Countdown to 60: "I am the Doctor!"

When Jon Pertwee went to meet his maker, he didn't have a little TARDIS in his coffin. He had a small Worzel Gummidge doll.

The fact is, Pertwee had a very odd relationship with Doctor Who.

He was a great ambassador for the programme, and attended every convention he could fit in. He was happy to return to the role at the drop of a hat - be it The Five Doctors or Dimensions in Time, on stage, or in the BBC radio dramas with Lis Sladen and Nicholas Courtney. If a TV channel wanted someone to appear on screen to talk about the programme, he could be relied upon to accept the invitation.

When he attended those conventions, he would loudly declaim "I am the Doctor!".

That phrase can be taken more than one way. Is he telling the audience - or is he telling himself? For Jon Pertwee was a particularly insecure man. In some ways he was reassuring himself that he had once been the Doctor - and been very good at it.

And this is the thing. He was always conscious that he was never the first Doctor, that others had created and developed the role before him. And he was always conscious that someone else would take over the role after he had gone. In short, he was just one of several Doctors.

What particularly rankled was the massive success of Tom Baker. Pertwee had been the most successful Doctor to date, remaining in the role for 5 years (compared to just 3 years apiece for his predecessors).

Then Tom came along and quickly became the internationally recognised Doctor - even unto the present day.

And Jon was never comfortable about that. This is why he tended to push Worzel over the Doctor in his later years. Worzel was his own creation, on screen at least. No-one had taken on the role before him, and no-one followed and proved more successful. (Pertwee was spared witnessing Mackenzie Crook's excellent take on Worzel). 

Another aspect of Jon Pertwee was his often strained relationship with the truth. He liked to tell stories - especially ones about himself. If he didn't have a big enough role to play in a tale, he would "adapt" the story to give himself a better part.

The story behind his departure from the role is a case in point.

In interviews he always claimed that he asked the Head of Drama for more money, and was turned down. This simply wasn't true. Barry Letts, who co-wrote, produced and directed "the one with the spiders", pointed out that any request for a pay rise would have come to him first. He managed the budget, and this included salaries.

Jon Pertwee left because Roger Delgado had died, Katy Manning had left, Letts and Terrance Dicks were about to follow suit, and he was well aware that he was not being offered other work.

Planet of the Spiders was a good one to bow out on for Pertwee. 

The second episode allowed Letts to indulge his star. Over the years they had noted a variety of interesting modes of transport - e.g. seeing a gyrocopter at the airfield where The Daemons was filmed, or spotting a one-man hovercraft at the London Boat Show when on publicity duty. Pertwee had also produced his own futuristic car, intended primarily for personal appearances but which he had talked Letts into including in the programme.

So Episode 2 sees a chase involving the "Whomobile", Bessie, a gyrocopter, a speedboat and a hovercraft.

Another indulgence for the star was the inclusion of actors who he knew from earlier stories, and with whom he was comfortable. John Dearth had voiced BOSS in The Green Death, Andrew Staines was Lett's nephew and had featured in Terror of the Autons and Carnival of Monsters, Terrance Lodge had been Orum in the latter story, Walter Randall had been in Inferno, Ysanne Churchman had voiced Alpha Centauri, George Cormack had been in The Time Monster, Kevin Lindsay had played the Sontaran Linx, and Kismet Delgado was Roger's widow. Stunt performers Terry Walsh and Stuart Fell also featured prominently.

As it was, Pertwee needn't have worried about work drying up. He returned to the stage, presented the crime quiz Whodunnit?, and then came Worzel Gummidge. He had his TV appearances and his conventions. He may have had a Worzel doll in his coffin when he passed away in 1996 but, as far as all the obituaries were concerned, Pertwee was the Doctor - as he'd been telling us all along.