Remembering Jon Pertwee, the ultimate showman who loved life – and loved being Doctor Who

He had a point. Since the white heat of mid-'60s Dalekmania, the show had waxed and waned in popularity: ratings for Patrick Troughton’s final story fell as low as 3.5 million and, in Britain’s school playgrounds, all the buzz was about the show that had supplanted it in the Saturday teatime schedules – a shiny US import called Star Trek.

So when, having failed to come up with a workable homegrown replacement, the BBC went ahead and commissioned a new run of Doctor Who for 1970, it was very much a last throw of the dice.

Raising the stakes still further, the producers took a gamble by casting Jon Pertwee – a comic actor and variety entertainer best known for doing funny voices on radio shows like Waterlogged Spa and The Navy Lark – and indulging his wish to play the role as straight as an arrow.

How did that gamble work out for them? Let’s just say that, by the time Pertwee departed the role five years later, the future of Doctor Who – a show which had spent much of its first decade teetering on the brink of cancellation – finally looked assured, its berth in the Saturday night TV schedules suddenly a given. So it wouldn’t be stretching a point to say that, without Jon Pertwee, there would probably be no Doctor Who today.

It wasn’t all down to the leading man, of course. In the summer that Neil Armstrong took a giant leap for mankind out among the stars, plans were well advanced to bring Doctor Who crashing down to Earth, with the jackdaw wanderer in time and space now largely exiled to the English Home Counties in the 1970s (or was it the '80s?). And even if correspondents to the BBC’s Junior Points of View did initially grumble about Kirk, Spock and co. being replaced with boring old Doctor Who, the new, more grounded format soon won them back onside. (It was also now in colour, though that probably didn’t mean much to most viewers, who were still watching on black and white sets.)

But Jon Pertwee was the lightning rod that gave the new-look Who its energy. With his dandy frills – achingly on-trend in 1970, when everyone from Carnaby Street hipsters to Peter Wyngarde’s Jason King was rocking a ruffled shirt – shock of white hair (© Terrance Dicks) and imposing 6’2” frame, the Third Doctor loomed large over the cultural landscape of the early '70s in every sense. His successor, Tom Baker, would later liken him to a “tall lightbulb”, which seems as good a description of Pertwee’s star wattage as any.

Attacking the role with a seriousness of purpose, the actor was only too happy to dial down the vaudeville act and play the Doctor – described by incoming producer Barry Letts as "a mixture of Quatermass and James Bond" – as a no-nonsense man of action, never happier than when gunning the throttle on a motorbike or bombing around the countryside in his souped-up roadster, Bessie. (During the war, Pertwee had in fact worked with Ian Fleming in Naval Intelligence, later recalling a satisfyingly 007-friendly world of compasses hidden in brass buttons, tobacco pipes that fired a .22 bullet and secret maps that only showed up if you urinated on them.)

In some ways, the Third Doctor is arguably the least “Doctorish” (to use every fan’s favourite made-up adjective) of them all – not least because he’s a more physical presence than we’re used to, equally at home using his fists as his wits. Arrogant and overbearing at times, he’s also the most patrician Doctor: a clubbable establishment figure – on the surface, at least – who’s on the payroll of the British military, drinks in the same Whitehall club as Lord “Tubby” Rowlands and offers casual strategic advice to dictators like Napoleon Bonaparte (who he knows, naturally, as “Boney”).

The most lordly of Time Lords, it all feels a long way from the character’s usual brand of puckish mischief. In other ways, though, this Doctor’s rebellious streak is as strong as ever: he’s forever railing against petty bureaucracy, and takes great delight in tearing strips off pompous, stuffed shirt civil servants – the Brigadier included.

Either way, there’s an iron core of moral certainty to the Third Doctor: an innate sense of right and wrong that Jon Pertwee projects with such natural authority – sweetened with a twinkly charm – it’s little wonder that more than eight million viewers (more than half of them now adults) regularly sought protection from the monsters in the folds of his velvet cloak.

Off-screen, the fabled “UNIT family” – including Nicholas Courtney’s Brigadier Lethbrige-Stewart and Katy Manning’s Jo Grant – were a close-knit band of brothers and sisters, with Pertwee as their much-loved company leader. He wasn’t without his flaws, of course: many of his tales were as tall as he was, and he was a man who needed his ego constantly feathering. He hated the Daleks, because he thought they might upstage him, and in 1971 he groused, only half-jokingly, about Roger Delgado’s Master taking centre-stage on the cover of the Radio Times. (In RT’s photoshoot for The Three Doctors the following year, he conspicuously asserted his position as top dog by physically looming over his two predecessors.)

According to Barry Letts, whose creative partnership with script editor Terrance Dicks was as central to this era’s success as its leading man, Pertwee was “a kind and unselfish man”, but also “over-sensitive, worried and manipulative”.

The epitome of a '70s medallion man – to the extent of wearing an actual, shiny gold medallion in his chest rug – Pertwee loved fast cars, motorbikes and gadgets, famously persuading Letts to write various boys’ toys into the show for him to play with, including the ultimate vanity purchase, the ‘Whomobile’ – a silver-finned, space-age car which he bought, taxed and insured at his own expense.

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As much a showbiz personality as an actor, he combined filming Doctor Who with a busy schedule of live cabaret and TV appearances, and even recorded a spin-off single, Who is the Doctor, in which he bombastically tooted his own horn – “I see where others stumble blind, to seek a truth they never find, eternal wisdom is my guide, I am… the Doctor! – over a pounding glam rock version of the Doctor Who theme.

Though recollections vary, most agree that Pertwee didn’t really want to leave Doctor Who, the role he loved so much, in 1974, but felt he’d been left with no choice after calling the BBC’s bluff in a pay rise stand-off. During the recording of his final story in April that year, he and new companion Elisabeth Sladen were guests of honour at the opening of the new Doctor Who Exhibition in Blackpool. Watching her co-star soaking up the adulation as he was mobbed by cheering crowds (below), Sladen said she’d “never seen him happier – and I suddenly realised: I’ll never see him this happy again”.

As it turned out, in Worzel Gummidge, Jon Pertwee would go on to create another iconic TV character – one that many consider to be his crowning achievement. But at the same time, he never really left Doctor Who, always ready to slip into the cape and frills for reunion stories, fan conventions, TV interviews and commercials.

In the last decade of his life, in particular, Pertwee relished his role as Doctor Who’s elder statesman, to the point where, at times, you could be forgiven for thinking he was still the presiding Doctor: he was heavily involved in promoting the show’s 25th and 30th birthdays, took centre stage in touring show Doctor Who: The Ultimate Adventure and reprised his Doctor for 30th anniversary knees-up Dimensions in Time and two BBC radio plays.

When he died suddenly in 1996, aged 76, his obituary in The Independent stated: “It’s hard to remember a time when Jon Pertwee was not on the airwaves, doing funny voices or pulling silly faces.” And it’s true: he had been a fixture of British public life for so long, a world without him seemed scarcely credible.

And for all the tall stories and showbiz peacocking, what was never in doubt was just how much Jon Pertwee cared about Doctor Who. In her autobiography, Lis Sladen recalled on incident that seemed to crystallise her co-star’s often misunderstood attitude: during location filming for his swan song story Planet of the Spiders, Pertwee was sitting in a corset (for his bad back) and curlers when a journalist from the local press arrived early for an interview. “Send him over,” said Pertwee cheerfully, without so much as batting an eyelid.

“People who say Jon was vain really didn’t get it,” said Sladen. “The truth is, his vanity was all for the programme: he wanted his Doctor to look a certain way and he was very protective of that. Behind the scenes, or off- duty, he was as laid-back as anyone.”

Most people who had the privilege of working on the show in the early 1970s tell a similar story: for Jon Pertwee, Doctor Who mattered more than anything else in the world – even Jon Pertwee.

Doctor Who returns to BBC One later this year. Check out our dedicated Sci-Fi page or our full TV Guide for more details.