Who And Me  :  Barry Letts

Memoirs of Doctor Who by the show's former producer Barry Letts.

Barry began his career as an actor in films and on tv. In the 1950s he acted on television with Patrick Troughton, who he got to know well. In those early days, tv was still transmitted live, as pre-recording the broadcasts was not yet possible, and Barry recounts some hair-raising moments when live tv went wrong.

In the 1960s, after becoming a television Director, among many television assignments at the BBC he directed one of Troughton's Doctor Who serials, The Enemy of the World.

In 1969 Barry was appointed as the new producer of Doctor Who, for Jon Pertwee's first season, and remained as producer throughout Pertwee's five years on the show. During that time he continued to direct, usually directing at least one of the serials in each season. He also began writing for the show, in collaboration with playwright Bob Sloman, initially under a pseudonym, and they wrote four of the best of the Pertwee serials including The Daemons.

In 1974, at the request of the BBC, Barry was responsible for casting Tom Baker as the new Doctor when Pertwee decided to move on.

No other man in the 26 year history of the show did so much for the show: the multi-talented Barry produced it, directed it, and wrote it -- sometimes all at the same time!

He returned to directing in 1975, including directing some early Tom Baker episodes. He then spent a further year as Executive Producer of Doctor Who. In the 1980s he was appointed producer of the BBC's Classic Serials strand for Sunday afternoons, on which show he spent a further five years, in the course of which casting many of the actors who he had used on Doctor Who in tv adaptations of classic novels. He also became a novelist, beginning by adapting some of his own scripts for the Target Books range of Doctor Who paperbacks.

In the 1990s he wrote original novels for the Virgin Books range of Doctor Who paperbacks, and was reunited with Jon Pertwee when he wrote the two BBC radio serials based on Doctor Who in which Pertwee starred in 1992 and 1995. He also wrote two radio dramas based on the BBC's other long running science fiction tv show, Blakes 7, and wrote some of the earliest audio dramas based on Doctor Who that were made by the independent production company Big Finish.

This book should be read in conjunction with The Making of Doctor Who, published in 1972, which is co-written by the then Script Editor of the tv show, Terrance Dicks. Barry and Terrance ran the show jointly for five years, as its producer and script editor from 1970 to 1974, the entire period when Jon Pertwee was starring in it. And they both wrote books about that period.

Coverage of the Pertwee years is thus the most detailed in the show's long history, as no other production team ever wrote up their memoirs in this way.