5) The Making of Doctor Who, by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks

Way way back in the mists of childhood, and I got hold of the second edition of this book, which was tremendously informative about Doctor Who up to, I think, The Hand of Fear, but was particularly important for me as it was the first book I had read which was about sf; it was possible, I realised, to think and write more deeply about sf as well as just reading it.

This is the first edition, which states on the first page, “Doctor Who has now been running over eight years, which makes it one of the most successful shows on British television.” I think I got it at WorldCon. It is very much aimed at a younger audience; quite a long chapter, for instance, on how a television programme is actually made, what the director does, etc. Here is the end of the section about the Master:

That last bit seems rather prophetic now!

One section which was completely changed in the second edition was the re-telling of the Doctor’s televised adventures as a continuous narrative, presented as memoranda from the files of the Time Lords and of UNIT. (The second edition simply presented each story separately in a list, as all serious Doctor Who reference books have done since.) This section is preceded by the indictment and initial defence for the Doctor at the end of The War Games, revealing also the Doctor’s “real name”.

Of course, this bears very little resemblance to the trial we actually saw in The War Games, but it is a nice bit of chrome.

(Can we really bear to refer to the Doctor as ∂³∑x² in future?)

Anyway, certainly superseded in usefulness by pretty much every work of reference on Doctor Who published since, but very nice to have.