Second paragraph of Chapter 3:
Michael [Troughton], however, was to see very little of his father as he grew up. While he was still a baby, Patrick set up a second home in south London, near Kew, with his girlfriend Ethel ‘Bunny’ Nuens. Patrick and Bunny would go on to have three children together, but Patrick and his wife Margaret never announced a separation. The couple kept up the pretence that they still had a normal marriage. Patrick’s long absences from the family home were explained away as his having to work away from home, due to the nature of the acting profession. When Patrick’s mother died twenty-four years later, in 1979, she was still unaware of the separation. Patrick and his original family had kept up the façade by visiting her every Christmas Day and pretending that nothing had happened. She never knew she had three more grandchildren.
This is a nice chunky book about the history of Doctor Who, from 1963 to 2024, by the author of the book about Watling Street which I enjoyed a few years ago. It takes an interesting approach: a chapter per Doctor (two for the First and Fourth Doctors), looking very much at the story behind the scenes, why particular decisions were made, why particular people were hired and fired, and treating the sixty years of the show as a whole, single phenomenon to be explained as a whole.
A lot of the material was familiar (indeed the Second Doctor chapter seemed very familiar to me, though others seemed more original). I wished also that a bit more space had been given to the spinoff series (sadly neither The Curse of Fatal Death nor The Scream of the Shalka is mentioned), and to the comics, books and audios (and indeed games); although the TV series is by definition the core, there’s a lot more Whoniverse out there.
(Also, it is not entirely Higgs’ fault, but I cannot completely forgive him for inspiring me to seek out Jon Pertwee’s two scenes in the 1977 sex comedy Adventures of a Private Eye. I urge you not to look for them. Some things are better left in well-deserved obscurity.)
However, Higgs brings a lot of good stuff here. His analysis of how the show got created in the first place in 1962-63 is one of the best of the many that I have read, bringing in some new facts and circumstantial material. I think he is also right to split the First and Fourth Doctor eras; the case for treating Four/Hinchcliffe distinctly from Four/Williams+JNT is fairy obvious, but I have long felt that there’s a similar case for One/Lambert and One/Wiles+Lloyd, and Higgs just does it effortlessly.
It also feels to me like it’s fairly rare to take the holistic approach and treat Old Who just the same as New Who (and the Movie). Even within Old Who, we tend to treat the so-called black-and-white era separately from the color era. But in principle, there’s no reason not to apply the same analytical approach to all of it, and Higgs demonstrates that such an approach can be successful.
A particular sub theme that I will have to think about is Higgs’ insistence that some key stories should be seen as direct reflections of what was happening in the production history of the show at the time. So, the two trials of the Doctor in The War Games and in Season 23 reflect the pressures of potential cancellation of the entire show (as does The Greatest Show in the Galaxy). This only gets you so far, but it does get you a certain distance.
In the end, Higgs is entitled to write the book he wanted to write, which is not completely the book I wanted to read, but is certainly close enough to it to make this very worthwhile. It’s only just out, folks, so you may not have seen much hype around it – well worth getting, and I will nominate it for the BSFA Non-Fiction award next year. You can get Exterminate/Regenerate here.
