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I recently found a stack of issues of the BBC’s staff magazine Aerial from 1972. Three stories caught my eye... Doomwatch references yes, but something else caught my eye...

When I realised they covered early 1972, I attacked each issue with the fervour of a Dead Seas Scrolls scholar seeking references to Doomwatch and I wasn’t disappointed. The edition dated week ending 4 February contained a picture I had never seen before featuring both Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis standing outside TV Centre with big smiles on their faces. The accompanying two paragraphs marked Davis’ forthcoming departure from the BBC in March.

In April, with the third series in mid-production, Pedler and Davis wrote to the BBC, explaining they planned to put out a statement protesting at their being excluded from contributing storylines for the new series. This had been a self imposed situation having both cut their ties with the programme owing to disagreements with producer Terence Dudley. Now Davis was freelance, they no longer needed to keep up the pretence that they worked on the programme as they did during the latter stages of the second series. Dudley suspected they were simply looking for a quote for the press. They had a movie to promote, and it was to go on release at the same time as the third series.

This will explain why in the edition dated 26 May, Dudley is on record as saying: ‘This series will be better than the others… It comes nearer to the real problems of society and treats them responsibly. Also we will benefit from having eight scientific advisors instead of just one we had before.’ A shot over the bows by Mr Dudley a few weeks before Messrs Davis and Pedler went public with their unhappiness over the direction Doomwatch was taking after the transmission of ‘Fire and Brimstone’ on 6 June.¹

But what interested me most was the story beside it.

Titled ‘Pilot Dramas for Possible Series’, it referred to something I had referenced in footnote 1 a couple of Stacks ago concerning three pilot dramas to be produced or directed by future Head of Serials Bill Slater and producer Anthony Cockburn (sic)² which were transmitted in the late summer of 1972 as Drama Playhouse. These were Terry Nation’s The Incredible Roger Baldick (‘Come Softly the Night’), The Venturers (‘The Chancer’)³ and my favourite of the three (or rather its eventual series), Sutherland’s Law (‘Man Overboard’.

But our Procurator Fiscal is nowhere to be seen in this article. The third Drama Playhouse was to be have an adaption of the 1961 novel The Pasang Run, aka The Burning Shore by Elleston Trevor, a British novelist, who under the name Adam Hall wrote the Quiller novels which became its own thriller series during the 1970s (which was only made bearable by the presence of Michael Jayston). The Pasang Run is set in Malaya and revolves around the struggles of a new controller at a besieged airstrip surrounded by jungle and communist terrorists, but with air hostesses to chat up. The adaptor was to have been John Wiles, a playwright, novelist, and a former BBC script editor, promoted by Donald Wilson in 1965 to become a Serials producer and take over Doctor Who from Verity Lambert.

I have had occasion to study John Wiles’ BBC freelance file, and in it you will find a contract dated 13 March 1972 for a storyline called Drama Playhouse The Pasang Run to be delivered in five days’ later. By 21 April, he was commissioned to write a fifty minute script called ‘A War of One’s Own’, the first episode of The Pasang Run, which he delivered ahead of schedule on 1 May and that’s the last reference I find. Unless I did not snap every single page of his file, there is nothing to indicate why the commission was rejected and replaced by Sutherland’s Law. Wiles quickly found work with the BBC, writing a documentary on Christopher Columbus, and later a rejected version Magellan, for a drama documentary series called The Explorers.

There are several obvious reasons why Coburn did not go forwards with the project. One – the script was found to be less than satisfactory. Two – the plot is set in Malaya, and Burnham Beeches or Black Park could not really be expected to double for the jungle (although It Ain’t Half Hot Mum had a good stab at jungles from time to time), but the scale the series needed was bound to be considerable. An airfield surrounded by jungle is not easy to fake. Three – budget. Shooting in Scotland – especially with the BBC’s own studios up there – is far cheaper than visiting or replicating Malaya.⁴

There were clearly no hard feelings because Coburn commissioned Wiles on 20 October 1972 to write episode 11 of his next project Warship, and on 20 December he delivered to script editor Graham Williams a storyline for Sutherland’s Law called ‘In the Deep Pool’ - and was commissioned the following day. A second contract issued on 28 December christened the episode ‘The Trial’. It was transmitted as ‘The Ship’ on 18 July 1973 and it is a very good episode in an excellent series. Warship was a difficult series for Wiles to get right, and he faced a script editor called Ian Macnaughton who knew the Navy inside out and had to revise several scripts. But their relationship was cordial on paper.

Wiles was a very experienced script editor having worked with Alan Bromly on the BBC2 Saturday night thriller serials in the mid 60s before he was promoted. As you will have read during my 199 Park Lane pieces, he was one of several temporary story editors and was performing that role while trailing Verity Lambert on Doctor Who. He may well have remembered how John Lucarotti was an unwelcomed writer on Doctor Who, insisting on a commission because the former story editor Dennis Spooner had verbally agreed to one.

Famously, Lucarotti had wanted to do a story on the Norwegian Norseman (Viking!) Eric the Red travelling to and exploring Greenland. Dennis Spooner then wrote as his farewell piece to Doctor Who ‘The Time Meddler’ which featured rather stereotypical Vikings (complete with horny helmets) albeit from a century later, scouting the coast of Northumbria before launching their invasion in 1066 on behalf of the Norwegian Harald Hardrada. This may explain why John Wiles and his story editor Donald Tosh rejected the story. Not them again… Wiles and Tosh gave him an idea for a religious intolerance story (the first idea featured Vicki being accused of being a witch in medieval England). This theme became ‘The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve’, but even then they apparently gave him the run around – or so he felt. The common cry of a writer.

Why was I interested in John Wiles? At one point during my struggles researching and writing Directed by Douglas Camfield in 2014 or thereabouts, the editor wondered why no one had ever written a book on the making of twelve-part Doctor Who monster classic from 1965-66 ‘The Dalek Master Plan’. A few weeks later, I was looking at my snaps of every single page of the surviving production files from that very programme (the casting of the bald Technix is a favourite), and thought, actually, he is right. Let’s call it V for Varga! The initial idea of ‘The Dalek Master Plan’ and its eventual transmission spanned John Wiles’ difficult tenure on the programme. I wanted to write the book as a companion piece for the Camfield biography and make it a mixture of John Wiles biography and an intensive guide to Serial V’s production (and perhaps finally have a stab at sorting out the companion issue).

Then I discovered somebody else who I respected very much was researching a Black Archive on the same story. Knowing the thorough job he would do on the script side of things, I quickly decided to concentrate on the Camfield book as it was competing for my attention with the world around me and let Black Archive carry on with his incisive approach I could not match. I really wish I had continued. It would have been such fun…

If you want a companion piece for Directed by Douglas Camfield - the revised Fantom version may receive a paperback printing sometime this decade - try my making of the Camfield directed 1981 masterpiece The Nightmare Man.

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COMING SOON: The original idea for ‘Project Sahara’ called ‘Check and Mate’.

Part One of The Big Pull.

How did Softly Softly Task Force celebrate ten years of Barlow and Watt, and how is it connected with Doomwatch?

1. The article also mentions there will be an episode on censorship suggesting ‘Sex and Violence’ had not yet been pulled from the schedules owing to concern that Long Longford’s controversial enquiry into pornography was mirrored by the programme’s own enquiry in which Quist’s wife Dr Anne Tarrant was a part of.

2. These were the days of distorted and tinny telephone calls and indecipherable short hand which turned a Doctor Who story called Image of the Fendahl into The Island of Fandor when a fan enquired with the production office. Talking of , one can only wonder if Terry Nation and Anthony Coburn discussed Doctor Who at any point, considering how the latter’s rejected script The Masters of Luxor aka The Robots had certain similarities with its replacement The Mutants aka The Daleks aka The Dead Planet aka well, you know. David Brunt’s Doctor Who Production Diary goes into the ins and outs of this most methodically.

3. Although it became a series with a different lead character, ‘The Chancer’ is all that survives from The Venturers and it recently leaked onto YouTube. It guest starred Brian Blessed asking for an investment and eventually getting one. Sutherland’s Law starred Derek Francis, but when a series was commissioned, he was replaced by Glaswegian Iain Cuthbertson. The episode ‘Man Overboard’ was remade as ‘The Sea’ and went out as the second episode, introducing Welsh actor Gareth Thomas as the deputy fiscal. Both versions are sadly lost. The episode features in the first novelisation.

4. In 1972, Doomwatch lost one episode due to budget cuts within the Drama department, and The Lotus Eaters which was already filming overseas in Crete, lost four episodes. The subject of these budget cuts will be explored later in the year.