Ask any Doctor Who fan of a certain age - by which I mean anyone old enough to be a fan when the "Classic Series" was just "the Series" - about their earliest treasured memory from the show, and chances are very good that more than a few of them won't give you a show at all, but a book. I certainly would.  

 

My very first Who book. . .

I was certainly aware of the show as a terrified six year old, but what turned me into an irredeemable, lifelong obsessive eleven year old fan was The Doctor Who Monster Book, a slim little compendium of beasties from that fantastical world[i]. Daleks and Cybermen and Ice Warriors and Yeti and Axons and Zarbi and Robots and grotesqueries and curiosities innumerable blew open the lid of the curious mind. This was the place for me! And the person I had to thank for it, my guide on this new and never diminishing adventure? An easy to remember, trisyllabic name on the front:

“Terrence Dicks”.

Terrence Dicks, gratefully remembered, sadly departed.

If no one person can claim to have invented Doctor Who, one man can claim to have shaped it more than anyone.

You couldn’t be a fan of the Classic Series without knowing Terrance Dicks. As script editor during Pertwee’s time, he had a hand in almost every script, was in some capacity co-writer of every story we saw from 1968-1974. He wrote many of the classic, archetypal stories. He invented and named the Time Lords[ii]. He decided the Doctor needed a rival, who would become the Master[iii]. He wrote Tom Baker’s first story. If you enjoyed the show at all, you were tasting the sweet fruits of his creativity.

But it wasn’t just the televised episodes that at least partly his. Most of the classic serials have been novelised, and it was Terrence Dicks who wrote no less than sixty-four  of them. 64. Give or take, I may have lost count. For a young Who fan waiting an intolerable week for the next episode to air, it was common practice to reach for a Target novelization. It was a way of skipping ahead, a way of prolonging and internalizing the experience. Confirming what one had just seen (or was about to see) and experiencing for the first time yet again. If watching an episode was a syringe induced jolt of imaginative adrenaline, reading the Target novel was a restful, rejuvenative period of Buddhist meditation. The grown-ups always told us that reading was good for us, and as long as there were Target novels around, we needed no coaxing. And there were dozens and dozens of them, an inexhaustible supply. And Terrence Dicks wrote most of them. 

If the grown-ups were ever disdainful of us reading so much TV-tie in, they could have consoled themselves that we were reading, willingly and voraciously, forming good reading habits early on that would last well into adulthood. They should thank Terrence Dicks: the man has done incalculable good for the cause of childhood literacy. Why wasn’t he given a medal?

 

A very small sample of the ouvre

(And the man was a machine! His Wikipedia bibliography lists a hundred and forty-three [143] books before even mentioning Doctor Who! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrance_Dicks)  

To us middle-aged fans, he did us the further service of preserving the missing episodes in the form of novels – the BBC, remember, in an act of mind-bogglingly idiotic dim-witted short sightedness, actually junked a whole pile of the early episodes. Almost three quarters of Troughton’s era in fact. For many of us, Dicks’ novelizations were the only versions of these serials we would ever experience. We owe him a special gratitude.

Dicks was perhaps not the greatest prose-stylist, philosopher or literati of the lot. But he infused his stories with a spirit of adventure, of innocence, and unabashed wonder that became the template for everything that followed and still holds to this day. Any doubt, just consider his formula for the Doctor:

“The Doctor never gives in, and never gives up. He is never cruel or cowardly”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because Peter Capaldi himself uttered as a line of dialogue.  

You’d be hard pressed to find a more generally agreed upon summary.

There was a time when consuming Doctor Who meant consuming Terrence Dicks. And he’s gone now. But far, far from forgotten.

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[i] Like so many franchises I got into, my interest was piqued not by any actual sample from the franchise, but by other people talking about it. Godzilla and assorted space operas would fall into this category.

[ii] With Malcolm Hulke

[iii] Robert Holmes would write the story, but Dicks and Producer Barry Letts called for the villain.