Victor Pemberton (Writer, 1992)

Here’s Victor Pemberton talking about working with Patrick Troughton in the 60’s, most notably on ‘Fury From the Deep’.

“(Patrick) was a great thinker. You could almost hear the machinery working in his brain. But you see no actor really is worth his salt unless he’s done his homework, and Pat was one of those actors who always did his homework. So by the time he brought it to the screen, it was fresh and as they say so much these days, it was innovative. And he such an interesting actor to watch, and to listen to. He wasn’t trying to analyze the part, as if you were doing a Freud cross-examination or something. In other words, he got on with it. But there were certain things he wanted to ask. I remember when we did ‘Fury From the Deep’, there were one or two things he wanted to ask about why a character did something, and that’s fair enough. He’d say ‘Do you think he’d say that?’, because in the continuity with a previous episode it might not have been right. And he was very meticulous, Pat, in his work, and not all actors are.

“I always felt in Pat’s performance, more than any other Doctor, that there was another side to that character, that somewhere out in that galaxy there was a dark side of this Dr. Who, almost a Jekyll and Hyde existence, but perhaps he didn’t know what that other part was doing. And every so often he brought that to the role, and I would love to have seen that brought to the role, and I’d like to see it brought to the role today. He brought majesty to the role, he brought fascinating insight into this character and tremendous fun. He was quite stubborn, if he didn’t agree with something he’d tell someone. He didn’t tell me, because I wasn’t the director. He knew the chain of command. But he was his own person and he knew what was right and he knew what was wrong. Just very basic things, like if he couldn’t say a line, he’d stumble over it or he’d use some excuse not to say it. Sometimes he’d fool his way out of it. But I always thought that he was a very nervous actor.

“Pat was a great Shakesperean actor, he’d appeared in some of the great Shakesperean roles. And of course he was in films, nobody terrified me more than him in ‘The Omen’, a short cameo role but amazing and chilling. He was, I think, at the forefront of his category of actor at the time.”

Tags: Doctor Who, Victor Pemberton