It has been announced that Script Editor Christopher H Bidmead has passed away at the age of 84.
An actor in earlier life, including a regular role on Emergency Ward 10, he later went into script writing. When JNT took over as producer on Doctor Who, Bidmead was recommended as his new Script Editor by writer Robert Banks Stewart.
Interviewed by the producer and executive producer Barry Letts, Bidmead impressed with his desire to get proper science back into the programme and treat it more seriously.
He worked on Season 18, and quickly found himself having to carry out major rewrites on some scripts, just as his predecessors had experienced. One rewrite went badly, when the director refused to work on a story after Bidmead had taken it too far from the writer's original draft. He reluctantly had to change things back.
Finding the whole process exhausting, Bidmead decided that one year in the role was enough.
For someone who championed proper science in the show, there are some very silly notions on view, such as the time loop in Meglos, or quite literally flushing out the Master in Logopolis by flooding the TARDIS.
DWM would later create the Bidmead-o-meter, to judge the silliness of the science in the revived series.
As well as script editing the work of others, Bidmead contributed three stories of his own - Logopolis, Castrovalva and Frontios. A fourth for Season 23 was cancelled late in the day. He also novelised his stories for Target.
Bidmead was an early champion of the home computer and wrote about the subject for science publications. He employed computer terminology within his Doctor Who scripts.
RIP.
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