Anthony Read - not an obituary

Anthony Read, 1935-2015.

This isn’t an obituary; if it was it would become a data-dump of dates, names, TV programmes and suchlike because I would have had to look up Anthony Read’s life and achievements beyond Doctor Who and as this is a personal Blog I don’t see the point in me doing that particularly – there’ll be enough obituaries out there anyway on fan websites no doubt.

This isn’t even really an appreciation of the man, because I am familiar with so little of his output. I didn’t watch Chocky back in the 1980s and I don’t even know Sapphire and Steel – which for a British sci-fi fan probably relegates me to the second division, alas.

But Anthony Read was the script editor on Doctor Who between 1977-1979 and also contributed a story, The Horns of Nimon, to the following season. As such he was responsible for guiding and creating some of the most memorable Saturday tea time television for little me. If I’d been utterly terrified by the later stories script edited by Robert Holmes, I was terrified and enchanted by those under Anthony Read through the end of Season 15 and throughout Season 16 ‘The Key to Time’. I clearly recall the excitement and anticipation that the Season 17 trailers created in me in 1979 in the run up to Destiny of The Daleks, which shows how hooked this little five year old was by what had gone before.

Read very knowingly took a demotion to work on Doctor Who. He’d been a script editor, producer and then a senior producer at the BBC before, and had moved on to freelance work at ITV. Doctor Who clearly held a certain kudos and appeal to some even though it was a fourteen year old programme. Graeme MacDonald, Head of Series, headhunted Read as a suitably competent successor to Robert Holmes who was eager to relinquish the role after three and a half very successful but very busy years. Holmes had written or re-written from scratch an unprecedented number of scripts himself during his tenure as script editor and unsurprisingly he was keen to take a break. With the exception of The Invasion of Time as a last-minute replacement six-parter to complete Season 15, Read tended to get off a little lighter than Holmes, it seems, in terms of enforced contributions (although his successor Douglas Adams arguably had a worse time that Holmes during his season!)

Read was happy, then, to step in as script editor on an established fourteen-year old programme which offered him the chance to flex some inventive and outlandish muscles. Graham Williams, the recently appointed producer, had worked as a script editor under Read previously when he’d been a producer so there was probably something of a collaborative work ethic between them both, having experienced both roles each.

The programme had been heavily criticised the year before for horrific violence – particularly during The Deadly Assassin where the Doctor is apparently drowned at the end of episode three. Mary Whitehouse dug her claws in and the BBC relented. To be honest I think she had a point, even if I don’t necessarily agree with the way she went about it. But I also think that it wasn’t so much that the show was being too violent, it’s that it was being performed and made with a level of realism at times that naturally raised the horror stakes and made it a bit too ‘on the nose’ so to speak.

Cliff hangers tend to be the moments that stick strongest in the mind, as a dramatic highpoint that one had to wait a week to see resolved. Most of my memories of Doctor Who up to the age of 5 or so tend to be cliff hanger moments. I was, I’m sure, too young to understand what was happening if I watched The Deadly Assassin episode three at the time but I certainly watched the week before because the last few minutes of episode two is possibly my earliest memory, as the Doctor enters the nightmare world of the Matrix. Should I have been watching as a toddler? Probably not in fairness, and my boy, who is about the age now that I was then, doesn’t watch the new series unless we know it’s suitable. But times were different back then, you couldn’t re-watch programmes, they were on and then gone. So I was left with fabulous graphic images of horses in gas masks, clowns under the sand, trains trundling towards the Doctor driven by faceless drivers, Laserson probes being thrust into the heads of robots, and a major discomfort around rodents thanks to the huge rat pursuing Leela through the sewers and eventually chewing on her leg. This last moment was too much for me and, scared half to death and screaming, my mother decided that I shouldn’t watch it any more. Thanks mum. This didn’t last all that long though, as I was back for the following season.

The series clearly wasn’t going to change very much while Robert Holmes stayed as script editor. The first three stories of Season 15, overseen by him, are largely in a similar vein to what had gone before with horror and possession aplenty. He left with an excellent script of his own, The Sun Makers, to fill the immediate need and handed the reins to Anthony Read who’d been shadowing him through Image of The Fendahl, the last truly dark and horrific Tom Baker story in the old style.

Read is notable, then, for coming in and planting a clear stamp on the stories with pretty much immediate effect. Possession goes out the window. Gothic and old Hollywood horror take a hike. Instead we enter a universe more literary, more garrulous, more witty – which suits the increasingly dominant Tom Baker. It’s difficult to decide whether these scripts encouraged Baker’s confident verbosity or whether the production team sensed this is where he was taking his Doctor and responded to that accordingly. There is more ‘light’ comedy, although there are still dark moments to compensate. Underworld and The Invasion of Time were both troubled productions to close Season 15 and Read clearly had a baptism of fire. But having tested the waters and not drowned he really flies the following year.

Read himself (writing with Graham Williams as ‘David Agnew’) was the only new writer to the programme in Season 15 – and then only through a certain desperation at the eleventh hour. He brings two new names to the show the following year, one of which is often sorely overlooked and the other is hyped up massively – certainly to the detriment of the former and possibly to the detriment of Read himself. I’m talking about David Fisher and Douglas Adams. Fisher fits into the show perfectly, delivering two cracking scripts The Stones of Blood and The Androids of Tara – between them eight weeks of highly entertaining and thrilling TV in the middle of the season. It’s like he’s been writing for the show for years. Read and Fisher had a long history of collaboration, which I believe continued after both had left Doctor Who. Douglas Adams was a slightly different (Babel) fish. He’d been encouraged by Robert Holmes previously, and Read also saw something worth nurturing in him. As a consequence he had to work very hard with Adams to turn The Pirate Planet commission into a script that could realistically be made – to the initial horror of Graeme MacDonald, it seems. It’s possible that this was only because the other slots were being filled by writers who needed less guidance. Holmes delivered two stories also, and the final six-parter came to Bob Baker and Dave Martin who’d been writing for the show since 1971 offering reliability but somewhat uneven quality.

I have an on-off relationship with The Ribos Operation: sometimes I love it sometimes I find it hard to enjoy and I don’t really know why. But I adore The Pirate Planet, The Stones of Blood, The Androids of Tara and Holmes second story The Power of Kroll and I have fond, fleeting, memories of all of these at the time. I struggle to find a run of stories that I enjoy more, outside of the Robert Holmes era, than these four. Such variety; such a lot to thrill, entertain, engage and divert the audience.

The six-part season closer, The Armageddon Factor, suffers in a similar way to The Invasion of Time the year before. It lacks punch and focus, it loses its way and then struggles to claw anything back for the end. Nowadays, of course, the opening and closing instalments of a story arc like this would be written by the series head writer – effectively the role the old-style script editor took.

Read had decided to move on again at the end of this full season. You can’t blame him, he wasn’t in for the long haul and he’d made his mark. Unfortunately for many the ‘mark’ he’d made was in commissioning Douglas Adams, who was then offered the chance to step into Read’s shoes for the following season. Adams accepted the role, shadowing Read on The Armageddon Factor. Then things started to pick up with The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy and the rest is history.

Anthony Read kind of came in and left as script editor on a whimper: both Underworld and The Armageddon Factor are among the least enjoyable and least visually impressive of Tom Baker’s stories, which is a shame.

 
However, Douglas Adams struggled to get new writers involved with the programme the following year and although Read had broken recent tradition in not commissioning himself for a script before he left as script editor, Read found himself commissioned to write for the series anyway, along with old hands Terry Nation, Bob Baker (solo this time) and recent successful newby David Fisher. His story The Horns of Nimon inadvertently closed Season 17 early when the six-part Adams-penned climax Shada was cancelled due to industrial action. Read’s is the final story of the 1970s, the last story to feature the blue time tunnel title sequence, the last to feature Dudley Simpson’s incidental music, the last to feature Delia Derbyshire’s original theme arrangement, the last to feature Tom Baker’s multi-coloured scarf outfit. It was the last time Graham Williams, Douglas Adams or Anthony Read were credited on the show. It was the end of an era. For many of us the show would never be the same again, never be as good again. For many it would suddenly get a whole lot better though. Que sera sera.

Certainly for me The Horns of Nimon sticks in my head as a story I loved at the time (it took me a long while to warm to all the changes the following season) and I continue to love it now. It’s light-hearted in many ways but like the rest of the season it has a consistency of tone throughout with a serious underlying drama and a great premise; overall I find it immensely enjoyable. It’s often said that the main reason Douglas Adams struggled as a script editor was that he found it impossible not to tinker with other people’s work, thus increasing his workload. He may well have heavily edited Read’s script, but his tinkerings are likely to have been tonal, maintaining the uniformity the whole season exhibited. I don’t think we can or should take anything away from Read for being script edited by Adams.

In another almost mirror image, Read’s first full commission as script editor was Underworld, a tale basically ripping off Classic legends of Jason and the Argonauts, and his final work on the series, the Horns of Nimon, was a re-packaging of the Minotaur myth. No wonder they were boxed up together by BBCDVD as ‘Myths and Legends’ (with the Pertwee yarn The Time Monster).

 

Read was clearly proud of his year and a half on Doctor Who - but sensibly, with a knowing appreciation of the difficulties under which they were working at the time and the limitations of what could be achieved. He was a lively contributor to the DVD range as, sadly, one of the few from the production side in the late 1970s to make it through to retirement age. I for one am glad that we at least have those contributions on record for posterity. Just hear the glee with which he mentions going to see Star Wars on its first release with Tom Baker and Graham Williams. Hearing his Whosround interview with Toby Hadoke, recorded at the 50th Anniversary Event at Excel London in November 2013, he mentions he's there with his grandson - and again he sounds so proud to have been part of something that has now been passed down to new generations, and is being cherished and enjoyed and developed further by them.

http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/toby-hadoke-s-who-s-round-139---anthony-read-and-mark-ayres-part-1-1398

I’d like to thank Anthony Read for all the stories he oversaw or wrote when I was very young and which entertained, enchanted and thrilled little me, and although I never met him my appreciation of a brief chapter of his working life makes me saddened by his death.

I hope that posterity records Anthony Read as more than just a Doctor Who script editor, and I hope that Doctor Who records him with more justice than simply the guy who filled the gap between Robert Holmes and Douglas Adams.