For this, on 26 June 2023 (which was 25 years to the day since they were recording their first audio production, Oh No It Isn't!) they convened Lisa Bowerman, Paul Cornell, James Goss, Gary Russell Nicholas Briggs and Jason Haigh-Ellery, plus - to represent younger fans - er, me.
I bought the tee-shirt especially.
The online version went live on Sunday under the title "The story of Doctor Who’s first-ever, and profoundly daft, Christmas special" (£).
Nine days ago, I had another piece in the same paper on writer Malcolm Hulke and the Sea Devils.
Four years later, Terrance produced a revised edition of the book for Target, published on 16 December 1976 alongside two wholly new books also by Terrance: the novelisation Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars and the largely non-fiction “magazine format” The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, illustrated by George Underwood. I’m going to conclude this series of long posts by looking at these three books in turn.
Of the three titles published on the same day, I think Terrance worked on The Making of Doctor Who first, and entirely without Hulke’s involvement. In early 1976, when keen young fans Paul Simpson and David J Howe visited Hulke at home to interview him, they knew more about the revised edition than he did:
“According to Mac at the time, he knew nothing of the Target Making of and was going to ask Terrance about it after we left!” — Paul Simpson to me, 8 December 2025.
There are two good reasons why the team at Target might not have wanted Hulke involved. First, he’d fallen out with them. On 15 September 1975, Hulke wrote to his friend Jean Tate to say he’d had to get his agent Harvey Unna to “bludgeon” the publisher over the copyedit on Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion. “Much of it no longer makes sense”, he said, while also admitting,
“I don’t have a degree in grammar [and] what if the rewrite is better?” (Cited in Michael Herbert, Things Are Not Always What They Seem, p. 397)
Despite this admission that the copyedit might have improved the manuscript, and that it would take him an estimated 70 hours to re-edit it into something more like its original form, Hulke set out to do exactly that — doggedly sticking to a point of principle that I suspect didn’t win him many friends. He didn’t write for Target again until Doctor Who and the War Games in 1978 (published posthumously in 1979).
Secondly, in commissioning Terrance to revise The Making of Doctor Who, I think the team at Target — and perhaps Terrance himself — wanted to excise some of Hulke’s more, ahem, fanciful notions from the first edition. Out went the philosophy and the sermon. Out went the long “in-universe” entries on past adventures, which were more fiction than fact. The new version keeps the non-fiction history of the television series Doctor Who, summarising the plots of old stories in much more straightforward form, and retains the analysis of how one story was made. Everything else got cut.
Excitingly, we know exactly what Terrance did on the book because he detailed it in a letter to Harvey Unna (his agent as well as Hulke’s) on 22 April 1976. He told Unna that the manuscript of the revised edition had been accepted by the publisher — meaning he’d completed the main bulk of the work on it, bar approving a copyedit. Then, “as requested”, he listed how it differed from the original:
Chapter One — How it all began — Based on original, revised and updated with additional material from Radio Times [10th anniversary Doctor Who] Special (hereinafter RT)
Chapter Two — The Daleks — Based on original, revised with additional RT material.
Chapter Three — Who is Doctor Who — Partly based on original but mostly on my own Doctor Who Monster Book.
Chapter Four — Tom Baker is Doctor Who — New chapter.
Chapter Five — The First Three Doctors — As original, revised and updated.
Chapter Six — Monsters Galore — new chapter.
Chapter Seven — The men from UNIT — New chapter.
Chapter Eight — The Good Companions — new chapter, based on RT.
Chapter Nine — Some Regulars Old and New — new chapter, based on RT.
Chapter Ten — The Adventures of Doctor Who — new chapter, RT material with additional material by me.
Chapter Eleven — Inside a TV studio — as original, slightly revised.
Chapter Twelve — Diary of a Production — new chapter.
Chapter Thirteen — How to make a Monster — as original.
Chapter Fourteen — A New Life for the Doctor — new chapter.
Glossary of terms — as original.
This breaks down into: Chapters from original book 3, Chapters wholly or partly based on original 4, Entirely new chapters 8. Total 15. (The original book’s royalties were divided 75% to Mac Hulke and 25% to myself.) We await the judgment of Solomon! Best wishes, Terrance
Unna seems to have been left to arbitrate the division of royalties from this new edition between his two clients. He decided to reverse the earlier split, so Terrance now got 75%. That was good news for Terrance as this version seems to have sold well, and was reprinted in 1980, 1984 and 1986. I have worked from my 1986 reprint, but Paul Simpson kindly shared photos of his first edition so that I could verify how little changed in the decade between them.
On the front cover of mine, the Target logo on the top right is a black-on-white outline; on the original edition, the logo was in colour: concentric red, yellow and blue circles. Artist Chris Achilleos incorporated that version of the logo into his cover art, framing a portrait of Tom Baker’s head, hat and part of his scarf. On the first edition it’s clearly the Doctor’s head within the established Target logo; by 1986, that link between Doctor and publisher is perhaps not quite so explicit.
The artwork doesn’t convey, in any sense, the “making of” Doctor Who; the Doctor is not surrounded by cameras, lights or a PA with clipboard. I suspect the idea was to commission a piece of artwork that Target could also use to promote the Doctor Who titles more generally. They would have been able to do so because Achilleos was paid a flat fee for each commission, rather than royalties:
“It was £95 per cover artwork, you had to sign a job acceptance form which basically said, ‘you surrender the original artwork and whole copyright over to the publisher’” — Achilleos to a “shocked” Terrance Dicks, interviewed by Russell Cook for his piece, “Doctor Who — The Neverending Stories”, Geeky Monkey (July 2016), pp. 41-42.
The portrait of the Doctor is similar to but not the same as Achilleos’s work on both The Doctor Who Monster Book and Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, the hat at the same angle, the same single ring of scarf around the neck, suggesting he worked from the same reference photographs, or ones from the same shoot. Of the three, I think this is the most accurate likeness of Tom Baker, the face better illuminated than the rather shadowy Monster Book version. It feels like his definitive portrait.
ETA Paul MC Smith has shared the reference photos, which do seem to be from the same shoot; look at the tones of the stripes on the scarf, in the same position relative to his chin. The photo used for the cover of The Doctor Who Monster Book is also reproduced inside the book; the shoot may have been done especially.
The illustration for The Making of Doctor Who sits under a bright green version of the logo, the colour in contrast to rather than complementing the logo, as if to make the effect brighter. Above the Doctor Who logo, the words “The Making of” are presented in — well, what exactly is that typeface? ETA: Paul MC Smith thinks it is Balloon Extra Bold.
It gives the impression of having been written in marker pen by hand, the sort of typeface you’d use on a book about how to draw comics or caricatures. I suppose that’s the closest match to how-to-make-TV, but it’s not very Doctor Who of this era. Why not employ the usual, perfect Futura Condensed ExtraBold?
The back-cover blurb is a good indicator of the different approaches taken by the Piccolo and Target editions. The 1972 Making of boasts 116 words:
What happened when Doctor Who was put on trial by the Time Lords?
Why did he agree to help UNIT?
This fascinating book tells you everything about the Doctor and his adventures, the points in Space and Time he has visited, the aliens and monsters he has defeated.
One of the most famous and longest running BBC serials of all time, Doctor Who depends for its success on the enthusiasm of everyone working on the show.
Come inside the TV studio and meet them, learn how the Daleks and the Cybermen came into being and how the special effects work.
What happens in Doctor Who often seems impossible. But is it? Could it all be true?
Quiz questions about old continuity, interesting bits of in-universe history and then, only in the fourth paragraph, a reference to the behind-the-scenes business you’d expect in a making-of. It’s all a bit woolly about the remit of the book.
In the 1976 edition, the blurb was condensed to 81 words and is a lot more direct and focused:
Here it is... the story behind one of television's most successful, longest-running shows. Come with DOCTOR WHO on a trip through time... to the early days of the programme when it all began... meet actors, authors and television staff... see inside a TV studio and watch a production take shape... learn the secrets of the monsters... relive every ‘Doctor Who’ story since the beginning... follow the Doctor through four incarnations and — perhaps — begin to discover just WHO is DOCTOR WHO?
“Here it is,” is a brilliant gambit: this is the book you’ve been longing for. While the first edition offers to answer “fascinating” questions, the revised version is more immersive, promising to take the reader “on a trip through time” where “perhaps” we’ll get answers. Perhaps! It’s at once more direct and focused, and more thrilling and intriguing.
Opening the pages, the first thing to note is the indicia. In his letter to Harvey Unna, cited above, Terrance happily acknowledged the debt he owed to the Doctor Who special published by Radio Times in 1973. Here, there’s no mention of that publication but we’re told:
“Parts of the material in this new edition appeared in The Doctor Who Monster Book by Terrance Dicks, Target Books 1975”
It’s odd that the debt is acknowledged to Terrance’s own work for Target but not to stuff written by someone else for another publisher. Was that material used under licence, and paid for?
Then there’s the “Thanks” page. Jack Kine, Barry Letts, Sydney Newman and David Whitaker are listed in both versions of the Making of, though I think they were consulted solely for the first edition. But they were not the only people consulted for that first edition — Donald Wilson, Verity Lambert, Shaun Sutton and various cast members also contributed. In revising the book, Terrance didn’t take the opportunity to add names left out of the acknowledgements in that first version.
Charles Bowman, Catherine Dale and Lauraine Palmeri are credited only in the first edition. We know Palmeri worked through old scripts to produce the plot summaries from which Hulke wrote his in-universe synopses for the first edition. These were cut from the revised version — hence her acknowledgement was cut, too. That may suggest that whatever Bowman and Dale’s contributions might have been to the book, they were also cut from this new edition. If so, my best guess is that they helped Hulke with the philosophical chapter, “Could It All Be True?”
For the new edition, Terrance thanks then-current producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, who presumably provided the outlines of Doctor Who stories broadcast since the Radio Times special, as well as offering other such assistance. Terrance doesn’t seem to have interviewed them for this book.
Lastly, Terrance credits Jan Vincent-Rudzki and Stephen Payne. We’re not told in what capacity they assisted, but they were fans and founder members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, established just as Terrance wrote this book. Exactly one week after writing his letter to Harvey Unna about completing work on it, Terrance was the guest of DWAS at an event held at Westfield College in London.
This is, I think, the first evidence of fans contributing to what Terrance was writing. In years to come, he borrowed VHS tapes of stories he was going to novelise, and he recommended particular fans to his publisher and other authors, as expertise to draw on. The corollary of that, I think, is that he couldn’t avoid hearing the views of some of these older fans, who objected to Terrance writing books aimed at 8-12 year-olds at the level of, er, 8-12 year-olds.
(In that context, I once made Terrance laugh by quoting a favourite gag from The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4, in which he complains that this year’s Beano annual is a bit childish.)
Then, at last, we’re into the body of the book itself.
Terrance begins the revised edition of The Making of Doctor Who with the boggling fact that the series is 12 years old (p. 7), though it was 13 by the time the book was published. In mulling over Doctor Who’s “incredibly long life”, he notes that there are now schoolchildren “unable to remember a time when there wasn’t Doctor Who.” Today, some of those schoolchildren are drawing pensions.
He then recounts the creation of Doctor Who by Sydney Newman and Donald Wilson, who handed the project to producer Verity Lambert and “script editor” (sic) David Whitaker, who cast William Hartnell in the title role, commissioned Anthony Coburn to write the first story and Terry Nation to write the second — which featured things called Daleks and made the series a hit.
It’s pretty much as per Hulke’s version but Terrance corrected a few details. Hulke says Newman and Wilson devised Doctor Who in 1962; Terrance says, more accurately, that Newman was appointed Head of Drama at the BBC in 1962 (he didn’t start work there officially until 14 January 1963, and the first documented evidence of him thinking about a new teatime serial for children is from March that year).
Terrance also corrects a claim about where the word Dalek came from, quoting Terry Nation directly:
“In a desperate attempt to satisfy [journalists], I told them I was inspired by the letters on a volume of an encyclopaedia. But the fact is that no encyclopaedia in print covers those letters, DAL-LEK. Anyone checking the facts could have found me out.” (p. 16)
There’s more from Nation on what makes the Daleks successful: “The Daleks must always be totally evil.” This isn’t in the original; Terrance interviewed Nation for the revised book.
Terrance is keen to note that,
“It would be a mistake to attribute all the success of Doctor Who to the Daleks” (p. 17).
Yet he acknowledges that they are inextricably linked to the Doctor,
“Like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, like Chauvelin and the Scarlet Pimpernel” (ibid).
I wonder how many 8-12 year-olds understood the latter reference. Older readers might have recalled the BBC’s 10-part version of The Elusive Pimpernel shown on Sundays at teatime in 1969, or there was the Powell and Pressburger movie starring David Niven (1950) — or even the Carry on spoof, Don’t Lose Your Head (1967). But I think this is Terrance assuming his young readers had an interest in and knowledge of adventure fiction. Or it was a prompt for more assiduous readers to go and investigate.
Chapter 4, “Tom Baker is Doctor Who”, boasts all-new information. The biographical details must have come from Baker himself, though he’s not directly quoted. Of particular interest to me are the details Terrance reveals about himself, such as why he left the job of script editor on Doctor Who, reported in the third person:
“Terrance Dicks wanted to return to writing his own scripts rather than editing other people’s, and was now increasingly involved with Target’s Doctor Who paperback series” (p. 24).
So the novelisations were part of the reason he left. He also tells us about the “lengthy and intense” (p. 25) search that he and producer Barry Letts undertook to find a successor for Jon Pertwee. I knew that having been recommended Tom Baker and met with him, they assessed his acting by going to see The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (if memory serves, at the Odeon on Tottenham Court Road). But here we get what they saw in that film:
“Tom Baker played the wicked magician [Prince Koura], a man worn out by the exercise of his own evil powers. Each spell left him a little older and more exhausted, and he was searching desperately for the Fountain of Youth to renew his failing strength. The character was sympathetic as well as villainous, and it was impossible not to feel saddened at his eventual defeat.” (p. 26)
Terrance doesn’t make the connection himself, but this account chimes with what he later tells us about the origins of Robot, the story he wrote for Baker’s debut in the role of the Doctor. Having been commissioned for a story about a robot,
“The writer [ie Terrance himself] remembers a remark by a famous film critic, to the effect that in most monster films one ends up on the side of the monster. Like in King Kong—one of the earliest and best monsters of all. … So—a sympathetic robot then, not so much evil in itself, as misguided, or misused.” (p. 104)
Annoyingly for my purposes, Terrance doesn’t provide dates for when this story was conceived and developed, and there’s not much in the way of surviving paperwork to narrow it down. That means we don’t know if Terrance already had this sympathetic robot in mind when he went to see The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, where his thoughts about the story may have informed what he saw in Baker’s performance on the big screen. But perhaps he saw the film and then had the idea of a sympathetic villain, in which case in Robot Tom Baker battles a version of himself.
Another fun thing revealed here is mention of changes made by director Christopher Barry to make the location shoot more manageable:
“An extended sequence in which Sarah, in her car, is attacked by the Robot, is reluctantly dropped altogether” (p. 106)
I wonder if this chase sequence explains why, in the story, Sarah drives a gold-coloured Midget MG sports car (registration RMF 654L) — quite a fancy motor for a freelance magazine journalist.
There’s a further sense of roads not taken, too. The original version of The Making of Doctor Who covered the making of a story that was in production as the book was written, and which aired just before the book was published. This new edition covers a story that aired almost two years prior to publication.
Terrance explains that Robot is of interest as Baker’s debut story. But surely the original plan had been to base the revised version of the Making of on a more recent production, also written by Terrance. The Brain of Morbius was in production in October 1975 and broadcast in January 1976 — but credited to the pseudonym “Robin Bland”. Terrance asked for his name to be taken off the story after it was extensively rewritten by script editor Robert Holmes.
There’s no mention of this in the book, written in March / April; the chapter summarising all TV stories to date includes the broadcast version of Morbius, credited to Bland, with no sense of Terrance being involved. I can understand why Terrance wouldn’t cover what happened in a book like this — it’s not as fun and positive as the making of Robot, for all its a more interesting behind-the-scenes story.
While Terrance cribs from the earlier edition, the Radio Times special and his own Monster Book, plenty here is new. For example, he tells us that there are three distinct types of Autons: basic Autons who resemble shop-window dummies, more sophisticated Replicas of real people and the spider-crab-octopus Nestene consciousness that is their true form (p. 37). He also recounts the career of UNIT’s Captain Mike Yates from Mike’s own perspective (pp. 42-43), and makes him a hero who gains full redemption following his wobble in Invasion of the Dinosaurs.
Many of the details are consistent with Terrance’s novelisations: Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart (no middle name) has a “neatly trimmed moustache” (p. 40), as per Doctor Who and the Web of Fear. Terrance cuts the reference to the Brigadier’s ancestor who fought at Waterloo — a detail not gleaned from the TV series. Benton is a Warrant Officer (p. 43) as per Robot and Terrance’s novelisations but not Terror of the Zygons. Though the summary of stories tells us, definitively, that Susan “is the Doctor’s granddaughter” (p. 55), Terrance says earlier that,
“It is possible that this was simply a title of affection” (p. 45).
That doubt is as per the Monster Book.
What’s really striking here are the numerous small errors. Of course, when Terrance wrote this there weren’t the wealth of websites, reference books and magazines with which to check such details. But the result is that this is not the authoritative source it first appears, and the story being told isn’t quite right.
For example, Donald Wilson is credited as the BBC’s “Head of Series and Serials” (p. 8) and David Whitaker as “Script Editor” (p. 10), when they were Head of Serials and Story Editor respectively, in both cases, less powerful positions. Terrance used the job titles of their successors in 1976, who each wielded a bit more authority. [ETA: Paul Hayes points out that the post of Head of Series and Serials was created in 1981, with David Reid the first incumbent; I will check how Wilson is credited in the first edition.]
Both posts — Head of Serials and story editor — were introduced by Newman when he joined the BBC, so the two men were new in post in new ways of working, assigned to a new series. The sense from Terrance is rather of business as usual in the way telly is made.
He says the audience of the first episode of Doctor Who was a modest “two or three million” (p. 11), but that things changed with the start of the second serial “on 28 December 1963” (p. 12). Again, this isn’t quite right and presents a story that isn’t quite true. The second serial started a week earlier; on 28 December, in the second episode of the story, viewers got their first full sight of the Daleks, only glimpsed in the previous instalment — which was part of the draw.
The leap in viewing figures wasn’t quite as Terrance makes out. The first episode of Doctor Who was watched by twice what he suggests, 4.4 million viewers, and the numbers rose over the course of the first serial to 5.9, 6.9 and 6.4 million. Terrance doesn’t mention that the first episode’s figures were affected by events in the news that fateful weekend; the wider socio-political context isn’t really covered here.
In fact, the first two episodes of the Dalek story got the same figures as the end of the previous serial — 6.9 and 6.4 million. Then the numbers rose, reaching 10.4 million by the end of that first Dalek story. The series started more robustly than he suggests and there was a steady rise in figures, which continued after the Dalek serial. Terrance’s version is more legend than reality.
Other details aren’t quite right. Terrance recounts, as per the Radio Times special, Deborah Watling’s anecdote about acting with her father in Doctor Who, which conflates the two stories in which Jack appeared — one in which they filmed on location on a mountainside, another in which he was made up in “grey bread and white hair” (p. 51). Terrance also misquotes a line of dialogue on which he himself was script editor, adding an extra last word:
“Chap with wings. Five rounds rapid, fire!” (p. 40).
Some of this stuff could have been picked up in the copy edit, such as where the recently published Doctor Who and the Space War being is missed from the list of adventures featuring the Master (p. 39), the mis-spelling of Carole Ann Ford’s name as “Carol Ann” (p. 45) or the unfortunate split of a word over two consecutive lines:
“Other travellers in the TARDIS included Vicki, survivor of a crashed spaceship, Steven, a spaceship pilot, Ben, a cock-
ney sailor, and Polly, a scientist’s secretary” (p. 45)
Likewise, there’s an unfortunate choice of word when describing the Sea Devils as being, “Aroused from their long hibernation” (p. 38).
Less rudely suggestive but still the wrong use of a word is where Terrance describes the space station Nerva Beacon in Revenge of the Cybermen as “a kind of galactic lighthouse” (p. 92), as if its light or signals can be detected well beyond the Solar System, when its in orbit round Jupiter.
Even so, “lighthouse” is a good way of conveying what the space station does. He’s keen on straightforward analogies like this. We’re told a TV studio is as big as a football pitch, a director has “homework” and that TV cameras are Dalek-like, all on p. 98. In the glossary, he has a rather grand definition of a TV producer:
“He is as a general is to an army” (p. 127).
Is that how Terrance saw it, a decade later, when he became a producer himself? And what rank did he think was the equivalent of script editor?
My nitpicking went into overdrive in the long chapter of plot summaries from old adventures. The 1972 edition includes a list of credits per broadcast story, citing writer, director, producer and script editor. Here, Terrance only credits writers, effectively making them the primary creative input. In other chapters he mentions the roles of directors, producers and script editors, as well as heads of department and people in make-up and special effects, but the sense is that they’re all in service to the real authority. What a delightful fantasy, the writer as king.
Then there’s the detail of what these writers wrote. On p. 71 we’re told of The Evil of the Daleks that “ancient Edward Waterfield” has to “travel through time as Maxtible”, which isn’t what happens in the story at all, and of The Tomb of the Cybermen that people are “Evacuating the last remains of the now-extinct Cybermen” — the first word should be “excavating”.
It’s not just the facts; the varying levels of attention paid to different stories is odd, too. The synopsis for the four-episode The Underwater Menace is far longer and more detailed than the four sentences allotted to 12-episode epic The Daleks’ Master Plan, where Terrance doesn’t even mention villainous Mavic Chen.
His summary of The Curse of Peladon likewise fails to mention that the Ice Warriors are in it, when he makes a point of mentioning returning monsters elsewhere — and lists the novelisations in which they appear. He makes no mention of Lethbridge-Stewart in the summary of The Web of Fear, whereas he had underlined the significance of that first encounter with the Doctor in his recent novelisation.
He’d also just novelised Planet of the Daleks, so its odd that the summary here is basically the version as per Radio Times, Terrance simply changing the reference to “Doctor Who” to “the Doctor” and adding that Jo is saved from the fungal disease by a friendly native. The summary here and in Radio Times refers to an “ice volcano”, not “icecano” as in the novelisation and Terry Nation’s Dalek Annual 1977. How odd, to synchronise novelisation and annual, then not be consistent in your very next book.
As per Radio Times, the summary here also suggests that the Doctor “falls gravely ill” after arriving on the planet Spiridon (p. 86). I wonder if that was how the story originally played out, perhaps with the Doctor spat on by the planet’s deadly vegetation before Terrance revised the ending of Frontier in Space and had the the Doctor gravely wounded there. Even so, it’s odd he didn’t amend the details here to fit the story as broadcast.
There are other indications of early drafts of TV stories. Here, the villain of The Hand of Fear does not die at the end but is left “to his solitary fate” (p. 96). His name is also given here as not Eldrad but “Eldred” — the name of a character in The Seeds of Death, on which Terrance was script editor (and uncredited writer). This is the last story summarised in the book; it had not entered production when Terrance delivered his manuscript.
That means he he doesn’t summarise the events of the next TV story, The Deadly Assassin, which was set on the Doctor’s home planet. The story had been broadcast by the time this book was published, so readers may have been surprised to find that The Making of Doctor Who does not mention “Gallifrey” by name. That name features in Terrance’s novelisation Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, published on the same day as this book. It’s the first time Terrance used “Gallifrey” in print, which I think is evidence that he wrote the novelisation after completing work on The Making of…
I know that picking over this stuff is pedantic, but today the writers of magazine articles, books and documentaries sweat over this stuff, knowing people will write in if we get it wrong (also, sometimes if we get it right). So I raise these small errors as indicative of another age, when the history of Doctor Who was more folk memory than documented history.
That goes hand in hand with the myth-making here. The chapter “Who is the Doctor?” repeats much of Terrance’s pithy account from The Doctor Who Monster Book, though he corrects the spelling of “crotchety” in reference to the First Doctor. But he also adds something to this lore.
First, perhaps by accident, he establishes what I think may be the first example of how we tend to refer to the Doctor’s different incarnations. It’s in marked contrast to previous forms of address. In The Doctor Who Monster Book, he speaks of “the Doctor”, the same person in each incarnation, just with a different face. In his novelisation Doctor Who — The Three Doctors, he refers to “Doctor One”, “Doctor Two” and “Doctor Three”, though sometimes the latter term is used for the Hartnell incarnation, and sometimes it means Pertwee.“The Changing Face of Doctor Who” on the first page of the early novelisations speak of, for example, “the fourth DOCTOR WHO”, the ordinal in lower case.
The original version of The Making of Doctor Who is almost the same, with chapters titled “THE FIRST DOCTOR WHO WAS WILLIAM HARTNELL” (p. 34) and “THE SECOND DOCTOR WHO WAS PATRICK TROUGHTON” (p. 36). On the contents page, these titles are given in title case rather than all caps: “The First Doctor Who Was William Hartnell”.
In the revised version, these two chapters and a piece on Jon Pertwee are all contained in one chapter, “The Three Doctors” (pp. 28-33), with subheadings in italicsed title case: “The First Doctor Who was William Hartnell”, etc. Terrance is consistent with the earlier version of the book, referring to the character in subheadings and the text as “Doctor Who” rather than “the Doctor”, though this was a point he picked up with other writers while script editor on the series.
Correct that small detail, and this is the earliest example I’m aware of where the different incarnations are referred to as the First Doctor, Second Doctor, etc, the ordinal capitalised as part of a proper noun. It originates in the first edition of the Making of, but it’s the revised version that puts “First Doctor Who”, “Second Doctor Who” and “Third Doctor Who” into the same chapter, one after the other — and so makes a point of that being their proper names.
Then there’s what Terrance adds to the end of the chapter on “Who is the Doctor?”. I said of The Doctor Who Monster Book that he describes each incarnation in a way that makes them heroic and consistent — the same person just with a different face (even though they are different heights etc). Here, he underlines that idea.
Again, what Terrance says is following the lead set by Hulke, in this case in response to a quote from Shaun Sutton, the BBC’s then Head of Drama, referring to Doctor Who’s “quality of moral indignation”:
“Put in simpler terms, the Doctor always cares about people: he believes in good and fights evil. He is never cruel, and he never carries a gun or other weapon. He is often in battles, but he hates war” (p. 8).
Terrance takes this, adds it to his point about the character being consistent throughout his different incarnations, and produces magic:
“He is still [in his new incarnation] impulsive, idealistic, ready to risk his life for a worthy cause. He still hates tyranny and oppression, and anything that is anti-life. He never gives in, and he never gives up, however overwhelming the odds against him.
“The Doctor believes in good and fights evil. Though often caught up in violent situations, he is a man of peace. He is never cruel or cowardly.
“In fact, to put it simply, the Doctor is a hero. These days there aren’t so many of them around…” (p. 23).
Benjamin Cook dug into this a bit when he interviewed Terrance for Doctor Who Magazine #508, with Terrance’s friend Paul Cornell noting the similarity to Raymond Chandler’s description of a hero in his 1944 essay “The Simple Art of Murder”; go read it in full if you haven’t but I will quote the best-known line:
“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”
Terrance certainly saw the link between his view of the Doctor and the idealised hero in that essay, quoting from Chandler directly to open his 1994 Doctor Who novel Blood Harvest and naming a 1997 novel Mean Streets. But did he know he was riffing on Chandler back in 1976?
I think back then he drew on something else, and the clue is in the words, “He never gives in, and he never gives up.”
That’s in line with something in Terrance’s second Mounties novel, Massacre in the Hills: “the soldier’s motto [of] Never explain, never complain” (p. 25), which he later echoed in his semi-autobiographical novel:
“Never explain, never complain, as Dad always said” (Prisoners of War (1990), p. 67).
The suggestion is that this is something Terrance heard while his father was a quartermaster-sergeant during the war. I have a piece in DWM’s new Unit Declassified special about how this and Terrance’s own time in National Service influenced his approach to the Doctor Who stories he worked on.
“Never complain, never explain” is a pretty well known phrase, with its own entry on Wikipedia detailing how it was used and then rejected as the public relations strategy of the royal family. It was originally attributed to the 19th century Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who in turn seems to have fashioned it from one of 11 “Maxims for a Statesman” (1873-76) written by Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College:
“Never quarrel, never explain, never hate, never fret, never fail.”
That’s the sentiment Terrance is expressing, isn’t it? So it’s a late Victorian idea of heroism, the kind he knew from the adventure stories he’d grown up on, such as Kim by Rudyard Kipling. There’s something, too, of Kipling’s poem “If—” (1895), which Terrance had a copy of on the door of the office where he wrote these books.
“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…”
All of that, I think, Terrance made into “Never cruel or cowardly”, which has now become part of the fiction of the character, quoted by the Doctor on screen — the hero s/he wants to be, if not always attaining this ideal.
The irony is that that’s in stark contrast to the way this book concludes. Whereas the first edition promised “The Shape of Things to Come”, as if setting out a blueprint of the future in the manner of HG Wells, here the final chapter is “A New Life for the Doctor”.
“At the time this book is being written, the Doctor seems to be loosening his connections with Earth, returning to his earlier role of the mysterious wanderer through the strange world of Space and Time” (p. 124).
The suggestion is that the Doctor will be less knowable and more of a mystery; yet this book sets out exactly who the Doctor is, the promise at the core of the character. Indeed, by detailing what we know about the Doctor in a book like this, and by setting a TV story on his home planet, the Doctor became much more known and less mysterious.
Terrance concludes this book by saying that the ever-growing list of novelisations — as many as 27 so far! — are preserving Doctor Who for posterity, allowing readers to relive adventures or catch up on ones shown before they were born. This comes in the same heart-stopping paragraph that he reveals that the BBC wiped tapes of old programmes and many Doctor Who episodes “are gone for good” (p. 124), which I think adds a sense of urgency — read the books or lose Doctor Who.
This underlines something implicit in this version of the book. Much more than the original edition, it continually prompts readers to get more involved. In the summaries of stories, Terrance tells us where novelisations are available so we can search them out and read up on these adventures in more detail, tick them off, collect them. He mentions the “hundreds of children” who meet Tom Baker at “Target book-signing sessions” (p. 27), the implication being that we could do the same — if we haven’t already.
In his chapter on how monsters are made, Terrance recommends the book The Techniques of Special Effects in Television by Bernard Wilkie, suggesting we borrow it from the library. It’s a book for grown-ups, largely aimed at those already working within the industry, but Terrance challenges readers aged 8-12 to give it a go.
In that context, The Making of Doctor Who as a whole is more than a book; it’s a challenge. Explore the fictional lore of Doctor Who. Explore the way the programme is made. Go out, be an active participant.
I know a load of people — me included — who did just that. In doing so, they made careers, forged friendships, met life partners, even had children. Terrance began this book by boggling that there were children who’d never known life without Doctor Who. Even more boggling is that, thanks to this book and what it started, there are children who would never have been born without Doctor Who…
Not bad going for a book.
*
Thanks so much to everyone for your support for these long posts about the books written by Terrance Dicks, whether by reading them, sharing them, responding and/or contributing to costs. But I’m afraid I have some exciting news for all readers.
I’m going to write two more long entries in this series, one on Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars and one on The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book. After that, I need to focus attention on some other biggish projects, not least the biography of Terrance. But I hope to be back for some longer posts again in future.
Among the friends he makes, and potentially compromises, is kindly blind girl Christian Stewart. But many of the characters here are real figures from history, and part of the fun is that we know much of what is coming, such as the plot to marry off Mary of Guise's young daughter - i.e. the later Mary Queen of Scots.
It is a long, long book and takes a while to kick into gear, much of the early part involving long, long scenes with characters going about their business with little - I felt - at stake. Yet as we get to know the characters and their world, we pick on up interconnections, misconceptions, and that things are not quite as straightforward as first presented.
There are some thrilling moments - late on, Dunnett abruptly kills off one leading character, which completely took me by surprise. This is swiftly followed by Lymond being blamed for the death, when we know he is innocent, and making a break for it to pursue a fiendish spy. He ends up leading a single-handed assault on an English castle. Things get especially thrilling when, in the midst of the ensuing chaos, Lymond trains his last arrow on where the spy is hiding, hoping to catch a glimpse of and kill him, while someone else lines up a shot at Lymond. It is incredibly tense and exciting. But that only serves to underline how slow the book is in other places.
The ending involves a long, long trial. We have, by this time, made our own minds up about Lymond, so have to hang around waiting for characters to catch up. The vital piece of evidence is somewhere tantalisingly just out of reach, which adds some suspense. It's all good, just a bit long, long.
The audiobook is ably narrated by David Monteath - not, as I thought when I downloaded it without having my glasses on, my mate David Monteith. It's been very good company on some long drives recently. And this was a favourite book of Terrance Dicks - he even wrote Dorothy Dunnett a fan letter. I shall have more to say on how he first discovered this book and Dunnett, and what he saw in her writing.
Among the many treats, it boasts two things by me:
pp. 34-37 "The Private Life of Terrance Dicks"
Many of the classic UNIT stories were overseen by a writer and script editor who drew extensively on his own experience of National Service.
pp. 76-79 "Chasing Cars"
UNIT was mobile right from the start, with a fleet of vehicles at its disposal. But which models of vehicle, exactly?
The first session began with a trailer, originally shown on BBC One on Thursday 15 December 1966 between the end of The Illustrated Weekly Hudd (of which we saw a closing bit of credits) and Sports Review of 1966. The trailer was for a thriller series called Vendetta, but Presentation clearly had no footage from the series, or wanted a generic trail for the whole series not just a given episode. Instead, specially shot material shows a hand with a syringe, a hand with a knife, a letter in which “Vendetta” is written in cut-out letters from newsprint. How amazing to advertise a series with, “This is roughly the gist…”
That was followed by a full episode of Vendetta, The Running Man, originally broadcast on 30 December 1966. It wasn’t at all what I’d expected from doing some reading in advance. The Radio Times of 27 October previewed the first episode of Vendetta with a profile of the series’ star, Italian actor Stello Candelli. His character, Danny Scipio, is a Sicilian who,
“fights the Mafia with his own methods … In the course of his unending vendetta Scipio will be confronting the Mafia in places all over the world: in the American south, in France, in Sicily, and in metropolitan Italy. But for tonight’s opening episode, written by the originators of the series, Brian Degas and Tudor Gates and called The Sugar Man, he travels to London.”
Scipio is not in or even mentioned in The Running Man, which is largely set on the Devonshire moors, with a bit of action in Cornwall. Agent Angelo James (played by Australian actor Neil McCallum) goes to Dartmoor Prison to bully prisoner Johnny Barbiere (Sebastian Breaks) into testifying against one of the notorious Pulito brothers. But Johnny is in prison with the other Pulito brother, who then tries to kill him. Johnny escapes and goes on the run — there’s quite a lot of location filming as he runs about the scenery and scrambles over stone walls, while stock footage shows groups of policemen on what are clearly different hills.
Johnny then breaks into the house of Patricia Rattan (Janet Munro), just as she’s leaving a note for the husband she is walking out on. Against her will, she must now drive Johnny out of the area and through the police checks, pretending to be his loving wife. Things don’t go to plan, and they end up having to spend the night together…
Janet Munro — who I knew from playing opposite Sean Connery in the Disney musical Darby O’Gill and the Little People — is amazing in this, with a lot of wide-eyed close-ups as she is variously terrified, brave or intrigued. There are some nice visual touches, such as the way the runaway sequence involves handheld shooting to give Johnny’s point of view.
Sometimes the writing is deft. Johnny tells Patricia that he wants to get to the Isles of Scilly, where he can sit and watch the few boats coming in and — if he sees anyone that concerns him — lie low for a bit. Later, agent Angelo says pretty much the same thing, independently: he had effectively deduced Johnny’s motives and movements.
Yet we’re led to believe that the story will hang not on whether Johnny can escape but who will catch up with him first — the ruthless but good-guy Angelo or the ruthless, deadly Pulitos. The latter get largely forgotten. Johnny shares with Patricia how he got mixed up with the Pulitos — the vital evidence agent Angelo needs — but this isn’t picked up at the end, either. It’s as if a chunk of plot got left out. I wonder how much the logistics of filming on a ferry for the climax determined what featured in the resolution.
After Vendetta, Chris Perry from Kaleidoscope shared some fun stuff. First, a cinema trailer for a 1964 stage pantomime starring Cliff Richard as Aladdin, with the Shadows, Arthur Askey and Vanessa Howard.
Then there was a reconstruction of the dramatic final moments from the first season of Doomwatch, with material from the otherwise missing episode Survival Code (11 May 1970) recovered from the recap at the start of the next episode and from an edition of Blue Peter (where it could be seen on a screen in the background of an item about the band, the Scaffold). The editing was done by Jon Coley and gives a good sense of the mounting tension — and the shock twist ending, decades before similar stuff in Spooks and Line of Duty. It’s good, too, to see something of Hugh David’s tense, enthralling work as director (all 10 Doctor Who episodes that he directed are missing).
Then there was a full episode of legal sitcom AP Herbert’s Misleading Cases, this one The Negotiable Cow (20 June 1967). Roy Dotrice was — as ever — aged up, in this case to play Albert Haddock, an old pedant who objects to a bill from the Inland Revenue for £68, 1s and 3d. Reading up on obscure bits of old law, he decides to deliver a cheque in person to the bureaucrat in question. But he does not write the cheque on paper: he daubs it on the side of a cow.
The case as to whether he can pay by cow, and whether he can tie up said cow at a parking meter, goes to court, with Alastair Sim presiding. This was quite a coup, and Radio Times credited Sim first and ran a photo of him not Dotrice. On screen, Sim seems delighted by the daft, witty script, such as when he asks of this particular, unusual cheque, “Were you afraid it might bounce?” It’s all good fun. Plus, for Doctor Who fans there was the bonus sight of John Levene — just prior to playing a Yeti in The Web of Fear — as one of the jurors, seen clearly in one shot.
Next up was a compilation of clips from Ed Stradling at the TV Museum, which included an unused take from Attack of the Cybermen (1985), a Top of the Pops performance of “Ships in the Night” by Be Bop Deluxe and a song from Play School (30 March 1983). You can see more from the TV Museum, and support its work, at https://www.patreon.com/TheTVMuseum
The second session began with The Best in TV, Michael Aspel presenting coverage of the Guild of Television Producers and Directors Awards held earlier the same day — 14 February 1969 — at the Dorchester Hotel in London. This forerunner of the BAFTAs had a chequered history. The bigwigs of the BBC were all at the event in November 1963 when news came in from Dallas that President Kennedy had been shot. This meant there was no one senior enough on duty to authorise changing the pre-agreed TV schedule. I’ve read about the fallout from this in Competition by Asa Briggs and A Survey of Television by Stuart Hood.
At the awards in 1969, host Kenneth Horne suffered a heart attack midway through the show and died. The show continued without him, and the TV version still went out that evening, but the footage of the ceremony was kept noticeably brief. Instead, the programme showed extended clips from the winning TV shows — many of them otherwise missing. We got to see Marty Feldman as a policeman using his cloak to “bullfight” with cars, Max Adrian and Christopher Gable at the piano in a (surviving!) film about Delius by Ken Russell, and an aged-up Roy Dotrice — him again — tell bawdy stories about Sir Walter Raleigh in Brief Lives. The show ended with a standing ovation for the Czechoslovakian TV Service, awarded in absence.
Afterwards, in the bar, I think this was the material shown to us that was mostly hotly debated. The strangeness of it, the ethics of carrying on with the broadcast after the death of the host, how posh it all was… I realised that just a month after this, the same venue hosted the Writers’ Guild Awards, which honoured many of the same shows and recipients. (You can see, in the opening moments of Marty Feldman: No, But Seriously… Feldman receiving his guild award from David Whitaker and Marius Goring.)
Next up, my pal Gary Brannan from the University of York presented footage from a videotape found within the archives of writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. This comprised brief fragments of programmes, some silent and in poor quality, including some of the fourth episode of Hancock’s, broadcast on 1 July 1967 with Vicky Carr singing “Here’s That Rainy Day” on the nightclub set. The tape was intercut with brief moments from an episode of Hancock called The Bowmans, originally broadcast in 1960 but — thinks Gary — taped from the repeat on 16 March 1966, with glimpses of Tony Hancock fronting a campaign of (fake) adverts for Grimsby Pilchards, which young women seem unable to resist. By chance, there was also more from Christopher Gable, this time giving a ballet performance with Maryon Lane to Debussy’s “Petite Suite” as part of an episode of Melodies for You. (Thanks to Gary for correcting what I originally posted here!)
The date in question is curious. 1 July 1967 was the day BBC Two starting broadcasting in colour — some two years ahead of BBC One and ITV. It was also the day on which BBC Two broadcast the final episode of The Forsyste Saga in its original run. I know this because June Barry, who starred in Forsyte, hosted a party the same night at the home she shared with her husband David Whitaker, whose serial The Evil of the Daleks concluded that evening, too. Stars from both series attended, filling up their small mews home that looked out on to railway tracks and was illuminated by the lights from passing trains. So, as Hancock advertised Grimsby Pilchards, the Second Doctor and Soames Forsyte may have been out on the balcony, smoking.
The fragments on this tape also included some tantalising glimpses of Alan Bennett’s otherwise missing series On the Margin (1966), with Bennett as vicar giving a sermon, then breaking the fourth wall by removing his dog collar to one side of the set, as the studio lights went out. The sound held long enough for one good gag about the BBC closing down for the night— the make-up woman has put away her lipstick, the wardrobe man has just put on his. What a shame, though, not to have sight of one of his costars in the series, Prunella Scales.
Oh, and this stuff was introduced by a clip from some 30 years of Bennett saying there wasn’t much to miss.
Next was Hank Rides Again, a mix of puppetry and animation for children made by Francis Coudrill for Associated-Rediffusion. It concerns the adventures of a cowboy and his horse, and their battles with the villainous Pete. From what I’d read in advance — Hank features quite a lot in Paul Hayes’ forthcoming book, When Saturday Came (Telos, 2026) — I thought this was some kind of Western. But the setting is contemporary, the villain driving a modern car, so I think it owes more to Roadrunner cartoons, with the same kind of stylised backdrops of Monument Valley. We also got to see a documentary about the series, with Christopher Frayling as appreciative fan and Coudrill’s son demonstrating how he provided the sound effects for different vehicles on his trumpet.
I wrote quite a lot of notes about all this but, in the darkness of the screening, they ended up on top of each other so whatever insights I had have been lost. You are rarely so fortunate. Besides, episodes of Hank Rides Again are now being shown on Rewind TV so you can watch and judge for yourselves.
Lastly, those heroes at Film is Fabulous shared one of the 53 episodes of Emergency Ward 10 they’ve recovered, which includes all six episodes from 1964 in which Annete Andre plays an actress who is severely sunburned. We got to see the first of these (tx 7 July 1964), in which there was a lot going on. One big element was the aftermath of surgeon Louise Mahler (Joan Hooley) walking out on dinner with Dr Giles Farmer (John White) and his father, after the latter said something inappropriate — presumably about her ethnicity. I’m not sure if this was just before or just after the couple were seen to kiss, which was only the second time a white actor and black actor had been seen to kiss on British television.
Then there’s the doctor who doesn't think the lamb chops served on the wards are good enough, the excitement of the imminent hospital fete, and the prospect of new uniforms for staff. But most of the episode is about old faithful Albert (Howard Douglas) having been electrocuted by touching a plug socket with wet hands. There’s a fun scene where the poor bloke struggles to tell the nurses that he wants something, and we realise he’s missing his ‘choppers’. One of the doctors is asked about this, acts surprised and then, er, remembers that he’s put the man’s teeth in a drawer. It’s an odd thing to forget!
Another plot involves a new locum with an eye for the nurses — though they seem excited by the attention, rather than warning each other about him. And then there’s Annette Andre, wheeled in face down wearing only her underwear and a smearing of dark make-up. Later, she’s topless. Although she’s always seen lying on her front, her bare back is a bit risqué for an early evening soap of the time — and pre-empts the notorious sunbathing scene in Triangle by almost 20 years.
The episode ends on a cliffhanger: Annette’s character has second-degree burns and has been told that she might be permanently scarred. In the closing moments, she has some kind of blob on her face. But what kind of blob? The credits roll…
Afterwards, Annette Andre was on stage to answer questions. She remembered one of her episodes of Emergency Ward 10 being broadcast live because something had gone wrong — implying that pre-recording was done very close to broadcast anyway. She also recalled a night playing poker with other cast members where she won £20.
And then out we tumbled into the bar, to compare notes and gossip.
"Last Sunday, as the whole world watched on tenterhooks, an ordinary man made an impassioned speech to a fish..."
(Yes, I then go on to explain that Salt is not actually a fish.)
ETA: The piece was also published in the print version of the Sunday Telegraph under the title "The Left-wing writer who radicalised Doctor Who", 14 December 2025, pp. 14-15.
Terrance certainly didn’t think so:
“The Auton Invasion [published in January 1974] was the first book of any kind I’d written, and I worked very hard on it.” TD interviewed by Peter Griffiths, “Author! Author!”, Doctor Who Magazine #273, cover date 12 January 1999, p. 46.
In April 1976, Terrance mentioned in a letter to Harvey Unna — the agent he shared with Hulke — that royalties on The Making of Doctor Who had always been split 3:1 in Hulke’s favour. But that doesn’t mean Terrance did 25% of the writing. So what did he do on this book?
Hulke mentioned in a letter while working on The Making of Doctor Who in September 1971, that Terrance was due to interview the show’s original producer, Verity Lambert, about the early days of the series. Hulke, meanwhile, interviewed Donald Wilson and corresponded with Sydney Newman and David Whitaker. (The correspondence with Newman survives, and includes a transcript of the interview with Wilson.)
That suggests that the bulk but not all of the material here on the origins of Doctor Who was researched and compiled by Hulke. In the process, Newman’s account of first conceiving the Doctor as, “a senile old man 745 years old from an un-named planet” (Newman to Hulke, 28 September 1971) was changed to the kinder, more heroic, “Let’s make him a crotchety old man … at least 745 years old” (p. 3). We don’t know if it was Hulke or Terrance who made the substitution, but Terrance used “crotchety” again in both The Doctor Who Monster Book (1975) and the revised version of The Making of Doctor Who (1976).
I suspect that Terrance also conducted the interviews with then-current cast members Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning, Roger Delgado, Nicholas Courtney, Richard Franklin and John Levene, as well as with former Doctors Who William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, and with Jack Kine of BBC Visual Effects. Their contact details would have been kept on file by the Doctor Who production office, where Terrance worked as script editor, so it would have been relatively quick and easy for him to ring round — perhaps a morning’s work.
(Hulke interviewed Donald Wilson and made contact with Newman in September 1971, so Terrance probably rang Hartnell and Troughton around this time, too. One of them, surely, mooted the idea that perhaps the actors might like to reappear in the series. Then, at the end of February 1972, writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin attended studio recording of their Doctor Who story The Mutants and Terrance must have raised with them the prospect of a new adventure involving all three Doctors. On 3 March, they duly sent Terrance an outline for Deathworld, eventually made as The Three Doctors.)
As well as conducting a share of the interviews, Terrance facilitated some of Hulke’s research, such as loaning him the production office’s scripts of all previous Doctor Who stories — Terrance wrote to ask for them back on 23 November 1971, in a letter included among the PDFs on the Season 9 box-set (10-03 — Frontier in Space production documentation, p. 2). Hulke’s sometime partner Lauraine Palmeri worked through these scripts, making summaries of plots from which Hulke then wrote his in-universe narrative of all of Doctor Who so far, as recounted by the Time Lords and by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart in the 24-page chapter “The Travels of Doctor Who”.
This is by far the biggest chapter in the book, accounting for just over 20% of the 115 pages. Add to that the in-universe chapters on everything we’ve learned about the Doctor (13pp), an account of his trial (4pp) and a doctor’s report on his physiology (3pp), and just over 38% of this non-fiction guide to the making of Doctor Who is, er, fiction.
What’s more, this stuff is riddled with small errors. The first chapter quotes a line of dialogue written by David Whitaker that was never used in a broadcast episode (p. 8). The book claims that the Cybermen originate from Telos and “first appeared on television on February 11th, 1967 in a Doctor Who story set on the moon” (p. 14), entirely ignoring the existence of and events depicted in The Tenth Planet (1986). The “Travels of the TARDIS” section correctly says Cybermen feature in The Tenth Planet, but adds that events take place in the year 2000, not 1986 (p. 49).
On 30 May 1972, fan Richard Landen wrote to Hulke and Dicks listing such errors over two pages, in the hope they could be corrected in the next edition. Terrance kept a copy of this letter and, indeed, corrections were made to the manuscript of the 1976 version. This is the first example I’ve found of fans advising Terrance on Doctor Who history and lore.
Hulke was on steadier ground writing the 19-page chapter “Diary of a Production”, since its about the making of his own story, The Sea Devils, which was in production at the time he wrote this book. He provides information not found in other sources — exactly what he was briefed to write by Terrance and producer Barry Letts, the changes made at different stages of commissioning, details of elements that were lost such as the Doctor waterskiing. He also shares passages from otherwise now-lost original storyline and scene breakdown for the story.
It’s a shame there isn’t more of this — longer excerpts from paperwork, more detail on exactly what happened and when, with dates. There’s an interview with Jack Kine about making monsters (4pp), but it might have been nice to hear, directly, from director Michael E Briant and other members of the cast and crew about what was involved day-to-day, in the thick of production.
Instead, we get a chapter exploring some real science and philosophy suggested by Doctor Who, entitled “Could It All Be True?” (9pp), in which Hulke — an atheist — cites the books of Joshua and Ezekiel. This is followed by what’s basically a sermon, contributed by the Rev John D Beckwith AKC, Chaplain to the Bishop of Edmonton. This has caused me a bit of a headache.
The see of Edmonton was new, having been created in 1970, with Alan Rogers appointed as first bishop. Prior to his appointment as chaplain, the Rev Beckwith, born c. 1933, had been senior tutor of Ijebu-Igbo Great School and Molusi College in Nigeria (1960-62), assistant curate of Bedale (1962-63), Mottingham (1965-69), house tutor at Eltham College (1964-69), and chaplain of St Andrew’s Gothenburg, with Halmstad and Jönköping, Sweden (1969-70) — source.
He had worked in schools, so had some qualification for contributing to a book aimed at children. But he doesn’t seem to have made a habit of this sort of thing, such as writing for other publications or appearing in the media. Sadly, the current Bishop of Edmonton doesn’t hold records going back to 1971 (I did ask!), so I’m a bit stumped as to how Hulke might have known the Rev Beckwith. Do please write in if you know.
(I’d also be grateful for any information about Charles Bowman and Catherine Dale, who are named at the top of the page of Thanks.)
While I don’t know the connected between Hulke and Beckwith, I can guess why Hulke might have wanted a closing word from such a figure. In early 1971, Doctor Who had been widely criticised for being too scary and unsuitable for children. Then, as Barry Letts detailed in his memoir, his boss Ronnie Marsh, Head of Serials at the BBC, objected to the “blasphemous” use of a church in The Daemons, requiring last-minute rewrites to a story already in production. I think Hulke effectively tried to head off this kind of criticism by obtaining the church’s blessing for Doctor Who.
I also think he was keen to show the scientific and social value of the series because The Making of Doctor Who had originally been conceived by science-fiction writer George Hay in light of the success of two books published in the US: The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry (1968), and The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 by Jerome Agel (1970). These were both aimed at adults. Subsequent editions of the Star Trek book sought to reach more widely than fans of science-fiction by claiming to be,
“The book on how to write for TV! … The only book of its kind! The complete history of a top TV series — how a television show is conceived, written, sold and produced.”
The book on 2001 also took a broad view, digging into the ideas in and related to the film — at once making-of and quest for meaning. Jerome Agel had form in this, having previously worked with Marshall McLuhan on both The Medium is the Message and War and Peace in the Global Village, as well as cowriting I Seem to Be a Verb with Buckminster Fuller.
Hulke, I think, fancied some of this chin-stroking stuff. His final, short chapter, “The Shape of Things to Come”, shares some hints about that might be coming up in future stories, hinting that the Doctor might recover the use of his TARDIS. But the title of the chapter is from HG Wells, a 1933 novel — then a film — that laid out a future history spanning hundreds of years, in some ways a kind of fictional sequel to his non-fiction A Short History of the World.
There’s something of this long view of history in Hulke’s approach to “The Travels of Doctor Who”, which is largely related by the Time Lords — who are very like the super-elites favoured by Wells.
George Hay was, like Wells, interested in the idea of using fiction as a kind of blueprint for the future. I recently wrote about the book he edited, The Disappearing Future (1970).
So all of this stuff went into the mix, and I think helps explain the structure. But the result is not very much about the actual making-of Doctor Who. The cover, showing a photo of Jon Pertwee and a Sea Devil, is from a TV story that had only finished being shown on TV on 1 April 1972; the book was published just over two weeks later. It promises Doctor Who of the immediate now but that isn’t what this book is.
It also isn’t exactly a how-to guide for wannabe writers or crew. There’s no tacit encouragement to readers to try and get into the industry, no tips for young readers who might write their own adventures. That’s notable given Hulke ran a course for writers, had edited two editions of the Writers’ Guide for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and would go on to write the hugely influential guide Writing for Television in the Seventies.
But I’ve spoken to a whole load of people who now work in TV and publishing for whom this book lit a spark. For them, it was a blueprint for the future. Job done.
And then Terrance rewrote it, without Hulke, for Target. We’ll get into that in Part II — but maybe not for a few days as I’m off doing things this weekend.
Yet there is evidence that in writing Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks Terrance swapped notes with another writer, and as a result ensured continuity with a book from a completely different publisher.
As I reread this book, I was also conscious of Terrance in dialogue with himself, in that it is a novelisation of a TV story on which he had been script editor. He fixes some things here that he didn’t fix then, but he also avoids the temptation to tinker too much.
More than anything, I was conscious of pace. On TV, Planet of the Daleks is a fast-moving action adventure, full of incident and forward momentum — what a delight it was to watch some years ago with my young son. But in that haste, some elements of the plot that we rattle past don’t hold up if we stop for a proper look. The novelisation addresses some of this, but I think we can also see a similar fast-paced, forward momentum at the typewriter. There are things here I would fix...
As usual in this period, Terrance worked from the camera scripts rather than rewatching episodes as broadcast. We can see this from the opening page of the novelisation, where Jo helps the wounded Doctor. In the script, she presses a button in the TARDIS, a,
COUCH SLIDES OUT FROM THE WALL & HE FALLS ONTO IT.
It’s a “couch” in the novelisation, too (p. 7). But on TV, it’s a pull-out bed, part of a unit of cupboards and drawers. Once on it, the Doctor directs Jo to a “locker” above the bed, in which he stores the audio log for the TARDIS.
But in the script, the Doctor says the log is, “In a locker under … here”. Stage directions say he points to it, but don’t specify where this locker is or what it is under. Terrance rationalises this by placing the,
“locker in the base of the [TARDIS] control console” (p. 7).
A little later, the script specifies that Jo “goes to a locker”, presumably a different one, from which she “pulls out a suitcase” containing a change of clothes suitable for the conditions on the planet Spiridon, where they have just landed. Terrance makes this a,
“clothing locker in the wall” (p. 10).
On screen, we don’t see from where she gets her change of clothes. (Lockers are clearly de rigueur in a spaceship, as the Thal ship also has a wardrobe-like locker (p. 17), named as such in the script.)
The audio log recorder is more than a simple Dictaphone; we’re told here that it has eternal batteries and unlimited capacity (p. 7), making it a bit more sci-fi than ordinary secretarial equipment.
As per the TV story, the vegetation on Spiridon spits liquid at the TARDIS and at people. This is meant to be horridly visceral, and Terrance makes them “spongy, fleshy plants” (p. 10), with the results of this “rubbery spitting” (p. 20) at once “viscous” (p. 11), meaning thick and sticky, and readily familiar:
“The plant spat milky liquid at her” (p. 14).
I suspect a modern editor would cut either “fleshy” or “milky”; both is a little suggestive.
When the TARDIS is covered in rubbery plant spit, no air can get in from outside, leaving the Doctor at risk of suffocation. It is nuts that the TARDIS relies on external air, not least because the ship travels through the Space/Time Vortex where there isn’t any. But this jeopardy is all as per the TV story, the fault of writer Terry Nation and, er, his script editor at the time. Terrance at least has the Doctor here acknowledge that he shouldn’t have let his emergency air supply run low (p. 13). Bad captain of the ship!
The Doctor then tries the TARDIS doors which, because of the rubbery spit outside,
“yielded but would not give way” (p. 18).
This is a rare example of Terrance employing the wrong word, as “yielded” means to stop resisting. (Writer Jonathan Morris suggests “yielded a little” would work better.) There’s something similar when the Thals first see the TARDIS:
“they realised that the tall, oblong shape was the ‘Space-Craft’ they were seeking” (p. 19).
Why would a space-faring crew capitalise and hyphenate “spacecraft” as if it were some exotic new concept? ETA: My pal Dave Owen suggests that the quotation marks are there to emphasise how unlike a spaceship the TARDIS seems to these Thals. Hmm, maybe.
I love the word “oblong”, too, but it means a two-dimensional shape. The TARDIS is, roughly, cuboid or a rectangular prism. A more apposite word is “box”, which would also convey limited size.
We’re told early on that,
“Jo had often heard the Doctor say that the TARDIS was invulnerable to outside attack” (p. 10).
This invulnerability is restated on p. 124, this time not as something Jo has heard but as fact care of the author. Terrance should have known better from TV stories on which he was script editor. For example, the TARDIS is destroyed in The Mind Robber (1968). It has only just reassembled itself when, in the opening moments of The Invasion, missiles are launched at it. The Doctor desperately works the controls to move his ship out of the way, surely because he doesn’t expect the TARDIS to survive the encounter.
In Death to the Daleks (1974), again written by Nation and script edited by Terrance, the TARDIS is subject to eternal attack by a sentient city, which drains away the ship’s energy — the Doctor then struggling to open the door of the TARDIS is a direct echo of what happens here. In the very next story Terrance was to novelise, Pyramids of Mars (1975), a psychic projection of Sutekh is able to enter the TARDIS. In novelising that, he didn’t — or wasn’t able to — amend the lines here. He moved forward, not back.
I’m not the only person to nitpick such stuff. Based on my estimated lead time of 7.5 months, Terrance wrote this novelisation in March 1976. The following month, he received a letter from fan Richard Landen listing errors in the original version of The Making of Doctor Who (1972), in the hope that these could be corrected for the revised edition — Terrance’s next writing assignment. On 29 April, he was the guest of the newly formed Doctor Who Appreciation Society at Westfield College in London. As Jeremy Bentham reported in the fanzine TARDIS in July,
“The evening commenced with a slightly nervous former script-editor explaining that he was often dubious about talking to dedicated Dr Who fans, since they tended to know more about the show than he did.” (Vol. 1, no. 8, p. 8.)
Soon, this scrutiny would change the way Terrance approached his novelisations.
For the time being, we can see other influences on the novelisation of Planet of the Daleks. Terrance describes the jungle of Spiridon, with its varied flora and fauna, as “one gigantic beast” (p. 9). That idea of a whole ecosystem being a single, complex lifeform was relatively new; Robert Poole suggests in his book Earthrise that it’s a consequence of the space age, and people — starting with the crew of Apollo 8 in 1968 — seeing the disc of the Earth for the first time.
Real space travel seems to inform Terrance’s description of the Thal spaceship, too. In the script for Episode One, stage directions say it is has a “HULL AND FINS” but is,
SHAPED RATHER MORE LIKE A GUIDED MISSILE THAN ANYTHING WE HAVE SEEN IN U.S. SPACE MISSIONS … A DESIGN THAT SHOULD APPEAR STRANGE AND ALIEN TO EARTH.
Terrance doesn’t use the analogy of a missile:
“The ship was small and stubby, vaguely cigar-shaped. Hull and fins were badly damaged” (p. 14).
The hull is, he says, “picked out in blue and gold” (ibid). The script describes, simply, an “interior”. But Terrance has Jo explore the “nose-cone” and “flight deck” (p. 15). Nation wanted the ship to be alien and unfamiliar; Terrance made it seem a more like a real, contemporary rocket — something readers could easily visualise.
The book is peppered with analogies that do something similar, likening the strange, sci-fi elements to things readers would know. The prone Doctor at the start of the story is like an effigy on a Crusader’s tomb (p. 10) — not just any stone effigy, but a heroic knight. Jo likens the alien temple she finds to something from Brazil (p. 11). The exposure of an invisible Dalek is like something from a children’s “magic” drawing book (p. 25).
Jo later hides from a Dalek behind an instrumental panel, where there is a,
“gap, rather like that between a sofa and a wall” (p. 52).
That is, of course, exactly how many readers would respond to seeing Daleks when watching Doctor Who. The enormous ventilation shaft in the Dalek base is like a “chimney” — a word used several times — from which the Doctor emerges like a cork out of a bottle (p. 76). The Thals behave, at one point, like children in a playground (p. 84), while the Doctor’s efforts to recover a bomb from between massed ranks of Daleks is,
“like a ghastly slow-motion football game” (p. 116).
This is a simple, quick means to convey meaning to younger readers — the intended audience of these books. But I think it also serves to make the events seen on screen a bit less strange and scary.
That’s not to say this is a wholly bowlderised version. On screen we’re told twice in dialogue that the Thals are on a “suicide mission”. The word “suicide” appears much more frequently in the novelisation, and not only in reference to the Thals. At the end of the story, Terrance gives Jo a moment to acknowledge the earlier “self-sacrifice” of brave Wester (p. 123), whereas on TV his death is a relatively quick, sudden shock and then we move on, without a backward thought.
Wester and the other Spiridons are invisible, which on screen makes for some fun visuals as stuff floats about via the magic of roughly fringed yellow-screen. Terrance makes the scenes — the un-scenes — with these invisible people suspenseful and involving; Jo’s first encounter with them (p. 17) is deftly, atmospherically told, and more tense than the TV version.
The Daleks insist that the Spiridons wear big furry coats to make them visible. Terrance, working from the script, doesn’t mention the colour (p. 46); on screen, they are a distinctive shade of purple. Wester abandons his coat to go unseen when he attacks the Daleks (p. 104). The implication, surely, is that he attacks them naked — but Terrance doesn’t spell this out.
Well, no, that might not be appropriate. Yet we’re told that the Doctor “cursed fluently in a Martian” (p. 109), and when our heroes succeed in one part of their mission,”,
“Jo and the Doctor joined the jubilant Thals in an orgy” (p. 100)
All right, it’s an “orgy of hand-shaking and back-slapping”. But is that really the appropriate word?
Many of the more technical words used here — “allotrope” (p. 47), “hermetically” (p. 86), the frequent use of “catwalk” and “arsenal” in the final part of the story — are as per the script. But Terrance adds some of his own: “flush” (p. 52), meaning to be fitted perfectly, or the way confused Daleks “milled about” (p. 66 and p. 104).
The young Thal called Latep, a potential romantic interest for Jo, is introduced as a,
“tall muscular man with a fresh open face” (p. 45).
That word is used again — on p. 81 it’s a “cheerful open face”. Terrance later employed “open” to describe the Doctor, again as a synonym for young.
Then there’s Terrance’s idiosyncratic approach to capitalisation, which we have seen before. Here, that includes Space/Time Vortex (p. 7), the study of Space Medicine and the threat of Patrol (both p. 16), “Space-Craft” (in quotation marks, p. 19), Time (p. 21), Command Centre (p. 35), Thal Communications (p. 44), and Galaxy (p. 78).
The Daleks on Spiridon are led variously by a Dalek Commander (p. 42), Dalek Expedition Commander (p. 84) and Expedition Commander (p. 108) — all the same single Dalek. His subordinate is the Dalek Scientist (p. 84), aka the Dalek Chief Scientist (pp. 93-4). But there’s no capital letter for the Dalek scientific section (p. 42).
The Expedition Commander answers to the Dalek Supreme (p. 108) from Dalek Supreme Command (p. 44), who we’re told here — but not in the TV version — is second only to the Emperor (p. 109). That’s surely Terrance recalling something of the Doctor’s encounter with the Dalek Emperor in The Evil of the Daleks (1967), a story repeated on TV just as he joined the production team of Doctor Who. But I think it is also doing something with the lore of the Daleks, to which I will return in a moment.
Taron is a Thal doctor, lower case (p. 19), for all that Space Medicine is up. The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver is also lower case, as is the “some kind of pterodactyl” identified by Taron (p. 83), who seems to know a lot about the history of life on Earth, given that the Thals think it is a legend, not a real place (p. 16). Terrance also hyphenates “wild-life” (p. 86).
The Thals are equipped with the latest futuristic kit: plastic beaker, plastic notebook and plastic carton (p. 17), plastic cape (p. 19), plastic box of food concentrates (p. 22), plastic wrapping for bombs (p. 42), and plastic rope (p. 75). On Earth, most plastic is derived from fossil fuels, whether gas or petroleum. The implication, then, is that oil is abundant on Skaro. Why, then, do the Daleks employ static electricity?
Terrance also tells us a bit more about Thal culture; they prepare their “rubbery cubes” of food (p. 22) on “tiny atomic-powered stoves”.
“Soon they were all washing down the tough, chewy food-concentrates with delicious hot soup” (p. 78).
It’s characteristic, I think, that what Terrance adds to this suspenseful, thrilling story, is a bit where they have a nice meal.
The Thals aren’t exactly the most liberated bunch. Rebec, the sole Girl One, adds little to the story beyond aggravating Taron, because being in love with her means he can’t think straight. That’s in the TV version, but Terrance doesn’t exactly improve things by having Rebec “sobbing with fear” (p. 67) as they all escape from the Daleks, and then again on p. 79, when the Doctor dispatches Jo to console her.
That said, the male Thals are also under pressure here. Terrance uses these moments to underline that the Doctor is a kind and canny hero: he makes allowances for Vaber’s rudeness because he knows the man is tired and lashing out (p. 21); when he sees that Codal needs cheering up, he thanks him for earlier bravery (p. 38). The Doctor is shrewd, but also takes time to form an opinion — such as when he acknowledges to himself that he,
“knew too little of the situation on Spiridon to form a proper judgment” (pp. 28-9)
There’s a fair bit added here about positive thinking. The Doctor is “cheerful and confident” (p. 107) as he heads into danger, and “as always, making the best of things” (p. 28). He tells the Thals, in a sequence not in the TV version, that they must guard against self-doubt — the “enemy within” (p. 84).
Terrance underlines other heroic aspects of the Doctor. For example, when running away from the Daleks at one point, we are told his route is not “completely at random” (p. 55), but purposefully leading him and his friends back to the lift so they can escape. We’re told that there is nothing the Doctor can do to save a Thal called Marat; even so, the Doctor is compassionate, with an “anguished look” (p. 60). When the bomb they need falls into a pit of 10,000 Daleks, the Doctor hurries after it “without hesitation” (p. 115) and emerges, triumphant, by climbing up the side of a Dalek then performing a “flying leap” (p. 116).
Sadly, Jo isn’t similarly bolstered in the prose version of the story. She’s described simply as “very small and very pretty” (p. 7), and her smallness comes in useful several times. She’s loyal and brave, as in the TV story, but all the novelisation really adds is that she has a dream about a holiday on the French Riviera (p. 85).
This is a rare hint of Jo’s life outside the events seen on screen. We learn all sorts of incidental details about the Doctor, too. For example, while he is down among the 10,000 Daleks,
“Talk about Daniel in the lions’ den, he thought” (p. 115).
So he’s familiar with the Old Testament. At this point in his lives, the Doctor has not been hot-air ballooning (p. 66). He cups his hands over his ears because of the changing pressure in the lift (p. 37), a rare example of this incarnation of the Doctor not having superhuman powers.
Yet it is uncharacteristic of this Doctor to be clumsy, stepping on and breaking the modified audio log recorder that proved so useful a weapon against the Daleks (p. 51). That weapon is possible because the Daleks imprison the Doctor and the Thal called Codal without “really” searching them. As well as the recorder, the Doctor has his sonic screwdriver and Codal an atomic-powered motor (p. 41). It is as per the TV version, but not typical of Daleks, and Terrance makes no attempt to explain it away.
By contrast, when a Dalek doesn’t immediately blast the Doctor, we’re told that it was “astonished” (p. 55) by his sudden appearance. That makes the moment more credible. There is more in this vein when the Doctor and his friends escape from a locked room (by floating up the chimney) and,
“The astonishment of the Daleks was almost ludicrous” (p. 66).
I think Terrance meant that their astonishment was funny, with the Daleks in “utter confusion”. But “ludicrous” suggests foolish, unbelievable. “Hilarious” or “surreal” might be better; “ludicrous” is not quite on the mark.
When the Doctor returns to this locked room later in the story, he notes the ruins of the Dalek anti-gravitational disc, but there’s no reference to the Dalek that tumbled down the chimney with it, or the other Daleks it crashed into. Did those Daleks survive — or is there a rank of Dalek that does the tidying up, and prioritised clearing the bodies before tackling the wreckage?
We glean other bits of Dalek lore here. The Doctor, for example, knows they build,
“bases underground wherever possible [as] daylight and open air meant nothing to them, and they flourished best in a controlled underground environment” (p. 37),
This is new information, but consistent with the bunker from Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, which (as we saw) Terrance linked to the city seen in the Daleks’ first TV story. The Doctor also refers here to the“first Dalek war” (p. 20), ie the events of that story, but there is no asterisk to “See Doctor Who and the Daleks”. On TV, that was simply “the Dalek war.”
In adding an ordinal, perhaps Terrance simply meant to differentiate the events of that story from the conflict going on around this book — ie the “space war” against Earth and Draconia. But I think adding “first” implies a series of wars, the Daleks a recurring menace in considerable force. It’s not what we’ve seen in TV adventures, which tends to involve small numbers of Dalek in small-scale machinations.
My sense is that these lavishly illustrated annuals, printed on good quality paper to a high standard, had much longer lead times than prose-only novelisations on regular newsprint. That surely means that “icecano” was coined for the annual, before Terrance even started on this novelisation.
Somehow, the term was then shared with him. My guess is that Terry Nation, working on the annual and knowing that Terrance was going to novelise this story, suggested he use the word. It was Nation, then, who encouraged Terrance to join up terms and lore, building an expanded universe of the Daleks far more rich and spectacular than we could ever see on screen.
The irony is that, in Planet of the Daleks, Terrance made his own massive contribution to Dalek lore. His amended ending to Frontier in Space, in which the Doctor is shot by the Master, leaves our hero in no state to set the controls of the TARDIS in pursuit of the Dalek army. Instead, in Terrance’s version, he uses the telepathic circuits to ask his own people for help.
For the first time in their long history — to the best of our knowledge — the Time Lords intervene against the Daleks. In doing so, they help prevent a space war but spark a wholly different conflict. This is the start of the Time War…
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Thanks for reading, sharing and responding to these huge long posts about the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks. I am glad they are still popular, though they take a fair bit of time to research and write, and incur various expenses. With other pressures and commitments, and the freelance world a bit sparse, I can only justifying continuing with your kind support. So do please show your appreciation…
Next time, more Mac collaboration (or not) with The Making of Doctor Who, a book that is very largely about anything but the making of Doctor Who…
