A couple of things I was planning on doing this week aren't happening. I've had time to get part 4 into shape, so here it is ahead of schedule.
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"Roger and Pat had very different working styles. Roger was always very meticulous. He'd be word perfect and have a lot of performance ideas mapped out in his head beforehand whereas Pat would experiment. Pat would convey the meaning of the lines, but change the actual words. He'd try different moods.
"One day at rehearsals, Jon Pertwee took Roger aside and said 'Why do you put up with this? You're the star.' But Roger had worked with Pat several times before and said 'If I put up with him, then maybe the next Doctor will put up with me'. I knew something was going on in Roger's mind.
"As much as Roger loved and still loves playing The Doctor, I had an inkling that he was considering when to move on as early as Season 9. After Season 8 had finished, he went off to Spain that Summer to be in Charlton Heston's film of
Antony And Cleopatra. Roger's not boastful, but he kept mentioning it a lot and I did wonder if he feared missing out on more work like that, but I also know he worried if he quit
Doctor Who, he'd be back playing the 'scornfuls and Spaniards'.
"I bumped into him after he'd done
The Man Who Would Be King and I could tell he was half-delighted to be in a film with Sean Connery and Michael Caine and half-deflated that he'd got a part that an Indian actor had dropped out of.
"Obviously, we know now that it worked out in the end. He got the perfect role for someone of his background and he got to be the hero again."
- Barry Letts, DVD Extra, The Three Doctors
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I was torn. I wanted to be The Doctor forever, but I still had ambition to demonstrate my acting range in other roles and since I'd proved that I could be a hero, my agent told me I might be able to get something more than the 'scornfuls and Spaniards' that had dogged me for so long.
The change came during the story called
The Three Doctors. Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell had been able to come back to the series. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to work with William on the story. He had to be pre-filmed and the only time all three of us got to be 'The Three Doctors' was for publicity photos. But working with Patrick was wonderful. At least, it was wonderful for Patrick and myself, poor Lennie Mayne the director and Barry Letts were tearing their hair out. Pat and I have a similar silly sense of humour and for every one line of the script we said, we'd add twenty utterly unusable ones in rehearsal.
The moment that stuck with me was when Patrick was in dress rehearsal, looking at his costume and said 'There's no such thing as an ex-Doctor Who is there? Time travellers can always come back.' And it was then I realized that I could leave the show, take up other acting engagements but still be Doctor Who.
- Roger Delgado, "Scornfuls, Spaniards, Sleuths And Spacemen", 1999
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"I am glad that Roger decided he'd do one more series before he'd quit. Gabrielle and Ray were leaving at the end of Season 10 and I knew I was going to hand off to a new producer and script editor as Terrance and I moved onto
Gabriel Baine. A change of Doctor might have been too much all at once. I did the casting for the new companion, left some notes of ideas I had, but ultimately let the new team work out the specifics of her character."
- Barry Letts, DVD Extra, The Three Doctors
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Actress Jenny Twigge, above, is to play Dr. Who's new assistant when the BBC-TV series returns in December.
Jenny, 23, will appear as a student from the 23rd Century.
- The Daily Mirror, June 27th 1973
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"As Paddy Russell moved into the Doctor Who production office and I moved out, I just said 'You have a year to find a new Doctor and watch out for Mrs Whitehouse'. She said 'You leave Mrs Whitehouse to me'."
- Barry Letts, DVD Extra, The Poisoned Earth
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"Most of the men in the TV industry didn't know how to talk to Mary Whitehouse, which gave her an advantage." Paddy Russell recalls. "They treated her as a housewife who should have stayed at home, or as an old battleaxe, or they were too scared of appearing to bully her. She didn't have that advantage with me."
It's typical
Doctor Who irony that the period of the show that most fans agree was the scariest is the one Mary Whitehouse had the least traction on attacking.
"We didn't show anything horrific," Paddy explains. "It was all done with atmosphere. As much as I'd like to take credit for that, I had the perfect script editor for spooky atmospheres."
- Paddy Russell interview, Doctor Who Magazine, 1996
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"Personally, I think she was taking a hell of a risk, I'd never even written for
Doctor Who before, but she liked my work of
Ace Of Wands and I had done script editing at the BBC before,
Z-Cars and other things. Maybe it was working with Pamela Lonsdale at Thames that swung it. I had no problems working for a woman. Not that I think that was a problem for anyone else. That might be why she picked me over some of the more obvious names.
The most obvious name was Robert Holmes, but he'd been offered the script editor job on
Doctor Thorndyke, so he was out and eventually, I was in.
The first job was deciding what sort of companion Jenny was going to be playing. There'd been talk of having a companion who was a women's libber but I had the idea of taking it a step further. Have her be someone plucked from the future and stranded in the 70s. Someone for whom women's liberation was the norm. The attitudes of the 70s were occasionally laughable to her, especially when they were being presented as modern.
There was the potential problem of her having too much future knowledge. Paddy suggested we get round that by making her a student of Medieval history. She could have just enough knowledge of previous times that we didn't have to have everything explained to her, but she didn't know everything that would happen before it happened. We could pick and choose what she knew between the Renaissance and the 23rd Century."
- PJ Hammond, DVD Extra, The Time Thieves
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"Hi, guys. It's me, Elijah, again. Welcome to part two of my look at the companions of
Doctor Who.
"Let's start with Kay Gee played by Jenny Twigge from 1973 to 1975.
"After Jo Grant and her endless procession of floaty dresses, Kay Gee was the ultimate sensibly dressed
Doctor Who girl. Kay was a student of Medieval history with the twist that she was studying it in the 23rd Century. She regarded her 1970s redbrick university as a venerable old seat of learning and the first we see of her, she's having to explain to a fellow student that, no, the 20th Century doesn't count as Medieval, even though it was hundreds of years ago.
"Thanks to Kay's curiosity,
Doctor Who had its first pure historical in 7 years with
The Taking Of The Tower seeing the Doctor and Kay get involved with the Peasants' Revolt. Nowadays, however, Kay's more noted for her devoted following in the LGBT side of Doctor Who fandom, particulary the L-part.
"Kay was from a future time when the battle of the sexes, as they called it then, was well and truly over and women dressed any way they liked. She went in for hard-wearing, practical, demin outfits and one time caused quite a stir by wearing a man's dinner suit to a formal dinner. Let's just say that she helped a number of girls in the 70s come to personal realizations.
"If you're wondering about her name. In an early pitch meeting for the new companion, Kay was meant to be a humanoid robot from the 'KG' series of androids, which got turned into a proper name by the humans around her. While that part got thrown away, the name stuck."
- Elijah Explains Classic Who, YouTube, 2017
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"Roger is a very intelligent actor and in that last series of his, he turned up the warmth and that twinkle in his eye. I have no doubt that he was doing it deliberately in reaction to the direction Peter and I were taking the show. Sorry what was that? Did he have a problem with the way the show was changing? No, I think if that was the case, he'd have come to me and told me openly."
- Paddy Russell , convention appearance, 1990
"Paddy gives me too much credit. I think it was unconscious on my part. I suppose I had noticed that it was becoming, what was it you called it, Gary? M.R. James for middle-schoolers. I do like that.
She's right, if I had a problem, I would have told her. If anything, I was more comfortable in that last series. So much done by suggestion and yes, I supposed I knew that The Doctor could put himself between the scary things and the audience. Paddy had a rule 'scares, not terror' and I think the show lived up to that.
Do I regret leaving when I did? Yes and no. It was a lovely family and a wonderful, wonderful role, but I did have that actorish thing of wanting to do new things and, let's face it, I needed to be free for my trip to Egypt, didn't I?"
- Roger Delgado, convention appearance, 1990
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"I think all the Victorian detectives did have an influence on casting a replacement for Roger, yes. But only insofar as I wanted to cast against that type. Sexton Blake, Dr. Thorndyke and I suppose Gabriel Baine, too, were all so…sexy! I didn't want Doctor Who to get lost amid all the dashing adventurers. Now, I'm not for one moment suggesting Iain is unsexy, but he doesn't trade on sex appeal.
He'd caught my eye playing Dr. Arnold in the BBC's classic serial version of
Tom Brown's School Days. He had that wonderful avuncular quality that would set itself nicely against the scaries in
Doctor Who. If needed, he could be a big teddy bear, but he'd had a lot of experience playing some very bad bad guys, so we could always bring out an edge. A bit like Roger, we could show him scaring the monsters, but he'd be like a favourite uncle to the companions and the children at home."
- Paddy Russell, DVD extra, Genesis Of The Daleks
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Who's Who:
Budgie and
The Borderers star Iain Cuthbertson will be taking over the role of Dr Who in the BBC's long-running science fiction series at the end of the year. Glaswegian Cuthbertson is probably best known for playing Soho "businessman" Charlie Endell on ITV's
Budgie.
- The Guardian, February 16th 1974
Next time: The Third Doctor's last word as he faces the
Army Of Hate
Thanks to Andrew Hickey who supplied the title and idea for The Taking Of The Tower