In 2014 Derrick Sherwin was interviewed on stage at the Whooverville convention in Derby. These edited highlights of his typically outspoken remarks are published here for the first time…

Interview by IAN PARKES Words by GREG MARTIN

Cybermen advance on UNIT troops in Derrick Sherwin’s seminal 1968 story The Invasion.

Sherwin’s first Doctor Who assignment was Fury from the Deep (1968), starring Deborah Watling (as Victoria), Patrick Troughton (the Doctor) and Frazer Hines (Jamie McCrimmon).

How did you become story editor of Doctor Who?

I was working on Crossroads with Terry Dicks and Peter Ling. We were a team together. Once a week we’d travel up to Birmingham and have a script conference over breakfast on a Monday morning, breakfast being gin and tonic and kippers. I was on Crossroads for three months, and you can’t cope with that sort of pace for much more than that.

I got a call from [the BBC’s Head of Serials] Shaun Sutton. He’d known me as an actor, but he knew I’d been writing as well and he thought I’d probably be right for Doctor Who. This was quite a jump from Crossroads.

When you arrived at the office were there scripts that had already been developed?

There were pieces of paper with writing on them but they weren’t necessarily scripts. They were fairly awful, and would have been almost impossible to act. This is what Pat Troughton was having to work with. I was brought over to clean the mess up and start again.