A Wheezing, Groaning Sound

Books. I genuinely don’t remember a time when they weren’t a daily part of my life. I’ve always been a dedicated reader and I always will be a dedicated reader*. There are the standard childhood influences that have been shouted about and lauded as inspirations over the years, from Roald Dahl through to JK Rowling and Cressida Cowell, but there is one man who rather quietly, almost anonymously inspired a number of generations to pick up the printed page. It just so happens that he also managed to combine two of my favourite things…

It was 1983. I was a young spotty herbert of the schoolboy variety. We’d just moved to a new house and my favouritest programme in the world (well, along with the Muppet Show) was celebrating its twentieth anniversary. This was in the days before mass releases of even VHS tapes of shows and so this show in particular released tie-in novels (published by a company called Target) in which previous and current stories were adapted for the printed page. As I sat on a bench in the playground, I had in my hands a shiny new book (and it was shiny too, with a special silvery cover for the twentieth anniversary) which covered the celebratory birthday story.

The show was Doctor Who. The story was The Five Doctors. The author was Terrance Dicks.

Dicks started off as an assistant script editor on Doctor Who before becoming head script editor  and penning the last Patrick Troughton story, The War Games (revealing the Doctor’s origin as a Time Lord), remaining in place throughout all of Jon Pertwee’s tenure. He penned a number of stories, including Tom Baker’s debut, but he is best known and loved for his Target novelisations. In all, he wrote more than sixty of them and, at a time when the show was not repeated or available, this was the only way for many of us to experience the past stories.

He had a number of phrases that he liked to use and they cropped up frequently:- “The mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor”; “a wheezing, groaning sound” to describe the TARDIS dematerialising/re-materialising; “capacious pockets”; and individual descriptions of the Doctors (Peter Davison’s Doctor having a “pleasant open face”).

Dicks sadly passed away on 29th August but the heartwarming thing has been the number of tributes paid to him by people who discovered a love of reading thanks to his work. He certainly helped to encourage my own love of the written word. Farewell, Terry, and thanks for the wrods.


*This definition is not based on numbers but intent. You could read two books a year or you could read two hundred books a year - if you read for pleasure, betterment, both or any other reason really then you are a reader.