Bernard Cribbins (2008)

Here are transcripts from two BBC interviews with Bernard Cribbins back in 2008, around the time of the transmission of ‘The Stolen Earth’ and ‘Journey’s End’. One’s from ‘The One Show’, the other’s from ‘Breakfast News’, but I’ve merged them for the sake of convenience.

Q: What’s Wilf like to play?

He’s a very nice character. He’s an avuncular, in a way, granddad, who is in cahoots with his grand-daughter, Donna, against Mum really, because Mum is pernickety and niggles them both. I say at one point ‘Was she nagging you?’, because she comes up to the allotment with a cup of tea. It’s a lovely relationship with Catherine, and with Jacks who plays Mum.

Q: It must have been great fun for you to get the call, having been in the film in 1966.

A: Yes, forty-two years ago! It’s unbelievable. That was with Mr. Cushing, who was a totally different Doctor, he was a waffly old professor, very stereotyped professor, and then you’ve got David, who’s on springs all the time, he’s wonderful. I think I’d have to say that David’s my favourite Doctor of all of them. I think Tom Baker – sorry, Tom – runs him a close second, but I think David’s the guv’nor, for me.

Q: Why is that?

A: It’s his intensity. He’s also, he’s a damned good actor, it’s a very intense, good acting performance. He’s a spooky guy. He comes on, he flashes a smile, and you think ‘Where’s he going to go with this?’.

Q: Is it true you were once in line to be Dr. Who, after Jon Pertwee?

A: I was interviewed. They were looking for a new Doctor, and I went along and the producer there said ‘What can you do?’, I said ‘Well, I’m a very good swimmer, I can’t ride a horse, I was a paratrooper, and I can fight’. And he said ‘Oh no, no fighting’. And I think I lost the job because I said I’d fight, and of course the first thing you see Tom Baker, who got the job, the first thing he did was going Smack! and knocking someone over. I’d have loved to have been Dr. Who.

Q: You’ve done a lot of television. ‘The Wombles’, ‘The Railway Children’…

A: The Wombles would be good in ‘Doctor Who’. A Womble planet.

Q: Have you mentioned that to Russell T. Davies?

A: I’ll ring Russell when I get off the air and say ‘What about the Wombles, then?’.

Q: But you must have had such fun doing such a variety of things.

A: Yeah. Ducking and diving. Don’t stand still, keep moving around.

Q: One of the things that’s so different between ‘Doctor Who’ now and working on it back then is the special effects. Do you stand around going ‘We wouldn’t have done it like that’?

A: I do remember that when we did the film, which was forty-two years ago, I got terrible giggles because one of the Dalek operators – you’re not supposed to know this, there’s a man inside – he had to learn all the lines in order to communicate with the actors, and he was an Australian guy called Bob Jewell, and he’d say ‘You will be exterminated’ (in an Australian accent) and I started wetting myself with laughter. The director, Gordon Fleming – God bless you – got very upset and swore at me.

Brian Hayles (Various)

Brian Hayles created the Ice Warriors and The Celestial Toymaker, and also had a prolific non-Doctor Who career, script-editing The Archers for a while and writing episodes of Doomwatch, Out of the Unknown and Z Cars. He died more than thirty years ago, so in-depth interviews are somewhat thin on the ground. This is what I’ve managed to find so far, but if anyone has anything else and wouldn’t mind sharing it, I’d love to see some more Brian Hayles interviews!

“I wanted to keep the Toymaker very vague, I didn’t want to explain exactly who he was. At the time, I had grand visions of his becoming like the Daleks, coming back again and again, and then of course something very like that happened a few years later with the Master.

“The Ice Warriors were never intended to return (after their first appearance), but I think at some stage it was decided to try them out again as possible recurring villains. I think there would have been more stories featuring them, had it not been for the big change when Pat Troughton left. Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks came in and wanted to get away from the past, which I think was a very wise move. I was very surprised when they decided to bring them back after a few years.

“I had to evolve a new landscape in terms of inventing a civilisation called Peladon. It wasn’t evolved as a saga, although in fact it could well have developed that way, because the planet had a history behind it – in my mind, at least. The original was going to be a one-off called ‘The Curse’. If you followed the psychology of the Ice Warriors, they were still basically the same people. The Doctor accepted their help very reluctantly, because he knew they could turn nasty at the drop of a scale or something.”

Elisabeth Sladen (1980’s)

Here’s Elisabeth Sladen talking about almost  drowning in Wookey Hole, almost being crushed by a collapsing TARDIS, and how she originally planned to play Sarah Jane for just one year.

“Sarah had to be able to stick up for herself. She was pretty forceful, especially at first, then we allowed her to soften and adapt more to the circumstances she was living in. Sarah was not only feminist, she was feminine – a rather happy, forthright girl with a lot of intelligence, and plenty of courage.

“I felt I worked well with Jon – we made a good duo, professionally. He works it all out the whole time but I can’t do that – it’s all instant with me. I try to act for that instinctive quality I like my characters to have. So although we approached it differently, we had a great time and a lot of laughs.

“With the new team we had Philip Hinchcliffe, who was young and enthusiastic, and Tom Baker who was a charming man. Eccentric, yes, but so warm, such a sincere person and a first-rate actor. We worked as a team and it was great. It sounds conceited calling them classic days – but that’s what they were for me. It had the sort of spark you get when everything gels. This applied even to the production team.

“One of the stuntmen – Terry Walsh – was as marvellous guy who stood in for us if the action got too dangerous. With me, as often as not, I had to do my own stunts because of my height – it would have been too obvious otherwise – but he was always there on the sidelines, and it’s to him I practically owe my life. We were shooting down in Wookey Hole for ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’, and they wanted me to do this ridiculous joyride on a sort of speedboat. I was petrified at the thought of being caught in the undercurrent of one of the pools, though everyone assured me that it would be alright. Terry wasn’t satisfied, though, and he stood by the side in a wetsuit in case anything went wrong. Sure enough, I came off and probably wouldn’t be here today if he hadn’t intervened.

“We never got glamorous locations. It was always from one quarry to another. It was just my luck that when I returned for ‘The Five Doctors’, Jon and I ended up once again in a disused quarry, freezing to death. It caused a few laughs for both of us. As we were turning blue, I said ‘Just like old times!’. We just had to grin and bear it.

“I’ll never forget the time the TARDIS collapsed on us! We did have a lot of special effects that had to be done in an amazingly short time, but we did it, and that’s a thing to be proud of. We were under lots of pressure, particularly during Tom’s first year, but we never ran out of time. Minor mistakes were made, and no doubt some of our directors had more grey hair by the end. It used to be worst on the six-parters – in ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, I think it was the last session in the studio and we had about five crucial scenes to do and only fifteen minutes before the plugs were pulled. With an extension and no second takes, we managed it. A remount at that time would have been a nightmare.

“The robot in ‘Robot’ was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship, but it was almost impossible to work with. The actor inside it kept falling over with the most tremendous crashes, and he came near to fainting because of the restrictions the costume imposed on breathing. We had exactly the same problems with the Ice Warriors.

“I was very pleased with ‘Planet of Evil’. It had a lot more to it that some of our more mundane scripts. For once we were in a tropical jungle with all this crazy wildlife around us – totally fantastic, but a marvellous break from what we usually did. Although I loved my time with Jon, the team I remember most fondly had to be Tom, Ian and I. We really did care. There was flexibility – room for improvement – and we all became very close. I loved nearly all my time on ‘Doctor Who’ and I’ve never regretted doing it.

“Originally I’d planned one year. That became two, then three. I got a great deal of satisfaction from making Sarah Jane what she was. Even so, there were boundaries that couldn’t be crossed and I felt I’d really done my best, had my day, and should hand over to somebody else. I felt regret, of course, but I was happy that it was I who took the initative, and not somebody giving me a quiet push – in fact, they asked me how I should go out and I said make it quiet, not over-dramatic. I didn’t want to die or anything like that. So at the end of ‘The Hand of Fear’, I slipped out of the Doctor’s life and back to the theatre.”

David Whitaker (1970’s)

As promised, here’s more from David Whitaker, talking about the creation of Vicki’s character, his Troughton-era Dalek scripts and his work on the first Doctor Who novelisations.

“The new girl Tanni (later Vicki) was intended to be something of a waif and stray, someone basically for the Doctor to adopt in place of Susan and to carry on her role in the series. I don’t think it was a particularly inspired piece of writing, but it was a necessary one.

“The Crusades is the story I am technically proudest of. It achieved almost to a word what I set out to depict and was people with some particularly interestingly real characters. I became fascinated with the relationship between Richard and his sister, which was almost incestuous in its intensity. I relished the dialogue that the story allowed me to write, and the period itself was so interesting that it became almost a labour of love to produce a script worthy of the colour and depth of drama that had inspired it, within the limits of the budget – and what was permissible for that time slot and indeed for that time, when television was not the liberated lady it has since become. The final satisfaction came with the truly inspired acting and direction – Douglas Camfield worked my words into some beautiful and taut images.

“I was approached to write the ‘Doctor Who’ novels and, once I agreed, found that I had taken on an incredible amount of work, because the whole of Terry Nation’s story for ‘The Daleks’ had to be re-structured and largely re-written by me to make the thing stand up on its own as a novel, separate from the continuing threads of the mainstream television series. I was quite pleased with the result and though it was hard work, I enjoyed it. The second book, ‘The Crusades’, was much more straightforward and less complicated, though, as I liked that one so much anyway. I found it enjoyable from the start.

“With ‘The Power of the Daleks’, it was around the time that William Hartnell was leaving and so, aware that the idea was to replace him with another actor, I wrote the Doctor’s part as sketchily as possible, so that it could be easily altered. I then concerned myself with the rest of the story and delivered my script just before I was due to leave the country. It was a very different kettle of fish when it appeared, and I wasn’t desperately happy about the whole thing.

“The Evil of the Daleks had a lot to it, and it included a theme I’m very fond of – the lure of alchemy. It was as good opportunity to write an atmosphere story, and I had some pleasing characters to work with. It still suffered from re-writes, however, and although it was intended to be the final Dalek story, as Terry wanted to launch them in America, I didn’t really think they’d be gone for good.”

Charles Curran

Sir Charles Curran was the BBC Director General during most of the 1970’s, and this is his response to Mary Whitehouse’s criticism of ‘Doctor Who’ over its violent content during the Hinchcliffe-Holmes era.

“The television service was not totally satisfied with the way ‘The Deadly Assassin’ developed. With hindsight, the service does accept that one or two viewers may have imagined that Dr. Who’s dreams were reality. What actually happened was that the head of the department felt, before these episodes were transmitted, that some of the sequences were a little too realistic for a science-fiction series. Accordingly, several of them were edited out before transmission.

“The result was what you saw on the screen, and which I myself think was reasonably acceptable. However, with hindsight, the head of the department responsible would have liked to have cut just a few more frames of the action than he did.”

Terry Molloy (1990’s)

Terry Molloy played Davros during the 1980’s, opposite Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. Here, he tells DWM about his knack for ‘funny voices’ and the difficulties he had moving around in Davros’s carriage.

“Matthew Robinson (director of ‘Resurrection of the Daleks’) wanted to maintain a continuity with the Davros’s that had gone before, and he knew that I’m fairly good at doing funny voices. So he rang me and asked me to see if I could match up. I looked at the videos of other Davros’s and said ‘Yeah, no problem’, and tried to get as close as possible to the original.

“I wanted to see exactly how far Matthew wanted Davros to go, in terms of mania, and we arrived at the performance – which is nice, because you’re actually crafting something, not just throwing it together, because you want to be true to people’s original conception of what Davros was, or is.

“One of the main differences, though, in my performances was the mask. We tried on the mask that David Gooderson wore but it was miles too big, so they said they’d do a new head mould. They used this stuff called Alginate, which dentists use because of its high definitino. The only problem is that it decays very quickly once you take it off – so they have to encase it in plaster of Paris and let it set.

“Luckily, they don’t do the mouth, so I could just about breathe. So I sat there, feeling as if I was being pressed into the floor with the weight of this plaster for about an hour. There was also a new hand, because they took a hand mould! It’s very hot and you can’t really wear the mask for more than twenty-five minutes at a time without getting out of it.

“There was also the carriage that Davros lives in. It was really uncomfortable. You have to move it around with your feet and it’s very heavy, with all the batteries in the back to run the flashing lights and things. To begin with, at rehearsals, I just used to move around in an ordinary chair but before long, they brought in the actual carriage – minus the working flashy bits – so I was able to get used to it, although the mask didn’t help in studio. It was made with eye sockets – although Davros is only supposed to have one electronic eye. The sockets are just slits, so you can actually see a fair amount, although it doesn’t show on camera because the slits are so fine. You don’t have much peripheral vision – it’s mainly tunnel vision, and you have to turn the whole carriage to see from one place to another.”

Ron Jones (1980’s)

Ron Jones directed a number of classic 80’s stories, including ‘Black Orchid’, ‘Arc of Infinity’ and ‘Vengeance on Varos’. Here, he talks to DWM about finding a body double for Sarah Sutton, taking the show to film on location in Amsterdam, and why the Plasmatons in ‘Time Flight’ didn’t quite work.

“Black Orchid was a very good script and looking back, I often think I’d like to go back and do it all over again. Although my experience as a production manager was useful, it was my first show and I always think of the studio as being like a juggernaut – once it starts rolling, you can only hope that you are the driver and that you’re taking it in the right direction. I found the really important thing after working out all the technical stuff was not to forget that you need to get the right performance from the actors.

“Black Orchid was supposed to take place in the height of summer, and we were filming in October trying to avoid rain and other horrors like that. The actors were understandably very cold! We had a lot of trouble actually finding the location because we needed to combine the house with an old-fashioned railway station. We found the station in Buckinghamshire, but the house was a real problem. We needed a terrace suitable for dancing, a cricket ground with a pavillion, and a roof for the final scenes. John suggested a house that might be sufficient after filming ‘Castrovalva’ in the grounds, but at first the owners weren’t keen on us using it – they thought it would become identified as a result. We managed to persuade them on the grounds that our story was a total fiction, but even then we had to construct a second, smaller roof on top of the house to enable us to film up there.

“It was an amazing problem finding a double for Sarah Sutton, someone who was the right height and also the right build. The girl we got, Vanessa Paine, was used for some scenes, but for others it proved to be an exercise in concentration for Sarah. In the studio, we used the split screen technique, recording only one half of the picture and then remounting the scene with Sarah playing it all over again to nothing except her own recorded voice, being played back via some speakers. It was extremely time-consuming, but I was helped by it being the main technical requirement of the script. Apart from that, there were the stunts, but there we were working with experts, so any risk was minimised.

“We had a minor dispute with our technicians over lighting in the studio, and so we never got the lighting exactly as I wanted it. There is basic lighting and fine lighting, and in the event we only had the basic, so the drawing room and hall sets weren’t picked out as well as I wanted. It’s the kind of thing I expect we, as a production, agonise over more than the viewer would.

“Quite a lot of nice stuff had to be cut. Breathing moments, like all the stuff I shot of the vintage car for instance, is always the first to go, simply because it’s not ultimately essential to the story.

“Time Flight’ was pretty demanding. I think the main obstacle was the filming factor. I think at one time we would probably have liked to have done all that heath stuff on location, but it would have required at least two weeks filming, which was out of the question. That said, to recreate an entire heath in the studio is very difficult. We had a perspective set, to try to give some idea of scale, but that meant that the actors were limite in their movement and the overall impression was too static. I tried to be a bit more interesting by using that rocky outcrop and setting some scenes up against it, some slightly away from it and so on.

“The Plasmatons came out of our pre-planning meeting, when we all agreed the problem with monsters was that because you usually have a man inside, it’s difficult to get away from the basic human shape. As a kind of amorphous glob, the Plasmatons were a desire to break away from that, although unfortunately I don’t think they worked as well as they could have done had they been more mobile.

“Time Flight actually broke a bit of new ground as far as Heathrow was concerned. They had more or less banned drama filming at the airport, because apart from being inundated with requests, I think they’d had bad experiences. We approached them early on, and British Airways were quite keen for us to use Concorde, but it all rested with the British Airports Authority, who said ‘Okay, we’ll give it a try’ – I think because they had a ‘Doctor Who’ fan there!

“It didn’t really fit to have all that snow there, but we had absolutely no way around it. What would have been our alternative? Filming in Terminal One was great fun, and interesting for the reactions of travellers as they saw the TARDIS and then Janet wandering around followed by a film camera. We used some stock footage because we had no alternative. It was difficult because it had to blend with our models and it was a very tricky opereation. If there had been any other way, I would gladly have used it.

“Kalid had to collapse to the floor and dissolve slightly. We used a double to save time, so that Anthony Ainley could go off and get changed for the rest of the scene, and also so that visual effects could set up the mask with the fluid pipes. We started to record it and in the gallery we all thought it looked very effective. After taking quite a long time, I said ‘Cut!’ and I shall never forget our poor double saying ‘My God, I nearly drowned!’. He’d fallen in such a way that some of the fluid was going up his nose and into his mouth. Later, in editing, I wasn’t allowed to forget the incident – it was preserved on tape to make me feel guilty.

“Anthony Ainley was very thoughtful and dedicated when it came to discussing his interpretation of Kalid. We gave it a lot of consideration, and that paid off with the pleasing result we achieved in the end.

“I said to a friend at the time ‘I did it as technically and as capably as I could, which is not to say someone else couldn’t have done it better’ I found the physical restrictions swamped us, rather. You always have an initial gut reaction to a story, and with ‘Time Flight’ I kew it was going to be tough to realise from the beginning.

“My theory is that you put your resources into what you can do best. ‘Frontios’ was written on this vast scale with the huge colony ship, and we were supposed to relate that to the street below. It was a major headache to realise that in a studio, with no pre-filming. Sometimes I’ll re-locate scenes to get the best visual impact out of them.

“I’m sure Johnny Byrne won’t mind me saying this – I virtually plotted the whole of the end action for ‘Arc of Infinity’. With a week’s filming, we wanted to get some sort of value out of it, and a chase on foot has to be very carefully constructed to make it exciting. I added things like the bridge being pulled up just as they wanted to cross it, as a way not only of prolonging the suspense but also of saying ‘Look, this is the locate at its most dramatic’. My locating of the final moments on the lock gates was another slight change from the original script. I thought it pointed our rather nicely that Omega had nowhere to run to anymore.

“Having got the script, I went to Amsterdam with John and our production manager, where we got in touch with the tourist board, who are very good at looking after visiting film crews. We told them what we wanted and they then pointed us in the right direction, so to speak. Indeed, the filming at the airport there was easier than it had been in the UK for ‘Time Flight’. The main location we used, although very central, was actually untypical of most of Holland, but it suited our purposes exactly. It was all kept in as close a vicinity as possible simply because if you’re travelling, you’re losing filming time.

“I cast Colin Baker in ‘Arc of Infinity’ because I liked him as an actor, and as a person he has a tremendous sense of humour. He’s a very intelligent guy and he’s bringing a lot of himself to the part, especially in the form of this dry wit.

“I read the script for ‘Vengeance on Varos’ and thought at once ‘This is very exciting’. If you remember ‘Gangsters’, it was in the same way a mix of toughness and humour. It fitted quite comfortably in the studio and I was quite happy for it to be that way. I hope it has that type of ‘no escape’ claustrophobia to it. I thought the sets were most effective, and they were fairly flexible. For that one mortuary fight scene, we had to construct an entire water tank in the corner of the studio.

“We were lucky in our cast. Jason Connery is very up and coming, and Nabil Shaban was exactly right as Sil. I wanted him to appear as slimy as possible, and Nabil gave a lovely performance of eye-rolling evil. The voice was designed to be quite sinister as well. Of course it’s very hot in all our monster costumes, and after takes Nabil had to be kept cool with face fans.”

Bob Baker (1990’s)

Here’s Bob Baker, who along with Dave Martin wrote a number of classic 70’s episodes, including ‘The Three Doctors’, ‘The Mutants’ and ‘The Claws of Axos’. In this interview, he talks mostly about ‘The Mutants’.

“Of all the scripts Dave Martin and I wrote for ‘Doctor Who’, ‘The Mutants’ is the best they’ve ever done. It was the show where everything seemed to blend perfectly. The monsters were terrific, really superbly done. The ganglion creatures in our previous story, ‘The Claws of Axos’, had been good; but the Mutants were a high point.

“Dave and I learned the ‘Doctor Who’ formula with ‘The Claws of Axos’. It took us a year to write that. The formula is to have a little something every couple of minutes, a small climax every five minutes, something big every ten minutes, and something huge at the end. It’s a structure you work to, using your characters to shape it. And it’s good fun.

“I think Terrance Dicks was pleased with ‘The Claws of Axos’, and he hinted that if we came up with the right story, he’d like to use us again. When Terrance asked us to put up a story, he said that they were looking for rsomething about pulling out of Empire. It’s the sort of thing the British do well. They’re still doing it with films like ‘White Mischief’. It somehow lives in the British consciousness.

“It was part of the brief to involve the Time Lords and get away from Earth. The Doctor was a detective for the Time Lords, who would whizz him off to do jobs, though he didn’t know what was involved. The classic situation was that he’d got with it takes, but he doesn’t know what it’s for. So the little black box appeared, containing the cryptic signs. The pure space ones were always more satisfactory. Putting monsters on Earth means that you reach a point where you have to ask ‘How do Daleks go down steps?’ or ‘Doesn’t that monster look silly walking down the street?’.

“We had the idea of the evolving creature, only it could take a lot shorter on another planet. Or a metamorphosis could take place in a much longer time. We explained this by the planetary movement around the sun: the creatures had to be like this for the next so-many centuries until the whole cycle started again. Another element was the idea – almost like South Africa – of the indigenous people being hunted by the new suppressors. We calle them Munts. Terrance Dicks called us up and said ‘You can’t call them Munts!’, so we calle them Mutts instead.

“The idea of Earth as a grey world was ours too, a sort of Friends of the Earth thing. It was the idea that, if pollution continued at its present rate, all that would be able to survive were rats and ants. it was a nice turnabout to make oxygen the pollutant on Solos. This would kill off the natives and make it very nice for the Earth colonists, selling real estate. The messages were there for those who wanted to see them. I wouldn’t be upset if people didn’t spot them. If so, that’s fine. The messages had to contribute to the telling of the story.

“The Three Doctors was alright because it was confined to the UNIT building. The worst thing about that was the gellguards – great blobs going round shooting people. It was exactly the same as those ‘fifties science fiction films in which jeeps full of soldiers pull up, and they fire like hell at these things that never get killed. UNIT were doing that every week. It got terribly boring, I thought.

“I liked K9. It was an extra character you could use. I didn’t like the idea of it killing anybody. That was never what it was there for. it was supposed to be an enigmatic character, moving independently to support the Doctor. It would be very difficult to sustain the programme with just the Doctor.”

Verity Lambert (1980’s)

Here’s Verity Lambert telling DWM about the early days of ‘Doctor Who’. She puts right a few misconceptions, and admits that she wasn’t too fond of ‘An Unearthly Child’…

“Doctor Who was never intended to last just six weeks. Right from the beginning, we were told it would be a year-round production. Certainly by the time the first episode was shown, we had most of our scripts together for the full season. The only thing we didn’t know then was that there would be another season after that. This myth about the show only being planned to last six weeks is one that has grown over the years, probably as a result of inventive reporting.

“The format for ‘Doctor Who’ was pretty well defined by the time I arrived. Donald Wilson had already given the job of writing the first story to Anthony Coburn, together with the firm guidelines as to how the characters would be broken down. The Doctor was to be irascible and unpredictable. What nobody wanted was a conventional dotty old professor, so it was stressed that the Doctor should be something of an anti-hero to begin with.

“Susan was his original travelling companion, to mix knowledge with naivety, though it was Anthony Coburn who cast her as the Doctor’s grand-daughter. I think Anthony Coburn felt there was something not quite proper about an old man travelling around the galaxy with a young girl for a companion. Ian was there to be the hero figure and to be physically adept, with Barbara on hand to solve the human orientated problem posed by the Doctor and Susan being something special.

“David Whitaker and Mervyn Pinfield were absolutely super in the work they put into ‘Doctor Who’. Mervyn was appointed to be our technical adviser because neither David nor myself were scientists in any degree. Our brief was to ‘use television’ – that is, make use of all its resources and new developments in order to achieve a scientific look. Mervyn Pinfield came up with opening graphics by suggesting the use of a camera pointing down its own monitor.

“We were all very nervous making our first few shows, simply because we were doing things that had rarely been done before, and certainly not by the BBC. David and I relied heavily on Mervyn to read through story ideas and scripts to see if they could be done easily and to our budget, or to suggest ways of modifying them so that they could be done with photographic tricks.

“I didn’t much care for the caveman story as a whole, but the ending of episode one is an absolutely magical sequences. There was no dialogue during those last few minutes, it was all done visually and, I think, with great invention, taking the four central characters on a ride through time to that desert and then ending with the shadow falling over the landscape. It summed up just how new ‘Doctor Who’ was as a concept.

“David chose Terry Nation on the strength of some science fiction work he’d already done for ITV, ‘Journey Into the Unknown’. At first we were a bit wary about accepting his storyline about the Daleks, because of the bug-eyed monster concept. Sydney Newman had outlined a series that was part history and part educational towards science; the aim being to expose children to science and history and hopefully interest them in it. I didn’t feel the Daleks altered Sydney Newman’s format, mainly as they were in functioning metal cases.

“The crisis came when Donald Wilson saw the scripts for the first Dalek serial. Having spent so much time defending ‘Doctor Who’, he saw the Daleks as just bug-eyed monsters, which went against what he felt should be the theme of the science-fiction stories. There was a strong disagreement between us, in fact it went as far as Donald Wilson telling us not to do the show. What saved it in the end was purely that fact that we had nothing to replace it in the time alloted. It was the Daleks or nothing. What was very nice, though, was Donald Wilson coming up to me after the Daleks had taken off and saying ‘You obviously understand this programme better than I do. I’ll leave it to you’.

“Dennis Spooner was known mostly for comedy, and as our scripts started coming in I decided I wanted to experiment with putting comedy into ‘Doctor Who’. ‘The Romans’ perhaps didn’t work very well, although I liked it enormously and I know Bill Hartnell felt much more comfortable doing comedy than all the scientific stuff”.

Victor Pemberton (1980’s)

Here’s Victor Pemberton talking to DWM about working on ‘Doctor Who’ during the Patrick Troughton era, as well as his script for ‘The Pescatons’ and his enduring interest in the sea.

“We had great fun producing ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’. I remember we introduced those little Cybermats. They were entirely Kit’s idea, because he was a great scientist and a very scientifically-orientated man, and in a way they almost wrote the thing around the Cybermats. The special effects team actually built them, but they came to us for the idea. It was quite a spooky story, because all the Cybermen were in ice tombs and they came back to life – like ‘Frankenstein’. But the Cybermats were better and in those days, they would have made lovely toys and we used to play with them.

“Two of us worked on ‘The Moonbase’ with Peter Bryant, although I can’t remember who, I’m afraid. It was all about people’s veins suddenly being brought out onto their faces and I remember (as an actor) spending two hours with make-up every morning, having these ghastly veins painted on our faces. I played an astronaut on the moon, and we were exploring when something nasty overtook us and I died the most hideous death I know.

“After that I had a break, and then came back for the Dalek story. Innes Lloyd asked me back, and we did ‘The Ice Warriors’ with Peter Barkworth. None of us thought he’d do it, because ‘Doctor Who’ didn’t seem his cup of tea, but still he came. It was the same job with the Yeti story. Assistant script editor. We usually came in to do additional dialogue when the writers weren’t available. It was always last-minute hitches, and it’s quite a nerve-racking business being an editor, because you must learn to be an instant writer, especially during rehearsals.

“They asked me to write a serial called ‘Colony of Devils’. In many ways it was ‘The Slide’, the same sort of idea. But it came at a time when the North Sea gas fields were just being discovered, and I thought it would be wonderful to create a kind of sinister story around these gas fields. Natural gas being pumped out through the pipelines affected some seaweed, which turned nasty and produced this foam and gas that came through people’s gas ovens and affected them. It was helped along by two very sinister people, Mr. Oak and Mr. Quill, who became a sort of evil Laurel and Hardy, one always talking, the other silent. They were the accomplices of the kind of root centre of the nasty organic creature.

“A lot of Quill and Oak’s stuff was toned down, because they wore these boiler suits and it looked like ordinary people who knock on your door. I remember that the one who spoke was terribly polite and really quite chilling. I remember there was a Times article about ‘Doctor Who’ at that time, asking just how far the programme could go to draw the line between adult and children’s entertainment. In those days, they thought, we were scaring the pants off the kids, when in fact we were getting letters saying they loved it all – kids like to be scared. The only thing I didn’t like was that they changed the title. To me, ‘Fury From the Deep’ smelt of a Hollywood ‘B’ movie but I guess the producer, Peter Bryant, liked it.

“The man at Argo Records who did ‘The Pescatons’ was Don Norman, who certainly knew I’d done ‘Doctor Who’ before, but also knew me because his agent used to be mine as well. It was purely a matter of knowing my work and needing someone who could do it quickly. However, they didn’t really know what to do and ideas were thrashed out by myself, Don and Tom at a visit to Tom’s house.

“I feel there’s a great deal of menace in the sea. I’ve always felt so. Even as a kid, I used to stand down on the seashore at Brighton or Southend and watch – during winter – the waves smashing against the rocks and thinking it’s menacing. It’s so very big and so very wide and so very everything.

“I don’t think ‘The Pescatons’ would have worked on television. They were too big and really only for records. I did once get approach by Anthony Read to write during the end of Tom Baker’s years on the programme, but I was working at that time and sadly had to say no.”

Click here for Victor Pemberton’s website, which has a lot about ‘Doctor Who’ as well as his other work, including his successful career as an author and the time he met Laurel and Hardy.