One thing that surprised me last night was the news that the chatroom on Twitch isn't too keen on the name Terrance Dicks. It's not people being less-than-keen on his writing (quite the opposite in fact, as the appreciation for 'The War Games' has demonstrated) but simply the fact the swear filter seems to think people are trying to type in rude words...
There have been various ingenious ways around this, with 'Terrance Ducks' being one of the more memorable, but surely everyone knows him as 'Uncle Terrance' anyway.
For those of us who grew up on the Target novelisations, he really does feel like an old friend, and when there was talk of starting a Book Club at school, there was a vague notion of inviting him along as a guest speaker. Sadly, this idea was never pursued and I've only ever got the chance to say the odd all-too-brief Hello to him in long queues at book-signing sesssions and the like.
But with the Pertwee years about to launch online tonight, his name will become familiar to a whole new set of fans, which is how it should be.
Faced with filling a ten-episode slot at the end of a season where money was getting tight, Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke contruct a serial that keeps on zooming out, showing us bigger and bigger worlds.
Episode One starts on a rubbish tip masquerading as a World War One battlefield, but in the same way that the Brighton dump is playing a part on screen, what appears to be simply a wasteland is also not all that it seems.
The final moments of Episode Two reveal that we actually have underestimated the ambition of the story and this trick will be successfully repeated as the weeks unfold.
By the end of Episode Ten we have fundamentally changed the nature of the Doctor and the series itself.
And as with so much that we now think of being at the very core of 'Doctor Who', this is simply the result of a couple of writers making it up as they go along. There's simply no time to dabble in a Grand Plan at this point. As Uncle Terrance would say, they're simply trying their hardest not to have to put the testcard up on BBC 1 that week.
But that is not to say that they're happy to slap any old nonsense down on paper, take the money and run. These are professionals who want to be employed in the future and the best way to achieve that is to do as good a job as time and money allow.
Fortunately they have David Maloney on board as director. His sterling work on 'The Mind Robber' (another story where last-minute panic leads to something wonderful) has already flagged up both his flair and reliability. It's no surprise that he will become a regular contributor again in the early Tom Baker years.
And Dudley Simpson provides one of his best scores of the 1960s, with all manner of themes from the jaunty to the epic. It was lovely to see his contribution being noticed and appreciated last night.
For a season that must have felt like the sky was falling some days in the production office, it ends on a very confident note. Goodbye to Pat, Wendy, Frazer and black-and-white cameras.
I think colour will come as a bit of a surpise to some people in the next few hours - but, as always, the adventure continues...
(By Andrew Trowbridge)
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