img_4775Yeovil Literary Festival, Octagon Theatre, Yeovil

October 23, 2016

Doctor Number Five, Peter Davison, entertained a Sunday afternoon audience with a brief retrospective of his career, tying in with the launch of his new autobiography – Is There Life Outside the Box? An Actor Despairs.

“I can’t believe you included Button Moon,” chuckled the actor as he settled into his seat after entering to a medley of associated TV themes, bookended by Doctor Who. He was on good form, apologising immediately for not having been to Yeovil before and confessing that he usually just goes through Somerset on the way to Cornwall. I would later remind him that even if he hadn’t been to Yeovil before, he did actually attend a very significant event just over the county border in Wiltshire some 30 miles away back in 1983 – the Longleat Doctor Who 20th Anniversary celebration. “Were you able to get in?” he asked. I nodded. “I remember going up and down the line talking to all those people who couldn’t get in. They thought that maybe there would be 5,000 people turning up but it was closer to 100,000.” And did he feel like a rock star? Longleat was his first proper appearance in costume in front of such a large crowd. “What I wore made look like a bit of a rock star,” he smiled.

Peter Davison has been blessed that he has been able to avoid typecasting. He was well-known before Doctor Who and worked equally regularly afterwards. He recalled being cast as Tristan Farnon in All Creatures Great and Small and how he and co-star Christopher Timothy started to get approached by people in the street – “You’re those vets from the TV!” – and the fame that followed.

He confessed that he turned down a recording contract with EMI because the nature of the deal seemed stacked against him (much to his son’s subsequent amazement) and that initially he just wanted to write music. He also shared how he had failed his English Literature exams twice because he had never bothered to read the text, and only passed when the text was changed to something he had actually read! The talk moved on to his TV sitcoms Holding the Fort and Sink or Swim, how he juggled Doctor Who with this work, and his dislike of canned laughter or live audience recordings.

And then the topic moved on to Doctor Who and I’d guess that the collective ears of 90% of the crowd pricked up! He had been a fan of William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton but wasn’t that familiar with Jon Pertwee’s or Tom Baker’s incarnations simply because he had been busy working. Yes, it was slightly intimidating following Tom after his seven-year stint, but he just couldn’t refuse the offer. He didn’t want to be the person who turned down the role. He really enjoyed the work and his only regret is that that maybe the show was too ambitious – the effects and stories sometimes suffered as a result.

Asked by a young lad as to what episode of Doctor Who he would have liked to have been in, he said that he was very keen on The Empty Child, and in fact most of David Tennant’s episodes (David is of course his son-in-law).

Talking about the origins of The Five-ish Doctors Revisited he says that it started as a flippant remark at a convention. “If I’m not in the 50th Anniversary, I’m going to do my own” – and it just grew and grew from there. “Someone told me John Barrowman was disappointed that he wasn’t in the 50th, so I said ‘Fine, we’ll have him in ours!’” As to the possibility of a follow-up. “Only if people will work for free.”

Verdict: An entertaining hour and an ideal opportunity to meet the man and get a signed copy of Davison’s autobiography.

Nick Joy