The Doctors Who's Who (9 page)

The Patrick Troughton Theatre opened at Mill Hill School in 2007 to celebrate one of its most accomplished former students and, along with his family and many
Doctor Who
fans around the world, Troughton’s legacy is somewhat secured. That and, of course, the Eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith, who singled out Troughton as a huge influence on his own interpretation of the Doctor, with bow tie and zany professorial humour.

‘I believed totally in the possibilities implied in the series. I never thought of it as fantasy. Far from it – it’s all happening. I think space will be conquered through the mind rather than the clumsy medium of space travel.’

‘Doctor Who Indulged my Passion for Clowning’ by Patrick Troughton
Doctor Who – A Celebration, Two Decades Through
Time and Space
, Peter Haining

CHAPTER FOUR

JON PERTWEE

‘Dr Who is me – or I am Dr Who. I play him straight from me.’

Jon Pertwee from
The Making of Doctor Who by
Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks

LIKE PATRICK TROUGHTON
and William Hartnell before him, Jon Pertwee was one of the great British character actors of the 20th century. An ability to throw his voice and adopt a multitude of characters made him an actor in high demand, especially on radio in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. He was incredibly versatile and as much in demand as Kenneth Williams, or indeed his character acting cousin Bill Pertwee (who Jon nurtured as an actor and who later played Hodges in
Dad’s Army
), but it was a great shock to many people when he landed the role of Doctor Who.

Pertwee was not a well-known TV actor; he had cut his teeth as a stage actor, appearing in films and, most notably, through countless character roles on radio. He was selected for the role of the Doctor because of his ability to entertain and be humorous. Unfortunately, Pertwee had decided to play the
Doctor completely straight, to use his own personality and, most importantly, his own voice.

‘All of my decisions were, as I later discovered, completely at odds with the reason why Producer Peter Bryant had originally wanted me – Peter had
wanted
a comedic Doctor; he liked the fact that I could sing and play the guitar and do all the voices and wanted me to bring those aspects into
Doctor Who.
’

I Am the Doctor – Jon Pertwee’s Final Memoir

So Pertwee’s great triumph was to find himself within the character of the Doctor, which was a novel change for the actor.

John Devon Roland Pertwee was born on 7 July 1919 in Chelsea, London. He was educated at Frensham Heights School, Rowledge and Sherborne School, Sherborne, Dorset.

The name Pertwee is of French-Huguenot origin, actually being Perthuis de Laillevault. He was the son of the famous playwright, novelist and actor Roland Pertwee. Roland’s friend Henry Ainley was Jon Pertwee’s godfather. His son, Anthony Ainley, would become an actor and play opposite Jon in ‘The Five Doctors’ as the Master, while Anthony’s brother Richard would become Tom Baker’s drama teacher while coached as an amateur by William Hartnell.

Jon’s father was also good friends with the author A. A. Milne, and Jon was invited to tea one afternoon, where he met Milne’s son Christopher Robin. After tea, Christopher took Jon upstairs, where he was introduced to the boy’s toy animals: Piglet, Owl, Kanga, Roo and Christopher’s favourite – Winnie-the-Pooh. Jon was also allowed to ride on Christopher Robin’s donkey – Eeyore.

Despite having a famous father and interesting acquaintances, Pertwee’s upbringing was not a happy one. For a start,
he didn’t see his mother until he was 15. She had an affair when Pertwee was an infant and his father kicked her out of the marital home. She moved away with her lover, and Pertwee and his elder brother Michael were left with a father who was wrapped up in his own world, with little time for them (Pertwee also had a stepbrother called Michael, whom he called Coby, which was short for his surname). The three boys were close but if anyone got left out, it would be Jon.

Jon spent much of his formative years under the care of his uncle Guy, but he was also very close to his grandmother, who helped to look after him.

Despite feeling left out by his father, Pertwee didn’t think of any other career but acting. Laurence Olivier was one of his early acquaintances. Towards the end of his life, Pertwee used to tell a story that proved Olivier was indeed the greatest actor that ever lived. He explained that one day he was invited to a party while Olivier was visiting his house. He asked the actor to accompany him, but Olivier wasn’t keen. Pertwee refused to take no for an answer and begrudgingly, Olivier went along. Once at the party, Pertwee sat Olivier down with a sandwich and a drink. Believing that he would be all right, he left him alone. He would then explain that Olivier hated anyone creeping up behind him, but unfortunately somebody did. An old lady came up behind him on the sofa, put her hands over his eyes and said, ‘Guess who?’ Olivier shot up in the air and the poor woman was propelled backwards over a chair. An enraged Olivier stormed over to the host and demanded, ‘Who was that woman?’

The host replied, ‘That was my wife.’

Seamlessly Olivier declared, ‘What an extraordinary woman!’

It’s a great showbiz story and must have an element of the truth in it, but Pertwee was always full of such stories.

Acting was the family business, so Pertwee took it for granted that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. In fact, Jon had four great-aunts, the Moore sisters, who were also on the stage. He explained during interviews that this complacency about his fated career made him laid-back when it finally came to fruition. During his
Doctor Who
years between takes he was always laughing and joking with the cast, to many a director’s chagrin. However, it didn’t quite start out that way. At boarding school there was a shortage of young lads who wanted to become actors. His peers considered it to be quite effeminate, so for a while he was picked on.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though. When he was old enough to drive, Pertwee bought a 250cc SOS trials motorbike and went for a ride. At a T-junction he lost control, went over a wall and into a vicar’s garden. ‘Well done!’ the vicar said. ‘You’re just in time for tea!’ Acting and fast bikes were part of his teenage make-up and neither ever left him.

Some people look upon the above story as a joke, but in fact it wasn’t – Pertwee was indeed propelled into the garden and greeted by the vicar. Years later, the actor was passing the same place with his son Sean and showed him the very spot where he hit the wall – it had never been repaired.

Pertwee joined RADA at 18, where he trained alongside Duncan Lamont, with whom he would appear in the
Doctor Who
story ‘Death to the Daleks’. His time at RADA came to an end when he was expelled for refusing to play the part of a ‘Greek wind’ in a production. This caused a bit of embarrassment for his father as he was one of the school governors.

Pertwee then spent some time – while still at school – at a travelling circus, riding the wall of death, which he maintained was very easy to do. What wasn’t easy to do – and something
he of course refused to do – was to put a real-life lion in the act with him. Because the circus had a very old toothless lion, they thought it would be good for Pertwee to take it for a spin on the wall of death. A preposterous idea, but it was suggested.

The rest of the 1930s saw Pertwee working in a travelling theatre company with the occasional stint on radio, which gave him good grounding for the intensity of radio work he would enjoy after the war. Much of his output from the 1930s and 40s is now lost. Programmes were performed live and too few were recorded on 78 rpm records. At one stage Pertwee was performing 15-minute stints on radio every day for months on end. This made him quite wealthy, but sadly there are only smatterings of this work preserved today.

What we do know of Pertwee’s early career is that his father helped him. One of his early theatre runs was in
To Kill a Cat
, which his father wrote. Also, his 1939 movie –
The Four Just Men
– was scripted by his father, who took a small part in it too. The movie has the added distinction of being the first in which Pertwee actually spoke.

Speed was still a passion of Pertwee’s: despite his growing popularity as an actor, he competed at Goodwood for the odd motor car engagement. He did this right up until the outbreak of the Second World War and then joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) and became an officer. Like Patrick Troughton, he too escaped death at sea. Pertwee was one of a small group of people who got transferred from HMS
Hood
shortly before it was destroyed in less than ten seconds by the
Bismarck
. ‘1,762 men went down in one bang,’ he told chat-show host Michael Parkinson in 1982. It was a very lucky escape on that occasion, and he experienced several other close calls with death during the war too.

Pertwee and Troughton met several times during the war
years, as he told Peter Haining, ‘[Troughton] had a strong dislike of the standard issue tin hat that the Navy made the people on motor torpedo-boats wear. So instead he wore this old family tea cosy on his head. It was a gaudy-looking thing and must have annoyed his Commanding Officer no end – but he still went on wearing it!’

Troughton would wear a tea-cosy hat while playing the Doctor in such sea-based stories as ‘Fury from the Deep’, and for him it became normal sea-going apparel. But he wasn’t the only eccentric would-be actor that Pertwee met during the war. There was also Robert Newton, a legendary character in the RN, always managing to acquire quality booze and disappearing to drink it and then sleep it off. Pertwee admired the man, especially the way in which he managed to get away with his insubordination (Newton was, like Pertwee, also expelled from RADA). However, he was eventually arrested and punished by the RN, who sent him on a trawler, but even then he managed to delay the ship’s departure in order to acquire smoked salmon sandwiches and quality booze (not easy in wartime), so he and the crew could enjoy a good meal on the ocean waves.

One morning Pertwee woke up after a particularly alcoholic run ashore with his shipmates to discover that he had a large tattoo on his right forearm. To his dying day he claimed that he could never remember getting it done. It is occasionally glimpsed during his
Doctor Who
days, including his very first story, ‘Spearhead From Space’, when escaping from a hospital in a wheelchair.

A little-appreciated episode in Pertwee’s war was when he was transferred to the Naval Intelligence Department (NID) in Whitehall. Towards the end of his life, he toured his one-man show,
An Evening with Jon Pertwee
, in which he briefly
mentioned his time in NID, but he gave no real detail about the job. NID was actually the department where Ian Fleming (who would later write the James Bond novels) worked. In fact, the real-life James Bond – Fleming’s main inspiration for the character – also worked there: Patrick Dalzel-Job, who, as part of 30 Assault Unit (a crack team of commandos created by Fleming), was instrumental in gathering intelligence concerning V Rocket installations behind enemy lines in Europe. Pertwee remembered that James ‘Jim’ Callaghan was also there as a ‘tea boy’ (long before becoming the British Prime Minister), which caused him much amusement years later.

Pertwee wasn’t one of the most distinguished officers in NID; during his one-man show he recalled that he had to dispose of Winston Churchill’s cigar ends after Cabinet meetings with the Joint Planning Staff (JPS, which included author Dennis Wheatley) and NID. To make a bit of extra cash, he would sell the cigar ends.

Although he eventually landed a desk job in NID, Pertwee admitted towards the end of his life that severe back problems originated from his time in the RN and some of the close brushes he had had with danger. Indeed, his war was not easy, and the tenure in NID shows that he had genuine injuries, but also that his input was still considered vital.

Towards the end of his naval career, Pertwee joined the broadcasting section, where he met Lieutenant Eric Barker, and seriously began his career in radio. This led to two series that made him a household name –
Waterlogged Spa
and
The Navy Lark
. He took on many trademark voices in the latter show, including an eccentric postman that endeared him to the nation, with the catchphrase, ‘It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you tears them up’ (referring to people’s letters).

For a while, Pertwee worked alongside another great mimic
in
The Navy Lark
, Ronnie Barker, who played Fatso Johnson in the show. The two became firm friends. Barker later said of Pertwee, ‘Jon was always such fun to work with. We had a lot of laughs and he was always one of the prime instigators. But he was very professional and very talented and I thoroughly enjoyed working with him.’ (
Jon Pertwee: The Biography
by Bernard Bale, André Deutsch, 2000).

When Barker left and Pertwee was asked who should take his place to do the other voices he’d done so well, he suggested himself, and went on to do over 100 different voices for the show in the end.

The Navy Lark
ran for 18 and a half years, making it the longest-running comedy show in the world at that time (only to be surpassed later by
The News Huddlines
), but it wasn’t the only success that Pertwee worked on during that time; he also appeared in the theatre alongside Frankie Howerd in
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
, with which Howerd continued successfully, both on TV (
Up Pompeii
) and film (both
A Funny Thing
… and
Up Pompeii
), Pertwee’s role in the movie being taken by Phil Silvers.