The Making of Doctor Who: The Original 1970s Programme Guide

by Malcolm Hulke, Malcolm Hulke, Dan Starkey (Reading)

Journey back in time with this nostalgic audio presentation performed by Jon Culshaw, Dan Starkey, Maureen O'Brien, Louise Jameson, Katy Manning and Geoffrey Beevers.It's the 1970s, and you're invited behind the scenes of Doctor Who. You'll go on location to witness the recording of two classic TV adventures (The Sea Devils and Robot) and spend time inside a vintage BBC television studio. You'll also learn how to write a script or make a monster, 1970s-style!Authors Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke will guide you through the first ten years of Doctor Who history, detailing how it was created, the people who brought it into being, and the actors who portrayed the Doctor, his friends and their monstrous enemies.Along the way you'll hear some of the Doctor's key early adventures recounted as Time Lord records, UNIT Memos, and other in-story documentation.Brought to life by an array of familiar Doctor Who voices, this celebration of the programme's early days is a delight for fans of all ages.Cover illustration by Chris Achilleos House of AchilleosReadings produced by Neil Gardner/Ladbroke AudioSound design by David DarlingtonExecutive producer for BBC Michael Stevens 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P) 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Genres: Doctor Who

Audio CD

Published June 1, 2023

About the author

Malcolm Hulke was a British science fiction writer best known for his tenure as a writer on the popular series Doctor Who. He is credited with writing eight stories for Doctor Who, mostly featuring the Third Doctor as played by Jon Pertwee. With Terrance Dicks, he wrote the final serial of Patrick Troughton's run as the Doctor, the epic ten-part story "The War Games." Hulke may be best known for writing "The Silurians," the story that created the titular race that is still featured in Doctor Who. Hulke's stories were well-known for writing characters that were not black and white in terms of morality: there was never a clear good guy vs. bad guy bent to his story.

Hulke joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1945 and worked briefly as a typist in the party's headquarters. He left the party in 1951, objecting to the Soviet Union's hostility to Yugoslavia and its line on the Korean War, but soon rejoined, and appears to have remained a member of the party, on until the early 1960s. His politics remained firmly on the left, and this was reflected in his writings, which often explored anti-authoritarian, environmental, and humanist themes.

In addition to his television writing, Hulke wrote the novelizations of seven television Doctor Who stories, each of which had written for the screen. He died at the age of fifty-four, shortly before his novelization of "The War Games" would be published.

Reviews

[wbforeman · Rating 2 out of 5]

So this is a reprint of a Doctor Who book from 1970s and the second revision which came in the mid 80s, giving a summary of Doctor Who and some behind the scenes information at the time. Now granted if I read this in the book 1970s I would probably love for its time it served a purpose but now I don’t need episode or character descriptions, because we have the Internet. The behind-the-scenes information is pretty surface level but it’s still entertaining and if you have nostalgia for this, you probably will enjoy it and everyone does a fine job with the reading you get a lot of Doctor Who actors, playing different parts. it’s a good time capsule for this period of Doctor Who fandom, but listening to it today it feels very antiquated