Art Gallery: Terror of the Autons

Art Gallery 3

When I was growing up, in the innocent days before regular BBC video releases, my only contact with the episodes of Doctor Who broadcast before I was born were the Target novelisations I initially borrowed from the library before obsessively-compulsively spending all my money to complete my collection. My two favourites from that innocent time were The Tomb of the Cybermen and Terror of the Autons, borrowed over and over again from the library to be pored over and memorised. Something about The Tomb of the Cybermen resonated in my childish brain, and I loved Terrance Dicks’ way of writing.

Terror of the Autons I loved for the cover.

It’s the stuff of nightmares; a one-eyed octopus creature with a truly disgusting mandibular mouth. It would watch you unblinkingly as it slowly ate you. The black areas surrounding it indicate a creature that only comes out at night to watch you as you sleep. And since octopuses can flatten their bodies into any shape to fit in the smallest of areas, it would even fit under your bed. It could be under there right now...

This representation of the Nestene Consciousness doesn’t belong on the cover of a children’s book. It would be far better suited to one of the lurid horror novels that flooded the bookshelves at the time. It isn’t much of a stretch of the imagination to picture it on the front of one of the Pan Book of Horror Stories paperbacks. Alun Hood, the artist who created the cover, only painted two other covers: Planet of the Spiders with a huge and poisonous-looking spider, and The Green Death, with a large dragonfly/ fly hybrids and a pile of maggots. He was clearly the go-to man when Target needed a horrific image.

Alun Hood’s cover replaced a tamer piece by Peter Brookes from early in Target’s run of Doctor Who books. It was only as I came to understand that some books had been reissued, later on in my days of collecting them, that I found the original cover version in a second-hand bookshop. By then I was too old and too much of a horror story veteran for the cover to have had the same impact as the Alun Hood painting, but I can imagine it was a pretty successful cover all the same.

There was a trend at the time for adding a smaller image at the base of the cover, in this case Roger Delgado’s Master about to dramatically pull a switch and allow the Nestene Consciousness to take over the Earth. In the background Jon Pertwee is poised to stop him with a hand that is larger than his hair, which scarcely seems possible. But the attention is drawn immediately to the towering one-eyed crab-beast that dominates the picture, ripping the top off a radar telescope, its vast brain-shaped head filling the skyline as its terrible red eye gazes down malevolently. It reminds me slightly of the Metaluna Mutant from This Island Earth, and certainly echoes that sort of fifties pulp horror. The two images are beautifully linked by an arc of lightning emitting from the radar telescope to indicate that the Master has indeed thrown the switch. The only thing that could have improved this would be the tentacles at the top of the cover wrapping their way around the Doctor Who logo.

Terrance Dicks must have been delighted by both covers. It wouldn’t surprise me if Terror of the Autons was one of the biggest selling Target books. I can’t imagine I was alone in being drawn to it by the cold thrill of terror looking at the Alun Hood cover in particular gave me. Hundreds of schoolboys all over England must have loved it. It would have been in many ways their first horror novel.

But there’s more. Not content with traumatising a generation with a freaky octopus thing, the book had illustrations inside too, and these were possibly worse still.

Exhibit A: The Scariest Doll Attack Ever.

Aaaaarrrrrrgggghhhhhh!

Exhibit B: Never Trust a Policeman.

Blaaaahhhhhhhh!

They’re quite simply horrifying. There’s no other word to describe them. Thank goodness my mum didn’t study my Doctor Who book collection too closely. I’m fairly certain she would have banned me from reading them, let alone collecting them.

Now, inevitably, when I actually came to watch The Tomb of the Cybermen and Terror of the Autons, there was an unreasonable sense of expectation; Phantom Menace syndrome, as I believe it’s known. The Tomb of the Cybermen was brilliant. It’s still my favourite Troughton, although The War Games runs it very close nowadays. I can see past the dodgy wire-work and the fact that in the first couple of episodes nothing much happens because it’s a dramatisation of one of my favourite ever books. The TV version of Terror of the Autons is less impressive, though, mainly because the images on the cover and in the book were so horrifying that nothing that could be broadcast before the watershed could possibly match them. I’ve always been fond of horror films, and I think the illustrations in Terror of the Autons have much to do with this. The difference between the two stories is that I read Tomb for the story, but I read Terror of the Autons because of the cover.

This is why Doctor Who fans will never agree on anything (and why should they, as long as they are made to understand that The Power of Kroll is brilliant). We’ve all come from different places to discover the older stories, with different values and perspectives. Some of us have seen them on DVD first, others on video. Some of us watched badly degraded copies first, whilst others were privileged to see the stories when they were first broadcast. But for a generation of us, the Target novelisations were our first encounter with the Doctors who came before our Doctor, followed by actually seeing the stories. It’s a strange way of watching anything. I can’t think of any other examples of a programme or a film where I watched it for the first time knowing every element of the plot. But it’s how we did it, thanks to Target.