An Unearthly Child - Terrence Dicks

A few months on and I have enlarged my original scope for this blog. Originally I was going to look at just the Virgin and BBC Book ranges. That's expanded a little bit. Just a little. In a little under a year I went from owning nothing Who related, to owning pretty much every story. Still got a few dozen Big Finish stories to get hold of once my bank balance recovers, and the DVD's will still take a few years to be produced and there are two stupidly rare BBV CD's and most of the Charity Books that I probably won't get my hands on now, but nevermind. I'm starting my marathon Doctor Who Review blog, for the simple reason that with such a wealth of stories, I'm gonna forget much of it otherwise before I even get halfway through.

So without much further ado:

Doctor Who and An Unearthly Child by Terrance Dicks

Now I've read far enough into the books to know that Terrance Dicks writes for a job. He doesn't write for the benefit of being a great, or even good writer. He is a journeyman who, when given the right conditions, can turn in magnificent work, and who, when given a deadline and a limited page number, will fulfil his contract. This one is a contract job. Being honest though, it's barely that. There are lines so clumsily written that you wonder if Terrance didn't write the whole thing hungover sat with his typewriter in a darkened room with some kids watching the episodes in another and had them shout through descriptions of the action, which were then put down verbatim. This is in fact, the only book I've ever read where even the use of brackets has been embarrassing.


Ultimately this is for completists only. It is poorly written, almost shoddy work, basic on a ten year old's level. Something that had very little time put into it. It is a shame as the TV Pilot is of course one of the most wonderful pieces of television ever screened. The explanation for the poor novelisation is that Dicks was only given a week to write it. Dicks did his job, whereas he perhaps should have refused this particular job on the basis that writing a novella in a week is, while not impossible, a huge barrier to quality, as evidenced here. The frustration being that Dicks could easily have done this justice with a longer time scale.


1/10