Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} and by Target Practice #3: Doctor Who and the Green Death by Malcolm Hulke. Of the three books that helped make me into a fan, this one is probably my favorite. And why not? It’s a story that dares to talk about pollution and the effects of the coal industry long before climate change became the hot-button political issue it is today. Even with the inherent conservatism of the Pertwee era in mind, (as writers like Paul Cornell and Elizabeth Sandifer have suggested) to see Doctor Who take a firm step for environmentalism this early on is wonderful. And while I wish I could say the situation has improved since the story originally aired on TV in 1973, (and then published in 1975) the truth is, I can’t. Things have only gotten worse in the last 40-odd years, thanks to rising levels of pollution everywhere, and the general warming of the planet leading to significantly stronger hurricanes, melting polar ice caps, and other such disasters. In 2016, the nations of the world signed the Paris Climate Accords, with the goal of keeping the global average temperature from breaching 2 degrees Celsius, but then former president Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the accords, and spent his entire term in office destroying the environment, rather than preserving it. True, Joe Biden returned the US to the agreement after he took office in January, but whatever else he may have planned from a legislative standpoint will run up against a reduced Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, a nominally Democratic Senate, a far right judiciary, and various recalcitrant Republican-controlled states who don’t believe his presidency to be legitimate in the first place, all ready and willing to block even modest reforms, whether through legislation or executive actions. If only a cartoonishly evil super computer was the worst of our problems. Let’s turn the clock back, then, to the early 1970s. The Green Death was the last story of the classic show’s anniversary season, its tenth, and saw the departure of as after 3 seasons. Here, she returns to narrate the audio version of Malcolm Hulke’s novelization, and she’s absolutely wonderful at it. The only problem with the presentation I found was the music and sound effects: while they do a lot to liven things up, on this book I found them overbearing and distracting at points, usually at the starts and ends of chapters. Chapter 1, for example, has the music continue to play for a solid 8 minutes, while the first act break in chapter 9 (following the scene in which Jo accidentally ruins one of Cliff’s experiments) drowns out the last few words, making them almost inaudible. Production issues aside forever, the book itself remains as exciting as I first found it to be when I first read it in paperback all those years ago. I didn’t really know who was back then (I don’t even think I knew he was a ) but I immediately liked him, and his quest to fight for what was right even in the face of adversity. I don’t much remember what I thought of Jo in those days, but I certainly love her now, standing up for more gender-neutral language and against the sexist treatment she faces from all the male characters. She may have been employed as the Doctor’s assistant, but she became so much more, and a lot of that comes from Katy Manning’s performance, which she recreates here. I will admit, I have to love the story’s villain, BOSS. Not because he’s an authoritarian with DREAMS OF CONQUEST, but because he’s a snarky bastard who does things like play part of the Wedding March in the act of taking over Stevens’ mind. He reminds me a little too of House, the villain of The Doctor’s Wife , since he exists as a voice and he has plans to take over the world. Perhaps the most chilling scene in the story is when BOSS orders Dr. Bell to kill himself, which he accomplishes by jumping through a window before the Doctor can come rescue him. The way Hulke describes Bell’s emotionless state during that sequence is horrifying, but in a way that makes you want to keep reading (or listening) to find out what happens next. Prose-wise, I quite love Hulke’s take on ’s original scripts. He’s brisk like at his best, fleshing out the characters so we really feel for them. It especially works for the scene that opens chapter 1, when Ted Hughes dies. On TV we just see a man in a miner’s helmet getting killed by green slime, but Hulke turns him into an lonely older man reminiscing on his glory days, before the mine closed. As Elizabeth Sandifer observed in her entry on the TV version, Hulke sands down the stereotypical aspects of how the people of Wales were shown in the original, giving a more nuanced take on them that I think might’ve been done by , if this had been remade in 2005. They feel like real people, and the disgust with which the Londoners in the story (mainly the Panorama Chemicals people, but the Brigadier gets in on the action too) view the Welsh is palpable, reminiscent perhaps of the way American east coast journalists look at we Midwesterners. All in all, Doctor Who and the Green Death remains as good as I remembered it being 14 years ago, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants some pre-Cartmelian political Who . My only wish, and this is not the fault of the writers, is that we’d listened to what the show was trying to tell us all those years ago, and reduced our dependence on fossil fuels. Maybe then we’d be living in a world a bit closer to the community envisioned by the Wholewealers. (They’d fit in well with the solar punk crowd, that’s for sure.) And while this is the end of my look at the books that brought me to the show, it’s not the end of the reviews. The next set will be one book per Doctor, since Christine’s Patreon (as of the night I’m writing this anyway) is sitting at exactly $300. That said, I’d still encourage everyone to donate and give her some wiggle room. With that said, please join me next month for my review of the very first novelization ever: Doctor Who and the , David Whitaker’s take on the very first story, as republished by in 1973. Malcolm Hulke. Malcolm Hulke (21 November 1924-6 July 1979 [1] ) was the author of many Doctor Who scripts and Target Books novelisations. Contents. Biography [ edit | edit source ] Hulke began his association with Doctor Who as early as Season 1, for which he contributed the storyline for The Hidden Planet (a.k.a. Beyond the Sun ), a serial which ultimately did not get accepted. Along with Terrance Dicks, in The War Games , he co-created the concept of the Time Lords and offered viewers their first glimpse of Gallifrey. He also created the reptilian Silurians, their cousins , and the Draconians. For Target Books, he wrote novelisations of every story he had written solo, and several he had worked on with other writers. He also wrote a Doctor Who radio series starring Peter Cushing which was recorded but never broadcast. Hulke wrote scripts for a variety of TV shows including: Pathfinders in Space , Pathfinders to Venus , Pathfinders to Mars , The Avengers , The Protectors , Danger Man , Crossroads , United! and Gideon's Way . He is noted for fleshing out minor characters in novelisations, writing shades of grey, and a strong interest in left-wing politics. Alan Barnes noted in the On Target: Malcolm Hulke documentary included on The War Games DVD that you can "see a political subtext in everything he wrote". Doctor Who and the Green Death. We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method. Publisher's Summary. The Green Death begins slowly. In a small Welsh mining village, a man emerges from the disused colliery covered in a green fungus. Minutes later, he is dead. UNIT, Jo Grant, and Doctor Who in tow arrive on the scene to investigate, but strangely reluctant to assist their inquiries is Dr. Stevens, director of the local refinery, Panorama Chemicals. Are they in time to destroy the mysterious power which threatens them all before the whole village, and even the world, is wiped out by a deadly swarm of green maggots? Katy Manning, who played Jo Grant in the original 1973 TV serial on which this book is based, reads Malcolm Hulke's complete and unabridged novelization, first published by Target Books in 1975. Doctor Who and the Green Death by Malcolm Hulke. Doctor Who and the Green Death . Original Target novelization cover. Title: Doctor Who and the Green Death Televised as: The Green Death Written by: Malcolm Hulke Teleplay by: Robert Sloman and Screen Credit to: Robert Sloman Televised in: May/June 1973 Published in: August 1975 Chapters: One through Five. “You ask about work and you ask about pay, They’ll tell you they make less than a dollar a day.” – Woody Guthrie. Malcolm Hulke did not write The Green Death . The TV serial itself was the annual season-finale, co-written as always by Barry Letts and Robert Sloman. Letts himself had already novelized the first Letts/Sloman script, The Daemons , and the final Letts/Sloman script, Planet of the Spiders , would be the next book novelized after this one. I’m not privy to the chain of events that led to Hulke writing this book, but I do know that, of his seven Target novelizations, this was the only one not based on his one of his own TV serials. However, in reading the book, it’s impossible to tell that this isn’t based on a Hulke script. It’s an intensely personal story told direct from Hulke’s own heart. What this is, is such a politically minded, labor-versus-management, good-versus-evil story that, for the first five or six chapters, it’s not even a science fiction story at all. The Minister cut in again: “Then let me put it to you another way, Brigadier. I have just consulted with the Prime Minister who is by my side. This country cannot afford to have an argument, or even the hint of a dispute, with Panorama or with any other multi-national company that’s good enough to have its plants here.” If you’re familiar with the TV serial, bear in mind that Hulke is novelizing the pre-production scripts. So TV’s Global Chemicals is still called Panorama Chemicals in the book. And the two accidental casting changes which occurred during the course of taping the story (with the actress who played Nancy absent from Episode One, and the character of Elgin disappearing after Episode Four to be replaced someone else named James) don’t happen in this book, so Nancy appears in the Episode One material, and James’ sad TV fate is reassigned to Elgin where it belongs. But never mind the production details. The basic story (one of the few things the TV serial and its novelization have in common) is about what happens when a petroleum manufacturer sets up a non-Union refinery in Llanfairfach, small Welsh village with a disused coal mine. The miners are bereft about having lost their dangerous and underpaid jobs, especially when the coal mine wasn’t nearly empty yet. Enter Professor Clifford Jones, a Nobel-prize winning chemist who’s got his own little commune in Llanfairfach, researching green alternatives to petroleum. He’s horrified by the prospect of the toxic byproduct that he expects to be the inevitable outcome of Panorama’s new oil-refinery methods. Panorama’s toxic sludge, which is pumped into the coal mine, is nearly instantly fatal to the touch, and kills three Welsh miners over the first half of the story. And,in a nod to Doctor Who ‘s sci-fi roots, the green sludge eventually mutates the local insect population of the mine, and creates enormous maggots which later hatch into enormous, venom-spitting flies. But that’s not important right now. There are many sides to the Panorama controversy. (or, if Terrance Dicks were to describe this book, he’d call it “a many-sided controversy”). Remember from our looks at Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters and Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon that Hulke is fascinated by the motivations of different layers of right-wing political theory – rapacious capitalists, evil industrialists, nationalist soldiers, dispossessed laborers, and amoral scientists. Most of the first half of the book is a paean to the laborer, the common man, the noble victim of capitalist oppression. Hulke lays it on quite thick in the book, in a manner just about entirely absent from the TV serial as broadcast. Llanfairfach Colliery, in a mountainous part of Wales, had been closed for some time. No one in the village saw the sense of this – particularly the miners who had spent their lives hewing coal from the pit. There was still ample coal down there, enough for another hundred years of mining. But government economists in London had “proved” it was better business to buy oil overseas than to mine coal here in Britain. So, Llanfairfach’s coal mine had been closed and its miners put out of work. The disused coal mine is an active character in this story, as much so as the displaced miners (three of whom die in the coal mine over the first half of the story). There are literally paragraphs and paragraphs from the POV of these miners (one relayed through thoughts, the other two through dialogue), which turns the book into a Woody Guthrie or Phil Ochs protest song, much more so than the novelization of a Barry Letts script. As he poured himself some tea the old sadness came over him. He looked up and down the section of gallery where he was sitting, thinking back on the old times when the mine had been worked and was full of his friends. There was no one to talk to now. Economists in London had made a calculation, and the friendly world of Ted Hughes had been brought to an end. Welsh miner Ted Hughes (not that Ted Hughes), as played by John Scott Martin, is the first victim of the Green Death. The miners are, under Hulke’s pen, good honest folk, and they don’t take kindly to outsiders: “To be accepted you had to have three generations of dead behind you in the village graveyard; above all, both you and they had to be miners”. And there’s lots of mention of labor action: The memory of the General Strike in 1926 was still with many of them. For seven bitter months the coal miners had remained on strike until finally they were defeated because they had no food. The real key to this first half of the story is not the Doctor, or Jo, or the Brigadier, or anyone else you read about in the earlier novelizations. No, the real heroes are two of the ex-miners: Bert Pritchard and Dave Williams (although, in an editing blunder that nobody caught, Hulke refers to Bert as both Pritchard and Williams in the book). On TV, Bert and Dave were characterized primarily by being Welsh. Bert on TV refers to Jo as “Blodwyn” (and “love” and “girl”), and, although he doesn’t say “boyo” a lot, four other characters in the script did. And in the book, Hulke does remind us that Welshmen tend to be short. But the books adds so much more depth to the miners. In print, Dave “shook his head at the simplicity” of the visiting Englishmen, and points that that “We’ve got telephones, just like you English”. He also gets in a dig about coal mine owners being in the business only for profit, and that it’s “uneconomic” for the mine to have more than one lift shaft. Bert is the bigger part, on screen and in print. On TV, Bert is a memorable role, but he’s still basically Jo’s exotic Welsh pet, as evidenced by the way she eulogizes him after he dies: “ He was such a perky little man. He called me Blodwyn. Cliff, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m crying. A funny little Welshman that I hardly knew.” Now, tertiary characters who die only partway through Doctor Who serials don’t typically get eulogies, so Bert is a bit unique in that respect. But his TV dialogue was mostly functional; he was there only to share exposure to danger (here, the green death) with the regulars, and dying so that they don’t have to (or so that, when a more important character gets infected by the same green death later in the story, they can be cured using information learned from Bert’s death). But in the book, Hulke adds several other dimensions to Bert, and provides him with almost entirely new, sharper, more poignant dialogue. He begins by patronizing Jo, a little bit, man-splaining to her how the lift shaft in a coal mine is slightly different from the lift at Woolworth’s, but quickly reveals that to be just bluster. “This isn’t a lift like you’ll find in a shop,” said Bert. “We don’t go down slowly and gradually, with someone to tell you what you can buy on the different floors. Once we start moving, we drop like a ruddy stone, and you can see everything go by.” “I’m not frightened,” Jo fibbed. “I was the first time,” said Bert. “Fourteen years old I was, and scared out of my wits, but I tried not to show it.” On TV, Bert does allude to having survived a mine collapse, but in the book he gets to describe it in detail, and in words that could easily pass for Woody Guthrie lyrics (“Six of us never saw daylight again”). And he gives voice to the laborers and common man – on TV he’s Jo’s pet, but in the book he gives voice to real people, and helps move Jo along her journey of self-discovery, the one that will result in her leaving UNIT and joining Professor Jones’ crusade to find meat-substitute food supplies. “Why do people become miners?” “You don’t get much choice,” he said simply. “There’s some people get born in Buckingham Palace, and they becomes kings and queens, because that’s the family occupation. Us, we get born in a place like Llanfairfach, where our fathers and uncles all go down the pit. When you’re old enough, you go down too, to show the world you’re a man. Daft, isn’t it?” But Bert is never bitter about his upbringing or lot in life. He finds the value in it, too, and we know from this that he’s the moral center of the book, in this version of the story that Malcolm Hulke wanted to tell. Of course, this isn’t the version of the story that got made for TV. But we have the book, and that’s the more important version. “When you’re a miner you are part of one big family, and that’s a wonderful feeling. Every man in the pits knows is life depends on the other men. We live together, we die together, and” – he grinned broadly – “by goodness if the people up top don’t treat us right, we go on strike together!” “It’s really like being a member of another nation,” she said. Bert got to his feet. “That’s exactly how it is, miss. There’s us down here, and there’s them up there.” As Bert dies, a victim of the green death brought on by Panorama’s toxic sludge, his mind drifts back to childhood, and he thinks he hears the voices of “his uncle Dafydd and his father, both long dead”. Jo doesn’t get to eulogize him in this book, and Cliff Jones doesn’t remind Jo of the uniqueness of Bert – those are some poignant lines, added for TV. But, because in the book Bert is his own fully-rounded character, those extra bits of eulogy just aren’t necessary. In the book, Bert got to speak for himself. Next Time : Well, those were the good characters. Now we’ll talk about all the evil ones. And I do mean “all”. Details about DOCTOR WHO - AND THE GREEN DEATH - PAPERBACK Target 1980 MALCOLM HULKE. You must return items in their original packaging and in the same condition as when you received them. If you don't follow our item condition policy for returns , you may not receive a full refund. Refunds by law: In Australia, consumers have a legal right to obtain a refund from a business if the goods purchased are faulty, not fit for purpose or don't match the seller's description. More information at returns .