The Art of... The Faceless Ones

In early 1979 Malcolm Hulke was negotiating to novelise this story, which he had co-written with David Ellis. Sadly, Hulke died soon after, having just completed Doctor Who and the War Games - another story which he had co-written. Ellis had died the year before.

In 1986, when it came time to novelise The Faceless Ones, Terrance Dicks wished to take it on as Hulke had been a very good friend of his and had helped him get into television writing in the first place. The paperback version was issued in 1987.

The cover art is by Tony Masero and he used a Vickers VC-10 as reference for the image, which comes from the very opening scene of the story. It was this make of aircraft which featured in the film footage taken by director Gerry Mill at Gatwick.

The reference photo used for the TARDIS was a 1980's one, so it differs from the version seen on TV in 1967.

The book was voted joint fourth favourite of the year by readers of DWM - or ninth, as they mistakenly listed it twice.

The soundtrack followed in 2002, with the usual photomontage cover. Images of companions Ben and Polly derive from publicity shots from The War Machines, and the Jamie image looks like it's from The Evil of the Daleks. Highlighting the fact that Polly gets duplicated will feature in other artwork - even though we never see any overtly Chameleon version of her on screen. The central image of Troughton derives from the mere handful of publicity pictures captured during the Gatwick filming, which all depict him and Jamie hiding under an aircraft.

There is an alternative version of this cover with a red band along the bottom instead of green.

The narrator is Frazer Hines.

As well as never having glowing eyes, Chameleon Polly certainly never looked like a refugee from that V series (where the lizard aliens sometimes had half their false faces torn off).

This was the main image for the cover for the DVD / Blu-ray release of the animated version of the story, which arrived in 2020.

Troughton looks more like Salamander than the Doctor, as it would appear they adapted an image from The Enemy of the World.

The animators took the opportunity to reimagine the Chameleons, but once again really simplified the artwork by ignoring a number of costume changes which take place through the story.

The steelbook opted to go for a retro airline style look, resembling more a travel poster. Presumably the greenish back cover is supposed to represent the Chameleon home world.

The audiobook reading of the novel uses the same Tony Masero artwork, and was released in May 2019, with the larger, squarer format allowing us to see the whole aircraft. As you can see, the reader is Anneke Wills.

And finally, long before the animated release came along, the movie database site moviedb used a rather nice photomontage image to illustrate the story, using similar imagery to some of the above. It's the only artwork which uses the only known photograph of the actual Chameleon from the series.