WORZEL GUMMIDGE

FEW DOCTOR WHOS ESCAPE THE shadow of the role, but Jon Pertwee was the only one to eclipse it – by swapping time and space for straw-stuffed coat sleeves… occasionally swapping his head for good measure too.

Worzel Gummidge came at the perfect time for Pertwee. He’d relaunched Doctor Who in colour at the start of the ’70s, giving it a new lease of life. But after handing over to Tom Baker in 1974, TV roles proved hard to come by.

Writing team Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall had remembered a radio character from their childhoods, Worzel Gummidge, a cantankerous scarecrow who befriends two children. The writers were best known for heavyweight dramas such as West End hit Billy Liar and script doctor work for Alfred Hitchcock. Worzel had been a 1940s mainstay on BBC Children’s Hour, but had fallen into obscurity. On a whim, they purchased the rights, planning to produce a feature film.

Pertwee was the only actor considered for the role and he embraced it immediately. Worzel presented a tailor-made solution for an actor typecast as a dandified Doctor; a scruffy physical transformation, with a burbling yokel voice borrowed from a character he’d played during his early radio days. When movie plans fell by the wayside, the project was reworked for TV. The BBC passed, but ITV’s regional outpost Southern Television came on