Doctor Who star Peter Purves is thrilled that fans will finally get to see two long lost Dalek-themed episodes from the 1960s on TV this Easter
Peter Purves played the Doctor’s assistant Steven Taylor in the 60s, see here with William Hartness and Maureen O’Brien
Doctor Who star Peter Purves is thrilled that fans will finally get to see two long lost Dalek-themed episodes from the 1960s on TV this Easter.
The actor and presenter, who played Tardis companion Steven Taylor, reckons the classic black and white series is far better than the rebooted modernised version. He said: “It was the golden era. I don’t think the show is a patch on what it was.”
The BBC is broadcasting two episodes from the story The Daleks’ Master Plan with the late William Hartnell as The Time Lord over the Easter holidays. The 12-part story originally went out in 1965 with more than nine million viewers tuning in to watch the wheeled exterminators try to take over Earth.
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But the Beeb then wiped the tapes – believing viewers no longer wanted black and white programmes – and the story has not been broadcast since. Over the years a handful of recordings of the missing instalments have been found and restored. But recently two more episodes – number one and number three – were discovered in a cardboard box in a collection of vintage films. They will finally be aired on BBC iPlayer some 61 years after their original broadcast.
The cast included Purves, who was an actor before he became a household name a few years later thanks to his role as a presenter on Blue Peter. He now claims that the sci-fi show, which launched in 1963, was in its prime back then even though the technology was basic and prompted jokes about wobbly scenery and monsters made from egg boxes.
Purves, 87, maintains that those early stories were more “intelligent” than they have been since the 21 st century reboot, featuring the likes of David Tennant, Jodie Whitakker and Ncuti Gatwa.
He said: “I was in it at a time when I think the show, technically, wasn’t very clever. The limitations were in the technology of the time. We didn’t do great sweeping magnificent film sequences.They were very short – we recorded as if it was live. We didn’t stop the tape even if a mistake was made.”
He said that the Tardis “disappearing and reappearing” was as good as the special effects got, at the time. “It was a very different show, but it was led by extremely good scripts,” he explained on The Chatterbox Redux Podcast,. “There are intelligent scripts. They worked on all sorts of levels. And I mean for me, that was the golden age. When they regenerated to Patrick and went to Jon Pertwee, I mean all things then became possible.”
He is less impressed with the modern version. “I mean the whole thing has become so technical and I don’t think it’s a patch on what it was.”
Peter stayed on the BBC show for a year and appeared in ten stories in total. Despite leaving Doctor Who in 1966, Peter revived his character Steven in 2014 for a long running series of audio adventures by Big Finish.
The company started to produce Who-themed stories when the BBC show was cancelled on TV in 1989. Over the years it has attracted a huge fan base as it has brought back many old faces including Tom Baker, Colin Baker, Bonnie Langford, Katy Manning, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann.
“I find the television stories less impressive than most of the stuff we’ve done on Big Finish,” he said. “I think there’s some great stories there. I think to my mind better than much of what’s gone on television. Television’s got consumed by the ability of technology to do wonderful things – but the substance is not there.”
Peter first appeared on Doctor Who playing a character called Morton Dill in a six part story in 1965 called The Chase, which also featured The Daleks. He impressed the show’s bosses, because three weeks later he re-appeared in the same story as an astronaut from the future called Steven Taylor, who ended up becoming The Time Lord’s new companion. He laughed: “I think I am the only person to have insulted The Daleks on screen and not been exterminated.”
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