I haven’t sent an update for a while, and hope to have some things to announce before too long, but I do have some new writing out this week. The latest Doctor Who Chronicles covers 1971, and I’ve written another of my Where Were They Then? features looking at where the former regular cast of Doctor Who were at in their careers.
The joy of writing these is in the more obscure items you turn up. It’s nice to note that 1971 brought Wendy Padbury her little piece of cinematic immortality, as the seminal folk horror The Blood on Satan’s Claw came out this year. There will be people who don’t know about that, and including it in the magazine shows how the Doctor Who serial The Daemons had tapped into a broader cultural trend. But it’s more satisfying to turn up something like Playbag, a trio of one-act plays premiered at the Basement Theatre, 49 Greek Street, Soho, at lunchtime on 15 March 1971.
In the middle of this was a sketch called Our Girls Are Famous, a two-hander in which both participants were naked. One of the actors would go on to become a good deal better known, but the other might well have been familiar to some in the audience as Ben Jackson in Doctor Who between 1966 and 1967. Stage and Television Today elaborated in its review that the sketch featured ‘Roger Lloyd-Pack interviewing Michael Craze for what would appear to be a pornographic modelling job with extras, both actors starkers except for clipboard and briefcase. Their monosyllabic conversation, running along two lines at once, is amusingly written, but the pay-off needs more punch.’ The author and director of the piece was Carl Forgione, one of the directors of the Basement Theatre, who’d later appear in the Doctor Who story Ghost Light.
Playbag ran until 26 March, and Our Girls Are Famous was presumably never staged again – I was unable to find any reference to it, anyway. I wonder how many people have even thought about it in recent years. But this week, thanks to its Doctor Who connection, it is briefly memorialised in a national magazine.
In addition to this, Doctor Who Chronicles 1971 includes my episode guides for Terror of the Autons and Colony in Space, and an article I’ve wanted to write for years, looking at the omnibus repeat of The Daemons that aired on 27 December – a broadcast that, I think, was more significant than most first-run episodes of Doctor Who. You can order Chronicles 1971 here.