John Lucarotti.
■ Sometime in the 1950s, British émigré John Lucarotti won a Canadian national competition for best radio play… whereupon he quit his day job as an advertising copywriter and flew to Mexico, where he spent a year writing radio and TV plays in the sun. There, he acquired an interest in the Aztecs – whose highly cultured Mesoamerican civilisation had flourished in the region throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, before being brought to a violent end by the Spanish conquest of 1519-21.
■ When Lucarotti’s former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation boss Sydney Newman became Head of Drama at the BBC, he recommended Lucarotti as a writer on a certain children’s sci-fi serial he’d dreamed up… which was how Lucarotti came to write the fourth Doctor Who serial, the sevenpart Marco Polo (1964). During the production period, story editor David Whitaker asked Lucarotti for another ‘past times’ proposal… which was how Lucarotti came to be commissioned to write a second four-part serial under the title The Aztecs on Tuesday 25 February 1964.