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Derrick Sherwin
chuffnobbler
Posts: 10,771 Forum Member
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I'm reading DS's autobiog at he moment: it's left me full of questions. I know autobiogs are a personal view of one's own life/experience, but this takes the biscuit.
The War Games ran to ten episodes because DS was trying to keep Troughton happy while working out how to replace him. No mention of "Prison in Space", the abandoned script full of sexism. There are a lot of mentions of there not being enough scripts or writers to go round (which bears out other script editors, and gives me even less sympathy for Eric Saward), but no discussion of the challenges involved in an eight and a ten part story.
He takes credit for UNIT, Brigadier, Earth-exile, etc, and all of this is done very quickly. He says he is in dispute with the BBC over the UNIT copyright (again, dealt with in one sentence), but surely as a BBC employee he would have no entitlement to ideas written into scripts during his time as script editor? Big rewrites on Fury and Web, although he was never really happy with either.
There's mention of a kind-of "deputy script editor" role, which Uncle Terrance got before he moved on to the "full" job, but I am sure Trevor Ray had that deputy role at some point and he doesn't get a mention. I might be confusing the time lines though.
Producer Peter Bryant doesn't come out of it well, but he's one of the unknowns of early DW anyway, so I am none the wiser.
Has anyone else read it? Thoughts welcomed ...
The War Games ran to ten episodes because DS was trying to keep Troughton happy while working out how to replace him. No mention of "Prison in Space", the abandoned script full of sexism. There are a lot of mentions of there not being enough scripts or writers to go round (which bears out other script editors, and gives me even less sympathy for Eric Saward), but no discussion of the challenges involved in an eight and a ten part story.
He takes credit for UNIT, Brigadier, Earth-exile, etc, and all of this is done very quickly. He says he is in dispute with the BBC over the UNIT copyright (again, dealt with in one sentence), but surely as a BBC employee he would have no entitlement to ideas written into scripts during his time as script editor? Big rewrites on Fury and Web, although he was never really happy with either.
There's mention of a kind-of "deputy script editor" role, which Uncle Terrance got before he moved on to the "full" job, but I am sure Trevor Ray had that deputy role at some point and he doesn't get a mention. I might be confusing the time lines though.
Producer Peter Bryant doesn't come out of it well, but he's one of the unknowns of early DW anyway, so I am none the wiser.
Has anyone else read it? Thoughts welcomed ...
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