P is for... Polidori

John Polidori was the personal physician to the poet Lord George Byron, and the Doctor encountered him when she and her companions visited the Villa Diodati on the shores on Lake Geneva. Byron's group were travelling through Europe. It was 1816 - the "Year Without A Summer" - and the weather was wet and cold. 

Strange things were happening in the villa, including ghostly apparitions both within and out on the lake, and Polidori began sleepwalking, which left him irritable and in a bad mood. At one point he tried to fight with Ryan Sinclair over a trivial matter. In his somnambulistic state, he was oblivious to the spatial distortions affecting everyone else in the building, appearing to be able to walk through walls.

Played by: Maxim Baldry. Appearances: The Haunting of Villa Diodati (2020)

• John William Polidori (1795 - 1821) graduated from Edinburgh University in 1815, aged 19. He wrote his thesis on somnambulism. His contribution to the ghost story competition in 1816 became the novella The Vampyre (1819). For years people thought Byron the author but the titular character, Lord Ruthven, was actually based on him - a decadent, parasitical aristocrat who feeds off others. Byron often belittled and bullied Polidori and failed to act quickly to acknowledge the true authorship of The Vampyre.
• He died at his father's home in London aged only 25, suffering from depression and owing heavy gambling debts. He almost certainly committed suicide despite the coroner declaring his death to have been from natural causes.
• One of his sisters was mother to the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti - born after Polidori died.
• 1973's Frankenstein: The True Story (which has Tom Baker in a guest role) featured a villainous medic named Dr Polidori, played by James Mason.
• Polidori has featured in a number of (often contradictory) Doctor Who spin-off media.
• An early role for Baldry was as the young Caesarion in the TV series Rome. 
• After a couple of years on soap Hollyoaks he appeared in RTD's Years And Years, and is currently featuring as Isildur in the Lord of the Rings TV series, LOTR: The Rings of Power.