The
first edition of The Making of Doctor Who, published by Piccolo in 1972, was credited — on the front cover — to Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks. The title page then reversed the names, suggesting an equity of credit. Yet, as we saw last time, I think Hulke did most if not all of the writing and took 75% of the royalties.
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; Wilson is credited as Head of Series and Serials in the first edition of the Making of, so the error was made by Mac Hulke.]
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 it is 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 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 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.
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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.
