The Underwater Menace concluded today in 1967 with its fourth instalment, whilst in 1978 The Invasion of Time got underway with its first.
This saw the Doctor return to Gallifrey, seemingly in cahoots with a hostile alien force, and taking up the Presidency of the High Council of Time Lords, which he had stood for in The Deadly Assassin.
Today we remember one of the architects of Doctor Who. David Whitaker was the series' first Story Editor. Despite his office being a caravan in the BBC car park, he script edited the entire first season and wrote one of its stories - The Edge of Destruction. After a year he handed over to Dennis Spooner, but maintained links with the series by writing further stories, and by collaborating with Terry Nation on the Dalek spin-off material (books, plays, movies and comic strips).
For Season Two he provided The Rescue and The Crusade. When Nation was unable to contribute any further Dalek stories himself, it was to Whitaker that the production team turned, resulting in The Power of the Daleks and The Evil of the Daleks - thought by many to be amongst the best Dalek stories. All that spin-off material meant he knew Nation's creations even better than their originator.
Still in the Troughton era, he provided the only monster-free story of Season Five - the Bond-like political thriller The Enemy of the World - and a Cyberman story developed from an outline by their co-creator, Kit Pedlar (The Wheel In Space).
Unfortunately, his final involvement with the show was a bit of a disaster for him. The Ambassadors of Death, in Pertwee's first season, has Whitaker's name on it, but there's hardly anything of his in it. It's mostly the work of Malcolm Hulke. Whitaker then emigrated to Australia for a few years, returning to the UK not long before his death.
He passed away today in 1980, aged only 51.
If the 50th anniversary docu-drama, An Adventure in Space and Time, has a fault, it's that it didn't include him.
No comments:
Post a Comment