You're quite ready for this task. You think I can do it? Yes I do and you're
the only man who can my boy. So Peter tell us about events that led up to becoming an actor.
There was no event that led up to me becoming an actor. I was brought up in
Blackpool. I went to see a lot of shows and I always wanted to do it. I always
thought it was great. I used to do radio plays from behind the sofa and do all
sorts of stuff when I was a little kid. And when I went to school, the first time
we had a school play, I think I was nine, I was cast in the lead in The Pied Piper
of Hamlin. I thought that was great. It's showing off isn't it. I just loved it.
And the following year I was cast as Robin Hood in Robin Hood so you got the
lead part twice. That was good going. And the third year, this was still in junior
school, I played, I can't remember the name of the character, in Kidnapped, Alan
Breck, which is the hero character in Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped. So I'd
always wanted to do it and I took part in whatever opportunity I had to act
when I was in senior school. It was a boarding school. We used to do plays every
year at Christmas just to entertain ourselves really. So I used to organise
those and get involved in that right from the start, from the age of about 12,
13, 14. And I always wanted to be an actor. That was my ambition. I was going to be
an actor come what may. And having left school and failed to get into university
because I really didn't do any work, certainly right really, but that wasn't
where my interests lay. I went to Teachers College where I wasted two years
running the Dramatic Society there and playing in my own band, we had a band
called Group 5. There were four of us. And that was quite fun. And I did a lot of
plays there, a lot of generally mucking about I guess, and enjoying it. And during
the holidays I went to the local repertory company and auditioned and
did a couple of plays in the summer break for the wonderful princely sum of
five and a half quid for a week's work. It was good going. And then qualifying as a
teacher I decided I'd get my qualifications just in case. So I taught
for a year in London teaching maths, which was crazy, and then gave it up, just
resigned and wore a lot of shoe leather out in London going seeing various agents,
not getting anywhere. Finally got a telegram, you remember telegrams? Finally
got a telegram from the theatre in Barrow-in-Furness where I'd done my
summer plays saying look if you're serious about this there's a job for you
here, you can come up and be an actor. So I did and I went and did weekly rep for
two years, did 96 plays in two years, learnt my trade really, and that's how it all began.
Can you remember what your first television appearance was? First television appearance
was Z Cars, episode of Z Cars. I played the bus conductor who gave some very
valuable evidence to the police. Z Cars, that was live, that was quite exciting,
first television was live. Have you got any specific memories of Z Cars or your early
days in television? I don't have any particular memories of Z Cars, it was a
simple episode, did that, did an episode of Softly Softly at one point, did there
were various other things that I did, all the things that jobbing actors did,
all the serials that were on at the time like Red Cap, Court Martial, The Saint,
Gideon's Way, World of Wooster, played little parts in all those, nothing very
significant. And then I went and saw a director called Alvin Rakoff who was
married at that time to Jacqueline Hill, who of course was one of the original
cast of Doctor Who, and he cast me as a beach photographer in Blackpool in a
play, they used to do a show called Armchair Theatre on Sunday nights on ITV,
became Thames, but it wasn't Thames now, I think it was ATV, anyway, doesn't really
matter. Armchair Theatre was the title of the, the overall, the umbrella title, and
this show was called The Girl in the Picture, I played the lead in that, and my
co-star in that was Nicola Padgett, and for both of us it was our first
television roles, first proper television roles, leading parts, and I absolutely
loved that, we filmed in Blackpool and we did this in the studio, what became
the Thames studios at Twickenham, and yeah, it was great, suddenly I was a
proper actor. Of course you don't get these, you do these jobs and no one sees
them for a while, because they don't go out the following week, they go out weeks
later, and so no one had seen it, so I didn't get any other work out of that.
It so happened that I did get another job within a month, which was playing the
lead in a part, in a show called The Villains for Granada, up in Manchester,
and that was another leading part with a great actor called Mike Pratt, who played
my brother in that, Mike Pratt did Randall and Hotkirk Deceased, as I'm sure
you know, and that was a great experience, I mean good actors around me, and
suddenly I was being a proper television actor, so two leads played, and
then desperately broke, tried to get a part in Doctor Who with Richard Martin,
casting for the Monoptera and whatever the other things were called, in a serial,
and he wouldn't cast me, because it so happened that the day before I went to
see him, he saw the girl in the picture, and said, no, he said, I'm sorry, you're
far better actor than this, these are easy, there's nothing to play in these
parts, so I don't want to cast you in this, he said, but I promise I'll cast you
in something in the future, when I'm casting proper actors in acting parts,
you know, which was nice to think he thought I was a proper actor at least,
and I took it with a pinch of salt, I didn't think anything would come of it,
but a couple of months later he was doing The Chase, and he needed someone to
play Morton Dill, this hillbilly in New York, I didn't even have to read for it,
he said, would I like to play it, I said, yes please, of course I would, and so I did
that, and well, the rest is history, they called me into the pub afterwards and
asked me if I'd like to take over from Bill Russell and Jackie Hill, because
they liked my performance, I mean the character Stephen was nothing like
Morton Dill, but they saw something in me that said I could play this part, so I
was both flattered and excited, and they obviously accepted it, and played Stephen
Taylor for a year.
I like Bill, I got on with him very well, I mean I knew he could be awkward, and I
watched him be awkward with people, he was never awkward with me, he was
always helpful with me, he was very kind, very generous, he used to take me out
for lunch at least once a week, he'd go across the road from the rehearsal room
at Shepherd's Bush, there used to be a Bertarelli's restaurant on the Green, he'd take me
over there, and he sort of got me into eating raw steak, and I think that's
probably where he gets his gritty earthiness from, but he said,
rare steak, I used to have them cremated, you know, and I got into eating it
properly, and wonderful, and so I will always remember Billy for that.
Well he was very good fun, he could be totally irascible, he could be
really nasty to people, he could be a bully, he could be all of those things,
and he was all those things, but not in my personal experience, I was never at
the receiving end of anything unpleasant from Bill, he was always very kind, very
generous, and he became a good friend of my wife and I, my first wife,
and I would go and have a curry with him in Ealing, or he
would come over to our flat in Gloucester Road, and he would have a meal
with us, so he was sociable and friendly and nice, though in spite of that I
didn't really know him.
When was the last time you saw your fellow travelling companions,
and all we know Brian and Jackie Lane?
Neither of them have I seen in years.
I don't think I've seen Jackie in 30 years, and I hadn't seen
Maureen in a long, long time, we never socialised afterwards, we did for a
very short time, but it didn't last, I don't know why, but I mean I've
followed Maureen's career and I've seen her do some wonderful things, and of
course she's a very good writer now, and successful, but no I haven't seen
her, I'd like to see her again, nice lady.
Your particular era of Doctor Who has now become a bit of a golden age, did
you consider it to be that at the time?
Well it was, the whole thing about Doctor Who was, it was a very popular
serial, I mean we were getting 8.5 million viewers, which ain't bad, though
that was at the time when there were only two channels, but it was Saturday
night, and Saturday night was not television watching time, people didn't
watch, certainly not early on Saturday night, I didn't watch, I never saw
any of these shows, and you couldn't record them, so if you missed them, you
missed them, I never saw them, I was out, or I might be opening a Fate or
whatever, you know, because you had all the spin-offs that go with the
success of the series, so they bounced off on you a little bit, or I'd be
playing cricket, or what, in the summer, you didn't get a chance necessarily to
see them, I never saw most of these shows, but I could appreciate that it was
popular, and as I say, we used to have regular audiences of 8.5 and more.
Certainly for the more sci-fi ones, the audiences were bigger, apparently, and I
didn't know this until very recently, Verity Lambert was saying that the
audiences were always better for the science fiction ones than for the
historical ones, and I find that sad, because I thought the historic ones
were by far the best scripts, were by far the most imaginative, clever, and better
characters to play, it was a better piece, it didn't draw the audiences in the
same way, it was something like 2 million more would watch the sci-fi ones rather
than the historic ones.
So the stories on Massacre and Myth-Maker is your personal favourite?
Yeah, definitely. I think, I mean the Time Meddler was great fun, but that was a
combination of the two, that was sci-fi and the Viking invasion in Tempest in
66. I mean, how do you do a Viking invasion with six actors? Anyway, they did,
they did get a long shot of the boat, and there's people rowing there, that looked
like a big crowd, must have been a very expensive shot that one.
Yes, the Myth-Makers, the Massacre definitely, they were, I think, my favourites.
So I loved the Celestial Toymaker, and in retrospect, I now like the Gunfighters.
I think the Gunfighters has quite a lot going for it, I didn't enjoy doing it.
I'm not sure whether it was, I don't think Rex Tucker, the director, liked me,
I don't think he thought I was any good, I also thought, got the feeling that he
felt it was beneath him to be directing a Doctor Who, I don't know, I might be
making that up, but that was just the feeling that I got. But I don't think
Bill liked him at all, and probably it was mutual, and I think it rubbed off.
So it wasn't a very happy experience, and I always got the feeling that Rex had a
lot of time for the actors he brought in to play the gang, and much less to do
with us, the regulars, he hadn't cast us, he was stuck with us, and he didn't
like us much. And that I found rather sad. I could be absolutely wrong, I could be
100% wrong with that, but that was the feeling I got.
So if there had been a sequel to The Savages, would you have been up for that?
If there had been a sequel to The Savages, I would love to have done that, I think it
would have been, I think it's almost required, there ought to be a
sequel to The Savages, it's an unfinished story. We don't know really what happened
when they left, but of course when I was in Doctor Who, that year that I did, and
the next year, and possibly a little longer than that, the TARDIS was always
broken. He couldn't control where he went, the doctor didn't know how to control
the darn thing. I mean he was either feckless, or the machine was
broken, and that was never spelt out. But he couldn't actually control it. So it
ended up wherever it ended up. He had no idea where he was going. Now you have
this in the modern series, which I've got to say I think is updated wonderfully,
I mean it's very clever, but they are in control of it, they can go wherever they
like. I thought one of the great things about it was you never knew, so you look
on the screen, where are we now? Wow, what's this? What's the atmosphere like?
We got, yeah fine, we can live here. And then the story develops and we find new
extraordinary things. That was really, I thought, really clever. And I think it's
rather sad that that's lost. I thought that was one of the absolute bonuses. But
as they can control it, they could come back and find me, couldn't they?
Oh, no money! I'll get it. You said that, Wack. Give me time. You've had time.
40 quid, Wack. What about it? I'll get it. I know how to get it, but just give us a
couple of hours. You did not bet, Wack. Not with us. You were a loser.
Oh, wait a minute. What's your idea? I'll get it. I'll get you the money. I know that.
It's ten. You've got till twelve. We'll be at Knockers. Oh, and just in case you're
not there with the money, Pinter, show me your name.
Make sure your look changes this time. I wasn't getting a great deal of acting
work. I'd done episodes of Zed Cars again and directors had used me, people like
Jerry Blake had used me on a serial that he did called The Girl in the Black
Bikini, I think it was called. And I'd done a few colour tests for various
directors, Dougie Canfield's one, Jerry Blake was another. But I wasn't getting a
mass of work. And I was more or less on the point of thinking, well, I've got to
do something to earn the living because I'm just getting nowhere with this. I'm
waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for agents to call you and agents losing
confidence and sort of saying, well, you know, I should try another agent. All
that stuff went on, you know. Oh my God. They said life was hard as an actor and
it is. And it's getting harder by the minute. Should I be doing this? I never
really lost faith in the business but you get near to it. And out of the blue,
I got invited to go and audition for Blue Peter. Totally different. So when I
was offered the job, which was after three auditions, I wasn't a hundred
percent certain I should take it because it was a big change of what I, you know,
this isn't what I do. I'm an actor. I'm an actor, dear boy. So, yeah, I wasn't sure
whether to accept it. In the end, I did accept it and I thought I was accepting
it for six months. And I stayed there ten and a half years. The funny thing is, if I
stop to think about the films that we made on the programme, I can
remember them pretty well. As long as my mind, my memory's triggered, you know, we
did say, oh yeah, I remember. And then the memory runs, it cuts in and I can
remember them. And I can remember them in quite a lot of detail. I can't
remember anything, hardly anything we did in the studio. Things that we did on a
recurring basis, like we'd have dogs in, like a new litter of guide dog puppies
is born. And we have them in the studio and see how you select a puppy and so on. Or
the Christmas appeals. I mean, I remember those sort of things because we did them
on a regular basis, you know, burying the tortoise and all that sort of stuff. But
items, nothing. Again, it was a film. I can remember some items we had in the
studio because they related to the film that went before. Like I remember
riding into the studio as part of a pyramid on five motorbikes with the
Royal Signals. But I'd made a film with the Royal Signals, learning how to
be a trials rider. I was abysmal, I fell off a lot. But those sort of things, yes, I
can remember. But for the most part, I can't remember details of things that we
did in the studio at all.
So you famously interviewed John Pertwee in the home of it all?
I think I interviewed him more than once actually. Yes, he came in the studio. But I knew John
quite well. I'd enjoyed John's company in, he had a lovely villa in Ibiza. A very
nice swimming pool. And we made a couple of films for his son, for Sean,
you know. I can remember him throwing me and my wife off the roof of the
place into the swimming pool. We didn't see the swimming pool in the film, we were
just thrown off the roof, which looked pretty good. But yeah, I spent time
with John most summers for about five years and became reasonably good friends.
You know, we'd be invited to his house in Barnes. Funnily enough, I recently met
his wife Ingeborg. She turned out to be a friend of friends who were at the
same dinner party that I went to one evening in Suffolk, which was a surprise.
Nice to see her again. But yeah, yes, I interviewed John on Blue Peter and that
was nice to do. I liked John, but I didn't like him as Dr. Who. That never cut it
for me. Never. I thought it was ridiculous. That was not Billy Arnold, you know.
I mean, it's just so far removed. And it's interesting that I never really took to
Patrick as being Dr. Who. Again, I liked Patrick very much, although he was a lovely man too.
But he was quite, in a way, he was quite close to what Bill had been. There was a
similarity about them as people, you know, just age. There was something that made...
It wasn't a massive move from Dr. Who Bill Hartnell to Dr. Who Pat Troughton.
It was a huge move from Pat Troughton to John Pertwee and so on and so on.
They went on and on. And one could accept those moves more, but for me, Bill was so
definitively Dr. Who, I never really accepted anybody else as being him.
I think of all the doctors that followed, Sylvester McCoy was the most like Billy Hartnell.
Not that I'm saying he was the best actor, but he was just... he had that same sort of
quirky edge that Bill had. Interesting. But it's all a matter of opinion. And I mean,
people who never saw Billy Hartnell, if they didn't watch Dr. Who right at the start, then
why would they think that was the doctor? You know, there are far more interesting or
more elaborate performances later on. I think Christopher Eccleston was fantastic. I think
David... what's his name? It's great. It can always move on. But for me, no, Billy Hartnell's
the man.