Christopher Bidmead

 

Christopher Bidmead, who has died, was the first of producer John Nathan Turner’s trio of script editors each of whom ushered in quite different approaches to Doctor Who. Bidmead was the chosen enabler of JNT’s intent on making the series more serious and drawn from real science as opposed to the boggle eyed, humorous iteration that Graham Williams and Douglas Adams had delivered the previous season. From a forty five year distance, Bidmead’s ideas and commissions were not that far removed and no less ambitious that those of Douglas Adams; it is just the way they were played was tonally different. 

Whereas for Adams one big idea was enough to sustain a story (albeit with sparkling, witty dialogue) Bidmead was more interested in what happened around that idea. He seems to have preferred logical developments driven by believable events rather than narrative through cliffhanger. Bidmead helped bring a seriousness to Doctor Who that seemed quite a jarring change from recent years especially as the Doctor himself reverted to the more sombre, isolated figure with which Tom Baker had started as. In a lot of ways it had been the preceding three years that had been different. Yet Bidmead did not take the show back to the faux horror of Philip Hinchcliffe’s era, instead using the influences of `hard` science fiction and real science to make matters more credible.

The difference greeting us when his first episode aired was certainly challenging. A long, long pan across Brighton beach heralded a serious minded, filmic approach and the subsequent story, `The Leisure Hive` was packed with incident derived from characters rather than chases or dangers. It has a fantastic air of being something special, a quality that each of the stories that season have to greater or lesser extent. The over lit studio does dampen the attempt to mark this out as wholly different to `Horns of Nimon` (those Foamasi hands are just as cheap looking as the Nimon’s feet) but the intent is there. It feels crafted, a production assembled with some care and maximum effort. Doctor Who was always pushed for time and money but the difference is when it doesn’t show in terms of the story.

In a 1988 interview with DWB Bidmead outlined what his approach had been “It’s very hard if you’re trying to write for a totally unpredictable fantasy situation where anything  goes. The idea was that the eccentric and unpredictable Doctor would arrive at a real planet which had real rules and a real economy and a real history, however bizarre. It was all to be rational and understandable, the only element of fantasy being the Doctor himself.”

If his ambition was sometimes undone by the series’ notorious low budgets (notably in `State of Decay` and `Logopolis`), they were more original than many Seventies stories. Bidmead seemed to encourage original ideas more than adaptations of previous genre work. Though he did oversee the removal of much of the `student humour` of the late Seventies, that’s not to say his season lacked dynamic visuals. Memorable moments include the Marshmen rising in slow motion from a swampy lake, the arty white backgrounds and camera tricks of `Warriors Gate` and the neo classical air of `Keeper of Traken`. He penned the final fourth Doctor story `Logopolis` himself creating a melancholy air quite unusual for the series in those days. Not that even he was able to completely erase the series’ penchant for embarrassing moments such as when Anthony Ainley melodramatically addresses the Universe.

Subsequent assessments of his season as script editor range from effusive to highly critical. While some feel he sucked all the fun out of Doctor Who losing viewers (the ratings were largely below previous years), others point to this as a rich seam of more believable original material than that surrounding it. There is certainly an argument that most of these stories have improved with age, their strong foundation and core means they don’t just look silly like some old stories do. Within fandom the season was greeted with near universal acclaim, seen as the start of a rich new era of the show. The general public on the other hand were less convinced.

In the end Bidmead only stayed the one year though he did write two more stories, `Castrovalva` and `Frontios` which suggest that had he script edited a second season it would have been even better. Peter Davison really suits the material, especially `Frontios` which is one of his best performances in the role. Bidmead’s self penned stories are clever, interesting and yet not overcooked. It’s a shame he didn’t get the opportunity to write more of them. He also mentioned in later interviews that during discussions about Tom Baker's replacement he suggested female actors showing he really was ahead of the curve.

However, simplicity won out; losing viewers to the somewhat less sophisticated Buck Rogers in the 25th Century on ITV, Doctor Who pivoted again under Eric Saward towards less high brow though more widely appealing material. Christopher Bidmead’s contribution to Doctor Who is larger than it may appear and shows an approach to the writing of the series that could still work to this day.