“Remember, remember the fifth of November…”
On Bonfire Night 1966, against a background of Guy Fawkes parties and fireworks, the Troughton era of Doctor Who began. The road to this “renewal”, as the script for that night’s episode describes it, hadn’t been easy. That summer, original Doctor Who William Hartnell had been persuaded by Producer Innes Lloyd to relinquish the role. Publicity stated Hartnell wanted to return to theatre work, and in later years, Hartnell’s failing health would be invoked as the primary reason for his leaving.
There were probably other factors: Equity rate for a speaking role on television was under £10 in 1966. Hartnell was paid more than £300 a week to be Doctor Who. Few working television actors in Britain would not have been cheaper. Hartnell had been periodically unhappy since the departure of Verity Lambert, Doctor Who’s originating producer, and had quarreled with successive production teams about the nature of the programme.
In 1965, the Peter Cushing-starring film Dr Who And The Daleks had been a success, and this had shown that audiences would accept someone else in the part. The recasting of Hartnell would therefore not necessarily mean the end of a series which had largely been the brainchild of Sydney Newman, as of 1966 still the BBC’s Head of Drama. Shaun Sutton, Head of Drama Serials under Newman, and Innes Lloyd’s boss, had an idea: Patrick Troughton.
Sutton had worked extensively with Troughton when still a director/producer; the actor being part of what Sutton termed his “rep company’” (Another of Sutton’s rep, Frazer Hines, would be cast in Doctor Who weeks after Troughton’s debut.)
Troughton was a decade younger than Hartnell and one of UK’s busiest actors. (He’d proved unavailable when sought for the role of Johnny Ringo in The Gunfighters months earlier). The 1950s had seen him established as one of the first leading men of the then-emerging medium of television. The first actor to play Robin Hood for British television, he’d also been its first Guy Fawkes starring in Gunpowder Guy, a live BBC production shown on 5th November 1950, sixteen years, practically to the minute, before The Power of the Daleks’ debut.
An actor who’d embodied two such folk myths would seem to be ideal to play a character already emerging as television’s first self-generated folk hero. There was just one problem. He didn’t want to. On location in Ireland filming Hammer’s The Viking Queen, Troughton fielded phone calls from his agent saying the BBC were offering him Doctor Who. He demurred. The programme wouldn’t last six weeks with him as its lead, he said. With each phone call, he later claimed, the fee increased.1 Eventually Troughton relented. At what the BBC were offering, even though it was still much less than Hartnell had been paid, Doctor Who would be worth doing even if it only did last six weeks. On 6th August, the same day the BBC announced William Hartnell would be leaving the series, Troughton signed a contract to star in twenty two episodes of Doctor Who: Five months work, not six weeks.
Lloyd and his Story Editor Gerry Davis were aware of the huge change they were making, and were keen to involve people who’d played key roles in Doctor Who’s earlier successes. David Whitaker, Doctor Who’s first Story Editor had been commissioned on 22nd July to write The Destiny of Doctor Who, the serial which would introduce “the New Doctor Who” (as Troughton’s character was referred to on internal documents) to the viewing public.
The production office stipulated that the story should feature the Daleks. Dalek creator Terry Nation had already turned down the opportunity to write the story, and would instead be paid £15 an episode to allow his creations to appear. BBC staff director Christopher Barry, who’d directed the Daleks’ first appearance, was assigned to Whitaker’s story at Lloyd’s request. Perhaps most importantly, Newman approved Troughton’s casting.
What everyone seems to have known from the outset is that “the New Doctor Who” could not be another actor imitating the Old Doctor Who. Cushing had played the part as a more cheerful, more vigorous version of Hartnell’s Doctor, retaining the white hair, grandfatherly demeanour and scripted confusions surrounding characters’ names. Whoever had replaced Hartnell on television was going to have to play the part their own way. Early ideas, such as the character presenting as “a sardonic Sherlock Holmes” did not find favour with Troughton, and Davis would later claim to have been influenced by the speech patterns of James Stewart’s character in Destry Rides Again (1939). It was seemingly Newman who coined the phrase “cosmic hobo” to describe Troughton’s characterisation, implying a resemblance, even if only superficial, to Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp character.
Various costumes were also suggested, including a 19th century naval uniform, and a Harpo Marx wig. Troughton later claimed that, frightened of typecasting, he suggested playing the part in a turban and dark makeup.2 Had that idea prevailed, fans would likely still be praying for more missing Doctor Who episodes to be found, but they would rightly have very little chance of turning up on Britbox if they were.
Another idea was to replicate the silhouette of Victorian Prime Minister, Gladstone. It was again Newman’s view that prevailed: “Whatever happened to the ‘cosmic hobo’?” he asked.3 The outfit which all settled on was, in effect, a shambolic parody of Hartnell’s Doctor’s clothes. The check trousers were louder and baggier. The tailcoat was shabbier. The cravat became a bow tie. In place of Hartnell’s occasionally-worn fur hat came a huge, curly-brimmed and very tall hat, usually referred to as a stovepipe. (It isn’t, a stovepipe has a flat top. It’s probably a Paris Beau. But we’ve been here before and more than once. I can’t help myself.)
Whitaker had started his scripts before Troughton had been cast, and had seemingly been unaware of these discussions and decisions. He had also, either by accident or design, made the Doctor peripheral to the story’s plotting. A rewrite would be necessary. Davis, whose job this normally would have been, was co-writing the stories to be made either side of the re-titled The Power of the Daleks, and didn’t have the time. With Whitaker busy with other work, Dennis Spooner, another former Doctor Who Story Editor with experience of Daleks, was hired to revise the Doctor’s characterisation, and increase his participation in events.
Spooner jettisoned several elements of Whitaker’s scripts to make way for his own new material. Some cuts, such as the Doctor suggesting he’d been “renewed” several times before, or the implication that the Daleks might have destroyed the Doctor’s home planet, would have had considerable impact on the development of later Doctor Who if they’d been retained. Of more significance in the short term was that Spooner’s redraft seems to have caused a delay to the story’s recording.
In 1966 Doctor Who was made one episode at a time, and on a weekly schedule. Each 25m episode was rehearsed from Tuesday to Saturday then recorded in story order on Saturday evening. The week Spooner needed to rejig the scripts meant that the initial recording was pushed back the same amount of time. Cast and crew were paid not to record an episode, while Doctor Who’s usual home of Stage 1, Riverside Studios, sat empty. Spooner’s rewrite of Episode One finally went before the cameras on 22nd October 1966, with the remaining episodes made across the five subsequent weeks.
Frazer Hines, interviewed at the BFI in 2016, recalled that by the time he joined Doctor Who Troughton had initiated a policy of the cast and crew assembling in their Saturday dinner break, between final rehearsal and recording, to watch Doctor Who on BBC One. With Doctor Who now recorded only two weeks ahead of transmission, Troughton and company, which did not yet include Frazer Hines, would have assembled to watch Episode One’s transmission immediately before the recording of Episode Three.
Was it on this evening, after recording completed, or perhaps another just a few weeks later that, as he later related, Troughton found himself approached by his friend, the producer Campbell Logan4 in the BBC bar. “Oh splendid!” he told Troughton, “It’ll go on for another three years. Have to get rid of the hat though!”5
We’ve already spent a lot of time in this newsletter looking at the increasingly damaged state of Doctor Who’s hat across the first eleven weeks of Troughton’s initial twenty two week contract for Doctor Who. We’ve wondered exactly when it was in that period it was disposed of and why. But is this moment, feedback from the hugely experienced Logan, and shortly after the first moment where Troughton could have seen himself wearing it on television, where the actor took against his eccentric headgear?
He did not like a hat like that.
Troughton made this claim in interviews, e.g. when interviewed by Ben Landman for the fanzine Whovian Times # 9 (1984).
Interviewed on BBC chat show Pebble Mill at One, 21 December 1973.
Troughton, when interviewed by Richard Landen in 1983 for Doctor Who Magazine # 78.
Scottish BBC Drama producer (1910-1978) whose career stretched back to the pre-War BBC television service from Alexandra Palace, and for whom Troughton had frequently worked, including on Smuggler’s Bay (1964) where he first worked with Hines. Logan’s best remembered credit is now probably The Railway Children (1968), with Jenny Agutter and Bernard Cribbins.
Troughton interviewed by Richard Marson for Doctor Who Magazine #104. Troughton also suggested that it may have been BBC Head of Drama Series Andrew Osborn who made the remark. But Logan is more likely to have been on site at Riverside on a Saturday evening in November 1966, as he was producing a 13 episode adaptation of Great Expectations which was also recording at Riverside in that period; it was transmitted starting in January 1967.