Feature by PAUL KIRKLEY
New decade, new broom: as the brown velour 1970s gave way to the neon and chrome 80s, Christopher H Bidmead was the script editor charged with bringing Doctor Who into the hi-tech era of the pocket calculator and the BBC Micro. But was he the man whose injection of ‘hard’ science rescued the show from what producer John Nathan-Turner famously dismissed as Douglas Adams’ “undergraduate humour”? Or was he guilty of turning a fun teatime adventure serial into a knotty lecture on tachyonics, telebiogenesis and charged vacuum emboitments?
Christopher H Bidmead, pictured in 2014. Photo © Marcus Hearn.