HIGHLAND FLING

Best-known for co-creating the Cybermen, writer and story editor Gerry Davis was also behind The Smugglers and The Highlanders. In this largely unseen interview, conducted in 1990, he fondly remembers two of the liveliest historical stories of the 1960s.

INTERVIEW BY ANTHONY CLARK

Michael Craze and Patrick Troughton film the scene from Episode 1 of The Highlanders (1966) where Ben and the Doctor discover a spiked cannon.

Gerry Davis was Doctor Who’s story editor from 1966 to 1967, during which time he helped to introduce Patrick Troughton’s Doctor and devised the Cybermen with his friend and writing partner Dr Kit Pedler. Davis also oversaw The Smugglers (1966) and The Highlanders (1966-67), the final purely historical stories of the era.

“I felt that if we were going to do ‘a history’ it was no good going back to something like the Massacre of St Bartholomew, which was a rather gruesome episode and not the subject of romance,” he explained, in clear reference to The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve, the 1966 story co-written by his predecessor as story editor, Donald Tosh. “Whereas I felt that if we could get close to some of the established classics – something like [the Robert Louis Stevenson novel] Kidnapped – there’d be enough boys out there who’d have read the books for them to be familiar with the background.

Former Doctor Who story editor and writer Gerry Davis, pictured in the early 1970s.

“At heart I was looking for historical series that were based on, or close to, identifiable areas of fiction. Like, for example, The Smugglers, which I set up with Brian Hayles, which was loosely based on [Russell Thorndike’s] Dr Syn novels – Romney Marsh, hauntings and the church with the smugglers’ basement. It was rather good fun I thought.”