Colin Baker (1986)

Here’s another Colin Baker interview, this time conducted shortly before ‘Trial of a Timelord’ was shown. From his comments about Mel, he seems to be about a week into the schooting schedule for ‘Terror of the Vervoids’. He also discusses violence in ‘Doctor Who’ (which was receiving a lot of criticism at the time), his friendship with Patrick Troughton and his desire to have the Brigadier return to the series.

Q: How did you prepare yourself for the role of the Doctor?

A: John Nathan-Turner lent me a lot of tapes; of Pertwee, Toughton, and Hartnell, and Baker mark one. I watched the tapes, not with a view to copying any of them, but simply to assimilate what it is that is the Doctor, that is, in addition to whatever the actors bring to it. But it is very much a part that depends on the personality of the actor. Producers cast because they see something in you that they want to bring to it. But I did have meetings with John and the script editor and the Head of Series and Serials, and I said what I thought I could do, and what I’d like to do in addition to that, and they seemed to like that. I wanted to bring unpredictability to it, and I wanted to highlight the fact that he was not an Earth person, and that he came from this place called Gallifrey, and therefore he was not going to behave in the way human beings would expect him to behave. I wanted to do things quite deliberately – like not crying when a person dies, but being extremely angry about other things.

Q: Did you consciously try to make your portrayal almost the opposite of Peter Davison’s?

A: No, not consciously the opposite of anybody. I didn’t decide on my Doctor as a result of the previous ones at all, really. I did what I would do, no matter who had played it before. Presumably, any contrast was dictated by the choice of me. Obviously, I am different from Peter. Peter is a much more introspective person, much more of a matinee idol sort. I’ve tried to get little echoes of my predecessors; Hartnell’s irascibility, the disrespect for authority of Troughton, the derring-do that Pertwee had, Tom’s irreverance and weirdness, and Peter’s innocence and honesty.

Q: What story did you most enjoy doing?

A: I most enjoyed doing ‘The Two Doctors’, because of working with Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines. Pat, I’ve adored for many years, and I’ve known him for a long time. I was best man at his son David’s wedding, and I shared a flat with David for ten years, so I’ve known Pat off and on, and always admired his acting, and adored his Doctor, so to actually work with him was a special treat.

I was a bit in awe, actually, but that was dispelled in a couple of days, and Frazer also is a delight. Frazer and I got on extremely well, and we larked around a lot, and Pat treated us like an affectionate… I’d say father… but he’d be offended. No, I’ll say father anyway, because he calls me Miss Piggy at the moment; I call him Gonzo.

Q: Which story have you least enjoyed doing?

A: I suppose it was ‘Timelash’, which never quite gelled for me. I thought it was actually much better than it was going to be. I thought it worked extremely well. Pennant (Roberts) did a good job on it. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with it, it’s just that of that particular series, it was the one that didn’t work for me. I don’t think that the Doctor’s element was as strong as I’d have liked.

Q: Who are your favourite enemies?

A: My favourite enemy is the Master, because Sherlock Holmes has his Moriarty, and while most monsters have no particular desire to destroy the Doctor, the good thing about the Master is that it’s a personal matter, so there’s great opportunity for confrontation. I would like, and haven’t yet had, a really thundering good Master story. I would also love to work with the Rani again. She was a wonderful adversasry. But after the Master and the Rani, I would say the Daleks and Cybermen come joint second, along with Sil, who is in the new season.

Q: What do you think of Mel?

A: We’ve only done a few days so far, so we haven’t quite worked out who we are, and what we are, but I think it’s going to be excellent. I think Melanie’s been conceived as being a little more ‘up and at ’em’ than Peri, and less complaining than Peri was, and in fact in a certain sense the situation is being reversed, in that she’s so keen that I’m the one who is saying ‘Hey, hey, just a minute, shouldn’t we think about this?’

Q: Would you like to have more than one companion?

A: I think the problem with having more than one companion is that it makes it extremely difficult for the writers to maintain a narrative, because you have to have a separation between the Doctor and one companion, which means that you’ve got two threads. I thought, for instance, that Turlough was a fascinating character, and I’d love to work with a character like that. With someone as strong and definite as him, then you would be all right having more than one.

Q: Would you like to meet the Brigadier in a future story?

A: I’d love to meet the Brigadier. I know Nick Courtney well, having met him at many conventions, and he’s worked with all the Doctors. I think it would be very sad if that was not continued. I know that JN-T says that he cannot conceive that Doctor number six will not meet the Brigadier, so I’m sure at some point it will happen.

Q: Do you think the programme has become too violent?

A: I didn’t think it was, but I can understand that others would miss the point, when the violence they complained of was in ‘Vengeance on Varos’ in particular, which was a programme saying ‘Violence is bad for you’. I can understand that some people would miss that message and just see hte violence. The good thing about ‘Doctor Who’ is that it does carry messages. Behind every story, if you look for it, and particularly if it was written by Robert Holmes, it’s usually making some other point. I think the tolerance of violence on television goes with swings of the pendulum, and we have to go with whatever is publically acceptable.

Q: How long do you intend to stay with the programme?

A: I think that’s probably in other peoples’ hands, rather than my own. Say the choice was mine; when I started doing this, I said that Tom Baker’s record of seven years was awfully attractive. I’ve done it three years now, even though we’ve only done two seasons, and I’m enjoying it. So I see no desire on my part in the near future to stop; also, I’d like to beat the episode tally! In order to do that at the present rate, I’d take about twenty years, because in Tom’s day they were making twenty-six episodes a year, now we’re down to fourteen.

Q: What are your feelings about the twenty-third season?

A: I’m very excited by the new season. The trial has a great many twists. The three stories are all very diferent stories, and there are also interconnections in them. There are lots of layers, and it’s very, very complicated, which I rather like. I like things you can’t understand. I think we have to get away from viewing figures. The BBC is about providing television for everyone, not necessarily at the same time. You can have seven million people watching one programme, and then going and doing something else, and another seven million watching the next one. The BBC has stood for quality for so long, it would be a shame to allow it to be watered down.

Colin Baker (1987)

Here’s a pretty angry Colin Baker talking to ‘The Sun’ in 1987 about his sudden removal from ‘Doctor Who’. He’d hoped to remain in the role for a number of years, so to get the boot after just two fairly short seasons was clearly a shock.

“I couldn’t take (being sacked) in, it was such a shock. I’d fought so hard for the show, I was stunned. What I couldn’t accept is that Grade didn’t have the guts to tell me man-to-man. If I knew why I was sacked then I would feel better about it all. But I got fobbed off with excuses about Grade thinking three years as Dr. Who was long enough. The fact is I only made 26 episodes before he cancelled the show. When it started again there were only 14 episodes. Hardly a long run, is it? All I wanted was a proper explanation. Many people believe, as I do, that I have been treated shabbily.

“Grade didn’t want me to say I had been fired. My boss, Jonathan Powell, the Head of Series and Serials, said that the BBC would stand by any statement I made. He strongly suggested to me that I should claim to be leaving for personal reasons. They actually wanted me to come back and do four more episodes, just so I could be killed off and fit in with their plans! I told them what they could do with their offer.

“I’m by no means a rich man from ‘Doctor Who’ because they never repeated any of the shows I did. I earned around £1,000 an episode and I was paid by Australian and American television companies who bought the show. But all the promises of extra money from spin-offs didn’t really materialise. Only small amounts of money dribbled in. But I was happy in my job and I was convinced that I was a good Dr. Who – certainly on an equal footing with my predecessors. I would have liked to have carried on for a good few years, and I believe that’s what should have happened.

“How could they expect viewing figures to rise when (Trial of a Timelord) was slotted in at such a bad time? Even so, five million viewers isn’t so bad. The Wogan show doesn’t do much better than that, but you won’t find Grade moaning about a show that’s his brainchild. I have been overwhelmed by the support I have received from the viewers. Fans have made the job really worthwhile.

“I can honestly say that working on ‘Doctor Who’ was one of the happiest working experiences of my life. It was a fantastic team and there were always plenty of pranks. Once, when the production team discovered I was terrified of spiders, they set me up. I arrived in my dressing room to find they’d festooned the place with massive plastic spiders, even to the extent of filling the loo with them. There was never any bitchiness on the set – unlike a lot of BBC series.

“There have been times when I felt like just throwing everything in. I have considered selling up and moving to a little place in Cornwall. I wouldn’t mind running a corner shop and leading an ordinary life. I honestly do still dream that Grade will turn up on my doorstep and say it has all been a terrible mistake, but I realise that this will never happen now.”

Nabil Shaban (2000)

Here are sections of two interviews with Nabil Shaban, Sil from ‘Vengeance on Varos’ and ‘Mindwarp’. The first part is ‘Doctor Who’-focused, and you can read the original here. The second part is from a Channel 4 documentary in which he talks about, among other things, his reasons for becoming an actor and his experience working with Derek Jarman.

“Ron Jones was searching for someone small to play Sil… he’d interviewed and auditioned many ‘dwarf” and ‘midget’ actors for the part but he wasn’t satisfied with any of them. Time was running out and rehearsals were scheduled to start within the month. Then Martin Jarvis, who had already been cast as the Governor of Varos asked if Sil had been found yet, and when he was told No, he said he knew of the ideal person. Apparently his wife had seen me in a TV show a few years previous, and reminded Martin that I could be what ‘Doctor Who’ was looking for. So as a result of Mr. and Mrs. Jarvis’ suggestion, I was invited to read a couple of scenes of Varos at an audition with Ron. At the end of the interview / audition, Ron offered me the part outright. However, I nearly didn’t make it to the interview because I got stopped by a traffic cop for carrying out an illegal motoring manouver, and because I insisted on arguing with the pug when I had no right to – I knew I was in the wrong but I don’t respect the law and I despise the pigs. He very near arrested me. However, I like to think that the ghost of William Hartnell was looking after me, as I was his biggest fan, and he planted a thought-form into the ‘Rozer’s brain and so I was allowed to continue.

“As a fan of ‘Doctor Who’ since its birth in 1963, I was extremely excited and nervous on the first day. By chance, I got into the lift with Patrick Troughton. Of course he had no idea who I was or what I was doing at the BBC, and I didn’t tell him. We just smiled at each other. I took teh coincidental encounter as a good omen. Because I was an inexperienced, untrained actor and disabled, I didn’t want to appear a dud, so I learnt all my lines before the first day. I assumed all the actors would have done anyway, well I then became embarrassed when I discovered I was the only actor to know the script word-perfect, so for the first few days I had to pretend not to know my lines, but Forbes Collins and Colin Baker saw through my ruse and Colin Baker announced that I was a swot and trying to win Brownie points from the teacher! Also, by the first day I had the Sil laugh off to a tee. I’m met a snake the week previous, and got my inspiration from watching it flick its tongue back and forth.

“I took up acting for several reasons. One, I wasn’t supposed to act. As a disabled person, it wasn’t expected of you, the best you could hope for was to be an accountant. Secondly, it’s a great form of escapism, being something that you’re not in your normal life. I’ve had the chance to playAyatollah Khameni, Haile Selassie, Jesus, Hamlet – a whole range of experiences which you wouldn’t normally be able to have. And thirdly, I like story-telling and being part of the story-telling process.

“I was able to get started as a professional actor as a result of setting up a theatre company for disabled actors. It was myself and an able-bodied guy named Richard Tomlinson set this up, round about 1979. It got going in 1980, we toured the States for a bit, went to Canada, and made a bit of a name for ourselves. We got press attention in Britain and attracted the attention of the Arena arts documentary makers at the BBC, and a combination of touring Canada and the Arena documentary allowed me to get seen. As a result, I was offered a few weeks’ stint as an actor on stage.

“The theatre I’ve done, I’ve enjoyed them for different reasons, so I wouldn’t say I enjoyed Jesus in ‘Godspell’ or Hamlet more, because they all enabled me to discover something in myself. I think it’s very hard for disabled actors and performes to get work, there’s still a lot of cliches within the arts industries and people tend to think of… for example, you get very few disabled people in leading roles, unless the script actually says ‘This person is disabled’, then they might get the role. I say ‘might’, because they might prefer to get an able-bodied person to ‘black up’, so to speak, and have that role. But generally because our culture’s very body-fascist, you’ve got to be beautiful, you’ve got to have a nicely-formed body, as a man or a woman, if you’re going to play a romantic lead, for example.

“In the case of ‘Wittgenstein’, it’s possible that Derek Jarman thought of me because we’d met before, when he was making ‘Caravaggio’. He was a very easy-going person, very open to suggestions, so I actually found it a joy working with him and it’s a great tragedy (that he died), there’s no-one to replace him.

“As a disabled person, there’s a lot to be achieved through the arts. Writing, acting, performing, it’s all about presenting mirrors of society, and the trouble for disabled people is that the mirror is one-sided, in other words we’re like vampires, the vampire’s not reflected in a mirror, and 99% of the time disabled people are not reflected in the mirrors that are presented to the people. And that’s perhaps one of the most important reasons for me being an actor”.

John Nathan-Turner (1993)

Here’s John Nathan-Turner, probably the most controversial producer in the show’s history, giving a quite wide-ranging interview about the show. He talks about working as a Floor Manager in the Patrick Troughton days, about trying to persuade Peter Davison to stay on for a fourth series, and about the real reasons for the Colin Baker era’s troubles.

Q: Going back to ‘The Space Pirates’, how did you find the production team, the atmosphere, compared to under Barry Letts, who was producer on your second one ‘The Ambassadors of Death’?

A: Well when I first worked on the show it was in the role of Floor Assistant, the most junior member of the production team, basically a kind of glorified Call Boy, my main responsibilities being getting the actors on the set at the right time. And the very first story I worked on was with Patrick Troughton as the Doctor, and subsequently two other stories with Jon Pertwee as the Doctor. Now the thing about the role of the Floor Assistant is that you’re working on the floor, you don’t have headphones, you’re not aware of what’s going on upstairs, and certainly it seemed to me that what was going on down on the floor was more fun on the Patrick Troughton show. There was a tremendous atmosphere of naughty schoolboys, almost, with the last Pat Troughton and Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury all goofing around. Being serious for the rehearsals and takes, of course. Now that’s not to say that when it came to working on the Pertwee shows they weren’t fun, they were just not as much fun. I think perhaps the technicalities of the show undoubtedly had become greater. The show had moved into colour, which required greater concentration in those areas. So that’s why my chief memories of the show are of Pat’s era, towards the end of black and white era of ‘Doctor Who’, as being a very fun environment, and Jon’s era being a little more serious from upstairs.

Q: When the BBC gave you the producer’s post in 1979, you’d already proved yourself as a Production Unit Manager on ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ and on ‘Doctor Who’ under Graham Williams. Did you know what you wanted to do from the start with ‘Doctor Who’, particularly with the changes to fan consciousness of the show in America?

A: I think if you’re hoping for something to happen, like you’re hoping to take over ‘Doctor Who’ as producer, then you tend to have very very tentative plans indeed, because I think the whole time perhaps you’re expecting disappointment and that it won’t happen. So I’d made only a few initial plans of what I’d do if I got to take over from Graham Williams. It wasn’t until I actually took over that I sat down seriously to appraise what it was that I actually wanted to do. I think it was a case of tempting fate too much, if I’d had an enormous list before I got the job.

Q: Recalling what Pat Troughton told Peter Davison, to not play the Doctor for more than three years, and then recalling the 18th month hiatus, the cancellation in 1989, and all that happened, do you wish you’d got Peter Davison to stay on for a fourth year?

A: Well I did attempt to persuade Peter to stay on after he’d completed three years. I think the decision that the optimum period is three years is one that’s been made subsequent to Peter’s time. I think everyone at the BBC – myself, the head of drama, perhaps even the controller of BBC1 – did attempt to persuade Peter to stay on. If that had happened, I think those questions of ‘What if?’ are very difficult to answer. One thing I know is that I really wish that I had moved on earlier, because I feel to some extent, although every actor who plays the part gets labelled by playing the leading role in the world’s longest-running science-fiction series, I feel that as producer for eleven years it labelled me more than I would like, because I don’t see my future being concerned totally with science-fiction. I actually see my career having a much broader canvas, really, so I think in terms of people moving on maybe I should have moved on earlier.

Q: On the bright side, if you come to the States you always have somewhere to stay.

A: (laughs) That’s true.

Q: Looking at Colin Baker’s era, and the official story that the show was put on hiatus for 18 months because of the excessive violence in his first year, do you wish you could change the violence level, looking back at it?

A: Well I think I have to pick you up there and say I don’t think it’s ever been said that it was taken off for 18 months because it was too violent. I think the real reason was that they needed a certain amount of money by cancelling many programmes – ‘Doctor Who’ was one of them – to establish daytime television on the BBC, and it was an attempt to suddenly demand this money because the BBC wished to pull forward their launch date because the independent companies were pulling forward theirs. So there was a sudden and dramatic attempt to get this money by cancelling a lot of shows, and this was always the reason, or certainly the reason I was always given, as to why it was rested. As for Colin’s contribution, I actually think he got a tremendously raw deal, in that he did one season, then there was the hiatus, then we came back and there were only fourteen episodes and they were in a different format, and then the decision was made to move forward with a new Doctor. So Colin never got a chance to get his teeth into the part. I think most people would agree with me that the first season of virtually every Doctor is really a very tentative one, the actor trying desperately to find a way to play the part, which after all is veyr thinly sketched, and coming to terms with the amount of themselves that has to be injected into the portrayal. So I really feel that Colin, maybe, if there hadn’t been that hiatus, would have got into a slightly higher gear that would have allowed him to mature his portrayal.

Q: He did seem to get screwed, and he did very well with the resources that he had. Was ‘Doctor Who’ put off a bit to make way for ‘Eastenders’?

A: No, I don’t think so. ‘Eastenders’ had been on the cards for a number of years. I think that where ‘Doctor Who’ got involved with ‘Eastenders’ was that after ‘Doctor Who’ was moved from its traditional Saturday slot, each year we’d be on different days. One year it’s be Monday and Wednesday, then another year Monday and Tuesday, and so on, and apart from doubling our audience during this time, which was a significant indication that those early evening drama slots could work, I think that what we were doing was really rehearsing which of the two evenings of the week would be ideal for a soap opera which had yet to be named, which was ‘Eastenders’. And the whole thing has come full circle, because this weekend in Britain there has been a programme celebrating thirty years of ‘Doctor Who’ combining the programme with ‘Eastenders’. The TARDIS arrives in London and gets embroiled with characters from ‘Eastenders’ in a two-part mini-adventure in 3D, a very exciting technology that I don’t think we’ve seen the end of. The story has all five living Doctors, twelve companions, a multitude of characters from ‘Eastenders’, and a multitude of monsters, something like twenty different monsters. And in a way there’s a certain irony that we were once rehearsing the slot for ‘Eastenders’, which by the way has just become the most popular programme in Britain, in positions one and two, it’s finally beaten ‘Coronation Street’.

Q: Fans want to know if the selection of Bonnie Langford as Melanie Bush was because the BBC wanted to keep the show on track when it returned, because she was popular from ‘Crackerjack’, or was it more a matter of calming down the front office from the BBC’s point of view?

A: You’ve got a lot of mis-information there. Bonnie was never on ‘Crackerjack’, which was a programme that was cancelled when ‘Doctor Who’ was rested in 1985, and ‘Crackerjack’ never came back. I don’t think Bonnie was ever involved in that. I cast Bonnie, it was my idea, I thought she was right for the part. I also thought that bringing in someone who already had a name, as a companion, would help with publicity, to refresh people’s memory and to help with that. It was not a popular decision with many of the fans in Britain, but I think you have to keep that in perspective. Fans with a big ‘f’ who are members of the DWAS in Britain total 2,500 people, and over the years, for example when we were doing two episodes a week and getting ten million viewers, I think you have to keep the views of the Fans in context.

Q: I was speaking to Sophie Aldred, and she said that she didn’t originally audition for the role of a companion. She said she auditioned for Chris Clough, then went to you for approval, then back to Chris Clough and found out that you had just selected her in a way that required no test readings or auditions whatsoever. And she said that she owes her career success to you.

A: Well it was a weird situation in a way, because at the end of that season there were two stories both of which featured a possible ongoing character. There was a young girl in ‘Dragonfire’ and a young girl in ‘Delta and the Bannermen’, and the script editor Andrew Cartmel and I couldn’t  decide which story should end the season, and consequently the casting of these two young girls involved my office in a very major way because whichever one went out last would possibly hold the key to staying on in the show as a companion. But I’m delighted that it was Ace. I certainly don’t think that Sophie was right for the other part. I’m not saying she couldn’t have played it, but I think she was much righter for Ace, and I think the combination of Ace with Doctor number seven, Sylvester McCoy, is probably one of the most successful in the show’s history.

Q: How do you know if that chemistry will exist?

A: If you could bottle that kind of chemistry, you’d be the next multi-millionaire. I think it’s very much a kind of instinctive chemistry that happens between two people who are working together and something additional gels in front of the camera. It’s something that I think was particularly applaudable in the work that Sophie and Sylvester did.

Q: Onto the ‘New Adventures’ books, do you like the novels and their treatment of the characters?

A: I have to confess that I have limited knowledge of those novels and their characters. Not being the resident producer of ‘Doctor Who’, although I’ve just guested on this Children in Need thing, I find some of the things that have developed that I’ve read slightly odd, you know, but then I’m a sweet old-fashioned thing hankering after my old days. I think it’s right that the show should develop, and I’m not knocking what Peter Darvill-Evans does with the books, and I think it needs to go forward in order to be successful. The development of characters, situations, the whole premise of the show, I think it would be infinitely preferable if it happened on television rather than in the novels first.

Q: Sophie Aldred said that she didn’t like seeing Ace as a warmonger in the books, she wanted her to be a pacifist, but she said that she hadn’t actually read the books. I take it a lot of people from the show don’t know how the books have developed things?

A: Unfortunately not had the time, I guess.

Q: Your participation with the video releases, after the cancellation, did that help to convince the BBC that they didn’t really need to make new stories? That they could just make a buck with rehashed old stories.

A: Well, I think that’s a very simplistic view, if I may say so. I think inevitably there’s a buck to be made, but you don’t have to be a mathematician to see that the buck is going to run out pretty soon. In the UK, they release twelve complete stories each year, plus three specials, and that’s a hell of a lot of material. They’ve been doing it for a number of years, and I don’t think it’ll be long before those video releases run out. I know you get them slightly slower in the States, so they’ll hang on longer, but I really don’t think that anyone thinks it’s a substitute for making new product.

Q: When the show comes back, how would you like to see it?

A: I’ve said in print and in a docuumentary that goes out tonight in the UK that I see this ‘Children in Need’ thing as my absolute farewell to ‘Doctor Who’. Although it’s only twelve minutes, it has brought together every living Doctor, all of them in costume, all of them recording new material that’s specific to this rather than using material that was left over from a junked story, and it’s brought back so many of the companions and so many of my old team that I really feel that it’s the end of ‘Doctor Who’ for me. What it needs for the future is a new team with new ideas and a whole new aegis of taking the show forward into the next century.

Colin Baker & Nicola Bryant (1992)

This is a transcript of Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant at the Visions convention in the US in 1992. It’s a long one, but it covers a lot of ground, including the fan crusade against John Nathan-Turner, the bizarre attempt to sue the BBC for not making ‘Doctor Who’ in the 90’s (!) and the lack of interest some people on the show had for even the most basic matters of continuity.

Q: What have you been doing since ‘Doctor Who’?

CB: (laughs) Well I’ve been doing a lot of theatre. The only television was something I did for the Children’s Channel, which is a cable / satellite channel in the UK, but nobody’s seen it because nobody’s got cable / satellite in England. And I did one episode of ‘Casualty’, which is a sort of ‘Hill Street Blues’ in a hospital, but I’ve been doing theatre, seven or eight plays one after another. I did ‘Run For Your Wife’, I just finished ‘Death and the Maiden’, which is a 1992 Olivier Award winner, which is the same as your Tony awards here – not with me, the good ones left and they got me. It’s actually on stage right now in Wolverhampton with me in it. Tricky, that, isn’t it? But they have these things called understudies.

That play finishes tonight, so I then go back to England on Sunday night, Tuesday I drive up to Sunderland where I’m putting on a show as a production company, at the Sunderland Empire, presenting, trying to write, I’m doing all the linking stuff for it. That’s on next Thursday, to celebrate the fact that Sunderland’s now become a city, my company was asked to put a show on. Then on Sunday I start rehearsing for a pantomime, ‘Dick Whittington’ in Weymouth from the 9th of January, then I’m open to offers.

17th January we’re both filming with Bill Baggs to finish off the latest of his ‘Stranger’ films, that’s a trilogy. or a multi-gy, we hope, lots and lots of them. The BBC owns ‘Doctor Who’ so no-one else can make that, but Bill Baggs is a resourceful fellow and he’s written a series about a man called the Stranger, who travels through time and space with a lady called Ms. Brown, played by Nicola Bryant! And we battle evil people who happen not to be Daleks or Cybermen. It’s a very neat way of continuing without… It’s video only, it’s not broadcast.

Q: What about Nicola in the past five years?

NB: Um, what have I done?

CB: Well that’s enough about Nicola.

NB: Notice some things never change. The first thing I did after ‘Doctor Who’ was going to the West with a play with Patrick Macnee, called ‘Killing Jessica’, and it was originally a TV movie shown in the US called… (pause) I’ve forgotten, which is very clever of me. Anyway, so I did a West End show for about six months, then I went and did a season at Chester, a variety of roles, ‘Come on Jeeves’, upper-crust characters, a whole of things, then I did ‘Blackadder’, the Christmas special, then to the West End for a very political play about the Falklands, four characters stating their opinions about the war and none of them really budged on their opinoin, and the play didn’t fall on any particular side, so depending upon the politics of your audience on any particular night, you were either very popular or in a lot of trouble. I’ve done lots of other theatre, the most recent of which was a nine-month tour of ‘The Great Gatsby’, playing Daisy Buchanan, which was the first time that play had been done in England.

Q: How did you get the part in ‘Blackadder’?

NB: At the time I  auditioned, I was playing Honey in ‘Who’s Afraid of  Virginia Woolf?’, and Honey has a particularly odd laugh, she just laughs hysterically from one crisis to the next, and when I went to the audition Ben Elton wasn’t there but he’d left a message with Richard Curtis that he wanted someone who could do a funny laugh. A lot of it was improvised during rehearsal, it wasn’t in the script. So I said I was playing Honey and I gave them Honey’s laugh, and they liked that. Then in one rehearsal Ben Elton came in and said ‘I’ve decided it should be something like a machine gun’ that you can’t switch off, you just press the button and it starts. He wanted something that would get on your nerves. I kept going off to the ladies’ loo and coming back, saying ‘How’s this one?’ and eventually I came back with this high-pitched soprano machine gun that he thought was right for the character, and he started writing bits about the ornaments falling off the shelves and things like that. A lot of that was improvised.

Q: Both of you have done mostly theatre since ‘Doctor Who’, is that because you’re typecast?

CB: (laughs) It’s entirely because I’m typecast. Typecasting isn’t anything to do with audiences, really. Audience, I find, will accept anybody in anything, they quite like seeing people in other things. What happens is producers don’t want their new piece prejudiced by preconceptions about whoever’s playing that part, so if you’ve played something very high profile on television, it tends to be qutie some time before you get any more television. And my Doctor was very specific, he wasn’t a kind of, well you wouldn’t fail to notice him… so the end result is I don’t get offered much television. Also unless you’re under contract, television tends to be quite short, a week or two, whereas theatre is often six months. As I have a young family to support, I have to go with that. That’s the reason. If you ask me which I prefer, I much prefer television. I know that’s not what actors normally say, they like to get the buzz of the live audience, well I like the buzz of going home at night and seeing my family. I enjoy working in television studios, I enjoy working on a bit and getting it right, or as right as you can, then moving on to the next bit.

NB: I had a lot of offers for screaming American teenagers when I left ‘Doctor Who’. Every part that had a screaming American teenager landed on my door. And I was very lucky to get ‘Blackadder’, because a lot of casting directors think I’m American, and it goes the other way because they might want an American but they go ‘No, we don’t want her, we’ve found out she’s English’, so you can get caught between that sort of problem and the fact that ‘Doctor Who’ is a rather strange show, in that they think it’s a children’s show, yet it’s under drama, and if you’ve made yourself a large-size character (laughs) it’s very difficult to break that image. These casting directors most of the time won’t take the time to meet you and discover you can do many other things. As Colin says, it’s not the audience’s fault, and it’s not the same in America. In England it’s ‘Oh my goodness, we’ve seen them before’. It’s a different attitude. I do love doing theatre, but I like doing something different every time, not just the character but the medium.

Q: Has it caused any regrets, doing the part in ‘Doctor Who’?

NB: No.

CB: No, I wouldn’t be asked to do all these plays if I was ‘Doctor Who’. I mean it’s a two-edged sword, it’s slowed down my rate of… before I did ‘Doctor Who’, I used to do television all the time, but as soon as you become identified with something then you’re stuck for a while. But soon I’ll be an unknown face again, which will be quite useful.

Q: Tell us about John Nathan-Turner, because there are these right-wing fanzines that blame him for all the problems with ‘Doctor Who’.

CB: Well I have extremely strong opinions about that, I feel very very sympathetic towards John because what he’s done for the programme is ten times what anyone else has done for it. There’s a tiny, tiny coterie of fans who are very frustrated because they’ve never been producer of the programme, they’re mainly in Britain, but there are two or three that I could name but won’t, in the UK, who have made it their lifetime job to do everything they can to sabotage John Nathan-Turner, and I think it’s miserable, petty, ghastly behaviour and I think they’re worms that ought to be trodden into the ground. (laughs) Don’t mess around, Colin, tell them what you really think.

But John was the producer for a very long time, and he’s responsible for it being over in the US and he came over and marketed it, he always cared about the fans, he always made sure people like myself and Nicola came to conventions when our first inclinations were that we weren’t too sure about it. He persuaded people like Pat Troughton, who never wanted to talk about the programme, who found out he loved it! And John kept the programme on the air in Britain, he was the only person fighting for it. Witness the fact that now he’s been ousted, there’s nobody in the BBC who’s waving the flag.

But those same people are still campaigning to get rid of the little bit that John’s still doing, he’s working on the videos and they’ve orchestrated a sort of hate campaign based on his choice of videos now! It’s so stupid, and it’s all jealousy, simple jealousy. I think the right-minded fan… it’s like all vocal minorities, they can swamp the majority, which covers a wide range of opinions, I’m not saying that everyone agrees with everything John’s done, of course he’s made mistakes, I’ve made mistakes, you’ve made mistakes. But they’ve said ‘Doctor Who has become a pantomime’. One article said that once. I don’t see men dressed up as women, that’s pantomime, I don’t see terrible jokes, apart from mine, and that’s my choice, not John’s. John is a friend and for a while he shrugged it off but now it’s beginning to get to him. If some people want to make someone unhappy, that’s up to them, but I think the rest of us should make sure that’s not allowed to continue. I rest my case.

Q: They seem to be unable to divorce personal opinions about the man from thoughts about the programme.

CB: Yes, and he’s set himself up, being involved with the programme for ten years, there’s an awful lot of stuff there to criticise, or to praise. Other producers came in for three years, didn’t give a hoot about the programme, and popped out again, and they’re kind of safe because they haven’t done anything controversial.

NB: He took all the risks.

CB: I think the fact that the BBC gets these very irritating letters from these fans less likely to bring the programme back rather than more likely.

Q: What do you think about this idea of them suing the BBC for not making ‘Doctor Who’?

CB: It’s ridiculous. You can’t sue an author for not writing a book you like, nor can you sue the BBC for not producing a programme you like. It’s a bizarre nonsense. It’s simply a matter of law, you can’t sue a company for not making a programme you like.

Q: Do you think the public stations in the US, and the Sci-Fi Channel and PBS and cable stations, could have any influence, by saying that the overseas sales are strong?

CB: No, sorry, I once had dinner with a nice man called Ray Kraft, alas no longer with us, who was president of Lionheart Films. He said to me, at the end, ‘Colin, when you go back to England could you tell Michael Grade we need more episodes? You’re making 22, we need at least 52’. I said ‘Hang on, I have no access to Michael Grade’. A lead actor in the US will probably know the guy in charge, that doesn’t work in the UK, actors are employees. I have no say with the top brass, and if I meet them it’s only for a nod at a cocktail party and they probably haven’t got a clue who I am.

If you bear in mind that the BBC is an organisation that annually has received more from ‘Doctor Who’ than it’s cost to make it, it’s got 28 years of product to sell, any other organisation would have a vested interest in keeping it going. But because the income doesn’t go back to the programme, it goes to the general BBC coffers and is spread very thinly, so the programme-making arm of the BBC has no incentive whatsoever to make more of it. You also have producers there who have projects, and if there are ten of them coming and saying ‘I want to make this’, and there’s no-one coming saying ‘I want to make Doctor Who’, then there’s no-one batting for it.

Q: Do you think the plans to make the Doctor a less likeable character might have been a mistake? And do you feel that during the hiatus, you were very vocal and you were ousted because of that?

CB: To be honest, I wasn’t that vocal, it’s one of those things that’s been perpetuated by fan magazines. I didn’t really speak out, maybe I should have done. Actually, I was quite careful not to criticise anyone for the simple reason that I didn’t want to be hampered with the baggage from that, so I don’t think that’s a reason. I think it’s more casual than that,  I don’t think any attitude towards me caused any of the decisions anyhow. I don’t think they were aware of my existence!

I thought it was quite exciting to have a character who was a little inaccessible, a little enigmatic. I don’t know if you have this experience in your life, but I have it in mine, the people who are my best friends are the ones I didn’t like much at first. Some of them I loathed at first. There’s a book called ‘Pride and Prejudice’, I don’t know if you’ve read it, there’s a character in that called Mr. Darcy who for the first two thirds everyone thinks is the villain, they think he’s a deeply selfish swine because he doesn’t go around wearing his virtues on his sleeve. And I think those characters are very interesting, and I wanted to play the Doctor like that.

Q: I think a lot of people liked that in the character. Your Doctor seemed more personally violent at times, and I didn’t have a problem with that, but some fanzines did.

CB: If the character was just slightly different all the time, but basically the same, if you have twelve versions of yourself, as we discovered with the Valeyard, who’s a kind of interface between two versions we discovered, there are going to be different qualities. It’s more interesting.

Q: Isn’t it true that every new Doctor has a period when they have to be accepted?

CB: Oh yes, I mean the hardest job was poor old Peter after seven years of Tom. Tom being such a strong and particular Doctor, I mean every interview I get with non-fans has ‘Where’s your scarf?’, but Tom was the only one who wore a scarf. But the scarf’s so associated with a lot of peoples’ idea of what ‘Doctor Who’ is about. So Peter has a tough job there, actually, which is why he chose to play it totally different. You have to overcome, in that case it was a generation of children. A young child will have seen as his Doctor only Tom Baker for about six years, and suddenly it changes. Nobody likes change.

Q: A lot of channels, when they start showing ‘Doctor Who’, they start with Tom Baker.

CB: Well I suppose they thought they couldn’t start with black and white. You can’t start a show in black and white. They had seven years of Tom Baker to get the show started.

Q: Do you know anything about the lost season, in particular the unknown story of ‘Penecasata’?

CB: All I know is that I read ‘The Nightmare Fair’ and thought it was a damn good story. I knew there was an Autons in Singapore story. And that’s all I know!

Q: They’ve been novelised, some of them. But not ‘Penecasata’.

CB: (‘The Nightmare Fair’) got as far as a full script. I read the ‘Nightmare Fair’ novelisation and I enjoyed it, having been very excitied when I read the script for it.

Q: There have been comments that one of the problems with ‘Trial of a Timeload’ was that it was confusing for the actors. Was that true?

NB: No, it’s not confusing for the actors because we film in bits anyway. One day we’re filming a sequence where you go into the TARDIS, and the next day you’re shooting a scene that relates to something you shot two weeks earlier. As an actor you’re always working in bits, and it’s up to you to keep a track of the story. I think the only problem of making it bitty was that as a programme you’d just get into a drama sequence, then you’d get thrown back out again into the trial. Whether that was the best thing, I don’t know, but it definitely wasn’t confusing for the actors.

CB: I was very confused by it, but I had a very different problem, especially in ‘Mindwarp’ because there was a point when I said to Eric Saward, the script editor, ‘When I’m tying Peri to this rock and threatening to torture her, am I doing it for some subtle reason of my own, because I think I’m being watched or whatever, or because I’ve been affected by the mind probe, or is the Matrix lying?’. Those were the three alternatives as I saw it. He said ‘I don’t know, you’d better ask Philip Martin’, so I got in touch and gave him those three alternatives, he said ‘I don’t know, Eric wrote the trial stuff, all the Matrix stuff was added after, by Eric, you’d better ask him’. So I went to John Nathan-Turner, he said ‘Oh, whichever you like’. This is the level of involvement at the time. Eric was going through his own problems at the time, disagreeing with John Nathan-Turner on all sorts of things. I felt that was all very sloppy, it was all cobbled together a bit. The stories were written independently, and the trial theme was put on top. I felt it was the Matrix lying, so I really was torturing Peri. But it was very difficult. You expect the writers to know what’s happening, but that’s not always the case.

NB: It’s like finding out later that suddenly I ended up being married to Yrcanos, when we were never playing that. You think ‘I might have played a couple of scenes slightly differently if I’d known that was what was happening’, and it’s not the way the script was written, it’s not the way either of us were playing it.

Q: You can tell it’s hacked on the end.

CB: That was my fault. I said ‘No mention is made of whether what happened to Peri is true or false’, and they said ‘Well what do you want?’, I said ‘I want to know your intentions’, they asked me! And I said ‘Well I’d like Peri to survive because I like her and she can come back’!

Q: You said the other night that the BBC probably won’t bring back ‘Doctor Who’, but they’ll probably bring back something to replace it. How would you feel if that something was ‘The Stranger’?

CB: I think there’d be absolutely no point the BBC bringing back ‘The Stranger’, because if they’re going to do that, they might as well bring back ‘Doctor Who’. Whatever fiction we all put together for the purposes of avoiding litigation, the similarities are so close that they might as well use the property they’ve got. I wasn’t the one who said they’d bring back something to replace it, I think they’ll bring back ‘Doctor Who’ or something totally different.

NB: It’s like the attempt at ‘Star Cops’.

CB: Every now and then the BBC have dabbed in sci-fi. They did a series called ‘Moonbase’, they did two or three series of it, I never see it shown now.

Q: It was destroyed, that’s why.

CB: Oh was it?

Q: The BBC wiped it all. Speaking of development of the Doctor, how did you get the part in ‘The Ultimate Adventure’?

CB: Well I got the part because when they decided to do it, they approached all the Doctors, a kind of blanket approach, and I think at the time two of them said ‘Yes’, that was Jon Pertwee and myself, and because Terrence Dicks who wrote it had worked with Pertwee he was keener to write for Pertwee, so they went down the Pertwee path, as it were. But just as it was beginning, Jon said that three months was his maximum, and they wanted to get six months out of it, so they asked if I wanted to do the rest of it. I said ‘Yes, I would’, so I met up with Terrence Dicks, who asked me what alterations I’d like, and it struck me there was no point making any, if he could trust me to change a few lines here and there that were hyper-Pertwee, as it were. Things like ‘reversing the polarity of the neutron flow’, and even then I just changed it to ‘reversing the linearity of the proton flow’ as a little homage.

The only change I made was that I had all the lines that Pertwee had written all over the set rubbed out, because I  could remember them. Sorry Jon. And I developed a different relationship with Zog, I think Jon felt that Zog was a little furry alien who was a companion, he was extremely cute, and I think Jon felt it was distracting from his charm as the Doctor so he tended to ignore it. But I thought there was potential for humour with Zog, so we built up a relationship.

Q: Nicola, as Peri you had a lot of screaming to do. How do you feel about Ms. Brown, is she more like the character you’d like to have been as Peri?

NB: When I first auditioned for Peri, the description was ‘tall, blonde, leggy Californian’, so I said ‘Yeah, I can play that!’ (laughs), but the character wasn’t very well formed and as the auditions went on over a few months I finally got to read the first draft of ‘Planet of Fire’. I thought she was obviously an intelligent young girl, extremely unhappy family background, young, naive, but a spunky little kid. So I thought there was a good chance of taking this somewhere, because (a) it was the beginning of her growth period mentally, and if she starts out as a courageous kid she’s obviously going to expand from that, and I liked the fact that in the very first story she was giving the Master what-for, and I thought ‘this is good’. And I expected the character to develop from that.

But by the time I got into my second season, they just harped on about the bickering between the two of us, and the language thing, and stories popped up like ‘Timelash’ and they seemed to forget where the character had come from. I was much happier with ‘Trial of a Timelord’ because at least they acknowledged that time had moved on and their relationship had changed, because if they’d gone on the way they were going they’d have killed each other, or she’d have said ‘for God’s sake, get me out of here’, or Colin would have said ‘get out’, because there was no reason for them to stay together. That seemed to get lost. But I would have taken her in a different direction if I’d been in the driving seat.

Q: And Ms. Brown in the Bill Baggs stories?

NB: Yes, it’s a little closer to what I would have done. Especially in the second story, she’s a little more intelligent, it’s not a case of… she’s dealing with situations herself and using the Doctor in a different capacity. And the story that we’re filming at the moment is extremely interesting, and I can’t reveal why, but it gives us a chance to form something new.

Q: You mentioned making script changes in stage productions. Did you have that power in ‘Doctor Who’?

CB & NB: No!

NB: I think I got about three words changed. I got ‘mincer’ changed to ‘meat grinder’, I remember that was a long saga, that took three weeks, I would say ‘I’m sorry but you don’t say mincer in the States, you say meat grinder’, and they said ‘no-one in England will know what a meat grinder is’, I said ‘Well cut the lines, I’ll say something else’, and it was like the whole thing about saying ‘cop’ when I’m American. And then there were times when we’d say ‘I can’t say this, because four stories ago we established that I never knew this’, so when he says ‘Shut the TARDIS door’, I can’t do it if I haven’t been shown. And most of the time they’d listen to you, but it was always ‘How annoying of you to remember that’.

CB: I remember once, at the beginning of ‘Trial of a Timelord’, being whipped into the court and I said to Eric Saward ‘last time we met the Timelords, the Doctor was the president of Gallifrey, wasn’t he?’, and he said ‘Was he?’, I said ‘Yes, I remember Peter being made president in The Five Doctors’. He said ‘So?’, I said ‘Well all he has to say is I’m the president of Gallifrey, sod off all of you’. So he said ‘We’ll put a line in if it makes you happy’, so they put a line in ‘You’ve been deposed’. But it happened by chance, I knew very little about the history of the programme, there should have been more thought going into it, I thought. I didn’t often get lines changed, but I got lines put in, most of them puns. It was agreed that my Doctor would be allowed to make awful puns.

NB: The only thing I got put in was something that came up in the BBC canteen at one point, we were talking about the budget and John Nathan-Turner said one of the things we got a lot of letters about was that it was very obvious that we built two corridors and ran between them. And I said ‘Well why don’t you stick a line in about it?’, and he said ‘Like what?’, I said ‘Well every time you go somewhere, the companion says All these corridors look the same to me’, and that way it was part of the story, that’s why they got lost!

Q: Did you also get very little input into your costumes?

CB: (laughs) No, Nicola chose hers.

NB: Madonna copied me years later. I was very happy in my first costume, it was very sensible. I was in cotton clothing, but the press made such a big to-do about me being in a bikini, big centre-spread in the ‘Daily Star’, and the ratings shot up and I think John Nathan-Turner thought he’d found a good thing so I didn’t get dressed again, really in ‘The Caves of Androzani’, which was ludicrous because there we were filming in Lanzarote in October, and then in November we’re filming the next series and it’s minus two or three, Peter’s in two layers of thermals and I caught pneumonia and got  frost-bite. And I wasn’t happy running around in shorts all the time, because that had nothing to do with the character that I started out with. I imagined sneakers and jeans and sweatshirts and T-shirts, you know.

Q: Sophie seemed to do pretty well.

NB: Yeah, well I think we went through a sudden fashion change as well. Suddenly we went in for this much more masculine dressing for women. A whole change of fashion happened, so I think it was much easier to choose another young person and let her make a fashion statement. If the press had just ignored it, I think I would have gone into jeans and T-shirt. When I auditioned, that’s what I wore. Then when it came to the press release, John Nathan-Turner said ‘Wear something clingy and short’, I said ‘I don’t have anything like that’, and he said ‘Don’t you have anything that clings to you?’, I said ‘I’ve got a leotard’, he said ‘Wear that’! It was the only thing I had. So I wore that for the press release, and John very kindly handed me this bag as I went to get changed, it was cotton wool. He’d brought me a load of cotton wool to pad my bra out because he thought there was nothing there. Which was rather funny when I put the leotard on, gave him a surprise.

CB: I was asked what I’d like to wear, and I said I’d like something black, a bit austere, ruffled sleeves, long black coat, black trousers. They said ‘That’s the Master, really’. So then John said ‘I think it should be really tasteless’, and he kept coming up with these designs and it’s quite trick for a designe, because you want to do things that are tasteful. Poor Pat Godfrey kept coming up with design after design, and in the end this collection of clashing materials came together and that was chosen. I never cared for it very much, but I was on the inside looking out, I didn’t have to look at it, you did.

Colin Baker (1986)

This is Colin Baker’s 1986 appearance on ‘Wogan’, covering such topics as lucky underwear, American ‘Doctor Who’ fans and people mistaking actors for the characters they’re playing.

Q: You’re not scared of monsters, are you?

A: No! I’ve been to the BBC canteen. Nothing can frighten me!

Q: Are any of your family scared? I know you have small children, do they look out for you?

A: The one who’s most frightened is my own wife, who actually wouldn’t come to the studio when we had Daleks there. She’s a grown woman and should know better, but she’s terrified of Daleks, and I told her that, you know, they’re not always real. Occasionally there’s one with a little man running around inside.

Q: Why is the old TARDIS a blue police box? I’ve never really understood why.

A: Well 23 years ago when it started, William Hartnell arrived in London in his police box, the TARDIS, and it had this thing called the chameleon circuit, and it didn’t work properly. It was supposed to make the outside of his time machine look exactly right in his surroundings. So in London, fine, but then the chameleon circuit broke and it’s been stuck like that ever since.

Q: Speaking of you as Colin Baker, you weren’t actually going to be an actor, were you?

A: Well, I always wanted to be, but when I was 18, I was shy and I said ‘I’d like to be an actor, please, Daddy’, and he said ‘Wouldn’t you rather be a lawyer’, so I said ‘Mmm, okay’, so I did that for five years.

Q: Then you went and joined rep, did you?

A: Then I went to drama school, I did my stint five or six years around reps.

Q: Hard, was it?

A: Yes. Well, I’d love to say we did twice weekly, but we didn’t, the worst I think was one play for two weeks, but we had our moments.

Q: Is it true, like many actors, you have your little chiblits and superstitions?

A: Is chiblits a posh word for knickers? When I did my first appearance on stage, I noticed that everyone else had their little things that they put around them on the dressing table, their lucky bits and pieces, so I thought that I had to invent a lucky bit and piece of some kind, so I said ‘These are my lucky knickers’ and everyone said ‘Oh, yes, lucky knickers’ and I kept them thereafter.

Q: Now the first time you leapt to fame was in that marvellous series ‘The Brothers’, in which you played a very nasty piece of work, didn’t you?

A: Yes. The readers of one of the national newspapers voted me the most hated man in Britain. I was chuffed at the time. How naive can you get?

Q: And did the public occasionally confuse you with your character?

A: I was attacked occasionally. The less violent ones were the little old ladies in supermarkets who prodded me and told me to leave Edward alone and don’t be mean to Jennifer. But I did actually get physically attacked by an irate driver once who took exception to the way I was driving and said ‘You’re that…’ and I said ‘Yes’, thinking he’d say ‘Oh, I love your work’, but no the first came straight through the window and into the face, and he marched off and got into his car. And I apologised for hurting his hand. He was a big man. A tooth came out.

Q: Men who play villains get a lot of fan mail from women, don’t they?

A: Yes. I got a fair amount. Funnily enough I get more now for playing the Doctor than I did then.

Q: In America, ‘Doctor Who’ is a cult series, isn’t it?

A: Yes. It’s not known to the man in the street, I mean I can walk down the street in New York and nobody will say ‘Aren’t you the Doctor?’ but it’s shown on the public service networks at eleven o’clock every night.

Q: There are ‘Doctor Who’ conventions. Do you go over to America?

A: I do. Those who watch it are potty about it. I mean, here you might get 1% of the people who watch the programme are Fans with a capital letter, but over there 90% of the people who watch it are besotted by it, so you go to conventions in various places, university towns, and thousands of people turn up to touch the Doctor’s hem.

Q: Isn’t it funny that after the sophistication of ‘Star Wars’ and special effects, ultra sophisticated, that this ‘Doctor Who’, apart from having an appearing and disappearing box, the effects aren’t all that good… what do you think the real appeal is?

A: I think that’s part of the appeal, actually. It’s very English, it’s always been plasticine and bits of string and you can’t summon up some piece of high-tech equipment to get you out of a situation, you have to rely on ingenuity. And because the budgets… you know, a special effect in ‘Star Wars’ would pay for an entire series of ‘Doctor Who’, but I think sometimes that can work to our benefit and I think it would be a mistake now for ‘Doctor Who’ to try to compete with the high-tech series.

Eric Saward (1986)

This is probably one of the most notorious interviews in the history of ‘Doctor Who’. Former script editor lets  John Nathan Turner have it with both barrels in a scabarous encounter first published in issue 97 of ‘Starburst’.

Q: Let’s start with the most immediate thing – you’ve recently left Doctor Who.

A: Well…I was getting very fed up with the way Doctor Who was being run, largely by John Nathan-Turner – his attitude and his lack of insight into what makes a television series like Doctor Who work. This had been going on for a couple of years and after being cancelled and coming back almost in the same manner as we were before…the same sort of pantomime-ish aspects that I so despised about the show. I just think it isn’t worth it.

Q: So, what exactly was the effect of the cancellation?

A: We were rather stunned. We didn’t know what was going on. I don’t think anyone’s really got to the bottom of why it was cancelled. I don’t honestly think that. Michael Grade can correct me, we were simply taken off because they thought we were awful. If we were really that bad I can’t believe he would have kept the same team. Grade did criticise us, and when he talks about the production team he’s basically speaking about the Producer and the Script Editor who are the team that are always there. I don’t whether he was just referring to us.

Q: What was the first thing you knew about the cancellation?

A: John had been told on the Monday that we were being cancelled, and he told me and Anji-Smith, the Production Associate on the following day. He wanted us to know before it was made public, but as it transpired the whole department knew anyway.

Q: There were no reasons given?

A: Other than it was thought the show needed resting, re-thinking. We were told we were going back to 25 minutes, which was Michael Grade’s decision, and that more comedy was wanted. I must admit that I didn’t understand Grade’s not about comedy, last season we had three very comic stories (‘Vengeance on Varos’, ‘Two Doctors’, ‘Revelation of the Daleks”). It was a pity that two out of the three stories were poorly directed.

Q: There’s a certain something, a sparkle, missing from the direction.

A: Most of the directors on Who haven’t got the lightness of touch necessary. And if they’ve got it they don’t hang around Who for very long because of the budget restrictions, working atmosphere, quality of the scripts and so on. The show isn’t that enticing to a rising director.

Q: What do you mean by working atmosphere?

A: Well, the constant thing of having to do everything for tuppence. Interference does go on. John can become so unpleasant to someone he’s employed, such as his director. The likes of Graeme Harper will not come back to Doctor Who if they’ve got something else to do. People like Peter Grimwade, who I suppose is the only other director of any note who has come out of Who since John has been producer, says he wouldn’t work with John Nathan-Turner any more – and I don’t think Nathan-Turner would employ him.

Q: There was some row, wasn’t there?

A: It was a lunatic situation…Grimwade directed a script I had written called “Earthshock”. He made the story work well, so John decided he could direct ‘Resurrection of the Daleks’ (in my opinion the worst Doctor Who story ever written. (As an author I am entitled to say that!) Peter had been booked and then there was a strike. So the story was cancelled. Grimwade said “Fine, well obviously we can’t do anything about that. If I’ve not got anything to do I’m going to have lunch and go home”. So he took me, remember I was an author as well as the script editor on the show, and his Production Manager and one or two other members on the team. I think there were about six of us. We went to the Television Centre for lunch – I mean so exciting, it’s unbelievable – only to find when we got back that John Nathan-Turner had been shouting and screaming all over the building “How dare they all go off to lunch together,
and not invite me”.

Q: Oh, no!

A: It’s true! Yes he was furious and it was so silly. “How dare they? I am the one who does the hiring and firing around here – how dare he take…” He took exception to my going because he said “How dare he take my Script Editor to lunch, and not me”. He took that absolutely as an out and out insult, and that was a contributing factor to why Peter was never invited back.

Q: No!

A: Pathetic isn’t it? It’s mind-numbing. One of the two half decent directors he’s had on the show he will not use because of a silly, stupid incident like that. I think he’s a very paranoid individual. He probably feels that I’ve been slagging him off all over the place since left…which is not true. There were lots of silly events before I did leave. When I left, I was
writing the last episode. We had talked about this ending of the season and he had agreed, in principle, to what was wanted – a hard cliff-hanging thing. I was surprised he had agreed, knowing he does go for these pappy pantomime sort of endings. I went ahead and wrote the last episode as I had discussed it with Bob Holmes and as I had with John, but the episode went in and, and John said “Yes, that’s all fine, fine. What about the end? I don’t like the end, we can’t go out on that end”. He reneged on but he had agreed. He wanted the “walk-down”, happy pantomime ending. I couldn’t believe it. But that’s the man. He knows so much, he has the show cancelled and is openly criticised by the Controller of BBC 1 television.

Q: A lot of fans criticise John for his America fixation. How much do you think
that going off to conventions affected the time he had available?

A: When he goes to these Conventions he has to get permission from the head of department to do so. I gather that usually goes through on the nod. At first, it didn’t encroach upon his work in that way. He started going to more and more of them. A lot of them would be at weekends. What did become apparent though, if he’d gone off for a weekend Convention to America, he would come into work on Monday straight from the ‘plane. It was as though he wanted to go to the Conventions, but wanted to show everyone that nothing was distracting him from his duties as producer, so he would do the lunatic thing of coming back Sunday/Monday morning, coming into the office, and just shutting the door and going to sleep. He is obsessed with the American fans. I gather that he sanctions who can go to America and who can’t. It’s very difficult obviously to control actors who are no longer working on the show, and obviously the fan Conventions want the leading actors and the companions. But you’ll find that writers were never invited. I mean someone like Robert Holmes who’s written God knows how many stories, has been involved in it since Patrick Troughton’s days, edited the show for three years, a man very experienced in writing for television who would have had a great deal to offer any audience who would bear to listen. Men like him were never invited. Only two directors ever went that I was aware of.

Q: When John originally started he said he was only going to do it for a short
time anyway. He would only do it for three years or so.

A: I think the main draw for him apart from the fact that he has got his fingers in so many pies is the income from the Conventions in America, which I think is quite a lot of money. I think that is something he is reluctant to give up.

Q: It has also been said that he doesn’t like any of the fans working for the
BBC.
A: Well, he’s obsessed about keeping everything secret. But the one thing that again aggravates when someone takes a 2.5-3 hour lunch break every day is that you know that you’re not going to be able to speak to him between that time. There’s no two ways about it. He will come back if something has come up, but it’s a ritual. He trots out at 12:30 and comes back after closing time…

Q: I believe there have been times when you’ve urgently wanted to speak to him
and he’s been on the ‘phone?

A: Oh, yes…that got rather silly and unpleasant. He went through a phase a couple of years ago of spending a lot of time on the ‘phone I think to America, certainly to the various Convention organisers – most of them are in America – and we had the lunatic situation one day. I was standing outside the office, I needed to see him and two of his directors needed to see him, and he’d been there chatting on the ‘phone, as far as the Secretary was concerned,
for at least an hour. It just wasn’t once, it was often, and with people waiting to see him – waiting to make the g*dd*mn show he was supposed to be the producer of. It was anything that would come up – I mean he’d rather read a manuscript from W.H. Allen, or spend hours ‘piddling’ about with some crappy piece of merchandising from Enterprises than willingly become involved in talking about what we were doing. I can’t understand it.