You might have missed it on Doctor Who’s anniversary last month, but a significant announcement came from The University of York with the news that they’ve acquired the archive of legendary Doctor Who writer Terrance Dicks.
Dicks, who died in 2019, was best known for his work on Doctor Who, which encompassed his roles as script editor, script writer, and prolific author of novelisations and original novels. His career on the series covered script editing between the years 1968 and 1974, and writing a number of classic era stories including Fourth Doctor debut Robot and twentieth anniversary jamboree The Five Doctors. His name was well known to a generation of readers in the 1970s and 1980s as the writer of dozens of Target novelisations, which, in the pre-home video era, were a crucial means by which fans could relive past adventures or discover ones they had never seen.
Announcing the collection, the university reports:
“The archive chiefly contains annotated drafts of Terrance’s books and stories, ranging from 1972’s The Making of Doctor Who to 2017’s Davros Genesis, and including more than 60 of the Doctor Who novelisations he wrote for Target Books…
“Excitingly for Whovians, Terrance kept copies of camera scripts for the television stories he was intending to novelise. This means that in addition to his draft manuscripts, we also have Doctor Who scripts as far back as the one transmitted 62 years ago today – Anthony Coburn’s An Unearthly Child – along with unique sets of scripts and production information for the Fifth Doctor’s swansong, 1984’s The Caves of Androzani.”
We’re also told that:
“The collection will especially delight fans of Skaro’s finest death machines, including as it does original scripts for The Daleks’ Master Plan, The Chase, Planet of the Daleks, and Destiny of the Daleks and original manuscripts for his novelisations of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Day of the Daleks, Death to the Daleks and Genesis of the Daleks.”
Researchers will surely have a field day delving into the archive, with the promise that:
“The archive contains detailed notes on the genesis and evolution of 1976’s The Horror of Fang Rock [sic], 1980’s State of Decay, and 1983’s The Five Doctors. You may have watched and enjoyed the final televised versions, but now you can thrill at their previous incarnations as ‘The Beast from Forty Fathoms’, ‘The Wasting’, and… ‘The Six Doctors’!”
The announcement goes on to say that the task of cataloguing the archive is ongoing, and expresses thanks to Terrance Dicks’ family and writer Simon Guerrier, who is developing a biography of the author, Written by Terrance Dicks, due to be published by Ten Acre Books in 2026.
