Graham Williams

In Doctor Who (1963), the actors have to believe in an absurd threat before we will. We were unsettled by their seriousness, which gives the scares their force. Graham Williams took over as producer in 1977 with instructions to reduce violence and horror. Across his 72 episodes as producer, with Tom Baker in the lead, the programme moved towards a lighter and more humorous tone. The reservation is that forced humour can make it harder to believe the actors when the danger returns.

Williams produced seasons 15–17, through to 1980, working with script editors Robert Holmes, Anthony Read and Douglas Adams. The Key to Time season (1978–79) gave the adventures a continuing story across an entire season. That is the decision we find most interesting: asking the audience to follow a longer narrative while making the programme less forbidding. But a season-long story still needs individual episodes to move, and the pacing is one of our reservations about Doctor Who.

His writing contributions matter as much as the producing credit. Williams worked on The Invasion of Time (1978) with Read and City of Death (1979) with Adams and David Fisher, both under the shared name David Agnew. His substantial rewrites on troubled stories show how directly he could become involved in the scripts. Before moving into production, he had worked as a BBC script editor on programmes including The View from Daniel Pike, Z-Cars and Barlow at Large.

Direction could mean taking over a production in difficulty: on Nightmare of Eden (1979), Williams stepped in after the original director resigned. His later work included producing 13 episodes of the anthology programme Tales of the Unexpected between 1982 and 1984, followed by the second series of Super Gran (1986–87). Start with the Key to Time season, and allow the programme room to talk.