Who & Me: The Memoir of Doctor Who Producer Barry Letts, 1925-2009 by Barry Letts

Author:Barry Letts [Letts, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Non-Fiction, Television, Doctor Who
ISBN: 9781906263447
Publisher: Fantom
Published: 2009-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

At first glance the idea of running a long-running series like Who might seem a simple task; difficult maybe, and hard work, but not complex; just a matter of doing each story in turn, after all.

Forget it.

In the first place, when you’re in the thick of it, you, your script editor and your secretary, and more recently your production associate and location manager – the permanent team – could find themselves coping with three directors and their teams at the same time.

One is in the run-up period: casting the guest actors, having planning meetings, discussing and sorting out sets, costumes, monsters, visual effects, finding locations, going on recces, planning the camerawork, and so on, and so on.

The next is in the throes of production, either shooting the outside locations or on the studio turnaround – and you’ll already have an idea how demanding that can be.

The third is wrestling with post-production: editing, working with the composer for the music cues (spotting them and recording them) and with Radiophonics for the rest of the sound effects, sound dubbing; and reviewing the finished article – which includes showing it to the Head of Serials for his final approval, which isn’t always forthcoming.

And just to make things even more of a tangled web, these things can overlap even within the limits of one story. The film editing, for instance, will be started even during location filming, and probably won’t be complete by the time you’re in rehearsals for the studios.

You, the producer, if you’re doing your job properly, have to find the balance between leaving everything to sort itself out (if you’re lucky), having a creative input yourself, and being a control freak who never delegates.

You need to give everybody the freedom to do their job as part of the whole enterprise but at the same time steer everyone in the right direction, keeping as light a hand on the reins as possible.

You have to have no reluctance to intervene if it’s necessary. I have known a director to misunderstand a script so radically that it would have made nonsense of the whole story if I hadn’t twigged what was going on. And I came to a final run at the rehearsal room of one of the Classic Serials to find the leading actor giving a perfect imitation of Laurence Olivier’s voice in Richard III – and neither he nor the director had noticed.

But above all, you have to be the Big Grandpa (the Director is Big Daddy or Mummy) to whom everybody looks for stability, inspiration, and help.

Quite a job.

So what’s left?

The most important element of all. The scripts. Or have I said that before?

Ah, but maybe you haven’t taken on board the sheer quantity of words that are going to be generated. As many as 26 25-minute episodes a year…

26 multiplied by 25 is 650; 650 divided by 90 is 7.22. So we have the equivalent of the scripts for seven feature films being discussed, storylined, written, delivered, rewritten during the year.

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