From: ira2p@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU (Iain Robert Asplin)
Subject: Re: other questions
Organization: University of Virginia
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 22:41:32 GMT

In article <Brr2pM.tx@acsu.buffalo.edu> v059jck9@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu (Ronald S Russ) writes:
>Thank you very much for the response to the Patrick Troughton query.  I am sorry
>that I might have offended some by the use of the word "episode" instead of 
>story.  I am rather new to this network.  Troughton was my favorite Doctor and I
>was curios as to how many stories he actually did.  I saw some of his later
>stories such as the Three Doctors, Five Doctors, etc.  War Games was to me at 
>least, the best story they ever produced.  On some other questions now, what
>ever happened to Jon Pertwee and what was the deal with the hour long stories
>in the Peter Davison era.  Thanks much
>
>Ron Russ
>University at Buffalo
>v059jck9@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu

Happy to oblige and answer:
Jon Pertwee:  I hope your question is "why did he leave Who?" because tyhat's
what I'm answering. :)  He felt that the entire team that he'd been 
woirking with was coming apart, and that this signalled the end of an
era and the time was therefore appropriate for him to go.  It started
with the death of Roger Delgado (the Master) in a car accident after
Season Ten had finished filming, Katy Manning had already left,
Terrance Dicks (Script Editor) was on his way out, Barry Letts (Producer)
was also, and the UNIT format was soon to be phased out by Robert
Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe, so that's why Jon left, because everyone
else was too!
These days he's still quite active, doing a play here and a convention
there.  He resumed the role briefly in 1989 for a stage play version
of the series called "Doctor Who - The Ultimate Adventure" written
by Terrance Dicks and starring Daleks and Cybermen along with him and
a bumnch of other people.  when he left the play, Colin Baker took
over the role to finish the run.

Peter Davison one-hour stories:  Actually, they run about 50 minutes,
but then so do American shows when you take out the commercials!
Well, throughout Tom Baker's tenure on the series, the series was
running 26 episodes long, and the producers had settled on a
standard format for episodee-length for stories, 4-4-4-4-4-6.
For a total of 26.  The six-part story had been very popular
until Robert Holmes took over as Script Editor, and began phasing
them out feeling they were just too long.  
John Nathan-turner became Producer for Season Eighteen, and he
was sick of six-parters altogether, so he decided he wouldn't
do them anymore.  This is a bit of a problem as 4 doesn't divide
evenly into 26!  So, the BBC granted him an extra two episodes
for Season Eighteen (Tom Baker's final year).
At the end of that year, the reatings had not improved, and
the high-ups decided there was little justification to keep these
extra two episodes and cut back to 26 again.  Rather than go
back to the six-parters, John Nathan-Turner decided to top off
the year with one two-part story per year, and so he did 
throuhout Davison's tenure.
When Colin Baker took over, the BBC were again tinkering with the
format.  Every episode was now 45-50 minutes long, thus a two-part
story would be the same lenth as a 4-part story once was.  
The problem here is an old two-part story would now be only one
episode long in this form, and JNT didn't want that to happen,
so "The Two Doctors" became a three-part story in the new form,.
six in the old.  Then the hiatus hit, and that's another story altogether...