The featurettes on the new Doctor Who original series DVDs have been a trial to get through at times — you often feel as if the producers shot 55 minutes of interviews and used everything they shot. But there are some wonderfully revealing bits in some of them, and I’ve especially gained a new appreciation for some of the women working behind the scenes on the show.
For one thing, there’s Alice Frick, who took part in the early BBC meetings that came up with many of the concepts that would later become the basis of Doctor Who.
More importantly, the first producer of Doctor Who, Verity Lambert, was a 28-year-old newbie producer who faced down institutional sexism and rigidity to push her own vision of the show. She was originally saddled with an older executive producer, Rex Tucker, who tried to push her around. As she explained in an interview in the DVD featurette Doctor Who: Origins (on the Beginning box set), Tucker didn’t expect Lambert to push back:
From the time I arrived it was quite obvious that he and I didn’t agree on anything… we didn’t agree on casting. We didn’t agree on what sort of input I was going to have… I think he’d been led to believe that really there was this young producer coming in and he could hold her hand and make all the decisions. I’m afraid I wasn’t that sort of person.
Lambert also had to stare down her bosses, when they tried to pull the plug on the Daleks in Doctor Who’s second story. She had to battle with other departments at the BBC that tried to starve the show of resources due to petty turf battles. Doctor Who wouldn’t have lasted a dozen episodes if Lambert hadn’t been willing to kick a lot of ass. You also get the impression that the show would have been a lot more “educational” and less focused on being a really intense drama.
That featurette also showcases Delia Derbyshire, who turned Ron Grainer’s score for the show’s theme tune into a novel piece of electronic music. The well-known rumblety rumblety woooo of the theme tune owes much more to Derbyshire than Grainer. She painstakingly pasted together pieces of tape and electronic noises to make the arrangement of the theme tune that lasted from 1963 to 1980. Here’s an amazing video of her explaining how she cuts and pastes different sounds to create music. Record companies wouldn’t hire her in the early 60s because she was a woman, but she’s now regarded as one of the pioneers of electronic music.
Finally, I was really blown away by Paddy Russell, who directed a bunch of Who stories in the 60s and 70s. She was one of the first female production assistants at the BBC and then one of the first female directors. She was definitely the first woman to direct Doctor Who, and had to deal with the notorious diva William Hartnell. In the featurette on her directing career (on the Horror of Fang Rock DVD) she talks about how she used the fact that Hartnell was also playing the Doctor’s doppelganger to keep him off guard. She also had to convince Tom Baker to dress up like a mummy in Pyramids of Mars. On the Mars DVD, there’s some great stuff about how Russell and Elisabeth Sladen (who played companion Sarah Jane Smith) rewrote the scripts to make Sarah smarter. In several instances, they gave Sarah some of the Doctor’s lines, so instead of asking him what was up, she was figuring it out for herself.
Doctor Who has a much-deserved reputation for sexism, in both its old and new incarnations. But it’s cool to realize that some totally kick-ass pioneers worked on the show behind the scenes.
Rather belatedly, I read the Business Week article about Web 2.0 companies that featured Kevin Rose from Digg.com and various other young entrepreneurs. A sidebar in the article was called “Valley Boys,” and featured a bunch of up-and-coming tech companies (including BitTorrent, Facebook, and LiveJournal) run by BOYS. No girls allowed. Who cares if people like Mary Hodder (