so much easier, so much more fluid, so much more
interesting than so many of the other things around it. is really
something.
Terrence is the definition of casually brilliant.
Yeah.
Making something really difficult, look easy.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it was that thing that you were talking about the
difference between art and craft, but like sometimes I'm not sure
there is a difference.
And, you know, like we tend to think of genre fiction or
novelisations or something like that is, you know, like that they
need to be apologised for.
Do you know what I mean?
They're not art.
They're not art, but they're craft.
We identify it as craft because we don't want to dignify it with a
title of art, but that's a kind of snobbery, I think, of sort of
genre snobbery, really.
That what he does is he creates something beautiful and meaningful
and something that has some kind of impact on the world.
I always define craft as all of the things you do to create
something.
Yeah.
And the art is making it better than someone else's.
It's the thing that makes it resonant.
It's the thing that makes you go, oh, I want to read that again. or
that was really satisfying.
Like, it's, you know, I felt the same about stand-up.
It's like, I could teach anyone to do a 5 minute set.
Like anyone, but mostly it's just going to be someone being very
boring and annoying for 5 minutes and maybe getting a couple of
laughs or you could be transcended and create a room full of joy.
And that's the art.
That's the, no, the extra one% that makes it better.
But the craft is like once you know all the rules, you should be
able to punch it out.
When you make the distinction between art and craft and genre
terms as well, I think people make a distinction between aiming
for art, which is more heavyweight literature and doing the craft
which can sometimes become art just by virtue of how well it's
done.
It's just that art without craft, I think, isn't really possible.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, it's just wank, really.
I think.
Yeah.
Well, that's all the time we have this week and for this season.
We'll be back early next year for season four of 500 year diary to
watch Torchwood, season three, Children of Earth.
In the meantime, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts
and you can keep up with us on our website, 500yearDiary.com, where
you'll find our social media links, as well as links to all of our
other podcasts, including our other Doctor Who podcasts, flight
through entirety, and the 2nd grade and bountiful human empire.
Until next time, remember that you're always allowed to be nice to
people, even if it changes human history for the better.
Thank you very much for listening and good night.
Good night.
Bye bye.
Good night.
That was 500 year diary, starring Nathan Bottomley, Peter
Griffiths, Kate Orman, and Adam Richard.
The theme was composed by Cameron Lamb.
This episode, Let's explain Hitler, was recorded on the 30th of
November 2025, and released on the 28th of December.
Over on maximum power, we've just released our epic retrospective
of the whole damn show, featuring hosts from every hemisphere
discussing how Blake 7 has thrilled, delighted, titillated and
enraged us over the years.
Go over to maximumpowerpodcast.com or to your podcatcher of choice
and give it a listen.
And we'll see you next year.
I don't know, that just sounds like an ad.
It really does.
It's um, I mean, you know, like, obviously, it's Paul and and
Terence that launched the missing adventures, isn't it?
I mean, Terrence doesn't write the 1st one, but he and Paul get
together to write the 2 parter, the blood harvest and another
great Terrence book that is just kind of filled with all of his
preoccupations. vampires, time lords.
You know, that's the one thing we didn't talk about was the time
lords thing too, because again, you know, Terrence creates the
time lords, essentially. and then Bob Holmes wrecks them. really
such a great way.
Yeah, wonderful.
I think it's great.
I don't know.
I love, you know, like I love what he does to them, and it's an
inevitably sort of homes thing.
And Terrence takes that on board.
You know, you can see, it's like the interactions between Russell
and Moffatt.
Do you know what I mean?
They like each other's Doctor Who and they take things from each
other.
And so you have Terence comparing the time lords to the Nazis here
explicitly and saying that the time lords are also, you know, full
of infighting and backstabbing and and, you know, I mean, it's a
striking comparison, I think.
And what he does is he creates a sort of mythical past for the
timelords, where they're much more evil and much more kind of
terrible, leaving the dodtery homes kind of timelords, alone sort
of thing, I think.
Yeah.
It's a bit of a case of diminishing returns, as Terence goes on
because he does, he does write many more entries in the new
adventures and then the BBC books.
And I think, you know, he's he's off his peak by then and maybe
he's sort of dashing them off for the money.
Who knows?
But this, I think, is distilled Terence, and so is Blood Harvest.
And I think catastrophe, which is one of his later entries, is
kind of fun because that's in his wheelhouse.
That's a 3rd doctor in Joe's story.
But once you reach things like the 8 doctors and he's really just
doing his greatest hits, he's revisiting all the things that he
did and having a bit of fun with them.
There's an audience for that, but I think this is a book where
Terrence is writing for the audience and is making them feel
comforted and costed and wrapped up in sort of a warm Terrency
glow.
It's doing the things that he does well, which he knows that the
audience will need at this point, which the readership will need.
And it's the bridge.
Like you say, he's just finished writing a couple of
novelisations.
So he's he is the entrée for the rest of us to go, oh, yeah. stick
my toe in here.
Because, I mean, you have it from the other direction, don't you
with things like Mark Platt's novelisation and, you know, those
season 26 novelisation...
Yeah, yeah, where we're working towards, well, that, you know
remembrance of the Daleks are so extraordinary. context.
It was just incredible, wasn't it?
Like amazing.
And so you have that heading towards something a little bit more
literary and a little bit more complicated.
And so the virtue, new adventure seem like kind of the next
logical stamp.
Yeah.
And that's kind of the comparison, isn't it?
If you're moving from the novelisation of the space pirates to
excess.
It's not too far of a leap.
I think moving from something like the novelisation of battlefield
which Mark Platt does to times crucible, might be going a little
bit far for some of the audience.
It's pushing it in a direction, which is not an entirely
comfortable fit.
And that's the thing.
It was kind of like, I am kind of here for the Doctor Who.
And so when I'm reading Times Crucible and I am unwilling to do
the work that it seems to want me to put in.
Um, you know, uh, like I'm just kind of not really having fun
where it's, it's very clear what's going on in, in Terrence's
thing.
I mean, like, I will put effort into reading things, but not
something with a big silver metal worm on the front cup, frankly.
And also not into things written by John Peel, just saying.
Oh yeah.