In 1974 a fresh faced young producer named Philip Hinchcliffe arrived at the Doctor Who production offices. Taking up his first major producing job, Hinchcliffe – in league with script editor/writer Robert Holmes – would guide Doctor Who through its gothic period. The result was a slew of classic chillers that brought the show both critical acclaim and its highest ever ratings...Words: Brian J. Robb

Your period in charge of Doctor Who was 30 years ago, but it’s still regarded as a critical highpoint and was certainly the ratings highpoint of the series. How do you look back on it these days?

Fondly. When I was doing the show, I was at the beginning of my producing career and I was looking forward. Now, so many years later, with its continuing popularity, having been brought back in to look at the DVDs, yeah I look back very fondly on that period. It’s still quite vivid really.

Do you find it easy to remember your time working on the show?

It’s a funny mixture of almost total recall on some things and an embarrassing amnesia about others…I do have quite vivid memories of most of the show I did, probably more so than some of the programmes that I produced after that!

Were you daunted by a new producer coming aboard this established show?

I was a bit, yeah. I was excited as well. I had the good sense to realise that I needed to do a lot of research and listen to a lot of people who knew what they were talking about. I think I brought a fresh outlook and new ideas to it, but I tried to soak up the required technical knowledge about the programme.

So how early in the process do you feel you put your own signature on the show?

I was quite lucky. I had a lot of help from [previous producer] Barry Letts. The show that I was meant to be doing before Doctor Who was cancelled, so suddenly I had longer to trail Barry than originally planned.

There were about three shows in early draft script form that [script editor] Bob Holmes had got together. It was difficult. I didn’t want to change all of them, I couldn’t really. I supposed the one that I had the most influence on was The Ark in Space. It just wasn’t working, so I pretty early on prevailed upon Robert [Holmes] to do a rewrite on that, to start from scratch. I really commissioned him to do a new script. So, I guess I had an impact early on, even in that first season, really.

What were your aims for the show?

I think I was lucky as I had quite a few months to immerse myself in SF and fantasy. I did a lot of reading. I did a lot of thinking about the programme. I actually had thinking time, a luxury that a lot of producers don’t have. So when I began, I could think about stories I wanted to do and also about what I wanted to do with the shape and form of the series. I had done a fair bit of thinking about it.

As soon as we saw Tom Baker, we had to figure out how would we also fit it to Tom. Obviously there were going to be Cybermen stories and Dalek stories, but I thought there was a way we could take the ‘naffness’ out of the programme. I don’t think I succeeded straight away. We were at the mercy of whether effects would work or not…

I think early on we took some very basic decision about taking these stories seriously. We’re were going to tell stories really tightly, make them as compelling as we could, ramp up the suspense and cliffhangers and generally make it work in terms of good adventurous storytelling. For the following seasons we wanted to try and bring in some more interesting settings, where the stories would go in time and space, whether historically or out into space. We wanted to try and bring in more imaginative elements that weren’t necessarily just a new monster, but a combination of different elements. That was probably a strand of my thinking...

How many of the changes you brought about were a reaction against the ‘cosy’ Earthbound, UNIT-featuring Pertwee years?

I think a little bit. Barry’s years were fantastic and I thoroughly enjoyed the Jon Pertwee episodes. They were terrific but, yes, we had a different Doctor.

I had a sense that the audience was evolving as well, in a curious way. I began to get letters from university students. I thought, hang on, there’s something going on here with the audience. They’re not just the intelligent 12-year-olds and the little six-year-olds hiding behind the sofa, everybody else is watching this. There was a sense that here was an opportunity to take the show in a slightly more adult area without it losing its identity as a family show.

You’re known for the ‘gothic’ approach to the series. Was that a deliberate plan you worked out with Robert Holmes or did it just develop naturally from your first few episodes?

I think it evolved naturally. I don’t think we ever used the term ‘gothic’. Bob liked to rework some of the old themes of Sax Rohmer [Fu Manchu] type stuff and some of the more gothic pool of material that provided action-adventure stuff.

Also, he was interested in one or two really quite core sci-fi concepts. If you look at The Ark in Space, it is exactly the same concept as the movie Alien. I’m sure it’s probably in a 100 sci-fi stories in one way or another. Bob had a leaning towards that kind of gothic thing, I suppose. So did I, up to a point. I don’t think we consciously put seasons together that would add up to that. We looked at every story idea on its merits. By going after imaginative settings where we could take the Doctor, we were led sometimes to revisit some of the motifs that had worked in the past [in literature], but we wanted to reinterpret them through the format of Doctor Who.

Some people mention the influence of Hammer and Universal monster movies…

No, I don’t think I ever really thought like that. They influenced Bob a little, but they never influenced me.

I always felt your inspirations were more drawn from early adventure or thriller fiction, like H. Rider Haggard or John Buchan…

Yeah, exactly. I think you are absolutely right. Both Bob and myself were probably in that tradition. I didn’t ever think that at the time, but now looking back with hindsight, I can see that we are very much in that tradition.

Was working on a fantasy/SF show on a BBC budget a challenge?

Yeah it was, but I hadn’t known anything different, really. The big challenge was that we didn’t have any post-production, so everything had to be completed in the studio or during the bit of filming that you had.

When you were being very ambitious with some of the effects, you were never quite sure whether they were going to work out, and neither were the special effects guys! They were limited by time and money. You can’t say they were no good: most of them were excellent, but even the really good stories have some effects that worked well and others that didn’t. It’s the time element, I suppose…

What I tried to do was to work out before we even embarked on a story whether the effects would, in principal, work. That was my approach and most of the time that would work quite well.

How important were some of your other collaborators like script editor Robert Holmes, James Acheson on costumes and designer Roger Murray Leach to realising your ambitions for the show?

Very important. Bob [Holmes] was absolutely crucial as he was probably the best writer for the show. He had terrific input into all the stories that we did. He and I worked well together as a team, so that was great. James Acheson was an incredibly talented costume designer, very imaginative, and also Roger Murray Leach was a very imaginative designer. They turned what could have been rather mediocre or just competent television programmes into something more successful by what they brought to it.

Your era is also associated with a perceived increase in violence and horror content, which brought a complaint from TV watchdog Mary Whitehouse. Were you surprised to be targeted by her group?

No, I don’t think so… She was very vocal at the time on a lot of programmes and she honed in on us. I think she confused violence with thrills. Our aim was to be thrilling, but I don’t think there was a huge amount of violence.

At the time television boundaries of taste were evolving very quickly. I was a young producer, and I think probably I was pushing the envelope, as it were, for that type of programme in that tea-time Saturday slot. I don’t think we ever got it massively wrong. I think we were bumping up against the limits of what we could do at that time with that audience, but I don’t think we got it grotesquely wrong at all.

You were trying to develop a more grown up version of Doctor Who, though?

What I tried to do was make the show work. When I inherited it, it worked very well for the very young audience and the smart 12-year-old, and there was something in it for mum and dad. I think what we did was to increase the appeal, so that it was more compelling. Mum and dad would continue to watch and really believe it and the growing audience of the student generation would also.

We wanted to make it more plausible, rather than have people think it was a joke. We treated the stories a bit more seriously in the way that we developed them and handled them.

Pyramids of Mars is out on DVD and you are the subject of a documentary on the disc. Do you enjoy revisiting your old shows through working on the DVDs?

I’ve done commentaries on Pyramids of Mars and The Talons of Weng Chiang. I’m glad people continue to be interested in it. I don’t know if it’s the people who’ve always been interested or newcomers who’ve come along, but it’s great. I gave a huge interview, of which they’ve only used a part on that documentary, so probably more of it will pop up on other DVDs.

Pyramids of Mars is very representative story from your era…

Yeah, very much so. It did seem to combine everything that Bob and I were trying to do. It’s a typical ‘good one’ from us. It’s a historical show, but imaginative in the way that it combines the science fiction element with the historical situation. There’s some very nice characterisation and some very nice acting, and a bit of humour in it.

I think the same would go for The Talons of Weng Chiang. I would personally quite like to see Masque of Mandragora released. I think they’ve got the qualities of a costume drama because people are very good at doing that at the BBC, but I think the stories were very different. We weren’t trying to be educational in any way!

What are your thoughts on the later series of Doctor Who? Did you keep up with the show after you left in 1977?

I didn’t really, because I was so busy, quite frankly. I’d moved on. I thought Peter Davison was quite interesting, but he felt a little lightweight after Tom. I didn’t really watch a lot of Tom’s later stuff, but some of them were really pretty good and were carrying on the tradition.

I guess the thing that probably distinguishes Bob Holmes’ approach and my approach was that we did take the story element very very seriously. Although there are some beautiful touches of humour done in the characterisation in Talons, for example, nonetheless, we took the story seriously. My feeling is that later producers saw it as ironic or a parody, so there was more humour and mucking about. Somehow it lost the narrative power at times. That’s my general impression. It just seemed that was the adopted approach that was decided upon. To me, that wasn’t a good thing. It got worse towards Sylvester McCoy’s time, not that I’m criticising his performance at all. If I’d been doing the programme, it would not have gone that way or been like that.

Planet of Evil is out now on DVD. Click here to read the review. Pyramids of Mars, The Ark in Space, The Robots of Death and The Talons of Weng Chiang are also available on DVD.

This interview originally appeared in Dreamwatch magazine.