Sylvester McCoy

Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy speaks candidly about revisiting his old TV stories, what advice he’d give to Matt Smith – and facing up to his harshest critics. ”The bad stuff hurts,” he tells Benjamin Cook…

This article originally appeared in DWM 425, published in August 2010.

‘When Saturday comes, Matt Smith will stop being the man trying to fill the biggest shoes on television and become the 11th Doctor, a character so huge that people measure their lives against him (I’m a Tom Baker man myself). I enjoyed a sneak preview of the new Doctor – the youngest ever – a few months back and, trust me, Matt is no Sylvester McCoy…’

Ben Preston (Editor, Radio Times), April 2010

It’s 3PM on a Tuesday in June, and DWM is sat outside a café in Belsize Park, north London, with the Seventh Doctor himself, Sylvester McCoy. We’re having a perfectly lovely time, but there’s an elephant in the room – at least, there was until Sylvester raised the subject of a recent Radio Times editorial, previewing Matt Smith’s first episode as the Doctor.

“I only brought it up because you said you wrote for Radio Times,” says Sylvester. “I was just curious as to whether you had anything to do with it.”

To explain: this DWM reporter does occasionally, come nightfall, moonlight for Radio Times – but the views expressed in Ben Preston’s editorial were, we feel compelled to point out, his own. ‘Matt is no Sylvester McCoy,’ wrote Preston. ‘Instead, Matt’s so comfortable in the role that within minutes you’ve forgotten anyone came before him.’ Ouch!

“Only yesterday, this lady brought it up,” explains Sylvester. “People always come up and, very kindly, tell you the negative things people have said. You think, yes, thank you, that’s very nice, but I don’t want to know. I hadn’t read the original piece. I had no idea.”

You have to feel sorry for Sylvester McCoy. As the Doctor for three series, between 1987 and 1989, he was the man – or Time Lord – with the keys to the TARDIS when the BBC decided to dispatch Doctor Who to the great TV graveyard in the sky. Although only the most mean-spirited, injudicious of commentators would lay the blame solely at Sylvester’s door, he was – and still is – associated with a TV show on its last legs, which next to no-one was watching anymore. That can’t do much for an actor’s ego.

“I did worry a bit afterwards,” he admits. “It niggled. The bad stuff hurts. You have to have a very thick skin. Anyone who says, ‘He’s the worst Doctor Who’ – it’s the stupidity of actors, listening to those people. We are stupid. But I got over it. It’s the negativity I’ve got to endure. I know that people have their favourites, and I’ve been told sometimes that I have become favourite at certain times.”

In early 1990, a few months after his final TV serial, Survival, was broadcast, DWM readers voted Sylvester the ‘Best Doctor Ever’, beating perennial favourite Tom Baker into second place. However, when DWM ran a similar poll in 2009, Sylvester came eighth out the then-ten Doctors. Only Colin Baker and Paul McGann trailed him.

“It changes depending who’s in it, and who’s doing what, and what’s just come out. It’s all timing. When I first got the part, oh God, there was a lot of negative stuff even before it had gone out. There was a guy – I won’t name him, but he was big in fandom at the time – who wrote a piece for The Mail, I think, which was really horrible. Eventually he did apologise, and we became friends. He works for the BBC now. I don’t hold any grudges, but I mention it because it did happen, and he had to eat his words. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll prove to him that I can play the Doctor.’ What cockiness! I don’t know why I was so cocky.”

Mind you, this happens every time a new Doctor is cast. Following the announcement, in 2009, that Matt Smith would be taking over from David Tennant in the role, sure enough, the newcomer got the treatment – for being too young, too pretty, not pretty enough, too white, too male, you name it – months before he even started filming.

“Someone asked me, ‘What advice would you give to Matt Smith?’ My advice was: don’t read anything they write about you. It’s sound advice. They were saying he didn’t look right for the part? He was too weird-looking? The weirder you are, the better it is to play the Doctor! Of course, I wasn’t at all weird-looking –”

You were a conventionally good-looking leading man, right?

“Precisely,” he grins.

Sylvester has a reputation for being a showman, a joker, a clown and, frankly, a bit unhinged. This makes it difficult to get a grip on – excuse the pun – the real McCoy, the man inside the eccentric. But spend time with him, and he reveals himself to be perceptive, intelligent, sensitive even. Yet, despite the flak he’s had to endure for being the Seventh Doctor, and despite the fact that some of it “hurts”, there doesn’t appear to be a bitter bone in his body. He takes it, gets over it, and moves on.

Sylvester attributes this thick skin to his days touring in experimental comedy act The Ken Campbell Roadshow, in the 70s. “We started off in the pubs in the north of England,” he says, “sometimes uninvited. And we were hated. Old women would look at us as if they wished we’d die. One time, we’d done 15 minutes, and the landlord came to us and said, ‘I’ll give you a fiver if you all leave.’ We got paid off! We were devastated. Bob Hoskins was touring with us at the time, and he was ready to give up his career. It was horrible.”

What kept you going?

“Well, the next night, we’d have a triumph. The audience would love us. You’d think you’d never achieve such greatness in your life again. You never could tell which way it’d go, which was a good training ground to give you a thick skin. By the time I arrived at so-called legitimacy, I was a hardened performer.”

Is that where the aforementioned “cockiness” came from?

“I think I grew into that. In the Roadshow in the early days, we were doing completely mad stuff, off-the-wall, breaking ground, breaking rules – and that gives you a hell of a lot of confidence. We were trailblazing. We were slightly avant-garde. We were cocky little bastards. We thought we were the bee’s knees. And it paid off. We were huge. When we toured Germany, we were known as The Beatles of the theatre.”

And which Beatle were you?

“I don’t know,” he laughs. “Ringo, probably. I’d like to have been John Lennon.”

 

Sylvester was born Percy James Patrick Kent-Smith, on 20 August 1943, in Dunoon, Scotland, to an Irish mother and English father. As a teenager, he trained for the priesthood, but ended up working as a trainee executive in a London insurance firm. “I was living in – see that house over there, the one sticking out?” He’s pointing at a property 50 or so yards down the road, from where we’re sat drinking coffee. “See that bay window? I lived in the attic of that bay, here in Belsize Park, for years. I was still there when I became a member of the Ken Campbell Roadshow. This is my manor.”

As Sylvester tells it, he became an actor by fluke. Having left the insurance industry (“Because it was horrible, and I hated it”), he got a job in the box office at the Roundhouse, in Camden, alongside Brian Murphy, later known for his portrayal of henpecked husband George in ITV sitcoms Man About the House and George and Mildred. “Brian was collecting the tickets, and I was selling them, because my skills were mathematical and office-trained.

“But Brian and I used to just loon around, so when Ken Campbell came in one day, he presumed that I was an actor. ‘Here, Brian,’ he said, ‘I’ve got this mad show, and someone’s let me down at the last minute. I’ve got to find a young actor to replace him. I’m desperate.’ Brian said, ‘Ask the guy at the box office. He’s completely out of his head.’ I was a hippy in those days, with long hair like you have now, and a beard.”

Years later, he beat Campbell in auditions for the Seventh Doctor, Campbell’s interpretation considered too dark. “I’ve always had a theatrical streak,” continues Sylvester. “I was always trying to be amusing. I also had this inability to say no. I say yes to everything – which is a positive philosophy, but it can get you in a lot of trouble. I remember saying yes to Ken, and then thinking, actually, do I want to do this?

“It’s every young person’s dream to work on the stage, but I liked that job at the Roundhouse. I was happy there. I was at the centre of some very exciting stuff. Groundbreaking theatre was coming from America and all over the world. I ended up on stage with the Rolling Stones, as a bodyguard –”

Hang on, what?

“It’s true. I was.”

No, but like – really?!

“It was only one night. By then I was in the Roadshow, but I still had connections with the Roundhouse, and the Stones were doing a gig there before their first big concert in America. I went, ‘Listen, can I come and work on that Sunday night?’ ‘Yeah, come on,’ they said, ‘we’ll fit you in.’ I said, ‘What do I do?’ They said, ‘You stand on the stage, and just keep people off.’

“It was only afterwards, the Stones toured America – and that terrible concert [at the Altamont Speedway, in December ‘69], where the bouncers were Hells Angels, and they stabbed a fan to death. I didn’t know I was supposed to do that! That wasn’t in the job description. I was the last innocent bouncer. People say that that concert marked the end of the days of innocence, when the hippie era began to turn sour.”

Meanwhile, in the Roadshow, young Percy James Patrick Kent-Smith played an off-the-wall stuntman called ‘Sylveste McCoy’, which – later revised to ‘Sylvester McCoy’ – became his professional name. Sylveste’s stunts included putting a fork and nails up his nose, stuffing ferrets down his trousers, and setting fire to his head.

“I was quite mad,” confirms Sylvester. “I’ve always been a daredevil. I like danger. I like hanging off things. I got two new hips this year, because I wrecked the ones that nature gave me. People used to say to my wife, Agnes, ‘He’s completely bananas! What’s he like to live with?’ She’d say, ‘He’s incredibly quiet.’ Because I was getting all the madness out on stage.”

Didn’t anyone ever tell you to get a ‘proper job’?

“Oh yes. My granny, who brought me up, she couldn’t understand why I’d given up a job in insurance in the City to bang nails into my face. The Roadshow was filmed for a BBC documentary, a high-class arts programme, and my family back in Dunoon was so proud, because this was my very first telly. One of my uncles went to the local newspaper, and put in an announcement that his nephew, ‘Victor Sylvester’, was going to be on the television. He got my name wrong, but never mind. They all sat down to watch. My aunt might have worn a mink coat. But they switched off. They couldn’t watch it. They thought what I was doing was too crude. They were ashamed, poor things – which delighted me, in a way.”

Have you always been a bit of a black sheep, then?

“I’d always been slightly odd. I think my family thought no good would come of me. I never fitted into the norm. I didn’t want to be a banker or work in insurance. I wanted to be something different.”

And yet, as a teenager, he trained to become a priest. Short of entering the military, isn’t that the apex of conformity?

“Yes, but that in itself was extraordinary,” he insists. “In my little town of Dunoon, you’d go to church on a Sunday, and the priest was the guy up there in great costumes, and he had an audience! That’s what I wanted. I chose it not for any deep religious reasons, but because I got the afternoon off school. Our headmistress, Rosie O’Grady, used to invite people to give us talks on their jobs – firemen, doctors, captains of steamships. At the end of every talk, she’d ask us whether that’s what we wanted to be. I’d put my hand up for all of them. That’s maybe an early indication that I wanted to be an actor.

“The day the priest came, I put my hand up – me and my mate Danny Sweeney were the only two who did – so we got the afternoon off to go see the priest. Danny changed his mind, but I thought, just out of cockiness, I’d knock on his door and go, ‘Father, I’d like to become a priest.’ Well, before I knew it, I was on a train to Aberdeen – and I had three or four wonderful years, from the age of 11, locked up in a seminary. It was like a borstal, really, only I loved it.

DWM can’t imagine Sylvester in a seminary. He laughs. “I took to it like a duck to water. I got housemaid’s knee from praying. I fell in love with a 17-year-old French nun. I actually did become very holy and saintly. I used to get stoned. I would try so hard to concentrate on a prayer, and wipe everything from my head, and I’d get so involved, I’d get light-headed. I’d see things. I was on the edge of seeing God or the Virgin Mary. I was on the way to that kind of religious experience that people do have, and they only have because they’re denying their brain oxygen. It’s like having a trip.”

So you believed in God back then?

“I did, yeah.”

Do you now?

“No. I hate the idea.”

When did you – so to speak – lose your religion?

“Well, slowly. I decided to leave the seminary to become a monk, a lay monk, because I wanted to travel. I decided I’d go to South America, because I’d read about a Dominican Monk who did all that, and he really inspired me. I applied to the Dominicans, and they said, ‘Great, yes!’ So I left the seminary – but then a letter arrived from the Dominicans saying, ‘Sorry, you’re a year too young to join us,’ so I had to go back to school for a year. I went to the local grammar school, and it was mixed sex. Well, that was it! I decided during that year that rather wear a skirt, I’d prefer to chase it. A terrible discovery. Wonderful girls.”

Were you much of a ladies’ man?

“No, no, I was terribly nervous, because I’d started very late. I was 17 before I even got near women. I remember getting very excited once, when we were taken out as a group from the seminary, and we were on top of a double-decker bus somewhere in Aberdeen. I looked down. and these girls were waving at us. I got – um – very excited. I was a bit worried about that. I thought, I’m sure folks aren’t meant to feel like this. But no, I was never smooth. I’d fall in love all over the place, and I’d get broken-hearted.”

At 18, Sylvester had his heart broken by a girl called Elswyth Calder, “who I met again three or four years ago. She’s now a dowdy, quite sweet old lady. She didn’t know that she broke my heart. But I left Dunoon, and came to London broken-hearted.”

London in the early 60s, suggests DWM, must have been an incredible place to live. Not entirely, says Sylvester: “In those days, there was great poverty in London. I’d never really experienced that growing up. In the seminary, I’d been saved from the injustices of the world. I didn’t know anything about real life. I started to question God about this. Why is it the poorest suffer most? My mother had gone mad, and died in a lunatic asylum, and she was the loveliest, gentlest woman. She hadn’t done anyone any harm. If that’s not injustice –”

His voice trails off. He pauses, before continuing: “These injustices made me question God – and eventually I thought, I don’t really want to meet this man, this person, this God. I realised that a lot of lies had been told to me. I’d been brainwashed. I was battling with myself. I was having terrible problems. I went to church, in Muswell Hill, to do a confession.

“After church, I went to the Odeon here. I went to see a John Wayne film. It was one of those where the cowboys have a comedy fight, and they all hit each other – and it was during that comedy fight that a flash went through my head, and I suddenly thought, it’s simple, God doesn’t exist! I came out of that film knowing that there was no God, and it was like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders.”

From then on, was it all drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll? The unholier, the better?

“The sexual freedom was there,” replies Sylvester, “and obviously, as a healthy young man, I took part. There were some great times. Some excesses, and some not. Some sex-esses.” He flashes a grin. “The 60s revolution was going on. I found a whole new religion: peace, love, and anti-war. I became a committed member. It was exciting, this freedom. You were part of a mass rebellion, and it was a rebellion for good. It might have been naïve. I think it was.

“What destroyed it were the drugs. People took time off from pursuing the dream, because they were stoned. They stopped focussing. It became too hedonistic. They allowed Thatcherism and all that stuff to get in through the backdoor. There were amazing people who would hang around the Roundhouse in the early days, who you thought were going to change the world. Four or five years later, you’d see them come in, and they’d burnt out their brains with excess use of drugs. They were just zombies. I can still feel that tragedy.”

Did Sylvester ever –?

“I did have the occasional smoke,” he cuts in. “And I did inhale. But it didn’t really agree with me. I used to get a trip on it, as though I’d taken LSD, not that I ever have, because I’m too terrified. All I had to do was have a couple of puffs of dope, and people’s faces would start to melt. I remember freaking out on the Underground once, thinking I’d never get home. I was up against the wall, and that was just from a toke of marijuana.

“In those days, anybody who had an ounce of a spark in their lives tried it. If anybody says they didn’t, they’re lying, because it was everywhere. And we were utterly ignorant of what it could do. I feel sorry for young people now, because the drugs are much heavier. When I became an actor, I’d found my drug. That’s where I really belonged. That was the answer to my inner happiness. I was 27 by then.”

Was there a sense that he’d wasted his adolescence, in the seminary?

“No, never, because this is the paradox of it: Dunoon, and the family I grew up in, were very insular – but locked up in the seminary, we were introduced to great music, great art, great literature. It opened up a lot of the world to me. I was taken to an opera. I didn’t know what an opera was. It blew my mind. Going to see La bohème at the age of 12 gave me a route of life that I wanted to follow: I wanted to become a bohemian.

“That’s what I did, eventually. I ended up in Belsize Park – which isn’t the Left Bank, but it was, at that time, the Left Bank of Britain – in an attic room. I still live with an attic. La bohème still haunts me. I wanted to be a bohemian, and that’s what I am. It all came from that opera. The power that is in live performance! It’s extraordinary. It can change your life.”

 

Which facets of his personality does Sylvester think suited him to play the Doctor?

“From the very beginning, I was an eccentric. I wanted to stretch the envelope. Or balloon. Or whatever it was. I wasn’t one of those actors who was internal and compact. I wanted to fly. I remember practising the trapeze, over a swimming pool, for the Roadshow, and that feeling of flying – leaving one trapeze, and going to the other – only lasted a few seconds, but it was almost orgasmic. Spiritual, too. Well, that’s what Doctor Who’s about, isn’t it? He gets into a TARDIS, and flies about all over the place.

“The Doctor is an eccentric. Look at Matt Smith – he looks eccentric, he is eccentric, and he’s brilliant. All the Doctors are eccentrics. Tom Baker – I love him to death, but the man is mad. So was Jon Pertwee. Colin is a wonderful, eccentric chap. I’ve never played a normal person in any of the acting that I’ve done. I wouldn’t quite know how.”

In December 1986, Sixth Doctor actor Colin Baker was dismissed – the knee-jerk reaction of a BBC hierarchy that needed someone to blame for the show’s dwindling ratings – and so the search was on for his successor. “For years, people had been telling me, ‘You’d make a great Doctor Who,’” says Sylvester, “even before I became an actor. I was told it so many times that I started to believe it, rather stupidly maybe, so when I heard on the news that Colin was leaving, I got onto my agent immediately. At the same time, I was at the National Theatre, playing the Pied Piper, which was a good audition piece.”

The producer of Doctor Who, John Nathan-Turner, attended a performance of The Pied Piper in the first week of January. Sylvester was interviewed for the role later in the month, with a screen test in February. The tapes confirmed to Nathan-Turner that he’d found his Doctor. Sylvester himself was less convinced: “They handed me the script and said, ‘There we are, get on with it,’ but I had no idea how to approach it. Nobody told me.

“Most of what I’d done before was comedic. I did funny stuff. I was physical. I was Chaplinesque. I had those skills that were akin to the silent-movie clowns, so I started doing it that way – but during the first few stories, I suddenly realised that there was much, much more to it. That’s why, later on, I tried to change it, explore it, make it darker, and deeper, and more mysterious. I thought my costume was too flippant, so we got a darker jacket [for his third season]. We should have got rid of the question-mark pullover, too, but that was JN-T’s baby, so I couldn’t, really.”

Did Sylvester have no say?

“It changed as time went on. In the beginning, I didn’t have any. I just did what they said. If we’d done a fourth season, I’d have got rid of the pullover, regardless of JN-T. Too many question marks. Not exactly subtle. Everybody loved it except me. I grew to hate it, a) because it was so hot and uncomfortable, and b) it gave me a beer belly, because stupidly I decided to have the braces on the outside.”

You thought you looked fat in it?

“Basically, yeah. But I would have kept the question-mark umbrella, because that was my invention – my own vanity – and if you’re going to have a question mark, at least that’s subtle. It’s an umbrella handle.”

How aware was he, back then, of what had happened to Colin? Did Sylvester know that his predecessor had been sacked, and was refusing to come back to record a regeneration?

“I had no idea. I just thought he’d done his three years and left. I wasn’t a tabloid reader – I’m still not – so I’d only heard it on the news that Colin was leaving. Nobody told me about the bad stuff, so I didn’t ask.”

And when they said, ‘Sylvester, would you mind donning this curly blonde wig and dressing up as your predecessor? Don’t worry, we’ll only film you from behind’ – did you not think, hang about, this is a bit odd? Is that what you thought every new Doctor had to do?

“I knew that a regeneration thing went on, because I’d watched Patrick turn into Jon, and Jon into Tom, but I hadn’t really watched the show since then. Come to think of it, I did wonder why Colin wasn’t there – why didn’t he come in and do it? – but I didn’t want to delve deep into it, really, because it seemed like somebody else’s sadness. It wasn’t my business. Some people said, ‘Aren’t you worried about taking Colin’s job?’ I said, ‘No. The job was there. Any actor would do it.’

The Seventh Doctor’s first adventure, the much-maligned Time and the Rani, is released on DVD this September. Sylvester had to re-watch it, for the first time since its original 1987 transmission, to record the DVD commentary. “I was hiding behind the couch,” he jokes, “and that’s when I came on. I’m not very good at watching myself. Also, there was such a lot of negative stuff said about it at the time that I thought it most likely wasn’t that good. But I was pleasantly surprised, I really was. I thought, actually, I’m not as bad as I’ve been led to believe. I’d thought it was a really crappy performance, but it turns out it wasn’t.

“It had been written for Colin, and they rewrote it for me, so it was, as I’ve often said, like wearing a jacket that didn’t quite fit. But if people approach it with the knowledge of what we were trying to achieve, and what we couldn’t achieve because of the bad weather, because of money, because of time… yeah, it wasn’t that bad.”

And when he watches back his other Doctor Who stories, what does Sylvester tend to cringe at the most?

“Well…” He thinks for a moment. “I sometimes think that maybe I was too theatrical sometimes. But then the Doctor himself is a very theatrical character, isn’t he? Maybe it should have been internal, in some areas. Um… my biggest sadness is that originally they were going to do The Happiness Patrol [1988] in black-and-white, all film noir, but then they changed their minds. I didn’t know this until after we did it. If I’d have known, I’d have gone in and begged them to do it in black-and-white. It would have taken away the curse of the sets. I think the sets were lacking.”

Earlier this year, The Sunday Times explored The Happiness Patrol in an article entitled ‘DOCTOR WHO IN WAR WITH PLANET MAGGIE’. It quoted Sylvester as suggesting that the show’s left-wing scriptwriters wanted to give it anti-Thatcher plotlines in a failed attempt to overthrow the government. The story even prompted a lengthy debate on Newsnight.

“In a way, it was a flippant comment,” explains Sylvester, “but at the same time, we were living through Thatcherism, and a large group of people didn’t like it. The reason that made it into The Sunday Times recently is more to do with today’s politics, because it’s Murdoch’s press that runs it, and they’re anti-BBC. They want to knock the BBC at every turn, because they want to get rid of it. It’s in the way of them making even more squillions of money. They got hold of that story, and decided that it proved that the BBC is subversive, full of lefties. It was all bollocks.”

Was it, though?

“Well… hmpf. The show was definitely never pro-Thatcher. If we could have brought down Thatcher, it would have been great. Oh, the vanity! But the Doctor is, by his very nature, anti-establishment. The little man against the evils of the universe. He always has been. The other day, I was listening a writer, on Desert Island Discs, who had worked on Brookside, and he said, ‘We were trying desperately to find the sentence that would bring down Thatcher!’ So we weren’t the only ones.”

Mention of Rupert Murdoch prompts DWM to asks Sylvester about the Licence Fee. Is it sustainable? Can open, worms everywhere…

“Yes! What?! Of course!” This is important to Sylvester. He continues: “BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, BBC Four, all the BBC radio, the news, the online stuff… I mean, you’re getting so much for – how much is it a week? The price of a pint of beer? The BBC is what makes Britain civilised. It’s what makes Britain different.

“Every day, there is a new play on the radio. Every day! This is so civilised. This is so wonderful. ITV, Channel Four and so on have had to compete against that, and have come up with some great programmes themselves. If the BBC wasn’t there –! You go to America, and watch American television – it’s complete crap. We get the best of the imports. Generally, it’s a desert. And that’s because they haven’t got a strong public broadcasting system. We have.

“And Fox News – have you seen it? Unbelievable! The lies, the fantasies, the fear… it’s terrifying. The BBC is one of the glories of British life. Does Murdoch need all that money? Does he have to destroy a piece of civilisation in order to get it? He wants to build his empire, and the BBC gets in his way.”

To steer the conversation back to 1980s Who, DWM turns our earlier ‘cringe at’ question on its head, and asks Sylvester which bits of his era he’s proudest of? What worked best?

“I’m very proud of Ace,” he replies. “I was strongly arguing that I didn’t want a screaming companion. I thought the companion should be given more to do.”

Is it fair to say that Ace, played by Sophie Aldred, was a better match for Sylvester’s Doctor than his original companion, Mel, played by Bonnie Langford?

“Mel was Colin’s companion first,” points out Sylvester. “She better suited that bigger, more colourful kind of Doctor. The reason she got the job was she was doing a charity gig at Alton Towers with JN-T, and they were on a Big Dipper, and she screamed, and JN-T thought, I’ve found my new companion!”

DWM sort of wishes that were true, but –

“I don’t know if that’s an exaggeration, but that’s what I was told.”

You were told a lie.

“Well, maybe.” He chuckles. “But Bonnie represented the end of that era, the last of that type of companion. Maybe that’s why there is a negativity towards her from some fans. That’s unfortunate for Bonnie. Ace was more streetwise. Mind you, she wasn’t allowed to talk with a London accent. That frustrated me. That was JN-T, worrying about the Americans. Ace ended up being a posh street kid. It wasn’t until Rose arrived [in 2005] that I thought, that’s what Sophie would love to have done. But it’s all compromise. I’m glad that I was part of those discussions with JN-T… as well as trying to bring down Thatcher,” he laughs.

 

Elsewhere, all was not well. During Sylvester’s three-year tenure, the show had an audience trajectory that resembled a cardiogram of the Sixth Doctor on an exercise bike: up, down, up, critical, dead. Hardly surprising, then, that the show was retired quietly after its twenty-sixth season, in 1989  “It just went kaput,” says Sylvester. “No big goodbye. No great dramas off or on screen. We’d finished filming, and I got a phone call from J-NT, and he said, ‘Kent,’ because that’s my real name, ‘I’m phoning up to tell you I’ve written you a letter, but I’ll read it to you’ – and he told me it wasn’t coming back. I wasn’t that surprised.

“It had been put into ‘hiatus’. A horrible word. I hate that word. There was loads of politics involved. The guys on the sixth floor wanted rid of it. They’d always wanted rid of it, because it got in the way of them making programmes that would make their name, make their career, give them immortality. If it had been commercial, if we’d been on ITV, they would never have got rid of Doctor Who, because it made too much money.

“I suppose, looking back, it was pretty obvious from the beginning of my first series that there was something amiss, that it wasn’t being given the support it deserved. Definitely in my third season, it was really obvious. The BBC was trying to destroy it. The tragedy for me is that we felt it was getting better. I think it was the best season, for us. Lots of good stuff in there.

“Although the viewing figures didn’t look good, we were put up against Coronation Street. We didn’t stand a chance. We got no advertising. I met people in the street, friends of mine, who didn’t know Doctor Who was still on! It was totally ignored, that last season. Radio Times did nothing. Partly that’s because JN-T knew he was going to leave, and wanted to save the press for that announcement, halfway through the season.”

That sounds… misjudged.

“It was misjudged, in a way. He was thinking about his career more than he was thinking about Doctor Who, but… look, he’d committed a long part of his career to Doctor Who. He thought, with this announcement, he’d be inundated with all sorts of offers. This never happened. I don’t even remember if the press took it up as a story. But I perfectly understand – he was looking out for himself. In this business, in a sense, you have to.

“Yes, you could say it’s selfish, but he wanted to have another career. I don’t want to knock him, really, because he was the guy that chose me, and I had a great time with him. Years later, I met someone who said they’d asked him who his favourite Doctor was, and he said, ‘I can’t tell you that. But I’ll tell you this – I’m a great friend of Sylvester McCoy’s.’”

Did it bother Sylvester, for those first few years following the cancellation, being known as the last Doctor Who?

“The last of the Mohicans?” he muses.

Yeah, if you like. It’s a bit of a cross to bear, isn’t it?

“Partly it did feel like that. But I always thought it’d come back. You see? I was utterly convinced. I kept the faith. Because it seemed to me the most stupid decision to take it off in the first place.”

In 1996, when Doctor Who returned, with Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor, in a TV Movie, the flame was reignited – but for one night only. The movie pilot was not taken up as a series. “That was disappointing,” says Sylvester, who returned for the movie’s opening act. “I’d always committed myself to film a regeneration, because of what happened with the changeover from Colin to myself.

“Originally, when they approached me, I thought I’d just be in the pre-credits, but I’m in quite a lot of it, aren’t I? I saw it again recently, and I hadn’t realised quite how much I’m in it. I mean, I don’t do much – I was lying about, being pushed up and down on a trolley – but I loved doing it. I had no responsibility. I could just enjoy myself. Paul was terrific.

“It did very well over here, didn’t it? But I was disappointed with the reception it got in America. It was only watched by blokes. No women watched, which is odd, really, because Paul is rather attractive. If more woman had watched it, it might have gone to a series. The producer, Philip Segal, was an English chap who had gone to America. He was trying to keep everybody happy – British audiences, American audiences, the BBC, Fox – and that got in the way of it.”

And here’s a confession: “They should never have had me in it,” says Sylvester, before adding: “Or I should have been in all of it. Heh! No, I should not have been in any of it, because it made it too confusing, I think, to a new audience. What it should have done is: Paul McGann, story, grab that audience, then brought me back later on, if they’d wanted, and explained that part of the show’s history. That would have been a better way to do it.”

A decade or so later, Sylvester watches Doctor Who today, but wishes that the show had had such support from the sixth floor of Auntie Beeb back when he had his foot in the TARDIS door. “It would have been great to have that support,” he says. “We could have conquered the world, I think, much as Doctor Who has now. Yeah, I’m jealous of that. I think anybody would be.

“But I’m delighted that they’ve done such a good job in bringing it back. I’m proud to have that connection with this very successful programme. It wasn’t allowed to be successful when I was doing it. At the time, I didn’t know why. It was only afterwards that I realised I wasn’t given a fair crack of the whip. I wish I had been.”

Would he go back?

“For a long time, I always thought I would, because that’s the one thing fans always ask for. They love stories with returning Doctors, and I’ve always thought we should try to give the fans what they want. But the other day, I was thinking, if I had to put on that costume again, I’d look ridiculous. Maybe if they put me back in my costume from the film…?”

But once a Doctor, always a Doctor. Since 1999, Sylvester has appeared in 40 audio dramas for producers Big finish. “My Doctor is still alive, and well, and kicking. I still really enjoy playing him.” Since 2004, several of the Seventh Doctor’s outings have starred Philip Olivier as original companion Hex, alongside Sylvester and Sophie. If two’s company, isn’t three a crowd? Presumably there’s a different dynamic.

“Yes, there is, really. It’s good for Ace, because she can be more mature, and instruct Hex, because they’re nearer each other in age. I suppose it does affect me sometimes in the stories, when they gently gang up on me. They take the mickey, and that’s good fun. Sometimes, Ace and Hex fall out with each other, and the Doctor has to treat them like children. It’s like Gordon Brown said: ‘They remind me of my two young boys squabbling at bath time.’”

Is Sylvester still learning about the character of the Doctor?

“It depends on the writers, and what they come up with. Over the years, I suppose I’ve played nearly every kind of emotion that you could have had.”

Is he more comfortable with listening back to the audio plays than he is with watching his old TV episodes?

“No, I don’t like the sound of my own voice. But I do like to get the response from fans. That’s the really good bit, what they think of it – although sometimes get a bit confused, because we’ve done so many now, and I can’t remember which is which.”

Has fan reaction shifted much in the last few years, since the show was resuscitated?

“There are loads more children now, and they know my work,” he enthuses. “They’ve gone back, got the DVDs, and they become interested in you again. I was at a signing in a big store a couple of Christmases ago, and there was a group of children all coming up to chat to me and get autographs. Suddenly, one little girl, I looked at her, and she was terrified. Something behind me had frightened her. She was shaking. Real, utter terror. I looked round, and it was a Dalek!

“I stood up and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m the Doctor, you’re safe with me.’ I didn’t do it for comedic effect. I did it for that little girl. I think it was the best piece of acting I’ve ever done. I wanted to save that little girl from her terror. But it’s brilliant that the Daleks are still terrifying.”

But Sylvester has a more sober view of the older, more ‘hardcore’ fans, the ones who take things a little bit too far: “I feel sad for them. It’s a shame. They should just enjoy it, and relax. It’s supposed to be fun. If people take it far too seriously, they’ll get hurt by it, because it’ll never be as perfect as they want it to be. There’s something quasi-religious about fandom. I may not have become a priest, but I’ve ended up becoming the equivalent, in a way! I was trying to work out how to turn it into cash, become rich. L Ron Hubbard made a fortune.”

Does Sylvester ever wish Doctor Who further? It was just three years in a career that’s spanned decades.

“It was, wasn’t it? I mean, it was, but it isn’t. It’s become a huge part of my life. I just enjoy it. It doesn’t bother me at all, because I’ve been able to do other things. My television career maybe hasn’t been quite as exciting, but nowadays I only tend to be asked to do the odd little eccentric role. I don’t mind. I quite enjoy that. I’ve had an extraordinary acting career. The things I’ve done!”

He doesn’t seem like the sort of person to have regrets, DWM suggests.

“No. Funnily enough, I was at the doctors recently, because I’ve got these new hips, and it’s a major operation, and afterwards some people can get depressed. He said to me, ‘Have you suffered from any depression?’ I said, ‘No, I’m surprisingly happy.’ That’s what came out of my mouth. I should have been depressed. I could have been. I’ve gone through a lot of pain. I used to be very physical – I used to run, jump, and never stand still – but I haven’t been able to do that for a couple of years now. But I’ve never got depressed, and I can’t understand why. Every morning, I wake up, and I’m just really happy to be around.

“If you look at my life, I should be the most miserable person alive. I suppose I wasn’t at my happiest when I was working in insurance. I was a bit lost then, for four or five years. And my early childhood wasn’t… well, when I look back on that boy, I think, my God, he had a hard time. At the same time, I had a great time. I found the good times in the bad time.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, sums up Sylvester McCoy. “I’ve been blessed,” he says, “with seeing the positive side of everything.”

Benjamin Cook

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