Doctor Who star says William Hartnell was “furious” over cast changes

By Morgan Jeffery

Published: Tuesday, 01 November 2022 at 12:00 am

Peter Purves, who starred in 46 episodes of Doctor Who in the mid-1960s, has admitted his time on the show felt “chaotic” amidst multiple cast changes.

Purves played Steven Taylor, companion to the First Doctor (William Hartnell), and completing the show’s central trio at first was Maureen O’Brien as Vicki, who was subsequently replaced by a series of more short-lived assistants.

“I was heartbroken when she left,” Purves said of O’Brien. “We got the new scripts for [1965 serial] The Myth Makers – sadly of which nothing remains – and Maureen read that in episode 4 she left the show. She didn’t know. She found it in the script. It was a shock – it was a shock to Bill [Hartnell].”

Purves – who was speaking at a BFI event to mark the release of the Doctor Who: The Collection – Season 2 Blu-Ray boxset – recalled Hartnell being “absolutely furious” at the news of O’Brien’s departure.

“The sad thing was that she was never really replaced – because she was replaced by Adrienne Hill from The Myth Makers [playing handmaid Katarina] for five episodes. We all thought she was the permanent new girl, but it was decided that a girl coming from ancient Troy could not cope with the science elements of the show and wouldn’t understand all that, so after five episodes, they just junked her, literally.”

Katarina became the first Doctor Who companion to be killed off when she perished midway through The Daleks’ Master Plan, with Jean Marsh fulfilling the companion role for the remainder of that story as space security officer Sara Kingdom.

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“Jean Marsh was established then in the programme for eight weeks, which was all she could do – she was never going to stay longer than that,” Purves explained. “So the cast kept on changing, which was not the nicest environment to work in, and didn’t make any of us feel particularly secure.

“I never felt secure in the job – once Maureen had gone, I thought I could go at any time.”

He continued: “I discovered later that I wasn’t in jeopardy at that time, but Bill was, for a variety of reasons. They kept on trying to find ways of writing him out of the show.”

Purves pointed to two stories, 1966’s The Massacre and The Celestial Toymaker, in which the Doctor plays a smaller part in the narrative as evidence that the production team were trying to “find a way of seeing if the show worked with Bill having much less of a role”.