Terrance Dicks

Terrance Dicks was always there.

He was a whole half of the D-section in Newton Aycliffe library, that boxlike plywood prefab construction at one end of our concrete town centre. Those WH Allen hardbacks with white spines were the stuff of dreams and feverish late night re-readings by torchlight. For me, Terrance Dicks’ books are more 70s Who than the TV episodes are. They hold up better in retrospect, I think. It’s a whole, perfect era of Who which begins, for my money, with that splendid ‘Auton Invasion’, which somehow manages to impart the true terror of the Autons and the panic they would cause. And it makes the Doctor new to us, too: this brand new Doctor, irascibly uncomfortable in his new home on Earth.

Dicks writes so well about the Third Doctor being stuck on Earth. We really believe in his fury when, years later, in ‘The Eight Doctors’ the Eighth Doctor pays an unexpected visit and almost gets clouted unconscious and his TARDIS nicked by the velvet-clad fop.

If we follow Dicks’ Target Doctor Who story it’s one of being trapped on Earth, building a haphazard family, having adventures in pre-punk England… and finally earning freedom again (by engaging in ‘the most extraordinary adventure in his very long life’)… but as he gains his freedom, he loses that family of his, bit by bit… and eventually his own self – in the cobwebby catacombs of Metebelis Three. It’s a story of having to turn into someone even more cantankerous and wayward… and shooting off into space again… into ramshackle voyages into space and time… gradually severing the ties with Earth – losing Jo, Mike, Harry, then Sarah, Benton and the Brig… becoming a lonely wanderer whose adventures happen on a cosmic scale. And, though he did novelise later tales – I think that’s the furthest end of the Dicks era. The end of the Seventies, with the Doctor in a new, hip, space-family of intellectuals – a clever dog, a clever lady companion. They trip about the cosmos, wryly amused by it all. Where once the Doctor and his UNIT chums got stuck into adventures… now the Doctor, Romana and K9 slide effortlessly through life on charm.

I think his books, put together, form a lovely complete story about the Doctor’s life – lucidly told and highly influential to readers such as myself. A story about a Doctor who begins as a cross, mysterious stranger – and ends up, still a stranger, but one who’s learned to take life less seriously. Who can’t see the benefit of getting all hot and bothered. Who would rather laugh his enemy into oblivion than blow him into smithereens.

I read these books again and again. But I would read other things as well. I branched out at first by reading other books by Terrance Dicks. And here I must put in a word for those two other series he wrote for WH Allen and Target. I’ve collected them up again in recent years and reread them with great enjoyment.

There’s his ‘Star Quest’ series, about three young humans taken off into space to become affiliates of a great galactic Federation at war with an evil empire. And, even less well known, there is his glorious series of five books about five kids involved with fighting monsters. In this series, he runs through new, late 70s iterations of the Universal movie monsters. It’s a fantastic YA series and surely needs reprinting. My favourite is the riff on Frankenstein, ‘Marvin’s Monster.’ It contains a scene that must be one of my favourites he ever wrote: an update of the monster meeting the blind man from the old movie. In Terrance Dicks’ version the school project monster rampages through the streets of the shabby little town, and wanders into an Asian grocery where he meets the elderly blind man sitting at the counter, who helps him patch up his wounds with corner shop first aid supplies.

It’s a scene of great compassion and all to do with humanizing monsters. Something which all of Dicks’ books try to do, I think.