Eric Saward is best known as the script editor on Doctor Who for the Peter Davison and Colin Baker eras, during which time he also wrote several well-regarded adventures such as The Visitation, Earthshock and Resurrection of the Daleks. For this latter script he created Lytton, alien mercenary from the future, played to perfection by the late Maurice Colbourne and then killed off in Paula Moore’s Attack of the Cyberman in 1986. But, some 30 years later, Lytton is back, penned once again by Saward, this time in comic book form for new publishing house Cutaway Comics. Saward chatted with journalist, playwright and screenwriter Ian Winterton.

Congratulations, Eric. I read the first issue of Lytton a while ago, being part of the Cutaway team myself. I’m writing the back-up strip for the forthcoming Omega series, and hopefully writing something much bigger and more epic, though it all depends on the vagaries of intellectual property rights and negotiating with rights holders.  With Lytton, I take it you had no such copyright issues.

No, I just asked myself if it was OK to write a Lytton comic, and I said yes.

It was Gareth [Kavanagh, creative director at Cutaway Comics] who first suggested this idea to you?

Yes. I met him at some convention or other and he asked whether Lytton would be available as a character. I called him later and talked about developing it, and it slowly took off from there.

I’ve just re-read the issue as my physical copy arrived a couple of days ago, and it really is a fantastic comic. This is your first time writing for the comic book medium; you’ve been a writer pretty much your whole professional life – TV, film, radio, prose – but never for comic books before. How well versed were you in the medium?

Not very well at all. In fact, almost non-existent. I did look at some stuff when Gareth first suggested it, and he also lent me a lot of stories by Alan Moore whose work I found very impressive and quite grown up, so that gave me an idea of an interesting direction I could go in.

I was going to ask you which writers Gareth suggested you look at, and would have guessed Alan was top of the list. What were the particular challenges you found in writing for the comic book medium?

Well, as ever the biggest challenge was getting the story right. The character I already knew, as I’d created him for Doctor Who, so drifting back into that was much easier than I thought it might have been. We had to change a few things for copyright reasons, which resulted in me creating Wilson as Lytton’s sidekick…

It was a case of getting a feel for it, and then thinking about how best I might do it myself. Gareth was very easy-going about letting me find my feet. He wasn’t piling orders on me, or saying, ‘You must do this, it must be like that.’ He wanted to see what I’d make of it.

He’s very light-touch when it comes to dealing with his creators, which always seems to get excellent results.

Yes, I was very pleased that he did do that. There was no time limit either, which was a luxury in a way.

You were the first and now we’ve all got deadlines! I’ve always loved the character of Lytton and thought he should have more stories. It was a shame he was killed in Attack of the Cybermen! I just rewatched that and Revelation of the Daleks on Britbox, and they really stand up well, especially the Lytton strand, with the East End gangsters. Obviously it helps that Maurice Colbourne, who played Lytton, is utterly perfect in the role.

I wasn’t involved in the casting of Maurice Colbourne. I wrote the part and the director [Matthew Robinson] filled it with an actor he thought would be suitable, who turned out to be Maurice Colbourne.

He’s absolutely perfect in the role. In the comic I’m particularly impressed with Barry Renshaw’s artwork, how he’s really captured the way Colbourne moved as Lytton, how he inhabited the role. That really is Lytton as we saw it on TV there on the page. Some Doctor Who fans, being the way they are, have worried about the continuity of Lytton – where does comic book Lytton fit in with Lytton from the TV series? You make mention of parallel universes which probably helps…

My main decision was to keep it vague. When someone looks at the comic I want them to enjoy it for what it is, I don’t want them tripping over and saying, ‘Oh, this must be happening in between when this was happening on Attack of the Cybermen’ or whatever. I wanted to be fairly free of that so it means I’m not spending all my time trying to work out a continuity that was never really there anyway. I was hoping that [I did that] by setting up the idea of parallel worlds, having things coming and going, having people turning up before they, in real time, could – like at the beginning with Shend arriving at the nightclub. So I tried to keep it vague for the sake of convenience, really.

I never quite understand why people get so uptight about the continuity in Doctor Who. It’s not Star Trek – it’s a great big amorphous thing where the universe and history is constantly rewritten as the Doctor zips about in the TARDIS.

We used to get this back when I worked on it. People would write in and complain that something happened one week that contradicted an episode from years ago. Like, I had the Cybermen doing a particular thing in Earthshock that apparently they shouldn’t have been able to do and one guy asked me, ‘Why did you do this?’ and my answer was ‘It doesn’t matter – the Cybermen in this story are reacting to the situation now.’ There’s no bible, or at least there wasn’t, for Doctor Who in any way, shape or form. If you did Cybermen, you did the best you could. If you go always for continuity, you compromise the story which, as far as I’m concerned, is the most important part.

Absolutely, I agree. Maybe it’s peculiar to science fiction fans, that we are by our nature, bothered about the detail and the world building and the continuity. Before Doctor Who came into your life, were you a big fan of the show? Because you seem to me to be someone who really understands it, and has a really good feel for it.

Thank you for saying that, but I hadn’t seen much of it for quite some time before taking on the job. I was living with someone who had two daughters and that was the last time I’d actually sat down and watched it with anyone, and that was several years before. But, no, thank you for the compliment that I seemed to be tuned in, but it was just picking up on the feeling of the show. I also quite like action-y type stories and I hope I can make them sometimes a bit amusing.

I’m 48 so the era I love is Philip Hinchcliffe, but I also love the violence and the grittiness that you brought into the show, that you were criticised for at the time. You’ve talked before about how you weren’t producer John Nathan-Turner’s biggest fan and in lots of ways, I think you saved the show from being even more pantomime-y than it often was. How was it working with him? He sounds like quite a frustrating person to have in charge.

Yes he was. If he’d had strong ideas of what he wanted then I would probably have been happy to go with them a lot of the time but he didn’t. He didn’t come in the office and say, ‘I want this, this and this’ or ‘Let’s talk about that’ or ‘Let’s have a general brainstorming session’ – he never did anything like that. When I first took on the script editor role, it was very rarely that he’d pop in, and that was early on, just to check I wasn’t insulting people or going mad, and once he’d decided I wasn’t crazy he left me completely alone, which made it difficult. I had to line up behind a queue of people to get a simple answer to something from my producer. But he never really contributed very much at all.

You seem to specialise in a lot of supporting characters who are a little bit morally compromised – Lytton being a prime example. How did casting work in those days? Sometimes it seems to be first-rate, like having Brian Glover as Griffiths in Attack of the Cybermen for instance, and other times you had choices that are, shall we say, puzzling. How did you feel, say, about Beryl Reid appearing in Earthshock?

At the time I wasn’t very happy with her being cast because I didn’t think she was right for the part. It could have verged on being a joke, but I didn’t see Earthshock for some years and when I did finally see it again I didn’t find her as irritating as I thought I might. She is competent in the role, but she is still not quite right.

She was a fantastic actress, obviously, but in Earthshock… not quite right, no. There seem to have been a lot of those sort of questionable casting decisions made during JN-T’s tenure – like when Ken Dodd popped up in a Sylvester McCoy adventure. But you’ve talked about directors as well, that people who were good were reluctant to work with Nathan-Turner, as well as finding the budget too restricting. And the same went for a lot of the writers JN-T employed – that a lot of them didn’t really understand how to write a Doctor Who script.

Sometimes the scripts needed me to work on them a lot, which got very annoying. Sometimes ideas that you’d like to go with yourself required so much work – you had to get the writers out of the way in order to get the scripts to work. I got to the stage several times, unfortunately, where I had to say to writers that I couldn’t have them writing for the show again. I needed someone who could deliver to me a more complete script. They obviously didn’t have the feel for it, so when someone like Philip Martin came in, or when I won Robert Holmes back, it was a joy. They delivered a script that I could sit down and talk to them about, that was interesting, exciting and had great ideas in it, that was fun, and funny. If I’d had a bunch of people like that all lined up I’d have had an amazing job talking the scripts through with them and tidying up the bits and pieces that might be necessary. But some of the others, I would never really blame any of them, but they were struggling all the time and I wasn’t allowed to get rid of them because John didn’t like that, didn’t like the idea of scripts being written off. He worried about ‘upstairs’, that the Head of Department might not look to kindly on it.

Was he worried it might reflect badly on his hiring choices?

I don’t know, really. I think a lot more rejection went on than I was aware of but it was a pain really.

When the show went on enforced hiatus in ’85, how did you feel? Were you partly relieved, because you then left not long after it came back, midway through The Trial of a Time Lord?

I was annoyed when the axe fell in ’85, and sad that those upstairs felt so badly about us and that we were deemed to be too violent, too lazy to work, as some of the stories that were flying around suggested. Only we found out a long time later that the real reason they closed Doctor Who down was because they needed the money for EastEnders, which they were just setting up then, and so axing Doctor Who was one way of scooping up cash and facilities. It put us in the dreadful position of having to face the fact that people were saying we weren’t up to it, that we weren’t good enough, and I knew that some of the stuff we were doing wasn’t bad at all.

And it’s still making money for the BBC even now. Britbox is driven by the fact that all the classic Who is on there, including all of your episodes, many of which are amongst the most highly rated episodes in Doctor Who history.

Well, quite…

I understand you weren’t overjoyed when Colin Baker was chosen to replace Peter Davison. Did you have any say on who would be the new Doctor? You weren’t on a panel or anything?

[Laughs] Oh no, that would have been too democratic! No, I was told Colin was going to be the new Doctor and then I went with John to meet him in the local pub and say hello. But I wasn’t consulted.

Also, when the costume was revealed that must have been a bad day at work…

I said to John, ‘Look, if it’s so ridiculous, the Doctor’s sometimes in stories where he’s walking down the street and wherever he goes, whatever he does, he’s going to draw attention to himself simply by the way he dresses.’ In the end, all I could do was just ignore the way he dressed. It was all I could do, otherwise I’d spend half of every new story explaining why this man was wearing such silly clothes. And then it came out – and I still don’t know how true it is – that John had chosen this look because he, himself, liked wearing these loud Hawaiian shirts and this reflected in Colin’s costume. I just thought it was insane – we were now making decisions based on this sort of reasoning rather than what was right for the character.

Colin is a good actor but he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That happens a lot to actors. He got terribly upset because he thought I got him the sack. I’d gone by then, though, which would have made it difficult for me to get him sacked.

The fact we’re talking about something that was on TV so long ago is kind of remarkable. I suppose you started working on the show at a time when it was already established as a cult – the convention circuit had been developing since the 1970s – but do you still find yourself bewildered that you’re still being asked about it? You don’t attend many conventions, so you?

I attend very few conventions. I don’t often get invited. I do the occasional signing locally, but that’s about it. But I don’t resent Doctor Who, I don’t sit about wishing I’d never done it. There were some good times as well, not least the fact that I met the person I now live with as a result, and we’ve been together since. There were lots of positive sides to it.

When you came to leave the show, did things reach a crisis point?

Well, I was trying to put together a show that was becoming increasingly more difficult. I’d obviously lost a lot of the oomph that I’d had before and I was just very unhappy and sad at the way it was going. And, of course, in the midst of all this muddle, Robert Holmes died, who I’d become very friendly with, so that was very sad. It was the first time I’d ever had a real sense of mourning. We’d got on so well – I used to call him Uncle Bob as a joke – that it was a very sad time when he died. By the time we got back on the show after the hiatus I was just thinking, ‘What’s the point?’

After Doctor Who, you wrote for German radio, and wrote various novels, but – aside from some short stories for Big Finish and for the BBC Books Dalek book – you didn’t write new Doctor Who-related material until your novelisations of Resurrection of the Daleks and Revelation of the Daleks a couple of years ago.

As I said, I don’t do many conventions but at one I did, everyone was saying why don’t I finish the two Dalek stories that remained unnovelised. So I thought, ‘Why not?’ and contacted Random House and it was extraordinary – they fell over themselves to say yes.

They’re fantastic books. But to bring it back to Cutaway, there is talk that Orcini and Bostock [from Revelation of the Daleks] could get their own run of adventures. Is that possible?

It’s possible in that I’m currently writing a small story of Orcini and Bostock. It’s being given as one of the stretch goals on the Lytton Kickstarter. We’ll be seeing how it goes after that. The story will be enjoyable in its own right, but I’m setting it up so there can be further adventures.

It’s quite difficult to write because the part of Orcini was very much enhanced by William Gaunt, and it’s getting that feel of him, as well as what was in the original characterisation, into the comic book without it getting tedious with him just going on about honour all the time. It’s finding other qualities to the man that I can then incorporate into the character. Bostock is fun in that he is almost just a comedy part. Again, if you’re going to sustain it, it has to have more depth.

I’m writing stories based on stories Bob Baker wrote during the Tom Baker era, and I wrote a treatment that he approved but when I came to write it as a comic book I discovered that I had far too many plot points – too much story – for the small number of pages I had to tell it. Did you discover a similar thing early on?

Yes. I was winging it at the beginning to a certain degree. I also found that scenes grew too much, they got out of hand, and weren’t fully being rounded to fit into the whole story. But you rely then on experience, and what skills you might have, to cheat the piece into a half decent story. Because I’ve always felt that story and characterisation are key. If you’ve got a good story that romps along then the audience goes with you, and if you’ve got interesting characters then you’ve added energy to what’s happening.

I can’t wait to read the next three episodes. Is there any chance Lytton could return for a further story?

There is a chance, yes. It all depends on the reaction to this one but I’m told people are really responding well to it so that all looks promising. Lytton very well could return.

 

Lytton Issue #1 is out now and can be purchased direct from Cutaway Comics here either as a one-off purchase or by ordering the full four issue run.

Read our review here.