Doctor Who scriptwriter and author of more than 50 novelisations based on the TV series
Terrance Dicks, who has died aged 84, had a long association with the popular
BBC series Doctor Who. He was the show’s script editor from 1968 to 1974, wrote numerous episodes, and adapted more than 50 of the television stories into bestselling novelisations. Published by Target Books, they could reasonably be claimed to have inspired legions of children to take up reading in the 1970s and 80s. A great number of those children became writers too, with Neil Gaiman, Mark Gatiss and Paul Cornell among those acknowledging his influence on them.
The books captured the imagination and excitement of the TV scripts and their prose was ambitious yet accessible, broadening the vocabulary of their young readers – the Doctor’s pockets, for example, were “capacious”, and “wheezing, groaning” is the closest anyone has got to accurately describing the noise made by the arrival of the Tardis.