Terrance Dicks, 1935-2019

[parrot_knight]

Registering here the outpouring of memorializing I've mainly joined in with elsewhere. Terrance Dicks was a great storyteller, a wry colluder with the childhood imagination, a subtle improver of memories of lost television. He was also acutely aware of structure, genre and his and his work's place in time, and of his work as collaborative act, whether with cast and crew or with publishers, and of course with the audience. The way in which Doctor Who is written and written about still owes a huge amount to him - and how many remember fondly his children's creations such as T R Bear, his many other series (I remember his 1981 novel Cry Vampire which includes a defence of children watching horror as well as Doctor Who) and his stewardship in the 1980s of the BBC Sunday afternoon classic serials? I look forward to him receiving due appreciation in the press in the coming days - I gather Toby Hadoke is already hard at work - and I remember well the experienced writer talking through one gauche undergraduate's attempt to invite him to Oxford over the phone. He did visit, though I continued to make faux pas with him over the next two and a bit decades. He was good and generous company, however.

Also posted at https://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/2019/09/03/terrance-dicks-1935-2019.html.