The Doctors Who's Who (7 page)

When grown, Jason saves a man – King Pelias – from drowning, and when Jason loses a sandal during the incident, Pelias knows that the events of the prophecy are drawing closer. Indeed, Jason doesn’t help himself: he tells the King that he is on a quest to regain his throne and kill the evil Pelias. Knowing that he could never kill Jason in one-to-one combat, Pelias tells him that he’s not ready to confront the King and tells him to gather good men and a ship and to prove himself first by capturing the golden fleece. Without knowing who he is, Jason agrees.

Jason and the Argonauts
is a well thought-out script with cutting-edge special effects for its day (Ray Harryhausen’s revolutionary stop-motion monster effects). When Jason eventually arrives at Phineas’s abode and witnesses Harpies (winged demons) stealing his food and tormenting the blind man, the film takes on a mystical edge. Before Jason obtains the
advice he seeks from Phineas, he sets up a trap to capture the Harpies, whereby his crew can catch them in a huge net thrown from the top of a ruined temple. The temple used in the scene is a real ancient temple in Italy, and the actors were given special permission to climb on it.

To create any stop-motion animation requires some level of improvisation from the actors involved. There are no model creatures or actors in suits roaming around during shooting, so the actor is left to visualise what is going on and act solo, with the creatures being inserted afterwards. Ray Harryhausen explained the process with regard to Troughton’s scene:

For the Harpies sequence I designed several ‘contacts’ with humans. The first where the blind Phineas is fighting off the demons and we see his stick and belt yanked from him by the creatures. Both objects were attached to off-screen wires and on my signal a member of the crew pulled them away from Patrick Troughton. Later in the animation studio I would animate the models… as though they were snatching the objects.

Jason and the Argonauts
took two years and £3 million to make, but the end result is a magnificent piece of cinema with a great performance from Troughton.

In 1964 he played alongside Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in Hammer Horror’s
The Gorgon
. Based upon the mythological story of Medusa, Barbara Shelley plays a respectable lady who turns into the Gorgon (played by Prudence Hyman) to terrorise her way through 84 minutes of Hammer fun. Troughton has a supporting part as a policeman (Inspector Kanof) in what is nothing more than a bread-and-butter role. Interestingly,
The Gorgon
was released shortly before Peter Cushing took on the role of Doctor Who in the
two cinema versions of the TV series. These in turn were finished shortly before Troughton took over from William Hartnell in the title role of the TV adventures.

It was in 1966, while Troughton was filming
The Viking Queen
in Ireland, that he was asked if he would like to become Doctor Who, as he told Peter Haining in
The Doctor Who File
:

My association with
Doctor Who
began in Ireland. I was there in 1966 filming
The Viking Queen
with Nicola Pagett when the phone started ringing. It was the BBC production office and they were looking for a replacement for Billy Hartnell, who was then a very sick man. ‘Come and play Doctor Who,’ the voice on the phone said. ‘No, no,’ I said equally emphatically, ‘I don’t want to play Doctor Who.’ Anyway the phone kept on ringing and I kept saying, ‘No, I really don’t want to play it.’ But they kept phoning and pushing the money up, so that in the end I began to have serious doubts… After about a week of these calls, I decided I must be crazy to keep refusing. It was ridiculous.

Troughton originally felt that Doctor Who was not the right part for him. ‘I was astonished that they asked me,’ he said later. He had watched the show with his children and really enjoyed William Hartnell’s Doctor, but was unsure if it could continue when Hartnell left. ‘I thought it would last about six weeks after Billy Hartnell had finished,’ he admitted in 1983. ‘The whole concept of the Doctor going on was quite a new idea, and one was jumping in at the deep end.’

The BBC’s persistence paid off and Troughton became the Doctor, but why were they so keen to cast him? He explained in a 1985 interview: ‘I think they cast me because I’d done about 20 years of character acting and so could cope working with something like that.’

His initial thought was to black up for the part, with big earrings and beard, so no one would recognise him. Thankfully, Sydney Newman was having none of that. Newman brought Troughton back down to earth and shaped his interpretation of the Doctor with a throwaway comment: ‘Do what you like with him – play him like Charlie Chaplin if you want to.’ (
Doctor Who – A Celebration, Two Decades Through Time and Space
, Peter Haining, WH Allen, 1983). This appealed to Troughton and is what eventually happened, but only after other ideas had been thrashed out, as he reminisced on the TV magazine show
Nationwide
(1983): ‘First they put a wig on me and I looked like Harpo Marx, then they dressed my hair like a Beatle’ – but that didn’t work. Troughton had further ideas, such as playing him like a Windjammer captain (very tough and hardy) but Newman wasn’t happy with that either.

It’s difficult to ultimately say if the Chaplin idea was Troughton’s or Newman’s. It appears that Troughton went off the idea and Newman asked, ‘Whatever happened to the cosmic hobo?’ after seeing the Windjammer captain look.

Eventually the clown-like interpretation was agreed, with Troughton playing the part in a very clown-like way to begin with – big baggy trousers and stovepipe hat – but this soon mellowed as he became more established in the role.

What is interesting about this process was the freedom Troughton was given to develop his character. Newman didn’t dictate to Troughton – he certainly advised him when he thought he had gone too far – but the final decision as to what he looked like was Troughton’s, which is something that has stuck with all
Doctor Who
leading actors ever since.

But it wasn’t just the look that was important – what about the character himself? Troughton had to undergo a gruelling planning meeting. It went badly, to the extent that story editor
Gerry Davis threw everyone out of the room apart from Troughton in order to get to grips with the new man. In the end they settled on someone who knows all of the answers but is keen to watch and observe others around him, gently directing them to do what
he
wants. This characteristic was clearly displayed in ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’, where the Doctor instantly knows what is happening but is happy to let the scientists – and megalomaniacs – find out for themselves, eventually secretly throwing a switch to help them discover the tomb of the Cybermen.

Troughton needn’t have worried about being accepted as the Doctor. He was fondly regarded from the off, as highlighted in the
Doctor Who Annual
(1967): ‘Our new Dr Who is more “with it”; he is more “switched on”, more in tune with the 20th century. There are, of course, still traces of his old personality and, characteristically, he still wears the same clothes, which are a trifle baggy on his new figure’. So the cosmic hobo was thoroughly accepted.

The cast accepted him too, as
Doctor Who
companion Anneke Wills (Polly) remembers:

We played our little joke on Patrick the first day he started. Michael Craze [companion Ben Jackson] and I ordered some special T-shirts and we greeted our new Doctor with the words: ‘Come back Bill Hartnell’ blazoned across our chests. It was a ghastly joke, I suppose, but dear Patrick took it very well.

Although the record of Troughton’s era as the Doctor has been decimated by the BBC in the 1970s clear-out of old programmes, some gems are still available. The surviving episodes from ‘The Abominable Snowmen’ and ‘The Web of Fear’ are dark and eerie, highlighting some of the greatest
thrills the black and white series of
Doctor Who
had to offer. Also the return of ‘The Tomb of the Cybermen’ to the BBC archive in 1991 (from Hong Kong) strengthened the view that tales from
Doctor Who
’s fifth season were some of the strongest and best ever. The Yeti and the Ice Warriors were both introduced during that season, alongside two new Cybermen stories, ‘The Tomb of the Cybermen’ and ‘The Wheel in Space’, with the former starting the season in an impressive way.

Troughton always rated his second season (the fifth season) as his favourite; while the first was all about feeling his way and the last season was simply tiring.

Despite being tired, he remembered his three years as Doctor Who with great fondness: ‘Of all my years as an actor, I think these were the happiest three years. I particularly enjoyed acting with Frazer Hines, who played Jamie [Troughton’s main companion in the series for all but his first story]. We never once had a cross word all the time we worked together.’

Troughton first met Hines in 1964 while filming
Smuggler’s Bay
, which was based upon the novel
Moonfleet
. Hines reminisced:

Patrick played an old smuggler. And the day before filming began, I’d actually put my hand through a plate glass window, and I turned up with these great bandages on, and they tried various things to hide it, and they were covered up with an old workers’ glove. Years later, when I saw Patrick for
Doctor Who
, the first day of filming he said ‘How’s the hand?’ He remembered. And that was the sort of man he was.

Hines also remembered his time filming
Doctor Who
with great fondness: ‘For three years Pat and I had an absolute ball
together. I think there’s always room for fun when you’re working – except, maybe, if it’s Chekhov or Shakespeare – and I’ve always been a practical joker.’

Troughton also got on well with other members of the regular cast and production crew, as he recounts in
The Making of Doctor Who
(Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks, Pan Books, 1972), ‘Innes Lloyd [who took over from Verity Lambert], the producer when I started, and Peter Bryant were great to work for. I had a lot of fun.’

Troughton enjoyed the fantasy of the show. He thought it was great that the Doctor could change his appearance, as he explained at the time of ‘The Three Doctors’: ‘We are all different aspects of the same character. Of course it’s bound to be a bit of a mystery to us, but in the Doctor’s space-time machine the so-called past just doesn’t exist.’

Like Hartnell before him, Troughton said that it was difficult to stop being the Doctor when the cameras were off, but, unlike Hartnell, Troughton’s Doctor was not a crotchety old man, as he explained: ‘When you’re playing a part for a long time you certainly take on some of the mental attitudes of the fellow you’re playing. Luckily the Doctor was a very jolly fellow and I just bubbled along.’

He would also say that having a young family at the time – three under ten years old – allowed him to keep in touch with the part of the Doctor, as children loved the character so much. So again, like William Hartnell, there was that Pied Piper aspect to Troughton’s Doctor, and not just in the pipe – recorder – he played, but also the children who followed him and his travels. Troughton mentioned the younger viewers in 1983: ‘It [
Doctor Who
] also gave me great pleasure coming into contact with children, for if I had not been an actor I would quite like to have been a teacher. Children keep one young.’ In fact, he also
stated that the continuing success of the show was due to new children being born.

Troughton regretted leaving the series ‘very much, but you can’t do something forever as a character actor’. Three years was a long time for him to be involved in one particular project, as he confessed: ‘If I stayed with it too long, I would get stuck.’

Leaving the show was a painful process. Troughton, Hines and Wendy Padbury (companion Zoe), had all decided in secret to leave by the end of the sixth season. Hines was the first to announce his departure and Troughton persuaded him to stay on until the last story of the year, the 10-episode epic, ‘The War Games’, whereupon all three left with smiles on their faces and the feeling of a job well done.

Some people may consider that the span of a
Doctor Who
’s television life is not that long – roughly three years for most of them – but the gruelling schedule hasn’t lightened too much over the past 50 years; the show still restricts the opportunity of appearing in too many other productions.

Troughton and Hines held a mild protest during the filming of one story (Hines recounts it as ‘The Mind Robber’ in the sixth – their last – season). They argued that they were too tired to keep playing in episodes where only three actors were carrying most of the action. Their protest was heard and the episode lengths cut down slightly with more robots added (Hines’s general recollection), so the reason for leaving wasn’t just an excuse – they were simply feeling drained.

When Troughton, Hines and Padbury left, it was the break-up of another successful
Doctor Who
family, but the show went on. A new decade was just around the corner and the series would make the transition from black and white to colour, forever changing the mood and pace afterwards. It would be the greatest change in the show’s history so far; more so than
William Hartnell leaving. The Doctor of mystery was no more. With ‘The War Games’ we were introduced to the Doctor’s own race, the Time Lords, and learned that he had the ability to continue to change his appearance. The mystery was unravelling, so where would we go to from there?

Patrick Troughton’s Doctor is often referred to as ‘the monster Doctor’ or ‘the missing Doctor’, to highlight two fundamental aspects of his tenure: great new monsters and the most missing stories from the BBC archive. People who remember the Troughton years rate his stories highly; the Doctor was soon to change into a dashing man of action and the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT), introduced in the stories ‘The Web of Fear’ and ‘The Invasion’, would become a regular entity in the more Earth-bound stories of the first half of the new decade.