CLASS ACT

IN TRIBUTE TO THE LATE WILLIAM RUSSELL, SFX PRESENTS AN ARCHIVAL INTERVIEW WITH ONE OF THE FIRST STARS OF DOCTOR WHO

- NICK SETCHFIELD

HERE AT SFX WE’VE INTERVIEWED a universe of Doctor Who stars over the years. But it was a singular thrill to meet William Russell. Perhaps it was the fact he had been there at the very beginning. As schoolteacher Ian Chesterton he had been whisked from the classrooms and corridors of Coal Hill School into the wilds of time and space, abducted by a wary alien in possession of an impossible blue box. This was the man, after all, who had walked on Skaro, Marinus and Vortis and been knighted by Richard the Lionheart seven centuries before he was born. The magic of those early Saturdays still clung to him. To be honest we half-expected him to be in black and white, maybe even flickering slightly around the edges.

It was an apt time to meet someone from the primordial dawn of Doctor Who. The series was just about to return to prime time BBC One, reimagined for a whole new generation. At SFX’s suggestion the genial 80-year-old signed the VHS sleeve of “An Unearthly Child”, the first adventure, as a token of good luck for new showrunner Russell T Davies, mischievously adding “Don’t mess it up!” (historical footnote: he didn’t).

William Russell always seemed to fight shy of the limelight, never cashing in on his part in the creation of a TV legend. He was self-effacing, too. When we met him he was at the BBC Audiobooks studios in Bath, recording narration for a CD release of “The Crusade”, a story he had made in 1965. Asked what he thought of the performance by his younger self he grinned and admitted “I always think I’m terrible!” How wrong he was.

Here’s an extended version of the interview that originally ran in SFX in 2005, presented in tribute to the man whose sincere, charming and quietly heroic performance helped make Doctor Who a phenomenon.