Season 3: The Colour of Monsters
The colour of monsters is gween.
Terrance Dicks (1935–2019) was one of the most important creative figures in Doctor Who history. He was appointed Assistant Script Editor in 1968 and was promoted to Script Editor the following year, starting on the story The Invasion. He served in the position until 1974, serving essentially as showrunner of the Jon Pertwee era, and finishing his run with Pertwee’s final story Planet of the Spiders. He is credited with writing five on-screen Doctor Who stories, The War Games (with Malcolm Hulke), Robot, The Horror of Fang Rock, State of Decay and The Five Doctors.
In 1973, Dicks was commissioned by Target books to write novelisations of Doctor Who stories, starting with Spearhead from Space (novelised as Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion). He wrote 64 novelisations for the main range, finishing in 1990 with The Space Pirates.
Dicks also wrote some of our favourite Doctor Who reference books, including The Making of Doctor Who (1972, with a second edition in 1976), The Doctor Who Monster Book (1975) and The Second Doctor Who Monster Book (1977).
In 1991, after the cancellation of Doctor Who, Virgin Books launched a new series of original Doctor Who novels called The New Adventures, and Dicks was chosen to write the second book, Timewyrm: Exodus. He would go on to write two more: Blood Harvest and Shakedown. In 1997, he was commissioned by BBC Books to launch a whole new series of original novels with The Eight Doctors. He continued to write Doctor Who fiction well into the twenty-first century. His final story, Save Yourself, was published posthumously in The Target Storybook in 2019.
Season 3 of 500 Year Diary is our own small way of expressing our gratitude for Dicks’s contribution to our favourite show. Over six episodes, we discuss all five of his on-screen stories and Timewyrm: Exodus. What’s great about his scripts, his characters, his sense of pace? What elements does he bring to the show, and to the character of the Doctor? And what — ultimately — is the colour of monsters, and why?