The Happiness Patrol by: Graeme Curry

 

The Happiness Patrol was written by Graeme Curry, based on his television story of the same name.  It was the 152^nd story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Politics in Doctor Who have never been subtle.  It’s not the show to attempt subtlety in its politics and that is honestly for the best.  Andrew Cartmel’s mission statement was wanting to overthrow the government which at the time was the revival of staunch conservatism with Margaret Thatcher.  The Happiness Patrol is a direct opposition to that, based on the 1988 serial whose large criticism has been directed towards the Kandyman (a cyborg made of candy), and the dictator Helen A (a clear Thatcher stand in).  This was Graeme Curry’s only Doctor Who serial and another example of late classic serials novelized by their original authors.  His prose is interesting as despite being in an era where novelizations had a tendency to expand material, The Happiness Patrol stays true to its televised version with some key exceptions.  First and foremost the prose comes across as more melancholic than the television serial ever could by the basis of being prose (though Chris Clough’s direction is indeed melancholic), everything is drab and the city at Terra Alpha is caked in neon and muzak.  This is something which the television serial attempted but couldn’t without causing issues for the main scoring as there was the need to hear the dialogue.

 

The Kandyman himself is altered from the television serial, going back to the original design by Curry of being closer to a human caked in sugar with licorice glasses.  There is a scene where he slices his finger off and reattaches it early in the novelization which isn’t in the television serial and Curry writes it with this almost sexual arousal from the Kandyman.  The relationship between the Kandyman and Gilbert M (and later Gilbert M and Joseph C) don’t get expansion but there is this added subtext that was sort of there on television, but has often been claimed even by Curry himself to not be intentional.  Helen A is given more depth with explanations about the three Terra planets and what exactly Trevor Sigma is doing on the planet to begin with.  There are tensions and Helen A has enemies all around her due to the insane way she runs the planet, the Happiness Patrol is much less of a success in this version of events which helps a lot when expanding on Daisy K, the member who helps Ace.

 

Overall, The Happiness Patrol is one of those novelizations that only manages to improve an already great story in some very small ways, but those small ways go a long way to make it an even more interesting story.  Graeme Curry could have had a career as a novelist as his prose is engaging and the commentary on Thatcher’s Britain is still prescient to today’s rather Conservative world.  It is all a musing about the need for other emotions as well as self-expression.  9/10.