I met the late Christopher Priest in 2007 at a convention in Leuven, after many years of admiring his writing, and we struck up a friendship immediately, carried on via email with occasional beers together when we happened to be in the same place at the same time.
One of the first things I asked him about was the history of his brief involvement with Doctor Who. He wrote me a couple of long emails about it, which I publish for the first time here, with the permission of Nina Allan. He had already told most of the story to David Langford in an interview in 1995, but there are a few more details and description in the account that he sent me 12 years later.
After I first published this on 21 June 2025, I was sent some very interesting extra material by Tim Roll-Pickering, Jonathan Morris and Richard Bignell (here and here), which I have now incorporated into the text below as of 22 June 2025.
Sealed Orders
I started by asking Chris about the “past controversy” of his involvement with Doctor Who, but he pushed back on that description.
Why do you call it a past controversy? There’s nothing controversial about it, at least as far as I’m concerned. Maybe people elsewhere are arguing about it without involving me?
It’s not all that interesting. I disliked the Dr Who programme from the outset, and still do. Towards the end of the 1970s I was approached by Douglas Adams, who was trying to talk “real” sf writers into writing for the series. I said, “Thanks, but no thanks”, but we enjoyed talking to each other so I went in and met him for a boozy lunch. His plaint was that it was high time Who was overhauled and given some decent scripts, and that he now had the budget and management backing to transform the series. Reluctantly, I agreed, and sent in an outline. It turned out things weren’t as radical as Douglas described, because many of the old prejudices remained. But the money was good and I was broke, so I accepted a commission for a 4-part series. While I was writing it, Douglas suddenly became famous and quit the BBC.
This much is consistent with what I guess is the most canonical version of events in The Complete History vol 33 (page 52), one of Panini Productions’ many publications on the show. In the section on Warriors’ Gate, it states:
Keen to bring ‘serious’ science-fiction into Doctor Who, script editor Douglas Adams approached science-fiction novelist Christopher Priest during 1979. Priest visited Adams and ideas for a four-part serial were developed. In December 1979, Adams left the show – but his replacement, Christopher H Bidmead, had even more of a drive towards science-fiction, and found that Adams had left very few script ideas behind. Priest’s was not among them.
Richard Bignell corresponded with Priest sooner after the events than I did, and his take is slightly different.
He met with both Douglas Adams and producer, Graham Williams (who he both liked) but decided that DW was not for him. Sealed Orders didn’t begin to come about until he met Bidmead.
Shannon Sullivan has the following summary of the plot of Sealed Orders, the first of the two Priest stories, gleaned from past issues of Doctor Who Magazine that I don’t have access to:
A political thriller set on Gallifrey in which the Doctor is seemingly ordered to kill Romana by the Time Lords. A complex plot involving time paradoxes would result in the appearance of a second Doctor (who dies) and lead to Romana’s departure; it also involved the idea of time running into itself, resulting in one TARDIS existing inside another.
If you put this plot summary in front of me, and asked me to guess which well-known science fiction writer was behind it, Christopher Priest would have been among my top choices. The doubled Doctor and intersecting realities are themes that appear in several of his later novels.
Nicholas Smale quotes an interview with Christopher Priest in Dreamwatch with a few more details:
SEALED ORDERS addressed an omission that cropped up in DOCTOR WHO stories: the central characters ride around in a time machine but use it simply as a sort of taxi, travelling from one studio-bound story to another – the curse of low-budget TV. My story was a time-paradox extravaganza, with the TARDIS creating endless complications by going backwards and forwards in time – once even materialising inside itself. In one scene, I recall, there were five Doctors on-screen at once, all with consistent plot-lines to follow: this happened, of course, five times at different points in the story, [so] you saw the scene from the viewpoint of a ‘different’ Doctor each time.
The Tardis materialising inside itself was of course used by Bidmead in Logopolis later that year.
Back to Priest’s account:
They replaced him [Bidmead] with a new script editor, but more importantly a new producer was also appointed. This was the famous John Nathan Turner, now deceased, so I am free to say he was a loathsome little BBC hack who had aspirations above his abilities. He happily adopted the mantle of “Mr Dr Who”, if you see what I mean, beneath whose brilliance everyone was subordinated. Almost the first thing he did was to commission a book about himself: a day in the life of Dr Who’s new producer, or somesuch narcissistic stuff. [A Day With a TV Producer, published 1980.] While he was queening around in his moonboots and padded jacket, my story was forgotten. Someone changed the brief (background story), and the story languished unproduced. When the brief changes, anything written within it obviously becomes unusable.
The Complete History has a slightly different version of how events unfolded.
Reading a Priest novel, Bidmead was impressed with its creativity and while Priest had no television experience, he decided he could be worth suggesting to Nathan-Turner. Contacted by Bidmead, Priest revived the storyline discussed with Adams; this was formally commissioned as a scene breakdown entitled Sealed Orders on Wednesday 27 February 1980. Bidmead was delighted with the hard science-fiction concepts Priest offered. He commissioned the four scripts for Sealed Orders on Monday 24 March; this serial would be made and run fifth in the 1980/1 series and conclude the E-Space. Aware of Priest’s lack of scripting experience, Bidmead worked closely with him and was excited by the idea of a prominent writer working on Doctor Who, but he underestimated the attention Priest required. When the first drafts were delivered, the concepts were excellent but the work was that of a novelist, with scenes that would not play well on television. Priest withdrew from the project in April.
There’s a significant variation between these two accounts. Chris Priest suggests that his story was “forgotten” and “languished unproduced”, whereas the Complete History, no doubt using Bidmead’s memories and BBC records, has several fairly intense weeks of work by both Priest and Bidmead on the story before Priest gave up. The story was formally commissioned on 24 March, and we are told that it ended in April, so that could be a week later or five weeks later.
Originally I thought that the crucial point was the introduction of Adric; Matthew Waterhouse’s casting was announced on 25 April 1980, and I suspected that Chris Priest was not sufficiently interested in the project to rewrite Sealed Orders, which sounds like a fairly tight Doctor / Romana story, to include a third companion. Also, he had already been paid. Warriors’ Gate was written as the replacement story, which worked out well.
Tim Roll-Pickering, however, has pointed out to me that the character outline for Adric was issued on 30 January 1980, before Sealed Orders was commissioned. Richard Bignell thinks that the failure of Sealed Orders “was more likely down to the fact that it had to wind up the E-Space trilogy”. Both suggest that the production team’s (ultimately unfulfilled) desire to bring back an old companion was an additional complicating factor.
The Enemy Within
The second Christopher Priest story was The Enemy Within (also one of the variant titles for the TV movie of 1996). Again, Shannon Sullivan has a summary:
Concerned a monster at the heart of the TARDIS which embodies the Doctor’s deepest fears. The story featured characters called Timewrights, and ended with Adric’s demise.
Christopher Priest’s slightly longer summary has some differences but is coming from the same direction:
THE ENEMY WITHIN was structurally much simpler, but contained what I thought was an interesting psychological argument. The BBC was always getting letters from viewers speculating about how the TARDIS was powered. I decided to answer that, dispensing with all the cheapo sonic screwdrivers, dimensional warps, etc, and suggested that the TARDIS was powered by fear. In other words, somewhere within its multi-dimensional spaces lurked the one creature in the universe that struck mortal terror into the Doctor. The story was about his journey into phobia, a descent into inner hell, to confront this enemy.
Christopher Priest’s version of events, as told to me in 2007:
A few weeks later someone realized what had happened, and I was invited in to write a second 4-parter, to make up for the cock-up on the first. Things were different, though: where Douglas had been an amiable, slightly subversive, amusing and amiable guy to work with, the new crew were standard BBC hacks of a low order … but the money was still good (better), and it saved my bacon that year. Forewarned, I sent in each episode as I completed it, and waited for authorization to write the next. This happened, with a few small changes on the way, which I incorporated. After I had sent in the final episode, a long silence ensued. I started work on other projects, visited Australia, started a new novel, etc. I assumed the script was in progress of being produced and shot. One day I took a phonecall from Turner, demanding to know when I was going to deliver the rewrite. I said “What rewrite?”, and Turner went into an amazing display of petulance and bad temper, claiming that my script was unusably illiterate and badly written, and that the whole thing had to be rewritten from start to finish. I told him that as far as I was concerned I had submitted each episode and had had it accepted by him, before moving on to the next, and therefore as a member of the Writers Guild was not expected to undertake a rewrite without more payment. He shouted that he wasn’t going to waste any more valuable programme money on me, and hung up.
Again, The Complete History vol.35 (page 70) has the BBC’s perspective:
For some time, Sealed Orders was kept on the list of active scripts until being abandoned in the autumn. However, producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Christopher Bidmead still wanted Priest to write for the series. On Friday 5 December 1980, Bidmead commissioned a breakdown for a further four-part serial entitled The Enemy Within. The story revealed that the motive power of the Doctor’s TARDIS was in fact fear – generated by the Doctor and his companions as they travelled. Again, Priest completed and delivered the breakdown as required, but Bidmead had left at the end of the year. He had been replaced on a temporary basis by Antony Root, who had different requirements for the serial (then planned as the sixth story of the 1982 series), with which Priest attempted to comply. One of Root’s requirements was that Adric, one of the Doctor’s companions, should be written out. Nathan-Turner felt that three regular companions was one character too many; the character of Adric was considered to have become rather ‘cocky’ in some serials, and as actor Matthew Waterhouse was finding the role frustrating, it was decided that he should be dropped from the regular line-up. The Enemy Within, therefore, had a problematic development, and after Priest refused to perform rewrites, it was formally rejected on Friday 17 July 1981, having not been what the production team had in mind.
Richard Bignell has put all the pieces together with evidence from the archives, and concludes:
Ultimately, the problem with The Enemy Within came down to rewrites. Priest had already done one set of rewrites and JNTs insistence that more work needed to be done and that he should come into the BBC for four days and work through them with Saward was met with a refusal as it appeared that the BBC didn’t want to pay him extra for these.
Priest’s agent tried to argue that Chris should be given the chance to put the scripts right later on, but as the story centred around the pivotal death of Adric, they wouldn’t be able to wait and the scripts were cancelled. Both the BBC and Priest’s agent agreed that there had been misunderstandings and breakdowns in communication.
Just to clarify, he’d certainly been paid for the work done to date (the original commission and the rewrite). What was under dispute was whether or not he was told by JNT that he wasn’t going to get paid for the further work that was required on the scripts after the initial 56 days had elapsed.
There is a lot more detail here, and I’m not very surprised that Priest had forgotten some of it by 2007.
Putting the pieces together, just as the decision to introduce Adric had led to the abandonment of Sealed Orders, so the decision to kill him off led to the abandonment of The Enemy Within, when Priest refused to do further rewrites without payment. (Deleting this sentence as both parts of it seem to be disproved by newer evidence.) The rapid changeover of script editors cannot have done the process any favours – Antony Root took over for the first three months of 1981 and was then replaced by Eric Saward, who lasted until 1986. One assumes that the vituperative conversation between JNT and Priest took place on 16 or 17 July; probably shortly after one of JNT’s well-lubricated lunches.
The aftermath
Well known writers write stuff all the time which may or may not get produced, and this would have been a minor blip in both Doctor Who and Christopher Priest’s histories if it had not been for what happened next. Again, Chris takes up the story.
A few months passed. Then someone sent me a cutting from a film/TV magazine, in which Turner was being interviewed about Dr Who. One of the questions was: “Why don’t you commission stories from established SF writers like Brian Aldiss, Chris Priest (and a couple of other names)?” Turner said in reply: “We prefer experienced TV writers. We did commission one script from Priest, but it was hopelessly amateurish and unsuitable, so we won’t be wasting any more time on that sort of experiment.”
I considered this a damaging thing to say, as well as untrue, but not being particularly litigious I found out the name of Turner’s boss at the BBC and wrote him a letter. I told him what had happened, I enclosed some of the letters I’d had from Turner about the episodes (which were, to be as euphemistic as possible, badly typed), also a copy of the WG [Writers Guild] guidelines on rewrites, and a copy of the interview. I said that what Turner had published was clearly a professional libel, one which I treated with complete seriousness, but as I was not particularly litigious I would accept a full retraction and apology from Turner.
Time passed, and I began to wonder if I’d taken the wrong tack. Then a few weeks later I received a letter from the BBC Head of Series & Serials, giving me an official apology on behalf of the BBC, an assurance that any future submissions from me would be treated with the utmost professionalism, and a statement of gratefulness that I had not dragged the BBC through the courts. Best of all was a handwritten PS under the signature: “I hope you will appreciate the enclosed.”
The enclosed turned out to be two handwritten letters, one from Turner, one from his script editor, abjectly apologizing. From the visible pressure of the ballpoints on the paper I assumed these letters had been written at gunpoint. I wrote back to Douglas Read (the BBC man who had written to me) [actually David Reid] and told him that as far as I was concerned the matter was closed. A couple of weeks later I heard that Turner had been canned. [In fact he survived several more years, as did Eric Saward, the script editor.]
If that’s a controversy, so be it. I remember it as an unnecessarily unpleasant professional dispute. The scripts are still in my drawer somewhere, and maybe one day when I’m dead and gone my kids will be able to flog them to someone. The Who fans are endlessly interested in them, but for the time being they remain in my drawer.
Although I’m always happy to talk about this sort of thing in private, it is not, of course, to go any further.
Richard Bignell has put me right on the sequence of events from closer to the time.
[Priest’s] ire about being named by JNT as a novelist who couldn’t write for television didn’t actually happen. It was a fan (who I shan’t name here) who wrote to Saward asking why they didn’t use “real” science-fiction writers. It was Eric writing back to the fan who said that “the names of the writers you quoat are all novalists” and that when they had tried to get a script from one of them, it had been with “disasterous results.” It was the fan who subsequently wrote to Priest and asked if Saward has been talking about him. So, not an interview, not JNT and Priest was never actually named.
(I will also not name the fan, who appears to have dropped out of sight completely and need not be disturbed.)
About Time vol. 4 by Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles (pages 315 and 317) quotes Saward’s letter verbatim (and I’ve also had it from Jonathan Morris):
“The names of writers you quoat are novalists. Infact one of them has attempted to write a Doctor Who script with disasterous results. That is why we don’t use novalists.”
But actually it was public knowledge that Priest had been commissioned to write an unproduced script – his authorship of Sealed Orders was discussed at the time in Doctor Who Monthly, as it then was – so for Saward to say that “one of them has attempted to write a Doctor Who script with disasterous results” could only be read as referring to Priest.
Richard Marson gives a fair account of this in his biography of John Nathan-Turner (pp. 159-160), including an interview with David Reid, the then Head of Series and Serials, who comments ruefully, “This wasn’t a one-off – very much not so.” Reid’s own pedigree includes being Executive Producer on the entire run of Sapphire and Steel.
I was aware that Saward was supposedly the author of the offending letter, and challenged Chris on his statement to me that it had been JNT.
Who fandom lore suggests that the particularly rude treatment you got was at the hands of Eric Saward the script editor (who was sacked in 1986) rather than Turner (who lasted until 1989). I seem to recall the account I read included verbatim a comment by Saward (or possibly Turner) about you along the lines you mention, but of truly staggering illiteracy. (I appreciate your euphemism.) Other than those fairly minor details, yes, you’re quite right, no particular controversy about the sequence of events or their outcome.
Chris replied,
I hardly knew Saward, although I met him a couple of times at the Beeb. He seemed pretty young and ineffectual to me, very much in Turner’s ghastly shadow. However, he was implicated in some way with the libellous comments about me, and certainly of the two handwritten apologies I received, one was from him and the other was from Turner. Perhaps it was he who said these things, but my memory is it was Turner himself. Certainly, the last conversation I had with Turner was one of the most profoundly unpleasant of my life, with a flood of petulant complaints, obscenities and spiteful personal remarks thrown at me.
It is clear that the abusive phone call from JNT lingered much more in Priest’s mind than the later letter which sparked his written complaint to the BBC, and that his dislike for JNT was far greater than his dislike for Saward – he told the story several times (including to Richard Marson), and the climax is always the phone call rather than the subsequent mopping up and apology, so he may have been a little vague as to who said what when we corresponded a quarter of a century later. In any case, Saward would have been speaking with JNT’s authority, so it comes to much the same thing. Priest wrote to Richard Bignell, much closer to the time:
If the phonecall from Turner in 1981 was (and remains) the single most unpleasant conversation of my life, then his grovelling letter of apology is probably the one that caused the loudest cries of you [presumably typo for ‘joy’] and triumph.
But I am still very intrigued by one point; can the spelling really have been as bad as is reported, with “quoat” and “novalists”? So far the only sources I’ve seen go back to Priest himself… Though if Saward is genuinely dyslexic, that’s not a crime.
I finished by asking Chris about the fate of the actual scripts – each of the stories had been developed into four full episodes. He replied:
No, I know the value of them. It increases year by year. My only worry is that one of Turner’s pals might find the BBC copies at some point, and try to flog them. I can do nothing to stop that, but the added value to my copies is that I can sign them … and throw in the letters as a bonus.
Nina Allan tells me that in fact the scripts and associated papers have been lodged with the British Library, where no doubt they will be eventually made available to the public. Perhaps Big Finish will pick up the option to dramatise them.
Around the same time, Chris wrote an episode of the children’s telefantasy Into the Labyrinth, in which three kids chase parts of the magical Nidus throughout history, in the shadow of duelling time wizards played by Ron Moody and Pamela Salem. His episode is the second of the second series, Treason, and you can watch it here and also here, here and here. It is set around the Gunpowder Plot, with Patrick Malahide guesting as King James I and VI, and I watched it (admittedly with only with half an eye) while writing this; there is a fair bit of murky double identity stuff going on, which again is in line with Priest’s other work. It was broadcast on 10 August 1981, so it must have been written between Sealed Orders and The Enemy Within, and it demonstrates that Chris was perfectly well able to produce a 25-minute story for the screen.
Many thanks to Nina Allan for allowing me, indeed encouraging me, to quote Chris’s correspondence with me; and many thanks also to Tim Roll-Pickering, Jonathan Morris and in particular Richard Bignell for chipping in with more details.
