Whose Who?

The Cybermen outside St Paul's from The Invasion (1969) written by Derrick Sherwin

QUITE when it was that I decided to become a writer I’m not sure, but I do remember my English teacher at school telling me to forget any such ambition since I could hardly write my own name, let alone produce something that was half-way acceptable as creative prose.

I had great pleasure one day when returning to my home town of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire and seeing my old English teacher in a coffee bar, telling her to watch BBC Theatre 625 that week, to see my first TV drama. It starred Emlyn Williams and Bill Frazer and was entitled Yob & Nabob. It was judged second most popular play after Unman, Wittering and Zigo. I don’t think the English teacher recovered her poise as I paid for her coffee and left with a smug smile on my face. Ever since that moment in my life, I have taken the opinions of those whom I have little respect for with a pinch of salt, including my bosses at the BBC. I remember having one hell of a battle with Paul Fox, the then head of BBC One, who refused to let me call a series Baker’s Dozen, even though it comprised 13 thrillers and was introduced by a character named Baker. He believed that the public wouldn’t know what a Baker’s Dozen was.

After my auspicious launch as a TV dramatist, I began the slow and sometimes tedious learning curve of becoming a commercial writer. I was still an actor, writing in my spare time, of which there was a great deal. I took on a job in a soap opera United! playing a famous centre forward (not bad for a rugby player) until, having suffered the ghastly scripts for six months, I took to re-writing episodes and eventually left to become a full time writer on the series. Having become used to the regular pay cheques and having bought my first family home I went on to join the team of writers on another auspicious series, Crossroads. Whatever, these two soap operas were a wonderful training ground and when I left I was approached by the BBC to join as an assistant story editor on Doctor Who.

A publicity shot from The War Games (1969), the first story on which Sherwin worked as Producer and Patrick Troughton's last as the Doctor

My experience of Who up to that point was comforting my kids who watched it religiously from behind the sofa as did most young fans of the time. Peter Bryant was the story editor at the time, but with Innes Lloyd (then the producer) looking to move on, Peter was looking to take over as producer. Although I had no experience of script editing at the time, I was at least a fairly experienced as a writer. Peter had no such experience at all since he’d come from producing Mrs Dale’s Diary on radio.

When I took over script editing the programme and Peter moved into the chair as producer, the series was in one hell of a mess. The scripts, both existing and commissioned, were dreadful and getting the authors to follow a re-write brief was impossible since writing for Doctor Who was considered at the time to be as prestigious as cleaning the gents toilets on Shepherd’s Bush Green. I therefore had to assume the sergeant major role and crack the whip. Egos were bounced around my office and ended up bruised but, in the end, compliant (since writers, despite their egos, enjoy their pay cheques and, unless they do the work, they don’t get paid). Certain scripts turned out to be winners and the mood of the entire crew blossomed. Now all we had to do was to get the premise of the programme back on course.

As a series based upon the adventures of a hobo in space (this was creator Sydney Newman’s description of what he thought the series should be about), it was far from being realized. It was in fact a series jumping from space and time travel through adventures with an historical background (which was credibly difficult since history couldn’t be tampered with or changed) or adventures with wobbly jelly monsters. The series never had clothes that fitted or that anybody was comfortable wearing. No wonder the writers hated scripting for it. There was no clear story direction, no series premise. But there was a certain something.

By 1969, and under these circumstances, Patrick Troughton was getting fractious as the leading actor because his workload had become impossible. Eventually, he cracked. I had already decided to ease his burden by introducing UNIT as a secondary storyline participant. It was about this time that Patrick decided that he’d had enough and had a big row with Peter, who bid him farewell. I was a little bit relieved because Patrick was quite a handful, and I had my work cut out trying to reform the series to include UNIT more permanently and turn the series into something more acceptable, like the Quatermass stories.

Casting Jon Pertwee and introducing military outfit UNIT headed by the Brigadier were Sherwin's major contributions to Doctor Who during his period at the helm

It must have been something in the air because everything that could go wrong at this time did. Peter Bryant left the series to take over Paul Temple and I succeeded him as producer. It was also at the point that Jon Pertwee was cast and joined as the new Doctor. It was an inspired piece of casting which we finally agreed on having ploughed through Spotlight (the actors casting journal) several times. Jon Pertwee was nervous because he had never done a virtually ‘live’ TV studio based show before.

I also had the problem of the series changing from black and white into colour and, on top of all this, the BBC technicians decided to go on strike, which meant that our studio dates had to be cancelled. So what to do? Only one thing for it: take the whole bloody thing, put it on film and shoot it outside London. This would make Jon feel easier since filming was a series of one shot takes and that pleased him, and it would take it out of the influence of the cussed unions. It was a monumental reorganization as far both I and the series was concerned – but fun. We completed the filming successfully on time and on budget. Jon’s first appearance was superb and I managed to persuade him to inject a little comedy into his performance here and there.

Peter, meanwhile, had been grappling with the task of placating the co-producer, a German company, about the series he was to rework. Not an easy task since Francis Durbridge had written Paul Temple as a radio series way back before television was even invented. The stories were set in a time that just didn’t translate to the ‘now’ of the seventies. When Peter took it over there wasn’t one workable script and a decidedly upset co-producer who had invested a lot of money in this epic. Peter, charming soul that he was, just couldn’t cope with this kind of situation, mostly because he was creative in that way.

I was just getting my feet comfortably under the table as producer of Doctor Who when Peter asked the powers that be if I could be persuaded to take over as script editor of Paul Temple. At first I refused, partly because I knew that Jon Pertwee would be disappointed to lose the one person he could bounce his ideas and concerns off. I did, however, agree to meet with the German co-producer, Nils Nilson, a charming man and a desperate one. I had to be blunt with the head of department in saying that given my expertise with script writing, while it could improve, the series needed more than that. And besides, having just become a producer myself, this would be a step down. I was subsequently persuaded by a joint producer agreement and set about the task of breathing some life into an otherwise dead but vitally important production. It was the first major co-production of the BBC. So in 1970 I moved from producing Doctor Who across to work on Paul Temple.

An auton, living plastic monsters introduced in Jon Pertwee's opening story Spearhead from Space (1970), the second and final show on which Sherwin is credited as being the producer

Doctor Who, on my leaving, had been put into the hands of my fellow writer Terrance Dicks, whom I had persuaded to join me as script editor. Barry Letts took over as producer. I don’t think they fully appreciated what I was trying to do with introducing UNIT and, in my opinion, the series regressed from then on, except for a short time when Tom Baker gave it spirit as one of the replacement Doctors.

Years later, in late 80s, I had started my own company and heard that the BBC (in its infinite wisdom) had decided to can Doctor Who. I was furious because, despite all of the trouble I’d had with the series, I had grown attached to it. I offered the BBC a deal whereby I would take it over as an independent production, pay for the production through sales and pre-sales (it had by this time a considerable following which in the right hands could be persuaded to back it financially) and I would simply give the BBC the series free to air. It refused.

Then I heard that it had been set up to be done in Wales with big co-production money from Canada. I was relieved but somewhat pissed that my offer had been passed over and the BBC had gone elsewhere – presumably because it could retain editorial control, something it always insisted upon – while receiving a cash injection for the coffers.

While the series from Wales went into production, I semi-retired to Thailand, thoroughly disenchanted with the TV scene in London, which seemed to be developing into a chewing-gum-for-the-eyes business, imitating the worst of the rubbish coming out of the USA. I was sent copies of each new series and was impressed that the extra cash from the co-production had happily seemed to have ended up on the screen. I liked some of the stories but not those that travelled back in time into history – something I thought should never have been tackled for the obvious reasons. History is history: don’t tamper with it. But if the new producers want life breathed into the old series, they’ve only got to ask.

Now I have started my own company again in New Zealand I have decided to write a TV series using all of my experience (the good kind) from my time with Doctor Who. My new series is called We and yes, it involves adventures in space, and a family, but also a unique android copy of the lead character. It could be fun…