Who and Me, by Barry Letts

“Terrance once laughed at me when I told him that a fly was his cousin.” p. 74

I said in my post on Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons that I could see, in the sometimes sparky but close friendship between the Third Doctor and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, something of Doctor Who producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks. Reading Letts’s memoir of his first two years in that role has only bolstered that view.

It’s an engaging, insightful book, which ends with Letts about to tell us about the origins of Day of the Daleks (1972), promising a story involving him and Terrance drinking champagne at Pinewood Studios with Terry Nation. This is just after Letts has also told us that Terrance’s own memories of what happened are very different from his own. How intriguing!

Sadly, the promised second volume of memoir never materialised and the first volume was published after Letts’ death in 2009. This expanded edition published in 2021 includes a good overview of Letts’ career by Michael Seely and a long interview with Letts conducted in 2008, which help to fill in some of the gaps. Also, Letts skips about a bit in his recollections, so the main body of the book includes some insights into his work on the BBC Classic Serials years after his time on Doctor Who. Even so, there’s a feeling of a story only partially told.

Really, I wish this were an autobiography — covering Letts’ whole life — rather than a memoir of one particular job. I’d have loved much more in this evocative vein:

“I was born less than seven years after the end of the First World War.  I can remember, as a small boy, the lamplighter with his long pole, coming up the road in the evening to turn on the gas in the street lamps; I can remember feeding lumps of sugar to Jones, the horse who pulled the baker’s delivery van; I can remember Mr Glover, the milkman, pushing his little cart with its giant wheels at the back, dipping his ladle into the great milk churn suspended between them to fill the can which he brought to our back door, to ladle a pint or two into our jug…” (p. 152)

That golden age when tuberculosis was delivered to your front door! 

Yes, this stuff isn’t directly related to Doctor Who but often it can inform what a person brought to the programme. For example, in an interview for the BBC’s Doctor Who website in 2004, Letts shared some other details of his early life, such as his childhood favourites:

“Books? Wind in the Willows; Professor Branestawm; the Just William books; the Arthur Ransome books; every sci-fi book I could lay my hands on. Films? All the Fred Astaires; Snow White and Pinocchio; The Wizard of Oz; Things to Come.”

The Wizard of Oz was a sizeable influence on the plot of The Three Doctors (1972-3), and Letts later adapted Pinocchio for the BBC. We can also see in these different books and films a mix of fantasy and adventure with a strong moral core, the bedrock of his Doctor Who.

There are lots of Who-related tidbits in the memoir I didn’t know. In the interview from 2008, Letts says that,

“The Mutants, for example, was basically my idea. That wasn’t all that clever actually, because I had pinched it from a book by Olaf Stapledon.” (p. 197)

My guess is that he was referring to First and Last Men (1930) or its sequel Star Maker (1937), which chart the history of humanity over billions of years, including evolution into other forms. 

Letts tells us twice about acting with Roger Delgado on Queen’s Champion (1958), which included Delgado killing him in a sword fight. I wonder if that inspired the Doctor and Master’s sword fight in The Sea Devils. 

He tells us about “kenshō”, a Buddhist term meaning “seeing” or “perceiving”, saying that he worked this concept into his 1974 novelisation Doctor Who and the Daemons, where he has the Doctor — facing monsters, the end of the world etc — taking a moment to enjoy a bright blue sky. (p. 167 of the memoir, p. 96 of the novelisation).

This is, of course, very similar to the “daisiest daisy” speech made by the Doctor in TV story The Time Monster, co-written by Letts. There’s a common perception among fans that such “moments of charm” were put in at the request of Jon Pertwee* but the one in The Time Monster is, given what he says here about kenshō, clearly Letts putting his own philosophy into the series.

(On the documentary Genesis of a Classic, about the making of 1975 TV story Genesis of the Daleks, Terrance recalls something he was told by his successor as script editor, Robert Holmes, about being approached by Pertwee: “Now, listen, Bob, you know what I like … just want a few moments of charm, you know.” I wonder when that conversation took place; the obvious moment is when Holmes started working as script editor, shadowing Terrance on Death to the Daleks in 1973.)

There’s some good detail on Snowy Black, the 13-part serial Letts devised as a potential replacement for Doctor Who if it were cancelled in 1970. The original plan, he says on p. 82, was to finish recording Inferno, the last of that year’s Doctor Who, on 29 May and “plunge straight into rehearsals for the OB shoot” on the new serial.

He says Snowy Black was itself cancelled “in April, because of the great success of the new Who” (p. 83). Indeed, on 11 April, Episode 4 of The Ambassadors of Death was seen by an extraordinary 9.3 million viewers. This, says Letts, was a relief, because he’d not started on the first script of his new serial beyond a sample scene used in casting lead actor Mark Edwards. 

“I had no time to write during the day. I was far too busy with the current productions; planning the next season with Terrance; setting up the team that would be working on Snowy Black with me and so on” (p. 83)

Then something happened that surely clinched the decision. On 27 April, director Douglas Camfield collapsed due to a hitherto unknown heart condition and Letts had to take over as director of Inferno. And that surely meant he had no time to complete his script and couldn’t be expected to go straight into production on this ambitious new project anyway.

There are some details Letts seems to have muddled up. For example, he tells us on p. 41 that in 1965 he had lunch with Hugh David to seek his advice about becoming a director. David was, says Letts,“in the midst of editing” Doctor Who story The Highlanders, but the first episode was actually recorded in studio on 3 December 1966. That was after Letts — finally, after some persistence over a year — started the BBC directors’ course on 29 November 1966 (p. 46).

So there are some things I need to fact check and follow up on for my forthcoming biography of Terrance Dicks. I’d especially like to know more about Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton,

“appearing together at an American convention — in a playlet written by Terrance overnight in his hotel bedroom — which capitalised on their supposed antagonism, enjoying it so much that they insisted on two repeat performances” (pp. 18-19)

The Broadwcast list of Doctor Who conventions in the United States offers only one occasion where Terrance, Troughton and Pertwee were all at the same event: the TARDIS 21 (Spirit of Light) convention in Chicago, 23-25 November 1984. Were any of my readers there?