Dennis Spooner

Well, I must have done something right, because...

After the recording on the Friday, I was invited by Verity and Dennis Spooner, the story editor, to join them for a drink in Studio 3.

That was the pub across the road from the Riverside Studios.

It's still there, by the way.

That's it.

You've got Dennis Spooner in charge now, haven't you?

Yeah.

And the weird thing is,

well, David Whittaker's writing this, but Dennis Spooner's clearly given him a bit of a lease of life, I think.

Yes, because Whittaker is not naturally a funny writer.

No, but there's a lot of fun going on here.

But maybe not so ostensible.

know, certainly if you think about kind of the later run of kind of Pat Trang and the unit stories of John Pertwee's early, you know, there's a They're quite similar.

And a lot of the similar writers, you know, you've got Dennis Spooner and you've got Terry Nation kind of crossing between both shows.

And both shows, of course, being the brainchild of Sidney Newman.

So there's definitely an overlap.

colour.

This is a Dennis Spooner script.

We've not

known that.

But yeah, this is real.

Yeah, crazy to think.

And apparently it was that that Dennis Spooner thought, it was the trigger for Dennis Spooner thinking, that in itself is so odd.

How can I make this? How can I incorporate it?

And then, and then we get to a Feast of Stephen.

And then Dennis Spooner takes over and actually gets worse.

Yeah.

It's

do some work here.

An outside, I mean, Dennis Spooner had left Doctor Who by that point, of course.

Oh, he had.

Yeah, he was re-contracted in to write some character bits, which delayed production of The Power of the Daleks by an entire week.

So this was a six-part story.

It was directed by Christopher Barry and written by David Whitaker and Dennis Spooner.

As I said, it aired between November and December 1966.

So Ben, to start with general thoughts on The Power of the Daleks.