I can distinctly remember buying The Five Doctors paperback; it was the Saturday before The Five Doctors was to be screened during Children in Need 1983 and I was astonished to see the book available before it was broadcast.

The bookshop, now long gone, was in the Harvey Nichols end of Sloane Street, Knightsbridge, and I recall being a little bemused that the Sloane Ranger (remember them?), in front of me in the queue at the till, paid for her book – a measly pound – with a credit card! How times change…

Presently, I was the proud owner of a first edition paperback copy with its silver foil cover. However, I couldn’t read it yet it as I didn’t want to have the story spoiled when I watched The Five Doctors the following Friday.

I kept the book, but it remained unread for 38 years. Until now…

There is always a bit of nostalgia picking up an old Target novelisation; if I ‘read’ any books these days, they tend to be the audio book version as, as with Big Finish or podcasts, one can do other things while listening, but an actual printed book demands one’s complete obedience and an accommodation of time.

Thus, just like the early Eighties when I devoured as many Target books as I could find, I found the time and gave my obedience to Terrance Dicks’ The Five Doctors. There was one major difference this time: I now need reading glasses.

But enough of my rambling. What of the book itself?

The Five Doctors is a fairly simple tale and Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of his own television story tends to align itself very tightly: collected characters make their way to Rassilon’s tomb and watch the ‘baddie’ get thwarted by his own corrupted desire, and then everyone goes home.

But the longer one thinks about it, The Five Doctors is Doctor Who’s version of Raiders of the Lost Ark (according to The Big Bang Theory). Remove the Doctor(s) and the main plot is still intact as it’s the Master that does all the legwork. The first three Doctors’ sequences are of how they travel into Rassilon’s tomb avoiding adversity and the Fifth Doctor is there to ultimately confront The Player so he can explain his plans; The Player being the name Terrance Dicks gives to the unknown figure, at the beginning of the book, who is carrying out the Death Zone kidnappings.

Oh alright, I’ll concede that without the presence of A Doctor, the fate that befalls The Player would have been served to the Master, but that is the only pivotal moment I can see. Please feel free to put me straight in the comments section…

However, being an anniversary story, it was all about getting a good selection of the Doctor’s past companions and monsters on screen and that can only be hung on either a very simple story or a very complicated one. On television, and for the sake of mass appeal, it has to be simple; which it most certainly is. Even so, the Daleks, K9, Jamie, Zoe, Captain Yates, Liz Shaw, Roman,a and the Fourth Doctor (obviously) make very brief appearances. It is a different situation with The Day of the Doctor as they didn’t try to do the same thing as The Five Doctors. Day only had a pinch of nostalgia; not a bucket full.

But that’s not to say that The Five Doctors book is bland: there are instances of the macabre. There is a rather unpleasant passage where a charred dead body is struck by lightning, “making it dance and twitch like some ghastly parody of life.” See also the grim detail of the Raston Warrior Robot’s slaughter of the Cybermen where we are treated to descriptions of arms and heads being violently amputated. Substitute Cybermen with a troop of humans and that becomes quite gory. Not to mention the horrific punishment meted out at the end; just think of the mind-boggling enormity of that fate and that the First Doctor encourages The Player into it!

There are some extra moments here and there. For example, there is a small description of New London – London rebuilt after The Daleks’ Invasion of Earth – where Susan Campbell nee Foreman now lives and has three children. Although, it is strange that Susan gets this big build-up. The First Doctor treks to Rassilon’s tomb, within the Dark Tower, with Tegan. Susan, after a small altercation with a Dalek, becomes surplus to requirements and ends up staying in the TARDIS, along with Turlough.

A special mention for an unintended moment of comedy. While the Third Doctor is trying to escape the time scoop in Bessie, the Doctor is described as “streaking down the road”. Oo’er missus… but it was nice to see my favourite often used Terrance Dicks description “crashing to attention”, but here it wasn’t a UNIT soldier but a Gallifreyan guard.

When we arrive at the final section – all protagonists meeting at Rassilon’s tomb – we are treated to a segment that harks back to The Three Doctors where the usual bickering resumes between the original trio, but the subject of immortality rears its head. Similarly, when the Fifth Doctor confronts The Player he exclaims, “Immortality? That’s impossible, even for Time Lords.” Nearly four decades later and that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore: we now have the Immortals (Can You Hear Me?) and a Doctor that is now part of that happy band (The Timeless Children). It’s difficult not to think of these things, when viewing or reading classic Who, now that The Timeless Child’s genie is out of its bottle.

Nevertheless, this Terrance Dicks’ novelisation is an easy read and that’s not a criticism. If it seems I’m rubbishing the story, I don’t intend to. I found it entertaining, but the novelisation is very limited in what it can do. If Terrance made this a more coherent and substantial novelisation, there is the danger that it would divert greatly from the original and the traditional Target books didn’t do that. It’s a story designed to celebrate the 20th anniversary on television. That gives this novelisation a bit of baggage.

Having said that, Terrance does give the Fourth Doctor a more coherent exit; returning him and Romana to the punt on the river Calm and not just replicating the most aligned piece of film that could be salvaged from Shada.

Of course, Target books were aimed at a young age group; I read most of my Targets from the age of 15 and Terrance Dicks’ simple prose helped in so much that I could get through quite a few books in a short space of time. Having Dicks’ name on the cover always meant that I would remain engaged.

The only other writer – that I have experienced – that is in the same camp is Ian Fleming: clear, concise, and keeping the action flowing.

I am very VERY grateful for the Target novelisations and the Terrance Dicks ones especially. Not only did they provide an insight into the vintage stories that I thought I would never see (that old cliche), they greatly improved my spelling, which was pretty abysmal during my school years. If only I’d started the read them while a little younger, my English grades might have been a bit better.

Doctor Who: The Five Doctors is available to read as part of the anthology title, The Essential Terrance Dicks: Volume Two.

The Doctor Who Target novelisations hold a very special and specific place in my heart. I’ve long been aware of what they mean to us as a community, especially to the contemporary fans of the classic series for whom they filled in the blanks, either by committing the stories to the memory banks of history or by introducing them to fans who joined the series along the way. For many, without readily available VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray releases, they were in fact the definite article, you might say.

For me as a fan visiting these stories for the first time when delving into the classic series, they were a great written or audio form for me to tuck into, to make sure my long journeys into work weren’t wasted. Later, even more importantly, they’ve been a great aid to go to sleep to (as a scandalous as it may at first sound) in times when that wasn’t (and sometimes isn’t) an easy thing to do when working irregular hours. It’s a habit my partner has developed too and we both owe many hours of rest to Terrance Dicks’ calming prose. 

For Terrance Dicks, who is the central subject of the series of reviews the Doctor Who Companion is providing, these books may well be his crowning glory. For the man who wrote and produced many of the Second, Third, and Fourth Doctor’s greatest adventures and even brought us Doctor Who’s glorious multi-Doctor 20th anniversary special, this is saying something. But Dicks’ prolific spell of Target writing projects not only provided these notable long-lasting accounts which mean so much to so many, but, in the process, also introduced many young and previously reluctant fans to reading for the first time and arguably inspired so many of them to go into writing themselves, influencing so much of what the show means right up until the present day. 

Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang was written at the peak of this flurry of creativity, with the great man producing multiple year on year at this stage. Based on Dicks’ close friend Robert Holmes’ Season 14 finale, and placed directly within arguably the most successful run of the show’s long history, it can be suggested that Dicks’ didn’t have a too much to do to make this an excellent story in novel form. While it’s true that the dialogue is very similar to what we see on screen and that the plot rarely deviates either, this is no bad thing. The dialogue is exactly what makes that story work best in its original form and to take the view that this is a fault on Uncle Terrance’s part would be terribly unfair. To ignore the importance of Dicks’ deceptively straightforward and incredibly readable prose’s impact on making the story work within the change of medium would also be a huge mistake. 

He throws you deep into the story from the off at breakneck pace and highlights every fantastic character, as well as their voices, beautifully and with impeccable ease. Many characters jump to life including Chang, Mr. Sin, Casey, Magnus Greel, PC Quick, and, of course, the real stars of the story, Henry Gordon Jago and Professor George Litefoot, as fully formed here as they were in the tenth or eleventh series of their successful and prolific spin off. The Doctor and Leela are both keenly realised and written too. You laugh with them, are scared with them, and excited to see what will happen next, as much as you’d ever want from any Doctor Who adventure.

Recent years have led to a reappraisal of this story in some quarters due to perceived stereotyping and for casting a Caucasian in an Asian role. While I don’t want to take the poisoned chalice which comes with this unwinnable debate, I would be remiss to not at least discuss how this may affect the book or perception of it. If you take issue with the serial, you’ll most likely have similar grievances with the book. Written in the same calendar year the serial aired, it is as unaware of the issues raised against it many years later as its source material is. As in the original story, most of the verbal indiscretion comes from the perceptions of the Victorian characters, which Chang sends up similarly dryly. I’ve always had a soft spot for Chang in this story, more sympathetic than I feel he’s been appreciated for and usually the most intelligent person in the room, as well as being one of the most three-dimensional characters of the piece. Unfortunately, the other Asian characters are far less fleshed out and the book doesn’t attempt to rectify this either. A more contemporary adaption may attempt to juxtapose favourable Asian characters into the story for balance which this certainly does not, and some of the prose falls into similar trappings of the time through some outdated language. If you’re looking for antidote to 1970s accepted norms against modern 21st Century values, you won’t find it here, though for obvious reasons ‘yellow face’ at least is not a factor. 

On screen The Talons of Weng-Chiang is held by its fans in high regard and the book deserves its place as an equally well-regarded adaption of it. Without needing to improve or adapt the story as dramatically to make the pages turn as he does elsewhere, this was perhaps an easier project for Dicks to complete than one of the less exciting TV adventures but that certainly didn’t stop him providing us with something special here. At 140 pages, there’s more than enough material to hold the interest and keep the story going and he clearly enjoys himself as he does so. 

In 2021, this novel has been long out of print in paperback. However, due to numerous historical printings, it is usually fairly readily available on eBay at competitive prices. It was also published as a limited-edition hardcover, reportedly just printing 3,500 copies, though for obvious reasons this will set you back a fair bit more, if you ever in fact find one. It’s been republished as part of a hardcover anthology, The Essential Terrance Dicks: Volume 2, which is certainly more affordable and less limited. It was recorded for audiobook in 2013, read excellently by the excellent Henry Gordon Jago himself, Christopher Benjamin. It’s available in this format on CD or on Audible, both individually and as part of ‘The Second History Collection’, along with similar gems like Doctor Who and the War Games, The Highlanders, Black Orchid, and The Gunfighters.

Entering a new phase of our lives, my partner and I still listen to a good old Target of a night when going to sleep. When pregnant women listen to white noise, classical music, or whale song, it is thought to have positive effects on the infant inside of them. Whether my partner has considered the positive or negative effects of listening to a Target novel on our unborn child as she rests, I’m not sure, but from my perspective, I can only see it as being a very good thing.

Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang is available to read as part of the anthology title, The Essential Terrance Dicks: Volume Two.

Horror of Fang Rock was a famously fraught production, commissioned as a late replacement script and filmed on cramped sets, tension hanging in the air like coastal fog as Tom Baker and director Paddy Russell rubbed each other up the wrong way. But despite these unpromising conditions, a true classic was somehow delivered, a masterpiece of suspense that ranks as a highlight even among the many other wonderful stories of its era.

So does the novel rank as a classic in the Target range? Well, the honest answer is no. Published in 1978, the book fell in the period when Terrance Dicks was knocking out novelisations at a phenomenal rate, leaving him little time to embellish or expand upon what had been depicted on screen. This is therefore a very straightforward retelling of the adventure, with a short prologue the only significant addition. In fairness to him, that wasn’t an unreasonable approach in that far distant pre-home video era when these books were one of the few ways to relive Doctor Who stories, and it was one I was perfectly happy with as a young reader who handed over his 70p for a copy (likely in WHSmith in Hull, but I can’t be sure…).

As has been remarked elsewhere, many people who voted in the Twitter poll that determined the list of books for these The Essential Terrance Dicks volumes were surely basing their choices on the televised version, rather than the actual novel. Several fans will feel there were superior examples of Dicks’ work that didn’t make the cut. But given that it’s such a darned good story and that it’s based on one of his own scripts, I’d argue Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock is deserving of its place.

Isolated settings have always been a favourite in Doctor Who and locations don’t come much more cut off than a lighthouse off the Channel coast. Fang Rock, the prologue tells us, has an evil reputation as a place said to drive men mad. Dicks establishes the setting and characters with his usual economy, never wasting a word but telling us all we need to know about the three-man crew in a few pages.

He may have been less than thrilled when given the brief by Robert Holmes to come up with a story set in a lighthouse, but it’s easy to imagine old Terrance warming to the task as the well-worked plot fell into place, chuckling as he came up with lines for Reuben, the seen-it-all veteran keeper (“One look at the sky and I know when fog’s coming. And today was clear as clear. It isn’t natural…”).

People with a sharper analytical eye than me have examined how Horror of Fang Rock demonstrates a mastery of structure and that essential Doctor Who formula, but there can be few stories that rattle along quite as well as this one. The characters may be stereotypes (stubborn old Reuben, young and keen Vince, self-interested capitalist Palmerdale) but each has their part to play and besides, there’s little time to dwell on that when the tale is so enjoyable.

A couple of suitably melodramatic elements in this Edwardian tale made me smile. If anyone ever comes up with a league table of the all-time greatest Doctor Who info-dumps, this instance of Skinsale explaining things to Palmerdale they both already know will take some beating:

“I kept my part of the bargain. I gave you secret advance information about the Government’s financial plans. I was a fool and a knave but I did it. You tore up my gambling IOUs – now we’re even!”

Glorious. And there are parts of the story which demonstrate the programme’s somewhat contrasting approach to female characters in this period. Palmerdale’s secretary Adelaide has little to do except sob and wail, even fainting in shock at the terrible events playing out before her. Meanwhile, Leela fearlessly takes on all comers, thinking nothing of threatening Adelaide’s employer with a knife and a vivid turn of phrase:

“Silence, fat one. You will do as the Doctor instructs, or I will cut out your heart.”

But perhaps I’m being unkind in highlighting elements like this from a book written over 40 years ago. The chills the story delivers, exemplified by Reuben seemingly rising from the dead to bring terror to the stranded souls that remain on the windswept island, are real enough in any era. This slim volume may not be a Target classic, but no one did this stuff better than Terrance Dicks.

Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock is available to read as part of the anthology title, The Essential Terrance Dicks: Volume Two.

There’s a wonderful bit at the beginning of Pyramids of Mars that I’ll rave about to just about anyone who’ll listen. As Sarah Jane wanders into the TARDIS console room, wearing Victoria’s old dress, she comes face-to-not-quite-face with a ruminating Tom Baker, who peers anxiously off to the left of the fourth wall and mutters “The Earth isn’t my home, Sarah. I’m a Time Lord”, with all the brooding melancholy of a Shakespearian ham. Not to be outdone, Sarah wraps a shawl around her head, inclines it like a fallen Madonna in a Renaissance painting, and replies “Oh, I know you’re a Time Lord”.

Assuming you’ve seen it, you’ll know why it’s funny. But it doesn’t work in print – as I’ve more or less demonstrated – and it’s not in the novelisation. Terrance Dicks is sadly no longer around to account for its omission, but we might second guess: Dicks knew, perhaps more so than any other Who writer, that sometimes what you leave out is far more important than what you put in. Not for him the untranslatable visual gags, the superfluous expansions of character, the plethora of extra scenes – not, at least, unless he deemed them absolutely necessary. Far better to tell your story and then get out before the tea’s had a chance to get cold.

But Pyramids (originally from the pen of Lewis Greifer, with substantial rewrites from Robert Holmes) is a tricky one to transcribe without getting into some of the history. Here was a tale that dealt not only with Egyptian mythology but which also had to establish an entire race of extraterrestrial superpowered beings that came to be worshipped as Gods: they had their own culture, technology, and a war between heroes and perhaps the greatest villain to grace the screens of 1970s Doctor Who (we could nitpick this until sundown, so let’s just agree he’s a mutual top five). Which is all very well unless you realise that Sutekh, masked and immobile but still – thanks largely to Gabriel Woolf’s sinister delivery – utterly terrifying, is difficult to render in book form, unless you happen to have Woolf hunched over your shoulder, whispering his lines aloud.

Dicks gets around it by slipping in a prologue. There is exposition aplenty in the dialogue between the Doctor and Sarah, and he’s sensible enough to leave it intact, but in two-and-a-bit pages he tells us everything we need to know about the Osirians [sic] and the Cain & Abel / Loki & Thor / Liam & Noel sibling rivalry that forms the centrepiece of their drama. It’s tight, and it’s simple, and it gets to the root of the conflict (envy, and unhealthy amounts of solitude) in a little under 700 words. Behind every successful man, it seems, there’s a jealous brother.

But what’s really interesting about the story is that the sibling relationship that underpins the Egyptian narrative is mirrored in its (relatively) contemporary setting. If Horus was the noble brother who refused to murder his own kin, leaving him instead imprisoned until he devised a means of getting out, it is left to the hapless Laurence to face the same dilemma, with catastrophic consequences – including, ultimately, the loss of his own life. It’s perhaps understandable that Baker’s Doctor, aloof and alien as he was, should treat such a moment with scorn, and it’s left to Sarah to provide the empathy that he clearly lacks, but for all its talk of curses and force fields and the will of Sutekh, this is ultimately a story about family, and the bonds they share and the price they pay for those bonds. History repeats, it seems: it has to, because nobody listens.

A lot happens in Pyramids, and most of it happens in an old Edwardian estate. It’s a story in which the Doctor takes on Satan, and wins, while Sarah Jane gets to (almost) blow up a rocket. They’ve even got that riddle about the two guards. There are disgruntled servants, crazed Egyptian fanatics, lumbering mummies, and a poacher who dies trying to be a hero. In the serial, he spends most of his screen time scampering through woodland or firing a shotgun through windows, with little or no reason given for his behaviour. In print, there’s a decent amount of filler about his history with the Scarman brothers, and even the visiting Dr Warlock. I mentioned superfluous character expansion, and this was apparently the exception that proves the rule: it’s clear that Dicks liked Ernie, and as a result so do we.

Other changes are more subtle. There’s a softening of the Doctor’s attitude when confronted with the corpse of Laurence Scarman; elsewhere some of the dialogue is tightened, or at least given more of a Dicksian sheen, if that’s a word.

Perhaps his most significant contribution is an awareness of what is arguable the story’s most important sequence – notably, when the Doctor takes Sarah Jane to a post-apocalyptic future to show what her what will happen if they don’t hang around and fix things. It’s shoehorned and almost out of character for both of them, but it ups the stakes, and Dicks weaves it nicely into the book’s epilogue.

Aside from that – and a conspicuous absence of wheezing and groaning – it’s all business as usual. There are more ellipses than are strictly necessary, but Dicks has the good sense not to insert breaks between every single scene (something Eric Saward really ought to have done in his abominable Resurrection novelisation), choosing instead to let the action flow naturally. Every adjective counts (Sarah’s fearful vision of ‘some heavily-moustached village policeman’ is a hoot) and every set piece is thick with tension. The result is an elegantly composed and keenly focused story that gets in, dispenses with a few mummies and the entire supporting cast, and then gets out again just before the Old Priory burns to the ground. It may have been a long time in that tunnel for Sutekh, but it’s a breakneck hundred-odd pages for the rest of us. I think I just might go and read it again.

Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars is available to read as part of the anthology title, The Essential Terrance Dicks: Volume Two.

The Time Lords send the Doctor and his companions back in time to Skaro just before the birth of the Daleks with the aim of preventing their creation, altering their development, or at least learning a weakness that could be exploited: anything to stop them becoming the dominant creature in the universe.

A plot we’re all familiar with; Genesis of the Daleks needs no introduction. Before the advent of multi-channel television and streaming services, it was one of the most (if not the most) repeated stories of Doctor Who. It was voted favourite story by readers of Doctor Who Magazine in 1998, is in the unique position of having an edited audio version released on vinyl by the BBC back in 1978, and was one of several stories repeated on television in a truncated 85 minute omnibus format. And of course, along with most stories from this era of Doctor Who, a Target novelisation by Terrance Dicks.

The book came out around the time Dicks was at his most prolific. Looking at the publication dates of the Target books, it appears Dicks was producing a novel a month around this time. Dicks wrote six of the 10 books published in 1976. Released in July, Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks followed its Season 12 stablemate Revenge of the Cybermen (published in May) and was rapidly followed by the Troughton classic, The Web of Fear (August). In case you were wondering, the other three Dick’s books published that year were adaptations of Terror of the Zygons (as Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster), Planet of the Daleks and Pyramids of Mars.

Coming in the middle of such prolific output, one would be forgiven for expecting Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks to be a rushed (dare I say hacked out?) job. How does Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks stand up 45 years on?

One thing I instantly noticed was the character interiority Dicks offers throughout this book. Sarah in particular benefits from this; we are on this adventure alongside her. Quite early on, she is separated from the Doctor and Harry when “buried beneath a pile of rapidly stiffening corpses”. You feel her sense of confusion, panic but with a gritty determination that won’t allow her to be overcome by it.

The backstory of Skaro really comes to the fore here. Reading about the rise of the scientific Elite in Kaled society rather than hearing about it in a few bits of dialogue gives the reader the space to ponder the ramifications of the power handed to Davros and his “Elite Corps”, a group of society’s leading scientists —  a technocratic elite, protected by heavy security.

Reading this today, one can’t help but notice that, as we continually use more advanced technology, the inner workings of which are beyond the comprehension of most, we find ourselves forced to cede to those with the most knowledge. We trust the computer programmers that create the code that drives everything we use from the Word Processor I’m using to write this review to the washing machine entering its spin cycle in the other room; we eagerly read news articles presented to us by an algorithm designed by teams of data scientists using the latest cutting-edge machine learning technology. Have we considered that any of these people could turn out to be Davroses? Megalomaniacs twisting technological advances for their own ends, rather than for the benefit of everyone?

Overall, this was a fine way to revisit the story. It gave me more admiration for Sarah Jane Smith and gave me something to think about regarding technological growth and the risks involved. Not bad for a “kids’ book” published nearly half a century ago.

Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks is available to read as part of the anthology title, The Essential Terrance Dicks: Volume Two.

The Target novelisation, Doctor Who and the Wheel in Space, more than nearly any other, is semi-legendary. It’s the almost lost book, most of the copies destroyed in a fire. Copies circulate on eBay for crazy amounts of money for a short TV tie-in novel (between £50 and £100, last time I looked). The big question is though – is it actually worth the money? Is it a good book, for all its notoriety?

Well, erm… here’s the thing. There are three kinds of novelisation in the Target range. Ones that somewhat radically re-imagine the source material (The Romans is a great example of this); those that are fairly faithful to the source, but attempt to bring in more depth of character and world-building (Dicks himself was great at in his Jon Pertwee novelisations); and then there’s the other sort. Not much better than the original script with a few “said the Doctor”s thrown in to make it coherent. This is largely that third sort. 

There are a few little bits of tidying and cleaning, the sort that Uncle Terrence just couldn’t help himself with (once a script editor, always a script editor). There are some extra lines of dialogue thrown in to better establish that the TARDIS is a model from a production line, rather than the Doctor’s own invention, as early TV stories tend to hint at. There’s some playing up of the strange results from the Doctor’s medical checkup, hinting at later continuity – i.e. the Doctor’s double heartbeat. That’s just about it, though. There aren’t even any significant removals, save perhaps Rudkin’s death in Episode Four, which is fairly striking on screen, but perhaps wouldn’t come over well on the page.

You’d think it would be a temptation to try and untangle the Cybermen’s ridiculously convoluted plot (destroy the laser, fix the laser, etc.) and there is a little of this. A few small clarifications as to why the Cybermen need the Wheel in the first place, but otherwise not really.

So, having established that this is a fairly literal rendering to page – is it worth reading? If this were like Dicks’ later novelisation of an existing (and not terribly good) story like Planet of the Giants, I’d say it absolutely isn’t. The Wheel in Space is missing, however. Despite its borderline incoherent plot, it still has a good atmosphere, especially in Episode One, before we reach the Wheel. In many ways, it feels like this story heralds later (and rather better) stories like The Ark in Space.

Aside from the fourth and sixth episodes, we simply can’t watch it ourselves. The novelisation is one of the only ways to experience the story from beginning to end without shifting between media. Is it possible that, given this, Dicks felt a responsibility to be as accurate as possible in this case? Maybe. I’d rather believe that than the easy assumption that it was just dashed off quickly to end the range and make a bit of easy money.

This book honestly isn’t worth what the scalpers on eBay are charging, so it’s wonderful that it’s back in print, and available again for those that would love to be able to read the whole range without breaking the bank.

Doctor Who and the Wheel in Space is available to read as part of the anthology title, The Essential Terrance Dicks: Volume One.

More often than not, when you’re a child, you don’t understand or even consider the significance of things. Take, for example, my Reception age daughter who is currently discovering the wacky madness of Sooty, Sweep, and Soo. She is aware that there was another friend of the trio before Richard Cadell, but that’s not important to her. Nor is it of any interest to her that Sooty is nearly 70 years old (and not even threadbare) nor that the character is the silent star of the longest running children’s programme in the world. She just enjoys the show for what it is: daft, funny, hilarious in places, and — most important of all — cosy.

Likewise, she knows that daddy’s fridge magnet of the man in the multi-coloured coat sporting blonde curly hair is called “The Doctor”. She also knows that an adjacent fridge magnet of the man in the brown suit, with spiky hair and specs is somehow also called “The Doctor”. She knows the odd thing on top of a bookshelf is a “Dalek” (she stomps around the house with arms outstretched shouting that she’s going to get us — even though she’s so far never even seen one in action), and that the swarm of blue boxes with lights on top dotted across other bookshelves is something to do with it. What she doesn’t yet realise is how important just those few items alone are to her father.

In the mid-1980s, I started down a road that I didn’t consider I’d still be travelling down some 30+ years later. It was at Longleat and, yes, specifically the Doctor Who shop that accompanied the exhibition. My mum bought me the paperback of Doctor Who and the Cybermen and I devoured the book with utter passion previously unseen by my 10-year old psyche. That was my first foray into the heady world of Doctor Who novelisations and I have never looked back.

Coming around in 2021, then, to re-read one specific novelisation was a chance I couldn’t pass up. Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion was crying out to me and, plucking the long-loved, musty little paperback with its pages now edged brown, the scent of old paper a familiar comfort as much as the name of the author on its front, I read with impassioned joy 156 pages of sheer excitement.

Terrance Dicks has long-been considered by many to be the go-to chap to knock out a stack of Target novelisations and, while it could be argued that his writing isn’t complex or requiring much in the way of deep concentration, it’s that fine line between children’s fiction and aiming for the adults alike that he was master of.

His 1974 adaptation of Robert Holmes’ four-episode serial, Spearhead From Space, is every bit the archetypal Terrance Dicks. Even though it was his first foray into novelising for the show, it already has the trademark lashings of delicious prose to remind viewers of what they’d seen on the telly four years before or intriguing and beguiling descriptions of events that a young fan could only ever dream of seeing. We’re given a tentative insight into the Brigadier’s feelings of friendship towards the Doctor through new companion Liz Shaw’s silent observations and presented with a version of the Time Lord himself that only Dicks could convey: the simplicity of a man lost in time, of finding his way on a familiar yet disbelieving world, and of being our hero of the hour, every hour, every day.

And if there was ever an author to describe the sheer excitement of coming home to find a Yeti sitting on your loo in Tooting Bec, it was Terrance. Yes, while we all know that This Never Happened, Jon Pertwee’s quip damn well should have done and it damn well should have been Terrance to have novelised it.

The Autons’ invasion we know will be thwarted by the new Doctor and his new/old team but that doesn’t matter (and so I’m not going to sit here and preach to you the plot of a story that you probably know far, far better than me). Hell, that can be said of any Doctor Who serial. We all know he’s going to save the day; it’s how he’s going to do it is what keeps us here – even if we’ve seen the episodes a thousand times or read the books a million more. And that’s what keeps me dipping into my Target library every now and again, what lures me to read yet again one of Terrance’s novelisations so many decades later.

I can jump from Ian Fleming to Terrance Dicks, then to Carlos Ruiz Zafón and back to Terrance again, via perhaps Abir Mukherjee and Empar Moliner. But whoever I want to read, lurking there in the background are the hordes of evil kept at bay by Terrance himself, by his flair at getting everything we need to know, to feel, to understand, by holding our hand as he guides us with apparent ease through a turbulent universe of Autons, Yetis, Daleks, Sontarans, and faceless ones and more.

I should (and do) thank my much-loved, much-missed ma and pa for my formative childhood years, but you won’t let on that dear Terrance helped out too, will you?

Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion is available to read as part of the anthology title, The Essential Terrance Dicks: Volume One.

Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks is one of the best of the Target novels. You will be amazed to hear that it is based on the television story entitled Day of the Daleks. I can remember its first broadcast, even though I was still at primary school; I found it absolutely entrancing and didn’t then notice that the Daleks themselves were oddly static or that their voices weren’t great, though I could see, even when tiny, that there were only three of them. I remember jumping out of my skin in Part One when the camera pulled back to reveal the gold Dalek barking “Report!” at the Controller, and wishing we’d seen more of the trundling nasties in the first episode.

And I can also clearly remember the specially shot trailer for the story. Did you know there was one? It showed a number of Daleks gliding along a railway platform as trains thundered past; it looked as though it was filmed at Clapham Junction (in south London, for our non-British readers). The final shot was of the gold Dalek (or light grey Dalek on our black and white set), filling the screen, shot from below to enhance its menace, and the caption, “Doctor Who: Day of the Daleks. Saturday, BBC1” (or something like that). You’ll have to rely on my memory from 50 years ago and take my word for it. The trailer is now long lost, joining the wealth of other junked Who material. (That it both existed and I hadn’t imagined it, and that was wiped was confirmed to me by my friend Anthony Forth of Bedford Doc Soc, far superior to me as a reliable Who historian.)

Terrance Dicks’ early novels are better than his later ones. It’s become a truism that the only way for Doctor Who fans to relive past stories before the days of VHS was to read the Target books. This is true, but it’s also reductionist: there’s more to it than that. The better Targets are genuinely worth reading, however well you know the TV versions. The audiobooks make them easily accessible when you’re driving or doing the housework. Terrance devoured books as a child and read English Literature at Cambridge; he immersed himself in words and that became his apprenticeship as a novelist. If you don’t read, you won’t be able to write. Dicks learnt at the feet of the greats.

And at the feet of the classy, too: of Rider Haggard and Edgar Allen Poe and their ilk. Without soaring too much into flights of ultra-pretentiousness, it seems to me that Doctor Who as a text (if you will) belongs to the class of “not quite lit but still great stuff”. Harlan Ellison put Who in the category of “elegant trash”. It ain’t Dickens, or Austen, or Shakespeare, or Trollope – but it is in the same league as Conan Doyle or Bram Stoker. At its best, it’s every bit as good as the Sherlock Holmes stories (and is often better). Genesis of the Daleks is superior to the novel of Dracula as a work of popular fiction. Its relationship to the greats is a bit like the relationship of The Beatles or Queen to Beethoven or Mozart: not in the same category, not in the same league, but still very, very good. Doctor Who isn’t champagne; it’s beer.

But I like beer very much.

(I shall shut up now before I vanish into a fog of flatulent pomposity. I’m also supposed to be talking about Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks.)

The novel is very, very well written. The prose is sparse and taught; the narrative moves at a cracking pace. It’s not faultless: occasionally, Terrance’s prose goes “clunk” and you wince. Never mind. While the book follows the script closely, the overall shape of the story feels different; the genre is more that of a long short story rather than a novel. The adaptation’s very skilfully done.

The tone is rather different too. Dicks is aware of his readership and keeps the horror in check; even so, the imagery throughout the book, and especially in the prologue – which Dicks added to Louis Marks’ script – comes from the concentration camps. There are no huddles of extras dropping rocks from a dustbin into a skip in the novel. Instead, there are human beings reduced to machines for producing output; if they don’t fulfill their quota, they starve or are beaten to death by the Ogrons. (Dicks says the Daleks could have used machines instead; the reason they don’t is that they can’t be bothered. There’s a sadistic as well as a ruthless side to the planet’s conquerors.)

You also get the impression from the novel, far more than the TV version, that the Daleks are hidden, secluded, and secretive. They’re rarely seen by ordinary people, or even by the higher echelons in their control centres (described by Dicks as rough slabs of concrete thrown up without regard to aesthetics or to anything beyond their function). Few are allowed to speak with the Daleks; it’s almost as though they are images of pagan gods, housed deep in the labyrinths of their temples, they lurk in the innermost chambers of their bunkers, and are not to be approached by ordinary mortals.

And they terrify. Again, this is an extra layer added to the TV version: the dread that the Daleks inspire. The Ogrons, the humans, the cold young women working the computer terminals, even the Controller: all of them regard their masters with absolute terror.

The Controller’s character is expanded from the Aubrey Woods version. A fair chunk of the novel is told from his viewpoint. If the Earth has become little more than a concentration camp, the Controller is clearly its Sturmbannführer. One of the paradoxes of the evil of Nazism was how SS officers could coolly and efficiently spend a working day eliminating their fellow human beings, and yet remain loving fathers and husbands. A spark of humanity remains in the worst of us — it’s that spark in the Controller that the Doctor rekindles: through his moral outrage at the Controller’s betrayal of his people (doubtless no one had ever dared speak like that to him before; he receives it as a huge shock) and through his appeal to the shred of decency that still remains somewhere, buried deep, in the Controller’s psyche.

And it’s in the Controller’s story that we get some of the best of the book. His reaction to the Daleks’ issuing more and more impossible demands, never praising him when they are met, but simply shouting at him: more orders, more pressure, more stress. He does not know how long it will be before the Black Dalek simply loses its temper and shoots him on the spot. One particular section made a huge impression on me when, as an eight year old, I read the book after its initial release. Even now, it still sends shivers down my spine:

The Black Dalek said, “Is your report concluded?”

[Controller:] “Except for one thing. It seems likely that the human returned from the twentieth century time zone with the guerrillas. According to the patrols, it must be the man the girl spoke about. She called him the Doctor.”

He turned to leave. The Black Dalek’s voice rose almost to a shriek.

“Stop! Doctor! Did you say, Doctor?”

The Controller was astonished at the strength of the reaction. The word “Doc-tor” was pronounced jarringly in two syllables. And he could almost feel the hate in the Dalek’s voice.

Now the Golden Dalek joined in, pronouncing the Doctor’s name with the same venomous intensity.

“The one known as the Doctor is not human. He is the supreme enemy of the Daleks. He must be found and exterminated!” …

As the Controller left, their voices rang in his ears… But there was something different about those voices: they held some quality the Controller had never heard before. And as he walked from the council hall, he recognised it.

The quality was fear.

For the first time in the Controller’s experience of them, the Daleks were actually afraid.

No, it’s not Dickens or Austen. It’s not Shakespeare. It’s not great literature.

But goodness me: it really is damn good.

Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks is available to read as part of the anthology title, The Essential Terrance Dicks: Volume One.

“And when all the programs on all the channels actually were made by actors with cleft-palettes, speaking lines by dyslexic writers, filmed by blind cameramen, instead of merely seeming like that.”

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Fit the Eleventh)

Doctor Who writer Douglas Adams has rightly been lauded for his comedic brilliance, visionary ideas, and technological prescience. But he doesn’t display much forethought about neurodiversity (and other disabilities) in the above extract. As a dyslexic writer myself, with a 20-year career as a writer and editor, I can confidently claim that technology (and a bit of determination) can overcome any such seeming setbacks. In fact, dyslexia can be a positive boon when it comes to ideas, imagination, and looking at the world in a very different way…

However, as an undiagnosed child in the mid-1980s, I struggled at school. I was pretty good at reading (The Beano, mostly) but I found novels – storybooks – a challenge. But I loved Doctor Who and collected everything associated with the programme. Target books were a favourite, as they were a door into Who’s dim and distant past. And you could pick one up for a pocket-money-friendly 20p from Oxfam.

I used to take half a dozen on family holidays. Just to look at them and wonder. Then one time, my brother (who is a year older than me) – in a fit of boredom – picked up my copy of Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen and started to read it. Gosh, I’d never dared to do that. He told me all about the Doctor digging about in a trunk for a holy bell, the Yetis and their control spheres, and the warrior Scot, Jamie. When he abandoned the book, I picked it up. And guess what? I started reading…

This is where you get the familiar story of “Terrance Dicks taught me to read”. His prose is engineered to hook young and tentative readers into adventure stories. It’s so sharp and kinetic, never fussy and verbose. I moved on from The Abominable Snowmen to read Target after Target on that holiday and the holidays yet to come.

I even persuaded my parents to buy me an inflatable dinghy, and I would row out to sea with a Doctor Who book, only coming back to shore for essential refreshments. This was much to the chagrin of my bored brother who would shout from the beach for me to come back and play with him. Not likely; I was in another time, another world…

Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen is an expertly crafted book. We only have episode two of the original programme to compare and, while I lament the loss of the other five, I know that six-part black and white Doctor Who stories tend to be a bit flabby. Not Dicks’ version, which is razor-sharp.

Terrance really gets the Second Doctor, a seemingly bumbling middle-aged man that everyone (even his own companions) underrates. They mistake his bluster, only seeing the acute intellect underneath when the Doctor is faced with a world- and potentially universe-threatening emergency. But the Doctor is always grounded and vulnerable, never a super-being, or assuming the god-like status of later Doctors.

But the ‘little man’ still commands authority. When his young companion is in hysterics, her mind controlled by an alien intelligence, this is how Dicks describes his response: “‘No, Victoria!’ There was a whiplash crash of authority in the Doctor’s voice.” It’s this precise and startling prose that fuels the narrative. It’s like Terrance is forging a template for future writers about how Target books should be done. No nonsense, tell the story, fire those young minds, and never allow them to be bored. 165 pages. Done.

I still struggle to read novels, although I had a good run pre-children when life was quieter. Maybe I need another boat. But I never struggle with a Terrance Dicks book.

Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen is available to read as part of the anthology title, The Essential Terrance Dicks: Volume One.

First published in 1977, Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth is a book steeped in decay and the smell of death. The TARDIS lands on an abandoned building site by the filthily polluted River Thames. Barbara goes to the river to get water and recoils from the body floating past. Do Not Drink Rainwater. All Rainwater Must Be Boiled Before Consumption. The Doctor and Ian stumble on the body of a murdered man, a dagger buried to the hilt in his back.

In fact, this is the sort of book that might lead Seventies child psychologists – and followers of Mrs Mary Whitehouse – to have the screaming horrors and call for it to be banned, lest it corrupt the young minds at which it is targeted. Aieee! That this should be aimed at children! Look, the original jacket (from a 1982 reprint) reads, “Children/Fiction”! Aieee! Just look at page one!

Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man. His clothes were tattered and grimy, his skin blotched and diseased over wasted flesh…In time, he came to a river, a sluggish, debris-choked, polluted stream…He quickened his pace, sensing that the water would provide the thing he sought – a way to end an existence of misery and pain…

When he came to a gap in the embankment wall, he marched stiffly through it and plunged into the water below. He fell, like a log or a stone, making no attempt to save himself…

Starving slave workers trade wedding rings and jewellery for scraps; Robomen are emaciated under their control helmets; a disgusting giant slug devours those foolish enough to be out at night, if the packs of wild dogs haven’t torn them to pieces first. Horror on horror on horror. Oh, no, no, this is too much for the tiny tots! Let them have a history lesson about Mr Tesla instead!

Well, actually, this is a great novel of a great story. Terrance Dicks’ solid, sparse, and taut prose keeps things moving at a cracking pace. He highlights the horror in Terry Nation’s original script but – and here’s the point – always places the horror in a moral context. This is what happens when society breaks down and the rulers have no care for the ruled: this is what happened, time after time, in countries occupied by the Nazis in the Second World War – starvation, concentration camps, exploitation, meanness, black marketeers turning on each other, heroic resistance fighters, the human spirit refusing to be conquered… Nation, as has been pointed out so many times, draws heavily on the War for his imagery and ideas. And the Daleks are the Nazis, of course. The horrors of the novel are placed in the moral context of, this is what happens when fascism wins and this is why we must fight fascism and evil, rather than, say, explaining it away with appeals to nonsensical moral relativism. (“Yes, we could say the Daleks are wicked but they think that what they’re doing is good so who are we to judge them?”). Dicks, highlighting the moral consequences of evil, teaches us to be revolted by it and to side with the Doctor and his friends in opposing it. Here, in this novel, the Judaeo-Christian tradition of the Just War theory is triumphant.

And what a page turner! Resistance fighters operating out of the London underground; a crazed crone and her daughter, living in medieval squalor in a tumbledown cottage, betray Jenny and Barbara to the Daleks for a few tins of food; Ian is sealed inside the Dalek bomb; alligators rush to attack Susan and David in the sewers… This is Doctor Who at its best and Doctor Who as it should be.

A bit of nostalgic reminiscence. I first read the book back in 1977, when I was aged 11 and in hospital, recovering from an appendectomy. Full of anaesthetic and pain killers, it took me a long time to finish the book (and I had to drag myself away to watch episode four of The Talons of Weng Chiang in the male surgery ward – they had a colour telly in there). Maybe the painkillers heightened Dicks’s nightmarish and surreal imagery as it’s a book which I remember vividly and which has stayed with me since my first reading. I had encountered the story before, of course, having watched the Peter Cushing movie version and seen the brilliant photographs from the TV serial in the Radio Times Doctor Who 10th Anniversary Special, but this was my first encounter with the Terry Nation original. I think Dicks makes some use of the Cushing movie in his imagery, with the impressive descriptions of the flying saucer buzzing over London and soaring above the prisoners when parked on the Chelsea heliport. Similarly, the Black Dalek is bigger than his counterparts – was Dicks thinking of the chunky movie Daleks? I remember being intrigued by the changes to the story as I knew it; Jenny was a new character on me and it is she and Barbara, rather than Wyler and Susie, who journey that perilous 60 miles from London to Bedfordshire to be betrayed by the crone in the cottage (thought: it seems to take the flying saucer an awfully long time to get from Chelsea to Bedfordshire… long enough for Larry to explain to Ian his theories about the Dalek invasion. Maybe the Daleks are obeying the 60 mile an hour speed limit). I remember thinking the Slyther was an excellent addition and wishing it had been in the film (apparently, it was in an early draft of the movie but was conceived as a mechanical beast rather than a giant slug thing). I was much less interested in David and Susan’s romance, as I had been by the hints of affection between Ian and Barbara in 1974’s Target publication of Doctor Who and the Daleks. Now I can appreciate how thoughtfully the production team had prepared for Susan’s exit, with the Doctor wondering about Susan’s future now that she is a young woman and no longer a girl, and David and Susan’s mutual attraction carefully woven into the story. Leela and Andred this ain’t.

Many fans have written about how they first encountered the Doctor in the novelisations, loved the books, and then were a bit disappointed by the television version, when they eventually watched it. This certainly happened to me when I finally saw The Dalek Invasion of Earth but Dicks, of course, isn’t limited by a tiny budget or even a film budget and can describe the vista of horror to the full extent of his imagination.

What a great book. Unputdownable. That’s how to do Doctor Who, Ms New Showrunner. Read Dicks and learn.

Thanks to The Essential Terrance Dicks, new generations can enjoy this much-loved First Doctor novelisation. And so they should. And so should you. Preferably not after an appendectomy.

Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth is available to read as part of the anthology title, The Essential Terrance Dicks: Volume One.