BBC1 will probably show this around Halloween. Brace yourselves for something special!

As always please post your comments!

Most of you know by now that ABC1 are broadcasting the new episode of Doctor Who on Sunday, the 31st of May. I’ll present a blurb here for those of you who are reading this blog.

When a London bus takes a detour to an alien world, the Doctor must join forces with the extraordinary Lady Christina, in this one-off seasonal special. But the mysterious planet holds terrifying secrets, hidden in the sand. And time is running out, as the deadly Swarm gets closer. Planet Of The Dead features David Tennant as the Doctor, Michelle Ryan as Lady Christina and Lee Evans as Malcolm. It is written by Russell T Davies and Gareth Roberts.

David Tennant as the Doctor, Michelle Ryan as Lady Christina

If you wish to post comments, feel free to do so?

I thought it would be appropriate today to talk about the only episode of Doctor Who that after the master videotape was wiped, it was permanently erased forever. The episode in question is none other than The Feast of Steven. There was no telerecording done by BBC Enterprises (now BBC Worldwide) at the time. When the television station the ABC in Australia was offered the Dalek story, Daleks’ Masterplan, they received the 11 episode story as viewing T/Rs & not the 12 parter that was originally broadcasted over the winter months of late 1965 – early 1966.

TFoS was deemed inappropriate for sale as the Doctor (William Hartnell) breaks the fourth wall to wish the viewers a Merry Christmas. This wasn’t suppose to happen in 1965.

Although the visual aspect of this episode doesn’t exist, happily some fans recorded it onto audio tape whilst the episode was being broadcasted on BBC1 on 25th of December, 1965. Also there are some pictures, probably taken from the television existing for the memorable episodes.

We maybe lucky and someone recorded it on a VKR-500 1965 Home Video Recorder, or maybe not. Only time will tell!

Film can found at the fair, c.2007.

Imagine the scene.

Morning at your local Antiques Fair.

Not quite crowded, but with a number of people and a bit of hustle and bustle.  One seller deals with football memorabilia and unusually his stall has a large number of boxes of silver cans.  No ordinary cans for sure.

You instantly recognise they are film cans and quickly move to the stall, asking if you can look through the cans.  The first few are unremarkable, being film copies of football matches from the 1970s and then your heart skips a beat because in front of you is an older label which clearly identifies an old TV programme you don’t immediately recognise.  Instinct being what it is you flip the can towards you to see what the next can is.

If your heart skipped a beat on the first can, you get a salvo as you view the second, for in front of you is the holy grail of missing Television.  A tattered, yellowed, sickly sellotaped label, watermarked and pocketmarked reveals the title “The Tenth Planet” Part 4.  To someone who isn’t indoctrinated in the ways of Doctor Who fandom the title means absolutely nothing.  If you were told that this is the last episode the first Doctor, Wiiliam Hartnell appeared in and it has been missing for 35 years you might understand the significance.  You tentatively asked the dealer how much the films are and he replies £10 each, but “if it’s the Doctor Who I want 20 because that is probably rare.”

In delirium you forget the other cans, taking your wallet out as slowly as possible and handing over a £20 note, trying to keep clam. The rest of the Antiques Fair is now meaningless and as you walk out the door you remember you didn’t even check what was on the other cans. Outside the venue your ticket is now expired. You decide to go back in the afternoon, but that second visit reveals nothing except that more of the film cans have been sold and you have no way of knowing what was on them. However, you have found gold. Next step is to find a 16mm projector…

So there you have the dream scenario for any Doctor Who fan. Remarkably there are over 100 missing episodes of the series. All were made in black-and-white. This particular case of Doctor Who is so well known it is almost a pub trivia question and general cultural hot potato. Certainly it is one of the few examples of missing Television which has actually penetrated public consciousness, even to a small extent. If the public know little, mass fandom has examined the area in such detail that they have only stopped short of materialising the missing episodes through mass will power.

The whole saga of how these programmes became missing is generally told via the fans as a David versus Goliath story. It does seem this way on the surface. The Goliath in our story is BBC bureaucracy that “destroyed the episodes” and the David side is represented by “crusading” fans that snatched episodes as they were thrown into the fiery furnace. So what is the truth? One should peel away the phony layers of mysticism and minor legend and peer further into a complex tale. This blog entry examines this and explains how the author came on the trail of missing Doctor Who, his experience of fan attitudes and what he found.

The obvious crucial question for anyone who doesn’t know anything about the subject is why these episodes are missing in the first place. A book could be written just on this subject but there are a few salient facts. Doctor Who in common with many other 1960s programmes was recorded on videotape, which was a reased and re-used as needed. Very much like a TIVO, it was an expensive means of holding a recording, but not for keeping it for a long period.

Programmes were generally held for the option of a single repeat and then erased. The period between recording and wiping in 1960s TV was typically, but not always around three years. In the case of Dr Who very few 1960s episodes were repeated at the time and thus being a serial, past episodes had no future repeat value.

With colour television starting in 1967 all black-and-white programmes were beginning to look like technological antiques. So today, not a single episode of 1960s Doctor Who survives on an original master videotape. If videotape had been the only means of recording absolutely nothing would survive, but the assortment of stories and episodes which do survive do so because they were copied directly to 16mm film.

The reason for this was not to preserve the probrammes or for usie in the United Kingdom, but as a means to send the episodes abroad. Mostly these prints were destined for Commonwealth countires. So there were actually two sets of each doctor who episode generally made, one on videotape and transcription copy on film.

The film copy wasn’t as good as the tape, but it was a cheap method of durable programme distribution. The film negatives mostly ended up at BBC Enterprises who exploited the episodes abroad, but eventually junked both prints and negatives when they were no further use. The bureaucracy angle is interesting in that BBC Enterprises wouldn’t necessarily know that the destroyed prints were the last remaining copies. By the time these film copies were being destroyed in the early 1970s, colour TV had caught on in a big way.

There was public apathy to any black-and-white material been shown. Programmes like “Points of View” and the letters page of the “Radio Times” and other tabloid television pages often revealed outright hostility from viewers. Presented with a black-and-white programmes they felt cheated after buying a colour set, which in 2007 prices was the equivalent of £4000. It’s a bit like buying a high definition set today and getting the service, but all the programmes are mostly low definition.

In that climate and with the well-known lesser quality of the film recordings, from a bureucratic point of view they were about as much use as silent films were after the conversion to sound. The whole focus today is on the possibilty that one of these transcription 16mm prints could turn up anywhere.

Of lesser debate amongst fans are the original master tapes which never seem to be defined in regards to why they were wiped. They endlessly repeated mantra you’ll find on the internet is that they were swalloed up in a mass array by some indiscriminate BBC Moloch. It’s the stuff of legend but not necessarily truth. Other programmes of probably lesser importance to popular culture have survived intact.

Ironically, Doctor Who was featured regularly and some clips of missing episodes exist today because they were used in “Blue Peter”. In the case of Doctor Who, the production team shifted many times and current knowledge this suggests that wiping permission for the black-and-white episodes was given by the teams responsible for making their 1970s colour episodes. So we have the potentially uncomfortable truth that the programme was partly destroyed by its own makers.

Where does that leave the fans? By 1978 organisation and interest in the show had reached a peak and several well-intentioned fans were making contact with the BBC. By the time they did this they were able to prevent further junking by making the matter well known to the point where the value of holding onto the remaining black-and-white material was established. In short, it did still have a market value.

That didn’t just hold for Doctor Who of course. Complete missing gaps from many other 1960s and early 1970s TV series where filled by retaining black-and-white film prints which were at least better than nothing at all. Much of what does survive now depends on the number of prints struck and when that they were printed, but also the qualities of random survival based on bureaucratic chance.

One factor which hadn’t been taken into account at the time was that there might be 16mm prints held in private hands. Remarkably, many people involved in the television industry did retain copies of shows they were involved in. This wasn’t a widespread practice and very much in the minority, but sometimes these were given as presentations and even taken from the piles of film destined for junking.

In addition many overseas prints found teir way into private hands. When you consider the number of these film recordings reached into the thousands by the 1960s, this was prehaps inevitable. Knowledge of the existence of such prints snowballed in the 1980s and a number of then missing episodes began to appear sporadically before all avenues appeared to be exhausted. Further gaps in missing colour episodes were filled by foreign TV stations returning tapes, which replaced black-and-white film recordings.

By the dawn of the 1990s future recovery of episodes looked particularly bleak but there have been a few surprises. Notably, the return of our highly regarded 1967 serial “The Tomb of the Cybermen”. This was rediscovered in a Hong Kong depository. At one time this set of prints would have been destroyed but by sheer chance had left them untouched. A couple off single surviving episodes also turned up and a fairly substantial selection of extract and clips.

With the internet explosion taking off in the mid-1990s, it wasn’t very long before fans eagerly started posting lists of missing episodes and then websites followed. All of this in the hope that coverage would result in a episode recovery, so far despite hundreds of internet references and probably thousands of comments on the subject nothing has resulted of any substance. Much of this is surely due to the intended publicity mostly hitting fans who already know the situation, rather that then people who don’t.

This of course doesn’t mean to say that the internet couldn’t prove fruitful and indeed it has been helpful in identifying previously missing episodes of other television programmes some of which have turned up on internet auction sites.

Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of this is that most of the fan focus has been in this direction. It’s easy publicity but it does not tap into the groups off where missing episodes should and possibly could still remain. It is however cheap and cheerful, but it doesn’t pay back the meagre efforts put in.

So this brings me into describing my involvement. Being interested in the subject of missing television in general. I was surprised to find even in the 1990s, that there were still a fairly large quantity of missing TV shows circulating and largely ignored by organised Dr Who fans. Conversations with collectors and dealers all drew a rather unfortunate picture of unsubtle approaches and rather naive bargaining.

A typical request was that the collector or dealer should phone the fan when he found a missing episode and the fan would send him a cheque, often stipulating that as a private sale, they wouldn’t pay more than a set amount, perhaps £30. After many such queries, most collectors and dealers quickly came to the conclusion that such a film print would be worth hundreds and whilst easily sold, would have been crazy to contact a fan who phoned up two years earlier on a whim.

In fact, good material was only becoming if you knew the person well and noted as a regular trader. Even then, nothing was guaranteed. There must have been a few fans sitting back, confidently waiting for the phone to ring. They still are.

In most cases the fans simply weren’t interested in anything but Doctor Who. This surprised me at the time though in restrospect, much less so. I had no idea how narrow minded some requests were and I gleaned much information from speaking to dealers. Other anecdotal evidence did reveal a rather ugly underside of ego parading as goodwill.

This has led to downright bizarre instances of friends outbidding each other in online auctions for missing television, often oblivious to each other because of unknown user ids. Pockets of related fan groups each appear to follow their own self regarding rules with respect to such material. On the surface it all seems of general benefit, but underneath there are furious undercurrents of ego, thrashing like eels in a basket.

This process of finding missing television if often more than 80 per cent investigation and 20 per cent luck. I was constantly amazed visiting film fairs to see people bluntly walking up to a stall and asking for any missing doctor who. It almost became a sport listening to the conversations. Regardless of the hobby or their interest such behaviour is hardly subtle. On getting a predictable negative reply that they might even flick through film cans before moving on to the next stall.

It was actually possible to then walk up to the same stall and in one case I remember clearly finding two missing ATV television programmes. It is for you the reader to consider the amorality of this but I tell the story from not just one experience.

Fans of that nature surely see it differently, with a constant lurch over the moral high ground, but you can still see the whites of their eyes glistening when they asked their questions, which tell you as much as the approach “I’m looking for the BBC series Doctor Who, do you have any episodes?”. One dealer told me it was amusing that the question was often asked as if they expected the reply along the lines of “I have two here, probably not worth much, shall we say a tenner each? It’s been a bad day for business and I’m grateful for making even that today”.

It was inevitable that I would eventually come into contact with a potential Doctor Who episode given the number of other TV programmes I spotted. One prime example, being a chance conversation with a film collector who remembered they had an episode with “Daleks in it” somewhere in a very large collection of random cans.

It may seem strange to the reader that such a collection wasn’t catalogued but film collectors are often apposite personalities. In many ways they are the antithesis of that bureaucracy and librarian attitudes that destroyed the episodes. In my case I was faced with a potentially missing episode and had to search through an enormous quantity of film cans. Most of the material was educational films and often had obscure labels.

I had to look at the actual leader in some cases. In a situation worthy of some forgotten Francis Durbridge serial, the very last can I found actually had a BBC Recording Leader on it. SAdly, this was just a red herring. This didn’t obscure the certain fsct that the collector in question had seen such an episode that but it been possibly sold on years earlier and forgotten about. You also have to remeber the person in question was approaching 70 and his memory wans’t particularly reliable.

Looking at this in reflection, there is a very good chance that the print in question was probably nothing more than an extract of one single episode produced for educational use in the 1960s. This was an episode of a William Hartnell serial called the “Dalek Invasion of Earth” and it does appear that a few prints of this have escaped into private hands. Around this time I also did secure another episode described to me as being on 8mm film and featuring the Cybermen. I had to buy unseen and the episode turned out to be a very good dupe of a previously missing episode which had been returned to the BBC on 16mm.

The Cybermen must have been popular because about two years after this I came into contact with a collector offering an episode featuring them in on 16mm. This turned out to be an original print of a Patrick Troughton episode, which did exist in the BBC Archives. The asking price was £290.

So there are three example where being very close didn’t necessarily prove fruitful, but without choosing favourites, careful methods and subtle inquiries did allow me the chance to secure a large number of missing television shows from other programmes which were subsequently returned for copying to the the BBC and the BFI.

Fan criticism as voiced on the internet appears to be often prejudicial amd simplified to the extent that all film collectors are hoarders determined to potentially deny fans the chance to see old episodes. In truth much of the trouble concerning missing Television. Then, they placed demands or attention-seeking behaviour based on the material they held.

One such case turned into a private tragedy when the fan in question cut-up and basically mutilated film prints and sent cuttings of these to organisations which hadn’t bowed to his demands.

It is fair to say that most collectors love film to the extent that such an act would be abhorrent to them. The danger lies in people who like Doctor Who more than film collecting, getting hold of material or attempting to get hold of material whilst having the potential to exercise such dubious morality. Emotion betrays reason.

When I did find a rare programme I often had to resist the temptation to watch it because I was aware that a sole surving print could be damaged. This was brought home to me once when the film leader broke in a projector and I was faced with such a situation. For this reason my advice to anyone who finds the sole surviving known print of anything is to ensure it is professionally transferred or copied. It should not be used as a viewing print under and circumstances.

Imagine the scene if a fan managed to find a missing episode. A few of the prints recovered in recent years have exhibited projector damage caused by improper handling of the print. In one case tramline scratching which is virtually impossible to obscure and in another missing frames caused by film breakage.

Aside from the internet, where does a fan go to research missing episodes? They are faced with a more difficult task because they generally don’t collect film as a hobby and therefore don’t know people or have contacts in the area. Strangely this brings out the unusualk requests such as one fan asking me to pass over all my contacts so he could research and investigate them on behalf of the Doctor Who fans.

If is for you to decide what you would do when faced with such a request, but my own feeling was that there was an implied arrogance. In other fields you would not (as an example) go up to an antiques dealer and ask them for all their acquired contacts and special knowledge. It isn’t good business and you can imagine the reply a less polite dealer may give you if you naively asked for such information.

So what about the speculation? Rather like people who like to predict the World Cup results in advance there are plenty of Dr Who fans who will gladly advise you on how many episodes possibly do still survive and which ones. This is all pure speculation based on usually third hand knowledge.

Leading on from this, what can actually be determined based on experience of potentially missing episodes? I can state with absolute certainty that there are other TV programmes in private hands and in many cases I can name titles. This isn’t paticularly helpful but it does give a rough idea of what could turn up should the collectors in question sell these.

Knowing that market and the type of programmes circulaating it is fairly clear that the only Doctor Who episodes traded or sold have been good used prints mostly produced in the 1980s and printed from existing episodes in private hands. It can also be stated with absolute certainty that there are a sizable number of film enthusiasts who don’t use the internet and are not particularly interested in television.

It is to these people that the true fruits of hard labour in investigation should be directed. That the only way to contact them is really through traditional methods which could mean getting to know them thorough a local video or film club or posting adverts in the time-honoured tradition using a newspaper or even posting leaflets.

It all sounds very simple but in practice this has proved highly successful in the past and in one spectacular case resulted in 20 television prints in considerable quality, some of whih were missing television. One single advert isn’t enough though.

It is worth emphasising that efforts like my own and those of others are intended to help and preserve the missing heritage of television, which also includes Doctor Who as a part of that wider picture. It is also without payment. Such efforts would have been virtually impossible using just the internet. The salient facts are that missing TV prints I have found were through social networking and traveling to meet collectors and film dealers. It’s old-fashioned, but very effective.

Some fans have modified the direct approach I’d seen at film fairs to target foreign archives. Usually in the form of a letter and sometimes as a phone call, fans have taken it upon themselves to contact foreign archives asking for Doctor Who. Again this is an unusual situation in that most Archives do not exist to handle such queries from private individuals and the reaction of staff to such queries may in fact breed hostility to the subject rather than engender goodwill. With no official sanction, it is a madcap idea which can cause damage to legitmate searches.

Now within the BBC there are already an established base of fans mostly represented by the Doctor Who Restoration Team. They have accumulated a definitive knowledge of foreign archives and also cinsider information from people such as myself. Most of that information particularly in regard to missing episodes is kept quiet for good reason, mostly to prevent knowledge spread causing problems in the recovery of material.

So in that climate I and many others supply information and sometimes certain leads which would never be discussed in public for fear of ruining chances of recovering missing episodes. This does bring us back to fan involvement. My own opinion is that although good intentioned, experience has shown that with the exception of the restoration team and one isolated case, fan involvement ends up attempting to find missing episodes usually causing more harm than good.

If you are reading this and want to recover missing doctor who or indeed any other TV programme it is worthwhile questioning why you want to do this and what makes the ideas you have for finding such programmes different from anything that has been attempted before? Your fresh idea was probably thought of five years ago. For exmaple putting up another list of missing episodes online is potentially far less fruitful than placing an advert in a local paper or targetting a local film and video club.

It is also worthwhile remembering that for the handful of missing Doctor Who episodes found on 16mm in the last 25 years, the numbers of missing episodes of other TV programmes in archives and privately found is measured in the hundreds so Doctor Who is a small minority in a far larger field. Putting this into perspective the chances of finding an episode are small but more than likely to exist in the hands of people who have unknown knowledge of the clamour which surrounds them.

If the fans want more missing Doctor Who back, they should consider different forms of social engineering to achieve that goal. This isn’t impossible and with careful effort it may provide results.

The Brisbane Doctor Who Fan Club is a non-profit organisation. Originally founded in 1989, it was decommissioned on the 28th of May, 2000. We are now proudly up and running again as of the 26th of April, 2007.

2007 is the twelfth year, making us the longest running Doctor Who fan club in Brisbane! Thanks to all our members over the years, let’s look forward to the future!

MISTFALL, magazine of the Brisbane Dr. Who Fan Club

1. Do you read any of the new novels based on Doctor Who?

No

2. Describe birefly the circumstances surrounding your casting as Sil.

Ron Jones was searching for someone small to play Sil….he’d interviewed and auditioned many “dwarf” and “midget” actors for the part but was not satisfied with any of them. Time was running out and rehearsals were scheduled to start within the month. Then Martin Jarvis who had already been cast as the Governor of Varos asked if Sil had been found yet, and when he was told No, he said he knew of the ideal person. Apparently his wife had seen me in a TV show a few years previous and reminded Martin that I could be what Dr. Who was looking for. So as a result of Mr. and Mrs. Jarvis suggestion I was invited to read a couple of scenes of Varos at an audition with Ron. At the end of the interview/audition, Ron offered me the part outright. However, I nearly didn’t make to the interview because I got stopped by a traffic cop for carrying out an illegal motoring manueuver…and because I insisted on arguing with the pig when I had no right to (I knew I was in the wrong but I don’t respect the Law and I despise the pigs), he very nearly arrested me….however, I like to think that the ghost of William Hartnell was looking after me (as I was his biggest fan) and he planted a thought-form into the “Rozer” (English slang for cop) brain and so I was allowed to continue.

3. Given the minor adventure you had with the traffic police on the way to your interview for the part of Sil, as well as the fact that you are a long-term fan of Doctor Who, the question begs as to just what rehearsals were like, in particular your first day.

As a fan of DW since its birth in 1963, I was extremely excited and nervous on the first day….by chance I got into the lift with Patrick Troughton….of course he had no idea who I was or what I was doing at the BBC. I didn’t tell him…we just smiled at each other. I took the coincidental encounter as a good omen. Because I was an inexperienced, untrained actor and disabled, I didn’t want to appear a dud…so I learnt all my lines before the first day…I assumed all the actors would have done anyway…Well, I then became embarrased when I discovered I was the only actor to know the script word-perfect…so for the first few days I had to pretend NOT to know my lines, but Forbes Collins and Martin Jarvis saw through my ruse and Colin Baker announced that I was a Swot and trying to win Brownie points from the “teacher”….Also by the first day of rehearsal I had the Sil laugh off to a tee (hee). I’d met a snake the week previous and got my inspiration from watching it flick its tongue back and forth….I think Anthony Hopkins got his “Animal Lectern” slurping noise from Sil’s laugh….very similar, don’t you think?

4. What work did you do immediately before and immediately after Doctor Who?

I don’t know about immediately before or after…I’d have to look that up in my diaries. I know, not long before (1983), I’d gone to India to do a theatre show (Casting Out), shook hands with Indira Gandhi whereupon she became jinxed and was shot within a year. Afterwards was a film shot in Turkey (Born of Fire) about Satan and his plot to destroy the world. I was a good guy and helped the hero to foil the Devil’s plans. However, the movie was a flop, the stars’ careers plummetted and we all nearly got burned, earth-quaked and arrested by trigger-happy soldiers – in that order. The Shaban Jinx strikes again.

5. Do you have a favourite role? A favourite project you’ve worked on?

Obviously, Dr. Who. I liked other roles/projects for different reasons. “Born of Fire” because I had the chance to play a sympathetic character and the location was exotic and exciting. “Deptford Graffiti”, a TV play. Again a sympathetic role…the romantic lead, in fact. I’m a rebel with a cause and I have a love scene. I also join a gang of bikers and give the cops grief. I love teenage/youth angst movies e.g. “Quadrophenia”, “If….”, “Trainspotting” etc. “Deptford Graffiti” is in that tradition, also it was directed by one of the stars of “Quadrophenia”, so it had proper “street-cred”. But my best work has been on stage…Hamlet, The Emperor, Volpone, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Crutch…

6. Are there any TV programmes or films your fans should look out for to see examples of the variety of your acting abilities?

Deptford Graffiti, Raspberry Ripple, Born of Fire, Wittgenstein, Slave of Dreams

7. City of Joy springs to mind. I understand that production was plagued with disasters from the beginning. Have you any interesting tales to tell about that?

The first disaster was that the Calcutta authorities and intellegentsia didn’t want us there….so we were continually harassed and abused. Eventually we were driven out by the persecution and had to finish the filming in England. The village set was dismantled and shipped to Pinewood Studios, London and rebuilt. The production was accused of making a porn movie, murdering a newspaper journalist, corrupting the child actors. On the first day I arrived, there was a petrol bomb attack. After that we had demos, riots making it impossible to film in the streets. On the last day, the cops came to the hotel to arrest the Director for making the film….and me, for playing a leper who gets burned by Calcutta gangsters….they regarded my portrayal as libellous, so I had to be prosecuted. Unfortunately for the authorities, the police were a bit slow and arrived several hours after we had all flown out of India. The worst disaster however, was having ME, International Jinx, in the movie. Patrick Swayze’s career flopped after that, Roland Joffe never made a good movie since and the film itself bombed….

8. What types of music do you listen to?

Rock and Roll, Blues, Punk, Raggae, Electronic (Dr. Who theme was the first electronic music I fell in love with), Techno, Ambient. I enjoy the Doors, Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, the Beatles, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Moody Blues, Toyah Wilcox, Sex Pistols, Stranglers, Crass, the Clash, OMD, Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, the Byrds, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, the Who, Pulp, Oasis, Sinead O’Connor

I also like listening to traditional music of different countries…so I have folk albums of Irish, Australian, Russian, Indian, Japanese, Andean etc.

9. What kinds of TV shows do you watch? Do you have an all time favourite?

I don’t. I hate TV now. 99 percent is utter crap. Nowadays, I watch video presentations of some TV programmes e.g X-files, Red Dwarf, Blackadder, Yes Minister. Sometimes there are the occasional good TV dramas like “Our Friends in the North” or “Ivanhoe”. I hate Yank TV…X-files is just about okay as Yank shit is concerned…pity I never got the chance to make The Ghosthunter, which I suggested to the BBC in 1988 as a replacement for Dr. Who. If the Beeb had taken up my idea, Britain would have got in before the X-files and done it better. But at the time the BBC shortsightedly claimed there wasn’t a market for the Paranormal and UFO stuff.

When I was a kid and right up until I was 22, Doctor Who was IT…the greatest TV programme in the world…in all time and space. Nothing was allowed to get between me and my Saturday viewing of this fantastic show. I hated Star Trek when it first came out because it attempted to usurp the Time Lord’s cherished spot…. Then in 1975, the pulling power of DW vanished and I lost interest….I only became interested again when I miraculously found myself in it and all the old shows came out on video…..

I like science, history, nature and current affair documentaries but they are becoming increasingly rare. Also I love watching foreign films…but they are getting rarer in British TV. We get stupid docu-soaps, endless garbage on the police and medical matters. We have too many police and medical dramas, all telling lies about how wonderful the cops and doctors are…The only cop series I really enjoyed was “Between the Lines” but that was showing how corrupt the British police were….and another excellent British series was “Law and Order”, showing how unjust British legal and justice system is….Needless to say, the police, judges, solicitors, prisons all complained bitterly to the BBC and threatened to deny further cooperation with future TV productions.

There are too many damn cookery, gardening, motoring, food, drink programmes. Simply, TV today is bloody boring….. Its getting to be as unwatchable as Yank TV…..

10. Do you have a favourite film? Do you go to the cinema often?

I use to go to the cinema at least once a week (in the Seventies) but as a disabled person in a wheelchair, today I’m rarely allowed access without an able-bodied escort (apparently, I’m a fire-hazard)….when I was younger, I had friends who were unattached, so finding someone to go with me wasn’t so difficult…now, people have partners, married, have families….also I live 40 miles out of London and most of my friends are Londoners, so I rarely go to my local flea-pit. Besides, I now hate most movies because they are Yank Hollywood commercial hype-tripe. Also, I boycott films where too much money has been spent or where the stars are overpaid. I think it is obscene that actors can get paid anything over a million dollars. Also most Yank movies all style and special effects and no content. The stories and characterizations are tedious and predictable, bland, shallow and I just feel like burning the cinema down (well, I am accused of being a fire-hazard…so I might as well practise what they preach).

However, I do have loads of favourite films….and surprisingly, many are Yank. eg. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s nest, The Exorcist, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Godfathers 1 and 2, Glory, Posse, Malcolm X, The Doors, JFK, Nixon, Natural Born Killers, Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, Deer Hunter, Close Encounters….John Carpenter’s The Thing, I like most Spike Lee movies, Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley.

Favourite British films include Whistle Down the Wind, If….., Clockwork Orange, Women in Love, Oh What a Lovely War, Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Quadrophenia, 2001, Alien, Trainspotting, Gandhi,…

Most non-Yank and non-British films are brilliant. I love loadsa movies of Russian, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Latin American, Turkish, African etc origin.

Oz movies? Yeah! Picnic at Hanging Rock, Mad Max (1 and 2), The Last Wave, My Brilliant Career, Gallipoli, The Cars that Ate Paris, Muriel’s Wedding, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Man of Flowers.

11. A favourite book? What kinds of literature do you usually go for? Are you more of a newspapar/magazine man at all?

No, I’m not a newspaper/magazine man. It’s literature for me…I like existentialist stuff. Dostoievski, Camus, Kafka, Tolstoy, Sartre…I also like Zola, Gogol, Turgenev, Voltaire, Herman Hesse, Knut Hamsun, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Hardy, DH Lawrence, Stephen King, John Wyndham, Arthur C. Clark, Salman Rushdie, George Orwell…well, lets just say, I love books. I read a lot of non-fiction too. Politics, occult, mysticism, religion, conspiracy theories, biographies, Ufology, philosophy

12. Favourite type of food? (And we know it’s not dyed peaches…)

Food bores me….

13. What have your general impressions been of Australia during your visit? How do Australian fans compare to British ones? (Please, be honest and, if necessary, brutal.)

Australia…..hot, bright, seemingly empty (that is, when away from the cities). Long straight dusty roads. Sometimes I felt like I was in America… a Road Movie or a Wild West…. I like the isolation, the vast open spaces, the animals, the danger of the deserts, the crocodiles….I like the aborigines, their myths and folklore, their mysticism and music. The non-aborigine Australians are okay too, they seem friendly and helpful. I found people always willing to chat. Of course, I know there is sexism, racism, ethnocentrism….but no country is perfect….I felt greater racism in Yankland than in Australia….I was surprised at how good Australia was for disabled people.

The Oz Fans as compared to Brits? I didn’t see much diferrence. Perhaps your enthusiasm and knowledge is more extreme but where you are similar as opposed to the Yank Fandom, is your interest in the hardware, story and monsters….the Yanks are mainly into the glamour, the superficial shit…but then your average Yank is pretty dumb, so it’s not surprising, really.

14. Do you have any specific religious beliefs? Are these based more on any dogmatic teachings from your adolescence, or are they based more in your own current world view?

I don’t have any religious beliefs…other than Religion is the Opiate of the People. Orthodox, institutional, establishment religion are based on human wishful thinking and created as a means of social control. Religion never practises what it preaches, so it is not worthy of respect. The concept of blasphemy is absurd…since no one can prove that God exists or that Jesus is still alive and our Saviour or that the Koran came from Allah. If God exists as portrayed in the Bible or the Koran, then he is a Fascist cruel Tyrant, unfit to rule the universe and therefore my enemy, and when I die, I’ll have a big fight with him. But I believe the Bible and other so-called Holy Books are all mythologies created by human imagination attempting to explain the inexplicable. There are strange, supernatural things in the universe and in our domain….we are strange supernatural things…I suspect there are more powerful beings than us. We are most of the time limited in our senses….so our grasp of reality can only ever be incomplete. Our mortal intelligence is finite, so how can we know the truth…..Even if it is out there….which I doubt…. If God or gods and goddesses try to speak to us, we will invariably misinterpret the messages or deliberately distort to suit our nationalism, politics and homo-centrism. Men wanting to dominate and oppress women will design God as a male…whereas new feminism trying redress the balance, wanting men to feel inferior and ashamed and no longer fit to rule the planet, will create the Earth Goddess in their own feminine image. Religion is about worshipping and obeying some supreme Creator, it is about seeking salvation, it is about escaping mortality, pain, suffering. It is about anger at being born imperfect or living in an imperfect world. Religion is an attempt at removing our fear of being ultimately alone and unloved. Because I can see why religion exists, I see it as a human invention and therefore I cannot accept it as a fountain of truth…I despise it as a comforter. I reject it because it does our thinking for us. Ultimately religion hinders us from discovering the truth…..Howz that for a load of pretentious bullshit….I bet you wished you hadn’t asked. Once some Mormons visited me…gave me the story of their founder, Joseph Smith, to read…and then came back the following week to ask me the most important lesson I learnt. I told them that I should do what Joe Smith was told to do by the Archangel Moroni (Moron?). He was told not to join any church but create his own. So, I told the Mormons, I must follow Joe Smith’s example (they didn’t like me calling him “Joe” – I wasn’t giving him due respect) and NOT join the Mormons and form my own church…..They were not amused.

15. Are you superstitious of anything?

No. Superstition is about fear and I fear nothing.

16. With recent ecomonic slumps in the Asia-Pacific region and so many ethnic wars in Eastern Europe of the last few years, do you see the current world economy or political climate falling into ultimate degredation in the near future, or is there a light at the end of the tunnel?

Lets put it this way, I wouldn’t be surprised if we humans don’t destroy ourselves or the planet in the near future. Ever since I was a child I had expectations of the Doomsday scenario occurring during my lifetime….and so spent the past thirty years watching out for tell-tale signs, reading about prophecies, myths and legends of the End-Times. Inevitably, it’s not surprising I should think like this…since I am of the Atomic Age Generation….also the WWII with its 50 million deaths and its Jewish Holocaust and its Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only finished 8 years before my birth….then the Cold War, Cuba, Teenage Angst through Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll…and having been brainwashed in Christian Apocalyptic Fantasies….the emerging science fiction culture and of course, Doctor Who fed much of my Armageddonist dreams, desires and paranoias. Most of the Doctor Who stories are concerned with his Messianic mission of saving either our planet or some other planet. The Apocalypse is intrinsic to 20th century culture. If the world doesn’t end in the next 10 years (I’m giving the Prophets a margin of error), it is quite likely Apocalyptic beliefs, visions and stories will be less influential in the 21st century….

However, I see no reason for optimism. I don’t believe there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Human nature is basically self-centred, greedy, discontented and therefore self-destructive. We know what’s wrong with us but on mass we don’t care enough or are too apathetic to do anything about it. We keep expecting someone else to do it for us. That’s why we believe in the Second Coming, in Messiahs, Saviours in Spaceships. Or…We think all we have to do is pray and our problems will be saved. Well, we have been praying for two thousand years and our shit has got thicker and stinkier. The Moslems thought praying to Allah would give them victory over the west during the Gulf War, but they were wrong… We shirk our resposibilities….we blame the politicians, the multinational corporations, the unions, the communists, the capitalists….we blame everyone but ourselves. But we get the society, the government, the religion we deserve. If we collaborate by cooperating with the rulers, by buying trash, by voting, by constantly consuming when we don’t need to, then we are personally responsible for the crimes of humanity. The only way to stop the rot is total revolution but….how?

17. I understand you are something of an avid Ufologist, as well as a member of BUFORA. If you can pin it down to any specific event or attitude, why do you think you are so keenly interested in the supernatural?

Disillusion with the Christian fairy stories, realising the story of Jesus Christ was at best a half-truth – the vacuum had to be filled. A new search for the miraculous was on. The idea of life on other worlds made more scientific sense than the existence of God. Since I have chosen to believe scientists more than priests, the existence of planets, stars, the moon as potentially habitable, solid worlds which through advanced technology I could travel to, makes it likely that extraterrestrial intelligences exist throughout the universe. And since we see a progression in our scientific and technological development, it is not difficult to imagine that other beings may be much further advanced….We are constantly revising our beliefs in the laws of nature, we are continuously pushing back the boundaries of the seemingly impossible…therefore just because at present we neither have the resources or technology or cannot even scientifically conceive of breaking the speed of light barrier….it doesn’t mean ET is so self-limiting. These were all thoughts I started to have in the mid-sixties, no doubt aided and abetted by avidly watching Doctor Who….. Obviously, the story of flying saucers was beginning to impinge on my consciousness…I’d read claims of their presence in our world. But I was sceptical….I wanted to believe so much I draconiously denied myself the indulgence of believing. I think most irrational, hardline sceptics are closet believers….Then, one day in 1965 I met a teacher of maths and physics, someone whose opinion I could respect…he told me he had seen UFOs on two occasions. That blew my mind and I became an avid reader of all things Ufological. However, I had to wait 8 years before I saw my first UFO. What I saw, together with another witness, was a flying saucer shaped object. We saw it on a day UFOs were being reported in various parts of the world. We saw it before the evening TV news told us that UFOs were being seen elsewhere. Since that year of 1973, I have had several other sightings of UFOs. I don’t know what these things are other than they are very strange and have a psychic component. I have no evidence of them being vehicles from outer space, controlled by ETs (or EBEs). I don’t believe they are machines produced by the Yank government – much as U.S. would like us to think they are so advanced and powerful. Flying saucers historically have been around long before the Stealth bombers and U2 spy planes. If the UFOs of the Forties and Fifties were really secret weapons belonging to the Americans, they would have been used in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf war and in Yugoslavia. In fact the Yanks’ best war technology was still pretty inept compared with what UFOs have always been reported of being capable of. If the Americans had had fifty years of UFO aeronautical ability, they would have put to commercial use by now. When war isn’t the mother of invention, then the profit motive is….The winged aeroplane would be a mode of transport as redundant as the abacus is in relation to the personal computer. The UFO phenomena is too universal, experienced by too many highly qualified witnesses and has agitated too many governments for it to be treated as a non-issue. They may be time-machines from our future, they may be spiritual or mystical or supernatural entities, or physicalized thought-forms, or extra-dimensional elementals (EDEs) or from alternative universes, demons, angels, or possibly survivors of a dying or destroyed planet (perhaps Mars) orbiting the Earth in giant space stations….in the fifties there were reports of giant space craft in Earth’s orbit. At the moment we have only speculation…though some governments may know more than they are admitting to. In a way, it’s now harder to discover the facts because of the wide-spread coverage of sci-fi programmes like the X-Files. Investigators can never be sure that a witnesses claims have not been contaminated by exposure to such programmes.

18. While on the topic, do you think the planet even has a future, what with all the Millennium paranoia circulating currently? Or do you think it’s all hogwash?

It could be all hogwash….or it might not be…..we won’t really be confident about writing it all off as a load of bollocks for about 10 years. In 999, there was extreme Millenium paranoia and during the 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. The goal-posts are always being shifted. On the other hand, this is the first time in human history we have had the capability to destroy the planet in just a few days, given our stockpiles of nuclear bombs. Even without nuclear weapons, with our biological and chemical weapons we could destroy most of the current complex life forms in a short space of time. And in less than a hundred years, we could destroy the planet with just our overpopulation coupled with runaway consumerism and capitalism and pollution. In the past, Millenial Fever has come from fear of God’s Judgement Day and Retribution….today, we can be the global executioners as we now have God’s power to wipe out life on Earth…..

19. Are you an avid follower of science fiction?

No. I like some of it but it often gets dated too quickly. Also, writers today are not as innovatory as as they used to be. Fact has caught up with most fictions and there are not many new ideas being generated. Most new science fiction today are pale regurgitations of yesterday’s. Most of it is boring. The movies are thick with special effects and thin on ideas.

20. With the immense hype surrounding the new Star Wars movie, although more science fantasy than science fiction, one would imagine that you have seen it by now. What were your impressions of it, both as an individual film and as part of the greater Star Wars canon?

I’m not interested in Star Wars, so I haven’t seen it and have no intentions of seeing it. If there is too much hype around something, I try to avoid it. Besides, I prefer the original story – Lord of the Rings.

21. What did you think of the new Comic Relief Doctor Who special? (Indeed, have you seen it?)

Nope, never saw it.

22. Your documentary, “The Alien Who Lived in the Sheds”, was most impressive, all the more so as you also wrote and directed it. I understand it formed part of a series of documentaries encouraging disabled awareness (is that the right term?). Could you tell us a little more about the background to the project, how you got commissioned, how you got the idea to use that story in particular (its focus on disabled awareness is hardly prominent).

The Alien Who Lived in the Sheds…..is a true story which happened to me when I was a student, twenty years ago. As you know, I have been a UFO nut for a long time, so when the opportunity came to investigate an apparent report of an alien hiding in my locality, I took it up. After we ascertained that the so-called alien was just an old recluse, I thought it would make an interesting feature film. So some of the original investigators and I decided to write it up. We thought of calling the movie “The Alien”, but we had to change our mind when Ridley Scott’s “Alien” came out six months later….(talk about Zeitgeist). I decided to call it “The Alien Who Lived in the Sheds”, which I thought was quite a quirky title and much more intriguing. However, we failed to get any film producer interested, so the project gathered dust in the bottom of one of my cupboards. Then in 1995, I made my first documentary film as producer, director, writer (”Another World”). Having succeeded in selling it to the BBC, I then thought of striking whilest the iron was hot and pulled out the “Alien…..” and suggested it as a half hour documentary-drama. I calculated that the idea would only be bought on that limited scale and that as a feature film it was a no hoper. My hunch paid off and I got the commission. Since then I tried to get another film commission but failed, so in answer to your next question, I have no other project in the pipeline at the moment.

23. After seeing your innumerable credits in “The Alien Who Lived in the Sheds”, it is probably safe to assume that you are growing to enjoy working behind the camera as much as in front of it. Have you any other projects in development that we should keep our eyes on?

Nope. Nothing. I’m a Hasbeen.

24. By the same token, are you currently appearing in anything as an actor?

I’m about to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in a play I helped create, about a bunch of disabled terrorists combating genetic cleansing.

25. Jumping back to Doctor Who, and given that you have been a fan of the series since its initial broadcast (as well as a programme creator yourself), what do you think has given the series its amazing longevity?

It was a highly imaginative, unique concept. The stories were fresh and so were the characters. It was a clever idea to keep changing the companions and then the Doctors. Also, the format allowed the stories to reflect current concerns and ideas…so it was always in keeping with the time and occasionally ahead…this however, means it can be dated…so when we see a story set on Earth in the year 2165, because it was made with 1965 mentality, in the 90s it feels like a piece of 60s retrospective but then that adds to its charm. Its very datedness, its unpretentiousness, naivete, simplicity all contribute to a lasting affection.In a way, Doctor Who represents the quintessential British TV programme…its quaintness, it’s favourite Uncle/Auntie quality. It upholds the English sense of fairplay (even if the Colonies know this to be a myth). Doctor Who is as much a typical British hero as King Arthur and Robin Hood. Perhaps in a thousand years time, people might believe he really existed. And like all British heroes he is chivalrous, but faintly patronising and snobbish.Because his very name contains a question, he remains enigmatic and mysterious. Being an outsider, and we love the outsider, especially if he is the Man with No Name, he fits the archetype of the Caped Crusader, the benevolent Avenging Angel, the Righter of Wrongs, the Messiah from another planet. I think the British are very good at creating this sort of character…just look at Mary Poppins for example. Or the wizard Gandalf in The Hobbit, and Lord of the Rings. Also for most of Dr. Who’s history it took its subject seriously and treated its viewers with respect and intelligence. The ideas have always been good and interesting.

Ultimately, Doctor Who is the kind of hero most of us would like to be…more brain than brawn, more pacifist than violent, more compassionate than sentimental. This is why Doctor Who is a British creation and not American. If I could choose between Doctor Who saving the world or Superman, I would choose the Doctor every time. And if I had the chance to play either, give me the Doctor any day….

26. You have expressed occasional interest in playing the Doctor himself. What elements do you think your interpretation of the character might exhibit? Do you see him being modelled to any extent on past Doctors?

My interpretation of the Doctor would have to contain elements of past Doctors because he has been the past Doctors. He is essentially the same being, the same soul, the same intelligence…only the physical aspects of him have been reshaped. He is the same snake that sheds its skin. But clearly physical differences have an impact….so a Doctor with a female body, will behave differently at times to previous incarnations, find feminine solutions to problems. Equally, a Doctor losing the use of his legs, being considerably more vulnerable, experiencing a new kind of prejudice, would develop different attitudes and responses to his previous incarnations. I would also bring back some of the more darker qualities…a certain toughness, a certain manipulativeness which William Hartnell originallly gave to the character. Also I would give the Doctor some of Hartnell’s apparent defencelessness. If we make the Doctor too invincible, then how can we relate to him, imagine ourselves in his shoes. I think Doctor Who is much more interesting when he genuinely needs his companions to help him solve the threat, because of his own shortcomings…Part of his flaws are his arrogance, his condescension, his aloofness….these are what often gets him into trouble. And I would enjoy bringing out these qualities. But he is absent-minded, occasionally bad tempered and at times too clever for his own good. But he is ultimately a good soul and very caring, and loaths cruelty and injustice and would sacrifice his life to defeat evil….well, that’s how I would portray him