In 1968 he was employed as the assistant script editor on the BBC's popular science-fiction series Doctor Who. Dicks went on to become the main script editor on the programme the following year, and earned his first writing credit on the show when he and Hulke co-wrote the epic ten-part story The War Games which closed the sixth season and the era of Second Doctor Patrick Troughton. He had, however, been the uncredited co-writer of The Seeds of Death earlier in the season, after performing extensive work on writer Brian Hayles' original scripts.
Dicks went on to form a highly productive working relationship with incoming Doctor Who producer Barry Letts, working as the script editor on each of Letts' five seasons in charge of the programme from 1970 to 1974. After his departure, Dicks continued to be associated with the programme, writing four scripts for his successor as script editor Robert Holmes: Robot (1975, the opening story of Tom Baker's era as the Fourth Doctor), The Brain of Morbius (1976, broadcast under the name 'Robin Bland' after Dicks' displeasure at Holmes' rewrites to the story led him to declare that it should go out "under some bland pseudonym"), Horror of Fang Rock and State of Decay.
Dicks also contributed heavily to Target Books' range of novelisations of Doctor Who television stories, writing more than sixty of the titles published by the company. As Dicks explains in an interview in the documentary Built for War, included on the DVD release of the serial The Sontaran Experiment in 2006, he served as unofficial editor of the Target Books line. In this role, he would attempt to enlist the original teleplay author to write the books whenever possible, but if they could not or would not, then Dicks would often end up writing the books himself (although he also enlisted other writers including one-time Doctor Who actor Ian Marter and former series producer Philip Hinchcliffe). On one occasion, Dicks recalls in the documentary, he had enlisted Robert Holmes to novelise his teleplay for The Time Warrior, but when Holmes gave up on the project after writing only one chapter, it was left to Dicks to complete the work. Dicks would be more successful in recruiting the original teleplay writers for later serials and ultimately only had to adapt one Sixth Doctor story (The Mysterious Planet and again replacing Robert Holmes, who had died soon after writing the original serial) and his name appears on no Seventh Doctor novelisations. Dicks had planned to novelise the stage play Doctor Who - The Ultimate Adventure but this was never published.
It was through his work on Doctor Who books that he became a writer of children's fiction, penning many successful titles during the 1970s and 80s.
In 1980 Dicks returned to the Doctor Who fold when he wrote State of Decay for the eighteenth season. State of Decay was in fact a rewritten version of a story entitled The Vampire Mutation which had been due for production during season fifteen, but had been hastily withdrawn and replaced with Horror of Fang Rock when the BBC decided that its vampiric theme would clash with their high-profile adaptation of Bram Stoker's Count Dracula, which was due for transmission at around the same time. Dicks made his final contribution to televised Doctor Who in 1983, when he wrote the ninety-minute twentieth anniversary special episode The Five Doctors.
During the early 1980s he worked again as script editor to Barry Letts' producer, this time on the BBC's esteemed Sunday Classics strand of period dramas and literary adaptations. When Letts departed the staff of the BBC in 1985, Dicks succeeded his colleague as the producer of the strand, overseeing productions such as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Vanity Fair, before he himself left in 1988 and the Sunday Classics strand in that form came to an end.
During the 1990s, Dicks contributed to Virgin Publishing's line of full-length, officially-licensed original Doctor Who novels, the New Adventures, which carried on the story of the series following its cancellation as an ongoing television programme in 1989. Dicks wrote three Doctor Who novels for Virgin, and continued to write occasionally for the franchise following the take-over of the books licence by BBC Books in 1997. He wrote the first of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, The Eight Doctors, which was for a time the best-selling original Doctor Who novel. His book World Game, featuring the Second Doctor is set during "Season 6B", a period derived from fan theories. His most recent contributions to the range are the "Quick Reads" books Made of Steel and Revenge of the Judoon, both featuring the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones.
Other work has included two Doctor Who stage plays (Doctor Who and the Daleks in the Seven Keys to Doomsday (1974) and Doctor Who - The Ultimate Adventure (1989)); co-creating and writing for the short-lived BBC science-fiction series Moonbase 3 (1973) and contributing to the ITV science-fiction series Space: 1999. He also wrote an audio drama for Big Finish Productions called "Comeback", which was the first to predominantly feature former companion Sarah Jane Smith. That story was released in August 2002.
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