Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: big finish, doctor who

Doctor Who Script Editor Christopher H. Bidmead Passes Away, Age 84

A look back at Christopher H. Bidmead, the script editor/head writer of Doctor Who Series 18 (from 1980-81), who passed away at the age of 84.

Former Doctor Who script editor Christopher H. Bidmead passed away on August 6th at age 84. As script editor in his one season on the show, he was head writer and responsible for commissioning scripts from writers since showrunners were not a concept in the  British television industry. Running a show in those days was split between the producer, who was in charge of the hiring of personnel and production of the show, and the script editor, who was in charge of the scripts for the show with the producer's approval.

Christopher Hamilton Bidmead was born on 18 January 1941 in Bolton, Lancashire, England. Raised in Chiswick, London, he developed twin passions for acting and science during his schooldays. After graduating, he briefly worked for a technology company before winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1960. He played several roles on stage, television, and radio, with a prominent role in Emergency-Ward 10. By the early 1970s, Bidmead was scriptwriting for Thames Television. He was also a journalist and contributed some articles to New Scientist until 1979. In 1979, Robert Banks Stewart recommended Bidmead for the post of script editor on Doctor Who, a role he took on for one season from 1980 to 1981.

Christopher H. Bidmead: The Last Hardcore Science Fiction Script Editor on "Doctor Who"

Bidmead wrote the screenplays and novelisations for ambitious Doctor Who stories that many fans now consider classics: the Fourth Doctor's (Tom Baker) final adventure, Logopolis, the Fifth Doctor's (Peter Davison) first adventure, Castrovalva, which took place immediately after the previous story, and Frontios. He was the script editor for Series 18 of Doctor Who, which was the Fifth Doctor's first season. Bidmead took a "back to basics" approach to the show, concentrating more on Science Fiction rather than Fantasy since he was a Science journalist and believed in getting the scientific details correct.

His stories and those he commissioned as script editor had a harder Science Fiction edge, including more awareness of computer technology, which is something since this was the early 1980s. Some fans regard Bidmead's era on the show as the last classic era before his successor Eric Saward, took the stories in more tonally whimsical and unpredictable directions that embraced jumps between Science Fiction, satire, and fantasy, with shifts between whimsy and brutal violence that anticipated the genre-shifting approach of the modern 2005 revival that old school fans now complain about. Bidmead was possibly the last script editor on Doctor Who who really cared about the "Science" in Science Fiction rather than just totally making something up.

Bidmead had developed a Fifth Doctor audio adventure for Big Finish in 2007 titled Renaissance Of The Daleks but asked for a "based on a story by" credit because he felt his script was changed by the producers in production. In 2010, his unproduced Doctor Who story, In The Hollows Of Time, was produced as a Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) audio drama "The Hollows of Time" as part of Big Finish's Lost Stories range.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!