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The Celestial Toymaker was first transmitted by the BBC in April 1966. It was the first
serial to be produced by Ennis Lloyd and it boasted a spectacular supporting cast, most
notably Michael Goff as the toymaker himself. Now the absence of the Doctor from the middle
two episodes was the first attempt by the BBC production office to write Bill Hartnell
out of the series. By not having the Doctor there for the majority of the story meant
that there was plenty of opportunity to bring in a new leading character in the final episode.
But that wasn't to be because in the meantime the BBC renewed Bill's contract and he was
able to continue in the series for another five stories, which is a little bit more than
could be said for me. The screening of the third episode, which was called The Dancing
Thor, brought a complaint from the estate of the author Frank Richards, complaining
that his character Billy Bunter perhaps had been used in an unauthorised fashion and at
the same time viewers to the serial complained that a much loved literary character was being
made far too evil. Luckily the situation was put right very easily the following week by
a continuity announcement which just said simply that Cyril was a Bunter-like character.
All episodes of The Celestial Toymaker were assumed completely lost. That is until the
spring of 1984 when a 16mm tele-recording was found in the vaults of ABC Television
in Australia and that was a recording of the final test. Maybe they thought it was cricket
and that's why they kept it there in the vaults but it wasn't, it was part of The
Celestial Toymaker, the final episode. Now I actually kept and owned for some little
time the spectacular Trilogic game. A beautiful piece of construction and a very fine game
to play but I felt it brought me bad luck and when finally after being out of work for
18 months I consigned it to the dustbin my career suddenly took off. So perhaps the malignant
influence of The Toymaker was still manifesting itself. Now there are no known tele-snaps
or off-screen photographs of The Celestial Toymaker in existence. So consequently this
reconstruction has been made using previously unpublished on-set photographs and publicity
material. So why not sit back now and enjoy this loose-canon reconstruction of The Celestial
Toymaker.