The novelisation never made as much of an impression on me as did some others; I took away more from the prologue than I did from any other part of it.

My impression from what I've seen of scripts and memos from the period is that there was definitely an appetite among one or two of the men involved with the programme for seeing Jacqueline Hill in extremities of peril or violence, complete with one late script change with lurid descriptions which comes to mind, and Whitaker's addition of the whipping scene (which the TLS reviewer, I think, found gravely out of place) is one of these.