Architects of Doctor Who: David Whitaker - by his biographer Simon Guerrier

Ahead of a new series of Zero Room, unearth the captivating history of Doctor Who, as we unravel the influential role of David Whitaker, one of the show's founding fathers, in this episode with Simon Guerrier. Ever wondered how the iconic Daleks found their place in the series despite BBC's initial resistance? We'll uncover that and more, like the dynamic relationship between Whitaker and fellow writer Terry Nation.

Join us for a detailed discussion on Whitaker's diverse career, his stint as a jobbing BBC writer, and his ongoing influence on Doctor Who. Simon speaks of the challenges faced while researching Whitaker's life and career, given how many other David Whitakers there were. He also shares intriguing stories about Whitaker's involvement in a failed Irving Berlin production - and the toll that early television production took on the crew.

Recorded at the launch of Simon's book, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, at Manchester's Portico Library, this episode is a treasure trove for any Doctor Who fan, offering a unique perspective into the series' early days. Get ready for a nostalgia-filled, time-traveling adventure.

Zero Room began as a cassette based audio zine in 1984. Now we're turning over for Side Two in the age of the Podcast.

'Doctor Who' is always about change and renewal - but fans have always been keen to look back over heritage, stories, continuity and lore and share opinions, hot takes and humour from a show that in no small way has often influenced and changed their lives.

With the best commentators from back then and right now, celebrating a season at a time. Sooner we get to this Zero Room place, the better, eh?

Transcript

John Ryan: 0:04

Hello and welcome to Zero Room Audio Zine. It's a while since I said that. Produced by members of a Duas local group in Bracknell, Zero Room was a fanzine on cassette which made it to 7 issues between 1984 and 1987. I was 19 back then. Now I'm 55, and Zero Room's coming back - a new issue at last. More on that later.

John Ryan: 0:25

While we prepare for that particular moment, we wanted to bring you a bonus episode to mark the 60th anniversary and one of the architects of the show we all love. My first memory of David Whittaker was reading his novelization of Doctor who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks and wondering about all that nonsense on the common. The Blu-ray documentary on the collection Season 2, looking for David filled in some of the gaps in our knowledge about him, and now there's a new biography of the man who was Doctor Who's first story editor. David Whittaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television is an intoxicating study, a meticulously researched page-turner that fills in the rest by Simon Guerrier. In this bonus episode we'll take you to Manchester's Portico Library where the book's being launched, Simon in conversation with Carol Ann Whitehead, a trustee of the Portico. But before we hear, them, let's remind ourselves of three of David Whittaker's finest moments from the Edge of Destruction. Evil of the Dal eks and the Ambassadors of Death.

Speaker 1: 1:53

I might even try and take you to my own planet.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 2:21

What would you say is the legacy from David Whittaker?

Simon Guerrier: 2:28

Okay, David Whittaker was the first story editor of Doctor who when it began in 1963. He wrote more episodes of Doctor who in the 1960s than anybody else and he also wrote books and comics and a stage play and additional material on the second of the Dalek movies. I think as we approach the 60th anniversary there are a number of things that are very David Whittaker coming up, One of which is that the first of the TV specials, the Star Beast, is an adaptation of a comic strip from the early 1980s and that idea that the multimedia bit of Doctor who feeds into the TV show, that it's not just a derivative of the TV show but it's a kind of two-way process, that what happens in the books and the comics draw from the TV show and then the TV show draws from the books and the comics. That is David Whittaker to a T. He was doing that in the 60s, introducing ideas and concepts in the comics and the books that he then fed into the TV episodes. For example, the Dalek Emperor that first appears in the Dalek book in September 1964 and then appears on screen in the Evil of the Daleks in 1967.

Simon Guerrier: 3:40

This is the guy that commissioned the Daleks. He's probably the guy that coined the word exterminate. It's in a memo that he wrote in July 1963 that the word exterminate is first used in relation to the Daleks. It doesn't appear in the 26-page storyline that Terry Nation wrote that David Whittaker then summarised in a paragraph and added exterminate. So I think that's him I'm waiting for the lawyers to map me on that one and I also think he encouraged writers while he was chair of the Writers Guild between 1966 and 1968.

Simon Guerrier: 4:24

He asked a guy called Mac Hulk, who also was a Doctor who writer, to write a guide for writers, so advice on how to get published, how to get into television, this sort of thing.

Simon Guerrier: 4:35

The Writers Guide produced in 1969, sold out within weeks. They produced a second edition within a year that was about four times as big and off the back of that Mac Hulk thought there's a market in this. So he set up a sort of mail order writer school that people like Terence Dicks contributed to. And he also wrote a book called Writing for Television in the 1970s which became a sort of industry Bible, and people like Andrew Cartmel who was script editor of Doctor who in the 80s, says the book was how he got into television, but also off the back of this market of people being interested in the mechanics of television, Mac Hulk and Terence Dicks wrote the Making of Doctor who in 1972, the first kind of behind the scenes thing on Doctor who. So the whole industry of being interested in how Doctor who was made starts with that book, which began because David Whittaker said we should open up television to people.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 5:31

You had your work cut out because, david Whittaker, it is a common name, yes, very common name. There's lots of David Whittaker's about.

Simon Guerrier: 5:38

Yes, it's a common name, but David Whittaker had a very broad career and lots of people with the same name also overlapped in that kind of career.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 5:46

Somebody who came up with the ISBN.

Simon Guerrier: 5:49

Yes. So David Whittaker worked in publishing and wrote books, but he's not the David Whittaker who was the editor of the bookseller and was one of the people who came up with ISBN. David Whittaker was an actor, but he's not the David Whittaker who is in things like our free design pet. David Whittaker played sports and tennis, but he's not the hockey international David Whittaker. It's mad. And there was a reverend David Whittaker who wrote lots of letters to newspapers in the 60s. He's not the same David Whittaker. Yes, there was a certain amount of pulling my hair out trying to make sure that I had the right one.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 6:25

Yeah, he died in 1980. Why write a book about him?

Simon Guerrier: 6:31

That's a good question. He died 4th of February 1980. So what is now? Doctor who magazine, the journal of the history of Doctor who, had launched what two months, three months before that, and had begun a process of interviewing the cast and crew of Doctor who in a more professional and rigorous way Fans and fan groups had been doing, and so they just missed David Whittaker. The thing that I kept coming back to in researching the history of Doctor who for Doctor who magazine and other publications was this guy didn't have a voice. He's present but doesn't have a voice. Things that were said about him I could see weren't quite right, and things were being repeated in subtitles of DVDs and on making of documentaries and things like that, which weren't quite right. And then I started to spot bits of his real life that fed into the stories he wrote for Doctor who.

Simon Guerrier: 7:29

And once I got onto that I thought there's something big here. This will make a sort of 5,000 word article for Doctor who magazine, and it got out of hand.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 7:39

Yeah, I could see how many pages is that.

Simon Guerrier: 7:43

It's 460 pages. It's 180,000 words.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 7:47

I think if he was looking down he'd like that that you want to give him a voice because he's an activist, bit of an activist. This man got on a plane to Moscow to campaign and demonstrate, didn't he?

Simon Guerrier: 8:00

He did. Yeah, in July 1969, he went to Moscow, to the International Writers' Congress, to protest the Soviet treatment of Solinitsyn. It's not least because I think one of the reasons he did that was because he was supposed to be writing something, and a classic writer just anything other than do the typing. But he was doing that at the time that he was writing the first episodes of the Ambassadors of Death, a 1970 Doctor who story, which is all about a conspiracy. And he goes to Moscow.

Simon Guerrier: 8:31

The issue with Solinitsyn is that the Writers Guild voted to send two delegates to protest what was happening, but they couldn't get anything on the agenda of the Congress because the Soviet hosts would veto it, of course. So how do you raise something that you can't put on the agenda? So there's a whole kind of shenanigans, of talking to lawyers and talking to, basically, how do you work the bureaucracy so that you can get something onto the floor for debate? And what you've got is David Whitaker, who is the former story editor of Doctor who, falling out with George Markstein, who's the former story editor, script editor of the Prisoner. He's the bald guy in the title sequence of the Prisoner that Patrick McGowan resigns to.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 9:16

Anyone remember that?

Simon Guerrier: 9:18

Yeah, these are my people. Yeah, I know.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 9:21

I know, I know, I'm just checking.

Simon Guerrier: 9:24

David Whitaker writes a report of what he does and the tricks they use to get this onto the floor and how they're going to do it, and it reads like the sort of tricksy thing that Doctor who or the Prisoner would do and it massively doesn't work. It's not like on TV. This is real life and there's a huge scandal about it. And he comes back thinking he's done an amazing job. And then it gets into the press and people who think he should never have gone, that the writers guild shouldn't be involved in international politics, that it should just be about the rights of writing and contracts. There are people who think he hasn't gone far enough. There are people who think he's capitulated. There's a scandal later in the year where the then chair has to step down and that makes the newspapers.

Simon Guerrier: 10:05

The Guardian report says this is all stemming from the trip to Moscow In the AGM of the Writers Guild in May 1970, so a year after he went, this all erupts again. There's a big fight, there's a big argument. He's had poison pen letters. He's had people targeting people he works for. He wrote a letter in 1971 basically saying this had ruined his career and that, having been prolific, he then has nothing. Also that it ruined his wife's career, and she was a very prolific actress and had a major role in the Foresight Saga, which was really big at the time. And in 1970 the Foresight Saga is repeated. Some of her other work is repeated, but nothing new.

Simon Guerrier: 10:48

And she basically goes for sort of 18 months two years, not being on television. In modern parlance we'd call that being cancelled. He certainly felt that's what had happened to him and he went to Australia to start again in film and TV there.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 11:03

He connected with the music hall. That's a bit lighter, isn't it sitcom? He knew Tony Hancock, didn't he?

Simon Guerrier: 11:11

So David joined the BBC in 1957, having written a TV play that was broadcast in the summer of 1957 he went in for a meeting with the script department to pitch other plays and they said we've got a staff job. There's a possibility that David Whittaker was maternity cover for Judith Carr, because he arrives just before she leaves to again have her daughter Tacey, and then, while doing childcare, she wrote the Tiger who Came to Tea and the Mogh Books. It was fascinating about looking at her career and any of the other writers of this period is the range of stuff they did. Judith Carr's last thing for TV, an adaptation of a French account of a real life case in the 19th century of a woman accused of poisoning her husband it's not very Tiger who Came to Tea at all. What they would do.

Simon Guerrier: 12:02

Dick Fiddy at the BFI was basically saying there was no training in writing for television at that time. What you did was you wrote for everything and you wrote comedy and you wrote links and you wrote for musical and you did drama and you did anything that they would throw at you. Anything that needed doing or tidying up or being made practical, the staff writers took on. But if you found your niche. That's what you stuck at. And so David's first year he's doing all sorts of things. He wrote musicals, he wrote adaptations of musicals, he did song and dance stuff, he did the BBC's Christmas show, all of these sorts of things, working with everybody.

Simon Guerrier: 12:46

He then, in 1962, moves from being script editor of Light Entertainment to being script editor of the prestigious Sunday Night Play, the sort of serious drama thing. While he's overseeing this serious, highbrow drama as a freelancer in his own time he's writing episodes of the soap opera Compact. They couldn't be more different. And from that, and having had this experience in Light Entertainment, he's put on Doctor who. And I think part of the reason he, of all the people in the department at the time, was put on Doctor who Was because he'd done everything and understood what you could get out of it.

Simon Guerrier: 13:29

So when he was doing Light Entertainment he was doing stuff for the magician David Nixon. And David Nixon would have a thing where he'd be introducing a singer but he would put his hands up to the camera and open his hands and there would be the singer stood on his hands and they used a sort of chunky technology called inlay at the time. That you can see in the first episode of the Dalek serial. They're using inlay to show the Dalek City and it's a big process. It involves basically projecting a film, so it takes up quite a lot of the studio.

Speaker 3: 14:00

Barbara Doctor over here. What's fascinating City, a huge city.

Simon Guerrier: 14:08

So if you have an effect like that, you've got less space for sets. David got all of that and understood the limits, how far you could push the technology and get it into the studio and make it practical. And that's really important to Doctor who, but all of his sitcom stuff as well, all the stuff about structuring how do you put familiar characters in new situations each week so that you can keep the thing going and produce 39 episodes a year. That applies to sitcom and it then applies to Doctor who.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 14:41

I want to talk about the diversity back in 63 and I'm talking about protected characteristics and talking women, people of colour as well, because it wasn't easy in 1963, but there was Verity Lambert.

Simon Guerrier: 14:53

Yes, so the first producer of Doctor who, Verity Lambert. She was 27, that's so young, isn't it?

Carol Ann Whitehead: 14:59

It's excellent, though it's so young.

Simon Guerrier: 15:01

And that was a progressive bit of employment. Sydney Newman, the head of drama, brought her over. She had been a production assistant at ABC and he made her a producer so promoted her. The first director was Warris Hussein British Asian is the way he describes himself, also gay. Sydney Newman, the head of department, was a Canadian. He wouldn't admit it but I suspect he had quite left wing, pushing into communist politics.

Simon Guerrier: 15:30

He was part of a wave of Canadian and American TV crew People who came over after house un-American activities, more than anything, not because they were facing any kind of persecution, but because television drama in America got very safe and advertisers didn't want anything that touched on social issues or things. You could just do more interesting work in the UK. And there's various people I spoke to, alvin Rakoff, who was a similar director, a Canadian who'd come over and was basically saying the only way you could do issues based drama Was if you were Rod Serling and you set it in space, and the Twilight Zone was him hiding all of these social issues in drama by going no, it's a sort of horror sci-fi thing. What?

Speaker 1: 16:14

are you talking about? It's an excursion into the odd and into the very, very different.

Simon Guerrier: 16:22

Doctor who were a bunch of outsiders and you can see it in the paperwork. They are pushing against a rather chummy oxbridgey school-tie-ish tradition at the BBC.

Simon Guerrier: 16:39

And loads of people that I spoke to and in the paperwork Assumed that's who David Whitaker was. But he wasn't university at all. He described himself as being university theatre. So when I put this to Boris Hussein he said the irony is that I went to Cambridge and when I wanted to be a director at the BBC I went to the careers person and said I'd like to be a director at the BBC, please. And they had me interviewed the next day and I was working there within weeks. Boris said actually he had all the credentials and the connections and things that David didn't. And he said you can see the difference.

Simon Guerrier: 17:20

Boris Hussein finished university, wanted to be a director, got in the door straight away and, as he said, and they put me on children's television and which I didn't want to do, but I was in. David Whitaker wanted to. He applied to Rada in 1949 and didn't get in. He worked in amateur dramatics in 1950 and that led to a job in rep on stage in 1951. He started sending stuff into the BBC from early 1956 and his first play was commissioned in 1957 and he had a job from October 1957. So that's seven years of graft to get into that position that Boris Hussein just said Can you get me an interview?

Simon Guerrier: 18:04

And in that culture Boris Hussein has talked about quite a lot and we chatted about it. So he said people would be openly sexist and to very tilamba, they'd be anti-Semitic to her face, they would say within her hearing that she'd only got the job because she'd slept with the boss. They were racist to Boris Hussein. So he said either there were those that would say it to your face and there were those who would say it in your hearing. So I said, was David Whitaker one of those? And his answer was really interesting. He said he might have said it behind my back, but he never said it in front of me. He was always the perfect gentleman and the issue was always the work. David Whitaker doesn't seem to have had any problem working for a woman producer.

John Ryan: 18:51

But no, he doesn't seem like it Very tilamba was not the only woman producer he worked for.

Simon Guerrier: 18:55

There's quite a lot of dinosaur behaviour in the paperwork. The head of design at the BBC in 1963 wouldn't copy Verity Lambert, the producer of Doctor who, into memos about Doctor who. So one of the reasons there's a massive overspend on the pilot episode of Doctor who recorded in September 1963 is because a whole load of decisions have been made without the producer knowing and they've just upped the cost. And there was a budget for £500 to make the TARDIS set and the police box and by the time it goes before the camera it's £4,000. And the head of design's response to this is to go. She doesn't know what she's doing and you should cancel Doctor who.

Simon Guerrier: 19:37

That's the kind of stuff that they're dealing with and she has to sort out. And she goes to Joanna Spicer, who's the programme coordinator, as we call it now, and they go through the budget and also, I suspect, go these bloody men and they sort it out. And David is in that because to balance the books he writes a short two-part story all set within the TARDIS. That's cheap to do, called the Edge of Destruction, and that's all the way of dealing with these guys who just feel they can behave like they want.

Speaker 3: 20:10

The ship refused to destroy itself. Yes, the defence mechanism stopped the ship, and it's been trying to tell us so ever since. Of course, of course.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 20:20

Well, I put it to you, your Honor, that the evidence stacked up shows that he's not sexist or discriminatory in any way, because he seems to support when that kind of constructive bringing down of Arity and the team and whatever. When that was going on he tried to find solutions as opposed to dropping her in the do or whatever.

Simon Guerrier: 20:44

Yes, let's not go too far with this. He's not a feminist.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 20:49

Yeah, but there's a fine like he's off his time he wrote a story.

Simon Guerrier: 20:53

A doctor whose story is set in Palestine Sort of character, as Saladin is clearly written to be played by a white actor. I've spoken to a few people who raised the racial thing. There's some very odd things going on in that. So it's set in Palestine, but there's a lot of Caribbean actors in the cast because they're the same. They're thinking at the time.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 21:13

But then again, before Star Trek, they had a black astronaut.

Simon Guerrier: 21:16

Yes, they did. Yes, the doctor who did have a black, earl Cameron, plays an astronaut in the 10th Planet in 1966. I wish I could put that at David Whittaker's door, but that was after his time. He was part of a culture and part of a time and yet there are things that I find really remarkable. His attitude to working with women is really interesting. He was a womaniser, I've heard a couple of people say, but none of the women involved have a bad word to say about him.

Simon Guerrier: 21:45

And when Toby Haydourk, who is here somewhere, interviewed Pauline Devaney she was the co-writer and co-creator of Augustine Gators. And when she was a 19 year old actor in Rep and sharing digs with David Whittaker, he made a pass at her. And when she said, no, I'm not interested, he left it at that and said, well, that's fine. Whereas she said, even 50 years later, still surprised by this, he didn't push it, he didn't try to persuade me, he didn't make things awkward, it was fine. And you can hear as she tells Toby that in the recording. It's not on the documentary, but it's in the recording. You can hear she's still. That's quite a thing. Yeah, yeah. So by the standards of the time, I think he was a bit of a gentleman. Yeah, that's not to get him off the hook in time.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 22:34

Yeah, no, I think that's the best we can do. Yeah, it's the best we can do. I was going to ask you what is your favourite part about researching the book.

Simon Guerrier: 22:44

I really like digging through archives and boxes of paperwork and just finding stuff and finding stuff I never knew was gonna be there. One of the things that I found is a letter to David from William Heseltine, the press secretary to the Queen, and he wrote David a short letter in 1969, basically saying no, the Queen is not going to give you permission to write a musical about Queen Victoria and John Brown the story that later became Mrs Brown with Judy Dench. Yeah, I found nothing else about this proposal, but that's nuts. I found the first page of David's proposed novelization of the Doctor who Story, the Enemy of the World, which was the last thing he was writing on. He must have signed a contract for that. So he submitted a synopsis in October 1979, and he was dead on the 4th February. So this was last things, which nobody knew existed. We knew that he'd submitted a synopsis, but we didn't know that he'd actually written anything. I found, yeah, all sorts of odd things. There's a photo of his parents with Charles Hortree.

Speaker 3: 23:53

Oh hello.

Simon Guerrier: 23:54

And it turns out that David's dad was an accountant and represented Charles Hortree and various other people. I think there's quite a lot of. The first doctor comes from David's dad, who was fired for insider trading and then was taken to court for stealing a car and was a bit of a maverick, but also charming, I think he was James Bond. Yeah, so there's something of that going on, but yeah, I found out. What are the other things that I found out? All sorts of, just the mad things that he Did.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 24:21

you find his Wotsit card when they have to go in the army.

Simon Guerrier: 24:25

Yeah, so he probably didn't do national service, but he had an identity card and he kept his last identity card because until 1951 you had to be able to have it on you. So, yeah, so we've got a copy of that in the book. Yes, I saw that. I thought, wow, ernest Maxson was the producer of More than One Wise in the mid-70s and producer of the Les Dawson show and stuff, but really big figure. And about a week before I had to hand the book in, I made contact with Ernest Maxson's son and he, on the 24th of June 1967, was taken by his dad as the guests of David Whitaker to the set of episode seven of the Evil of the Daleks.

Speaker 1: 25:08

The TARDIS doctor. You will take the Dalek actor. You will spread it through the entire history of Earth.

Simon Guerrier: 25:20

No, you can't make me do it, you can't. And, as Paul said, his dad and David had worked together on light entertainment stuff for years. His dad was fairly senior at the BBC but he couldn't have got into the Doctor who set and met the Daleks. That was all down to David and he clearly pulled favours and stuff. But trying to research that and trying to find out a bit more about it, I found the most amazing story about a production that David and Ernest Maxson worked on To celebrate Irving Berlin's 70th birthday.

Simon Guerrier: 25:55

David wrote and spent months writing a play about his life, berlin's life that would use his music like a jukebox musical. Now, this was a big production. So Riverside Studios in Hammersmith has got two big studios in it. They were going to use both, one for all the sets and the acting bits and one for all the dance routines and the musical numbers. They didn't have space for the orchestra, the live orchestra so that was upstairs what's now the bar at Riverside and they piped the music. Because it was a live production. They piped the music down into the studio so that everybody could hear it. Huge, lavish thing, because it was so big and lavish and exciting and stuff.

Simon Guerrier: 26:35

It got a bit of press coverage two or three days before it was on and as a result of that press coverage, so it was announced on the Thursday and it was going to go out on Saturday. Between the Thursday and the Saturday in New York, irving Berlin got wind of this and said no, you're not. Oh, I don't want an actor playing me on screen. So they had to rewrite it and they came up with an idea where the guy they'd cast as Irving Berlin an actor with the most amazing name of Gaylord Cavallero that's great. So rather than playing Irving Berlin, he plays a journalist who's been commissioned to write a piece about Berlin, and the framework of the drama as broadcast is him telling his editor what he's found out, and then they would cut to the various people he's spoken to who would then do their bits of the drama that had been written with Berlin.

Simon Guerrier: 27:32

This made variety, the film and TV industry magazine in Los Angeles, because it was such a big story where they basically went yeah, it didn't really work, the music bits were good, but the story didn't really work. But it was a heroic failure. What they must have sweated through to get something on screen and not just cancel it and whatever is extraordinary and clearly bonded these two, david Whitaker and Ernest Maxson, and Maxson was still supporting David in the last years of his life when he couldn't get any work and stuff. And that all came out of a chance comment that somebody had said. And following threads like that is really that's what I live for.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 28:09

Yeah just on picking threads like that, Two numbers. The same number jumps out at me, which is 51.

Simon Guerrier: 28:18

Yeah, so David died age 51. The other thing that I talked to Paul Maxson about his dad, ernest Maxson, died two or three years ago in his 90s. Nobody else that they worked with did. There's a period in the late 70s where David Nixon, william Hartnell, mac Hulk, brian Hales, anthony Coban, david Whitaker they all dropped dead Jack Pullman who wrote I Claudius, I have a letter from Jack Pullman on his deathbed to David Whitaker which was in the pile of stuff that David's niece gave me, but a whole series of them. And I said to Paul, why is that? And he said dad didn't drink whereas everybody else drank and they all changed modes. Yeah, and you just see the toll of it. And they all just conkelled. And it's a cultural thing that if you were in the crew you couldn't smoke at work because the smoke would appear on camera, but if you were the executive up in the control box where it was all glassed off, everybody changed modes. So even if you weren't a smoker, it's past the smoke.

Simon Guerrier: 29:24

Yeah, past the smoke and it was really stressful. Live productions were really stressful.

Speaker 3: 29:28

Two shots on camera five. That's about it, standby and cue, mrs Heaney.

Simon Guerrier: 29:34

So not only were they all chain smoking, but they were drinking and whatever. It's amazing that they lived till the end of the 70s. Once you get that, you suddenly start going oh, this explains the random fight they had and why things on Doctor who when David left Doctor who in 1969, why things were chaotic. I don't think I'm saying anything that people won't know, but the producer and script editor were just drunk and would commission things and then not remember what they'd asked for and all of this kind of stuff. So there's a kind of insight into the cultural thing. Now you just can't work like that now.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 30:09

Look, yeah, so 51 he dropped dead, but also 51 he's attributed to 51 episodes.

Simon Guerrier: 30:17

Nice.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 30:18

Yeah, yeah.

Simon Guerrier: 30:19

Doctor who. That very good, that is very good. Thank you very much. Annoyingly, he is credited for episodes he didn't write. Yeah, and he also did a lot of work on episodes that are credited to other people Because he was the story editor but, yes, yeah, I hadn't, yes, I hadn't made that connection.

Carol Ann Whitehead: 30:39

What is David Whitaker's connection to Manchester? Oh?

Simon Guerrier: 30:43

he was born in Nebworth but he was a Londoner through and through and spent most of his life within the environs of what's now television centre. But he had some work made in Manchester. He adapted a play called difficult age about a stockbroker a respectable stockbroker whose daughter, who must be in her late teens, wants to elope with a zookeeper Sort of knock about comedy, and that was made in Manchester's north of England studio over Christmas 1960. He also wrote two episodes of a Granada series called Mr Rose. One of them has a chase sequence in Manchester and is quite fascinating for going oh I know where that is.

Simon Guerrier: 31:30

That sort of thing. But more importantly, I think more significantly, david's first wife was a liver puddle and called Joan at June Barry, and In 1961 she was in Coronation Street. She was the first Corrie Bride, as Joni Walker. And there's a there's an interesting honey walkers daughter. Yeah, and the irony of this is that Joan marries and moves to Derby and never comes back to Coronation Street. She comes out twice. So what that allowed was that whenever they act was playing Annie Walker and wanted a break and a holiday, they go. Oh, she's gone off to Derby but also Annie Walker who is a bit snooty and looks down.

Simon Guerrier: 32:12

She's the original house of bouquet. Do you not think Her daughter doesn't come back to Coronation Street because it's beneath her and she's escaped that? And there's a link to she and Ken Barlow, with both trained as teachers. So there's that idea of education and social mobility and stuff. It's all tapping into that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3: 32:29

Hello, mr Tatlocker. Then I said to tell you when it was ready. Oh right, oh oh, you don't know, john, do you know she's mr Mrs Walker's daughter. This is Walter Pots. How's it go?

Simon Guerrier: 32:39

But having been in Coronation Street in 1961 for Christmas 1963, this Christmas episode of Corrie, they do a this Is your Life for Annie Walker and characters from her past come back, including June Barry who's then in four episodes now they recorded Coronation Street I think two days before broadcast, which means that June Barry was recording that Christmas episode while there are Dalek props on Shepherds Bush Green for a photo shoot, with people going what the hell of those? Because the Daleks didn't make their screen debut until the following Saturday. So June probably missed the first Dalek episode go out because she was in Coronation Street.

John Ryan: 33:24

Simon Gary are talking to Carol Ann Whitehead onto questions from the audience next, and the first was whether Simon had ever seen any evidence of blacklisting in His research at the BBC written archive a.

Simon Guerrier: 33:37

Producer Philip Hinchcliffe, who was producer of Doctor who in the mid 70s. He, very politely, at a convention, was going around the dealer's room looking at our various wares and he saw my book on the evil of the Daleks and said how did you research this? To which I said they've got all the paperwork at Cavisham and I went through it and they have production files for each story. And he laughed and said as producer of Doctor who, it was my job to put the paperwork into the official archive. So the first thing I would do when we struck a production, when we'd finished a production, was go through the production file and make sure there was nothing in it that was of any value at all. So it's only about what people get paid, so things for royalties, and it's about the mechanics of stuff. But anything juicy, anything interesting, anything like so-and-so had a fight or something like that, that would all go.

Simon Guerrier: 34:33

Which was haunts me now that everything we think we know is just the bit we're allowed to see. Yes, that kind of idea that there's nothing put on paper, but these decisions are being made. That is all over this. There's a thing in 1974 when David writes to the BBC hoping to get a job, and he's for my head of department at the script unit. Robin Wade, forwards this to the head of drama, sean Sutton, and says Something along the lines of I've just had this from our old friend, david Whittaker, and that's a really odd phrase to use. Does he mean it's our old friend, we should get him a job, or does he mean the complete opposite? And as we talk about in the documentary looking for David's, there's no record that Sean Sutton ever replied to David's, which there would be, you would think.

John Ryan: 35:32

So that's all very odd. Next up was a two-part question. How did David Whitaker and the rest of the Verity Fam as nobody called them navigate Sydney Newman's famous ban on bug-eyed monsters?

Simon Guerrier: 35:44

Sydney Newman wasn't the only one who said there should be no bug-eyed monsters. In 1962, the BBC script department had done a survey of science fiction, which is the, and that report is the earliest dated thing in the production files for Doctor who. So it was clearly something they were drawing on as they developed the show. And that says no bug-eyed monsters, and I think Sydney Newman was just quoting that edict. We've done science fiction serials like Quatermass and Aphorandromeda. Can we adapt science fiction novels as one-off plays? And they go. Yes, time travel would work on television. Telepaths would work on television, monsters just look rubbish. And that's kind of Sydney Newman's thinking.

Simon Guerrier: 36:27

There are a number of interesting things about how David and Verity Lambert get the Dalek story into production, one of which is to not tell their bosses what they're doing. So Terry Nation wrote a storyline that survives it's about 26 pages of the whole storyline and David, in commissioning scripts, writes a paragraph saying this is what the story is, and he doesn't use the word Dalek and he doesn't tell us that the creatures and or he doesn't use creature or alien it's people. So as far as his bosses were concerned, what he'd commissioned was a story that had no monsters in it at all. Verity Lambert's memory was that they got away with this until near production when heads of department Donald Wilson and Sydney Newman read the scripts and hit the roof and they were summoned to Donald Wilson's office not Sydney Newman's as it is in an adventure in space and time where they basically said we don't have anything else, so we're going to have to do this one. There's a level of a chutzpah going on there from Verity Lambert which I find extraordinarily admirable but also shows a level of faith from her and David Whitaker, not only in the script but in what Doctor who should be.

Simon Guerrier: 37:44

And I think there's some evidence that even before the Daleks was on the air and was a hit with the public, they were already trying to make Doctor who more like that. So the edge of destruction was commissioned as inside the spaceship. And the kind of gag of inside the spaceship is that there's something inside the spaceship and you think it's a monster, and then you realise that there is something inside the spaceship because the TARDIS is alive and that's the twist. But that setup that there's a monster is, I think, probably following in the footsteps of the Daleks and once the Daleks has been a hit on TV, they cancel all their plans for the next few stories and they commission Teri Nation to write the Keys of Marinus really quickly. So they commission him just before they start production on Marco Polo, and it's the story to go out after it. So he's got to deliver the whole thing ready for production in about six weeks, which is terrifying as a thing. But from that point Doctor who is then a show about monsters, and that's then.

John Ryan: 38:48

The questioner also said he saw Whitaker as Teri Nation's emissary on Earth. How boxed in did David Whitaker feel about that?

Simon Guerrier: 38:56

They clearly hit it off. Basically there's some evidence that they worked on Light Entertainment shows the same Light Entertainment shows in the late 50s, so probably knew each other, at least in passing. But a piece that David wrote for the screenwriter Quarterly in the autumn of 1963, where he basically says I've just had this storyline from Teri Nation and it's the best storyline I've ever read and it's really exciting and fun. They worked really well and collaboratively, not only on TV episodes but on books and comics and the stage play and the movies and stuff. And then there was a falling out, possibly more than one.

Simon Guerrier: 39:36

It's in the book but Paul Fishman, whose dad was the publisher of the Dalek Annals, said he saw them have a falling out. Tim Coombe, who was great friends with David Whitaker, said word came back to the BBC that they'd fallen out making the stage play. Whatever the case, david still wrote for the Daleks. Afterwards. The power of the Daleks and the evil of the Daleks that he wrote are after this falling out. What exactly what went on? I think part of it is that David was doing all of this work and Teri Nation was making the money and David was probably a bit frustrated. David didn't work on the ITC series, like the Baron and the Saint that Teri Nation was very well paid for. We spoke to Teri Nation's widow and she said, oh, I remember David and he was very nice and wouldn't say any more.

John Ryan: 40:28

And the final question was testing a theory that David Whitaker and his peers were creating the medium in a much freer space and time. Does that mean this was genuinely the much touted golden age of television?

Simon Guerrier: 40:40

Really useful for this sort of thing is something like Missing Believed White, where the BFI shows television that's been lost and has since been found, because you get a really random selection of material and a lot of it is awful but fascinating. Thank you, hello and welcome to the show.

Speaker 3: 40:59

Hello, hello, hello, hello and to the show welcome.

Simon Guerrier: 41:05

I watched an episode of Basil Brush where Basil Brush helps I think it's Mr Roy, I might have got that wrong, but basically helps Mr Roy chat to a girl on the beach and it's really inappropriate for anybody, let alone that it's a children's show. But that kind of low level sexism you see a lot in Old Telly. An awful lot of Old Telly is dancing shows because they were relatively cheap to put on. The problem is that we remember the best bits because those are the bits that stick in our memories and also are repeated and also referred to. We don't really deal with the run of the mill of television, so you do look back on it fondly.

Simon Guerrier: 41:52

But I think if you go through the paperwork on Doctor who you can see all the same battles about management. Don't get this. They've pulled a plug. They've promised us this amount of money and now they've changed their mind. Donald Bafferstock, the chief of programmes for BBC One, has said Doctor who can have 26 episodes. He's now said no, I said 20. He says we're going to have a six month extension. But that six month extension includes the six weeks holiday that everybody's booked and also is to the end of broadcast. So actually the extension that I promised you is only four episodes and we can't book any actors because none of them will commit to just an extension of four episodes. That's all going on in the summer of 1964.

Simon Guerrier: 42:33

For all, the technology has changed and the ways of making programmes have changed, the battles are all the same battles. I would be very interested in comparing notes with somebody like Stephen Moffat, because he's not the producer now, so I can probably say more about those kind of things. What happens when the set isn't available? What happens when the studio facilities you think you've got are changed at the last minute? That's another book. Yeah, all of those things. Yes, don't get me wrong, I love Old Telly and I'm really interested in it. But I think we need to be careful about imposing a kind of value judgement, because I've watched the surviving episodes of David's song and dance shows and they do go on a bit.

John Ryan: 43:18

Simon Gerrier, who wrote David Whitaker in an exciting adventure with television published by 10-acre films. That's out now at 17.99. Thanks to Caroline Whitehead and the Portico Library for allowing Zero Room to record the session. When we come back, our first full episode in 36 years, a nostalgic take on Classic who, with some of the voices from first time round and some new commentators too, as we explore season 20. Hit, subscribe and we'll see you in 2024.