The legendary Doctor Who producer writes for Dreamwatch!

Whenever I’ve been asked for my thoughts on a revival of Doctor Who, I’ve said that three things would be needed: One, a new Doctor who is not only an excellent actor, but who is out of the ordinary; Two, enough money for state-of-the-art special effects; and Three, a producer and writers who use those special effects always in the service of well-written stories, rather than letting them be the prime focus.

It seems to me that all these criteria have been triumphantly met, with Chris Eccleston as the Doctor, the BBC taking a deep breath and promising a proper budget, and Russell T. Davies as writer and executive producer. My hopes are high!

So what advice would I give the new boys on the block if they were to ask me? To be honest, I doubt if they need any advice. Provided the core personality of the Doctor stays, the show can go in more or less any direction, and take on any story. “The only challenge is to make it good,” says Davies. Right! And who better to meet that challenge?

All I can do, then, is to ramble on about my own experience after I was parachuted into the producer’s chair, an ex-actor/writer with no experience of producing and very little of directing. You never know, it might help.

Past Perfect

It’s very gratifying to hear that the production team, while remaining rooted firmly in 2004/5, want the new series to hark back to the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker years, without of course trying to emulate them. I suppose it’s only human that I should think of those years – following the defining Hartnell/Troughton eras – as representative of the best.

What Terrance Dicks, my script editor, and I established (and what was picked up and developed by Philip Hinchcliffe with Bob Holmes) was an approach based on some definite principles deriving from the best of the past. We took the programme seriously. This is not to say that we didn’t have fun making it, or that the writing had the po-faced grimness (or dullness) of some of the more dreary sci-fi offerings of the day.

I think the programme lost its way in some of its later years, having more in common with showbusiness, “Light Entertainment” or even pantomime – as exemplified by the costume worn by the Doctor which was covered in question marks. Doctor Who is not the character’s name, and the implication is an alienation effect too far. (I know that in my day the Doctor’s car, Bessie, had the registration WHO 1, but I inherited that. I would never have allowed it myself.)

One of the first things I did when I took over as producer on 20 October 1969 (My God! That’s history!) was to ask Audience Research for a breakdown of the Who audience – and I discovered that 58 per cent of it was over the age of 15. In other words, the majority of our viewers were adults. Yet that also meant that 42 per cent were children of all ages, the children that the programme was aimed at from the start, and we certainly couldn’t let them down.

So we tried to offer the stories on several different levels: first and foremost, we wanted good drama, solidly based on character; secondly, a fascinating science fiction idea and/or a theme with relevance to a real issue (such as the mining corporation versus the settlers in Colony in Space, or the ecological background of The Green Death); thirdly, a cracking action adventure; and lastly, scary bug-eyed monsters for the younger children. (Scary! Yes, that’s another thing I’m delighted about, that we’ll all be hiding behind the sofa again! Maybe we went too far sometimes – and Philip and Bob went much further than Terrance and I did – but this is one of the core features of Doctor Who.)

The stories also had to have integrity, in the total plotting and in the detail. This is just one of the things that I hated about the 1996 TV movie. For example, where did the Master get the costume he appeared in when he was in the TARDIS? Had he raided the Doctor’s wardrobe? And where did he find the nasty torturing apparatus he strung the Doctor up on? In the cupboard under the stairs? It makes you wonder what the Doctor got up to in the long winter evenings at home in the TARDIS!

But worst of all was the climax. All time-travel stories are a bit dodgy (the famous paradoxes), but really! Not only is the whole notion of reversing the end of the world by winding back time itself a ludicrous idea even in pseudo-scientific terms (you’d have to reverse the entropy of the entire universe), but the very idea makes nonsense of every story. That’s why we invented the Blinovitch Limitation Effect. “Why don’t we just go back to yesterday and this time get it right?” asks Jo Grant in The Day of the Daleks. Why not indeed!

What a waste of the excellent Paul McGann. And what a lost opportunity...

History Lessons

Leaping off this particular hobby-horse, I notice that I’ve used about three-quarters of my space talking about the stories. But that’s as it should be. If you don’t get the story right, you’ve lost the game before the kick-off.

So what about the other elements? The money? Just keep an eye on what the directors get up to! “It’s my job to push the system to its limit, and yours to tell me when to stop,” said Mike Ferguson, the director of my second story, The Ambassadors of Death, after his helicopter hijack of a missile – exciting as it was – had burst the budget.

And the special effects? These days, CGI can get you out of practically any hole, providing you have the expertise available – and, of course, the time. But at least that’s a matter of post-production. Things which appear before the camera – monster-costumes, models and other sci-fi gizmos which have to be built – can present you with horrible surprises if you’re not careful. For example, the dragon which was supposed to frighten the Chinese Ambassador to death in The Mind of Evil turned out, too late, to look like an eight-foot pink-quilted pyjama-case. He had to be shot in close-up, swathed in smoke.

That taught me a lesson. By the time we’d reached The Time Monster a year and a half later, I’d made sure that there would be time to change things. And a good thing too. A Minotaur with the head of Daisy-the-cow wouldn’t have scared a kitten. “Oh... I thought a bull and a cow looked the same,” said the mask-maker – not, I hasten to add, a BBC man.

Time is always the enemy. When I hear that they hope to start filming in May, I feel for them. Even June or July is pushing it. But there you are. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

One last thought – and this is a genuine and important piece of advice, addressed directly to the producer: AS SOON AS YOU KNOW THE DATE OF THE FIRST TRANSMISSION, START LOBBYING HARD FOR THE FRONT COVER OF THE RADIO TIMES!

Barry Letts was the producer of Doctor Who from 1970-75, and served as the show’s executive producer in 1980.

This article originally appeared in Dreamwatch Issue 117 (July 2004).