INTERVIEW BY JOHN DORNEY WORDS BY GREG MARTIN
Writer Chris Boucher, pictured in 2003.
Only three of Chris Boucher’s Doctor Who stories made it to the screen, but The Face of Evil, The Robots of Death and Image of the Fendahl, all broadcast in 1977, earned him a place at the series’ top table. Chris was a protégé of script editor Robert Holmes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his work couples a similarly sardonic sense of humour with some of the programme’s most disturbing ideas – and this in an era that was being closely scrutinised by ‘Clean-Up TV’ campaigner Mary Whitehouse. Chris was his mentor’s natural successor in more ways than one, for when Holmes declined script-editing duties on the BBC’s new space opera Blake’s 7 (1978-81), he instead recommended Chris for the role.