David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure With Television

by Simon Guerrier

To celebrate 60 years of Doctor Who, discover the extraordinary, little-known life of one of its chief architects, David Whitaker. As the show’s first story editor, he helped to establish the compelling blend of adventure, imagination and quirky humour that made – and continues to make – the series a hit.

David commissioned the first Dalek story, and fought for it to be made when his bosses didn’t like it. Regeneration, the TARDIS being alive, the idea of Doctor Who expanding to become a multimedia phenomenon in comics, books and films… David Whitaker was all over it. Yet very little was known about this key figure in Doctor Who history – until now. Why did he fall out with Irving Berlin? Was he really engaged to Yootha Joyce? And how did an assignment to Moscow badly affect his career?

Genres: Doctor Who, Nonfiction, Biography

460 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2023

About the author

Simon Guerrier is a British science fiction author and dramatist, closely associated with the fictional universe of Doctor Who and its spinoffs. Although he has written three Doctor Who novels, for the BBC Books range, his work has mostly been for Big Finish Productions' audio drama and book ranges.

Guerrier's earliest published fiction appeared in Zodiac, the first of Big Finish's Short Trips range of Doctor Who short story anthologies. To date, his work has appeared in the majority of the Short Trips collections. He has also edited three volumes in the series, The History of Christmas, Time Signature and How The Doctor Changed My Life. The second of these takes as its starting-point Guerrier's short story An Overture Too Early in The Muses. The third anthology featured stories entirely by previously unpublished writers.

After contributing two stories to the anthology Life During Wartime in Big Finish's Bernice Summerfield range of books and audio dramas, Guerrier was invited to edit the subsequent year's short story collection, A Life Worth Living, and the novella collection Parallel Lives. After contributing two audio dramas to the series, Guerrier became the producer of the Bernice Summerfield range of plays and books, a post he held between January 2006 and June 2007.

His other Doctor Who work includes the audio dramas, The Settling and The Judgement of Isskar, in Big Finish's Doctor Who audio range, three Companion Chronicles and a contribution to the UNIT spinoff series. He has also written a play in Big Finish's Sapphire and Steel range.

Guerrier's work is characterised by character-driven humour and by an interest in unifying the continuity of the various Big Finish ranges through multiple references and reappearances of characters. As editor he has been a strong promoter of the work of various script writers from the Seventh Doctor era of the Doctor Who television series

Reviews

[Jon Arnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

In life David Whitaker appears to have been modest and self-effacing; this nature means he remains a distant figure since his death. Simon Guerrier’s achievement in researching and writing a diligently researched and chunky biography from limited paper traces and a dwindling pool of those who knew him is hugely impressive, particularly in chronicling the chaos of his early and late life. He draws a picture of a jobbing writer with one remarkable achievement to his name: being in the right place and right time to significantly influence the creation of Doctor Who and kindle its expansion into literature, comics and factual books. Guerrier is particularly compelling in digging into the sources which seem to have influenced Whitaker in his conception of the show, expanding our understanding of the series by looking at other correspondence and subsequent work. It gives Whitaker the voice that his early death and lack of interviews have long denied him.

It’s also highly impressive that Guerrier never seeks to impose a narrative but lets events speak for themselves: a lesser writer could have constructed this as a tragedy, and certainly the last decade or so of Whitaker’s life looks to be a man hampered by a controversial incident and increasingly out of his times despite his best efforts. Yet this melancholy is never allowed to dominate: there’s always a sense of Whitaker keeping on despite the odds. Right to the end there are creative endeavours, including novelising Doctor Who stories. It’s the blind optimism a working writer often needs, and is as much cautionary tale as inspiration. That Whitaker ended up with so little is just as much of a warning of what might be expected of a life in the creative industries. Nevertheless, even if one year of his working life would come to dominate his legacy, that we now have so much more detail of the life of a key figure in Doctor Who’s early years and his inspirations, plus a vivid picture of the life of a working writer in the mid-twentieth century, is one of the great gifts for the show’s anniversary.

[Alex Sarll]

This opens boldly, you could say perversely, first questioning who'd want to read a biography of a script editor, and then exploding the obvious answer - because you know that Whitaker line about his fascination with alchemy, and its influence on his Who work, as referenced by Higgs and Sandifer? Guerrier has done some digging and makes a convincing case that Whitaker never said anything of the sort. If nothing else, though, this does make clear what kind of book we're reading; it's not flashy, but perhaps through simple conscientiousness, or maybe from knowing that this is a project that's only going to be done once (and it's shocking how many of the interviewees have passed away in the past few years*), Guerrier is determined to do it properly.

That thoroughness, it must be admitted, does not always make for the easiest read. You know how often, with biographies, you want the childhood and other prelude years to speed up so you can get to the bit where the subject did the stuff that has you reading the biography in the first place? Here I quite enjoyed the rackety upbringing and the early years in rep, including the possible impact on the subsequent careers of both David Jason and Judi Dench. Whereas once Whitaker gets to the BBC, the story sometimes threatens to drown in mountains of memos. There is still interesting stuff here - it speaks volumes that staff jobs were salaried in pounds while freelance writing was paid in guineas - but there's also an awful lot of bureaucracy, on top of which the stuff Whitaker is writing seldom sounds terribly interesting itself, ranging from vague plays about dilemmas in the business world to linking material for light entertainment shows whose absence from the vaults is hard to grieve. Once or twice, it's even the case that a promising avenue to tell us something more is missed. If The Army Game ran in mammoth 39-episode series, when and why did the expectation for British sitcoms change to the shorter model which now seems natural? When a departmental query is lodged as to whether you could do one-off SF, not just serials, why does Guerrier not pick up on The Twilight Zone already being well underway and ask how come TV professionals didn't know that?

Then, of course, we get to the period which, though fairly brief, explains why (almost?) everyone reading this book is doing so: Whitaker's role in the foundation of Doctor Who. Comparing stories and drafts, Guerrier points out how much of what we now associate with the show can be attributed to Whitaker, from the TARDIS being alive and the handling of cast changes through to the Doctor mentioning unseen past encounters with historical figures (and isn't it a perfect illustration of Who's Britishness that the very first such reference was to a meeting with Gilbert & Sullivan?). Guerrier is particularly good on the Doctor's stated policy of non-interference in history as recorded, what may have influenced Whitaker in so firmly espousing that, and the way others were pushing against it from the off. Some things, of course, didn't even get that far, like the early draft where the Doctor alters memories with drugged cigarettes - still, maybe Ncuti could be the one finally to introduce the psychic pspliff? The moment when I really got shivers, though, was on reading that David Whitaker may have been responsible for the name Doctor Who. There is, we are reminded, another claimant, Donald Wilson. And Guerrier doesn't give this the emphasis I do, but the way they both have the initials DW is one of those times I glimpse something infinite bootstrapping itself into existence with the imperfect materials available in the lower dimensions.

Not that it can have felt much like fate at the time, of course, not with the show that would often prove such an embarrassment to the higher-ups being mucked about by management from the off. They weren't always the ones to blame, mind - the various stumbling attempts to do a story around the TARDIS crew getting miniaturised provide a subplot running through what felt like at least a hundred pages, and which I suspect you might know wasn't going to justify all those efforts even if you hadn't seen the eventual outcome. But of course, what ensured the show's survival was its second story - and the reminder that December 28th was the first time a Dalek was fully seen on TV feels like at least one piece in the jigsaw of why Christmas specials feel like such a natural Who thing even though it took 42 years for them to officially exist. I do have some issues with Guerrier's treatment of Skaro's answer to Suella Braverman, not least the statement "Nation's creativity had made Doctor Who a hit" at a point where designer Raymond Cusick has yet to be mentioned by name - and even aside from my long-standing partisanship on that point, it feels still more of a stretch to credit Terry as sole Dalek auteur when Guerrier has just shown how much of that first story shows Whitaker's hand, likely even extending to the single most famous catchphrase in Who, "Exterminate!"

After the exhausting period on staff for the birth of a legend, Whitaker goes freelance, partly so that he can submit his own scripts to the programme. And while most of those were good stories, sometimes great ones, the wider screenwriting success for which he longs never quite comes. Stuff does get aired, but seldom much I'd heard of; when his name is linked to other fondly remembered shows of the era, it's usually a mistake (or possibly outright misrepresentation on his part - the longer it's been since Whitaker has had a script produced, the more outrageously inflated the tally of past credits on his CV). He becomes Chair of the Writers' Guild (in which Guerrier is also active), only to find his name mud after trying to strike an impossible balance of working towards consistent international copyright law without seeming pusillanimous over Soviet repression of writers. From there it's a slow slide of missed deadlines, unpaid debts, a terrible gambling habit and a collapsing marriage. For a time he's in Australia, vainly taking two years off his age while people who see him are routinely adding twenty or more (though at least they remember him - at times it almost becomes a running joke how many people he worked with don't mention him at all in biographies, or express polite puzzlement when asked about him). With the biographer's fondness for his subject, Guerrier tries not to say it outright, but equally he's too scrupulous not to let us see that by his death, aged only 52, Whitaker was a disappointed and sometimes even bitter man (though one who, to the end, always corresponded as though the Doctor were a real person he heard from sometimes, for which I forgive a lot). Guerrier remarks on how often Whitaker's scripts would leave the ostensible protagonists as observers, and there's something of the same sense here of a man who wasn't the lead in his own life. But dear heavens, he still left an impact, and if you're going to sacrifice your own life in furtherance of a greater cause, at least he chose one of the finest.

*There's also one who, alas, is still with us, but has gone spectacularly wrong; Guerrier avoids getting into that in detail, but the scepticism and uneasiness which come through whenever said blot is quoted are to the author's credit.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the architects of "Doctor Who", and one of its first prolific writers has always been an enigma...until this first rate biography arrives & reveals a talented, complicated man. Full of layers and hidden depths, it's about time an examination of this key player in early television was published...and I wasn't disappointed with the result.

[Gareth · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Please note: this was the Who Shop hardback edition, not on Goodreads.)

Not much seems to be documented about the life of David Whitaker, the first story editor of Doctor Who. This makes a biography of the man a challenging prospect — one that Simon Guerrier has clearly invested with a lot of thought and creativity.

The key problem facing Guerrier, apart from the maddeningly ethereal records and correspondence that surround Whitaker and his work, is that Whitaker was simply quite reticent. Guerrier occasionally describes him as “a quiet presence in the room”, and so he is, often requiring that this biography defer to louder voices. In order to shape Whitaker’s childhood during the Blitz (unevacuated) for example, Guerrier looks to a firsthand account of the time that may or may not reference Whitaker’s mother. We hear about people in his orbit and of their exploits, which gives us vital context, but often leaves a telling gap where this man existed. On occasion he quotes or speaks to co-workers that simply do not remember working with him. At times it’s like a biography of the general space around David Whitaker — because that’s all that can be known.

So much of Whitaker’s personality presented here is informed supposition — admittedly, as well informed as anyone could be. Did he put a lot of himself into his writing? Are there references to his failed marriage? Are there moments in his Doctor Who script (the last one, rewritten without his involvement) that needle at his controversial involvement in a Russian Writer’s Guild scandal, and if so, what did he think of that? We don’t know. Similarly we don’t know how his gambling problem came about or how he felt about it. Even the illness that killed him was kept quiet from others — of course, reticent to the end.

His creative life is illustrated in fantastic detail, again where at all possible. Whitaker himself tended to bolster his achievements when the opportunity arose, inflating his credits on successive CVs. Did this come from insecurity, or was he simply putting an active imagination to work? There is evidence of his family allowing gently fictionalised legends to spring up about their ancestors. Perhaps it was a familial habit.

What shines through is his burning desire to write, and his equal interest in helping others to do so. Guerrier explores, again creatively, the ripple effect of Whitaker on Doctor Who, from possibly giving the Daleks their catchphrase and shaping the dynamic of the characters to inspiring non-fiction books about the series, now an industry by itself. He believed in his ideas, and more generally in fairness, as shown both by his collaborative spirit and his well-intentioned (but ultimately disastrous) judgement around the Russia problem. He never stopped working, even when it stopped paying.

Sadly this is a recurring theme. Doctor Who (1963-1965) would be the greatest success of his life, not just for its lasting impact but for the sustained period of collaborative work. So much of his career otherwise seems to involve rejection, in many cases because of sheer bad timing and the writing world having changed around him, but there is also the impact of others in the industry taking a dislike to his work, seemingly personally.

It is very hard not to pity him in his thwarted ambitions, and yet he didn’t give up, and continued to help others while doing so. How much of this was creative drive and how much simply a fantasist’s determination is of course unclear, but his enormous influence and his sometimes brilliant talent are very much on record, and Guerrier’s book serves as a fascinating (if sometimes unavoidably frustrating) investigation into the rest.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/david-whitaker-in-an-exciting-adventure-with-television-by-simon-guerrier/

We got a lot fewer books last year to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Doctor Who than we did for the fiftieth in 2013. But this really makes up for it. David Whitaker was one of the crucial figures in early Doctor Who – script editor at the very beginning of the show, author of the first Doctor Who books, writer of eight Old Who stories; but dead at 51 in 1980, and so missing the extra lease of life given to many former Who creators by the explosion in fan activity later that decade.

Simon Guerrier has done a great job of telling the story of those 51 years in 413 pages. He complains near the beginning that most previous published accounts supposedly (and even actually) by Whitaker about his own life have turned out on investigation to be substantially untrue; details are wrong, achievements exaggerated, essentially the fiction-writer’s skill deployed to his own autobiography.

But Guerrier has mined the archives, talked to relatives (though again, a lot of them died young too), and dug through the assembled Who lore of the past six decades to paint a sober and intriguing picture of a man who knew he wanted to write but didn’t quite know how to do that for a living. He also brings in some vivid social research about Whitaker’s family background and his first marriage, and looks at how the BBC in the 1960s struggled to set up a career structure that adequately rewarded creativity. (I suspect it hasn’t quite got there even today.)

The documentary and memory trail goes a bit thin at the moment when Whitaker and his first wife went to Australia, and he came back a couple of years later with his second wife. It’s also a bit scanty at the very end, when his health broke down (probably from too much smoking) and he was unable to get work. But this is understandable, and doesn’t detract from the attractiveness of the book.

Myself, I was struck on reading it by how little people actually recall about Whitaker. Accounts of meetings and conversations where we know he must have been present just don’t mention him, and the drama doc An Adventure in Space and Time wrote him out of history completely. It reminded me of the protagonist of Bob Shaw’s A Wreath of Stars, who considered himself the human equivalent of a neutrino, a particle able to travel through the Earth without disturbing any other particle. When he went fully freelance at what turned out to be the end of his life, I got the sense that he couldn’t get work because very few people remembered who he was. Awfully sad.

Anyway, this is strongly recommended just as a good read about a creator who had a big success in his mid-thirties and was never quite able to find the magic ingredients again.

[Adam Stone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exceptionally researched and fascinating book about the life of the first Doctor Who script editor. Highly recommended.

[Clare · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a sad tale of a blighted life, a man whose talent was not recognised or encouraged by the BBC. He had some very strange ideas about life but wrote some great fiction.