Terrance Dicks

I only met Terrance Dicks, who has recently died aged 84, twice. One was the usual sort of thing when asking for an autograph, but the other occasion was special. It was while Nick and I were at the splendid Whooverville convention in 2015 in the capacity of the now-on-hiatus-because-of-real-life DictorcWho podcast. It was at the end of the day and all the podcasters, rather brilliantly, were given the chance to interview most of the convention guests in a whirl of speed dating. We must have spent no more than five minutes with Terrance, but they were five extraordinary minutes with Terrance on form and electrifying after, possibly, just a few pints other than the one he happened to be drinking. He was cheerfully honest and gave a great interview, happily opining on how the state of Doctor Who, when he arrived in 1968, was ominous, with a desperate shortage of scripts, because the production team were “a bunch of drunks”.

This was said entirely without malice, of course, but with a sense of conspiratorial, conversational ease that made me wish I’d been able to speak with him more than just that once, shamelessly hogging the interview without Nick being able to get a word in sideways. He was so generous, friendly and open with two people he’d only just met.

And he was, of course, a legend, the driving force behind Doctor Who between 1968 and 1974 and a huge influence thereafter. Every head writer on Doctor Who since 1974 has been hugely influenced by him for the simple reason that it’s impossible not to be. His scripts were amongst the very best- The War Games, The Brain of Morbius, State of Decay- but more than that is his wider legacy of shaping what Doctor Who was in his six years as head writer. He didn’t create the programme; indeed, it had glorious tones before him. But the Doctor as the hero we know, “never cruel nor cowardly”, will always define the character. The Doctor may change, but I think we all accepted Terrance as the ultimate arbiter of what was and was not “Doctorish”.

And that’s without even mentioning the Target novelisations, Timewyrm: Exodus or the many other things he achieved. Terrance, you’ll be missed.