Post by DR. QUIST on Nov 12, 2009 17:45:15 GMT -5
DWM MAGAZINE NO.124
MAY 1987
INTERVIEW WITH GERRY DAVIES
BY RICHARD MARSON
Script-editors provide the storyline backbone to television series and are a vital part of the production team. Gerry Davis, Doctor Who’s editor for nearly two years in the mid- Sixties, liked strong science- fiction tales with morals and monsters, and was co-founder of the infamous Cybermen. Nowadays, he lives and works abroad for the most part. Richard Marson caught up with him at his London home last summer.
Gerry began by explaining how he arrived in mainstream television. “I’d trained as an actor in England and had worked in repertory doing small parts and working as an assistant stage manager. Then I went to Canada and worked in theatre, getting into radio writing entirely on spec.
“I was stuck in a little outpost of the Empire where the temperature used to drop to twenty or thirty below and there was no entertainment except radio! I thought I could do as well as that and wrote off, getting a commission to write six plays all with sea themes, because I’d also spent some time in the merchant navy and so I’d picked up a lot of sea stories. I quit my job and started writing, and then I went to work for the National Film Board there. Finally, I joined CBC in Toronto as a stage hand and then a story editor.
“I came back to England and after a spell as a freelance joined the BBC as a script-editor. I joined a programme called 199 Park Lane, which was in a desperate situation — my predecessor had virtually had a nervous breakdown on it. It was a soap going out three nights a week and the scripts they had, which were supposed to last half-an-hour, lasted on average fifteen minutes. So I bailed them out and soon after, I was given the BBC’s new football soap, United! This was based in Birmingham and as my then wife was having her first baby, I asked to return to London and join Doctor Who, as I’d heard that Donald Tosh and John Wiles were leaving. My old friend Innes Lloyd joined as producer at the same time and we just plunged in together.
“We had three or four stories, but the viewing figures had been going down because of the inclusion of fanciful historical stories. I trailed through the Bartholomew thing (The Massacre) and The Ark and then I wrestled with The Gunfighters. That had a delightfully clever and sophisticated writer called Donald Cotton, but he was too much for Doctor Who.
“I do remember that in one or two scenes, Hartnell showed what a great comedian he was — he could really handle comedy.”
Next up for Davis was the script writing nightmare, The Celestial Toymaker. “That was written by Brian Hayles, who I’d just been working closely with. We suddenly had a crisis on this one. Gerald Savory had written this famous play called George and Margaret and Donald Tosh thought it would be terribly funny to do a Doctor Who version of this. This was a bit precious for a young audience, I felt, but Hayles had been asked to write this thing about two characters who actually never appear in the play — they are expected throughout but they only arrive, off stage, at the very end.
“We had booked the players, Carmen Silvera and one other whose name I’ve forgotten and then suddenly Gerald (Savory), who was our head of department, read the script and threw his bombshell. He didn’t like the script and wasn’t having the names of his characters used for this. And it was actually pretty tedious, but the framework was good. The content was a sort of pseudo-smart Noel Coward comedy which was wrong for the audience, but we had to salvage something — there was no option. Everybody was screaming for something, from the designers down.
“I literally had to sit down in the garden of the bungalow I’d just bought in Cookham and dash out an act a day. What happened was the Toymaker character suggested toys, which suggested nursery and I played around with something sinister on these lines. Had I more time I could have done a better job.”
There was some dispute about the inclusion of the schoolboy Cyril, who, with his marked resemblance to Billy Bunter, was accused on infringing copyright. Gerry denies this was the case. “It wasn’t intended. I wrote a jolly, mischievous schoolboy. I’d never seen Billy Bunter. But Peter Stevens, the actor, saw it as that, played it as that and somebody in costume gave him that costume, so it did turn into a rip-off.
“If anything, I’d thought of the character as being like the Artful Dodger. As it was, I was busy on something else and I walked into the studio and there it was. The overall concept of the piece — four plays within a play — was mine, but I never figured out the trilogic game. That was all Hayles.”
“Peter was good, but he was a bit unvarying in his portrayal.”
It was about this time that the new team changed companions from Dodo to Polly and Steven to Ben. Why had this come about? “I liked Peter Purves, but Innes decided he wanted a change. Peter was good but he was a bit unvarying in his portrayal. He was robust but stiff, and I think we wanted somebody a bit more flexible, so we got Ben, the cockney sailor. Dodo was dropped because the camera picked up that this was an older woman and we thought the audience would identify better with this leggy swinging Sixties girl.
“Ben and Polly were contrasts — light and shade, and Innes had a big input into those characters, while I was to create Jamie entirely on my own. I didn’t have a big say in the casting — I sat in on it, but left it to Innes. I cast one major person in my career and that was Robert Powell on Doomwatch, because I saw him in a play and spotted his unique ability to play the idealistic member of the team
“I got on with Billy Hartnell because I discovered it was no good confronting him.”
The first Doctor was renowned for being ‘difficult to work with’. How had Gerry found him?” I got on with Billy Hartnell because I discovered it was no good confronting him, because as soon as you did he’d get angry. There was a lot of anger in him. What I would do was, having the necessary knowledge, talk about something to do with his past.
“For example, there was the occasion of the chair. He came onto the set, took one look at this chair, and said, ‘This is ridiculous — I can’t sit in this chair, it’s wrong. Take it away and I won’t do anything until it’s taken away.’ They used to send for me and I’d come down and say, ‘What’s the matter?’ and he’d say, ‘Look at this, it’s an insult and ‘ completely wrong for the scene.’ So I’d reply, ‘Doesn’t it look familiar to you? — When Barrymore played his 1925 Hamlet he used a chair identical to that!’ And Hartnell would pause, think and then say, ‘Oh yes, I saw him.’ So we talked about Barrymore for five minutes and then I said, ‘Well, sorry to disturb you, you’d better get on with the scene, but first we must get rid of that chair!’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Oh no, that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that!’
“He was very nice to me and took great interest in me, always asking after my daughters. It was the make-up and costume people he bullied. But I remember when my second daughter was born and I wanted to call her Chelsea, as that was a snazzy name at the time. I recall going to Hartnell, who asked what I was going to call her and on hearing my reply he said, ‘One called Victoria — now Chelsea. How about Pimlico?!”
Eventually poor health took its toll and Hartnell quit. But the programme was to continue and in Hartnell’s last story, the Cybermen were to make their first appearance. ‘It was a head of series decision to continue. There was definitely a threat and a lot of hard thinking as to whether we should continue, but in fact, Troughton came in. I was reminding Shaun Sutton about this the other day. We had these big meetings and we sat around trying out ideas. Patrick Troughton was getting more and more confused.
“I’d noticed [Pat’s] principle characteristic was a very fey quality.”
“Suddenly, after sitting there for two hours and listening to a lot of talk going backwards and forwards, I lost patience and slammed the table and said, ‘Just a minute.’ And everybody stopped and everyone looked at the most junior member. I just couldn’t take it any more. I said, ‘Look, he’s got to play it. I’ve got to write it and get the writers to follow on. It seems it would be far better to leave it to us.’ And I suddenly thought, ‘Oh my God, here come my cards’, but everybody agreed and Sydney Newman said, ‘Okay, you two intellectuals get to it.’
“Pat and I worked it out. I’d noticed his principle characteristic was a very fey quality. You’d say, ‘Pat, what’s the weather like today? It looks like rain . . .‘ and he’d say, ‘Yes, yes . . .could rain. Yes, could rain.’ Then I’d say, ‘But over there are some very bright clouds,’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, it’ll probably be very clear.’ You could never pin him down — he always slipped away. It’s a very Irish quality. And really, if you’re going to be working with someone for three years, you’ve got to use their characters.
“The other ingredient came from a very favourite movie character of mine — Destry from the film Destry Rides Again. I always recalled that he’d be around and get other people to do what he wanted by sheer word play and telling them little parables. I thought that for a complete change from the autocratic Doctor who told everybody what to do, wouldn’t it be fun to have someone who never told them to do anything! So in the first story, the companions have to do all the figuring out.
“The Tenth Planet and the Cybermen were done together with Kit Pedler. I wanted a scientific adviser for the show, and I wanted to generate new science-fiction-based story ideas, as we had decided to phase out the historical stories. I’d been having meetings with Patrick Moore, Alec Comfort, Professor Laithwaite and the like, with one or two stock questions to see if I could provoke their imaginations.
“I’d say, ‘Suppose we had an asteroid that comes near the Earth,’ but Pat Moore wouldn’t agree, because this had no bearing on reality. Kit came in on recommendation and I said, ‘Supposing something tried to dominate from the new Post Office Tower,’ and he immediately said, ‘Oh, it would have to have a control network of sorts, possibly using the telephones,’ and that’s how The War Machines started. Iain Stuart Black was booked to write a script, so we gave him the storyline and between us — his academia and my TV experience — we came up with lots of stories. Every time we met we’d talk for hours and ideas would start bubbling out. The Cybermen came because we’d lost the Daleks and wanted a new monster.
“The regeneration was inspired directly from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.”
“I loved working with Kit, because we both got excited about working with images. The image of that time was, of course, space flight, which was still comparatively new, and so we suddenly thought it would be fun if we had this space capsule going along and then finding its energy being drained by something.
“We thought of a South Pole setting, because of the atmosphere it gave, with the tracking station and something — what? — affecting it. Also, the South Pole is so inhospitable that nobody would expect anything to come out of those howling blizzards. And the image of those great big silver monsters stalking was wonderful — we even devised the walk for them! The regeneration was inspired directly from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a simple inspiration to get the change-over between actors.”
Soon after this, Gerry provided the script for the final historical story, which also introduced the long- running character of Jamie. It ‘was called The Highlanders, and it is credited to two writers. “For that one I got hold of Elwyn Jones, who had just retired as head of series and was a big shot in the business. He created Z Cars, and we thought it would give it a nice twist to use him, so I booked him and he jotted down a few things, but didn’t actually do anything. There was nothing to go on. And one day I was called into Shaun Sutton’s office, and Elwyn was sitting there. Shaun asked me to take over from Elwyn, telling me that he had great confidence in me! So, for sheer credit, I ended up writing the whole thing.
“At the end, Elwyn wrote me a little note, saying, ‘Dear Gerry — how very clever you are!’ As I had no story from him, I used what was at the back of my mind — Kidnapped. I loved that swashbuckling period and I knew a lot about it. I had a lot of fun writing the book subsequently and it’s one of my favourites.
“I got on terribly well with the director, Hugh David. Innes was great, in that he didn’t really intervene — he had enough to do with his own bag, and Hugh would come up to me and say, ‘Look we can have a water tank in here?’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, great,’ and write it in. It seemed to me like harking back to the pre-Sydney Newman days, when there was only really an editor and a director/producer. In this case, I was the writer, too, so it went very smoothly and it was very nice. Hugh was also a superb director and did a great job.
Davis did much of the ground work on other early Troughton stories like the two Dalek tales and The Macra Terror, as well as Tomb of the Cybermen. “For The Macra Terror in the back of my mind were the morlox from H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, and Tomb was all very Freudian, with the symbolism of going down into the catacombs. It was an old-fashioned horror story with the breaking of the foetal membranes an added touch. That also gave us more scope with the Cybermats, who were based on silverfish. Although we devised them thinking mainly of the merchandise, they were also pretty horrific, with red eyes and the ability to leap up at you.
“I was first offered the producership of the programme by Innes.”
Soon, though, Gerry decided that enough was enough on Doctor Who and he quit. “I was first offered the producership of the programme by Innes, but I’m primarily a writer and I didn’t want to get swallowed up into his kind of job. Peter Bryant was my assistant and I thought he was producer material rather than script material, so I pushed him in in place of myself. At about the same time, I had the offer to join The First Lady series and suddenly it seemed very attractive and challenging. The producer, David Rose, was the best I’ve ever worked for.
“Meanwhile, Kit and I were still meeting and putting ideas together for features. Kit would come back from these conferences and say, ‘Do you realise what’s happening?’ and tell me about some dreadful ecological disaster that had been hushed up. Out of all this, Doomwatch was born.”
Doomwatch warned of the dangers of scientific ‘advances’ to society and when it was first aired on BBC1 in January 1970, it was a massive hit, later spawning a movie.
“It suddenly rocketed, but it had been very carefully conceived over a long time and they very quickly wanted a second series.
“Kit and I were besieged by book and film offers and after working off my BBC contract on Softly, Softly I left to go freelance.”
“Mac Hulke called me and said he’d been asked to write this Cyberman thing.”
It wasn’t long before Gerry returned to Doctor Who to write books and a TV script, altered by Robert Holmes — the Revenge of the Cybermen. “Mac Hulke called me and said he’d been asked to write this Cyberman thing, but he didn’t think there was enough material, so we talked and realised I was the one to do it. I did and was able to bring in some of my own background stuff. They asked me for more than I could supply, but I’ve fitted them in where I can.
“As for Revenge, which was the wrong title if ever there was one — mine was ‘Something In Space’ — basically what happened was that they wanted a cheapie, so I wrote the whole thing as a sort of Las Vegas in space — long before I’d ever been there, though I’ve been there many times since. It was a very concentrated script. You saw quite a bit of it with the plague stuff, and it was a little like The Moonbase with the Cybermats.
“At first it was a kind of Marie Celeste space casino, with all these deserted roulette tables. The Cybermen were destroyed with the gold used there, gold being the only pure metal. Then they got more money and decided to write in a sub-plot, which I thought diffused the interest a bit.
“I always find in TV that if you keep a straight storyline with strong characters you get excitement, but if you have too much going on and too much crammed in, it loses direction. This happened a bit and though I liked the Tom Baker Doctor, he was a bit over the top in places and tended to dominate the opposition, whereas I always thought that the menace should be greater than the Doctor.”
Apart from more recent books, Gerry has worked extensively in America over the last few years, including being the story editor of the Vegas detective show, and having a hand in the screenplay of The Final Countdown movie. Now divorced, he is living with Alison Bingeman, the co-author of his Celestial Toymaker novelisation. Gerry returned to the States with several new projects on line.
“I’m hoping to interest Stateside producers in an Eighties version of Doomwatch. I have a few tapes and they went crazy about them, so you never know what might happen with that. I think that would be very exciting, as a lot of the stuff we were doing all those years ago is as relevant as it ever was.
MAY 1987
INTERVIEW WITH GERRY DAVIES
BY RICHARD MARSON
Script-editors provide the storyline backbone to television series and are a vital part of the production team. Gerry Davis, Doctor Who’s editor for nearly two years in the mid- Sixties, liked strong science- fiction tales with morals and monsters, and was co-founder of the infamous Cybermen. Nowadays, he lives and works abroad for the most part. Richard Marson caught up with him at his London home last summer.
Gerry began by explaining how he arrived in mainstream television. “I’d trained as an actor in England and had worked in repertory doing small parts and working as an assistant stage manager. Then I went to Canada and worked in theatre, getting into radio writing entirely on spec.
“I was stuck in a little outpost of the Empire where the temperature used to drop to twenty or thirty below and there was no entertainment except radio! I thought I could do as well as that and wrote off, getting a commission to write six plays all with sea themes, because I’d also spent some time in the merchant navy and so I’d picked up a lot of sea stories. I quit my job and started writing, and then I went to work for the National Film Board there. Finally, I joined CBC in Toronto as a stage hand and then a story editor.
“I came back to England and after a spell as a freelance joined the BBC as a script-editor. I joined a programme called 199 Park Lane, which was in a desperate situation — my predecessor had virtually had a nervous breakdown on it. It was a soap going out three nights a week and the scripts they had, which were supposed to last half-an-hour, lasted on average fifteen minutes. So I bailed them out and soon after, I was given the BBC’s new football soap, United! This was based in Birmingham and as my then wife was having her first baby, I asked to return to London and join Doctor Who, as I’d heard that Donald Tosh and John Wiles were leaving. My old friend Innes Lloyd joined as producer at the same time and we just plunged in together.
“We had three or four stories, but the viewing figures had been going down because of the inclusion of fanciful historical stories. I trailed through the Bartholomew thing (The Massacre) and The Ark and then I wrestled with The Gunfighters. That had a delightfully clever and sophisticated writer called Donald Cotton, but he was too much for Doctor Who.
“I do remember that in one or two scenes, Hartnell showed what a great comedian he was — he could really handle comedy.”
Next up for Davis was the script writing nightmare, The Celestial Toymaker. “That was written by Brian Hayles, who I’d just been working closely with. We suddenly had a crisis on this one. Gerald Savory had written this famous play called George and Margaret and Donald Tosh thought it would be terribly funny to do a Doctor Who version of this. This was a bit precious for a young audience, I felt, but Hayles had been asked to write this thing about two characters who actually never appear in the play — they are expected throughout but they only arrive, off stage, at the very end.
“We had booked the players, Carmen Silvera and one other whose name I’ve forgotten and then suddenly Gerald (Savory), who was our head of department, read the script and threw his bombshell. He didn’t like the script and wasn’t having the names of his characters used for this. And it was actually pretty tedious, but the framework was good. The content was a sort of pseudo-smart Noel Coward comedy which was wrong for the audience, but we had to salvage something — there was no option. Everybody was screaming for something, from the designers down.
“I literally had to sit down in the garden of the bungalow I’d just bought in Cookham and dash out an act a day. What happened was the Toymaker character suggested toys, which suggested nursery and I played around with something sinister on these lines. Had I more time I could have done a better job.”
There was some dispute about the inclusion of the schoolboy Cyril, who, with his marked resemblance to Billy Bunter, was accused on infringing copyright. Gerry denies this was the case. “It wasn’t intended. I wrote a jolly, mischievous schoolboy. I’d never seen Billy Bunter. But Peter Stevens, the actor, saw it as that, played it as that and somebody in costume gave him that costume, so it did turn into a rip-off.
“If anything, I’d thought of the character as being like the Artful Dodger. As it was, I was busy on something else and I walked into the studio and there it was. The overall concept of the piece — four plays within a play — was mine, but I never figured out the trilogic game. That was all Hayles.”
“Peter was good, but he was a bit unvarying in his portrayal.”
It was about this time that the new team changed companions from Dodo to Polly and Steven to Ben. Why had this come about? “I liked Peter Purves, but Innes decided he wanted a change. Peter was good but he was a bit unvarying in his portrayal. He was robust but stiff, and I think we wanted somebody a bit more flexible, so we got Ben, the cockney sailor. Dodo was dropped because the camera picked up that this was an older woman and we thought the audience would identify better with this leggy swinging Sixties girl.
“Ben and Polly were contrasts — light and shade, and Innes had a big input into those characters, while I was to create Jamie entirely on my own. I didn’t have a big say in the casting — I sat in on it, but left it to Innes. I cast one major person in my career and that was Robert Powell on Doomwatch, because I saw him in a play and spotted his unique ability to play the idealistic member of the team
“I got on with Billy Hartnell because I discovered it was no good confronting him.”
The first Doctor was renowned for being ‘difficult to work with’. How had Gerry found him?” I got on with Billy Hartnell because I discovered it was no good confronting him, because as soon as you did he’d get angry. There was a lot of anger in him. What I would do was, having the necessary knowledge, talk about something to do with his past.
“For example, there was the occasion of the chair. He came onto the set, took one look at this chair, and said, ‘This is ridiculous — I can’t sit in this chair, it’s wrong. Take it away and I won’t do anything until it’s taken away.’ They used to send for me and I’d come down and say, ‘What’s the matter?’ and he’d say, ‘Look at this, it’s an insult and ‘ completely wrong for the scene.’ So I’d reply, ‘Doesn’t it look familiar to you? — When Barrymore played his 1925 Hamlet he used a chair identical to that!’ And Hartnell would pause, think and then say, ‘Oh yes, I saw him.’ So we talked about Barrymore for five minutes and then I said, ‘Well, sorry to disturb you, you’d better get on with the scene, but first we must get rid of that chair!’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Oh no, that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that!’
“He was very nice to me and took great interest in me, always asking after my daughters. It was the make-up and costume people he bullied. But I remember when my second daughter was born and I wanted to call her Chelsea, as that was a snazzy name at the time. I recall going to Hartnell, who asked what I was going to call her and on hearing my reply he said, ‘One called Victoria — now Chelsea. How about Pimlico?!”
Eventually poor health took its toll and Hartnell quit. But the programme was to continue and in Hartnell’s last story, the Cybermen were to make their first appearance. ‘It was a head of series decision to continue. There was definitely a threat and a lot of hard thinking as to whether we should continue, but in fact, Troughton came in. I was reminding Shaun Sutton about this the other day. We had these big meetings and we sat around trying out ideas. Patrick Troughton was getting more and more confused.
“I’d noticed [Pat’s] principle characteristic was a very fey quality.”
“Suddenly, after sitting there for two hours and listening to a lot of talk going backwards and forwards, I lost patience and slammed the table and said, ‘Just a minute.’ And everybody stopped and everyone looked at the most junior member. I just couldn’t take it any more. I said, ‘Look, he’s got to play it. I’ve got to write it and get the writers to follow on. It seems it would be far better to leave it to us.’ And I suddenly thought, ‘Oh my God, here come my cards’, but everybody agreed and Sydney Newman said, ‘Okay, you two intellectuals get to it.’
“Pat and I worked it out. I’d noticed his principle characteristic was a very fey quality. You’d say, ‘Pat, what’s the weather like today? It looks like rain . . .‘ and he’d say, ‘Yes, yes . . .could rain. Yes, could rain.’ Then I’d say, ‘But over there are some very bright clouds,’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, it’ll probably be very clear.’ You could never pin him down — he always slipped away. It’s a very Irish quality. And really, if you’re going to be working with someone for three years, you’ve got to use their characters.
“The other ingredient came from a very favourite movie character of mine — Destry from the film Destry Rides Again. I always recalled that he’d be around and get other people to do what he wanted by sheer word play and telling them little parables. I thought that for a complete change from the autocratic Doctor who told everybody what to do, wouldn’t it be fun to have someone who never told them to do anything! So in the first story, the companions have to do all the figuring out.
“The Tenth Planet and the Cybermen were done together with Kit Pedler. I wanted a scientific adviser for the show, and I wanted to generate new science-fiction-based story ideas, as we had decided to phase out the historical stories. I’d been having meetings with Patrick Moore, Alec Comfort, Professor Laithwaite and the like, with one or two stock questions to see if I could provoke their imaginations.
“I’d say, ‘Suppose we had an asteroid that comes near the Earth,’ but Pat Moore wouldn’t agree, because this had no bearing on reality. Kit came in on recommendation and I said, ‘Supposing something tried to dominate from the new Post Office Tower,’ and he immediately said, ‘Oh, it would have to have a control network of sorts, possibly using the telephones,’ and that’s how The War Machines started. Iain Stuart Black was booked to write a script, so we gave him the storyline and between us — his academia and my TV experience — we came up with lots of stories. Every time we met we’d talk for hours and ideas would start bubbling out. The Cybermen came because we’d lost the Daleks and wanted a new monster.
“The regeneration was inspired directly from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.”
“I loved working with Kit, because we both got excited about working with images. The image of that time was, of course, space flight, which was still comparatively new, and so we suddenly thought it would be fun if we had this space capsule going along and then finding its energy being drained by something.
“We thought of a South Pole setting, because of the atmosphere it gave, with the tracking station and something — what? — affecting it. Also, the South Pole is so inhospitable that nobody would expect anything to come out of those howling blizzards. And the image of those great big silver monsters stalking was wonderful — we even devised the walk for them! The regeneration was inspired directly from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a simple inspiration to get the change-over between actors.”
Soon after this, Gerry provided the script for the final historical story, which also introduced the long- running character of Jamie. It ‘was called The Highlanders, and it is credited to two writers. “For that one I got hold of Elwyn Jones, who had just retired as head of series and was a big shot in the business. He created Z Cars, and we thought it would give it a nice twist to use him, so I booked him and he jotted down a few things, but didn’t actually do anything. There was nothing to go on. And one day I was called into Shaun Sutton’s office, and Elwyn was sitting there. Shaun asked me to take over from Elwyn, telling me that he had great confidence in me! So, for sheer credit, I ended up writing the whole thing.
“At the end, Elwyn wrote me a little note, saying, ‘Dear Gerry — how very clever you are!’ As I had no story from him, I used what was at the back of my mind — Kidnapped. I loved that swashbuckling period and I knew a lot about it. I had a lot of fun writing the book subsequently and it’s one of my favourites.
“I got on terribly well with the director, Hugh David. Innes was great, in that he didn’t really intervene — he had enough to do with his own bag, and Hugh would come up to me and say, ‘Look we can have a water tank in here?’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, great,’ and write it in. It seemed to me like harking back to the pre-Sydney Newman days, when there was only really an editor and a director/producer. In this case, I was the writer, too, so it went very smoothly and it was very nice. Hugh was also a superb director and did a great job.
Davis did much of the ground work on other early Troughton stories like the two Dalek tales and The Macra Terror, as well as Tomb of the Cybermen. “For The Macra Terror in the back of my mind were the morlox from H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, and Tomb was all very Freudian, with the symbolism of going down into the catacombs. It was an old-fashioned horror story with the breaking of the foetal membranes an added touch. That also gave us more scope with the Cybermats, who were based on silverfish. Although we devised them thinking mainly of the merchandise, they were also pretty horrific, with red eyes and the ability to leap up at you.
“I was first offered the producership of the programme by Innes.”
Soon, though, Gerry decided that enough was enough on Doctor Who and he quit. “I was first offered the producership of the programme by Innes, but I’m primarily a writer and I didn’t want to get swallowed up into his kind of job. Peter Bryant was my assistant and I thought he was producer material rather than script material, so I pushed him in in place of myself. At about the same time, I had the offer to join The First Lady series and suddenly it seemed very attractive and challenging. The producer, David Rose, was the best I’ve ever worked for.
“Meanwhile, Kit and I were still meeting and putting ideas together for features. Kit would come back from these conferences and say, ‘Do you realise what’s happening?’ and tell me about some dreadful ecological disaster that had been hushed up. Out of all this, Doomwatch was born.”
Doomwatch warned of the dangers of scientific ‘advances’ to society and when it was first aired on BBC1 in January 1970, it was a massive hit, later spawning a movie.
“It suddenly rocketed, but it had been very carefully conceived over a long time and they very quickly wanted a second series.
“Kit and I were besieged by book and film offers and after working off my BBC contract on Softly, Softly I left to go freelance.”
“Mac Hulke called me and said he’d been asked to write this Cyberman thing.”
It wasn’t long before Gerry returned to Doctor Who to write books and a TV script, altered by Robert Holmes — the Revenge of the Cybermen. “Mac Hulke called me and said he’d been asked to write this Cyberman thing, but he didn’t think there was enough material, so we talked and realised I was the one to do it. I did and was able to bring in some of my own background stuff. They asked me for more than I could supply, but I’ve fitted them in where I can.
“As for Revenge, which was the wrong title if ever there was one — mine was ‘Something In Space’ — basically what happened was that they wanted a cheapie, so I wrote the whole thing as a sort of Las Vegas in space — long before I’d ever been there, though I’ve been there many times since. It was a very concentrated script. You saw quite a bit of it with the plague stuff, and it was a little like The Moonbase with the Cybermats.
“At first it was a kind of Marie Celeste space casino, with all these deserted roulette tables. The Cybermen were destroyed with the gold used there, gold being the only pure metal. Then they got more money and decided to write in a sub-plot, which I thought diffused the interest a bit.
“I always find in TV that if you keep a straight storyline with strong characters you get excitement, but if you have too much going on and too much crammed in, it loses direction. This happened a bit and though I liked the Tom Baker Doctor, he was a bit over the top in places and tended to dominate the opposition, whereas I always thought that the menace should be greater than the Doctor.”
Apart from more recent books, Gerry has worked extensively in America over the last few years, including being the story editor of the Vegas detective show, and having a hand in the screenplay of The Final Countdown movie. Now divorced, he is living with Alison Bingeman, the co-author of his Celestial Toymaker novelisation. Gerry returned to the States with several new projects on line.
“I’m hoping to interest Stateside producers in an Eighties version of Doomwatch. I have a few tapes and they went crazy about them, so you never know what might happen with that. I think that would be very exciting, as a lot of the stuff we were doing all those years ago is as relevant as it ever was.