The Mothership Always Terrance Dicks by Tony J Fyler

There have been at least handfuls of really top-notch writers on Doctor Who. There will be more in the future.

There have been at least several great script editors on Doctor Who. There will more in the future.

There will only ever be one Terrance Dicks.

Terrance Dicks knew the shape of episodic stories. He knew how to write a solid hero quest. And he quickly found a connection to the character of the Doctor himself. He was appointed as Assistant Script Editor on the show in 1968, and quickly found himself promoted to Script Editor, in time to handle (along with Malcolm Hulke) the behemoth ten-episode War Games script that was Patrick Troughton’s swan song in the role of the Doctor. Faced with stories falling out of the running and ten episodes to fill, Dicks and Hulke created a sprawling epic of paranoia, grand design, and a personalised villain to drive the huge plot forward. They also, together, settled an enormous question – who were the Doctor’s people? – by inventing the Time Lords.

Many script editors would have been content to have made such a monumental addition to a long-running show. Dicks went on into the Jon Pertwee era and found another partner in new series producer Barry Letts. Between them, they revived the fortunes of the show in its Earth-bound format (a decision of his predecessors, with which Dicks was never particularly happy), establishing the UNIT family, delivering three all-time favourite companions – Liz Shaw, Jo Grant and Sarah-Jane Smith - and overseeing one of the richest periods in the programme’s history for memorable monsters and alien races: the Autons and the Sontarans (both written into being by Robert Holmes), the Silurians and Sea Devils (both written into existence by Malcolm Hulke) all became firm fan favourites during his time on the programme, along with memorable scares like the giant maggots of The Green Death and actor John Pertwee’s favourite aliens, the proud and haughty Draconians. He was also the script editor who introduced the idea of an anniversary special which brought multiple Doctor-incarnations together (initially for the tenth anniversary, with The Three Doctors), and who, with Letts, developed the idea of giving the Doctor an arch-enemy, his ‘Moriarty’ figure – the Master.

By the time he left the show as script editor at the end of Jon Pertwee’s era, Terrance Dicks – and the writers whose scripts he worked on - had added hugely to the canon of Doctor Who. He would be called back several times in the years that followed to write specific stories, like the grim, atmospheric Horror of Fang Rock and a script for which he had to fight, the Hammer vampire homage, State of Decay, both for Tom Baker’s Doctor. He returned again to deliver the 20^th anniversary adventure, The Five Doctors, when a script from Robert Holmes proved impracticable. That was the career hallmark of Terrance Dicks – when things weren’t working, you called on Terrance, and you ended up with a workable, and usually a twinkling script.

While his legacy in terms of on-screen Doctor Who was huge, it’s perhaps as a novelist that Terrance Dicks most earned the veneration of Doctor Who fans around the world. In an era when there were no VHS releases of whole stories from Doctor Who’s past, he was the show’s Great Novelizer. When Doctor Who was a watch-it-on-transmission-or-miss-it-forever phenomenon, like most TV, Terrance Dicks became the gateway for a generation of children to stories they’d never seen, novelizing over sixty Doctor Who stories in the Target range, featuring the first six incarnations of the Doctor. He became known for his workmanlike, unflowery style, and yet he enriched his work with a gift for phrasing that was intensely evocative, coming up with the notion of the Tardis making a ‘wheezing, groaning’ sound when in flight, with the Doctor having a ‘young old’ face and ‘capacious’ pockets. It’s to him we owe the encapsulation of the fundamental nature of the Doctor – ‘Never cruel or cowardly’ - a line which subsequently made it into the Doctor’s self-assessment in the fiftieth anniversary multi-Doctor story written by Steven Moffat, The Day of the Doctor. In essence, Terrance Dicks imbued his Target books with the spirit of Doctor Who, and became a living Tardis for a generation of young fans, taking them to unknown times and places and giving them the only idea of some stories that they ever expected to have.

Many children who read Terrance Dicks’ Doctor Who work became avid readers because whatever else they did, they had to read the latest Terrance Dicks Doctor Who novelization. His output was prodigious and the quality of his work addictive. Many Terrance Dicks fans of course went on to be involved with the show in later years when it returned to the BBC.

When the Target range was bought by Virgin and the age of the New Adventures began, it was almost unthinkable that it would fly without at least some contribution from Terrance Dicks – he was key to the readership, and those readers trusted his storytelling gifts. He therefore wrote the second New Adventure novel, Timewyrm: Exodus, and followed it up with Blood Harvest and Shakedown – all of them adding the Seventh Doctor to his repertoire. He would add the Eighth too, writing The Eight Doctors in 1997 and Endgame in 2000. Terrance Dicks was by then a synonym for exciting Doctor Who novels, so between 1998 and 2005 he was commissioned to write five ‘past Doctor’ novels, including Players (1999) which was reissued for the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who as an example of the Sixth Doctor’s adventures. He also wrote two Doctor Who stage plays, worked with Big Finish on its Bernice Summerfield, Sarah-Jane Adventures and Companion Chronicle ranges, as well as translating his plays into the audio environment. He’s also credited, alongside Malcolm Hulke, with writing one of the first real books about the inside of a TV show – the production process, from commission to shooting and broadcast – The Making of Doctor Who (first edition 1972, updated and re-issued 1976). While his comfort zone was unmistakably in Classic Who, he ventured into New Who with a couple of releases in the Quick Reads range – Made Of Steel and Revenge of the Judoon, both starring the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones.

His final work in the Doctor Who universe, a short story in Doctor Who: The Target Storybook, will be published posthumously in October 2019.

Terrance Dicks was by no means ‘only’ a Doctor Who writer, script editor and novelist – he had made a name for himself in the sixties by writing scripts for The Avengers, and even worked on the legend that was Crossroads, as well as Space:1999 and an unfortunately short-lived BBC space drama in the seventies entitled Moonbase 3. During the eighties, he was prolific in the BBC drama department, first working with, and then succeeding Barry Letts as Producer on the Sunday Classics range, including memorable productions like Dombey & Son, Jane Eyre, The Invisible Man, Beau Geste and David Copperfield. The versions overseen by Letts and Terrance Dicks are widely regarded as being the closest to the books ever filmed, and remain, over thirty years on, gripping television drama in their own right.

Terrance Dicks also found time between 1976 and 2003 to write 141 non-Doctor Who novels, many for a children’s or young adult audience, and several in clusters or series, including the Baker Street Irregulars books.

Terrance Dicks then had a long career in both television and writing, his reach extending to both children and adults, and his influence felt by generations of readers who became writers and who are passing on his gift of telling stories with wit, with pace, and with a spirit of pure adventure.

But it is inescapably his work on Doctor Who, both as writer, script editor and novelist, that will make Terrance Dicks a name to remember for generations to come. Always amiable with fans, always willing to share stories from his time on the show, and always both a workman and a conjuror in his novels, he was beloved for decades by generations of readers, to whom he opened up whole new worlds and adventures unseen or unremembered.

Travel well, Uncle Terrance. Never cruel or cowardly. Always fun and funny.

Always Terrance Dicks.