Our Price: £10.00 Price Excludes VAT

Terrence Dicks Doctor Who, etc

In 1968 he was employed as the assistant script editor on the BBC's popular science-fiction series Doctor Who. Dicks went on to become the main script editor on the programme the following year, and earned his first writing credit on the show when he and Hulke co-wrote the epic ten-part story The War Games which closed the sixth season and the era of Second Doctor Patrick Troughton. He had, however, been the uncredited co-writer of The Seeds of Death earlier in the season, after performing extensive work on writer Brian Hayles' original scripts.

Dicks went on to form a highly productive working relationship with incoming Doctor Who producer Barry Letts, working as the script editor on each of Letts' five seasons in charge of the programme from 1970 to 1974. After his departure, Dicks continued to be associated with the programme, writing four scripts for his successor as script editor Robert Holmes: Robot (1975, the opening story of Tom Baker's era as the Fourth Doctor), The Brain of Morbius (1976, broadcast under the name 'Robin Bland' after Dicks' displeasure at Holmes' rewrites to the story led him to declare that it should go out "under some bland pseudonym"), Horror of Fang Rock and State of Decay.

Dicks also contributed heavily to Target Books' range of novelisations of Doctor Who television stories, writing more than sixty of the titles published by the company. As Dicks explains in an interview in the documentary Built for War, included on the DVD release of the serial The Sontaran Experiment in 2006, he served as unofficial editor of the Target Books line. In this role, he would attempt to enlist the original teleplay author to write the books whenever possible, but if they could not or would not, then Dicks would often end up writing the books himself (although he also enlisted other writers including one-time Doctor Who actor Ian Marter and former series producer Philip Hinchcliffe). On one occasion, Dicks recalls in the documentary, he had enlisted Robert Holmes to novelise his teleplay for The Time Warrior, but when Holmes gave up on the project after writing only one chapter, it was left to Dicks to complete the work. Dicks would be more successful in recruiting the original teleplay writers for later serials and ultimately only had to adapt one Sixth Doctor story (The Mysterious Planet and again replacing Robert Holmes, who had died soon after writing the original serial) and his name appears on no Seventh Doctor novelisations. Dicks had planned to novelise the stage play Doctor Who - The Ultimate Adventure but this was never published.

« Back