Doctor Who #146: Happiness Patrol

One of the great things about novelizations is that they can give an alternate experience to the screen version. The 1990 novelization of the 1988 Doctor Who TV story The Happiness Patrol is a prime example of this. Graeme Curry takes his seventy odd minute TV story and expands it here with plenty of new details and some different characterization. The result makes this an enjoyable, and possibly even better, version of the story. Gone are some of the performances that hampered the original TV version so much. On the character side Helen A comes across much more as she was intended as a sort of Margret Thatcher parody then the over the top version that actress Shelia Hancock gave us in the TV version which means, effectively, that the character works much better here rather then there. There's also an alternate version of the Kandy Man as well which means bye-bye to the literal Kandy Man of the TV version and hello to an actual person (whether this is for better or worse I'll leave up to you the reader). There's also plenty of new details to be found about supporting characters as well including Gilbert M, Joseph C and his relationship with the Kandy Man, the unnamed man executed in the first episode of the TV version (who is given a name plus a nicely fleshed out back-story) plus some background details on Helen A's pet Fifi (and its place as the last of its kind on Terra Alpha) and even the Pipe People. The result are characters who are much more fleshed out then their TV counterparts. Then there's the fact that some of the rather cheap looking sets and props are gone as well. Here we get a version where the streets and alleyways of Terra Alpha actually exude a sense of both menace and tension where danger potentially lurks behind every corner. The rather silly looking fun guns become machine guns that makes the Happiness Patrol a real force to be reckoned with. The result is that the story works much better and much more believably as well. Which brings us to the story itself. With the faults of the TV version removed we can see just how good a political satire lies at the heart of the story. It is a story about fascism, plain and simple, and how a government can force its will on a people by giving the wrong people power. That is until the Doctor and Ace give average people the courage to rise up against oppression anyway. The thing is, of course, that the Doctor never has to raise his fist or a gun to do so as shown in the best scene of both the TV and novelization versions of the story: the scene with the Doctor disarming the rooftop snipers. The novelization proves that, if not for cheap sets and questionable performances, fans might regard this story a bit higher then they currently do. While the TV version of the story had faults to be sure but the novelization removes virtually all of them. From improved characterizations and expanded backgrounds to a setting that exudes menace and tension, the novelization shows just how much be