Director Waris Hussein in the early 1960s.
Waris Hussein remains immensely proud of his work on Marco Polo, Doctor Who’s fourth adventure and also the earliest example of a story that remains entirely missing from the BBC archive.
“The whole point at that time was that Doctor Who was meant to be an educational programme,” he recalls. “The past was meant to be something that taught the children – which was who it was made for – something new about history. Marco Polo in the minds of most kids was probably nothing; they probably knew nothing about him. We did the programme to educate the children into this knowledge.