Category: FICTIONAL!!

Happy Birthday Doctor Who!

It is of course Doctor Who day, 23^rd November, 56 years since “the day after Kennedy was assassinated” and the BBC showed the first episode of a ludicrously-improbable programme about a mysterious alien who lives inside an uncontrollable time machine housed inside a rackety old police box.

It’s the sort of concept that can only really be met either with great success or huge derision – so too is regeneration, and the notion of a terrifying master race with sink-plunger arms and who can’t even get upstairs (for their first 25 years anyway). Luckily for millions of fans, not to mention rather a large number of actors, writers, directors, producers, designers, etc, it was option (A) great success.

The rest, as they say, is history.

(Or science-fiction. It depends on which story you’re watching.)

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So anyway… and in similar vein to ‘The Three Terrances’… this is another Production Notes column (not really) the earliest surviving example in fact (not really) from the 29^th October 1963 edition of the BBC’s in-house magazine (very specific but… no, not really) teasing us with what we might expect when Doctor Who finally lands.

Penned perhaps by Russell T Lambert, or possibly Veri T Davies, and with less than a month to go before Kennedy’s assassination, here it is…

Terrance Dicks has died.

I caught the news just in a passing comment, just as it broke, on my Twitter feed at lunchtime – and by the time I returned to the internet at teatime, there was tribute after tribute to a man who, in no small way, encouraged a generation (my generation) to become readers. People recalling the first book of his they’d read, or a particular episode of Who he’d written, or an occasion when they’d met and spoken to him.

In recent years, he had become a delightful presence as interviewee on the Doctor Who DVD range, sometimes making the self-effacing claim that his only goal as script-editor was to ensure the BBC had something to show instead of the testcard for 25 minutes on a Saturday afternoon. I’m sure that’s not quite true, but even if it is it almost goes without saying that Terrance, was far too professional to have ever let that happen.

Other than that, I don’t really know what to say. It would be absurd of me to claim floods of tears for a man I’ve never even met; but on the other hand, to know that suddenly he isn’t around anymore feels like a very sad thing indeed.

A few years ago, I put together a series of spoof/‘What If…’ Production Notes, taking Russell T’s famous post-millenium column in the Doctor Who Magazine, and imagining that it had been around back in the days of the classic era too. For the November 1983 issue of DWM, as the show reached its twentieth anniversary, I reasoned that while the BBC was celebrating Doctor Who, Doctor Who ought to be celebrating Terrance Dicks!

So, if only to prevent WordPress having to show the testcard in order to fill up the rest of this page, here it is…