#21
Players
By Terrance Dicks
Hullo, what’s this? Short chapters? Callbacks? Escapes to danger? This can only mean we’re in Terry town once again. Whether you like it or not, as a certain someone said.
Despite his many successes as script editor, writer and noveliser, the bar for Terrance Dicks: Novelist remains low. He’s still got it when it comes to telling a story at a rollicking pace — try and stop him. The problem is the stories he chooses to tell. Time and again he returns to ideas and, more often, tropes that interest him. If they interest you too, hooray! But for the rest of us there is a feeling of going back to the same old well.
Players is reminiscent of a few Terry books — in fairness, often deliberately. The story, although definitely a novel, reads like two short stories and a novella. You can tick off Shakedown there in terms of structure. (Shakedown had an actual reason to do that at least, the middle bit being a novelisation.) The story concerns dangerous forces trying to change the course of history, manifesting mainly in the Second World War. Tick off Exodus for subject matter. (It’s literally referenced at one point — and quite subtly, I had to look it up.) Tom Dekker, a character from Blood Harvest (tick!) shows up and joins the main cast, and some of the wacky tone of that book — see also Mean Streets there, particularly Garshak the trench coat-wearing Private Eye — bleeds into this one. And then there are the great sweaty slabs of continuity, ostensibly there to move the story along but, let’s face it, mainly because Terry likes to remind us of things he enjoyed or wrote. (Or both.) The book’s DNA must therefore include a bit of The Eight Doctors as well.
I suppose it’s really only important to consider what the book is and not what it’s like, since the reader might not have read any of that and so might not feel any marathon-y fatigue. So: in Players the Sixth Doctor and Peri aim for London in 1899 (Peri wants to go somewhere nice — this is long overdue, poor duck) and they hit South Africa instead. It’s the Boer War — oops — and a young war correspondent needs their help. This war correspondent drops numerous plucky bon mots as he inspires all the men around him, and with a little help from the Doctor the war correspondent eventually wins out against some armed Boers and a mysterious assassin keen on killing the war correspondent — and if you’re sick of hearing “the war correspondent” as a very conspicuous placeholder when everyone else just gets referred to by their name, fear not, for he is revealed to be Winston Churchill! After which the novel interchangeably calls him “Churchill” or “Winston Churchill.” (In the second case sounding as excited as Ant-Man saying “I believe this is yours, Captain America.”)
There’s absolutely no escaping the fact that Terrance Dicks thought Winston Churchill was the bee’s knees, and possibly the rest of the bee as well. Players drips with hero worship. “[The Doctor] noticed Winston Churchill’s unscrupulous streak … Just do whatever had to be done to achieve your aims. He smiled faintly. Perhaps it was a characteristic of all great men.” / “‘I wish you were leading the troops instead of writing for some rotten paper,’ said the General.” / “Ever since Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Churchill, and Churchill alone, had raised his voice in repeated warning about the Nazi menace.” / “The old boy didn’t miss much, thought the Doctor. Winston Churchill was a hard man to deceive.” / “Not many people can arrive unexpectedly at 10 Downing Street, demand an immediate meeting with the Prime Minister, and be shown inside — but Winston Churchill was one of them.” Enough subtlety, Terry, tell us what you really think.
There are at least indications of the man’s flaws, or that he could conceivably have had some. Mainly there’s his unscrupulousness, and we are (very) often reminded of how many times he failed in politics along his storied career. However, his lack of scruples ends up feeling like a compliment in disguise (just look at all his achievements!) and his political frustrations become a sort of mantra. Surely the universe was wrong to keep Winston Churchill from his destiny, when his magic oratory was all that the country needed to succeed? Surely his setbacks were everyone else’s fault? It’s like the bit in most biopics where the famous subject hints at a thing they will do later and someone whom we all should laugh at says “As if! That’ll never catch on!”
Hey ho: Churchill is here and Terry loves him. Now let’s return to that mysterious assassin in the Boer War. He is joined by a fellow anachronistic co-conspirator seeking to release Churchill from prison, then capture or kill him again. What’s all that about? Escaping with their and Churchill’s lives, the Doctor and Peri don’t worry too much about this — the first “short story” having neatly concluded — until Peri starts asking questions, which is largely her all-too-traditional purpose in the book. (Hey, at least someone got around to asking what the Boer War was all about. I’m not much the wiser now though.) The Doctor thinks he remembers something pertinent, so he quickly fishes out the thought scanner from the end of The Wheel In Space, then mentally unspools an entire 50-page sequel to The War Games starring the Second Doctor, here conscripted to work for the Time Lords before his regeneration takes effect and thus canonising the Season 6B fan theory. Fanwank? Where?
Stepping back in awe at the sheer indulgence of this, it is rather strange to detour your Sixth Doctor novel into a Second Doctor one for a bit. (And here we come to the second “short story.”) In it, the Doctor reunites with Carstairs and Lady Jennifer, who of course don’t remember him post-War Games, and they are all inveigled in an attack on a young officer. Who could the officer be but Churchill again, now a decade older! And wouldn’t you know it, the same nefarious people are still out to get him, this time hoping to more subtly detour his destiny by delivering him alive to Germany. Again they are foiled, and (as Carstairs and Lady Jennifer seal their affections — presumably some fans cheered) the Second Doctor whips back to Gallifrey. Our Doctor, in the present, decides to visit Churchill a third time, reasoning that whatever random date he picks will miraculously be the next time these malefactors pick on him, and they won’t have troubled him or anyone else in between. I would have no further questions if I were Dirk Gently and believed in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, but of course the Doctor is right and when they arrive in 1936 the shadowy forces are at work again, so what do I know?
This is the bulk of the novel at last, and Terry is clearly enjoying himself no less than in the other segments. Those mysterious people are colluding with Nazis and (unknowingly) Wallis Simpson and the King to enable a German victory before the war even starts. Churchill, the Doctor (usually in that order), Peri, Dekker and an older Carstairs foil various Nazis and blackshirts and eventually even the King. It all tumbles along in as frenzied and rollicking a fashion as you’ve come to expect from Terrance Dicks, and the denouement is neat, but it’s pulpy (not especially Doctor Who-ey) nonsense — fun in the moment, gone the next. I only started it two days ago and I’ve already forgotten half of it. Still, that quick turnaround says something positive.
Buried under all the (strangely sectional) shenanigans are the “Players” of the title, and they’re a good idea. Here we have some time travelling figures (not human, I think?) who want to divert history purely for their own amusement. They have strict rules (which they often ignore) and they don’t know who the Doctor is, although they’ve now met two of him. This introduces an interesting wrinkle into the Doctor’s travels: how much of the time are they secretly there, changing events? How much of actual history is their doing? Who, while we’re on the subject, actually are they?
Strangely Players — a book named after them — doesn’t get into it. The antagonists barely feature; due to the nature of their machinations (or the ones more subtle than “get a gun and shoot Winston Churchill”, anyway) they often appear to be more sub-plot than plot. Which seems like an odd choice? This is, of course, just setup for future books. But considering how one-note these characters are — I’m not saying they’re poorly written, more that they’re barely written at all — it ends up a pretty weak teaser for things to come. What a shame. The premise has potential. Why not toss in a few personalities as well? Hell, names would do. (“The Consortium” is the best we’re getting.)
Players mostly serves as an excuse to write a figure whom the author really likes, or otherwise a creation he fancied digging up again. As a Sixth Doctor and Peri book it hits some of the right notes, but I got the sense Dicks mostly likes about them what he likes about Doctors and companions generally: he is an awful name-dropper (who will happily swap his colourful coat for something more era-appropriate — as if!); she is quite capable thank-you-very-much but will nonetheless need to flirt with guards and eventually get kidnapped. (“In the good old days, the heroine screamed and waited to be rescued.” No comment.) There’s a real possibility that it’s only Sixie because his “truculence” was the best fit for Churchill — to whom he is, of course favourably, compared.
One good idea. Three goes at it. Not much luck. Players is harmless and it’s Terry at his Terriest, but not coincidentally it’s also Terry at his most aggressively forgettable. Want to see World War 2 gone awry? Stick with Exodus.
5/10
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