Doctor Who Dummy

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A DOCTOR WHO DUMMY
The revised edition is now out and about! I hope you’ll enjoy consuming its antique prose and raw realities as much as I had a quiet ball, between regular doses of whisky mac, cranking the thing up to give it another outing. The book represents my Swinging Sixties memories, my personal time-journey without a Tardis to revisit the densely-packed years 1965-69. They began for me when I hitch-hiked to the South of France in the June of 1965, met other freewheeling youth along the way and experienced Beatlemania in an echoing public hall in Nice.

Swinging London

I came back from France to find a vibrant ‘swinging’ London of psychedelia, bedsits, mini-skirted ‘birds’ and a house I shared with other lads near the Portobello Road. With an anguished German girl – who later became my wife – we watched on black and white TV as England kicked the daylights out of her country’s team in the 1966 World Cup. I wrote my debut novel Square One (‘debut’, hark at me!) in the same year, though it wasn’t published (by W.H. Allen) till August 1968, at which time I was interviewed on BBC radio about it by a young DJ called Terry Wogan. As a crazy consequence of all this I found myself attached to a BBC TV show called Doctor Who.

I was the film unit driver and director’s gofer for the first colour transmission of the story Spearhead From Space, the only serial of the Time Lord shot entirely on film. Followers of Rob’s Ramblings on this website will know I was pressed into service as an Auton when we went on location, the first Doctor Who monster to lurch across our screens in colour on British television.

Doctor Who Greats

In the book I use diaries and memories to anecdote about colleagues on both sides of the camera. They include my boyhood hero Jon Pertwee, director Derek Martinus, Terrance Dicks, Derrick Sherwin, Peter Grimwade, Christine Rawlins, Stan Spiel, Nicholas Courtney, Caroline John and other Doctor Who greats, including Tom Baker. I met Tom later, and worked with him in an easy-to-miss-if-you-blink role on Logopolis, as well as appearing in extremely small parts in The Daemons, Full Circle and others.

Pursuing a screenwriter’s highly insecure life I once found myself alone with John Hurt for nearly half an hour at his house and had an impromptu chat with this extraordinary man and actor. I briefly came face to face with Richard Burton during the filming of Under Milk Wood. The great Welshman gave me no more than a passing glare, but the astonishing thing he then did has always intrigued me, so it’s in the book. I once came face to face with an infant Julian Lennon at his dad’s house near Weybridge around the time ‘Hey Jude’ came out.

Meanwhile, with writing jobs often harder to land than the Graf Zeppelin, I continued to make fleeting appearances as a ‘walk-on’ or ‘extra’ in most of the British TV dramas, serials, series and sitcoms of the era, up to and including The Bill, The Two Ronnies and Only Fools And Horses.

Animated Sinister Doctor Who Dummy

Don’t expect, in this rough-hewn extravaganza, a documentary-style account of those heady past times. It’s more of a look at the life and times of a dreamy salesman who aimed to be a writer, and found himself playing an animated Doctor Who dummy of sinister intentions in what has since become one of the most successful television programmes of all time.

I’d like to say a special ‘Thank You’ to Jack Heathcote who won the cover design competition on my Facebook page. His strong image adorns the front of my book.

Order The Life and Times of a Doctor Who Dummy paperback here

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Order The Life and Times of a Doctor Who Dummy eBook here

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Read an Extract from The Life and Times of a Doctor Who Dummy HERE Allons-y!

Robin talks about The Life and Times of a Doctor Who Dummy, and more with Anthony Mason on Radio Warrington:

ANTHONY MASON With Cafe Society (YouTube)

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Read EXTRACTS from Robin Squire’s books

Auton ANECDOTES