Waris Hussein reborn 50 years after he directed Dr Who
- Publication: Eastern Eye
- Date: 2013-05-10
- Author: Amit Roy
- Page: 26
- Language: English
THE FILMMAKER TALKS ABOUT HIS CAREER
JUST when he feared he was being forgotten, Waris Hussein is very much in the news and in demand as debut director on Dr Who, the BBC's most successful franchise which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
Now 74, Waris finds it amusing that he was a 24-year-old, fresh out of Cambridge, when he was given the job of directing Dr Who's pilot episode, An Unearthly Child, with William Hartnell as the first Time Lord.
Waris remembers: "I was the first Indian-born director in drama (at the BBC) and I was the youngest. Dr Who came to me because no one else wanted to do it. They did not realise what they had on their hands.
"We were given no money, we were given the worst possible conditions to work at Lime Grove studios, the equipment was antique, the authorities did not have any faith in it, and then it became a huge hit," he says.
The first episode was broadcast on November 23, 1963, with the programming schedule thrown into disarray because US president John F Kennedy has been assassinated the previous day.
The start was so unpromising that Waris and Verity Lambert, the first woman producer at the BBC, thought they would get the sack. But after seven episodes which Waris directed, the nation was hooked.
Now the BBC has commissioned a 90-minute drama, An Adventure in Space and Time, about how Dr Who began, which will be broadcast on November 23 this year. "Mark Gatiss has written the screenplay," says Waris. "He also writes for Sherlock."
Apart from writing for Sherlock, Gatiss plays Sherlock Holmes's cerebral older brother, Mycroft, in one of the most successful detective series of recent years.
"I spent time with Mark and gave him my thoughts, but the main thrust of it is based on William Hartnell," Waris goes on. "It is about the creation of a legend. Prior to Dr Who he was a working actor in many secondary roles, but he was never really a star. When we approached him he did not want to do it. It took us two expensive lunches for him to say yes."
Hartnell was "very erratic and a superBrit. He was faced with three outsiders. Verity was a female - in those days no woman produced. Secondly, he was faced with an Indian. Then, he was faced with Sydney Newman, who was Canadian. Sydney Newman created Dr Who. He was the one who came up with the telephone box as a concept. Our relationship (with Hartnell) developed into something very special."
Hartnell, who was a grandfather and 55 when he started, quickly became a favourite with children. "He was a Pied Piper - children followed him everywhere." He had to leave after four years because he was finding it difficult to remember his lines.
In the dramatisation by Gatiss, the role of Waris has gone to the 29-year-old British-Asian actor, Sacha Dhawan. Waris considers this very surreal. "How many people are portrayed while they are stilling living? Okay, Alan Bennett has been portrayed on stage. And you have Helen Mirren playing the Queen."
Waris worked with Gatiss so he could get the characterisation and the history right. "Those days I had to prove myself constantly as a creative person."
He is also happy with the choice of Sacha. "I went to the read-through - Sacha is from the north, from Manchester, and has a natural north country accent. I had to sit with him and say, 'Now listen, Sacha, my life is quite different from yours.' He came home and recorded me. 'Look, we all come from different backgrounds. I went to private school and to Cambridge. This is my accent.' He got the essence of me very well, I thought. He is a talented kid."
If Waris is judged by his work and the famous actors he has directed in a career spanning half a century, he is probably the most successful Indian origin director there has ever been.
Among his collection of photographs is one of Waris straightening Richard Burton's tie, while a cigarette is held languidly in the actor's mouth. That was taken in 1972 when Waris spent four months in Italy and in Germany directing Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Divorce His, Divorce Hers.
"It was the only television they did together," he says. "It was the end of their marriage, ironically."
Waris has the notion of turning the experience into a film along the lines of My Week With Marilyn. "It was a mixture of laughter and tears. It is me as a young Indian director coping with the two biggest stars in the world."
Waris is reassessing what he should do next, having spent 1980 to 2012 in America. "You get a point in your life when you say you have done this - what can I do next? And how much more time do I have? I am anxious to get my creative juices going because things start to slow down and health matters and I am very aware of that."
Born in Lucknow, India, in 1938 into a well-connected Muslim family, Waris came to England in May 1947. Both he and his sister, Shama, four years his junior, were on their mother's passport. Attia Hosain, an artistic person in her own right, decided not to return to India when the country was partitioned in August that year.
She died in London in 1998, leaving behind two novels, Phoenix Fled and Sunlight on a Broken Column. An anthology of her unpublished short stories and an unfinished novel have just come out in India under the name, Distant Traveller. This year, Waris says, will mark the centenary of her birth. His father had passed away in 1982.
Shama (Habibullah), who went to Cheltenham Ladies College, has worked in film production - she was production manager on Richard Attenborough's Gandhi in 1982. Waris, who feels he inherited his mother's love of the arts, attended his father's old public school, Clifton College in Bristol ("the lavatories had no doors to stop the boys from abusing themselves but the pretty blond boys were b******d like anything"), and went up to Queens' College, Cambridge, which his father had also attended. But unlike his father, who was a great cricketer, Waris read English literature and threw himself into theatre during his undergraduate years from 1957-1961.
Laughing at the memories of "three of my best years", he lists some of his contemporaries: "Ian McKellan, Derek Jacobi, Trevor Nunn, David Frost, Peter Cook, Eleanor Bron, you name them, they were all there. And we had a great time. I was directing a lot of plays. I directed Derek Jacobi when we were at Cambridge. There was a newspaper called Varsity and they started an editorial 'Personalities of the Week' and I was number one. David Frost came number 4. The article was about how haughty I was and traded on my aristocratic roots which was hardly the case."
Waris was approached by the BBC - which he joined in 1962 - but managed to go to the Slade to learn about stage design.
He admits to being upset when favourable reviews of Dr Who in the nationals always managed to leave out his name. But his career, directing mainstream drama and films, was astonishingly successful. In 1965, he directed A Passage to India ahead of David Lean's 1984 version, having gone to Cambridge and persuaded EM Forster to film much more of his book.
"He (initially) said to me, 'I don't want anybody touching my books because films are a disaster to the literary mind.'"
In 1970, Waris directed Jack Wild and Mark Lester in the film Melody. "This was very first film that David Puttnam produced as a producer."
In 1972, he also directed the theatrical motion-picture version of Henry VIII and his Six Wives, starring Keith Michell, Charlotte Rampling and Donald Pleasence. "It actually had a royal premiere. It was Princess Anne and the Duke of Edinburgh who came."
In 1976 came The Glittering Prizes, about the changing lives of a group of Cambridge students, starting in 1952 and following them through to middle age in the 1970s. In 1978, he directed the seven-part Thames Television serial, Edward and Mrs Simpson, for which he shared a BAFTA with producer Andrew Brown. For the Barry Manilow musical Copacabana, Waris won an Emmy in America. As for the stage, "I was the first Asian director to direct at the National Theatre - John Gielgud in a play called Half Life - which transferred to the West End".
"At the same time as I was doing all these things, a certain Mr Enoch Powell was ranting on about immigrants," Waris remembers. "When I was doing Edward and Mrs Simpson the media coverage on it was intense but there was no mention of who was directing it. I ignored this and then got upset because of the anti-immigrant editorials."
He rang a friend, Naseem Khan, who wrote for The Guardian, but she was unable to help. "Wouldn't it be a good thing if somebody did an article on the Asians contributing to this society? There are doctors, there are lawyers, there are people who are not just coming off boats. I am one of them. I am a creative person. I am an artist. Is there nobody to cover us? 'I don't know whether I can.' Of course, nothing happened."
After his years away in America, Waris felt he would never be recognised by today's British- Asian community. But he is happy that the 50th anniversary celebrations of Dr Who have brought him back into the reckoning. On Sunday, April 7, Waris was interviewed by Sue MacGregor on Radio 4 in The Reunion and caused a global stir by suggesting Dr Who had become too sexualised.
His regret is that "there is an element now - and I know we're living in a different era - of sexuality that has crept in. The intriguing thing about the original person was that you never quite knew about him and there was a mystery and an unavailability about him. Now we've just had a recent rebirth and another girl has joined us, a companion, she actually snogged him."
As a director, Waris always appears to have been his own man and invariably a cut above the rest.
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- APA 6th ed.: Roy, Amit (2013-05-10). Waris Hussein reborn 50 years after he directed Dr Who. Eastern Eye p. 26.
- MLA 7th ed.: Roy, Amit. "Waris Hussein reborn 50 years after he directed Dr Who." Eastern Eye [add city] 2013-05-10, 26. Print.
- Chicago 15th ed.: Roy, Amit. "Waris Hussein reborn 50 years after he directed Dr Who." Eastern Eye, edition, sec., 2013-05-10
- Turabian: Roy, Amit. "Waris Hussein reborn 50 years after he directed Dr Who." Eastern Eye, 2013-05-10, section, 26 edition.
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