Terrance Dicks

Terrance Dicks, whom fans have long affectionately called "Uncle Terrance", script edited the Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee eras of Doctor Who and wrote many Doctor Who episodes, novels and novelisations.

Profile

Overview

Terrance Dicks began his long association with Doctor Who in 1968, when he joined the production team during the Second Doctor story The Invasion. He soon began writing scripts for the series. His first notable work was The War Games, an epic, ten-episode collaboration with Malcolm Hulke.

Dicks served as script editor through the Jon Pertwee era. He handed the reins to Robert Holmes with the coming of Tom Baker. Dicks continued to supply scripts for the series under his name and pseudonyms, specifically "Robin Bland" which was used when too many changes were made to his script for The Brain of Morbius.

Between seasons 13 and 14, he unsuccessfully attempted to sell a version of Doctor Who to BBC Radio, which would have starred Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen. (INFO: The Seeds of Doom)

At roughly the same time, he submitted what would become State of Decay to the Doctor Who production office. It remained unproduced for several years as the BBC had recently produced a new version of Dracula. His final script for televised Doctor Who was for the twentieth anniversary story The Five Doctors.

In 1973, Dicks, along with other writers from the TV series, were commissioned by Target Books to write novelisations adapting TV episodes. Over the next two decades, Dicks became the most prolific author of the line. He was editor of the range at one point. In later years, when Target adopted the policy of commissioning the original teleplay writers to novelise their works, Dicks became the "go-to guy" when the original teleplay writer was deceased, unable or unwilling to adapt their work in book form.

The Target Books line was retired in the early 1990s. Dicks wrote original novels for virtually every line of Doctor Who fiction, with notable exceptions being Virgin Missing Adventures, Telos Publishing, Big Finish Productions' Bernice Summerfield series of books and the current hardcover series of BBC Books novels, although he has written two entries in the Quick Reads novella series, most notably Made of Steel, which introduced fans to Martha Jones a full month before her TV debut. He is one of only a handful of Classic Era TV writers to have written licenced Modern Era stories (others include Andrew Cartmel, who has written for the Doctor Who Adventures comic strip, and Rona Munro, who contributed a script to Series 10).

He also co-wrote The Making of Doctor Who, the first non-fiction book about the series.

In 2007, after a hiatus of seventeen years, Dicks returned to writing episode novelisations by adapting Invasion of the Bane for a new series of novelisations based upon The Sarah Jane Adventures, published by Penguin Character Books.

Although most closely associated with Doctor Who, Dicks has also worked on other projects, such as a mid-1970s series of novels featuring the adventures of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Dicks has written novels and novelisations featuring every incarnation of the Doctor except the Ninth Doctor and Twelfth Doctor. In terms of novelisations, discounting the Modern Era Doctors, for whom novelisations have not been commissioned, along with the Eighth Doctor, the only Doctor era not receiving the Dicks treatment at some point was the Seventh Doctor (discounting the special case of Shakedown, a partial novelisation of the independent film Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans, which Dicks adapted for the Virgin New Adventures, expanding the story to include the Seventh Doctor).

He also contributed to the charity reference book Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who.

Contributions to the Doctor Who universe

Major characters and concepts created in a Terrance Dicks script or substantially developed by him as script editor include the Time Lords (in The War Games, co-written with Malcolm Hulke), as well as the Master played by Roger Delgado. More minor creations include the Rutans, the War Lord, the Death Zone and Morbius.

In-universe his name is given to a library as St Luke's University. (COMIC: The Lost Dimension)

Television Credits

Doctor Who

The War Games (with Malcolm Hulke)
Robot
The Brain of Morbius (re-written substantially by script editor Robert Holmes and credited to the pseudonym Robin Bland)
Horror of Fang Rock
State of Decay
The Five Doctors

Direct-to-video

Prose

Novels

Virgin New Adventures

Timewyrm: Exodus
Blood Harvest
Shakedown - (technically an expanded upon novelisation of his Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans)

BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures

The Eight Doctors
Endgame

BBC Past Doctor Adventures

BBC Quick Reads

Made of Steel
Revenge of the Judoon

Virgin Bernice Summerfield New Adventures

Mean Streets

Novelisations

Target novelisations

Junior Doctor Who

The Sarah Jane Adventures novelisations

Invasion of the Bane

Short Stories

Dalek

Davros Genesis

Non-fiction

The Making of Doctor Who (first edition co-written with Malcolm Hulke; second edition updated and revised by Terrance Dicks alone)
The Doctor Who Monster Book
The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book
The Second Doctor Who Monster Book

Stage plays

Audio

Big Finish Doctor Who stage plays

Contributions to the mythos

Major characters and concepts created for or debuting in a Terrance Dicks script include:

The War Lords
SIDRAT
The Time Lords (first named)
Gallifrey (not mentioned by name)
The Fourth Doctor
Harry Sullivan
K1
Morbius
Sisterhood of Karn
The Rutans
The Great Vampires
The Game of Rassilon and the Death Zone.
Raston Warrior Robot
Time Scoop
Eye of Orion

External links

Terrance Dicks at the Internet Movie Database

Tardis