INTERVIEW: Doctor Who Magazine

Please note that some of the additional information provided here by the journalist named below may not be accurate, so it should be treated with caution.

---

Wednesday, 23^rd September, 1998

When cult actor Peter Wyngarde flew to Lanzarote to film scenes for Planet of Fire, this month BBC video release, he never imagined it end up on the run from the local policia…

Even when young, Peter Wyngarde was a larger-than-life character. “I was a terrible, outrageous little show off. A precocious, hideous little child”. Born in Marseille in 1933, the last thing his upbringing could be described as is conventional. When he was just six he found himself held in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and it was here that he discovered his love of performing. “I remember the camp doctor, he was a marvellous fellow, who read stories to the children in the camp. One of those stories was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I was so taken with it that I decided to dramatize it for the monthly camp show”. For this, Peter kidnaped the camp commandant’s pet rabbit on which his Dr Jekyll would try out his fabled elixir!

Peter went on to become a well-established stage and screen performer and, in 1969, found himself cast as the hero in a new ITC series, an event predicted by Welsh clairvoyant who told him, “Very soon you are going to be in front of millions, not hundreds, not thousands, but millions. Millions and millions of people are going to be watching you”.

Not long after, and just before opening in London in Checkov’s The Duel, he was asked by Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner to appear in their new television series, Department S, but his character was largely undefined. “The original fellow was to be a professor, but that wasn’t me. So I went to Sevenoaks to stay with friends Michael Bryant (later a Doctor Who director) and his wife for the weekend. I told him that I have come up with a name for this character. By the end of the weekend I had thought of Jason, Michael’s wife had thought of King, and Michael had come up with the Bentley as the only car this character would be seen in”.

Jason King became famous for his highly fashionable, if somewhat outrageous clothes sense, and Peter admits responsibility for choosing the cuffs, shirts and ties worn on screen. Perhaps his haute couture was responsible for a poll which voted him ‘The Man Australian Women Would Most Like To Lose Their Virginity To’!

After 28 episodes of Department S, his character had so captured the imagination of the viewing public that Peter was offered a second series solo, this time called simply Jason King. “Actually what happened was Lew Grade, who was head of ITC, called for me and said, ‘I want to talk to you’. I thought he was going to tell me they were not repeating Department S. When I went to see him he said to me, ‘I don’t like you. My idea of a hero is somebody blond with blue eyes, like Roger Moore. You, with your funny dark hair, moustache, and terrible clothes are not my idea of a hero at all, but I have to tell you that my wife loves you so you have to do another series’”.

Jason King came to the end of its run early in 1972, and marked the beginning of a long period where the flamboyant Wyngarde was rarely seen on television screens. But, come 1983, he accepted the part of Timanov in the Doctor Who story Planet of Fire. “Somebody said to me, ‘You’ve done The Avengers, The Saint, The Prisoner and The Baron, you must do Doctor Who. I had no idea what Doctor Who was about, mainly because I was working a lot and you didn’t get a chance to see much television. I made a point of watching some episodes and found I liked it. I liked William Hartnell enormously. The first episode I was offered I didn’t do because there was too much studio work and I hate studio. However, with Planet of Fire the character was interesting, and there was the idea of going to Lanzarote. You only have to tell me once that we are going where the sun is and I’m there before I’ve even read the script. In fact the script on this occasion was a bit tricky. We changed a lot of the lines; some of them were a bit corny. I found the idea of the story fascinating and that was what appealed to me. Once you have the idea you can take it from there and rewrite the dialogue”.

Laughing, he explains that this is the reason people don’t employ him: “Directors are terrified of me when I do rewrites. They think I’m going to take over, and usually I do. I think you have to do that but nobody else thinks so, especially not the directors”.

Planet of Fire was directed by Fiona Cummings, and Peter is the first to acknowledge her input. “What is so marvellous about her is that she likes actors. Most of the directors that one gets in touch with these days don’t like actors. She assesses what kind of actor you are, always remembering that she and the writer want to bring to it. Then if she finds an actor who is rather over imaginative, she listens to whatever is good and takes it whilst at the same time getting rid of the rubbish. I will present a whole bag of tricks, and she would say what she liked. I’m surprise she doesn’t do more. I think there are two reasons for this. Firstly, she isn’t 12 years old as a lot of today’s directors appear to be and, secondly, she knows her job too well. You see they have to find someone they can blame; someone to carry the can if things go wrong. Fiona was great to work with and I wouldn’t have enjoyed it half as much without her”.

Lanzarote itself is a place of breath-taking beauty, and Peter decided to make the most of his time. “I rented a Jeep, and would drive myself out to the locations miles away from civilisation. Of course I’d get hopelessly lost until I’d find people looking at me rather strangely and pointing towards where the tents had been set up for the days filming. It was great fun. I remember my first scene with Edward [Highmore playing Malkon] was up in this wonderful lookout. That was a sensational place that Fiona had found. It was incredible, the views were wonderful”.

Once the film work is out of the way it left little time for the cast and crew to play, but Peter had one last trick up his sleeve before leaving Lanzarote. “When we arrived at our hotel we passed this pool in the grounds and saw these two little turtles going round and round like tigers in a cage, paddling up and down. I didn’t think it was very nice having turtles in a small pool like this, so as a joke I suggested we should get them out, and put them back in to sea. One or two of the company said, ‘don’t be ridiculous, you can’t do that’. None of them had any spirit of adventure, except Dallas Adams who played Professor Foster. We decided to do it very late at night so that we wouldn’t get into trouble. At about 4:00 O’clock on our last morning in the hotel, Dallas woke me up and said, ‘Come on, this is it.’ He’d worked out when the security guards went by and decided that this was the best time to do it. So I got out of bed, got some shorts on and went down to rescue these turtles. When we got there, however, we couldn’t move them. They weighed a ton. Just as we managed to get one out of the pool we saw torch light, so like the hero I am I ducked behind some sort of statue, while Dallas went off and asked the guard for a light to keep him quiet. As I crouched there I wondered, what would Jason King do in this situation? Once the guard had gone we got back to lugging these turtles. Mine was only a baby but it was huge, and it nipped me. Eventually I got it over the top of the pool and started trying to push it in the direction of the beach. There was quite a little distance between the hotel and the beach but I finally got my one on the sand. I started back to help Dallas with the other one. When we got the two of them down to the sea do you know what the silly things did? They turned around and started to head back to the hotel after we’d spent an hour pushing them down to the sea. Finally, we got them away and the next morning there was hell. Everybody was talking about it. They thought that they had been stolen for their meat, which is apparently very delicate and tastes like veal. When we went to book out there was Policia in the hotel reception. I looked at Dallas, he looked at me and said, ‘Let’s get out of here before we get nailed’.

We left with Edward not far behind. He had borrowed my Jeep a couple of days before and crashed it into another car while driving on my licence. He was equally sure that they had come for him. So there we were, the three of us like terrible fugitives trying to get on this plane to get away from these guys. What was worse was when we got to the airport there was more there. I don’t think they were really anything to do with us at all, but they kept looking over and checking our passports. At the time I think we were all convinced we were going to end up in a Spanish prison. Myself and Dallas for stealing the turtles, and poor Edward for hitting someone’s car.

To this day, Peter has never actually seen Planet of Fire. “I never watch myself. In fact it’s only recently that I’ve been watching any of the Jason King episodes, because I used to have to watch rushes every day on that show, and that was enough to put me off watching myself for the rest of my life!”

Interview by Liam-Michael Rudden.