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broadcaster’s key creative figures to become the BBC’s new Head of Drama. Sydney Newman had come to ITV from a successful career in his native Canada where he’d started out as a film editor for the National Film Board. After working in American television in the early 1950s in New York, Newman returned to Canada to take up a post with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where he became Supervisor of Drama Productions in 1954. By 1958, Newman was in Britain, having been hired by ITV regional franchise ABC (serving the English Midlands and the North) as a drama producer. Newman, brash and forthright like the independent broadcaster he was joining, rapidly rose to become ABC’s Head of Drama. He was directly responsible for the creation of Armchair Theatre , a weekly show that presented the work of a new breed of ‘angry young men’ playwrights to large audiences, and gritty drama Police Surgeon , which developed into the more fantastical The Avengers .
    Looking to revitalise the BBC’s moribund drama department and under instructions from Director General Hugh Greene, the BBC’s Director of Television Kenneth Adam hired Newman to become Head of Drama at the BBC. He took up the post as soon as his ABC contract expired in December 1962. Resented by many in the BBC – due to being younger, better paid, outspoken, and (maybe worst of all) ‘foreign’ – Newman was quick to make his mark. He split the unwieldy drama department into three units – series, serials and plays, headed by Elwyn Jones, Donald Wilson and Michael Bakewell respectively. All three reported directly to Newman, whose arrival was a sign of big changes to come at the BBC throughout the 1960s.
    Donald Baverstock, the BBC Controller of Programmes, met with Newman in March 1963 to discuss the need for a new show to fill an early-evening scheduling gap between the live afternoon sports programme Grandstand and the pop-music review show Juke Box Jury , which led into the prime-time Saturday evening schedule. The slot had been previously filled by a variety of short-lived shows and serials, including a Francis Durbridge thriller, a six-episode sciencefiction serial The Big Pool and comedy series The Telegoons . Newman and Baverstock wanted a new drama show for the slot, something that could potentially run all year round (with short seasonal breaks) and could attract a loyal family audience, keeping the older Grandstand viewers tuned in, yet also appealing to the younger, hipper audience attracted to Juke Box Jury . Newman proposed and considered a variety of ideas, including a drama set in a boys’ school.
    However, for as long as he could recall, Newman had been a fan of literary science fiction. ‘Up to the age of 40, I don’t think there was a science-fiction book I hadn’t read,’ he claimed. ‘I love them because they’re a marvellous way – and a safe way, I might add – of saying nasty things about our own society.’ Newman was aware of, and embraced, science fiction’s ability to comment on contemporary politics and society in the disguise of fiction about the future. While at ABC he’d commissioned the science-fiction drama-anthology series Out of This World , as well as the serial Pathfinders in Space and two sequels, Pathfinders to Mars and Pathfinders to Venus . The Pathfinders shows featured juvenile characters as a point of identification for the younger target audience and were co-created by Malcolm Hulke, later a key, politically motivated contributor to Doctor Who . Introduced by classic-horror-film icon Boris Karloff, Out of This World dramatised the work of key science-fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov, John Wyndham and Philip K Dick, whose Impostor was adapted by screenwriter Terry Nation, later to create the Daleks for Doctor Who . These previous Sydney Newman shows combined elements that would be central to Doctor Who : an anthology-series format, with strong ‘audience identification’ characters (as the BBC