In keeping with the Gallifreyan habit of adopting a title in place of a name, Terrance was often simply referred to as The Editor. His malfunctioning TARDIS touched down on our small blue world on the 10th of May, 1935. Things were never the same for Terrance or our planet after that.
To his near-eternal shame, the Editor's crash-landing obliterated the cenotaph in East Ham's Central Park. The only way to make amends, Terrance reasoned, was to disguise his TARDIS as the cenotaph. Stranded through the failure of a defective flux capacitor, there the idling space-time machine remains to this day.
While on Earth, in a misguided attempt to fix a faulty mercury link, Terrance inadvertently became a pioneer of lottery rigging - making use of the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle to mistakenly improve his chances of winning a lottery not yet established.
Thinking it over, and bypassing the Blinovitch Limitation Effect, Terrance made a short trip into the nightmarish future world of 1994, discovered a lottery just starting up, and spread his considerable winnings over the next five hundred years - keeping score in his diary.
Rooting around in the past was his favourite hobby, and he would often produce the most amazing curios from the depths of his capacious pockets, while muttering about e-mail, e-space, or other e-related oddities that he promised to explain later.
Later, around the year 2525, he provided all those explanations - and generations yet-unborn will be thankful.
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As for the generations of fans, they are thankful, too. Terrance Dicks, who
His mark on the show as script editor and episode writer was as indelible as the mark he made off to the side of the show in writing TARGET adaptations of storylines.
There's a particular place in space-time for Terrance. His TARGET adaptations covered an era when vintage WHO episodes weren't routinely aired years after the initial showing.
On top of that, whole chunks of storylines were missing from the BBC archives, presumed destroyed in the not-so-great videotape cleansing. If you wanted your DOCTOR WHO fix, living out the tales of old, you had to read the books in the days before home entertainment and wall-to-wall collections and shiny future discs and audio commentaries.
You had to read the books.
And if you read those books, you discovered David Whitaker and Terrance Dicks. There are plenty of other people out there in the dark who will scribble far-better obits of Terrance than the one I am typing now.
I remember him as a writer who described capacious pockets and all the unusual things fished from them. You can't get past an image of Pertwee without imagining a shock of white hair atop a remarkably young-old face.
If the hat/coat/scarf/mood is Bohemian and concerns a floppy broad-brimmed hat over a mop of curly brown hair, then the TARDIS doors must, by law, open on a toothy shot of Baker's face grinning like a loon.
Terrance gave us that stuff. Episodes, brought to life again as chapters. The Doctor and his trusty companions were always escaping into danger and facing the deadly attack that was sidestepped at the last second.
And after the final farewells to freedom fighters/mine workers and promises that your planet should be just fine, off our heroes all go in a big (bigger than that) blue box that departs with a wheezing-groaning sound, leaving only a square patch on the grass and the memory of adventures-just-won.
That's what Terrance Dicks means to me. Farewell, Mr Capacious Pockets. Rest easy.
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