David Whitaker

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For the video game music composer, see David Whittaker.

David Whitaker (1928 - February 4 1980) helped create the British science fiction television series Doctor Who and served as the series' first story editor.

He wrote a number of Doctor Who serials himself, including The Crusade, The Power of the Daleks and The Evil of the Daleks, considered by many to be classics. Other Dalek work included writing the Dalek comic strip in the children's magazine, TV Century 21, and the 1965 stage play The Curse of the Daleks.

In 1964, Whitaker was commissioned to write two novels based on the series, which along with a third by Bill Strutton later became the start of Target Books' long-running and popular series of Doctor Who novels. The second, Doctor Who and the Crusaders, was an adaptation of his own Doctor Who serial set during the Third Crusade; the first, Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks, was, perhaps inevitably, an adaptation of the series' first Dalek story (The Daleks, written by Terry Nation). Both books were originally published by Frederick Muller, with the Dalek story also having a paperback release by Armada.