Quotes

To me, a lot of what Philip Hinchcliffe had done went too far. When I learned I was taking the show over, I made special efforts to watch it. One of the stories I saw - Genesis of the Daleks (Genesis of the Daleks: Part Three (1975)) - had Lis Sladen (Elisabeth Sladen) climbing up a rocket gantry, being shot at by guards with rifles. She almost falls once, and then on reaching the top she gets caught and is deliberately tripped by her captors and left dangling in mid-air while they laugh. I had by then just become a father, and so was more aware that if children were going to be watching Doctor Who (1963) at 5.25 in the evening then a lot of this sadism and deliberate shock-horror, which Bob Holmes (Robert Holmes) and Philip Hinchcliffe took a particular glee in producing, was not very defensible. I thought Philip was wrong to let the drowning sequence in The Deadly Assassin (The Deadly Assassin: Part Three (1976)) go through, because the violence was too realistic and therefore could be imitated. Even on Z Cars (1962) one did not show a fight using a broken bottle, for precisely that reason. I was happy to tone down the realistic horror and gore. But then the BBC told me to go further and actually clean it up. It was over-reaction, of that I am sure, but it did not help that in my first year I was under a directive to take out anything graphic in the depiction of violence.

Sophisticated humour was certainly going to continue for the rest of the time that I was doing the series (Doctor Who (1963)), and that was not accidental. I wanted the humour to be there, available for those who wanted to grab it, and to add a little bonus without detracting from the story at all for those who did not want to catch hold. If people did not get the joke, then it should not impair their enjoyment of the show.