The Five Doctors
“Always onwards to the valley they thundered! Five! Four! Three! Two! One!”
A version of this went out to paid subscribers months ago, but if there’s a day for a free to air repeat about The Five Doctors, then surely this is it?
Seen: 23rd November 1983
The Long Way Round
“FIVE!”
When preparing The Day of the Doctor in late 2012 and early 2013, Steven Moffat initially had none of the three Doctors he wanted to star in it contracted to appear. Briefly contemplating a story led by Jenna Coleman’s Clara and featuring guest stars as previously unknown Doctors, Moffat ultimately got his men. Well, two thirds of them. Christopher Eccleston passed on the project, seemingly in part because he wanted to see a script that paradoxically couldn’t really be written before he agreed to take part. Instead Matt Smith’s and David Tennant’s Doctors would encounter the newly created War Doctor.1
Mark Twain, we’re often told, said something along the lines that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”. In this instance, that sentiment does seem to be kind of true. Thirty years before, Moffat’s predecessor as Doctor Who showrunner John Nathan-Turner had faced similar issues getting slightly more Doctors together for his anniversary story.
While JNT was trying to sign up five Doctors, not three, he had one advantage. Whereas Matt Smith was out of contract following the completion of the third leg of his 3x14 contract and contemplating how much more Doctor Who he wanted to do, getting the series mid 1980s regular cast on board was simple. They were all in the midst of making the 1983 series, and while the special was additional to those contracts, on 29th July 1982 Peter Davison, Janet Fielding and Mark Strickson signed up for the twentieth birthday special,The Six Doctors, which was to be written by Doctor Who stalwart and former script editor Robert Holmes.
No, really, it was. In July, anyway. I’ll explain as we go.
“FOUR!”
When initially approached by JNT earlier in the year, very recently ex Doctor Tom Baker had indicated that was not opposed to the idea of appearing in an anniversary story, but that he would like to like see a script first. The problem was, as with Eccleston thirty years later, the scripting of the story could only really begin in earnest once it was clear how many Doctors there would be. Which is in part why JNT found himself writing to the actor on 19th October 1982 to advise him that the script had been delayed.
“Delayed” in this case was a euphemism for “written off and started again from scratch”. Holmes had produced a storyline of sorts, but he was unhappy with it. He was unhappy, in fact, with the whole idea of a multi-Doctor story, and felt that he was unlikely to write one well. At one point he even suggested that the story feature the Doctor starting to “regress through his various phases” e.g. starting off played by Davison and then being played by Baker, then Pertwee, etc2. This would have avoided scenes with multiple Doctors, and the problem of a multi-protagonist story. But it would also have robbed the audience of the interaction between Doctors that had made The Three Doctors (1972/3) so memorable.
Because of these worries, Nathan-Turner and Saward approached Terrance Dicks, Holmes’ own predecessor as script editor to produce a '“reserve” idea for the special. On 13th October, Holmes delivered a scene breakdown for his story, having also attempted to write the first 20 pages of the script, to see if it worked better in practice than in theory. On 18th October, Dicks was asked for a scene breakdown for his reserve idea, and on 1st November he was commissioned to write the script for what was now called The Five Doctors.
On the 7th December, with writing of Dicks’ version now underway, JNT visited Baker at Brightons’s Theatre Royal, where the actor was starring in a revival of Educating Rita. (Albeit not as Rita, although he would later opine this would have been “brilliant casting.”) The two, to put it frankly, went out on the heavy lash together, and at some point during the evening an in-his-cups Baker agreed that he would reprise his role.
Two days later, Nathan-Turner sent Baker the first 70 pages of Dicks’ script. Baker confirmed their receipt. But he clearly had doubts, and JNT probably knew it. On 14th December, the producer began making enquiries as to the legal clearances required to include scenes from Shada, a 1979 serial starring Baker on which Nathan-Turner had been production unit manager. Its production had been interrupted by industrial action3 leaving it incomplete and unbroadcast.
Baker’s agent, Jean Diamond, called the producer on 29th December 1982 to inform him that Baker did not, actually, want to be part of The Five Doctors. After Christmas, and in what looks suspiciously like a bit of brinkmanship, JNT had a contract drawn up for Tom Baker to play “The Doctor (number 4)” in “90m 20th anniversary special” anyway4. He intended to send it to Baker’s agent, in effect acting as though he believed there was confusion over the matter between Baker and Diamond. Another phone call from Diamond the same day put the truth beyond doubt, and JNT’s fall back plan was finalised nine days later, with Baker and his former companion and ex-wife Lalla Ward agreeing to the use of exterior filmed sequences from Shada to enable Baker to make a cameo appearance without leaving the house.
But what role would Baker’s Doctor have played had he agreed to a full-blooded return?
It's actually fairly simple; Terrance Dicks later explained, and on multiple occasions,5 that the Baker Doctor’s role in the script he started writing would have been roughly that of Davison’s incarnation in the last hour of the finished special. I.e, he’s transmatted to the Time Lords’ capitol after an altercation with the Master and the Cybermen, and is the one to figure out that it’s the Time Lords’ Lord President, and his former mentor, Borusa who is the villain of the piece. Dicks also often noted that he was amazed how well the Shada material fitted into his story, and that someone ignorant of the production history could easily believe it had been shot for the story. Perhaps because it’s conceivable Baker was willing to reprise his role, but not to play scenes with other Doctors.6 Only with his ex-wife.
Dicks was right. Shortly after The Five Doctors was broadcast a letter credited to a Jennifer Saunders7 complained that while it “was particularly enjoyable seeing all the enemies of the Doctor together in one programme... I must also add that the amount of time Tom Baker was given was disgraceful. He was one of the best-liked and longest acting of all the Doctors and was my personal favourite."8
“THREE!”
In later years, Jon Pertwee would occasionally claim at conventions that The Five Doctors was his idea. That assertion passed by most fans by, not least because Pertwee was a world class raconteur, who would not have been above claiming to have invented crème anglaise had there been a laugh in it. But the story is not entirely without foundation. At the end of June 1982 Nathan-Turner had written to Pertwee to let him know that The Curse of Peladon (1972) in which he’d starred, would be being repeated in the summer and that a repeats fee would soon be despatched to him.
Pertwee replied two weeks later to say that he hoped repeats of his serials would “become a habit” and noted approvingly that the public had begun “thinking of me as Doctor Who again” more than five years after he’d left the role. He finished his letter with,“How about another ‘three’ or ‘four Doctors’?”
Nathan-Turner had been planning his anniversary story for some time by this point, but he was doubtless pleased that Pertwee was proactively interested in the idea, despite not knowing it was already in train.
The only potential issue with Pertwee’s involvement turned out to be cost, and not because Pertwee was himself demanding anything in particular. In the BBC accounting system of the time, an actor’s fee was made up of a number of payments, including a headline figure for attending rehearsals and studio recordings, with additional payments due for an actors’s time when they attended costume fittings or publicity shoots, plus a per diem for time spent shooting on location.
With the actors’ budget for the special needing to accommodate the fees of multiple leading actors, it was suggested to Pertwee that he only appear in the special’s studio scenes. He demurred. It would, after all, have been ridiculous for his “dashing dandy man of action” to not feature on location, where many of the story’s more physical sequences would take place. Pertwee offered to refuse his payments for location days, and this offer was accepted.
Yup, in contrast to his immediate successor Jon Pertwee was sufficiently keen on appearing in The Five Doctors that he took a reduced fee in order to do so. But then he would. It was his idea after all.
“TWO!”
Patrick Troughton was willing to appear in the anniversary special, with the only issue being his availability. Always busy as an actor, Troughton tended to have work booked up far in advance.9 Location filming for The Five Doctors had been tentatively planned for April 1983, but with Troughton already committed to Granada's Foxy Lady, the dates had to be brought forward to March. (Which can’t have helped with the scripting pressures.)
Something similar had happened with The Three Doctors nearly ten years earlier. Despite being the opening story of the 1973 series it was made as the third of six serials due to Troughton’s limited availability. Once these wrinkles were sorted out, Troughton was contracted to reprise his role on 30th September 1982, when the story was still The Six Doctors.
In the final The Five Doctors, Troughton’s scenes are all with Nicholas Courtney’s Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. Courtney was contracted in early October, having confirmed his willingness to appear while shooting Mawdryn Undead in later summer. Less willing to appear was Troughton and Courtney’s The Three Doctors co-star John Levene, who later reported that he had turned down a cameo in the special in disgust, as his one scene appearance saw his character “Refusing to even recognise the Second Doctor!”10 Despite being sent a re-write that increased his lines of dialogue from four to six, Levene would not change his mind.
Now, this bit of information is useful in terms of shaking down something that does happen on screen. When Levene refused Benton became the unnamed Sergeant on the door at the “UNIT reunion”11 where the Brigadier and Troughton's Doctor meet. And there's something peculiar about this scene. As it opens, the Brigadier's successor as UNIT's commanding officer, Colonel Crichton, seems reasonably aware of who the Doctor is; he says he tried to invite him to the reunion and refers to him as "... your scientific advisor". Then, when the Troughton Doctor suddenly bursts in, with an unnamed Sergeant trying to prevent him from doing so, it is Crichton who allows the Doctor access and dismisses the Sergeant with a nod and a gentle "That's all right, Sergeant". Once the Brigadier and the Doctor have left, the Sergeant re-enters and the Colonel suddenly asks "What the blazes is going on, Sergeant? Who was that strange little man?" to which the Sergeant replies "That was the Doctor." Predictably, the Colonel then says "Who?"
On the DVD commentary for the special Dicks denounces these lines with the words “That’s bloody Saward not me!” and the final joke noticeably does not feature in Dicks’ own novelisation of the story, which otherwise sticks closely to the finished programme. It rarely even reverts to Dicks’ own rehearsal script (in which the Sergeant is already Not Benton) which went through a several changes during rehearsal, filming and recording, and which is the earliest version of the script we still have in 202312
It's not just the joke that's the problem, however. It's that between the beginning and the end of this one short scene, the Sergeant and the Colonel have entirely reversed their relative positions in terms of being able to identify the Doctor. Taking all this together suggests that this final exchange between the Sergeant and Colonel Crichton is what was written by Saward as an attempt to placate Levene, and allow him to be involved. It was then retained even after he refused.
It is likely that even the involvement of Benton in the thankless Sergeant role was the production team’s idea. Dicks, who script edited and novelised The Three Doctors, would not make the mistake of suggesting Benton would not know Troughton’s Doctor by sight. It’s a shame, as it’s very easy to rewrite these brief moments to meet Levene’s complaint and ensure his participation. Instead of an off-camera Sergeant stonewalling the Doctor, and him slipping in, we could have a thrilled and in-vision Benton13 telling the Brigadier there’s someone to see him, before Troughton steps into the room, to Lethbridge-Stewart’s delight and Crichton’s bafflement. Once the Doctor and the Brigadier have gone, the Colonel could ask the Sergeant for information. Saward could even have kept his big “Doctor… Who?” gag.
“ONE!”
A key plot element of Robert Holmes’ The Six Doctors, and the reason for its title, was that its “Hartnell Doctor” is not only not Hartnell, but is not the Doctor at all. (The actor had died after a long illness in 1975). Holmes’ storyline was set on the planet Maladoom, and was about the Master and the Cybermen teaming up to try and discover the secret organic component of the Time Lord’s approach to time travel through doing experiments on the Doctor14. It eventually turns out that the “Hartnell Doctor” is a “Cyborg” created by the Cybermen, to infiltrate, fool and betray his other selves. So, incidentally, is his companion Susan. Nathan-Turner was worried that recasting Hartnell with a lookalike could be seen as unethical. So a lookalike playing a lookalike was the production office’s solution.
Whatever the ethics of recasting Hartnell’s Doctor and the merits or otherwise of Holmes' story, it would doubtless have been disappointing both for the audience and Carole Ann Ford herself for the Doctor's granddaughter to return to the series after 19 years only for her to turn out to be an evil robot.
On 3rd September 1982, while this version of the special was still in train, JNT wrote to Heather Hartnell, to let her known of his plans to use some clips of her late husband in The Six Doctors, and also that while he planned to cast another actor to impersonate his performance, it would ultimately transpire that this character was exactly that; an impersonator. Mrs Hartnell wrote back almost immediately, sending a letter dated 6th September in which she thanked him for the consideration of writing to her, and confirmed that she had no objection to her late husband’s Doctor being recast, both in the terms JNT had described but also “for real”.
As early as July, JNT had done an availability and cost check on Geoffrey Bayldon15 and it was perhaps the mounting wage bill for the story that prompted him to look elsewhere, finally alighting on actor Richard Hurndall.
Hurndall was of the same generation of actors as Hartnell, having been born under two years after him. While distinguished16, often on television17 and versatile18, Hurndall was not a leading actor in the way Bayldon was and would inevitably have been cheaper.
Hurndall commented that Nathan-Turner had seen him as Nebrox in the Blake’s 7 episode Assassin (9th November 1981)19 and credit for bringing a videotaped copy of this performance to Nathan-Turner's attention is often claimed by Ian Levine, a record producer and Doctor Who fan who was then close to the production office. Hurndall was contracted on 6th October, while Holmes’ version of the story was still a possibility, but when Dicks took over the writing of the special, the idea of his Doctor being a villain was dropped.
In the version of Dicks’ script written assuming Tom Baker’s participation, Hurndall’s role was smaller, and he may have been intended to appear only in studio rather than on location; Dicks has said that Hurndall's Doctor would have remained in the Davison Doctor's TARDIS after meeting him there, and arrived at the Dark Tower in it accompanied by Turlough and Susan.20 When Baker declined to appear, and Davison's Doctor assumed his plot function, Hurndall's Doctor took Davison's later scenes, crossing the Death Zone with Tegan.
Steven Moffat would later recall Hurndall’s performance as one of the inspirations for the idea of the War Doctor, noting that while Hurndall did convince anyone he was William Hartnell, he was simply a good actor giving a successful performance as the Doctor. Which in effect makes Hurndall the first of what Moffat termed “mayfly Doctors”.21
It’s almost like history does rhyme. Mark Twain was right. Except, Mark Twain didn’t actually write (or say) that thing about history rhyming at all. It was someone else22. The closest thing to it in Twain’s published works seems to be this -
“History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”23
Or if you prefer, “A man is the sum of his memories you know, a Time Lord even more so.”
The stuff of legend.
Who is one of the best things in the history of Doctor Who. Imagine if, at Doctor Who’s fortieth anniversary you’d have claimed that not only would there be a fiftieth anniversary Doctor Who story, but that it would be the most watched TV programme of the entire year, and that its highlight would be an ethical debate between Doctor Who (John Hurt) and a Gallifreyan Super Weapon (Pop Star Billie Piper). You would immediately have been sent to The Priory to clean up.
He acknowledged that a story that worked this way would leave little room for appearances by former companions unless “…in each of his forms he would see the companion he had at the time?” If this seems familiar, it’s because Nathan-Turner would later use a version of this idea for Dimensions in Time (1993).
It was a management lock out; don’t let anyone tell you it was a strike. Let alone a strike caused by the Play School clock. Even if they were there. It’s not true.
The covering letter survives and is dated 4th January 1983.
E.g. in Doctor Who The Fifth Doctor Handbook by David J Howe and Stephen James Walker (Virgin Books, 1995) and on the DVD commentary for The Five Doctors.
Which would be entirely in character, let’s face it.
Presumably not that one?
Letters, Radio Times, 10th to 16th December 1983.
Not least because, as was not widely known in his lifetime, he had three separate families to provide for, having left his wife Margaret and three children in 1955 to move in with his girlfriend Ethel Nuens, with whom he had another three children before the end of the 1950s. He never married Nuens, but in 1976 married another girlfriend Shelagh Holdup, acquiring a family of stepchildren in the process.
Interviewed by Steve Lyons and Chris Howarth for Doctor Who Magazine #230
This was initially scripted by Dicks not as a reunion but as the day of the Brigadier’s retirement from UNIT. This is one of several indications in the script that the production office had not made Dicks aware of the contents of Mawdryn Undead, which was then in production, and which showed the Brigadier as already long retired. Given that Dicks was a script editor in the BBC Drama department, it’s bizarre that Saward didn’t simply send him the scripts through the internal post.
Dicks was not temperamentally inclined to keeping a personal archive, and left very few personal papers relating to his own work outside official BBC paperwork stored by corporation itself.
And yes, I know Mawdryn Undead establishes that Benton left the army four years before The Five Doctors is set, but as Saward felt able to ignore that in his version, I’m happy to do it in mine!
If this seems familiar, it’s because Holmes would later use a version of this idea in The Two Doctors (1985).
Best known as the star of Catweazle (1970-71), the hugely admired LWT children’s fantasy series.
He had played Shakespearean leads, e.g. Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, at the then Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, in the 1950s.
Most memorably in the often repeated Steptoe and Son episode Any Old Iron (1970 ) and as the gangster Mackleson in Robin Chapman’s Spindoe (1968)
He had a stint as a presenter on Radio Luxembourg.
Quoted in Doctor Who Magazine #123 (April 1987)
In the finished production he appears in three location scenes, all brief, and only two of which he has any dialogue in. Even in the final script for The Five Doctors it is anticipated that the scene of this Doctor being kidnapped be accomplished with clips of Hartnell from an earlier story. This leaves only two. Only one of which is before he enters the Davison Doctor’s TARDIS. It would be easy to have Hurndall’s Doctor and Susan spot this TARDIS from their studio scene with the Dalek, rather than while walking in the Death Zone.
He is one of a surprisingly large number of actors who played the Doctor on television, but never in stories in which they are the only Doctor. The others are David Bradley, John Hurt, Jo Martin and Paul McGann.
The psychoanalyst Theodor Riek in 1965.
In The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day (1874)