TARDIS CREW

Following a guest appearance in The King’s Demons, Gerald Flood provided the voice for the Doctor’s robotic companion Kamelion. These were relatively minor engagements for a well-loved actor who earned his reputation in the theatre.

By JONATHAN RIGBY

Opposite page: Gerald Flood as the robot Kamelion, disguised as King John, in The King’s Demons.

Gerald Flood was first noticed by The Stage in February 1950, when he was 22. He was appearing in Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning at Farnham, and the paper’s anonymous reviewer pointed out that “Gerald Flood’s Nicholas was easy and vital.”

This was a perceptive summation, at such an early stage, of an actor who was soon to become extremely popular. His relaxed quality on stage and screen made it all appear ‘easy’, yet it was coupled with an ebullient energy that pushed him to the forefront of whatever he was in. It’s telling that, 20 years after that initial estimate, The Stage unwittingly repeated it. A profile published in October 1970 hailed him as “a brilliant comedy player of most agreeable charm, original in his smooth yet vital style, able to bring his own wit to good material and to make modest material appear better than it is.”

Two decades of experience had refined ‘easy’ into ‘smooth’, as you’d expect. Indeed, in later years he’d refer to his typical casting bracket as “pin-striped smoothies”.

But he was being too self-deprecating, for this was an actor who could move from boulevard comedy to sinister villainy and penetrating drama with no trouble at all.

In 1983, Flood’s mellifluous voice was heard as Kamelion, an android companion to the Fifth Doctor who first appeared in The King’s Demons, bowed out the following year in Planet of Fire and was granted a fleeting coda in The Caves of Androzani. In The King’s Demons, however, Kamelion’s shapeshifting abilities meant that Flood also appeared in person as a bogus King John.