Over two sessions at his London home, Waris read through the diaries for the first time in six decades and was highly amused to be reacquainted with his youthful self, aged just 24. Many forgotten details flooded back, as well as his frustrations and anxieties at that time, less than one year into his remarkable career as a director. Waris’s fresh observations appear below in parentheses, as do RT’s explanatory notes.

This is the first diary mention of Doctor Who…

Wednesday 29th May 1963

Today I reported back to the BBC and Mavis informed me that I was going to do a Moonstrike. The serial “Dr Who” would follow later. I am in the same office I had for [The Shadow of] Mart with Shirley Coward as my secretary.

[Waris in 2023: “I wonder who Mavis was. No idea now. But this was at Television Centre. I had a fabulous office on the fifth floor.”]

Thursday 30th May 1963

The more I think of “Dr Who”, the more it depresses me and I can’t bear the thought of it. I hope it never happens.

[Waris in 2023: “You see, nobody knew exactly what the format was. The scripts were non-existent apart from the first one by Anthony Coburn. There was nothing more to go on. The sci-fi element didn’t bother me particularly; it was more that we’d be dealing with Stone Age characters. I mean, the discovery of fire was not my idea of directing something after my Cambridge days where I studied Shakespeare. And I didn’t want to be laughed at – directing actors in skins.”]

Sunday 23rd June 1963

I am sitting waiting to join the Doctor Who set up at the Centre. 52 weeks of it! I met Verity Lambert. She is glamorous and young. Mervyn Pinfield [the associate producer and a senior BBC figure] is optimistically cresting one gigantic wave. So far we have one writer and no scripts. I put forward Marghanita Laski’s name as a possible.

[Waris in 2023: “I’ve no idea now why I suggested her. Anything to divert attention!” Laski was a writer and panellist on What’s My Line? “And that was my first meeting with Verity – wow!”]

Friday 5th July 1963

Now I’m faced with almost three months of non-activity because Dr Who has been put back till late September and Rex Tucker [the series’ original, caretaker producer], who was launching me on it, has handed over his preliminary plans to me, with, I suspect, a sigh of relief because the whole thing is so outrageously optimistic that I’m sure it will not carry through for a whole year.

We are having great casting problems and have not yet seen one suitable girl to play Susan after a conveyor belt of articulating drama school products with toffees in their mouths. Two people, Cyril Cusack and Penelope Lee, have already declined our offers and I shan’t be surprised if Leslie French does the same – meanwhile the scripts are going to be rewritten by Anthony Coburn and I am wondering what my future will be after all this has blown up in our faces.

Verity is charmingly optimistic without any real knowledge of what she actually wants from the serial. All idea of possible fantasy has been thrown to the four winds and we are discussing the portrayal of the Gum tribe quite seriously in terms of accurate palaeolithic terms. Sydney Newman’s brainchild is quite impossibly monster-like. The whole business is like a nightmare. I saw him briefly in the bar [with] Tony Page who is going to direct Stephen D with Sydney producing. It’s more than I can bear. [Stephen D was a BBC play, aired in October 1963.] Prompted me to call Helene to make an appointment for next Wednesday.

[Waris in 2023: “Helene Hoskins was the celebrity astrologer who wrote for Harpers and Queen under the name ‘Celeste’. She was very expensive but volunteered to do my chart without being paid because I was in such a state.”]

Saturday 13th July 1963

Moonstrike came out on Thursday and I was so upset by its slowness and bad camera work that I would hardly go into the Centre the next day [Friday 12th July] and only did so because Verity and I had to interview William Hartnell for Dr Who. We had a full three hours, lunched by his agent Terry Carney, having already decided among ourselves that Hartnell would do. Now there is nothing much to do till mid August as we have found Susan – Carole Ann Ford – who, we learned later, is married to [her agent] Walter Jokel and couldn’t possibly be 21 as she said. [She was 23, playing 15.] But never mind, we said to ourselves, she looks it, but we still had doubts, especially after seeing a rather good little actress playing in The Knack at Rada.

I went to see Helene. She was very interesting about my horoscope and said it was extremely favourable which bucked me up considerably, though I don’t mind admitting that I still have my doubts about my future and what will happen to all of us.

Thursday 18th July 1963

[At] Lime Grove where Verity, Mervyn and I watched film shapes for Dr Who.

[Waris in 2023: “That would have been elements of the title sequence.”]

I have asked to do a set of episodes for Compact between now and September 28th or whatever because weeks stretch out unattended otherwise and I need to be kept occupied all the time.

Verity and I went to lunch with William Russell and Terry Plunket-Greene his agent at the Eau de France and the whole session lasted way into the late afternoon … I shouldn’t have had to resort to any Compacts as there were earlier possibilities of doing another Moonstrike but as it goes everything has a habit of closing up on itself like a quicksand and no traces of rust left apparent when the machinery runs smoothly as a whole. I am tacking up all my faith in opening Dr Who as well as possible and hope that things will happen after that.

[Waris in 2023: “I’m trying to be optimistic. Here I am, having directed the play The Shadow of Mart, and I’ve done a Moonstrike – you would have thought I was a catch as a director but I’m wandering around frustrated because I’m dealing with a show called Doctor Who which no one has a focus on.”]

August [no date specified]

Aeons. Mart was received fairly well. A mixture in the press. Sydney strolled over to me up on the roof outside the bar [the BBC Club at TV Centre] and said he had liked the way I had shot the play and he also liked the acting. He introduced me to Peter Luke who is coming in as Friday Night Play producer. “Be nice to him,” said Sydney to me. “He may be useful to you in the future.”

[Waris in 2023: “I was extremely fond of Sydney. He was very helpful to me – and he was right. Peter Luke was instrumental in my career. He asked me to do A Passage to India for Play of the Month in 1965.”]

Almost a month has rolled by and all sorts of people have been away on holidays and returned tanned with foreign sunshine. The immediate future looks depressingly gloomy with nothing positive happening with Dr Who except long talks with Verity and a growing uneasiness in myself that this is my Thermopylae.

[Waris in 2023: “I mean a battlefield on which I’ve fallen.” At this stage, Waris and Verity Lambert had chosen their leading actors: William Hartnell as the Doctor, William Russell as Ian, Jacqueline Hill as Barbara and Carole Ann Ford as Susan. By September, the first episode, An Unearthly Child, was ready to be taped at Lime Grove Studios.]

Wednesday 4th September 1963

Verity has gone off for a week to Ibiza and [Head of Serials] Donald Wilson is away. [Script editor] David Whitaker handed me the fourth and concluding episode of the first Dr Who serial and it was depressingly cosy with none of the raw qualities in it, which will be the only saving quality in it as a storyline. I tried to argue my feelings with him because I respect his judgement as a script editor but he baulked off, and I was left slow-motioning against Mervyn’s nebulous arguments. There seems to be no way out of the mess unless I have it out with Donald and he is more like a naval commander than a creator’s mentor.

Sunday 29th September 1963

We recorded the pilot episode of Dr Who last Friday [27th September] after a traumatic week of rehearsal with uncertain timing, rewrites, arguments about scripts, complaints about rehearsal rooms and in spite of all a latent optimism, hoping for the best under the circumstances. Come Friday and we were delayed by set problems because of [designer] Peter Brachacki’s vagueness throughout the session.

I had not made things any easier by demanding a great deal of camera movement from the crew and had to make do with two heavy pedestals and two circular, Centre-type ones. Whatever the cause, my slowness or Peter’s inefficiency, we managed only one run-through, two runs in the spaceship sequence before the take. Somehow the technicalities clicked, as they always seem to do in the devious world of television.

We ran well on time and had a chance to reshoot the ship [Tardis] because the doors didn’t close properly and Bill Hartnell fluffed. Sydney Newman sat up in the box and I added a few choice words to keep up with his transatlantic mentality! Even Donald Wilson seemed to approve through his avuncular, bland, pipe-screened exterior.

After the whole business, Sydney asked Verity and me to have dinner with him to discuss the result. Verity dropped Bill Hartnell at Charing Cross so under Sydney’s edict and patronage I sat in his Jaguar and he criticised my profile shots and pushing into close-ups from long shots. Eventually a meal at the Fui Tong [a Chinese restaurant] and then Sydney’s extraordinarily contradictory observations. The cast in his opinion was not entirely successful. He was disappointed because they showed no sense of humour in their performances, especially Bill who was not quaint and mischievous enough. “He should be like the upper-class Steptoe.” Barbara should be a prissy woman who got on Susan’s nerves, and Susan wasn’t at all what Carole Ann made her. Carole Ann was too like a stunted woman and should in fact be a gangly gamine. (Hayley Mills type.)

Verity said the Steptoe image was a bit far-fetched as he was only successful as a pauper and there couldn’t be such a thing as an upper-class Steptoe. I defended Bill and Carole by saying I was responsible for the way I had portrayed them. Altogether the evening was negative except that although Sydney liked my handling of the thing he might ask us to do the thing again after we have seen the edited pilot on Tuesday [1st October]. I don’t think I’d mind doing it again but I don’t want to change the cast. Meanwhile I’m looking at the second episode and my heart sinks at the thought of it.

[Waris in 2023: (laughing uproariously) “Oh my God! This is gold. Interesting, isn’t it? I’d forgotten I’d written all this.”]

Saturday 2nd November

I’m not happy about the way Dr Who has been going. Perhaps it’s something in me but the first two episodes have proved to be dull as far as I’m concerned, even though we’ve had another chance to do the pilot again as Ep 1 [recorded 18th October]. Sydney saw to that in an amusing meeting up in his office, contradicting himself here and there about the exact method of presentation and finally fusing our minds with doubt so that there was no alternative but to accept revision and retaking. I was happier about the second time, but even then things fell off here and there and I’m not proud of the final results.

Episode two [recorded 25th October] was even worse – slow, with all the faults in the script glaring out through the cowhide atmosphere inflicted by the writing. The cavemen became caricatures, which was exactly what I’ve been trying to avoid right through the four-day rehearsal period and my shooting of the long campsite scene didn’t help either. Last night’s take [episode three, recorded Friday 1st November] seemed to be better and the forest seemed to come over fairly well but I won’t be able to tell until I have edited the thing on Tuesday [5th November]. Meanwhile the whole business has been very tiring and nerve-racking.

[Waris in 2023: “Well, that gives you some insight, doesn’t it, into how intense it all was.” In his diary the next day, Waris was still reflecting on the previous week of rehearsals for The Forest of Fear. A scene in the rehearsal script, where the Tardis travellers were hungry and sourcing food, needed to be rewritten.]

Sunday 3rd November 1963

Donald Wilson came to the Wednesday run-through [30th October] and insisted that the “food” passage in the forest be changed because it stuck out like a sore thumb. He had a heap of other minor criticisms of the piece and suggested that David alter them immediately. I saw his point about the “food” situation and although basically I agreed to the change, it was the late objection and the possibility of a major rewrite which made me adamant enough to object. Verity sat divided and sided with Donald, which only irritated me further. Donald lost his temper and I decided there and then that as far as I was concerned it wasn’t just the alteration that was bothering me but the principle of Donald’s argument and his complete lack of knowledge about the function of putting on a show in a four-day turnover. Although David was able to rewrite on the spot and it didn’t take me too long to plot it, I was angry enough to go home and miss eating with [writer] John Lucarotti to talk about “Cathay”.

[Here, Waris is already looking ahead to his next Doctor Who assignment, the seven-part historical story now known as Marco Polo, referred to then as “Journey to Cathay” or simply “Cathay”.]

On Thursday [30th October] I spoke to Verity and told her that I wanted to go and see Donald. She said if it was just a question of leaving the serials department I should say so but not to talk to him on any other level, ie alternatives and timing. Looking back on the whole session I suppose I was getting het up irrationally but even now I can’t honestly pretend that I’m happy at the prospect of staying with Who. One has to devote oneself to the project far too long with too little time in the execution of it. The one day in Studio D to line up anything worthwhile takes a long time and sometimes one cannot be happy with the result. I think the first storyline is extremely dicey anyway and I’m afraid that it will probably fail to get the audience we have been hoping for. Personally, as the director, I know that finally the blame for the programme’s inadequacy will be put on me, and this certainly isn’t going to help me in the future. The Future. It’s already worrying me. Nothing positive after November. The time has gone by so very fast and I don’t seem to have achieved much in spite of the outward trappings. One or two fruits and gatherings.

I’ve got on very well with Douglas who has been PA-ing till now and we think we can get down to writing a play together. He is surprisingly sensitive to send up which produces an antagonistic attitude in me and in a paradoxical way produces a kind of equanimity and tension which works well. After next week he goes over to [producer/director] Patrick Dromgoole and I’m not quite sure whether he will come back to the Who outfit after that.

[Waris in 2023: “Douglas Camfield, my PA, was desperate to become a drama director. He wanted to be in my shoes because he felt he was better qualified. Why is this little Indian being given all this stuff? What’s he done to deserve it? Douglas had fought to get where he was. He was from a working-class background. He felt this was all to do with me being someone from Cambridge. We were still very good friends. I supported Douglas, I liked him. He liked me a lot. He respected me because I knew what I was doing, but he resented me for doing that job. And I would tease him and flirt with him and try to get him to relax, but he would say, ‘Come on, Waris. We’re losing time. We’d better get on, otherwise I’ll put you on the next boat.’ We did all the filming at Ealing Studios and I must credit Douglas for overseeing the fight between the two cavemen, with the help of the stuntman. I was there watching, and it was decided how many shots we would take.” Camfield soon graduated from production assistant and became one of the most prolific and revered directors on Doctor Who, and at the BBC in general.]

Our office is being moved lock, stock and barrel to Threshold House in Shepherd’s Bush as soon as the fourth episode is in the can. First steps in extinction? What an extraordinary path I have travelled. Where will it all lead to?

[Waris in 2023: “That’s important because to me it symbolised downgrading. Television Centre at that time was sparkling new and Verity and I had lovely offices on the fifth floor. All my private things had to be moved. Threshold House was like going to the Outer Hebrides. It was awful. But that’s what the BBC thought of us.”]

Thursday 7th November 1963

Attended Donald’s Serials Department meeting. An incredible affair. Everyone, apart from Verity and myself, over 40 or am I imagining it? Certainly the atmosphere was loaded with good-humoured backslapping, pre-war stiff-upper-lipness and I could only react stupidly to the innumerable points and counterpoints put forward leading to nothing constructive except that we will all be moving to Threshold and there is no immediate prospect of moving from Lime Grove, though there is talk of transferring from Studio D to G, which is only a matter of the frying pan etc.

[On Friday 8th November The Firemaker, the concluding episode of the first four-part Doctor Who serial, would be recorded.]

After tomorrow I have a full two months out before “Cathay”. Prospect of a week’s leave official, but because I am office-less I shall take more time away. God knows what I’ll do with it. Wish I could go away somewhere. Restless office stuff will probably not be the same when we all come together. I don’t see any immediate release from Who but can only feed on the hope that things will improve in the new year – before next November when I don’t know what lies in store for me. I met [director] Hugh Munro up in the Club at lunchtime and he is out of work, pointing to the future problems awaiting all of us in this incredible sausage machine profession.

[Waris in 2023: “I was worried, you see, about the following November, which was when my BBC contract ended.”]

[The first episode of Doctor Who, An Unearthly Child, was transmitted on Saturday 23rd November 1963. Waris wrote his next journal entry two days later as he was making a trek across Europe.]

Monday 25th November 1963

On train to Moscow via Frankfurt.

A couple of weeks suddenly loomed up, empty, before I can start doing anything with “Cathay” in the next Who epic. I decided I needed to go away and, on B’s suggestion [“That’s my mother. We called her B”], cabled Paul in Moscow to ask if I could come and stay with him. After that the next few days were bound up in rapid journeys to the Russian Consulate and Shepherd’s Bush.

Problems at the BBC. [Director] Chris Barry’s first episode of The Dead Planet was completely ruined because of talkback right through. [Recorded on Friday 15th November, this was the start of the first Dalek serial.] The episode had to be done again and it set us back a week later. Verity sat at the phone and Mervyn smoked his pipe. We’ve been transferred to Threshold House and the traffic noise outside is ear-splitting. The atmosphere of the newly painted place is like entering a new school and the small-scale air of the trolley girls is provincial.

On Friday [22nd November] I dressed up in my Indian outfit and arrived at the Dorchester for the Guild of Television Directors and Producers Ball. Someone said in the foyer that Kennedy [the US President] had been shot. The cloakroom attendant took my coat and said, “Well, what d’you know!” The news was true. It was announced as we all sat down to dinner and the whole atmosphere was charged with disbelief. An extraordinary sensation passed through us sitting at the silver and wines. The full meaning of it didn’t come yet. Instead the awards were given by Sybil Thorndike – Vivian Merchant, Harold Pinter (I met him – he is superficial now).

On Saturday everything was gloomy with the pall of Kennedy’s assassination. All of us felt it as if he had been a personal friend. I think it is his youth and what he might have achieved that makes his death so horrifying. Special TV programmes were relayed about him throughout the day and ITV seemed to manage better in their programme content. The BBC just burbled on unsure and inconclusive with lengthy questions answered by all-knowing personages of one sort or another. No one really knows what Lyndon Johnson [JFK’s successor] will be like. Dr Who passed unnoticed. Presentation ran the tape too soon so that at least 10 seconds were lost in the opening titles. Bill rang to say the subject matter wasn’t me. [“That’s my godfather, Bill.”] I prepared for the journey.

[Waris spent nearly two weeks in the USSR, including train journeys of two days and nights, while back in Britain Doctor Who was gradually captivating its first audiences.]

Monday 9th December 1963

On train from Moscow to London. My birthday today. I am 25 officially.

Saturday 21st December 1963

London. Back for aeons, it seems… Things have changed on Dr Who. The show is a success and has been received well. Nobody in the corporation is quite sure whether it’s now an adult programme and varied complaints have come in about the violence in some of the episodes. Apart from that, people concerned with the programme are riding on the crest of a wave. Verity has taken all the fame and praise; newspapers ran articles on her as being the youngest producer in TV and Dr Who was her brainchild and baby. Success has gone to her head, her attitude has changed, certainly towards yours truly and I have been relegated to the second rank. Little incidents support me as I’m now indulging in self-pity.

[Waris in 2023: (laughing) “Yes, I was going to say, talk about self-pity! Verity got all the praises. Today the press would be going on about me being a British Asian. They would have featured me everywhere.”]

Casting for Cathay has not been easy because Verity has taken it upon herself to veto most of my suggestions so far. We are wallowing in various offers made to Nigel Davenport who has declined and now Peter Wyngarde who, according to his agent, is elusive for Marco. We’ve offered Tegana to Derren Nesbitt and I saw an unknown Anglo-Burmese girl Zienia Merton for Ping Cho. Yesterday Verity had a get-together with the cast – I was uninvited so it seems and the whole thing is so ridiculously infantile that I don’t even want to comment on it.

[Waris in 2023: “That’s interesting about Peter Wyngarde and Nigel Davenport. I’d forgotten that. In the end I cast Mark Eden as Marco. I’d cast him before in The Shadow of Mart.”]

Our budget for the epic programme is stupidly low and we’re having to watch every penny and at the moment I don’t even know whether I can afford any special music for the thing. I think I will probably have to overspend and to hell with Verity’s objections. She does it so petulantly, anyway, like a spoiled child. Come to think of it, I think that’s the reason for her being the way that she is. She’s spoiled. Also I think I began to feel uneasy about her when Miriam first arrived and Verity’s hair went back to being black. God this is becoming an insulting session. I’m being childish now. Silly of me. Especially as the joyous season is so near and everybody is sending cards and presents.

[Waris in 2023: “Miriam Worms was a friend of mine from Paris who then became a friend of Verity’s. But that’s interesting what I thought about my dear friend Verity back then. I didn’t realise we were at odds. I always remember she rescued me from oblivion years later but obviously there were a lot of temperaments going on back here. I do know that I felt very left out because she did literally get all the focus and nobody ever talked about my participation. I felt pissed off – I think quite justifiably, actually.”]

[Waris’s next diary entry comes nearly one month later.]

Monday 27th January 1964

Early morning. Start rehearsals tomorrow on the Cathay episode of Who. Bad recording of it is just playing on Radio Luxembourg à la Eric Winstone. [This was a newly released version of the Doctor Who theme tune, orchestrated by big-band leader Eric Winstone.] I haven’t had time to write down anything all this time because one occurrence tops another on the work front and although I couldn’t say exactly what takes precedence in the sequence of events, it all adds up to an amorphous mass of happenings – existing. Started the year with, above all, a sneaking acceptance that my contract with the BBC ends this November and I don’t seem to have done anything tangible as yet.

Asked Sydney and his wife to dinner as a long shot and much to my surprise he accepted so we rustled up a group of people B and I thought might be a good match. Jo and Richard Marquand, Sinbad and Eleanor Sinclair and Alec McCowen. The evening went very well and B’s cooking turned out to be very successful.

[Waris in 2023: “So my mother B and I entertained Sydney Newman at my flat in Elm Park Gardens! I didn’t realise we had dinner. Alec was a revered actor and dear friend. Jo was a screenwriter and, many years later, Richard directed one of the first Star Wars (The Return of the Jedi) and Jagged Edge. The Sinclairs were execs with Burma Shell. All very high-end people.”]

I didn’t get a chance to quiz Sydney at all which was probably just as well because I don’t think that was the purpose of the invitation. Still I think we became a bit more human in each other’s eyes. I can’t say the same about others on the “away” front. Verity is basking in a glow of golden success sparked off by the series which has proved to be a great success. I arrived from Russia [in December 1963] to find everything on the move and me somewhere in the tracks behind. I don’t think it’s even worth querying my part in the play-out. Actually the cave opener was juvenile compared to the achievements of the later episodes. [Director] Richard Martin managed last week’s very well. [Probably episode six of the first Dalek story.] We’ve filmed Marco’s fight with Tegana at Peking. A hectic exhausting week. [At Ealing Film Studios 13th–16th January.] But what about the seven weeks ahead? I daren’t think about it. Tristram Cary has composed some good music for the show.

Wednesday 29th January 1964

Desperate last-minute rewrites on ep 1. God knows how I’m going to manage seven weeks of this. It will be pure hell. Another blow today. Met Peter Luke [Head of Plays] in the bar and he said that I wasn’t going to be available for a Festival production after all. Gloomed me up because of hearing it second hand again and nothing from Donald who I finally cornered in the rehearsal room and asked why. He was very avuncular, pipe at mouth, summary in his dismissal. “I’ve told Peter you are not available. I want you to do Esther Waters. (My mind jumped.) No sorry, Silas Marner. I always get the two muddled. God knows why. Constance Cox is already adapting it. I think you will do it very well.” Silence from me. God the awful impersonality of it all. It’s all so transient, I could scream. A Kafka nightmare because one is so hopelessly cut down.

[Waris in 2023: “I never did either of those, but there we are. I didn’t like Donald Wilson. He was in charge of serials. I described him as a pipe-smoking captain of a ship, and it was as if I was welcomed aboard and supposed to carry on as the captain ordered. I resented the idea of being ordered about. Whereas I adored Sydney, who was in overall charge of the drama department, and Peter Luke, who ran the big BBC plays.”]

[Episode three of Marco Polo was recorded Friday 14th February, after which Waris took a week’s leave from Doctor Who.]

Monday 17th February 1964

I am exhausted after three weeks of Cathay. They haven’t been bad really but could have been better, I suppose. John Crockett is [directing] episode 4 which gives me a week’s breather. The script situation is abysmal because most of the situations have been queried and last week there was a traumatic rewrite taking place with virtually new scripts evolving.

[Episode six of Marco Polo was recorded on Friday 6th March. As we see, the star William Hartnell fell ill. He had also been poorly during rehearsals for episode two. Both sudden illnesses necessitated major rewrites to reduce the Doctor’s presence.]

Saturday 7th March 1964

Next week is my last on Who and Cathay. We have had a fraught session with last-minute script changes, cast illnesses and slow narrative structures in the episodes. The four regulars have complained, Bill Hartnell got so incensed the other day that I am sure it brought about his relapse with flu which incapacitated him all through last week and we had to rehearse without him until Thursday afternoon [5th March]. To top that we had an entire scene rewrite between Tegana and Marco. Derren [Nesbitt] slowed up his performance progressively and yesterday during the actual [recording] he went off his lines completely but the scene held because of the improvisations put on by Mark [Eden] who coped with it in spite of a reinsert of dialogue because we’re underrunning.

Verity sat, cool as cucumber changing shots and not really appreciating the problem. We had a strained five minutes in the control room. Many retakes including the end of last week’s episode [the fifth] because of the knife at Susan’s throat. Apparently Sydney, on seeing it, leapt out of his chair, choleric. He is under fire from all sides because of the way BBC drama has been gunned down constantly and he doesn’t want Who to be open to any unnecessary criticisms. I’m all in sympathy with him. I think he has been most unfairly treated and have stood up for him at a number of anti-Newman sessions.

Monday 23rd March 1964

Anatomy of a TV play in production. Hastened through the last episode of Dr Who Friday week [Marco Polo: Assassin at Peking recorded on 13th March]. On Monday night [16th March] I edited Who. From 7.15 to 11.30pm!

[Waris in 2023: “I was supervising the editors. They used to slice the videotape with a razor and splice it together. Down in the bowels of TV Centre. It took so long, because some of the editors hadn’t a clue how to edit, and they needed to do it with sound and vision in conjunction.”]

And that’s the last diary entry on Doctor Who. Despite the frustrations of the time vividly brought to life in these journals, Waris Hussein remains immensely proud of his association with the series. “It’s very interesting looking back at these diaries because neither Verity nor I knew what we had in our hands or what we were doing with Doctor Who. We had no idea of the quality of the show. I feel a sense of achievement. I’m grateful for the fact that Doctor Who was my jumping-up point at the BBC. It helped me to get into further television drama of the kind that I ended up doing, like A Passage to India [1965] and St Joan [1968].”

Waris and Verity Lambert went on to work together many more times and, by the end of the 1960s, had become firm friends. “I respected her enormously and now realise Verity was a vulnerable person. We were too similar. You see she was a Sagittarian, too. She saw me. She and I understood each other implicitly. It’s funny when one gets instincts about people. We were both self-orientated and needed reassurance. We became close friends, worked together and went on holidays together.”

An Unearthly Child and Marco Polo have long been revered as television classics, and Waris laments the BBC’s tape-wiping policy of long ago, which means that no copies of the latter story are known to exist. “I would so love to be able to watch Marco Polo now. I am very proud of what we achieved all those years ago.”

With thanks to Radio Times.