Stephen Thorne made the first of his four Doctor Who appearances in the 1971 story The Dæmons. “What was going to happen was that the creature, Azal, would be played by [tall actor] Michael Kilgarriff, and I would do the voice,” he says. “I did a lot of voice work and radio around that time. But when I went along to see them, [producer] Barry Letts saw how tall I was.” Stephen is six feet four. “He said, ‘Well, you might as well do both.’ So I did poor Michael out of a job.”
Stephen Thorne, pictured during recording of the BBC audio drama The Ghosts of N-Space in 1994.
Letts must have liked his performance, as a year later Stephen was asked to play an Ogron in Frontier in Space and then the main villain in the next story to be recorded (though it was broadcast first). The Three Doctors marked Doctor Who’s tenth anniversary and for the first time showed all the different incarnations of the Doctor together.