Jon Pertwee: The Gallant Doctor

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• Publication: Starlog
• Date: issue 79 (February 1984)
• Author: Patrick Daniel O'Neill
• Page: 21
• Language: English

The great shock of silver hair glints in the stage lights as he makes his entrance, dressed just as you expect him to be: black velvet smoking jacket, frilly shirt, with a red-lined Inverness cloak thrown over it all. He grins and announces, "I am the Doctor!"

For five years, from 1970 to 1974, Jon Pertwee, circus star, vaudevillian, cabaret entertainer, actor, played the title role in television's longest running science-fiction series: Doctor Who. His tenure was perhaps the show's most unusual era, beginning with the tale of how he nabbed the part.

As Pertwee tells it, "One day, between engagements, I called my agent and let him know that I would be interested in playing the Doctor, if—and when—the role ever became open. Now, mind, this is when Patrick Troughton was well-settled in the part, and he hadn't said anything about wanting to quit. At any rate, my agent was rather dumbstruck and asked if I were sure. I said, 'Of course, I am. Be a good fellow, and look into it, will you?'

"So, my agent rang up the program's producer, and said, 'I represent Jon Pertwee, and I'm calling to let you know that Jon would be interested in doing Doctor Who whenever the time comes for a replacement.' There was dead silence at the other end of the phone. And my agent said, 'Yes, I know, that was my reaction, too.'

"But the producer said, 'No, no, that's not it. Listen, I have my 'short list' in front of me right now. Would you like to know who's second on that list?' And damned if it wasn't me."

So, when Troughton opted to depart the series, Pertwee was chosen as his replacement. Now came a new decision: exactly what kind of "man" was this third Doctor to be? The answer: just like Jon Pertwee!

"They asked me, 'How do you feel like playing this?'," Pertwee explains. "and I said, 'How do you want me to play it?'

" 'Well, as Jon Pertwee.' "And I said, 'Who the hell's he?' "'Well, you.'

" 'And who am I?' You see, until that time, I had never played me. I was like Peter Sellers, hiding under a 'green umbrella' all my life. So, playing me was going to be difficult. But after a while, I found I rather enjoyed being me."

Who's Companions

Jon Pertwee has quite a varied background. Born into a theatrical family, his father, Roland, was a well-known playwright and screenwriter, both in Great Britain and Hollywood, turning out scripts for actors such as Leslie Howard and Ronald Colman. The elder Pertwee was also a noted short story writer, whose tales appeared in the original Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. Jon Pertwee's brother, Michael, is also a celebrated playwright (The Mouse that Roared), and his cousin, Bill, is a popular actor and comedian in Britain.

Pertwee was thrown out of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (for lack of seriousness, he says), and then went into touring companies, "putting up the stage, doing a show and then moving on the next day." Those days were followed by several years of repertory work, a stint in the Navy during World War II, and then a segue into radio and television. His credentials also include some time in the circus (an experience which would serve Pertwee in good stead during his Doctor Who gig), vaudeville and cabaret. For the past five years, Pertwee has been the star of Worzel Gummidge, a television fantasy about a scarecrow who comes to life, based on the story by Barbara Euthan Todd.

That incredibly varied career allowed him to avoid the bane of every actor's existence: typecasting after a long run in a prominent role. "The people who get typecast are those the public don't know," Pertwee explains. "I've been in the business for so long I didn't have to worry about it. For example, we had a program in England called Z Cars, all about police in Liverpool. It was tremendously popular, on twice a week, and the people in it were big stars, getting enormous reactions everywhere they went. And after a bit, they said, 'This is ridiculous, I can't go on doing Z Cars. I'll go independent, because I'm really big now.' They would leave the show and then just disappear off the face of the Earth. Nobody would touch them, because producers didn't know them before. The only place anyone knew them from was Z Cars. So, if these actors appeared anywhere else, people would say, 'Oh, that's the fellow from Z Cars!'"

Upon leaving Doctor Who, Pertwee signed on a quiz show, Whodunnit, as emcee. "After Who," he recalls, "I really couldn't go into another series playing myself in an acting role. On Whodunnit, I didn't have to be an actor, just a front man. Then came Worzel Gummidge, with the carrot nose and the makeup to look like a scarecrow, so there's no actual recognition factor."

During his tenure as the Doctor, Pertwee teamed up with three companions: Caroline John as Liz Shaw, Katy Manning as Jo I Grant, and Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith (STARLOG #77). He has fond memories—and definite opinions—about each actress. "I would never be so bold as to criticize any of them, because actors don't criticize each other," Pertwee begins. "It would be disastrous if we did. Nobody would work with anybody else.

"Technically, they were all utterly, utterly different. Caroline John is, I'm sure, a first class National Theater actress, though I didn't think she was right in Doctor Who. She wasn't quite the right physical stature. The sort of companion the Doctor needs should fit the 'Mary Pickford' syndrome—the 'Help, help, I'm strapped to the railway line' thing. And, therefore, I needed little, very feminine people—as Lis and Katy are—because they're easier to pick up and rescue. I was a protective Doctor. The cloak was symbolic of the mother hen, taking the chicks under the wing for protection. I used the cloak that way with Katy and Lis."

Comparing the two, Pertwee adds, "Lis is by far the better actress. She's a knockout. If she's able to give the impression she did, playing such an awful character—someone who rushes around, hiding, crying 'Help, help,' and always getting into trouble—and come out as perhaps the most popular companion, that's a real accomplishment. It's a very difficult role to play and come out of it well.

"But Katy had a sort of magic, and there would be days when she would be positively brilliant! She had this incredible face, with these wonderful eyes and this mouth life a safe door. If you dissected Katy Manning then she hadn't anything, but put her together she's one of the most wonderful sexual bundles which has ever exisisted. And she wore 'gear' like the minis.

"All three were great in their own way and all different, thank heavens! It made it so much more exciting to work with different people who had different attitudes."

Who stunts

Pertwee's memories of the SF series include more than the people, they also include the stunts. More than any other Doctor, Pertwee's character was a man of action, reflecting the actor's own fascination with danger and fast moving vehicles. In fact, one of the roost memorable vehicles of the Pertwee era, nicknamed the "Whomobile," actually belongs to Pertwee! A saucer-shaped auto, with hidden wheels, the actor had it specially constructed, not only to drive on Doctor Who, but for his own personal use as well.

"I've always been an adventurous bugger," Pertwee laughs, "much to my producers' horror, because I used to insist on doing all my own stunts, except falls. I wouldn't do falls, because if I broke a leg, then I would put everyone out of business.

"But in a question of, say, roaring a motorbike across a field with Jo Grant on the back, well—Katy would go anywhere with me, because she was so blind she couldn't see anything anyway. She would just put her arms around me and hang on!

"Sometimes it could get quite riotous, because Barry Letts, the producer, wouldn't ever let me have time to learn. He would just say, 'Oh, Jon can drive or fly anything.' Once, I drove a hovercraft in 'Planet of the Spiders' for a very hysterical sequence had exactly one hour's practice with it and I wiped out three camera crews trying to get through this gap, where I had to leap the thing over a tramp eating lunch."

Sometimes, Pertwee performing his own stunts led to unforeseen circumstances. For example, there was the time when he ran down a stuntman. "Because I'm not a professional stuntman and used to stopping a car dead on the button," the actor begins, "it frequently wouldn't stop dead on the button and I would go powering on and hit oil drums or something. Once, in a story caller( 'Inferno,' there was a great chase sequence, in which I was driving the roadster, 'Bessie', being chased by the Army. The script called for one fellow, a dear friend of mine named Allen Chance, to leap out in front of me. And I asked, 'What do you want me to do?'

"And he said, 'You barrel along and I'll jump out of the way at the last minute.'

"'Are you sure?' I said. 'You don't want me to brake?'

"No, don't do that,' he answered, 'because I won't be able to time it.'

"So, I went shooting down at him about 60 miles an hour, keeping it steady. He was supposed to jump out of the way—and he didn't! CRACK! I hit him! You can imagine how I felt: he was a dear friend and I hit him -with a bumper at 60 miles an hour on his shinbone. It threw him in a ditch, and I came out of the car and was nearly sick. He kept saying to everyone else, 'Take Jon away, take him away. He'll get upset.'

"Anyway, they took Allen off to a hospital and cut his boot off. The collision had opened him up, practically from ankle to knee and he had 27 stitches put in his leg. But he put his leg in a plastic bag, put another boot on, and came back to the set again, because he thought I would be worried! After lunch, he hobbled around, saying, 'Oh, I can stand.' Well, he fell over after 10 minutes, and they took him home. But he didn't want to upset me. He tried to work with 27 stitches!"

Pertwee returned to the series to do his turn as the Doctor in the BBC's 20th anniversary special, which was also broadcast in the United States. How did it feel to return to a role after nearly 10 years? "It's a question that's inevitably asked, isn't it? And it's an unanswerable question, really, because an actor's only doing a job," Pertwee replies. "Say, for example, you're a reporter on the Boston Globe, and you leave to become a reporter in San Francisco, and a little while later, you go home to Boston. Someone asks you, 'What's it like going back to being a reporter on the Boston Globe?' You would say, 'Just like any other job, just like any other day.' Being an actor is being an actor. I know how to play the Doctor, so if you asked me 20 years from now, I would be a bit slower, but I could still play it.

"Being in the anniversary special was an enormous joy. I was working with Pat [Troughton] and Peter [Davison] and masses of old friends, which was a wonderful experience. It became very difficult for the director, however, simply because we laughed so much. We behaved disgracefully throughout the entire production."

On an American tour, in part to promote the release of 14 of his Who adventures to U.S. television by Lionheart Television International (STARLOG #76), Pertwee is struck by the intense enthusiasm of American fans. "I think it's because they're SF buffs, much more than we British are," he ventures as an explanation. "You Americans have always been science-fiction fans, buying SF magazines and books long before we were. The United States would be a wonderful place to film a Doctor Who story. The Lionheart representative said that they might be interested in putting up the money for location filming of a Who story here with the studio work done, as usual, back in London."

The blue eyes twinkle at the thought. Perhaps in the back of his mind, Jon Pertwee is considering being a part of that production, should it ever happen. After all, for a whole generation of British fans, and for a coming generation of Americans, his "science-fiction James Bond" interpretation is the Doctor!

PATRICK DANIEL O'NEILL is a former Associate Editor of STARLOG and a Dr. Who aficianado. He chatted with Tom Baker in STARLOG #77.

Disclaimer: These citations are created on-the-fly using primitive parsing techniques. You should double-check all citations. Send feedback to whovian@cuttingsarchive.org

• APA 6th ed.: O'Neill, Patrick Daniel (issue 79 (February 1984)). Jon Pertwee: The Gallant Doctor. Starlog p. 21.
• MLA 7th ed.: O'Neill, Patrick Daniel. "Jon Pertwee: The Gallant Doctor." Starlog [add city] issue 79 (February 1984), 21. Print.
• Chicago 15th ed.: O'Neill, Patrick Daniel. "Jon Pertwee: The Gallant Doctor." Starlog, edition, sec., issue 79 (February 1984)
• Turabian: O'Neill, Patrick Daniel. "Jon Pertwee: The Gallant Doctor." Starlog, issue 79 (February 1984), section, 21 edition.
• Wikipedia (this article): <ref>{{cite news| title=Jon Pertwee: The Gallant Doctor | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Jon_Pertwee:_The_Gallant_Doctor | work=Starlog | pages=21 | date=issue 79 (February 1984) | via=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=18 April 2024 }}</ref>
• Wikipedia (this page): <ref>{{cite web | title=Jon Pertwee: The Gallant Doctor | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Jon_Pertwee:_The_Gallant_Doctor | work=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=18 April 2024}}</ref>