“I am the one and only. Nobody I’d rather be.”

On the 5 November 1988 episode of BBC One’s Saturday morning children’s magazine programme Going Live! incumbent Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy took questions from an audience of children. One of those posed, by someone who was roughly the same age as me, rather annoyed my nine year old self: “How many Doctor Whos have there been?” I mean, really? You get a chance to ask Doctor Who a question and that’s what you go for? Because the answer was obvious, right? Indeed the kind of thing everyone could and should know? Apparently not, it seemed. 

Unbeknownst to him, and indeed to me, the question was raised that same month by someone who considered the answer to the question open. One of McCoy’s predecessors, Edmund Warwick. Who? Well, exactly. (Sorry, sometimes this stuff is hard to resist.) The veteran actor, then 81, was interviewed by his local newspaper¹ on the topic of Doctor Who’s 25th anniversary, in which he explained that “Most people think that there have been seven Doctors - but you see, there were really eight!”

While Warwick’s story is better known now than it was then, it’s worth running through here. Early in the first series of Doctor Who Warwick had appeared in The Key of Marinus (1964), playing Darrius, a man who’d inadvertently created the episode’s titular The Screaming Jungle. Watching it now it’s a nice, small part. One which allows us to know that Warwick had a good voice for stage work, and lets him to show a bit of range, sliding from threatening to pleading to desperate in a few lines.