Harry Towb, a Northern Irish actor who made it moderately big on the British stage and screen, died at the weekend (a few days before his 84th birthday), and I just wanted to acknowledge his two roles in Doctor Who – as Osgood, the lunar controller in episode 1 of The Seeds of Death and McDermott, the old-school plastics factory man in episode 2 of Terror of the Autons. In both cases he gets kiilled off pretty early on, but rather memorably so. Osgood has a fairly standard English accent, but McDermott is the only character ever to appear on Doctor Who sounding like he shares Towb’s Norn Iron origins.
The Seeds of Death
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| Osgood bids his farewell as he heads up to the moon… |
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| …disappearing in the T-Mat booth… |
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| …to find that his management problems… |
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| …have been made worse by… |
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| …the unseen intruders… |
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| …(actually the Ice Warriors)… |
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| …who shoot him. And he dies. |
Terror of the Autons
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| McDermott is puzzled by the plastics factory… |
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| …and the new advisor with the natty beard… |
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| …who wants to show him a new invention… |
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| …the chair you can just sink into… |
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| …this is the forerunner of the bin that eats Mickey in "Rose"… |
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| …and so McDermott dies. |
Towb also returned rather bizarrely to play the Brigadier’s aged Italian Uncle in The Ghosts of N-Space, Jon Pertwee’s last outing as the Doctor, in 1996. There are no pictures from The Ghosts of N-Space, but perhaps that is just as well.
Yes.