After two years on our screens, Doctor Who had become a television phenomena.
It was regularly reaching an audience of 10 million viewers, and its most celebrated villains,
the Daleks, had followed up their invasion of Earth with a rather more successful invasion
of the nation's toy shops.
But its third year would decide the show's long-term fate.
Would it become a well-loved but largely forgotten piece of 60s ephemera, or a show that would
still be going strong 50 years later?
In early 1965, as the Doctor locked horns with the ominous Animus on Vortis, Doctor
Who's first producer, Verity Lambert, decided to move on.
Having made such a success of the show, she would be a tough act to follow.
As would the show's script editor, Dennis Spooner.
He was heading to ITC to write for The Baron with Dalek creator Terry Nation.
Spooner's successor would be Donald Tosh, who'd helped set up Coronation Street in his
time at Granada before moving to the BBC in 1963.
Donald Wilson had invited me to join the BBC, and so I did.
Having been told I would be doing classic serials, he asked me, and indeed told me,
to do Compact, which was a twice-weekly serial.
I did Compact for 18 months plus, and then felt it was time to move on.
And he said, well, how about Doctor Who?
Donald Wilson's chosen replacement for Verity Lambert was John Wiles, an experienced writer
and script editor, but, as it turned out, a reluctant producer.
He was South African.
He, as it were, fled the apartheid regime.
We got on terribly well.
He was terribly easy to get on with.
Both John Wiles and Donald Tosh came to the show determined to shake things up.
He'd worked a lot with children and knew, really, a lot more about the psychology of
children than the other people in the BBC, you know, and they mustn't be too frightened.
And he said, absolute rubbish, they love being frightened.
And so we really did, you know, begin to kind of turn the screws a little.
We wanted to develop the programme and get it out of the somewhat childish rut we felt
it was in.
It was the boundaries we wanted to extend the most to push it a little bit more towards
adult science fiction, so we could touch subjects that Verity and Dennis hadn't wanted to touch.
But before he could take over as producer, John Wiles would have to trail Verity Lambert
for a few months, during which time several stories would be commissioned for the show's
next season, whether he liked them or not.
In the meantime, William Eames delivered his scripts for Galaxy 4, unaware that a new companion,
called Stephen Taylor, had been introduced.
He would have had to adapt the script, which was written for Jackie Hill, to be Stephen.
So I was playing a woman's part, basically.
Well, that sounds reasonable enough to me.
I was captured by these Amazon ladies.
Actually, when I think about it, I could have made something of that, I suppose, but I didn't.
Oh, we have a small number of men, as many as we need.
The rest we kill.
They consume valuable food and fulfil no particular function.
It had these lovely things called jumblies, or chumblies, which trotted around the studio,
being manoeuvred by very tiny people.
I adored the jumblies.
We had a whole cast of midgets and dwarfs.
They had the most extraordinary life.
Their world was a whole world of the little people, and they would be employed in a troupe
to do pantomime and things like that.
And they always had... the dwarfs and the midgets, I think they didn't like midget,
the little people, always had to have separate dressing rooms because there were fights.
And I said, what are the fights about?
The fights were over the women.
There were the dravins, who were supposed to be kind of frightfully sexy and splendid.
And there were the rills, who were, because they were sort of wonderfully frightening,
but of course were actually the goodies.
The rills were these horrendous walrus-like things with huge tusks and tails like a manatee.
I mean, nothing had ever been in Doctor Who quite so grotesquely ugly.
The story itself was awfully thin, and we couldn't think what else to do with it.
We had inherited it, and it had all been approved.
And so we just kind of ran along with it.
The last story credited to Verity Lambert would be Mission to the Unknown, a single
episode not featuring any of the regular cast, but instead concentrating on the dastardly
Daleks as a prelude to the forthcoming 12-part Dalek story.
What 12-part Dalek story, I hear you ask?
What we did not know was that Verity had already commissioned a 12-part Dalek.
Johnny was furious, quite reasonably.
I mean, we should have been told at least, but we were presented with it as a fait accompli.
John Wiles had a similar reaction, considering it.
An enormous rock in the middle of the sea, and one on which any boat we were going to
run would be submerged.
It was handed to me by Verity and Dennis.
Donald and I virtually washed our hands of it, and it went on more or less without us
in the hands of Dennis Spooner, who did most of the writing, and Douglas Camfield.
I was nominally in charge, but I had absolutely no authority over it, since none of it was
my concern.
The main cast had to have a week out, as I recall.
They all had been working flat out for months.
So we decided, get Terry, write a trailer for the Dalek master plan.
None of the regulars were there, but the Daleks were.
But viewers would have to wait for their Dalek action.
Before that would come the first story commissioned by John Wiles and Donald Tosh, an adventure
set during the Trojan War called The Mythmakers.
The Mythmakers I absolutely loved.
We had a wonderful cast.
We had Ivor Salter, Francis DeWolf.
We also had as King Prime, Max Adrian.
Max Adrian, one of the great actors that this country has produced.
Not just a great actor, but a wonderful man.
For the first three episodes, it's high farce, and then, in part four, everyone gets brutally
massacred.
It's a very enjoyable comedy where the doctors interplay with a DCC, something we all laugh
at.
That had all sorts of nice humorous edges to it.
But then suddenly it all turns on a razor's edge, and suddenly everybody's killed, and
it becomes extremely nasty.
There's a strange mix in these stories of comedy and horror, often almost side by side.
Kids love to laugh, and they love being frightened.
You were quite happy to get the mood changes.
It wasn't so much a really conscious decision.
It was just that one was enjoying oneself, and this was sort of part of the mix.
The Mythmakers would also see the shock departure of the Doctor's companion, Vicky.
No one would be more shocked than the actress who played her.
We went off on our six-week break, and when I came back, I expected to find the next four
scripts waiting for me.
And there weren't any scripts.
The writing out of Vicky is one of the things I really regret about my time in Doctor Who,
because it was unfortunately so badly handled.
We came back from our summer break to discover that she was written out at the end of it.
It was a heck of a shock to her as well.
I understood that Maureen wanted to go.
I really was desperate to leave.
If they had offered me another contract, you know, for however many episodes, I might have
been torn, because even 50 quid a week, which wasn't a great fortune even in those days,
but it was a great fortune to me.
Then we get to the first read-through, and Maureen arrives absolutely furious, because
nobody had told her.
Her agent hadn't told her, Johnny hadn't told her.
And I suppose I was angry because I'd gone on holiday and I'd rather have been looking
for work.
She said, you know, you've written me out.
I said, no, darling, I mean, well, yes, I have at the end, because I thought you wanted
to go.
I never said I wanted to go.
I said, oh, my God, you know, this is now deeply, deeply embarrassing.
Ah, yeah, so that was the end of me in Doctor Who.
Because this was almost John Wiles' first decision as producer, it didn't exactly get
his relationship with William Hartnell off to a good start.
I know Bill was furious.
He really didn't want that to happen.
Bill, I think, was very upset.
I mean, I can remember him saying to me, he said, oh, darling, this is outrageous, I'm
not going to have this.
I got on very well with Bill, but he and Johnny fought like cat and dog whenever they met.
I know he didn't like John Wiles.
I know that he fell out very badly with him.
I was careful, but really, it was judo, it was all sorts of...
There was an electric current between those two, always.
I can remember Bill being quite...
He could be quite acidic and vitriolic, and I can remember him saying, that bloody man,
Wiles, he's done...
And he was really...
He really was giving it...
I can't remember what it was about.
So what used to happen, if there were things, trouble with Bill, I would have to deal with
it.
It was OK, fine, Donald, down you go to the rehearsal rooms.
Have a quiet chat with Bill while he's having his lunch.
If they couldn't get me, if I was doing something else in a way, then Johnny had to go and deal
with it.
Eventually, my directors devised a code for me.
They would turn to their PA and say, you'd better phone the designer, which meant, get
John down here quick, so that Bill wouldn't know I'd been summoned.
To replace Maureen O'Brien, the production team introduced Adrienne Hill as Katerina,
a handmaiden from ancient Troy, which seemed like a good idea at the time.
I think it was assumed that Adrienne was going to be the continuation, she was going to be
the next girl companion for some time, and they realised very quickly that they had a
problem because Adrienne was from Troy.
We suddenly realised the huge problems we would have in having somebody who came from
that far back in history, everything will always have to be explained to her, and it
was going to be a nightmare.
You know, that's where she goes.
After having been whipped up into a frenzy of excitement by Mission to the Unknown, many
viewers could be forgiven for wondering where the Daleks had got to, but they wouldn't have
much longer to wait, as the TARDIS touched down in the jungle of Kemble and the nightmare
would begin.
I was a bit disappointed because it meant putting everything to one side.
Terry Nation was to write the first six and Dennis would, he had agreed that Dennis would
write the second six.
The problem was, Terry Nation and Dennis Spooner were both writing scripts for ITC at the same
time.
The lovely Mr Nation kept saying, yes, yes, I'm onto it, I'm onto it, you will have the
script shortly, and about ten days before we were due to go filming, and Dougie Canty
was jumping up and datting, where are the scripts?
And so I rang his agent and she said, oh, but he's off to Los Angeles in about 48 hours
time.
I said, no he's not, not until he's delivered six scripts, please.
And then she obviously got on to him, he rang me, and he said, I'll deliver them to you
tonight.
I'm actually catching a plane tonight, but on my way to the airport I will deliver all
six scripts.
I said, Terry, bless you, wonderful.
The doorbell went and I went dashing down to the staircase, because I lived at the very
top of the building.
There was Terry, with a big grin on his face, saying, there you are, I'm going to thrust
this brown envelope into my hands.
And he was downstairs, into the taxi with a wave, and gone.
Lasting for nearly three months, the Dalek's master plan would be the epic to end all epics.
All the kids at school were talking about it.
My best friend, for the Dalek master plan part one, it was his birthday and he had 40
friends around his house.
And the TV was there, and all 40 people are sitting around there, cross-legged, watching
the show.
I think it worked on lots of levels.
There were nice historical bits in there, there was some good science fiction stuff
in there, there was some very good Billy Hartnell stuff in there as well.
And the other characters that appeared and came in, I think added a great deal to it.
It did work well.
And one of the great things about the Dalek's master plan is that the Daleks themselves,
I think almost entirely in that story, are taken very seriously, unlike in The Chase.
Something about the Dalek master plan just felt magical.
The story also saw the introduction of space security agent Sarah Kingdom, as played by
Jean Marsh.
And to this day, no one is quite sure whether she counts as a companion or not.
Jeannie Marsh was a hugely experienced actress, was already building up a big reputation,
and was absolutely terrific on screen.
Well, come on, I thought you said it was finished.
She was instrumental in the story working.
I don't think she would have been an ideal permanent companion.
I think she was probably too strong as an actress.
Another problem for the team was that the seventh episode of the Dalek's master plan
was to be broadcast on Christmas Day.
There was a special Christmas edition where we ended up with the Keystone Cops in Hollywood.
I mean, bizarre.
That kind of comic relief.
The Christmas episode was stuck in the middle of a very serious dark story, with lots of
references in it to the rest of the story.
It was discussed at a fairly high level, because suddenly we realised, if we, on the Christmas
Day, when everyone is sort of lying around, and we've got half an audience who never watched
Doctor Who anyway, but the kids will want to see the regular thing, we could not let
the story just flow on in its normal way.
It was Christmas Day.
I mean, they'd been having God knows what in the afternoon.
Then there was the news, then there was us, then there was probably more jollification.
It had to be a sort of one-off jokey episode.
I mean, it was full of sort of pantomime jokes.
I watched the Christmas episode on Christmas Day.
Probably at the time I was a little irritated that the Daleks weren't in it, but still enjoying
it for what it was, until the last moment.
We so rarely get a chance to celebrate, but this time we must.
Celebrate?
Yes.
It's Christmas.
And then Bill Hartnell did the unforgivable, and turned and wished everybody a happy Christmas.
Incidentally, a happy Christmas to all of you at home.
Suddenly was becoming to the viewer like a personal chat.
It suddenly wasn't a story in time and space.
I mean, nowadays, you know, people have broken the fourth wall many times, but then it really
wasn't done.
As the story progressed, it became clear that the production schedule was beginning to take
its toll on William Hartnell.
Bill was past the zenith of his skills.
He was a good actor, no question about it.
He sort of developed into an old man.
Off screen, it was strange because he, I mean, he wasn't that old.
It may well be that he was physically not in the best of health and so could not learn
lines.
Consequently, studio days could be absolute purgatory for everybody.
There were directors that he didn't get on with.
There were actors who came in that he didn't get on with.
It was my job, really.
My role was to laugh Bill out of his five or six kind of tempers a day.
And that's what I did.
And I did it very happily all the time.
He was a, I can't explain what he was like.
He was a charming creature in spite of his irascibility and those terrible teeth, you
know, that he used to bear when he was angry.
He was very fond of me and I of him.
He really took me under his wing and was very friendly and kind to me.
I got on extremely well with Bill.
And he said, when I was sent this script for Doctor Who, I decided this was my chance.
I was going to make this mine and I do make it mine and I make this show mine.
And that's why he insisted on everything being right.
It was his, you know, it was his reward after a lifetime of slogging away at things he didn't
respect that much, probably.
And so you could forgive him an awful lot of the irascibility and the standing on principle
and all that because it was so important to him.
I wouldn't say he was on his way down as an actor, but he was on his way down from being
able to do what he wanted to do.
As a result, the burden of carrying the show would increasingly fall onto Peter Purvis'
shoulders.
I had a huge respect for Peter as an actor.
He was absolutely solid as a rock, frequently at the last minute, because Bill would suddenly
cut something and you'd think nobody is going to understand the next episode at all unless
this line goes in.
So one would slide down onto the floor and very quietly slip a note to Peter and say
something like, or one which was written, for goodness sake, mention dun dun dun, whatever.
He would.
It would just suddenly kind of come out.
It seemed fairly natural.
We knew that, as it were, the writing was on the wall as far as Bill was concerned and
why we were experimenting with ways to change him.
You know, how do you do it?
As the months had gone by, William Hartnell's relationship with producer John Waz had gone
from bad to worse.
One day I got a call from the studio to say that all the dresses had come out on strike.
Now this was a cataclysmic start to a day in the studio where you depend on all your
backup all the time.
Bill had simply offended his dresser, who then complained, and so the entire staff had
walked out.
And this was on the one day you had to get an episode recorded.
John, I can remember on one occasion going absolutely berserk because we'd collapsed
in hysterics on the set.
I think Gene Marsh and I and Billy Hartnell were all absolutely wrecked.
Peter Butterworth was there at the same time.
And John, I can remember, coming screaming out of the gallery saying, will you concentrate?
A reluctant producer at the best of times, John Waz was now feeling the strain.
They kept on saying things like, you've got to save this amount of money or lose that
or do the other.
And he felt hugely restricted because, you know, there is the budget, I mean, which was
small enough anyway, and for it to be perpetually being mucked about with other people telling
him what he could and couldn't do in it.
He just felt, you know, life is too short.
I've got better things to do with my life and I don't blame him.
The long and stressful production of the Daleks' master plan, a story he'd never wanted to
make, eventually proved too much.
And at the end of 1965, John Waz decided enough was enough.
Johnny, I think, took me out to lunch and he said, I'm packing it in.
I've had it up to here because they'd been riding and riding and riding.
And I said, you can't go.
You can't.
I said, no, because we're going to go down this path, we're going down that path, we're
going to explore this.
And he said, I know, I know.
And he said, not with me.
Waz would remain as producer long enough to hand over the reins to his successor and would
see two more stories through to production.
After such a bleak conclusion to the Daleks' master plan, it was time for some light relief,
which would be nowhere to be found in the next story, The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's
Eve, written by John Liccarotti.
Well, according to the opening titles, at least.
It was written ostensibly by John Liccarotti, but Donald Tosh didn't like the script and
he chewed it around and moved it around and changed it.
And virtually, the script is Donald Tosh's script.
It was the third of the three Doctor Who's that I did, and writing it was a totally different
experience and a very unhappy one.
He suddenly, out of the blue, sent through this script about the Vikings, this story
about the Vikings.
We looked and we thought, no, we've sort of done the Vikings in the time meddler.
We don't want to do it again, certainly not this quickly.
And so one called John Liccarotti in and he said, well, you know, I've been commissioned
to write, and we discovered he had been commissioned to write three, right back in the early, early
days, to write three Doctor Who's, and he'd done two and never delivered the third.
And this now was the third.
I then said, well, OK, but look, do one on St. Bartholomew's massacre, because that's
something we haven't done.
And it has lots of wonderful potential to be on the black side.
I hadn't wanted to do it.
I'd wanted to do the Doctor helping Eric the Red to discover North America.
But suddenly there was a switch in production teams and the script kept bouncing back to
me.
What he delivered was a sort of bad Hollywood version of somebody who's never set foot outside
Wisconsin thinks might have happened.
And I persuaded John that we would pay John Liccarotti off and I would actually, you know,
do it for free, which I did.
Out of kind of courtesy, I sent John the script, which he hated.
I wanted to take my name off the credits, but my agent wouldn't let me.
There was a terrible schism between the two of them to get that on the air.
I was not aware of that.
But of course, the massacre featured Stephen wonderfully.
I mean, suddenly he comes back into his own.
Because what had happened in the 12th Park downer is he kept being pushed on side.
And one felt, well, you know, it's a little hard.
You're supposed to be the kind of second lead.
This story would see the Doctor and Stephen caught up in events in Paris in the year 1572,
in which Catherine de Medici instigates religious genocide.
An unusually adult and downbeat premise for a Doctor Who story.
And it resulted in the show losing more than a quarter of its viewers.
I think it was quite a serious piece in the end.
It's beautifully written, very, very historically accurate.
It was really classic drama.
Fair amount of bits about French politics of the time.
And it probably alienated a lot of kids at the time.
Kids who just watched a Dalek story probably couldn't get into it.
It's not even a sort of normal action adventure story, you know.
It doesn't, you know, there are lots and lots of scenes of people talking.
The children would possibly have been bored with all that sort of intellectual tosh.
Sorry, Donald, no pun intended.
And then at the same time, the adults who would like a good old historical drama set
in Paris with the massacre of the Huguenots going on, wouldn't be watching it because
it was Doctor Who.
You had to give it the element that would snatch everybody's attention.
And that was the doppelganger idea of William Hartnell.
After the pressures of the Dalek story, William Hartnell had been given a week's holiday,
and then returned, rested, to play not only the Doctor, but also the Abbot of Amoise.
Bill suddenly fell.
He had, he, one had taken him away and one had given him another part.
Doctor!
Silence!
Who is this man?
And why does he disturb my peace?
We had no trouble.
He sailed through that as the Abbot of Amoise.
Absolutely beautiful, one of the best performances he gave.
Bill's recuperation also meant he was able to handle some of the most powerful scenes
of his era in the story's final episode, in which the Huguenots of Paris are brutally,
well, you can guess what happens from the title.
The long monologue was written specifically for Bill.
They were all too impatient to get back to their own time.
And he did it beautifully.
What I love about all that early stuff about the Doctor's origins is that it always feels
like a little door is being opened and then it's slammed shut.
Perhaps I should go home, back to my own planet.
But I can't.
It is for me the crowning moment of what was and what didn't occur.
You know, it all went terribly, terribly well.
And it's something actually I am, I feel justly proud of.
The closing moments would also see the introduction of a new companion, Dodo Chaplet.
I think I'm beginning to enjoy this space travel, or whatever it is.
She was nice and quirky.
She was very different from anyone else that we'd had on the show.
You know, she was sort of bubbly, cheeky, sassy little girl, which I think was probably
very modern at the time.
She settled in very quickly.
She was a substitute for his granddaughter, Susan.
He said so in the first meeting.
And that's the kind of paternal relationship he developed with her.
We had sort of lost that grandfatherly element.
He was just becoming really a clodgety old man.
And we hoped that by, as it were, giving him someone to be more even grandparental about,
it might soften some of the clodgetiness.
Dodo's debut story, The Ark, by Paul Erickson, was one of the first stories commissioned
by John Wiles, and one close to his heart.
The one about the spaceship on its way to another planet.
That story was mine, at least from the conceptual point of view.
I had this idea of an enormous ship that was so big you could get the whole of South London
into it.
You could drive cars, ride bicycles, the whole notion of forests floating in the air.
Johnny could see all sorts of potential in it.
I would have probably, if it had been totally up to me, I probably wouldn't have ever done
it.
But I knew Johnny loved it, and he'd gone along with me for things which I'm sure he
would have normally kind of thought, Tom, are you sure we should be doing this?
But he'd allowed me to go ahead.
So this was his, so ahead we went with it.
It does have the air of a kind of 30s science fiction film.
It does look at things to come.
It's, you know, for 1966, obviously like most do, it's hideously dated in terms of science
fiction.
Very nice director called Michael Imerson was actually fired in the gallery as the last
episode was about to be recorded.
I think it was partially because the arc was such a badly executed piece.
I mean, it was not his fault.
I think it showed in the design, the costume designs were awful.
It just didn't work as a piece and it's a pity because it was a very good story.
But immediately after that, suddenly we had a new producer and he was introduced to us.
This is the new producer and I met Innes Lloyd.
Like John Wiles before him, Innes Lloyd had no experience as a producer, but had worked
as a director.
Lloyd also shared his predecessor's enthusiasm, or lack of it, at the appointment.
The BBC said to me, do you want to produce Doctor Who?
To which I said, no, thank you very much.
I commit to be a director.
And anyway, I don't like science fiction.
I felt I should probably carry on.
And then I met Innes and Innes's idea for Doctor Who and mine were miles apart.
I mean, he wanted to go down pure science fiction and absolutely total, you know, the
whole thing becomes sort of mathematical formula.
And so I said, well, I'm a terrible scientist.
I think I should, you know, move on.
I suppose the odd thing about Johnny Wiles as producer and me as editor is the fact that
we did agree so much.
I can't remember any, I don't think there was any major argument ever.
Before deciding to leave, John Wiles and Donald Tosh had already laid plans for the show to
continue without William Hartnell.
The writing out of Bill we knew was going to have to happen because he just wasn't
coping.
So we had to write him out in the next story, The Celestial Toymaker.
John Wiles' idea was that the Doctor would be rendered invisible, only to magically reappear
played by a different actor.
I mean, technically, how it was going to be done, I've no idea, but we would sort of
buffer one into the other somehow.
But as The Celestial Toymaker went into production, Innes Lloyd was already in the producer's
chair and Gerry Davis had been appointed to replace Donald Tosh as script editor.
He was full of ideas which matched up with what Innes wanted to do with the thing, which
I thought was dead wrong for the programme.
The Celestial Toymaker had been thought up by writer Brian Hales.
The whole thing was going to be a real scare fest with jokes.
Within a week he came back to us and said, I can't write this, I'm frightening myself,
he said, I can't, I cannot do this, because it was to do with playing with people's minds.
And so, in keeping with tradition of outgoing script editors, Donald Tosh was asked to write
the story himself.
I went away and really wrote it, and Johnny read it and loved it.
Then I took my first holiday for two years while Gerry was moving himself in.
One of Gerry Davis' first acts as script editor would be to scrap the Toymaker script and
start all over again.
The content was a sort of pseudo-smart-null-coward comedy which was wrong for the audience, but
we had to salvage something.
I had to sit down in the garden and dash out and act a day.
The Toymaker character suggested toys, which suggested nursery, and I played around with
something sinister on those lines.
With more time I could have done a better job.
I came back to find totally rewritten from top to bottom.
Oh, you know, okay fine, they couldn't get hold of me.
And I said, but you can't put my name on that.
You've written it.
The plan to replace William Hartnell was abandoned, but the Doctor would still be invisible for
much of the story, giving the actor another well-deserved holiday.
To have his character only being played by his hand was really quite clever.
So he wasn't there, and that hand could play the game, the trilogic game.
The whole story hinged upon Stephen and Dodo, Peter Pearce and Jackie Lane.
Jackie and I had a lot of fun with that.
We enjoyed it, because we were playing games.
You're finding a route through a thing.
If you step on a wrong thing, then it all explodes.
That's it, end of story.
So obviously it never happened, because we'd get through to the end of it.
Good fun, though.
It's make-believe.
The new production team would have a battle on its hands from the outset, as the show's
viewing figures had begun to slide, largely due to it being shown earlier in the evening
against a new ITV talent show.
You know, you're sat down on a Saturday night with your kids.
You can watch the Walker Brothers or Cathy Kirby or something, or you can watch the Massacre.
I think people are going to be heading towards the Walker Brothers, though of course the
monoids in the arc have the Walker Brothers' hair.
But far from acting as a discouragement to an uncertain producer, the challenges seemed
to spur Innes Lloyd on.
I discovered the fascination of Doctor Who.
I found you could actually do with it anything you really wanted to do, and that was fun
in drama terms.
You could cover an enormously wide horizon, from cowboys to computers.
But once again, it would be a few months before the full force of the new team's influences
would be felt.
The next serial was the last to be commissioned by the previous regime of Woz and Tosh, The
Gunfighters by Donald Cotton.
So fill up your glasses and join in the song.
The law is right behind you and it won't take long.
He knew a lot about the sort of tombstone and plantains and all of that.
And it really is very seedy.
And I said, I want all that, please.
I had heard that Bill Hartnell wanted to do a Western.
And of course it ended up being The Gunfighters.
I hated that so much when we did it.
I really did.
But having watched it since, it's really rather a good piece.
It's a very good story.
Mr Webb.
Oh, Mr Webb.
I say, can you do that?
No.
And I wouldn't try it if I were you.
I have no intention of trying anything.
Only people keep giving me guns and I do wish they wouldn't.
And we got a chance to dress up and wear the fancy clothes.
I mean, Bill looked terrific, didn't he?
I think I was just embarrassed by the song.
I think that really coloured everything.
With rings on their fingers and bells on their toes.
The girls come to tombstone in their high silk hose.
They'll dance on the tables or give you a tune.
For whatever's in your wallet at the last chance.
At your last chance.
I don't know what they thought they were doing,
because that song then kind of peppered the whole of the story.
It didn't add anything.
It held up the action.
It wasn't the greatest song ever written.
And it was...
Although The Gunfighters didn't perform particularly badly
in the ratings, the reaction from those who watched it
was resoundingly negative,
suggesting that historical stories might not be the way forward.
The problem, I thought, was that we had too many
very good costume dramas on the BBC,
especially at that family viewing slot.
So we were really stepping into somebody else's territory.
I wanted the kind of adventure stories
you could relate to in everyday life.
And I was also looking for something as an alternative to the dialects.
Instead, Gerry Davis told prospective writers
to avoid humour and historical adventures
and instead to concentrate on...
..escapist, futuristic science-fiction stories
with a strong scientific concept and loads and loads of menace.
Wiles and Tosh stuff is very deep and philosophical and thoughtful.
That's not something you could accuse
the Lloyd and Davis stuff of being.
I actually find it a great shame that Donald Tosh and John Wiles
didn't get a longer stint.
In a way, the series dumbs down.
I think, you know...
But I don't think that's a problem.
It becomes very much a show about monsters fighting a hero.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
As part of the fresh new look the production team wanted for the show,
it was decided that the characters of Stephen and Dodo
should be written out at the earliest opportunity.
I was actually told by Ernest Lloyd
that the next serial would be my last.
It's a four-part one and that was going to be the end of it.
They weren't renewing my contract.
The first story to be commissioned by the new team
would be Peter Purves' swan song, The Savages,
by thriller writer Ian Stewart-Blagg,
a science fiction parable about racial exploitation.
The Savages was an excellent story to go out on.
I was left as virtually king of a planet
and was going to make everything wonderful
for the tribe that I had managed to save.
So, yeah, I'd had a good role in getting to the end of the piece
and I decided to stay to make it all wonderful for them.
I think that that should have been followed up.
I think there was an option to go there.
I don't think I ever picked up on it,
but I think I should have become an absolute despot.
Jackie Lane, however, could be forgiven
for having less than happy memories
about her departure from the show.
She was told she would be leaving
as her first story was still being broadcast.
Gerry Davis later said that she was dropped because...
The camera picked up that this was an older woman.
Sure enough, the following story, The War Machines,
saw Dodo departing off-screen halfway through episode two.
Why couldn't they have gone about for five minutes
on the street of Fitzroy Square
and actually said, Doctor, I'm staying, I'm not coming,
why not at least give her a farewell scene?
And when I've counted up to five,
you will be fast asleep.
And when you wake again,
you will forget all about this distressing incident.
I think they kind of just wanted Rydan to bring in their new people.
I think she had a very raw deal, Jackie Lane.
I don't remember anything about it.
I was so pleased to get the part and move in,
and, you know, that I hardly noticed that she was gone
and that nothing was said about where she went
or why she didn't come back.
I don't understand!
To hell with that. I've got the role and here I am.
That's what I felt.
Replacing Stephen and Dodo were Michael Krays and Annika Wills
as Ben and Polly, a cockney sailor
and a miniskirt-y dolly bird plucked straight from the nightclubs
of swinging 60s London.
They wanted to bring it forward into the 60s
and they wanted a sort of 60s contemporary couple
rather than a granddaughter or a teacher.
So there was definitely a move afoot in the BBC.
And then I'm going to take them to the hottest night spot going
and it's called the Inferno Club.
The story epitomised the new contemporary,
earthbound, science-based storytelling
that Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis wanted.
I always preferred stories that dealt with people,
yet at the same time having a scientific background,
and that's why I got Kepeda involved.
They had a scientific advisor, Kit Pedler,
who was an old friend of Gerry's
and was somehow attached to the programme.
Kit Pedler was very important because he was a scientist,
so he could bring it forward into well-based science.
We are about to link this up with computers all over the world
as a central intelligence.
So that in a way what was then science fiction
has now become science fact.
Throw the history out the window and bring in pure science,
but they never really did.
He's a kind of mad scientist who's a rightful doctor,
the way Christopher H. Pymead is later.
You don't want somebody that's going to be
completely scientifically accurate.
It's going to kill everything stone dead.
Like his predecessor, Innes Lloyd soon realised
that William Hartner was becoming increasingly difficult
for others to work with.
Michael Krause and I actually, I have to say,
we both really rather disliked Bill, and especially his politics.
I mean, that was very hard for us.
We stayed polite, we minded our P's and Q's,
because he was the star of the show, but it wasn't pleasant.
And I don't think we could have continued, actually, with Bill.
Hartner was suffering from arteriosclerosis,
resulting in vascular dementia,
where emotional liability and short-term memory loss
are amongst the symptoms.
As a result, he was finding it increasingly difficult
to remember lines and to cope with the rigours
of a weekly television series.
Innes protected Bill, you know, sort of took care of him
and cosseted him.
He must have understood that he wasn't well, actually,
and so he was the sort of interim person,
making sure that there weren't too many explosions around.
He was a gent, you know, and he was doing his gentlemanly thing.
Innes Lloyd enjoyed a much better relationship with William Hartner
than his predecessor had, but quickly realised
that there was no alternative but to suggest
that Hartner leave the show to be replaced by a younger actor.
By this time, William was no longer a young man.
He'd done it solid for three or more years
and I don't think he'd intended staying as long as he did.
His wife, Heather, felt he needed a rest
and we were left to decide whether to carry on or not.
As godfather of the whole thing,
it was Sidney Newman's wholehearted wish that we should,
and so with Sean Sutton in on it as well,
we set about looking for a new doctor.
When informed of this decision in early July 1966,
William Hartner was reportedly heartbroken.
His condition meant another enforced break
during filming of the next story, The Smugglers,
for which the location shoot in Cornwall
was the biggest yet mounted for Doctor Who.
We always loved it when we could go off on location
and it wasn't a quarry, you know, in Dorset.
So off we went to Cornwall and what you see, with the clips we've got,
you see this figure sort of disappearing,
flapping cloak, and it's not Bill.
So I think they worked their way round
so that they didn't have to have him.
In mid-July 1966,
William Hartner reluctantly agreed to give up the role of Doctor Who.
He would continue to make occasional television and stage appearances
during the 1960s,
but only in roles that were much less physically and mentally demanding.
The following story, The Tenth Planet,
would establish the formula for the show's next phase,
a scientific research base in which a multinational crew
is threatened by horrific alien monsters.
We were very excited when we read the story,
the fact we were going to meet the Cybermen.
When we actually saw them,
the costume department had these stalking faces
and these strange mouths.
We weren't really sure kind of how effective they were going to be.
We laugh at those costumes, the surgical stalking and all that stuff,
but they have visibly human hands.
The creepiness of it comes over very well there.
When you saw them on the screen, actually in black and white, of course,
they were scary, they were very good.
The Tenth Planet would prove to be a landmark story,
not only as the first to feature the Cybermen,
but also as the last to feature William Hartnell.
Investors hope a body of mine is wearing a bit thin.
Everybody knew weeks in advance that William Hartnell was leaving,
the papers were plastered with it, but of course I didn't want it to happen.
Innes came in to the read-through of the next story
and said, we're having a new actor,
and the door opened and in walked Patrick Troughton
and everybody got on their feet and was cheering.
It was an amazing moment, actually.
And there he was in his little red cardi and his little Greek bag, ready to work.
It's far from being all over.
After enthralling viewers for three years,
William Hartnell's Doctor faded away before their eyes
and a new Doctor was born.
Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis had quickly established
a formula of space adventures and monster invasions
that continues in Doctor Who to this day
and demonstrated that whenever the show was wearing a bit thin,
its lead actor could be replaced.
And yet, John Wiles and Donald Tosh had also laid the groundwork
for the show's long-term survival,
not just because they were the first to consider changing the lead actor,
but because they realised the show was all about experimenting,
about attempting to be different, about pushing back the boundaries
and making it funnier, scarier and altogether stranger
than it had ever been before.
.