Patrick Troughton

When I realised how little I knew of Roddy McDowall's career, outside Planet of the Apes and Fright Night, it occurred to me that I didn't know a lot about Patrick Troughton's career, either.

Patrick Troughton became the Doctor in 1966. I was five years old, and I loved William Hartnell. I understood that Patrick Troughton was the same man, but I hated his silly hat and the way he played the recorder. What finally stopped me watching was an episode where what seemed like armies of Daleks were exploding on screen, revealing the Kaleds writhing horribly inside. My gran had to keep turning to ITV, and then flicking back again to see if it was all over - and after that we didn't watch it at all for a long while. When Patrick Troughton changed into Jon Pertwee, I suddenly took an interest again, but it took me a very long time to realise that Patrick Troughton had actually been rather good as the Doctor, and that some of those old episodes were worth watching.

Apart from the Doctor, I was aware that he had been the very first TV Robin Hood, though the episodes were filmed live, and I was too young to have seen any of them. I did enjoy seeing him in The Box of Delights - it was a book I loved as a child ("The wolves are running!" sends a chill down my spine even now). He was the magical Punch and Judy man who gave the Box to Kay Harker.

I'm a life-long Robin Hood fan, and I grew up on re-runs of Richard Greene's series - and there was Patrick Troughton again, playing various villains and good guys. In those days you only got to see the episode once - no videos or DVDs - so it was possible to have the same actor appearing as different characters all over the place. Paul Eddington, later famous in The Good Life, started off as Second Peasant and ended up as Count de whatever in a later episode!

He was also in films - playing the blind man harried by harpies in Jason and the Argonauts, that classic Ray Harryhausen film.

In the mid-Seventies, there was a children's serial called The Feathered Serpent, set in Aztec times. What I mostly remember is the young men in the production tying their hair back with the thick wool we used to call Dougals, which were fashionable briefly at about the same time as those clacker balls that got bashed together in a rather dangerous fashion. I also remember the heroine being poisoned by the evil chief priest (Patrick Troughton being really quite scary) and being totally paralysed, unable even to blink.

And just recently, I was hunting down some pictures online and came across a blog dedicated to Swallows and Amazons - especially the filming of the stories in the 1970s. The blog is called Sophie Neville, and it is quite fascinating. There was Patrick Troughton again, playing the eel man in The Big Six!

Apart from all this, he was another actor who always seemed to be working - he was in masses of TV series, did quite a lot of theatre work, and a few more films, and he appeared at Doctor Who Conventions as well.
And now I'm starting to collect the DVDs of his time in Doctor Who, with a new appreciation of his time in the role.