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 20th
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.
