Robert Holmes: The 2CV of Scriptwriters

<Disclaimer> I wrote this article, on writer Robert Holmes’ work in the 80s, way back in 1993 for the first issue of Circus. It’s a bit cocksure and probably riddled with factual errors, but it holds up reasonably well I think. </Disclaimer>

 

During one of the economic ice ages that regularly grip our household I bought a Citroën 2CV. The salesman assured me that this machine was the last word in frugality with an engine that ran on gnat’s water. ‘Ran’, in this context, is probably the wrong word. It sort of ambled. But it was a fine car and gave one plenty of time to admire the scenery. There was also the excitement of burn-ups with passing tractors and invalid carriages.

I mention this only because it fills up some of my fifteen hundred words and also to make my point that I am the 2CV of scriptwriters.

Robert Holmes, ‘A Life of Hammer and Tongs’ (The Doctor Who File)

Robert Holmes’ last work for Doctor Who after Anthony Read took over from him as script-editor was ‘The Power of Kroll’, a story with which he was naturally unhappy. He had been asked to write a script that revolved around the largest monster in the programme’s history, a feat he found difficult, particularly when he disliked traditional lumbering monsters, relying instead on unusual, appealingly quirky characters. Although it isn’t in any writer’s nature to deliberately produce sub-standard work, Holmes’ last Who story for six years must have been a disappointment to him.

He was hardly idle in those six years. After turning down the post of its script-editor, Holmes wrote four excellent episodes for Blake’s 7, including ‘Gambit’, considered by many to be the series’ best story, certainly its most unusual. In 1980 he took over from Bob Baker as script-editor for season two of Shoestring, and in 1981 adapted David Wiltshire’s novel Child of the Vodyanoi into the acclaimed BBC1 serial The Nightmare Man.

Holmes had also outlined a series for LWT, as Jon Thurley (Holmes’ agent from 1967 onwards) describes: “[Bob] wrote a very funny and extremely black comedy which was piloted with Bob Hoskins and Jimmy Cossens playing two escaped convicts on the run, who, during the course of their picaresque adventures meet an apocalypic tramp who lights a cigarette and accidentally immolates himself, and a black prostitute who throws them off her pitch under Waterloo arches. It was reluctantly concluded that the series was probably too rich for the audience of the time, and LWT did not make the series!”

The Six Doctors

In 1982 Doctor Who‘s Twentieth Anniversary was looming, and John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward planned to celebrate it in a style reminiscent of ‘The Three Doctors’ in 1973. Nathan-Turner had known Holmes socially for many years before producing Who, having both worked at Threshold/Union House in the early 70s. Nathan-Turner: “It was a wonderful place to work, with a constant cross-pollination of ideas, individuals and aspirations”.

Saward had been keen for Holmes to return, having seen enough old Who stories to realise that he was one of the programme’s finest living writers. Nathan-Turner was reluctant, according to a dubious [DWB 57] interview with Saward, because JNT was “frightened of him”. However, this time Nathan-Turner’s own explanation is more likely: “I did have, initially, a reticence to consider Bob as a writer; his involvement in Who had been of a specific direction, instigated in no small way by Bob himself, and I wanted to have time for our team to focus its objectives. ‘The Five Doctors’, in our view, required a writer steeped in the Who mythos – QED.”

‘The Five Doctors’ required, naturally, the involvement in some way of every Doctor, plus a wealth of returning monsters and companions, all to be fitted into a coherent and entertaining storyline, but more difficultly, ninety minutes. A near impossible task for even a most accomplished writer such as Holmes.

Eric Saward [DWB 57 again] : “I remember when Bob walked into the office. He came in a big man, tall, ex-policeman many years ago and he still had that presence. I think he looked at John and I and thought ‘Crikey, a couple of real jerks here’! He was wrong because he shouldn’t have made it so obvious, but he was right in that we were being silly about what we wanted. John wanted the Cybermen, the Master and the all the other bits and pieces that came into it, and Bob said: ‘Forget it, the Cybermen are stupid, they don’t work very well and I like creating original characters’ … Still we asked Bob to continue and we said we’d commission him to do it but he wasn’t certain he could make the story work … So Bob went off and wrote 14 or 15 pages of the script and I read them and to be honest they weren’t very good. I don’t know what had gone wrong, I mean, they were funny but it was ploddy and it was as if his heart was not really in it.”

Unfortunately, neither Saward nor Nathan-Turner now remember Holmes’ story Holmes rarely committed detailed storylines to paper although it is known he planned for Sutekh to return as the villain of the piece. Not surprisingly, Holmes quickly withdrew from the project, [Nathan-Turner:] “feeling we were giving him too many confines within which to work. It was totally amicable and I understood completely.” [Holmes' five pages of storyline suggestions for the story (working title 'The Six Doctors') has since been published in Doctor Who The Handbook - The Fifth Doctor (1995). I like the idea of a robot First Doctor, explaining why he looks different to how we remember, and Maladoom's a cool planet name! CB]

What none of these versions of events mention are the details of Terrance Dicks’ involvement, which goes some way to showing the somewhat irresponsible way many respected writers and directors were being handled during this period. Dicks: “Eric Saward phoned me at a Who convention in New Orleans and asked me if I’d like to write the Anniversary Special. Naturally, I accepted.

“On my return to England, Eric told me that Bob was already working on the special, but there were ‘problems’. Would I like to write my own Special in parallel with Bob so the production team could choose the best one? I felt this was no way to treat a writer of Bob’s status or come to that, of mine and rejected the invitation. Some time after that, Eric called again and told me that Bob had withdrawn from the project. Would I like to write the Anniversary Special … which, eventually, I did!”

Ideas

Robert Holmes’ television work was by now beginning to dry up. During the mid-80s he had plenty of ideas for television series, but none of them came to fruition. It had long been his desire to write a series on the life of the newspaper baron Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe (a formidable character who, for better or worse, pioneered the modern tabloid format, taking control of The Times in 1908), but the project was never to be. Likewise a very black comedy idea concerning the inhabitants of a nuclear fall-out shelter after the bomb had dropped. The idea was very popular with other writer friends and Jon Thurley, and he was begged to soft pedal it a little and make it commercial. He wouldn’t, so it was never made.

As fellow script-writer Roger Marshall puts it, “I suppose, in retrospect, he spent too much of his life tinkering around with lesser writers’ work rather than getting on with his own. Some of his best ideas were still born.

“To know Bob you have to appreciate that in his laid back, pipe-smoking, way he was never terribly ambitious. I always felt he should have pushed himself harder and done better things. It wasn’t to be … He joined my agent, but never really changed his ways.”

Eric Saward had got on very well with Holmes during their trials on ‘The Five Doctors’: “What can I say about Bob? He was difficult, arrogant, highly critical and rude… but then people who care about their work often are. I liked Bob Holmes very much both as a writer and as a person. He was a positive and honest man who said what he thought. As a writer I found him very easy to work with. Because he knew his trade well he would be quick to accept suggestions or criticisms that would strengthen or reinforce his stories it’s only bad writers who never want to listen to what others have to say.”

Caves

Saward was keen to pursuade Nathan-Turner to offer Holmes another story, but without the cramping restrictions this time. Holmes could virtually do what he wanted, which was the way he liked it (see his time as script-editor!). Well, there was one imposition: the fifth Doctor wasn’t allowed to live through to the end of the story, which, as Holmes put it, “was an added ‘plus’ as far as I was concerned and an inducement for writing it.”

‘The Caves of Androzani’ is undoubtedly a masterpiece. Much has been written of ‘Androzani’, but suffice it to say that few stories are so blessed with a script and a director that constantly enhance each other, both racing througout the story for attention. It has been noted that the script itself reads as only about average Bob Holmes, but not really a classic. This is no criticism, as it is still brilliant, but is a great tribute to Graeme Harper’s imaginative direction.

‘Androzani’ is excellent and powerful drama, something Doctor Who often overlooked at that time in its eternal quest to stay within a cosy little science fiction/fantasy genre of its own concoction. Holmes was essentially a dramatist (with a love for gritty police/crime series), and with the exception of his early Who work, his scripts basically reflected that. When he attempted to be fantastic or satirical (‘The Carnival of Monsters’ and ‘The Sun Makers’), his style was still totally unique, completely his own, and still manages to hit the right mark. ‘Androzani’ comes as a bolt from the blue for the character of the fifth Doctor. One gets the feeling that this was (or should have been) his character right from the beginning, and it just took Holmes to bring it out, and craft a plot that would emphasise these points and see him off in style. Wonderful stuff, shame it came so late in the day.

The difference between ‘Androzani’ and the period that proceeded it is no better exemplified by the massive drop in quality between its final part and ‘The Twin Dilemma’ Part One. According to Ian Levine in a vaguely comical DWB [106] interview, Holmes watched the filming of the latter story while preparing his next script and reflected: “This is not what Doctor Who is all about, this is not how it should be.”

The Two Doctors (and How to Ruin It)

‘The Two Doctors’ was rapidly commissioned while ‘The Caves of Androzani’ was still in production, in late autumn 1983. Nathan-Turner was convinced that he could add New Orleans to his impressive track record of overseas filming, having used Amsterdam and Lanzarote during the two previous seasons. Holmes was initially a little unhappy when asked to include the Second Doctor and Jamie in the script, as well has bring back his own creations the Sontarans, disliking the re-use of elements from Doctor Who‘s past.

It did, however, give him the opportunity to return the Sontarans to their former glory after finding their last appearance in ‘The Invasion of Time’ disappointing. It also allowed him to use the idea of cannibalistic aliens, which he had previously suggested as the basis of a story to Anthony Read (who found it a little too strong!) Holmes describes the origins of the Androgums: “I couldn’t think of a reason why aliens should visit New Orleans and I recalled it was a jazz place but not even I could envisage a race of aliens obsessed with jazz and then I remembered it is the culinary centre of America, with lots of restaurants so I invented the Androgums, who are obsessed with food an anagram of gourmand. So they went to New Orleans for the food.”

‘The Seventh Ammendment’ (or ‘The Seventh Augmentment’? Also referred to variously as ‘Creation’, ‘Parallax’ and ‘The Kraglon Inheritance’) was to be set in a plantation house and surrounding bayou on the banks of the Mississippi, in the French quarter of New Orleans. Peter Moffatt was the assigned director of the story, which was in the process of rewrites, and the production manager was preparing a recce in search of suitable locations. The story was to be a co-production, partly financed by American backers (Lionheart). But, at this relatively late stage, they pulled out. Holmes and his script were left in the air for a while whilst replacement locations were being considered. Turning their attention on Europe, Venice was a possibility before it was realised that it would be impractical to film there during the August shooting dates, the tourist season. On finally deciding on the Seville region of southern Spain, a major rethink was required for the scripts.

Holmes by this time was beginning to tire of the story, now entitled ‘The Androgum Inheritance’, and his rewrites reflected this. The main plot and the essentials of the characters remained, but the transition from English-speaking country to Spanish-speaking country resulted in the loss of a lot of Holmes’ trademark witty dialogue. Saward appreciated that an excellent story had declined badly, saying “the story suffered because of all this messing about. It was all so embarrassing and down to lack of thought.” [DWB 58] Holmes was also having problems with the direction the programme was taking and it would seem that his writing quality was similarly deteriorating.

Season 22 did, however, give free rein to Holmes’ love of gruesomeness and blacker-than-black humour, and it certainly wasn’t to the tastes of everyone. The character of Shockeye displayed this, especially in the infamous scene where he takes a large bite out of a rat. I think it’s true to say that Holmes probably went a little too far in this case, but at least it’s dampened by the maelstrom of OTT violence in the stories that surrounded it.

That’s not to say that the final script isn’t enjoyable, it just lacks much of the usual Holmesian spark. The Sontarans work well enough in their new guise as more militaristic individuals, but are pushed into a background rôle by the weight of other (perhaps more interesting) elements, such as the story’s original characters which naturally Holmes gravitated towards. The Dastari/Chessene/Shockeye triangle works particularly well, although the characters still lack that extra dimension Holmes usually excelled in. Similarly, Oscar Botcherby is a poor man’s Henry Jago, on the surface the archetypal Holmesian pompous and blustering creation but ending up as a rather dull cypher. Worst of all, the story’s chief guest star, the second Doctor of its title, although characterised very well, spends most of the story tied and gagged, separated from his other self for far too long. The potential of a pairing between him and the Sixth Doctor is clear from the few scenes they share (rather than barging his way through the story and past lesser mortals like the usual irritating thug, for once the Sixth Doctor comes up against someone of equal force of character), but their interaction is criminally slight.

Novelisations

Holmes was approached by publisher WH Allen as part of their new policy of getting the original script-writers to write the novelisations wherever possible. He was initially reluctant, having already attempted to write the ‘Time Warrior’ adaptation, but giving up after the prologue, finding writing prose instead of scripts much too hard work and leaving Terrance Dicks to complete it. It was Dicks who finally persuaded Holmes of the merits of writing novelisations, and Holmes eventually agreed to adapt ‘The Two Doctors’. He didn’t find it easy, and wasn’t helped by the fact that he was very ill at the time. The then-editor of the Doctor Who range, Nigel Robinson: “He was very much of a perfectionist. Because of this the manuscript was, in fact, delivered rather late (I suspect that our schedules were changed around somewhat to accomodate the situation, and to ensure that The Two Doctors was, appropriately, the hundredth Who novelisation). I do remember that Bob wrote me a very nice note, expressing his gratitude at my patience: from my limited experience of him I do remember that Bob was, as well as being a very good writer and a true professional, a bit of a gentleman.

“The Two Doctors was published pretty much as delivered though I had to tone down a little bit of the violence (though not as much as Ian Marter’s excesses!!!)”

Singapore

I see no reason why I shouldn’t carry on writing one script a year if I satisfy them, so hopefully I’ll carry on! It’s not so difficult trying to think up one story per year as it is six! I wouldn’t go back to being a Doctor Who script-editor.

Robert Holmes interviewed in DWM 100

Holmes was asked to write another story for the forthcoming twenty-third season, rather a fiasco by all accounts. After his success bringing back the Cybermen, the Sontarans and the Daleks the previous season, John Nathan-Turner intended the apply the same formula even more extravagently this time, in a story featuring more location filming, in Singapore this time, including [John Nathan-Turner:] “the Autons, the Master, the Rani, the street theatre (like the Noti theatre) in which the Rani appeared (white face and all) and a desire that the story opened with Peri’s wish to visit the US. The scanner would reveal the three-dimensional Statue of Liberty and on exiting the Tardis, they would discover they were in the ornamental gardens (name forgotten) where artefacts of the world were displayed in Singapore! This is an over-simplified version of a major discussion but it puts the germ of the idea in perspective.”

This sounds suspiciously like an imposition on Holmes by Nathan-Turner. Nathan-Turner and Gary Downie had done a recce, and apparently realising that they hadn’t achieved anything until their last day, hurriedly took shots of any interesting locations they found in the taxi on the way back to the airport. In a DWB interview, Saward says: “Bob Holmes and I sat in a viewing room and we watched this thing, which was about forty minutes long, and afterwards we just shrugged and thought, ‘Well, what is the point of this?’!”

Nathan-Turner: “The Singapore story never existed other than a video of some stunningly different locations – Indian, Colonial, Hi-tech, Shanty, Chinese, Period/ Modern.”

Saward: “The footage was as good as useless and we were both pleased it didn’t proceed further.”

This is all beginning to sound like another DWB rant, but it does go to show the impossible conditions writers must have experienced, or at least sensed, during those few years on Doctor Who.

Holmes did complete a vague storyline for the story, which used the same 3×45 minute format as ‘The Two Doctors’ and was intended to be filmed third. It was entitled ‘Yellow Fever’ (aka ‘Yellow Fever And How To Cure It’) by Holmes himself and ‘Singapore’ by Nathan-Turner,. It could have been the mess ‘The Two Doctors’ threatened to be had any more rewrites and changes been requested, but the season was postponed for eighteen months, giving the production team plenty of time for a rethink and to decide to recommission all the stories.

Before starting work on the transmitted Season 23, a four-page storyline of Holmes’ was vaguely adapted by Jim Hawkins as the pilot episode, ‘The Block’, for an intended science fiction anthology series misleadingly entitled Timeslip. The story, although unusual, suffered a severe case of visual style over substance and intelligable dialogue; the series never went ahead.

Trials

Although Holmes was less than happy with the way his talents were being treated, he did agree to write again for Doctor Who (as he had often stated, being a professional writer was still only a job, and he needed the money like everyone else), having become friends with Eric Saward. During the ‘hiatus’, the decision came from above to reduce the season to fourteen episodes, though Saward and Nathan-Turner were determined to make those episodes worth the fans’ patience (or lack of it).

Between them, Holmes and Saward came up with the basic structure of ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’, based loosely on the visions of the past, present and future featured in Dickens’ The Christmas Carol. Holmes was to write the the first four and the last two episodes leaving the season with some gigantic cliffhanger discussed with the season’s other original writers, Philip Martin, Jack Trevor Story and David Halliday. The latter two’s scripts were not used.

The characters of the Valeyard and the Inquisitor were Holmes’, who wrote the trial sequences into his first story, a black script entitled variously, ‘Wasteland’, ‘The Robots of Ravalox’ and ‘The Mysterious Planet’. The sequences that proliferated the other segments of the trial were Saward’s. Saward requested Holmes make the scripts ‘funnier’, following the direction Nathan-Turner planned to take after criticisms about the overt violence of the previous season.

With the scripts for those first four episodes apparently completed, they were sent to Jonathan Powell’s office for approval, as was normal procedure. Nicholas Mallett was assigned as director, while the scripts remained with Powell for several weeks. Finally the scripts returned with a notes from Powell extensively criticising the story. Powell is well-known in his dislike for Doctor Who and science fiction in general, so his criticisms were perhaps inappropriate. Holmes apparently performed rewrites, but as his attention shifted to the final two episodes, initially called ‘Time Incorporated’ (or ‘Time Inc.’), and as criticism continued from the Sixth Floor, it fell to Saward to extensively rewrite the story. How much of the script is Holmes’ and how much is Saward’s is difficult to guess, though Glitz and Dibber would appear a classic Holmes double-act (although, interestingly, it was these two characters Powell particularly objected to, so perhaps they were toned down by Saward?), as would Humker and Tandrell. Certain lines and exchanges, such as Sabalom Glitz’s talk of prison psychiatrists, sound Holmesian, but Saward has acknowledged how much his style had been influenced by Holmes. Overall though, the story is nothing special; although having an interesting premise, it is plotted rather dully. A traditional Doctor Who story, I suppose, but fans expected far more from Robert Holmes, on whose door criticism rather unfairly landed on the story’s transmission after his death.

Holmes had had trouble with his liver for many years, and he fell ill with another such affliction as he began work on the final two episodes of ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’. The details of the season’s climax hadn’t been specifically discussed with Saward and Nathan-Turner. Saward: “It was pointless until I had received all the scripts for the series. The only thing [Holmes and I] both wanted was that the Doctor was found guilty.”

Early on, Holmes was contacted again by Nigel Robinson in view of novelising the final two episodes of the season, which were then still yet to be written. Robinson: “Although not contracted (and this was before the final Baker season débâcle) Bob and I agreed that he was to novelise the final two episdoes of ‘Trial of a Time Lord’. I don’t know how Bob’s final script/novel would have turned out, but during a long and detailed chat on the phone Bob said that the Valeyard was very definitely the Doctor’s thirteenth regeneration (and not ‘somewhere between’ his twelth and final regeneration as stated in Pip and Jane’s televised version); also he planned the ending as a physical battle between the Doctor and the Valeyard, with the open-ended final episode closing with them both falling to their ‘deaths’ (a la Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty). Those were, at least, his ideas a few weeks before he died, though they may, of course, have changed during discussions with JNT and Eric Saward.”

With episode thirteen nearly completed and about twelve or thirteen minutes into the final episode, Robert Colin Holmes collapsed and fell into a coma. He died peacefully soon after on May 24th 1986, at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. He had been working on a big novel at the time of his death.

Tributes

Personally I consider him, with David Whitaker, the greatest writer to have worked on Doctor Who. As someone who never really appreciated his own talents, his scripts show a remarkable skill in giving the audience what they want. That is, compelling, unpredictable, often off-the-wall, stories, populated with equally bizarre and appealing characters. Although his 80s work shows something of a tailing off in quantity and indeed, quality, he was often working under difficult (and unprofessional) circumstances, and he left behind plenty of colourful stories during the 70s (‘Carnival of Monsters’, ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’, ‘The Sun Makers’, ‘The Ribos Operation’, etc etc…) for fans to enjoy and wallow in the wonderful things they do.

Terrance Dicks: “Bob Holmes was one of the finest writers to work on Who we worked together since my earliest days on the show. He was a nice, though sometimes prickly man, with a keen and sometimes mordant sense of humour, and a love of gruesomeness. He’s a great loss.”

Jon Thurley (Holmes’ agent): “Personally Bob was quiet, self-effacing, very likeable, with a dry sense of humour who never used two words where one would do. We used to meet periodically for one of the ferocious curries he liked so much at one of the many curry houses he ferretted out over the years.”

Eric Saward: “Socially Bob was great fun, full of life and energy, and by the evening, usually full of wine as well.”

Roger Marshall: “Bob Holmes and I were great mates and I still miss him. Our last meeting was at a friend’s flat. This friend was trying to get a group of like-minded thriller writers together to contribute to a series. Bob, who had a marvellously wry sense of humour, didn’t rate its chances any higher than I did. We left together, went strolling around a few bookshops. We parted at some tube station, with the promise that ‘we must meet more often’. I never saw him again.

“His wife, Pat, said he was the nicest human being she ever met. Not a bad obituary. Lots of shitty, phoney people on television. Bob was neither. He was a gent!”

Graham Williams [DWB 38]: “I only hope that wherever he is now the fees get paid quicker and the phone never stops ringing. I’m sure that’ll be the way of it even over there, they’ll know a good thing when they see it…”

Eric Saward was to rewrite the final two-thirds of the penultimate episode and the whole of the last, sticking to Holmes’ basic plan. Elements lost were that the Valeyard and the Doctor were meant to be similar in appearance, so much so that Mel believes them to be brothers. The validity of the three segments of the trial were also much more in doubt, as depicted by the intended appearance of Popplewick’s office: a room from Vervoid’s spacecraft redressed with Victorian trappings. A synopsis of Saward’s version of episode fourteen appears in Skaro 6.

Of course, Saward withdrew that episode in a flurry of stress, panic and publicity, and says he would also have liked to “have withdrawn the penultimate as well, but Bob had been originally commissioned to write it, therefore it had his name on.”

The televised version bears a few of Holmes’ trademarks, with some witty and apparently typical, dialogue ["I would point out that much of the Railyard's so-called evidence was a farago of distortion which would have had Ananias, Baron Munchhausen, and every other famous liar blushing down to their very toenails"], though, like ‘The Mysterious Planet’, it’s impossible to say how much of the script was Holmes’. The sequences in the Matrix are also just as effective and doomladen as their counterparts in ‘The Deadly Assassin’. Popplewick appears to be more Saward than Holmes (he was to have been a weasly, more Dickensian individual), and wasn’t originally a disguised Valeyard.

It pains me to admit it but Pip and Jane Baker’s version of episode fourteen isn’t bad. Holmes/Saward’s first half may explode into the tangle of confusion the Bakers reckon constitutes a good story, and leave more loose ends than they resolve, but it’s a reasonable effort when you consider they had four days to finish off a story they’d had no involvement with, and without any idea of the original intentions for that final episode. And at least Glitz’s fine character comes off better that it would in ‘Dragonfire’.

‘The Trial of a Time Lord’ Part Thirteen was Robert Holmes’ last work for television. An episode of Bergerac, ‘Winner Takes All’, written by Holmes, was transmitted on 10th January 1987, but it had been held over from the previous season in 1985.

Not much funny happens to you when most of your life is spent in solitary confinement staring at a typewriter. Not funny-funny things, anyway. Statistically, I suppose writers must cop their fair share of ordinary funny things like train accidents and boilers going bang in the night.

I once dropped a coal-hod containing half a hundredweight of Phurnacite on my foot. As the steel rim splintered into the metatarsal that controls my big toe I remember screaming, “Good gracious! That’s funny.”

Later that day I was talking to Louis Marks … I mentioned the appalling agony I was suffering and Louis, who is a doctor, took immediate clinical control. “Take a needle in a pair of pliers,’ he advised, ‘and heat it until it’s incandescent. Then drive it through the toe-nail.”

Louis is one of the funniest chaps I know, as well as being a doctor of philosophy.

Robert Holmes, ‘A Life of Hammer and Tongs’ (The Doctor Who File)

WITH THANKS TO: Terrance Dicks, Roger Marshall, John Nathan-Turner, Andrew Pixley, Nigel Robinson, Eric Saward, Jon M Thurley; and Alun Harris and Jeremy Bentham for the encouragement.REFERENCES: Bob Holmes interview [DWM 100] and article [The Doctor Who File], Eric Saward interviews [DWM 94; DWB 57/58, 106/107], Anthony Read interview [DWM 118], John Nathan-Turner interview [DWM 164], ‘Timeslip’ [Starburst 90], ‘The Guest of Madam Guillotine’ [Skaro 6], ‘The Fact of Fiction’ [Time Screen 5], ‘The Death of Yesterday’ [DWB 97/98], various DWM Archives.