Doctor Who Listener Archive - 1986

25 January 1986
Vol 112 No 2397 (25-31 Jan 1986)
p79: What I'd Watch column by "Robyn Holbrook (National Secretary of NZ Tecorians)" (excerpt)

But it is the unpretentious Dr Who on Friday at 6.30 pm that really gets my family together. It is not really my thing but I like the togetherness it creates.

8 March 1986
Vol 112 No 2403 (8-14 Mar 1986)
p??: TV People column by Bryan Nicholson (excerpt from item about the 25th anniversary of Coronation Street)

One fascinating aspect of the Street is that it has played host to a wide array of talent that has gone on to become famous elsewhere... the Street's impressive list... includes... Patrick Troughton (Dr Who)...

15 March 1986
Vol 112 No 2404 (15-21 Mar 1986)
p72: What I'd Watch column by "Graeme Coote (Nuclear Physicist)" (excerpt)

On Tuesday I will try to get home early to see Dr Who (5.30 pm on ONE) whom I missed in these early series. It is comforting to find that English is spoken in so many parts of the galaxy.

19 April 1986
Vol 112 No 2409 (19-25 Apr 1986)
p105: photo (b/w) of the Third Doctor [from The Sea Devils]; TV listings: Frontier in Space Episode Three (TV1, Tuesday 22/04/86)

ONE The Doctor (Jon Pertwee), sentenced to Lunar Penal Colony for political offences, organises an escape with the help of another prisoner. But things don't always go according to plan in DR WHO at 5.30 this afternoon.

17 May 1986
Vol 113 No 2413 (17-23 May 1986)
p112-113: photo of a Dalek; TV listings: Planet of the Daleks Episode One (TV1, Tuesday 20/05/86)

ONE "Ex-ter-min-ate! Ex-ter-min-ate!" The Daleks are back. The Daleks who originated on Skaro, a world that had been devastated by a neutron bomb, are a race of mutants who have lost the use of arms and legs and are obliged to live in a heavy metal casing. In tonight's story of DR WHO at 5.25, the Daleks turn up on another planet, Spiridon.

28 June 1986
Vol 113 No 2419 (28 Jun-4 Jul 1986)
cover: full page photo (col) of Jon Pertwee as himself and as Worzel Gummidge (photographed by Jane Ussher for the New Zealand Listener)

JON PERTWEE
Dr Who, meet Worzel Gummidge

DR WHO, Tuesdays on ONE, 5.30pm
THE NAVY LARK, Saturdays on National Radio, 11.05am

PERTWEE'S PROGRESS
by Douglas Jenkin

In his time Jon Pertwee has played everything from a Greek wind to Dr Who. In New Zealand recently he starred as one of his best-known characters, Worzel Gummidge.

A SCARECROW wearing bifocal sunglasses sits at a table on the edge of a vast expanse of green lawn. He is having lunch with a friend, a silver-haired, softly-spoken man who, casually dressed, wears a Mickey Mouse pin in his lapel. Above, the autumn sky is a sharp blue and a single tuft of white cloud adds the final, slightly surreal touch to the scene.

The scarecrow is actor Jon Pertwee, his friend, director James Hill. And the vast expanse of green is the Te Marua golf course near Upper Hutt, the location for a new television series Worzel Gummidge Downunder. The two men, both born in 1919, chat amiably about their long, fascinating careers as they enjoy their meal. But the conversation is interrupted by the persistent presence of an inquisitive and, it turns out, rather hungry wasp. James Hill brushes the insect away as he talks. It returns

"James doesn't like wasps," Pertwee says as I join them at the table, "but I don't mind them."

"I don't mind them too much," replies Hill, "but it's drinking my fruit juice."

Pertwee peers over his glasses, spies the wasp, tilts his scarecrow's head to one side, extends a finger (straw pops from the end of his coat sleeve) and squishes the pest against the polystyrene cup.

"Well it won't any longer," Pertwee says with a chuckle.

"Did it get much?" Hill inquires, engrossed in his dessert.

"Yes," says Pertwee, "but not enough to worry about..." And they both laugh quietly together, bemused, enjoying the sunshine and their work.

At this point, much to his annoyance, Pertwee discovers that he's still wearing Worzel's teeth - a film of stained, decidedly scarecrow-like false ones that fit over his own pearly whites. Worzel's teeth break as he tries to remove them. Pertwee curses (mildly) and gives them, with apologies, to the waiting makeup man. The Worzel Gummidge costume - straw hair, turnip nose, rubber warts - looks uncomfortable but Pertwee says he's been working in it for so long (this is the fifth series of the show he's starred in) that it's like a second skin. "I don't even know I've got it on," he says. The teeth, too, have caused problems on previous occasions. "I've actually gone out to dinner," Pertwee says, "and looked across the table at a beautiful lady with a hot, burning look - and received a shriek of laughter because I'd forgotten I had these teeth in."

What, ask visitors to the set, brings Worzel "downunder"? The story, a long and curious one, should have ended with Pertwee and Hill enjoying a rural location in Ireland, not New Zealand. But after production company changes and an industrial dispute in Britain, New Zealand producer Grahame McLean stepped in and bought the rights to the show - and the scripts.

The changes made to transpose the Worzel tales from Ireland to New Zealand, McLean says, weren't that considerable. The stories "are quite fantastic in the sense that they don't belong in a specific time or place. Instead of Worzel going to Ireland he goes to New Zealand. The motive for that is that Aunt Sally, the fairground doll that Worzel's in love with, is bought by an antique dealer in New Zealand and shipped out here. He stows away on a plane and follows her out." Adventures follow. "Downunder."

The aforementioned Aunt Sally is standing outside her caravan on the golf course. Beneath the brightly painted doll's face is Una Stubbs. She shields her eyes from the sun and then ducks into her caravan for a cigarette as a group of golfers approach. Una, someone explains, has to stay out of the sun to avoid tanning. The group of golfers cross the turf and hover near Pertwee and Hill who are still enjoying their midday break.

"Can I just say hello to Mr Pertwee. Hello!" calls a perky woman golfer with ruddy cheeks.

"Hello," says Pertwee.

"I've seen you a million times on TV," she exclaims.

"You can't avoid it, madam," Pertwee replies in his mellifluous voice the colour of fine port, "you have no choice."

Pertwee, and his fan, are referring to the current repeat screenings of Dr Who - Pertwee played the title character for five years. The BBC series, which began in 1963, is the longest-running science-fiction programme in the history of television. Dr Who's a rather pompous, self-opinionated man who's a know-all," says Pertwee, "but I enjoyed playing him very much indeed."

He left the series, he says, not because he was tired of playing the character, but because an era in the show's history came to an end. "Barry Letts, the producer I admired and worked very well with, left and Roger Delgado, who played the Master, was sadly killed. He was a very close friend and I felt his loss very much. Then the script editor left and it seemed to be the end of an era. So I left. But it's by no means dead. I spend half my time in America now because Dr Who is the number one science-fiction show there."

Jon Pertwee is in great demand for science-fiction conventions, particularly in America. He usually appears on a panel once and then likes to do a solo spot. "I just talk for an hour-and-a-half on the theatre or anything they want to talk about." In America, he says, they like to talk about England. "There are things they want to know about the Royal Family," Pertwee says. "They often ask what I think of Prince Andrew's engagement to Sarah Ferguson. They really want to know about these things," he chuckles, "it's very strange."

TELLING STORIES about the theatre, as he does at the science fiction conventions, Pertwee is in his element for he is, as he says, essentially a raconteur, a teller of anecdotes that are often witty, often droll. It's in his blood, he says, the theatre. Son of Roland (playwright-actor) and brother of Michael (playwright-screenwriter), Jon was first coaxed before an audience at the age of three by his grandmother. His grandmother (and three of her sisters) had been opera singers, coached in their youth by Mathilde Marchesi, the woman who first recognised and developed the vocal potential of Dame Nellie Melba. What Grandmother Pertwee encouraged little Jon to recite 64 years ago he remembers to this day. "I recited a poem about a duck," Pertwee recalls. "It was very good." And then, to James Hill's amusement, he recites, barely pausing to recall the words...

"Around the corner, out of sight,
Luckily all of us armed to fight,
'Who goes there?', cried little Jack
And a small voice answered...
'Quack, quack, quack.'

"Rather good isn't it? I was a riotous success - got a standing ovation which quite convinced my grandmother that Olivier didn't stand a chance in the theatre."

Later, Pertwee attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but he was thrown out. They said he didn't take it seriously, that he obviously had no future in the theatre at all. "I did take it seriously," Pertwee says, "but I wanted to get on with the acting. I didn't want to go around being a Greek wind. As part of a chorus in a classic Greek play they were trying to make me into a Greek wind and I thought it was terribly boring going ooooh, ooooh.

"Anyway Mr Coward was present at the last performance I did at RADA. I was playing two roles - both very short. I played the part of a man who was murdered in the first act and then the detective who found out who murdered me in the last. At the end of the show Kenneth Barnes, who'd fired me, asked Mr Coward (Pertwee suddenly changes his voice into a thin, nasal sound, very theatre): 'Was there, ah, anybody that you, sort of found showed any sort of talent at all?'

"And he said: (Pertwee does Noel Coward's voice perfectly: Clipped. Punctilious.) 'Yes. I thought there was a very good young lady there. Excellent. Great, great quality.' (It was Joan Greenwood who, became a very big star:' adds Pertwee in an aside.)

"'And, [as Coward again] ooh, there were two young men that I thought showed definite ability. The young fellow in the first act who played the man who was murdered and I particularly liked the detective in the last act.'

"For which I nearly kissed Mr Coward:' laughs Pertwee. "Of course Kenneth Barnes wasn't best pleased because he'd just thrown me out."

Pertwee then toured England with "fit up" companies, playing a different town each night. Some theatres didn't have electricity and so the company took their own gas lighting (and a proscenium arch) with them. The company had a programme of 150 items from which the audience chose 10. There were, says Pertwee, extracts from the classics, a good one-act play and the rest was "sort of high-class vaudeville. We did classical mime, bits of ballet, sea shanties and things - but beautifully staged." After touring in a repertory company, he appeared in films - as an extra - along with Michael Wilding, Stewart Granger and Richard Attenborough.

In 1939 Pertwee joined the navy and became involved with the broadcasting section. He accompanied one of his bosses to check out a broadcaster named Eric Barker who was, it was said, using material that was derogatory to the "lords of the admiralty". But Pertwee was a very bad spy because when Barker called for a volunteer from the audience to shout out a line in raucous Cockney, he jumped at the chance. The joke, of course, was of the type he'd been sent to prevent.

Pertwee worked with Barker on the naval edition of Merry-go-Round for five years and the characters he played (over 90 of them) and their catchphrases established him as one of the great "funny-voice" men of radio. His postman from Puffney became a national hero and it was this character that Hall and Waterhouse remembered when they were first thinking of someone to play Worzel Gummidge. His career in radio culminated in a long run as the chief petty officer in The Navy Lark (currently re-playing on Radio New Zealand) and his own show Pertwee's Progress.

It was from radio that the stars were chosen to tour the music halls and Jon Pertwee spent many years touring vaudeville theatres, often topping the bill. "I enjoyed it:' he says today, "it was a good time. And then television started and I did an early TV series called The Amazing Adventures of Commander High Price. Dreadful it was. Quite appalling. It was broadcast live from the Alexandra Palace under batteries of lights which were so hot they frizzled you, fried you."

James Hill joins Pertwee in recalling the early days of British television. "I must say I've never heard of this programme," says Hill.

"I'm glad to hear it," says Pertwee. "Everything was done live, nothing was taped. Oh it was awful. Most nerve-racking. I mean I did plays..."

Hill recalls how actors when they'd forgotten their lines would just continue to mouth words, any words, silently. "And pretend it was a technical breakdown," laughs Pertwee.

"Yes," says Hill, "so that people at home wouldn't think, 'Oh, the fool, he's forgotten his lines.' "

"That show destroyed me for years on television. Absolutely destroyed me," says Pertwee. "I wanted to do a sitcom but they put me in this revue-type thing with dancing girls. They tried to make everything big, which was silly because the screens were only nine inches square!"

Down but far from out, Pertwee went back "on the halls", did cabaret (including three stints in New Zealand) then films and a series of long-running hit plays including There's a Girl in My Soup, which he took to Broadway. On his return to England he went straight into Dr Who and then, in 1978, began playing Worzel Gummidge.

Worzel, says Pertwee, is "the actor's dream role. He runs the gamut of emotions from A to Z in 24 minutes. And he's by no means a saint..."

"He's a pig," adds James Hill, "the original male chauvinist pig."

"There's a wonderful sequence," Pertwee says, "that James shot and put into slow motion where Worzel rescues Aunt Sally on a white horse, a charger. He whisks her up onto the back of the horse and she's got this long white robe and it all sort of floats and James has them play Wagner at the back... Wonderful" says Pertwee with a smile.

The two men discuss the trouble they initially had getting Worzel Gummidge to the screen.

"The interesting thing," says Hill, "is that I'd never heard of Worzel Gummidge, had you?"

"Oh, yes. I'd read it as a kid," says Pertwee.

"I'd never heard of it, this classic, but when I first read the scripts they made me start laughing aloud which is quite rare to read that off the printed page," says Hill.

"But it's not only that, it suits James's sense of humour and mine. This is why we've got such a tremendous rapport:' says Pertwee. "We laugh at things together I don't laugh at with anybody else."

From left above, Jon Pertwee in radio's Merry-go-Round (1947), the star of his own show (centre), Pertwee's Progress (1955) and in The Navy Lark (1959).

Opposite page: Pertwee the star of TV's Dr Who and Worzel Gummidge.

p83: photo (b/w) of the Third Doctor [from The Sea Devils]; TV listings: The Green Death Episode One (TV1, Tuesday 01/07/86)

ONE Jon Pertwee begins a new adventure this evening in DR WHO (5.30), and a feature on the actor appears on page 10.

p99: TV People column by Bryan Nicholson

More news from the BBC, and some that will have Dr Who fans cavorting with glee - the good Doctor is on his way back in a brand new series. Controller of Programmes for BBC1, Michael Grade, recently told listeners to a talkback session that "there’s no question of him being killed off, in fact there's going to be a new series next year". In explaining to listeners why he had stopped Dr Who in his tracks - succeeding where hundreds of alien life-forms had failed - Grade said that the series had "lost a lot of its imagination and wit and had failed to capture a new audience. I decided it was time to take stock of the show, to look at it, rethink the shape of the programme and to rethink how we could revitalise Dr Who so that it would last another 20 years".

20 September 1986
Vol 114 No 2431 (20-26 Sep 1986)
p??: Behind the Screen column (formerly TV People) by Bryan Nicholson (excerpt)

The BBC unveiled its autumn schedule at the end of August... Dr Who fans will (hopefully) at last fall silent for the Doctor has shaken off the time-lock to make a triumphant return.

11 October 1986
Vol 114 No 2434 (11-17 Oct 1986)
p118-119: photo (col) of the TARDIS [from State of Decay] and insert illustration (b/w) of a Dalek; TV listings: Death to the Daleks Part One (TV1, Tuesday 14/10/86)

ONE Daleks - of all the evils in all the worlds, DR WHO has to fly into this one. Can the Tardis get them away? "Death to the Daleks", a four-part story, starts this evening at 5.30.

18 October 1986
Vol 114 No 2435 (18-24 Oct 1986)
p23: Behind the Screen column by Bryan Nicholson

AS REPORTED a couple of weeks ago, Dr Who has made it back on screen as part of the BBC's new autumn season schedule. Not that the Doctor had been idle during his time off - for one thing, he has been attending Dr Who conventions in America. Similar to Trekkies conventions (incidentally. it's now 20 years since Star Trek first hit the screen) the Dr Who conventions attract the faithful to "talk about the programme, look at it, compare notes, and dress up" says current Doctor Colin Baker. There are a number of changes in the latest series - for a start ,the familiar old police phonebox has gone, on the quite reasonable grounds that they no longer, exist in Britain and are therefore not familiar but quite mystifying to today’s youngsters. The Doctor will also be getting a new companion (the 26th to date) and the assistance of such distinguished actors as Brian Blessed, Michael Craig, and Honor Blackman.

25 October 1986
Vol 114 No 2436 (25-31 Oct 1986)
p126: photo (b/w) of Sarah Jane Smith [from Death to the Daleks]; TV listings: Death to the Daleks Part Three (TV1, Tuesday 28/10/86)

ONE Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen) is on the run in DR WHO, 5.25pm.

8 November 1986
Vol 114 No 2438 (8-14 Nov 1986)
p??: Behind the Screen column by Bryan Nicholson (excerpt)

First it was Live Aid, then Sport Aid and now it's "Soap Aid". Britain's top soap opera star recently got together for a famine relief appeal to sign autographs and encourage people to rally to the cause. Hosting the event was Anita Dobson... who in addition to other soap stars had Dr Who (Colin Baker) and his latest assistant Bonnie Langford on hand.