The Life and Times of a Doctor Who Dummy, by Robin Squire

New David Whitaker related information!

This short memoir by Robin Squire was recommended to me by Doctor Who assistant location manager Alex Moore, who I quizzed for Doctor Who Magazine last year. I knew Squire's name as, in 1981 story Logopolis, he plays the technician at Jodrell Bank* too busy listening to music to notice a TARDIS materialise behind him. He's also credited for small roles in The Daemons (1971) and Full Circle (1980).

Before these credited roles, Squire spent some four months as a trainee script editor in the Doctor Who production office - and kept a diary. His book recounts the period 1965-69, beginning with his backpacking trip across France where he saw the Beatles play a gig in Nice on 30 June 1965. As he says, Beatles histories can tell us the set list played that night but he can add extra detail, such us what the warm-up acts were and how the audience responded (p. 36).

Based on this gig and then a chance encounter with the former manager of a band, Squire wrote a novel about a band, Square One, published on 5 August 1968. At the time of publication, his wife had just given birth and Squire went for a pint with a neighbour whose wife was on the same labour ward. That neighbour was Terrance Dicks, who a few months later told Squire about a short-term trainee job going in his office at the BBC.

So, from the end of June to early November 1969, Squire was based at a desk in room 505 on the second floor of Union House, Shepherds Bush Green - and the home for nearly 27 years of the Doctor Who production office. Arriving for his first day at the “surprisingly late hour of 10 am”, Squire was met on the main door by a “uniformed commissionaire” (p. 71) and instructed to, “Take the lift to second floor. Third door on the left.” 

There he found a, “small and dusty-seeming office,” with Dicks “behind a desk to the right, beside the window looking out over the Green ...  To my right was an open door leading through to the producer’s office.” Peter Bryant shared that office with production secretary Sandra Brenholtz, whose job involved “all the correspondence” as well as “typing out scripts and production schedules and the Lord only knew what else on an electric typewriter” (p. 72). The producer’s desk was bigger than his secretary's and behind it was a “huge white plastic chart on which was written in black marker pen the forthcoming programmes, with studios times and dates, director, writer and so on” (pp. 72-3). Squire turned up for his first day in a suit; Dicks, in jeans and open-necked shirt, told him not to do that again.

Dicks then walked Squire round the corner to Lime Grove Studios - though Doctor Who was no longer made there (the last Doctor Who made there was the first episode of The Space Pirates, recorded in February). There they bumped into Patrick Troughton - even though, as Squire says, he'd recorded his last scenes as the Doctor a week or so previously. They also saw the TARDIS set, presumably in storage. Squire says it looked “tatty and worn ... Terrance said that on a black and white monitor the well-worn aspect didn’t show, but when transmission changed to colour early next year, it would.”

Soon enough, Squire attended filming on Spearhead from Space, the first Doctor Who to be made in colour. He was initially there as a spare body but got roped into playing an Auton and later worked as the unit driver, for which he had to take the BBC's own driving test. There's lots of detail here - dates he was and wasn't on location, the name of the hotel where the principal cast and crew were based and the names of its landlords, what was involved in shooting on location and what it felt like to be in that costume. We're told what he got up to on his day's off and what music was playing on the radio, which he still associates with that period. 

This all helps conjure a richer, fuller picture of what went on than we get from the production paperwork in the BBC's written archive. Yes, I have alerted David Brunt about this for when he gets to the relative volume of his production diary.

On one occasion, script editor Derrick Sherwin showed Squire a script for something other than Doctor Who - probably Project Air One, on which he was working with Peter Bryant at the same time. 

“But apart from that, and despite apparently being a trainee script editor, I received no training in script editing, but sat at a desk at the side of Terrance’s office where I was given the work of answering letters from fans and followers of the programme.” (p. 75)

That meant he was there as writers came into the office to discuss their scripts for the 1970 series of Doctor Who. Squire recalls meeting Robert Holmes, going to the home of Malcolm Hulke and even devising the storyline given to Don Houghton to write up as Inferno. That leaves one other writer from that year; he mentions David Whitaker in passing on page 81.

“I never met him,” Squire told me yesterday but “there was still talk about David Whitaker.” This was because, as Squire told me unprompted, of David's mission to Moscow in July 1969 on behalf of the Writers' Guild to protest the treatment of Solzhenitsyn, and the storm that followed. As described in my book, David, his wife and colleagues were subjected to poison-pen letters and phonecalls. In 2017, I asked both Terrance Dicks and Derrick Sherwin about this and whether such letters have been received at Union House. Neither of them could remember - but then they'd not been the ones to deal with correspondence.

“At the time I was at the Doctor Who office,” Squire told me, unbidden, “angry messages were continuing to come in along the lines of 'David Whitaker, traitor', for not having spoken up.”

For more details about and to order your own copy of The Life and Times of a Doctor Who Dummy, see Robin Squire's website.

* Yes, Jodrell Bank, as confirmed in Spyfall (2020).

Doctor Who Magazine #605

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out today. Having hogged loads of the last issue, this time I've contributed one small-ish thing, a Who Crew interview with Sam Dinley, assistant to composer Murray Gold.

(There was something else, too, but it's being held over...)

Doctor Who Magazine: Print the Legend

I've just received my contributor copy of the new Doctor Who Magazine special, Print the Legend, which tells the complete story of every Doctor Who novelisation - from Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks by David Whitaker (1964) to The Church on Ruby Road by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson (2024). Excitingly, each copy comes with a free Doctor Who audiobook on CD - I got Carnival of Monsters with mine. Result!

My two bits are:

pp. 18-21 Script to Manuscript: David Whitaker

The influences on Whitaker that helps to ensure the Doctor Who novelisations began at such a high standard, with some stuff I've picked up from my research into Garry Halliday as well as a previously unpublished photograph of Whitaker with Vincent Price.

pp. 22-23 The Final Chapter

Details of the Doctor Who related paperwork loaned to me by Whitaker's niece Melanie, including - reproduced in full - the surviving first page of his unfinished novelisation of The Enemy of the World, with permission of Whitaker's estate.

See also my biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television.

Making Sense of Suburbia through Popular Culture, by Rupa Huq

I read this on holiday as research for something I'm working on at the moment. Dr Rupa Huq, MP for Ealing Central and Acton, explores depictions of suburbs in novels, music, films and TV and then devotes a chapter each to woman in suburbia and mapping Asian London in pop culture.

“The suburbs are in many ways ordinary,” she tells us on page 13: “according to estimates some 80 per cent of Britons live in them.” (The figure comes from Paul Barker's 2009 book The Freedoms of Suburbia.) That makes them almost universal, and entirely relatable when we see them on screen.

Huq delineates two kinds of suburbia, I think. First there's that idea of crushing, bland ordinariness, a place to be escaped. 

“Of recent UK offerings, The Sarah Jane Adventures, a spin-off from the long-running BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, was based in Ealing. Part of the show’s attraction was that such storylines of time travel and aliens could be unleashed in such an unlikely setting as a straight-laced, upstanding and ostensibly boring location.” (p. 130)

That Sarah Jane Smith hails from boring old Ealing (or, in The Hand of Fear, South Croydon) is juxtaposed against her adventures in all of time and space. It's a joke: after all her wild adventures, she ends up somewhere so ordinary.

Ealing is so ordinary and relatable that it could be anywhere - and indeed the Ealing scenes in The Five Doctors were actually filmed in Uxbridge, the Ealing scenes in The Sarah Jane Adventures were recorded in Penarth.

In the very first episode of Doctor Who, the mundane details of ordinary life - a policeman, a junkyard, a comprehensive school - create a credible, relatable frame for the sci-fi wonders that follow. Basically, the first half of the episode feels real so we buy the more outlandish stuff that follows. But again it's following that basic idea: we must leave the ordinary suburbs to go somewhere exciting.

And that's where the second kind of suburbia comes in. Huq quotes playwright Alan Ayckbourn on suburbia: 

“It’s not what it seems, on the surface one thing but beneath the surface another thing. In the suburbs there is a very strict code, rules … eventually they drive you completely barmy.” Think of England: Dunroamin’ (BBC Two, 5 Nov 1991, dir. Ann Leslie)

The suburbs are a place on anxiety, the “suburban neurosis” outlined in the Lancet in 1938 by Stephen Taylor, senior resident medical officer at the Royal Free Hospital (and, er, my dad's godfather). Huq also charts similar ideas in Betty Friedan's influential The Feminine Mystique (1963). I can see these same ideas being explored in sitcoms of the 1970s, that sense of the suburb as a place of strangeness and secrets and danger.

In fact, I think The Sarah Jane Adventures and quite a lot of Doctor Who makes more use of this second kind of suburbia, where more is going on that meets the eye. With aliens and time travel and daft jokes aplenty, the whole point is that Ealing - or anywhere else - isn't boring. Which might be of some comfort to the local MP.

Anyway. More of this to come in the thing I'm working on...

Doctor Who Magazine #604

Out today, the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine includes "Babies on Board", my set report from Space Babies, having spent the day with the team at Bad Wolf Studios on 23 March 2023.

That's followed by "Baby Love", in which I talk to the team about realising the episode's diminutive guest stars. There will be more from me about Space Babies later in the year...

And then, in "Music's Gonna Flood Back In!" - a line cut from towards the end of the final version of The Devil's Chord, fact fans - I interview Sam Dinley, music assistant to Doctor Who composer Murray Gold.

The Doctor Who Production Diary - 1. The Hartnell Years, by David Brunt

"The number of nude photos needed for the Guardroom set has increased from three to six." (p. 647)

This massive, detailed day-by-day history of the making of Doctor Who is a great nerdy joy. The first volume covers the period from Monday, 2 November 1936 (the start of the BBC's regular Television service) to Friday, 4 November 1966 (the day before Patrick Troughton made his full debut as the Second Doctor, having been glimpsed in the closing moments of the episode broadcast the previous week). 

In effect, it's a much expanded version of the 164-page production diary featured in Doctor Who: The Handbook - The First Doctor (1994) by David J Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker. Indeed, Walker is the editor of this new volume, which is published by Howe's company, Telos. David Brunt looked again at the production files held at the BBC's Written Archives Centre used in that earlier version, and also looked more widely - there's an exhaustive list at the end of this volume of the files consulted for individual writers, actors and other personnel, as well as BBC departments.

I should probably declare an interest in that David's research at WAC overlapped my own for the biography of David Whitaker. We liaised a bit, compared notes and shared ideas, and I read a fairly early draft version of this book containing much less detail. There's plenty in the published volume that is new to me. In some instances, we looked at the same evidence and came to different conclusions. 

For example, the book says that David Whitaker "has most likely been appointed as Doctor Who's story editor" by the time of his wedding on 8 June 1963 (p. 49). My guess is that if this were case he'd have been copied into the memo dated Monday, 10 June from head of serials Donald Wilson to everyone else involved at a senior level: assistant head of drama Norman Rutherford (head of drama Sydney Newman being away), drama department organiser Ayton Whitaker (no relation), associate producer Mervyn Pinfield, acting producer Rex Tucker and incoming producer Verity Lambert (who didn't start for another week). Maybe the story editor wasn't considered sufficiently senior for inclusion in this august company, but I make the case in my book for David Whitaker being assigned to Doctor Who on Monday, 17 June.

I'm especially impressed by pp. 104-105, where the weekly cycle of rehearsals, read-throughs and technical runs is spelled out. As far as I'm aware, there's no single document detailing this sequence and it's been deduced from scattered references in myriad different sources. Understanding that schedule illuminates much that follows. We can appreciate the frustration of actor William Russell being given a new six-page scene to learn on Thursday, 20 February 1964, the day before The Wall of Lies was recorded; it's additionally frustrating when we know that after a Thursday morning run-through of an episode for the producer and senior technical crew,

"the cast will normally be free to ... leave early that day." (p. 105)

The other thing that this book illuminates is the frantic spinning of multiple plates at any one moment. Most histories of Doctor Who - in Doctor Who Magazine or the Complete History, or on the DVDs and Blu-rays - scrutinise one story at a time. The Production History lays out how studio production on one story overlapped with filming for the next, the writing and editing of the story after that and planning and budgeting for stories months ahead. At the same time, there was press and publicity, and responses to enquiries about the episodes just aired. 

Detailing the treadmill of production demonstrates, time and again, the problems caused by anyone holding things up, whether late scripts or delivery of props, or the repeated machinations of the Design Department to kill Doctor Who before it even started. It's dizzyingly, exhaustingly fraught. It's all the more impressive that Doctor Who was often so compelling and easy to see why working on this series burned through talent so quickly.

This day-by-day approach is very revealing and has made me make a whole tonne of connections. I'll give the example of one story, to show how it is in fact lots of stories and things happening at once.

On Thursday 26 May 1966, William Hartnell (Doctor Who), Michael Craze (Ben Jackson), Anneke Wills (Polly) and members of the guest cast were in Cromwell Gardens in Kensington for location filming on The War Machines. We're told that this included a high-shot filmed from upstairs at no. 50F (by arrangement with a Mrs Lessing there), and that,

"The location in Cornwall Gardens is diametrically opposite the property where Peter Purves is living at this time." (p. 603)

Hartnell spent that same morning in rehearsals on the preceding serial with Purves (Steven Taylor) and Jackie Lane (Dodo Chaplet). The Savages Episode 3 was then recorded in studio the following day. Both co-stars were being rather abruptly written out of the series, Purves the following week and Lane two weeks later in the middle of The War Machines. The prevailing atmosphere was not great, as Purves told me in 2013:

"I was very disappointed [to leave]. Later, I knew [producer] Innes [Lloyd] quite well and there was no animosity. But I didn't want to go. Bill [Hartnell] was furious. I remember him saying he'd make them change their minds. A few months later, he was gone, too." (Me, interview with Peter Purves for Doctor Who 50 Years - The Companions)

Given this, it's all the more astonishing that the production were there on Purves' doorstep, filming with his replacements.

Also present at the location filming that afternoon were William Mervyn (Sir Charles Summer), whose son Michael Pickwoad later designed more than one TARDIS and Mike Reid (uncredited soldier), later a comedian, host of Runaround and Frank Butcher in EastEnders and Dimensions in Time. There was more notable casting on this story. When the first episode of The War Machines was recorded in studio on 10 June, one of the extras in the Inferno nightclub was Alan Cassell, later the star of Australian TV's The Drifter, written by David Whitaker. Two weeks later, another extra left production during the lunch break to go for an X-ray and then didn't return for that evening's recording of Episode 3; Mike Yarwood is,

"now better known for his later TV career as an impressionist." (p. 620)

That week had been a little fraught anyway. On Monday, 20 June, the first day of rehearsals on the episode were disrupted by Hartnell "still feeling the after-effects" of filming in Cornwall the previous day for next story The Smugglers. Having completed work, he'd had a long trek back to London by train. His second-class ticket from Penzance (p. 606) seems extraordinary treatment for a veteran star of a series and came at a cost: his "travel fatigue" (as the Production Guide puts it) led to a delay in the usual schedule. On 6 July, William Mervyn wrote a letter to Lloyd suggesting that Hartnell should henceforth be transported by helicopter - for all the joking tone, it implies there had been a real problem.

Reading events day by day, I think it might have been the final straw for Lloyd. On 24 June, the day that The War Machines Episode 3 was in studio, the producer notified story editor Gerry Davis that, by arrangement with Hartnell's agent, the star would be absent from whatever episode was to be recorded on 11 February 1967 - in the event, The Moonbase Episode 2. But the problems caused to the schedule following filming in Cornwall surely affected the decision Lloyd was then involved in. On 15 July 1966, three weeks after that memo to Davis, Lloyd seems to have broken the news to Hartnell that his contract would not be extended beyond the next four-part story, The Tenth Planet. Hartnell told his wife the following day that he would be leaving Doctor Who.

I've pored over much of the original paperwork used here and thought I knew this stuff. This exhaustive diary tells a whole new story. Let's have volume 2 sharpish, please and thank you.

Doctor Who: Deathworld

Big Finish have shared details and Sean Longmore's lovely cover artwork for Deathworld, a very special Doctor Who audio adventure that will be out in July. It's adapted by John Dorney from the original story by Bob Baker and Dave Martin that was later reworked for TV as The Three Doctors (1972-73). 

"The First, Second and Third Doctors become caught in a temporal game of chess played between the President of Gallifrey and Death itself," says the blurb.

The cast includes Stephen Noonan as Doctor Who, Michael Troughton as Doctor Who and Tim Treloar as Doctor Who, with Katy Manning as Jo Grant, Jon Culshaw as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon. 

Doctor Who - Deathworld is directed and produced by David O'Mahony. I was script editor on this lost story, having previously adapted Prison in Space and The Mega, and produced last year's The Ark and Daleks! Genesis of Terror.

Doctor Who - The Unfolding Text, by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado

There’s a fun moment in the Doctor Who story Dragonfire when the Seventh Doctor is required to distract a guard. Some other adventuring hero might cosh the guard on the head but the Doctor instead politely asks him about the nature of existence. 

The guard turns out to have strong opinions on the matter and the Doctor is soon out of his depth:

GUARD

You've no idea what a relief it is for me to have such a stimulating philosophical discussion — there are so few intellectuals about these days. Tell me, what do you think of the assertion that the semiotic thickness of a performed text varies according to the redundancy of auxiliary performance codes? 

DOCTOR WHO

Yes. 

Doctor Who and the Dragonfire by Ian Briggs (1987)

The question is drawn directly from an academic book on Doctor Who, in a section applying some ideas originated by Keir Elam — now professor of English literature at the University of Bologna.

“What Elam calls the semiotic ‘thickness’ (multiple codes) of a performed text varies according to the ‘redundancy’ (high predictability) of ‘auxiliary’ performance codes.”

While this might at first seem impenetrable, authors John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado immediately unpick its meaning.

“Thus, for instance, if the sets, music and so on were simply to reinforce the actors’ performance without adding to it or inflecting it in the direction of new associations, but simply overlaid the acted ‘pace’ and ‘drama’ with their own, they would be relatively redundant, serving only to bind together the text’s temporal unfolding. On the other hand, in the Williams/Adams story, City of Death, the use of music and sets in the scenes featuring the Count and Countess was more entropic, drawing on motifs which some audience members recognised as ‘very forties’, and therefore potentially relocating the stolen art theme in terms of, say, The Maltese Falcon.” (The Unfolding Text, p. 249)

In fact, the production of Dragonfire might have learned something from this and benefited from the same kind of added richness.

I’ve been busy over the past fortnight researching and writing a bunch of things and The Unfolding Text has been useful on more than one. First published in 1983 to coincide with Doctor Who’s 20th anniversary (so covering what’s now one-third of Doctor Who’s history), it was part of a “communications and culture” range published by Macmillan and executive edited by Stuart Hall and Paul Walton. Alongside The Unfolding Text were an academic study of James Bond and titles such as The Politics of Information, Culture and Control and Reproduction Ideologies.

My memory of the book, having read it while doing English Literary Studies at UCLAN in the last millennium, was that it’s heavy going, that sentence spoofed in Dragonfire representative of the whole. There’s certainly a lot of technical language but this time I found it all enjoyably gossipy.

The authors spoke to cast and crew from the past and then-present of Doctor Who, and attended rehearsals and recording of the 1982 story Kinda. Their media studies approach is quite different from the interviews published in fanzines, Doctor Who Magazine and other sources from the time, which tended to focus on what happened when, building up a timeline of production. Here, we get deeper insights into the thinking behind creative choices and a sense of what these mean. That’s especially revealing when people involved in making Doctor Who talk about stories they didn’t work on.

How fascinating, for example, to hear Douglas Adams — script editor on Doctor Who 1978-79 before becoming the best-selling author of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — explain why he didn’t like Logopolis (1981), written by his successor.

“In comparison to what we were doing, the new ones [episodes] are terribly, terribly slow. We seem to have endless, endless wanderings round and round the same point. I think that, in the time we were there, there was this sheer weight of ideas we managed to pack in — the sheer number of events and things going on … In contrast, in Logopolis we … did seem to spend ages and ages wandering around and around and around the interior of the TARDIS.” (pp. 219-220)

Then there’s where all this wandering led. Adams says he'd expended considerable energy in clarifying the “final threat” of any given story and “what the villain actually wants” (p. 170). He could see that reintroducing the Master — in the story preceding Logopolis — made plotting much simpler because he’s effectively the “guy in the black hat” and we can take for granted that he’s up to something bad.

“But to my mind that in the end means ‘boring’ because why does a guy want to take over the universe? … At the end of Logopolis suddenly you had the Master broadcasting a message to the entire universe, which to me just doesn’t mean anything. There’s nothing you can visualise there, and there’s nothing that actually has any meaning in any real world.” (p. 171)

Logopolis still haunts my imagination but it’s fascinating to hear Adams explain what he saw as fundamental shortcomings, the issue of tangibility illuminating his time on the series and the stories that followed. The sense is that, had he stayed in post, he wouldn’t have commissioned Logopolis. And he could critique the story because, even after leaving Doctor Who, he kept on watching and puzzling over how to make it work.

So, these interviews offer us authoritative insight into Doctor Who. Yet there’s something odd about the authority of this book. I’m especially conscious of this as the author of books and magazine articles about Doctor Who, and rereading The Unfolding Text has sparked a whole load of thoughts about my approach to authority.

For example, in citing Adams, the authors of The Unfolding Text repeatedly refer to him as “Doug”. How we refer to people has an impact on the way we perceive what they say. “Doug” is not Adams’s name professionally — he was always credited as “Douglas” — and I’d never heard him referred to “Doug” elsewhere. That suggested that the authors were on particularly close terms with Adams, which might then explain why he’d been so candid. My sense of the authors’ authority was coloured by the way they used his name. 

But I checked with Kevin Davies, editor of last year’s best-selling 42: The Wildly Improbably Ideas of Douglas Adams, who’d known Adams very well. And he told me that, no, Douglas wasn’t “Doug":

“I think it’s safe to assume the Unfolding Text guys didn’t really know him.”

And that recolours my sense of authority here: if the authors got that wrong, what else might not be right?

While the authors clearly had access to production and many members of the cast and crew, they lacked access to archive materials more readily available now. That leads to some errors of fact.

“Though Donald Wilson, head of series/serials, also hated the [first] Dalek story, Lambert went ahead on the grounds that the next planned story, Marco Polo, was not ready.” (p. 42)

For one thing, Wilson was head of serials — there was a separate head of series at the time. For another, Lambert wouldn’t have considered replacing Marco Polo with the Dalek story. When it began, Doctor Who alternated historical stories with sci-fi, so you couldn’t swap one for the other. In fact, the first Dalek story was brought forward to replace a serial then called The Robots. 

Besides, I think the above is cribbing from a mistaken belief among fans that two-part The Edge of Destruction was commissioned at late notice to fit between the Dalek story and Marco Polo because of delays on the latter. We now know from contemporary paperwork held in the BBC Written Archives Centre that that isn’t what happened at all — which I go into at inordinate length in my recent book for the Black Archive. 

The most striking issue of access in The Unfolding Text is how little the authors have been able to see of old episodes on which to base their judgements. Chapter 1 devotes a lot of time to the very first 25-minute episode, An Unearthly Child (1963), and a similar level of depth is given in Chapter 6 to the Fifth Doctor story Kinda (1982). Coverage of the Fourth and Fifth Doctor’s eras is pretty wide-ranging, I suspect because it’s a recent memory for the authors and those they spoke to rather than that they went back and watched episodes anew. Discussion of the Second and Third Doctors’ eras is predominately focused on one story each, neither of them particularly representative of that period of Doctor Who. From the index:

‘Krotons, The’  61, 69, 74-81, 91-7

‘Monster of Peladon, The’ 9, 52-4, 86-91, 106, 114, 182-3, 188, 224, 280

How different things are today, with almost all of Doctor Who up on iPlayer for researchers to research and for readers to check. It's also easier to check the correct titles of stories — The Unfolding Text refers to Masque of Mandragola and Castravalva on occasion, but also spells them correctly on others. And it attributes a line of dialogue to the wrong production team:

“With the exception of the Troughton era, Doctor Who has fundamentally adhered to the original brief of Verity Lambert and David Whittaker (sic) that the Doctor should appear as a ‘citizen of the universe and a gentleman to boot’.” (p. 100)

I don’t mean to nit-pick: it’s more that these things all illuminate something I’m very aware of at the moment — how access to old episodes is changing the ways that fans can and do engage with Doctor Who’s rich history. In what I write now, I can direct readers to watch episodes for themselves rather than spelling out what happens, and I can leave them to judge for themselves rather than offering an opinion. It’s a surrender or sharing of authority. But that also makes me realise how seldom The Unfolding Text provides synopses of the stories it mentions, given readers at the time were generally unable to see them again. We must take these authors on trust.

Some of the people interviewed hold pretty sexist views, not least on the role of the Doctor’s companions. This can be very revealing about what made it to the screen. Sometimes the authors also challenge the people interviewed but I think there’s a danger that things said by cast and crew then inform or even dictate the analysis.

For example, producer John Nathan Turner explains how the regular characters in the 1982 series were designed to appeal to a broad audience:

“We’ve got the young heroic Doctor who hopefully appeals to everyone, especially the ladies. We have a female companion called Tegan, who is 24, nice figure, nice legs who appeals to the men. And we have two young companions, Adric and Nyssa, who are both 18-19 and are there for audience identification — the younger audience.” (p. 207)

This is very different to what he inherited a year before from Douglas Adams and producer Graham Williams. Indeed, Nathan Turner thought that the mature, knowledgeable line-up of the Fourth Doctor, Romana and K-9 was “ludicrous”.

“There was no reason for the Doctor ever to have to explain anything to Romana. So that all conversation between them either became very bitchy to impart the plot, or else it was an unreasonable scene where the Doctor has to say, ‘Well, there’s part of your education that you don’t know about, and here it is…’” (p. 217)

When, exactly, is Romana “bitchy”? With episodes now readily available, we can go look for ourselves. Without them, we can only go on Nathan Turner’s say-so.

To be fair, the authors dig into these claims a bit, citing his “nice figure, nice legs” comment twice on the same page before asking him if there had been only tokenistic development of female companions.

“I don’t think it’s tokenism. Certainly the feminists would like Tegan. It just makes for greater drama between your regulars if you’ve got an aggressive girl who tends to think she knows best. It’s not tokenism in any way. It just makes for a better line-up if there is friction.” (p. 218)

But that doesn’t really square with what he said before, which the authors don't really address. Worse, I think, is that The Unfolding Text purses a line of analysis directed by what they’ve been told and the terminology used.

“In … his second season, Nathan-Turner also reintroduced the 1963 element of Doctor and companions who don’t always ‘get on with one another’ but — very consciously — for ‘character’ rather than ‘bitchy’ reasons. … As with Barbara and Ian [in the 1960s], Tegan’s ‘bitching’ relationship with the Doctor was generated by his inability to return her [home].” (p. 217)

Even in quotations, it’s deploying “bitchy” as objective rather than objectionable. Do Barbara and Ian have a “bitching” relationship with the Doctor? How does the “friction” generated by “aggressive” Tegan differ from the “bitchy” Romana? Is that really the word to use? Go watch those episodes again and I think the answers are no, no and no.

Doctor Who Magazine - 50 Years of the Fourth Doctor

Just over 50 years ago, on 2 April 1974, actor Tom Baker was in Studio 1 at BBC Television Centre to record his brief appearance in the final shot of Planet of the Spiders - and his first as Doctor Who. The episode was shown on 8 June. The official Doctor Who Magazine marks this anniversary with a special edition out today, 50 Years of the Fourth Doctor.

There are new interviews including Richard Unwin's chat with Louise Jameson and Matthew Waterhouse, Robbie Dunlop's chat with Janet Ellis and Graham Kibble-White's chat with Dave Gibbons. Robbie also met with June Hudson, the costume designer of the burgundy version of the Fourth Doctor's costume seen in his final year in the programme, and with Mark Barton Hill who now owns that coat. How lovely to see a photo of the label, with Tom Baker's name written in under the address of Morris Angel & Son Ltd, the costume house Hudson employed to cut the coat.

It's prompted me to post on the Koquillion site the article I wrote about the Fourth Doctor's Season 18 costume and my chat with Ron Davies who cut the coat. 

I've also got two pieces in the new special edition:

pp. 22-25 The Doctor Who Wasn't
A very different version of the Fourth Doctor can be glimpsed in surviving draft scripts and other evidence.

p. 82 Many Happy Returns
He left our screens after 1981's Logopolis - or did he? The Fourth Doctor was never far away.

Doctor Who Magazine #603

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out today and is full of thrilling stuff about the imminent new series, starting 11 May.

I've written the preview of Episode 1, Space Babies (pp. 14-15), and spoke to writer and executive producer Russell T Davies about this completely nuts story (to quote the preview), ahead of a post-broadcast set report next issue.

I've also written Who Crew: Second Brain (pp. 36-37), in which I spoke to Sharon King and Jess Gardner, co-producers on next year's series of Doctor Who.

Then there's Script to Screen: Jimbo (pp. 38-41), featuring some of the team behind the chonky robot seen in last year's Wild Blue Yonder: production designer Phil Sims, concept artist Nandor Moldovan, prop modeller head of department Barry Jones, and puppeteers Brian Fisher and Eliot Gibbins. 

Berkeley Square, a Play in Three Acts, by John L Balderston

This is an odd, beguiling time-travel romance first staged in 1926, then later adapted for radio, TV and two films. John L Balderston chiefly wrote it, in collaboration with JC Squire — later the editor of If It Had Happened Otherwise, a book exploring ways in which history might have been different — with the plot suggested by an unfinished novel by Henry James. I find Balderston a fascinating figure — he adapted both Dracula and Frankenstein for the stage, and his versions were then the bases of the Universal movies. He wrote The Bride of Frankenstein and worked on Gone with the Wind and the US film version of Gaslight. 

Yet I’d never heard of Berkeley Square until it got mentioned in passing in an interview (more of which below). Given all the adaptations, it seems to have been very well known for three decades and was then lost to time — which is ironic given what it’s about.

The plot involves young Peter Standish, who has inherited a house in Berkeley Square in London, 1929. As the play opens, his strange behaviour is of concern to his fiancee, who calls in the US ambassador (one of Standish’s friends). Standish then somehow swaps places with his ancestor of the same name who is visiting the same house in 1784. The ancestor Standish is about to be engaged to his cousin Kate Pettigrew but Standish-from-the-future instead falls for Kate’s sister Helen… 

At first, Standish-from-1929 is thrilled by the prospect of being back in the past and the opportunity to explore:

“How would you like to walk the quiet streets of London in the eighteenth century? … And breathe pure air, instead of gasolene? And ride in Sedan-chairs, instead of taxi-cabs. … See Sheridan at the first night of The School for Scandal, or hear Dr Johnson say the things Boswell wrote, or watch Reynolds at work…” (p. 38)

But the real past is a disappointment, such as when Standish meets Dr Johnson:

“Oh, he thundered out a few platitudes. Really, his friends ought to stop him from dribbling food and snuff all over his waistcoat. And he’d be none the worse for a bath.” (pp. 83-4.)

Worse, Johnson has, with Standish’s supposed friend Captain Clinton, paid for a good seat in front of Newgate prison to watch the burning of a woman called Phoebe Harris as punishment for coining. Standish is horrified by the brutality and also knows he can make no difference here: history cannot be changed.

The way Berkeley Square uses time travel is really interesting but some context is needed. Time travel stories weren’t new in 1929. They weren't just reserved for science-fiction either, but were very much in the mainstream. In A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens, Ebeneezer Scrooge journeys back in time with a ghost to observe the formative events that have made him who he is. He then journeys forward in time with another ghost to see where his life and work will lead. This perspective prompts him to change his ways — and effectively change the future.

In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) by Mark Twain, Hank Morgan travels back in time and across the Atlantic to medieval England, where his knowledge of science is put to good use battling villains and injustice. Time travel again provides some perspective on social issues. That's not the only link between the two stories. From the way A Christmas Carol is told, it’s possible Scrooge dreamt the whole adventure (but his unconscious still prompts him to change his ways), while Morgan may have imagined his journey to Camelot following a bump to the head. That was generally quite common: the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction entry on time travel says that, “until the end of the nineteenth century, dreams were the favoured method.”

The Time Machine (1895) by HG Wells offered something very different. It begins with the unnamed time traveller discussing — with a psychologist, a provincial mayor, a medical man, a very young man, “an argumentative person with red hair” called Filby and the unnamed narrator — the physical principles of travel through time. It’s a scientific debate among a number of learned, sceptical people, positing time travel as a practical enterprise, a mechanical process accomplished with a machine. 

Wells is vague on exactly what this machine comprises. It has “ivory bars”, “nickel bars”, a “brass rail” and “quartz rod”, but the traveller sits on a “saddle” rather than a seat or chair, which has always made me think of a sort of glorified bicycle. When the traveller works the starting lever, the sense is not that the traveller feels any motion. Instead, as he sits there, he watches a woman come into the room and head out through a different door — at unusual speed.

“I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow.” (Chapter IV)

It’s as if the traveller is perched on a bicycle in front of a cinema screen, working a lever to speed up the film being shown until it passes in a blur.

There are other examples from the period, not least the unfinished novel by Henry James published in 1917 that Berkeley Square draws on. But I think Berkeley Square is situated somewhere between the dreams/subconscious of Dickens and Twain, and the physics of Wells. The play does not feature a time machine or tell us anything about how Peter Standish is able to swap places with his ancestor. But he does tell us quite a lot about the mechanics of time.

“Suppose you’re in a boat, sailing down a winding stream. You watch the banks as they pass you. You went by a grove of maple trees, upstream. But you can't see them now, so you saw them in the past, didn’t you? You’re watching a field of clover now; it’s before your eyes at this moment, in the present. But you don't know yet what’s around the bend in the stream there ahead of you; there may be wonderful things, but you can’t see them until you get around the bend in the future, can you?

Now remember, you’re in the boat. But I’m up in the sky above you, in a plane. I’m looking down on it all. I can see all at once the trees you saw upstream, the field of clover that you see now, and what's waiting for you around the bend ahead. All at once! So the past, present, and future of the man in the boat are all one to the man in the plane. Doesn't that show how all Time must really be one? Real Time with a capital T is nothing but an idea in the mind of God!” (p. 36)

A page later, Peter shares a limerick:

“There was a young lady named Bright


Whose movements were quicker than light


She went out one day, in a relative way


And came back on the previous night.” (p. 37)

These machinations on the behaviour of time don’t feature in James and surely come from Einstein. They’re also achingly new. It’s not just that perspective of time is relative to the observer. We also gain this perspective by using a then-new kind of vehicle — the plane.

Berkeley Square wasn’t the only work of fiction from this period to draw on Einstein as a dramatic conceit. A year before the play premiered, Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) did something similar. That novel explores all sorts of aspects of time on people's lives and consciousness (and was written under the working title of The Hours). Einstein is name-checked early on in the novel but his ideas about the relativistic effects of travel on our concept of time are demonstrated later on. 

One character, Peter Walsh, returns to London after five years in India and goes to see Clarissa Dalloway. He has been moving while she has been in the same place all that time. The result is marked: 

“And how are you?” said Peter Walsh, positively trembling; taking both her hands; kissing both her hands. She’s grown older, he thought, sitting down. I shan’t tell her anything about it, he thought, for she’s grown older. She’s looking at me, he thought, a sudden embarrassment coming over him, though he had kissed her hands. Putting his hand into his pocket, he took out a large pocketknife and half opened the blade.

Exactly the same, thought Clarissa; the same queer look; the same check suit; a little out of the straight his face is, a little thinner, dryer, perhaps, but he looks awfully well, and just the same.”

Basically, time has passed for Mrs Dalloway but not Peter.

In the case of Berkeley Square, I think Einstein is just bit of the zeitgeist thrown into the mix. The plot also features a Crux ansata — an ankh — to suggest the eternal souls of our star-cross’d lovers, surely drawing on Egytomania sparked by the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 (Balderston later adapted The Mummy for Universal). 

Or there’s the eye-roll at modern life as the UK follows the US:

“Yes, cocktails, jazz and one universal traffic block—London’s just like New York.” (p. 29) 

I wonder how much the fatalism was of its age, too. The horrors of the past can’t be changed and young lives can’t be saved, in a play staged less than a decade after the end of the First World War. No one here has any agency; the implication is that none of us do. 

This seems to have connected with audiences of the time. According to JP Wearing’s The London Stage 1920-1929 (p. 467), Berkeley Square premiered at St Martin’s Theatre in London on 6 October 1926 and ran for an impressive 179 performances up to 5 March the following year. The cast included sisters Kate and Helen played by Jean Forbes-Robertson and Valerie Taylor. (I know Taylor as Nora in Went the Day Well?, a film made in 1942 but bookended by a character addressing us from the future, after the end of the war.) 

Taylor and some other members of the London cast of Berkeley Square transferred to New York when the play opened at the Lyceum on 4 November 1929 with Leslie Howard in the lead role as Peter Standish. It ran for 229 performances. Theatricalia lists multiple stage versions until 1949.

1937 BBC radio
Berkeley Square,
image from Radio Times

Howard and Taylor were in the 1933 film version available in full on YouTube. Howard was also in a 1937 radio production for the BBC, and the BBC broadcast other radio versions in 1935 (with Peggy Ashcroft as Helen), 1941, 1944 and 1951. That last one coincided with a second film version, now under the title The House in the Square (aka I’ll Never Forget You), with Tyrone Power in the title role (a version of this, with Gregory Peck, failed to get off the ground in 1945). And there were TV versions on the BBC in 1948 and 1959.

And then… Well, nothing. Whatever connection it made with the audience, it’s time has passed.

I’ve a copy of the script published by Longmans, Green and Company (London, New York and  Toronto) in 1929, to coincide with the premiere on Broadway. I bought it because of a chance remark by New Zealand born playwright Jennifer Compton. She told Toby Hadoke for our Looking for David documentary that in 1973, while working on the play that became No Man's Land / Crossfire (in which feminists from different times meet in the same house), her tutor on NIDA's playwriting course advised her to read this old play.

1959 BBC TV
Berkeley Square,
image from Radio Times

That tutor was David Whitaker, the subject of my book. I’m not sure when David discovered the play. He was working on staff in the BBC script department when the 1959 adaptation was made. Whenever he encountered it, I think it had a profound impact on his understanding of time while first story editor of Doctor Who.

For one thing, the speech quoted above about the river and the plane is very like David’s own description of the mechanics of time, which he outlined in a reply to Doctor Who viewer Mr R Adams of Quinton on 1 May 1964 — a copy is held in file T5-649 Viewers Letters 1964 at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre in Caversham. David changes the metaphor a little: instead of a river observed from a plane, time is a winding road which the Doctor can observe from up on a hill. This position gives him perspective of the whole pattern but he cannot change or divert its path.

David wrote this letter on the same day that recording took place on The Temple of Evil (first episode of The Aztecs), in which the Doctor insists to companion Barbara that,

“You can't rewrite history! Not one line! … What you are trying to do is utterly impossible.”

A few months later, in Prisoners of the Conciergie, Barbara again probes what is possible. She has witnessed the young Napoleon Bonaparte in 1794 and later wonders what change she might have enacted with a few quiet words.

DOCTOR WHO:

Well, I can assure you my dear Barbara, Napoleon would never have believed you. 
 

IAN: 

Yes, Doctor but supposing we had written Napoleon a letter telling him, you know, some of the things that were going to happen to him.  


SUSAN: 

It wouldn’t have made any difference, Ian. He'd have forgotten it, or lost it or thought it was written by a maniac. 

BARBARA: 

I suppose if we’d tried to kill him with a gun, the bullet would have missed him. 

This is in a story written by Dennis Spooner, who succeeded David as story editor — and immediately changed the rules. Spooner's next story, The Romans, has the Doctor directly influence the course of history, sparking the Great Fire of Rome. In Spooner’s next self-scripted story, The Time Meddler (1965), we meet a member of the Doctor's own people who can and does change history. David responded; his 1966 novelisation The Crusaders, based on a TV story he wrote for Spooner, begins with the Doctor once again insisting that history is immutable.

Spooner’s view of time has prevailed in Doctor Who. In fact, it’s given the Doctor a sense of purpose, as protector of the delicate web of time. That explains why the Doctor on some occasions can and on others cannot stand idly by and let things take their course. A classic example is in the 1975 story Pyramids of Mars, in which the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith face a villain in the year 1911.

DOCTOR WHO:


If Sutekh isn’t stopped, he’ll destroy the world. 


SARAH JANE: 

But he didn't, did he? I mean, we know the world didn’t end in 1911. 

DOCTOR WHO:

Do we?

He sets the controls of the TARDIS for Earth in 1980, where they find a desolate wasteland. Sarah acknowledges that they have to go back to stop Sutekh. Change is possible, even necessary. The sense is less of change as of moulding.

DOCTOR WHO:

Not chosen [but] shaped. The actions of the present fashion the future. 

The threat of changing history therefore serves as motivation for the Doctor, and so has dramatic value. Not being able to change history makes the Doctor and the companions mere bystanders, and is so less dramatically satisfying. Yet David Whitaker stuck to his guns anyway - and I think that’s because Berkeley Square suggested the drama of not being able to change history, which is what gets explored in The Aztecs, one of the best acclaimed early stories.

It occurs to me that the series Quantum Leap owes (perhaps by coincidence) something to Berkeley Square in that its hero Sam Beckett swaps places with individuals in history in the same way that Peter Standish swaps with his ancestor. Yet the whole point of Quantum Leap is that Sam is tasked with changing history for the better, guided by his friend Al who can provide him with the odds of success in a probabilistic universe.

Anyway. I think Berkeley Square also influenced the middle section of David’s The Evil of the Daleks (1967). There's something of moral, outspoken Kate, good but timid Helen and their caddish brother Tom in Ruth Maxtible, Victoria Waterfield and Arthur Terrell. The TV story features a portrait of Victoria’s late mother, whereas in the play, the house in 1929 features a painting of Peter Standish by Sir Joshua Reynolds, painted during his trip to the past.

That painting has a bigger role in the play, where Reynolds is haunted by his subject.

REYNOLDS:

Something in your face eludes me … I thought at first it was irony. And yet, I fancy I know irony—and there is a quality in your every look, when I take up my brushes and fasten my eyes on your face, beyond all my experience of human nature. (p. 74)

As in the 2010 Doctor Who episode Vincent and the Doctor, the idea is that artists can see something the rest of us don’t. (The fact the Silents in 2011’s The Impossible Astronaut look so much like the figure in the famous painting The Scream suggest Edvard Munch had the same ability.)

Reading Berkeley Square again this weekend, it strikes me that the modern Peter Standish has a guide to his time in the past — his ancestor's diary. David Whitaker provided the Doctor with a diary when, in The Power of the Daleks (1966), the Second Doctor must take on the mantle of the First. 

And, perhaps fittingly, there's a connection that the authors could never have known as it’s related to their future. David's novelisation of The Crusades includes the detail that the Doctor’s granddaughter has married a man called David Cameron; in the play, there's an important American character called Bill Clinton.

The Power of 3 podcast #212 - The Pirate Loop

The Pirate Loop

The Power of 3 podcast is currently scrutinising the adventures of the Tenth Doctor in print, and I spoke to Kenny for the latest episode about my 2007 novel The Pirate Loop, which was the first original Doctor Who novel read by Steevie.

• The Power of 3 podcast #212 - The Pirate Loop

Here's the blurb on the back of the book:

The Doctor's been everywhere and everywhen in the whole of the universe and seems to know all the answers. But ask him what happened to the Starship Brilliant and he hasn't the first idea. Did it fall into a sun or black hole? Was it shot down in the first moments of the galactic war? And what's this about a secret experimental drive?

The Doctor is skittish. But if Martha is so keen to find out he'll land the TARDIS on the Brilliant, a few days before it vanishes. Then they can see for themselves...

Soon the Doctor learns the awful truth. And Martha learns that you need to be careful what you wish for. She certainly wasn't hoping for mayhem, death, and badger-faced space pirates.

Garry Halliday and the Kidnapped Five, by Justin Blake

This is the third of five novelisations of the adventures of airline pilot Garry Halliday, following Garry Halliday and the Disappearing Diamonds and Garry Halliday and the Ray of Death. It was published by Faber in 1962, based on a six-part serial broadcast on the BBC between 16 January and 20 February 1960. The time slot was 5.25pm on Saturdays - the same as later taken by Doctor Who. 

Episode 3, The Outcasts, is the only one of 50 episodes of Garry Halliday to survive. It used to be available on Youtube, from where I took screenshots of the lengthy recap at the start. While exciting music plays, a plummy voice speaks over the following still images:

"Garry Halliday, owner and chief pilot of the Halliday Charter Company is up against his old enemy…

[Image showing Terence Longdon as Garry Halliday]

"... The Voice, now engaged in a colossal scheme to kidnap five world famous atomic scientists and sell them to the highest bidder. Two scientists have already been kidnapped. Now the Voice plans to take another…

[Image showing Elwyn Brook-Jones as The Voice]

"... Professor Mundt, who has been visiting England with his secretary…

[Image showing Richard Dare as Professor Mundt]

"… Martin. At the suggestion of…

[Image showing John Hussey as Martin]

"… Inspector Potter from Scotland Yard, Halliday’s plane has been chartered to fly Mundt back to Frankfurt, much to the annoyance of…

[Image showing Nicholas Meredith as Inspector Potter]

"...  Mr Smith-Clayton of the Home Office, who has been looking after Mundt’s security in England.

[Image showing Peter Myers as Smith-Clayton]

"... Bill Dodds, Halliday’s co-pilot, is on the plane with him, as well as Bill’s fiancee...

[Image showing Terence Alexander as Bill Dodds]

"... Sonya, who is acting as stewardess for the flight because…

[Image showing Juno Stevas as Sonya Delamare]

"... Jean, Halliday’s usual stewardess, has been deployed away by a fake message sent by the Voice. The only other people on the plane are three security men, but they are headed by…

[Image showing Jennifer Wright as Jean Willis]

"O’Brien, who is in reality the Voice’s principal lieutenant." At last, we crossfade into the interior of the plane, and the action ensues.

[Image showing James Neylin as O'Brien]

It's striking how complex this all is after just two episodes: lots and lots of characters and a then-and-then, House that Jack Built plot. That, of course, made it harder for viewers to join the story midway through. Compare it to the opening of the surviving second episode of soap opera Compact - with no recap, and a single, short scene involving a receptionist to bring us up to speed on everything we need to know. (This was some of what I looked at in my talk “Television Before the TARDIS” at the GallifreyOne convention in February.)

But once the recap is over, the pace of this Garry Halliday episode really picks up. The villains hold the heroes at gunpoint and demand that Halliday changes course for Switzerland. Halliday and Bill then battle with the villains, and we cut from TV recording to film for the fisticuffs. It's all very well-staged by fight arranger Terry Baker, though the book ups the stakes by having Garry grab the handle of an emergency hatch.

"He pulled down, and pushed out, and the other hand got hold of [a villain called] Crake, and impelled him through the hatch. There was a terrible roar of wind and a scream from Crake." (p. 56)

This may have been too technically difficult to realise on TV rather than something they omitted as unsuitable for children watching. It’s striking what was considered okay for this Saturday teatime adventure. There's a fair bit of killing in the story anyway and also the odd relationship between Sonya and George Smith-Clayton. Sonya explains to Bill:

"Well, [we're] not exactly chums, except that you do feel rather close to people when you've been through a lot with them. It was about seven years ago at a Commem. Ball at Oxford, you see ... and some of the boys decided to take Georgie's trousers off. ... Of course the champagne had been flowing a bit. Old Charlie champers. ... All I did was hit him over the head with a champagne bottle. It can't really have hurt him. It was empty. ... It was only a gesture of affection really. A sort of love-tap." (p. 46)

Smith-Clayton says that as a result he was in hospital for nearly 10 days. Now, this exchange occurs in the missing second episode of the TV serial so we can't be sure it was relayed exactly as in the book, but Sonya refers to the champagne bottle in the surviving third episode so some version must have been included.

So when Doctor Who began in 1963, its elements of kidnap, murder and threat were all in keeping with previous adventures shown in the same slot. What’s very different is the tone.

Having defeated the villains, Halliday then gets a call from the Voice, who has kidnapped Jean. So, despite winning the fight, Halliday ends up changing course to Switzerland anyway. The Voice also tells Halliday not to tell the authorities and gets his men to hand Halliday a suitcase of money - making it look to Smith-Clayton as though Halliday is his willing agent. Soon, Halliday and Dodds are on the run from the police while also trying to thwart the Voice's next attempt at kidnap.

It's all good, fast-moving fun, our frightfully well-spoken heroes battling all manner of accented folk, ranging from villains to eccentric character-types. One of them, a Swiss Clerk in the surviving episode, is played by no less than Jill Hyem.

I'd love to know how the TV version realised the exciting finale, in which the Voice coolly escapes in a cable car, only for Halliday to give chase on skis. Was there location filming in Switzerland? It now feels very James Bond yet predates the ski stuff in 1963 novel On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

There are a few other fun details, such as a sense of changing times:

"I mean, you don't say 'sir' in the nineteen-sixties." (p. 20)

We learn that Halliday is a veteran of the Korean War and has always "had the habit of attracting adventures" (pp. 20-1). But there's still the painful lack of anything for women to do. Sonya, while getting some laughs at Smith-Clayton's expense, is left behind in a cell when Bill and Halliday make their escape, and Jean spends most of the story locked up. On the last page of the novel, she "surprised us by getting married" recounts Bill; her husband is Philip Latters, a character from the previous serial, not credited in TV listings for this one. The implication is that she leaves Halliday Charter Company. I suspect she didn't have an exit on screen and just didn't appear in the next serial; I can't really blame an actor given such an unrewarding part.

In fact, this could easily have been the end of Garry Halliday since he outwits and captures the Voice. But the book ends on a cliffhanger.

"Because the news in that telegram was that the Voice has escaped from prison. Now nobody who had ever seen the Voice's face would be safe." (p. 119)

The adventure continues in Garry Halliday and the Sands of Time, if I can ever track down a copy...