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The Sunday Post: What's in a Name?

2017-04-02T09:00:00+00:00

Born Barbara Ann Deeks, Barbara Windsor saw early success on television in The Rag Trade before joining the Carry On team

In this age of fake news, the spoof-friendly start of April seems like a particularly good time to take a look at one particular aspect of benign deception, as practiced in the worlds of radio and television: that of pseudonyms, used to disguise the identity of a writer, director or actor, for various reasons.

Actors are particularly prone to having names other than that which they were given at birth. Stage names can be invented just because the actor’s real name sounds a bit uninspiring to them or others, or hard to remember. Another hazard is that it may be the same as that of another actor: Actors’ Equity insist that actors do not have the same name as another working performer, to avoid the danger of confusion, or even deception. If you go to see a play starring that well-known thespian Freda Bloggs, you want to make sure it is that lady, not someone who shares her name but perhaps not her talent.

Occasionally an actor has begun their career before their name has been finalised, for example young Barbara Deeks was credited in a 1953 television relay of the stage musical Love from Judy, but when she next made an appearance, only a year later, she had been renamed the more familiar Barbara Windsor. Her later Carry On (and Six-Five Special) co-star Jim Dale was similarly first billed in the pages of Radio Times as the more mundane Jim Smith. In the same era, The Seventeen to Twenty Club, a Light Programme series in 1959, once played host to a ‘teenage celebrity’ called Gerry Dorsey – later better known as Engelbert Humperdinck.

Sometimes actors can also work in another field, and especially when that field is writing, it’s not unusual for them to use another name. One actor who started out under his real name before he adopted the stage name of David Baron, later became a playwright, and after a shaky start gradually built his literary reputation, in radio and television, as well as for the stage. He often appeared in his own plays, and while in some early radio productions he kept his stage name, when he became fully established he reverted to his real name, now a household one, of Harold Pinter.

Ronnie Barker's acting career encompassed straight parts, sketch comedy and sitcom. He also wrote sketches (as Gerald Wiley) and some of his sitcoms (using various names)

Another literary name which has gradually become well-known is that of Gerald Wiley. Mr Wiley was a contributor of scripts to a number of late 1960s shows, and it was only when the quality was recognised and the cast members demanded to meet this talented man that Ronnie Barker admitted that Wiley was him. Barker used the Wiley name mainly for sketches, but he also contributed sitcom scripts from time to time, using names such as Jonathan Cobbald and Bob Ferris.

Then there is the mysterious career of the actor Walter Plinge. If you look him up in Radio Times you will find a long but not particularly distinguished career. His first credit is in 1929, and his last in 1967, which would be an enviable and respectable career for any actor. That first credit is as David Gardiner in The Mists of Morning, which is described as a sketch. Curiously enough another member of the cast is Ida Plinge, an actress who is never heard of again, at least in the pages of Radio Times. Even earlier, there was a performer called Fred Plinge who collaborated with Walter Weekes in a Plymouth local programme – again this was his only known broadcast…

Post-war Walter Plinge is listed for rather more productions, including regular roles in the serial Rocket to the Stars and a show called Answer Next Week. Work seems to dry up again for a while, and after an occasional job during the 50s and 60s Mr Plinge’s swan song is in The Perfect Fool on 7 May 1967. But don’t worry about him struggling in his old age – Walter Plinge does not exist…

There is a long theatrical tradition of the name Walter Plinge being used in plays, where an actor is playing more than one part, and the management want to make it look as if they have hired someone else for the additional role. There are also instances where an actor does not want to be credited for personal or professional reasons; and sometimes when a character is, for example, mentioned extensively but never in fact appears – the name make the audience believe they will turn up, until at the end it becomes apparent that they will not.

Of course other names can also be used for this ruse. The classic play George and Margaret by Gerald Savory goes to the extreme length of billing the non-appearing characters in the title! At least when the play was presented on radio and television, there was no question of listing these characters with false names attached.

Walter Plinge has his customary equivalents elsewhere: George Spelvin is the American theatrical version, and Alan Smithee is the preferred Hollywood credit for aggrieved directors taking their name off a film. Credits of convenience have also been used from time to time on the BBC for writers, where for one reason or another their own names cannot be shown on a programme. Doctor Who seems to be particularly prone to this, with Norman Ashby, Guy Leopold, Stephen Harris, Robin Bland and Paula Moore being among the writers with fictitious names.

Sarah (Elisabeth Sladen) and the Doctor (Tom Baker) in Doctor Who: The Brain of Morbius - appropriately, given its pseudonymous writer, it has lots to say about the nature of identity...

To their number must be added David Agnew, who as well as having two full credits on Doctor Who serials, almost uniquely had a life away from the series (Norman Ashby also 'wrote' an episode of Warship). Agnew first appears on a Play for Today in 1970 called Hell’s Angel, then on 1975 play Diane, and episodes of police series Target two years later. But Doctor Who would be his swansong.

The main writer behind the pseudonym was Anthony Read, who also worked on oil industry drama The Troubleshooters, and Z Cars. While he was script editor on Doctor Who, a replacement story was needed at short notice, and Read obliged using his usual nom-de-plume. In similar circumstances the following year, 1979, David Agnew was the ostensible author of City of Death – which was mainly the work of Doctor Who’s new script editor, one Douglas Adams. Confusingly, Read contributed one more script to the same season, but now under his own name, after leaving the BBC.

There can be a little wit displayed in a good pseudonym: Gerald Wiley hints at the subterfuge used, and playwright and screenwriter Clive Exton’s occasional pseudonym of MK Jeeves is borrowed from one of WC Fields's scripting pseudonyms, but just using the initials instead of the full original, Mahatma Kane Jeeves.

Another good example is the writer credited for the 1976 Doctor Who story The Brain of Morbius. It was originally written by Terrance Dicks, but major changes were made by the show’s script editor Robert Holmes while Dicks was on holiday and could not be contacted. Dicks later agreed Holmes could put it out under some ‘bland pseudonym’, and was amused to see in Radio Times that the story was duly credited to ‘Robin Bland’.

Names, which we see as so much a part of our identity, can at least in the world of radio and television be a bit more complicated. What’s in a name? as Shakespeare’s heroine, Juliet, asks. Sometimes quite a bit. Other times, nothing at all…

The Christmas Sunday Post: Festive Episodes

2016-12-25T11:00:00+00:00

Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without... Christmas Night with the Stars? Dad's Army had already earned a place in the 1968 edition after one series

Television and radio schedulers have always given special attention to the festive period, and pull out the stops to come up with a range of programmes that will keep the family entertained when they settle down to watch the box, after the annual avalanche of turkey, sprouts, pigs in blankets, Christmas pudding and too many chocolates (not to mention more tiny oranges than you can shake a stick at).

There are a plethora of Christmas episodes to consider, from all periods of broadcasting and in all genres. Last year we picked out the schedule of fifty years ago for special attention, but one programme which was absent from the line-up that day was the variety show Christmas Night with the Stars. First seen in 1958, this was a successor to previous years' all-star pantomimes and Television Christmas Parties - one difference being that Christmas Night with the Stars featured pre-recorded sketches and short episodes of popular entertainment series rather than being a live, continuous show.

By 1958 pre-recording of inserts was more easily achieved, and so the necessity of getting all the performers together at the same time was avoided - the sketches might be recorded during the studio session for a normal episode in fact. Those appearing in Christmas Night with the Stars that first year included Tony Hancock in his Budgerigar sketch, Billy Cotton and his Band, Jimmy Edwards, Ted Ray, the George Mitchell Singers and the cast of Dixon of Dock Green - a regular presence in the show for the next few years since Dixon was made by the light entertainment department, not the drama department, at that time. With occasional breaks, Christmas Night with the Stars continued until 1972.

However, not all programmes shown at Christmas are stand-alone specials: sometimes the series in question was going on anyway, and there just happened to be an episode on Christmas Day or nearby, that acknowledged the event one way or another.

PC Jock Weir (Joseph Brady) auditions to join The Swinging Blue Jeans! The first Z Cars episode of Z Cars to be shown on Christmas Day, 1963

One example of that would be the Z Cars episode It Never Rains…, shown on Christmas Day 1963. The main plot is about a garage robbery, and there is a thief dressed as Father Christmas, but there is also a special guest appearance by the Merseybeat group The Swinging Blue Jeans (also appearing on the Light Programme the following day). Though Z Cars was usually live, a custom was established to prevent the cast and crew having to work through Christmas itself by pre-recording an episode about half way through the autumn on a scheduled transmission day, with that date covered by pre-recording another episode before the start of each season.

Z Cars, from its inception until the mid-1970s, was on for long periods of the year, so there were plenty of other episodes around Christmas time, although only one other on Christmas Day itself. The same applied to many other long-running series, though with shorter and shorter episode counts for all but the soap-operatic drama, it’s no longer so common now for series to co-incide with Christmas except by appointment.

Casualty is another drama series which has tackled the perils of Christmas time on a regular basis, and now tends to go on through most of the year, so there is no escape from Christmas editions. Since the early 90s there have been a series of notable Christmas adventures, with sister show Holby City joining in as well, sometimes even in a combined edition Casualty @ Holby City.

Another medical drama joining in the Christmas spirit was Dr Finlay’s Casebook, the 1920s set series originally adapted from the stories of A.J. Cronin. Fifty years ago to the day came the episode The Gifts of the Magi, in which Doctors Finlay and Cameron, and housekeeper Janet, are called on to perform their party pieces for the cottage hospital Christmas party. Other popular series however have generally eschewed the seasonal special, perhaps considering the festivities would get in the way or compromise their hard-hitting edge.

The Doctor and Rose battled robot Santas and the alien Sycorax in The Christmas Invasion, 2005, the first of a run of regular Christmas episodes of Doctor Who.

EastEnders has established a firm tradition of saving some of its more spectacular plot twists for Christmas Day, from the first event-episode in 1986 which saw Den serving Angie with divorce papers in one of the biggest rated episodes in the series’ history (anyone out there who doesn’t know who Den and Angie were, congratulations, you have now made me feel very old). There have been a number of high profile storylines at this time of year, and presumably 2016 will go out with a similar bombshell… But perhaps surprisingly, the first Christmas during the run of EastEnders, 1985, was comparatively low-key, and there wasn’t even an episode on 25 December itself.

For the last 11 years Doctor Who has also always had a Christmas episode, though they have not necessarily involved the series' most spectacular turning points. That said, David Tennant had his first full episode in that first modern era Christmas episode, and bowed out in 2009 in a two part Christmas and New Year double episode story.

As I discussed this time last year, the only time, before Doctor Who was revived, that there was a Christmas Day episode was in 1965, and in other years the programme went out of its way to avoid transmitting on the big day, even if that involved a big gap in the series, as in 1976. This year, 2016 having been without a full series, we will get in The Return of Doctor Mysterio the first new episode of the show since last Christmas Day.

Comedy too has its Christmas episodes, though given the shorter length of comedy series it is rarer for their yuletide editions to be an integral part of a series. In fact it is not unknown for a Christmas special to be the only outing in a given year for a particular programme – as with the 1976 Porridge special, or the Dad’s Army episodes in 1971 and 1976. As with The Good Life’s one and only Christmas special, these programmes are among those which are revived to fill out the Christmas schedules on a regular basis - which probably tells you something about how to make a comedy that stands the test of time.

Another series which became a Christmas fixture, was the 1980s monster hit Only Fools and Horses...., though it wasn't until its third series that the Christmas episode was seen on the big day itself, and then in a somewhat dark story about Del and Rodney's father turning up (but was he really Rodney's father...?) The 1990/1 series of Only Fools, of which the Christmas episode was an integral part, turned out to be the last full run of the show, with only Christmas episodes until 1996 when the series ended - or so it was to be at the time - with the Christmas trilogy that saw Del becoming a millionaire at last. A further three episodes were made, but they two were spread out over Christmas Days from 2001 to 2003 (on the same day, co-incidentally, as a one-off revival of Christmas Night with the Stars).

It’s Chriiiiiiiiiiiistmas!!! (to quote the song, written by Noddy Holder and Jim Lea) The original caption to this photo pointed out helpfully that there were BBC cameras in the shot. Really? Where???

Top of the Pops of course has now become a traditional part of the Christmas season, even though it stopped being broadcast as a weekly show ten years ago. The Christmas special has gone out every year since 1964, the first year of the programme’s existence, though at first at least it did not always go out on the Christmas Day itself. The Christmas edition is now the only chance for artists to say they have been on Top of the Pops.

Of necessity, the programme was always live, or recorded very close to transmission, and though there is now a little leeway with the Christmas edition, they are still taped fairly shortly before transmission. There was also a tradition for many years of having two editions at Christmas, so that the programme could become an in-depth look back at the whole year’s music, rather than just covering the Christmas chart and the (admittedly important) Christmas number one.

Radio is perhaps more prone to continuing existing series at Christmastime, as much of its output is generally very regular. Radios 1 and 2 tend to continue with the same programme slots, with occasional special programmes, and sometimes there are different presenters in the normal slots.

On Christmas Day 1967, the first under the new regime of Radio 1 and 2, when they still shared many programmes, regular shows like Tony Blackburn and Jimmy Young were interspersed with specials like Kenny and Cash with Kenny Everett and Dave Cash, and The D.J.s’ Christmas Party hosted by Pete Murray. Radio 2, when not sharing Radio 1’s programmes, had special editions like a Christmas episode of Round the Horne and Cotton’s Christmas Knees-Up starring Billy Cotton.

Ernie and Eric (unlike Ant and Dec, they don't always stand in alphabetical order) appear in their 1972 Christmas Show - the sketch featured a guest appearance by Bruce Forsyth

Of course, the concept of special Christmas episodes only really came to fruition once the actual concept of series of programmes gradually had developed in the early decades of broadcasting. The first Radio Times Christmas edition shows that the early programmes on offer for December 25th were modest enough.

Children’s Hour is one of the earliest regular programme strands, though there were different regional versions of it, often under different names, rather than one centralised networked edition. The London edition on 25/12/23 was mostly concerned with a play, On Christmas Eve. The evening schedule consisted of a programme of music played by the Wireless Orchestra (forerunner of all BBC orchestras), the News, a talk on Wit and Humour and more dance music, this time by the Savoy Orpheans direct from the Savoy Hotel itself.

Of all the myriad seasonal shows that have been created since those early days, one institution that seems never to disappear is the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show, one example of which always seems to be shown on or around Christmas Day. This has become the archetypal Christmas special, though to be fair in its day it was responsible for some of the highest ratings of any programme.

When Morecambe and Wise returned to the BBC in 1968 after many years on ITV, it was partly due to the fact that the BBC could offer them colour television, although it meant their programme would be on BBC2 at first. Eric Morecambe was sadly victim to a heart attack after the first series aired, but had recovered enough by the end of the year that he and Ernie Wise were able to host the annual Christmas Night with the Stars. 1969 saw the series return with a new writer, Eddie Braben, and longer, 45-minute episodes which allowed them the room to expand their characterisations. The hour-long Christmas episode gradually became a showcase for even more elaborate staging and more impressive guest stars.

Given concerns for Eric’s health, the BBC was careful not to overtax the duo by demanding too many shows, and eventually in 1977 the only programme they made was the Christmas show. Even so, it was Eric who took on the stress load, with his perfectionism meaning he worried about whether each year’s show would be good enough - if it wasn’t, he thought it might spoil people’s Christmas.

But they didn’t. The classic shows from 1971 (Shirley Bassey and the army boot, André Previn and 'all the wrong notes') to 1977 are full of classic moments and stand many many repeat showings. Angela Rippon dancing, South Pacific performed by a chorus of BBC presenters and newsreaders, Glenda Jackson as Queen Victoria… and Ernie’s ‘dry’ version of Singin’ in the Rain – the list goes on…

John Noakes, Lesley Judd and Peter Purves, with schoolchildren and the Chalk Farm Salvation Army Band, look forward to Christmas 1974 in Blue Peter

In the field of current affairs, there was naturally less by way of Christmas editions, other than the Money Programme looking at its financial side, but the early evening magazine Nationwide contributed to the festivities from the mid-70s, until its demise in 1983, by organising a Christmas carol competition, which was carried on with afterwards by the likes of Breakfast Time and Pebble Mill at One. Carol competitions on the BBC go back at least to one held by Children's Hour in 1936, and survived until the 1980s A Song for Christmas.

And who could forget the Blue Peter Christmas celebrations, in the 1970s especially, with the studio full of well-behaved kids singing carols, led by the band of the Chalk Farm branch of the Salvation Army? The run-up to the big day was also trailed with present-making ideas and the ceremonial lighting of the Advent Crown.

Other popular children's series have also done their bit for the cause of festive fun - from Jackanory to Crackerjack to the Rentaghost special Rentasanta (a programme that had the misfortune to miss its original transmission slot in 1978 due to industrial action and only turned up the following year).

So there you have it – some samples of the kind of fare available for our Christmas entertainment and edification. All it remains to do now is go off and enjoy (hey, why are you looking at your computer anyway – go and indulge in some festive frolics…!) A Merry Christmas from the Genome Blog - we'll be back next week (aka Next Year...)

Stars of Genome: Margot Hayhoe

2016-11-11T07:00:00+00:00

Margot Hayhoe in studio TC6

Margot Hayhoe joined the BBC in 1964 as secretary in BBC Enterprises – she then progressed to the Drama Serials Department where she worked up the ladder from Assistant Floor Manager to Associate Producer. She worked in Doctor Who, EastEnders, Silent Witness, Man in the Iron Mask, War and Peace and many other BBC productions. She left the staff in 1994 and worked as a freelancer until 2005 when she retired for production work – she occasionally works as a background artist.

What was your first job in the BBC? My first job was acting in the children’s drama African Holiday which was transmitted live from Lime Grove. It was telerecorded then transmitted again in April. I also appeared in Jack in the Box, The Thompson Family, Women of Troy, The Common Room, The Lady from the Sea and Champion Road for the BBC plus Cool for Cats, Emergency Ward 10 and The Lonely World of Harry Braintree for ITV amongst others. These were whilst I was still at my school,The Arts Educational.

Were you ever mentioned on the Radio Times magazine? Or is there any particular magazine you have kept as souvenir? I have never been interviewed for the Radio Times, only had my name listed in the casts of the above productions. I have kept the front covers of the Radio Times for the programmes I worked on as part of the production team, such as Christ Recrucified, Prince Regent, War and Peace, The Old Men at the Zoo plus many others. I also kept the supplement that came for War and Peace.

How do you use BBC Genome? And have you found any particular programme episode you are fond of? I sometimes look to Genome to jog my memory of which actors were in certain series. I was particularly fond of any of the Francis Durbridge serials which always had wonderful cliff-hanger end of episodes!

"When finding locations, the variety of places I have been to has added to my education: inside prisons, mortuaries, council flats then stately homes, hospitals, court rooms, the working end of crematoriums, factories, dock yards and airports."

Can you share any special memories you have of the programmes and features you worked in? It is very difficult to pick out any special memories from Doctor Who and many of the other productions I worked on, as they mostly have all been memorable. However a Dr Who I did with Patrick Troughton called Fury from the Deep gave me the chance to fly in a helicopter for the first time. As we took off from a cliff edge to go down to the beach, I screamed as I watched the earth disappear from beneath my feet which encouraged the pilot to swerve around, very exciting.

Another memorable moment was on Les Miserables, a serial with Frank Finlay, when we were filming a scene on the Isle of Wight that involved convicts in chains. These 20 or so actors were costumed and made-up in Portsmouth and I had to get the ferry tickets and march the men on board with their chains clanking away to get them to the location.

Trudging 14 times up and down St, Michael's Mount in a day on Man in the Iron Mask is seared into my brain as is hiding in cars to cue the drivers on Z Cars before the days of walkie-talkies.

A scene from War and Peace

On War and Peace we had a thousand Yugoslav soldiers for several days and the organisation involved in getting them ready and into position was impressive.

Filming in the centre of Bern for A Perfect Spy which involved closing the streets for a night shoot; Filming on Tender is the Night in Switzerland and France was a challenge, especially the beach scenes with strong winds blowing away the parasols and having to reschedule due to the rain.

Shooting Old Men at the Zoo with wild animals was interesting, plus having to find enough male extras prepared to have their bottoms exposed for injections as part of one scene shot in a disused biscuit factory near Hereford.

Trying to shoot London street scenes for Day of the Triffids was problematical as it was supposed to be deserted of any moving traffic. I enjoyed filming in Bath on Persuasion, as to see the actors in period costumes in the actual places in the book was a delight.

When finding locations, the variety of places I have been to has added to my education: inside prisons, mortuaries, council flats then stately homes, hospitals, court rooms, the working end of crematoriums, factories, dock yards and airports.

Working with the Visual Effects on Silent Witness makes one a bit blasé about body parts and post mortems!

How important do you think it is to preserve the history of TV and radio listings? I think it is very important to preserve the history of TV and Radio listings to show future generations the breadth and level of productions of the past. Looking at the pages in the 1950s and comparing them with the present day listings, shows how trivial much of today's output has become. It is also a great reference source.

Doctor Who: The Regeneration Game

2016-11-05T08:00:00+00:00

Patrick Troughton's Doctor consults his 500-year diary as he prepares to face an old enemy in The Power of the Daleks

We love an anniversary here at the Genome Project, hence last Wednesday’s post to celebrate the 80th birthday of high-definition television. This week we’re a day early for a similar reason, to commemorate a pivotal moment in one of the BBC’s best-loved programmes – Doctor Who. BBC Store is also celebrating the anniversary by releasing an animated reconstruction using the original soundtrack.

Fifty years ago, on 5 November 1966, the first episode of the Doctor Who story The Power of the Daleks was broadcast. As well as the start of yet another adventure featuring the programme’s most enduring villains, it was also the debut of the second actor to play the lead role – Patrick Troughton.

Troughton had appeared fleetingly at the end of the previous week’s episode, the last of a four-part story called The Tenth Planet. That story was also a milestone in the series’ history for two other reasons: as well as the last regular appearance of the show’s founding star, William Hartnell, it introduced the race of aliens who became the second most popular monsters in Doctor Who’s history – the Cybermen.

William Hartnell had become typecast in military and ‘hard man’ roles when he was offered the role of the Doctor in 1963. Three years later, many things had changed, with original producer Verity Lambert and familiar regular cast members having moved on. Hartnell was unhappy with the direction the show was taking, and, not in the best of health, was persuaded to stand down. He agreed to make one last story in order to be written out of the programme.

When new producer Innes Lloyd joined the show in early 1966, he and his story editor Gerry Davis decided that Doctor Who was drifting too far into the realms of whimsy and fantasy. They also wanted to steer the programme away from its original mix of science fiction alternating with historical adventures, ranging from the educational Marco Polo (1964) to the comical The Gunfighters (1966). Lloyd and Davis also did away with the individual episode titles for each Doctor Who adventure, giving the stories a more obvious discrete structure.

The Who crew - outgoing Doctor William Hartnell, with newly arrived companions Ben (Michael Craze) and Polly (Anneke Wills)

Lloyd and Davis next looked round for a scientist who would be able to help make stories more credible, and one of those they spoke to was Kit Pedler, an ophthalmologist. He came up with a storyline, which was turned into scripts by another writer, based on the idea of the Post Office Tower – then being built – taking over the world. On the strength of this Pedler became Doctor Who’s semi-official scientific adviser.

Pedler’s next idea was based on his concerns about the topical area of transplant surgery. What would happen if people had so many transplants that they were no longer sure if they were human, if metal and plastic replacement organs and limbs meant they lost their emotions?

These thoughts developed into the concept of the Cybermen, and were linked with an idea about the Earth having had a twin planet, Mondas, which had drifted away into space millennia ago, to form the basis for Pedler's scripts. This time he intended to write by himself, however, after completing two episodes, he was stricken with a serious illness, and it fell to story editor Gerry Davis to complete the remaining two episodes from Pedler’s storyline. They shared the writing credit, and Pedler and Davis began a long professional relationship as a result that led to, among other things, the 1970s science fact/fiction drama Doomwatch.

The Tenth Planet would itself become a template for the series’ development over the next few years, concerning as it did a future Earth, a remote base besieged by alien creatures, and the Doctor and his friends helping the base personnel defeat the invaders. A further topical element in this instance was the backdrop of a manned space mission, being tracked from the base, which was in Antarctica.

The Cybermen were an immediate hit with viewers, despite what seem, compared to later versions, somewhat primitive costumes. Their hands were visible (and sometimes their eyes, although their heads were covered in a kind of stocking mask as if they were en route to a bank job), to show that they were not robots, but had once been human.

Their costumes comprised plastic coveralls with metallic sections added, notably a chest unit, and a skull-cap with a large lamp perched on top of the head, to give extra height. However, despite the Cybermen supposedly being very powerful, the costumes were flimsy, with parts held together with sticky tape, and hot – some of the actors fainted under the studio lights.

William Hartnell had not been required for the filming session at Ealing studios that preceded the main recording of the episodes, as he was not to appear in close-up, so his place was taken by a double. As it was, he was almost making a cameo appearance in his own show.

All seemed to be going well after two episodes had been videotaped at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, but then Hartnell was taken ill with bronchitis, and had to be written out for a week – his double returned to show the Doctor collapsing and he spent the episode in bed, covered by a blanket. Fortunately, Hartnell recovered sufficiently to be able to appear in episode four – the last of his era as the Doctor.

Dateline: Antarctica, December 1986 - or in the real world, BBC Television Film Studios, Ealing, September 1966. The original Cybermen do look as if they have been through a series of unpleasant medical procedures - no wonder they have it in for doctors...

His replacement as the Doctor, Patrick Troughton was a very experienced television actor, having made his debut on the medium in the 1940s, and among his early credits was a production of the 1920s science fiction play, R.U.R., which brought the word Robot into the language.

He was known more as a character actor than a leading man, although he had played the title role in a production of Robin Hood in 1953. He had nearly been cast in the Doctor Who story The Gunfighters a few months before, and one of his most recent roles was in fantasy series Adam Adamant Lives!, in which he had played an incongruously bearded British Army general.

When Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis determined that they would replace the lead actor in Doctor Who, there were long discussions about how they would go about this, and about who they could get to replace their iconic star. While it was not unknown for a part to be recast, it was unusual in such a prominent role – so they made a feature of it rather than hope nobody would notice…

The process in this case would be dubbed a renewal or rejuvenation, rather than regeneration as it was in later years. While not explicitly stating that Troughton was supposed to be a younger version of Hartnell, in purely physical terms he was, although there was only twelve years’ difference in age between the men – Hartnell had played as if older than his actual age, 58. Troughton retained an air of mystery and other-worldliness, but was far more sprightly.

Both actors met only briefly on the recording day, 8 October 1966. The technically complex changeover scene was recorded first, as an insert. At this time, although most programmes were no longer made live, they tended to be recorded in story order, with the minimum of edits. Recording this scene first however removed the danger that such a crucial moment would be rushed, at the end of the day’s work.

Director Derek Martinus and vision mixer Shirley Coward devised the visuals for the change of actor using a defective piece of kit to white-out the images of both actors, so the fade from one to the other was almost seamless. With this scene achieved, the rest of the episode was recorded.

With the Cybermen defeated, the Doctor announces that his body is worn out, and his two companions, Ben and Polly, follow him back to the Tardis where they find him about to change…

The Doctor collapses in the Tardis at the end of part 4 of The Tenth Planet - moments later he would be transformed...

To give Troughton a breathing space and find his feet, a week’s break was allowed before work on the next serial began. This was playing with fire, as episodes were not recorded far ahead of transmission – there were only three weeks between episodes of The Tenth Planet being recorded and being shown. The Power of the Daleks would now be only two weeks away from catching up with itself. Over the Christmas period a few weeks later, the gap shrank to one week, and remained such until the summer of 1967.

Troughton was a shy man, rarely giving interviews, but he was also worried that a lead role in a series like Doctor Who might hurt his career by typecasting him – ironically, given that it had rescued Hartnell from the same fate. However, it was a steady job and he accepted the challenge.

At first he favoured playing the part in some kind of disguise, but instead indulged himself with a costume that was a parody of the stylish Edwardian garb of his predecessor. He sported a baggy frock coat, broad-checked trousers, and at first, a battered stovepipe hat. Over the next few months the costume department toned the look down, but he retained a somewhat scruffy appearance.

Oddly enough, he was already wearing the costume when he first appeared clearly at the start of The Power of the Daleks, as if it had changed with him. Ben and Polly, his companions, took the place of the viewer in wondering if this strange figure could really be the Doctor they knew, but over the course of the story they gradually came to accept him.

In fact, this was a time of crisis for Doctor Who. Though it had been a hit in its early days, thanks largely to the sensational popularity of the Daleks, viewing figures had gradually declined. The BBC was not yet ready to replace it, especially as it had a strong advocate in the Head of Drama, Sydney Newman, who had been responsible for its commissioning in the first place. But the show was in need of rejuvenation if it was to survive.

Daleks, seemingly dormant, in their capsule on the planet Vulcan: but are they as dead as they seem? Or do they just need Power...?

Bringing back the Daleks was one way of giving the new Doctor at least a fighting chance of bringing viewers back to the series. The scripts for The Power of the Daleks were by David Whitaker, who as the first story editor of Doctor Who had worked with their creator, Terry Nation, on their original appearances. With Gerry Davis busy rescuing The Tenth Planet, when Whitaker had problems getting his scripts into shape, another former story editor, Dennis Spooner, was drafted in to help.

Terry Nation, having become hot property because of the success of the Daleks, was now too busy on lucrative ITV dramas to write for the series that made his name, but was happy for others to take over – though his agent had to prompt the BBC to give him a ‘created by’ credit. He was also working on a proposed Dalek series he hoped to sell to American television, and as a result would withdraw permission for the BBC to use the creatures after one last story in mid-1967.

In the end nothing came of the series idea, but the Daleks would not return to Doctor Who until 1972. For the rest of the 1960s, the Cybermen became the show’s new chief baddies.

Whitaker meanwhile turned in an imaginative twist on the Dalek story. In The Power of the Daleks, seemingly lifeless Daleks are found in a crashed spaceship on the planet Vulcan (nothing to do with the planet in Star Trek, which had just started on American television: it was not seen in Britain until 1969, ironically replacing Doctor Who in the Saturday evening schedules).

A misguided scientist brings the Daleks back to life, hoping to make them into servants to the colonists on the planet. There are also a group of rebels who think they can use the Daleks to their own ends. Of course both are mistaken, as the Daleks are pretending to be docile in order to create an army of their own and take over.

The new Doctor steps out into a new adventure - as captured by the cameras at BBC Riverside studio 1

Over six exciting episodes, the adventure played out, until the Doctor won in the end, and was accepted by Ben and Polly. The final shot of the last episode has a seemingly dead Dalek show signs of life – as if they could never be fully defeated…

From this auspicious start, Patrick Troughton made the role of the Doctor his own, and spent three years in the part. The concept of renewal/regeneration of the lead was one of the master strokes in the history of Doctor Who, and like the Daleks and the concept of the Tardis, it has proved to be part of what made the series an enduring hit, still going (with occasional breaks) fifty-three years since it first started.

So when Troughton called it a day in 1969, and the BBC decided (after some uncertainty) to go on with Doctor Who, the hunt was on for a third actor to star in the series. In the end, the choice was someone who, co-incidentally, was the storyteller on Jackanory in the week between the showing of the last part of The Tenth Planet and the first episode of The Power of the Daleks… Jon Pertwee.

The Power of the Daleks is among many episodes of Doctor Who which no longer exists in its original format, but it is now available as an animated reconstruction through BBC Store.

Doctor Who is back on Christmas Day in The Return of Doctor Mysterio.

The Saturday Post: Dancing on Air

2016-10-01T08:00:00+00:00

The backbone of the BBC's dance coverage for nearly 50 years was Come Dancing. Here, a formation team prepare to do battle in Glasgow, 1970 (you can just see the tasteful plastic palm trees)

Dancing is one of the most ancient forms of human artistic expression, with roots in ceremonial behaviour relating to religious rites and courtship behaviours. It can also be fun (especially in the latter case).

It’s not surprising therefore that BBC broadcasts have featured or been related to dance from the earliest days, whether simply music to dance to, or all the other fields that dance can be employed in, up to and including the success of Strictly Come Dancing.

There are so many forms of dance, from tap to country, from ballroom to ballet, from jive to street dances, that it would be impossible to give a complete account of the BBC’s coverage in the space available here – so this overview will inevitably be very selective, not that it means we won’t cover other forms individually at a later date.

One of the earliest programmes specifically of dance music, and it seems the earliest billed in Radio Times, was on the Birmingham 5IT service in 1923, where Lloyd’s Rhythmic Dance Band performed, though there is no mention of the music they played, on the listing. The very next day the New Savoy Band broadcast from the Savoy Hotel, and this was relayed to a number of other stations.

The BBC would continue to have a long relationship with the Savoy, with acts such as their in-house Savoy Orpheans providing dance music for years to come. The day after the New Savoy Band, the 2LO Dance Band then performed, and again the tradition of the BBC’s own specialist orchestras would go on through the years.

As well as dance music, another feature that radio provided was the dance lesson, such as that given by Mr. W. Browning of the Piccadilly Picture Theatre, Manchester, in 1925. Of course, such things are harder to achieve effectively without any visual component, relying on the descriptive powers of the speaker alone. Soon after the start of television proper in November 1936, professional dancers Alex Moore and Pat Kilpatrick gave the first of a series of dance lessons that would continue into the late 40s.

Alex Moore and Pat Kilpatrick show how it's done in a 1936 broadcast - with helpful floor markings for the beginner

Palais de Danse in August 1939 was an outside broadcast from the eponymous venue in Hammersmith that showed the public dancing to the latest hits played by Oscar Rabin and his Band. It was an early example of popular dance, rather than by professionals, at a time when formal styles of dance predominated in ballrooms.

Post-war, bandleader Victor Silvester started to make television programmes too, and he was well known as the exponent of dancing lessons, including in his radio series BBC Dancing Club. His Television Dancing Club series ran from 1948 to 1962 and always included a dance lesson amongst its features.

Come Dancing came to outshine and outlive Television Dancing Club, and was for many years just about the only place to see ballroom dancing. There is some debate about when Come Dancing began, as it is often quoted as beginning in 1949. However, as can be seen from Genome, the first programme under this title was in 1950, and there doesn’t seem to be a programme that fits its description in 1949.

Devised by Eric Morley, Come Dancing was an occasional programme at first, with two editions in 1950 and two in 1951; from 1952 it gradually started to become more frequent though episodes were still well spaced apart. The series was always staged in actual ballrooms and BBC outside broadcast units went to all parts of the country to cover dance competitions, at a time when television coverage was spreading throughout the UK.

It wasn’t until 1957 however that Come Dancing became first a monthly, then a fortnightly fixture, and the BBC organised its own inter-regional dancing contest in collaboration with Mecca Dancing. Occasionally it featured the presentation of the prestigious Carl-Alan Awards, though these were sometimes also incorporated in other programmes or in a dedicated show.

Come Dancing was primarily an amateur competition, though there were always professionals on hand to give demonstration dances. The competitors came from all walks of life and dancing was their hobby, albeit one that was prone to obsessive levels of time for dancing practice, as well as the time spent on more and more elaborate costumes, especially for the ladies.

Pan's People contravene health and safety regulation 57 (b) subsection 28 by blocking a fire exit at Television Centre

Ballroom dancing of course is just one aspect of dance featured in television. Top of the Pops of course (and programmes such as Six-Five Special and The Beat Room) feature two distinct kinds of dance. There was the informal kind done by the audience, later augmented by cheerleaders and professionals mingling with the crowd by the 80s, and the choreographed routines of the likes of Pan’s People and Legs and Co, which were set pieces to accompany records for which there might be no other visual material available.

American choreographer Flick Colby was responsible for devising each weekly routine, and the groups had to learn, rehearse and perform a new dance each week within only a few days. As Top of the Pops had a policy of not featuring songs that were going down the charts, in the days when the new chart was announced on Tuesday this meant that a number could have to be dropped at short notice and replaced by a new one.

The first dance group on Top of the Pops was the Go-Jos, who were replaced by the classic Pan’s People. In 1976 they were briefly succeeded by Ruby Flipper, then Legs & Co, and finally Zoo, before the use of more and more videos meant there was no requirement for a regular dance sequence.

Top of the Pops was by no means the only light entertainment show that used dancers of course. Pan’s People also appeared on other shows such as Bobbie Gentry and Lulu’s programmes, while other series like The Rolf Harris Show and International Cabaret among many other shows featured The Young Generation, who also appeared in their own right on occasion.

The Young Generation were choreographed by Douglas Squires, who had contributed to many series since the 1950s as a dance arranger, and latterly had his own troupe of dancers. Other regular choreographers in this genre included Geoff Richer and Nigel Lythgoe, the latter of whom progressed from dancing with the Young Generation to being their choreographer, and work his way up the entertainment business to be Head of Entertainment and Comedy at London Weekend Television, before becoming a celebrity by being a judge on the ITV series Popstars.

Choreographed dancing does not of course just happen in light entertainment shows, it can also be a feature of dramas. Many period dramas feature dance sequences, and dances have to be performed by actors who may or may not have any dance experience themselves, and if they do it is less likely to be of the kind of dance required. Thus a mixture of professional dancers and actors may have to work together for this kind of sequence, depending on the demands of the scripts.

Barbara (Jacqueline Hill) encounters the alien Menoptra in Doctor Who, 1965

At one time, ballroom dance might not have been too much of a stretch for many actors, but as this has become more and more of a niche interest since the 1960s, choreographers have more work to do to achieve dance sequences in even relatively recent period dramas.

On occasion too, choreography strays over into the realms of ‘movement’, where for example in science fiction series a specially designed walk or style of movement might be required – such things go back as far as Karel Capek’s The Insect Play, and in a similar way, Doctor Who in 1965, where actors were required to play giant ants called Zarbi and butterfly-like creatures called Menoptra, whose movement was choreographed by Roslyn de Winter.

The most exacting form of choreography of course is for ballet, whose demands mean that only the highest trained professionals are capable of taking part. Ballet tends to be a genre all by itself (and as such deserves a blog post all to itself, so I’m not proposing to discuss it in details here), though occasionally people trained in its skills have moved over into acting, or other disciplines – actors such as Christopher Gable and Jan Francis began as ballet dancers.

Perhaps the most famous ex-dancer was Angela Rippon, whose achievement as one of the first, and certainly highest-profile, female newsreaders, was somewhat overshadowed by her dance routine in the 1976 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show – previous to this, many people might not have known she even had legs, as newsreaders rarely ventured from behind the regulation news desk in those days. Rippon’s appearance was not billed in Radio Times, to preserve the suspense when she appeared and seemed to be introducing an unscheduled news item.

Morecambe and Wise themselves perhaps fall into another category: while not formally trained dancers, as life-long variety performers they had acquired such skills as part of their act (Ernie Wise’s first television performances in the 1930s were as a song-and-dance act with Jack Hylton’s Band), and complex dance routines were often part of their shows – mainly for comic effect, as in the classic Singing in the Rain pastiche. It’s as rare for a comedian nowadays to be proficient in dance as it is for them to close their act with a song; in the variety and music-hall days these skills were expected.

Dance then, being one of the most democratic of art forms, can be seen to range through many different styles and levels of accomplishment, from the talented amateurs of Come Dancing, through the not-always-so-talented celebrities on Strictly, to the different styles of professionalism in light entertainment and ballet. It’s hard to imagine that it will not continue to feature in many guises on television, into the future. So… keeeep dancing!

Share your views on dance, dancers and all things choreographic... We'll be back to the normal day next week (but look out tomorrow for an extra feature in the Genome blog)

The Sunday Post: Missing - Believed Unscheduled

2016-09-11T09:00:00+00:00

Radio Times publicises the TV50 season in 1986 - but not all the scheduled programmes were to go out as planned...

Here at Genome we face a lot of challenges with our extensive database. One of them is the days and weeks of schedules and individual programmes that do not currently appear on the website.

There are a number of issues behind these gaps in the record. For example, prior to the start of Radio Times in 1923, there were about nine months of BBC programmes since the Company (as it then was) was founded, which we have not yet been able to include. These will probably have to be pieced together from the BBC’s records of its actual transmissions.

We also have some gaps where no issue of Radio Times was published for other reasons – there is a full list in the FAQs, but here are the details:

14 May 1926 was the first time Radio Times was not published. This was due to the General Strike, which saw almost all newspapers and periodicals stop publication for the duration.

21 and 28 February 1947 saw the next gaps, as the very severe winter led to a fuel crisis, which also saw the recently returned television service and the new-born Third Programme closed temporarily.

A printing dispute meant that the 8 September and 13, 20 and 27 October issues in 1950 did not come out. A similar dispute in 1956 meant that RT was printed in France in broadsheet newspaper format, though at least in that case the details are available.

There were no problems for some time after that, apart from a few occasions where national editions were published due to limitations on printing facilities. An issue was missed on 1 August 1981, the issue following the week of Royal Wedding of Charles and Diana – luckily missing the huge demand for that number. In 1983, printing disputes meant that issues from 2 and 9 April and 3 December did not appear.

As well as whole weeks being absent, there are also days where problems have arisen due to unforeseen circumstances, when planned programmes did not go out. These include momentous world events like 9/11 and the death of Princess Diana, which resulted in the schedules being abandoned or severely altered not just on the day the events occurred, but for days or even weeks afterward. Past events of a similar nature include the deaths of monarchs and the outbreak of wars.

A television scoop - live coverage of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain arriving at Heston Aerodrome with his 'piece of paper' - September 1938

For example, Radio Times was published as usual on 1 September 1939, only for it to be superseded by the outbreak of World War Two. An amended schedule was presented on the following Monday, 4 September, though the preceding weekend was incompletely presented as a result, with the replacement of the National and Regional Programmes by the Home Service, and the closure of the Television Service, on 1 September.

In another instance, the assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963, the schedule was only slightly changed though there were some additional programmes, proving controversial when the scheduled episode of the Harry Worth comedy Here’s Harry was transmitted despite the grim news.

There are also many individual programmes which were not transmitted for one reason or another – and unscheduled programmes that were broadcast in their place.

At the moment, we are confined to publishing what was scheduled in Radio Times, and then only what was listed in a single regional issue, usually the London or South-East of England area. The original Radio Times covered the whole country in one edition, but this gradually refined into smaller areas of the UK, before in recent years the number of regional editions was scaled back again. We’re still working on the best way of displaying regional opt-outs.

We are also missing some television listings from the 1930s, when they were in a supplement or a special page in RT, and then not in every copy (because television was only visible in the London/South East of England area), so we have not always had the data available. But there are records of that information so it will appear on Genome in time.

The Doctor tries Venusian Aikido on a Sea Devil in a 1972 adventure - repeated unexpectedly in 1974 (though not with this scene as it was just for the photo shoot!)

Finally, let’s look at some specific examples of unscheduled programmes…

1936 - The BBC’s television service was scheduled to begin on 2 November, but just after staff had been appointed in August, senior producer Cecil Madden was instructed to start work on programmes to go out that month. The RadiOlympia exhibition was having difficulty selling stands, and the BBC was asked to help out by organising a demonstration of television.

Although they only had a few days to prepare, the BBC team was able to mount a basic service of live programmes and film material for the duration of the show. None of these programmes was billed in Radio Times, nor were several weeks of experimental shows, including the first edition of long-running magazine Picture Page, which went out during October (notwithstanding the billing for 2 November saying that it was the first…)

September 1938 – Television outside broadcasts from Heston Aerodrome of the return of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain from Berchtesgaden and Munich were speedily arranged. The second was especially historic as Chamberlain delivered his infamous ‘piece of paper’ speech. These were also the first occasions when a Prime Minister spoke on television, though they were also captured by radio and newsreel cameras.

1972 – As we detailed a couple of weeks back, the pilot episode of Are You Being Served? was unscheduled when it was first shown. Cancellation of some Olympic Games broadcasts necessitated programmes being quickly found to fill the gaps, and that included this Comedy Playhouse episode.

27 May 1974 – Due to cricket coverage being cancelled, an omnibus version of the Doctor Who story The Sea Devils, which had previously been transmitted at Christmas 1972, was given another airing.

7 November 1986 – As part of BBC2’s TV50 season, celebrating the half-century of television, the first episode of Not Only… But Also was to be screened. However at the last minute clearances could not be obtained so an early Likely Lads and a 1962 edition of Points of View were substituted, separated by an Interlude, The Kitten dating from 1954.

There have been various occasions since when a programme or film has been deemed unsuitable for transmission at a particular time because of a news event which would make it in poor taste; also when a particularly famous star or personality has died, sometimes a special showing of one of their films or programmes is hurriedly repeated before it can be advertised in Radio Times.

Also, there are many occasions when because of an over-running sporting event, or an extended news bulletins, programmes have been cancelled or postponed. With some sporting events there are alternative schedules published, and obviously only one of these alternatives would actually have come to pass on the day in question.

We love creating the Genome database, and we look forward to being able to add even greater levels of detail in the future – though our first task is still to correct OCR errors which arose from scanning the Radio Times. Of course, we couldn’t do it without the support of our dedicated band of crowd-sourcing editors – please continue to contribute, we greatly appreciate your efforts!

The Sunday Post - Douglas Adams: So long and thanks for all the scripts

2016-05-29T09:00:00+00:00

Unfeasibly tall author Douglas Adams on location in the BBC gravel pit for the TV version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Those other people aren't small, they're just far away

Writers are strange people, but some are stranger than others. Comedy writers are perhaps doubly strange, because they write to make us laugh, which can be especially difficult.

Douglas Adams, who died in May 2001, was a very particular sort of comedy writer. While famous as the creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he was not hugely prolific. Granted, he didn’t need to be given Hitchhiker’s success, but he suffered greatly from writer’s block, an acute affliction in such an insecure profession. Adams was also involved in two of the biggest cult programmes of the last 50 years, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Doctor Who.

Born in Cambridge in 1952, he excelled in creative writing at school, and won a place at St John’s College Cambridge in 1971 to read English. Not immediately a member of the famous Footlights Club, he formed comedy group Adams-Smith-Adams with two fellow students, going on to join Footlights before he graduated in 1974, where he was spotted by Monty Python’s Graham Chapman.

Chapman recruited Adams to provide sketches and make minor appearances in the fourth series of Python. Made without the involvement of John Cleese, the show struggled to maintain its quality, and was ended by mutual consent after just six episodes instead of the normal 13. Adams continued to write despite this and other setbacks, including the one-off pilot episode of Chapman’s show Out of the Trees. It was the one failure of the various post-Python projects.

His writing career struggled for a while and he took a series of menial jobs. Benefitting from his Footlights contacts, he started contributing to radio comedies such as The News Huddlines and The Burkiss Way (by whom he was spoofed in later series). Long interested in science fiction (he submitted a poem in the 1960s to The Eagle comic, which featured space pilot Dan Dare), he began sending in storylines to the Doctor Who production office in the mid-1970s.

'Hang on while I just finish the script...' A production shot from the 1978 Hitchhiker's special, with David Tate, Alan Ford, Geoffrey McGivern, Douglas Adams, Mark Wing-Davey and Simon Jones

But Adams’ greatest work was just on the horizon: inspired by factual books such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe, and his own experience of lying drunk in a field near Innsbruck, looking at the stars, he conceived a comedy about various ways in which the world could come to an end; one of these became the basis of an eventual Radio 4 series commission.

An ordinary man, Arthur Dent, is rescued from the destruction of Earth by his best friend, an alien with the unlikely name of Ford Prefect, who turns out to be a researcher for the electronic book (an unlikely concept in 1978) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Tea-loving, dressing-gown clad Arthur is upset that the Earth’s entry in this tome is limited to the phrase “mostly harmless”.

Meeting two other space-travellers, Earthwoman Trillian and three-armed, two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox (and a depressed robot called Marvin), Arthur discovers that the Earth was actually a giant computer, built for a race of aliens who wanted to discover the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Arthur and Ford at last end up on a primeval Earth, having discovered that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42.

That was as far as the first series got, but the story continued with a one-off episode aired at Christmas and a five-part second series in 1980. Adams had experienced problems meeting deadlines for the first series, which was to become an on-going problem, this time due to his also being asked to write a story for the 1978-9 series of Doctor Who.

Adams’s The Pirate Planet is clearly from the same imagination as Hitchhiker’s, with a half-robotic pirate captain (complete with electronic parrot) who materialises a hollow planet around other planets in order to use them as fuel for a secret purpose. When there was a vacancy for a script editor on Doctor Who at the end of the season, Adams was appointed – despite his existing job as a radio producer, and the prospect of more Hitchhiker's.

The 1979-80 series of Doctor Who was heavily criticised by the show’s fans at the time, who were not keen on the post-modern style of humour. But with an ITV strike, the programme got huge ratings, and due to script problems, Adams was forced to contribute heavily to the show.

Doctor Who takes a trip to a wet-looking Paris in Douglas Adams's 1979 tale City of Death

The second story of the season was called City of Death, developed from a story by experienced writer David Fisher. When the script got into difficulties, Adams quickly wrote a replacement with only the faintest resemblance to Fisher’s tale. For contractual reasons the writing was credited to BBC in-house pseudonym David Agnew. Adams also ended up writing the final, six-episode story of the season, Shada – but in the event, a strike at the BBC led to production being abandoned, and the story was to remain unfinished (though later resurrected on BBC7).

By the time the second series of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was transmitted in early 1980, it was already a multi-media phenomenon. Adams’s book of the series was a bestseller, and there was an album version, as well as a stage show mounted by Ken Campbell. All these versions had slight plot differences, which would be a continuing feature of Adams’s work.

Work also began on a television version of Hitchhiker’s, which appeared in January 1981. Many of the same cast were involved, but while the end result was impressive, it was not quite successful enough for a second series, and very expensive due to the need to bring to life some of Adams’s epic conceptions.

One of the problems encountered was those sequences involving passages from the Guide itself. These were voiced by the urbane Peter Jones, but on television it was necessary to illustrate them. At the time, computer animation was in its infancy, so the graphics were done in the traditional fashion, on film.

Adams was by now concentrating on writing more books from the series, and these continued to take on a life of their own. There was even a computer game spin-off by the mid-80s, and talk of a film being made – though that was to take far longer to achieve than expected. The radio series enjoyed numerous repeats, successful and well-known radio comedies being something of a novelty by this time.

Ford Prefect (David Dixon) and Arthur Dent (Simon Jones) forsake the radio studio for the joys of location filming. Very exotic, quarries

In 1985 Adams presented an edition of Radio 4 series Natural Selection, about the rare and elusive Madagascan Aye-aye. Endangered species became one of his keenest interests, and in 1989 he co-presented the series Last Chance to See with Mark Carwardine. Adams was also interested in technology, and in 1990 he wrote Hyperland, a speculative drama documentary starring Tom Baker, about the future of computers and their relation to television.

By now Adams had written two novels outside his Hitch-Hiker’s series, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and the sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, which re-used some elements of plot and characters from his Doctor Who work, especially the abandoned Shada. Dirk Gently’s adventures have also been adapted for radio and television, and a new series is currently in the pipeline from BBC America.

It’s notable that with the success of Adams’s series of Hitch-Hiker’s novels, by the umpteenth repeat of the original series in 1993, Radio Times was billing it as being based on the book.

Adams continued to make various guest appearances, reflecting his various interests from music to conservation and technology. 1999 saw him present the two-part The Internet: the Last 20th Century Battleground, about the potential plusses and drawbacks of the web, followed in 2000 by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Future. He also hosted a celebration of Peter Jones’s life that year.

But time was sadly running out for Adams, who was soon to be the subject of his own tribute. He died aged only 49, in California, in 2001. His ashes are interred in Highgate Cemetery, where there is a pot of pens left in remembrance by those who have been inspired by his original, thought-provoking, and above all, funny works.

The long-awaited Hitch-Hiker’s feature film was released in 2005, only 30 years late – which might have amused the deadline-averse Adams. The Hitchhiker’s franchise has continued on radio, with adaptations of his later books, while his Doctor Who scripts City of Death and Shada, unusually not novelised in the lifetime of the original series, have been turned into books in recent years.

It has also just been announced that a sixth radio series of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is to be made for transmission by Radio 4 in 2017, based on the novel And Another Thing… by Eoin Colfer. The Guide goes on…

Can you survive on 30 Altairian dollars a day? Do you know where your towel is? Or do you have a pain in all the diodes down your left hand side? Share your thoughts and memories of the great Douglas Adams below.

Stars of Genome: Matthew Graham

2016-05-01T09:00:00+00:00

Matthew Graham says some Doctor Who fans were unimpressed with his episode Fear Her

Matthew Graham may not be a name that's immediately familiar to television viewers. But you're likely to have seen the screenwriter's work in the last few decades.

He has penned episodes of major shows including EastEnders, Doctor Who, Life on Mars and This Life among others. Here he shares some of the inner workings of his craft and stories of some of the actors and major names in television he's worked with over the years. Matthew currently has 110 mentions in the Genome database.

What was your first job in radio or television? My first job was writing an ITV children's show called Streetwise - must have been in 1990. I think I was hired because I was practically a kid myself. It was about cycle couriers in London and it starred an unknown young actor by the name of Andy Serkis. I wonder if he’s still in the business??...

What are your strongest memories from working on the following shows?

EastEnders This was my writing school. I started at 23 and wrote about 35 episodes over five years. It taught me to work quickly and to interweave multiple storylines. It also taught me to understand production and how to write around production problems. For example I once had to tell story with Pat and Frank, where Mike Reid was only available on the Studio days and Pam St Clements was only available for exteriors. So I had them refusing to talk to each other and she would only shout at him through the window of the Queen Vic. It actually made the scenes more dynamic.

Doctor Who A joy. Both under Russell T Davis and Steven Moffat. You have to write with boundless energy and of course with those two leading the way you have to “run” very fast to have any hope of keeping up. Doctor Who is tough in the sense of the exposure and scrutiny that every line of every scene seems to come under from the fans. My first episode was Fear Her which the older Whovians didn’t much care for. But I was tasked by Russell with writing an episode specifically for the younger ones - and they seemed to enjoy it. Under Steven I got to do a two-parter that was darker. I tried to tap into the vibe of the Patrick Troughton era. I don’t envy the show runners on Doctor Who. It’s wonderful gig but the worldwide attention would drive me nuts!

Life on Mars We thought nobody would watch it. It was this big, indulgent white elephant - our attempt to get away with The Sweeney. It was only after we filmed Episode One that we realised how strong the chemistry was between Sam and Gene and so I beefed up Gene’s role. I remember after the first episode aired, I was in a cafe near my house and I overheard a couple talking. The guy was saying, “And you don’t know if he’s mad or in a coma dream or if he’s fallen back in time …” And I thought, “Hmmm, maybe we’ve got something here that people will get into …"

This Life It was a small, low budget BBC2 show with no real plots as such. Having come straight off EastEnders I wasn’t familiar with drama that didn’t end in a birth, marriage, affair, termination or death! It was initially terrifyingly vague and then very, very liberating. I felt I could just have the characters drinking wine on the sofa and talking about sex and careers and money (or lack of it) - in other words all the things me and my mates were talking about. My boss was Tony Garnett - an amazing producer of course and a man who once he trusted you, just let you write what you wanted. His only note was “keep it real”.

Matthew Graham: 'I really loved writing for David Tennant - he’s an actor who actually inspires you to write in a different way'

What is your experience of ‘giving birth’ to characters and shaping their existences? I usually have to picture an actor in the role to start with. With Life on Mars I pictured John Simm as Sam even though I knew we probably wouldn’t get him! Sometimes though I picture a person I know - a friend, colleague or relative that I think embodies the character. But everything changes at casting when a talented actor reinterprets the role. Often then you start recalibrating for that actor's strengths.

What is it like having such a pivotal role but working out of sight? Mostly I like being out of sight! More and more these days a show creator or show runner is visible. We give more interviews and the public link us more emphatically with the drama. In other words we soak up the praise and get the blame. It teaches you to be robust and I think it can make your writing more strident and more assured.

Which character and storyline of your creations are your favourites? I have to say that Sam and Gene are my favourite creations. The whole arc of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes I just loved and am very proud of. But I also wrote an episode of EastEnders many years ago when Sonia gave birth to a baby she didn’t know she was carrying. I tried to make it scary, funny and life-affirming and I think in the most part I pulled it off.

Matthew Graham shaped EastEnders characters including Pauline and Arthur Fowler

Tell us a killer line of dialogue you’ve come up with that you’re most proud of Gene, Life on Mars: (to small children in the street) Anything happens to this motor and I come round your houses and stamp on all your toys. Got it?

Who are the stars and actors have made the biggest impact on you over the years? I always loved writing for Bill Treacher from EastEnders. Arthur Fowler was such a tragic figure and Bill could make the lines vibrate with sadness or with gentle warmth. Of course it was always so much fun to see what Phil Glenister was going to do with the Gene Genie. I really loved writing for David Tennant - he’s an actor who actually inspires you to write in a different way because of the vibrancy and élan he brings to his performance.

Are there any other people working behind the scenes who have made an impression on your career? Tony Jordan was a big inspiration to me in my formative years. Tony was so effortlessly creative and he demystified screenwriting by being so blasé and down to earth about it. He showed me that writing wasn’t the exclusive domain of a certain middle-class quasi-intellectual.

Jane Featherstone (who ran Kudos) was my executive producer on Mars. Jane is so clever at managing talent and driving through an idea. She believes in writers and fights for a vision. Courageous, creative and bloody good fun to be with. Russell T Davies - his boundless love for TV drama is inspirational. He knows his own creative mind so well and I’ve tried to emulate his confidence and self-belief and (like him) still try to not fall into the trap of arrogance and pig-headedness.

Working on cult hit This Life was 'initially terrifyingly vague'

Do you remember the first time your name appeared in the Radio Times? Yes. Episode 779 of EastEnders. By Matthew Graham.

Have you ever searched for yourself in the Genome database? No, but I’m going to now you’ve put the idea in my head!

How important do you think it is to preserve the history of TV and radio listings? It’s the main artery of our popular cultural heritage. It reminds us where we were and who we were as a nation. It’s essentially important.

The Sunday Post: Shakespearean Spin-Offs

2016-04-24T09:00:00+00:00

Peter Howell comes a cropper in John Bowen's Heil Caesar.

We are now busily marking the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, and with Genome’s retrospective glance we decided to tease out programmes which take an unusual look at the Bard’s work.

Programmes that refer to Shakespeare and his works are of course even more numerous than performances of his works. We're looking at unusual documentaries on the great man, and other quirky offerings, including dramas inspired by his plays, as well as programmes featuring Shakespeare (and his relations).

One of the most memorable productions I personally remember was 1973 schools series Heil Caesar, an adaptation of the story of Julius Caesar by John Bowen. Not only staged in modern dress, it was also rendered into modern English. With an excellent cast and high production values for a schools drama, what shocked was the level of violence for something shown during daytime. In place of the traditional stabbing of Caesar by daggers, his assassination involved flick knives, and the bloody results were very graphic.

The original three-part production was so successful that it was shown again in an adult viewing slot the next year, edited into a 90-minute feature length programme, and in 1975 an introductory programme for schools examined the series, with comments from the cast.

Billie Piper, Damian Lewis and Sarah Parish in the ShakespeaRe-Told version of Much Ado, set in a newsroom.

Another re-imagining of Shakespeare came thirty years later in the ShakespeaRe-told strand, with four new plays based on Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These were peak-time productions with all-star casts, featuring the likes of Damian Lewis, Julie Walters, James McAvoy, Billie Piper and James Nesbitt.

Neither of these was of course the first time Shakespeare had inspired other writers, and there have been many other re-imaginings of his works from Forbidden Planet to the films of Kurosawa to Kiss Me Kate.

Another innovative interpretation of some of Shakespeare’s plays came with Shakespeare: The Animated Tales, where abbreviated versions of some of the best-known plays were turned into animation, using various techniques.

Initiated by BBC Wales, and including Welsh translated versions as well as the English originals, the series also employed the skills of Russian animation studios at a time when the country was in a state of flux with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The 1939 version of Bernard Shaw's The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, in the days before the BBC could afford chairs.

Inspiration for wholly original works has also come from Shakespeare’s life and legend, and the many mysteries and controversies surrounding him, as far back as George Bernard Shaw’s The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, shown on television several times from the 1930s onwards.

There is also the Clemence Dane play Will Shakespeare, and in more recent times radio dramas like Mrs Shakespeare by Robert Nye, and A Song for Edmond Shakespeare, imagining events in the lives of his wife Anne Hathaway, and his brother Edmund respectively. Anne Hathaway’s famous bequest from her husband also inspired the play The Second Best Bed which was produced on the BBC as long ago as 1931, and re-performed several times.

1982 saw Radio 4 broadcast John Wilders and John Powell’s ‘imagined scenes from a documentary life’ in I William Shakespeare, which starred Martin Jarvis. Judith Shakespeare in 1996 was Nan Woodhouse’s take on the travails of being the relation of a celebrity, from the viewpoint of Shakespeare’s youngest daughter.

In the field of conventional documentaries, of course Shakespeare has been better served that many others, as the most analysed and referenced figure in British culture. To take some fairly random examples, Shakespeare’s Island was a 1971 film looking at how the RSC prepared for a production of The Tempest at Stratford, which included Ben Kingsley and Ian Richardson among its cast.

Shakespeare on the Estate and Shakespeare Behind Bars were two examples where Shakespeare’s plays have been mounted in challenging settings as a way of involving communities in the first instance, and prisoners in the second.

My Kingdom for a Cook: The Black Adder, 1983.

The place of Shakespeare in British culture has inevitably made him the subject of humour on numerous occasions. How to Appreciate Shakespeare was a 1947 Third Programme comedy ‘lecture’ by Stephen Potter of Oneupmanship fame. There have been many comedy sketches using the best-known Shakespearean scenes, such as the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, memorably re-enacted for Comic Relief with Frank Bruno.

Blackadder never featured Shakespeare himself, even in Blackadder II, which covered the period he lived in – though he was briefly mentioned and there were various themes that would have been familiar to Will himself. The first series, The Black Adder, however, was a spoof of many aspects of the History Plays, and included of course lines from Richard III, as portrayed by Peter Cook – the series acknowledged the debt by crediting Shakespeare for “additional dialogue”.

While not a comedy (as such), Doctor Who has also featured references and appearances by Shakespeare. As well as Tom Baker’s Doctor claiming to recognise his own writing on an original Shakespeare manuscript (Will having sprained his wrist writing sonnets), Shakespeare makes two appearances in person.

In 1965 episode The Executioners, the Doctor uses a device called the Time-Space Visualiser to look at various scenes from history, including that of Shakespeare being commanded to write a play about Falstaff in love by Queen Elizabeth I (and inadvertently being inspired to write Hamlet as well). That was a cameo, but he was a lead character in 2007 David Tennant episode The Shakespeare Code, where the plot revolves around the writing of the lost play Love’s Labours Won.

What are your favourite BBC Shakespeare moments? Let us know below (extra points for iambic pentameters!)

Sunday Post: The Radiophonic Workshop

2016-03-06T10:00:00+00:00

Radiophonic Workshop composers used various instruments and objects to create sounds

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop created music and sound effects for radio and television programmes for 40 years from 1958-98, including the iconic Doctor Who theme. Composer and Radiophonic Workshop archivist Mark Ayres tells us about its history and how it operated - and why it is still significant today.

When and why was the Radiophonic Workshop set up?

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was formally opened on 1st April 1958. At least, that’s the legend! It grew out of a desire by the Third Programme (now Radio 3) to use the new electronic music techniques coming out of mainland Europe to enhance - in the main - its drama output. Producers Douglas Cleverdon and Donald McWhinnie were taking radio drama into more adventurous areas with works written specifically for the medium by playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Giles Cooper and Frederick Bradnum.

This was a different emphasis than on the continent: the French and German studios, where the likes of Pierre Henry and Karlheinz Stockhausen were building facilities to produce ‘art music’ exclusively. The Radiophonic Workshop specialised in what one might call ‘applied sound’, rather than electronic music. It’s this different approach that makes the Workshop unique and so fascinating.

Who were the prominent early figures?

It was founded by two studio managers from Broadcasting House, Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe, who had worked on early pre-Radiophonic. Daphne was immediately frustrated, as she wanted a European-style studio, so she left the BBC soon afterwards to set up on her own in an oast house in Kent. Desmond was joined by engineers Dick Mills and Richard 'Dickie' Bird. Within a few short years the staff included a roster of legendary names such as Brian Hodgson, Delia Derbyshire, John Baker and David Cain.

RW made incidental music for many Doctor Who outings, including The Keeper of Traken

What were the musical influences?

The European Avante Garde and impressionists. In John Baker’s case, the Jazz Greats. For David Cain, medieval and renaissance music. For Delia - well, she was more influenced by sound and texture. She was very young in Coventry during the early days of the war and well-remembered the sounds of German bombing runs on the city. She spent much of her life creating beautiful sounds as an antidote to the horrific ones.

What sort of programmes used the Workshop? Were there advantages to an in-house service?

In the early days, experimental drama. Then freelance composers began to realise that the Workshop offered something original that they could add to their work, so the rhythmic editing of steam train sounds provided the percussion track to Ron Grainer’s theme for documentary film Giants of Steam (predating Doctor Who).

Later, science fiction such as Out of the Unknown and even thrillers like Vendetta. But their largest clients, by far, were the educational departments for both radio and television. Radiophonic abstraction was just the thing for firing children’s imagination and illustrating mathematical games. Look and Read on television harnessed both Radiophonic sound design, and the composing and songwriting talents of Paddy Kingsland and Roger Limb. Certainly, producers were encouraged to use the Workshop - it was in-house and therefore, in effect free.

How did things develop during the 60s with advances in technology?

Slowly! Synthesisers didn’t begin to arrive until the very end of the decade. The Workshop relied on various electronic organs, the ubiquitous test oscillators, and ingenious filters and switchers plus the ever-clever use of ‘found sounds’.

Elizabeth Parker, shown in 1985, was the last remaining composer before the Workshop's demise

Radiophonic Workshop is often associated in people’s minds with Dr Who – to what extent did it dominate and even overshadow other work?

Doctor Who was a fraction of their overall output, but their biggest single client other than (as a whole) education. There are a few hundred Doctor Who tapes in the archive including 243 reels of sound effects! It certainly overshadows their other work, but in a good way. It became their calling card. Ironically, Doctor Who started soon after Desmond Briscoe had declined to take on any more work for The Goon Show, fearing that Spike Milligan’s anarchic comedic demands would take over.

There were big changes in personnel and leadership in the early 70s – what form did they take and what was their effect?

Brian Hodgson left, along with Delia Derbyshire, John Baker and David Cain. The old tape techniques were being superseded by the coming of the synthesiser and the department was becoming more of a music studio and less of a sound factory. More commercially-minded composers such as Paddy Kingsland, Roger Limb and Peter Howell joined. Brian returned a few years later as Desmond took a back seat and eventually retired.

How did the RW co-operate with outside composers?

One of the earliest collaborations was with Ron Grainer on Giants of Steam and Doctor Who. Later Doctor Who composers including Dudley Simpson and Geoffrey Burgon realised that taking their recordings to the Workshop for treatment added something that could not be obtained elsewhere - and cheaply, too. Even Richard Rodney Bennett mixed his Doctor Who music (The Aztecs) at the Workshop, following a successful 1962 collaboration on radio play The Long Distance Piano Player.

What technological changes affected the Workshop from the 70s into the 80s?

The coming of the synthesiser in the early 1970s - initially in the forms of EMS devices the VCS3 and the enormous Synthi 100 - killed the old techniques stone dead. Tape manipulation was no longer cost effective when there was now a machine that promised to be able to create any sound at the turn of a knob.

But the new ‘voltage control’ devices were inherently unstable and rather difficult to use. Digital control, which started to appear at the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, was far more convenient and easier to use. Sounds could now be saved and accurately recalled. The new ‘sampling’ machines (spearheaded by the expensive Fairlight CMI) soon provided a digital way to replicate the early tape experiments far more quickly, so once again ‘real’ sounds started to find a home amongst the synthetic.

With electronic music in the charts so much in the 80s, was there a feeling the RW was now more mainstream or was it being left behind?

Electronic music took off massively as the synthesiser became cheaper. But the Workshop did not rest on its laurels. Brian Hodgson won considerable investment to modernise the studios in the mid-1980s with the latest equipment. It grew to become home to six full-time composers each with their own room and, according to Yamaha UK's Marketing Director at one point, was “the most up-to-date MIDI studio in the world”. It was some time later that the wide availability of the technology finally contributed to the Workshop’s downfall.

The Workshop shown during its formative days in 1958

Who were the prominent figures in the second half of the Workshop’s existence, in the 70s onwards?

Paddy, Roger, Peter, Elizabeth Parker and Jonathan Gibbs. In the last few years, Richard Attree was the final composer to join, but Elizabeth was the last to leave, with the remains of the department being dismantled around her.

How did the closure of the Workshop come about?

John Birt introduced a scheme called Producer Choice which was supposed to make the BBC more accountable and more cost-effective. It meant that every department had to put a price on its services and, if a producer could find a service cheaper outside the BBC, they were encouraged to use it. But it was a false economy. If a producer used an in-house department, the money stayed within the BBC. If they went outside, the money did too. And the Radiophonic Workshop, having to factor in the canteen, the commissionaires and the pension schemes, could never compete on cost terms with freelance composers with similar equipment in their spare bedrooms - and that included me. Eventually, the Workshop had to close.

What is the role of the RW archivist now?

It’s a hobby role. Other than a relatively small payment at the very start, I’m not paid to do it, but I’ve labelled all the tapes and built a database, and stood in front of the bulldozers a few times! I’ve released a few CDs of Radiophonic Workshop music, enabled others, and mastered many audiobooks and DVDs that have used the contents of the library for surround sound remixes and so on.

I’ve started a digitisation programme but it needs a lot of investment to do it properly. It’s nearly 4,000 analogue tapes and they won’t last for ever. The national sound archive reckon we have about 10 years to save all this material - either it will have disintegrated beyond saving, or the equipment to reliably play it will no longer exist. I have a lovely old ex-BBC Studer A80 which is built like a tank, but even that gets harder to maintain. It does worry me.

How do you see the place of the Workshop in the history of music, broadcasting and as a cultural influence?

It’s enormously influential in all these respects. Certainly, people of my generation and younger grew up listening to this work in our playgrounds and classrooms. It’s part of our DNA. It encouraged and inspired musicians from The Beatles and Pink Floyd through to Orbital, Aphex Twin and Labrinth. Delia Derbyshire has become a feminist icon and has given her name to a charity that encourages the involvement of young women in music. It’s massively important. And there is so much more in the archive that I’d love you all to hear one day.

Were you enthralled by the work of the Radiophonic Workshop? Do you think it should be saved for the nation? Let us know your thoughts in the space below.

Swapping actors in roles – from Ann and Harold to Doctor Who

2016-01-17T10:00:00+00:00

A 1938 episode of Ann and Harold when Ann Todd was actually present.

Choosing the cast for any drama or comedy is one of the most important factors in its success. Many things have to be taken into account, not just the suitability of a performer for a role, but how they balance against the other actors, whether they are available for the shooting dates, whether – if they are a star name – the production can afford their fee… Sometimes, however, despite all these efforts, for one reason or another an actor has to be replaced even in the most successful programmes.

There are generally two options when an actor has to be replaced, to recast the role, or in some circumstances to ‘kill off’ the character and devise a replacement – as sometimes the problem is not with the performer, but with the character itself.

In an earlier Post I mentioned the situation with the 1930s comedy series Ann and Harold, where lead actress Ann Todd got a part in a West End play during its run and asked to be released early from the programme. Television at that time was not in a position to argue it seems, as the series was shortened from 6 to 5 episodes to accommodate her.

Examples of actors being replaced at the last minute include Dame May Whitty, a legendary figure in theatre and film, who had to withdraw from the second performance of the drama The Royal Family of Broadway on 14 February 1939 due to illness. In this case as she was a major attraction of the production, the producer George More O’Ferrall made an on-screen apology for her non-appearance before the transmission. Her role was taken by Betty Romaine, who had played another part in the first performance.

Less high-profile substitutions occurred in series such as Dixon of Dock Green, first broadcast in 1955. For example in the series 2 episode The Rotten Apple (which had a young Paul Eddington among the cast), the regular character of Inspector Cherry was played by Stanley Beard instead of Robert Cawdron, and A.J. Brown played Alderman Mayhew in place of the billed Geoffrey Wincott.

Z Cars and other products of the BBC drama department documentary unit in the 50s and early 60s did not make public any cast substitutions, as they did not publish cast lists in Radio Times. But being live they were still susceptible to accidents of fate. In the case of the episode The Share Out in 1965, an actress died just over a week before transmission and had to be replaced. Even when Z Cars returned as a twice-weekly, videotaped series in spring 1967, its relentless schedule occasionally meant that lead actors missed a week and replacement characters were hurriedly written in to cover the gap.

Not the Lad 'Imself

Another notable substitution in another genre occurred with the second series of the radio Hancock’s Half-Hour in 1955. Tony Hancock was under a lot of pressure with stage commitments, and as the second series was about to start, producer Dennis Main Wilson was informed that Hancock had left the country… It was the first major indication of the nerves that were to afflict the rest of Hancock’s career and contributed to his battle with alcoholism. While attempting to locate his star and coax him back, Main Wilson still needed to produce a show, and turned to a friend and colleague, who he knew from the early years of The Goon Show – Harry Secombe. While Secombe was a very different character to Hancock, he was willing and able to step in and replace him for three episodes.

Cast substitutions happened with the Goon Show too, though the circumstances were different. Over the long run of the show, from its early days under the title Crazy People in 1951, there were occasions when all of the main cast missed episodes. In the case of Secombe and Peter Sellers it was minor illness that prevented them appearing, and various colleagues stepped in – more difficult in the case of the multi-voiced Sellers, who required more than one replacement, including the likes of Kenneth Connor, Dick Emery, and, resurrected from ITMA, Jack Train’s Colonel Chinstrap, who was anyway not too dissimilar from Sellers’ character Major Bloodnok.

It was Spike Milligan who suffered the longest absence however, when he had a full blown nervous breakdown, caused by, among other things, the pressure of producing scripts every week, and the after-effects of post-traumatic stress, as it would now be termed, a result of his service in the Italy in World War Two. The fourth original cast member was Michael Bentine, but he clashed with Milligan over the direction of the series and decided to leave after two series.

The first of the Last of the Summer Wine.

One series that had a large number of cast changes over the years was Last of the Summer Wine. Originally a Comedy Playhouse transmitted in January 1973, with Michael Bates as Cyril Blamire, Bill Owen as Compo Simmonite and Peter Sallis as Norman Clegg, a series followed the same year. After the second series Bates left due to ill-health, although he continued in his role in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, presumably as, being mostly studio-based, it was less arduous. Blamire was replaced by Foggy Dewhurst, played by Brian Wilde, who stayed for nine years. Foggy was then replaced by Michael Aldridge’s Seymour Utterthwaite, before returning briefly in 1990. Illness forced his replacement by Frank Thornton as ex-policeman ‘Truly’ Truelove, and though Wilde had wanted to return, this never happened. Bill Owen himself died in 1999, and was replaced by his son Tom Owen, playing Compo’s son. As the programme continued, while some secondary characters were not replaced, the regular cast gradually increased, in part to lessen the burden on the central trio, and by the last series a completely new group of characters were roaming the Dales, with Peter Sallis’s Clegg making cameo appearances – though it was he who delivered the series’ last line when it finally ended in August 2010.

A similar thing occurred more recently with the popular police series New Tricks, which shed the original cast members in its last few years, until by the end the four leads were all different (but at least they kept Dennis Waterman singing the theme tune). Waterman, the last of the originals to go, had been in the situation before when he left the ITV series Minder after many successful years, and back at the beginning of his career, when he had starred in the BBC William series in 1962. He was replaced by Denis Gilmore in the 1963 series – well, the name was close enough...

It is clear that the replacement of a character is a far more common occurrence than the replacement of the actor playing a part. Obviously there are reasons for that, not least the credibility problem of a character suddenly having a different face. In ensemble dramas that can be got round in part by having the character disappear for a while, and when they return hopefully people will accept the new actor – although obviously their performance is likely to be different from the original.

One of the most obvious examples of the replacement of the actor playing a character is of course Doctor Who, where it has become part of the format that the lead role can be played by someone else. By 1966, the original Doctor, William Hartnell, had difficulty learning lines and was generally ailing physically, but the BBC did not want to end the series – its instigator, Sydney Newman, was still head of drama and was reluctant to dispose of his brainchild. The fact that it had been established from the start that the Doctor was from another planet, led to the brainwave that he could change his face. When Hartnell was transformed into Patrick Troughton at the end of the story The Tenth Planet, it was rationalised that he had rejuvenated, as if Troughton was just a younger version of Hartnell. Indeed, his costume was similar to his predecessor’s, and actually changed along with his body...

The Doctor reads aloud from his 500-year diary, unaware that the Tardis is bugged.

A few months into the reign of the new Doctor, there was another kind of substitution when the character of Chicki was played by Sandra Bryant in episode one and by Karol Keyes in episode four of the adventure The Macra Terror – Bryant had been contracted for both episodes, but asked to be released after the first recording. At the time the show was being recorded just a week in advance of transmission. As the character was relatively minor, it’s likely the production team assumed no-one would notice the difference.

After the first recasting of the lead role, it was often uncertain whether the show would be cancelled when subsequent lead actors decided to leave. This was certainly the case in 1969 when Patrick Troughton left, and the BBC actively looked for a replacement series. On a personal note, I for one was not happy with the change at the time – aged 5 ½ I was assured by my (lovely) older sisters at the end of Troughton’s final story that he was dead; when the Doctor returned to television some six months later in the guise of Jon Pertwee, instead of being reassured, the style of the programme had changed to a much scarier, violent, adult version, which put me off watching for the next two years…

By the time Tom Baker took over in 1974, Doctor Who had become a ratings-winner, but this was no longer the case when he left seven seasons later. Through the 1980s the series did recover viewers at first, but after its ‘rest’ in 1985-6 audiences gradually reduced, partly due to erratic and unfavourable scheduling, with two more changes of lead from Peter Davison to Colin Baker, and then Sylvester McCoy. An American co-produced TV movie with Paul McGann in 1996 failed to take off despite good ratings in the UK, and it was not until 2005 that a new series emerged, starring Christopher Eccleston. Eccleston unexpectedly bowed out after only one season, replaced in turn by David Tennant, Matt Smith, and the current incumbent Peter Capaldi.

But Doctor Who is a unique case. We find it hard to adjust to well-known characters seeming to become other people. There are exceptions, though it helps if you get in early.

Recasting occasionally happens in soap operas, most commonly with child actors who cannot or will not continue to appear as a particular character – and a child actor cannot be guaranteed to turn into a convincing performer when they get older. Occasionally an adult part is recast, as in the case of Mark Fowler, following the suicide of original actor David Scarboro, replaced some time later by Todd Carty. The redoubtable Peggy Mitchell too was originally played by Jo Warne, but she was only in the series briefly; when the character returned in 1994 she had morphed into Barbara Windsor. Another member of the Mitchell family, Sam, was first played by Daniella Westbrook, but following a troubled history with the programme due to her cocaine use, Kim Medcalf was brought in to replace her in 2002. Yet when the character came back again briefly in 2009, Westbrook played the role again.

Typecasting can be the bane of an actor’s life, and being known for one part can prevent them getting more interesting and different work – it’s certainly one of the reasons for people leaving a role, they hope, not too late to escape it. Rupert Davies, star of Maigret from 1960-63, certainly felt that the series blighted his career, though he still returned to the part in a 1969 Play of the Month. Ironically he had not been in the 1959 edition of Sunday-Night Theatre which acted as a pilot for the series. It’s a testament in a way to the strength of an actor’s performance if we cannot accept them as anyone else than the part that made them famous. It is however much harder to accept someone else playing that role.

Replacement characters are another matter altogether – but viewers I’m sure are not always sorry to see the cast of long-running series refreshed from time to time. With the accidents of mortality, or just the wishes of actors to spread their wings after a time, it is something that we all have to get used to.

Have you had a traumatic reaction to a new Doctor Who actor? Do you get confused by the changing faces of soap actors? Have you missed or welcomed replacement actors in your favourite series, from Dixon and Z Cars to Casualty and New Tricks? Let us know…

Sunday Post: Christmas Day 1965

2015-12-20T10:00:00+00:00

I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas with a Dalek... (or not)

Fifty years ago, the BBC's Christmas Day was more or less fully developed into a form recognisable now, with a full range of programmes on radio and the small screen.

1965 was the first full year where there were two BBC television channels, following the launch of BBC2 in April 1964. The second channel was gradually becoming available in more parts of the country, though it would be a while before it reached the same level of coverage as BBC1. But many people still had television sets working on 405 lines only, so were unable to receive the 625-line BBC2 even if they lived in an area where it was available.

Television programmes on BBC1 began at 9.15 with Welcome Christmas, a music programme featuring singers Ivor Emmanuel (then perhaps best known for his appearance in the film Zulu) and Ursula Connors.

At 9.45, Laurel and Hardy were seen in their 1937 film Way Out West, featuring the song The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, which was to become a top ten hit in 1975. This was the fifth showing of the film, it having been first televised in 1950.

At 10.45 See the Children Sing was a carol concert from the Royal Festival Hall, and was followed by a Christmas Morning Service live from the village church in Fenny Compton, Warwickshire, at 11.15.

Midday saw the regular Meet the Kids programme, this year hosted by Leslie Crowther, and relayed from St. George’s Hospital, Tooting, where Crowther and guests Tony Hart and ventriloquist Ray Alan, accompanied by Tich and Quackers, helped entertain children confined to hospital for the festive season. The show had first been televised in 1961, when the presenter was Max Bygraves. This was Crowther’s second stint as compere, and he would do the next two years as well.

Champions on Ice at 12.45 featured international ice skaters including the new British ice dance champions Diane Towler and Bernard Ford. At 1.25 The Andy Williams Show included regular guests The Osmond Brothers, long before their fame as 1970s pop stars.

Afternoon All

Usually shown in the early evening, Dixon of Dock Green was relegated to 2.15 because of the Christmas schedule. The series had been going for 10 years at this point, and by now the only remaining characters from its first series were the lead, George Dixon, played by Jack Warner, and Peter Byrne as Detective Sergeant Andy Crawford (there were occasional appearances by George's daughter Mary, who was also Andy's wife). This Christmas Day episode was called Georgina, written by Eric Paice. It took place in real time and saw the avuncular Sergeant Dixon deal with a medical emergency when help is unable to reach a sick woman. It’s notable that there is no character called Georgina in the cast list...

Several time-honoured Christmas staples followed this dramatic interlude, with the Queen’s Christmas message at 3.00, Billy Smart’s Circus directly afterwards, Disney Time at 4.00, presented by Maurice Chevalier, and at 4.50 the pantomime Mother Goose. Terry Scott took the title role with Norman Vaughan playing ‘her’ son, and the cast included Jon Pertwee as the Squire, and right at the bottom of the list, one David Jason (his first BBC appearance, though he had previously appeared on ITV in Crossroads). After the 6.25 News Summary, Val Doonican fronted the Christmas Day charitable Appeal. At the same time - 6.30 - BBC2 started its transmissions for the day, with When Comedy Was King, a compilation of early American comedy movies from the likes of Chaplin, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy.

On BBC1 at 6.35 was the latest episode of Dr Who. Now just beginning its third year, it had been decided to continue with the current story, an epic twelve-episode adventure known internally as The Daleks’ Master Plan, rather than skip a week for Christmas.

The episode was called The Feast of Steven - a festive pun on the name of the Doctor's companion Steven, played by future Blue Peter presenter Peter Purves. Like the current series, at this time every episode had its own title, although they were always part of a story consisting of a number of 25-minute episodes, most often four or six. Allegedly commissioned because BBC executive Huw Wheldon’s mother liked the Daleks, the original six-part story written by Dalek creator Terry Nation was extended to 12 episodes, with former story editor Dennis Spooner contributing the extra scripts from a storyline by Nation.

Since it would go out on Christmas Day (the only time this happened until 2005), it was decided that unlike the rest of this dark and disturbing story, which had already seen two sympathetic characters killed off, the instalment would not feature the Daleks, despite the fact that half the country had probably unwrapped items of Dalek merchandising that morning, as this was still the height of ‘Dalekmania’.

The episode was split into two mini-stories, with the first set in a Liverpool police station, although the production team of Z Cars had turned down a proposal for an appearance by its cast. The second half of the episode took place in 1920s Hollywood. The episode was played for laughs, and was topped off by William Hartnell, as the Doctor, turning to the camera at the end and wishing “A Merry Christmas to all of you at home”.

I've arrived, and to prove it, I'm here...

Following Dr Who was Max Bygraves meets the Black and White Minstrels at 7.00. The Minstrels' founder and choirmaster George Mitchell had been broadcasting since 1945, and had become the BBC’s go-to man for light choral singing. His choirs made frequent radio and occasional television appearances, including a regular spot on Off the Record, an ancestor of Top of the Pops.

The Mitchell Minstrels first appeared in Gentlemen, Be Seated!, part of the National Radio Show coverage in 1957. The first Black and White Minstrel Show was shown on 14 June 1958, and it was soon a popular favourite with its mixture of old-style minstrel songs, show tunes and other middle-of-the-road material, gaining huge ratings by the early 60s. The use of black-face make-up (ironically it was actually red when the show was made in monochrome, for technical reasons) was not controversial at first, as minstrel shows were a long-established tradition, but by the late 60s some protests were received and a series called Music, Music, Music was made without the make-up, but this was not as successful.

Max Bygraves was, like Mitchell, one of the rich wave of talent that emerged after the Second World War, and regularly broadcast as a singer and comedian. He made a big impression in Educating Archie, the hit 50s comedy series based around ventriloquist Peter Brough and his dummy Archie Andrews, and Bygraves made many more radio appearances in the 50s and early 60s. He was also a successful recording artist, and had spent most of 1965 on a world tour, beginning in South Africa. His next appearance on BBC tv after this Christmas show was on New Year’s Day 1966, together with two of his children and ‘Uncle Eric’ (Eric Sykes, one of Educating Archie's writers), as the panel of Juke Box Jury.

One notable absentee from this year’s Christmas schedule was Christmas Night with the Stars, which began in 1958. This was only the second time, the other being 1961, that it had not been broadcast. The annual show consisted of short episodes of popular entertainment shows, usually specially made. The programme was also missing from 1966’s schedule, but then returned every year until 1972, and was revived in 1994 as Fry and Laurie Host a Christmas Night with the Stars, and in 2003 under the original title, presented by Michael Parkinson.

The big Christmas night film at 8.00 was Road to Bali, receiving its first BBC screening, in an era where you were unlikely to see recent films on television. It was made in 1952 and starred the classic team of Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour.

Hollywood studios were becoming more willing to allow their output to appear on television, having previously been wary of the effect of the medium on cinema attendances. As it had become clear that television was here to stay, film companies protected their future by making films and series specially for television. Nevertheless it is still noticeable how few feature films were shown at this time.

Comedy continued at 9.30 and The Ken Dodd Show, with special guest star Sandie Shaw, and John Laurie and Patricia Hayes among the cast. The script was by Dodd and his then regular writer Eddie Braben – they parted company a few years later and Braben became the writer for Morecambe and Wise. The main news was at 10.30, where stories covered included carol singing on President Johnson’s Texas ranch, American troops celebrating Christmas in Vietnam, and the traditional Christmas Day swim in the Serpentine.

Davies, Davies, Quaife and Avory - Number 1 in '65

Surprisingly late in the day, at 10.35 (although it was repeated the next day at 12.15), was Top of the Pops ’65. This was only the second Christmas the show had seen since its debut on 1 January 1964. The programme was pre-recorded and featured ‘The No.1 Records of the Year’, including the Beatles, inevitably, as well as newer stars like Tom Jones, Sonny and Cher and the Rolling Stones, and was a bumper edition lasting 75 minutes. The last programme on BBC1 was A Christmas Reverie, a talk by the popular religious broadcaster Werner Pelz, followed by the Weather and Close Down at midnight.

BBC2’s alternative television schedule, after When Comedy Was King, consisted of a News Summary at 7.55, Berlioz’s The Childhood of Christ at 8.00, the prize-winning Swedish nature film Island Yearbook at 9.35, then episode two of a three-part adaptation of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet at 10.35, with Valerie Gearon in the title role. It was directed by former BBC children’s staff producer Rex Tucker in the BBC’s Glasgow studios, where he had been producing classic serials since leaving the Doctor Who production team in 1963, while the series was being developed.

The evening concluded as usual with Late Night Line-Up at 11.20. As the programme was open-ended, no closedown time was listed, but it is likely to have been around midnight.

Christmas Listening

BBC radio was still composed of the post-war Home and Light Programmes, plus the Third Network, which itself comprised the Music Programme in daytime and the Third Programme in the evening (and, depending on the day, the Sport Service or the Study Session between the two, though neither of these broadcast on Christmas Day).

Radio highlights for Christmas Day 1965 included another Ken Dodd show at 1.10 on the Home Service, followed by Desert Island Discs where the castaway was the Earl of Harewood; an adaptation of A Christmas Carol with Ralph Richardson as Scrooge was at 2.15, and at 4.00 Spike Milligan starred in The Naughty Navy Show. The Home Service Christmas Day ended with Richard Burton reading his own Christmas story, then at 11.02 the traditional Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, repeated from the previous day.

Over on the Light Programme, Brian Matthew introduced the usual mixture of pop music in Saturday Club at 10.00, including Cliff Richard and the Shadows, there was a Christmas episode of the sitcom Sid and Dora with Sid James and Dora Bryan at 5.00, and composer and former head of BBC Light Entertainment Eric Maschwitz recalled Some Foolish Things at 6.00.

Home and Away at 7.30 was a Forces Christmas show from Berlin, then Gracie Fields sang at 8.15. The night was rounded off with Music for Your Party at 10.15, where the bill was headed by Freddie and the Dreamers.

On the Third Network, the Music Programme had Wagner’s The Mastersingers all afternoon from 1.30, while the Third Programme schedule had Breath of Fresh Air at 7.30, a drama of a Sussex childhood during the First World War, and a Mozart concert with Vladimir Ashkenazy and Daniel Barenboim at 8.35. Closedown was at 11.15, following the News.

A taste of the scary

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It's Hallowe'en. The long winter evenings are drawing in, and dark shadows gather round us, so time to look at scary, frightening and unsettling programmes (and I won’t mention George Galloway pretending to be a cat – that wasn’t on the BBC).

The tradition of ghost stories and horror tales goes back into the mists of antiquity, and broadcasting didn’t take too long before it started sharing them with the nation. The first mention of ghost stories is in Some Ghost Stories of the Midlands told by John Hingeley on 5IT Birmingham in December 1923, and thereafter ghost stories at Christmas start to become a bit of a regular occurrence. Famed early radio storyteller A.J. Alan (aka Allan) told one in 1924 and 1925.

In the 1970s, there was a television series of one-off plays called A Ghost Story for Christmas, often based on stories by M.R. James, as was the 1968 Omnibus dramatisation of Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You. This was adapted and produced by Jonathan Miller, who had earlier in 1966 made a television film of Alice in Wonderland, which with its odd, dreamlike atmosphere tends towards the ‘unsettling’ rather than the ‘frightening’ end of the scale.

Radio continued its tradition of scary stories in the 30s and 40s, with Algernon Blackwood reading his own horror and ghost tales. He had been a writer since the turn of the 20th Century, and first broadcast in 1934. Towards the end of his life he also appeared on television reading his Saturday Night Story. A more regular series, starting in 1943 at the height of the Second World War, was Appointment with Fear, a series of horror and suspense stories by various authors, including classic works by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, although most of the early episodes were written by John Dickson Carr. The series was noted for the sepulchral delivery of Valentine Dyall, who introduced the drama adaptations, and was known as The Man in Black.

Television was slow to embrace ghost and horror stories, perhaps because their lurid possibilities would have been more graphic and shocking in the visual medium. The production of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine in 1949 gave an opportunity for one of TV’s first monsters to appear, the subterranean Morlocks, but they probably didn’t give anyone any nightmares.

The same cannot be said for the first great television science fiction serial, The Quatermass Experiment, which rattled the nation in the summer of 1953. Following the Coronation coverage, many more people had television sets and were exposed for the first time to a horror serial, with writer Nigel Kneale’s tale of a British space rocket which is infected by an alien organism, possessing the mind and later the body of one of its astronauts.

Kneale was to create an even greater sensation with his 1954 adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. More satire than science-fiction, this created a storm in the newspapers and in Parliament with the terrifying scene of the hero, Winston Smith, being threatened with torture using his greatest fear – rats. The dramatisation brought Orwell’s book to a much wider audience, and helped to implant concepts and phrases like ‘thought police’, ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Room 101’ in the national consciousness.

The scariness of science fiction came to the screen in 1949 with The Time Machine

The following year saw a follow-up to The Quatermass Experiment, called Quatermass II (possibly the earliest use of a sequel being called ‘Something + Number’), which again featured some unpleasant scenes of body horror, with people being taken over by an alien parasite landing on Earth in hollow meteorites. Particularly gruesome scenes included a storage tank filled with writhing alien creatures, and a man covered in corrosive black slime, staggering down the stairs on the outside of the container. At least one episode, as we know from the surviving recording, was preceded by a warning that the programme was not suitable for children and those of a nervous disposition.

Kneale was still not finished with his main character, the conscience-troubled rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass, and he returned in a third adventure in 1958, called Quatermass and the Pit. Here, demolition work in Knightsbridge uncovers what is first assumed to be a Second World War bomb, but it turns out to be evidence that Earth has been visited by Martians in ancient times. The serial turns into a kind of ghost story, although one that tries to give a rational, if fantastical, explanation for psychic phenomena, as well as for racism and man’s inhumanity to man. The standout horror scene shows a workman afflicted by unearthly sounds (an early job for the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop) and psychokinetic attacks as he staggers towards sanctuary in a church.

Much of Kneale’s work for the BBC was composed of single plays, many of which had a supernatural or horror element. 1963’s The Road, set in 1770, has a supposed haunting turn out to be a premonition of nuclear holocaust in the near future. The Year of the Sex Olympics in 1968 saw a future society where television was used to subdue the population, and showed a ‘reality’ tv show where a couple and a child are exiled to an island and threatened by a psychopath. Perhaps Kneale’s best post-Quatermass piece is The Stone Tape, broadcast on Christmas Day 1972. This is in a way a ghost story, but rationalising ghosts as a kind of recording trapped in the fabric of buildings and places – but still with terrifying consequences.

There was a kind of spate of adult-oriented horror and supernatural dramas around this time. One of the earliest is the series Late Night Horror, a collection of half hour single plays shown on BBC2 in 1968. The science fiction anthology series Out of the Unknown, which began in 1965, developed into a part sci-fi, part horror series by its later series in 1969 and 1971. Similar stories were shown in Dead of Night in 1972, and less overtly fantastical series including as No Exit and Menace.

1977 saw both the anthology series Supernatural, in which people who had had horrific experiences told their stories to members of the Victorian ‘Club of the Damned’ in an attempt to be admitted to its ranks, and one of the best productions of Count Dracula, starring Louis Jourdan as the title character and Frank Finlay as Van Helsing.

The Nightmare Man was a 1981 thriller serial about a psychopath on the loose on an isolated Scottish island – but is he in fact an alien… or something else? Tightly directed by Douglas Camfield, it has a number of chilling and horrifically violent scenes – and all transmitted before the watershed! The same year also saw a well-realised version of The Day of the Triffids starring John Duttine, with atmospheric sequences of blinded humanity, and surprisingly convincing giant walking plants.

One of the most unsettling BBC horror drama’s was 1992’s Ghostwatch. Framed in the context of a live broadcast of the investigation of a haunted suburban house, and starring real television personalities such as Michael Parkinson, Mike Smith and Sarah Greene, its mixture of reality and fiction in the manner of Orson Welles’s 1930s production of The War of the Worlds, and genuinely unnerving depiction of a ghostly presence, never breaks the illusion it is actually happening, so much so that the BBC decided it should never be repeated.

Proper scary Victorian ghost stories - television series Supernatural

The longest-running and best known of the BBC’s ‘scary’ series is of course Doctor Who. From its outset in 1963 it was famous for terrifying children (in a good way), most famously with the Daleks. Conceived from the outset as not being the standard bug-eyed monster, they were introduced at the end of the first episode of the second Doctor Who adventure by the sight of the notorious sink-plunger arm approaching the Doctor’s companion Barbara, seen from the Dalek’s point of view. Barbara naturally enough screams lustily. The following episodes built on their menacing and inhuman threat, as they ‘exterminated’ without compunction and plotted the destruction of their fellow inhabitants on the planet Skaro, the Thals. One episode saw the creature inside a Dalek machine being removed – its hideous appearance being indicated by the horrified reactions of the Tardis crew, and a brief glimpse of its alien claw (actually a rubber gorilla hand bought from a joke shop).

The series managed to build a reputation for family-friendly horror that saw it win comfortably healthy ratings throughout the 60s and 70s, with occasional dips as lethargy and over-familiarity crept in, but Doctor Who entered the national consciousness as a source of mild but compulsive thrills and scares.

Arguably more effective in black and white, from its abstract title sequence and innovative radiophonic music, Doctor Who used all the tricks of fairy tales and suspense films to literally have the nation’s children hiding behind sofas and cushions, but yet keep watching. Occasionally it went too far – in 1971 questions were asked in Parliament when one alien monster was disguised as a policeman and another as a kind of doll in the adventure Terror of the Autons.

The new, colour adventures starring Jon Pertwee that started in 1970 began with a more adult tone, though this was soon toned down into a cosier and more fantastical version, but still allowing the endless parade of grotesque and inventive monsters to continue. With the advent of Tom Baker as the lead actor in 1974, a new production team began to make parodies/pastiches of well-known horror staples such as Frankenstein, with moments of gruesome violence which attracted the ire of Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners Association, and led to a toning down of later 70s episodes.

The 80s saw the series gradually fade away as audiences’ expectations post-Star Wars were not satisfied by BBC budgets, and an increasingly inward-looking approach, and a move away from its traditional Saturday slot, saw the audience dwindle away. Effectively cancelled in 1989, after a one-off TV film made in America in 1996, the series was finally brought back in 2005 to surprising levels of acclaim and appreciation, and new generations were thrilled and scared as they had been in earlier decades.

And yet – despite such effective creatures as the Weeping Angels that first appeared in the episode Blink, and the gas-mask clad small boy asking “Are you my mummy?” in 2005 adventure The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances the new series is a product of a different time. The loss of the cliff-hanger aspect of the format (though this is making a comeback in the current series) lessened the tension for the viewer, as does one-off stories so there is little time to establish and develop situations and characters.

We live in an era now where it’s possible to depict greater and greater extremes of violence and horror on screen, whether fictional or factual. Much time and imagination is expended on special effects whether ‘real’ or computer-generated.

Has this resulted in scarier dramas? Or are we too used to be being artificially frightened? Let us know your views in the space below.