Free Doctor Who by Alan Kistler Page A

hero fans know today rather than an occasional obstacle in the lives of his crew.
    In 2013, Peter Purves made his first appearance at Gallifrey One, a fan-run convention held annually in Los Angeles since 1990, and spoke glowingly of his time on Doctor Who. “There was actually a while where I didn’t want to do more conventions because I thought, I don’t like looking back. But doing these DVD commentaries on the old shows and seeing them again, there’s a lot I fondly remember and things I like much better now. ‘The Gunfighters,’ where the Doctor gets mistaken for Doc Holliday? I used to think it was quite bad . . . but now it’s great fun to me. Bill was just enjoying himself. He loved the idea of a Western for the kids. He really wanted the show to be enjoyable for children. It bothered him if it got a little too dark or violent.”
    I pointed out to Purves what a unique crew he and Maureen O’Brien made. Rather than two ordinary people from the modern day, here were a soldier and a genius from the future. “Yeah, it became a different show in a way,” Purves replied. “Now you couldn’t ignore it was science fiction even if you just had a historical fiction story. . . . Vicki and Steven were from the future, and they could recognize ray guns and spaceships all by themselves.
    â€œIt was a great time, and Bill was marvelous,” he added. “Looking back, I can still be critical of my performance. We were shooting so many episodes, and we had I think about ten weeks off in the year, so there was a rush. You didn’t always have time to consider things you wanted clear about your character. But now I’m back doing Steven [in audio dramas] for Big Finish. . . . In The Anachronauts [audio drama], there’s a bit there about Steven’s guilt that he left a war to go have fun time traveling. He didn’t mean to, but he did.”
    Lambert Leaves
    Soon after Peter Purves joined the cast, Verity Lambert left Doctor Who, though she remained at the BBC. She later explained,
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    I had been at Doctor Who for . . . probably more than eighteen months . . . and I just felt that, you know, it needed new blood. I think things do . . . especially something like Doctor Who. I mean, I’d had tremendous fun, and we’d been able to do so many different things, and I just needed to move on, really. And there was another idea that Sydney had called Adam Adamant which was equally kind of, sort of mad, and I was quite attracted to that.
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    The last episode that Verity Lambert produced was “Mission to the Unknown.” It’s the only story of the classic series that was one episode in length and is the only episode of both the classic series and the modern that doesn’t feature or mention the Doctor or even any of his companions. The episode was a prelude to the adventure “The Daleks’ Master Plan,” though the four-part story “The Myth Makers” aired in between.
    Lambert always spoke with pride about her time with Doctor Who. When people mentioned how often tight budgets or problems on set created obstacles, she offered that people learn more during times when things go wrong. She was happy with having worked on a show with such an atypical hero and a universal appeal to children and adults, though she did criticize some later eras during which she felt the program strayed too far from what she considered to be the core story. She died in 2007.

The Comic Doctor
    At twenty-six years old, the classic Doctor Who program remains the longest running science fiction series in television history. Less known is that the Doctor Who comic strip, though it has changed publishers, is the longest running comic strip based on a TV series, starting in November 1964 in the pages of TV Comic and continuing to this day in Doctor Who Magazine.
    TV Comic catered to a readership generally under the age of ten, so making stories that appealed