Adapting The Novel For The Screen
I remember having a great deal of trouble starting the original novel of Human Nature. I made several false starts and wasted several thousand words, until I decided to begin with the weird kick off of the quotations from fanzines and music and crash right into the middle of Benny's grief.
Similarly, in adapting the book for television, the beginning was the hardest part. The first thing I did, after Russell told me he wanted a two-part adaptation, was to re-read the book, making notes as I went about which bits of plot were vital and which weren't. The not vital stuff included, immediately, the trick 'Tenth Doctor' that Benny meets, and the plotline involving the suffragette. Also, the subplot of Benny's landlord's secret was a second string there wasn't room for, though the sort of dialogue involved in his examining of Bernice's history device did pop up in several versions of Smith working out the sonic screwdriver.
Also, I knew we were going to have to begin very much in the middle of things happening, so we couldn't spend money visiting planets to get hold of what was still at that point a cricket ball to put the Doctor's personality in.
I wrote, initially, a very straightforward plot adaptation, featuring only the storylines of the Doctor being human at a 1914 school, falling in love, and the aliens hunting him. I placed the cliffhanger at the moment the Doctor has to decide whether or not to let the school boys open fire on the aliens. This plot featured Martha's family visiting her, because at that point she was meant to originally come from 1914.
But then I had second thoughts, and second guessed myself. I started to think that what I'd written was way too traditional, and that wasn't how the series did things anymore. So I wrote a new plot, this one starting with the Doctor married to Joan, and them waking up in bed together on a typical morning, with, as always, Martha as their maid.
That was the plot that I initially took to Russell. He'd deliberately not re-read the book, while both Julie Gardner and script editor Helen Raynor had read it. His first batch of notes, and actually every batch subsequently, sent us back to the book, until we were working on a straightforward adaptation. And that's when things fell together and started to work.
The first issue to deal with was the Doctor's motivation. In the novel, it's left unclear why exactly he's done this to himself, though there's a dirty great hint that it's to share and understand Benny's emotional state. We needed a driving force that would provide a pre-titles sequence. So we settled on the chase set-up, and, after a few meetings, we decided that the aliens would have a short life span, so the Doctor hiding from them wasn't a cowardly way out, but an act of mercy, mainly to the worlds the aliens would devastate in a normal pursuit, but also to the aliens themselves.
The scarecrows came from Russell. The aliens were shape-changers, and looked like people. So a monster was needed, so 'how about some scarecrows?' I've never heard them called 'Jack Straws' apart from in that interview with David. I think it's a Scottish thing.
The biggest continuing debate was about the pod where the Doctor keeps his Doctorishness. Was it going to be a cricket ball? Another Russell solution: a fob watch. Not just because of the Time Lord symbolism, but because a fob watch has a door you can open, an easy something that John Smith can choose to do or not to do. Did splitting the pursuit of the ball away from the aliens' pursuit of the Doctor mean two awkward, disconnected stories, as Julie for a long time thought there might be? The danger was certainly there, but we fixed it to her satisfaction, which is always the thing worth doing in production meetings. Julie has a way of knowing what viewers will get and what they won't.
One of the last things that got sorted was the time frame. For many drafts, Smith's courtship of Joan was played in dissolves of days and weeks. But it took the immediacy out of the aliens' pursuit, and left them looking rather useless. They became lovers, for many drafts, but without the many weeks, such a swift intimacy would be inappropriate for 1913. I think the flash forwards to the couple's future together give us that flavour of time passing.
In the book, the aliens adopt a range of human forms, only one of which was really kept for the screen, the little girl with the balloon. The balloon is a weapon in the original, and was for some drafts of the TV version, but the mechanics of trying to make a balloon deadly in visual terms defeated us. It's one of those things you can do in prose which might just look silly on the small screen.
Similarly, it's sometimes a question of putting down solid markers to let viewers know where they are immediately. It's 1913, not early 1914, to say it's before the war happens. It's Mr. Smith rather than Dr. Smith so that nobody calls Smith 'Doctor'. Mind you, Smith is from Nottingham rather than Aberdeen because David wanted to keep an English accent. And Smith's parents, originally Sarah Jane and Harry, became Verity and Sidney (after the original series' creators) when SFX magazine journalist Nick Setchfield mentioned to Verity Lambert, during her interview with Russell, that a character in the book was named after her.
The very ending is interesting. David plays 'run' like he's toying with the aliens, happy to be the Doctor again, when in the book it's a dark sign that the tragedy has been played out. But that gives a nice contrast with the havoc that comes immediately afterwards. In the book, the Doctor having his finger back is the sign that he's his Time Lord self again, while in the TV version it's the return of the glasses (very Clark Kent!) that does the job.
I'm very pleased that the coda, at the war memorial, is as in the book. It's my favourite bit.
I'm also very pleased that, through accident or design, a lot of the recurring images of my work appear in the TV version. Owls can be heard in the distance, and were first indicated in Russell's polish of the script. (There's also a lovely brush with an owl design on it in Smith's study, though you don't see it.) So the owls of the book, Rassilon's messengers who watch over the Doctor, are there in spirit. There's a female vicar, as there seems to be in almost everything I write. 'Baxter' is someone Russell drops into dialogue all the time, but 'Saul', also one of his additions, reminds me of Saul the sentient church from my other Who novel, Revelation.
And you see what Smith is eating, in that scene where we're cutting from his speeded-up list of 'things not to let me do'? That's a pear. One of those instructions, in the book, and in the slowed-down version of what you see, is not to let him eat that particular fruit. Because he doesn't like the taste.
That sort of attention to detail is why I love working with these people. And why I'm so immensely proud of this adaptation. I hope you enjoy it too.
